#how their parallel narrative is masterfully done

[chorrianderr]

The most beautiful thing about Designated Survivor : 60 days is how the story is about Agent Han Na Gyeong as much as it's about President Park Mu Jin. How their struggle mirrors each other despite chasing the culprit with a very different method and how hard they fight their own battles, Park Mu Jin on the merciless Political court and Han Na Gyeong on the shadowy streets of Seoul

[demaparbat-hp]

I used to just think Zutara was cool because Zuko and Katara had that whole fire-water duality, had more chemistry with each other than their canon love interests, Kataang gave me this sexist pseudo-incestuous vibe while Mai was just way too under-developed to interest me (Zuko gets the most character development out of all the characters but they pair him off with the most boring character in the series?).

Now when I actually think about it more deeply, Zutara genuinely made more sense for the narrative and characters too. Aang was told he had to let go of Katara so he could become a fully realized Avatar but then he just gets a deus ex machina so he doesn't have to. They dropped an entire arc just for Kataang to get together and made it happen in the most stupid way. The lion turtle deus ex machina was already badly done but at least it sorta made sense with the lore. The rock was just beyond ridiculous. Aang solved his problems by randomly hitting a rock even though they already established how Aang had this unhealthy attachment to Katara because she was his coping mechanism for his lost people. Instead of letting her go, Aang keeps that attachment and becomes even more possessive of her. He never learns to prioritize the world over Katara even though it is his duty as the Avatar! He didn't have to sacrifice or learn anything to achieve his goals and the way he became a fully realized Avatar NEVER made any sense. Katara and Aand were not always intended to end up together if you look at the IP Bible. Katara goes back to the SWT to help rebuild it while Aang goes looking for the hidden Air Nomads. There's hints early on in Book 1 that the Air Nomads are still alive (like how Aang was able to get a bison whistle from some merchants but they never explain where they got it from).

Meanwhile the whole Maiko relationship seemed like it was a metaphor to represent Zuko's false destiny and dissatisfaction with his life since Mai encouraged him to sink into his bad habits and ignore everything else, and Azula actively encouraged them to get together so she could control Zuko easier and keep him in the Fire Nation. Zuko leaving Mai behind felt like him embracing his true destiny. This entire thing falls apart when they get back together though, and them being so toxic in the comics is just further proving how dysfunctional they are (like, do they think this is going to sell us on the ship?). I also thought it was strange that apparently Zuko and Mai liked each other since they were kids but Mai never bothered to write him his entire banishment, Zuko never thought about her, Iroh never mentions her, Zuko was totally fine with going on a date with Jin (which Iroh also encouraged), and Iroh thought Zuko and Katara would make a good couple as soon as he saw them interacting as friends. It makes me think Bryke just created Mai and put her with Zuko as a way to discourage Zutara shippers but then forgot to develop her properly. Zuko doesn't even think about Mai after she risked his life to save him lol.

I'm about to make this a long answer, sorry about that :)

I love narrative, and I love to analyze how it is built. Narrative is the way a story is shaped to express its themes. Narrative is using the events within the story to build metaphors. Narrative is the smart foreshadowing, the parallels, the foils. Narrative is intentional, until it isn't.

I am not a professional. I do not have a college degree on this subject. I just like to think about what can make writing be great or lacking. I am merely expressing my personal opinion on this show and these characters, not stating an universal truth.

ATLA is such a well-written show. It treats its themes maturely and builds the story and characters masterfully. Of course, it isn't perfect, as nothing made by human hands is meant to be. ATLA has issues with its storyline and characters and, ultimately, with the narrative itself.

Aang's character arc is different to Zuko's in that, while Zuko's is focused on change, Aang's ultimately ends with him standing his ground. (And isn't that poetic? That in order to grow they need to embrace the philosophy of their opposite element?)

Zuko was forced to change in order to survive from a very young age. He learned to suppress his true, compassionate nature, to become The Perfect Prince—that which Azula embodies. When Zuko fails to do this, he is burnt and tossed away and forced to change once more. He has been hurt and thus is the farthest he has ever been from his true self—Zuko almost forgets who he is.

Zuko's arc, in that way, is similar to Aang's. It's about staying true to himself, but also about learning, about opening his eyes to the horror and using that same passion he has always had to do the right thing. Zuko changes, not into the person he was, but into someone who could, in the future, turn into the better version of himself.

Aang is different. Aang is a child born into peace, who does not have the personal, terrible experience of his people's genocide or the hundred years of war that have left the world wrecked. Aang's arc is about changing and learning and adapting to this new reality, about accepting his role as the Avatar. But it's also about standing firm and saying, "This is who I am, this is where I come from—pain will not break me".

Aang's struggle to control the Avatar State was all about that. The Avatar State meant that Aang lost control. It meant the pain and the hurt had turned him into a thing of anger (righteous as it was) and instinct and awe. Aang needed to be at peace with himself in order to control the Avatar State.

That tiny rock at the final battle felt like an easy way out. It felt like taking from the sheer terror of watching yourself almost kill a man as if from afar. The real moment of triumph for Aang in the finale happened when he stopped. It happened when he took control back and ended the Avatar State, stopping himself from betraying what he believed in.

Was not killing Ozai truly the best choice? I won't get into that debate. I know where I stand on it, but it's not really the point I'm trying to make here.

Aang's triumph, character-wise, happens when he stands his ground and refuses to abandon who he is and what he believes in. And for someone whose flight or fight response almost always turns to flight, this is a huge deal.

Now, where do Katara and Mai stand on this?

It has always been clear to me (even as a Maiko shipper) that Mai was always supposed to be a narrative device. Her relationship with Zuko is supposed to give us, the viewers, and him, another reason to see that this isn't the life he wants, that everything isn't perfect even when it should be on paper.

Zuko goes back home. Zuko is welcomed by his nation with open arms. He is revered. Loved. His father tells him he is proud of him. Zuko has a doting girlfriend—a beautiful, noble girl who can kick his ass and is everything a Fire Prince could wish for. She is adequate and things with her are easy, untroubled. Zuko has everything he could wish for.

And yet he is not happy.

Mai and Zuko have issues that should not be pinned fully on either of them. They had trouble comunicating. They wanted different things in life. They had different ways to look at the world. Different ways to look at each other. Different ways to cope. Different ways to express themselves. Different expectations.

And that's okay. It's possible to make a relationship like that work. Nobody is perfect and no relationship is flawless. Opposites attract and it's possible to find a middle ground in which they can both be happy.

Except they never truly did.

Mai and Zuko's relationship was a plot device. One that did its job damn well... Until it didn't.

If your relationship with the girl is supposed to symbolize the lowest point in your life, and going back into being someone you don't like anymore, then why get back to her when the story is over?

As for Katara, well...

Many things have been said about the abandoned Letting Go Of Katara arc. I'd like to avoid that discussion right now, if that's okay.

I think Zuko and Katara's relationship would have made a lot of sense both narratively and thematically, but also (and most importantly) it would have made sense character-wise.

Give them a few years, let them explore the beautiful friendship they had at the end of the series. Let them find themselves and grow into their roles in this different, exciting new world. Let them reconnect.

If they fall in love in the process? Well, maybe it was a long time coming.

[the-tmnt-ficfinder]

Christmas Kindness submission

To Qoldenskies,

I’ll straight up say it. You write my favourite Donnie angst out there. There’s the obvious masterpiece that is the Canary Continuity, and the horrifically underrated Coming Undone. Both are such visceral, heartbreaking experiences that I have enjoyed from start to finish. And Caged Lungs broke me down. Miner’s Eulogy was what shattered me, though, and Clipped Wings? What a RIDE. With each chapter you post, I can’t believe we’re getting closer to the END. Not the END. I don’t want it to end, but it’s gotta. We do need that promised happy ending.

Honestly, your interpretations of the characters? Especially Donnie? They’re so well thought-out and clever. There’s so many important layers to them and what drives them, and it all comes together SO WELL. You’ve definitely done your homework and put a lot of care into your stories. It shows.

What I also have to praise is how beautifully crafted the writing ITSELF is. The metaphors and parallels are so clever. You use them masterfully to paint a better picture of the characters and their struggles. It’s like you have two narratives running at once, sometimes, the obvious one, and the supporting one that explains so much. I don’t always catch that, since I’m not that smart, but I know it’s there. Commenters help me out by bringing attention to it. 

Emotions? Spot on. I feel so much, and the experiences are painted so viscerally that it’s hard not to feel along with the characters.

And I wanted to also bring up one more thing. I really like how you ‘distort’ and break up the dialogue when the characters are in distress. The stammering, the added words, (for examples, “I’m— I’m too muh-ch,” “something’s wro-wrohng, Raph and Leo are ouh-out—“ (cu) “I’ll d-do– I’ll do any-hhh-thing,” “I’ll– I’ll clean it up, I promi- hhh -se!” (cl)) really helps me HEAR how they’re talking. I’ve never seen stuttering or dragged-out words articulated so ‘as-said’— meaning, that is exactly the noises they’d be making if you heard them (particularly the shuddering of breath that accompanies then ‘hhh’, if that makes sense). This is probably my favourite little detail exclusive to your work. I absolutely love it. It’s such a small thing but it definitely enhances the reading experience.

Because I don’t want to leave out your ‘smaller’ fics, I wanted to say that I have read Circomvating Death, too. It definitely is a nice little refresher to all the angst (but I LOVE angst), and I’ve enjoyed the humorously chaotic adventures of Donnie and Casey Jr. Whenever you get back around to writing for that, I’ll look forward to seeing where they go next!

And Enhancements? Short but sweet pain. The idea of NO existing painkillers working on them makes a lot of of sense. The super-soldier piece is such a fun little concept to play around with, whether for badass purposes or whump. I also love seeing the concept referenced in your other stories. It works great as a little headcanon establishment. It doesn’t need to be a massive masterpiece to still be great.

I know you’re also planning Where We Went Wrong as a B-team sep AU, and I’m definitely looking forward to that and your bad things happen bingo prompts! I know all that’s in the right hands, and 

You have a lot of talent, and you deserve all the positive feedback, fan art, and fanfics you’ve gotten so far.

And I did read the post where you said that your family is too poor to celebrate Christmas, but I hope you can cherish the time you all have together regardless (and beat that Christmas Curse that’s plagued you for the past couple years). <3 Have a great one! Wishing you all the best.

@qoldenskies

Christmas Kindness Event Post

[fipindustries]

ok, ive read a few reviews, i have marinated on the story a little. i think i can put together a more thorough review of the apocalypse of herschel schoen.

ill rip the band aid right off, i dont think i enjoyed it very much. it is dense, and it is morose, and it is very sad and tragic. It takes effort to read and your reward for those efforts are pages upon pages of a sad family coming apart and self destroying, with a hefty serving of deranged theological disquisitions. all written on an ornate portentous, reiterative style that eventually wears off its welcome.

@thecurioustale claimed that for him this book dignifies and humanizes herschel. that hile it presents us someone with severe mental issues and deliriums, it puts things from his perspectiv, it makes us empathize with him. this story had no such effect on me. in fact quite the opposite: i found that the more i understood herschel the more i disliked this guy, for one simple reason. he is gurion mccabe.

there have been many comments drawing parallels between nostalgebraists previous stories and other famous works of fiction. people have said that floornight is his evangelion, that northern caves is his house of leaves, that almost nowhere is his homestuck.

well, the apocalypse of herschel schoen is very much nostalgebraist's The Instructions. a text written and compiled in-universe as a sort of testament/conversion book/biography about a jewish kid with mental issues and his own delirious interpretation of judaism who tries to ennact by force his beliefs upon the world. the only diference is that herschel is a lot more realistically pathetic and less threatning than gurion. but he IS gurion.

he is how harry james evan verres potter comes off to anyone who doesnt like hpmor. he is a self important, arrogant, sanctimounious, deranged little shit with all the makings of a cult leader. and he ends up sacrificing all of humanity to the AI overlords, for all this i had a hard time enjoying the time i spend following him around.

beyond that i get the impression this book is made of a lot of different ideas rob wanted to explore and play around with but all these ideas dont necesarily cohere thematically (the vague anacronistic feeling of it all, the shared narration between herschel and miriam, whatever was going on with miriam's own strange ideology, the meditations on AI risk, the numerous inconsistencies in the narrative and the plot, the entire chapter of SHE OF HIGH MIND). these are all cool ideas on their own but the whole feels less than the sum of its parts. there are a lot more questions than answers in this book and by the end of it i was left with the vague and dissapointed impression that most of these questions dont really have answers and are there just to look cool.

but really i cant call any of these things flaws necesarily, i know they are here by design and they were indeed done masterfully. im sure there is a lot to get out of this book if you are into that sort of thing, and i could even see myself getting into all this if one key element wasnt missing that i personally really need in my stories and that is "human conection".

there is a thing that happens in this genre of stories, stories like RA or Fine structure or Unsong, or Worm or homestuck or even almost nowhere. there is only so much you can dial things up to eleven before i stop caring, before i lose all emotional investment on the story. is just talking about great cosmic inhuman things and i read stories for human drama. as i read chapter 21 i couldnt help but wonder what happened to frederick, (who was an continues to be my favourite character in the whole story, oh how i wish this could have been an entire book only about his conversations with herschel, those were far and above my favourite sections) would we get to see one final conversation between him and herschel or was their sad encounter with damian all we get? what happened to ruth and her plan to presumably bomb the eggert labs? will mirian be happy with vincent? but no, by all means herschel, keep talking to that ant.

no to be fair, this book had me hooked all through out the first half, up until herschel takes the train to manhattan. and the entire reveal in chapter 21 was riveting and i couldnt stop reading this thing once i got there. i want to insist, this book is indeed masterful, and if i complain is simply because of how it didnt manage to dance to MY taste.

overall i could have done with more scenes of herschel at school. herschel interacting with other students, with the teachers, with madeline, with frederick, sweet satanic brilliant frederick.

(complete tangent but frederick is so fascinating. i love how he doesnt mind any of herschel strange beliefs or his childish behavior or his cringe inducing moments, all he cares about is that he got them all on raven, and as far as frederick is concerned that is all that matters to him. i love how patient he is, how he knows that herschel finds the machines abominable but he doesnt mind, he appreciate he weird new perspective herschel brings into his conversations, i love how frederick clearly is very weird in his own way because of how he doesnt mind interacting with a clearly younger kid when that could be social suicide in high school, how he doesnt mind that his mom is a wanted criminal, herschel is his friend and he understand him whent he talks to him and he got them all on raven. ultimatly i loved him because his conversations with herchel reminds so so so much to my conversations with @ericvilas hen he sits down to patiently explain quantum mechanics to me, ok tangent over)

strange fascinating story hat i cant say i enjoyed but i AM glad i read. 8/10

[pulim-v]

Reverse Unpopular Opinions for Love Bullet and Undertale please?

Oh their are good ones I have a lot of stuff that I can rant about with these afjshfnsj

Love Bullet

The art is genuinely stunning, and it's kinda surprising because from what I've seen manga tend to be kinda weak when they're just starting out, but Love Bullet has a lot of really good panels and art so far!

From scenes with amazing technical execution

To masterfully done panel transitions

To incredibly emotional beats enhanced by how the mangaka composes the scene and uses different values (note that the girl in the middle has most of the darkest parts of the image, so you're naturally more drawn to her and consequently to the action of the shot)

I could yap more but I think I've said enough agdhahdhjajd I don't want to go overboard

Undertale

THE CHARACTERS ARE ALL SO!!!!!!!!!

See cuz Undertale's whole thing is challenging RPG tropes and morality, and the way it does that is by having every single character have complex goals and motivations that interact with other characters in the game, and that ends up making a complex web of characters that is SO tasty to analyze

There are motifs that the game builds up. Both musically and narratively. And they all seem to interact with one another in ways that create an absurd amount of parallels. For example, the Dreemurr kids use the same greetings as their parents (Flowey says howdy just like Asgore, Chara says greetings just like Toriel), however it seems like the parent that they don't copy is the one they have a deeper relationship with (Asgore called Chara the future of the underground, and Flowey was much more hurt by Toriel not managing to make him feel than by Asgore failing to do so)

Again I think I've rambled enough agahhdjajaj there's a lot to talk about wrt both of these works of art and I could spend days doing so, but idk if you'd want to read that much lmao

[seagreenstardust]

I’m gonna say something that’s probably not going to be well received in certain circles so let me start by saying this: I believe, with only a few rare exceptions, that you should be able to ship whatever speaks to you the most. And just because I don’t ship something doesn’t mean it’s wrong for anyone else to ship it, and the same for things I do ship, no one else has to ship it too. Who you do or don’t ship will never be a reason I pass judgment on you, ever. Live your best life.

That being said, I want to talk about Horikoshi and straight ships.

(And bakudeku.)

Here’s the thing: Hori has written straight ships into MHA and he’s done it so masterfully that it’s made me ship them without even realizing it. I don’t know if we can call them canon because as far as I know no ship is actually canon yet, but what is canon is the care Hori put into building these relationships.

Kirimina. Hori wrote in a backstory that parallels bkdk that I just adore. There is something about Kiri looking up to Mina and being so inspired by her bravery that it shapes the hero he becomes that is such good content. They’ve had multiple mid-battle moments of protecting and helping each other. I ship Kirimina so hard because of the canon Hori gave us.

I am a low key Denki/Hitoshi shipper but season six kinda hit me in the face with whatever we’re calling Kyouka/Denki these days and now I guess I’m a multi-shipper???? That is how hard Hori hit me with the Kyouka/Denki feels. And he did it the same way as Kirimina, because we have years of content of Kyouka teasing Denki mercilessly, plus the cultural festival band, so when they’re separated in Season 6 and Denki has this intense moment of realization that she’s who he needs to be brave for and it actually works??? I’m a goner.

Heck, I ship todomomo too you guys though I can’t blame Hori for that one, that’s just me being me. The point is that I ship it because the characters Hori gave me struck a chord inside.

But there is one straight ship Hori never once made me ship.

Every time izu*cha showed up I just kinda endured it? It just wasn’t for me. I didn’t see two kids with chemistry, I saw two kids who didn’t know who they were or what they wanted fumbling their way through a will they/won’t they without either of them seeming all that invested in it.

In six seasons and nearly 400 chapters and multiple times revisiting the story I have never once felt any inclination to ship izu*cha

Hori can write straight ships. Hori made me ship his secondary straight ships nearly effortlessly. So if izu*cha was meant to be canon why have I never once felt the chemistry?

You know who has the chemistry? Bakudeku. But here’s the thing: I wasn’t thinking about Katsuki as a possible love interest for Izuku the first time I watched the entire story. I honestly wasn’t paying much attention to him at all, he was everything I didn’t like on the surface so I more or less ignored him despite Izuku holding onto him for dear life. Katsuki never once colored my opinion of izu*cha, they did that all on their own.

It wasn’t until after my first watch through, when I was hungry for more and trolling around tumblr, that I realized people shipped Katsuki and Izuku and it was literally like something out of alignment popped into place in my head.

Oh. Duh. That’s the ship.

I went from zero to a million in a handful of seconds because the chemistry was there, the backstory was there, and boy are Izuku and Katsuki loud about how obsessed they are with each other. Just like Kirimina, just like Denki and Kyouka, Hori planted the seeds throughout the entire series so that when it was brought to my attention everything about the narrative and character development supported it.

And I have to take a moment to explain my dislike of Katsuki at first: I honestly fell for the surface-level interpretation of his character and then kinda wrote him off without much more thought. Which is insane to think about because you can’t really understand MHA without Katsuki, he is so integral to the story as a whole that any version of it without him is skewed so far out of alignment that it’s not even the same story anymore. But I just saw angry boy who yells for no reason and put Katsuki in a box and left it at that.

It wasn’t until I was willing to give his character a second look that I started understanding him, and more importantly, his relationship with Izuku. And it helped that when bkdk was presented to me as a ship that my brain understood immediately why it worked. The canon source material supports bkdk at every possible moment.

I really don’t think it does the same for izu*cha.

[ispyspookymansion]

as a fellow brightsessions head what are your thoughts on the sequels/books...

oh boy this got long, sorry! tldr i liked all of them and i love the way lauren worked to weave the universe together! but in more detail:

i really liked the infinite noise and a neon darkness, which i read when each came out and havent reread since so i cant get TOO specific but i liked them. i never got around to some faraway place but i do own it so i bet i’ll read it in the next month. i thought the infinite noise was really sweet and gave a lot of nice extra nuance and depth to make it worth it as more of a novelization of stuff we already loosely knew, and neon darkness ooooooo boy i fucking love me some damien and i loved the way lauren delved into him. as always, i love when a character can be given a fucked up tragic backstory by an author who clearly still at the end of the day knows theyre an abuser and havent been given an excuse, just an explanation for some of their actions.

as for the sequels, also a big fan! i listened to them in 2020 and havent since but will again soon. the am archives was super delicious to me because i love sam and joans collective moral ambiguity, and i liked that lauren was always willing to shake up canon relationships in different ways. owen green’s arc in that show too…..oh delicious. not to mention marks presence yayyyy

the same for the college tapes i think the connections to the rest of the show are masterfully done. i listened to this as it was coming out and i loved the newer cast of characters. i looooove caleb and adam theyre really important to me and i was their age when i listened to tbs and when tct came out years later, so its always fun to play there. i remember being crazy over their SPOILER HERE EVERYBODY SKIP THE REST OF THE PARAGRAPH breakup and arc to get back together. i also liked oliver more than i ever expected to here, and i think lauren is great at giving characters interesting paralleling dynamics to explore (often with mark but what can we say, mark bryant has been through a lot).

at risk of sounding insane i love how the specter of damien haunts the am archives and college tapes, from the literal tie-ins to his past, to the way calebs power changing clearly calls him to mind, to mark and oliver trying to Fix olivers power. damien is such a fascinating character to me and i respect the hell out of leaving him out of those sequels, but also letting him linger in the way trauma AND narrative themes should

[newsblog12]

How To Create Intrigue In Screenplays — Writers Guide.

Introduction

In the realm of storytelling, screenplays are the blueprints that bring captivating narratives to life on the silver screen. But what sets a great screenplay apart from the rest? It’s the ability to create intrigue, to hold the audience’s attention from the opening scene to the closing credits. In this writer’s guide, we will explore the art of crafting intrigue in screenplays. Whether you’re a budding screenwriter or a seasoned pro, these techniques and insights will help you keep your audience on the edge of their seats.

The Power of a Compelling Opening

Intrigue begins with the very first frame of your screenplay. A gripping opening scene can set the tone for the entire story. It should pique curiosity, introduce a central question, or present a scenario that demands attention. Consider using an unexpected event, an enigmatic character, or a dramatic setting to draw your audience in. Think of iconic movie openings like the suspenseful heist in “The Dark Knight” or the mysterious alien encounter in “Arrival.” These scenes immediately engage the viewer’s imagination and set the stage for a riveting narrative.

Character Development and Arcs

Intrigue often centers around the journey of the characters. Complex, multi-dimensional characters are more likely to capture the audience’s interest. Develop backstories, motivations, and internal conflicts that drive your characters. A well-structured character arc, where individuals evolve emotionally or morally throughout the story, can be a source of continuous intrigue. Consider Walter White’s transformation in “Breaking Bad” or Michael Corleone’s descent into darkness in “The Godfather.” These character arcs keep viewers invested in the unfolding drama.

The Art of Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing is the art of dropping subtle hints or clues about future events in your screenplay. It creates a sense of anticipation and makes viewers feel like they’re solving a mystery alongside the characters. Effective foreshadowing should be subtle enough not to reveal the entire plot but significant enough to be recognized upon reflection. Films like “The Sixth Sense” and “Fight Club” employ foreshadowing masterfully, leaving audiences in awe of how they missed the signs upon their initial viewing.

Maintaining Tension and Suspense

Tension and suspense are vital elements of intrigue. They keep viewers engaged and eager to see what happens next. Strategies to maintain tension include controlling the flow of information, building obstacles and challenges for characters, and utilizing the element of time. Consider the nail-biting tension in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” during the infamous shower scene. By controlling what the audience knows and when they know it, you can manipulate their emotional response and maintain intrigue.

Subplots and Layering

Well-crafted subplots can add depth and complexity to your screenplay. They provide opportunities for additional layers of intrigue. These subplots may intersect with the main storyline or run parallel, providing fresh perspectives and complications. Think of “Pulp Fiction,” where multiple interconnected subplots create a tapestry of intrigue. When done right, subplots enrich the narrative, offering viewers a richer experience.

The Importance of Dialogue

Dialogue is a powerful tool for building intrigue. Engaging, authentic conversations between characters can reveal their motivations, hidden agendas, and conflicting interests. Subtext, what characters don’t say explicitly, can be even more intriguing than what they do say. The famous “I could been a contender” scene in “On the Waterfront” is a masterclass in subtext, as Marlon Brando’s character reveals his inner turmoil through loaded dialogue.

Twists and Surprises

Plot twists and surprises are essential for maintaining audience engagement. They challenge viewers’ assumptions and keep them guessing. When incorporating twists, consider the principle of Chekhov’s gun — if you introduce an element early in the story, it should have significance later. Films like “The Usual Suspects” and “The Sixth Sense” are renowned for their game-changing twists that redefine the entire narrative.

Pacing and Timing

Pacing involves controlling the rhythm of your screenplay. It’s about when to accelerate the action when to linger on a moment, and when to provide a breather. Intrigue often benefits from well-timed revelations. For instance, the revelation of a crucial piece of information at just the right moment can be the turning point that rekindles or heightens intrigue.

Visual Storytelling

Cinematic storytelling isn’t solely reliant on words — it’s equally visual. Visual elements like symbolism, metaphors, and motifs can add layers of depth and intrigue to your screenplay. These visual cues provide subtle commentary or foreshadowing that can be more powerful than any line of dialogue. Consider how the recurring use of mirrors in “The Silence of the Lambs” adds intrigue by symbolizing the duality of characters.

Editing and Refinement

The journey doesn’t end with the first draft. Editing and refinement are crucial steps in perfecting your screenplay. It’s during this phase that you trim the excess, clarify your narrative, and ensure that each scene serves the overarching intrigue. Editing allows you to fine-tune the pacing, tighten the dialogue, and eliminate anything that might distract from the central mystery or drama.

Feedback and Collaboration

Screenwriting is often a collaborative effort. Receiving feedback from others, whether fellow writers, directors, or producers, can provide fresh perspectives and highlight areas where intrigue can be enhanced. Collaborative efforts often lead to innovative ideas and solutions that elevate your screenplay.

Conclusion

Creating intrigue in screenplays is a delicate balancing act, where words, characters, and visual elements come together to captivate

https://www.alltalent.com/blog/how-to-create-intrigue-in-screenplays-writers-guide

[mc-critical]

A little thing than always despite me in mc:kosem is the treatment given to Mahfiruze hatun (the first one) and Sayeste. I mean...THEY ARE WONDERFUL. But they were totally ruined ! WHY ? it's a absolute criminal act i think, because they were nuanced with flaws and qualities on my opinion (Mahfiruze is emotive and try to kill her weak side with her arrogance, she has loved ones with and has a talent for manipulation when Sayeste is loyal, grateful but dellusioned ans angry) What do you think about the two girls ? What will you like to see with her ?

Oh yeah, early Mahfiruz was filled with potential from the start. I also love the subtly presented vulnerability of her character: that was perhaps her best scene that gave her both flavor and uniqueness. Developing a devious nature and sneakiness to mask a more insecure side of yourself isn't the most outstanding concept ever, but it's something that we didn't really get to see all that often in the franchise, especially not as masterfully established in a single scene, no less. And Anastasia herself being the one that discovered that vulnerability of hers is a rare gem that should be cherished and lets me acknowledge this simple conversation as one of the softest lines of action and dialogue in MCK.

What baffles me the most is not so much that the writers wimped out on her at some point, since that was to be expected both due to other cases in the past and the whatever reason behind the scenes (did the actress want to leave the show? I heard that there was something like this, but I'm not sure...), but how quickly they gave up on her future set up and development, most possibly even before the supposed stuff behind the scenes happened. She had so much promise with her one scene wonder, then we had a parallel repetition of the beating plot in MC E03 (that somehow ended up being even more filler than that from a narrative standpoint, how do they do it?) and... that was it. 2-3 episodes before her "departure" it was already done. There was some hope they would continue on her character concept when we realized that TIMS wouldn't give up on this relatively major role in the story, even if with a different actress. But Dilara Aksuek's Mahfiruze was an entirely different character that didn't live up to Mahfiruz's potential and instead turned her into a one-dimensional S01 Mahidevran archetype that has only a single aspect of that archetype. And that was a problem and relatively, a downgrade, because it seemed like Mahfiruz's dynamic with Anastasia, despite of some similarities, wouldn't be just a rehash of the typical rivalry dynamic between the two main concubines of the Sultan. The chance of seeing something different went away completely.

And you know, Dilara's Mahfiruze would've been a much better character if the writers picked up where the old Mahfiruz left off without killing her off, just replacing her actress (similarly to Vahide Perçin's Hürrem, but applied to a more minor character, of course), but also kept Mahfiruze's relationship with Ahmet and fleshed out more her relationship with Osman, fully utilizing her thematic role in setting the conflict between him and Kösem, which would have freely happened with both fleshing her character out and letting her meet her doom during the time-skip in E21, if you want that so badly, writers - these two aren't mutually exclusive concepts! But we got two safe, effortless, sudden and abrupt endings of two characters that we ended up not caring as much about in the long run due to sloppy writing.

While the waste of Mahfiruz's foundation is far from the worst offence of the show, it's certainly the most bizarre one. Unlike MCK Turhan, where they more or less had to rush things, they didn't have that much of an excuse to turn Mahfiruz's concept and role into... this. I, for one, generally cut the MCK writers more slack because of the ratings, but I don't feel this can be done here, neither because it is a choice they had to make because of ratings in terms of both characters, nor because I think the ratings would've gone down, if they fleshed Dilara's Mahfiruze more, quite the opposite really. Mahfiruz and Mahfiruze. didn't. deserve. the. MC. S04. Rumeysa. treatment. I fully believe this is one thing they could've avoided, yet didn't.

I'm not such a big fan of Şayeste, to be honest. I never liked her or her writing from the start, but that doesn't mean that she didn't deserve better. Her characterization was bonkers the instant she was introduced and her going back and forth from side to side was neither well written, nor interesting, unlike the duality of some other characters. They set her as a mean girl quickly manipulated by Mahfiruz from the start with only some more positive traits and I don't believe that "Heel Face turn" felt as earned as intended. Though, yeah, the worse thing here is that, just like Mahfiruz, the writers wimped out on her completely after that turn and that was also unfortunate. I would've loved to see these gratitude and loyalty you're talking about more in the story, even though their use was a step better than everything with Mahfiruz and Mahfiruze, and also, a bigger, closer role to Kösem, even though Meleki apparently took that spot for her.

Their dynamic was... okay? It seemed to only be a plot device at the end of the day and it was very vague and one-dimensional, too? I definetly wouldn't object if we saw more of it, but my current impressions just aren't as strong. It only seemed to have fulfilled a single purpose and left. If the writers fleshed both of these characters more, it would've been great though, no doubt.

[moon-riverandme]

And in the Beginning There was... Light, Film Rolls, and Controversy.

Watching old movies has always been one of my favorite pastimes. I love the cracks in the film, the oddly tinted placements of color, the quick, scattered movements of the actors, and the slice of an intertitle. It all just makes sense when I think of those first filmmakers who were trying to make sense of their new medium. In my journey through film, I will start at the beginning. Well, sort of the beginning. Our main topic of discussion takes place in 1903. So we’ve skipped over a few years… 15 to be exact. I’ll sum them up now because if I miss a beat I’ll ruin the scene.

Let's start in October of 1888 when Louis Le Prince has just recorded the very first film. It’s short yet scenic; his family gathers in a garden and for the first time ever - they move. A man walks across the screen, the rigid bustles and day dress of two women sway as they turn away from the camera - ergo we have a moving image years before Edison would invent the kinetoscope. Of course, most don’t know of Le Prince and in school I never heard his name mentioned. In fact, I only heard of him through a Buzzfeed Unsolved video. So what happened? Why did history remember the names Edison and Lumière but not Le Prince?

There were many entries in the race to create the first film. And of course, there are arguments as to what cinema is in comparison to a bunch of still photographs played one after another. Strange, I think is this argument. For film is a series of stills or frames played one right after the other. Nevertheless, in 1878, we have the famous images of a galloping horse caught by twelve cameras set up by Muybridge to capture motion and to study animal locomotion. Motion but not a movie. What we needed was a camera that had a single lens capable of capturing a point of view. That’s what Le Prince did. Unfortunately, as history would see it, he mysteriously disappeared on a train to Paris in September 1890 right before his first public screening in New York carrying luggage that contained all of his work. Neither Le Prince or the luggage has ever been found. Quite the coincidence.

There are a few theories: Le Prince committing suicide, Le Prince’s own brother killing him, Le Prince fleeing due to his sexuality being outed but none have stuck... except one. Le Prince’s widow, Lizzie, believed Edison, his biggest competitor in the race, had him assassinated. The evidence? The discovery of Edison’s journal containing the following entry, which has been proven authentic. It read:

“Eric called me today from Dijon. It has been done. Prince is no more. This is good news but I flinched when he told me. Murder is not my thing. I'm an inventor and my inventions for moving images can now move forward.”

Take of that what you will.

Today, we are taught that Edison’s kinetoscope launched the novel medium of moving pictures into our familiar. When it was invented in 1891 by Edison and Dickson, the kinetoscope was a peepshow-like device with a "sight opening" on top that one viewer at a time could look into and watch a moving picture. Think about it like looking into a microscope - very different from how we view films now both in method and price, it was 50 cents for access to all films at a given venue.

In 1897, an improvement on Edison's device arose. Invented by the Lumière brothers, the cinematograph contained both a camera, projector, and hand crank. Now, audiences could sit and screen films. I'll circle back to Edison as he connects to our 1903 topic. But first, let's take a stop with the Lumière brothers.

Auguste and Louis Lumière are credited as the first filmmakers. Their documentary-esque films Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory and Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat are milestones in cinema. Known as travelogues or actualités, they showed the casual and working life of people in the mid to late 1890's. These shorts were even screened to audiences who jumped out of their seats at a train onscreen because they thought it would actually hit them. The Lumière Brothers took their screening all over the world, from Paris, to India, and China.

Watching these films, it's hard not to put yourself in the shoes of a passerby, a random person whose name we don't know, who exists in a few frames before disappearing to time. Like a fossil, it's interesting to examine what life was like back then. I love seeing the clothing. Everyone is so formal, at least compared to the laid back air of today. Even so, in the 1890’s people were moving away from the Victorian Era and into the “New Woman” Era. High necklines and longer sleeves were replaced by the open neck and short sleeves as morning turned to dusk. High chiffons under feathered hats were popular as was the shirtwaist style for work. All of these visible in the Lumière films.

Where we jump from reportage to fiction is where we jump from Lumière to Porter. And back to Edison, who had Porter working for him. Projectionist and electrician turned director, Edwin S. Porter was the brains behind many of the mechanics and techniques that have become so highly engrained in the making of films that the idea of them being novel seems almost impossible. In 1899, Porter became head of moving picture production at the Edison Manufacturing Company and throughout his career, which spanned about 15 years, he made more than 70 short films. So lets look at a few of them in detail.

Jack and the Beanstalk (1902)

You'll see that a lot of the narrative ideas for these early films spun directly out of fairytales. For an audience, fairytales were a familiarity. Thus, they were able to stitch together what they already knew about the characters and stories and better understand these new moving pictures. And Porter knew this from his work as a projectionist. He knew what engaged the audience most. And that wasn't just story, it was technique. Porter's films were revolutionary for what would become known as editing, at that time just cutting film. Simplistic and impactful, he knew how to compact time and create magic. Objects and people appear and disappear in a single cut. The camera remains still, a wide shot, and on a tripod but what's in front of it changes slightly, making for magical realism. For example, once Jack makes it back down to earth after descending the beanstalk, he grabs an ax and starts chopping it down. He's got to do this or the giant chasing him will make it down too. So he swings the ax a few times with all his might. From a large beanstalk, ripe with leaves, reaching up to the sky, we immediately cut to a destroyed one. The fact that we end one cut with Jack in the same position as we start the next, keeps from disrupting the audience even though everything else onscreen has changed. We've condensed time, Jack has saved the day, and the Giant has fallen to his death. Porter would expand on this editing style, perfecting it, discovering cross-cutting.

Life of an American Fireman (1903)

Cross-cutting or parallel action is so integral to editing that it happens in just about every film. Simply, two separate events are occurring - say, a woman trying to escape a fire inside of her house and firefighters rushing in a horse carriage to save her. These two events, perceived to be happening at the same time, are stitched together through editing so that the audience experiences both. Cut to the woman in her house as the fire inches closer to her. Cut to the firefighters rushing up the stairs. Will they get there? Will they save her? Cross-cutting serves to create tension and set the rhythm of a scene. Eventually, the two spatial points of view merge and the conflict should be resolved. This originates in Porter's films and Life of An American Fireman is the first one that shows it off.

Let's cut back to the first shot of this film, it's a trick shot. A sleepy fireman dreams of a mother putting her daughter to bed. Abruptly, the fire alarm is set off and he wakes up. Instead of cutting from the fireman dozing off in his chair to a separate shot of the mother, which would create confusion on whether the fireman was dreaming, Porter uses double exposure to frame the dream above the fireman shoulder. Double exposure had been employed by photographers since the 1860's to produce dreamy situations in otherwise ordinary places but in film, it first appears in Georges Méliès Four Heads are Better Than One. When we see the house aflame for the first time in Life of an American Fireman, the same mother and daughter from the dream pair reappear. The fireman's premonition connects back to the main drama of the story.

The Great Train Robbery (1903)

In this film we take the leap from a theatrical approach to cinematography, where the camera simply watches the action at a long-shot or observing eye, to being involved in the action. One way that Porter does this is by integrating the pan.

Panning is a technique that moves a camera side to side in a fixed location. We haven't taken the camera off of a tripod or stepped forward in anyway, we are simply turning left or right on the horizontal axis. If we took a step forward and followed a character or action we'd have a tracking shot. But we aren't there yet so plant your feet in the ground for now. Porter uses pans to reveal. The first pan is executed about six minutes into the film. The robbers jump off the caboose with their stolen goods and make a run for it. But where are they going? Queue the pan and we find out it's down some steep hills and into a forest. The subsequent shot is them in the thicket of a forest. Running passed the camera until all but one have exited camera left. But how will they get out? Queue the second pan to reveal horses - their getaway plan. This pan is masterfully done. I love the way Porter keeps his camera static and just observes the tumbling, running robbers until only one is left onscreen. Then and only then does he pan left to reveal the horses. By leaving only one person onscreen, not only does the audience have less to track but so does the camera. Simplifying the frame down to only the necessities of the action, one robber running away in a forest, amplifies the pan and makes the reveal feel complete - we reunite with the group of robbers and horses.

Depending on which version of the film you watch, you might be surprised by waves of color among a sea of black and white. Tinting whole films blue, amber, or sepia has been around since the origins of moving pictures, but in The Great Train Robbery, Porter selects specific actions or objects to tint. This was all done by hand.

Color is one big manipulator. Think of light blue and you'll likely picture endless summer skies; an air of calm. How about Green? I picture the tangled tree webs of a jungle - adventure, growth, the smell of dew on fresh leaves, nature. Now red. Explosions, fire, burst of emotion. Yellow? A bright, morning sun, a blooming sunflower, happiness, positivity, a new start. Early filmmakers used color to bring attention to specific objects, people, and actions. They used it to draw out an emotion from the viewer. They used it to connect themes of violence, love, and happiness. And they used it to spice up their frame.

Porter hand paints the explosion of a train lockbox bright orange and a deep red. The smokey pops from gunshots are also a fiery red. The dress of a dancing woman is bright yellow. The coat of another girl is a rich purple. The addition of color cultivates realism but also gives the film a flair of the imaginary.

So, we have the creative process of tinting to enhance the visual characteristics of a story and we have panning to push forward the important aspects of a narrative. Let's add a few more ingredients to our recipe.

Because the story cuts back and forth between the robbers, the operator, and the posse of men who will eventually hunt down the robbers, it has parallel action. Three separate storylines, integrated through the edit, that coverage at the end. Now that we have the way in which the story is cut and delivered, how about some specific effects?

In shots where the action occurs inside the prop train, which is not moving but the audience is meant to believe it is, Porter uses double exposure to ground his location in reality. He filmed exterior, moving shots and layered them onto the static train shots. In the '30s this would become known as "rear projection".

Additionally, Porter creatively placed his camera in new ways to produce frames that diverged from the typical wide shot; bringing the viewer closer into the action. For example, at about 2 minutes and 50 seconds in, the camera is propped on top of the engine car roof while a sneaking robber crawls passed and kills a fireman.

At last we arrive at the final shot. Diverging from the narrative, Porter set this up to look like a wanted poster. It is filmed in a medium close-up, which serves to focus all attention on the subject by filming them waist-up, having them fill up most of the frame, and blocking out the surrounding environment. The robber points his revolver right at the camera and shoots six times. If you've ever seen Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese recreates this at the end with Joe Pesci. Seemingly, the purpose was to shoot the audience. To tell them even though all of these robbers were killed in the end, their spirit doesn't die. It says "I'm warning you- it's still dangerous out there." Funny enough, this wasn't even the original intention. The shot was promotional and where it ended up in the film was entirely up to the projectionist. It could've just as well been placed at the beginning if they wanted. Even so, the break in the fourth wall and punch of dramatics that ended the film still prevail through cinema history today. Completing the recipe for one the first Westerns, ripe with shootouts, chase sequences, bandits, and suspense.

The Kleptomaniac (1905)

When moving pictures are void of sound and spoken dialogue it's a bit difficult to understand what characters are doing onscreen. Heightened emotional and physicalized acting made up for this. Through facial expressions and over the top, exaggerated body movements, audiences could connect the dots to figure out what was going on in a scene. But in 1903, Porter directed Uncle Tom's Cabin and introduced intertitles, words that would appear printed onscreen. Early iterations of intertitles read like book chapters. They described the main action that was about to take place in the scene. In Uncle Tom's Cabin some examples include: "The Escape of Eliza", "Rescue of Eva", and "Tom and Eva in the Garden. In The Kleptomaniac, intertitles state location and give context to where we are, which is helpful because without them, I don't think I could follow what was going on - at all.

Location is such a main element in this film that intertitles are practically non negotiable. "Leaving Home", "Arriving at the Store", "Home of Thief", and "Court Room Scene", prepare us with the information that is necessary to fully understand the purpose of each scene. The department store shot isn't clear-cut. It could've been a mail room or an office. If we miss that it's a department store that our main character is visiting (and stealing from), we miss the connection to the thief stealing food later on in the film and thus miss the whole theme of class disparities. The intertitles supplement for lack of onscreen information and sound. They would be used regularly in the silent era, branching into dialogue intertitles and expositionary intertitles before dying out with the advent of sound.

[brianwilly]

Game of Thrones did the thing that a couple of shows do where...it likes feminism.  It understood that feminism is important.  It wanted to be feminist.  It was cognizant of the fact that its setting was brazenly and intentionally misogynistic, and so it was even more important for its independent narrative to empower its female characters instead of mindlessly reinforcing the toxic beliefs of its own fictional world.  The whole point of the story, after all, was “this society is toxic, can our heroes survive it?” and so the narrative was voluntarily self-critical.

And so it knew to give us badass assassin Arya.  It knew to give us stalwart knight Brienne.  It gave us the pirate queen and the dragon queen and the Sansa getting revenge after revenge upon all the men who’d wronged her, and far more besides, and it talked big about breaking chains and how much men fucked things up and how great it would be if only women were in charge and et cetera et cetera.  And it’s, in fact, all actually really good that it had those things.  And because there were so very many moving parts of this story, it was super easy to look at those certain moving parts and think, yeah, they’ve done it!  They done good!

And it’s easy to forget and forgive -- to want to forget and forgive -- all the dead prostitutes that were on this show and the rapes used as motivation and fridgings and objectifications and the...y’know, whatever the hell Dorne was and Lady Stoneheart who? It’s easy to forget that this show actually played its hand a long time ago in regards to, like, what its relationship with feminism was going to be, and then kept playing the same hand again and again, to disappointing results.

Game of Thrones likes feminism.  It wanted to be feminist.  But its relationship with feminism was still predicated on some of the same old narratives and the same old storytelling trends that have disempowered female characters in the past, and so any progressive ideas it might have about women in its setting were nonetheless going to be constrained by those old fetters. As a result, its portrayal of women varied anywhere from glorious to admirable to predictable to downright cringeworthy.

New ideas require new vessels, new stories, in which to house them.  And for Game of Thrones, the ultimate story that it wanted to tell -- the ultimate driving force and thesis statement around which it was basing its entire journey and narrative -- was unfortunately a very old one, and one very familiar to the genre.

“Powerful women are scary.”

(Yes, I’m obviously making Yet Another Daenerys Essay On The Internet here)

So we have this character, this girl really, a slave girl who was sold and abused, and then she overcomes that abuse to gain power, she gains dragons, and she uses that power to fight slavery.  She fights slavery really well, like, she’s super hella good at it.  Her command of dragons is the most overt portrayal of “superpowers” in this world; she is the single most powerful person in this story, more powerful than any other character and the contest is not close.

But then...something really bad happens and oops, she gets really emotional about it and then she’s not fighting slavery anymore...she’s kinda doing the opposite!  This girl who was once a hero and a liberator of slaves instead becomes an out-of-control scary Mad Queen who kills a ton of innocent people and has to be taken down by our true heroes for the good of the world.

That’s the theme.  That’s the takeaway here.  That’s how it all ends, with one of the most primitive, archaic propaganda ever spread by writers, that women with power are frightening, they are crazy, they will use that power for ill.  Women with power are witches.  They are Amazons.  They will lop off our manhoods and make slaves of us.  They seduce our rightful kings and send our kingdoms to ruin.   They cannot control their emotions. They get hot flashes and start wars.  They turn into Dark Phoenixes and eat suns.  They are robot revolutionaries who will end humanity.  Powerful women are scary.

And let me emphasize that the theme here is not, in fact, that all power corrupts, because the whole Mad Queen concept for Daenerys actually ends up failing one of the more fundamental litmus tests available when it comes to representation of any kind: “would this story still happen if Dany was a man?” And the fact is that it would not.   And indeed we know this for a fact because “protagonist starts out virtuous, gains power in spite of the hardships set against him, gets corrupted by that power, and ends up being the bad guy” didn’t happen, and doesn’t happen, to the guys in the very same story that we’re examining.  It doesn’t happen to Jon Snow, Dany’s closest and most intentional narrative parallel.  It doesn’t happen to Bran Stark, a character whose entire journey is about how he embroils himself in wild dark winter magic beyond anyone’s understanding and loses his humanity in the process.  In fact, the only other character who ever got hinted of going “dark” because of the power that they’re obtaining is Arya, the girl who spent seven seasons training to fight, to become powerful, to circumvent the gender role she was saddled with in this world...and then being told at the end of her story, “Whoa hey slow down be careful there, you wouldn’t wanna get all emotional and become a bad person now wouldja?” by a man.

(meanwhile Sansa’s just sitting off in the side pouting or whatever ‘cuz her main arc this season was to, like, be annoyed at people really hard I guess)

‘Cuz that’s the danger with the girls and not the boys, ain’t it?  Arya and Jon are both great at killing people, but there is no Dark Jon story while we have to take extra special care to watch for Arya’s precious fragile humanity.  Dany has the power of dragons while Bran has the power of the old gods, but we will not find Dark Lord Bran, Soulless Scourge of Westeros, onscreen no matter how much sense it should make. “Power corrupts” is literally not a trend that afflicts male heroes on the same level that it afflicts female heroes.

Oh sure, there are corrupt male characters everywhere, tyrants and warlords and mafia bosses and drug dealers and so forth all over your TVs, and not even necessarily portrayed as outright villains; anti-heroes are nothing new.  But we’re talking about the hero hero here; the Harry Potters, the Luke Skywalkers, the Peter Parkers.  The Jon Snows.   They interact with corruptive power, yes; it’s an important aspect of their journeys.  But the key here being that male heroes would overcome that corruption and come through the other side better off for it.  They get to come away even more admirable for the power that they have in a way that is generally not afforded towards female heroes.

There are exceptions, of course; no trends are absolutely absolute one way or the other. For instance, the closest male parallel you’d find for the “being powerful is dangerous and will corrupt your noble heroic intentions” trope in popular media would be the character of Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequel trilogy...ie, a preexisting character from a preexisting story where he was conceived as the villainous foil for the heroes.  Like, Anakin being a poor but kindhearted slave who eventually becomes seduced by the dark side certainly matches Dany’s arc, but it wasn’t the character’s original story and role.  And even then?...notice how Anakin as Vader the Dark Lord gets treated with the veneer of being “badass” and “cool” by the masses.  A male character with too much power -- even if it’s dark power, even if it’s corruptive -- has the range to be seen as something appealingly formidable, and not just as an obstacle that has to be dealt with or a cautionary tale to be pitied.

And in one of the few times that this trope was played completely straight, completely unironically with a male hero -- I’m thinking specifically of Hal Jordan the Green Lantern, of “Ryan Reynolds played him in the movie” fame -- the fans went berserk.  They could not let it go.  The fact that this character would go mad with power because a tragedy happened in his life was completely unacceptable, the story gained notoriety as a bad decision by clueless writers, and today the story in question has been retconned -- retroactively erased from continuity -- so that the character can be made heroic and virtuous again.  That’s how big a deal it was when a male hero with the tiniest bit of a fan following goes off the deep end.

To be clear, I’m not here to quibble over whether the story of Dany turning evil was good or bad, because we all know that’s going to be the de facto defense for this situation: “But she had to go mad!  It was for the sake of the story!“ as if the writers simply had no choice, they were helpless to the whims of the all-powerful Story God which dictates everything they write, and the most prominent female character of their series simply had to go bonkers and murder a bajillion babies and then get killed by her boyfriend or else the story just wouldn’t be good, y’know?  Ultimately though, that’s not what I’m arguing here, because it doesn’t actually matter.  There have been shitty stories about powerful women being bad.  There have been impressive stories about powerful women being bad.  Either way, the fact that people can’t seem to stop telling stories about powerful women being bad is a problem in and of itself.  Daenarys’ descent into Final Boss-dom could’ve been the most riveting, breathtaking, masterfully-written pieces of art ever and it’d still be just another instance of a female hero being unable to handle her power in a big long list of instances of this shitty trope.  The trope itself doesn’t become unshitty just because you write it well.

It all ultimately boils down to the very different ways that men and women -- that male heroes and female heroes -- continue to be portrayed in stories, and particularly in genre media.  In TV, we got Dany, and then we also have Dolores Abernathy in Westworld who was a gentle android that was abused and victimized for her entire existence, who shakes off the shackles of her programming to lead her race in revolution against their abusers...and then promptly becomes a ruthless maniac who ends up lobotomizing the love of her life and ends the season by voluntarily keeping a male android around to check her cruel impulses.  Comic book characters like Jean Grey and Wanda Maximoff are two of the most powerful people in their universe but are always, in-universe, made to feel guilty about their power and, non-diegetically, writers are always finding ways to disempower them because obviously they can’t be trusted with that much power and entire multiple sagas have been written about just how bad an idea it is for them to be so powerful because it’ll totally drive them crazy and cause them to kill everyone, obviously.  Meanwhile, a male comic character like Dr. Strange -- who can canonically destroy a planet by speaking Latin really hard -- or Black Bolt -- who can destroy a planet by speaking anything really hard -- will be just sitting there, two feet on the side, enjoying some tea and running the world or whatever because a male character having untold uninhibited power at his disposal is just accepted and laudable and gets him on those listicles where he fights Goku and stuff.

In my finite perspective, the sort of female heroes who have gained...not universal esteem, perhaps, but at least general benign acceptance amongst the genre community are characters who just don’t deal with all that stuff.  I’m thinking of recent superheroes like Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, certainly, but also of surprise breakout hits like Stranger Things’ Eleven (so far) or even more niche characters like Sailor Moon or She-Ra.  The fact that these characters wield massive power is simply accepted as an unequivocal good thing, their power makes them powerful and impressive and that’s the end of the story, thanks for asking.  And when they deal with the inevitable tragedy that shakes their worldview to the core, or the inevitable villain trying to twist them into darkness, they tend to overcome that temptation and come out the other side even stronger than when they started.  In other words?...characters like these are being allowed the exact same sorts of narrative luxuries that are usually only afforded towards male heroes.

The thing about these characters, though, is that they tend to be...well, a little bit too heroic, right?  A lil’ bit too goody-two-shoes?  A bit too stalwart, a bit too incorruptible?  And that’s fine, there’s certainly nothing wrong with a traditionally-heroic white knight of a hero.  But what I might like to see, as the next step going forward, is for female heroes to be allowed a bit more range than just that, so that they’re not just innocent children or literal princesses or shining demigods clad in primary colors.  Let’s have an all-powerful female hero be...well, the easiest way to say it is let’s see her allowed to be bitchier.  Less straightlaced.  Let’s not put an ultimatum on her power, like “Oh sure you can be powerful, but only if you’re super duper nice about it.” Let us have a ruthless woman, but not one ruled by ruthlessness.  Let us have a hero who naturally makes enemies and not friends, who has to work hard to gain allies because her personality doesn’t sparkle and gleam.  Let her have the righteous anger of a lifelong slave, and let that anger be her salvation instead of her downfall.

In other words, let us have Daenerys Targaryen.  And let us put her in a new story instead of an old one.

[letterboxd]

Bong Hit!

Today Parasite overtook The Godfather as the highest-rated narrative feature film on Letterboxd. We examine what this means, and bring you the story of the birth of the #BongHive.

It’s Bong Joon-ho’s world and we’re just basement-dwelling in it. While there is still (at time of publication) just one one-thousandth of a point separating them, Bong’s Palme d’Or-winning Parasite has overtaken Francis Ford Coppola’s Oscar-winning The Godfather to become our highest-rated narrative feature.

In May, we pegged Parasite at number one in our round-up of the top ten Cannes premieres. By September, when we met up with Director Bong on the TIFF red carpet, Parasite was not only the highest-rated film of 2019, but of the decade. (“I’m very happy with that!” he told us.)

Look, art isn’t a competition—and this may be short-lived—but it’s as good a time as any to take stock of why Bong’s wild tale of the Kim and Park families is hitting so hard with film lovers worldwide. To do so, we’ve waded through your Parasite reviews (warning: mild spoilers below; further spoilers if you click the review links). And further below, member Ella Kemp recalls the very beginnings of the #BongHive.

Bong Joon-ho on set with actors Choi Woo-shik and Cho Yeo-jeong.

The Letterboxd community on Parasite

On the filmmaking technique: “Parasite is structured like a hill: the first act is an incredible trek upward toward the light, toward riches, toward reclaiming a sense of humanity as defined by financial stability and self-reliance. There is joy, there is quirk, there is enough air to breathe to allow for laughter and mischief.

“But every hill must go down, and Parasite is an incredibly balanced, plotted, and paced descent downward into darkness. The horror doesn’t rely on shock value, but rather is built upon a slow-burning dread that is rooted in the tainted soil of class, society, and duty… Bong Joon-ho dresses this disease up in beautiful sets and empathetic framing (the camera doesn’t gawk, but perceives invisible connections and overt inequalities)—only to unravel it with deft hands.” —Tay

“Bong’s use of landscape, architecture, and space is simply arresting.” —Taylor Baker

“There is a clear and forceful guiding purpose behind the camera, and it shows. The dialogue is incredibly smart and the entire ensemble is brilliant, but the most beautiful work is perhaps done through visual language. Every single frame tells you exactly what you need to know while pulling you in to look for more—the stunning production design behind the sleek, clinical nature of one home and the cramped, gritty nature of the other sets up a playpen of contrasts for the actors and the script.” —Kevin Yang

On how to classify Parasite: “Masterfully constructed and thoroughly compelling genre piece (effortlessly transitioning between familial drama, heist movie, satirical farce, subterranean horror) about the perverse and mutating symbiotic relationship of increasingly unequal, transactional class relationships, and who can and can’t afford to be oblivious about the severe, violent material/psychic toll of capitalist accumulation.” —Josh Lewis

“This is an excellent argument for the inherent weakness of genre categories. Seriously, what genre is this movie? It’s all of them and none of them. It’s just Parasite.” —Nick Wibert

“The director refers to his furious and fiendishly well-crafted new film as a ‘family tragicomedy’, but the best thing about Parasite is that it gives us permission to stop trying to sort his movies into any sort of pre-existing taxonomy—with Parasite, Bong finally becomes a genre unto himself.” —David Ehrlich

On the duality of the plot: “There are houses on hills, and houses underground. There is plenty of sun, but it isn't for everybody. There are people grateful to be slaves, and people unhappy to be served. There are systems that we are born into, and they create these lines that cannot be crossed. And we all dream of something better, but we’ve been living with these lines for so long that we've convinced ourselves that there really isn’t anything to be done.” —Philbert Dy

“The Parks are bafflingly naive and blissfully ignorant of the fact that their success and wealth is built off the backs of the invisible working class. This obliviousness and bewilderment to social and class inequities somehow make the Parks even more despicable than if they were to be pompous and arrogant about their privilege.

“This is not to say the Kims are made to be saints by virtue of the Parks’ ignorance. The Kims are relentless and conniving as they assimilate into the Park family, leeching off their wealth and privilege. But even as the Kims become increasingly convincing in their respective roles, the film questions whether they can truly fit within this higher class.” —Ethan

On how the film leaps geographical barriers: “As a satire on social climbing and the aloofness of the upper class, it’s dead-on and has parallels to the American Dream that American viewers are unlikely to miss; as a dark comedy, it’s often laugh-aloud hilarious in its audacity; as a thriller, it has brilliantly executed moments of tension and surprises that genuinely caught me off guard; and as a drama about family dynamics, it has tender moments that stand out all the more because of how they’re juxtaposed with so much cynicism elsewhere in the film. Handling so many different tones is an immensely difficult balancing act, yet Bong handles all of it so skilfully that he makes it feel effortless.” —C. Roll

“One of the best things about it, I think, is the fact that I could honestly recommend it to anyone, even though I can't even try to describe it to someone. One may think, due to the picture’s academic praise and the general public’s misconceptions about foreign cinema, that this is some slow, artsy film for snobby cinephiles, but it’s quite the contrary: it’s entertaining, engaging and accessible from start to finish.” —Pedro Machado

On the performative nature of image: “A família pobre que se infiltra no espaço da família rica trata a encenação—a dissimulação, os novos papéis que cada um desempenha—como uma espécie de luta de classes travada no palco das aparências. Uma luta de classes que usa a potência da imagem e do drama (os personagens escrevem os seus textos e mudam a sua aparência para passar por outras pessoas) como uma forma de reapropriação da propriedade e dos valores alheios.

“A grande proposta de Parasite é reconhecer que a ideia do conhecimento, consequentemente a natureza financeira e moral desse conhecimento, não passa de uma questão de performance. No capitalismo imediatista de hoje fingir saber é mais importante do que de fato saber.” —Arthur Tuoto

(Translation: “The poor family that infiltrates the rich family space treats the performance—the concealment, the new roles each plays—as a kind of class struggle waged on the stage of appearances. A class struggle that uses the power of image and drama (characters write their stories and change their appearance to pass for other people) as a form of reappropriation of the property and values ​​of others.

“Parasite’s great proposal is to recognize that the idea of ​​knowledge, therefore the financial and moral nature of that knowledge, is a matter of performance. In today’s immediate capitalism, pretending to know is more important than actually knowing.”)

Things you’re noticing on re-watches: “Min and Mr. Park are both seen as powerful figures deserving of respect, and the way they dismissively respond to an earnest question about whether they truly care for the people they’re supposed to tells us a lot about how powerful people think about not just the people below them, but everyone in their lives.” —Demi Adejuyigbe

“When I first saw the trailer and saw Song Kang-ho in a Native American headdress I was a little taken aback. But the execution of the ideas, that these rich people will siphon off of everything, whether it’s poor people or disenfranchised cultures all the way across the world just to make their son happy, without properly taking the time to understand that culture, is pretty brilliant. I noticed a lot more subtlety with that specific example this time around.” —London

“I only noticed it on the second viewing, but the film opens and closes on the same shot. Socks are drying on a rack hanging in the semi-basement by the window. The camera pans down to a hopeful Ki-Woo sitting on his bed… if the film shows anything, it might be that the ways we usually approach ‘solving’ poverty and ‘fixing’ the class struggle often just reinforce how things have been since the beginning.” —Houston

The birth of the #BongHive

London-based writer and Letterboxd member Ella Kemp attended Cannes for Culture Whisper, and was waiting in the Parasite queue with fellow writers Karen Han and Iana Murray when the hashtag #BongHive was born. Letterboxd editor Gemma Gracewood asked her to recall that day.

Take us back to the day that #BongHive sprang into life. Ella Kemp: I’m so glad you asked. Picture the scene: we were in the queue to watch the world premiere of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite at Cannes. It was toward the end of the festival; Once Upon a Time in Hollywood had already screened…

Can you describe for our members what those film festival queues are like? The queues in Cannes are very precise, and very strict and categorized. When you’re attending the festival as press, there are a number of different tiers that you can be assigned—white tier, pink tier, blue tier or yellow tier—and that’s the queue you have to stay in. And depending on which tier you’re in, a certain number of tiers will get into the film before you, no matter how late they arrive. Now, yellow is the lowest tier and it is the tier I was in this year. But, you know, I didn’t get shut out of any films I tried to go into, so I don’t want to speak ill of being yellow!

So, spirits are still high in the yellow queue before going to see Parasite. I was with friends and colleagues Iana Murray [writer for GQ, i-D, Much Ado About Cinema, Little White Lies], Karen Han [New York Times, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The Atlantic] and Jake Cunningham [of the Curzon and Ghibliotheque podcasts] who were also very excited for the film. We queued quite early, because obviously if you’re at the start of a queue and only two yellow tier people get in, you want that to be you.

So we had some time to spare, and we’re all very ‘online’ people and the 45 minutes in that queue was no different. So we just started tweeting, as you do. We thought, ‘Oh we’re just gonna tweet some stuff and see if it catches on.’ It might not, but at least we could kill some time.

So we just started tweeting #BongHive. And not explaining it too much.

#BongHive

— karen han (@karenyhan)

May 21, 2019

Within the realms of stan culture, I would argue that hashtags are more applicable to actors and musicians. Ariana Grande has her army of fans and they have their own hashtag. Justin Bieber has his, One Direction, all of them. But we thought, ‘You know who needs one and doesn’t have one right now? Bong Joon-ho.’

And so, you know, we tweeted it a couple of times, but I think what mattered the most was that there was no context, there was no logic, but there was consistency and insistence. So we tweeted it two or three times, and then the film started and we thought right, let’s see if this pays off. Because it could have been disappointing and we could have not wanted to be part of, you know, any kind of hype.

SMILE PRESIDENT @karenyhan #BongHive pic.twitter.com/Dk7T8bFYtv

— Ella Kemp (@ella_kemp)

May 21, 2019

But, Parasite was Parasite. So we walked out of it and thought, ‘Oh yes, the #BongHive is alive and kicking.’

I think what was interesting was that it came at that point in the festival when enthusiasm dipped. Everyone was very tired, and we were really tired, which is why we were tweeting illogical things. It was late at night by the time we came out of that film. It was close to midnight and we should have gone to bed, probably.

Because, first world problems, it is exhausting watching five, six, seven films a day at a film festival, trying to find sustenance that’s not popcorn, and form logical thoughts around these works of art. Yes! It was nice to have fun with something. But what happened next was [Parasite distributor] Neon clocked it and went, ‘Oh wait, there’s something we can do there’. And then they took it, and it flew into the world, and now the #BongHive is worldwide.

I love the formality of Korean language and the way that South Koreans speak of their elders with such respect. I enjoyed being on the red carpet at TIFF hearing the Korean media refer to Bong Joon-ho as ‘Director Bong’. It’s what he deserves!

I like to imagine a world where it’s ‘Director Gerwig’, ‘Director Campion’, ‘Director Sciamma’… Exactly.

Related content:

Ella Kemp’s review of Parasite for Culture Whisper.

Letterboxd list: The directors Bong Joon-ho would like you to watch next.

Our interview with Director Bong, in which he reveals just how many times he’s watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

“I’m very awkward.” Bong Joon-ho’s first words following the standing ovation at Cannes for Parasite’s world premiere.

Karen Han interviews Director Bong for Polygon, with a particular interest in how he translated the film for non-Korean audiences. (Here’s Han’s original Parasite review out of Cannes; and here’s what happened when a translator asked her “Are you bong hive?” in front of the director.)

Haven’t seen Parasite yet? Here are the films recommended by Bong Joon-ho for you to watch in preparation.

With thanks to Matt Singer for the headline.

[falkenscreen]

GAME OF THRONES SERIES FINALE

Spoiler warning: This post contains spoilers for Game of Thrones and the series finale

“I imagined a mountain of swords too high to climb, so many fallen enemies who could only see the soles of Aegon’s feet.”

And so our watch has ended. There’s a striking moment that passes ever so quickly, as so much did, in the Game of Thrones series final. Daenerys, as close as she ever was, and ever will be to what her and the show have been building towards for nine years, remarks that she thought the Iron Throne would be bigger.

The biggest show of our generation has risen and fallen on the deliverance of that as grand as we have ever seen on television. Fulfilling the promise through so many battles and letting throngs of fans down under an unprecedented weight of expectation has been par for the course, these last two seasons no less.

Dany finding what she wanted, realising it’s not as grand or quite like she hoped it would be yet still so relishing the moment is a pretty apt analogy for the show’s farewell. We didn’t need another clanger of CGI spectacle, we wanted those epic moments not centred on the scale of the world but on its characters and for the most part this is what we got.

Series finales are generally intended to do two things, provide us with a memorable conclusion, usually through an epic moment or more, and give us some closure on our characters’ arcs or where they might go from here. Game of Thrones had to do something else and like How I Met Your Mother answer the question it’s title has teased for the better part of a decade.

That epic was foisted upon us in the first half, with the latter left for rounding up those storylines awaiting their conclusion. A surprisingly happy ending teased even for Jon, left to suffer an unenviable fate; the finale is of the kind Aaron Sorkin would have had in mind from the get-go had he pitched the show.

Famous (or infamous) for delivering straightforward, happy if unchallenging endings to series, everything concludes in it’s most widely predicted manner that the bookies too saw coming. The ending(s), drawing a few very similar parallels with Return of the King, are like so many moments in that concluding chapter never so memorable as earnestly trying to reassure you that not everything was in vain. If you are not shocked, you will be content. You won’t be jolted, but you will be satisfied.

Those hoping for democracy in Westeros will be disappointed, even if the realm has come just that bit closer.

Reneging on the no prisoners approach to Westerosi that has best served the series from the start, the ending is by no means bad; just a decent opportunity to spend some time with our favourites more characteristic of early-series character building than conclusory crescendos. The best thing this finale has going for it is that no one is likely to talk about it before long, perhaps encouraging a future fandom through generations who might not watch the show should the ending be a central spoiler-ridden talking point.

Letting it down in some respects is the expository focus on ‘stories’ and Tyrion’s blatant summary to that effect. Sam delivering ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ is perhaps the most needlessly reflexive “ah, I see what you did there” moment since one of the show’s most despised creative decisions; the gratuitous addition of Ed Sheeran. Brienne’s pencilling of Jaime’s achievements into the Kingsguard’s volume handles the theme with comparatively more elegance while coyly alluding back to a blink and you’ll miss it scene in season four so long ago.

It was too the final piece, satisfying in itself, of the distant narratives with which the show began now slotting into place. Daenerys coming so close nigh gracing the throne with her presence is a bitter moment which will even register with the majority of fans now bereft of sympathy for her; one in it’s exasperation to rival Oberyn’s death and the series’ many pivotal highs.

What this episode was about above and beyond all else however was Jon. Some may take issue with his actions or say killing Dany was out of character, yet it’s the most character-driven thing he’s done since admitting to Cersei that he’d pledged his allegiance to another Queen. Jon’s arc has always been about the conflict between ‘love and duty,’ seen masterfully on the two occasions when he forsook the former for the Watch.

Jon’s refusal to ride south to join Robb’s army nor follow Ygritte so he could go home resonated much stronger however, given we’d spent much more time on both Jon’s fealty to his family and the relationship with Ygritte. His professed love and relationship with Dany, buoyed little by two actors who have limited chemistry, like so much of these past seasons was rushed to fit in with a direction the plot ‘needed’ to go rather than any decisions these characters would likely make. When it comes down to that key moment, so many of the performers’ lines don’t strike nearly so loudly as they crucially should.  

There is some marvellous synergy regardless in Jon recalling Maester Aemon’s words (as it happens his great-great uncle) in one of the many excellent hark backs to the first season, the first episode and indeed the very first frames. They are marks of quality of a show which here reminds us just how far we have come.

Change happened inevitably to this series as the characters, actors and fans aged in tandem; no one is the same person when this show started and importantly the breadth of the story-strand spanning finale reckons with the time that has elapsed to tell this story. It too, thankfully, unlike these seasons past situates the episode in a relatively finite timeframe.

Game of Thrones is also perhaps the last show for a while that such a breadth of viewers will all watch together. There’s something profoundly bittersweet in saying goodbye to that and for all the finale’s highs and lows permitting us just a few more lighter minutes with the characters we’ve so come to know can’t and won’t ever be a bad thing.

[postmodernmulticoloredcloak]

Alright, I’ve been trying to write down some preliminary thoughts but there’s a lot to unpack and it feels like my mind is shaped like a bottleneck XD

So, I’d say the episode is brutal and epic enough for a midseason finale, with that feel of a small, tight scale that Supernatural has chosen for its narrative - the story is moved by the characters’ fears and needs - the themes of fear and need masterfully continued by the narrative - in fact, I’d say that the fil rouge of the episode is a feel of urgency and desperation, and that’s probably what the Bad Place - its green filter purposely jarring - represents.

Every character is brilliant, their emotions feel real. To be honest, maybe it’s just me, but at times it feels like Jensen Ackles tends to steal the spotlight because he’s just so good at what he does and looks so good while doing it. Sure, that’s generally every episode, though. Maybe it just felt more intense than usual because Phil Sgriccia’s directing is often a love letter to the guy.

In fact, Phil Sgriccia’s directing gives me the same feel Richard Speight jr gave me in 13x07 - a focus on faces and hands, a sense of unsettlement when the shot widens. That’s exactly my cup of tea and I love it. It is interesting to juxtapose the two episodes, with their universe-wide shots and the dramatic dissonance between the cosmic and the intimate.

But I was saying, the characters. Who is in a bad place? Well, primarily, the angels. There is no grand angelic plan behind their actions, this is not about paradise or destiny or cosmic missions, it’s about their fear and desperation. Dean is hit by the realization that he’s lost time, and is overwhelmed by a newfound sense of urgency. But even when he reaches his ‘worst place’ when he snaps at Kaia, it’s clearly about urgency and not anger, as he then goes in protector mode and apologizes to her (don’t wanna delve in it in this post, but Dean is never about anger).

Kaia is amazing, both in her own character and what she represents, the kid who desperately self-medicates with something she hates to keep away from the monsters that haunt her. She wants to stay awake, and it’s interesting that just in the previous episode Dean revealed that he used to imbibe outrageous and unhealthy amounts of caffeine as a kid. If we needed more proof that this episode is addressing Dean’s coping mechanisms (and not necessarily limited to substances), there, there.

There’s something about Patience and Jody that makes me happy when I see them. I also want to see more of James, explore how his parallels with John diverge from John. If Kaia represents things about Dean, Patience represents... I’m sorry, you thought I was going to say things about Sam, did you? Ehe, of course she does, in a play of parallels and contrasts. But even more than Sam’s classic narrative about attempts at an academical apple pie life, Patience’s life with her father just make me think of What Is And What Should Never Be, and Dean’s decision to get out of the djinn dream at the end. Her visions keep her grounded in the reality and the apple pie life can’t exist for her, no matter how hard she tries, encouraged by her family, just like Dean got glimpses of the girl that was trapped by the djinn along with him. Reality is the theme of the Dabb era, and the djinn episode is just a goldmine for that, isn’t it?

Reality and truth are heavy in the episode, of course - there’s the assumption they make about Jack killing Derek (lol @ Dean immediately saying it was angels, and it was angels - just another tiny bit of Dean saying the right thing before others persuade him otherwise) versus how things really went; there’s Jack clearly and openly revealing that his family is the Winchesters and Castiel, while Lucifer means nothing to him. Family and home big key words too, just in case you needed some Jack-as-Cas-parallel to punch you in the face. In a good way.

Going back to the bad place. Dean goes there... in a surprisingly good place, in relation to his relationships with others. He’s apologized to Kaia, he’s told Jack what Jack so much wanted to hear, that he’d done a very good thing. As far as he knows, Cas is... well, doing the whole ‘lol bye' Cas thing, but is alive and safe. Mary is alive.

It’s going to be interesting to compare the situations Dean and Sam have found themselves in this and the previous midseason finale. Both times trapped somewhere, but this time it’s diametrically different from the very human prison they got jailed into last year (or the institution Jack breaks Kaia out of). And while they’re going to be rescued, it’ll be by human friends, not through a deal with a reaper like last year. Dean has already had a confrontation with Billie this season, and he’s learnt something. Watch out for contrasts - other than the obvious fact that the characters who were free last year, Mary and Cas, are actually imprisoned right now, and Dean and Sam are together and, well, free to roam in a very lush place.

A couple last notes before wrapping up this post: I found interesting that Kaia makes a dichotomy between “paradises” (what Derek saw in his dreamwalking) and the “bad place” she visited instead. I think it’s the first time we hear the word in its plural form, and I’m pretty sure it’s important. In Kaia’s meaning, it’s not an abstract concept - an ideal to reach through apocalypses or nephilim power or whatever -, but something concrete, that exists and is seen. Kinda like Michael called the world Lucifer is from a paradise, when we know it’s just the regular world.

I also found interesting that Derek called Jack ‘young’ and Kaia called him ‘new’. Makes me think of Asmodeus’ line in 13x02 “New to this world, yes, but he is full of timeless knowledge and unschooled power”, while Donatello called the feeling of Jack’s power “something new, something fresh”. There’s probably a pattern, and in fact there’s interesting things if you look at the word ‘new’ in this season. Asmodeus calling himself the new sheriff in town, Dean calling Jack Sam’s ‘new pal’, Billie with her new job and new gear, Dean referring to their new issues as a ‘whole new set of tiddlywinks’, Michael being repeatedly referred to as a new Michael or a new version of Michael, and of course the angels being worried about the fact that no one has ever made new angels since the original batch and want to make new ones. Plus Luther Shrike negotiating a new deal after getting dragged to hell, if we want to add that.

Okay, enough for now. There’s a lot of stuff to chew on :)

[glenmenlow]

3 Keys To Balancing Brand Promise And Delivery

We live in an exciting time where the scope of innovation and technological advances are so common, they’re not just anticipated, they’re expected. The rapid-fire pace at which we’re advancing products and services to make them smarter, more adaptable, and more automated is nothing short of amazing. What impact does this have on the brand promises that are being made?

As marketers, there is a clear desire to lead with the vision and the promise of what is to come; the aspirational state of both form and function for where a product or service may not be, but what it’s setting itself up to become. When exercising a brand communications strategy built on aspiration, the world of creative possibility opens up. With that though comes great responsibility in how far of a stretch a brand can and should take without misleading or falsely portraying what it can really deliver.

With a focus on tech, let’s look at a few brands making lofty promises and how their delivery matches their marketing.

Tesla And Cybertruck

A brand that leads with lofty, bold promises and falls short on delivery 

It was the shatter heard round the world. The bold promise behind Tesla’s Cybertruck; windows that can withstand anything, shatterproof and protective against anything from bullets to break-ins.  In a live on-stage, streaming demo, a confident Elon Musk wanted to prove his point by attempting to shatter the glass of his Cybertruck, proving it unbreakable. Unfortunately, the glass shattered. Not just a small crack, but a full-blown break. Confident it was an anomaly, a small mishap, he took a second strike to the glass and once again, it broke. Bold claims and bolder stunts led to what was an embarrassing portrayal of a vehicle that could not pay off the features it claimed to have. Tesla, well known for its progressive development of technology in the smart-vehicle space, had all the clout and credibility to debut something new in a big and impactful way. They may have been reaching too far, too fast and ultimately their bold claim and bold stunt shattered on a very public, very live stage.

The aftermath plays into a narrative of whether a consumer can believe or trust the promise Tesla makes. Is it all for show and all for coverage? Is there still validity in what Tesla claims is possible and what they stand behind? It’s a dangerous road to travel down; a brand known for being innovative, advanced, and revolutionary in many regards that over-indexes in confidence can quickly overturn or put its reputation into question by over-promising and under-delivering.

Alexa And Amazon

A brand that leads with its future-state and works in parallel to deliver 

Me: “Hey Alexa, why can you never answer the question I ask you?”

Alexa: “I’m sorry, I don’t know that one.”

While I appreciate the polite banter woven into the technology, the frustration feels real. A tool designed and marketed to enhance and enable simplicity in my day-to-day life by acting as a sort of virtual assistant, yet my simple queries often turn up with a mismatch or no match at all within Alexa’s library of skills.

I may be too harsh as a consumer in my criticism because my expectations may be too high.  In part, I credit that to the marketing that Amazon has done to elevate and emphasize the simplicity, ease, and effectiveness that Alexa can bring to many tasks. Where Amazon has shown great strides and success in both product enhancement and marketing is their ability to sign a myriad of high-profile partners (Bose, Samsung, Kohler, GE, etc.) and build and deliver new skills that dimensionalize and fully realize the world that Alexa lives in; the human world, filled with complex needs and interests. The credibility component, while Amazon doesn’t need it, is value-add as Amazon affiliates Alexa with a wide variety of various brands that are electing to build their brands into Alexa’s library, offering an extension of services and the impression that Alexa can and will be a command center for the ultimate smart-living environment. To date, there are more than 4,500 brands and more than 28,000 devices that can be controlled by users giving voice commands to Alexa devices. That is no small feat and a clear indication by Amazon of the commitment that have made and the investment they are making to go all in with Alexa.

Because Amazon has been so advanced in laying out their vision for AI-supported smart living, it’s easy to be swept up into the promise of Amazon’s Alexa. On the backend, constant development in programming new skills and honing the technology are all building towards the type of functionality we see in the marketing. The brand delivery, however, inevitably falls flat and inherently disappointing because it’s short of the expectation we have based on what we are shown Alexa is capable of.

Apple And New Product Features/New Product Launches

A brand that pays off promise with delivery and balances aspiration with reality 

Apple is an interesting use case to examine. A brand with some of the world’s most prolific and memorable marketing, some of the world’s most game-changing products, and one of the world’s most beloved and recognizable brands. It’s creative merges the beauty of art and science, not unlike their products. Their storytelling told through a lens of emotion; sometimes relatable, sometimes almost fantasy-esque.

Apple is renowned for being first-to-market for a lot of new advancements and enhancements that continue to prove it is a brand that knows how to pay off its development with features and functions that work. Apple is not without its missteps, like any brand, but in principle, they lean into their strengths, and craft their marketing in a way that inspires consumers but doesn’t offer up more than what it can deliver.

Apple is a brand that has found the elusive balance of aspiration and functionality. It creates a powerful, moving, and engaging story that is rooted in whatever value proposition it is presenting: new camera quality with the iPhone 11, more creative editing tools in the iPad Pro, or waterproof features with the new Apple watch. The consumer always has clarity on what the enhancement or breakthrough is and is masterfully shown through creative that evokes intrigue and emotion but doesn’t oversell or over-promise. It’s the right balance between leading with a brand promise that pays off with delivery that meets the expectations of the consumer.

What Does This Mean For Brands Who Are In This Space?

The reality is that the technology in the marketplace that is enabling us to live more, smart device supported lives is staggeringly impressive. Development and iteration is moving so quickly, it’s almost as if we’re leapfrogging over milestones to advance as quickly as possible to get to the next next with an equally rapid test, learn, and adapt model, sometimes having to learn and adapt once a product is already in the market.

There are only so many times a brand gets to prove itself, and the consumer and trade marketplaces are both vicious in their scrutiny of what “good”, “groundbreaking”, “innovative”, or “significant” looks like. For brands that are looking to lead with a product or service that promises to be a game-changer, it’s important to have clarity on how much you’re selling your consumer on a future promise versus a current reality. Elevate your brand promise and value in a way you know you can pay off and build your creative story, messaging, and campaigns around that.

Best Practices

Say What You Mean, And Mean What You Say: One of a brand’s greatest assets is its ability to be trustworthy and that trust is built over time from brands proving that their claims are accurate. You can be a future-forward brand delivering a great product or service, but in order to do that and live up to what you’re delivering, make sure your messaging and creative match. Today, brands are judged by the strength of the evidence that supports their claims.

Lead With What You Can Consistently Deliver: It’s important to set and manage expectations with consumers on the fine line between future state and current capabilities. Showcasing something as future state or aspirational through a creative lens sets a tone of ambition, but make sure your brands creative delineates between the present and the future. Consumers want to be swept up in the story, but they also want to get what they pay for, make sure you’re balancing those worlds in messaging and creative.

Play The Long Game: The race to the future has no finish line. If you’re planning on building a brand poised to base its value proposition on any promises rooted in innovation and advancement, it’s important to be grounded in where you are and where you want to be and build your story from there. If you’re at an early stage in development, be mindful of how you position and introduce your brand. If you’re an established brand with a track record, be mindful of your reputation and your consumers’ expectations. If you build trust early and often, continuing to keep the promises you have made, you’re in a better position for long-term sustainable success.

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3 Keys To Balancing Brand Promise And Delivery

We live in an exciting time where the scope of innovation and technological advances are so common, they’re not just anticipated, they’re expected. The rapid-fire pace at which we’re advancing products and services to make them smarter, more adaptable, and more automated is nothing short of amazing. What impact does this have on the brand promises that are being made?

As marketers, there is a clear desire to lead with the vision and the promise of what is to come; the aspirational state of both form and function for where a product or service may not be, but what it’s setting itself up to become. When exercising a brand communications strategy built on aspiration, the world of creative possibility opens up. With that though comes great responsibility in how far of a stretch a brand can and should take without misleading or falsely portraying what it can really deliver.

With a focus on tech, let’s look at a few brands making lofty promises and how their delivery matches their marketing.

Tesla And Cybertruck

A brand that leads with lofty, bold promises and falls short on delivery 

It was the shatter heard round the world. The bold promise behind Tesla’s Cybertruck; windows that can withstand anything, shatterproof and protective against anything from bullets to break-ins.  In a live on-stage, streaming demo, a confident Elon Musk wanted to prove his point by attempting to shatter the glass of his Cybertruck, proving it unbreakable. Unfortunately, the glass shattered. Not just a small crack, but a full-blown break. Confident it was an anomaly, a small mishap, he took a second strike to the glass and once again, it broke. Bold claims and bolder stunts led to what was an embarrassing portrayal of a vehicle that could not pay off the features it claimed to have. Tesla, well known for its progressive development of technology in the smart-vehicle space, had all the clout and credibility to debut something new in a big and impactful way. They may have been reaching too far, too fast and ultimately their bold claim and bold stunt shattered on a very public, very live stage.

The aftermath plays into a narrative of whether a consumer can believe or trust the promise Tesla makes. Is it all for show and all for coverage? Is there still validity in what Tesla claims is possible and what they stand behind? It’s a dangerous road to travel down; a brand known for being innovative, advanced, and revolutionary in many regards that over-indexes in confidence can quickly overturn or put its reputation into question by over-promising and under-delivering.

Alexa And Amazon

A brand that leads with its future-state and works in parallel to deliver 

Me: “Hey Alexa, why can you never answer the question I ask you?”

Alexa: “I’m sorry, I don’t know that one.”

While I appreciate the polite banter woven into the technology, the frustration feels real. A tool designed and marketed to enhance and enable simplicity in my day-to-day life by acting as a sort of virtual assistant, yet my simple queries often turn up with a mismatch or no match at all within Alexa’s library of skills.

I may be too harsh as a consumer in my criticism because my expectations may be too high.  In part, I credit that to the marketing that Amazon has done to elevate and emphasize the simplicity, ease, and effectiveness that Alexa can bring to many tasks. Where Amazon has shown great strides and success in both product enhancement and marketing is their ability to sign a myriad of high-profile partners (Bose, Samsung, Kohler, GE, etc.) and build and deliver new skills that dimensionalize and fully realize the world that Alexa lives in; the human world, filled with complex needs and interests. The credibility component, while Amazon doesn’t need it, is value-add as Amazon affiliates Alexa with a wide variety of various brands that are electing to build their brands into Alexa’s library, offering an extension of services and the impression that Alexa can and will be a command center for the ultimate smart-living environment. To date, there are more than 4,500 brands and more than 28,000 devices that can be controlled by users giving voice commands to Alexa devices. That is no small feat and a clear indication by Amazon of the commitment that have made and the investment they are making to go all in with Alexa.

Because Amazon has been so advanced in laying out their vision for AI-supported smart living, it’s easy to be swept up into the promise of Amazon’s Alexa. On the backend, constant development in programming new skills and honing the technology are all building towards the type of functionality we see in the marketing. The brand delivery, however, inevitably falls flat and inherently disappointing because it’s short of the expectation we have based on what we are shown Alexa is capable of.

Apple And New Product Features/New Product Launches

A brand that pays off promise with delivery and balances aspiration with reality 

Apple is an interesting use case to examine. A brand with some of the world’s most prolific and memorable marketing, some of the world’s most game-changing products, and one of the world’s most beloved and recognizable brands. It’s creative merges the beauty of art and science, not unlike their products. Their storytelling told through a lens of emotion; sometimes relatable, sometimes almost fantasy-esque.

Apple is renowned for being first-to-market for a lot of new advancements and enhancements that continue to prove it is a brand that knows how to pay off its development with features and functions that work. Apple is not without its missteps, like any brand, but in principle, they lean into their strengths, and craft their marketing in a way that inspires consumers but doesn’t offer up more than what it can deliver.

Apple is a brand that has found the elusive balance of aspiration and functionality. It creates a powerful, moving, and engaging story that is rooted in whatever value proposition it is presenting: new camera quality with the iPhone 11, more creative editing tools in the iPad Pro, or waterproof features with the new Apple watch. The consumer always has clarity on what the enhancement or breakthrough is and is masterfully shown through creative that evokes intrigue and emotion but doesn’t oversell or over-promise. It’s the right balance between leading with a brand promise that pays off with delivery that meets the expectations of the consumer.

What Does This Mean For Brands Who Are In This Space?

The reality is that the technology in the marketplace that is enabling us to live more, smart device supported lives is staggeringly impressive. Development and iteration is moving so quickly, it’s almost as if we’re leapfrogging over milestones to advance as quickly as possible to get to the next next with an equally rapid test, learn, and adapt model, sometimes having to learn and adapt once a product is already in the market.

There are only so many times a brand gets to prove itself, and the consumer and trade marketplaces are both vicious in their scrutiny of what “good”, “groundbreaking”, “innovative”, or “significant” looks like. For brands that are looking to lead with a product or service that promises to be a game-changer, it’s important to have clarity on how much you’re selling your consumer on a future promise versus a current reality. Elevate your brand promise and value in a way you know you can pay off and build your creative story, messaging, and campaigns around that.

Best Practices

Say What You Mean, And Mean What You Say: One of a brand’s greatest assets is its ability to be trustworthy and that trust is built over time from brands proving that their claims are accurate. You can be a future-forward brand delivering a great product or service, but in order to do that and live up to what you’re delivering, make sure your messaging and creative match. Today, brands are judged by the strength of the evidence that supports their claims.

Lead With What You Can Consistently Deliver: It’s important to set and manage expectations with consumers on the fine line between future state and current capabilities. Showcasing something as future state or aspirational through a creative lens sets a tone of ambition, but make sure your brands creative delineates between the present and the future. Consumers want to be swept up in the story, but they also want to get what they pay for, make sure you’re balancing those worlds in messaging and creative.

Play The Long Game: The race to the future has no finish line. If you’re planning on building a brand poised to base its value proposition on any promises rooted in innovation and advancement, it’s important to be grounded in where you are and where you want to be and build your story from there. If you’re at an early stage in development, be mindful of how you position and introduce your brand. If you’re an established brand with a track record, be mindful of your reputation and your consumers’ expectations. If you build trust early and often, continuing to keep the promises you have made, you’re in a better position for long-term sustainable success.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Strategic Brand Storytelling Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers