#i finally rewatched this after seeing several gifsets on my dash lately

[hudders-and-hiddles]

(re)watched in 2024: The Fifth Element

[zimshan]

august braindump: on the state of tv and heartstopper

the last year has been such a strange time for me and tv. i honestly cannot remember a time i watched less new tv shows. it’s not for lack of trying but every show/season i started, i was just dragging my heels to finish. some of that is because they’re older shows that aren’t as good as their earlier seasons. stranger things s4 took me an entire year to finish. the pacing was just wildly off to me, and that’s disappointing after the incredible structure of s1. some of that is because of subject matter. i haven’t been able to work myself up to watch outlander after the s5 finale because i just don’t have the mental bandwidth for a sexual trauma storyline. babylon berlin i stopped watching because they were threatening to kill another kid. i’ve noped out of so many shows because of the ratcheting stakes, something that i'm so so tired of seeing done just for the hell of it.

of all the shows, i probably watched the great s2 quickest because it was just so off the wall and the tone of s1 still fascinates me. but even that dragged and was partly guilt tripping to justify my hulu subscription, and i could never let my guard down because it was always going for the most outrageous grotesque thing. i’m stalled on s3 now that they’re killing off characters left and right.

i watched shadow and bone s2 like 15-20 minutes at a time in july because i just found it a snoozefest compared to s1. i legit just wanted to finish it to cross it off my list. how terrible is that? the moment i finished, i started the fame game, a bollywood show, literally because of one gifset on my dash. and watched that 4x faster than anything else i’ve seen all year. cementing my idea that the best of netflix is their international shows. but that shit was pretty dark too.

so beginning of august, i opened up netflix sleep deprived and looking for something to get my mind off my impossible deadline and fuel some writing inspiration. someone on my dash was recently talking about Heartstopper, and it reminded me i missed watching it last year when everyone was talking about it. so seeing it pop up on my netflix screen, i absentmindedly thought, "what the hell let’s see what the fuss is about" and started the first episode. and you know it did the impossible. it grabbed me from the first few frames, and i looked up 2 hours later like oh right sleep. and now i just want to analyze it like a bug. what the hell makes it work where others have failed?

the binging culture inherent to streaming tv is fascinating to me because i almost never do it. if there is one anti-binger out there, she is me. i miss the era of one episode a week on a certain night every day for years. my patience maxes out at 45 minutes every time. i think it’s terrible that shows need to be so bingeable millions of people have to watch an entire season in a weekend to get renewed. because even the best shows i can't commit to doing that for. where does anyone find the time or brainspace, idek.

i know most of the coverage and reaction to the show seem to be about representation and i agree. but there’s something about the elements of Heartstopper that just work where other tv shows lately have faltered and i want to break it down for parts. because on paper it does seem so simple. some of it really is just basic storytelling in tv. those first three episodes are key and the pacing is excellent, every second counts and the acting, editing, and music really drive the show and keep it compelling. on rewatch, i can see how the addictive quality is very much in the editing, in the music, to keep it punchy so that you never think to stop watching. but it’s also in the white space, the moments they give to the lead actors to let a moment breathe. i've been beating this drum for decades now but this show gave so many good examples of it.

several 5-minute sequences caught me thinking god that so compelling why how. the one that stood out on rewatch is the texting sequence in 102 after nick’s interception of the assault scene. there’s zero dialogue but the editing, acting, and music work together to feel the weight of the moment and then lift up from there.

all these essentials combine with something unique like the animations as visual representations of emotions and attraction and create some kind of magical alchemy. it’s been a long time since i’ve thought about it but “lightning in a bottle” describes the best seasons of tv i’ve seen: where it feels like everyone on set, all the actors, every one of the crew, writers, directors, care about the story and are working on all cylinders to do their best job. in the age of streaming, this seems to be more rare than ever and learning about mini writing rooms during the WGA strike has helped to understand why. so has seeing those checks to send home the overall state of residuals in the streaming era. to do the best job people need to be paid fairly. full stop.

so i started Heartstopper and watched 4 episodes in the blink of an eye. the next day, 6; the last day 4. then i did a thing i almost never do anymore: i looked up the soundtrack. music has always been a driver for me, a tv show that nails a score or soundtrack is always gonna get under my skin more than one that doesn’t. it’s part of the necessary ingredients for a good show for me. all my forever tv loves, music plays a central role, music that defines and sets the tone for the show and then becomes forever married to it. you can create a list of the songs and play it back and see the show unfurl again in your mind. its my favorite way of revisiting a show without actually watching it, after a good vid that is. but it works best when the music is a dead lock for the scene or character and typically this is sound driven more than lyrically driven. this show uses a 2012 era style sound i already have a strong affinity for, i have multiple work playlists from the last decade to drive me through a deadline with Foster The People, Fitz and the Tantrums, et al.

but it also did a thing i haven't seen in a long while: the lyrics were used as an extension of the script for internal character POV. in the first episode alone you have the following lyrical-visual pairs: -i'll go anywhere you want to go on charlie getting ben's text to meet -i wanna get lovesick with you on nick watching charlie run and asking him to join the team -right before i'm swallowed by my mind and cursing at the sky on charlie out of place on the rugby field before nick pulls him in to the group -what's the point of looking at the view? cause every time i do i just see you on elle and tao missing each other -the world ends it's you and me/in my head if we can be together/maybe we'll live forever on nick tackling charlie and the leaves animations around them -i see the signs of a lifetime on nick getting charlie's thank you x text paired with the flowing bird animations roll to the credits

this is vidding happening here.

so i spent a good two days listening to the soundtrack and related albums as i got through my deadline. and then i started getting some more questions about the timeline on the story (the soundtrack is of a style popular circa 2012 that i associate with 8tracks playlists even though the actual songs are a bit later, 2015 onwards) and looked up the books the show was based on. i started Solitaire after seeing it was the author’s first book and wanting to read tori’s POV after the glimpses in the show got me thinking about her elder daughter role.

then i looked up the comics when i realized the timeline of Solitaire was a year later and wanted to fill in the gaps. and wow, i’m in awe of how much of the show was already here, how much detail went into the show to match certain frames. the comics are basically acting as storyboards for the show. i used to do the most basic storyboarding for vidding a lifetime ago. i’ve recently gotten the storyboarding itch again the last few months after watching some BTS docs on TCM about storyboard artists and remembering how fascinating and underappreciated the skill actually is. there's some beautiful storyboarding out there, but it doesn't have to be beautiful, it's just got to be functional. at its heart, it's about the frame, the shot, the visual that tells the story. and a lot of that is already done in the comics and translated straight to screen.

i’m inspired learning about alice oseman’s story as a young author, how she started and finished Solitaire before graduating high school, writing the story she wished she saw on the shelves. then how she was taken with her two secondary characters and started teaching herself how to draw to visualize and bring to life their own journeys. it’s such a great example of how storytelling takes on a life of its own and how you are not defined by only your current skillset. there are no boundaries on creativity and curiosity but the ones we self-impose on ourselves.

the last few years, i’ve been thinking a lot about why some works fail to resonate while others succeed, especially in regard to book to screen adaptation. it probably started with the absolute fail that was GOT S8 and rereading THG next to the films and grown from there with my TCM pandemic focus. obviously it’s a gamechanger when the author is the showrunner and that alone is rare. the whole nature of Heartstopper as a webcomic first and driven by subscribers and kickstarter donations is unique as well. alice has built up a passionate audience to create for that helped promote the show and that makes a lot of difference.

but the streaming element is an added issue. by the time i finished season 2, my one overriding thought was wow, imagine society if this had aired 20 years ago. i couldn't help but think of the kids this show could have helped, seeing such an sincere example of queer community on screen. but interrogating that further, i know it’s a silly thought. it wouldn’t have gotten made at all. in 2000, dawson's creek kicked up hate over one gay kiss that amounted to almost nothing. my best friend at 15 came out as gay and felt like he had to pirate QaF asap as the only piece of queer rep around but something far outside of our age group. this story is age appropriate for the age that needs it. in 2023, homophobic parents are waging wars on the school board and libraries in our area for carrying books with queer representation including those of oseman's. no network would greenlight 22 episodes of a queer tumblr webcomic. netflix gave the show 4 hours for its first season in the middle of the pandemic. it only gets made in the streaming era. it is a product of the times, even if the story originates 10 years earlier.

[]

the picture of queer community and lifting up and supporting others is essential for the age this is targeting. i know i'm 20 years older than that target and am mindful of that. this show is not for me. but it's been a while since i've watched a teen series, probably skam, which is a big outliner in teen shows. i think from my dash i assumed the show was going to be pure teen fluff but instead was surprised how much texture it has. the love story is the focus of the gifsets, but it does sell the show short imo. the world doesn’t ignore the dark parts---homophobic bullies, abusive partners and clueless parents, trauma and its long tail, anxiety and eating disorders, the ways love and community can uplift and support but not cure. reading Solitaire i can see where it’s coming from, a dark story that starts the verse. the darkness is there not ignored but part of the journey. its presence makes the light more powerful. but its best virtue is that despite its dark parts, it’s at heart a comforting story. and i think this is an overarching reason why it succeeds as a show. the comic does right by each character and in turn cares for the reader. so everyone working on it saw the story as a comfort themselves and did right by the story. that care shows on screen.

the way Solitaire ends is a thesis statement of sorts for the osemanverse: support and lift each other up, you’re not alone and stronger as a community. it matches skam's thesis, and heartstopper continues it. that reminder is a balm to these times. it's the ethos of organizing but it got lost in isolation of the last few years. its simplicity is part of its power. part of lightning in a bottle is timing. i know some people have lived with this story for years, but after 4 long plague years, its sincerity speaks to me. i can’t think of a reminder i needed more than this story at this time. sometimes you really do stumble on the right story right when you need it.

anyway, this verse has gotten in my brain now so fair warning. heartstopper/osemanverse posting ahead.

[elizabethrobertajones]

Yesterday I finally caught up with probably half of Tumblr and finished watching Sense8 (*hugs my new Netflix account*)... 

I really enjoyed it and I guess it lives up to the hype, though waiting forever to watch it kind of took the edge off, since I was curious enough to examine every gifset on my dash for the last... couple of years? since it appeared. I really like how everyone’s so in love with the characters and their dynamics that despite learning a great deal about almost every character and their relationships, I 1: didn’t even know Naveen Andrews was in it and 2: had no idea what the main plot was and assumed it was mostly just a great big action/romance romp with random soulmate dynamics thrown in to spice it up. :P 

And it’s brilliant as a soap opera ignoring the main plot, as several characters have pretty much nothing to do with it (yet? I started off trying to analyse the plot and linked up Capheus, Kala and Sun as the most important players in an epic biomedical scandal involving the businesses and such they’re tied up in that must surely link further back to all the sinister stuff with the real bad guys, and then of course nothing’s come of that yet in a season + Christmas special...) and definitely one of its main strengths is the characters and their relationships and interactions, especially as with so many ways to sort them, and some plots with a lot of one on one cross over, characters you’d come to know and love were still meeting each other for the first time fairly late on. 

Anyway, Daryl Hannah floating around being the fridged woman with a remarkable resemblance to Mary Winchester aside (I feel so sorry for actresses whose entire role is wearing a dirty/bloodstained nightgown while making spooky appearances for the sake of the main characters :P) the actual plot seems like Orphan Black in many respects, and the more I think about it the more connections I make, aside from the obvious of Weird Science bothering a group of seemingly normal people who then discover they’re actually clones/soulmates with a whole bunch of other people they have uncanny connections to. By the end of the current season of Orphan Black, our protagonist clone is even having sustained visions of the clone who started the series with the suicide of one of their own who, like Daryl Hannah, kicked off the entire plot for the main characters, and her daughter seems to be psychically connecting to the other clones through the same Weird Science as Sense8. There’s a strong focus on life and death and altogether too much childbirth stuff on screen :P

I think Sense8′s advantage is that it’s much less confined by the format not just that it can be absolutely openly as diverse as it wants to be, but because without having to be somewhat procedural or else fitting the regular format of TV shows, you can get the really long, weird sequences which aren’t really doing anything except quiet, meaningful stretches of character stuff. There are story arcs per episode, but the entire thing moves incredibly slowly. I swear Orphan Black made the same progress through the plot in a handful of episodes as Sense8 has done so far in its entire run. 

Obviously neither show is finished yet, and in several important respects Sense8 blows Orphan Black out of the water, with OB being included in the great Onscreen Queer Women Massacre of the start of the year it only just bought my interest but not my trust back by backpeddaling that... and even if they always intended to bring said murdered queer woman back, they’ve not allowed the couple in question to just exist happily and unapologetically, and inflicted that trope on us in the first place... they also DID apologise while at the same time doing it, admitted they were aware they should use a trans actor to play a trans character but because of the clone thing, still used Tatiana to play a surprise brother clone they threw in for one episode basically, I guess, to show something about variation etc, and at this point I don’t know if it’s for the best he’s not in a ton of episodes, although weird they never mention him again after that. 

Sense8 has a much clearer sense of these issues, though its attempt to portray a broad stroke of human existence world wide has netted it a lot of criticism for stereotyping & racist tropes in those portrayals, which I’m not equipped to comment on, but as someone who wearily watches a lot of media, certainly none of the non-western, white, stories felt particularly unexpected or not like something I could see elsewhere... Orphan Black has mostly stayed clear of those issues by just not going near them; the actual cast when you narrow it down away from the character list is still very white. Throw in the dozens of versions of Tatiana and the other clone guy and they’ve got endless room to add in as many more characters as they like, obviously all versions of the same white actors dressed up differently.

... in any case, Sense8′s plot gave me a fair amount of deja vu to the show I’d already watched, but because OB put me off several times (and yet I kept coming back to it :P) I don’t have a very clear memory of the first season’s plot to make a stronger side by side comparison. I’m mostly intrigued by the sense of the huge terrifying rich biotech and medical corporations, doing Weird Science juuust beyond the range of what we can understand now, or with a slight science-fantasy element to it, relying on real world conspiracies or Fortean Times level suspicions of what might possibly be real if you wanted to believe tales of precognition, telepathy, etc. In Sense8 there’s a few mentions of ~real~ stories of such things, but I can’t remember if OB went over it yet. 

Certainly in both there’s a sense of unity and impossible but unbreakable family bonds, and a lot of exploration of who the Self is vs these huge faceless corporations. OB cycles through several villains or weird cults and such as the bad guys, each one in turn unknowable but powerful or embedded in a way with science or military or religious connections that make them dangerous to go up against. It’s hard to tell exactly what message Sense8 has about it because so much less plot involving it has unfurled but it’s obviously not good news with the big corporations, definitions of humanity, and secret conspiracy to police what is human and what is not. It even sets the entire viewing audience against the Sensates as part of a mass of non-sensate people who lack the emotional connection and empathy to feel like they do, implying the whole lot of us are murderous and cold as a result... In this way the evil scientists out to get them are only the very personal version of ALL the struggles they face, represented by that moment in the Xmas special where they all see the writing on the wall at Lito’s house transform into the worst things they have been called. 

It takes a much colder view of humanity, making it us or them, and for us, switching which of those groups we identify with by way of sympathy to the main characters. OB is less personal in that way but focuses on the dangers of science trying to create a better human, and while the clones are supposedly all “improved” humans, they have enough flaws, physically and emotionally (although yikes, Krystal makes me sure they have latent super soldier genes none of the others have properly unlocked except maybe the unkillable Helena :P) that they don’t come across as totally othered for more than the unfortunate circumstances of their births they obviously didn’t ask for. Rachel as the only one raised in the know ends up the most dangerous of them all, perhaps for having her sense of humanity denied to her and knowing for most of her life that she was only an experiment and property of the company. What makes the rest of humans human isn’t in question so much as how much the clones might belong with humanity, and that they could grow up oblivious and fit in emotionally, and still have human values even when they discover they’re “only” property and experimental prototypes who’ve been living almost Truman show lives. In that respect, Sarah as the narrator is the most free and human because she was raised outside of the program with no influence from it whatsoever - narratively it’s not coincidental that she and Helena are also the only clones who are fertile and can have children.

... I’ve been making connections all day but this post is really long now so I’m going to stop here. I want to rewatch Orphan Black now, since I noticed it on the Netflix menu and I’m having a bit of a cackling wildly, world at my fingertips moment here. :P