#i just pivoted so hard this year into original writing and i miss some of the fanfic writing i was doing | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mashounen1945 · 11 months

Text

An interesting Star Wars history essay I saw on Reddit (yes, really)

[Star Wars] The Rise and Fall of the Expanded Universe: How Disney's buy-out of Lucasfilm brought a 22-year era to an end, and split sci-fi's biggest fandom in half.

Posted originally by the Reddit user "TheMightyHeptagon" on February 23rd, 2022.

[Link to the original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/szvovy/star_wars_the_rise_and_fall_of_the_expanded/]

--------------------------------------------------

How did we get here?

Unless you've been frozen in carbonite for the last decade, you've probably noticed that Star Wars is currently bigger and more ubiquitous than it's been in a very long time. You also probably know why that is: the Walt Disney Corporation bought the rights to the franchise in 2012, and Disney subsequently reignited the series by producing a 7th, 8th, and 9th episode—which seemed nearly inconceivable when the prequel trilogy concluded back in 2005. And you've also probably noticed that the Star Wars fandom is (to put it mildly) a bit divided at the moment. For various reasons, the various Star Wars films and TV shows of the so-called "Disney era" have their fair share of both supporters and detractors, and some recent works are more widely beloved than others.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about today.

If you're a relatively casual Star Wars fan who's generally just content to watch the movies (and there's nothing wrong with that), you might not realize that Disney's buy-out of Lucasfilm in 2012 was also effectively the end of an era for the franchise; the effects of that are still rippling through various Star Wars works to this day, and many fans still have strong feelings about it.

So why is it so hard to talk about Star Wars these days without getting into an argument? Why did the Disney buy-out start hundreds of online screaming matches back in 2012 before Disney even released a single film? And what does it all have to do with the European Union?

To answer that last question: absolutely nothing.

See: when a Star Wars fan talks about "the EU", they're probably talking about the "Expanded Universe". So... what's the Expanded Universe?

"A short time ago, in a sci-fi section not so far away..."

The short version:

In the context of the Star Wars franchise, the "Expanded Universe" is a loosely connected series of officially licensed Star Wars works released in various artistic mediums other than live-action films, which provide information that isn't in the movies that make up the core of the franchise.

Technically, the Expanded Universe is the same world as the Star Wars universe—or rather, it was until Disney declared that it wasn't anymore (but we'll get to that).

More broadly speaking: in modern fandom discourse, the term "Expanded Universe" generally refers to works in a popular franchise released in a different medium than the works that initially made the franchise famous, which may or may not be considered part of the franchise's "official" canon. It's most commonly applied to franchises that began as movies or TV shows, where particularly devoted fans might eagerly consume novels or short stories or comic books featuring their favorite characters while awaiting the next episode or installment.

In general, such works tend to act as a supplement to the main story, and they serve to expand the story beyond its primary medium (hence "Expanded Universe"). When writing such works, however, creators generally avoid writing particularly dramatic or pivotal plot turns that would drastically affect the world of the story—since that might alienate relatively casual viewers who don't necessarily have the time or the inclination to hunt down every work in a popular franchise, and the creators generally don't want to make those casual viewers feel like they're missing out on important plot points.

For a while, the Star Wars franchise was famous for being especially prolific in that regard, which probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise. After all: the Star Wars films are set in a whole fictional galaxy filled with hundreds of unexplored planets, and they're brimming with enigmatic references to thrilling events that the audience never sees. The world that George Lucas created is the perfect playground for sci-fi writers.

But when sci-fi fans talk about the "Star Wars Expanded Universe" (or "the EU" for short), they're usually specifically referring to a series of novels published by Bantam Spectra and Del Rey Books (and a few comic books published by Dark Horse Comics) between 1991 and 2013.

So what was it about that 22-year period that made it such fertile ground for Star Wars stories?

Well, that's where it gets a little complicated...

"We seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life..."

According to most accounts, the Star Wars franchise has a bit of an odd history because George Lucas' plans for the series were in a constant state of flux for nearly all of his career. Originally, he didn't even plan on Star Wars being a series at all: he just wrote a single screenplay, but had to drastically cut it down at the studio's behest when it turned out to be way too long for one movie; conveniently, that left him with plenty of material for two more movies when the first film turned out to be a surprise hit, and the studio expressed interest in sequels.

And once he started to make plans for continuing the story after the Original Trilogy, he similarly waffled on how many more movies he wanted to make: some sources claim that he wanted to make a full nine movies (or possibly as many as twelve) before the arduous production of The Empire Strikes Back convinced him to trim it down to just six. Even after that, Lucas still considered taking a crack at making his own Sequel Trilogy a few times after the Prequel Trilogy wrapped, and he didn't completely give up on those plans until shortly before the Disney buy-out. Some plot points in Disney's sequels, in fact, were supposedly based on Lucas' own story notes.

But by the early 1990s, Lucas finally seemed reasonably sure that the Star Wars prequels (which were in pre-production at the time) would be the last Star Wars films, ending the series at six movies. Some fans didn't take that news well—at all.

On one hand: the original Star Wars trilogy does tell a more-or-less complete story with a beginning, middle, and end. On the other hand: it also sets up some rather intriguing questions that easily could have been the basis for a whole new saga.

Did another Emperor rise to power after Palpatine died? Did the Rebels win the war? Did Luke become a Jedi Master? Did he ever train an apprentice of his own? And if the Rebels did win the war, how did our heroes handle the responsibilities of running the galaxy? And did the Jedi ever make their glorious return?

Understandably, some fans were bummed that those questions (and dozens more) might never be answered, and they were really bummed that they might never meet the next generation of Jedi.

With all that in mind, you can imagine why it was a really big deal when fans suddenly learned that there would be a new chapter in the saga of Star Wars after all.

No, I'm not talking about when Disney announced the release of The Force Awakens in 2015. This is a different chapter in the story of the Star Wars franchise—and it begins well over two decades before Finn, Rey, Poe Dameron, Rose Tico and the rest of the gang ever saw the light of day.

See: by the late 1980s, the Star Wars franchise was facing an uncertain future. Once the Original Trilogy wrapped up in 1983, and nobody knew exactly when a new trilogy might make its way to theatres, it seemed entirely possible that Star Wars was finished for good. Sure, Lucasfilm managed to tide young fans over with a pair of made-for-TV films in 1984 and 1985 (both of which were inexplicably all about Ewoks), and a couple of Saturday morning cartoons (one of which was... also all about Ewoks) that both ended in 1986. Even Marvel Comics' popular Star Wars comic book series was cancelled in 1987 after running for a full decade. After that, Star Wars basically went into hibernation. There's a reason why the final years of the '80s are sometimes jokingly called "The Dark Times" by fans.

And then, in the dim twilight of the 20th century, something happened.

"Never tell me the odds!"

The year was 1991. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, Boris Yeltsin had just become the first President of Russia, Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress were negotiating an end to the Apartheid in South Africa, CERN scientists had just unveiled "The World Wide Web", Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls had just won their first NBA Championship, The Simpsons was on its second season, Nirvana had just achieved mainstream superstardom with Nevermind, Will Smith was still the star of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the Golden Age of Hip-Hop was in full swing... and there hadn't been a new Star Wars movie in theatres for nearly a decade.

And then the news broke: Lucasfilm had just reached a deal with venerable science-fiction publisher Bantam Spectra, allowing them to publish an officially licensed Star Wars novel written by Hugo-nominated author Timothy Zahn, widely considered to be a rising star in the world of sci-fi literature.

On its face, the simple existence of a Star Wars novel wasn't that big a deal. After all: Lucasfilm had been allowing the publication of tie-in novels since the 1970s, when they hired prolific sci-fi writer Alan Dean Foster to write the novelization of the original film, and later tapped him to write the original Star Wars novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye (which was based on a proposal for a low-budget Star Wars television film that never got made). There were also a handful of pulpy sci-fi adventure novels in the '80s following the adventures of Han Solo and Lando Calrissian before the timeframe of the movies. So what was so special about this book?

Simple: unlike every other Star Wars novel published up to this point, this one was going to take place after the epic conclusion of Return of the Jedi. In fact, it was going to skip forward a full five years after the deaths of Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine—because it was going to be all about the beginning of a whole new era in the history of the Star Wars galaxy following the Rebels' pivotal victory at the Battle of Endor. Instead of telling the story of a plucky band of outmatched rebels striking a desperate blow against the forces of tyranny, this story would portray Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Leia Organa as the idealistic leaders of a reborn Republic locked in an epic power struggle with a resurgent Galactic Empire.

Even better: the novel was going to be the first in a trilogy of novels. And in a time when many fans had given up hope that they ever get to see a 7th, 8th, and 9th episode on the big screen, that was exactly the kind of news that they'd hoped for. At long last, fans were going to get to see the next chapter of the Star Wars saga—and absolutely anything could happen.

Within a few weeks, Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire shot to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List as fans across America rushed to their local bookstores to grab a copy. And within the first few pages, they were introduced to the story's new antagonist. His name was "Thrawn"—and in nearly every way imaginable, he was the complete antithesis of everything that fans had come to expect from a Star Wars villain.

Instead of a sinister Sith Lord dressed in a dark hooded cloak or a fearsome suit of black armour, he was a Grand Admiral in the Imperial Fleet dressed in a crisp white naval uniform. He was also an alien (specifically: a member of a newly introduced species known as the "Chiss"), instantly identifiable by his striking bright blue skin and glowing red eyes. Instead of relying on the vaunted power of the Dark Side, he was determined to best our heroes through good old-fashioned ingenuity and cunning. Instead of brutality, he relied on his strategic genius. And instead of earning the obedience of his men through fear and intimidation, he inspired their loyalty through his unmatched charisma—which made it easier for some fans to root for the Empire without feeling too guilty. To this day, Grand Admiral Thrawn remains one of the most popular characters ever to come out of a Star Wars work, and his fans love him just as much today as they did in 1991.

But with every new chapter, the story introduced more twists and turns, taking every opportunity to flesh out the world that fans had come to love. Readers got to see Chewbacca's home planet of Kashyyyk for the first time (since everybody knows that the Star Wars Holiday Special never happened), they got to meet the slippery information trafficker Talon Karrde, they got to see the galactic capital of Coruscant for the first time (the name "Coruscant" originated in the book, in fact), they got to see a clone for the first time in an official Star Wars work, and they even got to meet Emperor Palpatine's alluring Force-sensitive personal assassin Mara Jade—who was teased early on as a potential love interest for Luke.

(Yes, Luke finally got a love interest who didn't turn out to be his sister. It was pretty exciting at the time.)

All of those thoroughly intriguing ideas (and many more) kept fans hooked all the way through Heir to the Empire and its two sequels Dark Force Rising (released in 1992) and The Last Command (released in 1993). Those three books, retroactively titled "The Thrawn Trilogy", helped push the Star Wars franchise back into the cultural spotlight for the first time since the halcyon days of the Original Trilogy, and they showed that demand for a new series of adventures was just as strong as ever.

But were they any good?

Honestly, most fans will tell you that the answer is a pretty resounding "Yes". The Thrawn Trilogy managed the difficult task of feeling like an authentic entry in the Star Wars saga while fearlessly exploring the aftermath of the movies. It had memorable new characters and thrilling action sequences, it explored poignant themes, and it combined a genuine reverence for the films with an earnest desire to build on them.

The Thrawn Trilogy wasn't a perfect story—but in the areas where it delivered, it delivered big. And even though George Lucas wasn't personally involved in writing its story, he took its success as a sign that audiences were eager for more Star Wars movies. According to some accounts, it was the success of the Thrawn Trilogy that convinced Lucas to fully commit to making the Star Wars prequels. So if not for those three novels, Star Wars might never have returned to theatres.

But as fans soon discovered: the Thrawn Trilogy was just the beginning.

"This is where the fun begins!"

Around the time that Heir to the Empire came out, Lucasfilm also reached a deal with comic book publisher Dark Horse Comics, allowing them to publish officially licensed Star Wars comic books. Thanks to that deal, Dark Horse's officially licensed Star Wars miniseries Dark Empire also hit shelves in 1991, becoming the first new Star Wars comic book since the cancellation of Marvel Comics' Star Wars series in 1987. Telling the story of Han, Luke, and Leia battling a resurgent Galactic Empire commanded by a resurrected Emperor Palpatine, it also jumped headfirst into exploring the aftermath of the movies, officially taking place one year after the Thrawn Trilogy.

Meanwhile: Bantam Spectra, eager to build on the success of the Thrawn Trilogy, soon contracted a murderer's row of prolific sci-fi novelists to churn out even more novels exploring the aftermath of Return of the Jedi.

And then, well... Then the dam broke.

Between 1991 and 1999, Bantam Spectra published nearly three dozen Star Wars novels. And that's just the novels aimed at adults; if you count the ones aimed at teenagers and young readers (and there were a lot of them), the full tally is closer to five dozen. And if you also count the numerous comic books published by Dark Horse during the same period, it's even more. The sheer number of Star Wars works to come out of that decade is honestly kind of awe-inspiring, and even the most ardent fans often have trouble keeping them all straight.

There was The Courtship of Princess Leia, which told the full story of how Han and Leia got married. There was Crimson Empire, the story of a former Imperial Guardsman on a mission of revenge against his treacherous former comrade. There was the Jedi Academy trilogy, which told the story of Luke training his first Jedi apprentices. There was The Corellian Trilogy, where we finally got properly introduced to Han's home planet. There was the X-Wing series, where we got to follow the continuing adventures of the brave pilots of Rogue Squadron. There was the Black Fleet Crisis trilogy, where we got to meet Chewbacca's family for the first time (since everybody knows that the Star Wars Holiday Special never happened). There was Shadows of the Empire, where we learned the full story of what happened between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. There was the Young Jedi Knights series, where we got to follow the adventures of Han and Leia's children as they studied the ways of the Force under their uncle Luke.

... There were a lot of freakin' books, is what I'm saying.

So were they any good?

Well... That question's a little harder to answer. Most fans agree that the Thrawn Trilogy started the Expanded Universe off with a bang, but the general consensus is that the subsequent novels and comic books varied wildly in quality. Some were good, some were decent, some were tolerable, and some are widely agreed to be just plain God-awful. To reiterate: Bantam Spectra and Dark Horse published nearly five dozen of the damn things in the 1990s alone, and they were written by a rotating stable of more than a dozen different authors. It shouldn't be too surprising that not all of them were equally great.

But regardless of how good they might have been, they succeeded in bringing about a massive resurgence of interest in Star Wars, which paved the way for the saga's return to the big screen 16 years after Return of the Jedi. The original film may have been a product of the late '70s, and "Star Wars mania" arguably reached its peak in the early '80s, but the franchise's renaissance in the '90s was nothing to sneeze at.

Little by little, the novels exploring the aftermath of Return of the Jedi had blossomed into a vast and epic saga in their own right, with their own expansive cast of characters and their own vast array of original concepts. Fans came to call that saga "The Star Wars Expanded Universe"—or "The EU" for short. By the end of the '90s, the EU had gotten so big that its timeline officially covered more than 15 years worth of stories set after the original Star Wars trilogy. To put it in perspective: the original Star Wars trilogy itself (as epic as it might be) only takes place over the course of about four years. So in effect, the Expanded Universe had grown even bigger than the film series that it was based on.

You probably know what happened after that:

The Phantom Menace hit theaters in 1999, officially kicking off the much-anticipated Prequel Trilogy. It was followed by Attack of the Clones in 2002 and Revenge of the Sith in 2005.

And yet, even as the new movies were hogging most of the attention, the novels just kept coming.

In 1999, the same year that The Phantom Menace made its way to the multiplex, famed sci-fi publisher Del Rey Books (who'd published the first Star Wars novels in the '80s) reclaimed the license from Bantam Spectra. With the publishing rights to Star Wars in hand, the company kicked off the biggest and most ambitious project that the Star Wars Expanded Universe had ever seen: a massive 19-book epic called The New Jedi Order, which told the story of a full-on invasion of the Star Wars galaxy by a hostile race of aliens from another galaxy beyond the Outer Rim. It continued the ever-evolving story of the Expanded Universe, steadily moving its timeline further into the future.

The New Jedi Order was a huge story that saw the deaths of numerous longtime characters and the permanent transformations of many more, and it took the Expanded Universe into progressively bolder and stranger territory as it continued to diverge from the movies. But as imaginative and ambitious as it may have been, it was also one of the most divisive series in the history of the Expanded Universe up to that point, with many instalments getting a tepid reception at best. The series reached its conclusion in 2003, just two years before the Prequel Trilogy concluded in 2005 with Revenge of the Sith. And yet, just as the entertainment press was reporting on the "end" of Star Wars, it soon became clear that the continuing story of the Expanded Universe was still far from over.

Yep: the novels just kept coming.

By 2006, when Del Rey unveiled a new nine-book series called Legacy of the Force, the timeframe of the Expanded Universe had reached a point more than three decades after the events of the movies. By this point, the core trio were well into middle age, Han and Leia's children were nearly twice as old as Luke was in the original Star Wars, and the war between the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire was a distant memory. Out in the real world, the Expanded Universe had been running more-or-less continuously for 15 years, but book sales and critical reception were starting to falter noticeably.

And still, the novels kept coming.

Legacy of the Force, which ended in 2008, proved to be (arguably) the single most divisive series in the history of the Expanded Universe, largely because it took one of the main characters in a bold new direction that proved to be highly controversial among long-time fans. Del Rey's follow-up, the nine-book series Fate of the Jedi, was somewhat better received—but it proved to be rather divisive for its own reasons, and many fans didn't like how the writers handled certain aspects of the lore. Fate of the Jedi, which concluded in 2012, proved to be the very last multi-part series in the Expanded Universe.

And... then everything fell apart.

"I've got a bad feeling about this..."

So what happened to the Expanded Universe?

In short: Disney happened.

In 2012, the year that Del Rey's Fate of the Jedi concluded at nine instalments, George Lucas announced his retirement from moviemaking, planning to step down as President of Lucasfilm after more than 40 years. Before stepping down, he reached a deal with Disney CEO Bob Iger and agreed to sell Lucasfilm to Disney, along with the rights to the Star Wars franchise. He agreed to that deal with the full knowledge that Disney would commence development on a 7th, 8th, and 9th episode of Star Wars as soon as they had the rights to the franchise, and he gave his blessing to the new trilogy with the understanding that he wouldn't be a part of making it. Lucas' longtime colleague and confidante Kathleen Kennedy took over as President of Lucasfilm, now a fully owned subsidiary of the Walt Disney Corporation.

It took a couple of years before fans learned anything concrete about the plot details of the hotly anticipated Episode VII (eventually titled The Force Awakens), which would take place roughly 30 years after Return of the Jedi and feature a full reunion of the original cast. But Disney was clear about one thing from the beginning: their new trilogy would tell a wholly original story—and the new films wouldn't be acknowledging any stories from the old Expanded Universe as canon. Instead, the sequels would be presenting a whole new interpretation of what happened after Return of the Jedi, effectively starting with a blank slate.

As far as the new creative team was concerned: Grand Admiral Thrawn and Mara Jade never existed, the Yuuzhan Vong invasion never happened, and Jacen and Jaina Solo and Ben Skywalker were never born. And Kyp Durron, Corran Horn, Kyle Katarn, Prince Xizor, Talon Karrde, Tycho Celchu, Jagged Fel, Tenel Ka Djo, Allana Solo, Mirta Gev, Natasi Daala (and dozens more) were just figments of the fans' imaginations.

After more than two decades, the Star Wars Expanded Universe had officially come to an end. The 2013 novel Star Wars: Crucible—which was announced as something of a "swan song" to the series—proved to be the very last Expanded Universe work, bringing its story to a close. All subsequent Star Wars novels and comic books would take place in a whole new universe with a whole new continuity.

So... what happened to the old ones?

Simple! They didn't vanish from existence—but in all subsequent printings, they would be released under the new imprint Star Wars: Legends, which served as a reminder to fans that they were no longer canon.

As soon as that announcement went out, a certain contingent of the Star Wars fandom went absolutely berserk.

Keep in mind: not only had the old Star Wars Expanded Universe been around for twenty-two years (which was even longer than many fans in 2013 had been alive), it covered four decades worth of stories. Not all of those stories may have been equally great, but some fans had devoted a lot of time and effort to following them through all of their ups and downs. And to some of those fans, being told that many of their favourite stories never happened was a massive slap in the face.

But as Bart Simpson once reminded the Comic Book Guy: "None of these things ever really happened..."

"I've felt a great disturbance in the Force. As if millions of voices cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced..."

Considering the Star Wars Expanded Universe was around for twenty-two years, it's pretty understandable that some fans grew pretty attached to it over time. But if you look at the big picture, it's also pretty easy to understand why Disney retired it.

It's important to remember: part of the reason why the Expanded Universe grew into such a big and ambitious saga was that most people had every reason to believe that there would never be any Star Wars sequels on the big screen. Because of that, the writers at Bantam Spectra, Del Rey, and Dark Horse effectively had a blank check to go nuts (within reason, of course...) telling the story of Han, Luke, and Leia's continuing adventures without ever having to worry about their stories conflicting with the stories of the movies. Since, y'know... everybody was absolutely certain that there wouldn't be any more movies. (Until there were.)

For his part, George Lucas always made it pretty clear that he didn't consider the Expanded Universe part of his artistic vision. As far as he was concerned, Star Wars ended when the final credits of Return of the Jedi rolled, and the numerous questions about what happened afterwards were destined to remain unanswered forever. The novels and comic books of the Expanded Universe effectively just presented fans with one hypothetical answer about what might have happened next.

So when the Sequel Trilogy was greenlit, the creative staff at Disney were left in sort of an odd bind. Sure, some fans were inevitably pissed when they announced that the EU was no longer canon. But if they'd (theoretically) done the opposite and kept it canon, it would have made it incredibly difficult to make a trilogy of sequels for a general audience.

There's really no getting around it: the old Expanded Universe might have had plenty of fans—but compared to the full-blown cultural phenomenon that was the original Star Wars trilogy, its following was... Well, all things considered, it was pretty niche. And the number of people who successfully managed to keep track of all forty years worth of continuity in the EU is pretty paltry compared to the legions of people who know the story of the original Star Wars trilogy by heart. If Disney had somehow tried to make a trilogy of Star Wars sequels that actually fit into the continuity of the Expanded Universe (which was designed for a completely different artistic medium than the movies), it would have been pretty alienating for the vast majority of people who hadn't spent 22 years keeping track of it.

Seriously, though: can you imagine trying to recap 22 years worth of sci-fi novels in an opening crawl? Exactly.

Disney tried to have it both ways by at least keeping the old Expanded Universe novels in circulation and declaring them an alternate continuity, but a particularly vicious sub-set of the Star Wars fandom continued to loudly insist that Disney had "betrayed" the proud legacy of the Expanded Universe by erasing it from canon, and that refusing to acknowledge the Expanded Universe was the ultimate act of disrespect to the fans.

Because if they really respected the fans, then they "obviously" should have just spent millions of dollars on a trilogy of movies based on a loosely connected series of moderately successful sci-fi novels of wildly varying quality that came out during the Clinton administration, right?

... Right?

What's the Big Deal?

By now, hopefully you've gotten a decent idea of why it sent tremors through the Star Wars fandom when the old EU was officially retired in 2013. For the most part, the arguments that resulted from that development have mostly just amounted to fans yelling at each other on message boards and posting the occasional angry YouTube video. But you could also make a pretty good case that those arguments (as petty as they may be) actually open up some intriguing questions about the enduring legacy of Star Wars and its place in American popular culture.

Even if they're not a fan, most people probably know that the release of the original Star Wars in 1977 was a defining moment in the development of the "geek" subculture. And everybody knows that geeks and nerds love Star Wars. As many disagreements as people might have about Star Wars, everybody knows that it's a "geek classic".

But here's a surprisingly difficult question to answer:

What is a geek? And what is a nerd? And what actually makes a piece of media "geeky" or "nerdy"?

In theory, everybody knows the answers to those questions. But in practice, most of us just sort of know geeky and/or nerdy stuff when we see it. And like with most modern neologisms, the definitions of the terms "geek" and "nerd" have been in flux ever since they were first coined.

Case in point: a "geek" was originally a type of carnival performer, and a "nerd" was originally a fictional creature from a Dr. Seuss book.

(Yes, really. Look it up if you don't believe me.)

Probably the most consistently agreed-upon definition of "geek" is "A person with esoteric interests" ("esoteric" meaning "Not enjoyed or appreciated by the general public"). And one of the most consistently agreed-upon definitions of "nerd" is "A person with an obsessive devotion to their personal interests". So in theory, geeks and nerds are people who like stuff that most people don't appreciate, and get really obsessive about that stuff.

When people talk about "geeky" or "nerdy" hobbies, they're likely to mention stories about Star Trek fans devoting hours of effort to learning the Klingon language, or fans of The Lord of the Rings spending hours learning the Elvish dialects of Quenya and Sindarin. Part of the reason Dune and The Lord of the Rings are considered "geek classics" is that they include 100+ pages of appendices fleshing out the workings of the worlds where they take place, which is perfect for fans who don't mind spending hours diving into the nuances of the lore.

So that settles it! Star Wars is a geek classic because it's esoteric, and most people just don't appreciate it.

... Is it, though?

Lest you forget: adjusted for inflation, the original Star Wars was the second-highest-grossing American film in history at the time of its release, second only to Gone with the Wind. All three movies in the original trilogy were extraordinarily successful, and a lot of people really loved them. So from a certain perspective, they weren't that geeky.

You could also make a case that they're not really that nerdy. After all: at this point, it's pretty well-documented that even George Lucas barely knew anything about the finer points of the Star Wars universe when he first started making the movies in 1977, and he mostly made that stuff up as he went along. In the early years of Star Wars, even the most ardent fans couldn't claim to be "experts" on the lore, because, well... For the most part, there wasn't any. There were just... three very popular movies, which practically everyone in 1980s America had seen.

For better or for worse, the Expanded Universe changed that forever. Thanks to the EU, there was suddenly a hard and fast dividing line between "casual" fans and "serious" fans, and "serious" fans could justifiably claim that they knew more about Star Wars than everybody else. And even at the EU's lowest points, many of those fans took comfort in that—and some of them let it go to their heads.

The unfortunate prevalence of "gatekeeping" in geek culture has been a pretty hot topic for the better part of the last decade, and the evolution of the Star Wars fandom between 1991 and 2012 is often cited as a classic example for good reason. For a while, a vocal minority of Star Wars fans earnestly and unironically believed that the movies were just the tip of the iceberg, and you weren't a real fan unless you had the patience and devotion to keep up with the Expanded Universe too. The movies might have been universally beloved cultural touchstones, but the hardest of hardcore fans had the Expanded Universe all to themselves.

When the Expanded Universe ended in 2012, there were many reasons why some fans weren't happy about it. Some of them were just nostalgic for the Star Wars novels that they'd loved growing up, and were sad to see their favorite original characters go. Some of them truly believed that the sequels would have been better if they'd been based on the Expanded Universe novels from the '90s and the 2000s. And, well... Some of them were angry that their license to gatekeep had been revoked—and for the first time since 1991, they knew just as much about Star Wars as the "casual" fans that they loved to look down upon. Unfortunately, smug superiority is a hell of a drug.

So if you've ever wondered why it's so hard to talk about Star Wars these days without getting into an argument, hopefully that gives you a good idea.

Ghosts of Paperbacks Past

Bottom line: the Star Wars Expanded Universe was a massive undertaking that meant a lot to a lot of people. Love it or hate it, a lot of people put a lot of work into it for a very long time. It's pretty hard to believe that a series could run that long without leaving a legacy behind.

Which is probably why it did leave a legacy behind.

See: when Disney announced in 2012 that the Expanded Universe would be ending, they announced that the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars would still be acknowledged as canon alongside the movies. And in an interesting little footnote: a few storylines in The Clone Wars prominently feature a planet called Dathomir, which is home to a group of Force-sensitive "witches" known as the "Nightsisters".

As any EU fan will happily tell you: Dathomir and the Nightsisters were first introduced in the 1994 novel The Courtship of Princess Leia, which was one of the first Expanded Universe novels ever published. So even though that novel wasn't considered canon anymore, some of its more iconic and fondly remembered concepts were saved from the dustbin of continuity, just because they were included in The Clone Wars.

Similarly: the interstellar crime syndicate "Black Sun" (first introduced in the 1996 EU novel Shadows of the Empire) also showed up in a few episodes of The Clone Wars, meaning that Black Sun still existed too.

Thanks to those little details, some fans were able to cling to the faint hope that their favorite EU characters were still out there somewhere in the newly reshaped Star Wars universe, even if they hadn't been properly introduced yet. And sure enough, their prayers were soon answered.

In 2016, Disney released a promotional video for the then-upcoming third season of the animated series Star Wars: Rebels, unveiling the character who would serve as one of the main antagonists of the upcoming season. He was a Grand Admiral in the Imperial Fleet, and he dressed in a crisp white naval uniform. And as soon as they saw his striking bright blue skin and glowing red eyes, fans instantly recognized him.

It was Thrawn! Exactly 25 years after his introduction in 1991, it was confirmed that Thrawn had survived the demise of the Expanded Universe, and he was still hanging around in the new continuity after all. Even better: Disney soon announced that they had contracted Thrawn's creator Timothy Zahn—the man who effectively birthed the EU—to write a whole new trilogy of novels about the character, which would introduce him to a whole new generation of fans.

He's not the only character who's made a comeback since 2012: just two months ago (as of this writing) the comic book series Crimson Reign name-dropped the fan-favourite character Prince Xizor (the leader of Black Sun), confirming that he also still exists in the new continuity.

For various reasons, the end of the EU remains a touchy subject among Star Wars fans—but now that it's been confirmed that some of their favourite characters from the EU could (and might) still return, many disenchanted fans are crossing their fingers and hoping for the best. I don't know if that'll be enough to stop the online screaming matches, but it's something.

And if it ever turns out that Mara Jade is still around too, it'll probably break the internet.

(Personally, I'm still holding out hope for the one-armed space princess. But that's another story...)

--------------------------------------------------

A selection of enriching comments from the original post:

--------------------------------------------------

"TheMightyHeptagon" (the original poster) said:

Hey guys. Thank you to everyone who's taken the time to read this post! As you can probably tell: this is a big subject to cover, and it took me a while to write. Due to space limitations, I had to cut a lot of stuff out.

For the benefit of anyone who's curious about what actually happened in the 40 years' worth of stories that I discuss here: I also wrote a short(ish) condensed summary of the story of the Expanded Universe.

Please note: this is by no means an exhaustive account of everything that happened in the Expanded Universe between 1991 and 2013 (that would take hours...), but it should at least give you an idea of the highlights.

Beware spoilers ahead.

So... Beginning shortly after the end of Return of the Jedi, the story goes a little something like this:

The war between the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire drags on for another 15 years, but the Rebels rebrand themselves as "The New Republic" shortly after wresting the Galactic Capital of Coruscant from Imperial control. A full-blown power struggle for control of the galaxy swiftly ensues, and the Empire falls into chaos as various ambitious power brokers vie for the vacant Imperial throne in the wake of Palpatine's death. Numerous would-be Emperors come and go, some more memorable than others. In no particular order, the big ones are:

Carnor Jax, leader of the Imperial Guard.

Ysanne Isard, director of Imperial Intelligence.

Grand Admiral Thrawn, commander of the Imperial Fleet. Notable for being of the few non-humans to rise to a position of power in the Empire, he's a member of a reclusive and xenophobic race of aliens known as the Chiss, who dwell in the Unknown Regions beyond the Outer Rim (like I said: for various reasons, he's a huge fan-favourite).

Natasi Daala, an ambitious admiral in the Imperial Fleet.

Warlord Zsinj. He's, um... a warlord named "Zsinj".

Little by little, the New Republic retakes the galaxy from the Empire. Rogue Squadron becomes a top-notch X-Wing squadron under the leadership of Luke Skywalker's old friend Wedge Antilles, and numerous brave space pilots become widely renowned heroes, with Corran Horn (who turns out to be Force-sensitive, and eventually becomes a Jedi) and Tycho Celchu (a former Imperial pilot who defects to the New Republic, becoming Wedge's wingman and best friend) being among the most notable. Things get a little complicated when Wedge's sister Syal Antilles falls in love with his greatest rival—ace Imperial TIE pilot Baron Soontir Fel—but Fel eventually joins Rogue Squadron after having a crisis of conscience and defecting to the New Republic.

The Empire briefly bounces back after Palpatine rises from the dead with the help of cloning technology and dark Force magic, and even manages to turn Luke to the Dark Side—but Leia manages to save his soul and redeem him.

On a more personal front: Leia and Han finally get married after resolving a brief love triangle involving a filthy rich space prince from a kinky matriarchal planet ruled by women (long story...), but things end happily after Prince Isolder falls in love with a sexy space witch from a different kinky matriarchal planet ruled by women (again: long story). The pair celebrate the births of their twin son and daughter Jacen and Jaina, eventually followed by their second son Anakin.

Also: Luke meets Palptatine's sexy Force-sensitive apprentice and secret personal assassin Mara Jade, who was previously assigned to kill him. Naturally, the two of them fall in love and eventually get married.

Also: Han's asshole cousin Thrackan Sal-Solo starts a rebellion on his home planet, and we learn that Corellia is technically a system of five planets artificially kept in close proximity by a mysterious long-abandoned space station built thousands of years ago by an unknown alien race. Since Centerpoint Station is capable of controlling the orbits of entire planets, it has the potential to become the galaxy's deadliest weapon if it falls into the wrong hands—but it's so old that only a handful of people know how to control it (one of whom is Anakin Solo).

Also: it turns out that Boba Fett survived falling into the Sarlacc's pit, since the fans wouldn't tolerate him staying dead.

Luke also starts his own Jedi Academy and devotes his life to training a new generation of Jedi, including the three Solo kids. There are a few bumps along the way—most notably when a troubled Jedi apprentice named Kyp Durron briefly turns to the Dark Side and uses a lost Imperial superweapon called the "Sun Crusher" to murder millions of people before coming to his senses. Kyp returns to the Light Side, but remains the New Jedi Order's resident brooding bad boy, advocating a more violent approach to protecting the galaxy from evil.

Also: Leia's would-be suitor Prince Isolder and his sexy space witch wife (remember them?) have a daughter named Tenel Ka, who turns out to be Force-sensitive and joins Luke's Jedi Academy, where she eventually falls in love with Han and Leia's son Jacen. Jacen also accidentally cuts off her arm in a tragic accident during lightsaber training, but she gets over it.

After a long string of losses, the former Empire is whittled down to a tiny fraction of its former self, and the Imperial Remnant (now led by Thrawn's old right-hand man Gilad Pellaeon) is forced to give up the ghost and sign a peace treaty with the New Republic, finally bringing the war to an end.

Naturally, the peace proves to be short-lived, and the galaxy is soon invaded by a race of horribly nightmarish alien religious extremists from beyond the galaxy called the Yuuzhan Vong, who practice ritualistic body mutilation and treat torture as a religious sacrament. They also believe that technology is an abomination (all of their spaceships and weapons are organic), and exist entirely outside the influence of the Force. The war against the Yuuzhan Vong kicks off with the death of Chewbacca (yes, really) after they use gravity manipulation to crush him to death with a moon (yes, really). Despite the best efforts of the Jedi and the New Republic, the Yuzzhan Vong unleash untold death and destruction across the galaxy, and countless people are killed—including Anakin Solo.

Finally, the New Republic collapses after Coruscant falls to the Yuuzhan Vong, forcing the fugitive leaders of the New Republic to join forces with the Imperial Remnant to drive them off and retake Coruscant. Thus, a new government called the "Galactic Alliance" rises from the ashes of the New Republic, and eventually manages to defeat the Yuuzhan Vong after the Skywalker-Solo clan finds the Yuuzhan Vong's missing home planet—which is sentient, and can travel through hyperspace (don't ask...).

Amid the doom and gloom of the Yuuzhan Vong war, Luke and Mara have a son named Ben, and we learn that Syal Antilles and her husband Soontir Fel (remember them?) have a son named Jagged (yes, that's really his name...), who's grown into a world-class starfighter pilot after years of training among the Chiss (remember them?). With a name like "Jagged Fel", it probably goes without saying that he's a sexy and mysterious bad boy. So, naturally, he and Jaina Solo eventually fall madly in love.

Things briefly quiet down after the war with the Yuuzhan Vong, with the exception of a brief war with a race of insectoid aliens called the Killiks, who turn out to be the creators of Centerpoint Station (remember Centerpoint Station?). In the intervening years, Ben Skywalker becomes a Jedi, and Jacen has a secret love affair with his childhood girlfriend Tenel Ka (remember her?), the one-armed space princess who's also a space witch. One thing leads to another, and the one-armed space princess gets pregnant with Jacen's daughter.

Years down the line, the galaxy is plunged into civil war yet again when Han's asshole cousin (remember him?) leads the five planets of the Corellian system (remember them?) in a bid to secede from the Galactic Alliance, causing a rift between the Skywalker and Solo families when Han temporarily sides with his home planet, and the Galactic Alliance government takes some rather draconian measures to quash the Corellian independence movement. Amid the chaos, Jacen—who was never really the same after the Yuuzhan Vong war—does some pretty morally questionable things in the name of ending the war and preserving peace, eventually going whole-hog and turning to the Dark Side. Along the way, he forms his own special squad of secret police to root out Corellian terrorists, he kills Mara, he unsuccessfully tries to corrupt Ben Skywalker after taking him under his wing as an apprentice, and his relationship with Tenel Ka permanently breaks down. He also accidentally kills Boba Fett's long-lost daughter Ailyn Vel during an "enhanced interrogation" session gone wrong, giving Fett ample reason to want him dead (which generally isn't great for a person's life expectancy).

In the end, Jaina is forced to save the galaxy by facing her brother (now known as "Darth Caedus") in a duel to the death with a little help from an aging Boba Fett, who has a little experience at the whole Jedi-killing thing. We also learn that Boba Fett has a wife named Sintas Vel and a granddaughter named Mirta Gev who are poised to carry on his legacy.

Things mostly go back to normal after Jacen's death, and Jacen and Tenel Ka's daughter Allana thankfully escapes unscathed. Years after that, the Jedi find themselves plunged into a war with a Lost Tribe of the Sith led by an evil entity called "Abeloth", but the good guys win once again, and Jaina and her sexy ace pilot boyfriend Jagged (remember him?) get married.

In the end, Jagged apparently starts a new Galactic Empire with Jaina by his side and declares himself Emperor, it's implied that Allana may or may not be the real Chosen One destined to bring balance to the Force, and Ben Skywalker carries on the Skywalker name as he continues to train as a Jedi. And 100-odd years after that, Luke's descendant Cade Skywalker (a disillusioned former Jedi turned bad boy smuggler) helps save the galaxy from a reborn Sith Empire led by the evil Darth Krayt, a fallen Jedi raised by Tuskens on Tatooine (don't ask...). The details about what happened in between those events are pretty vague—but the important thing is that the good guys win, and the galaxy is safe and at peace. And the Force will be with us, always.

--------------------------------------------------

"ToaArcan" said:

A lot of the most bitter online fighting centred around the missteps the EU had made, with regard to the post-movie timeline. Look into any pre-2014 article about the weirdness of the Star Wars novels and comics, and you'll see a pretty interesting list of things that fans and casuals alike took issue with.

Han and Leia's son turning evil. A million superweapons that make the Death Star not remotely special. The deaths of iconic movie characters. Cloning the Emperor. Luke turning to the Dark Side.

When the EU was jumped, there were people who were looking at the silver lining. Sure, we'd lost Thrawn and Mara Jade and all that good stuff. But we'd also dumped all the really stupid shit like BDSM 40K rejects that whip people with eels, or that time Darth Vader totally had a Buzzcut McWhiteboy apprentice who could kick every other Jedi and Sith's arse one-handed, you guys. Karen Traviss would never again touch Star Wars!

Of course, the dismissal of the EU as a load of trash with one or two bright spots only made the diehards angrier, and that, at least, seemed to be justifiable. It also got pretty awkward when the dust settled on the Sequel Trilogy and we had an evil Solo spawn, an even bigger Death Star and a whole fleet of planet-killing Star Destroyers, all of the original trio dead, an Emperor clone, and a Luke who, while he didn't turn evil, definitely ended up going in a much darker direction than most fans liked.

On the whole, post-Disney buy-out Star Wars has been slow to reintroduce the elements of the EU that fans actually liked, like Thrawn and Boba Fett's survival, but sure as f*** did rehash a lot of the things people used to mock the EU for in the first place. Fortunately no eel-whips yet, but we're never truly safe. And of course, the Disney canon is rapidly becoming another self-referential bloated beast of a franchise, just like its father before it.

--------------------------------------------------

"TastyBrainMeats" replied to "ToaArcan":

[Mention of Karen Traviss]

Beware, lest you summon her weird fanboys.

--------------------------------------------------

"ChristmasColor" replied to "TastyBrainMeats":

I was a fan of her books. I enjoyed her pointing out the Jedi were weird for using slaves.

What makes her so controversial?

--------------------------------------------------

An unknown Reddit user replied to "ChristmasColor":

I think her stuff for the Clone Wars era is mostly liked. She tends to go a little overboard with her "the Jedi were the real villains" shtick, but Lucas is the one who made them weird dogmatic virgins with no compunction whatsoever with using child slave soldiers that some mysterious benefactor just sort of left on their doorstep with no explanation, so it's hard to blame her. She tends to take more of a gritty military fiction approach to Star Wars, which can be somewhat divisive, but I really like that aspect of her work, and I think the EU could have benefitted from a little more diversity of style honestly.

The main reason she's hated is her contributions to the Legacy of the Force series, where her "Mando" fetish really got out of hand. The Mandos got thrown into the centre of the story, despite playing almost no role in the EU after Return of the Jedi up to that point, and Traviss spends half of her books talking about how awesome and better than everyone else the Mandalorians are: they can beat up Jedi without breaking a sweat, their ships are indestructible and specifically described as faster and having more firepower than X-Wings, their culture is loving and inclusive and family oriented but also everyone is trained to be a super-awesome warrior from birth, and so on. It comes across as forced, unmotivated, and disrespectful to the existing lore.

And to cap it all off, it often seems like the only way she knows how to build one of her self-insert characters up is to tear some other character down. The way she shows that Mandos are awesome at hand-to-hand combat is by having them repeatedly beat the s*** out of Jaina Solo when she's training with them, and having Jaina's inner monologue read like "Man, I wish I was a Mando. These guys are so cool and I'm just this pampered Jedi princess who's never had to work for anything in my life" (despite fighting on the front lines of a brutal war since she was like 15 years old and by this point being a 30-year-old decorated fighter pilot, fully trained Jedi, and galaxy-wide famous war hero).

I've never read her Republic Commando books (I've never been all that interested in the Prequel era), but her Legacy of the Force books are full of obnoxious Mary-Sue author inserts, mean-spirited characterizations of beloved characters, and a petty refusal to make her stories flow together with the ones written by Allston and Denning (though she's far from alone in that last sin, as the authors of Legacy of the Force did not play well together for some reason). Apparently, Traviss also had a habit for a while of getting in online flame wars with fans and calling the Jedi "nazis" and shit like that, which rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, but I never heard of any of that until years later.

--------------------------------------------------

"ZeitgeistGlee" replied to "ChristmasColor":

"I enjoyed her pointing out the Jedi were weird for using slaves."

The issue is that Traviss was hilariously one-sided in her criticism, she mischaracterised, picked at or overplayed minor faults or outright wrote new ones in the Jedi Order and their characterisation to justify her (character's) positions, and then handwaved or whitewashed or lionised the toxic behaviour and culture of her Mandalorians and their history.

The "Jedi use slaves" is a good example of that: they didn't "use slaves", they were ordered to take command of the Republic's Clone Army and fight the Separatists, and better authors than Traviss specifically paralleled the experience of the Clones with Jedi (both groups being made up of children raised into service culture segregated from the rest of society).

If I remember correctly, the Revenge of the Sith novelisation specifically has Palpatine monologue that the entire Clone Wars conflict was constructed to destroy the Jedi whether they participated or not. If they fought, then the horrors of a galactic-scale war would break them down psychologically, spiritually and literally, as well as spread them out so the remainder could be killed all in one swoop by Order 66 once Palpatine had seized power; if they'd refused to fight and withdrawn to the Jedi Temple or one of their alternate academy worlds, then they'd have been painted as cowards/traitors who could be executed all in one spot at the end of the war without complaint.

--------------------------------------------------

"ZeitgeistGlee" replied to the unknown Reddit user:

"I've never read her Republic Commando books (I've never been all that interested in the Prequel era), but her Legacy of the Force books are full of obnoxious Mary-Sue author inserts, mean-spirited characterizations of beloved characters [...]."

Her Clone Wars novels after the first one or two are exactly the same as her Legacy of the Force stuff. Kal Skirata was a particularly obnoxious version of her Mary-Sue Mando culture, and then there's Etain, her pet Jedi who dies defending one of the clones assaulting the Jedi Temple from Padawan trying to escape.

--------------------------------------------------

"mxzf" replied to "ToaArcan":

"On the whole, post-Disney buy-out Star Wars has been slow to reintroduce the elements of the EU that fans actually liked, like Thrawn and Boba Fett's survival, but sure as f*** did rehash a lot of the things people used to mock the EU for in the first place."

This is really the crux of it. Disney got rid of all of the EU material and then pretty much only brought back the worst parts of it.

In theory, they were house-cleaning and were able to bring the better parts of the EU back into the fold. But instead, they took the worst parts of the EU and chose to bring them back while leaving the best material abandoned.

--------------------------------------------------

"ToaArcan" replied to "mxzf":

There's been good stuff too. The aforementioned return of Boba, and him being re-canonised as a Mandalorian. Thrawn's still kicking, and while the Old Republic continues to limp on in Legends, they've at least started referencing Revan in canon again. Delta Squad are a thing again, Filoni got them into The Clone Wars and Scorch showed up properly in Bad Batch.

But it's taken a lot longer for those pieces to come back into play, while the movies were quick to jump on some of the worst ideas. Not all of the things they did opt to bring back were bad, but a lot of them were, and the execution leaves a lot to be desired. The Force Awakens played everything extremely safe, too safe. The Last Jedi was bold and challenging, and I enjoyed it very much, but bringing Abrams back for The Rise of Skywalker and having its script mostly written by the comments section of a MauLer video retroactively made it a whole lot worse. And then The Rise of Skywalker itself is just a trainwreck of epic proportions. I still had fun seeing it in the cinema, but I'm in no rush to watch it again.

--------------------------------------------------

"UnsealedMTG" said:

This is a fun memory lane journey as a 1980s-born Star Wars fan. For that generation, Star Wars really did feel like a more niche, albeit common, interest. For our formative years, no movies had been released in theatres since either before we were, like, 3 years old or (for me) before we were born. So Star Wars was just a finished "thing" in a way that it wouldn't have been to people who were born earlier—or to people who were born a little later and had the Prequels and The Clone Wars and everything else come out while they were in the real target age bracket.

Sure, "everyone" had seen Star Wars but being into it was more akin to being really into comic books or fantasy novels than, like, the MCU or Game of Thrones when it was on (to name cultural phenomena that would have seemed practically unthinkable in the 1990s).

And of course as one of those people I have to push my glasses up and make one comment—not a correction, but just another reframing to put you back in the early 1990s:

"(specifically: a member of a newly introduced species known as the 'Chiss')"

It was actually much more mysterious than this! Thrawn's species was pointedly not named in the original. He's just blue and has glowy eyes and is an alien. What species he comes from and how he come to be highly ranked in the human supremacist Empire is left as part of his mystique at that point.

It wasn't until Zahn's much later Visions of the Future—released in 1998, towards the end of that core EU era in the 90s before The Phantom Menace in 1999—that Thrawn's species got a name.

--------------------------------------------------

"TheMightyHeptagon" (the original poster) replied to "UnsealedMTG":

Ah, thank you for the correction! I must confess: it's been a while since I've actually read the Thrawn Trilogy.

I can relate! As a Star Wars fan born in the early 1990s, I was sort of tangentially aware of the EU just as it was taking off, but it was all pretty mysterious to me since I was way too young to read most of it at the time. I have distinct memories of seeing all the Star Wars novels on the shelves of my local library and bookstore whenever I went there with my parents when I was about 4 or 5 years old and wondering why I didn't recognize half the characters on the dust jackets. That sense of befuddlement eventually inspired me to take a deep dive into the EU when I was a teenager.

--------------------------------------------------

"UnsealedMTG" replied to "TheMightyHeptagon":

I think that also speaks a little bit to the "geek culture" thing about Star Wars in the 1990s, too. I mean... Now there's Wookiepedia. Anyone with any amount of interest, a smartphone, a few minutes, and the ability to get through Fandom's intrusive ads can know anything about those mysterious characters in the books. There's no barrier of effort.

In the 1990s, if you wanted to gather that knowledge about the Star Wars galaxy, you had to go out of your way and either read the books themselves or go get one of the dictionaries or encyclopedias that they published to dig out that information.

I think that makes it more understandable how people reacted to the transition, even if the transition was clearly inevitable and a lot of people on the "Pro-EU" faction were kind of toxic gatekeep-y dicks. This old EU information was something people had gathered through effort that creates a feeling of meaning. To them, saying it "doesn't count now" isn't just saying that some things that didn't happen... extra didn't happen. It's taking something that they worked to collect and invalidating it.

Now, I'm personally a person who is much more interested in the history of how the stories were told in our chronology than in the details of the actual in-universe world so the canon status/non-status is not a big deal emotionally to me.* But it's at least something that follows logically from the sort of information collector mentality that the Star Wars EU and properties like it really encouraged.

(*Which is why I'm interested in stuff like how Thrawn was originally a "unique blue alien guy" and only later did they introduce a "whole species of Thrawns", and why I get annoyed when finding the history of how the words "Sith" and "Mandalorian" got used in Star Wars is so much harder than it is to find the cobbled-together and retconned in-universe histories of the Sith and Mandalorians)

--------------------------------------------------

"DocWhoFan16" said:

The Courtship of Princess Leia is absolutely ludicrous, honestly a very stupid book, and it is also genuinely one of my favourite Star Wars stories in any medium ever.

In this book, Space Fabio shows up to try and woo Princess Leia. Han gets jealous and tries to win her over by... winning a planet in a card game where she can re-house the refugees from Alderaan. Leia isn't too impressed, so Han's response is... to use the "gun of command", a blaster which essentially shoots mind control, to kidnap her and fly her off to this planet he's won: Dathomir.

Dathomir, as it happens, is deep in the territory of the Imperial warlord Zsinj, but Han doesn't let that perturb him. Then they get to Dathomir and learn that it's this matriarchal society of Force witches. Also, Zsinj has an orbiting network of satellites which, for all intents and purposes, allow him to turn off the sun. Space Fabio and Luke follow them, crash-land on Dathomir and get picked up by one of the Force witches, who has this weird Mills & Boon romance storyline. I'm pretty sure it's implied that Yoda might have shagged a witch when he visited years ago.

All the while, C-3PO becomes this weird matchmaker trying to set Han and Leia up. He tries to prove that Han has royal blood so he can marry a princess, only to discover that Han's supposed royal ancestor is a notorious pirate who was actually a pretender to the throne.

(The most frustrating thing about that last point is that one of the tie-in reference books from years later actually went ahead and revealed that, yes, the ancient prince of Corellia who once dominated the ancient Republic was called... Solo. To me, that sort of missed the point, but I admit I had long since grown out of Star Wars novels by then!)

Is it especially well-written? Not really. But it's creative. It's interested in what Star Wars can be, far more than what it should be (and if I have one criticism of Tim Zahn, it's that he often seemed to lean a bit more in the latter direction). See also: The Crystal Star, in which Space Hitler kidnaps Han's and Leia's children so he can feed them to a gold-plated meat monster from another dimension who has promised to increase his Force powers, and the galaxy is full of centaurs and werewolves and stuff like that.

I think after 1999, when the licence leaves Bantam Spectra and goes to Del Rey and Lucasfilm starts exerting a lot more top-down control (and this is across the board in all media, not just with novels), the Expanded Universe lost a lot of that. I think it became a lot more homogenous, at least aesthetically.

Consider something like the Knights of the Old Republic video games. Those are fairly good games. But they look like the Prequel movies! They're set four thousand years ago, but they look like the Prequels. Compare that with comics like Tales of the Jedi or (my personal favourite) Jedi vs Sith, which look properly ancient while still looking like Star Wars.

--------------------------------------------------

"Lastjedibestjedi" replied to "DocWhoFan16":

You leaving out the Rancor riding in the middle of all this other madness is a war crime.

--------------------------------------------------

"DocWhoFan16" replied to "Lastjedibestjedi":

Yes, and I also forgot that the creatures in The Crystal Star are actually called "wyrwulfs" rather than "werewolves", sorry.

How about the half of Children of the Jedi where Luke falls in love with the computer on a lost Imperial super-weapon which was designed to kidnap Jedi children, except it's not really a computer, it's really the disembodied spirit of an Old Republic Jedi which is trapped in the computer, and at the end of the book, she sort of reincarnates in the body of one of Luke's hot young Jedi students.

Barbara Hambly was specifically instructed that, in that novel, she had to introduce the perfect love interest for Luke Skywalker. Then a couple of books later, nobody likes Callista, and Hambly is back to write Planet of Twilight (the one where Leia has a lightsabre fight with a Hutt) and she's told that this time her job is to get rid of the perfect love interest for Luke Skywalker, which she does in a couple of pages right at the end of the book.

How about the time the Young Jedi Knights met a group called "the Diversity Alliance" whose ostensible ideology was anti-racism and opposition to human supremacism in the New Republic and who are led by a former Twi'lek slave (and because this is the Star Wars EU, this Twi'lek was the sister of Oola from Return of the Jedi BECAUSE OF COURSE SHE WAS), but their real plan is to commit genocide against humans using stolen Imperial bio-weapons. Because the anti-racists are the real racists (IT MAKES U THINK).

Seriously, I appreciate that Kevin J. Anderson in 1998 or whenever it was had benign intentions to do "racism is bad" stories in the YA series, but... Look, it's a faction of villains called "the Diversity Alliance" whose opposition to racism is actually a cover to kill all white people humans, and it's up to Han and Leia's kids to stop them. That sounds like some kind of parody of nerds on the Internet in 2022, doesn't it?

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy the pre-1999 novels a lot (don't really like the ones on the Del Rey era, but that's neither here nor there; the comics are still good after that point, though), but it's very much a "warts and all" thing.

--------------------------------------------------

"bhamv" said:

"(Personally, I'm still holding out hope for the one-armed space princess. But that's another story...)"

Ah. Ah ha. I am glad that someone else shares my fondness for Tenel Ka.

I was a huge fan of the EU. I didn't read every book, but I read a lot of them, and the sheer depth of the lore was amazing. It was like swimming in a vast ocean that always threw up something new and fascinating for you to see.

In particular, I thought Xizor was a great antagonist, and I'm glad to see that he might reappear in the new canon some day.

EDIT: Also, one of the plot threads suggested in Legends that has unfortunately been abandoned is that the Emperor foresaw the invasion of the Yuuzhan Vong, which is why he took over the galaxy and had the Death Star built. The galaxy had to be united to fight such a foe, so it needed a weapon capable of taking out the Vong's moon-sized world-ships. Stuff like this adds so much depth to the motivations of existing characters, and I much prefer it to the simple "this space station will help us rule by fear" motivation in the movies.

--------------------------------------------------

"Coronarchivista" replied to "bhamv":

Or in Heir to the Empire, where Thrawn speculates that the reason the Imperials lost the Battle of Endor despite far outnumbering the Rebels is that Palpatine was using "battle meditation" to coordinate the Imperial fleet, and when Vader threw him down the shaft, the Imperial fleet was thrown into chaos and routed.

--------------------------------------------------

"FuttleScich" replied to "bhamv":

I always thought the "Palpatine just wanted to help" thing was the worst part of the old EU, and I’m glad it’s dead.

--------------------------------------------------

"DocWhoFan16" replied to "FuttleScich":

It did get a bit of "Hitler just wanted to make Europe strong enough to fight the Soviet Union" some of the time.

#star wars #star wars expanded universe #star wars eu #sw eu #sw legends #star wars legends #essay #transcription #fandom discourse #fandom history #fandom culture #star wars history #star wars fandom #star wars discourse

3 notes · View notes

10thmusemoon · 1 month

Note

what would your qijiu baby shen yuan omegaverse au look like in a world where YQY came back for sj in time/already told him the truth about Xuan Su years ago? Im so sorry but the concept of qijiu baby sy just has its hooks deep in my heart...

So I’ve already started writing a version of this where they reunite at the IAC but SJ assumes yqy was kept at CQMS because of his omega status (not completely wrong but one of the factors) and is more understanding of it. Their teen romance is met with the barrier of everyone around them caring too much about impropriety so they sneak around and eventully get together organically. It helps that they are immediately marked down as each others heat/rut partners. Originally they planned on marrying right before their peak lord ascension but the sect pushes it until afterwards for the optics of two peak lords being this united blah blah blah

In this version, I’m certain SY would be raised to be a QDP disciple because SQQ is going to make sure his spawn inherits the most power possible. Also he can be as terrible to his own disciples without SY’s soft heart getting in the way. However, being the nerd he is, SY spends as much times on QJP as he can get away with, rifling through the bestiaries that just can’t be found on CQMS. It becomes clear to QiJiu that this kid is Not gonna wanna be sect leader and it's a well worn argument between them.

(alternatively in the world of the father oh father fic he'd joing QJP because SJ is trying very hard to impress him and worm his way into his affections without having QDP poison SY against him.)

Binghe still joins under QJP and everything goes like it normally would until SY realizes he missed the protagonist joining the sect and suddenly pivots to spending 75% of his time there. SQQ is pleased and suspicious of this in turn until he realizes SY has taken LBH on as a pet project.

(there's a furtive discussion between qijiu that they should have let SY keep at least one of the injured monsters he's brought over the years 'this is your fault qi-ge' 'xiao jiu i'm allergic-' 'then die!')

meanwhile binghe is on his very best behavior trying to win over his in-laws. I haven't decided, but there's no abyss arc here some other shenanigans happen as a result of SY and SQH figuring each other out years before.

#10thmusemoon talks #10thmusemoon fics

1 note · View note

beastars-takes · 4 years

Text

Zootopia Takes: Darker’s Not Better

The Shock Collar Draft

So, it sounds like people are largely positive on me doing some Zootopia posts on this blog, and I wanted to talk about this tweet I saw the other day:

I’ll punt on explaining why Beastars isn’t “Dark Zootopia”--that’s a great topic for another post. But I would like to talk about why this popular yet stridently uninformed tweet is so, so wrong. Why the shock collar draft was not better, actually.

And obviously, I’m not writing several pages in reply to a single tweet--this is a take that’s been around since the movie came out, that the “original version was better.” It’s been wrong the whole time.

Let’s talk about why!

Part 1: “Because Disney”

Let’s start with this--the assumption that the film’s creators wanted to make this shock collar story and “Disney” told them to change it.

That’s not how it works.

I try to keep stuff about me out of these posts as much as possible, but just for a bit of background, I’ve worked in the animation industry for about half a decade. I know people at Disney. I have a reasonable idea of how things are there.

There is this misconception about creative industries that they’re constantly this pitched battle of wills between creative auteurs trying to make incredible art and ignorant corporate suits trying to repress them.

That can happen, especially in dysfunctional studios (and boy could I tell some stories) but Walt Disney Animation Studios is not dysfunctional. It’s one of the most autonomous and well-treated parts of the Disney Company.

The director of Zootopia, Byron Howard, isn’t an edgelord. He made Bolt and Tangled. He knows what his audience is, and he’s responsible enough not to spend a year (and millions of dollars in budget) developing a grimdark Don Bluth story that leadership would never approve. It wouldn’t just be a waste of time--he would be endangering the livelihoods of the hundreds of people working under him. Meanwhile, Disney Animation’s corporate leadership trusts their talent. They don’t generally interfere with story development because they don’t need to. Because they employ people like Byron Howard.

Howard and the other creative leads of Zootopia have said a dozen times, in interviews and documentaries, that they gave up on the shock collar idea because it wasn’t working. They’ve explained their reasoning in detail. Maybe they’re leaving out some of the story, but in general? I believe them.

But Beastars Takes, you say, maybe even if Disney didn’t force them to back away from this darker version, it still would have been better?

Part 2: Why Shock Collars Seem Good

I will say this--I completely sympathize with people who see these storyboards and scenes from earlier versions of the movie and think “this seems amazing.” It does! A lot of these drawings and shots are heartbreakingly good, in isolation.

I love these boards. They make me want to cry. I literally have this drawing framed on my wall. Believe me, I get it.

But the only reason we care this much about this alternative draft of Zootopia is that the Zootopia we got made us love this world and these characters. You know what actually made me cry?

Oh, yeah.

So let’s set aside the astonishing hubris of insisting Zootopia’s story team abandoned the “good” version of the story, when the “bad version” is the most critically-acclaimed Disney animated feature in the past SIXTY YEARS.

“But Beastars Takes!” I hear you say. “Critics are idiots and just because something’s popular doesn’t make it good!”

Fair enough. Let’s talk about why the real movie is better.

Part 3: The Message (it is, in fact, like a jungle sometimes)

This type of thing is always hard to discuss, in the main--a lot of people don’t want to feel criticized or “called out” by the entertainment they consume, and they don’t want to be asked to think about their moral responsibilities. But it’s hard to deny that Zootopia is a movie with a strong point of view. Everything else--the characters, the worldbuilding, the plot, grows out from the movie’s central statement about bias.

And the movie we got, with no shock collars, makes that statement far more effectively.

To dive into the full scope of Zootopia’s worldview and politics (warts and all) would be a whole post on its own, so I’ll just summarize the key point of relevance here:

Zootopia's moral message is that you, the viewer, need to confront your own biases. Not yell at someone else. No matter how much of a good or progressive person you consider yourself to be--if you want to stand against prejudice you have to start with yourself.

That’s a tough sell! For that message to land, we need to see ourselves in the protagonist.

Judy’s a good person! She argues with her dad about foxes. She knows predators aren’t all dangerous. She’s not speciesist. Right?

Ah fuck.

Let’s fast-forward to the pivotal scene of this movie. In an unfortunate but inevitable confluence of circumstances, Judy’s own biases and prejudiced assumptions come out, and she shits the bad.

Nick, who’s already bared his soul to her (against his better instincts), is heartbroken. But not as heartbroken as he is a minute later when he tries to confront her about what she’s said, and she makes this face:

Whaaaat? Come on, Nick. I’m a good person. Why are you giving me a hard time?

People like to complain about this scene. That it’s a hackneyed “misunderstanding” trope that could be easily resolved with a discussion. They’re wrong. Nick tries to have a discussion. She blows him off.

This isn’t Judy acting out of character, this is her character. Someone who identifies as Not A Racist, and hasn’t given the issue any more thought. This is not only completely believable characterization (who hasn’t seen someone react this way when you told them they hurt you?) it’s the film’s central thesis!

Yes, Nick somewhat provokes her into reaching for her “fox spray,” and her own trauma factors in there, but she’s already made her fatal mistake before that happens.

(As an aside, people also make the criticism that the movie unrealistically deflects responsibility for racism onto Bellwether and her plot. It doesn’t. All the key expressions of prejudice in the film--Judy’s encounter with Gideon, her parents’ warnings, the elephant in the ice cream shop, Judy’s early encounters with Bogo, Judy's views on race science--exist largely outside of Bellwether’s influence. She is a demagogue who inflames existing tensions, she didn’t invent them. Bogo literally says “the world has always been broken.”)

So, anyway. But we love Judy. She’s an angel. She also kinda sucks! She’s proudly unprejudiced, and when her own prejudice is pointed out to her she argues and doesn’t take it seriously. This is bad, but it’s also a very human reaction. It’s one most of us have probably been guilty of at one point or another.

Look at Zootopia’s society, too--it’s shiny and cosmopolitan, seemingly idyllic. Anyone can be anything, on paper. But scratch too deep beneath the surface and there’s a lot of pain and resentment here, things nobody respectable would say in public but come out behind closed doors, or among family, when nobody’s watching. It’s entirely recognizable--at least to me, someone who lives in a large liberal city in the United States. Like Byron Howard.

Wow, this place is a paradise!

Wait, what’s a “NIMBY”?

Part 4: Why Shock Collars Are Bad

So, with the film’s conceit established, let’s circle back to the shock collar idea. Like I said, it’s heartbreaking. It’s dramatic. It’s affective.

It also teaches us nothing.

If I see a movie where predator animals are subjected to 24/7 electroshock therapy, I don’t think “wow, this makes me want to think about how I could do better by the people around me.” I think “damn that shit’s crazy lmao. that’d be fucked up if that happened.” At a stretch, it reminds me of something like the Jim Crow era, or the Shoah. You know, stuff in the Past. Stuff we’ve all decided couldn’t ever happen again, so why worry about it?

The directors have said this exact thing, just politely. “It didn’t feel contemporary,” they say in pressers. That’s what it means.

If anything, the shock collar draft reifies the mindset that Zootopia is trying to reject--it shows us that discrimination is blatant, and dramatic, and flagrantly cruel, and impossible to miss.

And...that’s not true. If you only look for bias at its most malicious and evil, you’re going to miss the other 95 percent.

The messaging of this “darker version” is--ironically--less mature, less insightful, less intelligent. Less useful. Darker’s not better.

Part 5: Why Shock Collars Are Still Bad

So what if you don’t care about the message? What if you have no interest in self-reflection, or critical analysis (why are you reading this blog then lmao)? What if you just really want to hear a fun story about talking animals?

Well, this is trickier, because the remaining reasons are pretty subjective and emotional.

The creators have said that the shock collar version didn’t work because the viewers hated the cruel world they’d created. They agreed with Nick--the city was beyond saving. They didn’t want to save it.

The creators have said that Judy was hard to sympathize with, not being able to recognize the shock collars for the obvious cruelty they were.

Fuck you, Judy!

But we haven’t seen the draft copies. We haven’t watched the animatics. We have to take their word for it. Anyone who’s sufficiently invested in this story is going to say “well, I disagree with them.” It doesn’t matter to them that they haven’t seen the draft and the filmmakers have. The movie they’ve imagined is great and nobody is going to convince them otherwise.

But the fact remains that the shock collar movie, as written, did not work. And, if behind the scenes material is to be believed, it continued to not work after months and months of story doctoring.

There’s even been a webcomic made out of the dystopian version of Zootopia. It’s clever and creative and well-written and entertaining and...it kind of falls apart. The creator, after more than a little shit-talk directed at Disney, abandoned the story before reaching the conclusion, but even before then the seams were beginning to show. How do you take a society that’s okay with electrocuting cute animals and bring it to a point of cathartic redemption? You can’t, really. The story doesn’t work.

Does that mean people shouldn’t make fanworks out of the cut material? That they shouldn’t be inspired and excited by it? Hell no. This drawing is cute as hell. The ideas are compelling.

But I suppose what I’d ask of you all is--if you’re weighing the hot takes of art students on Twitter against the explanations of veteran filmmakers, consider that the latter group might actually know what they’re talking about.

See you next time!

#zootopia #zootropolis #zoomania #zootopia takes #judy hopps #nick wilde #disney #chief bogo #byron howard

382 notes · View notes

daleisgreat · 3 years

Text

The Avengers: Endgame

youtube

Over the last couple months I finally upgraded to somewhat modern TV and gaming rigs in the form of a 55” Samsung 4KTV and Xbox Series X. I own three 4K UHD discs, but one I already covered a couple years back with my entry of the BluRay version that came bundled with the 4K disc of Die Hard. The other is a two pack of the first two John Wick films, and rest assured those will get their day in the sun here eventually. From my research, the Xbox Series X is not a top shelf 4K BluRay player, at least not at the system’s launch before presumable system software updates, but also sounds like a fairly better quality version of the drive that came in the Xbox One X|S, and also supports upscaling of regular BluRays to 4K. Coincidentally, on top of my movie backlog pile was a movie I absolutely wanted to take advantage of that 4K upscaling and thus here we are with today’s write-up for 2019’s The Avengers: Endgame (trailer). WARNING: Unlike nearly most of my other movie recaps I will be diving into serious spoiler territory ahead. The amount of hype leading up to Endgame was insurmountable. Anthony and Joseph Russo did an astounding job directing the first part in 2018’s Infinity War (read my entry for it here). Both that and Endgame top the three hour mark to squeeze in as many characters, references, periphery side plots and so much more from the previous 21 Marvel Cinematic Universe films that lead up to this finale. By accomplishing just that, both movies are the breeziest three hour viewings I have experienced because the Russo brothers do a commendable job at keeping the scenes flowing and doing their best to give everyone their proper time to shine. The ending of Infinity War saw Thanos (Josh Brolin) deliver the snap heard around the world that vanished half of all life in the entire universe. It was a soul-crushing downer of a cliffhanger to end on, but the post-credits tag hinting at the cry of help for Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) left crowds with a glimmer of hope. This being based around comic books there is the unwritten rule where no one truly stays dead either, so part of the experience going into Endgame was to see how the remaining Avengers plan to bring everybody back. Endgame kicks off with the fresh effects of ‘the snap’ when it starts with Hawkeye’s family all getting dusted from him in the middle of a picnic.

The film transitions to the remaining un-dusted Avengers squad of Nebula (Karen Gillan) and Iron Man (Robert Downer Jr.) floating aimlessly in space until the convenient deus ex machina that is Captain Marvel miraculously tracks them down and hauls them back to Earth. A few weeks Avengers HQ tracks down Thanos on an isolated planet and with Captain Marvel’s power, they anticlimactically kill him off in a brief scene. This was one of the parts of the film that did not sit well with me after building up Thanos as this unrivaled threat in all the previous films, and to have the Avengers cold-bloodedly put him down in quick order seems so……unlike them, but he did off half the universe so I understand how the Russo’s felt justified for filming it that way, but I cannot help that it did not come across right, and could have been handled better. Of course, a more proper Thanos battle would be coming later in the final act thanks to my pet peeve plot device that is…. …TIME TRAVEL!!!! This and alternate dimension traveling I despise and have turned me off to many shows over the years like Lost and CW’s DC shows. The worst of it is indeed present here because meaningful character deaths that happened in Infinity War to Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Gamura (Karen Gillan) become undone and their sacrifices proved for naught. All that griping aside however, I will give the Russo brothers credit because even with those qualms I feel they pull off time travel and have it appear as more than a convenient storytelling method. Again, major props because that is a hell of a hurdle to overcome. The filmmakers go out of their way in a couple scenes to directly call out Back to the Future’s style of time travel bullshit, and have a couple characters ever-so-carefully explain in detail and for the laymen how “real” time travel works.

This is all thanks to a rambunctious rat who inadvertently zaps Ant Man (Paul Rudd) out of the Quantum Realm…after being trapped there five years due to his team being on the end of a dusting before bringing him back. Ant Man deduces upon his return that he is able to undo the dusting through his van-quantum-realm-contraption, and convinces the Avengers to conjure up a plan they cleverly dub the “Time Heist” to travel back to capture all the Infinity Gems Stones before Thanos does. I loved how these scenes played out, and there is a plethora of fan service throughout it as the three squads of Avengers jump to different periods like the final battle of the original Avengers film, and a 1970 military base where Howard Stark (John Slattery) unknowingly meets his son. Plans do not proceed swimmingly to say the least, and past timeline Thanos becomes clued in to their plan and thwarts the Avengers attempt at trying to undo the past in a CG showpiece for the ages with his assault on Avengers HQ. The CG fireworks continue to dazzle for the bulk of the final hour of the film with a climatic showdown between Thanos and his forces against The Avengers and the returning of the dusted Marvel characters. I have seen too many comic book films fail at translating over-the-top comic book action on the silver screen, but the Russo brothers always manage to pull it off. I fondly remember the theater crowd going gaga when Captain America (Chris Evans) summons Mjolnir and wallops Thanos with it. The women of Marvel have another moment to shine together where they collectively team up to kick ass. Moments of levity are brilliantly peppered in throughout the chaos for a much-needed chuckle from the nonstop adrenaline-boosting action. That final battle masterfully builds up to the dramatic sacrifice of Iron Man in the standout emotional scene of the film.

The resulting aftermath was heartwarmingly done here with a pre-recorded farewell from Iron Man, and a collage of nearly all the major and minor MCU characters at Iron Man’s funeral. I believe this is the first MCU film without a post-credits tag, and that is 100% fine by me, because the beginning of the credits is a lovingly crafted tribute to the original Avengers cast done in the fashion of the Original Series cast of Star Trek VI that resonated with me feeling the end of a pivotal era of the MCU that I have been largely enjoying since the original 2008 Iron Man. I usually do not dive into this much detail and spoilers when recapping the movies here, but due to this being the final chapter of this era of the MCU films I could not help myself, and believe me there is so much more I wanted to dive in here on because like I said, the Russo brothers crammed in an incredible amount of narrative into three hours. There is so much ground in here it is impossible for me to recap it all, and that it will in all likelihood be the fastest three hour movie you will ever endure. I did not get a chance to even touch on over-the-hill Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and the hybrid Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo (spoiler: they both killed it!)). Endgame unsurprisingly did major bank at the box office, so I feel safe knowing most of you reading this already watched it by now which is another reason I went all out on the spoilers.

I re-watched the film for this entry a second time with commentary from the Russo brothers, and writers Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, and that greatly helped explain some little tidbits that were easy to miss and/or not fully comprehend in the midst of the three hours. I know this is a little detail, but I want to give props to Marvel for being one of the few companies out there for shelling out resources to caption the commentary track! I exponentially appreciate it more than you know! The commentary helped with understanding why they did not do a lot for Black Widow’s (Scarlett Johansson) aftermath of her death because she has her prequel film set to release. Other notable takeaways from the commentary was how Stark’s “I am Iron Man” line was a last minute addition to the film, giving credit to Star Trek VI as inspiration for their credits sequence, being hopeful for Marvel capitalizing on Falcon donning Cap’s shield and lots of understandable love for the visual effects team for their hard work. Aside from the commentary track, the BluRay has a second disc with just under an hour of bonus material. There is the requisite short, but top-of-the-line gag reel that is standard in most Marvel Studios home videos. There are five minutes of deleted scenes worth a look, with some of them lightheartedly covering up plot holes. Remembering Stan Lee is a touching tribute to Stan, filled with archived interviews from him on his experiences in the cameos, and showing plenty of delightful off-camera interactions with the cast and crew. There are well done character profile pieces for Thor, Black Widow, Captain America and Iron Man, with each one having countless cast and crew state proper kudos to what the actors have done for those characters over the years. If you only have time for one then I recommend Man Out of Time: Creating Captain America, because it goes into a little more detail than the others and Chris Evans has some intriguing introspection from his years with the character. Finally, there are short, but worthwhile pieces on the Russo brothers and the women of the MCU that should not be skipped out on either.

As I mentioned above, the hype building up to Endgame was insurmountable, but Joseph and Anthony Russo overcame the odds and delivered a gratifying conclusion to this era of the MCU. Watching the BluRay upscaled in 4K on a TV about a third bigger than my previous set made it a grander experience too for those showpiece moments. Sure I had quibbles and nitpicks I mentioned above, but by and large those are easily overcome by how much the Russo brothers got it right with this film. I am kicking myself for waiting a year and a half to re-watch it, but picked up on a lot of little things that went right over mine and Drax’s heads the first time out. If you have yet to give The Avengers: Endgame another viewing, then do not hesitate because you will not regret once again taking in this landmark epic that delivered against all odds! Other Random Backlog Movie Blogs 3 12 Angry Men (1957) 12 Rounds 3: Lockdown 21 Jump Street The Accountant Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie Atari: Game Over The Avengers: Age of Ultron The Avengers: Infinity War Batman: The Dark Knight Rises Batman: The Killing Joke Batman: Mask of the Phantasm Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice Bounty Hunters Cabin in the Woods Captain America: Civil War Captain America: The First Avenger Captain America: The Winter Soldier Christmas Eve The Clapper Clash of the Titans (1981) Clint Eastwood 11-pack Special The Condemned 2 Countdown Creed I & II Deck the Halls Detroit Rock City Die Hard Dredd The Eliminators The Equalizer Dirty Work Faster Fast and Furious I-VIII Field of Dreams Fight Club The Fighter For Love of the Game Good Will Hunting Gravity Grunt: The Wrestling Movie Guardians of the Galaxy Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 Hell Comes to Frogtown Hercules: Reborn Hitman I Like to Hurt People Indiana Jones 1-4 Ink The Interrogation Interstellar Jay and Silent Bob Reboot Jobs Joy Ride 1-3 Last Action Hero Major League Man of Steel Man on the Moon Man vs Snake Marine 3-6 Merry Friggin Christmas Metallica: Some Kind of Monster Mortal Kombat Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpions Revenge National Treasure National Treasure: Book of Secrets Nintendo Quest Not for Resale Payback (Director’s Cut) Pulp Fiction The Punisher (1989) The Ref The Replacements Reservoir Dogs Rocky I-VIII Running Films Part 1 Running Films Part 2 San Andreas ScoobyDoo Wrestlemania Mystery Scott Pilgrim vs the World The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Shoot em Up Slacker Skyscraper Small Town Santa Steve Jobs Source Code Star Trek I-XIII Sully Take Me Home Tonight TMNT The Tooth Fairy 1 & 2 UHF Veronica Mars Vision Quest The War Wild The Wizard Wonder Woman The Wrestler (2008) X-Men: Apocalypse X-Men: Days of Future Past

#random movie #marvel #avengers #avengers endgame #joseph russo #anthony russo #chris evans #Robert Downey Jr #mark ruffalo #Scarlett Johansson #jeremy renner #chris hemsworth #josh brolin

20 notes · View notes

deejadabbles · 3 years

Text

A Thousand Songs (Atem/Yami x Reader)

Chapter Three: I Love You

One /// Two /// Three /// Four /// [Five Coming Soon]

Summary: You knew that you and your band could make it big. Not only that, but stay together while doing it; the five of you were family, after all. The only problem was that despite all your musical talents...none of you were particularly good at lyrics. After years of struggling to put out your first full album, the solution finally made himself know in chance meeting on an empty stage.

Rock Band AU, Atem x Reader, gender neutral reader.

Atem’s mind was still reeling as he parked his car in the lot of his building. It had been a normal and rather mundane day at first; he woke, made breakfast, ran his errands, then went to rehearsal. The rehearsal was particularly boring, considering he already memorized their new set of songs for the next show (good thing this was the last few days of rehearsal before the new show debuted). It was likely that very boredom that gave Atem his wistful thought as he packed away his violin. Everyone else had gone, bidding him good night or not even speaking to him as they moved on to their own plans for the night, and Atem found himself alone in the theatre. The stage had always held a bit of...glamour to Atem, and a simple walk around the grand set alone had got him daydreaming- which turned into him singing.

The young man sighed to himself as he rode the elevator up to his floor. He had thought he was singing to himself, that the theatre was empty save for himself and the janitor who was usually outside smoking that time of night. Imagine his surprise when an audience of one had ambushed him the moment his solo was done. He let out another sigh as the elevator stopped.

Atem was careful when opening his door, and the reason why made herself apparent when a delicate ‘mew’ greeted him.

“Hello, Bastet,” he greeted the gray tabby as she rubbed her chin against the door, trying as always to explore beyond the confines of the penthouse.

He scooped her up into his arms as he shut the door, then wandered to the kitchen as his mind continued to replay the odd incident at the theatre. Despite Atem’s shock, the boy- Yugi’s enthusiasm actually made Atem...consider the out-of-the-blue proposal. Him, a first chair violinist, write songs for some rock band? The idea seemed ludicrous at first glance... but, Atem would not deny his interest.

After setting Bastet down on the leather stool by the breakfast bar, Atem pulled out the black business card from his coat pocket, the title “The Dark Magicians” being the first golden text that caught his eye. The name had captured Atem’s interest from the start, though he couldn’t be sure if the name had anything to do with his favorite card from the old Duel Monsters game.

Behind the name of the band, was a circular logo (again, a bit reminiscent of the duel monster) and Atem recognized the symbols of the zodiacs, as well as some other markings he vaguely remembered seeing somewhere, but couldn’t place the meaning of in the moment. Atem then flipped the card over and saw what looked like the names of their social media accounts, but only got a brief glimpse at it before a tug on his coat got his attention.

“Mowo?”

Atem looked down and found Bastet, claws tugging at him and eyes looking expectant. He found himself chuckling and giving her a gentle scratch on the head.

“Sorry, Bastet, you must be hungry, I’ll make us some dinner.”

After finally taking off his coat (the black fabric now covered in his kitten’s fur) Atem turned on his speakers, started his playlist, and got started on dinner: a beef-based stir fry for him, and a can of Fancy Feast for the spoiled cat who wove between his legs the whole time he tried to prepare the meals. And of course, because she really was just that spoiled, Bastet got a small spoon full of his own dinner before he retired to the living room.

Atem kept his music playing as he ate, preferring to get lost in his thoughts rather than his favorite shows; and again Yugi’s proposal swam into his mind and occupied him.

The whole thought was ridiculous, he knew nothing about Yugi or his band, why was he even thinking about writing songs for them? Songwriting was just a hobby for him, it always had been. The orchestra was his career, and though his father had gotten him singing lessons when he was younger, Atem had never truly entertained the idea of making that voice and his lyrics into anything more than a personal amusement. Well, at least not seriously.

Well, and didn’t it say something that Yugi had been so drawn to Atem’s song? The young man had seemed so excited, so sure when he said that he thought Atem was the perfect match for his band. Atem believed in fate, and that had been the first time he sang publicly since he was a child...what were the chances that someone looking for a songwriter would be listening? Not only that, but be so enthralled with the song that he practically bounded down the row of seats to talk with Atem?

As he finished off the last bites of his meal, Atem picked up the card again, looking over the accounts listed on the back. There was one for Youtube and Atem figured that would be a good place to start if he wanted to see what he thought about this band.

He quickly searched the band on the app via his TV (might as well see them on the big screen) and was not surprised with what he saw at first. Their icon was the same logo from the card and they barely had a few thousand subscribers. A small-time group just trying to leave their musical mark on the world. What did surprise him was that they had almost fifty videos posted- though a quick look through their content said that most of them were “band vlogs”.

Their banner picture was nice, all of the band members in the throws of a song with multicolored lights blooming behind them. The picture displayed all five of the members, the framing purposefully showing all of them so no one was left out or hidden behind another member.

Atem of course recognized Yugi first and was intrigued to find the young man working a set of turntables. An odd addition for a rock band- though now that he thought about it, Yugi never actually said what type of band they were. Soon enough, Atem found his eyes drifting to the other members. There was an energetic looking blond pounding on the drums and a brunette woman who had some soul playing the keyboard. Then there were the two guitarists, and the lead guitar player seemed to also be the singer, mouth poised in front of the standing mic and fingers splayed across the strings in unison.

But looking at still pictures would not get Atem far in getting to know the band, so he moved on to the videos. He found a convenient playlist for their actual songs (he’d move on to the vlogs if he liked what he heard) and clicked on the oldest, their first, video.

The setting was simple enough, the five of them standing in an almost warehouse-looking venue, but the video quality wasn’t bad. The girl on the piano started out first and Atem’s found his interest instantly piqued when the notes sounded epic enough to fit in with an orchestra. The singer stepped up to the mic, guitar missing, and started a fast string of lyrics, hard-hitting and dramatic- a perfect combo with the epic-style piano. The drums and bass joined in quick enough and the moment the chorus hit the synthesized sound of the turntables cut in, an interesting contrast to the other instruments that...actually worked...it really really worked. The lead guitarist’s missing strings were deliberate, Atem noted, since the base standing on its own created a deeper sound that complimented the dramatic flair of the song.

It ended too quickly, being barely more than two minutes long, and Atem instantly found himself pressing replay to give the song another listen. This time, now that he wasn’t trying to pick out the different instruments working together, he paid more attention to the lyrics. It sounded like an ode to bad relationships, the toxic kind that made a couple who claimed to love each other fight and scream daily. The singer’s voice was good, and he was impressed with the long note held at the end of the song.

Atem considered giving the title a third listen, but decided he could always come back to it after he sampled their other songs. He moved on to the next, noting that there were a few cover songs in between the originals- though he skipped them for now. This song seemed to have the most views, and Atem figured it was for the actual “music video” style. It was much more entertaining to watch a story-driven video than the band members simply standing on a set (though he thought that was perfectly fine for the first video).

A fade from black showed a ballerina (the pianist?) on the ground, contorted into a common starting position for ballets. A sorrowful note sounded as the camera zoomed in on the ballerina, then, the moment the piano started, she was dancing. It was then that Atem realized that he knew the piano player, at least in passing, she was one of the dancers from the theatre.

The same voice from the first song started to sing, and the dancer soundlessly captured the lyrics with her graceful movements. The thing that truly made Atem stare in wonder though, was the visuals taking place beyond the dance.

As the song went on, the ballerina’s state...worsened. Her visage mirrored the hurt lyrics of the song. At first her make up ran, as if she had been crying, then holes and tears started to appear in her clothes, then bruises on her skin, until finally, half of her tutu was torn and dirty and dark spots littered her body. The pivot point of the song came, and the ballerina fell to the ground, crying, silently conveying that she didn’t want to go on.

But then the tune started to shift, slowly swelling, lifting up as one by one, hands reached out to the despairing dancer. The first gripped her shoulder in comfort, the next wiped away a stray tear, the third rubbed her back, and the fourth simply held itself out to her, a wordless urge to take the offer of help. The ballerina did, and the moment the hands lifted her up, the scene brightened, and her appearance was restored to its original beauty. The woman still had some sadness in her eyes, but the notes were hopeful as she finished her dance, ending the song on an uplifting tune.

Atem found himself simply staring at the screen as a “Thank you for watching!” text scrolled across it. The simple beauty of the video struck him. The song was about loneliness, broken hearts, the darker side of emotions, almost everything most people would feel in their lives. But, ultimately, it was about loved ones making all those things easier to bear- to accept help from those around you and becoming stronger in the process. A song about a sad truth with a hopeful ending.

Atem liked it, he liked it a lot.

He continued to watch the videos and was let down to find that there were only two more original songs by the band. The third was well done too, though Atem admitted that they didn’t capture his attention as much as the previous. It featured the band in steampunk style garb, standing on a stage as masked patrons in ballgowns danced in front of them (Atem knew he recognized said dancers as more ballerinas from the theatre), this song was more light in its beat, though he thought the lyrics alluded to the concept of liars and the masks they wore.

The final song opened with a heavy drum beat and sound effects from the turntables, the black and white camera blinking onto a shot of the drummer in some abandoned building. Water burst from the drums with every hit for even more dramatic visuals as the keyboard and guitars joined in. Then it cut to the singer leaning against a brick-walled alley, still in black and white and the voice Atem was beginning to know well followed the instruments.

He liked the lyrics already, a poetic contrast to the almost upbeat rhythm. What piqued Atem’s interest most, however, was that it was a love song, the first romantic brand of tenderness he’d heard from the band so far.

Where the light shivers offshore

Through the tides of oceans

We are shining in the rising sun

As we are floating in the blue

I am softly watching you

Though, tender as it may be, he couldn’t say it was a happy love song.

Oh boy, your eyes betray what burns inside you

Atem felt something rake at his heart, a pull, the lyrics drawing him in, chest rising with an ache.

Whatever I feel for you

You only seem to care about you

Is there any chance you could see me, too?

'Cause I love you

Is there anything I could do

Just to get some attention from you?

In the waves, I've lost every trace of you

Where are you?

At one point the camera lingered on the singer’s face, eyes pleading and hands splayed in a gesture as if to pull the viewer closer in a desperate embrace. Atem didn’t even realize he was leaning forward until he was at the edge of the seat. If he were a romantic, he might liken the vocalist to a siren, drawing him in with gravitating lyrics.

Whispers are wasted in the sand

As we were dancing in the blue

I was synchronized with you

But now the sound of love is out of tune

Atem had to actively tell himself to sit back in his seat as the chorus came again, though his eyes never left the screen, even as it flashed between all the members in various forsaken settings. It had been a long time since a song made it feel actual heartbreak, made him hang on each pleading lyric.

Not only that, but even as the song began its ending crescendo, Atem’s mind was compiling some violin chords that would slip into the song perfectly. It had been even longer since he wanted to add his own music to a song.

Atem had to give the song one more listen, this time closing his eyes and getting even more lost in the beats and words. Again he had to tell himself not to go for a third listen and moved on to the band’s cover videos. Though, he was momentarily distracted by Bastet as she hopped onto the couch, demanding cuddles and pets by shoving her tail in his face. He obliged, letting her fall asleep on his lap as he flipped through the band’s cover songs, ready to hear more from them.

Most of them featured the players standing in their venue from the first video, which made sense since recording in that simple location allowed the band to pump out videos faster. He liked the diverse array of covers, some were of pop songs, others of rock and metal, and even one rap song. The band made each cover their own, with that unique array of instruments that made Atem endeared to the band.

His favorite covers had to be the ones of Studio Killers’ “Jenny” and “Through the Fire and Flames” by DragonForce.

The metal song was the only one that had someone other than the lead guitarists singing. Atem understood why, the guitar chords were brutal- and the vocalist was playing them like an expert! Again, Atem was impressed, not just anyone could play the strings like that. Instead Yugi sang, belting his little heart out with some decent talent in singing. Atem may have had the deeper voice, but Yugi pulled off the metal style well. Atem then felt bad for not recognizing the bass player’s skill until the near end of the song, and promised to rewatch the video later to fully appreciate how well the brunette played the bass chords.

Jenny was one of the few covers that got a better video and again, Atem found himself interested and surprised, but for an entirely different reason this time. Although the song was about a lesbian crush, the couple acting out the video were two men: Yugi and the blond drummer. Atem found himself smiling when the video ended with the two men kissing in front of a sunset, Yugi having to pull down the taller boy by the collar of his shirt. The song itself was impressive as well, it was undoubtedly a rock version of the pop song, but it still had that upbeat, almost bubbly quality to the music.

That video was also the first that had the band members speaking to the viewers at the end, all five of them sitting on a couch and smiling brightly at the camera. They explained that the video was made for pride month and that they hope to someday donate all the ad revenue of the video to LGBT charities, once their videos started making money in the first place, that is. Unfortunately, (though not to his surprise) that video had the most amount of dislikes, and Atem found himself leaving a string of heart emojis in the comments just to counteract the negativity- and Atem never used heart emojis.

Before he went on to the other videos, the vlogs, Atem paused the playlist and leaned back on his couch, a string of thoughts taking him over as Bastet purred and stretched out to lay on his chest.

He liked the band.

He liked their style, their diversity and unique form, their creativity, and so far he liked the actual members too. He liked all of it a lot. If he were to ever put his original music out there, he knew it would be with a band like this.

Atem believed in fate, so, had he and Yugi met for a reason?

Atem pressed play on the first band vlog video, making his final decision as he petted the purring cat resting on his chest. So long as these more personal vlogs didn’t tarnish his view of the members, he’d speak to Yugi the next day.

#atem x reader #yami x reader #yugioh x reader #Yugioh Band AU #Atem #yami yugi #band AU #series: a thousand songs

16 notes · View notes

murasaki-murasame · 3 years

Text

Thoughts on Higurashi Gou Ep11

*Rika voice* we poppin’ the BIGGEST bottles next week when we successfully tear apart fate and reclaim our happy ending! :)

Anyway, thoughts under the cut.

I think we can all agree that there’s no way in hell this is going to go as smoothly as this episode wants us to think it will, when we still have 13 episodes left to go before this all ends, lol.

Obviously this won’t play out exactly the same as Minagoroshi, but even Minagoroshi ended with everyone getting brutally murdered because they didn’t actually manage to achieve the proper win condition, so going into this type of scenario was never really a good sign anyway.

And yeah on that note, this episode takes a hard swerve into full on Minagoroshi mode, which I figured might happen, but not in such a 1:1 way. But the fact that it’s suddenly lining up so much with that arc just makes me even more suspicious that we’re being given a false sense of hope.

Obviously the bottom line is that one way or another, this isn’t Minagoroshi, it’s Tataridamashi, and the overall situation is distinctly different. Like how Ooishi is on bad terms with Keiichi this time around, unlike in Minagoroshi, so they’re probably going to have a much harder time getting the large-scale protesting done if he decides not to help them. Which might also lead to the Sonozaki family refusing to help them either.

I also get the feeling that even if Keiichi has been successfully convinced by his dream to not murder Teppei, it still feels like both Rena and Shion are on the brink of going off the deep end, and if their attempts to handle the situation via peaceful protesting gets shut down by the cops this time, that might push them over the edge.

And even though I have mixed feelings about the ‘Satoko culprit theory’, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the big twist of this arc will be that Teppei already got murdered off-screen by Satoko before anyone else could get to him, and she’s been lying about it.

Specifically I don’t like the idea of her being some kind of villain who’s intentionally and maliciously lying about being abused to get away with murder, but I think it’d make a lot of sense if we find out that Satoko did something like accidentally overdose Teppei with his medication, or push him down a flight of stairs in an abrupt fit of her syndrome, and then afterward she might enter the stage we saw in Tatarigoroshi where she straight up hallucinates that he’s still alive. So even if he’s dead, she might not be intentionally lying about it.

I can at least imagine a scenario where the gang [or at least part of the gang] gets fed up once and for all and breaks into Teppei’s house to murder him, but they find his corpse instead. And in a Tatarigoroshi type of way, maybe Satoko will see them and assume that they’re the ones that killed him, and everything will go to shit.

Then there’s also the whole separate question of what’s going on with Takano and Tomitake, and the statue in the Saiguden, and so on. We should at least get some more clues about that stuff before the question arcs end.

This episode is also making me even more confused about how much Rika actually knows about what’s going on, and what arcs she actually remembers. She seems to directly quote Keiichi from Minagoroshi in this episode [I think], but even in the VN they stated that she completely forgot what happened in that arc, and Hanyuu had to tell her about it later.

But her being more active in this episode and thinking that they actually have a shot at winning this is kinda just making it even more strange that she hasn’t said or done anything about the Takano situation. Especially since the entire deal with Minagoroshi in the first place was that they assumed dealing with Teppei in a timeline where neither Rena or Shion go L5 was enough to get a happy ending, but then Takano came around and killed everyone. So the fact that she seems to have basically the exact same mentality she had in Minagoroshi after Keiichi convinced her she could change fate makes it feel like she’s in the exact same position of thinking that Takano isn’t important.

And then there’s the fact that in ep2 she talks about ‘knowing who kills Furude Rika’ and how they all achieved their happy ending, so really there’s just a lot of conflicting information going on here, lol. I honestly can’t tell if it’s intentional, or if it’s literally just weird writing and Rika is acting ‘out of character’ because having her immediately reveal the Takano situation would spoil new fans.

I can’t exactly deny that it might just be a weird writing issue that we shouldn’t think much about, but I think it’s more interesting to try and think about what it could mean if this apparent contradiction in Rika’s level of knowledge and her actions in Gou thus far is actually intentional and meaningful.

I haven’t entirely ironed out my theory about this yet, but my current idea is that the whole meta-structure of Gou is that it’s basically a series of fictional stories created by Rika and Featherine together after the events of Matsuribayashi, and the Rika we see in Gou is effectively just a fictional character in this story who doesn’t actually align fully with Rika from the VN.

Specifically I think that Gou’s whole story is basically written from the premise of being a what-if fanfiction of sorts, where the Rika we see in Gou is more or less based on Rika’s character as of the end of Meakashi, or maybe Tsumihoroboshi. So she starts off in Gou at the point where she’s already figured out the basic rules of the gameboard, but doesn’t actually know about Takano, and also hasn’t experienced in any timelines where they successfully deal with Teppei, and she maybe also hasn’t seen any of her friends start to remember past timelines yet.

And I think the way they might explain what we see Rika say in ep2 of Gou is that Tataridamashi is actually the first arc chronologically in Gou, and it might with a deceptively happy ending where everyone on paper gets their happy ending, and everyone even survives long enough for Rika to go to high-school, but then she winds up dead there, and it’s after that point that Rika wakes up in ep2.

I don’t even necessarily think this would be incompatible with the idea of this arc going off the deep end and going in a more tragic direction. Maybe Teppei does end up dying one way or another, but everyone else survives, not even Satoko goes L5, and Teppei’s murder gets successfully covered up and everyone just goes back to living their lives. And because of whatever’s clearly been changed behind the scenes with Takano, the GHD never happens, so everyone just assumes they managed to achieve their happy ending by killing Teppei. But then Rika ends up dying a few years later in high-school anyway, in a way that ties into whatever the actual mystery of Gou is that all the characters are missing. At the very least I think teenage Satoko is gonna end up being the one to kill teenage Rika, and I could easily see that happening in a timeline where Teppei dies and she doesn’t immediately go off the deep end, but still has psychological scarring that nobody is fully aware of or properly deals with. So maybe she ends up becoming secretly resentful of Rika and all of her friends, blaming them for what happened, and she winds up killing Rika because of it.

I think this would actually pretty neatly explain the apparent contradiction of Rika talking about ‘knowing who killed her’ and ‘getting her happy ending’, while coming across like she genuinely doesn’t understand what’s actually going on. Her wording to Hanyuu in ep2 was always intentionally vague, but instead of just being about hiding the truth from new fans, maybe it was a multi-layered twist where what she’s talking about is totally different to what VN readers assume she means. Maybe the happy ending she meant was Tataridamashi, with everyone killing Teppei, and the person who kills her is Satoko.

She did act like she knows who kills her in *every* timeline, but if Rika in this arc is effectively pre-Minagoroshi, and this ends with a version of events where Takano never kills anyone and the GHD never happens, and it’s Satoko who kills Rika, that might lead Rika to falsely assume that her death in at least most of the timelines is just a result of Satoko going L5 and killing her.

Gou’s whole deal seems to be based on the idea that Rika is acting on false information, so I think it’d make sense if we find out that the truth she talked so confidently about knowing in ep2 was totally misleading.

One thing I’ve also been considering that might support this is that we see what at least seems to be teenage Satoko in the OP, but given that they’re going to change the show’s subtitle for the second half, they might change the OP too, which would imply that we’ll see teenage Satoko before this arc ends. Which makes me think that there’ll be some kind of timeskip epilogue at the end of the arc, and it’d be pretty likely at that point for that to be the big pivotal thing that happened with Rika as a teenager.

It’d also just flow better for new fans if the timeskip stuff with them in high-school takes place after one of Gou’s arcs, rather than Matsuribayashi, since that’d be kinda confusing and make new fans feel like they’re missing out on vital information.

Either way, like most people I think most of Gou’s central mystery is going to revolve around Satoko, and I think ultimately it’s gonna boil down to the question of what it would truly take to ‘solve’ all of her personal problems, and whether or not just getting rid of Teppei would be enough. For one thing, I imagine this arc will also still leave Satoshi’s whereabouts completely up in the air, which is another bit of unresolved trauma for Satoko.

More broadly than that, though, I feel like the Gou gameboard is Featherine’s way of giving her own perspective on the original story of Higurashi, and being like ‘if I take control of the story and introduce a new element to get rid of Takano before she does anything, does that automatically mean that everyone will get their happy ending, or is it more complicated than that?’. And I think this arc might be the best representation of that, where everything seemingly goes well for everyone, and Takano seems to never do anything evil, but everything still goes to shit anyway because of the various issues that the main characters still have even if Takano is dealt with.

I’m not sure exactly what new elements Featherine could bring to the board, and how it could lead to Takano being dealt with in every arc, but it probably has to do with what Takano found in the Saiguden, and also the fact that Featherine herself literally appears in the Saiguden in the OP.

I won’t get into super explicit details about Umineko here, but I think that Umineko Ep5 gives a pretty good example of how a new author can take control of a gameboard and insert a new ‘piece’ in order to achieve some new goal.

Anyway, once we get into the second half, I think the next arc will basically just be a version of Meakashi that acts as Watadamashi’s answer arc. We’ll probably spend about three episodes on Shion and Satoshi’s whole backstory from Meakashi [mixed with some of the flashbacks from Matsuribayashi], and then the arc will end with showing Shion and Mion’s perspective on Watadamashi, which I don’t think would take very long if they just focus on showing what they were doing in some of the important scenes. And some of it still might be left a little intentionally ambiguous.

Then I think that either whether they label it as it’s own arc or just treat it as part of one big final arc, we’ll get around three episodes that show Onidamashi from Rena’s POV, which would basically serve as a substitute for Tsumihoroboshi, and we’ll finally get an explicit reveal of how Keiichi hallucinated part of their fight scene. It might play out in the exact same way, but I could also see it seeming like a 1:1 retelling of Onidamashi at first, that then diverts at the last minute by having Keiichi remember the truth of what really happened in Onidamashi after he invites Rena into his house, in time for him to talk her down from killing him. Then after that I think we’ll basically get Gou’s take on Matsuribayashi, where everyone properly tackles the real issues and mysteries going on, to achieve a proper happy ending.

I’m not really confident about a lot of this, but I think it all more or less makes sense, especially since I’ve been thinking for a while that Gou will probably end up being much more of a remake than a full on sequel.

And then in the final episode we might get a glimpse at the ‘outside world’ where Rika/Bern is going over Featherine’s manuscript version of Gou, to help explain the whole framing device.

Also, I’m still wondering if Lambda is gonna play into Gou’s story at all, going by how we’re more or less already dealing with Bern, and Featherine has shown up in the OP and will presumably come into play later on. It’d feel a bit weird to have those two show up but not Lambda.

I feel like it’d be much harder to provide context for her whole deal compared to those two, though, but if Gou is effectively a fictional story in-universe, then she doesn’t necessarily need to follow the same logic she did in the VN. She was technically already present [but unmentioned] in the VN as being the witch who provided Takano with her blessing of certainty, so maybe she’s going to do the same for Satoko here instead [and maybe her not providing Takano with her blessing within the context of Gou is part of how Featherine is ‘dealing with her’]. Maybe a post-Tataridamashi Satoko ends up making a deal with Lambda as a result of her years of unresolved trauma and whatnot. Maybe she wants to go back in time to stop herself [or her friends] from killing Teppei, and Lambda agrees to provide her with the power to turn back time.

And along those lines, I’m also wondering if that might be part of why the Saiguden statue’s hand is undamaged in Gou. We’ve seen how Satoko thinks that she got cursed when she did that, and that it caused everything in her life to go to shit, so maybe she specifically wants to go back in time to prevent that incident from happening. And like I’ve also theorized, maybe the statue is undamaged in the first two Gou arcs because they happen chronologically after this one, and start from the premise of Satoko avoiding that incident.

Anyway, this is a whole lot of wild speculation that might not turn out to be true at all, lol. For one thing, even though I think teenage Satoko will show up in this arc because she’s in the OP, I’m not sure if or even how Featherine might appear in this arc, and that might really take things in a whole new direction I can’t predict.

#murasaki rambles #higurashi #higurashi gou #this got longer than I planned but I've got lots of theories lol #I probably should have just made a separate post about them but oh well

19 notes · View notes

alwaysmarilynmonroe · 4 years

Text

When most people hear the name, “Veronica Lake” usually one of three things comes to mind – that incredible peek-a-boo hair, the Film Noir’s with Alan Ladd or possibly Kim Basigner playing a Miss Lake lookalike in L.A. Confidential (1997) – fun fact, she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for that role. Although, with Veronica’s heyday being well over half a century old, that’s sadly usually as far as it goes.

However, with the Classic Hollywood Era being hugely timeless and forever coming back into fashion, the genre is becoming less of a niché subject and more Stars are on the public radar. If you’re a long time Vintage Lover like myself, you’ll be aware that unfortunately, a lot of our favourites don’t have many books written about them, or if they do, they’ve been out of print for a number of years and can be hard to find, or very expensive. Therefore, when I came across the news that Dean Street Press were publishing a reprint of Veronica’s Autobiography, which was first released in 1969, I was absolutely ecstatic! As most who know me are probably aware of my love for Blonde Bombshells, it may not be as well known that Veronica is my other favourite, after Marilyn.

There have only been two books published on Veronica, which I must add, astounds me – and one of them is this one which was co-written by ghost writer Donald Bain, who sadly passed away in October of 2017. The other is by Jeff Lenburg and I am fortunate enough to have both. However, Lenburg’s book is fairly controversial as he takes a lot of his information from Veronica’s mother, who claims a lot of detrimental things about her daughter – yet was estranged from her for many, many years. I think it’s actually being reprinted this summer and I will read it again, but would definitely advise new fans to stick to Veronica’s own words.

The republished version of Veronica’s Autobiography features a new cover with a stunning publicity photo of her in Ramrod (1947) which was directed by her then Husband, André de Toth. The book is a shiny paperback, with a non crease format, so even when you’ve finished reading, it will be in great condition and can take pride of place on your bookshelf! At 215 pages and 27 chapters, it’s not a huge length, but definitely a substantial read and full of personal anecdotes from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Broadcaster and writer, Eddie Muller adds a new Introduction and his following words really stuck with me, their relevancy still to this day does not go unnoticed,

“I’ll point out instead that while the public has granted Sterling Hayden, a legendary boozer and hash-head, a legacy as a heroic, larger-than-life iconoclast, it has branded Lake’s life after Hollywood a steady downward spiral of abasement, worthy of only pity. Blame a cultural double standard that applauds reckless rebellion in men but shames it in women.”

As the chapters do not have titles, I’ve decided to write down a snippet of information which sums up the pivotal points and various timelines in each section.

______________________________________________________________________________

Chapter 1:

– Starts in 1938 and traces Veronica’s move to Hollywood with her mother, step-father and cousin on the 4th of July. Veronica enrolls in the Bliss Hayden School of Acting and has her first role in a movie as an extra in RKO’s Sorority House (1939).

Chapter 2:

– Veronica’s signature peek-a-boo hairstyle is unintentionally created on the set of Forty Little Mothers (1940) by Director, Busby Berkeley who stated, “I still say let it fall. It distinguishes her from the rest”.

Chapter 3:

– Director, Freddie Wilcox sets up Veronica’s first Screen Test, whilst at home her step-father suffers a collapsed lung.

Chapter 4:

– Veronica joins the iconic William Morris Agency and recounts her knowledge of the infamous Hollywood Casting Couch and how she turned away from the many advances.

Chapter 5:

– Veronica meets her first husband, John Detlie and has her named changed by Producer, Arthur Hornblow Jr., who, after a second Screen Test, decides to cast her as Sally Vaughn in her breakout movie, I Wanted Wings (1941).

Chapter 6:

– Focuses on the location filming of I Wanted Wings (1941) from August 26th 1940 in San Antonio, Texas.

Chapter 7:

– Continues filming in Hollywood for I Wanted Wings (1941) and elopes to marry her first husband, John Detlie.

Chapter 8:

– Veronica discusses the first 8 years of her childhood and her move to Florida in her teen years and the two schools she attended in Montreal and Miami.

Chapter 9:

– Recounts various appearances in Miami Beauty Pageants as a teenager.

Chapter 10:

– Returns to 1941 with the release of I Wanted Wings (1941) and focuses on the worldwide phenomenon of the famous hair. Also finishes with Director Preston Sturges hiring Veronica for the role of The Girl in Sullivan’s Travels (1941).

Chapter 11:

Veronica shares the news of her first pregnancy with her mother and how her third trimester would coincide with the physical demands of filming Sullivan’s Travels (1941).

Chapter 12:

– Covers the filming of Sullivan’s Travels (1941) from May 12th 1941 and the revelation of Veronica’s pregnancy. It’s simply incredible when watching the film all these years later to come to the realization that she was between six to eight months pregnant!

Chapter 13: – The filming of This Gun For Hire (1942) and The Glass Key (1942).

Chapter 14:

– The filming of I Married A Witch (1942), So Proudly We Hail! (1943) and The Hour Before The Dawn (1944). Veronica also discusses the deterioration of her marriage and the tragic loss of her second baby, Anthony, who died a week after being born two months prematurely.

Chapter 15:

– Veronica divorces John and retells various anecdotes of the Hollywood Lifestyle in it’s heyday in the 1940s.

Chapter 16:

– Veronica discusses the filming of Star Spangled Rhythm (1942) and also her dating history during this period. She shares some fascinating stories of various celebrity anecdotes which include such Stars as, Errol Flynn, Katharine Hepburn, Howard Hughes and Gary Cooper.

Chapter 17:

– The filming of Bring On The Girls (1945), Duffy’s Tavern (1946) and Hold That Blonde! (1945). Veronica recalls marrying her second husband, Andre de Toth and shares a moving story from her visit to The White House in January 1945.

Chapter 18:

– The filming of Miss Susie Slagles (1946), Out Of This World (1945), Ramrod (1946), The Blue Dahlia (1946), Saigon (1947) and The Sainted Sisters (1948). Veronica and Andre expand their family as she has her third baby, a boy named Michael. She also talks about her and Andre obtaining their Pilot Licenses and how the death of her step-dad deeply affected her.

Chapter 19:

– Features a highly entertaining story of Veronica flying her plane, whilst carrying her forth child, in her fifth month of pregnancy. With her on board is her secretary Marge, who up until then had never flown before.

Chapter 20:

– Veronica gives birth to her forth baby, a girl named Diana and talks about the turmoil of her relationship with her mother, who decided to sue her for, “lack of filial love and responsibility” and over $17,000.

Chapter 21:

– The filming of Slattery’s Hurricane (1949) and Stronghold (1951). Veronica discusses her frustration with Andre’s prolific spending, which results in them filing for bankruptcy and ultimately, the deterioration of their marriage.

Chapter 22:

– Veronica moves to New York in 1951 and continues her acting career through various television appearances and the stage. She enters her third marriage to husband, Joe McCarthy, which she admits was volatile from the start and they divorce after just four years, in September 1959.

Chapter 23:

– Covers the years 1959 through to 1961. Veronica discusses her time taking a job as a cocktail waitress – which contrary to popular belief, she actually quite enjoyed. She also talks about the traumatic accident which resulted in a severely broken ankle, which caused her inability to act for two years.

Chapter 24:

– Delves into her relationship with Andy Elickson, a Merchant Seaman, who she met during her time working in the Martha Washington Hotel and focuses on the period between 1961 and 1966. She also writes about a high note in her stage career; appearing in Best Foot Forward in 1963.

Chapter 25:

– Veronica discusses her move to Miami from New York in 1966.

Chapter 26:

– The filming of Footsteps In The Snow (1966) and Flesh Feast (1970) which was then known as Time Is Terror and was originally shot in 1967.

Chapter 27:

– Ends in October 1967 with Veronica discussing her reading performance of The World of Carl Sandburg, which she describes as one of the, “finest moments” of her life.

______________________________________________________________________________

Veronica’s words are full of honesty, she does not sugar-coat her flaws and her anecdotes convey a great sense of humbleness towards her career and lots of self criticism to her talent, the latter which saddens me. I’ve noticed many of the great Stars rarely seem to have any belief in themselves. If only they could see how loved and appreciated they truly are. However, her loyalty and generosity towards her close friends and even acquaintances does not go unnoticed. It’s refreshing to see her be able to share her own story, without various opinions and conspiracies that have grown over the years being included.

Overall, there’s only two downsides that springs to mind. Firstly, as the book was originally published in 1969 and finishes at the end of 1967, we’re missing the six final years of her fascinating life and tragically nothing can be done to change this. Of course no one is at fault, it’s just a shame that those last years will remain mostly a mystery to us. It would have been wonderful to read about her time in England. Lastly, in the original edition, a number of pages featured very rare photos of Veronica throughout her years, including her own comments. Sadly, only a small version of the cover photo reappears at the end of the newly republished book. I’m assuming this is down to cost and or copyright, but it would be nice to see these rare treasures reappear in the latest edition for fans that are not fortunate enough to also own an original copy.

Ultimately, Veronica always maintains her true self and comes across as not a Screen Icon, but just like one of us – albeit with some extraordinary Hollywood stories. She’s simply, and I mean this in the most complimentary way – a human being. It’s been almost a decade since I discovered Veronica, eight years in fact and I for one have not only became even more endeared to Miss Lake, but, I have also developed a warm space in my heart for my fellow 5’2″ little lady, Miss Connie/Ronni Keane.

Lastly, a huge thank you to Dean Street Press for believing in the popularity of Veronica and so wonderfully reprinting hers and Donald Bain’s special words for us all to enjoy.

For anyone who wants to see more of Veronica, I’ve amassed a fairly large archive of photos over the years which can be viewed on my blog devoted entirely to her; missveronicalakes.

Follow me at;

BLOGLOVIN

INSTAGRAM

TUMBLR

TWITTER

YOUTUBE

For inquiries or collaborations contact me at;

[email protected]

Veronica: The Autobiography of Veronica Lake; Book Review. When most people hear the name, "Veronica Lake" usually one of three things comes to mind - …

#1940s #1950s #1960s #autobiography #blonde bombshell #book review #classic hollywood #constance keane #donald bain #femme fatale #icon #legend #old hollywood #peek-a-boo blonde #veronica lake #vintage

29 notes · View notes

animatedminds · 4 years

Text

Scoob! Review

Apologies: I watched the movie two weeks ago, but forgot to write this because I was so busy doing the Dragonball FighterZ thing. But, with that out of the way...

An interesting ride. As a longtime Scooby Doo fan, it was pretty much a given that I would watch this installment by the Warner Animation Group as soon as possible, and I had a pretty good time - albeit with some issue. It’s a fun Scooby adventure, mostly focusing on Scooby and Shaggy, as they go on a new kind of adventure. It’s full of fun references, super charmingly animated action scenes, and lots of humor that actually nails the characters’ goofball antics without diminishing them as the butt of the joke - which is something the previous theatrical series was hit or miss about - which which is also hampered by the fact that it doesn’t really give itself enough time or space to really make any of those things shine.

Spoilers, but only a couple.

The first thing we ever heard about this movie years ago was that it was conceived as a dramatic retool of Scooby Doo into a out-and-out spy series, in order to set up a Hanna Barbera cinematic universe a la the MCU (which, given that they already had a shared universe they could adapt in Future Quest, hit a little hard), giving the impression that Scooby was going to be a pastiche of James Bond. It’s very obvious from the finished product that this concept was since heavily changed, but you still see it in the film. The gang is still the same-old gang - a bunch of kooky teen mystery solvers - but plotwise it’s very much “what if instead of solving a mystery, the gang just fought a supervillain?” Which, let’s be clear, is not unheard of for the franchise: see Scooby Doo and the Cyber Chase for another story that’s mostly just “fight a cool bad guy, with a tacked on mystery,” or the other Shaggy and Scooby-centric stuff like Ghoul School or Reluctant Werewolf for other movies that just plain eschew their usual setting entirely - this is a lot like those. It’s centered around the two characters’ relationship, like pretty much every theatrical Scooby release it seems, as this new challenge almost breaks their union, and the group as usual does very well in that kind of action. Faced with an army of dimwitted robots that can go from silly to terrifying multiple times in the same scene, Scoob and Shag’s typical mix of silly bumbling with surprisingly - and destructively - clever antics make for some great scenes, my favorite being a madcap chase through an amusement park that ends with them getting away on a ferris wheel that’s been knocked of its hinges.

This is very much a movie that wants to be a Hanna Barbera crossover, but is trying hard to restrain itself. As a kid Shaggy was a fan of the Impossibles (who, iirc, were once intended to get a movie as part of this universe) with models and posters that the camera never completely focuses on, you see Laff-a-Lympics on an arcade machine, references to classic Scooby writers and actors as location names (I laughed at Messick Mountain, and the Takamoto Bowl outright went over my head at first), even little things like Scooby bowling like Fred Flintstone or the blink and you’ll miss it appearance of Yankee Doodle Pigeon - and yes, Captain Caveman shows up, fully voiced by Tracy Morgan and kicking butt for a very short scene, with one of his show’s supporting characters (Dee Dee Skyes) as a prominent in this movie’s plot. There’s even musical references in addition to visible ones: at one point, the movie even orchestrates one of the classic bits of Scooby Doo background music. I was hoping for a reference to the classic Scooby Doo / Blue Falcon theme, but alas that was one nod we didn’t get.

However, this approach does work especially well with Blue Falcon - who was originally built up through Scooby Doo, sharing a timeslot, advertisement and technically a theme song, and in time has more or less become to Scooby Doo what Donkey Kong is to Mario: technically a supporting character, but able to do his own stuff every once in a while. There have been several Blue Falcon Scooby Doo crossovers in the last few years (though in terms of sheer number of references this movie’s got nothing on Mask of the Blue Falcon), and they’ve all been very fun as each show, movie or comic reinterpreted the character to fit their specific world - and this movie’s novice Blue Falcon who is kind of an egoistical loser, but turns out to have a lot to learn even from Scooby and Shaggy’s brand of cowardly bravery, grows on you even if he has kind of a rough initial landing.

Unfortunately, this is also a movie that very much wants that rigid hour and a half timeslot, and has absolutely no interest in a going a second longer - and that’s where it’s problems come in. I’ve said before that animated films have become more and more written with expediency in mind: plot points are rushed, denouements are minimized, side or even main characters might not get much utilization, and sometimes things come of as just kind of happening to the protagonists without much set-up. Even the best or the best animation companies fall into these traps at times, and this movie is a good example of what it looks like if you fall into that too much. Take the Scooby gang - Velma, Daphne, and Fred. They’re not really fleshed out that much in this movie, even if they were tweaked a bit with their new VAs - but that’s not necessarily a problem in itself, given the heavy focus on Scooby and Shaggy. What’s more noticeable is where this intersects the plot: for example - one of the better examples of what I’m talking about - the scene that kicks off the whole story. Fred, Velma and Daphne want to expand Mystery Inc, and call Simon Cowell to invest in them. Cowell decides Scooby and Shaggy are incompetent because reasons, and the two storm off. This is later framed as the gang abandoning the duo, that’s not really what happens. Once Cowell hits the scene, beyond one or two lines the rest of the gang essentially ceases to exist, and barely reacts to anything: there’s no moments with them where they seem to buy into what Cowell is saying, there’s nothing beforehand that implies that they’re dissatisfied with Scooby and Shaggy, there’s isn’t even really a status quo for what their dynamic is like. We cut straight from them meeting as kids to them having a supposed fight as adults - this is something that wouldn’t have taken a lot of time, but would have strengthened pretty much everything, from Scooby and Shaggy’s reaction to the trio’s guilt later, but is skipped over entirely. The others get very little beyond being summed up as “the muscle” (Fred), “the face” (Daphne) and “the brains” (Velma), and it feels less like expediency and more like we missed a scene somewhere.

Granted, this particular thing also runs a unique problem that the Scooby gang face. As characters who just turned fifty and who are well entrenched in pop culture, adaptations often assume you know who they already - and this movie definitely assumes you can do its work for it and establish a baseline for the Scooby gang on your own... and on that front, I suppose it does better than the previous film series, which based a lot of its humor on fandom in-jokes they poorly assumed everyone agreed with. But... there’s a degree to which every film needs to establish a baseline for that it itself to trying to do, and I think skipping this hurt the film more than it should have. And it’s hardly the only point where the need for speed cuts out the flow of the film. Scooby and Shaggy get abducted by Blue Falcon, whose assistant then promptly exposits on everything the audience doesn’t know yet about the plot so that they can just skip straight to more action - basically setting up a question and then answering it immediately without set-up. This essentially robs Dick Dastardy - definitely the best thing about the movie - of a strong introduction, in favor of, again, expediency, and it’s kind of baffling given that there’s later scenes where the rest follows the mystery and so repeats that exposition anyway. I mentioned that Blue Falcon himself got a rough initial landing, and that’s because his intro scene is just a lot of new element popping in with exposition, interspersed with pop culture references - and that exposition just stops the whole thing cold for a while. We hit again the “expects you to know” angle with Falcon himself, who is a legacy character of the original Falcon - who we never see, which raises the question of why they bothered to make him a legacy and not just a novice hero in the first place. I’ve always been a strong believer that you can introduce elements without needless explanation unless who introduce concepts that suggest explanation: Scoob and Shag being a fan of the original Blue Falcon, Dynomutt constantly reminiscing about him, and there being a full Falcon organization around which the movie pivots, along with lots of reference, suggest the need for at least a little more than we got - even if it’s just a thirty clip of the way Blue Falcon worked before Brian (the new Falcon) came along - but the movie just wants to rush past it. The entire quest on which the plot is centered it halfway through when we first encounter it, and doesn’t get any explanation at all until halfway through the movie. And then there’s little things like Captain Caveman cameo, which just leave you wanting more.

This happens again and again, with plot points, characters, all sorts - things introduced halfway and then brushed past as though they’re not. People don’t expect much from animated movies, and stuff like this is one of the reasons why - this movie feels sometimes like it was written for tv, which is ironic given how it ended up being released. But the movies that were themselves DTV or released to TV, like Shaggy’s Showdown or Legend of the Phantasaur, the aforementioned Mask of the Blue Falcon or - my perosnal favorite - Moon Monster Madness, even tend to not have these problems themselves, because they’re more measured and precise about what they want to introduce and why. It’s great to be childish, as long you do childish well.

But now that the criticism portion of the review is done, I will say that this doesn’t hamper the movie’s desire to be fun and easy to follow, it just makes it not as much so as it clearly could have been. If you wanted more Falcon, or more Scooby and Shaggy, more Mystery Inc shenangians, more Dastardly, more adventure, more of a certain gag or humor, more of really any of the movie’s best points, you weren’t getting them that much because the movie was trying to do all of them all at once. But one the movie starts getting traction, about halfway through, that starts to fade as everything coalesces. All the characters meet, we finally know what the heck is going on, and it’s just a straight shot to the end with lots of what this movie does best: cool visuals, silly characters doing silly things, and brave characters doing brave things. Much as I wish there was more to the Captain Caveman segment, it’s one of the most visually hilarious parts of the movie, with the stark contrast of these hi-tech, modern character colliding with these explicitly more cartoony prehistoric designs and antics, and its just wonderful. Everything about Dick Dastardly’s story is great - though I was wishing for a Penelope Pitstop reference - and he even gets a heartwarming conclusion to the whole thing.

I don’t know where the series is going after this - whether they do indeed intend to make more Hanna Barbera movies in this vein. The credits teased Johnny Quest, Frankenstein Jr, Grape Ape (who according to concept art was supposed to be in this one), Atom Ant, and even a bit of Wacky Races, and it’s clear they have the love for classic Hanna Barbera to make it happen. I just hope that if they do, they go with a series who can expand this in a more concise way, with a little better character introduction. I’ve still got my fingers crossed for Future Quest.

The film is still very recommended by me. I loved it, I watched it twice, and it a heck of a lot of fun even with its hang-ups. If you haven’t seen it, there are worse ways for a parent, a kid, or just a big ol’ child at heart to spend an afternoon.

#scooby doo #scoob #movie review #animation review #shaggy #daphne blake #velma dinkley #fred jones #hanna barbera #warner animation group #blue falcon #dynomutt #dick dastardly #animated film #review #animated minds

15 notes · View notes

grapefruitsketches · 4 years

Text

Chapter 8, Memory

Final part of my Songxiao post-canon fix-it fic series, started under the Untamed Spring Fest 2020 event:

Please see the reblogged version of this under the my-writing and songxiao-fix-it-series tags on my blog - will be a pinned post for the next little while - for links to previous chapters/the Ao3 version!

4,134 Words

“Remember your assignment, Xiao-daozhang!” Wen Qionglin said good-naturedly, although Song Lan knew that undertone well, the one that softly implied an or else if the kindly reminder wasn’t heeded.

And with a soft nod from Xingchen, and the requisite farewell bows, Wen Qionglin had gone.

The farm was quiet.

For the first time since Xingchen had awoken in Cloud Recesses, the two were truly alone.

It had been Wei Wuxian’s idea.

“You know,” he had said, chewing thoughtfully on a particularly tough piece of pork, “Lan Zhan tells me that your guqin playing has gotten pretty good, Song-daozhang. Right, Lan Zhan?”

Hanguang-Jun, apparently long resigned to his husband’s insistence on starting conversations not only during meal times, but mid-bite, nodded.

“I wonder if… now that you don’t usually even need an interpreter… if you two might want some… alone time?”

To Song Lan’s relief, Xingchen (having completely missed the combination of Wei Wuxian’s suggestive eyebrow raise and Hanguang-Jun’s silent mouthing of Wei Ying!, and the sudden flush Song Lan could feel rushing to his face) was able to, quite innocently, consider the idea, “Hmm… I mean, if you two don’t mind us being here alone, then it might be nice… I mean… it might be good to test how well this works, just the two of us… if we are to… to travel alone again.” Xingchen’s voice faded out, and Song Lan felt his heart quicken. They had not yet discussed what might follow their time at the farm. For months, it had seemed enough to imagine that where they were might as well have been where they always were, where they would forever be, even though both knew there had been a beginning and so there would be an end.

But now… Xingchen’s mental state had seemed to be improving steadily as of late. There were still nightmares, still outbursts. But they were more controlled. Xingchen seemed to be getting more comfortable with the idea that these emotions would rise from time to time, and, at least out loud, did not chastise himself so much for them.

“What do you think, Zichen?” and with this offer of a future, of a something that came next, of a return to something that looked like the normal of his life twenty years ago, of course, Song Lan caught the other’s hand and squeezed a quick, enthusiastic, Yes.

And so, after seeking Wen Qionglin’s approval of the suggestion, the date was set for the cessation of Wen Qionglin, Wei Wuxian, and Hanguang-Jun’s rotating visits. Letters were sent to the Juniors, who were liable to pop by at a moment’s notice, that the farm would be off limits until and unless Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen decided otherwise.

It would be just the peace and quiet that the two had wanted, had deserved, for so long. Just the right way to ease back into the peace and quiet on the road that so clearly characterized Song Lan’s favourite memories - the two of them alone, side by side.

Or so Song Lan had thought.

Barely five weeks in, he began to feel restless. He and Xingchen went about the daily chores, took boat rides, had picnics, cooked, cleaned, took walks, explored. But the farm was starting to feel exceptionally small without the ever-rotating collection of friends (did Song Lan dare acknowledge them as family?) to distract from the sameness of the scenery, the sameness of the limited range of activities. Fuxue seemed to whine at his back, Shuanghua humming comfortingly, but Song Lan felt that it too wondered, why, now that they were not held here by obligations to friends and family, they were not pursuing far more important matters.

But it was also Shuanghua that brought echoing words of Wen Qionglin back to Song Lan, words that reminded him that there was still work to be done. Here. Now. Work that needed this quiet alone time to work itself out.

Why does Song-daozhang still carry Shuanghua for you?

Remember your assignment!

Song Lan wondered what that assignment might be, but never dared intervene or ask about Xingchen’s solo sessions with Wen Qionglin. It had hurt at first, to be suddenly excluded from the meetings, but he had soon recalled what his early sessions had been like, and flinched at the thought of Xingchen being there. He had been grateful even then that he had been using sign language at the time. He didn’t even have to worry about Xingchen overhearing anything in a moment of lucidity from the spirit pouch that had never left his side.

If Wen Qionglin had taken the time to remind Xingchen of the assignment as he left, it must have been important. He was sure Xingchen had not forgotten, but knowing Wen Qionglin, it wouldn’t be anything easy.

It was clear Xingchen was working hard on his recovery. Song Lan did not think Xingchen realized how light a sleeper he was now, but every morning Song Lan watched, as Xingchen reached for the blade. He saw that, every morning, he flinched away. A full arm’s length still between his fingers and Shuanghua. He watched how Xingchen steadied himself before standing back up, seeming to conclude that today, again, was not the day. Xingchen would sigh, unconsciously letting his fingers brush the raised scar, the only spot on Xingchen that Song Lan tried to avoid looking at, before lying back in bed.

Xingchen would then let a hand drift over to Song Lan - maybe to his hair, his waist, his arm - before apparently falling asleep so the two of them would seem to wake up together just a little later (Song Lan always making a show of stretching not long after this morning ritual, Xingchen mirroring with a sleepy yawn, both doing their best so that the other didn’t realize they had been awake for quite some time by then).

But Shuanghua was not the assignment. At least, Song Lan didn’t think so. Instead, the hints came at the quietest of moments. While the soup bubbled. While they dozed in the sun on a nearby hill. When Song Lan stopped rowing for a while and let the stream carry them lazily downriver. Xingchen would sit up, maybe open his mouth, maybe raise an arm to meet Song Lan’s. Sometimes, he would even seem to start to say the words, “Zichen, I…” or “I need to…” before pivoting suddenly to something wildly different than his tone had originally implied, “…am hungry. Let’s go make dinner” or “…tell you this terrible joke Wei-gongzi told me.”

Song Lan’s heart ached for him. He was clearly trying, so hard. Xingchen was tired. His face drawn, strength returning but fortitude slipping. And there was nothing Song Lan could do except to play, over and over again, the chords, I’m listening.

It had been three months that they had spent alone at the farm. Xingchen knew he was running out of excuses. And while the excuses ran out, and his ability to resist weakened, the pressure within him mounted. There were nights where he couldn’t sleep, torn between his desire to just let go, and his fear of turning out to be too much for Zichen after all. He knew Zichen wouldn’t leave, but in a way, that made it worse.

But the peaceful days went on. And Zichen seemed only to get sadder. The notes of the guqin not intrusive, but still imploring.

I need to tell him. But I can’t. He had said.

You want to tell him. And you can. Wen Qionglin had corrected.

But what if he does not want to know? Xingchen had asked.

What would you want him to hide from you?

And even though it had taken months, and the pressure building to near unbearable levels, for Xingchen to realize, he finally understood that Wen Qionglin was, as always, right.

“Zichen… I need to… no, I want to… talk to you about, about Yi City.”

The words had come out of him in a rush. Xingchen honestly couldn’t believe he had finally said it. But there the words hung, heavy. Finally escaped from his lungs, his heart, unretractable.

A long, unbearable silence followed, and Xingchen heard the sound of urgent shuffling, the guqin being dragged closer to Zichen. The instrument had apparently been left with wheelbarrow as they dug up fresh potatoes. Xingchen heard a faint clapping sound, Zichen ever unwilling to let a speck of dirt touch the smooth surface of the instrument.

And the chords which finally came, ones so familiar, so commonplace, brought tears to Xingchen’s eyes when he heard them answer. I’m listening. But this time, they were followed by something more. No matter what.

And so Xingchen began.

Song Lan had known, or at least suspected, most of this.

He remembered vividly the way Xingchen had laughed when Xue Yang had teased him, had seen the quiet little home those three had shared. He also had heard directly from the now, thankfully, dead man what brutal manipulations had been imposed on Xingchen. And Song Lan knew only too well, though most of his other memories as Xue Yang’s puppet were dull and distant, what revelation had been Xingchen’s breaking point, remembered this moment clearly. Song Lan had internally screamed out, realizing only then that there would never be a way for him to break out of the control the needles in his neck imposed. Because if Xingchen’s grief torn face, his gut-wrenching scream wouldn’t let him do anything more than turn his head just ever so slightly towards his beloved, nothing would.

But he listened. Of course he listened. And Xingchen clearly needed to speak. He tensed, but was not surprised at the guilt Xingchen carried, at the I should’ve knowns, all the I’m sorrys, every if only I hads. Each one a punch to Song Lan’s gut, hearing the weight Xingchen had been carrying, but bearable in that Xingchen was clearly letting off some of the pressure that Song Lan had watched Xingchen undeservingly endure since he had awoken. Had felt this man turn on himself even as far back as when he first felt the squirms of a reassembling soul in the pouch he had carried.

A hand on his thigh, “Zichen.”

Song Lan looked up, startled out of the trance Xingchen’s words had put him under. He realized Xingchen had been silent for a few moments, waiting anxiously for Song Lan’s response.

Song Lan reached for the hand, carefully slotting his fingers between Xingchen’s and holding tight. Xingchen smiled, a smile which finally seemed to light up his face the way it should. And something, a pressure Song Lan hadn’t noticed until now, burst inside him as well. Tears flowed freely from his - from Xingchen’s - eyes.

Song Lan thought of the young girl Xingchen had described, that he himself had met so briefly. He thought of Xingchen’s soft smiles at the younger visiting cultivators, and Song Lan wondered, as Xingchen must have, how A-Qing would have gotten along with them if she had truly had the chance.

He thought of loneliness and grief, how they could each inspire such compassion, such horror, or both. He thought of life, death, renewal. Baoshan Sanren, Yi City, Baixue Temple.

He thought of all the ridiculous thoughts that had crossed his mind over the long twenty years they had spent apart. That Xingchen must hate him. That Xingchen must blame him. That what had happened to Xingchen was his fault. He had fought these thoughts for years. Wen Qionglin supporting him, then Hanguang-Jun, now Xingchen. But until now, until hearing the same thoughts mirrored in Xingchen’s voice: that Xingchen, Xingchen thought he could ever be hated? That Song Lan could ever truly think any of this was Xingchen’s fault? Only now did Song Lan truly understand how ridiculous he must have sounded, similarly taking on all the blame.

Wen Qionglin had had regrets. Hanguang-Jun had had regrets. Each of them had demonstrated to Song Lan that your darkest moments, your biggest mistakes, your worst actions, did not have to define you. They had shown him that forgiving yourself could sometimes be a selfless act. If absolving himself for actions he’d taken under another’s control, if acknowledging his own growth past lashing out at Baixue Temple, could present the possibility to Xingchen that he could forgive himself? If Song Lan telling himself that no matter what he had done - willingly at Baixue Temple, unwillingly as a puppet - he was still worthy of living a life with the ones he cared for and who cared for him, if that made it any more likely that Xingchen understood that he deserved at least the same? Then suddenly any further moral quandry dissipated.

But he had to say something. He reached for his guqin, wondering just how to explain this to his partner. Instead, what came out was a question that had haunted him since the moment Shuanghua had pierced his chest.

I have sometimes thought… what if I hadn’t found you? Would you be happier? If you had never known… who he was?

He braced himself for these notes to fall heavily on their mood, for Xingchen to freeze, withdraw, think that Song Lan wasn’t as easy a confidante as he’d thought.

“No.” That was all Xingchen said. A simple word, and a gentle laugh.

So Song Lan was instead the one who froze, surprised. After a few moments, Xingchen heard the volumes Song Lan’s stillness spoke.

Xingchen sighed, “The truth is important. I still missed you all those years apart, even if there were others, trustworthy or no, with whom I could temporarily relieve that feeling once in a while.” Xingchen leaned a cheek on his hand, tapping it thoughtfully, “I don’t even know for sure if I didn’t suspect even then that something was wrong with the man who turned out to be… to be Xue Yang…” Xingchen raced through the end of the sentence, the name hard to say even now, “I just didn’t realize… no, never mind.”

Please. Simple, not forceful. Enough.

Xingchen smiled weakly, “I know now this wouldn’t excuse anything, and it’s still a pretty silly conclusion to come to but… I suppose I just didn’t realize, didn’t even consider, that if this person wasn’t to be trusted, that if he was by my side, that he could still hurt people that weren’t ah… you know.”

That he could hurt people who weren’t you. Song Lan understood, and didn’t need to hear Xingchen say so, or guess the end of the sentence through the guqin to confirm. An easy temptation, to think that saving others could be as simple as sacrificing oneself. It was one they had each fallen into at some point, but one that, hopefully, they were finally learning to leave behind.

Xingchen rested a hand on Song Lan’s shoulder, inviting, warm. And Song Lan responded in kind, pulling Xingchen close. There would be no more gardening today.

The sun went down over fields that had only recently seemed so confining. The fields now seemed almost endless, comforting in their depth. The two cultivators lay side by side, enjoying the shade as they leaned against the trunk of an ancient tree. The warm pinks and oranges painted across the sky reminded Song Lan of the campfires the two of them had fallen asleep next to on so many nights, back when they were still dancing around the now obvious fact that they wanted to remain at each other’s sides for as long as they were able.

Song Lan absent-mindedly strummed the guqin, describing for Xingchen the swirls of fading light, the way the last bursts of sunbeams painted the leaves of the peach grove below them. He had been thinking of new ways to adapt some of his poetry into this auditory language, and realized with a smile he might just be getting it. He looked down at Xingchen, who was resting his head on Song Lan’s shoulder, breathing slowly, evenly. Xingchen shifted, the delicate features settling into a faint smile. Song Lan’s smile reflected Xingchen’s without a thought. There was no contest between the sunset and Xingchen’s peaceful expression. Song Lan knew from experience that not even thousands of sunsets could match the latter.

“Song Zichen,” Xingchen said, the use of his full name taking Song Lan aback for a moment, but his tone was still drowsy, if sombre, “I need you to know that I will never put you through anything like that ever again. I cannot change the past but I cannot, will not cause any more suffering. Not on anyone, but not on you especially.”

Song Lan’s answer came through powerfully, louder chords than those he had been playing until now coming through naturally, an effortless translation of his own feelings on the matter, And I need you to know that if you do, I will be there to help you fix it. Because I cannot allow suffering for you any more than you can for me.

“Zichen, Zichen. Always one upping me with your words,” Xingchen laughed, losing the serious tone he had held moments before, “Just you wait until I can spar again. Then we will truly have some justice.” Xingchen yawned and snuggled closer into Zichen’s side. Song Lan returned to his softer, melodic descriptions of the landscape. Xingchen fell quickly into a gentle sleep, one that Song Lan hoped to be a well-deserved deep and peaceful one.

Song Lan blinked his eyes open, the pale light confusing until he realized - it was the sunrise. Xingchen’s arms were wrapped around him, the other man sleeping later than Song Lan for the first time in a long while. Song Lan had no intention of moving, of risking rousing him, and in the moment, failed to see the problem with staying here forever.

Something tugged at his mind, though, a feeling that he was missing something important, something obvious. Not quite as urgent as the feelings he often had on the battlefield, those ones which had saved his, and sometimes Xingchen’s, life on more than one occasion, but something important nonetheless.

He blinked lazily, doing a quick sweep of the surroundings.

The garden tools still rested in the wheelbarrow, the remains of their late lunch turned dinner packed neatly in the basket nearby. The fields were empty. Fuxue rested on his back.

That was it. Fuxue.

Or rather, Fuxue’s near constant companion.

Having sat by the tree with the initial intention that it would only be a quick break, Song Lan had not bothered to remove the swords from his back. And now Song Lan realized that at some point in the night, as Xingchen’s arms had snaked around Song Lan’s waist, as Xingchen had pulled him closer, a hand must have landed inadvertently on a certain blade.

And though the sword was still sheathed, though the hand was nowhere near the handle on which it belonged, Song Lan thought he heard, clear as the early morning birds taking stock of their nesting grounds, Shuanghua sing.

And so the days passed, boredom slipped away as they found each other again, easily, even if slowly, now that the final walls had fallen between them. The nightmares became rarer, and the past more historical fact than vengeful ghost.

They were sitting on the edge of the bed, side by side, contemplating the same spot near the corner of the room.

“I think I will this time,” Xingchen said, smiling, sure, not needing Song Lan’s answer, just stating this as the truth.

And in that moment, Song Lan believed him, of course he did. Before Xingchen even stood up, Song Lan had seen him cross the room, grab Shuanghua by the hilt, wield it, stand ready to protect as many as he could, to vanquish evil where he must. Song Lan knew he would be there by his side. He knew that at the end of a journey, they would come back, to a place like this, but a place far less quiet, one full of people who needed and loved them and who one day the world would need and love.

The nightmares of the past may be rarer, but the dreams for the future were becoming far more haunting.

The Xingchen of the present finally did lift Shuanghua from the stand, and, even if somewhat more hesitantly than Song Lan’s mind had presented it, Xingchen once again stood, truly united with his sword. Watching Xingchen, but mind still racing weeks, years, decades ahead, Song Lan knew the first chords he played should have been congratulatory, celebratory, awestruck. But instead, the chords his fingers danced over without a thought were instead, We should start talking about our sect again.

And if the mere thought of Xingchen reconnecting with Shuanghua, had been dazzling, then the sight of Xingchen turning, laughing, sword in hand and exuberant agreement lighting up his whole face? The sight almost made Song Lan need to shield his eyes from the brightness. Almost. But then, how could he forgive himself if he missed even a moment?

There were more talks, more walks, more cooking, boat rides, gardening. A tension had been relieved, worries still lurking but temporarily eased, more nuisance than threat. And soon, the farm came to feel too small again, like a cozy sickroom occupied just a bit too long after the fever had passed.

They spoke of the sect they would build.

“Zichen, I was thinking… if you think it would be right, we could set our sect up where…”

At Baixue Temple, came the quick set of chords. And Xingchen had grinned, nodding. They could not bring back or replace what was lost, but they could certainly keep their memories close by as they rebuilt their lives and reclaimed the dreams they had long believed forever out of reach.

When Wen Ning appeared, months after he’d left, arms laden with carefully chosen gifts and treats from the various villages where his patients lived, he came upon a sight that brought an immediate smile to his face, a glow of pride to his chest.

The clashing of swords, sweeping robes, elegant but powerful leaps through the air. The Distant Moon and Gentle Breeze. The Distant Snow and Cold Frost. Swirling, dancing together in playful combat, like snow flurries on a winter’s day. Shuanghua in one’s hand, Fuxue in the other. And if there was still a hesitation in one’s step, unwilling to take an opening he had clearly noticed, or if the other sometimes struck a bit more gently than the teasing, taunting voice challenged him to, to Wen Ning, this was still success.

And weeks later, after the proper festivities were had, after Xiao Xingchen asked to see Jin Ling’s dog and Wei Wuxian accused him of high treason, after Ouyang Zizhen spent half a day in silence, before breaking and realizing if he was going to be remembered in stories or song, it would not be as a Song Lan or Hanguang-Jun silent type. After Sizhui taught Song Lan the word for “adorable” and Xiao Xingchen’s cheeks remained flushed the rest of the evening once Hanguang-Jun translated the chord for him, if after all that Song Lan held Xingchen’s hand, and Xingchen understood that that meant it was time. If Xingchen asked if Song Lan was sure, and if Song Lan made out the chords for Yes. If Xingchen said, “To Baixue Temple?” and Song Lan replied, “They would want us to rebuild.”

If after all that, as Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji watched the two cultivators set off, they felt a little stirring of nostalgia for the moment they had first detected whispers that they might have what they had now? If those two cultivators left side by side, one in white, one in black, a sword draped over each one’s back, and felt a feeling of rightness descend over them in a way it hadn’t for decades? Well, that wouldn’t mean that everything was back to how it was, or even that the world was as those two deserved it to be. But perhaps it meant it didn’t matter. That for them, it was enough to have each other, their dream, and an open road ahead of them. That the road behind, arduous as it had been, could be left as something only ever behind them. Always there, maybe having left a stain of dirt on robes or shoes so that it could not be readily forgotten, but not nearly as present as the road under their feet now.

And certainly never more important than the one they each had forever by their side.

[END]

Thank you so much if you've kept up with/read this whole thing! This is the longest fic I've ever posted, and just thinking of anyone having read so many words I wrote is both terrifying but so nice <3

Thank you again so much for reading, and I hope you enjoyed this journey!!

#songxiao #the untamed #cql #xiao xingchen #song lan #songxiao fix it series #mdzs #my writing

6 notes · View notes

cxhnow · 4 years

Photo

Growing Up With Chloe x Halle

The Bailey sisters on why they didn’t switch up overnight — the world just caught up to their speed.

On their 2018 debut album The Kids Are Alright and on Freeform’s Grown-ish, a 19- and 17-year-old Chloe and Halle Bailey sang “Watch out world, I’m grown now.” So you’ll have to forgive them for acting out a little on their new sophomore record — they warned us. While Ungodly Hour might sound like a pivot to the grown ‘n’ sexy side of R&B similar to plenty of their peers, trading TKAA’s colorful doodles for chrome angel wings and skin-tight latex, they’re really just living the same truths they preached up and down TKAA: Own your insecurities, work hard, don’t get distracted by drama. “When we created this album, we said, Okay, we want to show all the different sides and layers of us,” Chloe tells me, sitting side by side with her sister, over Zoom from their family home in Los Angeles. “We don’t just want to show this one side. A lot of people still think we’re teenagers.”

Now 22 and 20, the former child stars are ready to explore the topics they’ve been singing about since they were kids making covers on YouTube, the ones that landed them a record deal with music royalty before they were old enough to vote. The new album calls out former flings, seethes with jealousy, and apologizes when necessary. Lyrics like “It’s four o’clock / you sendin’ me too many pictures of your …” and “No drama, no baby mamas” immediately started dating rumors online, roping in their Grown-ish co-star Diggy Simmons. While most fans are having fun with it, those a little, um, outside of the Baileys’ age demographic are still struggling (try to get through this Breakfast Club questioning without cringing). In case you missed it: They no longer have to change Beyoncé lyrics from “You showed your ass” to “You showed your butt” — on “Do It,” they proudly sing “I’m a bad girl, shake a li’l ass.” Alongside all the perks of growing up, the album makes sure to normalize the struggles, too.

When the coronavirus pandemic sent Halle home to L.A. from The Little Mermaid rehearsals in London, their house (complete with mom, dad, and younger brother, Branson) became their album rollout headquarters. One of the few albums to not be pushed due to the coronavirus, Ungodly Hour was originally planned for June 5, but the deaths of George Floyd in Minnesota, Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, and far too many others across the country, created a moment that Chloe and Halle felt they couldn’t ignore. They pushed the album one week, to June 12, and continued to use their platform to share petitions, funds, and awareness, while also personally signing petitions and making donations. As both an escape and work, they’ve been focusing their energy on the album, diving into elaborate DIY remote performances and mashing up songs, but making sure to leave Sundays for rest. After a busy weekend tearing up the BET Awards and Global Citizen virtual stages, channeling Aaliyah in one performance and going full rock and roll in the other, they’ll be back on Instagram Live this Thursday for Ungodly Hour Tea Time, where they often chill out in Snuggies, try to remember what day of quarantine it is, and update their supporters on their lives.

How has it been, emotionally, to have to sing and dance while all of this turmoil is happening? Halle Bailey: Emotionally, what’s keeping us afloat is music and feeling better through the art. I think that’s why we love music so much because even though we create it and we sing it, we use it as our healer, too. Everything going on really makes you reflect. But we’re young black women, this hasn’t been anything new to us. Our community has known about this for a very long time, and it’s constantly upsetting. But what I’m appreciating about technology and social media is that our voices can’t be silenced anymore. And the things that they used to try to hide, they can’t any longer. We’re seeing these injustices happen over video, and [so is] the rest of the world who’s usually ignorant to the racism that’s been underlying in this community. They’re seeing it and they’re upset as well. So it’s good because change can only happen when we’re all working towards a common goal. I can’t wait to see what comes out of this.

I feel like every time we have one of these moments where everyone is just mourning so publicly in such a communal way, there’s also music that uplifts us. Talk me through deciding to postpone the album.

HB: During the height of the George Floyd protests, emotionally, we just were not right to release a project. Our little brother and our father — when we see a video of George Floyd getting killed in the street, we think that could be them tomorrow. And we wanted to shine the light on what needs to be seen. That George Floyd video, Breonna Taylor, all of the other brothers and sisters that we have lost to police brutality — that is what needed to be at the forefront and what still needs to be at the forefront.

And when The Kids Are Alright came out that was right around March for Our Lives, the Women’s March was happening. How does this moment compare for you?

Chloe Bailey: Wow, now that I’m thinking about it, this time, it feels a bit more like change is really going to happen. Around The Kids Are Alright, we went to the March for Our Lives and we were around that incredible energy; it was really positive and uplifting because we were all banding together. But for some reason, this time right now … I feel like we have the entire world’s attention. Actual change is going to come out of what’s been happening. So, it feels the same but different, right?

HB: Yeah, I definitely think this one feels more massive. Feels like, Okay, maybe we’re getting somewhere this time. Maybe it won’t just go away a week after all of this is over, you know?

In the early stages of Ungodly Hour, did you go in wanting it to be something that showcased your maturity? Or did that come out as you were going with it?

HB: We absolutely knew that we wanted it to showcase our growth, the evolution of us into young women. Because I feel like The Kids Are Alright was very much us finding ourselves and that project took three years to make. So with that length, you can kind of go through and see like, Oh, wow, they must have been really shifting through and figuring out what’s wrong and what’s right. So, for this project, it was like, Yes, we are here. We are now grown women. I’m 20. My sister’s about to be 22 this week.

CB: Hey!

HB: So we took that and we were just like, Let’s show who we’ve become. And let’s show the side of us that people don’t see whether it’s the naughtier side of us or the insecure side of us, or the part that picks every single thing apart about ourselves out. We wanted to show all the layers of us as young women, once you kind of know who you are, but also you’re still learning.

You’ll never be a finished product.

CB: Never, constantly evolving. And that’s the goal.

There have always been glimpses at your boss-bitch attitudes, hints of it in your music and on Grown-ish. Do you ever get the sense that you’re waiting for the industry and fans to sort of open their eyes and catch up to where you’re at?

CB: I’m not gonna lie, there are some moments. And I remember when we were even creating this album we were putting a certain pressure on ourselves. Because we were thinking, What do we want the world to hear from us? What do we think the world wants us to sound like? What would make people become more receptive to us? I remember we were creating for, like, one to two months in that mind-set, and we were creating some of the worst music we ever have.

HB: Yeah, it was. It was trash.

CB: It was because we weren’t creating from our hearts. We weren’t being honest with ourselves, and as a musician, you gotta be vulnerable and share that true part of yourself or the music isn’t going to be very good. Once we threw that out the window and said, You know what, let’s create a good body of art, the album continued to write itself. But that main lesson for us was never change yourself; the world will catch up to you when it’s ready. I feel like they’re kinda ready now for this project. It’s older and more mature than The Kids Are Alright because we’re older and more mature than who we were when we created that.

In making a more vulnerable album, were you nervous about expanding your image in that way? Was there anything that you debated not including or things that didn’t make the cut?

HB: Wow, so, I will say that our parents kind of had a hard time … well, not a hard time, but just like opening their eyes to the fact that, Okay, these are the topics that we’ve decided to talk about. This is what’s happening. It was really fun for us to watch them. I completely understand how they feel because, you know, we’ve been just little babies to them and now we’re growing and they’re hearing [about] certain things that we’ve been through, or that we just wrote in the music. They have been like, “Oh, okay, so that’s that.”

Fans tweet collabs at you all the time, but what’s your actual approach to choosing who you work with? (Ungodly Hour features just two major collaborations: Swae Lee on “Catch Up” and the title track with Disclosure.)

CB: Definitely we have to be fans of them, number one. Even though we make music, we are such big music fans and music lovers. Two, we have to feel like the person can sonically fit the song. We don’t want to throw just anyone on a song just because they have a big name, which is really cool too. It’s really great to get big features. But it’s so funny because we have a big wish list of who we hear on which songs and some people bite, some people don’t. It’s always fun to see what the end result will be. And I know we’ll start putting out remixes and stuff soon, which will be fun.

HB: It’s very interesting because it’s hard during the creative process. You kind of have to open yourself up to somebody you do not know when you make music; it’s a part of your heart that you’re sharing. So, it’s a very intimate thing to do with a stranger. Which is why with my sister it’s really easy. But when it comes to us working with new people, we gravitate towards the ones who have very open spirits and souls, nice people.

Chloe, would you ever produce for other artists?

CB: Absolutely, 1,000 percent. That would be so much fun. I would be getting out of my comfort zone, because the only person who I can comfortably produce in front of is my sister and blast it loud over the speakers. Whenever we have other sessions with other producers and we’re collaborating, I’ll put my headphones in, I won’t blast it on the aux with theirs. I have my little computer on my lap because I like using weird sounds and samples and chopping them up in a weird way. Sometimes it’s trial and error, so I don’t want people to hear my mistakes.

HB: She’s amazing and she should just blast it everywhere she goes, okay?

CB: I would definitely love, love, love to do that.

Yes, we want to hear you everywhere! So, when shelter in place started, you guys very flawlessly transitioned to doing these home covers and incredible remote performances. What’s the process of coming up with these concepts, especially the more elaborate ones?

HB: Oh my gosh, it’s really just a bunch of play. When we’re coming up with concepts, our creative director Andrew Makadsi is really amazing at seeing our vision for the songs before we actually perform them live. It’s been really interesting and exciting to have new songs to play with. But as far as the covers, you know, those are easy. We can do those in our sleep; we just love singing other people’s songs.

How long does it take to pull together a remote performance like the Today show one for example?

CB: Our amazing creative director came up with that and it took him a day. He just kept sending us a bunch of references and photo ideas he thought of and we picked the backdrop we wanted. The song arrangement, because we always like to switch it up every time, takes —

HB: Like a day.

CB: It takes us like ten minutes to arrange the songs. But then we took some of the choreography [by Kendra Bracy and Ashanti Ledon] that we learned during the music video shoot, and we added new choreography ourselves for the Today show performance. We were like on the floor and stuff — we did that the night before we filmed it. That took us like 30 minutes because we wanted to make sure the moves weren’t awkward because we’re not choreographers, so we would prop up our iPhone and that would be our little dance-studio mirror.

You guys are really doing it by yourselves in quarantine. So, what’s the tennis court situation? Has that always been there?

HB: Yeah, it has actually, we just haven’t really used it. I mean, we’ve been where we live for about two years now. We never really thought to use it until quarantine happened ‘cause we always go somewhere else to shoot performances. That’s been a beautiful evolution — using what we have. We feel so blessed to just be able to do what we love and also do it somewhere nice.

The tennis court performances have been life-giving.

CB: It’s been so useful, from the at-home photo shoots we have to do and then the performances, like I’m so grateful. We don’t actually know how to play tennis, but there are basketball hoops on each side so our little brother Branson’s usually out there. So, when we do have to do these things, I feel bad because he’s always out there shooting hoops, but he’s like, “Okay, you can have it for two hours …” [x]

#vulture #june 28 2020 #june 2020 #2020 #interviews #articles #ungodly hour #ungodly hour interviews #ungodly hour articles #chloe bailey #halle bailey #chloe x halle #chloexhalle #chloeandhalle #chloe and halle

12 notes · View notes