#if we are being real. like everything he did with utterly bland utterly boring utterly unimaginative

[roobylavender]

i don’t really agree with the idea that ra’s can be swapped out for talia in terms of damian’s upbringing and nothing would change about the story bc he’d be near exactly as abusive as morrison wrote talia to be like.. no.. that’s just misunderstanding ra’s as a character which frankly a lot of people do. ra’s is emotionally abusive but there are still specific patterns to that behavior. he wants the people at his side to genuinely believe in his vision and abide by it and act upon it, it’s far more complex than him being a physically abusive person who would brutally train a child with no remorse or regard for that child’s well being. current canon esp in the last year has led to this belief that talia grew up cold and pressured to take upon the role and be the perfect weapon but she didn’t. she and ra’s were implied to have a relatively fine relationship as she grew up and things only began to shift once bruce entered the picture and became an influence on talia and her loyalties

when the idea of losing talia to bruce began to veer into reality, ra’s became more possessive and insistent in what he wanted talia to do to ensure she would remain on his side. but even then when she ultimately left him for good to move to metropolis the retaliation that ra’s took out wasn’t on her, it was on bruce. he respected her attempts to break out and do something on her own terms, and that’s not to absolve him, i’m simply pointing out how he’s capable of respecting the people he cares about so long as they don’t go directly against him. so when you toy with the idea of ra’s killing damian’s adoptive parents (which is something i believe he would do. they’re an obstacle to his family after all) and thereby choosing to raise him on his own you have to remember that damian is ultimately a child who will possess little to no tangible worldview with respect to what ra’s is preaching (unless his parents are conveniently environmentalists and he’s a genius child which personally is a boring cop out)

so damian is this relatively unexposed kid whose parents suddenly die only for a man to present himself as his grandfather. ra’s pulls the strings to let it all show in the paperwork and damian goes home to one of his bases. and i think the first thing ra’s would do is teach damian about the world. about the way he views it but in the simplest terms understandable to a child. and he would pull damian into this world of scholarship and travel and athleticism not out of cruelty but out of love. bc there is genuine love that ra’s has for bruce and talia even if he eventually abused it. he was overjoyed when they were going to have damian. and he can still be overjoyed and engrossed in the idea of having a grandson to call his own and to teach his philosophy to even if ultimately what he would be doing is projecting his own desires onto damian. he can hope for damian to be the one person in his family who stands by him and understands him and follows him and it can be tragic bc we know his worldview is ultimately wrong and what he’s done isn’t right and damian needs to be rescued asap. but it would all be punctuated by love that would frankly be so much more interesting to explore bc the real crux of ra’s as a character is that he is incredibly proud and lonely and loving in all of the most heartbreaking and potentially unforgivable ways possible. he holds onto people too tightly without understanding why they might want to let go. and there’s no better person to explore the breaking point of that behavior through than a completely unaware damian who ends up on his doorstep and genuinely believes he’s going to live with a grandfather who loves him in all of the right ways. and love him ra’s does. just without telling damian all of the ugly truths it took to get him there

[tearsofgrace]

endings are hard... but they aren’t impossible

tldr; the good place fucking nailed the finale, supernatural completely and utterly bombed it.

tags: wc--4.5k, gif heavy, spn meta, the good place, supernatural finale, spn wank, all gifs are mine, if you read til the end there’s a pretty gif

so i recently finished the good place (i was watching w my family and we finally had time to sit down and watch the last season) and god fucking dammit that ending is FLAWLESS. literally flawless. 

and because i’m, well, me… i spent most of the time during that hour long finale thinking about how supernatural could have had even a fraction of that and avoided so much heartbreak. 

anyways. i decided to compare them. to REALLY compare them. to get into the nitty gritty of why the fuck the good place ending left me feeling, as the finale is all about, sated and complete. and why the spn ending left me confused, lost, broken, betrayed, unable to even enjoy my comfort show at all until a dear friend finally just watched an episode (8.08) start to finish with me. 

so without further ado (always wanted to say that) here’s the good place/supernatural finale meta that no one asked for

comedy

we’ll start small. both these shows have excellent comedy. in extremely different ways… but still

in the good place finale, the comedy was perfect. whether it was jason reappearing in the forest, michael trying to get through The Door, tahani reversing the “hot bod” bit on eleanor, every comedic moment was actually pretty emotional and added something to the show. they deepened characters’ meanings, added to their relationships, and made the audience think as much as they made the audience laugh.

in the spn finale… the comedy was the pie gag. the whole sam shoving pie into dean’s face. beyond this being… like meta as hell (the whole prank thing) it doesn’t have any depth to it.

and to add salt to the wound, this “hilarious” thing happens RIGHT AFTER salmondean have a conversation about missing jack and cas that is equal parts flat and infuriating. the brothers, in particular sam about jack and dean about cas, should care more. this is their family. and family is everything to them. but, no, by all means pie dean in the face.

last lines

this one IRKS me. okay. 

the last line of the good place  "I'll say this to you, my friend, with all the love in my heart and all the wisdom of the universe: Take it sleazy.” “All right.”  is ICONIC. okay?

it’s a reference to season 1 that doesn’t feel fan-servicey. it’s kinda honestly emotional cuz it’s like a message to us, the audience. it perfectly completes michael’s arc. it captures the light-hearted vibe of the show while also somehow managing to be poignant. you can see it coming like the second before it happens but it’s also not the obvious choice. it’s just. goddamn it’s good.

the last line of supernatural…. is… “and cut.” not even said by one of j2. i mean i know it’s a meta show but COME ON ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME??????????

now i hear you shouting wait but that’s just the end of the thank you message. okay fine whatever. in that case the last lines are “Hey, Sammy.” “Dean.” (i couldn’t bring myself to gif that moment)

i’m sorry but. that’s predictable. that’s obvious. that’s boring. that’s flat. sure, it celebrates the bond between the brothers. but like… that’s not what this show is about anymore. it’s not just about sam and dean winchester it’s about what they’ve created. it’s about the world they’ve saved, the family they’ve made, about how they always keep fighting but nope we get bland, boring, coulda seen ‘em coming from miles away lines for the very end. that’s fine.

montages

the spn finale is like 50% montages that don’t make sense and are poorly done and not emotional

the good place has a montage of michael being human that brought me to tears

timing

here’s another short section. the good place finale was 53 minutes long as opposed to the usual 20 minute long runtime of every episode. granted, the fandom of the good place is very different, but STILL there was no documentary telling the fans things they ALREADY knew (there was a short special after the ep, but the episode itself was still far longer than normal). it was 53 minutes of plot. of really fucking good not rushed plot. 

the supernatural finale was… what 36 minutes long?? as opposed to the normal 40 minute runtime?? granted, we did get an hour long documentary of things we’ve all heard in cons and interviews a billion times so hey. take what you can get i guess.

character arcs

this is most of the meat of this meta. one thing we’ve all been harping on a TON is how they RUINED character arcs. soooo let’s go through and juxtapose some character arcs shall we

eleanor

eleanor shellstrop starts the show completely self-obsessed. she died getting hit by shopping carts while picking up margarita mix and let’s be real she’s a total icon. love her to death. she grows a ton, becomes one of the most selfless characters on the show, and starts to actually (jack forbid) CARE about things. it’s one of the most satisfying and relatable character arcs i’ve ever seen. 

it’s not just her selfishness either, her character is super multi-faceted and complex, and i feel like even in the end we’re getting to know her better. she’s afraid of commitment, always worried about what others’ actions will do to her, loves the trivial side of life, is queer as fuck (as acknowledged by the show in a way that’s not harmful at all but also isn’t explicitly bi/pan/unlabeled/omni etc, allowing queer fans to see their own identity in her), and is all around a HUMAN BEING. her ending at the beginning of the show was her death. her stupid, trivial, meaningless death where she was, as she puts it, all alone. and her final ending ISNT that. yes, everyone goes before her. and i think that’s purposeful. to show that she’s grown enough that being alone in some sense is okay.

but she’s never TRULY alone. and in the end. the REAL end. janet is there. the whole time. because eleanor asked her to be!! she got over her crazy need for independence and simply asked for help. and eleanor dies an amazing person that has become selfless, has found joy in philosophy while still enjoying trashy content, has fixed her relationship with her mother, and has found a sense of completion. eleanor’s life ends on her terms, and it’s beautiful.

dean

alright. now just as you’re feeling all warm and fuzzy let’s look at dean winchester’s ending. you’ve heard it a million times, so i’ll be brief. dean was raised to be a hunter, a soldier, a killing machine with no feelings and no purpose. he was raised to die scared on a hunt, his life over because of some mistake he made because he will NEVER measure up. at least that’s what john and everyone else told him with the exceptions of some of his family (and family don’t end in blood). he started to accept that he didn’t have to have this. he started to realize that he could CHOOSE what his ending was. 

the beautiful thing is, we never truly got to see what that was. i personally like to think it’s similar to the roadhouse michael locked him in while he was trapped in his own mind. a safe place for hunters, somewhere he (and cas in my opinion, but that’s not important) could settle down and still be in the life. it would be an amazing tribute to jo and ellen, and just all around a great ending. he wouldn’t have to be scared, but he wouldn’t have to conform to some apple pie facade of normalcy. and ya know what?? say that he died so he could have peace i dare you. because dean doesn’t find peace until sam is there anyway so i beg of you WHAT WAS THE FUCKING POINT. 

dean winchester died scared. dean winchester died on a hunt. dean winchester died on one of john’s old hunts. dean winchester died not directly at the hands of a monster, but at the hands of a mistake. his mistake. dean winchester died without ever working through the trauma of his best friend in the entire world confessing his love in a final act of self-sacrifice. dean winchester died in a way that leaves a sour taste in my mouth and does not at all show the audience what he’s been through and how much he’s grown. dean winchester did not die on his terms, and he deserved better.

chidi

okay back to happy. chidi anagonye. by far my personal favorite good place character (don’t tell anyone i always say jason cuz he and i are very similar). chidi in the last few episodes is SO DRASTICALLY different than the chidi we meet at the beginning. he’s decisive, confident, self-assured, and it’s amazing to see. he’s not afraid of life anymore. he’s not afraid to make the wrong decision and forever alter his reality, because he’s okay with failure. 

at the beginning, chidi was so petrified of life that… it killed him. and in the end, he’s completely at peace with every decision he makes, even the final one. yes, he considered staying for eleanor, but that just shows how his moral code and his compassion for others is still very much still intact. it shows the audience that you can be confident and decisive without being a selfish asshole. 

chidi leaves the good place knowing that it’s the right thing to do. knowing without a doubt that his time has come. the old chidi never would have been able to fathom being that sure about something. it’s beautiful. it’s a development that can give the audience peace, can show them that this drastic of change is possible, and that chidi became a better person for all of it. chidi went on his own terms, and it was beautiful.

sam

… this one might be controversial… but sam winchester. god i hated sam’s ending. at first i was kinda okay with it. like, okay fine he got his normal life. but, really, in the end that’s not what sam wanted. he started to realize that he didn’t need that apple pie, white picket fence life. he didn’t need the wife and the kids and the backyard and the barbecues because that is NOT sam’s personality and i will throw hands on that. 

that’s not to say he doesn’t want some sort of romance, maybe even kids, but not in that way. he lets himself see that he doesn’t need to be defined by his rebellion to john. doesn’t need to be defined by going to college or any of those “normal” smart kid things because it doesn’t fit him. and that’s okay! but how does sam’s story end? it ends with a wife (that isn’t even important enough to show her face). with kids. with a goddamn white picket fence. we think he’s still hunting to some extent… but it’s not the arc we were led to believe would happen. it’s not this amazing leader sam that we see in season 12-14, uniting hunters and organizing them. 

he had SO MUCH potential and they throw it away on a vanilla ending that shows only surface level pain at losing his brother. he doesn’t even invite the rest of their family to the wake for fuck’s sake. jared did an incredible job. pls don’t think i’m saying he didn’t. but that script…. sam winchester’s arc was cut short. he didn’t go on his terms, and he deserved better.

jason

jason mandoza. the only character that has ever embodied my complete dumbass energy to the insane extent that it exists. he went to hell for his impulsivity. he never thought before a decision. i aspire to be as reckless as jason while on earth. but he LEARNED. he got better, just like they all did. and by the end of the show, jason doesn’t need to be impulsive anymore. much like eleanor being left “alone,” the show does a masterful job with making him be the first one to go, capturing his old impulsiveness. but he chooses to leave. he takes his time in deliberation, waiting until a feeling of peace, of completion, of well, ‘true happiness’ (sorry cas stans, i’m right there with you) has settled over him. 

the ending of his story is one of growth, just like all these characters have been. and the best part? the show makes it comedic in the most poignant and beautiful way, because it’s jason, it had to be funny. we learn that jason has been in the woods for like, eons, just waiting to go through the door because he wants to give janet a necklace. he’s learned to simply wait. to be at peace with… nothing. his torture was being a monk, but in the end, jason embodies those ideals. his arc comes to fruition in an extremely satisfying way. jason goes on his own terms, and it’s beautiful.

castiel

this one is gonna hurt like a bitch. castiel is my comfort character. he’s my role model. he’s me in a lot of ways. i love him. so fucking much. so excuse me if this is slightly incoherent. i’m actually okay with cas’ ending… in a way. because his actual ending as an on-screen character? perfect. self-sacrifice while coming out and professing his love to dean winchester. a little bit bury the gays, but let’s be real, it’s supernatural. and “happiness is in just saying it” has to be the most powerful way to think of coming out. it takes away the fear, it takes away so much of the pain that can follow. because the joy is in just saying the words.

it’s how this was treated on the show that makes cas’ character arc terrible (and we haven’t even gotten to 15.20). YOU CANNOT JUST IGNORE A LOVE CONFESSION. that is god awful writing and i will never change my mind on that. cas deserved his family to care about him. to at least address and be sad about the fact he was gone. jesus fucking christ after everything castiel deserved at least that. and then we go to 15.20. cas is in heaven. cas is serving god. cas is right back where he started. now, i’m coming off a little strong. 

if the show had decided to show us cas and jack in heaven makin’ the world a better place… i woulda come around to it. i woulda realized that that’s not REALLY erasing 12 years of character development and cas realizing that his whole identity isn’t just him serving heaven and isn’t just him being an angel and that he’s so much more than all of that and he could still be happy as a human… because really he’s with his son. but they didn’t show us that. they barely even mentioned him. and to me. that counts as a bad character arc. and i’m sorry if you disagree. castiel may have gone on his own terms, but they treated that beautiful sacrifice with disrespect and disdain, plus resolved his arc by putting him back where he started. he deserved better.

tahani

*deep breaths guys this is a long post i’m sorry* anywayyyy tahani!!! we love tahani obviously. let’s talk about her arc, because it always kinda bothered me. throughout the show, we see all the other character’s growing and expanding their knowledge of right and wrong. and, don’t get me wrong. we see tahani grow a lot. but she makes a lot of the same types of comments and shit like that. but it’s how she treats the reactions to those comments. by the end of the show, she laughs at the caricature of herself that the others see. she isn’t looking for vindication in name-dropping, she just does it. she is far less self-absorbed, and is genuinely interested in those around her. she fixes her relationships with her sister and her parents in a way that doesn’t feel forced and actually feels like a beautiful, healthy family reunion. 

she has a list and she does everything on it. it’s worth noting, that the things on her list are not at all what they would have been at the beginning of the show. most of them are humble “labor” type tasks, and all of them are in self improvement. tahani’s end on the show is not the same as everyone else’s. she realizes that she doesn’t need to be done. that there doesn’t have to be an end to self-improvement. and she becomes an architect. the writers perfectly embody her transformation from a self-obsessed rich girl who has never done a thing for herself and laughs at the lower-class to a down-to-earth worker that simply doesn’t want the journey to end. 

it’s incredible how perfectly the writers were able to close off these character arc’s without it feeling forced, and without ignoring their character development. imagine that. tahani chooses her own way, and it’s beautiful.

jack

jack’s ending may be the only one that i’ve actually somewhat come to terms with. it’s not terrible. it’s not great. but it’s not nearly as bad. because ignoring that awful monologue about every drop of rain and shit, jack really does end up helping people. he ends up doing something that he loves and that makes the world a better place. and he doesn’t lose his personality in it. but. i dunno, that’s still his destiny, right? to create paradise. and this is a show about ripping up the rule book, about choosing free will above all else… so to have every single character just fulfill their destiny is cheap. 

still… i’ll try to be unbiased. because really at the beginning of jack’s time on the show, he’s unsure what he wants. and at least, in the end, he’s sure. he has a wisdom that he’s always had but he’s now using. and i’m good with that. but what’s NOT okay about jack’s ending is the lack of on-screen family. jack learns that family is important. sam, cas, dean those are the people he cares about. and you’re telling me he would just NEVER see them again? and be okay with that? i know he rebuilds heaven with cas, but we don’t even get a story about him rescuing cas from the empty. and he seems in 15.19 to not be that concerned about it (after the amazing emotional scene at the beginning). jack should have cared about his family. he did. but they ruined that for him. so jack kline deserved better.

michael

oh man where do i start. michael’s growth is the biggest on the show. i mean. he starts as a literal demon and ends a human. he gets better, he falls in love with humanity (*castiel fan in me sobbing again*) and he chooses over and over to be good instead of bad. his whole arc is a classic redemption arc, and every single beat just gets better. he chooses selfishly to side with humans but in the end it turns out to be the best decision he could have made. because he develops emotions, he develops compassion, he develops a moral compass. 

and his end reflects that. because to complete this arc of a demon becoming more human… he literally becomes human!!!! it fits so well. and he’s allowed to make mistakes and be happy and gain all that humanity has to offer. this just shows that human!endgame for cosmic beings that become more human WORKS SO WELL (and it shoulda happened for cas and jack that’s all i’m saying). michael went on his own terms, and it was beautiful.

eileen

oh boy… this one stings. because they brought her back, used her up, and we never saw her again. eileen was one of the best side characters on the show, and they rarely addressed her arc. she comes onto the show as a hunter seeking revenge, and gets that revenge in the same episode. her s15 arc is focused on what’s real and what’s not, with her relationship to sam admittedly being a central part of her character because… it’s supernatural and women can’t exist without that. but still! eileen grows throughout the show and in the end… we don’t even know what happens to her. it’s as if her arc wasn’t important enough to even glance at. 

it’s as if the connections the boys make outside of each other mean nothing when in reality they mean everything. they prove that the co-dependency is behind them and that family doesn’t end with blood and that real connections can be formed between people that last a lifetime. eileen was a disabled hunter that was shown to still be one of the best in the business, and they didn’t even give her the courtesy of a goodbye. eileen didn’t go on her own terms, and she deserved better.

janet

this is gonna unbalance my list but goddammit janet’s ending was perfect. she was a not-robot, not-girl that should have been incapable of feelings. but throughout the series we get to watch as she learns first-hand about human emotions and processes them. she cares about the humans in her charge and fights for them on multiple counts. 

in the end, we see janet come to terms with both her cosmic being side, and her human side. she never stops being with the “cockroaches.” she sees them all leave, she’s there for them while they’re there, and she also continues to speak her mind and live autonomously. janet was a non-human character done right. she lived on her own terms, and it was beautiful.

some honorable mentions

spn ignored (in the finale) chuck, amara, stevie, charlie, jody, donna, garth, bess, the other angels, claire, kaia, patience, alex, and the list goes ON in favor of focusing on JUST sam and dean. did none of those characters at least deserve a quick goodbye??????

the good place wrapped up multiple arcs i had completely forgotten about in a totally natural and not forced way. mindy, doug forester, (the mushroom guy, i know, it took me a second), pillboy, donkey doug, kamilah, tahani’s parents, eleanor’s mother, eleanor’s friends, chidi’s best friend, vicki, shawn, glenn, simone and so many that i’m forgetting all got satisfying ends that they totally deserved. 

they even fucking resolved FROG GUY’S arc and gave him a real frog. that’s right. frog guy (jeff) had a better character arc resolution than dean motherfucking winchester. 

heaven and hell

obviously in very different vehicles, both shows explore in depth the realities of the afterlife. and lemme tell ya, at the end of the day, one sits a whole lot better than the other. 

the good place finale ends this quest for the perfect afterlife by saying that everyone can improve and that an eternal paradise shouldn’t keep you from eternal rest. they pretty much make me wish that this is what our afterlife looked like. they handle everything with care so it’s balanced precariously in a way that doesn’t give you anxiety looking at it but instead fills you with peace and faith in humanity. 

supernatural addresses this series long battle between heaven and hell by creating a heaven where you drive for forty years without seeing the people (cough cough cas and jack not his parents) that matter to you and drink beer that tastes like shit. a place you can’t be happy or find any sense of peace until your brother has died and he’s there too.

and hell… well they barely even address it. there’s a new queen of hell i guess? but so what. it’s still very much heaven and hell in a way that’s the worst and hey plus to them… makes me wanna stay alive thank you very much. oh and purgatory is in shambles and not functioning properly cuz all that eve bullshit.

loose ends

whenever something is ending, you gotta tie up the loose ends. not in a “oh, we must wrap everything up and leave no stone unturned” kinda way but in a “wow, we should probably try to make this unambiguous because this is the last time we will ever see these characters” kinda way. 

the good place does that. so fucking masterfully. all these side plots with all these different characters were taken care of all while focusing on the main six characters. we get to see how their intervention has changed everyone else. for example, mindy’s arc is wrapped up perfectly, with eleanor going to save her.

plus different running jokes like “take it sleazy” are wrapped up, we revisit really old callbacks like the original neighborhood, and all of it feels natural and in the moment. it feels like full circle in a way that doesn’t erase growth. 

supernatural, on the other hand, left a million loose ends open. what happened to the boys they saved? where the fuck are jody, donna, etc.? did eileen make it back? cuz sam was pretty upset about that. what happened to it “being loud” in the empty? hell, what happened to the empty? what happened to hell? what about chuck? it woulda been nice to see just for a second what became of him. did charlie and stevie make it (i’m very invested in that relationship)? if we’re taking the original ending… why the fuck is jimmy there? did kansas just all,,, die? 

i’m not saying they needed to address everything… but god a few wrapped up storylines besides the brothers wouldn’t have hurt

coloring

can i just… real quick… as a giffer lodge a complaint

the good place has beautiful vibrant coloring in the finale

spn has like bland washed out whatever the fuck that is coloring. it’s not even the dark early aesthetic cuz they dropped that it’s just… ew. so. do with that what you will. 

conclusion

first… while writing this i realized just HOW MUCH it’s not about destiel… like believe me. i knew i wasn’t just pissed about destiel. but holy shit it’s not destiel at all like did i even mention destiel that much???? this was never about a ship. this was just a trash finale. 

in the end. the good place writers knew what they were doing. they knew their fans, they knew their characters, they knew their world, and they knew how to wrap it up in a way that was satisfying and sad and perfectly fit the tone of the whole show. it wasn’t out of character or rushed, basically every loose end was tied up without the audience even realizing that’s what they were doing, and i feel happy and complete having watched it. 

the supernatural ending was a betrayal. flat out. to the audience that has stuck by it in a way bigger way than the good place fandom. to the characters that have helped so many people. to the actors that have given so much of their lives. to the other members of the crew, to certain writers… all of it was just a slap in the face.

we deserved better guys. there are better endings possible. so i’m sorry. i really am. but i guess… that’s what fanfic is for, right?

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Psycho Analysis: Suicide Squad Team A

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOILERS! Seriously, as soon as you click that read more, you’re gonna be smacked with SPOILERS! Don’t say I didn’t give you ample warning this time!)

The world’s in danger yet again, and Amanda Waller is in need of some expendable forces to take on some dirty jobs in the name of preserving peace. Last time she did this, it seems like she hired the wrong people. Nice guy Will Smith Deadshot? Bland, boring Killer Croc? El Diablo, who became attached to a bunch of reprobates after spending a couple hours with them? The only one who was useful in that squad was Katana. She had their backs, could cut all of them in half with one sword stroke just like mowing the lawn, and her sword traps the souls of its victims. Unfortunately, she was decidedly not expendable, so what is a girlboss like Waller to do?

Easy: Assemble a brand new squad of criminals to do the dirty work. Harley and Boomerang are the only ones she brought back, because let’s be real, they’re the only ones we give a damn about. Filling out the rest of the squad are the stoic, craggy crackshot Savant; the handsome, German spear-thrower Javelin; the alien warrior Mongal; the frothing, psychotic animal Weasel; the confident and all-powerful TDK; and Blackguard, who is literally just a guy. Together, this team gets deployed to Corto Maltese to do what no one else can do, and with skills like theirs, they are absolutely unstoppable!

They all fucking die before the opening credits.

Motivation/Goals: Considering the goal of the squad is to shave time off their prison sentences by going on the mission, it’s ostensibly the reason every single one of these goons accepted the job. Savant and Weasel are pretty well established in this regard; we get to focus on Savant for much of the opening, so we can get a sense of him, and Weasel is stated to have murdered no less than 27 children. So, yeah, they need to do this mission.

The rest, though? Who knows! Why are Mongal, Javelin, and TDK in prison? How did they even get an alien like Mongal? What did they do to land in the position they’d need to go on a suicide mission? Why doesn’t this movie have flashy, intrusive cards explaining everything to us in a throwaway gag in a montage?!

Blackguard, at least, has some other motivation. He sold out the entire squad to the military of Corto Maltese, which is why they’re ambushed. Now, there’s actually some ambiguity here: Did he do this of his own volition, and was this a complete surprise, or is it, as it is heavily implied, all part of Waller’s plan and she let this happen as a diversion for the other team to get in unnoticed?

Honestly, though, it doesn’t matter what their goals are. They’re all dead within five minutes of the movie starting, with one exception.

Performance: So, the reason these guys are even worth talking about is because, despite their minuscule screentime, all of their actors manage to cram in enough humor and characterization that they’re all pretty fun and likable. Michael Rooker is as stony and stoic as ever as Savant (until he hilariously isn’t), Flula Borg’s Javelin is really sweet and charming in his interactions with Harley, and Pete Davidson’s Blackguard is just amazingly douchey and pathetic. Special mention goes to Nathan Fillion’s TDK, who has an utterly endearing and unwavering faith in his astoundingly crappy ability to… detach his arms. It’s honestly kind of beautiful. Then there’s Weasel as portrayed by Sean Gunn, who is just a hilarious crackhead of an animal man.

Final Fate: Literally every single one of them die horribly thanks to Blackguard’s betrayal. He’s the first to go, because as soon as he walks out saying “Hey guys, it’s me, the one who contacted you!” he literally has his face blasted clean off. The rest go soon after. Mongal, in one of the most astounding moments of idiocy I’ve ever seen, leaps on a helicopter despite Rick Flag telling her specifically not to. Her weight and strength send it careening out of control, which leads to it shredding Captain Boomerang to bits before exploding, burning her alive as she painfully screams and writhes in agony. TDK gets his arms shot into Swiss cheese, leading to him bleeding out since even detached they still are part of him. Javelin is also shot, but gets a dying moment with Harley where he passes her Checkov’s Javelin. Finally, after witnessing all of this carnage, Savant completely loses his shit and tries to swim away, leading to Waller blowing his head up.

You may be wondering what happened to Weasel. He appears to drown as soon as the Squad deploys, because despite being actually smart in this movie, Waller forgot to make sure everyone on the Squad could swim. Thankfully, this lovable child-murdering crackhead rodent was just sleeping, and wakes up in the first credit scene.

Best Scene: Obviously, it’s their one and only scene. It’s a magnificent slaughter that puts the X-Force scene from Deadpool 2 to shame.

Final Thoughts & Score: I’ve gotta hand it to James Gunn. Even though these losers are only onscreen for a few minutes, they all get to cram a lot of charm and personality into that time, to the point it’s actually kind of sad seeing them all die. It’s a beautiful mix of comedy and tragedy. Since their screentime is so limited, though, I’m mostly going to be grading them on style, performance, and so on rather than on villainy like normal. They are all bad guys, as they don’t really get a chance to redeem themselves like the other Squad, so I’m still counting them as villains, which means they could potentially score above an 8 (which is the highest score I’m willing to give heel-face turn villains, because they end up being better as characters in general than as villains).

I’m also not going to talk about Boomerang (I’ll talk about him when I review the original Squad) or Harley (because she not only lives, but deserves her own solo Psycho Analysis). Now here we go, from best to worst:

TDK

If you thought anyone but TDK would get top marks, you’re sadly mistaken. Seeing Nathan Fillion proudly wield the insanely lame power to detach his arms to lightly tap soldiers on the head and gently grab their guns is a sight I never knew I needed to see until this movie. The fact he just seems so darn proud about this power that he doesn’t even bother to use in any way that would be remotely useful is honestly really endearing. Frankly, the sheer fact they adapted Arms-Fall-Off Boy in any way is enough for me to give him a 10/10.

Weasel

Weasel is just disgustingly delightful. He’s just a horrible, nasty, ugly little bastard… But he’s kind of adorable? He clearly has no idea where he is at any given time and is just so goddamn freaky that I can’t help but love him. The fact that, despite being a character who in the comics is noteworthy only for dying on his first mission with the Squad, he manages to survive the entire movie is pretty impressive. Hopefully he comes back in the future, but either way he gets an 8/10 from me.

Javelin

Honestly, aside from Boomerang, his death stung the most. He’s just so cute and charming, and he doesn’t even get to fling his javelin at anyone! Thankfully, he passes it on to Harley, and boy does she ever get to use it! He’s so cute, I have to give him an 8/10. I just wish we got more of him.

Savant

Savant is just an absolutely hilarious bait-and-switch. We follow him through the prologue, with everything seeming to point to him as our main character and the Squad leader. He’s stoic, he’s cranky, and he has impeccable aim… and then we get to the beach and he just freaks the hell out and starts screaming and crying and running away like a little bitch. Seeing Michael Rooker act like he’s shitting his pants after playing a badass like Yondu is just the sort of hilarious subversiveness that James Gunn loves to do when you let him loose. The fact that he looks like, to paraphrase the TVTropes YMMV page for the movie, a “cyberpunk Tommy Wiseau” is the icing on this 7/10 cake.

Blackguard

I was prepared to hate this guy just based on how lame Pete Davidson’s costume was, and you know what? I do hate him. But I love to hate him. He’s just an utterly pathetic scoundrel and a coward, true to his name. The fact he is the first to die, as just about everyone predicted, and is killed absolutely gruesomely makes any annoyance he could provide moot, and his freeakout over being seated next to Weasel on the plane is actually kind of funny. I was originally going to give him a 6, but you know what? He can have a low 7/10. He’s like the only member of this particular Squad to actually do anything evil, so I gotta give him props for that.

Mongal

Let me make this perfectly clear: I do not blame James Gunn or actress Mayling Ng. I’m not actually mad at either of them for what they chose to do, because it is ultimately hilarious and sad. It suited the narrative of the film, and I’m not actually, genuinely mad.

With all that out of the way, Mongal is one hell of a stupid cunt. It is one thing to cause your own death with your stupidity, it is something else entirely to cause the death of a beloved character with your poorly planned attack. The fact she didn’t take into account how her weight and strength would effect an airborne helicopter makes one wonder if she is really supposed to be based on a character who can take on Superman and live to tell about it.

Let’s compare her to two similar characters to really show how bad she is. Like Blackguard, she is directly responsible for a death on the beach, Blackguard being responsible for everyone by selling them out and leading them into an ambush (and yes, I’m including him as well), and Mongal killing Boomerang with the chopper. The difference is, Blackguard’s betrayal was deliberate, he meant to sell the team out, he was actively doing something evil there, while Mongal killed Boomerang out of sheer idiocy.

Now, let’s compare her to Zeitgeist from the similar bloody massacre that occurred during X-Force’s deployment in Deadpool 2. Like Mongal, he accidentally kills a teammate. The difference is, in the case of Zeitgeist, he only accidentally melted Peter, it was a freak accident, and ultimately it does get undone by the end. Meanwhile, Mongal made a conscious, stupid decision and ended up killing her squadmate with her own idiocy. She sucks, hardcore. I don’t do this lightly, but I’m giving her a 1/10. Villains just don’t get much stupider than her.

I will giver her this, though: the makeup work on her is good. She’s lowkey kinda hot if I’m being honest. But being hot and having good makeup does not a good villain make.

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on: Criterion's Neo-Noir Collection

I have written up all 26 films* in the Criterion Channel's Neo-Noir Collection.

Legend: rw - rewatch; a movie I had seen before going through the collection dnrw - did not rewatch; if a movie met two criteria (a. I had seen it within the last 18 months, b. I actively dislike it) I wrote it up from memory.

* in September, Brick leaves the Criterion Channel and is replaced in the collection with Michael Mann's Thief. May add it to the list when that happens.

Note: These are very "what was on my mind after watching." No effort has been made to avoid spoilers, nor to make the plot clear for anyone who hasn't seen the movies in question. Decide for yourself if that's interesting to you.

Cotton Comes to Harlem I feel utterly unequipped to asses this movie. This and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song the following year are regularly cited as the progenitors of the blaxploitation genre. (This is arguably unfair, since both were made by Black men and dealt much more substantively with race than the white-directed films that followed them.) Its heroes are a couple of Black cops who are treated with suspicion both by their white colleagues and by the Black community they're meant to police. I'm not 100% clear on whether they're the good guys? I mean, I think they are. But the community's suspicion of them seems, I dunno... well-founded? They are working for The Man. And there's interesting discussion to the had there - is the the problem that the law is carried out by racists, or is the law itself racist? Can Black cops make anything better? But it feels like the film stacks the deck in Gravedigger and Coffin Ed's favor; the local Black church is run by a conman, the Back-to-Africa movement is, itself, a con, and the local Black Power movement is treated as an obstacle. Black cops really are the only force for justice here. Movie portrays Harlem itself as a warm, thriving, cultured community, but the people that make up that community are disloyal and easily fooled. Felt, to me, like the message was "just because they're cops doesn't mean they don't have Black soul," which, nowadays, we would call copaganda. But, then, do I know what I'm talking about? Do I know how much this played into or off of or against stereotypes from 1970? Was this a radical departure I don't have the context to appreciate? Is there substance I'm too white and too many decades removed to pick up on? Am I wildly overthinking this? I dunno. Seems like everyone involved was having a lot of fun, at least. That bit is contagious.

Across 110th Street And here's the other side of the "race film" equation. Another movie set in Harlem with a Black cop pulled between the police, the criminals, and the public, but this time the film is made by white people. I like it both more and less. Pro: this time the difficult position of Black cop who's treated with suspicion by both white cops and Black Harlemites is interrogated. Con: the Black cop has basically no personality other than "honest cop." Pro: the racism of the police force is explicit and systemic, as opposed to comically ineffectual. Con: the movie is shaped around a racist white cop who beats the shit out of Black people but slowly forms a bond with his Black partner. Pro: the Black criminal at the heart of the movie talks openly about how the white world has stacked the deck against him, and he's soulful and relateable. Con: so of course he dies in the end, because the only way privileged people know to sympathetize with minorities is to make them tragic (see also: The Boys in the Band, Philadelphia, and Brokeback Mountain for gay men). Additional con: this time Harlem is portrayed as a hellhole. Barely any of the community is even seen. At least the shot at the end, where the criminal realizes he's going to die and throws the bag of money off a roof and into a playground so the Black kids can pick it up before the cops reclaim it was powerful. But overall... yech. Cotton Comes to Harlem felt like it wasn't for me; this feels like it was 100% for me and I respect it less for that.

The Long Goodbye (rw) The shaggiest dog. Like much Altman, more compelling than good, but very compelling. Raymond Chandler's story is now set in the 1970's, but Philip Marlowe is the same Philip Marlowe of the 1930's. I get the sense there was always something inherently sad about Marlowe. Classic noir always portrayed its detectives as strong-willed men living on the border between the straightlaced world and its seedy underbelly, crossing back and forth freely but belonging to neither. But Chandler stresses the loneliness of it - or, at least, the people who've adapted Chandler do. Marlowe is a decent man in an indecent world, sorting things out, refusing to profit from misery, but unable to set anything truly right. Being a man out of step is here literalized by putting him forty years from the era where he belongs. His hardboiled internal monologue is now the incessant mutterings of the weird guy across the street who never stops smoking. Like I said: compelling! Kael's observation was spot on: everyone in the movie knows more about the mystery than he does, but he's the only one who cares. The mystery is pretty threadbare - Marlowe doesn't detect so much as end up in places and have people explain things to him. But I've seen it two or three times now, and it does linger.

Chinatown (rw) I confess I've always been impressed by Chinatown more than I've liked it. Its story structure is impeccable, its atmosphere is gorgeous, its noirish fatalism is raw and real, its deconstruction of the noir hero is well-observed, and it's full of clever detective tricks (the pocket watches, the tail light, the ruler). I've just never connected with it. Maybe it's a little too perfectly crafted. (I feel similar about Miller's Crossing.) And I've always been ambivalent about the ending. In Towne's original ending, Evelyn shoots Noah Cross dead and get arrested, and neither she nor Jake can tell the truth of why she did it, so she goes to jail for murder and her daughter is in the wind. Polansky proposed the ending that exists now, where Evelyn just dies, Cross wins, and Jake walks away devastated. It communicates the same thing: Jake's attempt to get smart and play all the sides off each other instead of just helping Evelyn escape blows up in his face at the expense of the woman he cares about and any sense of real justice. And it does this more dramatically and efficiently than Towne's original ending. But it also treats Evelyn as narratively disposable, and hands the daughter over to the man who raped Evelyn and murdered her husband. It makes the women suffer more to punch up the ending. But can I honestly say that Towne's ending is the better one? It is thematically equal, dramatically inferior, but would distract me less. Not sure what the calculus comes out to there. Maybe there should be a third option. Anyway! A perfect little contraption. Belongs under a glass dome.

Night Moves (rw) Ah yeah, the good shit. This is my quintessential 70's noir. This is three movies in a row about detectives. Thing is, the classic era wasn't as chockablock with hardboiled detectives as we think; most of those movies starred criminals, cops, and boring dudes seduced to the darkness by a pair of legs. Gumshoes just left the strongest impressions. (The genre is said to begin with Maltese Falcon and end with Touch of Evil, after all.) So when the post-Code 70's decided to pick the genre back up while picking it apart, it makes sense that they went for the 'tecs first. The Long Goodbye dragged the 30's detective into the 70's, and Chinatown went back to the 30's with a 70's sensibility. But Night Moves was about detecting in the Watergate era, and how that changed the archetype. Harry Moseby is the detective so obsessed with finding the truth that he might just ruin his life looking for it, like the straight story will somehow fix everything that's broken, like it'll bring back a murdered teenager and repair his marriage and give him a reason to forgive the woman who fucked him just to distract him from some smuggling. When he's got time to kill, he takes out a little, magnetic chess set and recreates a famous old game, where three knight moves (get it?) would have led to a beautiful checkmate had the player just seen it. He keeps going, self-destructing, because he can't stand the idea that the perfect move is there if he can just find it. And, no matter how much we see it destroy him, we, the audience, want him to keep going; we expect a satisfying resolution to the mystery. That's what we need from a detective picture; one character flat-out compares Harry to Sam Spade. But what if the truth is just... Watergate? Just some prick ruining things for selfish reasons? Nothing grand, nothing satisfying. Nothing could be more noir, or more neo-, than that.

Farewell, My Lovely Sometimes the only thing that makes a noir neo- is that it's in color and all the blood, tits, and racism from the books they're based on get put back in. This second stab at Chandler is competant but not much more than that. Mitchum works as Philip Marlowe, but Chandler's dialogue feels off here, like lines that worked on the page don't work aloud, even though they did when Bogie said them. I'll chalk it up to workmanlike but uninspired direction. (Dang this looks bland so soon after Chinatown.) Moose Malloy is a great character, and perfectly cast. (Wasn't sure at first, but it's true.) Some other interesting cats show up and vanish - the tough brothel madam based on Brenda Allen comes to mind, though she's treated with oddly more disdain than most of the other hoods and is dispatched quicker. In general, the more overt racism and misogyny doesn't seem to do anything except make the movie "edgier" than earlier attempts at the same material, and it reads kinda try-hard. But it mostly holds together. *shrug*

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (dnrw) Didn't care for this at all. Can't tell if the script was treated as a jumping-off point or if the dialogue is 100% improvised, but it just drags on forever and is never that interesting. Keeps treating us to scenes from the strip club like they're the opera scenes in Amadeus, and, whatever, I don't expect burlesque to be Mozart, but Cosmo keeps saying they're an artful, classy joint, and I keep waiting for the show to be more than cheap, lazy camp. How do you make gratuitious nudity boring? Mind you, none of this is bad as a rule - I love digressions and can enjoy good sleaze, and it's clear the filmmakers care about what they're making. They just did not sell it in a way I wanted to buy. Can't remember what edit I watched; I hope it was the 135 minute one, because I cannot imagine there being a longer edit out there.

The American Friend (dnrw) It's weird that this is Patricia Highsmith, right? That Dennis Hopper is playing Tom Ripley? In a cowboy hat? I gather that Minghella's version wasn't true to the source, but I do love that movie, and this is a long, long way from that. This Mr. Ripley isn't even particularly talented! Anyway, this has one really great sequence, where a regular guy has been coerced by crooks into murdering someone on a train platform, and, when the moment comes to shoot, he doesn't. And what follows is a prolonged sequence of an amateur trying to surreptitiously tail a guy across a train station and onto another train, and all the while you're not sure... is he going to do it? is he going to chicken out? is he going to do it so badly he gets caught? It's hard not to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, wondering how you would handle the situation, whether you could do it, whether you could act on impulse before your conscience could catch up with you. It drags on a long while and this time it's a good thing. Didn't much like the rest of the movie, it's shapeless and often kind of corny, and the central plot hook is contrived. (It's also very weird that this is the only Wim Wenders I've seen.) But, hey, I got one excellent sequence, not gonna complain.

The Big Sleep Unlike the 1946 film, I can follow the plot of this Big Sleep. But, also unlike the 1946 version, this one isn't any damn fun. Mitchum is back as Marlowe (this is three Marlowes in five years, btw), and this time it's set in the 70's and in England, for some reason. I don't find this offensive, but neither do I see what it accomplishes? Most of the cast is still American. (Hi Jimmy!) Still holds together, but even less well than Farewell, My Lovely. But I do find it interesting that the neo-noir era keeps returning to Chandler while it's pretty much left Hammet behind (inasmuch as someone whose genes are spread wide through the whole genre can be left behind). Spade and the Continental Op, straightshooting tough guys who come out on top in the end, seem antiquated in the (post-)modern era. But Marlowe's goodness being out of sync with the world around him only seems more poignant the further you take him from his own time. Nowadays you can really only do Hammett as pastiche, but I sense that you could still play Chandler straight.

Eyes of Laura Mars The most De Palma movie I've seen not made by De Palma, complete with POV shots, paranormal hoodoo, and fixation with sex, death, and whether images of such are art or exploitation (or both). Laura Mars takes photographs of naked women in violent tableux, and has gotten quite famous doing so, but is it damaging to women? The movie has more than a superficial engagement with this topic, but only slightly more than superficial. Kept imagining a movie that is about 30% less serial killer story and 30% more art conversations. (But, then, I have an art degree and have never murdered anyone, so.) Like, museums are full of Biblical paintings full of nude women and slaughter, sometimes both at once, and they're called masterpieces. Most all of them were painted by men on commission from other men. Now Laura Mars makes similar images in modern trappings, and has models made of flesh and blood rather than paint, and it's scandalous? Why is it only controversial once women are getting paid for it? On the other hand, is this just the master's tools? Is she subverting or challenging the male gaze, or just profiting off of it? Or is a woman profiting off of it, itself, a subversion? Is it subversive enough to account for how it commodifies female bodies? These questions are pretty clearly relevant to the movie itself, and the movies in general, especially after the fall of the Hays Code when people were really unrestrained with the blood and boobies. And, heck, the lead is played by the star of Bonnie and Clyde! All this is to say: I wish the movie were as interested in these questions as I am. What's there is a mildly diverting B-picture. There's one great bit where Laura's seeing through the killer's eyes (that's the hook, she gets visions from the murderer's POV; no, this is never explained) and he's RIGHT BEHIND HER, so there's a chase where she charges across an empty room only able to see her own fleeing self from ten feet behind. That was pretty great! And her first kiss with the detective (because you could see a mile away that the detective and the woman he's supposed to protect are gonna fall in love) is immediately followed by the two freaking out about how nonsensical it is for them to fall in love with each other, because she's literally mourning multiple deaths and he's being wildly unprofessional, and then they go back to making out. That bit was great, too. The rest... enh.

The Onion Field What starts off as a seemingly not-that-noirish cops-vs-crooks procedural turns into an agonizingly protracted look at the legal system, with the ultimate argument that the very idea of the law ever resulting in justice is a lie. Hoo! I have to say, I'm impressed. There's a scene where a lawyer - whom I'm not sure is even named, he's like the seventh of thirteen we've met - literally quits the law over how long this court case about two guys shooting a cop has taken. He says the cop who was murdered has been forgotten, his partner has never gotten to move on because the case has lasted eight years, nothing has been accomplished, and they should let the two criminals walk and jail all the judges and lawyers instead. It's awesome! The script is loaded with digressions and unnecessary details, just the way I like it. Can't say I'm impressed with the execution. Nothing is wrong, exactly, but the performances all seem a tad melodramatic or a tad uninspired. Camerawork is, again, purely functional. It's no masterpiece. But that second half worked for me. (And it's Ted Danson's first movie! He did great.)

Body Heat (rw) Let's say up front that this is a handsomely-made movie. Probably the best looking thing on the list since Night Moves. Nothing I've seen better captures the swelter of an East Coast heatwave, or the lusty feeling of being too hot to bang and going at it regardless. Kathleen Turner sells the hell out of a femme fatale. There are a lot of good lines and good performances (Ted Danson is back and having the time of his life). I want to get all that out of the way, because this is a movie heavily modeled after Double Indemnity, and I wanted to discuss its merits before I get into why inviting that comparison doesn't help the movie out. In a lot of ways, it's the same rules as the Robert Mitchum Marlowe movies - do Double Indemnity but amp up the sex and violence. And, to a degree it works. (At least, the sex does, dunno that Double Indemnity was crying out for explosions.) But the plot is amped as well, and gets downright silly. Yeah, Mrs. Dietrichson seduces Walter Neff so he'll off her husband, but Neff clocks that pretty early and goes along with it anyway. Everything beyond that is two people keeping too big a secret and slowly turning on each other. But here? For the twists to work Matty has to be, from frame one, playing four-dimensional chess on the order of Senator Palpatine, and its about as plausible. (Exactly how did she know, after she rebuffed Ned, he would figure out her local bar and go looking for her at the exact hour she was there?) It's already kind of weird to be using the spider woman trope in 1981, but to make her MORE sexually conniving and mercenary than she was in the 40's is... not great. As lurid trash, it's pretty fun for a while, but some noir stuff can't just be updated, it needs to be subverted or it doesn't justify its existence.

Blow Out Brian De Palma has two categories of movie: he's got his mainstream, director-for-hire fare, where his voice is either reigned in or indulged in isolated sequences that don't always jive with the rest fo the film, and then there's his Brian De Palma movies. My mistake, it seems, is having seen several for-hires from throughout his career - The Untouchables (fine enough), Carlito's Way (ditto, but less), Mission: Impossible (enh) - but had only seen De Palma-ass movies from his late period (Femme Fatale and The Black Dahlia, both of which I think are garbage). All this to say: Blow Out was my first classic-era De Palma, and holy fucking shit dudes. This was (with caveats) my absolute and entire jam. I said I could enjoy good sleaze, and this is good friggin' sleaze. (Though far short of De Palma at his sleaziest, mercifully.) The splitscreens, the diopter shots, the canted angles, how does he make so many shlocky things work?! John Travolta's sound tech goes out to get fresh wind fx for the movie he's working on, and we get this wonderful sequence of visuals following sounds as he turns his attention and his microphone to various noises - a couple on a walk, a frog, an owl, a buzzing street lamp. Later, as he listens back to the footage, the same sequence plays again, but this time from his POV; we're seeing his memory as guided by the same sequence of sounds, now recreated with different shots, as he moves his pencil in the air mimicking the microphone. When he mixes and edits sounds, we hear the literal soundtrack of the movie we are watching get mixed and edited by the person on screen. And as he tries to unravel a murder mystery, he uses what's at hand: magnetic tape, flatbed editors, an animation camera to turn still photos from the crime scene into a film and sync it with the audio he recorded; it's forensics using only the tools of the editing room. As someone who's spent some time in college editing rooms, this is a hoot and a half. Loses a bit of steam as it goes on and the film nerd stuff gives way to a more traditional thriller, but rallies for a sound-tech-centered final setpiece, which steadily builds to such madcap heights you can feel the air thinning, before oddly cutting its own tension and then trying to build it back up again. It doesn't work as well the second time. But then, that shot right after the climax? Damn. Conflicted on how the movie treats the female lead. I get why feminist film theorists are so divided on De Palma. His stuff is full of things feminists (rightly) criticize, full of women getting naked when they're not getting stabbed, but he also clearly finds women fascinating and has them do empowered and unexpected things, and there are many feminist reads of his movies. Call it a mixed bag. But even when he's doing tropey shit, he explores the tropes in unexpected ways. Definitely the best movie so far that I hadn't already seen.

Cutter's Way (rw) Alex Cutter is pitched to us as an obnoxious-but-sympathetic son of a bitch, and, you know, two out of three ain't bad. Watched this during my 2020 neo-noir kick and considered skipping it this time because I really didn't enjoy it. Found it a little more compelling this go around, while being reminded of why my feelings were room temp before. Thematically, I'm onboard: it's about a guy, Cutter, getting it in his head that he's found a murderer and needs to bring him to justice, and his friend, Bone, who intermittently helps him because he feels bad that Cutter lost his arm, leg, and eye in Nam and he also feels guilty for being in love with Cutter's wife. The question of whether the guy they're trying to bring down actually did it is intentionally undefined, and arguably unimportant; they've got personal reasons to see this through. Postmodern and noirish, fixated with the inability to ever fully know the truth of anything, but starring people so broken by society that they're desperate for certainty. (Pretty obvious parallels to Vietnam.) Cutter's a drunk and kind of an asshole, but understandably so. Bone's shiftlessness is the other response to a lack of meaning in the world, to the point where making a decision, any decision, feels like character growth, even if it's maybe killing a guy whose guilt is entirely theoretical. So, yeah, I'm down with all of this! A- in outline form. It's just that Cutter is so uninterestingly unpleasant and no one else on screen is compelling enough to make up for it. His drunken windups are tedious and his sanctimonious speeches about what the war was like are, well, true and accurate but also obviously manipulative. It's two hours with two miserable people, and I think Cutter's constant chatter is supposed to be the comic relief but it's a little too accurate to drunken rambling, which isn't funny if you're not also drunk. He's just tedious, irritating, and periodically racist. Pass.

Blood Simple (rw) I'm pretty cool on the Coens - there are things I've liked, even loved, in every Coen film I've seen, but I always come away dissatisfied. For a while, I kept going to their movies because I was sure eventually I'd love one without qualification. No Country for Old Men came close, the first two acts being master classes in sustained tension. But then the third act is all about denying closure: the protagonist is murdered offscreen, the villain's motives are never explained, and it ends with an existentialist speech about the unfathomable cruelty of the world. And it just doesn't land for me. The archness of the Coen's dialogue, the fussiness of their set design, the kinda-intimate, kinda-awkward, kinda-funny closeness of the camera's singles, it cannot sell me on a devastating meditation about meaninglessness. It's only ever sold me on the Coens' own cleverness. And that archness, that distancing, has typified every one of their movies I've come close to loving. Which is a long-ass preamble to saying, holy heck, I was not prepared for their very first movie to be the one I'd been looking for! I watched it last year and it remains true on rewatch: Blood Simple works like gangbusters. It's kind of Double Indemnity (again) but played as a comedy of errors, minus the comedy: two people romantically involved feeling their trust unravel after a murder. And I think the first thing that works for me is that utter lack of comedy. It's loaded with the Coens' trademark ironies - mostly dramatic in this case - but it's all played straight. Unlike the usual lead/femme fatale relationship, where distrust brews as the movie goes on, the audience knows the two main characters can trust each other. There are no secret duplicitous motives waiting to be revealed. The audience also know why they don't trust each other. (And it's all communicated wordlessly, btw: a character enters a scene and we know, based on the information that character has, how it looks to them and what suspicions it would arouse, even as we know the truth of it). The second thing that works is, weirdly, that the characters aren't very interesting?! Ray and Abby have almost no characterization. Outside of a general likability, they are blank slates. This is a weakness in most films, but, given the agonizingly long, wordless sequences where they dispose of bodies or hide from gunfire, you're left thinking not "what will Ray/Abby do in this scenario," because Ray and Abby are relatively elemental and undefined, but "what would I do in this scenario?" Which creates an exquisite tension but also, weirdly, creates more empathy than I feel for the Coens' usual cast of personalities. It's supposed to work the other way around! Truly enjoyable throughout but absolutely wonderful in the suspenseful-as-hell climax. Good shit right here.

Body Double The thing about erotic thrillers is everything that matters is in the name. Is it thrilling? Is it erotic? Good; all else is secondary. De Palma set out to make the most lurid, voyeuristic, horny, violent, shocking, steamy movie he could come up with, and its success was not strictly dependent on the lead's acting ability or the verisimilitude of the plot. But what are we, the modern audience, to make of it once 37 years have passed and, by today's standards, the eroticism is quite tame and the twists are no longer shocking? Then we're left with a nonsensical riff on Vertigo, a specularization of women that is very hard to justify, and lead actor made of pulped wood. De Palma's obsessions don't cohere into anything more this time; the bits stolen from Hitchcock aren't repurposed to new ends, it really is just Hitch with more tits and less brains. (I mean, I still haven't seen Vertigo, but I feel 100% confident in that statement.) The diopter shots and rear-projections this time look cheap (literally so, apparently; this had 1/3 the budget of Blow Out). There are some mildly interesting setpieces, but nothing compared to Travolta's auditory reconstructions or car chase where he tries to tail a subway train from street level even if it means driving through a frickin parade like an inverted French Connection, goddamn Blow Out was a good movie! Anyway. Melanie Griffith seems to be having fun, at least. I guess I had a little as well, but it was, at best, diverting, and a real letdown.

The Hit Surprised by how much I enjoyed this one. Terrance Stamp flips on the mob and spends ten years living a life of ease in Spain, waiting for the day they find and kill him. Movie kicks off when they do find him, and what follows is a ramshackle road movie as John Hurt and a young Tim Roth attempt to drive him to Paris so they can shoot him in front of his old boss. Stamp is magnetic. He's spent a decade reading philosophy and seems utterly prepared for death, so he spends the trip humming, philosophizing, and being friendly with his captors when he's not winding them up. It remains unclear to the end whether the discord he sews between Roth and Hurt is part of some larger plan of escape or just for shits and giggles. There's also a decent amount of plot for a movie that's not terribly plot-driven - just about every part of the kidnapping has tiny hitches the kidnappers aren't prepared for, and each has film-long repercussions, drawing the cops closer and somehow sticking Laura del Sol in their backseat. The ongoing questions are when Stamp will die, whether del Sol will die, and whether Roth will be able to pull the trigger. In the end, it's actually a meditation on ethics and mortality, but in a quiet and often funny way. It's not going to go down as one of my new favs, but it was a nice way to spend a couple hours.

Trouble in Mind (dnrw) I fucking hated this movie. It's been many months since I watched it, do I remember what I hated most? Was it the bit where a couple of country bumpkins who've come to the city walk into a diner and Mr. Bumpkin clocks that the one Black guy in the back as obviously a criminal despite never having seen him before? Was it the part where Kris Kristofferson won't stop hounding Mrs. Bumpkin no matter how many times she demands to be left alone, and it's played as romantic because obviously he knows what she needs better than she does? Or is it the part where Mr. Bumpkin reluctantly takes a job from the Obvious Criminal (who is, in fact, a criminal, and the only named Black character in the movie if I remember correctly, draw your own conclusions) and, within a week, has become a full-blown hood, which is exemplified by a lot, like, a lot of queer-coding? The answer to all three questions is yes. It's also fucking boring. Even out-of-drag Divine's performance as the villain can't save it.

Manhunter 'sfine? I've still never seen Silence of the Lambs, nor any of the Hopkins Lecter movies, nor, indeed, any full episode of the show. So the unheimlich others get seeing Brian Cox play Hannibal didn't come into play. Cox does a good job with him, but he's barely there. Shame, cuz he's the most interesting part of the movie. Honestly, there's a lot of interesting stuff that's barely there. Will Graham being a guy who gets into the heads of serial killers is explored well enough, and Mann knows how to direct a police procedural such that it's both contemplative and propulsive. But all the other themes it points at? Will's fear that he understands murderers a little too well? Hannibal trying to nudge him towards becoming one? Whatever dance Hannibal and Tooth Fairy are doing? What Tooth Fairy's deal is, anyway? (Why does he wear fake teeth and bite things? Why is he fixated on the red dragon? Does the bit where he says "Francis is gone forever" mean he has DID?) None of it goes anywhere or amounts to anything. I mean, it's certainly more interesting with this stuff than without, but it has that feel of a book that's been pared of its interesting bits to fit the runtime (or, alternately, pulp that's been sloppily elevated). I still haven't made my mind up on Mann's cold, precise camera work, but at least it gives me something to look at. It's fine! This is fine.

Mona Lisa (rw) Gave this one another shot. Bob Hoskins is wonderful as a hood out of his depth in classy places, quick to anger but just as quick to let anger go (the opening sequence where he's screaming on his ex-wife's doorstep, hurling trash cans at her house, and one minute later thrilled to see his old car, is pretty nice). And Cathy Tyson's working girl is a subtler kind of fascinating, exuding a mixture of coldness and kindness. It's just... this is ultimately a story about how heartbreaking it is when the girl you like is gay, right? It's Weezer's Pink Triangle: The Movie. It's not homophobic, exactly - Simone isn't demonized for being a lesbian - but it's still, like, "man, this straight white guy's pain is so much more interesting than the Black queer sex worker's." And when he's yelling "you woulda done it!" at the end, I can't tell if we're supposed to agree with him. Seems pretty clear that she wouldn'ta done it, at least not without there being some reveal about her character that doesn't happen, but I don't think the ending works if we don't agree with him, so... I'm like 70% sure the movie does Simone dirty there. For the first half, their growing relationship feels genuine and natural, and, honestly, the story being about a real bond that unfortunately means different things to each party could work if it didn't end with a gun and a sock in the jaw. Shape feels jagged as well; what feels like the end of the second act or so turns out to be the climax. And some of the symbolism is... well, ok, Simone gives George money to buy more appropriate clothes for hanging out in high end hotels, and he gets a tan leather jacket and a Hawaiian shirt, and their first proper bonding moment is when she takes him out for actual clothes. For the rest of the movie he is rocking double-breasted suits (not sure I agree with the striped tie, but it was the eighties, whaddya gonna do?). Then, in the second half, she sends him off looking for her old streetwalker friend, and now he looks completely out of place in the strip clubs and bordellos. So far so good. But then they have this run-in where her old pimp pulls a knife and cuts George's arm, so, with his nice shirt torn and it not safe going home (I guess?) he starts wearing the Hawaiian shirt again. So around the time he's starting to realize he doesn't really belong in Simone's world or the lowlife world he came from anymore, he's running around with the classy double-breasted suit jacket over the garish Hawaiian shirt, and, yeah, bit on the nose guys. Anyway, it has good bits, I just feel like a movie that asks me to feel for the guy punching a gay, Black woman in the face needs to work harder to earn it. Bit of wasted talent.

The Bedroom Window Starts well. Man starts an affair with his boss' wife, their first night together she witnesses an attempted murder from his window, she worries going to the police will reveal the affair to her husband, so the man reports her testimony to the cops claiming he's the one who saw it. Young Isabelle Huppert is the perfect woman for a guy to risk his career on a crush over, and Young Steve Guttenberg is the perfect balance of affability and amorality. And it flows great - picks just the right media to res. So then he's talking to the cops, telling them what she told him, and they ask questions he forgot to ask her - was the perp's jacket a blazer or a windbreaker? - and he has to guess. Then he gets called into the police lineup, and one guy matches her description really well, but is it just because he's wearing his red hair the way she described it? He can't be sure, doesn't finger any of them. He finds out the cops were pretty certain about one of the guys, so he follows the one he thinks it was around, looking for more evidence, and another girl is attacked right outside a bar he knows the redhead was at. Now he's certain! But he shows the boss' wife the guy and she's not certain, and she reminds him they don't even know if the guy he followed is the same guy the police suspected! And as he feeds more evidence to the cops, he has to lie more, because he can't exactly say he was tailing the guy around the city. So, I'm all in now. Maybe it's because I'd so recently rewatched Night Moves and Cutter's Way, but this seems like another story about uncertainty. He's really certain about the guy because it fits narratively, and we, the audience, feel the same. But he's not actually a witness, he doesn't have actual evidence, he's fitting bits and pieces together like a conspiracy theorist. He's fixating on what he wants to be true. Sign me up! But then it turns out he's 100% correct about who the killer is but his lies are found out and now the cops think he's the killer and I realize, oh, no, this movie isn't nearly as smart as I thought it was. Egg on my face! What transpires for the remaining half of the runtime is goofy as hell, and someone with shlockier sensibilities could have made a meal of it, but Hanson, despite being a Corman protege, takes this silliness seriously in the all wrong ways. Next!

Homicide (rw? I think I saw most of this on TV one time) Homicide centers around the conflicted loyalties of a Jewish cop. It opens with the Jewish cop and his white gentile partner taking over a case with a Black perp from some Black FBI agents. The media is making a big thing about the racial implications of the mostly white cops chasing down a Black man in a Black neighborhood. And inside of 15 minutes the FBI agent is calling the lead a k*ke and the gentile cop is calling the FBI agent a f****t and there's all kinds of invective for Black people. The film is announcing its intentions out the gate: this movie is about race. But the issue here is David Mamet doesn't care about race as anything other than a dramatic device. He's the Ubisoft of filmmakers, having no coherent perspective on social issues but expecting accolades for even bringing them up. Mamet is Jewish (though lead actor Joe Mantegna definitely is not) but what is his position on the Jewish diaspora? The whole deal is Mantegna gets stuck with a petty homicide case instead of the big one they just pinched from the Feds, where a Jewish candy shop owner gets shot in what looks like a stickup. Her family tries to appeal to his Jewishness to get him to take the case seriously, and, after giving them the brush-off for a long time, finally starts following through out of guilt, finding bits and pieces of what may or may not be a conspiracy, with Zionist gun runners and underground neo-Nazis. But, again: all of these are just dramatic devices. Mantegna's Jewishness (those words will never not sound ridiculous together) has always been a liability for him as a cop (we are told, not shown), and taking the case seriously is a reclamation of identity. The Jews he finds community with sold tommyguns to revolutionaries during the founding of Israel. These Jews end up blackmailing him to get a document from the evidence room. So: what is the film's position on placing stock in one's Jewish identity? What is its position on Israel? What is its opinion on Palestine? Because all three come up! And the answer is: Mamet doesn't care. You can read it a lot of different ways. Someone with more context and more patience than me could probably deduce what the de facto message is, the way Chris Franklin deduced the de facto message of Far Cry V despite the game's efforts not to have one, but I'm not going to. Mantegna's attempt to reconnect with his Jewishness gets his partner killed, gets the guy he was supposed to bring in alive shot dead, gets him possibly permanent injuries, gets him on camera blowing up a store that's a front for white nationalists, and all for nothing because the "clues" he found (pretty much exclusively by coincidence) were unconnected nothings. The problem is either his Jewishness, or his lifelong failure to connect with his Jewishness until late in life. Mamet doesn't give a shit. (Like, Mamet canonically doesn't give a shit: he is on record saying social context is meaningless, characters only exist to serve the plot, and there are no deeper meanings in fiction.) Mamet's ping-pong dialogue is fun, as always, and there are some neat ideas and characters, but it's all in service of a big nothing that needed to be a something to work.

Swoon So much I could talk about, let's keep it to the most interesting bits. Hommes Fatales: a thing about classic noir that it was fascinated by the marginal but had to keep it in the margins. Liberated women, queer-coded killers, Black jazz players, broke thieves; they were the main event, they were what audiences wanted to see, they were what made the movies fun. But the ending always had to reassert straightlaced straight, white, middle-class male society as unshakeable. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy demanded, both ideologically and via the Hays Code, that anyone outside these norms be punished, reformed, or dead by the movie's end. The only way to make them the heroes was to play their deaths for tragedy. It is unsurprising that neo-noir would take the queer-coded villains and make them the protagonists. Implicature: This is the story of Leopold and Loeb, murderers famous for being queer, and what's interesting is how the queerness in the first half exists entirely outside of language. Like, it's kind of amazing for a movie from 1992 to be this gay - we watch Nathan and Dickie kiss, undress, masturbate, fuck; hell, they wear wedding rings when they're alone together. But it's never verbalized. Sex is referred to as "your reward" or "what you wanted" or "best time." Dickie says he's going to have "the girls over," and it turns out "the girls" are a bunch of drag queens, but this is never acknowledged. Nathan at one point lists off a bunch of famous men - Oscar Wild, E.M. Forster, Frederick the Great - but, though the commonality between them is obvious (they were all gay), it's left the the audience to recognize it. When their queerness is finally verbalized in the second half, it's first in the language of pathology - a psychiatrist describing their "perversions" and "misuse" of their "organs" before the court, which has to be cleared of women because it's so inappropriate - and then with slurs from the man who murders Dickie in jail (a murder which is written off with no investigation because the victim is a gay prisoner instead of a L&L's victim, a child of a wealthy family). I don't know if I'd have noticed this if I hadn't read Chip Delany describing his experience as a gay man in the 50's existing almost entirely outside of language, the only language at the time being that of heteronormativity. Murder as Love Story: L&L exchange sex as payment for the other commiting crimes; it's foreplay. Their statements to the police where they disagree over who's to blame is a lover's quarrel. Their sentencing is a marriage. Nathan performs his own funeral rites over Dickie's body after he dies on the operating table. They are, in their way, together til death did they part. This is the relationship they can have. That it does all this without romanticizing the murder itself or valorizing L&L as humans is frankly incredible.

Suture (rw) The pitch: at the funeral for his father, wealthy Vincent Towers meets his long lost half brother Clay Arlington. It is implied Clay is a child from out of wedlock, possibly an affair; no one knows Vincent has a half-brother but him and Clay. Vincent invites Clay out to his fancy-ass home in Arizona. Thing is, Vincent is suspected (correctly) by the police of having murdered his father, and, due to a striking family resemblence, he's brought Clay to his home to fake his own death. He finagles Clay into wearing his clothes and driving his car, and then blows the car up and flees the state, leaving the cops to think him dead. Thing is, Clay survives, but with amnesia. The doctors tell him he's Vincent, and he has no reason to disagree. Any discrepancy in the way he looks is dismissed as the result of reconstructive surgery after the explosion. So Clay Arlington resumes Vincent Towers' life, without knowing Clay Arlington even exists. The twist: Clay and Vincent are both white, but Vincent is played by Michael Harris, a white actor, and Clay is played by Dennis Haysbert, a Black actor. "Ian, if there's just the two of them, how do you know it's not Harris playing a Black character?" Glad you asked! It is most explicitly obvious during a scene where Vincent/Clay's surgeon-cum-girlfriend essentially bringing up phrenology to explain how Vincent/Clay couldn't possibly have murdered his father, describing straight hair, thin lips, and a Greco-Roman nose Haysbert very clearly doesn't have. But, let's be honest: we knew well beforehand that the rich-as-fuck asshole living in a huge, modern house and living it up in Arizona high society was white. Though Clay is, canonically, white, he lives an poor and underprivileged life common to Black men in America. Though the film's title officially refers to the many stitches holding Vincent/Clay's face together after the accident, "suture" is a film theory term, referring to the way a film audience gets wrapped up - sutured - in the world of the movie, choosing to forget the outside world and pretend the story is real. The usage is ironic, because the audience cannot be sutured in; we cannot, and are not expected to, suspend our disbelief that Clay is white. We are deliberately distanced. Consequently this is a movie to be thought about, not to to be felt. It has the shape of a Hitchcockian thriller but it can't evoke the emotions of one. You can see the scaffolding - "ah, yes, this is the part of a thriller where one man hides while another stalks him with a gun, clever." I feel ill-suited to comment on what the filmmakers are saying about race. I could venture a guess about the ending, where the psychiatrist, the only one who knows the truth about Clay, says he can never truly be happy living the lie of being Vincent Towers, while we see photographs of Clay/Vincent seemingly living an extremely happy life: society says white men simply belong at the top more than Black men do, but, if the roles could be reversed, the latter would slot in seamlessly. Maybe??? Of all the movies in this collection, this is the one I'd most want to read an essay on (followed by Swoon).

The Last Seduction (dnrw) No, no, no, I am not rewataching this piece of shit movie.

Brick (rw) Here's my weird contention: Brick is in color and in widescreen, but, besides that? There's nothing neo- about this noir. There's no swearing except "hell." (I always thought Tug said "goddamn" at one point but, no, he's calling The Pin "gothed-up.") There's a lot of discussion of sex, but always through implication, and the only deleted scene is the one that removed ambiguity about what Brendan and Laura get up to after kissing. There's nothing postmodern or subversive - yes, the hook is it's set in high school, but the big twist is that it takes this very seriously. It mines it for jokes, yes, but the drama is authentic. In fact, making the gumshoe a high school student, his jadedness an obvious front, still too young to be as hard as he tries to be, just makes the drama hit harder. Sam Spade if Sam Spade were allowed to cry. I've always found it an interesting counterpoint to The Good German, a movie that fastidiously mimics the aesthetics of classic noir - down to even using period-appropriate sound recording - but is wholly neo- in construction. Brick could get approved by the Hays Code. Its vibe, its plot about a detective playing a bunch of criminals against each other, even its slang ("bulls," "yegg," "flopped") are all taken directly from Hammett. It's not even stealing from noir, it's stealing from what noir stole from! It's a perfect curtain call for the collection: the final film is both the most contemporary and the most classic. It's also - but for the strong case you could make for Night Moves - the best movie on the list. It's even more appropriate for me, personally: this was where it all started for me and noir. I saw this in theaters when it came out and loved it. It was probably my favorite movie for some time. It gave me a taste for pulpy crime movies which I only, years later, realized were neo-noir. This is why I looked into Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and In Bruges. I've seen it more times than any film on this list, by a factor of at least 3. It's why I will always adore Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's the best-looking half-million-dollar movie I've ever seen. (Indie filmmakers, take fucking notes.) I even did a script analysis of this, and, yes, it follows the formula, but so tightly and with so much style. Did you notice that he says several of the sequence tensions out loud? ("I just want to find her." "Show of hands.") I notice new things each time I see it - this time it was how "brushing Brendan's hair out of his face" is Em's move, making him look more like he does in the flashback, and how Laura does the same to him as she's seducing him, in the moment when he misses Em the hardest. It isn't perfect. It's recreated noir so faithfully that the Innocent Girl dies, the Femme Fatale uses intimacy as a weapon, and none of the women ever appear in a scene together. 1940's gender politics maybe don't need to be revisited. They say be critical of the media you love, and it applies here most of all: it is a real criticism of something I love immensely.

[umbreonix]

On link's first April fools day or the one that happens when the channel starts getting big, for his prank he actually puts in a bit of effort. Thing is, he's making Moza's dishes. So, it's a high quality, 4k 60 fps of link cooking the "Lavish Meat" dish, the "Ancient Meal,"(or something like that) and the "Ultimate Survival" dish. So basically, for April fools day link ruins your day. (He would of course put a warning at the start/end/middle/in the corner that says do NOT try to make these because he doesn't want people to ruin their kitchen) Bonus points if it's in Revali's house and he doesn't know.

Ooo yes XD Tbh I was thinking Moza might in herself be a minor minor character (mentioned once or twice but never interacts with main cast)

Maybe a rock hard food...

Random fic clip incoming because I am clearly in a write-y mood today for anything that isn't one of my current fics:

Revali dropped his bags dramatically at the entryway. Shopping was exhausting.

He deserved some recovery time from this ordeal. Perhaps a long hot soak with that cocoa butter bath bomb he got from one of those pop-up vendors at the mall was in order.

The thought was interrupted by the sounds of pots and pans clanging around. He rose an eyebrow at the apartment’s security panel as if it might actually understand his exasperation. “Come now, part of your job is to keep out riff-raff like that dirty little beach vagrant. You didn’t let him in again now did you?” He asked, running a hand along the nearest wall. There was a coddle-y cooing tone to his voice that often came out whenever he addressed the Medoh Suite’s smart system.

Of course there was no response, AI technology was coming a long way but it was certainly another fifty years minimum before it gained the awareness to snark back to his sarcastic remarks. Or maybe this was her response. Her silence seemed almost passive-aggressive. As if telling him ‘you were the one who registered his face in the first place.’

Well no matter, he was in now. Revali readjusted his hair in the mirror and moved to greet his interloping guest.

Any witty comment he had locked and loaded on his tongue died at the sight before him and all he could utter was “The f@%#?”

Link turned to look at him with that blank look of neutrality he was learning to hate more and more every day. All it ever did was make him look like everything he did was an overreaction, and Revali had never overreacted to a single thing in his twenty [redacted] years of life! His reactions were always EXACTLY what was necessary and proper to a given situation. If anything, the rest of the world underreacted.

“SURELY,” he said stalking towards the marble island. “Surely you did not let yourself into my suite, take over my kitchen, and ding up my cookware for this ridiculously childish attempt at an April Fools Joke?”

Link just looked at him with an utterly serious expression. “Joke?”

Revali squinted at him. This was what he meant by underreactions, figuring out sarcasm on Link was like solving the world’s most obscure puzzle.

“Do you take me for an imbecile?” Revali said. “Do you honestly think that you can bluff your way with that bland face of yours into having me both forget that it’s April 1st and that ‘this’-“ he waved a hand at the dishes already completed. “is all inedible?”

He seemed to have cooked the various dishes entirely with rocks. The presentation was surprisingly nice but that certainly didn’t trick him into thinking anything was palatable.

“It’s edible,” Link said, still not a single twitch of his lips indicated that he was being anything other than dead serious. He looked almost bored. “Minerals are important to the human diet, there is a way to cook the stones so they soften and break up and can be eaten directly. How do you think they extract minerals for vitamins?”

“You’re not convincing me of anything,” Revali scowled. “This is tiresome, I know you like to get your rocks off from taunting and tormenting me, but just give it up. I’d ask you to replace any scratched-up pots you damaged in this sad endeavour but we both know you can’t afford that- IS THAT MY IMPORTED CERAMICS YOU’RE USING?” Revali blanched. Those were worth more than Link probably spent in a year!

The aspiring chef did not even flinch at the rock pun nor the onslaught of Revali’s following verbal barrage- one which lasted a good few minutes and stretched the range of his vocabulary up into the firmament, reaching the apex of what the English language could achieve. If only they could, poets would study this rant for centuries until it became mandated material for every highschool HP English class. Yes, it could have been a classic if it weren’t for all the angry vulgarities interspersed throughout.

“-and how about you, from now on, take your extreme frugality and apply it to the way you care for my own belongings as well!” Revali finally said. He backed up a little and scuffed imaginary dirt off of his shoulder, as if just being that close to the blond sullied him in some way. He then scowled as he noticed the small rivulet of sand in his sink leading down towards the drain.

“Come now, you had to know that is bad for the pipes, you did your own plumbing for that dilapidated, former drug-den, off-the-grid, sand-filled shack you call a house did you not? Just admit this was a terrible joke that fell flat and we can clean this mess up.” He had leaned in so close to the blond he could pick up on all the grey-blue fibrous shades that rippled like ocean waves in his irises.

Link leaned forward as well, the first hint of any expression crossing his face- and it was absolute, blood-boiling, smugness. “No.”

He took a spoonful of pebble soup and popped it into his mouth.

Revali froze. Yes, he wasn’t an idiot. What he was always forgetting was that Link was.

“Wh- Show me your mouth right now! YOU DID NOT JUST SWALLOW THAT!”

He took a step towards Link and Link took a step back. He did however show his mouth and there was horrifyingly nothing in it.

“And under your tongue?” Revali asked, actually getting quite nervous.

Link didn’t comply to that one.

Soon the multimillion-dollar beauty icon was chasing the wild beach bum around his kitchen island with the frantic worry of a weary dog-owner.

When he finally did catch him, it was a no-holds-barred scuffle. Link burst out into a delighted laugh as he tried to escape Revali’s hold… then immediately paused with a shocked expression.

“You just swallowed it for real didn’t you?” Revali asked.

Link nodded, looking pale.

“Do you want to go to the hospital?” He asked.

Link was already at the door and he tossed Revali his own keys. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he muttered.

The pair rushed out the door.

Link’s livestream was forgotten.

[manuscripts-dontburn]

Journal of a Russian Grand Duchess: Complete Annotated 1913 Diary of Olga Romanov, Eldest Daughter of the Last Tsar

Edited by Helen Azar

First published: 2015

Pages: 302

Rating: ★★★★★

Another excellent addition to the first-hand sources about the Romanovs. Just be aware that this really is a journal of daily events, not a novel, and may not be easy or super engaging to read unless you really are into the subject. Perfect if you want to do some serious research into the daily lives of the Imperial family

Only Plane in the Sky: The Oral History of 9/11

Author: Garrett M. Graff

First published: 2019

Pages: 512

Rating: ★★★★★

I read this book in record time partly because my human nature was fascinated with a new, intimate look into one of the greatest tragedies of my own lifetime, but partly also because I knew I did not want to spend any more time in the chaos and terror it represents so well than necessary. I was 14 when 9/11 happened and even though on the other side of the world, I watched live as that second plane hit and other hijacked planes were announced missing. I remember being numb all over and crying through the night, fearing that the Third World War was upon us and it was the end of everything I knew. The author himself makes you aware early on this is not a strictly structured narrative supported by the meticulous research of archives. This is a cry of those who lived it all.

The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps

Author: Edward Brooke-Hitching

First published: 2016

Pages: 256

Rating: ★★★★★

Gorgeously illustrated and engagingly written as a sort of encyclopedia - yet without being exhausting or dry - this is an utterly fascinating book. Read it if you are at all interested in old maps, discovery of the world, human obstinacy, shameless liars and pranksters.

If We Were Villains

Author: L.M. Rio

First published: 2017

Pages: 432

Rating: ★★★★☆

This is one of those books everybody knows about so I feel no review is needed from me. You either enjoy it or you find it pretentious. I personally enjoyed it. Certain parallels with The Secret History are inevitable, but even then the book stands the comparison more than well.

Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident

Author: Donnie Eichar

First published: 2013

Pages: 288

Rating: ★★★★☆

Even though my curiosity was immense, I have abstained from reading anything about the recent discoveries and explanation of the Dyatlov Pass Incident precisely because I wanted to read this book first and judge it on its own merit. I am glad I did. (And I would advise anyone to do the same). Although some of the parts in which the author narrates his own personal journey and research may seem slow and even unnecessary, the rest of it is a terrifying, haunting and genuinely disturbing wild ride. I found myself almost reluctant to turn the next page in fear of what it would bring to the picture. I also have to acknowledge that the author really tries to introduce all of the possible theories that were available and suggest his own, trying to be as impartial as possible. In other words, he is not courting scandal, he just really wants to know the truth. Yet again this book proves that real life can top any fictional horror book. And now I´m off to read on what actually did happen.

The Haunting of Hill House

Edited by: Shirley Jackson

First published: 1959

Pages: 246

Rating: ★★★★☆

Fantastic. Creepy. Heart-breaking. Weird. And so, so beautifully written.

The Forest of Enchantments

Author: Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni

First published: 2019

Pages: 372

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

This is not a powerful feminist retelling of Ramayana. It is a simplified version of the great Hindu epic told from Sita´s point of view. Here and there an outcry over the injustices Sita suffers appears, but for the most part, the language the author uses feels impersonal and reduces what could have been a truly magnificent story full of contradicting emotions and passions into a bland fairytale. Even Sita´s arguably strongest, the most defining moment in the story - the trial by fire - is rushed, unexplained and simply "undercooked" if you pardon the expression. I am deeply disappointed. (Sidenote: I always found it curious how Ram - a literal God - is in a way the worst and most unlikeable character in the whole of Ramayana.)

The Fall of Gondolin

Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

First published: 2018

Pages: 304

Rating: ★★★★★

Every single sentence Tolkien has ever written sings. The dedication of Christopher Tolkien to his father´s legacy is nothing but awespiring. The illustrations by Alan Lee stunning and outworldly. These are the reasons why I am rating this much-welcomed addition to the Middle-Earth mythology so high.

Cinderella is Dead

Author:  Kalynn Bayron

First published: 2020

Pages: 389

Rating: ★★★☆☆

This was actually a lot of fun, once I stopped expecting something grand and subtle. A wonderfully original idea that is the basis for the story is worth notice and some of the action scenes are truly engaging. If you don´t mind being hit over the head with the injustices (though I wonder if the lack of subtlety was brilliant or the opposite of that still) heaped upon women in this world, and if you are not bothered by insta-love, this is a good book to spend an afternoon or two with.

Floriography: An Illustrated Guide to the Victorian Language of Flowers

Author: Jessica Roux

First published: 2020

Pages: 224

Rating: ★★★★★

Perfect coffee table book!

The Henna Artist

Author: Alka Joshi

First published: 2020

Pages: 366

Rating: ★★★☆☆

I enjoyed this book but... I have almost nothing to say? Somehow this is exactly the kind of book that is good.... but it is that "standard" kind of good. Like... sure. It was good. I have not had any super-strong feelings towards it.

Catherine House

Author: Elisabeth Thomas

First published: 2020

Pages: 320

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

It started with a promise, turned into a boring slog and fizzled out without anything resembling a satisfying climax. I may have enjoyed it more had it not been for other books centred around weird and creepy campuses (namely Vita Nostra and If We Were Villains) I have read this year, which were simply better in every way. I believe the author might win me over in the future, her writing was good and the premise itself interesting. Unfortunately what this whole thing misses are an actual plot and a finale. I did not feel scared or creeped out... I was just bored.

[kane-m-killer]

Here’s a small horror story draft

________________________________________

Has anyone seen Pete? He’s 25,6’1,black curly greasy hair,pimple face? Used to frequent this subreddit often? I wanted to ask you all if you have seen them cause I’m an old friend of his and I wanted to say if any of you saw him or have seen him.

Run away, Run far away.

No I’m not joking either,Or trying to paint him in a bad light. This guy is serious bad news, and if you won’t take my word for it. First off, good on you for not trusting a random Redditor. Allow me then to start from the beginning as to why the next time I see this man it will be in a morgue when we are both dead.

I met him at a A&A meeting. I was in bad shape when I met him, addicted to drinking at 21 and down on my luck. He was a new member we had to say hi to and he sat next to me once he introduced himself.

I can’t remember the details of the conversation but I know we talked about something boring like the weather maybe.

He was there for a few more sessions until he stopped coming.

I didn’t think much of it until one autumn night when I left the building after the meeting,7 weeks sober then mind you, he was there leaning against the building. It was like he was trying to seem cool but in actuality just looked dumb and a try hard.

But nevertheless I still went up and talked to him, I can’t tell you why but I guess it doesn’t matter now. We talked more and his slow monotonous voice gave an air of disturbed charm to me. I thought he was like one of those guys that are bland on the outside but fascinating on the inside. And strangely because of that we became friends.

Friends for 3 years for that matter. And through all that time he was a good friend, he offered his advice and gave me a shoulder to cry on when needed. It’s just that something about his behavior sometimes really should’ve told me he was trouble.

For example when me and him were at a bar being the sober friends at a party and he was flirting with a girl next to us, me being too tired to be a wingman I stayed quiet but listened to his conversation.

“So what are you doing tonight honey?” He started off with

“Nothing to do with you that’s for sure” she retorted and I held back a laugh.

“…You should shut the fuck up then before I take those hot lips of yours and cut them off.” He said with a voice that I haven’t heard him use ever. It was fucking creepy

“Excuse me?!” The lady said immediately getting up to leave

“I’ll be able to kiss your sexy lips all the time if I cut them off, you sure aren’t using them much if you're using them to talk shit.” He continued grabbing her arm. I was utterly shocked and disgusted with him and got up and punched him clean in the face. He reeled back and gave me the dirtiest look and yelled at me, we argued, screaming at each other for a good minute before we were kicked out the bar for disturbing the peace, he left in his car and I was there with no ride.

I was about to call an Uber when someone tapped my shoulder. It was the girl who Pete harassed, she wanted to thank you for defending her and asked if I needed a ride. We talked on the way to my house and I’ll cut off at this bit to just say Her name is Desiree and she’s now been my best friend for three years.

The reason I’m telling you this is because me and Desiree became close enough to move in together, and throughout that whole move from my mothers house (yes I know, cringe) I haven’t told Pete about her and me, in fact I don’t think I had a full conversation with him since the bar fight. And honestly I was fine with that.

I just wish it stayed that way.

It’s been a couple weeks since I fully moved in with Desiree and I was home alone while she worked the night shift. I was messing around on my phone when I felt eyes on me. Not the kind of eyes you feel from a worried mother or annoying friend but just eyes, cold unmoving eyes.

I got up from the couch and looked at the windows. Desiree had one of those studio apartments with the balcony window the size of the wall. I tried to stare into the blackness that was night outside but of course I saw nothing of anything or anyone. But the eyes still wouldn’t leave me. I looked everywhere in the house but no dice.

The eyes felt like it was amused at me failing to try and find its source. I decided it was just my mind messing with me and I just went to bed.

I fell asleep pretty easily after I calmed down and the eyes almost went away,until I woke up.

Now there’s this thing about humans that can detect if it’s life is in danger. I think my body activated because of that. Cause when I woke up I felt a weight at the side of the bed.

Someone was in the bed with me.

I didn’t dare move, I didn’t dare speak. Anything that could have indicated I was alive save for my breathing ceased. I tried to access the situation but a hard metal object touched my back, it felt like every nerve in my body prepared me for this moment but when the moment came I just froze. It’s such a pathetic thing to do but I couldn’t do anything other than freeze.

I felt the person scooch up to me pressing the knife closer at my back, to the point where I was drawing blood and the person’s chest was touching my back. I could feel their hot breath on my neck that night.

We stayed that way for what felt like hours. I think they were waiting for me to move or show that I was awake or something cause I stayed froze in that position, at that time I couldn’t even feel my body with how hard I was trying to keep it together.

The worst part about it was that they never spoke a word, but their eyes were unmistakable. They were the same eyes watching me from afar earlier now staring at the back of my neck waiting for me to mess up.

The front door soon opened with what I assume was Desiree coming home from work, the person in my bed slowly moved away and came off the bed. Their weight being so heavy I almost flew up when they got up.

While they opened the door out of my room I slowly reached for my phone on the desk. I heard him walking downstairs and typed in a number quickly.

Pretty soon I heard it. Desiree’s phone rings. She picks it up and her sleepy but joyful voice almost makes me cry of relief.

“Hey dude, what’s up? Did you go to sleep early?” She said, I can hear her smile as she puts down her things and opens the fridge. I can’t hear the person who was in her house.

“I’m fine, just wanted to say hi, and yeah…could you do me a favor and go outside real quick?” I said trying my best to not sound like I’m shaking as my body finally responds to moving as I snuck out of bed.

“Um,what? Listen man I’m too tired for any games rn.” She said sounding a little annoyed. I don’t blame her.

“Just, go outside like right now.” I hear a creak of wood on her end of the line “please.”

I raised a glass cup high above my head, the plan came to me during the call as I was straining to listen for the intruder. I smashed the glass against the wall and I heard it double on the phone.

“Now!” I screamed into the phone before hanging up and jumping out the window of my room, her apartment was thankfully on the second floor to the way down wasn’t deadly. But concrete on bare skin hurted like a bitch.

I heard a scream from the window and my heart dropped, but the next thing I saw made my whole body stop again. The intruder was looking at me recon the window I dropped from.

And it was Pete.

Me and Pete stared at each other for what felt like eternity, his dark eyes and pimple faced morphed by the dark room into something hideous to look at. I heard the building door open and out came Desiree with blood coming from her arm.

We both ran away with him close behind. It hurt to move after being still for so long but I had to keep running. We managed to lose him in traffic and alleys and after thirty minutes found a police station. We came in scared and with bloody bare feet, we told them everything and we stayed there for the rest of the night.

Some police went back to the apartment and by a stroke of luck found him waiting for us in Desiree’s room doing stuff that I won’t repeat here. He was arrested for attempted murder and breaking and entering. I later found out he was outside watching me through the window via a ladder. So that would explain the eyes.

But something happened in court and he was let go due to good lawyers from his family. He’s out free and I haven’t seen him since

So that’s why I ask, have you seen Pete? I don’t know if he’s moved to another country or is still around here. He could be anywhere and I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea where to look.

Remember what he looks like. 25,6’1,black hair and pimple face. Don’t trust anything he says to you and just run.

And watch the people you meet in a AA meeting

[radramblog]

Full-Art Lands Pt.2

Hello internet persons, this is Rad from 2/9/21 speaking. I am tired from an early early shift at work, and also just got the first vaccine dose, so I’m going to be posting these words written on Monday when I anticipated exactly this level of exhaustion. This might defeat the purpose of “a blog post a day”, but its hardly the first time I’ve done it and also I think I have a pretty solid excuse.

Anyway. This is a continuation of a discussion of every Full-Art Basic Land set in Magic: The Gathering, starting now with Modern Horizons. It counts!

Modern Horizons

Kind of cheating, because technically the Snow-Covered Lands are different cards, but unless you’re building around them (or a card like Extraplanar Lens) then they’re functionally pretty much the same. These are also literally the only Full-Art Snows, so if you’re running those then this is basically your only pimp option.

Ultimately these are kind of held back by the fact that, well, everything has to be blanketed in snow. There’s some interesting blues going along with the Plains and Mountain, and there’s some fun sky colours, but the remainder is left a little bland.

I currently believe these are worth investing in, for what it’s worth. Both Full-Art Lands and Snow Basics always go up eventually, slowly, over time, and these are still less than a dollar each for now.

 Secret Lair: Artist Series: Seb McKinnon

This one is kind of a special case, because there’s just a Swamp. And there are technically two of them, but one is just an older version of the art. So I wasn’t sure whether or not to count these.

Because of these limitations, it’s hard to recommend these unless you have a lot of money and also a mono-black deck. They look great, matching Seb’s excellent style from the other cards in the drop, but it’s a bit of an awkward one. That said, I just have these sitting around, seeing as I got this drop just for the Damnation, so…might as well, I guess?

 Theros: Beyond Death

Much like Amonkhet/Hour of Devastation, this set has one full-art mixed in with several regular basics. The difference is that these are representative of Nyx, the world of Theros’s gods, with its symbolic and nebulaic art.

There’s no real getting over the part where these just look like the Basic Energy cards from the Pokemon Trading Card Game. Considering WoTC’s hand in designing that game, and that the two are equivalent because, well, WotC designed them that way, it’s a fair comparison. But I don’t think this is why these ones aren’t as good as other full-arts. I have two main issues with these lands, and the first is that, well, there’s no land on them. For a set themed around a specific plane, one would expect that plane to be represented in the art, and Nyx does have actual landscapes on it. I get the space-themed design, but they could have been up in the sky above an actual Mountain or whatnot.

The other is the missed opportunity of these being Nebulae. That’s a fine enough design choice, though the symbology is a bit hammered in, but like. In a set based on Ancient Greece and its astronomical focus, with Gods that look like and are represented by constellations, with a mechanic called Constellation, they probably should have just been constellations. It would have made for a more subtle, less, well, Pokemon look, as well.

 Unsanctioned

New Un-Set, new basics. These ones are kind of a hybrid between the Unglued and Unstable ones, with that golden frame and almost borderless design. I’m actually not sure how I feel about these, since while the frame looks nice, it’s also kind of pointless, and the texturing on the mana symbols is a little weird. I don’t like how smooth and reflective they are.

The art is at least still excellent. Not John Avon, but Adam Paquette does a great job distinguishing himself, less realistic but still believable places that feel fantasy. I actually feel like Unsanctioned was overall a miss, especially since each box came with like 2 of each of these basics, but that’s not something I’m holding against them.

 Secret Lair: The Godzilla Lands

Secret Lair has been an opportunity for WotC’s designers to experiment a lot with card frames, though this set of basics doesn’t quite represent that. I’m not sure how well this one did, to be honest, though they did make future basic-only SLs, so fair enough I guess.

So, do you like Godzilla? Because he’s on all of these, along with some other Kaiju from the greater series canon. It’s kind of a little distracting, because the landscapes are otherwise gorgeous. Ironically, though, Godzilla himself is kind of being a scale-reptile in these pieces, giving a sense for just how big that mountain is, or how far away the “camera” is from the ground.

The only Island I see in that Island is Godzilla himself, though.

 Double Masters

These are just a set of reprints from Unhinged and Battle for Zendikar, but in a more borderless style. I’m honestly not sure how I feel about the Unhinged arts being blown up like this. But this is a reprint set, and these are honestly kind of boring, so eh.

 Zendikar Rising

Another Zendikar more lands etc. etc. you get the idea. Like the title suggests, this iteration of the plane has a lot of vertical exploration in its flavour, and the new basics reflect this. Especially  in the Plains, Islands, and Mountains, that sense of adventure and traversal is back from the first Zendikar set.

Interestingly, this one doesn’t have any reprinted arts, unlike Battle for Zendikar, even though there’s only 3 of each land here. There’s probably something to be said about distancing this set from BFZ- that set faced a fair bit of backlash, and it is thematically very different from ZNR. There’s also the conspicuous absence of the Hedrons, apparently having been replaced in art and in flavour by the Skyclaves. No, I still don’t know what those actually are supposed to be.

At the end of the day, these cards do end up making Zendikar feel like it’s lost its edge a little. They’re just a bit too bright and friendly for my liking, even with the inclement conditions in some of the images. I think it literally just might be the clear, bright skies in this one.

 Secret Lair: The Unfathomable Crushing Brutality of Basic Lands

Yeah these are about as edgy as the name suggests. Monochromatic and striking, this set of basic’s iconography is much more evocative than literal, the mood of the colours in their themes, captured largely without them.

It does greatly amuse me that literally all of these arts contains skulls. Talk about gothic. I like these a lot better than the Theros: Beyond Death lands, despite the similarities- Particularly, that the mana symbols aren’t literally just the standard ones- arguably the Island is, but it at least is in the form of negative space.

I can’t get over how thematic these are. Plains embodies community with its weapons and runes and roots, and the human face on the Sun icon. Island represents the vastness of knowledge with its endless waters and starred skies. Swamp is death, skeletons mired in the depths of the surroundings. Mountain is fire, bold and unflinching, while Forest’s gnarled branches running through the skull shows the unflinching nature of, well, nature. They’re all so utterly sick.

 Innistrad: Midnight Hunt

The most recent addition to this list, and one you actually can’t get yet. I think the frames on these being so thin is excellent, since it means they aren’t taking away from the spectacle of the art- not to mention the monochrome of the border and art.

These pieces are magnificent gothic landscapes, the kind you’d expect to see illustrated on the inside cover of Frankenstein or a Lovecraft story. Each and every one of them is ominous in its own special way, with the Swamp that’s a ruined river town to the rugged cliffside path of (presumably) Geier Reach. And the Island with the waves crashing across the cliffs is utterly gorgeous.

Obviously we haven’t seen these in paper quite yet. And the monochrome may make it difficult to tell them apart at a glance. But these are sacrifices I am willing to make for the sake of style.

This is the sum total of all the FABs. For now. Something I didn’t quite realise when writing this was the sheer number of options for this kind of pimping, and how much they’ve ramped up in production over the last few years. Much like with the increase in cards in general, I suppose, as well as premium product versions like the Secret Lairs. I would be genuinely shocked if the game ever exclusively started using Full-Arts, but I’d also not be surprised if we saw them yearly at the longest. 

Either way, I’m sticking with my BfZ lands, because those are the ones I already have!

[secret-engima]

So - in the female!Ardyn 'Taur 'verse, how does the romantic relationship between Cor and Ardyn develop? (Nox, meanwhile, is having - slight hysterics in the background, because The Immortal and the (formerly) literally Immortal Accursed? It's like a bad joke). And, for that matter - how does everyone *else* react to that relationship? (Regis is. Not sure how to feel. On the one hand, Cor is going to be *literally his brother*, squee! On the other, Cor is *dating his sister*.)

*cackles evilly* oh THAT’S easy-

They start dating out of Pure Spite.

See, Cor has been doing everything he can to get out of formal events WHENEVER he can for years because he’s the Marshal and the Immortal and all the widows and older bachelorettes seem to think they can win him over with enough makeup, perfume, primping of their fur, and fluttering of their eyelashes and Cor HATES IT. Always has. Regis has told him that if he actually GOT A DATE with someone maybe they’d back off, to which Aulea just rolls her eyes and says that they’d turn into sharks and shred whatever poor soul Cor tried to take as a plus one. Cor agrees, he’d have to find a Plus One that was even more deadly in the political and verbal arena, as well as one of high enough status to survive the gossip, and frankly it’s not worth the effort to look for such a wonder woman.

Then Ardyn happens. Then Ardyn is revealed as female in private, and after much discussion agrees to be revealed as female in public as well and the bachelors start calling. Cor watches for like- a year at least, probably closer to two as Ardyn deals with the same issues he does only in male form, as she tears them apart with a smile and leaves them thinking they’ve been complimented and not mocked to death. He watches, and knows that Ardyn is watching him too.

Then one day, on the cusp of YET ANOTHER Gala (okay there aren’t that many but they ARE annoying and Cor dreads each and every one with a passion), he comes home to find Ardyn IN HIS APARTMENT, lazing on his couch, all four paws in the air, and staring at the ceiling as she plays with her hat. “How did you get in here?” Cor scowls.

“Picked the window lock and opened it enough to shove my knife through, then I warped.” She says casually like that isn’t the most impressive form of warping there is, to be able to slide through a space that her mind should have told her was impossible to fit through and thus prevented the warp. Before he can demand she leave, she rolls off the couch and lands on her belly and paws on the floor like she’s the felinedaetaur and not him, “Court me,” she says with a manic gleam in her eyes, so manic her blue eyes are now bright gold.

Cor wonders if Regis will forgive him if he ends up drawing a sword on the king’s half-sister because this is like all of his worst nightmares in one, minus Gilgamesh being there, “No.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not interested.” He manages past stiff lips.

Ardyn hisses, low and feral, tail lashing in annoyance and wings mantling there on the floor before she settles with bland, “I’m not either, obviously. Come now, Immortal,” he growls at the hated nickname, “I thought you were the smart one of my brother’s troupe. The Gala is three days from now and we both know what that will mean, you’ll spend all evening choking on rote niceties to all the female nobles you can’t insult without it reflecting on your king and I will spend all evening wasting time verbally shredding all the male idiots who come with dreams of being a prince instead of letting me drink my fancy wine in peace.”

Cor senses one of Ardyn’s mad schemes on the horizon. Unlike Clarus and Titus, this actually makes him relax. Ardyn’s schemes are usually brilliant in a brutally unorthodox way, and if she has a plan to get them out of the Gala... “So?”

“So,” she parrots as she frisbees her hat to him, making him catch it on instinct, “court me, and we’ll have the perfect excuse to tell each other’s crowd of respective blithering stalkers to go skin themselves.” Cor’s eyebrows shoot up as he finally lets himself stalk into the living room, tail swishing in thought as Ardyn grins, her fangs glinting in the light, “Think about it,” she purrs low and seductively, tail waggling like she’s making a proposition and not plotting to help him out of all his propositions, “No woman will have a prayer of competing with me in status or prestige, I’m the king’s sister, a dragontaur and former Chancellor of an empire. At least half of them will leave you alone knowing they have no chance and the other half will be easy for me to scare off.”

Cor’s mind begins working overtime as he unthinkingly settles on the carpet in front of her, paws tucking under his chest as he crosses his arms, “And your suitors will thin enormously as well rather than compete with me, the King’s favored and Marshal of the Crownsguard.” And the famed Immortal, he doesn’t say, because he hates that nickname with a passion.

Ardyn’s grin grows bigger, “Exactly,” she rumbles seductively, looking far less like a mortal Taur and fare more like a tackily dressed succubus trying to talk him into selling his soul for a night’s pleasure, “So? What do you say? Want to give all of Lucian high society a nice heart attack?”

Cor feels his lips twitch and passes her ugly old hat back to her, a deal as good as made in blood, “We’ll need to match clothes and be seen entering the Gala together,” He says after scrounging in his brain for all the things Regis did to announce his courtship with Aulea. He paused, then held up a finger and padded off to his room. A few minutes digging through his chest of knickknacks and junk found on missions and he returns with a glittering tail-band of gold, engraved with lions and with sapphires for eyes. A prize found when wandering through old ruins, he’d only kept it out of boredom. Ardyn smiles viciously as she accepts the “courting gift” and slides it onto her tail, then pulls a shimmering ebony foreleg bracelet out of her armiger, engraved with the symbol of Lucis and with rubies set in the eye socket and outline of the skull. Cor raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t question where it came from, just slides it on to make sure it fits. It does, perfectly, and he suspects she had it commissioned for just this scheme.

He expects the tailors to throw a fit over having to provide matching outfits on such short notice and in secret, but instead they start crying for joy (“No checker patters or plaids!” one sobs as he carefully cuts out the silk pattern, “Only three layers!” wails another for joy as he alternates between taking a bemused Ardyn’s measurements and dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief).

They don’t tell anyone else in the Citadel, and Cor just tells Regis and Clarus that he’ll be a bit late for the Gala (Regis eyes him suspiciously, like he thinks Cor is going to play hooky, but Cor just blinks solemnly and Regis lets him go with a sigh).

The utterly dead, stunned, horrified silence that falls over the Gala when the frazzled goattaur herald announces, “The Marshal Cor Leonis and the Princess Ardyn Izunia Caelum.” and everyone watches as they stalk slowly, languidly down the stairs in matching finery, Ardyn’s short hair done up with tasteful gold ornaments, hat nowhere in sight, the golden lion-engraved band on her tail glinting like an executioner’s freshly sharpened axe while Cor’s foreleg band of black and rubies stands out sharply against his golden fur.

They don’t have to announce a thing or say a word. Everyone present knows what this means. To bear each other’s colors and symbols, to arrive openly together, Ardyn’s arm linked delicately through Cor’s, to be wearing matching attire-.

Cor decides instantly that this entire charade is worth it when he sees several of his more annoying stalkers straight up faint and Clarus choking on his wine while Regis gapes.

 (Of course, after gloriously and shamelessly fake-dating for three months, Ardyn gets bored and asks Cor out to coffee somewhere public, to really sell the whole courting thing. After that, Cor, as thank you for the help against all the harpies in his life, drags a willing Ardyn off on a prolonged mission out in the wilds where there are no people and no rules, just him and Ardyn hiking through the wilds, spying on the Nifs (blowing up the base like Regis expressly told them not to do without backup) and pushing each other into the nearest body of water when one or the other gets too cheeky/sarcastic and-

You can see where it spirals from there. XD. Nox is losing his mind a little because his Uncle and his Aunt are DATING. But also yay? They’re dating? Regis is a Crisis because how do you Shovel Talk Cor? You can’t! And he can’t Shovel Talk Ardyn either because that’s his sister dating the lion Regis raised as a little brother figure and oh no think of what those two will get up to Clarus. Think of the chaos. Aulea, literally the only person other than Nox and Titus to realize this is fake dating, is very gleeful in carefully nudging them into REAL dating with Titus’s help. By the time Cor and Ardyn realize the trap it’s too late).

[nerianasims]

Billboard #1s 1979

Under the cut.

I discuss Michael Jackson’s life and actions a little bit underneath here. So be warned if that’s something that will upset you.

The Bee Gees -- "Too Much Heaven" -- January 6, 1979

Uugh. When The Bee Gees weren't releasing bad, bloodless, falsetto disco, they were releasing bad, bloodless, falsetto lite "rock." Also the lyrics are about how love is soooo hard to get, so they're special since they have love, and yuck. Nonsense and glop.

Rod Stewart -- "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" -- February 10, 1979

I laughed out loud when I saw this next on the list. People can't have taken it seriously in 1979, right? It was seen like "I'm Too Sexy", yes? Even though Rod Stewart was a "serious" singer -- come on, this is a ridiculous song. It isn't about the narrator; it's about two people meeting on a dance floor and then going to have what's probably a one-night stand. But when Rod Stewart sings the chorus, it sounds like it's about him. It's a highly unsexy and very silly song.

Gloria Gaynor -- "I Will Survive" -- March 10, 1979

The joy I feel listening to this song. It's the best disco song. The bright piano flourish opens to Gaynor's amazing voice and phenomenal singing ability. She sells her anger at the guy who's "back to bother" her, along with the assertion that she's now totally confident and is gonna do great without him, will all her life to live and all her love to give. The lyrics are great, which is incredibly rare for any dance song. The music is great. And Gaynor is perfect. You can belt it in the car and it drives people to the dance floor. Just an amazing, incredible song.

The Bee Gees -- "Tragedy" -- March 24, 1979

The real tragedy is that The Bee Gees shat up disco. What could it have been if not for their influence? There were disco singers and groups who escaped it, but Barry Gibb and Friends' clogging of the charts kept out so many worthy acts. Lots of synth on this song, and synth can be really cool (I'm a diehard fan of The Alan Parsons Project), but the Bee Gees made it boring and turgid. Then that damned falsetto. I don't care about the lyrics, I just want to not hear the Bee Gees again ever.

The Doobie Brothers -- "What A Fool Believes" -- April 14, 1979

The guy the song is about thinks he's going to get an ex back because she was nice when he met her again. He's a fool, and "no wise man has the power to reason away." The music's good, too, a sort of mild rock. "Yacht rock" I suppose. The sentiment is kinda country music though. Good song, anyway.

Amii Stewart -- "Knock on Wood" -- April 21, 1979

What is that in the background? A synth sound, obviously, but it sounds like -- a washboard? I have no idea, but it's annoying. This is a cover of an older soul song by Eddie Floyd that's pretty good, but they wreck it here. The amount of gunk clogging it up is painful. Also Amii Stewart doesn't modulate at all, her voice is a constant blare. Headache-inducing.

Blondie -- "Heart of Glass" -- April 28, 1979

The 80s are coming. Blondie does interesting things with synth here, the beat's irresistible, Debbie Harry's voice is unique, and the lyrics are about an ended relationship that was "a pain in the ass." Not some huge broken-hearted thing, despite the "heart of glass" lyric. Just... done, that didn't work, moving on. Not that the lyrics particularly matter here. It's all about the interesting, different-sounding music.

Peaches & Herb -- "Reunited" -- May 5, 1979

If synth can sound more synthetic than usual, that's how this song begins. It's about a couple getting back together, but it doesn't sound like they were ever in a lot of pain or that they're really excited now. There's some neat guitar stuff. It could be worse. But mostly it's bland.

Donna Summer -- "Hot Stuff" -- June 2, 1979

It's a disco song, but with a lot more rock in it than disco usually has. Maybe that's why it's survived so much better than most disco. The narrator wants one of her lovers (of whom she obviously has many) to answer the phone so that she can get laid. It's the ballad of Romance Sims. It's fun.

Bee Gees -- "Love You Inside Out" -- June 9, 1979

Well, ew. This guy's whining that the woman he loves has too many lovers but he's the one who will "love you inside out," whatever the hell that means. It sounds like a serial killer. She needs to dump him, and also probably move and change her name. And, of course, there's Barry Gibb's horrible orchestration and falsetto.

Anita Ward -- "Ring My Bell" -- June 30, 1979

Disco, of course. He's been gone for a while and she's singing to him "you can ring my bell." So, they're gonna celebrate his homecoming with lots of sex. The lines "You can ring my bell, ring my bell/ (Ring my bell/ ding-dong-ding)" repeat a couple hundred times. The background synth sounds are painfully repetitive. Like something on The Prisoner used to brainwash people. And Anita Ward sings in a Betty Boop-ish sort of childish voice that I also find annoying. It's not Bee Gees bad, but it's bad.

Donna Summer -- "Bad Girls" -- July 14, 1979

"Bad girls" are not the same as "sad girls." Sorry, this song might be fine or even good, but that one line has always bugged me way too much. So does the police whistle.

Chic -- "Good Times" -- August 18, 1979

Disco about how "happy days are here again" for now. The lyrics are obviously pretty shallow, but at least there is a line about how it won't last forever. That's not my problem anyway. My problem is that the chorus bores me, musically. Like, it hurts. There are two notes I think? And the beat is the same throughout. I always sort of ignored this song before, but on actively trying to listen to it, I have started to hate it. It doesn't interact well with my brain chemistry.

The Knack -- "My Sharona" -- August 25, 1979

This became a hit again when Reality Bites came out. So I danced in a convenience store to it my freshman year of college. We were "of the younger kind" then, considering I was 17. That made me like the song better -- it was about me! Rock isn't supposed to be clean, and you're really not supposed to take it as advice. The riff is amazing, and I love this song.

Robert John -- "Sad Eyes" -- October 6, 1979

I've never heard this song before. The music box sounding intro lasts a while and lulls you into complacency before the horrible falsetto kicks in. Not only extremely 70s white man falsetto, but an entitled brat of a man breaking up with a woman and being put out that she's looking at him with "sad eyes." Incredibly bad in an incredibly 70s way. I can see why I've never heard this song before. It's absolutely terrible.

Michael Jackson -- "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" -- October 13, 1979

Sigh. All right, now that he's an adult, gotta tackle Michael Jackson. He was a rampant and, as far as we know, unrepentant child molester. He destroyed people in the most personal way possible short of actual murder. (Phil Spector is still worse.) He was murdered through at least extreme malpractice by his doctor. He was forced into stardom as a child himself. And he was a huge, massive, incredibly gigantic star, even after he became a punchline. I was never a big fan, but like most children of the 80s, I loved some of his songs and spent a lot of time doing the moonwalk, or as close as I could get. I feel an immense amount of pity for him, along with utterly despising him, along with admiring his talent, along with being sickened by the fact that Hollywood and the music industry knew and no one did anything about what he was doing. All in all, I end up at this place: Child stardom must end.

Okay, now for the music. This song takes forever to actually start. Also I have actually never heard it before today. Probably because it's falsetto. Jackson's falsetto is obviously far superior to Barry Gibb's, but it's still falsetto the whole song. The riff is great once it starts, and everything about the music should be good -- but, falsetto. The whole time, as far as I can tell. I can't listen to all of it. Whose idea was it that falsetto should ever be anything other than an occasional few bars? Was it Frankie Valli? I'm gonna blame Frankie Valli.

Herb Alpert -- "Rise" -- October 20, 1979

It's a jazz-funk instrumental and it's pretty good. Piano, guitar, trumpet, some kind of glittering thing -- xylophone? Bells? The people laughing like it's a laid-back party are annoying, but not enough to wreck the song. If this doesn't play on every cruise ship ever, they're missing a trick.

M -- "Pop Music" -- November 3, 1979

I saw the title, and thought I didn't know the song. Then I heard the first bars of the song and went, "OH this one." It's New Wave. I love a lot of New Wave, but this one's on the purposefully shallow end, rather than the Eurythmics end. The lyrics are nonsense, but the beat is pretty irresistable. Which makes it a dance song, whatever its intent. One of the lines is, "Dance in the supermarket," so it probably was intended to be danced to. In any case, I find it pretty forgettable, but fine.

The Eagles -- "Heartache Tonight" -- November 10, 1979

I've heard this song before, but not often. I'm not sure if it's about sex before a breakup or about cheating. Don Henley does not have Elvis' voice, though he seems to be trying to reach that level. Real power is required for the chorus, and Henley lacks it. If this were sung by Freddie Mercury, we'd have something. Queen also would have brought more musical interest generally. But as-is, it doesn't work for me.

The Commodores' -- "Still" -- November 17, 1979

Lionel Richie was still the frontman/ writer for The Commodores here. Should I explore why I can't stand Lionel Richie's music? I'd have to listen to it more to fully understand. It always sounds totally insincere to me. The songs themselves are too slow. This one doesn't have a bassline. It's so polished and gloopy. And in this song, that pause between "I love you" and "still" is both highly predictable and entirely phony. I managed to listen to the entire song, and I rolled my eyes throughout, but especially at that last whispered "still." Oh he's just so sad puh-leaze. Crying his way to the bank.

Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer -- "No More Tears" -- November 24, 1979

I hate Barbra Streisand's singing and like Donna Summer's. I wish this were just Donna Summer. If it were, I'd probably like the song. It's slow for almost 2 minutes, then becomes disco. Streisand isn't able to do as much self-loving in a fast dance song, but it's still there. I tried to find a version with just Donna Summer and failed. So, I dunno, the fact that I can actually listen to the whole thing makes me think it's the most tolerable song with Barbra Streisand in existence. But it would have been so much better without her.

Styx -- "Babe" -- December 8, 1979

Styx was prog rock, but watered-down, simplified prog-rock. Lite prog rock, as weird as that is. But they still had that massive theatricality of prog rock, which I like, and they were great for places like Pine Knob. Outside of those massive arenas, they don't work for me. Dennis DeYoung, the writer and singer of this song, belts the whole way through. Yeah, he hits the notes, but he doesn't seem to realize you're supposed to sometimes modulate, even on a power ballad. Meh.

Rupert Holmes -- "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)" -- December 22, 1979

If you take this song seriously, you're likely to hate it. It ain't that deep. It's a goofy song about a goofy thing -- both he and his wife are bored and want to cheat, so they write personal ads, and lo, they answer each other's personals! Though how that happens when they're the blandest Reaganite yuppies ever, I'm not sure. Maybe it's because they're both full of themselves ("if you have half a brain.") I enjoy this song because it is catchy, silly, and totally non-serious. I do not like pina coladas, btw.

BEST OF 1979: "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor. WORST OF 1979: "Love You Inside Out" by the Bee Gees

[strechanadi]

Swan Lake Wolfgang/Siegfried overthinking no. I-refuse-to-count-how-many-times-this-stupid-ballet-and-this-even-more-stupid-characters-did-not-let-me-sleep!

Dear @spinmelikeyoumeanit ... this is yet again yours and yours fault only.

(And yes, once I start I physically cannot stop myself, which leads to... err. THIS!)

(I sincerely apologize. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Truly.)

Well, I promised, didn’t I? And it literally took me just about a lifetime! (On the other hand – academic life happened. Don’t do postgrad, kids, it’s just not worth it…) (Or maybe just dont try to write a dissertation in a MONTH! FFS!)

  One would think I would be over it. That after so many Swan Lakes nothing would have the ability to shake me. That after so many sleepless nights spent thinking over every little think here and there, I would know almost everything, therefore would be prepared for anything thrown at me. And yet here we are! Once again, blown away by Swan Lake of all ballets. I mean… could there be anything more cliché?

However, I already made peace with one thing (and you should probably too, saves lives and all that) and that’s the genius of Nureyev, of his Swan Lake and of the duality of Wolfgang/Rothbart.

As many of you remember, I’m sure (and slightly horrified), even recording of Nureyev’s SL is more than able to put me out of service, to prevent me from living what even the tiniest group of people would call a normal life. Or something. So, what the hell was I thinking when buying the ticket to see the ballet in question live, I have literally no idea. (Well. I have, actually. He may even have a name…) But yes, I did saw Swan Lake with POB live on stage. From the first fucking row, because that’s how extra I have to be. (Yes, my diet consists solely of bread and water since… seems like forever now.) I saw it, I died and that’s about it. However, my being dead is not something anyone would be particularly interested in, so let’s just move to the only thing you (the whole lot of exactly one person) are here for.

 I did write a review on said performance. And usually I’m trying to translate them (even though I’m not exactly sure why, because it causes me almost physical pain and at the end I feel endlessly stupid, since I have to search every second word in dictionary, which is slightly pathetic, also I love my Czech sentences too much and with my pitiful knowledge of English I simply cannot make them justice, so they look utterly weird in the end and they deserve better than that), however unlike with my first POB SL review 3 years back this time I’ve decided to just don’t give a shit and dive into the story head first consequences be damned, so I think with writing this thing here I would have everything important covered (i.e. no need for the actual review) (the first half was basically just me showing off my endless knowledge on SL music score, which is plain boring, let’s be real, plus I wrote all that in my first review).

/AN - This is actually longer than the review itself. I think I feel a little bit sick…/

So. Right. Swan Lake.

I’m not gonna pretend there’s anyone else in whom I am more interested than Siegfried. And it’s not just because Nureyev made him a main character of the story. It’s because it makes sense. Who is on stage from start to finish? Through whose eyes we are watching the whole story? We should be able to sympathize with Siegfried, we should be able to see his point, to understand him, to get what he’s doing and why – sort of at least. And that’s probably why I am so annoyed with traditional SLs where it mostly looks like the choreographers/dancers/ballet masters/whoever don’t even try and go with some bland hero, because whatever, we are all waiting for the 2nd act and the Swan anyway.

So, it’s clear I love Nureyev’s story with passion (you wouldn’t tell, would you!) and the moment the curtain raises I’m drawn to Siegfried no matter who’s the dancer. And, OK, if it’s Mathieu Ganio, I’m kind of helpless, I admit (it would be cute, I guess, were I not be way over 13 yo).

I will try to stay as reasonable as I could and not to embarrass myself. Too much. So I would not write about the stupid little things that nobody in their right mind would (or could!) notice (or at least not at the first sight), because, dear god, literally no one gives a damn about the way his fingers twitched during his Prologue‘s nightmare in perfect synchrony with the music and action on stage… Can I get to the point?! Preferably on this day!

  Normal person would be probably unable to talk about Siegfried without Odette/Odile. But I think we have already established I’m by no means a normal person. So, I am not able to talk about Siegfried without Wolfgang. (Yes, we are finally getting somewhere!)

I love their relationship in any shape and form and I would gladly watch every single cast and every possible combination of dancers in those two roles as I’m sure each time I would get something new (you cannot stop my brain, believe me, I tried). There was the oddly depending, blurred, yet intense José/Karl take. The terrifyingly creepy, what-the-fuck-happened-or-is-still-happening-behind-the-close-doors Mathieu/Francois one (that still makes my hair stand whenever I think about it, because… holy shit, that one moment between 1st and 2nd act!). The clueless puppy/slightly perverted, obsessed mastermind vibes from Germain/Francois. So what about Mathieu/Jérémy this time, hm?

  /AN – I’m gonna probably end up mixing dancers‘ names with their characters‘, so… Yeah. I have no excuses, it’s just going to happen anyway, no matter how hard I would try to prevent it./

  It was clear from the very first moment, Siegfried was much more mature this time, much more the young adult than barely 18yo adolescent. He looked reasonably confident, sure of himself, a true aristocrat, a crown prince ready to be a king (almost to the point where I was thinking – oh, where’s my lost, Asperger’s child? I want my lost, Asperger’s child! Spoiler alert – I got my lost, Asperger’s child eventually, do not worry. Just wait for it). However, watching him during the opening dance scene it was becoming more and more clear everything’s not so smooth as it may seem. He grew impatient, the whole situation slowly but surely becoming unbearable, and he was fighting against it with all he had, trying to stay calm, trying to play the role he was expecting to, his nervous, involuntary fingers tapping against his throne the only thing out of place. But there was always Wolfgang for him in those moments. Wolfgang, who was the constant, never-changing presence. Wolfgang, who could be standing on the other side of the room and the connection between him and his prince almost palpable, magnetic, electrifying. Always there. Always sure.

They look like best friends, no matter their different social status. Wolfgang casually showing Siegfried one girl or another (funny how he didn’t need to bring Siegfried’s attention to men, since he was happily watching them on his own accord), whispering something to his ear (A court rumour? An inside joke? A reassurance to keep Siegfried in his right mind?), hand casually on his shoulder. When they were walking together, Wolfgang was positively hugging Siegfried with his arm around prince’s shoulders. And then you saw him standing side stage, watching Siegfried being crowned, watching him dance, watching his inner struggle started by queen’s mention of marriage, watching him trying to act all casual and „oh, it’s nothing, I’m all right“ while knowing his autism and insecurities and all the good stuff is kicking, trying to break free and took over his mind and soul again. Because Siegfried may be more in charge now, but once autistic, always autistic… The mental issues were there. Waiting. As well as Wolfgang. Watching, waiting, calculating, manipulating without anybody knowing, using the Machiavellianism to the point.

And I wanted to scream, because hell, Siegfried, you look like a reasonable, mature human being. You are not the lost child with puppy eyes, you have to know something’s off! Tell me, what do you know! But then they were together and it was painfully clear he simply believed they were at the same page, he had no reason not to think so, they were in this together. Take the moment at the end of the „dance lesson.“ José himself leant towards Karl, believing him implicitly, automatically, without question and on top of that he actually looked him in the eye, and there was the brilliant moment where Karl looked away like – “oh no, stop, this is too much, that’s not right” and also “I’m not affected by this at all.” Francois just grabbed Mathieu’s arm and pulled. The gesture strong, harsh, leaving no doubts and literally no space between the two of them, because “oh no no, my prince, you have no personal space, no free will, I am the one who will tell you what to do, I am the one in charge, don’t forget that, I certainly not let you forget, ever.” With Mathieu and Jérémy the movement towards each other was mutual. Mathieu leaned back, Jérémy went slightly forward whispering into his ear.

However just a few seconds earlier, during the actual dance lesson, was a moment that couldn’t be more out of the realm of things OK even if it tried. I remember someone did something similar in one of the older videos I saw through the years of my healthy social life, I, however, do not remember it being quite like this time. I’m talking about the moment nearly at the end with Siegfried kneeling on the floor with Wolfgang walking around him. Some Wolfgangs simply put their hand on prince’s shoulder and squeeze, some let their hand stay there for a bit (too) long, some doesn’t touch Siegfried at all for one reason or another. And then came Jérémy. He did touch Mathieu’s shoulder. Let his hand there. Heavy, grounding. And then, slowly, intentionally, almost proprietary traced his chest from one collar bone to the other. Touching the bare skin. Not in some delicate, subtle, almost-not-there motion with fingertips barely touching. This was open. Possessive. Claiming. I inhaled so sharply people on the balcony must have heard it. I almost gave myself a brain concussion. Or got high on oxygen overdose. Or something. Being at home alone (or maybe even with my family around) I would be screaming myself hoarse and/or swearing profusely. But since I was sitting in a theatre with 2,5 thousands other people completely clueless of my inner battle, I had to… just keep breathing and acting cool. Not that I was particularly successful or anything.

How the 1st Act was going, it was more and more clear Siegfried depended on Wolfgang. And what was even more painful, it was his own decision. Surely, he was manipulated into it to some extent and at some point, but with this prince I believe if one asked him, he would say he believes Wolfgang. “Because he’s a friend. Because he’s helping. He’s good. Stop asking stupid questions, I’m not an idiot!” You had to admit this Wolfgang did a fucking good job without actually showing it (and showing off, looking at you, Francois). Because at the end of Act 1 all he had to do to stop Siegfried from following the running boys was turn his head. He didn’t step to stay in his way, he didn’t cross his arms or shake his head disapprovingly. He just stood there, then looked slightly over his shoulder and Siegfried stopped. Like that. And then, just before he was about to start his andante sostenuto variation (during which I most definitely died, because there was simply no other option, since this monster of a man, while doing his manege of jetés entrelacé, decided to turn the palm of his front arm up to make the landing pose in arabesque a cry, with his arm desperately reaching towards something, to fill every fucking detail of his movement with intention and meaning and who the hell asked this from you?! I can scarcely cope even while you are just dancing and feeling the music in ways that are too close to mine, could you please tell me, why you had to even do THIS to me?! Am I not dead enough?), he looked back at Wolfgang. Like if I could forget about their connection…!

But what was between the two of them exactly? I don’t have a clue. I know what I see in José/Karl interpretation. I know how I understand Mathieu/Francois relationship (because I am a bad person, my mind is poisoned and my brain is sick!). But Mathieu/Jérémy? There’s so much going on but I for the love of all that is holy cannot put a finger on it. (And that’s probably one of the reasons I almost went to the stage door to tell them I love them. I didn’t. I am an adult. I do not fangirl. I just go home and deal with all the feelings like the emotionally repressed person I am. I would make an excellent posh Englishman.) Let’s just say it was for the first time that Wolfgang was taller than Siegfried. Significantly taller. So whenever Siegfried wanted to looked him in the eyes, he had to look UP. And this stupid, tiny, little detail made me feel so many things, it’s not even funny anymore (which falsely indicated it WAS funny once, which most definitely was NOT). But just imagine the Siegfried/Wolfgang duet between act 1 and 2 with Siegfried coming to Wolfgang, to looking up to his eyes, and try not to see the vulnerability in it. Try not to see all the cards changing. Because it should have been Siegfried over Wolfgang because of their social status. During act one they were at the same level – because Siegfried wanted so. And now, suddenly, it was Wolfgang over Siegfried. And when he put the prince on the ground in the end, Siegfried looked yet again completely lost, devastated and abused… You just didn’t know how exactly this time. Or you did, but it was still just a wild guess, you couldn’t be completely, absolutely, 100% sure.

What was sure – Siegfried was broken. He took the offered crossbow as if not knowing what he is doing, as if not knowing it’s his hands that is holding it.  And then he stood up, turned and wanted to go to Wolfgang, because obviously. He made two steps, and Wolfgang was just standing there, centre stage, looking (not with the arms dismissively crossed as Francois, mind you) and Siegfried stopped, tripped over his feet, looked and promptly turned back. And there was something so unbelievably hurt in him. Because he knew what the crossbow means, figuratively. And that’s what hurt him most. Seeing Wolfgang with it. Seeing Wolfgang pushing him towards the edge, knowing he’s helpless, knowing that it would be him who would jump, he himself, nobody would actually push him, just bring him so near the edge, there would be no other choice. It was like an accusation. Because “I believed you. I trusted you. I thought we were friends. I thought you would help me. And you pushed me back towards my illness, pushed me into those dreams that we both know will be the end of me.” You could almost touch the moment, the last flicker of consciousness, the hurt creeping from the deep of Siegfried’s soul but it was too late already. It was late the moment he took the crossbow. And you were watching him losing the somewhat sane part of his mind, the part that knows, and falling to his dreams, to his forbidden world. Because giving the poor Asperger’s little prince a bit of schizophrenia is a way to go. Hello, this is me, nice to meet you.

Yes, partly this whole mess of a situation was the Queen’s fault. Her mentioning marriage and crowning and you know, the adult stuff, made Siegfried quiver in his so painfully hard-won stable mental state of sorts, that seemed more stable than in other SLs, but was still too fragile. But Wolfgang was the one who made it happened, who was the vital help, who was the final cause. Because who else could have been more successful? Who would have been better for such job? Who could have managed such thing if not him…?

 I’ll give you a break and am gonna talk about 3rd act for a bit. Because Mathieu Ganio’s Siegfried in act 3 is a fucking piece of art and someone give the man an award for it!

There was an achingly apparent difference between Act 1 Siegfried and Act 3 Siegfried. While during the 1st Act he was able to hold himself together to the point one would not tell he had any mental issues, in 3rd Act he was loosing his contact with reality from the start. And of course he was, with no Wolfgang behind his back whispering to his ear, keeping him in check, distracting him while things become too tedious and tiring, calming him by his mere presence. So his standing up and leaving the stage during character dances made so much sense. He refused the princesses with pleasure and right then he threw everything, his control, his mind, his consciousness out of window, and just jumped, leaving his illness in charge and Odile with Rothbart appeared. And if Odette and the lake was a dream, this was much more a fantasy. I’m going to repeat myself, but I stop when there would be more than one Siegfried like this in 3rd Act. Because this Siegfried was not dragged across stage by Odile, he was not simply following her with heart eyes, smiling and thinking rather stupidly she’s Odette, the pure, fragile girl from the lake even though she’s acting almost completely different. This Siegfried was confident, self-assured, constantly trying to convince Odile of his power and to prove himself. He grew impatient with her constant escaping, there was anger and sharpness in some of his movements. We all know the moment when Siegfried is standing behind Odile and she’s taking his arms to hug herself, right? So Mathieu Ganio leaned in and kissed. Her. On. The. Neck.

(I let that information sink.) (And while it would be sinking, I take a little walk to ease some of the tension and calm my inner voice that is screaming profanities, cause HOLYFUCKINGSHIT, can you imagine the dreamy, pure, innocent prince from previous act to do such thing?!)

I would also like to mention the black adagio. You know, the one where Siegfried is supposed to be fascinated by Odile who is seducing him? The one, during which this time was not quite clear if the prince was watching the enchanting black swan or Rothbart with the same intent, with the same intensity in his eyes and tension between the two of them…? Yeah.

(Also – Jérémy before his Rothbart variation, sitting on Siegfried’s throne like it belongs to him. Good grief!)

The end of act 3 wasn’t as much of a mad scene as it was in 2016. However Siegfried fell down on the floor completely unceremoniously, lying on his back and while the curtain opened and we were in the 4th Act he lied there in the exact same position and it looked almost like he’s in his bed. Like he completely lost it during the ball (and lost it he did) and was escorted to his chambers, put to his bed and now his poor, tortured mind sent him yet again to the woods, to the lake side.

Odette in act 2 was a complete figment of Siegfried’s imagination, appearing suddenly from nowhere, made from thin air, sharing Siegfried’s pain and deep grief. (Yes, even in act 2, because this time there were no heartfelt love confessions, no big romance, no sunny smiles and promises of happily ever after. But there was a bond. Strong and deeply felt.) In 4th Act she was resigned. She knew she’s about to die and there’s nothing she could do about it. Because Odette is Siegfried. In this performance and interpretation more than ever. She was his innocence that was somehow betrayed and violated by the act 3 fantasy. She was his integral part, she was his childhood, she was his hope, she was the last piece of his sanity, she was him. And Siegfried came to her guiltily, ashamed of himself, afraid to look herself in the eyes and see what became of him. Because he was dying. And he knew it.

And then Rothbart appeared and took Odette from Siegfried. Took his hope, his mind, his soul - like the mental illnesses, Siegfried’s ultimate bane and his final doom. And then came the last moment. When Siegfried turned around and there, in the middle of the mists stood someone. With arm held forward, palm up as in an invitation. And then… magnificent, ethereal Wolfgang spread his arms wide. Opened them for his prince, to let him jump into. And Siegfried run and jumped with his last breath and last desperate cry of arched back to the arms of death. That is nor evil, nor kind. That simply is.

And it makes you wonder – what if this was in the end the best option for Siegfried after all? What if Wolfgang was doing what he was doing having his prince’s good in mind? Was it something he himself believed in? That he was helping? Or was it just something he would say, if anybody asked? And was he ever even real?

 Hello. This is Nureyev’s Swan Lake for you. Causes many questions. Answers none. Gives you bunch of other instead.

  Please, do feel free to tell me I should find a professional help.

[ladyloveandjustice]

Fall 2018 Anime Overview: Double Decker! Doug & Kirill

Double Decker! Doug and Kirill follows a special police force devoted to dealing with cases involving “Anthem”, a highly dangerous super-drug that can be both fatal and grant uncontrollable superpowers. The squad is divided into three pairs of partners. The eponymous Kirill is a enthusiastic newbie who partners with a deadpan, “kind of an asshole” veteran named Doug.

It’s hard to say when a show crosses the line from “dumb in a fun way” to “just mind numbingly dumb” but I’d say Double Decker crossed that threshold around about the midpoint of the series. Which is a shame, because I was rooting for it. It seemed like an anime with a lot of potential- it was humorous, irreverent and bombastic, it seemed fun and colorful with a varied cast, it had a nice variety of ladies in the squad, and two of the ladies, Max and Yuri, were heavily coded as a couple right off the bat-

-with Max (on the left) in particular going putting off some Impressive Lesbian Energy with her aesthetic...and early on Doug announced that his life goal was to “eliminate poverty and class”, indicating the series intended to deal with social issues. 

It IS possible to be a cheesy, fun show that is also inclusive and deals with social ills, but Double Decker’s clumsy, simplistic attempts to balance this with the larger goofy plot ultimately meant it fell short of being an truly entertaining romp AND was utterly disastrous at being socially aware. 

Double Decker acts like it wants to say something about tolerance at points, but is ultimately gutless, toothless and halfhearted, sometimes verging on offensive. It became apparent the show wasn’t going to be truly LGBT inclusive with a character’s uh, “gender reveal” scene midseries that is a just...a mess. Some characters reactions to the “revelation” are just blatantly transphobic (thinking its hilarious, saying the character in question should “tell the truth" about their sex, etc) and this was never called out or challenged. It’s finally explained (baffllngly late in the series) that rather than actually being trans, this character is a cis man who just disguised himself as a woman for flimsy plot reasons, it doesn’t make how the reveal scene was handled and how it was painted as being “funny” any better. It’s not my lane so I won’t really go into it, but this article at Anime Herald covers the whole mess in detail. The whole thing is SO stupid and honestly there was no reason for it to be a plot at all.

If that “reveal” episode had me feeling wary about the show, the episode following sunk any hopes I had for it. Double Decker didn’t even have the guts to have Max and Yuri be explicitly romantically involved, instead just giving vague, baity hints. What’s worse, the episode focusing on Max was boring as sin. It was painfully bland and on the nose “critique” of high school proms SO rote it even had the girl who wanted to be popular transform into a literal “queen bee” (GET IT). The only thing we actually learn about Max in her supposed focus episode is that she hates proms because a bunch of kids rejected her trans friend at one which caused her friend to turn to drugs and disappear forever. Yep, not only can the show not bother to give us actual lesbians, trans people are just tragic props (and the attempt to say a thing about how trans people are treated badly would have felt a LOT more sincere if transness hadn’t been treated as a joke in THE EPISODE JUST BEFORE THIS ONE).

Doug also only became aware of poverty existing because of a tragic prop- his backstory amounts to a dead little shoe-shining street girl so one dimensional and cliche I’m surprised she wasn’t found frozen in an alley clutching a book of matches, and that one incident made him realize Poor People Shouldn’t Be a Thing so now he’s, uh....well, he’s not really doing anything about it, but he says he wants to, and that’s good enough right?

Yeah, that’s about the level of nuance we’re dealing with here. It’s nice that Double Decker tried, I guess, but if this was going to be the level of its effort, I wish it had just stuck to being a goofy sci-fi show. As it was, even the “goofy buddy cop” aspect felt really hollow because the show didn’t give us a reason to be invested in these partnerships or these characters.

I wanted to be invested! I was SO ready to appreciate the punk butch and her robot girlfriend, but instead we barely learn anything about them or see them interact. I was READY to be tremendously invested in the straightlaced office girl and her vulgar pink haired partner, but we didn’t learn anything beyond their surface personalities- nothing substantial about what drives them or where they come from or anything. Doug had his eye-rolly dead-little-girl backstory and admittedly sometimes amusing snarky asshole personality, but he spends so much time being insincere there wasn’t much to latch onto with him.

 Kirill was pretty much the only one in this show who felt like an Actual Character, and I did find him extremely likable- he was utterly sincere in everything he did, full of heart, dumb and enthusiastic in a fun way, and incredibly sweet and supportive to his friends and loved ones (he was also the only one who was chill and accepting about the not-really-trans character too so that earned him some points) but all the stuff going around him was so empty it didn’t matter.

(ending spoilers here)

The show didn’t put the work into making you connect with these characters, but it DID still expect you to be invested in them. One of the kinda-lesbians appears to have died at one point in the show, but it makes zero impact because you knew basically nothing about that character anyway- it instead just feels annoying, like “wow, you’re just gonna kill that gay without bothering to develop her huh” but the show clearly expects you to be devastated. Then when it’s revealed at the end “PSYCH she’s alive for this ridiculous jokey contrived reason haha really pranked you huh” it’s just even more annoying. Just because I’m relieved you didn’t actually bury the gay doesn’t mean you pretending to bury her wasn’t insulting and pointless. All you did was bring my attention to how little you bothered to develop this character and how willing you are to use her and her kinda-girlfriend’s pain as a plot device, so thanks?

(spoilers end)

The humor of the show basically followed “you thought THIS thing was gonna happen but instead WACKY TWIST haha now the narrator makes a snarky comment about it” and while that was fun at first it just got old without anything going on besides that. And as for the plot, it’s...generous... to call it a plot. At the end it jumps straight to “AND SUDDENLY THERE WERE ALIENS” with almost zero foreshadowing and it just gets stupider from there. Such a ridiculous development would work on a show that was either a) a pure farce or b) something super wacky but with enough heart, drama and character to keep you invested, but DD was neither of those things. It was an anime that wanted you to care, but gave no fucks itself. 

(Also this show is supposed to be related to Tiger and Bunny but I honestly have no idea how these two anime are connected in-universe. Is this a prequel? sequel? Are they happening at the same time? WHO KNOWS, THE CREATORS SURE DON’T)

The animation was also nothing to write home about, with a lot of awkward CGI shots and pretty ugly clothing designs- it was colorful enough to distract from it a lot of the time, but definitely not winning any aesthetics awards.

So yeah, Double Decker is very far from the worst anime I’ve ever watched, and I like the concept I think it was GOING for- but what we ended up with was something completely mediocre. The first couple episodes were fun, but by the end it was a chore to watch. I finished it because “well I’ve come this far might as well” rather than any real investment in the show. It wasn’t painful (except for the clumsy attempts at dealing with trans issues), but it was so completely stupid and forgettable, which is sad, because it seemed like it had so much potential at the start.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Michael After Midnight: The Legend of Korra

Avatar: The Last Airbender is, without a single doubt in my mind, one of, if not the, greatest cartoons of all time; it’s up there with Batman: The Animated Series, The Simpsons, and all those other time-tested classics. But even as it ended, there was always this feeling like the magnificent world created for the show could be explored ever further, expanded upon, and just in general be given a whole lot of new perspectives.

Enter The Legend of Korra.

The show is set several decades after Aang saved the world (as Katara always believed he could, according to the opening narration). Aang eventually died and a new avatar was born, the titular Korra; the show is all about how she comes into her own as the Avatar.

Now, just from that brief summary, it seems like this show would be an awesome thing right off the bat, right? Everything is there for this to be an epic continuation of an incredible animated work… and yet, it took this show two Books to truly find itself, and even then there were some truly questionable storytelling decisions that leave this show far behind Avatar in terms of quality. And look, I like this show. I really do. I enjoy it, I enjoy seeing the callbacks to the earlier series, I like most of the villains a great deal, I love the mythos they created about the Avatar as a concept by showing us its origin, there is a lot of genuinely great stuff that’s on par with the original series here. But while the original show had weak episodes here and there, Korra had entire weak Books; where the original show had some occasional bad writing, Korra had some truly bad plot points; and where the original show had a dragged-out romantic arc that, while a bit tedious, never really overstayed its welcome, Korra had one of the absolute worst romantic arcs in modern fiction with the most terrible, stupid, pandering, and nonsensical ending imaginable, one that insults me on so many levels.

But I’m getting far ahead of myself there. I’m going to briefly go over each Book and what works about each, and what doesn’t. The best place to start is from the beginning, so… let’s start there.

Book 1 has a sort of reputation as being a Book that was too rushed to really live up to its full potential. And you know what? I’ll agree to that. Nickelodeon really screwed this show over big time throughout its run, but the tiny amount of episodes they allowed the first Book was a big problem. The plot that doesn’t really get going until halfway through, the inane twists, the rushed conclusion… with more episodes things could have been fleshed out a lot better. Here’s the thing, though: even with more time, if they kept a lot of this Book the same… it would still suck a whole lot of ass.

Book 1 is pretty much a trainwreck, evident from the first scene, which shows a toddler Korra bursting through a wall, showing off every kind of bending save air, and saying “I’M THE AVATAR AND YOU GOTTA DEAL WITH IT!” This is our introduction to our main character. This is the first time we see her, our first impression. And they decide to introduce her in the least likable, most obnoxious, and dare I say most Mary Sue-ish way possible.

Now I have gone on record before saying I absolutely loathe the term Mary Sue; I find it to be a term that lacks any real substance to it and is really just shorthand for someone to dismiss a character. But the most common definition - a character who has so much going for them, rarely suffers any consequences, and is just well liked by everyone while getting the world handed to them - actually, sadly, fits Korra in the early episodes. She’s good at all forms of bending save air from when she’s a toddler, she almost instantly becomes a pro playing sports, she gets two cute boys fawning over her, she gets the greatest possible airbending teacher anyone could ask for… One could argue she gets built up so much like this to make her being torn down halfway through the Book more powerful, but it just really comes off as grating and obnoxious to watch.

It’s not like the other characters are written much better. Mako in particular is written to be one of the biggest morons on Earth, and Bolin, while charming, is something of a Diet Sokka. Tenzin is easily the best character of the Book, what with being voiced by J.K. Simmons and all, but his children… yuck. All of them are annoying and just feel superfluous, with Meelo in particular existing for seemingly no reason other than fart jokes. It’s not like Avatar was above using those kinds of jokes, but they didn’t have an entire character dedicated to them. Lin Beifong is pretty cool, a worthy successor to Toph, though be warned: she takes a lot of stupid pills between this Book and the next. Asami is pretty and badass, and she’s also one of the better characters of the Book, but sadly she gets tangled up in the worst aspect of the entire first Book: the love triangle.

The love triangle involves Korra, who is loved by Bolin and Mako, though Mako was in a relationship with Asami after they met, and Korra is with Bolin, but secretly likes Mako and… who cares? This is not what anyone wants out of a show based on Avatar. Just because they’re teenagers doesn’t mean they need to get up in all of this sub-par soap opera bullshit. This here honestly ruins the Book; while some would say Book 2 was the weaker Book due to its incredibly stupid plot and lackluster villain, at least Book 2 had Varrick and the Avatar Wan episodes. This Book really doesn’t have any big plus it can count in its favor. No, not even Amon.

Amon is the villain of Book 1, and early on he is just indescribably cool. His menacing voice provided by the always excellent Steve Blum, his creepy mask that evokes the titular V of V for Vendetta, his ability to remove bending, the fact he manages to scare Korra shitless… it’s all amazing. And then comes the reveal that he’s actually a bender. A waterbender, even. He has been using bloodbending this whole time to remove people’s bending. All of the shit from the big reveal really just leads to defang Amon from a nightmarish force to be reckoned with to a miserable bundle of angst. Noatak, who he is revealed to truly be, feels like an entirely different character. Still, even with his derailment, his final scene is one of the most effective in the entire series: as he and his brother escape on a flying ship, his brother, despite his brother’s words indicating that he wants to start over a new life with him and have things be good between them again, takes an electrical gauntlet and fires into the ship’s fuel tank, causing an explosion which kills them both. This is a murder-suicide that was shown on Nickelodeon. It is emotional, powerful, and truly shocking in a good way. It’s easily the standout scene of the Book, and almost makes it worth it.

Then comes the asspull.

You see, Korra had her bending taken by Amon. This could have led to so many incredible storylines as she worked to gain it back, utilizing only the airbending she was stuck with, the one kind of bending she wasn’t instantly good at. Sure, it may have ended up retreading a bit of Aang’s struggles, but that was good stuff! But instead… Aang’s spirit comes out of nowhere and the past Avatars all combine their powers and POOF! Korra gets her bending back. This is a dreadful resolution; I get they were unsure if they’d get to follow up on this or not, but leaving the door open with uncertainty is so much better than closing a bunch of doors. Why not have her just get a talk from Aang, telling her she can get her power back with enough training? End it on a dark but still hopeful note, with her having to work back up to how she was before. That would have been a hell of a lot better than this deus ex machina crap.

Overall, Book 1 is just a hot mess. It has isolated elements that are pretty good, but overall it’s kind of a complete mess story wise and character wise. It’s frankly amazing this show got a second Book… but it did. And oh lord is this Book something.

Book 2’s biggest crime is that it is utterly forgettable. I hardly remember anything from the first half of this Book because it is just so bland and uninteresting, and while it’s nowhere near as bad as Book 1’s love triangle, it doesn’t even stick in the mind. The shining gem of this first half - and the Book as a whole, mind you, if not the SERIES - is Varrick, the eccentric inventor, and his beleaguered assistant Zhu Li, who is frequently asked by Varrick to “do the thing.” These two make all the difference; without them this Book would easily be more unwatchable than the first, but with them… well, it still sucks but they manage to carry things.

Unalaq, the villain of the Book, is an utter bore. He’s obviously bad from the get-go and he is easily overshadowed later by the far more intriguing Vaatu, who ties deep into the mythos of the series by being one of the reasons the Avatar came to be at all. Unalaq also has two kids who are just as boring as he is and who spend the series not doing much anything noteworthy.

The real draws of this Book are basically everything to do with the spirits and their realm, as well as the origin story of the Avatar. Avatar Wan’s big two parter is the first part of the series to feel as fresh and epic as the original series, and it shows us just how the Avatar came to be in the first place. The other scenes in the spirit world are pretty great, featuring appearances from Uncle Iroh, Wan Shi Ton, and Admiral Zhao of all people. Then there’s the big shakeup at the end: Korra is now cut off from her past lives, and spirits and humans can now live together. These are some huge changes to the status quo of the series to the point where it feels like an apology for how bad and pointless Book 1 feels in the grand scheme of things. And you know what? Apology accepted. Book 2 is a mess, but it manages to find itself in the end and help steer the show into being the great work it ended up as.

Now on to Book 3.Book 3 is where the show really was able to show off how great it could be, to the point my only issues with the Book are minor. Most of my problems stem from the fact that Korra had very small Book, with about 12 or so episodes per book as opposed to Avatar’s 20. This is kind of a problem, because it gives some characters less of a time to develop, a fate that unfortunately befalls the members of the Red Lotus who aren’t Zaheer. Now don’t get me wrong, I absolutely adore the Red Lotus and think they’re all fascinating villains, and Zaheer is one of the most interesting villains in the series as an evil airbender, but Ming-Hua, Ghazan, and P’Li sadly get very little in terms of backstory. You DO get something, but they end up feeling more like the Cobra Unit from Snake Eater than fully fleshed-out bad guys… which is to say, they’re fun and effective, just don’t expect them to show great complexity. I wholeheartedly believe that they could have been expanded on if Book 3 had those extra seven episodes in it, and it’s a real shame we didn’t get to truly explore these fascinating characters.

My other problems, again, are pretty minor. I didn’t much care for Bumi becoming an airbender, and felt like it sort of cheapened his and Tenzin’s character a bit. Kai, a pubescent airbender scamp, was not a very likable character here, and it was pretty annoying having to put up with him, not to mention his ship tease with Jinora. Zuko also shows up, but it’s in a very minor role and he’s not really focused on at all. There’s a few more nitpicks here and there but these things are really my main issues.

The story is a lot darker and more mature here, especially in its repercussions for the rest of the series. Korra’s near-death experience here leaves her broken and haunted by PTSD, which becomes a major focus in Book 4. This Book is also where they really stopped giving a shit, and there are several particularly shocking and gruesome deaths for the show. We have Zaheer answer that age-old fan question “Could an airbender suck the air out of somene’s lungs?” with a demonstration on the Earth Queen, P’Li’s laser eye backfires and blows her head up, Ming-Hua is painfully electrocuted to death, and Ghazan takes a page from Gollum’s book and dies immersed in lava (and rubble for good measure).

This Book truly delivers the experience this series promised us in the beginning; it truly feels like an evolution of the Avatar series in the best way possible. While there are a few bumps here and there, there’s nothing really brutally bad that could derail the overall quality of the season. It has a great villain, and that villain has a great villain posse; there’s a lot of great cameos and character appearances, including some surprising ones; we learn more about Lin’s past; we get a whole lot more airbenders and an interesting plot going on with them that even in the end makes Kai more likable; and most importantly we have a solid plot with real consequences on the characters.

Oh, and there’s that little Zelda Williams character who appears near the end… wonder what her significance is…

She’s Book 4’s bad guy.

Book 4 is the final season of Korra, and while I don’t think many would say it surpasses Book 3 (which is quite the task, considering), I definitely think it’s a really great final season that wraps up just about everything that needs to be wrapped up. It also does a really good job with character development, like, REALLY good.

This season is where Korra really becomes a character I love, because her struggles are very personal and interesting. She’s constantly haunted by what happened to her in Book 3, and is stalked by a shadowy version of herself wherever she goes. Long gone is the obnoxious borderline Mary Sue character that she felt like in the first season; here, Korra truly feels human and relatable. More impressive than even that may be the transformation of the character Prince Wu, who starts the season as one of the single most unlikable characters in the whole series but ends up as an amusing and even somewhat heroic figure. Frankly I find it hard to hate a character who utilizes his terrible singing to help evacuate a city.

As I mentioned before, Kuvira is the villain, and she’s very much a visionary sort who thinks ruling the world under her iron fist is what’s best for everyone. Zelda Williams really gives her a real air of importance and even a bit of sympathy; she’s definitely a great example of an anti-villain of the quality of Zaheer, though I wouldn’t go as far as to say she’s as good as him exactly. Still, one can’t help but appreciate a woman who creates a massive robot that fires death lasers made out of entirely unbendable platinum. I know a lot of people find this thing to be utterly ridiculous and stupid, with little foreshadowing of its existence and just in general how ludicrously impossible and impractical it could be… but come on, it’s a GIANT ROBOT. I guess it just appeals to my inner Metal Gear fan, even if I do realize and accept it’s the most ridiculous thing in any of the two series.

I think what’s really great about this book is how it really just makes things that shouldn’t work, work really well. Case in point: there was an annoying, executive mandated clip show that, if they didn’t do, would have caused a lot of staff to be laid off. So what does the team do? They use the episode to take the piss out of everything in the show that didn’t work, from the shitty romance subplots to a hilarious scene where Zaheer, Amon, and Vaatu are all on the phone and trying to keep not just Unalaq, but Varrick’s movie version of Unalaq, out of the loop. In fact, the entire thing basically being Varrick doing an abridged series of the show is golden, because everything Varrick does is golden. Speaking of Varrick, his “Do the thing” catchphrase is used interestingly three times: one time it is a legitimately heartbreaking tearjerker, and the other two are just the sweetest, most heartwarming things you will ever hear. This sounds absurd, but again: this Book is all about making the most implausible things end up pretty good.

There’s so much about this Book that really makes it stand out - from Hiroshi Sato managing to reconcile with his daughter and sacrifice himself to the return of so many characters to just about everyone getting a happy ending… it’s a shame that it all got overshadowed by the most shallow, stupid moment of the entire series. Hell, BOTH series. You know what I’m talking about, you know what it is, it’s the thing that made me want to write this review in the first place:

Asami and Korra end up an official couple.

Now, generally speaking I wouldn’t have a problem with this. I like both characters, I myself am bisexual so it’s nice to see characters represent me in media, and hey, I’ve always championed Dumbledore as a great LGBT character when he was never explicitly shown to be so, so why do I hate this so much? Well, in regards to the latter, here’s the thing: Dumbledore is not the main character of the series, and his homosexuality is foreshadowed. We are not privy to Dumbledore’s private thoughts, we are not even given an in-depth look at his character until he dies in the penultimate book, and romance was never really a focus of the character. In contrast, Korra is in fact the main character of the show and who we follow the most, romance has unfortunately been a major factor in her development since the first Book, and the biggest problem: her being bi for Asami comes right the fuck out of nowhere.

There is like one line earlier in the book where Korra, while wandering, only really wrote to Asami. That’s it. These two barely interact or show any signs of romantic interest in each other until that final moment when they walk into the portal together. It feels like the ultimate ass pull, just a really lame third option to resolve all the love triangle garbage while simultaneously winning brownie points for being such a bold, daring move for a cartoon… but it doesn’t even show them kiss. They stare longingly at each other. THAT’S IT. Contrast Steven Universe, which is wholly and unabashedly filled with LGBT romance, particularly Garnet, who is literally the physical embodiment of a lesbian relationship, or even Adventure Time, who built up PB and Marceline’s past romance before having them get together and even kiss onscreen in the finale of that show. Korra is ultimately nothing`special, and that final moment was not a big step forward for representation or an important moment in TV history. It was a poorly built up shocking swerve that ended a series that had finally risen to the quality of the series it spun off from with the same bullshit that hampered this show’s original seasons to begin with.

Despite this, Book 4 is definitely a good finale to a show that, while it didn’t start out as such, ended up great. Really, the fact the final book was good despite having a lot of stupid elements and bad romantic resolutions is sort of a microcosm of the show as a whole, and showed despite those things the show could still tell an interesting story and be as grand as the original show was.

I don’t think this is one of the greatest cartoons of all time, but as a sort of follow up to the original series, I think it’s pretty solid. It was at its best when it was trying to tell mature stories and deal with darker subject matter than one would expect from a modern cartoon, and fumbled when it tried to shoehorn in the sort of romantic gunk one expects from teenagers. It worked best with its characters when their flaws felt natural and their issues were personal, and its villains worked better when they had simple yet fully fleshed out goals rather than overly complicated backstories or evil for the sake of evil. Korra is most definitely a mixed bag, but it’s a mixed bag I definitely recommend opening up sometime. If you liked the original show or just like story-driven or action oriented shows in general, this is one of the best ones of recent years. You have to slog through some crummy stuff to get to the gems, but boy oh boy are those gems shiny.

Also, I should have mentioned this earlier, but I am just so happy Toph is just a cranky old bad bitch even after all that time. Even while the Avatar world changed so much, it’s nice to know that some things will never change,

[the-desolated-quill]

Before The Flood - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

While Under The Lake pretty much played it safe, Before The Flood takes a very unexpected turn. The opening piece to camera with the Doctor carefully explaining to the audience what the bootstrap paradox is seemed to suggest the story was going to go in a completely different direction from last time around. And it does... Pity it isn’t very good.

We might as well start with the bootstrap paradox. Turns out the Doctor’s ghost was a hologram, and the only reason the Doctor knew to create the hologram was because Clara told him about the hologram in the first place. Okay. Fairly straight-forward. Why did we need the opening piece to camera to explain that? It’s not so complicated that the Doctor needs to break the fourth wall to bring the audience up to speed. And, more importantly, what’s even the bloody point of this? Yes the Doctor’s ghost lists the order in which people are going to die, and that could have been immensely creepy if Toby Whithouse actually committed to that, but then that’s rendered pointless when you realise that the Doctor was just listing names randomly. The only real purpose the Doctor’s hologram serves is for the previous episode’s cliffhanger, which was always going to be a massive cheat because we know for a fact the Doctor isn’t going to die and is going to find some way out of the situation. You could have written this out entirely and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference. (also, if the Doctor’s ghost is a hologram, how did it manage to open the door to the Faraday Cage and let all the ghosts out? And why did it do that in the first place?).

Before The Flood is pretty much a two pronged narrative. You’ve got Clara, Cass and her translator Lunn in the 22nd century, and the Doctor, O’Donnell and Bennett in 1980. Let’s focus on Clara and co for now. With the Doctor potentially ‘dead’, Clara must now take up the reins. Her phone call to the Doctor has pretty much confirmed what I suspected before. With Danny gone, she’s now clinging on to the other important man in her life for comfort and distraction. I’ve already talked about my problems with this in my previous review, so I won’t go into all of that again. What I’m mostly annoyed by is that the episode never actually does anything with this. Even with the prospect of questioning whether Clara’s relationship with the Doctor is actually healthy for her, the story is still more about flinging moral judgements at the Doctor rather than analysing Clara’s character. Yep, I’m afraid this yet another episode that’s all about the Doctor.

Clara makes the perfectly reasonable suggestion to Lunn that he needs to get the phone, at which point Cass starts silently chastising her and questioning whether it’s because of the Doctor’s influence why she’s willing to risk other people’s lives. Except, like all the bullshit with Davros in the previous two parter, these accusations have no foundation to them whatsoever. Clara’s suggestion is hardly cold or calculated. They need the phone to keep in contact with the Doctor and they already know that the ghosts won’t attack Lunn because he hasn’t seen the writing on the wall due to plot convenience. What’s the alternative? Just standing around, twiddling their thumbs?

Brief tangent, I’m really not happy with how Cass and Lunn are handled here. Lunn had no character in the previous episode and he somehow has even less character here. He’s just utterly bland (and is revealed to be sporadically in love with Cass at the end, which came completely out of the blue). Cass, meanwhile, is horribly mistreated in this episode. One thing that really pissed me off was when Cass was rebuking Clara, and Lunn initially refuses to translate. No! Not cool! When you’re serving as a translator for a deaf person, you essentially become their voice. Therefore it’s not up to you to decide on, edit or censor what they say. That’s just utterly disgusting. Another bit that annoyed me was when the ghost with the axe was stalking her. Given that Cass can’t hear the sound of the axe being scraped across the metal floor, this could have been legitimately tense if it wasn’t handled in such a stupid way. Think about it. You suspect that an army of homicidal ghosts are after your blood. What do you do? Do you crouch down, hoping to detect the vibrations through the floor and thus make it easier for the ghosts to decapitate you? Or you could just, oh I don’t know, look over your pissing shoulder!

My main gripe with Clara and co is that they don’t actually do anything to contribute to the plot. They could have stayed in the Faraday cage playing tiddly-winks the entire time, and the story would still be the same.

Meanwhile the Doctor, O’Donnell and Bennett are in Cold War era Scotland. I must say I really liked O’Donnell in this, probably because, out of all the characters, she’s the only one that behaves like an actual person. Her brief moment of excitement about the TARDIS being bigger on the inside before composing herself was just a precious little moment of real humanity that the story desperately needed more of. I also liked Paul Kaye as the Tivolian undertaker Prentis, but he’s sadly bundled out of the episode far too quickly just like Colin McFarlane was (what’s the point of hiring these great actors if you’re not actually going to use them?). O’Donnell too bites the dust after stupidly splitting off from the main group, which leads to more moral accusations being flung at the Doctor by Bennett, criticising him for being cold and calculated, testing his theory about the order of deaths in order to try and save himself. Let’s just say the Doctor doesn’t exactly come out of this looking good. 

For starters, there’s a scene where the Doctor tries to get O’Donnell to stay in the TARDIS. In hindsight, you realise it’s because he suspects that O’Donnell is the next to die, but with or without that information, the scene is just really odd. If you hadn’t picked up on this, then you’re left wondering why the Doctor thinks it’s too dangerous for her (a trained soldier) and not for Bennett (a scientist), but if you did pick up on that, then you’re asking yourself why did the Doctor not try harder to get her to stay. Then when Bennett confronts him about O’Donnell, the Doctor reasons that he’s not trying to save himself, but trying to save Clara, and apparently that makes everything okay... except it doesn’t, does it? Surely Bennett should be just as pissed off that the Doctor is prepared to put Clara’s life over O’Donnell’s as opposed to his own. The result is the same. O’Donnell dies as a result of the Doctor not trying very hard to help her. But for some reason Bennett views this as a satisfactory answer and goes back to trusting him. I’m sorry, but that doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Bennett, like Lunn, is a useless waste of space by the way. Unlike with Lunn and Cass, Whithouse hasn’t been hiding the fact that Bennett has got a hard-on for O’Donnell, which is apparently supposed to make us care about him. except it doesn’t because it never actually goes anywhere and I really don’t care about Bennett. The bit where he and the Doctor inadvertently cross their own time stream and Bennett is given a chance to save O’Donnell could have been interesting, but that never goes anywhere (in fact I don’t even understand what the point of that whole bit was). Bennett is basically just the spare wheel, and considering how he did basically nothing in the previous episode too, I’m left wondering what he’s even doing here.

Finally we get our confrontation with the Big Bad. The Fisher King. My God, what an anti-climax this was. What actually happens? The Doctor and the Fisher King fling a few insults at each other before the Fisher King drowns. The end. And why was it even called the Fisher King? It has nothing to do with the archetype as far as I can see. At least the design was pretty cool. It would have been nice if we could have had an actual character to go with it though. Instead we get a bog standard, muhahaha evil villain who wants to enslave humanity. Boring! Wouldn’t it have been more interesting if the Fisher King was creating ghosts in order to signal for help as opposed to an invasion fleet?

I’m not angry. I’m just bitterly disappointed. Under The Lake may have been basic, but it was somewhat engaging. Before The Flood, on the other hand, quickly drowns the story in a loch of utter stupidity. I think it’s fair to say this is Toby Whithouse’s first official dud. Ah well. I suppose it had to happen some time or another.

[my-mystic-messenger]

My thoughts on and analysis of the V route

I did play the V route and so far I got the Good End, Normal End, Bad End on day 9 and today and the Bad End on day 7, therefor effectively filling all my albums. As for analysis, there is sadly very little too analyse plot wise, in all honesty. Despite it’s overdramatic and pseudo-philosophical nature there wasn’t really a lot to pick apart and find the hidden meaning behind. As for my thoughts, if anyone really cares to read this, I was quite frankly a little disappointed with the route and especially the eventual conclusions in form of the Normal and Good End. @promiscuous-jalapeno wrote a very good piece on the V route - which you can read here - where she mentioned a lot of the things that bugged me about the route and some points I disagree on so here it comes:

In short, I can only say that while I found it quite interesting to play, I have to admit that I found the route highly underwhelming altogether, although I will wait with my final judgement until the After Story is out. But if you know me, you know I like into detail so let me tell you what I thought about specific aspects of the game:

V: 

Honestly, I was never the biggest fan of V. People who know me know that. I blame him for Mint Eye almost as much as I blame Rika for it and in my opinion Saeran was much more deserving of a route and redemption than him.

So, when the route was announced, I was already a little bit salty but figured I give him a change to prove himself. He is pretty and I did like the idea of romancing him, since I saw potential for his character.

As a writer myself, I was majorly disappointed. V was a bland character at the beginning and the story ended with him remaining a bland character. Other than his self-sacrificing he really doesn’t seem to have a personality.

Despite the fact that I’m no big fan of Saeyoung, Yoosung or Jaehee those are distinguished characters with likes, dislikes, problems, talents, flaws and many things that make them human. V has nothing going for him.

There were certain parts of the route where I actually went aww and came close to liking him as a character, but then he started with his peaceful solutions to problems he shouldn’t even try solving himself and I was done.

All in all, as someone who writes headcanons, fics and more and therefor invests a lot of time into these characters this route was in no way helpful in actually getting to know V and that’s just sad.

His Mother:

That whole thing bothered me immensely. I’ve seen people enjoy it, liking that whole backstory part but I couldn’t have cared less for a single one of those diary entry VN even if I tried.

This was V’s route and yet I learned more about his mother than I did about him. I think if I count, more VN were dedicated to her than to the actual protagonist of the story. 

What kind of thinking is that? I could have gone well without all those extra VN if those we had ended up actually focusing on V or even adding to the progress of the story, but they absolutely didn’t.

Please, explain to me how his mothers very detailed past is in any way relevant to the events that transpire during the route? They don’t even explain why V is the man he is, not really.

The Plot:

While we’re already at it, let’s talk about the plot, because frankly I think they made a mistake choosing this setting and it’s obvious that they didn’t really think the whole two years in the past thing through.

There were a couple of continuity issues with the entire thing, but that can happen so I don’t really want to focus on that. I’d much rather talk about the setting and why I think it would have been better as a Saeran route.

Despite this being V’s route, you not only barely get to romance V - but we’ll get to that later - but you actually barely get to interact with him at all. And due to setting the interactions like the car phone calls are extremely cringeworthy. 

Personally I would have preferred the entire thing having been set in the same time line as the original routes just a little later with Rika gone and V having to deal with what he’s caused and how to move on.

That way interactions would not only have been more natural, they also would have made more sense as well as actually giving you the opportunity to romance and help V properly. 

In this route, you really don’t help him like you do in the others. It’s more about saving yourself than V and the change in his heart that does happen doesn’t seem natural at all.

One moment he is telling you how he loves and adores Rika and how he needs to sacrifice himself and the next moment he realizes it’s obsession and not love and let’s everyone else take the reigns.

That change came way too fast and therefor seemed rushed and rather unnatural to me. The general flow of the entire story did. At first is was far too slow and then it turned into a rushed clusterfuck towards the end.

The Romance:

This is honestly one of the parts I am the saltiest about and I don’t even know where to begin with this honestly. Cheritz is aware that MM is an otome game, right? Why can’t I romance the main character?!

Like I’m not even a V fan, but even I felt let down but the romance aspect of this route because there was literal none. The entire routes it’s Rika, Rika, Rika and ‘I don’t know how to love, keep away from me’

To me it felt like someone had taken the worst parts of Yoosung’s and Saeyoung’s route and smashed them together to create this. It was honestly so frustrating and the suddenly ‘romantic endings’ were unsatisfying.

Worst of all, the romance we did get wasn’t really all too nice either. It was a constant cycle of MC trying to save V and V trying to sacrifice himself for MC. They don’t even get to know one another?! How is that even love?

The RFA:

Where were they? I’m seriously confused. Zen disappeared for an entire day and it literally changed nothing. You barely get to talk to any of the RFA, actually, despite them being kind of the focus of this game.

I learned nothing new about them, I didn’t get to build any friendship with them which made them suddenly trusting me and caring so much for me really awkward and from a writing point illogical.

I mean technically as a player you get to know Jumin through the backstory VN but he doesn’t know that and neither does MC so why do they talk about her like she is some saint and she cares so much. 

Also, and I want to mention this specifically because it bugged the hell out of me: I literally lost all respect or faith I had in Yoosung. He was a huge disappointment and I’ll never see his character the same way.

I really enjoyed how unapologetic everyone else in the RFA was of Rika, as they should be after everything she’s done , but Yoosung even attempting to excuse it despite not knowing of her past made me rage

Rika:

Ah yes, the grand bitch herself. Honestly, I really hope that anyone who ever posted positivity for her feels really, really bad after playing this route because there is literally nothing that could excuse her choices.

She is a horrible person and on top of that they really added a notch of completely mental in this route, making all conversations with her hard to follow and boring as hell.

In fact both V and Rika have this tendency to talk in code and comparison and I cannot hear the word sun anymore. Everything seemed so pretentious after some time, like two hipsters discussing Nietzsche at Starbucks.

Her backstory didn’t really surprise nor touch me, mainly because I too suffered bullying and abuse by my parents probably even more severe than hers and I do not go around torturing and drugging people. Not impressed.

The whole look into V’s and Rika’s past made me extremely uncomfortable as well. Their ‘love’ was really sick and unhealthy and what weirded me out was how strangely sexual everything seemed.

I mean don’t get me wrong, I love me some Wolf!Zen and Bad End Jumin, but with V and Rika it seemed so out of place and plain uncomfortable, especially the whole photo thing…

But above all, and I cannot stretch this enough, I find it utterly disgusting that you basically have the option to romance Rika. To even think that was okay to put into the route is beyond me.

That worn out idea that every villanious woman has to be over sexualized and in this case even homoerotically is a cheap writing point to begin with, but executed the way it is, it’s like a slap to the face.

How come Rika gets to cuddle it up with MC in multiple CG’s and flirt the entire time but Jaehee’s entire goddamn route has none of that? That is seriously just insulting to the players in my opinion. Moving on before I have an aneurysm. 

Saeran:

Loved him! Hands down the highlight of the entire route. I’d always dreamed about his route being similar to this route, with you working with Mint Eye to take down the RFA instead of the other way around.

This was like a taste of a dream, really. He was what I’d hoped V to be; romantic, devoted, actually pursuable to some extend and beyond everything you actually get to know more about him.

His character is really well expanded in this route and for a writing who always wants to get to know the character better, this addition to the game was like a dream come true.

Beyond just getting to know more about him, however, he actually gave some room for interpretations, analysis and discussion. Is he really dead? Is Ray the real personality or Saeran? 

He made me laugh. He made me cry. He actually made me go through the emotional rollercoaster the route should have been but only was due to him. He saved the whole thing for me, because he was actually human.

The Art:

I was a little disappointed by the art as well, if I’m honest. It’s not as bad and rushed as the DLC art was, but also not entirely the same style as the original. The fact that they can’t stay consistent within the same game is sad.

The colour palette was constantly changing between the CG’s as well as the CG’s in comparison to the in game play. Just look at Jumin in the picture with V’s father and the one with his own. The skin doesn’t even add up.

On top of that some of the colours were way too vivid and made some of the art seem flat for lack of shading. And don’t let me get started on those pathetic chibi pictures of Jumin and V.

I was actually looking forward to the backstory parts of those two, I even wrote a fic about that, but with the art looking like super poor chibi’s like not even the cute kind, I was extremely let down.

As for the CG’s themselves, they weren’t all too overwhelming either. A lunch box, a salad and an old ass book? Thanks for the amazing additions to my character albums.

Not to mention the amazing V album that while it actually expanded quite a lot, most of it was useless since it involved Rika or his mother. 3 CG’s. We get 3 MC x V CG’s and two of those look like MC is forcing herself on V. Great!

Also was it just me or did V look kind of blurry the entire time? Not in the CG’s but in the game he looked kind of fuzzy compared to the old design. I mean not that there is much of a difference with anyone, despite 2 years…

The Voice Acting:

Some were amazing, some were mediocre and of some I was really disappointed, namely Rika. Since we non-Korean’s rely heavily on the text below we obviously pay a bigger focus on that.

Now reading the subtitles Rika’s VA really underperformed on this one. Rika had some very dramatic scenes and a lot of anger and pain that were conveyed beautifully while written but fell flat while spoken.

I honestly expected more vigor with this one, because as an actor myself I know how much fun it can be to get those really dramatic slightly over the top roles. It didn’t look like the VA was enjoying it at all.

She could have screamed so much more, could have actually sounded angrier and match the facial expressions Rika was making while talking, but never did. A grave opportunity missed.

Ray on the other hand. I wasn’t really a fan of the VA in the normal route but he really stepped up his game with this one and I loved it. Emotions to rip your heart out. Once again, saving the route. 

Conclusion:

While I enjoyed the route with the new content and general excitement it provided, I was overall disappointed with what seemed to be a lack of thought and care put into creating the route.Of course I am still thankful to Cheritz for creating at all, but as a content creator myself who gets literally nothing out of it, I still make sure to keep certain standards. Let’s hope for a better Saeran route…

[askmerriauthor]

I remember you railing against BvS pretty hard before. Have you seen Justice League yet?

I actually did get to see it just the other evening, yes.  Movie review and writing talk after the jump, because spoilers.

To its credit, JL is a far better movie than BvS.  That’s a very low bar to set, I admit, but the point stands.  That doesn’t mean it was a good movie though.

When I saw BvS I walked out of the theater thinking “Meh, it was boring but whatever”, only to become more and more angry about it from a writing standpoint as I mulled it over in my head in the following days.  JL garnered the same initial response but - despite my dwelling and pondering and scrutinizing - has not advanced any further than that same “meh”.  It’s a passable movie with plenty of problems (both in production and in performance) at best and just plain ol’ boring at worst.  The most generous I can be with the movie is to say that it had a lot of good ideas with very poor execution.

The basic thrust of the movie is that Batman feels guilty about the shenanigans he was up to in BvS and wants to make good by forming the Justice League to deal with threats now that Supes is dead.  The world has been getting progressively shittier since that event as society falls into a sort of existential dread afterward, contributed wholly to their iconic hero biting it.  Which is somehow what the baddie of the film - a shmoe named Steppenwolf - needs to enact his evil plan of evil bad death doom nasty bad.

Y’know, completely ignoring the fact that Supes was depicted as a severely divisive public figure in BvS that a bulk of the population actively hated, including the US government at large.

Anyway.  There’s a nonsense non-story about Steppenwolf needing to collect the three magical macguffins to destroy the world and the heroes need to join forces to stop him.  Honestly though?  Steppenwolf, as a villain, was utterly pointless.  He had no character, no involvement with the heroes, and spent the bulk of his time on screen only briefly popping in via teleportation and back out again.  He goes through the film collecting the magical macguffins, but for all the difference he makes himself, they could have just spared the character animation budget and made the macguffins naturally gravitate toward one another on their own.

Also - really movie?  Steppenwolf?  Really?  Of all the characters associated with Darkseid, we’re starting with freakin’ STEPPENWOLF?  I admit someone like Granny Goodness would have been a bit much for this movie, but we couldn’t have at least gotten Kalibak?

ANYWAY.  So the Justice League is put together from a ragtag bunch of misfits who overcome staggering odds, learning to be a team in the process.  Superman is brought back from the dead (because of course he is), Steppenwolf is defeated, and everything is hunky dory until the next movie.  Which apparently is going to involve the Legion of Doom rather than Darkseid if the after-credit stinger is to be believed, which just goes to show DC has absolutely not learned their lesson about trying to retroactively introduce characters in a big franchise.

I mean, seriously, who are we going to get in that movie?  Deathstroke apparently.  Solomon Grundy?  Cheetah?  Captain Cold?  Gorilla Grodd?  The general viewing public doesn’t know who the usual array of Legion of Doom’ers are and aren’t going to give one flying flip about seeing them shoe-horned together.  Especially not after the cluster that was Suicide Squad doing the exact same damn thing.

AN-NEE-WAY.  Justice League has a lot of trouble with its pacing and tone, with a clear breaking point happening halfway through the film when Superman is brought back to life.  In reviewing my thoughts on the movie, I keep coming back to that spot being where things really begin to unravel on the whole.  Writing wise, the movie has a hard time keeping itself steady as it constantly waffles between trying to be gritty and dour one moment, then playful and slapstick the next.  Apparently the film was handed over from Zack Snyder to Joss Whedon halfway through production which would certainly explain quite a lot, but doesn’t do much to excuse the final product.

We have a big ensemble cast to work with that the movie makes no effort to endear us to, on top of them being very contrary to previous depictions where the big three are concerned.  Bats, Supes, and Diana don’t act like they did in their previous movies at all.  Bats bounces between being  grim to actually cracking jokes and being the butt of a few himself, Supes spends half his time just sort of being there looking bewildered and the other half being incredibly smarmy, and Diana (along with the Amazons as a whole) had any-and-all character granted by her own movie violently siphoned out of her until she was a bland cardboard cutout.

Given that we just had such a great Wonder Woman standalone movie, this version of Diana really grates on my by comparison.  She’s dull, isn’t proactive, and spends the film needing to be goaded into being a hero by Batman of all people.  Bats is constantly lecturing and advising her on how to be a hero, a leader, how to not lock herself away from the world and others… y’know, stuff that Batman classically has trouble with himself and it REALLY SHOULD BE DIANA TEACHING HIM THAT SHIT SINCE SHE ALREADY DID ALL THAT IN HER OWN DAMN MOVIE AND BEING A RECLUSIVE UNTRUSTWORTHY ASS IS LITERALLY BATMAN’S ENTIRE M.O. IN THIS FRANCHISE.

Flash was fun though.  I enjoyed his presence and jokes, which felt a bit more natural since he is such a young character compared to the rest.  Cyborg was just sort of there as a plot device - dude literally just grows new powers and plucks meta-information out of nowhere whenever the plot needs him to.  Thor - I mean Drax - I mean Aquaman was… well, he was there.  Yep.  He sure did take up screen real estate without actually having any useful contributions to the story, setting, theme, or conflict resolution.

This may just be my own personal sense of humor at play, but there was a gag I really wish they’d gone for with Flash.  After he’s first introduced and the movie is half-assedly explaining his powers, he points out that using his superspeed burns tons of calories, so he’s always famished and is constantly snacking.  “I’m like a blackhole for snacks.  A snack-hole.” he says, while chowing down on an entire pizza himself as he walks.  It’s a fun notion that is never used in the movie beyond that.  At most he says “I’m hungry” about 45 minutes later and is told to go have nosh off-screen, but that’s it.  Since Flash is constantly zipping around from moment to moment, I really wanted to see him always eating whenever he’s not doing something important.  Like, every scene should have him munching on something different.  He’ll be chowing down on this big burrito in the background as the camera slightly pans away to someone talking, and then when it pans back he’s got a tub of Ben & Jerry’s under his arm.  Or in any scene where he has to stand still for more than 10 seconds, each time the camera cuts back to him, there’s increasingly large and varied stacks of discarded food containers scattered around him.

Or, hell, just have him share his snacks with the others.  It would’ve been super cute for him to offer Diana some ice cream and have her be genuinely delighted in return.

Except, y’know, that would require Diana to actually have character in this movie…

The strongest scene in the entire movie to me (and certainly to a bulk of the audience for how vocal a reaction it got in the theater) was right after Supes is resurrected.  He’s all addle-brained and violent because he’s still grave-groggy, so he starts fighting the League members.  As he’s being dogpiled by the rest, Flash kicks into superspeed and starts running around him.  The movie shows the rest of the world freezing in place from Flash’s point of view… until Supes’ eyes start tracking Flash’s movement ever so slowly.  That single point made for a fantastic “OH SHIT” moment that nothing else in the film managed to hit quite as well.  Unfortunate on the whole, but I will give points for that one, if nothing else.

Supes actually tries to fight Flash with both of them going at superspeed, which is a neat bit as well.  It’s clear in watching how they’re moving that Supes is indeed slower, but only just, and it’s more because Flash is so startled that anyone can begin to keep up with him - along with his own inexperience - that Supes takes him out pretty quickly.  The same can’t be said for the big bad of the film.  Steppenwolf is effectively invincible to everything the entire movie, including the heroes.  Attacks literally bounce off him without him even realizing they landed in the first place.  The League members do their best to fight him and will, from time to time, manage to put him through a wall or stagger him before he knocks them through several buildings himself.  But because everyone is pretty much the same level of invulnerable, the fights become pointless because they’re just knocking each other around through papier-mâché set pieces without effect.

But then Supes shows up and instantly trivializes whatever threat Steppenwolf was supposed to have.  It’s played like Awakened Neo verses the Agents in the first Matrix movie, right down to the whole “leaning casually away from a mega-punch” move.  Supes casually walks all over this villain without any effort whatsoever, actually leaves the fight entirely for a few minutes to go save a building full of civilians (by literally picking up the entire apartment complex over his head and flying away with it, because all effort at gritty realism is long gone), and then comes back to derisively snark “Is this guy still bothering you?” at the rest of the group.  And y’know what?  Even with all that, the heroes don’t even kill off the bad guy.  He gets swarmed by his own mindless Parademons for absolutely no good reason, because apparently suddenly a bunch of canon fodder minions that even Batman can take out in a toe-to-toe fight are powerful enough to overwhelm Steppenwolf?

The movie’s writing falls prey to two very common problems the comics suffer from, and it is purely a fault of the writers.  You’ll often hear people say “Superman is a boring character - he’s got unlimited power so he’s impossible to write good stories for”, which is the hallmark of an unimaginative writer.  The other common problem is many writers’ fondness for hoisting Batman up on a pedestal as this amazing genius who can do no wrong.  We get both here.  Batman is the driving force behind everything that happens and all other characters’ motivations, and yet is so vastly outclassed by their power at the same time that the movie struggles to find anything for him to do.  Superman is so beyond powerful that he makes the rest of the movie and its entire cast obsolete - he can do anything in this version through brute force alone, so how is there any danger or conflict?  He literally stops the destruction of the world by using brute strength to pull apart the three macguffins with his bare hands.

So… yeah.  Justice League has a lot of problems if you look at it any harder than just “open eyes, turn off brain, eat popcorn”.  If you can do those steps, it’s a passable bit of brainless fluff and flashy special effects.  And it’s still a superior film to BvS by a vast margin.