#inspired by rewatching alien again while i draw

[amalgamcorps]

more people need to make yonic looking ocs and creatures and sonas. if you do show them to me.

[xyzcekaden]

🕶 operation: m.e.e.t.c.u.t.e. 👓

by airauralintensity (aka me, xyzcekaden!)

memorable encounter explored through changed universes, totally excellent

fandom: codename: kids next door characters: lizzie devine, nigel uno ship: nizie genres: romance, comedy, fluff, pre-canon, first meeting, transfer student!lizzie, hero complex!nigel, nigel pov, mostly themes: paranoid!nigel, nigel asks first, literal schoolyard bullying, canon typical laws of physics, loosely inspired by operation holiday and stop the g:knd word count: 2.6k+ chapter: 1/3 rating: K+ for depictions of bullying

read it below, on ffnet, or on ao3!

~~~

A/N (1.11.2025): I can’t believe a kids' cartoon is what breaks my 2 year fanfic writing slump. All of this is sparkymouse’s fault. If they didn’t leave such a great comment on just another textbook case, none of this would have happened!!!

I didn’t rewatch every episode of C:KND, just the Lizzie ones. If anything I write contradicts canon (not that the show is overly preoccupied with canon to begin with, lol), then just read this like an AU, nbd. I deal in feels, not facts.

One-shots are in the order of ideation, nothing more particular than that. Chapter titles are from Soldier by the Backstreet Boys.

~~~

somebody shot you down

His working theory is that Lizzie is a disguised alien from a planet of sentient plants sent to monitor Earth’s children, and he just needs the proof.

~~~

“Class, settle down! I have an important announcement to make before homeroom ends!” Mrs. Thompson’s voice rings out above the chatter of fourth graders.

Nigel listens with half a mind as he draws up blueprints for the new scanner he wants to install in mission control. Projectiles smaller than a baseball are currently ignored by the treehouse’s security system, but the Teen Ninjas have started paintballing graffiti onto the tree trunk; and he wants that behaviour curtailed expeditiously.

Normally he’d use this time to chat with his teammates, but they’re all out this morning. Hoagie has food poisoning, Kuki’s got a family emergency, Wally is suspended, and Abby is on some personal candy mission. It’s just him today.

“We have a new student who’ll be joining us for the rest of the year! Please give a warm welcome to our newest classmate, Elizabeth Devine. Elizabeth, why don’t you go and tell us a little bit about yourself?”

He lazily tilts his head up to catch sight of the new girl—long auburn hair in twin braids framing a cherubic face, wide circle glasses framing wide brown eyes, wide frame in general. She doesn’t look like much; but then again, he thought the same of Kuki until he got to know her better.

“Hiii, everyone! I’m Lizzie, and I just turned 10,” she introduces with a voice that sits high in her throat. “I like watching romcoms with my sister and baking pies with my grandma.”

At least she’s American. She won’t have it as bad as he did when he transferred to Gallagher. In fact, he notices a group of girls in the class surround her table once Mrs. Thompson prompts her to sit; and the sound of eager gossip among them starts not too long after. Seems like she’ll be in good hands.

He doesn’t pay her any more attention for the rest of homeroom, and he more or less forgets about her entirely, too… until recess, that is.

While on his customary playground patrol (a routine he is well-equipped to handle even without the rest of his team), he catches sight of a group of kids where the fence meets the wall of the school. Curiosity propels him closer; to his knowledge, that corner of the playground has nothing there to play with.

He doesn’t want to unnecessarily get their attention, though. The point of recess is that kids can spend their time doing whatever they want in order to recharge and face the rest of the school day; so be it if these guys are choosing to spend their time over there. A few paces away, he makes the decision to just leave them be… but then he hears laughter.

It’s not the fun and happy laughter of a good joke; it’s meaner than that. It’s the laughter of bullies.

He lurks on the periphery of the group to observe the situation. Through the gaggle, he sees someone on the ground, but he can’t tell yet whether that person was pushed down.

“But I don’t understand,” a familiar voice pleads. “What was I doing wrong?”

“For crying out loud, girlie! You were eating dirt; do I really have to spell it out for ya?” the ringleader jeers.

Natural shifting of the crowd reveals none other than the new girl, Lizzie, as the center of attention. She’s lounged on the ground, hands trenched in the earth and legs neatly tucked to her side. There are grass stains on her blue skirt and a brown smudge on her cheek, too, lending even more credence to the absurd accusation that Nigel just heard.

Was she really eating dirt? he thinks to himself with slight disgust. That is, admittedly, very, very weird.

But for all that she essentially doomed herself to a lifetime of name-calling and ostracisation, she does not appear distressed at all. Her posture is lax and movements unhurried as she draws herself up to stand.

“Gee, I had no idea…” Her voice wobbles with innocence, and her eyes get impossibly more fawnish.

Nigel’s face hardens. He has to step in before she starts to cry.

“Absolutely no idea that THIS SCHOOL IS FULL OF NOSY BULLIES!!!”

Caught mid-stride, her volume forces him to take a step back. The bullies circling her get the brunt of it, though: the power of her decibels knocks them onto their butts, skidding in the dirt.

“How bored are you that you have to go around causing trouble where there isn’t any, huh!? Does it make you happy to pick on kids all by their lonesome? Kids who aren’t bothering anybody?? Only losers care too much about what other people are doing with their free time! Go touch some grass, why don’t ya!”

Kids flee left and right, but very few escape the wads of turf she throws after her aggressors. Her aim is erratic, but her power and frequency more than make up for it.

Just on the edge of the target zone, Nigel merely watches her defend herself with an eyebrow raised in interest. He believes he just got to know Lizzie better.

“Haven’t had enough yet, baldy?” she growls at him as he walks up to her.

“Trust me, I’ve had plenty; but I’m afraid you’re mistaken. I’d never join a ring of playground bullies like those guys.”

He stands in front of her with feet shoulder-width apart, arms crossed behind his back, and chin held high. “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Nigel Uno; but when acting in my capacity as a Kids Next Door operative, I go by Numbuh One,” he says with a slight smirk. He’s not ignorant of the effect he tends to have on people between his position, his confidence, and his accent.

“‘The Kids Next Door’? What’s that?”

The smirk freezes on his face in an awkward way. The KND aims to save kids worldwide from adult tyranny, and no team was more prolific at that mission than Sector V. Based in America as Lizzie was, surely she should have heard of them. Has his team never saved her or her classmates from overpowered bullies, insane teachers, or gross school lunches before?

No matter; he was never one to pass over the chance to advocate for his cause. He passionately describes the mission, vision, and creed of the Kids Next Door; details the various perpetrators who stand against kids’ rights and privileges worldwide; and expounds upon the bonds and camaraderie that forms among operatives.

The only thing that stops him is the bell that signifies the end of recess.

Lizzie noticeably perks up at the sound, to Nigel’s mild embarrassment. “Well… All that being said, you should join us. The Kids Next Door is always on the lookout for promising youths to join our battle against adult tyranny. Extending recess by an extra 15 minutes is one of our long term goals,” he entices.

“That’s real sweet of you to offer, Nigel, but I’ll have to pass. See you in class!” She punctuates her dismissal with a smile and a wave before skipping off towards the school entrance.

He stares, flabbergasted enough to let her get a head start, but he quickly gets himself into gear. “W-W-Wait, are you sure?” he stutters as he catches up to her.

Nigel prides himself on his 100% success rate of recruiting hopefuls into the KND ever since he himself was scouted by Numbuh 5. He knows potential when he sees it, and he’s usually so good at galvanising that potential into action. What part of his impassioned spiel didn’t immediately appeal to her? Lizzie has moxie and gumption and spunk and—

“Yeah. I’m not interested, no offense; I’ve got other hobbies that need my time. I really appreciate the invite, though! Your club sounds like it would be the perfect fit for someone else, someone with way too much time on their hands or who has trouble making their own friends. You know the type. Anyway, good luck with recruitment!”

—absolutely no interest whatsoever. (Not to mention tact.)

He watches the school doors swing shut behind her, bewildered and a little bit offended. What kid would give up the opportunity to join the Kids Next Door?

Then the hamster wheel in his brain kicks into gear, and his eyes narrow.

Unless she isn’t a kid in the first place.

~~~

His working theory is that Lizzie is a disguised alien from a planet of sentient plants sent to monitor Earth’s children, and he just needs the proof.

There’s the alleged dirt thing, of course; but Nigel didn’t see that for himself. He tries tailing her during recess in case of a repeat performance, but she’s since started hanging out with some girls from class. They often gossip in the shade of a tree with branches whose strength he misjudged, and they did not appreciate it when he accidentally crashed onto the flower crowns they were in the process of making one afternoon.

(There is an errant thought about how the crown becomes her when she puts it on, but it is fleeting and ignored in favour of figuring out his next course of action.)

He almost caught her eating celery once during lunch—which is honestly no better than eating dirt and would have been surefire proof she was not a human child—but it turned out to be ants on a log. Just because he doesn’t think that’s a real snack doesn’t mean she’s forcing children to eat vegetables against their wills necessarily. Since then, Nigel’s been monitoring her lunch every day, cleverly taking samples when she wasn’t looking and searching for unknown contaminants hidden in her food that might indicate her true biological identity, but he had to stop after he made the mistake of actually trying one of her homemade meals. He was out of commission for three days after that.

(He can’t help but be impressed that she finishes every bite of her lunches, though. He’s always been jealous of kids who can eat whatever they want without getting sick; it’s almost like a superpower.)

She behaves strangely in class, too. Whenever someone uses an idiom, she has to ask the teacher what it means. On top of that, she actually takes notes and pays attention. That should be enough to make anyone suspicious, but she also doodles! By virtue of their last names, Nigel sits far enough behind her that he can surreptitiously examine her notebook with 2x4 technology (Glaring Ocular Gap Gadget Lets Entities See). The flower sequences she draws all over her notes are patterned in such a way that reminds him of code. He hasn’t quite cracked it yet, but he’s working on it.

(The most common flower has a blue center and yellow petals, which instantly brings to mind the shirts she always wears. It’s to the point where he can pick her out in any crowd by that fact alone.) (For surveillance, of course.)

As far as he’s concerned, he needs no further proof; but he knows his team. If he goes to Sector V with anything less than photographic evidence of Lizzie Devine’s alien heritage, they’ll make fun of him and his paranoia for weeks. He just has to keep observing her until he captures something on camera.

When he reviews the photos later at his locker, however, her eyes seem to take up more and more of the images’ focus.

“These are useless,” he mutters to himself.

“What’s useless?”

“Wah!”

He jerks away from the surprise voice, and the photos from the Long-range Orbit Observations Kaptured Only Using This fly into the air. He hastily grabs at them as they fall down before whirling around to find none other than the object of his investigation holding one that he missed.

“Hey, I look good in this!”

“Lizzie!” he screeches in embarrassment as he snatches the picture out of her hands. How is he going to explain this? “What are you doing here!?”

She crosses her arms and levels him with an unimpressed glare. “As of two weeks ago, I go to school here, Double-Oh-Seven.”

Nigel’s embarrassment is momentarily overshadowed by excitement. “Actually, my Numbuh is One,” he corrects eagerly, thinking this is her way of expressing interest in taking him up on his offer from all that time ago. He knew his sense for potential operatives wasn’t deteriorating! If she joined the KND, it would summarily lay all of his misgivings about her to rest!

“More like Number Dumb,” she scoffs, crashing his hopes again. “When you told me all about your little spy club, you made it sound like you were actually good at spying.”

“I’m one of the best there is!” he retorts with offense.

“That’s sad, then. I could tell you’ve been following me and my friends around for the last two weeks, and I’m actually here to tell you to knock it off. The other girls won’t keep hanging out with me if some loser with a crush is always there to weird them out.”

He blushes something fierce. “I’m not f-following you,” he stammers out. “I-I’m just… gathering valuable intelligence about areas where you happen to be.”

“I see. So this is for one of your missions?”

“Yes!” he exclaims, happy that the easy answer is the truth.

“Can you tell me about it?”

“I—Um. Am! I mean, I am… I am afraid that’s classified.”

“Oh, so I’m a suspect.”

“N-not necessarily.” His voice breaks as he deflects.

“Am I a target, then?”

“I’d be taking much better precautions if you were,” he swears.

She leans forward as she baits, “I’m not any kind of person of interest?”

He blinks. “I, uh, wouldn’t say that…”

She looks him up and down before raising her eyebrow. “For a James-Bond-wannabe, you sure are a bad liar.”

He’s actually a fantastic liar. Normally. He doesn’t know why it’s so hard now, though.

The longer it takes for him to think of something to say, the more amused she looks. She even smirks at him as she leans back.

This is nothing like he’s used to. He knows how to handle himself in front of threats to his safety or threats to other kids’ freedoms, but this? Whatever threat Lizzie poses is not one he has any defences against.

But let it never be said he ever backed down from a threat.

Just when he decides to stop letting her get to him, however, she rolls her eyes and sighs. “Let me make this easy on you, then. Do you know what a pinky promise is?”

“Of course I know what a pinky promise is,” he snaps.

She shrugs. “I just learned about them on Tuesday. Anyway. Ask me whatever question you want, and I pinky promise to answer it honestly.”

He gapes stupidly at her outstretched finger, offered way too lazily considering how vulnerable she’s making herself to him. Whatever internal conflict he was facing doesn’t matter now. He could learn anything about her: where she came from, what she’s doing here, whether she really eats dirt.

It’s a heady feeling.

He sees himself reaching out his own hand in slow motion, not fully cognisant or controlling of his own actions. Not until his skin touches hers.

“Are you free on Saturday?”

Instead of his pinky hooking around hers, his hand settles over her fist in entreaty. He hastily arranges his fingers into the correct orientation before meeting her eyes, and what he sees there makes him gulp.

The guarded look she always wore—the one he can only recognise now that it’s melting away—is replaced with a surprised delight, glittery and warm.

“I sure am.”

She giggles behind her other hand, and the sound wraps around his heart and squeezes a little too tight. If Lizzie really is a threat to the children of Earth, she’ll have to get through him first.

There is no one else he could allow to face her like this.

[fine-nephrit]

1x01 Pilot

Just rewatched the Pilot ... oh man A first episode that does a fine job introducing all the core stuff and setting that tone and mood I love so much. It has an unhinged rawness that's charming.

All the signature elements are already here:

dark, wet forest in the Pacific Northwest small town, motel, diner, flight, rental car ride on the highway autopsy, clash with local law enforcement, coverups, old white dudes in suits and chairs, believer vs skeptic arguments & banter flashlights, gratuitous "action" sequence with running and gun draw, calling each other's names plot that barely makes any sense and has no resolution trust, the center of the partnership, is underscored in their conversation in the motel room and will come back again and again

Some early-installment weirdness stands out since I am too used to the classic era of the show: "The following story is inspired by actual documented accounts" Uh huh no iconic theme tune and title sequence yet Scully with straight long hair and then pony tail Mulder in denims Scully is very much Agent Clarice Starling. Mulder is like Sherlock, brilliant but a kook. The acting is somewhat jarring for both leads. Scully is high-pitched, bright-eyed and slightly smug. Mulder is over the top, bordering on cartoonish at times. He makes jokes at every opportunity and has violent outbursts. He throws his arms up towards the sky like a mad scientist. He comes off as snarky and a bit of a maniac and weirdo. These aspects of him will get toned down later on. It's fun to see how our leads settle into their characters and how the show finds its footing as Season One progresses. That Scully disrobing scene, while I like it giving fanfic writer ideas, is both OOC for Scully and the show itself. I never quite think of it as canon. It's a new show trying to grab audience's interest by blatant, old-fashioned fan service. Little did the audience know that they would not see any more bombshell Scully in underwear, but rather hunky Mulder fan service from this point on. Little did the audience know that they'd wait for a long, long time for these two to strip and embrace each other again.

All the pilot weirdness and goofiness aside, I love the "missing nine minutes" and "universal invariant", some of the coolest ideas and phrases the show ever came up with. I also love the alien abduction scene, where the boy offers up the girl under an eerie, harsh white light in a clearing in the middle of a dark forest. The visual and vibe are so compelling and memorable that the scene holds up even after all these years.

Rating: B

[moriganstrongheart]

On Firefly, Mediocrity and Problematic Media

When I first set to writing this, I intended to write a review of Firefly. I had recently rewatched Firefly and its tie-in, semi-sequel movie Serenity with my fiancée, and I wanted to express my thoughts on it. But I put the original first draft aside after writing two sentences and did not revisit it until months later. By then, I found I was no longer interested in reviewing Firefly, opting to explore issues of underlying misogyny and mediocrity in media instead. I think that Joss Whedon’s work is a good case study for these problems, as he exists simultaneously as a folk hero of sorts when it comes to speculative fiction, and as the harbinger of the now divisive Marvel Cinematic Universe. And Firefly being so beloved by its fans, I think it's worth diving deep into its problems to illustrate my points.

Perhaps the best way to demonstrate Firefly’s problems is in how it appeals to its fans. While I find the character interactions the best aspect of the show, I’m sure that quite a few fans—primarily young, white males—are attracted to the space western setting of the show and all the trappings that come with it. The Verse is filled with guns, alcohol, rape, savages and prostitutes—everything a new frontier needs, or so I expect is the intent. I don’t think these are ever the focus of the show, nor are they something Whedon ever places on a pedestal as ideals to strive for. But they are a part of the worldbuilding, and so were included with intent. There has been a debate for several years among fans of speculative fiction on whether worlds inspired by historical periods or specific cultures should include these so-called “less favourable” aspects of that period or culture, or if the speculative nature of the fiction should allow for their exclusion. I want to make it clear that I am in the second camp; I don’t believe that just because a fantasy world is set in a medieval time period that women shouldn’t be allowed to be knights, or that aliens or people of colour have to necessarily be slaves in a colonial space opera. It is speculative fiction after all, and we are under no obligation to hold ourselves to any supposed cultural or historical accuracy.

This is, of course, ignoring the fact that the cultural and historical accuracies being strived for have flawed origins, having been decided by academics with their own bias, or even maybe their own agenda. I would make further arguments that historical fiction and literature are themselves often coloured by the author’s intent, and so certain aspects are accentuated while others are ignored or downplayed in order to tell a specific story—often to the detriment of minority groups. It’s impossible to divorce bias from one’s work, no matter how objective the work claims to be. This has been proven time and again, evidenced by the revision of textbooks throughout the years.

Regardless, counter arguments to the exclusion of “less favourable” elements are normally that doing so waters down the source material, diminishing its authenticity and, more interestingly, it represents a disagreeable emotional sensitivity on the part of the opposition. This point of view assumes that the opposition is averse to certain perceived realities in the world, and that the narrative they want to ascribe themselves to would be unrealistic and, as such, not entertaining. In reality, all parties are involved in some form of escapism. The outcry for realism is a smokescreen for the desire to keep a specific form of escapism, one which can only be described as a violent, misogynistic power fantasy. The source of this outcry—again, predominantly young white males—sees the inclusion of bigotry and sexual violence as essential to their viewing experience, as they take enjoyment out of them. That isn’t to say that having violence, sexual themes or social inequality don’t have a place in fiction; they just need to have a purpose. Without purpose, they are only there to service the twisted fantasies of the target audience.

For an example that brings us back to Firefly, it never really feels like Irana’s career as a courtesan serves any other purposes than as an excuse for partial nudity, sex scenes and for Malcolm to call her “whore” on the regular. There are times where her position as a high-ranking courtesan opens doors for the Firefly crew, but this is a contrivance of how courtesans work within the Verse, and not a part of the skillset she has accrued to become a courtesan. The only true exception to this—that I can remember—is her role in grooming the magistrate’s son in the episode Jaynestown, which directly affects the primary conflict. Apart from this instance, none of her meaningful contributions to the plot necessitate her being a courtesan. She could have just as easily been someone with social or political clout. However, this wouldn’t have allowed for her to be the ship’s prostitute, there only to drive Malcolm up the wall and have someone he could call “whore” without guilt. As such, it became necessary for Whedon to not only make her a sex worker, but to create an entire system around her which would give her importance to the plot. In essence, he wanted his cake and eat it too. It’s disappointing, as the idea of having a sex worker being an important member of the main cast is interesting enough as a concept to explore. Ideally, this person would be treated with respect by others for their work, and their value should come from them as a person, not from a fabricated social status.

As a side note, I acknowledge that most people in the show respect Inara, but it is because of her fabricated social status and not because of who she is as a person. The only people who respect her for who she is and what she does are women and the one person of colour on the crew.

There are a lot of other small decisions within Firefly that show Whedon’s intent, such as the characterizations of River’s mental illness and Jayne as a character. I can’t help but wonder if Firefly were produced today on HBO or Netflix, if the showrunners would have allowed the inclusion of far more sexual violence and bigotry in hopes of attracting a larger audience. Because while we have collectively become much more cognizant of issues like diversity and the portrayal of women in media, shows with portrayals of sexual violence and bigotry tend to perform better overall. Unfortunately, the vocal minority shouting their preferences on social media only helps to reinforce this trend.

However, I don’t want to make the wrong impression. Sexism, racism, violence and bigotry are not the focus during Firefly’s runtime. In fact, Whedon generally does a good job of representing healthy relationships, strong female characters and positive representation of people of colour. For example, Zoe and Wash’s relationship is very admirable, and Kaylee is perhaps the best character on the show. The problems exist beneath the surface, informing everything from story conflicts to character motivations. Whedon comes off as a guy just wanting to have some fun, someone who is cool and trendy, just rude enough to be interesting, but knowing where to draw the line. Really though, he’s just the best of a bad lot within the entertainment industry. A lot who are, unsurprisingly, white men catering to their younger selves.

As a white man myself, I am constantly checking myself and the works I create to ensure I am providing a compelling story while avoiding trappings indicative of a male power fantasy. Because of the environment I grew up in, it can be easy to rely on tired old tropes instead of thinking of meaningful and interesting things to write. Does that mean that catering to the needs of a diverse audience is too difficult, and as such, is detrimental to the creative process? I don’t believe so, despite what many may believe. If anything, it forces writers to think of novel, more captivating stories that don’t rely on tropes and power fantasies to work. I believe that the reason people have become so weary of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and similar works is because they all rely on a power fantasy to function. I myself have grown tired of seeing the same story over and over, and it is only in the last decade that I realized the reason for this is that most people behind the works I consume are—again—white males catering to their younger selves.

This has led me to question if it’s right for me to have my voice heard at all. Would I not just be another straight, white male entering a space already filled with the same? Perhaps, but I don’t think the intent of fostering diversity in media is to exclude white people. In fact, if people like Whedon were the worst in terms of what white males have to offer the entertainment industry, I think we’d be in a better place. The problem is that the majority of the media we consume today is problematic and doesn’t allow for any variance from what’s trending among a young white male audience. All I can do is hope that shows like Firefly can be used as a learning experience for creating more compelling and varied stories. Stories should rely on interesting characters, worlds and the interactions in between them to be entertaining, and not on fulfilling the twisted power fantasy of the audience under the guise of realism.

[millennialzadr]

WHY I LOVE ZADR!!!

HEY GUYS WHASSUP? LMAO

So this is a whole ass giant long post of me absolutely spewing my feelings of love for ZADR, it was the very first thing I wrote when I made this blog and I think it’s a nice, positive thing for my fellow shippers to inhale and enjoy 👌👌

it was originally a reply to mitarashiart’s post about why HE loves ZADR (link in replies) but I decided to delete that and make my own post since MY WHOLE ENTIRE TEXT WALL WAS SHOWN IN THE REPLIES and drowned out anyone else who was trying to talk (thanks tumblr mobile u fuckin idiot)

I had also posted a summary of an AU that I’m working on in the original post, but decided to remove it since it just about doubled the length (I’m thinking about posting it separately along with the wips I’ve been putting together, we’ll see 👀)

But ANYWAY, here is about a million reasons why I think ZADR is the fucking best, so if you like reading gushy gay ship feelings, please enjoy ❤️❤️❤️

[Posted June 2019][WARNING, LONG ASS THOUGHT BARF]

SOOO, holy hell y’all my journey back into this fandom has been a wild and unique experience for me, i went from adding invader zim to my bookmarks on kisscartoon, rewatching the series, finding out theres a movie coming out, finding out there was a shitload of content i’d never seen before (commentaries, lost episode scripts and audios, panels, the COMIC, episodes i’d never seen because the dvd i used to watch was scratched!! and a FUCKLOAD of quality modern fan art like oh my GOD) and finally curiously googling ‘zadr’ (which i was way into when i was maybeee 13/14) to see if there was any interesting new art, and holy hell, mita (the artist above) singlehandedly THREW me down the hole into modern zadr hell, first with his absolutely stunning IZ art (all his art is dope tho check him out yo), then reading the above explanation put the final nail in the coffin like, 100%

so i wanted to add onto his post here on why this ship got me so fucked up, both for anyone who might be wondering why on earth i’m shipping two characters from a kid’s show (i’m very aware how weird that is at first glance trust me) and also so i can get some ideas down for possible future reference (will i ever draw them? maybe)

(first of all, a disclaimer, and this is not pleasant to write but it’s important to address for clarity’s sake: I have no interest in romantic or sexual relationships between minors, and do not ship zim and dib as they are presented canonically in the show (as children). what i’m interested in is the conceptualized relationship they may have as modern adults, and i view zadr more as taking the concepts of existing characters and experimenting with them with different interpretations, which i personally think is a constructive and fun creative outlet, especially if these characters hold personal significance for you (childhood faves of course). growing up together is an important facet of their relationship, and certainly they were important to each other even as children (see: mopiness of doom) but as an adult i’m personally curious about what kind of adults they might’ve become, and that’s the focus of my interest. i’ll still be reblogging regular IZ art because it’s dope but if you see shippy looking art of them as tiny lil beans its either friendship or chibis (and i personally headcanon zim as getting taller with dib but some people stick with his canonical height when drawing them as adults, which is super short. it still doesn’t mean he’s a kid). aaand i wish i didnt have to write this and it would just be obvious but we live in a sick sad world and it is sourced from a children’s cartoon so i feel its necessary. end of disclaimer)

NOW THAT THAT’S OUT OF THE WAY

- ok, first reason’s a bit obvious - the nostalgia. holy hell, the feeling of rediscovering a ship that was popular when i was a preteen during the mid 2000s and discovering a totally new perspective on it as an adult comes with an almost totally overwhelming sense of nostalgia and comfort, as well as inspiration!! the kind of art that seems so common for zadr, these sketch pages of scenes and expressions and visual gags where artists would just scribble every idea they had and LOVE doing it, this was exactly the kind of art that made me so passionate about drawing as a kid, and it still sparks such a powerful feeling of love and admiration for me to this day. fan content of iz and zadr is simultaneously achingly familiar and totally new and fascinating, and it just makes me SO damn happy to consume, it is most definitely my new comfort content. and just, GOD. THE ART!! SO GOOD. FUCK

- now for the characters themselves: for some reason i just really love the thought of a mid twenties, modern Dib?? lanky goth dork, disaster bi, depressed as shit, uses bad sweaters and memes to cope?? when i was a kid i didn’t even LIKE Dib, but now i totally sympathize with him! he’s just a hyper obsessive nerd wishing there was more to life than the situation he got stuck with, how wildly relatable. he was a pretty big asshole as a kid (even to people besides zim) but he was also totally isolated and constantly bullied, so there’s a lot of room for growth. i feel there’s a lot of juicy character development potential for that boy, and there’s always been a special place in my heart for characters who are totally sad and screwed and hopeless, but there’s one thing, or person, that means the world to them and could possibly save them…

- aliens. Zim. i love nonhuman characters, i love monsters, i love aliens, i love characters that don’t understand human shit (and thus have much less room for shame or fear bc theyre just totally oblivious the negatives of modern society) and need guidance (bonding!!) from their human. i also love morally grey characters and characters with skewed logic, they’re always really interesting, and Zim himself just has such a unique personality and set of mannerisms, he contradicts himself a lot and you can never quite expect how he’ll behave, and i love that in a character, it makes them super versatile and fun, especially since there’s so many different possibilities for their development. Also, Zim is a gremlin, a little shit, and a disaster. I also love those traits in a character. And don’t even get me started on his character design?? big sparkly eyes? expressive antennae? monster teeth? complimenting colors? he’s adorable.

- mutual obsession. for someone like Dib, who seems almost repulsed by how boring and slow the people around him are, Zim quite literally personifies Dib’s  escapist fantasies, both as an inhuman entity from beyond the stars, and as a person who’s knowledge, charisma and mystery far exceeds that of anyone Dib has met in his entire life. (so basically what i’m saying is that for a shunned, jaded misanthropist, an actual alien is terribly alluring, even if said alien is dangerous, stupid, and possibly insane). not to mention Zim vindicates Dib’s entire life passion, the supernatural! Even when their relationship is totally negative, there is not a single inch of room for Dib to get tired of Zim. as mita explained, they validate each other. for Zim, WHO AGAIN, IS TOTALLY SHUNNED, ISOLATED, AND HATED BY EVERYONE HE KNOWS, Dib is the only person in the universe who gives a single shit about him!! he gives Zim credit as a threat, a capable invader, which if you ask me is the sole thing Zim is after (he’s hellbent on his mission because it would win him the approval of the tallest, all he’s ever wanted is recognition from the people he thinks so highly of). He literally gets depressed when Dib isn’t around to pay attention to him, not even the tallest were enough to motivate him before Dib came back. these two have no one and nothing without each other, and while lifelong nemeses is fine and dandy, i personally prefer friendship, affection and love, cause i’m a softie like that. how could they possibly get there after years of actively trying to kill each other?? well, i think under just the right circumstances it could become a possibility after a long, long time.

- growth. i. love. me. some. good. character growth. especially for characters with trauma/mental illness, bc again, relatable. these boys have issues, and as mita mentioned, their canon stories are actually INCREDIBLY sad! but the happy thought is, they could recover! they could help each other recover, for little reason other than the two are the only source of happiness for each other. now of course this also opens the gate for angst lovers, but at the same time offers potential for comforting, uplifting content of the boys supporting and inspiring each other, maybe even to the point of becoming happy and healthy enough to create the lives they want for themselves (as in appreciating life and doing things that make them actually happy instead of the delusions of grandeur they both sought when they were younger). gimme that positive shit and let the poor beans be happy  щ(ಠ益ಠщ)

- LITTLE THINGS. LITTLE THINGS THAT ONLY COME WITH CHILDHOOD FRIENDS. WITH HUMAN/NONHUMAN. WITH THE SHOW’S WEIRD LOGIC. Zim being the person Dib knows best and vice versa. Zim having an involuntary respect/admiration for Dib because he’s tall. Learning each other’s needs, limits, and communication methods, both emotionally and biologically. Sensitive antennae. Affectionate bickering. Being less insecure bc your partner literally has no idea why you see your flaws as flaws. Laughing at the flaws they do notice because they make no sense. Zim only wanting to eat waffles and chow mein. Dib being forced to overcome his depression lethargy and stay hygienic/keep the apartment clean because Zim has a sharper sense of smell and is afraid of germs. Endless conversation about anything and everything because they’re from literally different worlds, and endless intrigue. TOUCHING. TALKING. DOING EVERYTHING LIKE ITS THE VERY FIRST TIME AND ALWAYS NEEDING THE OTHER TO GUIDE THEM. HOLY HELL THERE IS SO MUCH POSSIBILITY FOR TINY LITTLE MOMENTS THAT MEAN THE WORLD. FUCK. GOT ME FUCKED UP.

so that wraps up the why. fuck man. its just such a good ship. if you read this big ass text post, thank you for indulging me, i hope you enjoyed it! because i enjoy it very much 👀 so stick around if you’d like to for a shit load of IZ and zadr content on this blog, possibly (MAYBE) even from me!! come roll around in alien hell with me why dontcha ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ its a fun time! thanks for reading!!!

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SO THAT’S MY MANIFESTO Y’ALL, FEEL FREE TO REPLY WITH YOUR OWN REASONS!! I WOULD LOVE FOR THIS POST TO JUST BECOME A BIG GIANT PILE OF LOVE AND YELLING!! GO NUTS! SCREAM ABOUT IT! INFODUMP! DO WHATEVER YOU WANT! I’LL READ EVERY LAST REPLY! Y’ALL DESERVE TO ENJOY YOUR SHIP BC IT’S LITERALLY THE FUCKING BEST!!! LOVE Y’ALL!!!!!!

[iamanartichoke]

Why do you feel that way about fandom? (In regards to your latest reblog)

Ah, I’m not sure if I know how to explain it, but I’ll try. (This got long, so I’m really sorry.)

The thing is, I first got into the Loki fandom early in 2018, so I’m coming up on about two years of being active here. That first year was so fun and exciting; I was elated to be able to discuss my Loki theories and meta with like-minded people, and I was so happy (and surprised!) at the attention my fic was getting.

I was also still at a point where I believed IW was going to blow our minds, so there was that extra kind of thrill of suspense (and a bit of fear but, when you believe in the MCU and haven’t yet lost faith in its writers/directors, the fear is surface-level and adds to the thrill - there’s not really the accompanying dread and despair). 

IW was a crushing blow to that, of course, but even though we were all devastated, we were all devastated as a fandom. We were still in it together; we had one another to vent to and cry with and share fic with. “Loki is alive bc reasons” became kind of an unwritten rule in most post-IW fics; we all agreed that Loki deserved better. 

In 2019, two things happened: one, I was underemployed and dragging my feet on finding better employment due to my mental health, which ruined my life for a little while. I had to move back in with my parents, which (I love them and am grateful they were willing to support me, but) was a toxic environment. I was too depressed to indulge in my escapism the same way (fic and fandom) and my progress on my stories slowed way down. I’ve never quite been able to get back the momentum I had when writing Sanctuary, but that’s another issue. 

The second thing that happened was, obviously, Endgame came out and whatever theories and hopes the fandom was collectively holding onto about Loki were crushed. Not only that, but the portrayal of Thor seemed to amplify the divide in the fandom between the pro/anti Ragnarok argument. 

It seems, to me, that what was a series of battles or skirmishes only became an all-out war after Endgame. That’s only my perception, of course, but I do feel that the latter part of 2019 saw the divide grow larger and larger. Everyone had opinions on what the “correct” portrayal of Thor was, and how it related to Loki, and whether fanon Thor and Loki’s relationship was founded in canon or not. Everyone was defensive of their own point of view; bullying and name-calling and anon hate became more widespread. 

Again, this is just my observation. Those who’ve been on the front lines since Ragnarok came out probably have a much different perspective; I’m only talking about what I observed bc it directly impacts how I feel about fandom these days. 

So here we are in 2020; like I said, I’ve been here about two years. I haven’t rewatched any of the Thor movies in ages (although @delyth88 and I are talking about it), because they make me so sad and also so angry. Sad for what we had, angry for what could have been. So much wasted potential. Loki’s horrific end hangs over everything, as does Thor’s radical character change, and I don’t have the same excited outlook about the characters and the meta potential anymore. 

Not having watched the movies in a long time, along with that feeling of “ugh” around them, impacts me creatively bc I’m not actively feeding my writing inspiration. For me, fanfic writing comes from being so full of feels about the source material that I just can’t get enough and I need more. I draw my inspiration from things like watching Loki’s facial expressions, catching subtle moments between Thor and Loki, analyzing the way they speak, thinking about the story choices happening, and so on, and so on. 

My source of inspiration has dried up, in other words, which has made it hard for me to keep a good writing momentum going. I was feeling great when I rewrote Sea, and then my inspiration kind of plummeted again - this time, bc I felt that I did such a good job rewriting and the response was so positive, I didn’t know if I could finish the rest of the story as well. Like I was already setting up the second half to fail, bc it would be much more “rough draft” than the first - revised and polished, yes, but not gone over with a fine-toothed comb the way the first part was. 

The truth is, I carry a lot of stress and anxiety around my writing. I am always incredibly anxious that no one actually likes my fic, that no one is reading my fic, that people think it’s stupid or pointless, that my quirky humorous touches are ooc, that my plotlines are convoluted and boring and my sex scenes awkward and non-existent. 

I’m having trouble with the Valki relationship bc I haven’t watched Ragnarok in so long, I’ve forgotten how much chemistry was between them and how it made me feel. I’ve forgotten why I chose to pair them up in this ‘verse in the first place. And I worry about that, too - that the people who read my stories for the Valki are walking away unsatisfied. 

So that’s where I am with fic writing - slow and steady, still trying to find my footing, still secretly assuming what I write is shit.

This is on top of feeling more and more isolated on tumblr, mostly because of the aforementioned tensions and overall negativity that’s erupted in the fandom. I have been unfollowed and blocked by people who were once mutuals; I have been blocked by people I’ve never spoken to before. 

There’s so much stress surrounding the things I post now - I’m constantly thinking, have I worded this correctly to convey my meaning without shitting on someone else’s opinion? Is this post going to be the one that makes this or that mutual unfollow me? Am I tagging correctly so my pro Ragnarok mutuals don’t see my criticism, and vice versa? Can I still post pictures of Chris Hemsworth, who is possibly the only man in the world I am definitely attracted to, which is a shame bc I agree that he’s kind of a douche now? But he’s so beautiful, but I have to disclaim that it’s just his face I’m attracted to? If I reblog this post about Loki that I think is hilarious, but is also founded on the flat stabby villain characterization, will I alienate my anti friends? Does it imply I don’t understand or appreciate Loki and that, by reblogging the thing, I’m endorsing a shitty characterization? 

And so on. It makes scrolling my dashboard uncomfortable and un-fun, bc I end up saving tons of posts to my drafts without reblogging them, and after awhile I am not enjoying myself, so I stop scrolling. 

But this means I miss tons of mutuals’ posts, and I was trying to check individual blogs for awhile but I kept falling further behind, and there were more and more posts I’d missed, and I’d get overwhelmed and then feel like they probably hated me anyway at this point for being a shit mutual, so I might as well just keep lurking on the dash for ten minutes and call it a day. 

On top of that, I haven’t read fic in awhile bc of this mindset, so I haven’t commented, and then when I don’t get comments it’s like, well, maybe the story’s not shitty but no one’s reading it bc what do I expect when I’m not reading theirs? You’re not special, Charlotte. 

The worst part about all of this is that none of it should diminish (and hasn’t diminished!) my love of Loki as a character. I am excited about the series, but I am also very anxious about it - about the story not being good, yes, but also about the inevitably divide that will further split the fandom. 

No matter how the story goes, someone’s going to be upset. You can’t please everyone, and trying only makes for worse storytelling. So the wank will continue. 

But I love Loki. I love everything about him. I am interested in writing about him and reading about him and thinking about him. I am invested in him and always will be. It’s just that, right now, I’m kind of falling further and further out of fandom and I find I have less to say. 

And so I either have to wait it out, or work on my own mindset, or keep on keeping on. I just don’t know how long that will take or if I’m even liked enough here to try to bother. 

tl;dr: Fandom has made me cynical and jaded, and it has dampened not my love of Loki, but my love of interacting with the Loki fandom.

(I know you didn’t ask for this hot garbage pile of my feelings, anon, so I’m sorry.) 

[lucyreviewcy]

Symbolism in The Last Jedi

Here it goes, I’m posting a full blog post about The Last Jedi. This Star Wars movie has a lot going on that I like, and after Rise of Skywalker left me feeling a little hollow, I rewatched The Last Jedi to try and put my finger on exactly why I prefer Rian Johnson’s offering to JJ Abrams’. 

The key is symbolism. The Last Jedi draws on a lot of influences, mythical and literary, resulting in a more human story. Let me break down some of these references to explain what I mean. 

1) Jane Austen’s Force and Forcefulness 

If you’re a fan of both Pride and Prejudice and Star Wars, then it is unlikely that you missed the similarity between the exchanges that Rey and Ben/Kylo have in The Last Jedi and Darcy and Elizabeth’s interactions. 

There are key beats that these conversations hit that map directly with Darcy and Elizabeth. These are conversations between two characters who are drawn together by forces outside of their control, but whose worldviews are completely incompatible. Rey tells Ben “I know everything I need to know about you.” Rey’s opinions at this point are built on what Luke has told her about her opponent. This moment recalls Elizabeth’s reaction to Darcy as a result of the picture painted by Wickham. Johnson’s choice to have Rey express these feelings during a downpour mirrors the proposal scene between Elizabeth and Darcy in Joe Wright’s 2005 adaptation. 

Later, in the throne room scene, Ben asks Rey to join him. He says “You’re nothing, but not to me.” This recalls Darcy’s first attempt to propose to Elizabeth, where he tells her that he loves her despite her inferior rank and her embarrassing family. It is even more similar to the modernized P&P adaptation Bridget Jones, where Mark Darcy remarks “I love you, just the way you are.”

Given the way that these scenes reflect Austen’s characters’ interactions, and the subsequent adaptations, it isn’t surprising that “Reylo” became a phenomenon. Austen’s approach to romance has influenced the way we tell love stories for centuries. These beats evoke romance in the mind of the audience. Johnson reflects the conflict between Rey’s ideals and Ben’s, using the frame of romantic dialogue to help audiences to contextualise their interactions. A lot of The Last Jedi is about exploring the reasoning behind the decisions that people ultimately make, for better or for worse. Ooh, there I go using some words with romantic connotations to make my point... It’s infectious...

Luke Skywalker AKA Achilles AKA 

One of the best moments in The Last Jedi is when Luke is revealed to have been projecting his image across the universe to fight Kylo Ren. The subtlety of Johnson’s direction at this point (Luke leaves no red footprints in the white salt layer of the planet), is a marvel, but this is also another instance of age-old symbolism. In The Iliad, when Achilles refuses to go into battle, his best friend and/or lover Patroclus puts on his armour and rides out into the fray. It is the image of Achilles that strikes fear into the hearts of his opponents, just as it is the image of Luke that draws Kylo Ren out to fight. 

This is not the only instance of this kind of story, the legendary Spanish knight known as El Cid is believed to have been posthumously dressed in his armour and sent out on horseback to inspire troops during the siege of Valencia. The repeated notion that the image of a war hero can be just as powerful as his physical presence is what Johnson evokes in Luke’s projection.

Evil Things - They Hiss! 

Tale as old as time, Evil objects hiss, They sound like just like snakes, hissing in your wake, hiss hiss hiss his hiss...

You know how horcruxes in Harry Potter, the ring in Lord of the Rings and the big evil pit of the Dark Side in The Last Jedi all hiss? This is not a coincidence. There is a cultural association between evil objects and hissing sounds. Why? This echoes basic Christian mythology. The snake in the garden of Eden is the embodiment of evil, and tempts eve towards an object she should not take. 

Hissing is the sound of snakes, and therefore the sound of temptation. Rey is drawn to the hissing, snake pit of the Dark Side, she is tempted. Once again, Johnson taps into some very basic mythology with effective results. 

So why does this use of mythology make The Last Jedi better than Abrams’ films? 

It is because it makes them feel more real. By reflecting the audience’s culture in the culture of the film, Johnson creates a world that is tangible and human, despite its inherently alien quality. This sets The Last Jedi apart from Abrams’ films in the trilogy, because Abrams spends more time evoking the mythology of the Star Wars universe. A familiar object here, a referential line of dialogue there. 

Abrams’ movies are nostalgia trips, but they feel very compact in comparison to The Last Jedi because the mythology is all internal. The Last Jedi stretches its story out of the Star Wars universe and into our own, while Abrams’ films feel like they are more bound up in themselves, tied in knots of their own mythology. 

[timeagainreviews]

“The Faceless Ones” gets a facelift

Back in 2011 when I was first getting into Doctor Who, I managed to track down the Loose Cannon Reconstructions of the missing Doctor Who episodes. For those, like myself, who did not grow up on Doctor Who, classic Doctor Who can be a bit of an adjustment. The editing is slower. The dialogue is closer to theatre than television, and there is so much padding. That being said, over time I grew to love classic Doctor Who and rewatch it more than I do the new series. Regardless, the reconstructions have always been a bit of a slog to get through.

Watching a reconstruction is tedious, even with good writing. The fleeting moments where some fan shot a four-second clip pointed at the television are like small oases of movement in the desert of static imagery. Despite the valiant efforts of some truly talented fans, nothing will ever beat the real thing. So whenever a new animated remake of a missing Doctor Who episode is announced, I get excited. The opportunity to see these static images once more brought to life with movement is always good news. Except maybe when that announcement is "Fury From the Deep," when clearly "The Evil of the Daleks," is next in line, but that’s a gripe for another review.

For my review of "The Macra Terror," I watched the colour version of the story. However, this time around, I decided to stick with the classic black and white, which I found I much prefer as it feels appropriate to the storyline. I almost feel like the colour versions are an attempt to rope a younger audience into watching something old. As these animated reconstructions go, I feel as though the animation has gotten increasingly better. However, I can’t exactly say that this time. I will go into it further but suffice it to say, I feel as though some corners were cut. That isn’t to say that there aren’t moments of brilliance. For instance, the inclusion of the mugshots of both the Roger Delgado and Sacha Dhawan Masters into the background was a clever little easter egg.

"The Faceless Ones," is a bit of an odd story from beginning to end. Frankly, it’s overly long and a bit clunky, but at its heart is a mystery that keeps you wrapt with anticipation. It starts with the Doctor and his three companions- Jamie, Polly, and Ben landing the TARDIS at Gatwick airport. It’s a strange bit of storytelling from the outset as the primary source of conflict comes from the fact that the Doctor and his friends are trespassing where they shouldn’t be. The Doctor basically says "Cheese it, the fuzz!" and they scatter, running away from the police. The true point of this sequence is to split the group up. While running from the police, a strange group of mystrerious men load the TARDIS onto a flatbed and drive it away. Polly wanders into a building with a chameleon logo, where she witnesses the ray gun murder of a nosy inspector. Now the story has focus, we now have a mystery.

The Doctor and his pals go in and out of states of capture at the hands of airport security with such regularity that it begins to become laughable. Having no passports, the Commandant wants to keep the Doctor and Jamie for questioning, but the Doctor insists they look for the body of the man Polly saw murdered. The airport’s Commandant fills the role of the insufferable prick trope just long enough to draw the proceedings out into a proper six-episode runtime. I understand the need for a character’s refusal to believe in aliens as a reasonable reaction, but it becomes repetitive after three or so episodes. Luckily, the man actually proves to be rather useful further down the line, which is a nice break from the usual trajectory of such characters in Doctor Who which is usually one that leads to their and/or others’ demise. He does eventually acquiesce and go looking for the body, but they find nothing.

We learn that the man murdered was an inspector by the name of "Gascoigne." The men responsible for his death, Spencer and Blade, believe he may have been sent by the parents of one or more missing people. There are a few pieces to the puzzle early on. We’re shown a collection of postcards, over which Gascoigne was murdered. There also is the case of this strange organisation- Chameleon Tours and their collection of unused foreign stamps. We know the two things play in together, but how exactly is unknown. All the while, Ben seems to bumble from scene to scene with not a lot to do other than save people at the last moment, which seems to be all he’s ever really good for. As final stories for companions go, "The Faceless Ones," does a great job making a case for the departure of both Ben and Polly. As opposed to going out on a high, Ben and Polly’s own uselessness is highlighted here as they almost seem like an afterthought.

This is made even more painfully obvious when the brand new character of Samantha Briggs is given more prominence and agency within her first scene than Ben or Polly get in the entire serial. We learn that Chameleon Tours is some sort of front for a shady bunch of aliens that replace people by taking over their identities. Polly, having been kidnapped is replaced by a body double, pitting her against the Doctor and Jamie. Acting as though she’s never seen the two, she goes off to work at her new job as a receptionist for Chameleon Tours. This is where we meet Samantha, a young girl from Liverpool searching for her lost brother. All she had to go on was a postcard from her brother sent from Rome. Polly’s double benefits in no way by helping her learn the truth, so Samantha’s enquiries are deflected.

Around this time, Inspector Gascoigne’s partner, Inspector Crossland, has gone looking for him which leads him to the Commandant. He informs him that he’s there investigating his missing partner and looking into the activities of Chameleon Tours. Throughout this bit of the story, I honestly couldn’t tell you what Ben is up to. He’s a fart in the wind as far as the story is concerned. Other than being sent off to investigate, there is very little for him to do. The fact is, this is the Doctor and Jamie show at this point. The Doctor once again tries to plead with the Commandant, and once again runs away feigning a bomb with a bouncy ball. Jamie goes off to eavesdrop in the waiting area outside Chameleon Tours, which is where he overhears Samantha talking to fake Polly.

All the while, the baddies have a mole in the air traffic control room in the form of Meadows, a man replaced by a chameleon body double early on in the story. Because of this, they know the Doctor is a threat. While Jamie and Samantha flirt and compare notes, the Doctor heads back to the Chameleon Tours hangar to seek out Ben and further answers. There he discovers a penlike device which was used earlier to kidnap Polly. The Doctor pockets the device and continues his investigation. It is at this moment when the Doctor discovers the original Meadows in a crate, unresponsive, but seemingly alive. Spencer watches the Doctors activities over CCTV and draws him into a room which he proceeds to fill with cold gas. After a struggle, the Doctor plugs the gas nozzles with rags and covers the camera with his oversized coat. Upon arriving, Spencer finds the Doctor, seemingly unconscious, that is, until the Doctor springs awake and sprays Spencer in the face with the pen device and makes a break for it.

Jamie and Samantha have pieced together by now that Chameleon Tours give their young passengers pre-stamped postcards ahead of their flights. Their claim is to save the travellers time by posting the postcards for them, but in actuality, this is to dupe their families into believing they made it to their destinations. It’s a rather sinister plot which still leaves quite a few unanswered questions. Namely- if the passengers don’t arrive at their destinations, where do they end up? It’s enough for Crossland to consider a lead which he brings to the Commandant’s attention, but they’re afraid to tip their hand too much. If they halt the Chameleon Tours flight to Zurich, they may never find the answers or evidence they’re looking for.

The Doctor finally wins the Commandant over to his side by showing him the pen device can freeze fake Meadows’ tea instantly. At first, I thought the Doctor was antagonising Meadows, but it turns out, he simply didn’t recognise his face from the catatonic man in the crate earlier. It’s funny to imagine this, as modern Doctor Who would never allow such a lapse in the Doctor’s memory, but it’s part of why I love the Second Doctor so much. You can buy that this man is simultaneously the smartest man in the room, while also believing he would forget such an important face. There’s a sort of effortless absent-minded brilliance to Troughton’s performance that I just find utterly charming. The point is driven home by a small little one-off line where the Doctor asks Meadows if they have met before. Villains are left to wonder just how much the Doctor knows, up until he’s standing over their smouldering corpse muttering "Oh crumbs."

After the Doctor’s display, and Crossland’s encouragement, the Commandant gives the Doctor free reign of the airport for twelve hours to investigate. At this point, Jamie and Samantha arrive with the envelope of postcards giving Crossland enough cause to go question Blade. The Doctor, Jamie, and Samantha head off to look into the room where the Doctor was gassed. However, as the Doctor is leaving, Meadows plants a device on his back. Crossland finds Blade aboard a flight but discovers the plane is not a normal plane at all. After serving the passengers food and drinks, the stewardess seals them behind a giant vault door. I got a kick out of this bit as the animators were clearly having fun designing hip '60s inspired passengers on the plane. In fact, some of the background character designs throughout most of this serial range from inspired to questionable. Either way, it was nice to seem them at least trying, for the most part. The plane disembarks with Crossland aboard. Blade encourages Crossland to watch on a screen as the passengers vanish into thin air.

Meanwhile, the Doctor, Jamie, and Samantha go back to the hangar to try and find the command centre of the Chameleons. While searching, they discover a monitor showing a live feed from the room where Meadows was copied into fake Meadows. However, before they can go search for the room, the device on the Doctor’s back is activated, knocking him to the ground. Spencer emerges and renders them unconscious with another pen device. Upon waking up, our three heroes have discovered themselves unable to move, and in the path of a laser, very slowly creeping toward them, or at least Jamie or maybe Samantha. Either way, someone is going to die if they don’t work fast enough. This is such a cute moment in the episode as it’s like something from a bad James Bond film or Austin Powers. The villain leaves the heroes unattended while a laser slowly inches toward them. Classic.

It’s moments like these that really make me sad the episode is missing as I would have loved to see the faces Patrick Troughton pulled while struggling to move. Jamie and Samantha are able to move just enough for Jamie to use Samantha’s compact mirror to deflect the laser back at itself. Having destroyed the machine, the trio is suddenly very much not paralysed as they all stand up, good as new. Adorable. It’s a great little slice of campy goodness that is pure genre inspired fun. I’m all about it. All the while, Blade informs his director that he has an "original," in the form of Crossland for him to possess.

The Doctor and his friends find the conversion room where the airport medic, Nurse Pinto, is helping convert another Chameleon. The conversion involves attaching what looks like a Wiimote to each subjects’ forearm and transferring the biological information of the human victim to the Chameleon. After some adjusting, they’re able to talk like a human and even recall the memories of their original. In this case, it’s Jenkins, one of the immigration officers at the airport. I rather liked a small detail here that Jenkins still lived with his parents. Call me crazy, but it was a bit of character building that made you feel for a guy. Classic Doctor Who is full of those moments if you know where to look for them.

The Doctor and Jamie pretend to be a doctor and patient as to throw Pinto off their scent. But even if she believes their story, she’s still not going to allow them into the X-ray room where she performs her vile conversions. Jenkins and Spencer watch from a monitor, angry that their enemy has once again escaped his fate. But they let the Doctor leave as they have bigger plans and will let him come to them in his own time. Upon returning to the control tower, the Doctor learns that Crossland has been unheard from in quite some time.

At about this time, the crew of the control tower really begins to take shape. The secretary, a woman named Jean just kind of comes out of leftfield as MVP. First, she drops the bomb that not a single airport has reported ever receiving passengers from a Chameleon Tours flight. And then even further, allows herself to act as a decoy long enough for the Doctor to go root around in the X-ray room. Jamie goes off to find Samantha who has bought a ticket on the next Chameleon Tours flight in an attempt to take the investigation of her missing brother into her own hands. It seemed a bit weird to me that she would do this, seeing as they were already uncovering a huge chunk of the mystery at this point, but I guess the writers needed a reason to thrust Jamie into the action as he pockets Samantha’s ticket and goes in her place. That is, before stealing a rather saucy kiss from the precocious lass. Seriously, why was she never a companion? Samantha was awesome. Samantha 2020.

The Doctor finds two of the Wiimotes and completely misses the original Nurse Pinto propped up in a closet behind him. Once again, the brilliant imbecile misses the biggest clue right under his nose. Hoping to call Meadows out, the Doctor returns to the control tower again. But he’s not there. This is one of the most frustrating elements of this story- the constant back and forth between locations is enough to give you whiplash. On top of that, there is the constant cycle of capture and escape, capture and escape, capture and escape, that really bogs this story down. I wish it could have been more streamlined because as you may guess, they end up back in the X-ray room shortly after. Agh! Pick a fucking location and stick with it! Honestly, it’s writing like this that loses me the most and is why I couldn’t tell you where Ben is at this point in the story. Seriously, where is Ben? I don’t even care anymore.

Jamie gets taken onto Samantha’s flight in her stead. Only when the food and beverages are served, Jamie is off to be sick in the loo. He was referring to aeroplanes as giant metal beasties in the first episode, and now he’s flying in one. The dude may be made of sterner stuff, but even the best of us get airsick. Due to this, Jamie doesn’t disappear like the other passengers. Must be something to do with the food and drink, huh?  Having realised Jamie took her ticket, Samantha becomes irate, but the receptionist guides her to Jenkins who of course pulls a ray gun on her. Another ray gun. Another capture. Woof.

The control tower tails the Rome flight with Jamie aboard with a small fighter jet, which honestly is a little weird. Did they just happen to have this fighter jet and pilot on hand? Is this a thing airports usually have? I honestly don’t know. Either way, the sequence doesn’t make much sense other than maybe they had some stock footage of a jet they kind of thought was cool. It’s funny then that the footage should now be missing and thus needs to be recreated by a computer years later. What was probably ten minutes of film splicing back in the '60s is now hours of rendering. These CGI plane shots are honestly one of the few times where the animation is more impressive than live action. So kudos to the animation department as those shots are genuinely cool.

Despite their cool rendering, the fighter jet is no match for Blade’s lasers as it is quickly shot out of the sky. It is just around this point that the Chameleon flight must have also crashed as it too disappeared off the radar. However, the Doctor believes that as opposed to going down, the plane actually went up- into space.  Of course, the Commandant gives this theory zero credence. But the Doctor is absolutely correct as we see the plane’s wings fold back like a rocket ship and thrust higher and higher into the sky until it approaches a large black satellite orbiting Earth. This is once again one of those moments where I am cursing the lack of footage as I would relish the ability to see the models built for this sequence. I will say however, this is, once again, a crowning moment for the animation department.

Now aboard the satellite and unaffected by the plane’s vanishing trick, Jamie discovers drawers full of what appear to be small people lying unconscious. At this point, the plot still hasn’t really come fully together, so seeing tiny people in drawers is just mind-boggling. You think you have some idea as to how or why these bodysnatchers are doing what they’re doing and the story throws us this brain bender. Hats off to the writers because I challenge anyone to say they saw this bit coming ahead of time. As it turns out the passengers didn’t vanish, so much as they were shrunk down into tiny people. The reason why? Because the satellite wasn’t big enough. Which actually makes a lot of sense in some ways. Terry Pratchett once wrote that a gnome character of his was the richest man in Ankh-Morpork, by ratio. If his resources stretch further, then a dollar buys him more than it would a full-sized man. Brilliant.

After discovering the jet pilot was electrocuted (by lasers somehow), the Commandant is beginning to soften to the idea that the Doctor is onto something with his spacemen theory. After confronting Meadows with the Wiimotes, our MVP Jean stops his ass with a rolling chair. Seriously, I love Jean. Jean 2020. At this point, Meadows just kind of becomes their bitch and totally spills the beans about their plans. How their planet faced a catastrophe and how they needed new bodies, new faces. He even gives up the satellite position and the fact that they have some 50,000 young people on board, ready for conversion. He even leads them to where the real Nurse Pinto is being held. I think if they’d have broken out the thumbscrews he would have copped to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby. What a chump.

Around this time in the story, the animation begins to take a serious nosedive. Nurse Pinto kills a policeman with a ray gun, and I swear to God that the policeman has a partner that looks exactly like him. Now, I know this is a story about body doubles, but reusing the same character design on two separate human characters in the same scene is just lazy. I thought at first that perhaps the actors in the original version were twins. But then, later on, you see two of the same faced cops in a scene together again! So it’s not just twins, it’s triplets, evidently. And they all grew up to be coppers on the same beat. Sorry animators, but you’re nicked!

Shortly after, the link between Nurse Pinto and her original is broken and fake Nurse Pinto turns into a pile of clothing and some sort of amniotic fluid. Her water just broke in the worst way possible. I’ve said it before, but part of me wishes they would improve upon some of the foley in moments like these. Mark Ayres does a great job mixing and remastering what was already there, but would some sound effects be completely out of line? Some squidgy squashy mess would have gone a long way to sell this moment. I figure a seasoned Doctor Who pro like Ayres would really be able to deliver such a thing. Also, if you ever get curious to know what Mark Ayres looks like, I’ll save you a google search and just say- he looks exactly how you picture a guy named Mark Ayres to look. Just a little fun fact there.

The real Nurse Pinto and the Doctor decide to pretend to be chameleons at this point so they can infiltrate the satellite. However, Spencer’s not having it as he’s onto them, but he allows it because he has plans to take turn the Doctor into an original for yet another Chameleon. Upon arriving on the satellite, the Doctor discovers Jamie has been turned into a Chameleon as well, which is rather funny as the Doctor laments the loss of Jamie’s charming Scottish accent. Those two, I swear. It’s as Frank Rossitano from 30 Rock once said "I’m not gay gay. I’m just gay for Jamie." Before they can turn the Doctor into one of their ilk, the Doctor destroys their machine buying the Commandant down on the ground some time to find the originals the Chameleons were linked to.

All the while, the Doctor is sowing seeds of doubt among the Chameleons that their director, in the form of Crossland, only cares for himself. That he wouldn’t care if he endangered them into becoming puddles themselves. He drives the point home by bluffing that they have found the locations of the originals. It’s a gambit that actually seems to work as Spencer and his men begin to question their director. The Commandant, on the ground level, is still plugging away, trying to save the day from his end. I kind of love the Commandant for following through with the Doctor’s bluff, and with such gusto. As I said, he really comes into his own by the end of the story. It’s kind of a shame that the guy never got a name. In the same vein as Counter Measures, I could see him, Jean, and maybe even Crossland in their own spin off adventures. They’re really a great group of one-off characters. Nurse Pinto and Samantha can come too.

It’s rather weird to me that the Chameleons opted to hide the originals as opposed to just taking them with them in the first place. After Samantha and Jean discover 25 cars registered to Chameleon Tours, they set off to search the car park. We find out that the catatonic originals have been stowed away in the cars to slowly die while the conversions complete. This may seem like a really dumb place to stash a body, but it’s not exactly unheard of. The airport of the city I’m from actually missed a truck containing the body of a man for eight months. Either way, it’s an odd little plot hole that exists mainly to give the Doctor something to hold onto and create dissent within the ranks. There is literally no reason not to take the bodies until the process is done. But ok.

Seemingly out of nowhere, the great stool pigeon that is Meadows, grows a pair and escapes from his guards. This is where the animation gets really ropey. I don’t know if it’s because the black and white versions are a 4:3 aspect ratio as compared to the 16:9 ratio of the colour versions, but as Meadows wrestles free, his body proportions are comically incorrect. His arms look about several inches too short, and they are positioned in such a way that the shoulders are set far too high. My guess is that the animators originally made this scene for the widescreen ratio, and merely squashed the image, thus shortening the arms for the black and white version. As opposed to, you know, bending the elbows. He tries to subdue Samantha but eats pavement. Slow clap for Meadows. Meadows 2016.

To prove they aren’t bluffing, the Commandant removes the link on Jenkins arm which turns him into a puddle aboard the satellite. This sends the Chameleons into a frenzy and they shoot their director, killing fake Jamie in the process. The Doctor negotiates with the remaining Chameleons to return all of the missing people and even agrees to help them find a cure for the catastrophe that set them on this path in the first place. After finding Crossland stuffed in a locker like a high schooler, he and Jamie go back home.

Down on the ground level, Jamie parts ways with Samantha, which is really kind of sad considering what a great character she turned out to be. What's even worse is that with Ben and Polly up and deciding to stay in 1966 London for basically the most boring of reasons, there was definitely a vacant spot for her to fill in the TARDIS. I would have really liked to see her as I instantly identified with her plight to find her brother. My family has experienced the disappearance of a loved one, and I know exactly how that feels to not know whether someone you love is alive or dead. They absolutely nailed that part of her character, and it was great to see it portrayed accurately. She could have been great. Instead, she stays behind and Jamie continues onward with the Doctor. However, the episode ends on a note of mystery- the TARDIS appears to be missing! Hopefully one day I’ll be able to follow up on that mystery with yet another animation to review, but until then, you’ll just have to wait! That is unless you already know.

All in all, the Faceless Ones is a pretty cool story with some rather lousy execution. There are quite a lot of moments that work to its benefit, but it’s marred by it’s bloated runtime. This story could have easily been told in four parts, and I feel as though it was a perfect candidate to be edited down into a single movie à la "Planet of Fire," or "Terror of the Vervoids." The strongest elements are the characters. And another bit of praise is that it was a slight departure from the base in peril episodes that dominated the Second Doctor Era. I do rather like Brian Hodgson’s score as it was genuinely creepy at parts. It evokes memories in me of the Woodsmen in Twin Peaks dancing to the impossibly slowed sounds of Beethoven’s "Moonlight Sonata."  

Regardless of any ropey bits of animation, I absolutely admire the work and craft of the animators involved. The character likenesses were an improvement upon "The Macra Terror," (especially Polly). There are points where you know the production team had to invent shots from thin air to fill the gaps that existing tele-snaps and sound simply weren’t illustrating. There’s a lot of creativity involved that evokes a lot of the same spirit of the original series. There’s also those really fun opportunities to retroactively tie the old series to the new. Such as the Dhawan Master, or yet another Magpie Electricals reference. Although they are far from my favourite companions, it’s also nice to finally see Ben and Polly’s send off in proper motion. As always, it’s the next best thing to the original.

[letterboxd]

Making Waves.

“I live in Florida, my cat’s in the movie. It is incredibly personal.” Waves writer and director Trey Edward Shults opens up about his filmmaking process, reveals the movies that made him fall in love with cinema, and gushes about fellow A24 alum Robert Eggers.

Trey Edward Shults doesn’t want to spoil Waves. We don’t want to spoil Waves either. To even begin to describe its unconventional structure would be a spoiler. We’ve said too much already. Just know it’s a sweeping melodrama that solidifies Shults as one of the defining American voices of the decade.

The coming-of-age family drama centers on brother Tyler (Shults regular and breakout star Kelvin Harrison Jr., pictured above) and sister Emily (Taylor Russell), their relationships and struggles with each other, their parents (Sterling K. Brown and Renée Elise Goldsberry), and first loves (Alexa Demie and Lucas Hedges). This is Shults’ third collaboration with A24 after his DIY debut Krisha (set in the same family house as Waves, and similarly playful with its aspect ratio), and the polarizing horror It Came At Night.

While its structure hasn’t worked for everyone, Waves has captured the enthusiasm of many Letterboxd members in a profound way. “This is the coming-of-age movie to end coming-of-age,” writes ActionTomasello. “The less you know of it, the better it is going into this one.” It’s been added to the popular ‘You’re not the same person once the film has finished’ list, and the film’s soundtrack, collected into this Spotify playlist by Letterboxd member Ella, is one of the most-mentioned contributing factors to its success. Writes Nick: “A soundtrack that’s meant for a specific group of people that I’m a part of. It feels too perfect how someone made a film filled with songs from Kanye, Frank Ocean, Radiohead and many others. It feels like one long, sad, fucked-up music video.”

But no Letterboxd review currently beats Jack’s heartfelt letter to Shults: “Your film has moved me to better myself, to love, and to meet my emotions head on. Thank you.” (He also put it in his top five of all time.)

We caught up with Shults to learn how Waves was conceived and executed, and investigate which films have hit him the hardest.

Taylor Russel as Emily in ‘Waves’.

You often draw your films from your personal experiences and you’ve described Waves as autobiographical. Can you go into some detail about which life experiences fed into this film? Trey Edward Shults: Where to start? In broad strokes, I was a wrestler and tore my shoulder in the same way as Tyler. The relationships between Tyler and Alexis and also Emily and Luke are inspired by my girlfriend and [me] in the good moments, bad moments, and everything in between. Their parents are inspired by my parents. I live in Florida, my cat’s in the movie. It is incredibly personal, but I had a huge collaboration with Kelvin, and then as more actors came on it got more collaborative, so it really started from this personal place and grew out of that.

How do you reconcile your relationship to your own suffering with the fact it’s become your livelihood and commodity? It’s very strange. When we recreated events in Missouri I think that was the furthest I’ve ever gone. That shoot was an all-consuming dread and I broke down, it was very hard. I would question: “Is this healthy? Is this right?”, but I came out the other side happy I did it. It was cathartic. My mom and my step-dad are therapists and I would be a total mess without them, though I’m not in therapy right now. Working through these movies is a bit of therapy.

I’m trying to make personal things that I hope connect with other people, especially this movie. Going through life and getting to the other side of it and having perspective informed me a lot. Whether it’s just tonally or pacing-wise, I wanted the film to spiritually feel that way.

The film’s photography is remarkable, especially the first act, when you have your fullest frame. Can you take us inside how you executed some of those spinning 360-degree shots? For the car shots we took out the middle console of the truck and put a slider that went from the backseat to the front. Basically, the dolly grip and I were crammed down hiding behind the car seats and the grip pushed the camera from the back to the front. Drew [Daniels, the director of photography] was in the car behind us with a remote, so he’s operating the spinning and I have a monitor in the back. That way I could talk to the kids in the car and I also had a walkie so I could talk to Drew.

A lot of the dynamic camera stuff was a case-by-case scenario, sometimes it was just running behind our steadicam operator or just hiding and letting them go and play. We wanted the camera to be purely motivated by where our main character’s emotional state of mind was, so it’s all coming from them, but then we also wanted to figure out the technical shit and make it feel to the actors that the camera disappeared and we’re not even there. So it was an interesting balance getting there. It’s a second skin for us and we know exactly what we’re after visually, but let’s disappear and let the kids play and we’ll adapt to them.

Since our name is ‘Letterboxd’, I feel obligated to ask you an aspect-ratio question. Can you share with us how you built this intuition to change at will—did you have films you saw that you feel did this well? That’s a good question, because this one really felt like it was building off what I did with Krisha and pushing it further. I do remember The Grand Budapest Hotel came out right before I started Krisha and it had the three aspect ratios to separate [its] time periods, which was really cool to me. I think I got really excited about using aspect ratio to echo the character’s state of mind. That was the goal with that, especially for Tyler’s trajectory.

The soundtrack is getting some acclaim. Do you have any songs you wanted to fit in but couldn’t find the room, or couldn’t clear the rights for? I realized there were so many songs I wanted in it, but the movie told you what works. If you tried to force it on, it didn’t work. It started with the writing and it worked its way organically. The final soundtrack is pretty close to what was in the script though I think a few changed along the way. We got incredibly lucky that we got everything we wanted. I don’t know how we did it. It was a long process and our last song didn’t even clear until after Telluride and Toronto.

Trey Edward Shults and Sterling K. Brown on the set of ‘Waves’. / Photo: Monica Lek

There are shades of Chungking Express, Magnolia and Moonlight in the film’s DNA. What were some other films you watched or recommended to your cast and crew as preparation? Funny thing is we didn’t do a lot of movie-watching for preparation. Drew and I lived in the same house so we’d always have a movie on. We were watching The Story of Film a lot—the giant anthology series and study of the history of cinema, incredible. What we watched would totally range, it could be things like Ordinary People and Raging Bull, to The Tree of Life and I Am Cuba, to Boogie Nights and Punch-Drunk Love. We would take inspiration from anything, even a film like Yi Yi. It’s a completely different cinematic approach.

Yi Yi might just be the best film about family, so it’s a good start (Lulu Wang also mentioned it in our recent chat with her about The Farewell). That’s the thing exactly: even though Waves is made in such a different way, I think spiritually they’re sprawling tales of family. That’s one of my favorite movies. For the cast, we didn’t actually talk about movies that much. It was more about Florida, music and the character dynamics and all that good stuff.

Which movie scene makes you cry the hardest? One that just popped in my head is Dancer in the Dark. When Björk escapes in her head doing these musical numbers and it leads to the end, to the most devastating thing possible, it broke me. That movie’s rough, man. That’s not one I could watch and have good cries or something. I can’t rewatch it because it’s utterly traumatizing. I was probably crying for hours after it, I felt dead.

Which film makes you laugh the hardest? The most recent film that made me laugh the hardest is What We Do in the Shadows. I saw it for the first time on an airplane sitting next to a stranger and I think they thought something was wrong with me. Then I got home to Florida and showed it to my girlfriend, and her brother came home and we watched it again. It never got old.

Who was the most relatable coming-of-age film character for you? It’s hard because when I was a teen I was obsessed with sports and then it was music. I’m trying to think who I related to the most. Man, I don’t know. Nothing is coming to mind. Shocking.

What film do you wish you made? I’ll go with There Will Be Blood. It’s the first film that popped in my head.

What mind-fuck movies changed you for life and why? There were three that I saw pretty close together at a young age: Boogie Nights, A Clockwork Orange and Raging Bull. I had a digital cable box in my room, so I would sneak and watch a lot of things that my parents didn’t know I was watching. They just rocked my world. Until that point it was all Aliens and Terminator and every big action movie, so then when I saw those films it was like “this is what movies can be! What the hell is this?”.

I remember with Raging Bull I didn’t actually enjoy it. I was like, “This isn’t Rocky but I can’t stop watching.” It’s like a trainwreck and I’m fascinated but I don’t know if I like it, then I was obsessed with it and it’s one of my favorite movies now. Boogie Nights and A Clockwork Orange felt like a bigger vision was at work. It wasn’t just something made out in the ether, it was a specific singular vision and I cannot stop looking at it.

Sterling K. Brown in ‘Waves’.

What’s the most overlooked movie from A24? Shoot, I wish I could look at the catalogue right now. I’m just gonna go with The Spectacular Now because I just watched it again on the airplane and I thought it was really beautiful. It’s a good one, man.

Lastly, it’s time for best-of-decade lists. What’s the greatest film of the 2010s? When we interviewed Robert Eggers, Waves was his first choice. Shut up, come on! Oh my god, Rob’s the best. I will say that The Lighthouse is my favorite film of the year, without a doubt. I’m obsessed with it. I could gush about him for hours. He’s not just one of the greatest young filmmakers, he’s one of the great filmmakers working now. Honestly though, for my decade number one I gotta go with The Tree of Life. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time so I would put that at number one, and then The Lighthouse is close to it.

‘Waves’ is distributed by A24 and is playing in select US cinemas now. Photos courtesy A24.

[arecomicsevengood]

Is This How I See Jaime?

Objectively speaking, I am not that old. Still there’s no getting past the fact that I am getting older every day, like everybody else. I might not be at the point where my body betrays my age, where I ache all the time and grunt when I stand, but my mind still carries with it the weight of decades of lived experience, and this can at any moment make me want to lie down.

There are few artists that capture the feeling of aging quite like Jaime Hernandez. Partly this is because of his working method. No one else does what he does, making serialized comics for close to forty years, that tell stories with the same characters. These are not truly STORIES, utilizing flashbacks that provide crucial context to events and create literary effects, even as the overall narrative they tell moves forward in time and builds an attachment between reader and character comparable to long-running television series. Still, when broken up into serialized installments in issues of Love And Rockets, it can frequently feel like nothing is happening. Often, what you get in an individual issue is around fifteen pages, split between multiple pieces focused on different characters. These fragments are focused, compressed in a manner closer to cinema than television, but you’re still only getting what might amount to three to five minutes depicted on-screen. With a few exceptions, what you get in an issue is not a complete short story with a beginning, middle, and end. For all the influence the Hernandez Brothers have had on alternative comics, reading the people they’ve influenced will not prepare you for how much Love And Rockets is modeled off of serialized comics, and how much of its power it draws from continuity and extended engagement.

This pacing demands a certain level of expectation-free interaction, which is crucial to deep relationships. It’s worth noting Jaime’s strips run alongside his brother Gilbert’s work, which is similar in some ways, but by no means the same. Gilbert’s body of work is a lot more complicated, due in part to how prolific he is, the meta/self-referential/self-deconstructive elements of the stories he’s telling, and also how he draws tits like Mark Newgarden draws noses, that just keep getting larger. He deserves a deep critical reading, but I don’t have the energy, money, or time to keep up with him. Running the two brothers’ work side by side makes Love And Rockets implicitly about family, which then in turn becomes a subject each cartoonist explicitly makes work about. And not just “chosen” family, but the actual people who’ve known you your entire life. Which is, inherently, a concept which both means more the older you get, and remains somewhat alienating. As a reader, it helps to be prepared to extend to Love And Rockets the goodwill one would a family member, to begin to get on its level.

On a superficial level, making work about family seems somewhat conservative and nostalgic. That’s not to suggest it’s not valuable, or worth fighting for. There’s just a certain adjustment of values or attitudes a reader needs to make to get on board with the work, that might be at odds with the punk rock alternative comics reputation that precedes it. The comics themselves are built on a formal language of cartooning that’s older and out of fashion: Sixties Ditko comics, Lil Archie, Dennis The Menace Goes To Mexico. This adds to a feeling of being about aging in a way younger art cartoonists inspired by their same-age immediate peers can’t get to. For instance, I love Olivier Schrauwen, and I can see the influence Yuichi Yokoyama has on his work, and I view the two of them as peers in dialogue, creating the future of comics, which creates a totally different reading experience than I get reading work that feels more in dialogue with the past. The formal choices of the Hernandez brothers, including that their work appears for the first time in serialized comic book formats, calls conscious attention to history. Consciousness of the past hurts, and this truth is a huge element of the plots and themes of Jaime’s work.

It’s the sheer graphic strength of Jaime’s drawing that enables it to stick in the memory. He’s able to capture a tiny gesture and render it iconic through use of line and spotted blacks. The precision he brings his images gives them a certain ease of recall. This is the crux of a two-page spread at the climax of The Love Bunglers where, as a bunch of different stories and images are recalled, now rendered at different angles, they’re all there in your consciousness, in a mix of your memories of the comic and your memories of your own individual life. It’s a hugely cathartic climax.

However, both Gilbert and Jaime have this aspect to what they do that can easily frustrate a reader, and it is seemingly inextricable from the core of their power: Once a point is reached where you can easily follow along, and a satisfying conclusion to a story occurs, the next several issues will completely destabilize that and you will again not know what exactly is going on. For instance, if you read the Perla La Loca collection, collecting the “Wigwam Bam” and “Chester Square” graphic novels, by the end of it, you will have a very exciting experience that should convince you Jaime Hernandez is one of the greatest cartoonists in the world. Reading the Penny Century collection of the work that followed, plenty of stories will leave you feeling like he lost his touch, or is spinning his wheels. At the end of the book, and the “Everybody Loves Me Baby” story, you’re knocked flat on your ass again, but if you had read the original comic books as they came out, who knows if you would’ve stuck it out that long.

This, by the way, is one of the most realistic things there is. Life’s “things just keep happening” quality will fuck you up time and again. While I haven’t given up on life just yet, I have stopped reading Love And Rockets a few times. I’m not the sort of reader who sticks with a series out of inertia. I have always been hyper-aware of the value of my comic-book buying dollar, and therefore pretty fickle. If I read two issues straight of a comic that feels like it’s treading water, I would be done with it. I’ve gone back and picked up things after the fact and filled in gaps, or I’ve switched to reading trade collections checked out from the library. I bought the first two issues of the recently relaunched Love And Rockets volume 4 in one go, realized that it was continuing stories from Love And Rockets: New Stories, and didn’t go back for more, put off by the stories’ continuation from the previous volume.

It’s only now, with the release of Is This How You See Me and Tonta, that I am reading the stories that followed up The Love Bunglers in a complete form. They blew me away. The effects Jaime’s going for at any given moment may be subtle, but they accumulate, and this accumulation then becomes the true effect, and why I analogize it to aging: There’s this sheer weight that results from how things just continue to happen, and each time they hit you with what feels like more force, even as the moments themselves are minor ones. This is a true-to-life feeling that is very hard to capture. It’s present in the relentless pace of Charlie Kaufman’s masterpiece Synecdoche, New York, but that is a movie too intense to rewatch for many. Jaime’s work is built around you returning to it, which means it has to be somewhat inviting, and include levity.

Is This How You See Me focuses on the characters of Maggie and Hopey, introduced in 1981 as teenagers, now presumably in their mid-fifties, happily married to other people but still weighing the possibility of cheating with their ex. The characters return to a “punk rock reunion” in their hometown, to reminisce on the past with old friends, and old characters we haven’t seen in years appear, visibly older than when they were last drawn, but still recognizably themselves. This plot lends the comic some elements of nostalgic fan-service that I intellectually feel an aversion to. It feels almost like the plot is designed transparently for those purposes. Bringing back old characters would strike me as a crass project in the pages of X-Men or Legion Of Super-Heroes, but the naturalism of Jaime’s approach means that it allows him to show me things I legitimately haven’t seen in a comic book before. It’s probable they’ve been in movies or books, but I would argue they work better in comics.

For instance, there’s a scene where the reunited cast are showing each other photos on their phones.  This is a normal thing people do, and so surely it has been depicted in a film. But in a comic, there’s this weird meta element to it. Smartphones have text message conversations appear in little word balloons, right? The word balloon being a technique comics used to depict speech, as part of their normal communication system of images. Then, when interacting in physical space, people show pictures to each other, using this device they usually use for the mimesis of speech over distances, but they’re communicating using pictures to show what their life is like. Which is what the comic itself is doing more generally. So, there’s there’s this semiotic quality to the gesture of the outstretched hand with phone in it which feels really profound when depicted in comics, while it would feel sort of stupid and uncinematic in a movie, where the aging theater audience would have to squint and ask their neighbor what is being shown in the text message they’re seeing on screen.

Similarly, we see the married couple of Maggie and Ray, separated from each other for the length of the weekend, fretting over how much they should be in communication, drafting texts and deleting them. There’s an intimacy people who live with each other share, where much of what they encounter apart from the other person they want to talk to them about, because to be close to another person is to have them in some ways always present inside your head. Depicting the writing of a text, and then the decision to delete it, captures both the intimacy of a couple and the intimacy of one’s own private thoughts, in a way that only a form with the intimacy of a comic is able to depict effectively. Prose alone can’t capture the fluctuations of posture and self-presentation which is the heart of deleting a draft.

Concern for one’s image is depicted as well in the title pages to individual chapters, showing characters taking pictures of themselves in mirrors with their phones. These pages seem to depict not so much the cultivated selfie but the self-awareness of the drafting process, the titles above them taking on a certain poetry, built around the words spoken to oneself unconsciously that are the opposite of the language one chooses to send in a message to convey a precise thought.

This stuff really impressed me, and it all fits within a language of small gestures. While there are tons of books that are about how connection works in the digital age, it also always feels like that stuff is a commentary on how young people live. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything as interested in how people in middle age use these devices. Of course, it’s possible examples exist in work targeted to older audiences, and I just missed it because it wasn’t marketed to me.

It was actually Jaime’s other 2019 book, Tonta, that spoke to me more. Here, the aging the book is about is a coming-of-age thing about a high school student, and the book has this spirited youthful quality to it from the outset. While other, darker, plot elements unfold as it goes on, what was interesting to me is that the noir-like narrative that exists as a counterpoint in the finished book might not have even seemed part of the same story to a reader of Love And Rockets, where the character nicknamed Tonta just sort of suddenly emerged. There’s even a few pages in this collection given over to narration by Ray, who otherwise doesn’t appear in the book. These elements don’t seem dissonant or like they don’t belong. It just makes the book itself feel loose, like it feels as free and exploratory as a teenager looking for something to do. Placed together inside a book, the disparate threads become united by having a main character to pay attention to how developments of the plot affect her. The book has a real tonal arc as it unfolds, and the way the book gets you in its grip from such a goofy start seems to replicate how the stories about the Maggie character developed over time, here captured in miniature.

The sum of these two books will at some point only be a portion of a future volume of the Love And Rockets library, the formatting of the Perla La Loca and Penny Century books I mentioned earlier. There are portions from recent issues of Love And Rockets that are natural continuations and codas from these books, and what tapestries these fragments will be woven into is unknown to me. Another gutpunch could be just around the corner or years in the offing. There’s really no way to know what the future holds.