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scotianostra · 3 years

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Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?

One of my favourite quotes by J M Barrie who died on June 19th 1937.

The creator of the boy who never grew up, Peter Pan was born and brought up in Kirriemuir, the seventh child to David Barrie, a hand-loom weaver, and Margaret Ogilvie, the daughter of a stone-mason. Surviving on the income provided by declining weaving industry, the Barries were never wealthy and it is from his early childhood experiences as a dweller in the tenements that Barrie drew his sympathetic portraits of the rural poor.

The death of his older brother, David had a profound effect on the young Barrie, His mother never recovered from the loss of her son, whom Barrie perceived to be the favourite and whose place in his mother’s affections he strove to replace. The psychological significance of Barrie’s relationship with his mother and his need for maternal approval are apparent in the uncritical, almost doting biography of her life which he published in 1896. The exploration of feminine identity was to become a marked feature of Barrie’s writing. The experience of death in childhood would also influence Barrie’s work, which is constantly pre-occupied with the themes of exile, immortality and the otherworldly.

Barrie’s most famous work is of course Peter Pan and his tussles with Captain Hook are legendary, but you might be surprised to know Hook was not in the first drafts of the story, the villain of the piece was actually Peter Pan himself!

The original draft to me sounds more like the Peter Pan inspired horror film in which the boys retain their youth and gain their powers, including flying, by becoming vampires.

Of course if you’ve read the books, you will know of them, they never really featured in the Disney cartoon, but were in the later film Hook.

Barrie himself described the original Peter Pan as a “demon boy” and depicted him kidnapping children from their beds in the dead of night. Although Peter’s image definitely softened once Hook was added to the story, he is still not an altogether heroic hero. As Allison Kavey, co-author of “Second Star to the Right: Peter Pan in the Popular Imagination,” told The Week, “He is selfish, devoted to his own entertainment, and except in battle scenes, incapable of taking care of himself. He also loves like a child, without thought to the effect his love has or what it will mean if he forgets for a while.

More on the Disney film and the character Tinkerbell, contrary to popular myth, Tinker Bell in the Disney movie was based on actress Margaret Kerry, not Marilyn Monroe. Stills of Kerry modelling Tinker Bell poses (including with giant prop scissors and other objects from the movie) can easily be found with a quick Google search.

Another myth is that Barrie invented the name Wendy, not true, the name Wendy in the playBarrie arrived at the name by shortening ‘my fwiendy-wendy’, reportedly how the young Margaret Henley, who had trouble pronouncing her Rs, referred to Barrie. But the name Wendy had been used as a girls’ name since the nineteenth century deriving from the much older name Gwendolyn. However Barrie is credit with inventing the term ‘Wendy house’. The name originates in the small house that Peter Pan builds around Wendy Darling when she is shot by Tootles, one of the Lost Boys. The idea came from the washhouse outside Barrie’s own childhood home.

Off Barrie himself, he was friends with some of the most important writers of the time — many of whom played on an amateur cricket team he started — including Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, P.G. Wodehouse, G.K. Chesterton and Robert Louis Stevenson. In fact, not only were Stevenson and Barrie well acquainted, so were their respective pirates — Captain Hook, wrote Barrie, was the only man ever feared by Long John Silver, the iconic villain from Stevenson’s “Treasure Island.”

Finally he gave Quality Street chocolates their name. One of J. M. Barrie’s less well remembered stage works was the 1901 comedy Quality Street, set during the Napoleonic Wars. The play is not read or revived much now, but its lasting legacy was in providing the confectioners, Mackintosh’s, with a name for their new chocolates in 1936.

Barrie’s own view of his mixed fortunes in the theatre was wittily summed up by his assessment that ‘some of my plays peter out, others pan out, a bit like this post maybe?

Anyway Sir James Matthew Barrie passed away age 77 in Marylebone, City of Westminster, Greater London, he is interred back home at Kirriemuir cemetery, as well as Peter Pan his legacy includes donating all the rights and royalties to “Peter Pan” in both the play and his books to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London

That hospital still benefits from this endowment. At the time of his death in 1937 he was Chancellor of Edinburgh University.

I’ll leave you with another quote from the man, please note though, the term “Scotch” was widely used back in his day rather than the more acceptable “Scots” we use nowadays.

“I've sometimes thought ... that the difference between us and the English is that the Scotch are hard in all other respects but soft with women, and the English are hard with women but soft in all other respects.”

#Scotland #scottish #playwright #writer #Author #literature

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hagridkeeperofkeys · 3 years

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May 2021 posts

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the-desolated-quill · 4 years

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It’s Summer And We’re Running Out Of Ice - Watchmen (TV Series) blog

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

I’m not going to lie. I was incredibly sceptical going into this. This isn’t the first TV adaptation of a classic novel to go beyond the source material and try to continue the story, and they nearly always suck (see The Handmaid’s Tale and The Man In The High Castle). There’s a reason why books end where they’re supposed to end. If the author intended to carry the story on, they would have done so. This is why I get angry when the TV industry arrogantly oversteps the mark and try to continue a plot that has already come to a satisfactory conclusion. Doing a sequel to Watchmen, a story that hinges on the ambiguity of its ending, is just utter madness to me, and allowing Damon Lindelof to write that sequel borders on moronic at first glance. This is the man behind the TV series Lost, a show that ran out of steam within the first couple of episodes due to the fact that the plot was complete and total bollocks and the fact that nobody could be bothered to come up with satisfying answers for these ludicrous mysteries and series arcs beforehand. They were just making that shit up as he went along. Now you’re handing Lindelof the keys to one of the most intricate and detailed comic book properties of all time?! Fuck, why don’t you just let JJ Abrams direct the next Star Wars mo- Oh yeah, I forgot, he already did that.

Thankfully, judging by this first episode anyway, HBO’s Watchmen is nowhere near as bad as Lost. It’s certainly far more engaging and coherent. Does that mean I’m looking forward to the rest of this season? Well... I don’t know if I’d go that far. I’m definitely intrigued though.

HBO’s Watchmen is a sequel to the graphic novel (Lindelof called it a remix, but come on. Grow a pair and call it what it is. A sequel). Superheroes are still illegal, Robert Redford is now the President, Rorschach’s death has inspired a white supremacist cult, and it’s raining squid.

Yeah, the raining squid thing feels like the only egregious bit of fanwank in here, to be fair. Maybe they’re going somewhere with this, but I have my doubts. Are we supposed to assume that Ozymandias has been making squid rain for the past thirty odd years in order to keep up the whole alien invasion ruse? Why squid rain? And why is everyone so nonchalant about it? Shouldn’t people be just a bit concerned by this, considering what happened in New York?

Speaking of Ozymandias, we see him riding a horse and writing plays for his butler and maid in some fancy mansion. Quite what the significance of The Watchmaker’s Son is, I don’t know. All I do know is I’m not going to be able to sleep at night without thinking about Jeremy Irons’ thighs from now on, so thanks for that.

Putting my cynicism aside for a moment, I do like what Lindelof is trying to do here. He’s not merely cashing in on the Watchmen brand. There is a genuine effort to do something fresh and different with this material, and I commend that. Watchmen’s central theme has always been about power, but whereas the source material focused mainly on its relation to sex (Comedian’s hedonism, Nite Owl’s impotence, Rorschach’s mummy issues and the sexual objectification of Silk Spectre), the TV series seems to be zeroing in on race as a topic. This I applaud. Expanding on certain areas that the graphic novel only ever really touched upon is a great idea. This doesn’t feel like a repeat of the graphic novel, but rather a clarification of it, exploring areas and themes that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons may have overlooked. This helps set this series apart from the outset.

The opening scenes where we see the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 is a pretty harrowing way to start. I’m ashamed to say I had no idea about the Tulsa Massacre prior to this, and we could have a whole other discussion about why schools seem to have been avoiding teaching specific topics like this in favour of the broad strokes of the Jim Crow era, but now is not the time. The fact that it’s depicted here sets the stage for what’s to come. Some have criticised the show for the length of time the opening focuses on Tulsa, claiming that it sensationalises the pain of black people at that time. I personally don’t think it does. It’s not overly graphic or gratuitous, at least in my opinion, but it is a very shocking way to open a series. Some might say even upsetting, but I think it’s important that we saw this because it’s relevant in setting the tone for the episode and indeed the season as a whole, as well as letting the audience know that this show isn’t going to fuck around or shy away from more sensitive topics, and I can respect that. Unlike Zack Snyder’s overly stylised adaptation from 2009, Watchmen the HBO series is grounded very firmly in reality.

Let’s discuss characters. This episode mostly focuses on Angela Abar, also known as Sister Night. Regina King has given some terrific performances in the past and this is no exception. She’s simply phenomenal. The way she switches from light-hearted wife and baker to violent, no nonsense vigilante cop. The shift is noticeable and yet both personas feel like they’re aspects of the same character. It’s exceptionally good. It also helps that the character herself makes for a great protagonist. Having survived the ‘White Night’ four years prior, where the Seventh Kavalry attacked the families of forty Tulsa police officers in response to the government giving special reparations to the victims of racial injustice, Angela has become cynical and battle hardened. She has no sympathy for Kavlary members and is willing to skip due process by beating one of them to a pulp and bundling him in the back of her car. She’s angry and in pain, and yet retains the audience's sympathy. I’m interested to see what happens to her over the course of the season.

I also really liked her friendship with Don Johnson’s character Judd Crawford. Johnson is a charismatic performer and Crawford is a charismatic character. He really dives into the olde western sheriff persona and seems to be having a lot of fun with it. Crawford is the only other character, besides Angela, who stayed on as a police officer after the White Night, and the two characters seem to have a great relationship. They laugh and joke around and there’s clearly a mutual respect between the two. I genuinely like this character, which is what makes his murder at the end so much more heartbreaking. Not to mention all the little details that force us to realise he may not be what he seems. We see him sniff cocaine in private and there’s a photo on his desk featuring the kid from school who aggressively asked Angela why black people deserve reparations. It doesn’t necessarily mean that Crawford himself is racist, but there’s clearly more going on with him that we don’t know about.

The final character of interest at the moment is Tim Blake Nelson’s character Wade Tillman, aka Looking Glass. We don’t know anything about him yet other than he’s a human lie detector, which I find very intriguing and I hope will be explored further as the show goes on. There’s a lot to play around with there, and the moral implications are tantalising. A conviction based not on physical evidence, but rather on the observations of one man. Even Sherlock Holmes has to back his deductions up with evidence, and yet Looking Glass clearly doesn’t need to. That just raises so many ethical questions. What if he has a particular bias towards someone? What about burden of proof? What if forensic evidence contradicts him? If Looking Glass is supposedly that accurate, does that mean the police will side with him regardless? It’s a great premise for a character and I really like Nelson’s performance, giving him a cold and detached personality that contrasts beautifully with Angela’s.

The characters and ideas are solid, however where I feel the show is lacking is with the consistency of its world building. Let’s analyse. This is an alternate history where Nixon used superheroes to extend his term limits, but after the New York attack at the end of the graphic novel, he’s been kicked out in favour of Robert Redford (nice nod to the source material there by the way. lol). As a result, black people got reparations for the racial injustices their ancestors went through and police are now unable to openly carry firearms without special permission from Panda (literally a cop wearing a panda costume). However, after the events of White Night, the government agrees to allow cops to wear masks to protect their identities, hence why quote/unquote ‘superheroes’ like Sister Night and Looking Glass are around despite the existence of the Keene Act. These are, in effect, legal vigilantes. Except already there’s a problem with conflicting messages. I like the idea of masked cops. In the current age of Black Lives Matter and police accountability, it makes sense and could be interesting to explore. However this is hindered by the whole ‘no guns’ stuff. Again, not a bad idea. America’s current gun laws are, to put it mildly, woefully inadequate. What if we went the other way? What if not only was it near impossible to own a gun, cops couldn’t even use a taser without special permission. Both ideas could work... but not at the same time.

Cops being allowed to wear masks creates the effect of empowering them through anonymity, and runs the risk of officers overstepping the mark and normal citizens being unable to hold them to account. But on the other hand, we’ve also got cops whose lives are constantly at risk and who are hindered in their duties by an overprotective nanny state, which effectively depowers them. So... which is it? It can’t be both. I like the scene where Panda reads the law about how the use of firearms can only be permitted in extreme circumstances, and everyone just angrily shouts him down because it tells us how the police feel about this new system. The fact that they’ve made one cop the sole arbiter of these new restrictions and forced him to dress like some ridiculous furry demonstrates the sheer amount of disdain they have towards this policy. But having said that, with the masks on, they have the power and freedom to break into people’s caravans and basically kidnap and assault them without consequence anyway. So what the fuck are they complaining about? It just doesn’t gel together. Either have it that the rules and regulations of the police are the same as our world except that cops can wear masks now, which has led to an increasing problem of police brutality and corruption, or have it that the police are being too heavily restricted and so a few have chosen to turn toward more ‘unorthodox’ methods of crime fighting out of frustration. Pick one and go with it.

Then there’s the Seventh Kavalry. Again, not a bad idea. In fact I love it. A white supremacist cult that’s taken Rorschach’s journal as gospel and have banded together out of a fear of being sidelined in a more liberal world. Very relevant and very interesting. Except... well... there’s not an awful lot to it, is there? In the original graphic novel, there was no clear bad guy. Ozymandias believed he was doing the ultimate good by killing millions of people to save the world, and everyone reluctantly went along with it. It was morally complicated. This, not so much. They’re unambiguously evil. The end. So what? What is there to discuss? It just feels lacking compared to the graphic novel and it runs the risk of creating a conflict that’s too clear cut. Obviously we’re going to end up siding with the cops, regardless of what they do, because the alternative is objectively bad. Hopefully Lindelof is going somewhere with this, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t say I was slightly concerned.

So on the whole, would I say I enjoyed this first episode? Well... I’d say I did, but with reservations. There’s some good characters and ideas that could be interesting to explore and develop, but its execution feels a little shaky in places. Hopefully the episodes to come will offer further clarity.

#it's summer and we're running out of ice #watchmen #watchmen hbo #damon lindelof #dc #hbo #review #spoilers

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thebibliomancer · 4 years

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Essential Avengers: Avengers #207: Beyond a Shadow...

May, 1981

“After countless centuries HE LIVES AGAIN! THE SHADOW LORD COMETH!”

He cometh riding upon a tornado like its a mighty sand worm. What a guy, this Shadow Lord.

Honestly seeing the Avengers tumbling about in a tornado cracks me up every time. Especially Wonder Man who looks nonchalant about it aside from being ass over head.

So I don’t think we’ve really talked about it but this period of Avengers is kind of between main writers.

Since issue 200 and its four writers, we’ve had David Michelinie and Roger Stern on the two-part adaptation of that Ultron novel, David Michelinie for that weird story with the Crawlers in the sewers; Jim Shooter, David Michelinie, and Bob Budiansky for the Yellow Claw two-parter, Bill Mantlo for the everything is on fire story and now Bob Budiansky and Danny Fingeroth for this issue and the next. We start getting a consistent writer again starting in #211.

I wonder what was going on behind the scenes around this time.

Anyway, onward.

So we start the issue with who I assume is the Shadow Lord. But he’s not riding a tornado, like Pecos Bill. He’s standing on an invisible ocean structure of some kind. Apparently a mysterious invisible ocean structure of some kind that hasn’t been seen for almost two millennia.

And yet, someone has kindly painted the title of the issue in English on the mysterious invisible ocean structure of some kind.

Some guy, maybe the Shadow Lord: “The dreaded time has at last arrived, the moment I prayed would never come... the moment I knew would surely come. He is soon to return, and only the power entrusted to me is capable of stopping him. And even that power may not prove sufficient.”

“With every passing second, my city and myself pass ever more fully into the Earth’s plane of existence. Would that the cause of my return here from the barren vastnesses of the Shadow World was as joyous as the glow of this new day’s sun.”

“But the grim responsibility of an entire race is my unwelcome inheritance. It is a duty I cannot shirk. Alas, I must take what comfort I can in knowing that no matter what the result of the coming debacle, I will at least be free to rejoin Ayshera, she whom my heart holds most dear... though whether our reunion will be in celebration of victory -- or in darkest mourning for the ashes of this planet -- none willy truly know until the final battle.”

Some Guy sure is helpfully monologuing his entire life story here. And even so he manages to be vague, inside his own mind, about the nature of the threat he faces. Way to preserve the mystery, Guy.

Also, he’s from the Shadow World so he may be a Yugioh.

Anyway, as one might expect, a city appearing in the middle of the ocean out of nowhere is of alarm so US aircraft carrier Poseidon shows up and starts yelling at Some Guy.

Some Guy decides that they sound mad but he doesn’t have time for lengthy explanations so instead he gestures and the winds and waves start whipping up.

Welp! Seems like the US Poseidon is going on an Adventure!

Meanwhile, Mt. Vesuvius!

Yup. Its that kind of story, the kind partially set at Vesuvius.

Some archeologists are digging in the foothills of the mountain in what has been a fruitless several weeks of archeology but one of the archeologists finds a hand shaped object which may be a hand.

They mistake it for a statue at first but realize its actually a perfectly preserved lava mummified corpse.

And while they’re busy congratulating each other about how wealthy and famous this discovery will make them, they fail to notice the hand moving its finger shaped fingers.

And elsewhere again, the best damn thing.

A cowboy shouts “SLAP LEATHER, YA GALOOT!” and then gets shot by a cannon.

This isn’t the Wild West of the America, this is a spaghetti western film set and the director is very upset at Black Bart’s shitty death acting. How hard is it to get hit by a cannon and then to fall down and pretend to die like you just got hit by a cannon?

You wouldn’t think there’s a wrong way to get shot by a cannon but you’d be wrong.

Simon Williams, Wonder Man: “I’m sorry, Mr. Bertolini. It’s just that, being Wonder Man, it’s hard for me to pretend those cannonballs are hurting me when I can hardly feel them.”

Mr. Bertolini: “True, signore Wonder Man, but I hired you because I thought you could-a act!”

Oh yeah, Mr. Bertolini talks like Mario. So that’s another tally for Marvel’s respect of other countries and cultures.

Aside from this being the seventh take on a ‘guy gets hit by a cannonball, beefs it’ scene, cannonballs are expensive. The cannonball that bounced off Wonder Man’s midsection looks fine but maybe you can’t just reuse them.

The filming breaks for lunch and Wonder Man wanders over to where his moral support is.

His moral support, of course, being Beast.

And he is moral supporting but he’s also multitasking with some women because even in Italy, women are just fascinated by blue fur. Furries are universal.

Wonder Man doesn’t feel supported though and this lousy spaghetti western film is a good opportunity for him.

If you remember, the last project we saw him get was as a cheetah print leotard wearing muscle man on a kids show and he got fired for making the host Uncle Elmer look ridiculous.

(Revealed to Simon’s chagrin in #194, lost to mishap in #201)

Being in an actual movie, even a spaghetti western, is the boost his career needs.

(I think we need to confront the actual possibility that Wonder Man is not a very good actor. But he might be a good stunt man if he can learn to act like things hurt)

Wonder Man’s publicist Rachel Palmer shows up as well and wow. Rachel has never appeared before and given the fillery nature of these chaotic no consistent writer times may not appear beyond this story. But you instantly get the sense of their working relationship.

And they have good banter too.

Wonder Man: “Wait. There she is -- Rachel Palmer -- the apple of my eye, the light of my life, the bane of my existence!”

Rachel: “If you delivered your lines that well in front of the cameras, Simon, you might actually keep this job -- which’ll make it just a little easier to hype you as a star back in the States.”

Wonder Man: “Your encouraging words are a constant source of inspiration, Rachel. But I’d appreciate it if you’d confine them to your press releases.”

Rachel: “You’ve got me all wrong, Simon. I hope this whole thing turns out well for you. Really.”

Wonder Man: “And for yourself. After all, if you make me a big name, you can ride along on my coat-tails and become a media hotshot -- instead of being stuck as a flak for Grade D Westerns.”

Rachel: “No, Simon. I--”

Wonder Man: “Forget it, lady. I’m a big boy. I know that all’s fair in love -- and show biz.”

And then he walks off towards his trailer, satisfied at getting the last word with someone whose job it is to make him look good. Beast says that he thinks Wonder Man was too hard on her and that Rachel probably digs Wonder Man.

Wonder Man: “Maybe you’re right. But I still can’t get over feeling that Rachel’s motivated by sheer self-interest and everything else places a distant second.”

(I’m pretty sure she does dig Wonder Man because unbeknowst to Wonder Man and Beast, she follows them to the trailer, wanting to convince Wonder Man that she’s not as self-serving as he thinks and also to invite him to a romantic dinner)

Anyway, Wonder Man’s social life isn’t important. At all. And not right now. Because when he and Beast go into Wonder Man’s trailer and discover the Avengers’ emergency signal briefcase is BEEP BEEPing.

It’s Cap and there’s an emergency situation that demands immediate investigation.

A brand new island city has just popped up in the middle of the Mediterranean slash off the coast of Majorca from out of nowhere and the government wants the Avengers to investigate.

Presumably the US government.

Because if I know anything about mysterious island cities appearing from nowhere - and I know exactly one thing - by jingo, they start wars!

Beast is enjoying his vacation so asks why the US Sixth Fleet doesn’t handle it instead. They’re actually paid to do things while on an ocean. But Iron Man just says that the fleet has had problems.

And with a little reading comprehension we can guess what problems. Because we’ve seen it. Its not a mystery.

Iron Man has a Stark plane sent to pick Beast and Wonder Man up and fly them to Majorca. Or somewhere thereabouts. I don’t know if Majorca has or had an airport.

Wonder Man bemoans that he’ll never be a movie star if he keeps leaving the set to go have exciting comic book superhero adventures.

Which is a little like complaining about being too handsome. Ya jerk.

And remember how Rachel Palmer was peeping on them? No? Scroll up a little and look at the above panels again. Back? And remember how Rachel Palmer was peeping on them?

Her media senses are tingling and telling her that she should definitely go check out the city that appeared in the middle of the ocean. She’s much intrepid for not a reporter.

Meanwhile, some slice of life filler fluff that doesn’t matter but that I find delightful.

And if this liveblog isn’t about sharing things that I find delightful then what is it about? Exhaustively recounting plots to comic books from decades ago? That’s just a side benefit!

The call to action back at Avengers Mansion comes right when Wanda is having Vision move a couch.

Vision: “Wanda, while it may be true that I am capable of moving this couch about all day, it seems a gross misuse of my android abilities to do so.”

Wanda: “Maybe if we just move those shelves then you just put it down there. We’re Avengers, not interior decorators.

This is the content I eagerly crave.

So back in not America, Beast and Wonder Man complain about the plane ride but passing over the ocean they see what trouble the Sixth Fleet was having.

Some Guy, Possibly Shadow Lord managed to strand the Poseidon aircraft carrier fully on a deserted island.

And I was wrong about the plane taking them to Majorca. Its apparently taking them to Poseidon because it lands on the ship’s airstrip so the two Avengers can consult the stranded sailors about what the heck is going on.

Captain Paul Garrison tells them that they were investigating the mysterious new island/city (not mentioning that they were also yelling at it) when a tidal wave suddenly swelled up and carried the Poseidon several miles and left it on this island.

And apparently the same thing happened to any other plane and ship that attempted to approach the island. Thwarted by winds and waves.

Damn you, nature!

Anyway, its all rather mysterious but Wonder Man figures

“Well, we were sent here to investigate. So... let’s investigate.”

And Wonder Man rockets off to investigate the city. While giving Beast a piggyback ride.

Which. Amazing image. Bless this issue for its bounty of amazing images.

Bear in mind that the captain said that the aircraft carrier was carried several miles. Wonder Man’s belt rockets have impressive duration considering he can’t be carrying much fuel on his person.

When they reach the city, they find a localized hurricane hovering right above it. But Wonder Man just flies down through the eye of the storm to get to the city.

Some Guy Shadow Lord is surprised because he had been expecting big boats and planes. Not a guy with rocket pants and a blue gorilla riding on his back.

But he’s able to shoo them away just as easily as any big thing, with a wave of his hand summoning a wind that carries Wonder Man and passenger Beast away from the city.

Meanwhile, Rachel Palmer is also here. She spent all her money renting a plane and then a boat but she’s going to get to that mysterious city and get an exclusive inside story!

So is she a journalist? Or what? She’s Lois Laneing but as far as we’ve heard her job is to convince people they want to see Wonder Man do stuff in movies.

Wonder Man spots her and tries to fly to her rescue but two water spouts spurt up to ruin this rescue plan.

The first one launches Rachel’s boat into the air and smashes it to pieces. The second blasts Wonder Man out of the sky preventing him from saving Rachel from falling to her death.

But unseen by either of the Avengers, a strong breeze safely lowers Rachel to the ground of the city.

Because what is an Avengers comic without men developing weird and intense feelings for a nearby woman.

Some Guy: “How beautiful she is, how like my own Ayshera. And, also like Ayshera, she is courageous... and more than a little headstrong.”

Cool. I hope this doesn’t get weird. Or that we’re not asked to sympathize with a guy whose only ‘sympathetic’ trait is a possessive attraction to a woman. Looking at you, Living Laser. And, I guess, Graviton.

Anyway, Wonder Man doesn’t see Rachel getting rescued by an airbender so he works himself into a lather.

Wonder Man: “That sinks it! It’s one thing to attack naval ships and planes... one thing to attack Avengers... But when he kills an innocent woman who could do him no harm -- that guy’s gonna answer to WONDER MAN!”

Honestly, I think you’re selling Rachel short. I’m sure she could do harm if she put her mind to it. Like, what if she covered him in bees. That would suck.

Anyway, Wonder Man rages through the city’s protective winds and then gets SAFUUSH!’d between two walls of solid water.

He’s left sputtering and disoriented in the ocean. At least until some hooks hook down from the Quinjet, hook Wonder Man, and then hook him up into the ship.

I didn’t know that the Quinjet had hooks for grabbing people out of the ocean but I am thrilled.

Ideally, the Avengers would use their newfound ability to vaudeville hook people into orbit more often. I can think of so many instances where it would be useful, or at least hilarious.

Anyway, Wonder Man apprises the other Avengers into the situation.

Meanwhile, not dead Rachel Palmer wakes up and finds the Shadow Lord brood slouching in a chair and watching her while she was unconscious.

She is alarmed that he’s just sitting there staring but he basically goes ‘DON’T WORRY I READ YOUR MIND TO LEARN YOUR NAME AND LANGUAGE’ and then decides to explain his entire backstory.

Shadow Lord: “The city in which we stand is the Shadow Realm and I... I am called the Shadow Lord!”

DAMMIT I KNEW HE WAS A YUGIOH!

Anyway.

THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO! Give or take! An ancient tribe decided to move to an island to isolate themselves from “primitive, superstitious neighbors who feared [their] more advanced society.”

Off to a good start with this guy.

Free of the mundane concerns of living in a world that hated and feared them, they were able to peacefully ALL BECOME WIZARDS WHO COULD CONTROL THE FORCES OF NATURE.

Maybe the X-Men are onto something.

So the Shadow Lord’s people learned to control, winds, waves, earth, and maybe fire so what I’m saying is that it was an entire island of Avatars.

Boom, sequel idea. Give me millions of dollars, Nickelodeon.

“Though veiled in mystery, rumors of our existence spread throughout the world. We were feared and shunned by the other peoples of the Earth -- which allowed us to continue our studies undisturbed.”

“Those who mistrusted anything they could not comprehend... they called us witches and sorcerers. Those who knew and understood us called us... the Earth Lords!”

“For centuries our sole purposes were to augment our knowledge of the Earth’s forces and to maintain the natural balance between these forces. Otherwise, we had no interest in the day-to-day affairs of the outside world.”

Maybe I was wrong about them being Yugioh. Maybe they’re the Time Lords from the Doctor Who.

Anyway, the Earth Lords were happy sitting on their island being Avatars but over the eons they sensed a disturbance in the Force, for I must reference all the things.

"Over the eons, we became aware of a seemingly immortal, human force of awesome destruction, one who could potentially plunge mankind into an irreversible slide to its doom.”

“Singlehandedly he could destroy towns. With an army beside him -- countries. Time and again, he did. It was when he finally joined the legions of Rome at the peak of the Empire’s power... that we first feared the balance of nature was in danger of being destroyed. Rome could forever take over the world.”

The Earth Lords tried on several occasions to destroy this menace. We don’t get to know what constituted these efforts and that’s disappointing because of what the final successful attempt was.

By 79 AD, they knew he was on the slopes of Mt. Vesuvius so they caused it to erupt, just to bury this one guy under hundreds of tons of rock and ash and lava.

Mission accomplished.

Except for the little thing where the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius also wiped out Pompeii and Herculaneum and other cities people know significantly less about, killing over 20,000 people.

As things go, that’s pretty dire amount of incidental deaths to kill one person. And the Earth Lords realize that this was a pretty major fuck up.

So they decided that they couldn’t be trusted with their powers and that they would disperse into the outside world to live and die as people do and have their powers dissipate over the years.

But before they did that, they discovered that the seemingly immortal guy they hit in the face with a volcano was somehow still alive somehow. Just trapped. Under hundreds of tons of rock and ash and lava that cooled into rock.

They killed thousands and didn’t even permanently kill the dude they were trying to kill? That’s pretty incompetent. They really can’t be trusted with their power.

Since he eventually might get out and resume being a dick, the Earth Lords drew lots and chose one of their number, the Some Guy later known as the Shadow Lord from the Shadow Realm, to forever watch over the city alone and await the day that the immortal guy would again walk the land.

And to help him solo the dude that took an entire city of people and a volcano to deal with, the Earth Lords concentrated all of their powers into this one Shadow Lord guy and taught him how to send himself and the city into a twilight plane of nothingness which is back to being called the Shadow World.

So this might also be Twilight Princess.

For two thousand years the Shadow Lord in the Shadow Realm in the Shadow World observed Earth and waited. And now, it seems that the seemingly immortal dude is back.

Rachel: “But I don’t understand. How can one man threaten a whole world -- and live for thousands of years in solid rock?”

Shadow Lord: “This is no mere man, my dear... this is the Berserker!”

And speak of the devil and we scene transition to him because we scene transition to Pompeii.

The lava mummified human figure that seemed to move before has stopped beating about with finger twitches and has gotten up to rampage around and backhand archeologists.

Don’t feel bad though. They were in it for the money and fame, those fiends.

Back at the city of Shadow Realm, the Avengers suddenly show up as a full team and basically enter swinging. Iron Man even blasts a wall for no reason.

Rachel tries to tell the Avengers that Shadow Lord means no harm but the Avengers can’t hear her over the sounds of Wonder Man loudly reassuring Rachel that they’re here to rescue her.

Iron Man exploding a wall for no reason probably also didn’t help.

So Rachel instead tries to tell Shadow Lord that the Avengers are a force for good. While he can hear her, he chooses to ignore her.

Using his powers of being the Avatar, he tries to pull a rocks fall but nobody dies. Rocks falling is something the Avengers deal with panache and also lasers and punches.

Some panache. Beast’s skycycle gets hit by a rock and he ends up leaping onto one of the spires of the city to avoid crash. And then, like a cat who climbs a tree except its a building in this context, Beast has a hard time figuring out how to get down from there.

While the larger Avengers punch and laser boulders and jump onto spires, Wasp just flies right in and shoots Shadow Lord in the eyebrow.

Amazing. Another good use of Wasp powers, being able to get in close while the opponent thinks the team is distracted at a distance.

Shadow Lord is none too pleased to be shot in the eyebrow by a tiny insect-sized flying woman and decides that a particularly karmic punishment is required.

Shadow Lord: “An insect-sized flyling woman! What sorcery is this? But if an insect you be, then it is only fitting I ensnare you in a cocoon of living wind... a cocoon which will grow and envelop your so-called fellow Avengers!”

And as Rachel still pleads with Shadow Lord to knock it off, he summons a giant tornado that suck in all of the Avengers (save Beast stuck up on his spire).

Shadow Lord even has the tornado carry him along, the better to continue mocking the Avengers as he carries them to their doom.

Shadow Lord: “You hopeless children! Did you actually think to defeat me, to deter me from my purpose? I who who command the earth and wind themselves to do my bidding?”

Yeah, dude. Definitely not sounding like a supervillain now. Cannot fathom why the Avengers are assuming you are one.

Iron Man manages to escape the tornado by firing his boot-jets at maximum, sending him flying free with a SHA-BOOSH! but also carrying him far away because momentum.

Shadow Lord then creates a whirlpool in the ocean and has his tornado carry the Avengers towards it. The whirlpool goes to the bottom of the ocean. Which then cracks open to reveal bubbling magma.

That’s right. The Shadow Lord is going to shoot them out of a tornado, into a whirlpool and into magma beneath the ocean floor.

Its. At least more precise than hitting them with a volcano, I’ll give him that. Definitely feels like overkill to go from rocks to tornado-whirlpool-magma execution but its definitely more precise.

Somewhat more precise.

Because when Iron Man manages to slow himself down to turn back he notices that a yacht is being swamped by the waves Shadow Lord is churning up.

And because of heroism, he takes the time to scoop the yacht out of the ocean and rest it safely on an island.

Geez. There’s a lot of boats being beached in this story.

Shadow Lord actually sees this. And a thought starts penetrating his thick skull that maybe he should have listened to Rachel.

Shadow Lord: “The armored one paused in his attack on me to save those people -- innocent people... which is more than we were able to do 2,000 years ago. Perhaps, as Rachel says, they are not agents of evil...”

He decides that he’ll stop throwing them out of a tornado into a whirlpool into magma but he doesn’t get the chance to put that train of thought on the tracks.

Beast waves Iron Man over. From his perch on the spire he’s noticed that the building he’s on is cracking from the strain of all the power Shadow Lord is throwing around even though he’s not been throwing it at that building.

So Beast deduces that the city is key to Shadow Lord’s power in some way and should have the shit beaten out of it.

And as Iron Man starts punching some wall, Shadow Lord doubles over in pain and the tornado he was about to dissipate dissipates.

The other Avengers get free and decide hey, follow the leader.

Jocasta: “The battle has truly just begun. Malevolent power such as this must not be allowed to exist. We must follow Iron Man’s lead and destroy the city -- totally!”

So unnoticed by the Avengers as they level the city into a pile of rubble, Shadow Lord staggers and swoons at Rachel’s feet.

But even dying, he still has some exposition bottled up.

To be fair, he’s been isolated for 2,000 years with no one to talk to.

He explains that the powers of an entire population of Avatars was way too great to be contained in one squishy mortal body so the powers were instead imbued in the city itself.

And with the city destroyed, it can no longer serve as a source of power and also can’t keep him alive anymore.

He’s honestly not too broken up over it. Since the Avengers are valiant and worthy, they can pick up his unfinished business while he goes and dies and gets to reunite with his girlfriend who died sometime during those 2,000 years.

Shadow Lord: “But please understand... I am as much to blame for today’s events as anyone... I bear you no malice... we misjudged each other. I have done my best... no more can be expected of a man... perhaps you will succeed... where I have failed. So do not mourn my passing... for me, death is but the long-awaited door that opens to my beloved... Ayshera.”

And the Avengers realize belatedly ‘we done goofed.’

“A sad -- and confused -- group of heroes grimly watches the passing of the Shadow Lord... and only then does the cruel truth reveal itself to them: what they had thought to be one of their greatest triumphs is instead... one of their most bitter defeats.”

Oh, and as I expect they’ll soon find out, the Berserker has been kicking the Italian army’s ass near Pompeii so that’s probably escalating into a bit of a situation and they just accidentally killed the guy who could have helped with that. Although in fairness, he deliberately ignored Rachel when she told him that the Avengers were heroes.

Like he said, he fucked up too.

Still, while its a bit of a Marvel tradition to have mighty misunderstanding fights, I don’t think they tend to result in people dying. One for the history books.

Next time: the Berserker.

Follow @essential-avengers. Also like and reblog. And send me Avengers triumphs that are way more impressive than beating up a city.

#Avengers #Essential Avengers #Wonder Man #Beast #SHADOW LORD #essential marvel liveblogging #Iron Man #Wasp #Captain America #Jocasta #Vision #Scarlet Witch #huh its been a while since they've gotten to do much #from the volcano thing and the tornado whirlpool depths of the earth thing #i think that the Earth Lords just had no grasp on subtlety at all #go big or go big

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motherwasapapafucker · 5 years

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Doctor Who All-Consuming Fire Annotations; Prologue & Chapter One

Prologue

The Old Man, his granddaughter and the British Army officer are the First Doctor, Susan, Siger Holmes respectively. The Doctor and Susan originate from, whodda thunk it, Doctor Who while Siger Holmes is a direct lift from Baring-Gould’s Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World's First Consulting Detective.

Lane takes a number of elements of Baring-Gould’s attempt at a biography for Holmes, including both Siger and the third older, older Holmes brother, Sherringford, who will appear later in the novel. Gould identifies Siger as the Holmes family patriarch and seemingly derived the name from the detective’s use of Sigerson as an alias in The Adventure of the Empty House.

The other figures present during the prologue are of course the Seventh Doctor, Ace and Bernice Summerfield following the events of the book. They primarily serve to add a few tantalising hints at what’s to come and help introduce Lane’s notion within the book that Holmes and Watson are false-names attributed to the duo by Doyle during the publication of Watson’s memoirs. An idea largely abandoned by the time they appear in Happy Endings.

With Barbara and Ian notably absent during this sequence, it could be taken that the events are pre-Unearthly Child. However, you could always assume that they are just around the corner and aren’t terribly interested in Siger’s tale. There’s a slightly indulgent vibe to the entire set-up, however, Siger’s knowledge of the temple ultimately plays a larger role within the novel and beyond that, there’s a nice atmospheric element to these figures existing on the periphery of the tale.

Chapter One

“thirty-five volumes of my diary” - Doyle wrote 60 Holmes stories between 1887 and 1927, however chronologically his adventures begin in 1881, All-Consuming Fire takes place in 1887, with The Final Problem occurring four years later in 1891. The later is foreshadowed throughout the book, and one of the short’s more notable figures will appear in a minor role later in the novel.

“I see the repulsive story of the red leech, the terrible death of Crosby the banker.”- Lane continues Doyle’s trend of hinting at untold Holmes stories within Watson’s diary. The line paraphrases a similar moment inThe Adventure of the Golden Prince-Nez. Numerous pastiches have attempted to document these cases to one degree or another, and Lane himself would subsequently use the red leech for his second Young Sherlock Holmes novel.

“The singular affair of the aluminium crutch and its connection with an attempt upon the life of our dear sovereign…” - Another untold tale, this time lifted from The Musgrave Ritual. Its role in an attempt on the life of Good Queen Vic is seemingly an addition by Lane, and I can’t help but see this as a reference to the Jackal’s use of an aluminium crutch during his attempted assassination of Charles de Gaulle during the final act of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal. “Following the tragic curtailment of my marriage to Constance Adams of California I was again living under the same roof as Holmes.” - The exact number and nature of Watson’s wives are a running joke/source of hilariously serious debate within Holmes Fandom. Born of a few off-hand mentions and Doyle clearly not giving a fuck, Watson seemingly goes through between two to seven marriages. Gould alleges Constance Adams was set to be Watson’s bride to be in Doyle’s unpublished play The Angels of Darkness, so this is a bit of a twofer reference. The failure of the marrage is a bit of a joke on this front.

“The cost, he claimed, was of no concern, for he had recently been generously remunerated by Lord Rotherfield for proving to the satisfaction of various Coury circulars and scandal sheets that Lady Rotherfield was not a female impersonator.” - Another Untold Tale, seemingly a Lane original this time and an unnecessarily unpleasant “joke.”

“Finally, completely restored to health and happiness, we returned to England on the Orient Express.” - While the Orient Express was a real long-distance passenger train, it’s hard to image Lane didn’t leap at the chance to have the two return to England via the service for obvious reasons. “...Colonel Warburton and his charming wife Gloria.” - Presumably, the same Colonel Warburton whose supposed madness would come to the attention of Holmes via Watson. One of two such instances mentioned in The Engineers Thumb.

“..but only the Reverend Hawkins was present in the dining car. Baden-Powell, a self-proclaimed expert on butterflies whose tan and manner indicated military service, was absent.” - Hawkins is seemingly a Lane original, however his alias shares a surname with Doyle’s first wife. Baden-Powell is presumably Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout Movement and at the time of the novel Intelligence Officer within the British Army. Powell often travelled disguised as a butterfly collector and would use detailed drawings of butterfly wings as a means of hiding maps and other sensitive information. His presence during the sequence adds a touch of humour to Holmes’ complete failure to pick up on this while noting Hawkins own subterfuge.

“The man in the chair, swamped by his white robes, was the least impressive thing in the carriage.” - As we’ll soon learn, this apparently unimpressive figure is, in fact, Pope Leo XIII, who served as head of the Catholic Church between 1878 and 1903.

“I am Cardinal Ruffo-Scilla, and this,’ he gestured to his mirror image on the other side of the chair, ‘is Cardinal Tosca.” - Cardinal Tosca’s sudden death will latter be investigated by Holmes in yet another untold adventure mentioned in Black Peter. Notably, as with the events of All-Consuming Fire, this is at the behest of the Pope. Ruffo-Scilla is an odder figure, sharing the name with a real Cardinal. However, the Ruffo-Scilla died around three decades prior to the events of the novel. I’m tempted, primarily for fun anagram reasons, to view him as yet another Scaroth splinter particularly as it adds a few of extra layers of mirroring to the scene. Who and Holmes characters on either side of the Pope and all that shit.

“‘I remember Sherringford writing to tell me,’ he murmured, ‘ that one of our distant ancestors had been Commander in Chief of the Naval Forces of his Holiness the Pople. I had never credited the story until now.” - The first overt mention of Sherringford within the novel, this also takes another element from Gould in that the Holmes family are seemingly lapsed Catholics. Watson’s surprise at Holmes’ sudden, casual, revelations regarding his family recalls his shock upon first meeting Mycroft in The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter. “Have you heard of the Library of Saint John the Beheaded?” - Recurrent minor Who fixture that first appears here, the Library holds a number of rare, banned texts. Lane would subsequently detail elements of it’s founding in Empire of Glass. Where rather fittingly, the Doctor’s alleged older sibling Irving Braxatiel played a role in its creation.

“One of the three unexpurgated versions of the Malleus Maleficarum is in the Library,” - The Hammer of Witches, Well known treatise on Witchcraft that encouraged the extermination of its practitioners. Written by discredited clergyman Henrich Kramer, lots of blatant insights into the mind of a murderous wanker.

“...along side shelves of books on the Chinese Si Fan society and its leader, Doctor Fu Manchu - a man whom we in the Vatican believe to be as huge a menace to civilization as you believe anarchism to be.” - Fu Manchu is the creation of Sax Rhomer, appearing in 12 novels between 1913 and 1948. Manchu is the archetypical yellow peril, inspiring countless equally racist figures including Who’s own Li H'sen Chang. An Anti-British figure, Manchu would battle cheap Holmes knock-off Dennis Nyland-Smith in an attempt to end British Imperialism. Rhomer was a joyless fuck, so this was treated as the Doctor’s greatest crime. Lane portrays the Si Fan as a largely unknown force during the late 18th century, and this fits quite well with the early 20th century setting of the Manchu novels.

“The Affair of the Politician, the Lighthouse, and the Trained Cormorant” - Title of an episode of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes radio show, context would suggest Lane’s version is slightly more salacious.

#Doctor Who #Sherlock Holmes #vna #all-consuming fire #annotations #crossovers and such

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thousandeyesand-one · 5 years

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Tagged by @naomimakesart

■What are your top 3 favorite houses of Westeros?

HOUSE TARGARYEN. I mean Hello! 👀

HOUSE STARK. The Ice to my favorite fire house!

HOUSE DAYNE. Extremely underrated & unexplored I would love to know more.

■If you could live during one era in GRRM’s universe what era would it be? (Age of Heroes, Valyrian Empire, Conquest of Westeros, Dance of Dragons etc.)

I'd probably be like either a weirwood & live through all of these eras lol or I'd be a child of the forest secretly surviving since dawn age at the isle of faces or something! Coz I can't choose one era 😜

■What is your favorite episode/scene from the Game of Thrones TV series?

Battle of the Bastards, Loot train attack, Tower of Joy, First look at Ser Arthur Dayne 💜 basically every time arya is on screen. But I guess S05E04 holds a special place in my heart that whole episode was about Subtle hints at jon's Parentage/Subtle-mild hints at Jonerys future magical babies/ & had perhaps my most fav scene in the show of dany & Ser Barristan Selmy bonding over Rhaegar!

"Rhaegar never liked killing, he loved singing."

■What ruler do you think brought about the most change in Westeros, be it good or bad?

Jaehaerys I Targaryen, the Conciliator. Alysanne Targaryen, the Good Queen. I think they were the Obama's of the 7k literally inherited the realm from Maegor who almost crumbled the dynasty & the realm but they rebuilt it to last for two more centuries. While you asked Good & Bad I'd like to mention for 99% of good that Baehaerys did there was 1% of bad done by him too. The Iron Precedent of 101 A.C. that establishes male inheritance over female which single handedly caused DOD, Blackfyre Rebellions & is still a problem! If only Jaehaerys would've listened to Alysanne & made daenerys the heir! Listen to your wives Men! Make it a habit!

■If you could ask GRRM one question what would it be?

In a shitty, patriachial world like Westeros, where it is more than clear that men have build & sustained their kingdoms & legacies through Acts of War or Revenge or Want & Need to secure power. Why are women like Daenerys, Arya & Cersei criticized as would-be Mad or psychotic/Too far gone or Already Mad characters?

■If GRRM could write a short novel/series about one other family or historical time (besides the Targaryens) in his universe what would you want it to be about? (My choice would be Nymeria’s Journey!)

Good choice Naomi!👌

I would like to learn more about The Daynes man House Dayne! They are so peculiar, mysterious & any reader of asoiaf knows theres more to that house that is important for the endgame than what we know! More about this family dating back to the Dawn age & the era of the rule of Kings of Torrentine. More about Ashara Dayne & her eldest brother who is still unnamed what is his name? How did he actually look like if his son has valyrian features? was he a snack just like his younger brother?.. you know.. important questions like those needs to be answered!

■What was your first introduction to ASOIAF/Game of Thrones? Did someone tell you about it, did you see it online or did you come across it at a store/shop?

My cousin told me about the book series but I was busy with my studies at the time so I couldn't pick it up. But then the show happened & he told me about it too so I watched the first season before reading the books. Then I picked up my Jaw from the floor after watching S01 & straight away bought those books. & THAT'S HOW MY LIFE ENDED!

■What’s one thing that bothers you about GRRM’s series?

I think it's the doylism that bothers me. It has always bothered me I am a Tolkien nerd & that man wrote stories beyond human capacity & error. Middle earth is as fantasy as fantasy can be & even though J. R. R Tolkien was inspired to write his stories by the service he did in military during war his story isn't a doylist one, maybe mild references here & there but nothing as serious as asoiaf. I feel like doylism complicates everything in this story! (P.S I also never was much of a history student Biology was Life!)

■What’s one thing you unabashedly love about GRRM’s series?

The impossibly, irrevocably, unattainable & unfair high expectation of men (selective men) that GRRM has created. I mean good luck to myself on getting in a relationship or getting married coz you aint never gonna be Ser Arthur Dayne awesome or Rhaegar Targaryen & Jon Snow Broody, Melancholy sexy!

■What are your feelings about the prequel series in development at HBO right now for the Long Night?

I really really love Bran Stark & how he is connected to the rich 8,000 or longer history of Kings of Winter & the actual nature of this world, all the stuff that predates back to Dawn Age. First Long Night is something I would definitely love to watch, Fingers crossed am sure I'll like it! Also because valyria came into existence right after the First Long Night so this series only gives me hope for a Valyrian Freehold Prequel THAT WHICH I TRULY WANT!

Now tagged by @chillyravenart

Here goes..

■Which Westerosi castle would you like to live in?

Starfall, Dorne. Duh!

■Would you rather be a rich and influential lord, born into wealth and privilege or would you rather be someone who wields power from the sidelines, like Littlefinger?

I'd rather be born rich & influential because I know myself I won't be another cuckoo Lord or lady of the 7k. Plus it seems like anyone like Little Finger or varys who rises from sidelines have to sell their souls to the Satan with zero sense of humanity & everything being a race for power.

■Pick one: platinum hair or purple eyes?

I'll take purple eyes because I have jet black hair & purple eyes just compliment the fuck out of black hairs!

■Based on a tag I made once, based on your physical features, which part of Westeros/which house do you belong to?

In dorne probably House Martell.

■Who do you think will actually defeat the Night King?

I think Bran is the one who is truly going to defeat Night King.

■Three people you think will die in season 8?

Night King, Cersei & Varys. Can I add a fourth? Melisandre too.

■What would you name your dragon/direwolf?

My Dragon would be called Tzarax & my Direwolf would be called Amaris which means Child of the moon. She'd be an albino without red eyes maybe golden eyes!

■How must Ser Pounce be avenged?

Ser Pounce's daughter should train to be a faceless assassin & return all badass with many faces of cats & avenge Ser Pounce roaming around the red keep biting the hell out of anyone because Valar Mewghulis. All Men must be biten.

■Whose POV chapters are your favourite? (If you haven’t read the books... skip this and hang your head in shame lol jk jk jk)

My fav POV chapters are Bran, Dany, Jon, Arya. In that order!

Hang your head in shame lmao👏😂

■Your favourite ASOIAF/GOT antagonist?

Varys. This dude is going to burn in the seventh hell for all the bs he has unleashed upon just about everyone he has ever come across. I would name LF too but unfortunately it seems Varys outlived him so yeah The Spider & his webs are deadly as they come.

My Questions are:

1. What is that one moment or situation in asoiaf or GOT Tv show that inspires you positively?

2. YOUR ONE TRUE SHIP?

3. What is your favorite, ride or die character? CHOOSE ONE, ONLY ONE!

4. If you were to be the Ruler of Westeros & name Seven fighters to your Kingsguard who would they be? (They can be from the current generation of asoiaf or any fighter from any era, choice is all yours!)

6. Your own House sigil, house color(s) & house words?

5. What are your views about Robert's Rebellion?

7. Which is that one Character you wish had more screen time on the show (or) had a POV in the books?

8. Imagine Red Keep School of Witchcraft & Wizardry, which houses would the sorting hat sort these characters into? { Arya, Jon, Daenerys, Bran, Tyrion, Robb, Jaime, Cersei, Sansa, Rickon, Gendry, Joffery, Margaery, Brienne, Pod, Tormund, Hound, Missandei, Greyworm, Bronn, Sam & Gilly }

9. How do you prefer to watch the Final season? With a partner or spouse / alone by myself with no one to bug me / go to a watch party or bar episode events.

I'm Tagging @chillyravenart @naomimakesart @beautifuloutkasts @drakhus @phoebemaybe @mamadragon-daenerys @blue-roses-and-red-rubbies @northernlights37 @tomakeitbeautifultolive @toaquiprashippar @daenerys1417 @submarinesofpacific @crystalmusezz @ anyone who would like to do this i'd like to know your answers!

10. Nobody knows for sure how this story ends, but what is your ideal end to this story?

#tag #game of thrones #a song of ice and fire #this was fun!#ya'll better answer these questions it took me forever to make them up!

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tomorrowedblog · 3 years

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Friday Releases for March 26

Friday is the busiest day of the week for new releases, so we've decided to collect them all in one place. Friday Releases for March 26 include Nobody, Invincible, It Takes Two, and more.

Nobody

Nobody, the new movie from Ilya Naishuller, is out today.

Emmy winner Bob Odenkirk stars as Hutch Mansell, an underestimated and overlooked dad and husband, taking life’s indignities on the chin and never pushing back. A nobody. When two thieves break into his suburban home one night, Hutch declines to defend himself or his family, hoping to prevent serious violence. His teenage son, Blake (Gage Munroe), is disappointed in him and his wife, Becca (Connie Nielsen), seems to pull only further away.

The aftermath of the incident strikes a match to Hutch’s long-simmering rage, triggering dormant instincts and propelling him on a brutal path that will surface dark secrets and lethal skills. In a barrage of fists, gunfire and squealing tires, Hutch must save his family from a dangerous adversary (famed Russian actor Aleksey Serebryakov)—and ensure that he will never be underestimated as a nobody again.

The Vault

The Vault, the new movie from Jaume Balagueró, is out today.

When an engineer learns of a mysterious, impenetrable fortress hidden under The Bank of Spain, he joins a crew of master thieves who plan to steal the legendary lost treasure locked inside while the whole country is distracted by Spain’s World Cup Final. With thousands of soccer fans cheering in the streets, and security forces closing in, the crew have just minutes to pull off the score of a lifetime.

A Week Away

A Week Away, the new movie from Roman White, is out today.

Troubled teen Will Hawkins (Kevin Quinn) has a run-in with the law that puts him at an important crossroad: go to juvenile detention or attend a Christian summer camp. At first a fish-out-of-water, Will opens his heart, discovers love with a camp regular (Bailee Madison), and sense of belonging in the last place he expected to find it.

The Seventh Day

The Seventh Day, the new movie from Justin P. Lange, is out today.

A renowned exorcist who teams up with a rookie priest for his first day of training. As they plunge deeper into hell on earth, the lines between good and evil blur, and their own demons emerge.

Enhanced

Enhanced, the new movie from James Mark, is out today.

A young woman with enhanced abilities finds herself hunted down by a sinister government organization. But when an even stronger enhanced serial killer emerges on the scene, agents and mutants are forced to question their allegiances.

The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers

The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, the new TV series from Steven Brill, Josh Goldsmith, and Cathy Yuspa, is out today.

In present day Minnesota, the Mighty Ducks have evolved from scrappy underdogs to an ultra-competitive, powerhouse youth hockey team. After 12-year-old Evan is unceremoniously cut from the Ducks, he and his mom Alex set out to build their own ragtag team of misfits to challenge the cutthroat, win-at-all-costs culture of competitive youth sports.

The Irregulars

The Irregulars, the new TV series from Tom Bidwell, is out today.

Meet The Irregulars: Bea, Jessie, Billy, Spike and Leo. Join this ragtag gang as they uncover the demonic and mysterious depths of Victorian London alongside the sinister Dr Watson and his enigmatic business partner, Sherlock Holmes.

Invincible

Invincible, the new TV series from Robert Kirkman, is out today.

INVINCIBLE is an Amazon Original series based on the groundbreaking comic book from Robert Kirkman, the creator of The Walking Dead. The story revolves around 17-year-old Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun), who’s just like every other guy his age — except his father is the most powerful superhero on the planet, Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons).

It Takes Two

It Takes Two, the new game from Hazelight and Electronic Arts, is out today.

Embark on the craziest journey of your life in It Takes Two, a genre-bending platform adventure created purely for co-op. Play as the clashing couple Cody and May, two humans turned into dolls by a magic spell. Together, trapped in a fantastical world where the unpredictable hides around every corner, they are reluctantly challenged with saving their fractured relationship.

Monster Hunter Rise

Monster Hunter Rise, the new game from Capcom, is out today.

Set in the ninja-inspired land of Kamura Village, explore lush ecosystems and battle fearsome monsters to become the ultimate hunter. It’s been half a century since the last calamity struck, but a terrifying new monster has reared its head and threatens to plunge the land into chaos once again.

Balan Wonderworld

Balan Wonderworld, the new game from ARZEST Corp. and Square Enix, is out today.

BALAN WONDERWORLD is a wondrous action platformer game themed around the Balan Theatre. Led by the enigmatic maestro named Balan, the stars of the show Emma and Leo will use special abilities from a multitude of characterful costumes as they adventure in the bizarre and imaginary land of Wonderworld. Here memories and vistas from the real world mix with the things that people hold dear. Twelve different tales await our stars in the Wonderworld, each with their own unique quirks. They will explore all corners of these labyrinthine stages, filled with a myriad of tricks and traps, to get to the heart of each story.

Genesis Noir

Genesis Noir, the new game from Feral Cat Den and Fellow Traveller, is out today.

A noir adventure spanning time and space. When a love triangle between cosmic beings becomes a bitter confrontation, you'll witness a gunshot fired by a jealous god—otherwise known as The Big Bang. Jump into the expanding universe and search for a way to destroy creation and save your love.

I TAPE

I TAPE, the new album from Vic Mensa, is out today.

#Games #Movies #TV #Music #News

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gloriousgwendolinechristie · 7 years

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Press: What's Next for Westeros, Gwendoline Christie and Her Empowering Brienne of Tarth

NEWSWEEK – “I’m Gwen,” she says, as if she could be anyone else. Gwendoline Christie is tall. This won’t come as a surprise to fans of Game of Thrones, the show that features the 38-year-old actor as the dutiful and fearless warrior Brienne of Tarth. And yet, when meeting Christie on a Friday morning in the rooftop bar of a London music venue, the full 6 foot 3 inches of her can still take you aback, even without her character’s coat of armor.

For the uninitiated, Game of Thrones is based on George R.R. Martin’s wildly popular fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, of which there are five novels, with two more planned. The books are set in a vaguely medieval world on fictional continents where the leaders of seven kingdoms battle the undead, dragons and one another for the exceedingly uncomfortable-looking Iron Throne. Since the show’s premiere in 2011, it has won more Emmy Awards than any other scripted series in history (38 to date), kept Reddit and social media ticking with memes and theories, and inspired all manner of online debate—over excessive violence (heads chopped off, girls burned alive, men castrated) and gratuitous sex (the rape of one character in particular).

But the 23 million viewers (on average) who watch each episode come for the unusually large number of indelible characters—like Lena Headey’s power-mad Queen Cersei; the brooding, putative hero, Jon Snow (Kit Harington); and Brienne.

Christie’s physical stature made her a quick sell for GoT producers. Fans of the books had suggested the relatively unknown actress for the part before she auditioned. At that point, her screen credits were minimal, her work mostly onstage. (There was some notoriety beyond acting, thanks to photographer Polly Borland’s “Bunny” series; shot between 2002 and 2008, it features a nude Christie spoofing the Playboy Bunny in odd, funny and seductive ways.) But from the moment Brienne appeared in Episode 3 of Season 2, beating a seasoned male warrior in a tournament and becoming the sworn sword of Renly Baratheon, Christie and her character shot to the top of the GoT popularity index.

Brienne was an easy sell for Christie as well; the actor was immediately attracted to her character’s power and androgyny. “Even when I was very young, I didn’t understand why the women had to have the boring parts,” says Christie, who grew up in a small coastal village near Hampshire, in England. “I didn’t understand why the women had to be submissive. They predominantly seemed to be of one type—they were often beautiful, but I didn’t understand the relationship between virgin or whore, mother or sex object.”

In Martin’s books, Brienne is described as being “ugly” and unfeminine: “[Her] features were broad and coarse, her teeth prominent and crooked, her mouth too wide, her lips so plump they seemed swollen…. Her nose had been broken more than once,” Martin writes in A Clash of Kings . The character is bullied mercilessly, and playing her brought back unpleasant memories for Christie—of being ostracized for her own appearance.

“I remember when I had my hair cut off, the armor, the mud…I completely changed the way that I looked,” says Christie, who added 28 pounds of muscle to play Brienne, in addition to learning to fight with swords and ride horses. “I knew I had to overcome the things that I was uncomfortable with, like my androgyny, my height, my physical strength, feeling like an outsider, being told I was an outsider. It’s definitely given me more confidence.”

As often happens in Hollywood, Christie has been typecast. She isn’t complaining; playing the fearsome warrior has its perks: In 2015, she landed the role of Commander Lyme in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 2 and the villain Captain Phasma in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (she’ll reprise that role in The Last Jedi, out December 15). But it was a bit of real-life intrepidness that got her a role closer to earth on the second season of director Jane Campion’s acclaimed series Top of the Lake, starring The Handmaid’s Tale’s Elisabeth Moss.

Campion’s films, like 1993’s The Piano, heavily influenced Christie, and after seeing the first season in 2013, she wrote to Campion. “I didn’t have the nerve to send the letter for 18 months,” she says. Eventually, she gave it to a mutual friend. “I got a lovely note back,” Christie says. Four months after that, Campion wrote her again: “‘I’ve been dreaming about you. I’ve written you a part.’”

Christie plays the vulnerable and embattled Miranda, who partners with Moss’s police detective. “I’m going to admit that it’s hard to play a character who’s failing all the time, who isn’t good at anything and who can’t seem to overcome that,” Christie says. “It doesn’t give you the same wonderful rush of supporting the hero, but it was a very interesting investigation for me, and a more realistic one, of how many of us feel.”

The notoriously secretive Star Wars and Game of Thrones productions prevent Christie from saying much of anything about those projects. The final 13 episodes of GoT will be divided into two mini-seasons, the first seven beginning July 16, the final six in 2018. “I have to speak generally,” she says, and we both glance around, as if HBO spies might be lurking in the shadows. “ Game of Thrones is famous for different characters coming together with unlikely consequences. And what’s recurrent in Brienne’s life is forming relationships with people that start with an opposing force, then a begrudging mutual respect and, out of that, a deep respect and pure love. That happens again this season. Brienne will realize a deep alliance.”

The heated online speculation is that the alliance will be with the mighty red-headed Wildling Tormund Giantsbane (Kristofer Hivju). When I mention that, Christie releases a loud cackle. Viewers will remember an appreciative glance from Tormund toward Brienne last season. It was a throwaway moment in the script (“I think it read, ‘Tormund hasn’t seen a woman like her before,’” Christie says), but Hivju made the most of it. “I don’t often laugh during filming,” she says of the dinner table scene, in which Tormund sensuously attacks a chicken leg, his eyes locked on Brienne across the table. “That was really difficult. Because he is so intensely hilarious.”

But she answers my question of their future with a question of her own. “Do you think she actually likes him?” she asks. “No,” I say. “Well, there you go!”

The more sensitive GoT fan might be holding out for a reunion between one of the show’s odder duos, the entertainingly humorless Brienne and her erstwhile traveling companion, the jocular, one-armed Kingslayer Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). She, of course, is unfailingly honorable, while he—among other things—is the father of three children with his sister, Cersei. (It’s complicated.) The closest Jaime has come to pure heroism was provoked by Brienne, in the seventh episode of Season 3, when he jumped into a bear pit to save her from certain death—one of the most rousing moments in a series filled with aggressively rousing scenes. Their resulting fealty—even tenderness—was undeniable, and so is the on-screen chemistry between Coster-Waldau and Christie.

Any hope for them? Christie can’t say, but she also doesn’t laugh it off. “There’s a whole world there,” she says. “But I don’t think either of them has any idea of what’s going on or how to deal with it.”

Christie has her own hopes for Brienne. If she had her way, the battle-weary white knight would ride alone into the Westeros sunset, squire Podrick following closely behind. Any particular destination or future? I ask. She ponders. Perhaps her ancestral home, Christie says finally, and “a Brienne of Tarth’s Finishing School for Unconventional Young Ladies.”

Games of Thrones airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO, beginning July 16. Top of the Lake: China Girl premieres on the SundanceTV network in September.

Press: What’s Next for Westeros, Gwendoline Christie and Her Empowering Brienne of Tarth was originally published on Glorious Gwendoline

#gwendoline christie #game of thrones #got cast #Brienne of Tarth #star wars #Captain Phasma #The Force Awakens #Mockingjay 2 #Commander Lyme #THG #The Hunger Game

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thelonelyrdr-blog · 7 years

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Thoughts on the Heroes of Olympus series (Part 3)

(The ending is somewhat spoiled in this one, so if that bugs you, read with caution.) Apparently, yesterday was Percy Jackson's birthday. So he's a Leo. Makes sense, I thought, and set to integrating this piece of trivia with my mental image of Percy, but then I realized that I already knew it from the following exchange in The Blood of Olympus: "Like the zodiac sign?" Percy asked. "I'm a Leo." "No, stupid," Leo said, "I'm a Leo. You're a Percy." The bad puns in this series are so real, guys. Anyway, given that it was Percy's birthday, it would've been neat if I could've posted this review yesterday, but alas, I just didn't have the energy after work. But hey, my lateness won't stop me from tagging this post with #happybirthdaypercy in a shameless attempt to increase my readership. Happy Birthday, Percy! I know you won't mind my using your birthday as a marketing tool. The Blood of Olympus Reyna and Nico are by far my favorite parts of this book, both separately and as a pair, but especially as a pair. Both are characters with deeply traumatic pasts who feel a respect and kinship for one another that eventually evolve into familial affection. Hazel may be Nico’s sister in name, but Reyna seems closer to filling Bianca’s role as big sister to Nico: whereas, historically, Nico has had to protect and guide Hazel, Reyna is someone who will not only do the same for him, but who will also worry for him. She has the magical ability to literally empathize with his need, as a boy who has lost a mother and an older sister, to feel cared for and considered, and is therefore uniquely qualified to respond to it. Nico’s bonds with both Reyna and Hazel, though, are beautiful. As for Reyna herself, as much as I love all of the female characters in both this series and the original, in my estimation, she's the best, simply by virtue of being the most complex. Riordan's skill with developing characters through their internal struggles shines in Reyna's chapters. Let's not kid ourselves like the other characters do: she killed her father, even if it was in self-defense and even if he'd degenerated into a mania, giving her what is certainly the darkest backstory of any character in this series and probably of any character in any middle-grade series ever. I'm surprised that the publisher didn't insist on cutting the murder, though Riordan does gloss over its moral ambiguity somewhat. Nico's pretty terrifying in that one scene, too, and in his case, Reyna and Coach Hedge fully acknowledge the immorality of his actions. You all know the scene I'm referring to, or will if and when you read this book. Can I get some Dark!PercyxDark!Nico fanfics in addition to the Dark!Percy ones I already tried to commission in my previous blog post? (Oh, and if you're wondering about my thoughts on Reyna's sexuality, as I know many have imagined her as gay or bisexual, I personally ship her with herself regardless of her sexual preferences. To be clear, I have nothing against either interpretation of her character, but I got a little disenchanted with every character being or wanting to be in a serious romantic relationship as the series progressed. There are single teenagers, you know. I was one of them.) Before I conclude my discussion of Nico and Reyna, though, I have to mention the scene where Nico finally confesses to Percy that he once had a crush on him. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one cheering for him and wishing that I could be that cool while simultaneously laughing at Percy’s confusion and Annabeth’s amusement. And oh man, that high five between Annabeth and Nico. Perfect. But it's time that I commented on Leo’s happy ending, in which he fulfills his role in the prophecy by dying (but not really) and keeping his oath to Calypso to free her from Ogygia. Their whole relationship is comprised of moments of subtle tenderness, but the line in the last chapter that struck me most was: “Leo Valdez,” she said. Nothing else - just his name, as if it were something magical. I fangirled when I read that line, and the entire last chapter, for two reasons. The first is that, no matter how I try to deny the tendency in myself, I’m a hopeless romantic (yes, I’m a hopeless romantic who doesn’t read straight romance and who wants to see more single characters in middle-grade and YA novels. Everyone has their contradictions) who was invested in this couple from the start. However, the second reason pertains to Leo’s character. He’s the “seventh” wheel of the group, who’s spent the whole series doubting his own merits and developing crushes on girls who either take no interest in him or take no interest in him and seem interested in one of his friends instead. To be fair, one of these girls is a villain anyway, but her rejection still validates Leo’s insecurities. Even Calypso herself has a history with another of the Seven (Percy) and initially reacts to Leo's arrival on Ogygia as though it were a cruel joke of the gods'. The fact that the other characters largely disregard Leo - even I've ignored him until now, ironically, despite how hilarious I found his dialogue and narration - is what makes Riordan’s positioning him as the hero of the series so emotionally and narratively satisfying. He forms a plan to defeat Gaea without even consulting the others (might it be said that his inherited tendency to work independently and in isolation, which he and dad Hephaestus both perceive as a flaw, is what enables him to save the world?); he breaks Calypso's curse without leaning on the gods or on Percy's bargain with them. He goes from being the most overlooked of the Seven to someone whose very name inspires awe (and you can't tell me that Calypso's awe results solely from romantic feeling - I'm sure that, when she utters that line, she's also thinking of how Leo is the first and only person to manage to free her, to even remember her after leaving Ogygia). His is an underdog story done right. Overall As I hope you've gathered from my individual comments on each book, there's a lot to appreciate in this series: it's by turns light and funny and dark and morally ambiguous; it's smart and subtly overturns stereotypes and prejudices; and, perhaps most importantly, it's full of likable, relatable characters who feel distinct and real. It's self-aware too: as in the original series, Riordan raises the question - here, most notably in Arachne's version of her myth - of whether the gods are truly good or merely better than the alternatives of Gaea and the Titans; whether theirs is the side the demi-gods would willingly choose or merely the one they happen to be on because of their parentage. It's not often in children's adventure stories that the heroes consider that the villains may have a valid moral point, and beyond that, one that invalidates theirs. Even the last two Harry Potter books don't go as far with humanizing and demonizing Voldemort and Dumbledore, respectively. Unfortunately, the narrative does not adequately answer this question or many of the others that it raises. Take, as another example, Percy's "fatal flaw," loyalty, which I noted in Part 1 of my review never seems to result in negative consequences for either the Seven or the quest, despite being talked up by both gods and monsters throughout the series. Were the repeated warnings about it supposed to be foreshadowing Percy's decision to fall into Tartatus with Annabeth? If so, that makes no sense, as at least one demi-god was needed on each side of the Doors of Death, anyway, and Percy and Annabeth were obviously more successful as a team than either would've been alone. Or, as is more likely, was Percy's "fatal flaw" part of a larger plot thread that was dropped due to time and space constraints? But if that's the case, then why couldn't the first two books in the series have been condensed into one, or the series extended to include six or seven books? Surprisingly, considering how tightly plotted the original series was, the plot in this series fizzles to near nonexistence by the end of The Blood of Olympus, the tension building inconsistently as the climax approaches. Compared to the final battle in The Last Olympian, which engrossed me even more than the Battle of Hogwarts did (fellow Harry Potter fans, you don't have to call me a traitor; I assure you, I already feel like one), the stakes in the battle against Gaea and her army seemed the equivalent height of those in a fight involving elementary school children wielding sticks. Riordan's failure to deliver in this respect was especially glaring considering that he'd promised readers not one major battle in The Blood of Olympus, but two. Instead we get a one-on-one fight between Reyna and Orion that feels more internally than externally resonant and forestalls Major Battle #1, the Roman attack on the Greeks, before it even begins; a fight with the earthborn during which no one but Jason is really needed, as he's shown to be tremendously overpowered; and a fight between Leo and Gaea, which should've been Major Battle #2 but which is over within a page or two. The characters reiterate throughout the series how powerful Gaea is and how much more substantial of a threat she is than the Titans, but even the lowest monster in Tartarus was scarier and took longer to defeat. Hell, the Minotaur in The Lightning Thief would've been a worthier opponent for our heroes. The only explanation I can think of for the disappointing finish to this series is, again, that Riordan must have run out of time or space to give readers a proper final battle (though he hinted at two, I would've settled for one). Or possibly steam. Still, although the series as a whole has a rushed and sloppy quality to it, I would still highly recommend it, both for the reasons listed above and for its resemblance to fanfiction. Yes, sadly, only in fanfiction would I expect to read a continuation of Percy Jackson's story with as many minority as white demi-god protagonists, whose cultures, used respectfully by Riordan, inform rather than define their identities; a gay character who is revealed to be in love with the protagonist of the first series; and an emphasis on female empowerment and the glorification of the feminine. There’s even a character - arguably the most physically attractive of the Seven, might I add - who discovers that he needs glasses! I was shocked, albeit pleasantly so, to find a published series containing all of these elements, and I'm not even gay or a minority. If you pick up these books for the representation alone, you won't regret it. But that won’t be necessary: there are a multitude of other fun reasons.

#heroesofolympus #thebloodofolympus #rickriordan #percyjacksonandtheolympians #childrenslit #greekmythology #happybirthdaypercy #books #bookreviews #reading #disneyhyperion #pjo

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hollymountcastlecreatives19 · 5 years

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Design Process

I started off my planning process by writing down a bunch of ideas. Having initially chosen Illustration as the path I would go down, I looked further at what I could do specifically. Environments? Game Art? Character Design/Illustration?

To help narrow it down I went into some of my likes and inspirations. For example, I have recently been playing a lot of Red Dead Redemption 2 and have been enjoying the world it is set in with its vast landscapes, ranging from mountains to deserts. By choosing a theme I could decide if I wanted to do an illustration, character design, environmental or fanart piece.

I came to the decision of creating a full illustration, possibly including new, original characters and a small animation if I thought it do-able. I looked at what atmosphere, movement and expressions I may want featured, creating a list to base my ideas off.

Now, with some ideas in mind I decided to jump right in and start sketching to help me come to a better idea of what I would like to do. I started with environmental sketches, creating landscapes and including notes of what extra I could include like people, buildings and animals.

The first idea uses perspective and foreground/background. At the front is a hill ledge, where a character or animal may stand looking out at the forest, village, river and mountains below/in the distance.

The second sketch features a camp, very similar to what is featured in the game RDR2. In the centre is a fire, surrounded by logs, skins, tents and chairs. From this I could add characters and set an emotion, whether it be happy or sad.

For the next sketch I did a very basic idea, often seen in books and films where the sun is large and either setting or rising in the distance, with characters walking/riding along the horizon. This would mean there would be a lot less detail in characters due to the lighting but it could be too basic.

Next I looked more at nature and a different environment, moving up into the mountains where it’s covered in snow and filled with thick pine trees. In the snow could be animal tracks and I could add either animals or characters battling the snow.

For the fifth, and similarly, sixth and seventh sketch, I looked at rocky environments, similar to places you might find in Arizona, USA like the Grand Canyon. The colour theme would be quite orange but could be edited by setting a specific time of day (morning/afternoon/evening/night). I looked at ways of including characters up close and in the distance, such as higher up on the ledge in the first of this set or following a winding path much further in the distance like the third.

Finally, a river where the point of view is close to the ground, pointing upwards towards a hill that shows a path. Characters could be included going through the water or up the path.

After looking at the very brief sketches I had made I chose some of the ideas that I liked most. For me, it was the final and the ones that included the rocky environments.

Going into slightly more detail and including characters I re-sketched these ideas, combining previous sketches to make a more intricate one, like how I combined parts from each of the rocky sketches into one, by adding the higher grounds with the path below, leading away.

I still wasn’t sure on what I wanted to choose, so to further help me I turned to digitalising these sketches and creating thumbnails for the final piece. By doing so I could add colour and move things around how I like, also allowing me to pick a style to use for the final.

Backtracking I did all three rocky scenes and the river sketch. Whilst both have their benefits, I liked the challenge that came with the two-levelled sketch (bottom left) as it allows me to play with perspective more so than I usually would.

STILL unsure I further finalised the sketches, messily painting over the thumbnails, adding some textures and, eventually, sketching out some characters. Whilst I didn’t go into full colour, I wasn’t 100% sure if I wanted to, at the time quite liking the colour theme. The characters included would be original which if I were to continue I’d need to create simple reference sheets for.

I made sure to include something extra than just a basic environment, in this case the fox in the corner and if I had added more detail there would be prints in the snow.

Eventually, whilst I did like and was very close to finalising the sketch I made for the rocky scene, I thought it over more and realised it wasn’t what I really wanted to do.

I much prefer to include lots of colour in my drawings and was further reminded of this after I watched the film Spiderman: Into the Spider Verse. It easily became one of my favourite films and I quickly lose interest in my previous idea. I wanted to create something with more movement and colour.

As I hadn’t drawn anything similar to the Spiderverse before I started by referencing scenes from the film, sketching the characters and taking note of their body shapes and clothing. My original idea- though I was running out of time by this point- was to include all six spider people in one drawing, but soon realised I wouldn’t have the time nor was I confident enough to do so, narrowing it down between three.

In the end I chose the protagonist of the story, Miles Morales. He had the easiest body shape and I preferred his character design over the others.

The next stage was planning the drawing. I still wanted to create an illustration only this time I would be focusing on the character rather than environment. Spiderman is known for being... well, spider-like, using webs to swing from tall buildings and easily to climb up them with his sticky hands and feet. So, naturally, I created some thumbnails of him featured on buildings or leaping from one (a common occurrence in the Spider Verse film).

I asked the opinion of a friend and narrow it down to the first and last sketch. Finalising the sketches I eventually chose the first one, including Miles’s clothing which he wears on top of his spider-suit which helped add more movement.

Despite the fact there is no theme this year, it’s still the Nottingham Young Creative Awards and came up with the idea of including Nottingham in the background.

#task 2

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scotianostra · 6 years

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On 19 June 1937 J M Barrie, the Scottish playwright and novelist, died.

Barrie's most famous work is of course Peter Pan and his tussles with Captain Hook are legendary, but you might be surprised to know Hook was not in the first drafts of the story, the villain of the piece was actually Peter Pan himself!

The original draft to me sounds more like the Peter Pan inspired horror film in which the boys retain their youth and gain their powers, including flying, by becoming vampires.

Of course if you've read the books, you will know of them, they never really featured in the Disney cartoon, but were in the later film Hook.

Barrie himself described the original Peter Pan as a “demon boy” and depicted him kidnapping children from their beds in the dead of night. Although Peter’s image definitely softened once Hook was added to the story, he is still not an altogether heroic hero. As Allison Kavey, co-author of “Second Star to the Right: Peter Pan in the Popular Imagination,” told The Week, "He is selfish, devoted to his own entertainment, and except in battle scenes, incapable of taking care of himself. He also loves like a child, without thought to the effect his love has or what it will mean if he forgets for a while.

Barrie’s own view of his mixed fortunes in the theatre was wittily summed up by his assessment that ‘some of my plays peter out, others pan out.

#Scotland #scottish #author #Literature

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tessatechaitea · 6 years

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The Flash #33

There's a whole voyeuristic shit eating fetish thing going on here that I don't want to think about too deeply.

Afterward, The Flash gives Steel the "I have a huge boner" eyes.

After Superman disappears into a black hole which certainly leads to the Dark Universe because reasons, Gorilla Grodd attacks the city. But it turns out it's not Grodd at all but a hungry person who just needed to eat a Snickers. It's a weird moment but it's good to see superheroes actually doing some good and helping regular folks for a change. Steel contemplates fucking the Anti-Monitor's giant butt plug but The Flash argues against it. It's too dangerous! He points out that Batman fiddling with it is why they're in the mess they're in. I'm not sure they can really blame Batman though. Didn't they read Dark Nights: Batman Lost #1? Batman was manipulated by Barbatos for his entire life. I bet Barbatos even manipulated the radiation around Thomas and Martha Wayne so that Martha only had one viable Bat-egg and Thomas, one viable Bat-sperm. The other members of the Justice League are all on missions to find Nth Metal. Remember when that happened in Metal? It was just before Detective Chimp was murdered by BatJoker. I know that Detective Chimp never dies on-panel but what other result should readers expect?! That maybe Detective Chimp jerked off all the Bat-monsters so he'd be spared? I suppose that's something that would take place off-panel, so I can't argue against that being what happened. Also I don't want to argue against that being what happened. It doesn't matter what the other Justice League members were doing because they all get sucked up in Evil Boom Tubes. I'm sure they'll get back to their missions in the next issue of Metal. But for now, they need to fight some of the Bat-monsters to a stalemate so it seems like Metal is full of more action than it really needs. I'd like to scan a picture of some of the big battles that take place but I can't because they don't exist. Okay, one exists. Doombat and Cybat beat the shit out of Steel and send The Flash into a dark room. The other Justice League members also find themselves in this room. This is probably the hell that the bats must get out of. And by bats, I don't think the title refers to the Batmonsters. I think the bats refer to the Justice League members who aren't Batman. It makes sense because fuck you. It's a clever take on a known phrase! People read it and go, "Oh yeah! I've heard people say that! It was even a Meatloaf album!" The hells they wind up in are different versions of the Batcave where they're all individually attacked by the Batmonster inspired partly by each of them. And that's where the issue ends because this was all prologue to the big action scene. And in comics, the big action scene is the only reason people keep reading them! So exciting! The Flash #33 Rating: 4 out of 10. It might earn a higher score if it had left out all of that Narration Boxing. A writer's use of Narration Boxes tends to make it so the writer doesn't need to write a script for a comic book. They just write the plot out through the character's rendition of what happened and leave it like that. It's also the way a writer can force a theme into the story's unwilling orifice. So The Flash, through Narration Boxes, tells a story about how he races Superman. Then that leads to him saying that Batman always advises him to run faster which leads to the big twist conclusion where The Flash points out that he's hearing Batman again but he's telling him there's nowhere to run! It's classic Flash storytelling! Just mention running as much as you can and equate it to whatever the fuck else is going on. Then finish it off by saying, "See? See what I did there? Clever, right?!"

#The Flash #DC Comics #Metal #Dark Nights

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battleofthebastardsblog · 5 years

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Blog Entry 2

George R. R. began writing the first Game of Thrones book in 1991, and it was finally published in 1996. The next few novels in the series were published in 1998, 2000, 2005, and 2011, with two more in the works to come out in the upcoming years.

In 2006 after speaking with one of George R. R. Martin’s agents, David Benioff read the first book in Martin’s series. This is when him and D. B. Weiss realized they were both enthused by the series and wanted to adapt it to television. The two of them had a meeting with Martin where he asked them one question that would decide whether they could be the ones to produce the adaptation or not. He asked them, “Who is Jon Snow’s mother?” to which they gave the correct answer. After that they pitched the idea to HBO and it started development in 2007.

The pilot episode of the series, “Winter is Coming”, was shot in 2009. During a private viewing, the pilot response to the pilot was so poor that HBO told them there had to be a reshoot. I found a statistic that claimed approximately 90% of the episode had to be changed along with cast members. That first pilot has never been released and no general audience member has ever seen it.

The “Battle of the Bastards” is the penultimate episode in the sixth season of Game of Thrones. Each Game of Thrones season until season seven contained ten episodes, with the ninth episode usually being the one with a major battle or event, and the 10th episode would normally show the repercussions of said event. “The Battle of the Bastards” was directed by Miguel Sapochnik and written by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. The date the episode aired on TV was June 19th, 2016. The episode was based on the sixth novel in George R. R. Martin’s series, “The Winds of Winter”. While writing the episode, Benioff and Weiss claimed that they found inspiration from the American Civil War. It was meant to replicate the accounts of bodies being piled up so tall they became obstructions on the field.

“The Winds of Winter” is the final episode of the sixth season of Game of Thrones. This episode is the sixtieth episode in the series overall. Like the previous episode, the “Battle of the Bastards”, “The Winds of Winter” was also directed by Miguel Sapochnik and written by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. The episode aired on June 26th, 2016 and was approximately 68 minutes in length, which was the longest episode in the series at that point in time. The writers and producers always put a lot of thought into the final scenes of each season, and in this one they decided to make the final shot Daenerys and her fleet making her way to Westeros, which is the first time we ever see her there which came off as very triumphant, which is completely different from how they end the seventh season, with The Wall crumbling down and the army of the dead breaching Westeros.

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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Every week, we pick a new episode of the week. It could be good. It could be bad. It will always be interesting. You can read the archives here. The episode of the week for August 19 through 25 is “The Queen,” the seventh episode of Hulu’s Castle Rock.

“It could have been just a spectacular fucking disaster,” says Sam Shaw, as we discuss the seventh episode of Castle Rock. “It wouldn’t have just been a ‘gentleman’s B.’ This could have been a catastrophe.”

Even the most cursory look at the episode makes it clear what Shaw, who co-created the series with Dustin Thomason, is talking about. “The Queen,” which Shaw also wrote, is the keystone of the entire season: It provides further context for what’s happened in the six episodes preceding it, as well as laying out a groundwork for what’s to come. And, in what seems like the ultimate gamble, it’s presented through the eyes of Ruth Deaver (Sissy Spacek), whose struggle with dementia sends the story flitting between the past and the present.

But the operative phrase here is “could have been.” In the days since the episode’s airing, it’s been hailed as the series’ best episode, as well as one of the best hours of television this year, with Spacek’s performance drawing praise as a “tour de force.”

And rightly so. “The Queen,” beautifully directed by Greg Yaitanes, is a wonderful, devastating hour of TV, and impressive on every level. That it holds a certain personal significance for Shaw only adds to the weight that it carries.

Ruth with her grandson, Wendell (Chosen Jacobs). Maura Connolly Longueil/Hulu

Thus far, we’ve been witnesses to the effects of Ruth’s dementia; “The Queen” makes us active participants. The moments earlier in the season in which she’d lost focus become moments of clarity as they’re revisited through memories, with Ruth’s perspective on scenes that we’ve already seen pulling back the curtain on the Deaver family past.

It’s a feat of what Shaw calls “advance planning and strategy, and then serendipity, instinct, and luck.” A Deaver-centric episode was always in the cards, given the way Henry (Andre Holland), Ruth’s son, is positioned as the show’s point of entry into the world of Stephen King, but the exact nature of it developed as the family was fleshed out.

“This is a story about a protagonist who is missing time from his childhood, whose own memories are somewhat problematic, who’s kind of estranged from his own story, and has had a story imposed on him by this town,” Shaw explains. “To put a character who is losing her bearings and losing her memory at the center of that story in the form of Ruth, and tell a story about a character who actually, ironically, becomes the important custodian of a whole lot of backstory and a whole lot of the dramatic information that pushes the story forward — to have that person be someone who is losing her memories felt like an interesting irony to write about.”

To keep that in everyone’s heads, a notecard labeled “Ruth, dementia” kept moving about the writers’ room as the show took shape. In Shaw’s words, the writers set the table, making sure that the reckonings to be addressed in Ruth’s episode had all been set up before diving in.

“At a really practical level, there were some things that the episode just had to accomplish,” Shaw says. “There were two stories it had to tell.”

The first was filling in the blanks regarding Matthew Deaver (Adam Rothenberg), Ruth’s late husband, revealing the darker, abusive side of the preacher as well as establishing that Ruth had once had the option of taking Henry and running away with the lovelorn Alan Pangborn (played as a young man by Jeffrey Pierce, and by Scott Glenn in the present day). The second was the back-and-forth between Ruth and the Kid (Bill Skarsgård) — for which Shaw cites the 1967 thriller Wait Until Dark as inspiration — culminating in Pangborn’s accidental death by Ruth’s hand.

Though those aspects of the story were worked out in the writers’ room, the task of actually committing the episode to writing fell to Shaw.

“I think we were in the writers’ room one day and [writer] Tom Spezialy just casually said, ‘Let’s just skip to the next one,’ because I had sort of decided that I would write this episode, and Tom just had this instinct that, given the nature of the episode, and given the year I’d had and some personal stuff that had gone on for me, and my own interest in the subject matter of the episode, I think he felt like it lent itself better to a kind of solo mission.”

“The Queen” sees Ruth square off against the Kid (Bill Skarsgård). Dana Starbard/Hulu

Though loss and heartbreak figure prominently in “The Queen,” the episode ends on a note of tenderness. Battling through memories of Matthew as the Kid stalks her through her own house, Ruth finally finds the bullets for her late husband’s gun. When a figure appears in the doorway, she shoots, not realizing that it’s Alan until it’s too late. In the morning, after she’s washed off all the blood, there’s a knock on the door. Standing on the other side is Alan, in a memory that we’ve only heard Alan relate.

Old and exhausted, he begins to make excuses for what’s brought him back to town after all these years before finally confessing that he’s returned because he loves her. The episode ends as they hold each other on the porch, as Ruth tells him, “Don’t leave.” Behind them are the chess pieces that indicate it is indeed just a memory and that Alan is truly dead, but it doesn’t diminish the moment. If anything, it’s what makes the episode so wrenching, capturing both heartbreak and joy in a single moment in a way that feels distinctly true to life.

The desire to frame Ruth’s journey with some measure of truth — and kindness, in conjunction — stemmed from the episode’s extenuating circumstances. The day before “The Queen” aired, Shaw tweeted out a short thread, calling the episode likely the most personal thing he’d ever worked on, and dedicating it to his mother, who passed away shortly before the writing on Castle Rock began.

As such, it became all the more important to figure out just how to address and portray Ruth’s dementia. It became a collaborative effort between Shaw and Spacek, as they talked through personal experiences with people with dementia, as well as reading the same books and watching the same documentaries on the subject.

“There’s this documentary that Sissy loves that I’d never seen called Confessions of a Dutiful Daughter,” Shaw recalls. “It’s this really poignant, kind of miraculous picture of a relationship between a mother who has dementia and her daughter, and part of what’s incredible is that there’s lightness, and there’s spontaneity, and there’s laughter. It is a much more specific picture of what dementia looks like than the picture that we usually see represented on-screen.”

Bringing all of that to life visually also sprang from that desire to portray dementia in a more considered way, as the idea of making the Deaver house into a literal memory palace — in the episode, Ruth leaves one room in 2018 and enters another in 1991 — appealed to Shaw, not least because it struck him as atypical.

“We think about dementia as this process of subtraction. Memories are taken away, and as the memories go, so do parts of the identity of the person who suffers from dementia,” he explains. “But there was something that was really interesting to me about the idea that, actually, the experience that Ruth is having over the course of this season might look a little different from the experience that you might imagine when you think about dementia and about Alzheimer’s, that the past might be very present to her.”

The emotional core of the episode, meanwhile, became clear in Spacek’s insistence that Ruth’s story not be presented in a strictly black and white matrix. According to Shaw, she didn’t want Ruth to be just a figure of tragedy, or somebody essentially haunting her own story — and Shaw didn’t want that, either.

It was this realization that helped ground the episode in the love story between Ruth and Alan, bringing warmth and light to a storyline that could easily have slipped into something less nuanced.

“In a way, the mission became telling a love story for Sissy and Scott,” Shaw says, adding that that approach also opened up the story to further explore the bond between Ruth and Henry, not just in terms of the mother-son dynamic, but in terms of Ruth’s old doubts and regrets.

That “The Queen” is so heartbreaking comes down to that focus on love; the Lewis chessmen that Ruth uses to remind herself that she’s in the present, while also a narrative solution to keep viewers oriented, lend an extra dimension to the story as a gift from Alan. They serve as repositories for Ruth’s memories. In his explanation, Shaw cites a piece in the New Yorker on the cognitive scientist Andy Clark and the idea that the way that objects can hold memories helps to constitute a person’s identity.

“It dawned on me that it might be really interesting if there were some objects that have a kind of almost talisman-like or magical set of properties for her character,” Shaw adds. “Genre stories are most interesting when they live in a place of ambiguity. It can either be a story about dementia or about something like time travel — that really appealed to me.”

As such, the relatively commonplace use of chess as a means of trying to stave off the effects of dementia gave birth to the idea that these objects would become magical wards, keeping the “monster of dementia” at a distance.

“You sort of have those little moments where you feel like the universe is telling you, ‘Keep writing,’” says Shaw. Dana Starbard/Hulu

The amount of work that went into “The Queen” is obvious, but just as the episode mixes the realities of dementia with the undefinable feeling of love, the creation of the show similarly lends itself to a few supernatural touches.

“You get kind of superstitious at times, as a writer — or I do, at least — and there are little moments or breadcrumbs or discoveries that suggest, to me, that I’m writing in the right direction,” Shaw says, “and there were a lot of those kind of spooky moments for me in the course of making this episode.”

The biggest revelation was the Lewis chessmen. Though never explicitly stated in the show, Ruth was envisioned as having studied Icelandic literature, and the Lewis chessmen were what came up when Shaw went looking for Viking chess sets.

“There was this theory that they had been carved by this woman who was the wife of a priest, and of course Sissy’s character is the widow of the minister,” Shaw explains. What also struck him were the expressions on the queen’s faces — both looked stricken, with a hand held up as if in shock. It was supposed that they looked that way because, at that point, queens were considered the weakest character on the chess board, whereas now they’re the exact opposite.

That turn helped inform the way that the episode centered on Ruth, who, like the queen, had largely been relegated to the sidelines and dismissed up until this point in the season. To Shaw, it seemed like a sign, and one that’s only become more profound now that he’s on the other side of it.

“When I set out to write this episode, I think if you’d asked me [if it was a personal experience], I would have said that I was just writing an episode of TV,” he says. “But I also think, by the end of it, that I was really metabolizing something over the course of working on it and making the episode. It sounds a little crazy to say that you had this personal experience writing an episode of a JJ Abrams-Stephen King horror thriller, but in hindsight, I think it was. In the end, I think, whether the episode worked or didn’t work, it worked for me.”

Castle Rock is streaming on Hulu. New episodes are released every Wednesday.

Original Source -> Castle Rock showrunner Sam Shaw explains the series’ best episode yet

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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