#james's trauma conga

[james-vi-stan-blog]

I’m sorry if you answered a similar question like this but was there any terrible or traumatic experiences/events King James went through?

Yeah, so, James's life was basically nonstop trauma from the age of negative 3 months to the age of 20.

Unfortunately I don't have a lot of time today but I can come back later and make a post with double-checked dates and links. But just going off of memory here are some highlights (ages may be wrong):

His mother Mary QOS claims a gun was pointed at her belly during the assassination of David Rizzio when she was pregnant with James

His father was murdered, his mother exiled, and he never saw her again after the age of 15 months

As a 1-year-old baby king Scotland fell into a civil war between "his" forces and his mother's

He was raised isolated and lonely in Stirling Castle mostly by grim Presbyterians (not completely locked up alone, but he later spoke of this time as lonely, I rambled about this before, cn: Esmé Stewart) who attempted to brainwash him against Mary QOS (I rambled about this AT LENGTH before)

He was so harshly disciplined/beaten by George Buchanan that he had PTSD symptoms as an adult

He seems to have had developmental problems such as delayed speech and walking, which were probably... not treated sympathetically. He was probably physically disabled though there are dozens of different modern diagnoses that have been offered.

3/4 of his childhood regents were murdered as part of the civil war and/or political feuding. First, his uncle. Then, his grandfather, who was carried bleeding into Stirling castle and died in front of 5 year old James's eyes. Then, the Earl of Mar, who was James's custodian/foster-father, was probably poisoned (James=6).

When James was 11, one of his childhood friends (who was then 20 - he was a bit older than James), pushed by the then-regent Morton, led an armed attack on Stirling Castle to try to take custody of James by force. The Master of Mar, father of his other childhood friend (Thomas Erskine, same age as James) had to take up a halberd and physically protect James from the attackers. James at one point thought the Master of Mar had been killed in front of his eyes. He wasn't, but Thomas Erskine's older brother really was killed.

When James is 13 he looks around at this shitty situation and says "nope", proclaims himself an adult ruler, meets and then immediately falls in love with his 37-year-old cousin Esmé Stewart. (The main subject of this earlier ramble) Probably not good for James's emotional development.

When James is 15 he executes the last of his childhood regents, Morton, probably convinced by Esmé Stewart that the guy had a hand in the murder of his father Lord Darnley. So 4/4 of James VI's regents met sticky ends.

When James is 16 his anti-Catholic nobles, who hate Esmé Stewart, kidnap James and hold him hostage, treating him badly. Esmé Stewart has to flee Scotland and dies in France and James never really recovers from this.

When James is 17 he escapes and rules surrounded by various allies including Catholic nobles. When James is 19 though the kidnappers from before come back to Scotland funded by Elizabeth and take over again.

I think I've forgotten some incidents, like I think he might have almost died once already by this point, but I don't remember the details.

After this point, though, James actually is an adult ruler who can hold his own in politics. So, like, wild backstabbings, betrayals by loved ones, war, etc., but James was more effectively able to ride the political waves and gave as good as he got, so it's not the same level of "helpless kid bashed around by politics".

So......... yeah. A bit of trauma. It's really no wonder he turned out like he did in a lot of ways.

[toneelspeelster]

re a little life - is this the one with james norton as jude? i'd love to hear more of your thoughts about how you found it. was hanya similarly involved in this one as in the dutch version?

oh. get ready, i got thoughts. read more for spoilers i guess. mind you i'm very biased as a dutch person. i don't know if hanya was more involved.

the show's almost exactly the dutch one and it's kinda to its detriment a little when you know of the dutch one (which i still prefer). like the stage's the same (but way smaller as a consequence of dutch theatres just being way bigger than london ones). clothing wise it's even very similar. but this made it extremely difficult for me not to just focus on the differences in acting bc it's the same play functionally.

the show is shorter by 20 min and as a consequence there's not a lot of breathing room for the characters or audience. one specific part i noticed is that the happy years were cut down. that choice is an interesting one bc it does all around make it feel like this version is a bit more of a trauma conga line than the dutch version feels like. this combined with the fact that the rape scenes were simulated way more extensively than it was in the dutch one and you got to wonder: why is this needed for the english version? it's not like we shy away from explicitness in the netherlands.

acting wise it was all very similar direction to the original. james was fine i guess, he wasn't really directed differently from the dutch one but i did sense a different feeling in that i feel that james felt more emotionally open throughout whilst i feel that ramsey really got that internal strife and guardedness that jude had way more. his portrayal is so fucking layered and his screams are guttural. then again ramsey is like. one of The Dutch Theatre Actors. it's no wonder he got the dutch equivalent of tony awards/laurence olivier awards for this role. and was one of ivo van hove's main cast of actors but more on that later. so james was fine. he did have a good challenge in the role i think, which he took to what his heights are.

willem's interpretation here was frankly terrible. my friends and i fully agreed on this; he just didn't feel like willem from the book at all. he's way more of a weird teenager dude bro and there were less moments in the first half that fully indicated that there always was a bit more between willem and jude so in the second half i didn't completely buy that this version would be in love and say it to jude like that. it just didn't feel organic. and in the final death scene - when throughout the second half he felt a bit marginally better - he fully reverted back to this comic relief status like. i just snickered. i'm sure the actor is fine in other work. i just think the interpretation missed its mark here. maybe as adelstitel mentioned in one of our comments they felt he needed to be a comic relief character bc the play is full of trauma and in those tragic stories the audience does need to have release of tension sometimes. but it was way too much.

support cast was good, especially jb was terrific, and i liked andy. have no real feelings about caleb/luke/taylor but i do think hans kesting is way more terrifying in the role, maybe also because of the room he has in the dutch one. like he's got space he can use menacingly that the english actor can't bc of room limitations.

everything was in an american accent. sometimes the accent was quite strong, like with harold. that was kind of.. very distinct. and different from the dutch actor who is flemish and has one of the softest accents and voices. harold also stayed closer to jude at the end. one of the changes i did like is that both harold and jude sang a bit more at each other as a reference to the mahler song.

i think the dutch actors have the advantage of being a set cast of actors who work with each other through multiple different theater plays. there's just something magic there in their chemistry. and i thnk ivo very much knows what he can extract from them and that would be more difficult from a different cast.

so in short; basically the same show so it was good, but different interpretations and comparing them are difficult to avoid when seeing this in multiple languages. i appreciate the booklet giving a bit more background on ITA's existence bc how many times would an international show not in english be able to successfully make the move to english. nevertheless.. it's just subtitles to overcome!

[byronicherobracket]

Byronic Hero Bracket Round Of 128 Batch A #3

The Nostalgia Critic from YouTube vs. Jace Wayland from The Mortal Instruments

Reasons under the cut (spoilers for both)

(All sources from TV Tropes)

The Nostalgia Critic:

The Nostalgia Critic is an impulsive cynic who has a Trauma Conga Line backstory. He wants to be good, but his self-hate and temper keep getting in the way.

Previously Beaten: Adam

Jace Wayland:

Jace Wayland from The Mortal Instruments is handsome, brooding, charismatic, aloof, the list goes on. Also a Death Seeker and drenched in Mangst. He has a very strong personal presence, but he's not exactly a source of much positivity.

Previously Beaten: James Delaney

[longitudinalwaveme]

How Not to Write the Flashes and Their Rogues, Part 2 (Geoff Johns’ First Run, Rogues’ Revenge, and Blackest Night)

Geoff Johns is another character who did some characters really well and other characters poorly. I liked his Linda quite a bit. His Jay and Joan were good. He does a fantastic Captain Cold, a good Heat Wave, and a very distinct and interesting Weather Wizard. I liked aspects of his McCulloch and applaud his creativity in the creation of a bunch of new villains (collectively, the new Rogues). His handling of Grodd and Abra Kadabra was  good. He invented the second Trickster and Zoom and was also involved in crafting the second Captain Boomerang (but more on Owen later). He understood Piper’s character. And his characterization of Keystone and Central City was really good. He breathed life into them like no other writer. That being said, he’s not perfect, and there are aspects of his writing that I dislike.

First, I find that his Wally is a bit too similar to Barry. I don’t hate his take on Wally, but I do find it to not be as good as Messner-Loebs’ or Waid’s . Johns’ Wally seems just a bit too serious and mature.

Likewise, I’m not crazy about his Bart. Again, I find that he makes Bart a bit too stoic and serious. I’m also not a fan of Johns having him take the Kid Flash identity (I like him calling himself Impulse better).

I can’t say he handled the Piper improperly, because he didn’t, but I do feel like the trauma conga line he put the character through was a bit much (although it wasn’t his fault that subsequent, much worse writers put him through even more trauma.)

I’m not crazy about the direction in which he took Magenta; he made her much more murderous than she had ever been before. It was also strange that she started teaming up with various supervillain groups, because before Johns’ run all of her criminal activity was linked to her mental illness and her anger at Wally for their bad break-up. She wasn’t ever 100% out-of-character, but she seemed off compared to how she had been previously written.

His treatment of the Top seemed mean-spirited. Everyone has characters they don’t like, but the fact that he made all the other characters share his distaste for the character to the extent that he did was unnecessary, since the character does have fans who don’t appreciate having him arbitrarily treated as though he’s a much bigger jerk than the other Rogues when he really isn’t (or at least wasn’t prior to Johns writing him). The fact that he used the Top as a plot device to justify a retcon that I don’t like doesn’t help matters, either. That being said, he did at least give the Top some extra powers, so that’s cool...and the idea that he thinks of himself as more sophisticated than the other Rogues is an interesting distinguishing trait.  

His Golden Glider was...kind of a mixed bag. I appreciate that he gave her a backstory and established that she and Cold were very close, but at the same time, he took away a lot of the character’s strength (treating her primarily as a victim rather than the strong-willed villain she was during the Bronze Age)  and kind of fridged her posthumously. He used her death, even though he didn’t write it, to motivate Captain Cold, and he also refused to bring her back for that reason. He also strongly downplayed her relationship with the Top (probably because, as previously noted, he really seems to hate the Top). 

I don’t actually dislike the backstory he gave to McCulloch or the retcons he gave to the backstories of Heat Wave, Weather Wizard, and (later) the original Captain Boomerang, but I do think that they display a slightly worrying trend with Johns’ work: namely, that he appears to think that the best way to make sure the Rogues are taken seriously as characters is to have them kill a lot of people (especially their relatives and particularly their fathers, for some reason). I’m not particularly fond of this method, but that’s largely a matter of personal taste. 

In speaking of McCulloch, I will also note here that Johns’ McCulloch is a lot more grim and unhinged than Morrison’s McCulloch, being more in-line with the McCulloch Waid wrote in #105. 

And then there’s the stupid Identity Crisis tie-in retcon. Not only does this retcon make Barry rather morally-ambiguous by revealing that he had Zatanna alter the Top’s mind, but, more annoyingly, it also completely undoes Trickster’s character development under Waid, undoes some of Piper’s character development under Messner-Loebs and Waid, and makes most, if not all, of Heat Wave’s choices post-COIE not the result of his own agency. If Johns wanted to undo the redemption arc of Heat Wave, fine (James really should’ve stayed semi-reformed), but it would’ve been better served by a different narrative choice. Pretty much anything would be better than saying that the Rogues’ redemption arcs were the result of the Top tampering with their minds, in fact, since doing that basically undid about 80% of the impact the choices Heat Wave, Trickster, and Piper had made since COIE. 

And finally (for now) we have what happened with Owen during Blackest Night. While I don’t begrudge Johns wanting to bring back the original Captain Boomerang, I do wish he had done it in a different way than having Owen turn into a child-murderer and then be killed by Captain Cold. Poor Owen suffered both a figurative and a literal character assassination there.