#like some scenes clearly served a purpose but they could just conveyed some information better by saving time and saying it out loud

[zevranunderstander]

just watched ballad of songbirds and snakes and I really liked it, my only tea is that I don't think the narrative really is made for a good movie adaptation and it kind of shows, it probably would have been better as a short 1 season show or a double feature because the pacing from part 2 to part 3 is a bit awkward and just because there is so much content to get into, a lot of moments felt pretty rushed. loved seeing the main setpiece of the capitol street be a roundabout I used to work 1 street away from tho & a lot of buildings being slightly edited famous berlin buildings was a huge banger.

[oof-big-oof]

ACOTAR and Setups Part II: Tamlin and Rhysand

SPOILERS: ACOTAR series (and Macbeth too ig)

Part 1: Feyre

In "Macbeth", Macbeth and Banquo are narrative foils to each other. While Banquo is loyal to the king and uses language of growth and imagery of nature when he speaks, the traitor Macbeth's words are full of references to destruction, fire, and unholy happenings. Foils are not just good ways to explore character traits, but also excellent for setting up conflicts and exploring the thematic concerns of the world.

I think it's safe to say Tamlin and Rhysand are foils. They have opposing imagery (spring, flowers and sun for Tamlin, winter, snow and night for Rhysand) and always stand in opposition to each other when it comes to Feyre's narrative, switching in and out of being the "bad guy" and the "good guy". But the way this is handled is .... eh.

I'm going to look at shifts in Feyre, Tamlin and Rhys that work of this foil - and try to look for when and how they were set up.

1. Feyre's shift - TW: discussions of abuse, mental health issues

In the first book, Tamlin is a source of protection and love for Feyre. But by the second book, Feyre is not only struggling with her PTSD but has begun to realise that life at the Spring Court as a dolled up accessory might not be for her. By the end of the book, she has found her place in the Night Court - by Rhysand's side. And honestly? Go girl! Go live up to your potential!

The problem arises with how this is done - that is, Sarah J Mass never does the brunt work of showing us why Feyre cares. It is plausible she is motivated by a desire to protect the human lands, but we never actually see that. There isn't a moment where she realises she needs to work for a greater good, or a moment she realises that she needs to protect those more vulnerable than her - instead, the narrative has her tolerating abuse until she finally has had enough.

Which is great. I have got to admit that I really like the explicit rejection of a happily ever after storyline for Feyre because it took away her agency. But we get this radical shift in character motivation from wanting to be protected and comfortable with those she loves to desiring agency and understanding of herself in two lines:

"The girl who had needed to be protected and who had craved stability and comfort... she had died Under the Mountain"

and

"I didn't know how to go back to those things. To being docile"

hhhhhh. I mean - if you have to say it that explicitly, you're already doing something wrong. But also, why? We never see Feyre struggling with herself in her new body, and wondering why she does not want the same things as she did when she was a human, never see an impetus point for when her desires shifted.

But honestly? I don't mind Feyre's arc. I think it's a bit confused and lacks clarity or intent, and as a result, it is harder to root for her because you don't quite know what she wants, but I think it's still quite good. Where I really have problems are with Tamlin ad Rhys.

2. Tamlin - TW: discussions of abuse, mental health issues

I am not a fan of Tamlin's arc. You could argue that it is part of the thematic message of the series: that things are not as they seem. Tamlin is the wolf to the savour to the abuser, Rhysand is the "most beautiful man " Feyre had ever seen to Amarantha's monster to Feyre's eventual mate. But - the constant twists are unnecessary, more importantly, they and have little to no foreshadowing and just seem like retcons- making it seem as if they are there to keep the audience guessing rather than genuine plot progressions. This becomes even more obvious when the series abandons its core theme of "appearance vs reality" altogether, and as a result loses a lot of its cohesion: a direct consequence of having a bad setup.

His reason for doing the abusive things he does is conveyed to us in two lines, in the same monologue that Feyre's motivation is:

"Tamlin had gotten his powers back, had become whole again - become that protector and provider he wished to be"

Sure. He was much more powerful than Feyre when they first met, so I am having a hard time buying it is the return of the powers that his making him act this way. We know that his actions come from a genuine desire to protect Feyre - this is the guy that was willing to sacrifice his life multiple times and the future of his entire court to keep her safe. The only justification we have left then for the way he acts is that his PTSD, borne out of the trauma and torture he underwent and watched Feyre undergo changed him in some way.

This is why the endless villainizing of Tamlin makes me really uncomfortable. While it is true that the abused can become the abuser, and figuring out how to help them while protecting yourself is something that absolutely needs to be discussed and explored - the way it is done with Tamlin is horrendous because he is never given a chance to heal. Instead, he is thrown from plot point to plot point, an eternal punching bag for the Inner Circle and others to seem morally superior in front of.

And his treatment of Feyre is just weird. If he's so concerned about her safety - why does he not wake up when she has nightmares? Is he instead trying to pretend like everything is okay - if so why does he give Feyre an escort of guards? If his core motivation is protecting Feyre at all costs - why does he lash out at her?? And the text really tries to tell us how to feel about him in this regard, but it doesn't do it very well. For example, take the scene where Tamlin says "There is no such thing as a High Lady". Feyre a second before expressed her desire not to take on any responsibility, and Tamlin responded with this - and the text really makes us want to hate him for it, but all you can see is a person who is perhaps not the best at reading subtext trying his best.

In conclusion - Tamlin's shift to the villain of the narrative is hamhanded and underexplained, making it hard to genuinely hate him, and further confusing the narrative.

3. Rhys the foil gets the girl - TW: discussions of abuse, sexual assault mental health issues

Rhysand in the first book is interesting - he clearly has a heart and a soft spot for Feyre but is also a schemer with dubious motives that drugs and sexually harasses Feyre. There are places in the set up where we understand he cares - but never where we can begin to see he might be a genuine paragon of virtue.

And I will address this more in my post on ACOMAF, but the point I am trying to make here is: we are told through the constantly opposing imagery that Rhys and Tamlin are wolds apart - but never actually given examples of how. Rhys is said to be different from Tamlin because he respects Feyre's choice - but he drugs her in a bunch of weird scenes (that serve no clear narrative purpose by the way - like what was he trying to achieve? why he couldn't he just let Feyre in on that part of the plan?) and withholds information from her about life-threatening situations. Rhys is said to pull less rank - but we multiple times see others defer to him, especially in later books, and never actually see rank being enforced in Tamlin's court with his treatment of Lucien (many times described as his partner, and openly questioning him) and later Ianthe. Rhys is said to have less archaic laws in opposition to Tamlin's Tithe - but he abandons the Court of Nightmares to the monsters who rule it, and never takes serious actions against the Illyrian people who clip of women's wings, and a lot of Tamlin's idea of racial superiority and general superiority just come completely out of left field in the middle of ACOMAF.

Both of them are problematic - it's just that the text tells us to root for one, without actually showing us how one is better, or setting up any clear ideological difference between them. And that cheapens Feyre's character shift and lessen the efficacy of the foil - turning it into Feyre hopping from one lover to the other with little to no character consistency and no nuanced exploration of the theme of the series or trauma.

[daily-douma]

Demon With No Name

An analysis on Upper Moon Two: Douma

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba spoilers!!

Hello! ❤ I wanted to discuss the significance on Douma’s real name never being revealed to us in the KNY story.

I'd love it if you guys could share your thoughts on this with me please!

Before I start:

Disclaimer: I do not speak Japanese at all, I’m basing all quotes off of the first manga site i could find. Translations may vary depending on the source. Also I may not be aware of alternate meanings of words that may have been lost in translation for the most important quotes! So please forgive me if I misinterpret something!!

A lot of the demons in KNY’s story are either nameless, or go by an alias that isn’t their real name. Examples of the former include most minor demons, such as the Temple Demon, Swamp Demon, Older brother/sister, Mother, and Father Spider demons, etc. Examples of the latter are mostly are more relevant Upper moon demons-- Daki, Akaza, and Kokushibou, whose real names are Ume, Hakuji, and Michikatsu respectively. The other upper moons, Nakime, Gyokko, and Hantengu, however, don’t have their human names revealed, along with Douma. However, these 3, did not hold as much story significance as Douma.

Then in addition to that, there are some demons who go by their human names still, such as Rui and Kaigaku. I assume it is because they are young enough relative to other demons age that they haven’t forgotten it (or maybe they just like their human names lol).

(I don’t know if Gyutaro’s name is his actual name or a fake name and, if it is a fake name, I don’t remember if his real name is actually given, which is weird because his sister’s was. But that’s a topic for another day.)

However, Douma, who holds the rank of Upper Moon 2, is one of the most relevant demons in the story, yet his real name is never disclosed. Even in the Kimetsu Acadmeny chapter extras, is stated that his AU version’s real name is unknown.

So, why is that? Douma even said so himself that he has great memory. He remembered many details of his life but he failed to ever disclose to us his name. Was that one thing he did forget? Was it not important to him? Did he simply not have a real name before becoming a demon? (Maybe his parents thought he was above having a normal human name?) And most importantly, was this intentionally done by Kyoharu Gotouge?

Before I continue, first we should know the meaning behind Douma’s name. His name is officially 童磨. According to the Kimetsu no Yaiba wiki,  童 ( dō ) means “child,” and 磨 (ma) which can mean “polishe,” “grind,” or “improve.” (Someone also said it can mean magic but I don’t have the source im sorry :( ) Based on these, Douma’s name has a meaning somewhere along the lines of “magical child” or “polished child.” This is most likely to reference how his parents thought he had divine powers at his birth.

For most people, your name is one of the most significant aspect of one’s identity. It’s the first bit of information you to give to anybody upon introduction. However, Douma’s unknown name is a demonstration of his own lack of personal identity.

If we take a look back at Douma’s childhood, he’s been put on as the figurehead of the Eternal Paradise cult from the day he could even sit up. His entire life he was put on a pedestal for an identity he did not make for himself, but one manufactured and forced onto him by his parents. In chapter 142, Douma admits that he can’t speak to the Gods or have any spiritual connections that his parents believe he has. In fact, he doesn’t even believe in any of it. If that’s the case, why does he seem so fixated on the idea of bringing his troubled followers to “paradise” as his sole reason for being born?

Earlier I mentioned that one large aspect of identity is our name. However, another important aspect in defining our identity is the personal relationships we have around us. Who we value and surround ourselves will shape our own individual perceptions of ourselves. However, Douma, who has admitted to having limited capability in feeling emotions, is unable to form meaningful bonds with people around him. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba is story where most, if not all, the main themes revolve around love, family, and friendship being the main motivators to drive characters in the pursuit of goals. However, here we have a character who serves as a direct antithesis to of all these themes. He has nobody he loves and nobody who loves him.

In chapter 157, Kanao calls out Douma in their fight, telling him she can see through the fake persona he puts on. She then proceeds to question him: “Why were you even born?” (damn....) Douma gave clearly visible cues that he was not pleased with what she had to say. The important observation to take from this scene is Douma’s reaction. The man who was just revealed to not feel any emotions, who is usually unbothered by harsh words thrown at him from demon slayers and other members of the upper moons alike, showed an emotional response to the cutting words of a child questioning his existence.

Based on this reaction, I think there is reason to believe Douma has an innate dissatisfaction with his own identity, or moreso his lack of identity. From his childhood, he’s been more than aware of how he cannot feel emotions the same as others. Even in his dying thoughts in chapter 163, he thinks back on how he was “always been this way.” He thinks about how human emotions to him were nothing more than  “mere dreams.”

I think should we take a close look at the word choice used here. He could have simply said something along the lines of “I’ve never felt emotions;” however Gotouge specifically phrased it as a metaphor comparing it to dreams. This word choice conveys a sense of longing associated with the idea of being able to experience emotion. This suggests that there is a chance he did wish for a better understanding of emotions. After all, like Kanao said, what’s the point of living if one can’t truly indulge in all of life’s pleasures associated with the emotional bonds we build with one another?

However, what does all this of this have to do with Douma not having a name? Douma not having a name is symbolic of his entire character. He is a man with no true identity of his own. He was unable to maintain any close, meaningful, interpersonal relationships with anyone around him in the hundreds of years he lived. He lived every day with a false persona knowing deep down inside of him knowing he was different from everyone else around him, but not in the “spiritual way” that was expected of him. And in his own Nihilistic opinion, he felt his own life was pointless. But as a direct contradiction to those beliefs, he continues to lie to himself, telling himself the people need him to save them. It’s ironic--Douma, the man who mocked demon slayers’ efforts to do whatever they can to achieve their goals, is doing the most to do whatever he can to mask the emptiness he feels inside. His boastfulness of his cult, his over-acting of emotions, and his insistence of friendly and polite conversation even in the face of insults and attacks from opponents all demonstrate this. While he may not be able to process and understand emotions like most people, there is one thing that Douma appears to have in common with many people: wanting a sense of purpose and meaningfulness in life.

While Douma’s reason for becoming a demon is never explicitly disclosed in the manga, I think we have reason to suspect him of becoming a demon for the purpose of finding an identity to call his own. Muzan Kibutsuji is notorious for taking advantage of humans who are at their lowest points in their life. They have lost everything that mattered to them and have no one else to turn to. However, it was a different case with Douma--a man with no loved ones, no purpose, no real identity--already had nothing to lose to in the first place.

Despite all Douma thought he though he “dedicated [...] to people and made contributions to the world,” in the end, his choice to become a demon never brought him the sense of identity and purpose he sought out by the time of his death. Unlike even other demons, who had family members they could happily reunite with in death, he would simply be forgotten from the rest of the world. Sure, maybe the demon slayers will remember him as Douma, one of the strongest demons. However,there was not a single person who knew the real Douma, the real name behind the man who served as Upper Moon 2 under Muzan. He will just continue to remain nameless even in death. A cruel reminder of how any way Muzan’s involvement in any other demon’s life did nothing to improve any of their lives, if not worsen it.

I don’t think I worded this well but I hope it still makes sense to everyone 🥺

[esmeraldablazingsky]

I’ve finally hit my limit on the number of bad takes on the Lan parents I can see before I have to lay out all the reasons I disagree, so hello, I’m Blazie, and in this essay I will justify my visceral dislike of the assumption that Qingheng-jun married/imprisoned/had sex with Lan-furen against her will.

    Warning for mentions of rape (in context of Interpretations I Really Hate) and a very, VERY long post below the cut.

    Before I start going off about the finer points of all this, I want to make sure people are on the same page regarding what we actually know about what went down with Qingheng-jun and Lan-furen. What I say is based off the EXR translation of MDZS, for the sake of clarity, and although I don’t think the exact wording should be too important, feel free to let me know if you think I’ve missed an important bit of nuance or something (the whole story is in Chapter 64.)

    The story we get is told by Lan Xichen, and it goes like this: a young Qingheng-jun falls in love at first sight with Lan-furen, who doesn’t return his feelings, and at some point kills one of Qingheng-jun’s teachers over unspecified “grievances.” Although he’s understandably very upset over the murder, Qingheng-jun sneaks Lan-furen back to Cloud Recesses and officially marries her in order to announce to his clan that anyone who wants to hurt her has to go through him.

After that, he locks Lan-furen in one house and himself in another as a form of repentance. Wei Wuxian speculates that this was because “he could neither forgive the one who killed his teacher nor watch the death of the woman who he loved. He could only marry her to protect her life and force himself not to see her.” 

    A central detail of this story that I think people don’t give the import it deserves is that aside from marrying and protecting her, Qingheng-jun’s other option was to let Lan-furen be executed by his clan. His purpose in marrying her wasn’t just for kicks/out of a possessive sort of love, it was so she wouldn’t straight up die. How she felt about this arrangement isn’t stated, but I’ll get into that in a bit. In addition to that, Qingheng-jun and Lan-furen live separately, which was apparently purposeful on Qingheng-jun’s part, and runs counter to the interpretation that he intended to take sexual advantage of Lan-furen.

Though there aren’t many concrete details in Lan Xichen’s retelling, he does specifically inform Wei Wuxian that his mother never complained about remaining in her house. What exactly this signifies is unclear— whether she was simply putting on a brave face for her sons, or whether she was in fact at all content with the situation— but it at the very least serves to further muddy the waters on how she and Qingheng-jun felt about all this. 

Beyond what Lan Xichen and Wei Wuxian are saying out loud, there’s also quite a bit of subtext in this scene, especially in light of later events and revelations, like Lan Xichen’s confession for Lan Wangji at Guanyin Temple. 

So what is Lan Xichen trying to convey with all this? There’s a lot of memes about this scene, most of which err too far on the side of Himbo Airhead Lan Xichen for my liking, but one that I do find amusing emphasizes how Lan Xichen draws parallels between Wangxian and the story of his parents (Lan Xichen: [flute solo] please use your one brain cell to connect the dots.) If Wei Wuxian hadn’t completely lost his memory of Lan Wangji defending him against his own clan elders, one would assume that Lan Xichen’s story would have had a much better chance of hitting home. 

In hindsight and side by side, the parallels are much clearer— Qingheng-jun, “ignoring the objections from his clan… told everyone in the clan that she would be his wife for the rest of his life, that whoever wanted to harm her would have to pass through him first.” Similarly, according to Lan Xichen in Chapter 99, “for [Wei Wuxian,] not only did WangJi talk back to him, he even met with his sword the cultivators from the GusuLan Sect. He heavily injured all thirty-three of the seniors we asked to come.”

In that context, it makes a lot less sense to interpret Qingheng-jun as an aggressor towards Lan-furen, as in Lan Wangji’s case, the narrative clearly establishes that his actions are to secure Wei Wuxian’s safety. The action of Taking Someone Back To Cloud Recesses is— okay, actually, it’s a little more nuanced than I took into account when I started writing that sentence, so let me go a little deeper into Lan Wangji’s actions and how they relate to his father’s, story-wise. 

My intent is not to dive into the terrifying underworld of novel-versus-drama discourse, but simply put, Novel!Lan Wangji as he is written isn’t exactly the poster child for clear consent. (I’m going to entirely leave off the extra chapters for the sake of everyone’s sanity, so I’m just talking about the main body of the novel here.)

He means well, and I’m sure we can agree that he does actually love and want the best for Wei Wuxian, but his lack of communication on this point means that he accidentally gives Wei Wuxian the impression that he wants to imprison and/or punish him in Cloud Recesses at least twice off the top of my head (pre-timeskip, as we know, and post-timeskip immediately after Dafan Mountain when he actually drags Wei Wuxian back to his room.) 

That all likely has something to do with MXTX’s narrative kinks and regular kinks and all that, and can absolutely be taken with many grains of salt. However, these events establish how easy it is to misinterpret the action of Taking Someone Back To Gusu as an attempt to imprison rather than protect them (much to Lan Wangji’s chagrin.)

Failing to communicate his purpose to Wei Wuxian doesn’t mean that Lan Wangji actually had any intent of hurting or caging him— that was just a misinterpretation on Wei Wuxian’s part, and we, as the audience, find that out in due time— but as written in the novel, it can be really uncomfortable to read. Because of that, many people choose to accept CQL canon regarding Lan Wangji’s more possessive actions or mix characterization from different adaptations, which, to be clear, I completely understand and respect. 

However, Qingheng-jun doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt as often, which I frankly find baffling, because nowhere in the text does it state that Lan-furen objected to being taken back to Cloud Recesses, while even Wei Wuxian clearly objected the first few times. In fact, while we’re on this note, I’ll take it a step farther— I find it baffling that people seem to default to an unsympathetic view of Qingheng-jun, because nowhere in the text does it state that he overruled Lan-furen’s wishes in any way. The text doesn’t clarify a lot of things, actually, and that is part of the point. 

The narrators of MDZS are, in many situations, highly unreliable. This is, presumably, very purposeful! MDZS can easily be read as a sharp criticism of reputation and mass judgment and the concept of condemning people without knowing their motives! And I don’t want to sound mean, but guys… did any of us learn anything from that? Here, I’m going to put it in meme format for a second to convey what I mean. 

MDZS: It’s easy to condemn someone as a villain if you don’t know their story or the reasons behind their actions

MDZS: Anyway, here’s a character whose story and reasons behind his actions you know nothing about

Some Parts Of This Fandom: Ah, a villain 

    Memes aside, here’s what I want to point out. It’s entirely possible to assume Qingheng-jun was a bad person who disregarded a woman’s wishes in marrying and confining her when all you have is Lan Xichen’s (actually very neutral, thank you Lan Xichen for being an eminently reasonable and concerned-with-evidence character) account of what happened. It would also be at least that easy to assume Wei Wuxian was just an evil necromancer if he hadn’t un-died and brought his own story to light, or even to believe that Lan Wangji had somehow tamed Wei Wuxian into submission and being a respectable cultivator if you were an average citizen of Fantasy Ancient China with nothing but rumors to operate on. 

    The thing about Qingheng-jun and Lan-furen’s story, then, is that there is nobody left alive who knows the full tale. Nobody knows what they thought about anything, really. Nobody even knows why Lan-furen killed Qingheng-jun’s teacher. Wei Wuxian asks why, and Lan Xichen can’t tell him, but I think the best answer would be something along the lines of I don’t know, Wei Wuxian, why did you kill people? Your guess on the motivations of your own thinly disguised narrative parallel are as good as anyone’s. 

    So, while it’s not technically impossible to assign darker motives to Qingheng-jun, the cautionary tale of MDZS seems to warn against that exact assumption. 

    I’ve refrained from getting too salty on a personal level thus far, but now that I’ve said a lot of the more logical and story-based points of my argument, I will say that at least some of my annoyance with the interpretation of Qingheng-jun as a possessive rapist and Lan-furen as his victim stems from the fact that I just think it’s straight up boring. Where’s the nuance? Aren’t you tired of reducing these characters to the flattest possible versions of themselves? Don’t you just want to add a little flavor? 

    In a slightly more serious phrasing of that criticism, I find that making Lan-furen a helpless prisoner strips her of whatever agency she might otherwise have. To be fair, she’s more or less a non-character in keeping with the general state of the MDZS universe, but making her a damsel in distress only consigns her more deeply to hapless, milquetoast innocence. 

    It’s perfectly valid to enjoy ladies who have done nothing wrong, ever, in their lives, but like… Qin Su is right there, if that’s your ball game. There’s also really no need to make Qingheng-jun someone who doesn’t respect women. Isn’t Jin Guangshan enough for at least one universe? 

    Anyway, ultimately, you do you. I don’t like arguing on the internet, and will just ignore things I don’t agree with (or write an 1800 word vaguepost) like a mature human being. I’m just saying, if it’s a cut and dry tale of imprisonment and assault you’re looking for… you probably don’t want to turn to a woman who committed a murder and a man who loved her enough to forfeit everything to keep her safe. 

[syncogon]

[QZGS meta] what’s in an OP? dawning glory (pt 1)

or, why TKA S2′s OP is actually really good

{The King’s Avatar season 2 premieres in less than 24 hours!}

(part 2) (part 3)

Ever since I got into The King’s Avatar, I’ve always wondered what a “classic-anime-style” TKA opening would look like. OPs are something I pay a lot of attention to, both for the sheer enjoyment and hype as well as the deeper story and symbolism they may allude to. And although I enjoy the S1 and OVA OPs for what they are, I always wanted an OP that really followed the tried-and-true formulas, an OP that gave a proper look at what the series was really about, an OP that had a lot to dig into and analyze. 

S2 brought us this kind of OP, finally, and I’m very excited to see it. Heavily inspired by the “What’s in an OP?” youtube series by Mother’s Basement, I really wanted to try and break down this OP. Because things got very long, this is only part 1; the other 2 parts are linked above and below.

Some of the points I bring up may be reading too deeply, but whether some of these details were intentional or not, their meanings and effects are still worth analyzing. Also as a warning, there will probably be novel spoilers. 

For reference, watch and read the lyric translation here.

With all that said, let’s jump right in.

We open with some very nice shots of the morning light streaming in, shining on the gamers’ tools of the trade. Right away, the new animation studio promises us a visual treat - the lighting and colors are excellent. Although the props are unmoving and there are no living beings in these shots, the changing angle of the light adds motion to the scene, giving the impression of a sped-up sunrise. This accompanies the music well, which starts out muffled and distant, and gradually comes into clarity. From the very beginning, the OP grabs our attention and holds it, building our anticipation for what’s to come.

Now we cut to outside, atop a roof, and we get a proper look at the sunrise - only for a brief moment, though, as Ye Xiu’s hand quickly comes up to block the blinding light. “Anime protagonist staring at sunrise” is a pretty common trope, but I think it’s used to nice effect here - we’re introduced immediately to the “dawn” motif that underlies this entire OP (it’s even in the title). It’s a suitable motif for this arc of the story, because this is where Ye Xiu finally has the concrete goal of building up his own team - this is truly the dawn of Team Happy.

I like how it’s Ye Xiu’s hand that’s the first thing we see of him, or of anyone. As a pro, his hands are the most important part of himself; his hands are also one of the first things that Chen Guo notices about him when she first meets him. 

Furthermore, this view provides a nice natural transition to the next shot, in which we finally get to see him properly.

Look at how pretty the sky looks! Look at how pretty his smile looks! 

After the first few seconds of pure buildup in the music, the beat kicks in at the exact same time as his hair begins to blow in the wind. I think it’s very important for the visuals and the music to sync together in an OP, simply because of the raw impact this has on the viewer - they reinforce each other’s effects. Both components of an OP need to work well together in order to create something greater than the sum of the parts. It’s just very exciting, when you can sit back and think “oh yeah, it’s all coming together.” 

Ye Xiu stares thoughtfully at the sunrise for a few moments, before breaking into a soft, relaxed smile (right on the second four-count after the beat starts). It’s not one of his mocking smiles, or his shamelessly confident smiles - here he’s just genuinely happy and hopeful at what the future has in store. 

We see him lower his arm, and then the camera pans upward to a shot of the new series logo for Season 2. This pan-up to title card is also a fairly standard technique, but hey, it’s effective and efficient at getting us ready. 

Speaking of the new logo: it’s basically the same as the old, but I was shocked to see just how prominent the English title “The King’s Avatar” is now. Honestly, it’s really exciting to see - feels like it adds some legitimacy to our small English fandom, and it’s also so cool, knowing how the title “The King’s Avatar” became the official English name almost by accident - we could have easily ended up with something much less interesting. However I do think they could have positioned the text a little better, because I and others keep reading “The King’s Iavatar” haha

As the dawn shifts more into morning, we refocus on Happy Internet Cafe, the origin of it all. Notice the new green leaves on the tree: our story began on a snowy winter, but we’re now firmly in spring, a time of new beginnings. 

The music excitement level settles down a little as we enter the first verse, and here we get a montage of many of the to-be Team Happy members. Although each shot is fairly short, each manages to tell a story, conveying a good amount of information about the character in question. One of TKA’s strengths is its large cast of well-developed characters, and I’m really glad to see that they’re not completely flattened out in this opening montage.

Here we see Chen Guo, presumably opening up the cafe for the day. However, by the time she comes down here to do this, it seems that Tang Rou has already been awake and training for a while.

Like Ye Xiu, the first thing we see of Tang Rou is her hand, a parallel that perhaps emphasizes how deep Ye Xiu’s influence on her is and how she wishes to learn from and surpass him. The nimbleness of her fingers on the keyboard definitely evokes the image of a pianist - a subtle clue for the future.

Look at her straightened back and serious eyes - her posture and expression say it all. Awake, alert, steady, calm, as she continues to strive for improvement. 

The lyric for this part is roughly, “the bugle call to split open the dawn is sounding right here and now.” As mentioned, it’s here at Happy Internet Cafe that it all begins.

From one internet cafe to another, it’s Wei Chen and his bros! Notice how he’s at the center of their little group, in both position and attention - we immediately get the sense that he’s their leader. Slouched against the couch (which seems to be built more for comfortable lounging than proper gaming), hands behind his head, glancing between his friends, an easy smile, it all gives off a relaxed, casual air of confidence. 

Still, in contrast to the seemingly light-hearted mood of this scene here, the accompanying lyric is somewhat melancholy: “were those daydreams or the past?” 

When Wei Chen’s character design came out, a lot of people were surprised at how young he seemed to look, and he has barely any stubble. But with this close-up of his face (which is specifically timed to “or the past”), the lines under his eyes are clear to see. Combined with the lyric, there’s suddenly something sad beneath his smile here. He’s not young anymore. 

Notice the one screen that’s turned on behind him - clearly an image of Glory. Despite everything, he couldn’t bring himself to leave this world entirely.

Where the hell is Steamed Bun? Why does he have a bat? We just don’t know. We don’t even have any lyrics to give us a hint. He’s a real-life Brawler, totally incomprehensible. Even the camera shakes a bit erratically as it tries to follow his movement. Honestly, isn’t this just the best way to sum up his character?

Our favorite math nerd Luo Ji, in a library of course. The shot begins with everything blocked off by the books, and it’s only when he pulls out one of the books (the black-to-light is timed with the lyric “I open my eyes”) that we’re able to see him. He’s still framed by the books in this shot, because he’s first and foremost still a student. For now and for a long time to come, his studiousness and mathematical ability will be what defines him and his contributions to Team Happy. 

Still, he looks thoughtfully at the book in his left hand. Maybe his contributions can go farther. Pay attention to his character Concealed Light when we see him later.

I can’t say if there’s a significance to the woman passing by, but it serves its purpose as a transition to the next scene.

Qiao Yifan! From the logo in the back, as well as his uniform and color scheme, you can see he’s still at Tiny Herb here. He looks determined and focused on his screen at first. When he blinks, though, his gaze subtly shifts to the side and down. Something is distracting him; he’s not quite as certain as he might appear at a glance. 

The lyric here is “[I can’t tell] what side of the road I’m running on,” an apt reflection of his current, conflicted and somewhat precarious situation. He’s on a championship team right now, a place that so many would envy. But he feels much more at home with the ragtag crew from Happy. But what prospects do they have? But it’s not like he has much of a place in Tiny Herb right now either…

From Qiao Yifan looking to the side, we cut to An Wenyi looking to the side - our eyes are able to very naturally follow the transition. Although blurry at first, we soon see that he’s looking at a figurine of Immovable Rock - the number one Cleric in Glory, An Wenyi’s idol. He looks at it thoughtfully for a moment, brows furrowed, before turning away and closing his eyes. As though in resignation, knowing he’ll never be able to reach that level.

The lyric is, “do I understand” - a very short line, with the note held out.

An Wenyi is the logical one; he’s the one who understands. He understands his current position, he understands that he has no hope as a pro with his current skill, he understands that the chance Happy is offering him is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of opportunity for someone like him. It’s a decision he considers carefully, he’s unafraid to ask bold questions about the practicality of what Chen Guo and Ye Xiu are trying to do, but in the end he knows this isn’t something that he can pass up.

I like An Wenyi’s character arc a lot. There’s a lot of worry and self-doubt in his expression as he looks at that figurine; there’s a lot of sadness as he turns away. Even through Season 10, this aspect of him doesn’t just magically disappear - he has to deal with this reality of being Happy’s weak point. His logical mind is both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness.

From An Wenyi’s closed eyes, we cut to Su Mucheng’s downcast eyes - another natural eye-focused transition. She looks up as the wind picks up around her, blowing her hair and scattering leaves. 

Notice that she’s not wearing her Excellent Era uniform here. Her dress reminds me of her outfit from the prequel movie, actually - color scheme, sleeves, bow, length, cut, etc. 

It’s a style calling back to younger, simpler times. The light pink color adds to that effect as well. 

As the camera pulls out, we’re able to see just how alone she is, isolated from the cars passing beneath her, not a single other person nearby. And at this point in the story, she really is rather alone; she doesn’t really have any allies on the team, and her only escape is to play in the game with the Happy crew. 

The wind is scattering many leaves, and she blurs into the background as the camera focuses on one drifting red maple leaf in particular. 

Blatant symbolism is blatant (it’s not even fall right now, it should be early spring…). Still, it’s a convenient shorthand to reference many things. One Autumn Leaf, Ye Xiu’s account and identity for a decade, now snatched away. The symbol of Excellent Era and those earliest hopes and dreams, now lost to the wind. It could even reference Su Muqiu himself, the boy with “autumn” in his name, now lying in eternal rest. 

The lyric is, “interwoven in the dawn, those memories and rests.” The past is now past, far out of reach; all we can do is look up and reminisce on what once was. 

Over the course of these shots, you can see the passage of the morning. The earlier characters are illuminated by a golden glow, but by the time we reach Su Mucheng, she’s standing in full daylight. Here we end section 1 (verse 1), and move onto the next part of the song.

Thanks for reading so far!

(part 2) (part 3) 

[these-are-the-first-steps]

“The Rise of Skywalker”- A Review from Memory

So it’s been a week since I’ve had to live with this film in front of my eyes, and a week and a half that I’ve had to grapple with the brunt of its sins. With a heavy sigh, I think I’m ready to go through the play-by-play of every plot hole in this film that I can manage from memory without the thing in front of me. And even then, the laundry list is hefty. Keep in mind that this is a FILM-BASED review only- I have tried to refrain from including new information we have learned since its release last Thursday in an effort to keep this as focused and topical as possible.

+The first scene of this film is weird. I’m all for watching Adam Driver wild out on some dudes, but it is never explained who these guys are and if it’s just Kylo ‘committing more slaughter’ (as the casual audience is wont to think) or if there’s something significant here. As the movie goes on and Kylo makes it clear that he’s under no one’s thumb, *and* that the object he was after was Sith, you start to get an idea that maybe those guys at the intro are No Good, but this is never explained or confirmed. To a casual audience with no interest in additional materials, it just looks like Bad Ole Kylo Doing More Bad Ole Stuff. *sigh*

+Exogol and Palpatine’s hideout looks like the Borg Cube from Star Trek: First Contact from 1996. This really smacked me in the face how similar it was.

+Snoke’s significance getting sniped by Palpatine in one fell swoop felt like two five year olds arguing over action figures in the sandbox. “No! He’s dead now! Now the good guys can go on their quest!” “Well if he’s dead now, it’s only because MY guy was the REAL bad guy! DOOSHDOOSHDOOSHDOOSH!!” Like….really? At least Palpatine’s never-spoken-of Snoke manufacturing lab was vaguely interesting. Too bad we never saw anything about that- what a story of intergalactic puppet-masters that would have made! We’re not here for clever storytelling, though, so moving on…

+I don’t think they should have included Leia in this film. It really added to the disjointed nature of this movie with flat audio, crippled dialogue, and CGI where Leia only really had one facial expression for 90% of her appearances. It really wasn’t worth it. I know Star Wars doesn’t do flashbacks (which, frankly, I appreciate a lot), but I think they could have utilized the IDEA of Leia better than her actual self. Leia was forced, it showed, and it wasn’t good. Honestly they did a WAY better job reviving Tarkin in RO.

+An incredibly unnecessary amount of new information for the third act of a series was introduced in this film, starting with Leia suddenly being a well-trained Jedi or something. At least enough to ‘train’ Rey, which…frankly wasn’t believable. Leia having the force was a given. That she distanced herself from active application of the Force as a residual reaction to the bombshell of Darth Vader being her father is what is, and always has, made sense. THAT is a nuanced perspective, but it gets thrown out in favor of not just shoe-horning Leia in to the movie, but also because they had no idea what else to do with her at all in this film. This is also why Leia shouldn’t have been in this movie the way she was.

+Oh, you knew Palpatine was behind all this the whole time, Leia? Really? Always there, huh? When in TFA it was always snoke? Obvious dialogue lift is obvious, but the use of it was just Bad and inconsiderate to the story.

+Poe’s backstory was published on December 18th, 2015 in a book called “Before The Awakening” that details the lives of Poe, Finn, and Rey leading up to TFA. Poe is the son of two famous Rebel fighters and he grows up with a nice quiet life on Yavin 4 learning about ships and loving to fly. He goes straight from his home world to joining the Republic navy. It’s a handful of months before Leia Organa picks up on him and brings him into the Resistance. Now…this is a backstory that is JJ Abrams approved, has been out since 2015, and yet Oscar Isaac said he ‘never knew’ Poe’s backstory, and JJ somehow thinks four years later that there is space in this incredibly concise timeline for him to become a drug runner. What?? This was possibly the BIGGEST wtf moment for me in this film. What in the actual world. WHAT.

+Sidelining old characters to pointlessly introduce new ones does not serve a story, it clogs it up, drags down its rhythm, and confuses the hell out of it. As seen by Zorri and Jannah. And out of those two, only Jannah carried any kind of actual literary weight, because for Finn, he’s found more people like himself. This sort of setup is a typical play to foreshadow where Finn eventually settles down and goes at the end of the war. But this is never expounded on or explained further. It’s just, BOOM, more former troopers and a girl who is suddenly irrationally attached to him at all times.

+Rose gets replaced by Jannah, a brand new character that we only know one single thing about, and who gets to latch on to Finn out of the blue while Rose is left at home or on a ship. It was weird. It was obvious. It was incredibly awkward to watch. There was no point to Jannah clinging to Finn like this. She was reduced from a strong character to a cringy clingy one, while Finn’s love interest was completely ignored.

+The ‘Journey to The Rise of Skywalker’ comics released a couple weeks before the film heavily implied we’d get a lot of great Rose and Rey team time. We received none of it. It felt like someone had jerked a present away from us and it was a gross omission.

+It is only by the very end of the film and after multiple watches that you THINK they are trying to hint that Kylo is spiraling, thus why Leia steps in in death, but it never ever gets shown. Never once are we let in on Kylo’s state of mind. In fact, never once are we let in on *any* of these characters’ states of mind. We never really see what they are feeling or thinking or going through. Kylo is nothing but action when in TFA and TLJ we see him falling apart. This is what bad direction looks like, and it takes a Real Talent to fuck up directing an actor like Adam Driver. Another big sigh…

+There are only two cool things about this movie- The bleeding of reality between Kylo and Rey, and Palpatine’s shadow senate. When Kylo and Rey fight and the red bits go flying on the floor, it screamed serious TLJ aesthetics to me that I had to blink a moment. I think this ‘Bleed-through’ of their realities is the only TLJ hold-over we were allowed. It was a genuinely fascinating touch, which is how you know it didn’t come from *this* film’s production office.

+When you stick three people in a closet together, you expect some sort of progress in two-thirds of the potential relationships in such a cramped space. We received no such thing. Forced Trio Time resulted in no character development and seemed more like an unnecessary comic relief vehicle than anything.

+In ‘Before The Awakening’ and ‘Rey’s Survival Guide’, both publications printed under JJ Abrams’s  blessing, we learn Rey named *herself* after a helmet she found in the desert. How is it Rey’s alleged parents know her fake name? Gross, gross plot-hole.

+Four years was spent emphasizing that you don’t have to come from anywhere ‘special’ to be Important to a big story. Then they threw it out. Post-TROS interview with JJ reveals it was because they ‘couldn’t think of how else to get rey engaged in fighting palpatine’. Because he wasn’t a nasty enough dude on his own? Seriously? This is pure negligence.

+Four years was also spent emphasizing that you also don’t even NEED the force to be important to the big story and make a huge difference to the future. But let’s throw that out, too, and give Finn the force. Clearly regular people are absolutely worthless in the Star Wars Universe, according to JJ Abrams.

+Finn is only used to babysit Rey the entire time they share screen time together. The number of times he shouts her name could be turned into a drinking game. It’s one thing to care about somebody, and another thing entirely to act like you’re their high school chaperone. The whole thing was weird and awkward.

+Zorri Bliss sounds like a stripper name and she served no purpose other than to shoehorn Felicity into a star wars movie. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Babu Frik is the only true-to-star-wars critter in this whole film.

+Leia literally goes and lays down on her own funeral spread? What was that about. And that’s what that was because why would her bed be out in the open like that? That was really, really weird. And the RoTJ medal throwback was just a tacky tether to the past.

+Everyone seems so irrationally tethered to the past in this film. Kylo Ren’s spent two movies desperate to ‘leave the past behind’ and I don’t blame him at this point because it’s getting exhausting.

+As stated previously, it’s only vaguely suspected but Kylo seemed to SUPPOSED to be spiraling. Adam Driver plays Kylo like a man finally free of the voices in his head, but the plot and dialogue point to an entirely different direction saying that REALLY the monsters have allegedly doubled-down and he’s even more unhinged than before. Here is a MAJOR indication of story re-working after the film has already been shot. Adam Driver, and Daisy for that matter, is a PRECISE actor. It seems almost impossible to tell a story with him that you did not originally MEAN to tell. And it shows. JJ tried to U-Turn the story but it absolutely failed- Adam’s Kylo Ren is a calm, free man, focused, who finally knows what his purpose in life is, and that is uniting with his Dyad in the force. When really JJ tried very hard to suggest that he was spiraling so hard and so ‘lost’ in the Dark Side that it took his mother’s last breath to swing him back around. No one is going to see that narrative. The only reason why I see this shoddy attempt is because I’ve been absolutely immersed in this shit since December 2015. But the main audience? This was absolutely not conveyed.

+Seeing Dark Side Rey was nothing but a ‘cool’ moment and actually served zero function to the plot. Rey was always shown as being Grey in the force and someone who struggled to maintain balance. If that whole scene was removed, it wouldn’t change anything.

+Kylo was never in a position to kill Rey on the Death Star, and Rey taking her cheap shot to stab him while he heard his mother’s voice is an attempt to convey how much seeing her Sith self affected her than Kylo’s already very faded aggression in this film but it failed. It was weird and out of character, and even coming to that conclusion took may rewatches to come to because there is NEVER a ramp-up to Rey’s darkside taking over long enough to stab Kylo- there’s no fire, no red eyes, no teeth, none of it, to indicate she was ‘overcome’ so it just looked like bad mischaracterization. Yikes.

+Kylo and Han’s moment on the Death Star is the most moving scene of the entire film. The dialogue starts out rather familiar, and it almost seems like a cop-out, until you realize….how many times has Ben had this conversation with himself?? He doesn’t seem shocked at all that his father is there. Not at all. In fact, that Last Conversation on the bridge of Starkiller comes off as a well-rehearsed dance that Ben puts himself through regularly. And every time he hopes it’ll be affirmation enough that it’s all been worth it. But here, at the last reenactment of the worst day of his life, the script changes. He surrenders. He says dad. And he rejects Kylo Ren forever. Harrison Ford and Adam Driver are two beautifully matched, talented actors and I’d watch a movie with the two of them in it any day. God bless them.

+Hux has been wasted for the past two films. He was Terrifying in TFA and Dom gave him such significant presence that I was genuinely terrified for what he might try in the future. But instead he was lost as comic relief. When it is comically delivered that HE is the spy, every single person in my movie theatre shouted “WHAT??” in a way that was not a Good what, but in a “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me” kind of what, and I will never ever forget that. I hate seeing Star Wars diminished like this.

+Luke rehashing Obi-wan’s speech to him about how Rey MUST confront the Big Bad was an obvious rehash, and way too convenient to what Palpatine wanted. This whole appearance of Luke is very suspect, but that would be crediting them again with clever storytelling, which again this is not.

+Luke claims that Leia saw ‘the death of her son’ at the end of her Jedi Path, which one can assume why she threw it away. But then Luke says something bizarre about ‘hoping someone else would pick up her path someday’. Is that...is that not the same path leading to Ben’s death that she was avoiding in the first place? And if someone else picks it up, is that not no longer Leia’s path but that other person’s? Therefore, is not the outcome automatically going to be different and thus *avoid* Ben’s death? This was an attempt at supposedly clever foreshadowing or Mystical Talk or some shit, but all it was was dialogue that backfired in meaning spectacularly due to looping-in on itself too many times. Luke negates himself at the same time he tries to prove his point...which he then negates in the same breath. What a mess.

+All of Ben Solo’s lines were cut the last act of the film to stuff more pointless exposition at the END of film and to give more screen time to Ian McDiarmid. Ian’s great, but he’s not the main character of this series, and cutting Ben’s lines for this was Gross.  

+Space Horses? Really?? I didn’t like them in TLJ but at least there they had context- they had zero context here. The size of the horses and the ship they came off of was absurdly mismatched. Is that ship the TARDIS? That whole bit was so unnecessary and ridiculous, especially with zero setup. Which is amazing because this film is 90% set-up.

+All those ships at the end? That’s all it took? After books and comics going on about how everyone’s too terrified to help Leia because of FO scorched earth policy? Jesus it was weak, and too obvious a Deus ex Machina with THAT many ships.

+Palpatine’s Shadow Senate is cool. The idea that this guy trapped on an ugly planet stuck on Sith life-support couldn’t go two seconds without attention and praise to the point where he had to recreate the exact same senate he destroyed years ago is a concept I like. Is the Shadow Senate just in the *shape* of the old senate but filled with animated Sith proxies? Or is it actually comprised of the enslaved souls of former Senators now forced to attend the Emperor for eternity? Either way, destroying the Shadow Senate at least either set those souls free or sent them back to wherever they came from. That was actually interesting, and it’s a shame we didn’t get to learn more about such a genuinely creepy thing.

+Palpatine’s ‘we’re family’ routine drops the moment he realizes Ben and Rey are a dyad. This is suspicious, but considering the whole movie so far, it seems incorrect to giver JJ and Torrio credit for a possible mis-direct.

+Rey and Ben’s realities bleeding into each other is experienced again in swapping the light saber. This is cool. This is probably the coolest moment in the film. And then the coolness literally gets thrown into a pit when, instead of the both of them, as a Dyad, defeating Palpatine, Rey is left to carry the burden alone.

+Oh hey look a cop-out to save Rey from being bad- just have her reflect his own power back at him so it’s like he’s killing himself, wow, so original! The second Palpy revealed his gameplan about wanting to die, this became the obvious choice to both kill him and avoid giving him what he wanted. Eh….

+The Star Wars 9-movie series is the story of one man desperately begging anyone within hearing range to kill him, apparently. This is so, so old by the 9th friggin movie. 

+Ben Solo spends his entire life begging for guidance from his ancestors only to be ignored and Rey get all their attention instead. Ben Solo spends his entire life since the womb being a burden to his parents by merely existing and being manipulated by gross sith ghosts. But nah, let’s be parents to Rey and help out Rey. This is not to say she doesn’t deserve any of this, but to say there are priorities here- Rey has had a lonely life, but at least she had her sanity and was self-sufficient. Ben had neither his sanity or any control over his own life whatsoever. And to place Rey above Ben is a literal mess. The two of them were meant by the Force to rise TOGETHER, and it didn’t happen.

+Rey doesn’t disappear when she ‘dies’ after using the last of her life force to both feed Palpatine, fight him, AND defeat him. And yet while Rey has two strikes in her before kicking it, Ben, someone who is RADICALLY more trained in the force, its lore, and mechanics, only has one? This doesn’t make any sense.

+Rey has no reaction to the literal other half of her soul vanishing in front of her. Because this is a mangled JJ Abrams Finale(tm) and why should anyone, let alone his own characters, have any space to Feel? I mean, that’s not what movies are even about, right? Feeling and Telling A Story? It’s not that, right? Right?? JJ Abrams covers up Rey’s reaching-hands scar on her arm for the entire film, doesn’t address it, and apparently hates the shit out of it. I don’t know how the King of Cheese could possibly hate something like that. It was a weird and obvious omission, and frankly disappointing because the scar had come to mean something at the end of TLJ and it, like a lot in this film, got thrown in the trash.

+More forced trio time in the form of a group hug where nothing gets actually expressed because we ran out of space for dialogue 30 pages back.

+Anakin Skywalker viewed Tatooine, his place of enslavement, as the worst place in the galaxy. Luke Skywalker spent his entire youth trying to escape. Leia hated it on principle because it was where Darth Vader came from and where she herself had been enslaved in a gross gold bikini for a giant slug. Rey spent 14 years of her life dreaming of leaving the sand planet she was trapped on. But I guess that’s a fitting place to bury some memories, yeah? The place where nothing good ever, ever happened. That’s a nice spot, right?

+Rey Skywalker isn’t explained, is never led up to, and feels like a gross gimmie after four years of trying to create a Better Message that names don’t matter. HEAVY SIGH.

+Rey watches the two suns set as she is left with little more than she started- alone, on a sand planet, but this time taunted by the Twin Suns of Tatooine that the other half of her soul is literally missing and that she is now left with a gaping wound in her Force signature and her own spirit worse than if she’d just lost a Force Bonded mate.

+Ben Solo is left missing, vanished on a world that is supposedly a thin spot in the force, with no ghost, no presence, and no one to mourn him- not even by the other half of his very soul. THREE GENERATIONS of Skywalkers over NINE FILMS died to try and rescue their future embodied in the form of Ben Solo and it looks like it was for nothing. Instead, the incessant bad guy no one can move on from looks like he ultimately wins the day through an alleged granddaughter, and even that claim is on shaky ground considering the mistakes in the vision and how quickly the family conversation vanished upon the revelation that Ben and Rey are a dyad. Ben is lost, so every family member died for nothing, apparently. But hey, this is a Fun and Hopeful narrative, right?

+While the Final Order fleet is destroyed at the end, the First Order is.....still out there? It’s still out there. Nothing in that department has changed whatsoever. Leaders die. They get replaced. The cycle goes on. We spent three movies batting at a fly we didn’t even kill. Amazing.

Overall this movie is BRUTAL. Every other scene is a plot hole served to us on a silver platter, with the biggest insult being that they are plot points JJ created HIMSELF 4-6 years ago. This man literally shot himself in the face and then said it was fine as he bled out all over the film reels and it shows. If you were anyone who came along for the Additional Materials ride of the past four years, you were greeted by this film with a hard, swift, and REPEATED, backhand to the face. There was no reward here at the end of this road for fans, old and new, who actually paid attention and took an interest in the deeper lore surrounding this sequel trilogy. There was just a big fat Disney-branded middle finger as all your hard work and cash was ripped from you with a trademark villain laugh.

And that is what we’re left with.

This review does not go into detail over what we’ve discovered since the release of the film, either. That it was never finished in the editing room. That a current comic series, Rise of Kylo Ren, and what’s in the new TROS visual dictionary maddeningly contradict themselves. That allegedly SIX different endings were shot for this movie, and in the end the one they chose looks like it was *literally* reverse-engineered to confusingly kill, as JJ once called him, ‘The Other Half of Our Protagonist’. There is no time to go into detail about how Oscar Isaac just told us that noone in the cast knew that Rey Palpatine was going to be endgame except for maybe Adam when they made him do ADR declaring it with a masked face on screen (convenient). There is no room to show you the collective cast reaction they all gave to the end of the movie- none of them good, and John Boyega looking like he was holding back from punching something (he loved Kylo/Ben as much as the audience did and more). And there is no room to include what we will continue to find out as the days roll on about the tangled mess of a film that was edited and reedited, and how word on the street is a cocky director demanded Carte Blanche from Kathleen Kennedy, and I guess the story group too given the state of things, and then promptly self-destructed in the grossest, messiest end to a 40+ year series in cinema history.

There’s just no space.

But there IS a lesson.

And the lesson is this: No matter what, never stop investing in Story. Never stop caring about the details and about plot and about moving a story FORWARD. Never be afraid to move FORWARD. Look at TROS, the mess it is and the potential it had it in itself to be, and then look at the beauty that is TFA and the love that went into TLJ, and study that shit until it burns into your brain- Do not repeat those mistakes. Go out into the world and write better, shoot better, direct better, and BE BETTER. Because these producers and directors? They’re old and they’re on their way out. Just like the stable boy at the end of TLJ who secretly has the Force, know and realize that those of you out there reading this are the next generation of storytellers. YOU. And YOU, and I, and others out there like us who loved this series with our whole heart and who are watching it bleed out now on a floor that doesn’t give two shits about it, have the ability to make sure this NEVER happens again. But in order to do that….we have to pick up that pen. Pick up that pencil. Pick up that camera. Jot down that story idea and share it with likeminded friends. Go out there and CREATE, and create BETTER. Because it’s up to us now- the future of cinema is up to us. And my god, we have so much potential….

[linklethehistorian]

Randou and the Sins of Season 3's Fifteen Adaption (Part 35/???)

Bones' Biggest Changes & Greatest Failures — The Tragedy of Arthur Rimbaud (14/?)

The first and much lesser in importance of these two — the one involving the physical appearance of Arahabaki — I believe was clearly done not necessarily in a calculated attempt at deceiving the audience, as there is not much to be gained in doing so, but instead with the puerile intent of mirroring a certain scene in the movie, DEAD APPLE.

As I’m sure you can easily see for yourself, these images are indeed quite reflective of each other in a lot of ways, easily harkening back to each other each time a viewer might see them; regardless, while I can appreciate the attempt to create this parallel between Arahabaki’s appearance in Randou’s retelling of his supposed first encounter with the being, and the one scene in DEAD APPLE when Chuuya crouches on a floating rock while using Corruption, that does not take away the fact that what we’re given in terms of its physical manifestation is simply not anywhere close to being accurate to the true account told in the novel.

What Randou describes Arahabaki to be in this is not some abstract, indistinct being that looks like it is barely holding itself together at the joints — if the creature in the anime even is at all, which is highly questionable given the large gaps where they normally should be — but rather, one that is almost human in appearance, if not for being solid black and having “fur”, a “tail”, and eyes of fire; as he says himself quite explicitly, more than anything, it is its very presence that sets it apart from a human, rather than the physical differences that may be visible to the eyes.

Naturally, this should bring us to wonder if it does any damage to the tale to change it so, and the basic answer to that question is ‘no’ — which is why I did not make too big of a deal out of it — but, just because something doesn’t actively do noticeable harm to the plot does not mean that it is exactly a good change. This is not the same situation as their rather different interpretation of the color of Randou’s ability or even the way that Chuuya was restrained by it in the episode prior; whereas those alterations served logical, even commendable purposes in potentially helping the adaptation properly convey information it might otherwise struggle to express, this one only removes details while accomplishing absolutely nothing in their place, blatantly ignoring and retconning the entire character design of a rather crucial figure in the arc just because it could.

Yes, as I said, I know that it may very well have been done with DEAD APPLE in mind and I understand that, but in all honesty, as far as I can tell, there wasn’t even a need to change it to begin with, if that was truly what they wanted to do; really, if they genuinely wanted to mirror that one pose Chuuya struck during the movie as much as possible, they actually would have been able to do so far better if they had just kept its appearance in line with its actual descriptions in the book, because he was more human-like in the source material.

I suppose that one might argue then, that that was the point — that they wanted to mirror it, but also differentiate between the two as much as possible, both to hammer home just how inhuman Arahabaki supposedly was and also to throw people off the tracks of guessing that it was Chuuya before the reveal, and if that is the case, then I will grant that they did do a spectacular job of it, but I still am not sure I exactly appreciate the decision, as whether or not this was a change made understanding that the visual medium would make it harder to hide the identity of the being, it is still an intentional misrepresentation that could have been made entirely unnecessary had they simply not tried so very hard to make the two scenes look like direct reflections of each other.

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Daring and the Duke. By Sarah MacLean. New York: Avon, 2020.

Rating: 3/5 stars

Genre: historical romance

Part of a Series? Yes, Bareknuckle Bastards #3

Summary: Grace Condry has spent a lifetime running from her past. Betrayed as a child by her only love and raised on the streets, she now hides in plain sight as queen of London’s darkest corners. Grace has a sharp mind and a powerful right hook and has never met an enemy she could not best, until the man she once loved returns. Single-minded and ruthless, Ewan, Duke of Marwick, has spent a decade searching for the woman he never stopped loving. A long-ago gamble may have lost her forever, but Ewan will go to any lengths to win Grace back… and make her his duchess. Reconciliation is the last thing Grace desires. Unable to forgive the past, she vows to take her revenge. But revenge requires keeping Ewan close, and soon her enemy seems to be something else altogether—something she can’t resist, even as he threatens the world she's built, the life she's claimed…and the heart she swore he'd never steal again.

***Full review under the cut.***

Content Warnings: explicit sexual content, violence, blood, references to child abuse and maiming

Overview: There was only one book left in the Bareknuckle Bastards series so I thought “why not?” I was curious as to how MacLean would redeem the main antagonist of the first two books, and I rather liked Grace every time she showed up on the page. While there were some things I enjoyed, I would put this finale closer in quality to Brazen and the Beast than Wicked and the Wallflower. There wasn’t much to bind the two leads together aside from their past, in my opinion, and while MacLean attempts to tell a darker, angstier story, much of the plot felt empty and repetitive. Still, there were some nice nods to feminism and consent was always at the forefront, so I’m giving this book 3 stars.

Writing: MacLean’s prose isn’t radically different in Daring than it was in Brazen. It might be a little more serious, as the subject matter is definitely darker, but overall, it’s easy to get through and conveys MacLean’s ideas clearly. My only major complaint is that Daring felt more slow-paced than its prequels, perhaps because we got a lot of filler and repetition of the same scene but from different perspectives. Granted, some of this happens in the previous books, but because Daring isn’t largely focused on something external (like a business rivalry or a power play with an antagonist), everything just seemed to drag.

Also like Brazen, I don’t think MacLean used her themes to the fullest extent. There were some interesting attempts, such as the story about Apollo and the recurring mask motif, but there were also some duds, like the commentary about people being mad that Victoria was queen because she was a woman (Victoria was not a good symbol of “girl power,” in my opinion). While any one of these could have worked, they didn’t have as heavy of an impact as the themes in Wicked.

I also think MacLean held back on giving her characters unique quirks that served as metaphors; while Grace does have a tattoo that has some significance, it didn’t have sustained presence like Felicity’s lockpicking or Whit’s two watches. As a result, Daring felt the most thematically flat of the three books, and I wish as much care was put into both Brazen and Daring as was in Wicked.

Plot: Aside from the romance, most of the plot of this book revolves around Ewan’s redemption and a subtle concern over the increased frequency of raids on houses of ill repute. To be honest, I think this book started out rather well; Grace rescues Ewan from the explosion that happed at the end of Brazen, and their initial reunion and confrontation was fairly angsty. From there, though, I felt like the plot started to get repetitive and had no shape. Devil and Whit would threaten to beat up Ewan, Ewan would make some grand gesture (like hosting a ball or ask to help Covent Garden in a way), Grace would be attracted to that gesture, they’d have some intimate moment, Grace would then get nervous and run, only for the cycle to start over. While I did like the ways in which Ewan tried to earn forgiveness by helping Covent Garden, there wasn’t a whole lot of tension in these scenes aside from the threat of a brawl. I also didn’t feel like the subplot about Grace’s bordello was prominent enough or thematically related enough to have an impact; the bordello raids seemed to be a commentary about women and power, but it fell flat for me because Ewan didn’t really have to struggle with seeing Grace as an equal or as someone with power in her own right. He’s mostly already there, so the commentary felt rather hollow.

I think I would have much rather seen a plot with stronger parallels to the romance or one with more dramatic references to the characters’ pasts. Maybe Ewan’s secret could have been at risk throughout the book, and Grace has to decide what to do (which could have made for an interesting final showdown, if Ewan’s true identity had been discovered). Getting out of that pickle seems like a much more interesting plot than the empty gestures towards women in power that we got.

Characters: I liked Grace in Wicked, so I was happy that she got her own story in Daring. She’s a smart businesswoman with an intelligence network of almost all women, and I love the pleasure she takes in roaming the rooftops and dressing in bold colors. I also really love the friendships she has with her lieutenants at the bordello, and the sibling banter between her and Devil and Whit. However, my admiration from her cooled whenever she would engage in her back-ad-forth with Ewan. She never seemed to know what she wanted and was fairly flighty, which is understandable to an extent but irritating when there isn’t a strong plot or clear emotional progression to back it up. I always felt like Grace was stagnating and never really evolving, and her main character flaw was just to get over her past and hesitation about Ewan’s title. I wanted her to have something more, like an insecurity that Ewan could help her with.

Ewan, for his part, is somewhat interesting in that he was a villain in previous books. I liked the angst he brought to the story as well as the heartbreak when we finally learn why he made certain choices in his past, but other than that, he didn’t really have an exciting emotional arc. After the first scene, Ewan leaves London for a year to make himself a better man worthy of Grace, and when he returns, he seems to have finished growing and only needs the people around him to see it. I feel like we were cheated of seeing that growth happen on-page.

Side characters were fine and served their purpose. Devil and Whit were at their best when teasing Grace, but at their worst when talking about Ewan. I felt like they were always threatening to beat Ewan up but they never acted, which meant that their words felt hollow and their confrontations were useless. It would have been more interesting, in my opinion, if they had had more honest conversations with Ewan about their pasts so the angst was not just between Ewan and Grace but between the brothers as well. I wanted the brothers to struggle more with their emotions, rather than just think about punching one another.

Grace’s lieutenants, Veronique and Zeva, were fun when they were teasing Grace, but it also felt like they were there to relay information about the raids, which weren’t all that interesting. I liked that Grace was shown to have female friendships, and I liked that the lieutenants showed women in positions of power outside of a domestic setting, but ultimately, the raids just weren’t exciting enough to me to think of the lieutenants as much more than filler.

Romance: Based on the events from the previous two books, some readers may not find Ewan redeemable, so the quality of this romance will largely depend on what your personal threshold is. Personally, I was willing to give MacLean a shot, and while I do think she did everything she could to show that Ewan was trying to atone, I also don’t think she did enough to make the romance exciting. Grace and Ewan seemed to be mainly bound by their pasts, and though Ewan says he loves Grace for her boldness and power, it seemed all tell and no show. Part of the romance requires Ewan and Grace to learn who the other is now rather than try to recapture their childhoods, and I felt like not much of that happened outside of Grace just giving Ewan a tour of her bordello and telling stories about what happened to her after she fled with her brothers. I would have much rather had moments where the two bonded over some shared values - the laundry scene in Covent Garden kind of did that, but it was so dragged out and nothing was really built upon it, so I don’t think it had the intended effect.

I also don’t feel like Ewan and Grace grew within the romance very much, and by that I mean they didn’t help each other overcome some kind of character flaw. Ewan’s character development happened off-page, so most of his arc was about getting others to see that he had changed rather than changing before our eyes. Grace’s main barrier to the relationship was her past and her inability to trust, which would have been fine if all her reservations didn’t go out the window the moment she noticed Ewan’s muscles. It was somewhat exhausting to see her have an intimate moment with Ewan, insist that it was just this one time, then flee because they couldn’t be together (due to his title and her emotional hang-ups). The cycle would repeat, and it didn’t feel like each encounter built on the previous one. I think I would have liked to see a continuous evolution where the two learned who the other had become in the 20 years they were apart, uncovering truths along the way and building back trust rather than this back-and-forth of “we can’t be together” and “well, we can bang this one time but NO MORE after tonight.”

TL;DR: Despite including some delicious angst, Daring and the Duke ultimately relies on a cyclical romance and a lackluster plot, making this book a middling finale to the Bareknuckle Bastards series.

[notbecauseofvictories]

I........just finished Good Omens miniseries ("GOTV”), and (a) I can’t believe how easily Tennant and Sheen won me over, given how resistant I was to that casting; (b) I think it was a missed opportunity.

[negativity below the cut, fair warning]

Let me preface this by saying: it was fine. I had a good time watching it. I have no objections.

I just also think that it was a missed opportunity to try something that might have been....different. A conservative, sometimes painfully literal adaptation that felt more like a paint-by-numbers than a thoughtful adaptation.

And look, Pratchett’s voice (which is a prominent part of Good Omens) is hard to adapt to the screen. It just is. Nested puns, amusing character descriptions, and using footnotes to make wry asides is not something that you can easily translate to a visual medium. This is something the Discworld adaptations also suffer from---most of them import the Pratchett narrator wholesale, and what is immensely funny in prose gets lost in voiceover.

Now, I think a really clever and innovative writer/showrunner would sit down with their creative team and say, “All right, how do we translate this sense of humor into a visual medium? What can we do to convey the spirit of wry asides, puns, and amusing character descriptions without having to read them aloud?” And maybe they would have punched up the dialogue and made it more like a stage play, cracking with dramatic irony and wit; maybe they would have used close-up camera work and let the actors run wild with reaction shots. I’ve seen too many British comedies to think it’s impossible to convey all that dry humor and silent judgment.

They even might have decided to keep the narrator! You can do very interesting things with narrators---Jane the Virgin and Fleabag both deploy narrators to great success in completely different ways. The intro of the first episode of GOTV was actually bang-on imitation of the 1980s Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV show, which also had little asides, featuring “encyclopedia entries” from the titular guide. (Douglas Adams, however, got his start in radio, which is more similar to film than to fiction prose, in terms of structuring scenes and writing dialogue.) GOTV’s introductions of the Them made me think of Amelie, which also had a narrator that would break the fourth wall and discuss characters’ backstories in an omniscient third person way. Breaking the fourth wall in clever, unexpected ways can be a major asset to a show; there’s nothing that says you couldn’t have a Pratchett narrator be one.

The point is, I think if you’re smart and strategic, you can adapt Pratchett’s distinctive but difficult-to-translate voice for the film.

But faced with a particular challenge, GOTV chose.......none of the above. God-as-Narrator quotes whole passages of the book rather than conveying that information visually. (And some of it is backstory or action that would be served by the visual medium! B99 is not but cutaway shots for comedic effect! PUT SOME INFORMATION IN THE FRAME.) God-as-Narrator is also never acknowledged, or woven into the story more than as the omniscient third person talking to the audience. As a consequence, GOTV’s use of narrator feels neither strategic nor smart---she doesn’t add anything to the story being told.

Not only does it make for a lost opportunity to do something interesting with the adaptation, but it also takes out a lot of the humor and heart of the book. GO is funny largely because these characters bounce around in an absurd, ridiculous world that only we see absurdity in; a lot of the pleasure of GO hinges on the dramatic irony of Newton Pulisfer’s terrible Japanese-made car, the kraken avenging sushi dinners, War waltzing through a bar full of war correspondents, the ducks having a preference for certain international breads. With a visual medium there are other ways to convey this irony. GOTV was most successful when they actually did this---characters would turn off radios talking about the nuclear core disappearing, televisions showing footage of the kraken. Adam and Them talking about whether Atlantis and Tibetians in tunnels are real. Shadwell talking about how he’d sent Newton to be subjected to the “wiles” of a witch, and then cutting to Newton and Anathema.

I mean, I think by far the effective, most interesting part of the whole miniseries was the 30 minutes of Crowley and Aziraphale throughout the centuries---and I don’t think it’s incidental that it was (1) new, and (2) without narration. 

I bring up the narrator specifically because I think it’s a good example of the problem at the heart of the adaptation:  GOTV is entirely too faithfully married to the text of GO. So much so that it can’t seem to even translate itself fully into television. It seemed unwilling to create new scenes that might have conveyed what the book conveyed in description, or recontextualize plot points in a way that might have gotten their purpose across better, or bend the narrative to suit a six-episode miniseries. Those times it did so were the more interesting ones: incidentally, mostly scenes with Aziraphale and Crowley.

I have other issues with GOTV. (Why wasn’t it funny, goddamn it? did NG never think to consult with a single comedy writer? was he afraid to lean into the ridiculousness of it all? THE CRIMINALLY UNDERUSED JACK WHITEHALL IS A FUNNY COMEDIAN, HE COULD HAVE GIVEN SOME POINTERS.) But that I think is the main thing. Good Omens the book was clearly treated as sacred, rather than a source to draw inspiration from. Which is ironic when you consider the subject of the thing.

EDITED TO ADD, ALSO the joke about Crowley’s car and Queen music is that all music in the car gets turned into Queen. The joke in its entirety was not made ONCE, making Crowley someone who just likes listening to Queen all the time, and I resent the hell out of ruining a perfectly good joke.

[the-cabalist]

This evening, a man came to my humble hut. 

This is much stranger than it sounds. Given my reputation and my services, it is not normal for an average citizen of Ionia to seek me out, especially at night.

Regardless, he came to me seeking services. I didn’t recognize him as an agent of the Cabal, and he certainly didn’t look like a Noxian agent to me. I decided to believe his outfit, and took him at face value as just some run-of-the-mill citizen.

He looked skittish walking through my door. Unlocked, of course. No sense in locking the door when you don’t get any proper company anyway, so may as well leave it open for the wind. I welcomed him inside despite his skittish nature and offered him a drink, but he ignored my idle advances like most men do.

He was entirely business, which didn’t surprise me either. He wanted me to work on his wife, that is to say he wanted her out of the picture to claim her possessions. 

“So this is out of raw greed? Not some emotional discourse or her being a wretch..?” I had asked him, wanting to evoke whatever other information I could from him, as he appeared to not understand the nature of my service.

“Oh, well when you put it that way it sounds wrong, Demon!” the man quipped, wobbling like butter once I said something of substance. “No, I wouldn’t call it greed! I’d call it...” he stopped, likely thinking of a synonym for the word ‘greed’. “... I just want a fresh start! This slow life isn’t for me at all, Virtuoso! Oh, and i’m entirely sure that she’ll chase me half way to the Placidium if she isn’t taken care of!”

I got up from my chair, frankly insulted that this man saw me as some sort of clown that one hires to do a gag or two. He appeared to confuse my work, something methodical and filled with purpose, for something akin to assassination; a practice as simple as ramming a knife in the neck of some unassuming socialite as they sipped their umpteenth drink of the night. 

“So, you want me to remove this wife of yours just because you don’t want her following you around the land like some dejected puppy?”

“Could you quit talking like that, you madman!? Stop trying to inject emotion into everything! This is just something I need done! You’ve got a damn fine reputation as a death-dealer so you ought to know what business is!”

He was correct. I certainly did know what business was, and still do. This simply wasn’t my business, though. His confusion as to what I actually do for men in my line of work appeared evident, and I thought I would remedy him of it. One might say, ‘do him a kindness’. Firstly, I asked of pay.

“What are you paying for this work, sir?”

He didn’t answer with a number in regards to the gold, simply tossing an overweight brown bag of the stuff onto my desk, spilling it over the pages of the journal and into my lap. It served as another sign that this poor man had no idea who he was dealing with. Did he expect me to accept overpay for work? I rarely even care about what i’m paid, it is about the job itself. I took it as an obvious sign of disrespect, as he likened me to some under-the-table assassin from Noxus or Bilgewater, merely looking for coin in exchange for services. I would do it for free if it conveyed the proper message, frankly.

I reached onto the table and heaved the sack up in my hand, feeling it like the curvature on the side of a malnourished courtesan. It was bumpy and uneven, which felt awkward to the touch. I waltzed over to the nearby window which overlooked the craggy rocks beneath and slid it open, glancing outside as I let the evening air into the room. The tension in our dispute eased a little, and I welcomed the chill.

Before the man could cut in about asking as to whether the still undetermined amount of gold was enough, I sent the plump pouch sailing out the window and onto the rocks. It slapped against the various crags until I could no longer hear the annoying sound of jingling coins.

“That was MY MONEY, Jhin! We didn’t even agree to a deal, or a job, or anything yet!” The man shouted, his voice echoing out the window that I had just opened. “I hope you don’t expect me to go crawling down there to pick up all those pieces! Damn it, why did you do that?!” He finished, huffing as if he were a bull ready to charge me straight through the window.

I responded honestly, and in a much calmer tone than the one he took with me. “I did it because you just insulted me, my friend. You seem to equate me to lesser assassins, and I don’t appreciate you walking into my home to both insult me and then shout nonsense at me. Though, the offer was amusing and tempting...” I added, cluing him into my intentions despite my actions.

“Oh, so you’re up for it then, right? You’re going to go sack her?” He asked finally, a glint of emotional and instinctual hope hanging in his eyes. He knew full well that I was now his only option, having lost his pay. I had assumed such, as no sane man would do any risky work without a bit of coin, right?

I gave him a chuckle and drew Whisper off my desk, giving her leathery grip a squeeze. It gave me a bit of courage, and a slight inspiration to pull the trigger.

“Oh, no! No! Not at all! I am not some lowbrow showman, you hog! What about this do you not understand!? Your deal amuses, it doesn’t entice!” I barked, losing my temper for a moment and letting my first shot fly into his stomach. Not an accident, I will admit, but this individual clearly had it coming.

He wailed out, as expected. His hands tightened up and he slumped over onto my table, digging his gloved nails into the poor leg of the furniture. He struggled to stay half-upright. Upon snapping back to reality, he clutched a hand over the new wound in his stomach, only having one free one to support his weight against the table.

I fired off my second, and then my third shot. Not into my patron, though, but straight out the window. He was undeserving of the pain they would cause, and in my murkiness I did not think of two fresh places to bless him with the bullets. Off they went, and off I went around the corner of the table to grab him by the back of his collar.

“Fuckin’... madman...” He sputtered at me, getting a bit of spittle on the polished oak. “Shooting your clients... worse than I thought...” He added, seemingly digging his grave deeper and deeper.

I sunk my fingers just deep enough into his exposed neck to elicit some pain. He quivered and shook, his nerve clearly wearing down at the sense of pain, both fast and slow mixing together within him. I didn’t blame him, of course. When under so much pain and confusion, one could only ever wish for it to stop. Nothing in our realm could be more brutal and convincing than pain, and when faced against a mountain of it there was no room for the brave or the foolhardy.

Before he could throw another round of insults at me, I slammed his forehead into the table. I cracked it, a thing I now regret. The furniture was perfectly fine before I had to muddy it with this man’s skull. Nonetheless, I slammed him into it again, and brought him right up to the motionless lips of my guise so I could tell him something very important.

“You come to me seeking an escape from your lover? Do I look like I deal in petty squabbles of greed? No, I do not think I do. Perhaps i’ll pay your dear wife a visit myself. Now that I see you blathering like some dying animal I have the inspiration to see her.” I had smirked beneath my lips, and from the look the man gave me, I could only assume he could see right through my false face.

Regardless, I continued to teach him what he had to learn.

“There are those in this world that take flesh by the pound, and those that run around mindlessly killing innocents, splattering walls with their filth and their clumsy acts of evil. Ah, that’s the word. Evil. What you just requested of me is so entirely evil that it disgusts me, sir. I do not do the work of evil men, I do the work of necessity. Your request is not necessary. It is evil.” I concluded to him, nestling Whisper up against the side of his head. I let the smoke plume out from the spent shots, the hum of the mist filling his ear and heating his skin as if I had pressed a hot coal against it.

I considered his position. He would likely beg for his life if he had the stones to speak to me again, but he stayed silent.

“Perhaps this is my good deed for the day. I know most men like to keep to that principle, yes? A good deed a day, and it keeps something away. I do this out of charity, though. I have taught you the difference between necessity and evil. Teaching you this lesson is so wholly necessary that I think you’ll be better off in the end.” I informed him kindly, smiling genuinely beneath my mask. My momentary anger had faded away in the rush of my short instruction.

“Worry not, I will let your wife know you sent me, sir. I think I will take pride in teaching her something of value as well.” I assured him, just as I put my final bullet into the side of his head, sending a wave of red out my window.

‘Now it really was blood money.’ I had thought to myself, priding myself on some gallows humor as I heaved the man from his position, and levied him out my door. I dragged him around the perimeter of my home and cast him off down the crags. He sailed down just as swiftly as his money and his blood.

I would have prepared a proper scene for him, but I have little time on my hands. I have a date to prepare for, his wife is waiting! Well, I suppose she is a wife no more. Happily so too, I’d think. Who would want to be married to such a drab and senseless man like that?

I’m sure I will get her to see the light once I come upon her. He kept a photo of her on his person, so at least I have a lead. I merely need to gather my things and head off. I suppose I will have to clean up the mess when I return.

Pigs will be pigs, won’t they?

- Jhin

[crisisoninfintefandoms]

Love and Sacrifice: Will Graham and the Great Red Dragon

So, there’s a common (not universal, but common) fanon and fanfic trope, that after the Fall, despite Will’s apparent attempt to kill both Hannibal and himself, that after surviving he won’t really try again--that whatever happens with him and Hannibal post series, it won’t involve us worrying that Will’s gonna try to off Hannibal again, and that they’re sort of done with that.  And I’m going to talk about why I don’t think that’s a crazy conclusion to come to or merely a product of wishful shippy thinking.  I mean, it’s definitely somewhat motivated by wishful shippy thinking, but I also think the audience is picking up on something actually present in the text, that something has to do with with Francis Dolarhyde, the Great Red Dragon, and Reba McClane. 

This got long y’all, so be warned. 

Recently I made a bit of an offhanded post about the parallels evident opening and closing of the series finale episode, The Wrath of the Lamb: we open seeing Dolarhyde attempt to burn Reba alive and blow his head off with a fiream (not really, but that’s what we see), and we close on Will plunging both himself and Hannibal into the Atlantic.  Two apparent murder/suicides, the first in fire, the second in water.  It’s a neat little bookmark, a nice bit of artistic symmetry.  But, practically speaking, what it ends up doing is subliminally linking Francis/Reba and Will/Hannibal, and since the Francis/Reba/Fire stuff happens first, it serves as a kind of set up, foreshadowing, and, in a way, a blueprint of sorts for the Will/Hannibal stuff that happens later.  For instance, both Reba and Francis survive their murder/suicide scene, and, presumably, so do Hannibal and Will.    

Which brings me to my first rhetorical question: was anybody worried that after Reba got out and survived the fire, that Francis would come after her again?  No?  Me neither.  If that concern is ever mentioned on the show, it’s very underplayed and not at all the focus.  Will doesn’t seem worried about that.  Jack’s not worried about that.  Hell, Reba doesn’t even seem worried about that.  Now, sequentially of course, they think that Francis is dead initially, but that gets disproved almost immediately (and who in the audience was really buying that anyway?), and we never get a scene really following up or addressing that.  I mean, when Jack is told by Team Sassy Science that the corpse isn’t Dolarhyde, he doesn’t go, “Oh shit, better call Ms. McClane, better put a guard on her, she was his last target and he might come back to finish the job.”  Naw.  Nothin’.  They’re all fully on to the Hannibal Bait plan.  And this isn’t framed as them being irresponsible either, cause there’s never any adverse consequences to that.  Like, say, Will sets up his whole plan, they’re all ready to kill Dolarhyde, but WHOOPS, he actually throws them for a loop and goes after Reba instead!  Oh, the woeful tragedy!  Oh, their terrible short sighted hubris!  I mean, it would’ve been an entirely different story, is my point, one that we’ve seen before, and likely may have been expecting if the show didn’t work so very effectively to put even the possibility of it out of our minds.    

Instead, as an audience, we are told in every bit of narrative and cinematic language that, while she might be emotionally scarred or traumatized by what happened, Reba is safe.  That we don’t need to worry about it..  And, so, we don’t.  In fact,  we’re not even really worried that Dolarhyde might go after her later, if he succeeded in killing Will and Hannibal and surviving (that could’ve been played up as an element of tension, to raise the stakes in that final battle even higher, but again, nope.  Different story).  Because this story has somehow conveyed to us, subliminally but unequivocally, that Dolarhyde will not try again.  That his danger, to Reba specifically, is over.  And, so, because of the parallel that’s been set up, when Will and Hannibal act out a similar script, we instinctively take some cues from that script to inform our presumptions of how it turns out, simply based on our familiarity with narrative foreshadowing and the human tendency toward pattern recognition.

But let’s delve a little deeper: why won’t Dolarhyde try again?  We could take it simply as a plot and narrative device to keep the episode moving and keep the audience focused on the the main story (which...yeah, it is) but I think an argument can be made on an in universe, Watsonian, purely character based level as well.  

Follow me on this:

First of all, he doesn’t remotely try to kill Reba the way he does his other victims-- he doesn’t shoot her, which of course he could do easily.  Heck, there are, like, a dozen simpler, more effective ways Francis could have gone for other than setting the damn house on fire.  So why do that in the first place?  Well, clearly, he doesn’t want to kill her, and as Will even says later, in the end he couldn’t.  But then why do the whole fire thing at all?  Just to fake his own death?  Seems a bit much.  PLUS, if he genuinely really wanted Reba to not die, then that’s putting her in a huge amount of risk just to cover up his own fake death, which then gets disproved almost immediately anyway.  So, we could conclude that maybe he just doesn’t really care about Reba that much, but that’s clearly untrue.  So what’s going on here?  

Well, Francis doesn’t want to kill Reba...but it’s clear the Dragon does.  That’s something set up in earlier scenes--chilling moments where Francis is fighting against the voice inside him that wants, nay, demands that she die, and that he be the one to kill her.  So, I think, the fire was a sacrifice, and a bargain, with the Dragon.  It’s Francis saying, “Okay Dragon, I’m gonna kill her, I’m gonna go for it, I’m gonna lock her in a room and set it on fire.  But.  If she makes it out...then that’s it.  Okay?  We don’t go after her again.  She’s off limits.”  In essence, he’s giving it the old college try so to speak, in order to satisfy the demands of the Dragon, but he’s not just shooting her in the spine because he wants to leave a chance--no matter how small--that she’ll somehow survive and make it out.  Because he’s made a deal with the voices in his head that if she does, well, then she’s earned her life, earned her immunity from the Dragon’s violence.  The fire is a way to have her face the Dragon, but maybe, just maybe, come out alive.  

And that, laddies and gentlegams, is exactly what I think is happening with Will and Hannibal too.  The parallel set up between Francis and Reba with Will and Hannibal can allow us to reasonably infer that certain conclusions can be drawn about the latter, based on the former--particularly where their apparent murder/suicides are concerned.  Will, like Dolarhyde, also has a voice in his head telling him to kill the one he loves.  You can call that voice, I dunno...Justice, Morality, Society, God even, whatever.  The point is, he is being pulled in two different directions by the part of himself that loves Hannibal, and the part of himself that wants to, nay, demands that Hannibal die...and that he be the one to kill him.  And so, he does the exact same thing Dolarhhyde does: he makes a sacrifice, complete with all the spectacle and ritual that old school sacrifices to primal gods used to demand.  And like with Dolarhyde, I think it serves a similar purpose--it’s him making a bargain with that voice: this is it.  this is the last time.  If he makes it through this--bleeding and battered, if he can fall from this height into the freezing ocean and not die, if he can make it through that gauntlet, that trial of blood and ice--then that’s it.  I don’t owe you any more than that.  He’s earned his life.  And so have I.                      

Anyway, there’s a LOT of parallels with Dolarhyde to talk about on the show, this is just one, itty bitty layer, so I may make another post to try and cover some more stuff later if anyone’s interested.  I heard something about “Meta Monday”, and I dunno if that’s really I thing, but I’m gonna try and do something in that vein for every week I don’t write fic.  It still counts as writing right?  lol.  It might just be the mad ravings of a mild manic-depressive but hey.  Whatever.    

[hub-pub-bub]

I pride myself on creating interesting titles for my articles and blogs. Who could ignore, “Does This Script Make Me Look Fat?“, “S-e-x Tips For Screenwriters,” or “Are You Writing With Beer Goggles On?”

The title is essentially the logline of the column, and I want mine to intrigue you into reading more.

My choice this month is as deliberately colorless as I could muster to make a point. I’ve been reading a lot of dry, dull, and flat dialogue of late.

This is a cautionary tale on how “not good” dialogue can

drag

your

entire

script

down.

Even when you have an exciting and compelling concept and a solid story.

No matter what the genre, bad dialogue flattens the story by undermining the tone. Visceral moments built around dull dialogue, whether they are shocking scares, heart-racing action sequences, thigh-slapping comic moments, or tear-inducing dramas, are akin to a slammed oven door on a rising soufflé. Deflated and disappointing.

Dialogue: Art or Craft?                                                    

Before I began this article, I had to think about whether dialogue is a screenwriting skill that can be taught, practiced, and mastered, or whether it is an art. I’ve been fortunate to work with some truly talented writers who had “an ear for dialogue.”

My ultimate decision is that while you can get better at it, like a craft, for the top writers of dialogue – although they work hard at making it outstanding – it is an art. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn something from them and use it to grow.

Writers known for their dialogue actively listen. They pay attention to voices, they eavesdrop, they recall patterns, phrases, distinctions, inflections. But great dialogue is not transcribing. It is learning about howpeople talk in the real world and then distilling it into something better that reflects real life rather than imitates it. We’re telling stories, not making documentaries.

Great writers take the everyday and elevate it. Because, in fact, how we talk in “real life” can be wordy, meandering, and damn boring. In a script we are looking for powerful and succinct expression of thoughts and feelings.

Writers known for great dialogue write in voices that they know. Voices that they can hear in their heads, whether it is “smart,” or “Southern,” or “smarmy.” I have had more than one marvelous writer of dialogue tell me that they get to the point where the characters are speaking to them in their heads. Congratulations, you are probably in the only profession where “hearing voices” doesn’t guarantee you will get carted away to the crazy house.

Writers known for great dialogue understand that dialogue must serve a purpose. It must advance the story, reveal character, support the tone, and compliment the pace of the scene.

Writers known for great dialogue know that less is more. Great dialogue is often characterized as “lean.” They avoid lengthy talky scenes, long, uninterrupted monologues, and they leave space for subtext – that which goes unspoken can have the greatest impact.

Writers known for great dialogue know that it has to woo the reader on the page and sound authentic when spoken. Read your work aloud. Have it read. Tape it and play it back. If it “sounds like dialogue,” start rewriting.

Writers known for great dialogue still agonize over every word. Because they want the characters’ intentions to shine through, their personalities to come across, and the nuances of their inflections to be clear to the reader.

In the industry, writers known for great dialogue often come from theatre. Yes, I’m talking about Aaron Sorkin, Alan Ball, and many others. Because on a page of a play there is almost no description. What is there is minimalist. Playwrights learn to tell their entire stories and reveal their characters through dialogue. They are forced to get darn good at it. Might be a good exercise to practice by writing a scene or a short piece that is almost 100% dialogue.

On the other hand, the more I’ve thought about dialogue, the clearer it is to me that dialogue is inextricably interwoven with description. I found that you simply can not talk about one without referencing the other. As you master how to write a screenplay, it becomes clear that the interaction between dialogue and description is like a carefully choreographed dance. A tango that would not be complete without both partners, moving seamlessly together, supporting and elevating each other. That’s where you make the leap from craft to art.

Killer Dialogue

In striving to write dialogue that enlivens your story rather than killing it dead, these are the top crimes to avoid:

Expositional Dialogue: Dialogue that struggles to convey fundamental information to the audience can be deadly dull. In decades past, we might have seen newspaper headlines on the screen. Now we’re often subjected to lengthy (and incredibly conveniently timed) TV news broadcasts that spells out the facts and background. This may be efficient, but it feels like a cheap writing short cut and is inherently dry.

Voice over narration can be useful, but only if there is no other way to show us rather than tell us. This device is best used sparingly and artfully, as an integrated element of the story that reflects the tone.

There should be a rhyme and reason to narration in a script. It should be consistent with the story. Its usage might be heavier in Act One to establish the narrator and their point of view. Sparingly in the second half of Act Two, as the pace and stakes increase. Then wrap up and underscore the theme, provide resolution and add resonance in Act Three.

A large clump of narration in one juncture of the story stands out. It slows the pace and can feel like a crutch for conveying information. The best exposition comes from many sources. Showing is more powerful that telling. We can glean information from vividly described settings. We can see character’s appearance, behavior, actions, body language, and expression in description.

Lean dialogue supports other expositional tools, and description can add subtext that speaks volumes.

OTN Dialogue: Industry shorthand for “on the nose” is far from complimentary. This is dialogue that is literal in conveying what the characters think and feel. I am scared. I am happy. I am hungry. It is stiff and unnatural. Characters who speak in simple declaratory sentences reflect what the writer wants us to know. More skillful dialogue comes from the character and is supported by description.

Doubling Up Dialogue: Dialogue that repeats what we have just learned in description is redundant. Don’t tell us what we already know. It drags down your script and slows the pace of a scene. Be confident that we’ll get it.

Description: Jack acts nervous, worrying about the plans for the big heist. Jack dialogue: “I am very nervous that you are not going to be able to pull this heist off.”

Versus:

Description: Jack paces restlessly, taking a few steps in one direction, then reversing. Jack dialogue: “Tell me you have your shit together.”

The second version is shorter, more visual and more visceral.

Showboat Dialogue: Few things rankle readers more than recherché or Delphic dialogue. While you and I may have an SAT-worthy vocabulary, imagine the frustration of being unable to comprehend a sentence. Or maybe you don’t have to imagine if you were unaware that recherché means rare or exotic and Delphic is deliberately obscure or ambiguous.

The purpose of dialogue – and I see this blunder in description too – is not to show us that you are smart. It is to communicate clearly. I shouldn’t need a dictionary just to grasp a sentence. And if your reader does, then you are throwing off the reading experience, putting a stumbling block in their path when your aim should be for the words to flow in smooth, comprehensible sentences. Your script should communicate clearly to any and all readers.

Dialogue and description that includes obscure literary or musical references may have meaning to you, but unless it is recognizable to your reader, it’s a fail.

Yes, if your character is a brainiac, they might have a great vocabulary. But baffling your reader, even in a story about rocket scientists, should be rare and serve a purpose. Unless it is reflecting a specific character trait, strive for clarity.

The Worst Dialogue Sin: Thou Shalt Not Write Dialogue That Fails To Reflect The Tone. The quickest path to dialogue that makes a script dead on arrival is a failure to reflect the tone – not merely the genre – tone is far more specific. Family comedy, broad comedy, raunchy comedy, dark comedy, and dramedy are just some of the many tonal variations in the catch-all genre of “comedy.”

While your comedy doesn’t require a joke in every sentence, keep your dialogue in line with the tone of the story and of the scene. We think of action dialogue as terse, while character-driven stories are expected to have more dialogue that reflects and reveals character and arc.

Dialogue should also match the pacing of the story and the scene. As conflict escalates, especially in the second half of your script, dialogue should also be tight and brisk to match the pace.

Another cause of flat dialogue is the “repressed” hero. I’ve found that main characters whose core issue involves suppressing their feelings, leads to dryer, clipped dialogue. Fair enough as a character trait, but this often infects the entire script, keeping everything from falling short of being visceral. And in truth, the repressed character should be simmering beneath the surface, with inner conflicts conveyed in description and supported by subtext.

Think of the voice of the story – its unique tone – coming through in every sentence – from description to dialogue.

Praiseworthy Dialogue

How do industry pros describe great dialogue?

Lean, fluent, distinctive to characters, authentic sounding, and enhancing the tone…

All forms of high praise for dialogue.

Here are some ways to earn those accolades:

In N’ Out Dialogue: Sharply written scenes get in late and get out early. No wasted time on greetings and exits. In N’ Out hones in the on the purpose of the scene. Effective scenes both advance the story and reveal character arc.

Jack, John, Jake and Joey Walk Into A Bar: I know that some people go crazy when I imply that professional readers don’t read every single word of your script – but it’s because we shouldn’t have to. We should be able to stop reading character’s names after Act One because their voices are distinctive. It’s more challenging in an ensemble where the characters are highly homogenous, but that makes it all the more important. And a visual difference in the characters’ names makes it even easier for our brains to process, which makes your script flow.

Totes Dated Dude: Strong dialogue reflects the time period and is age appropriate.

Writing for teens can be tough, but the best dialogue avoids the clichés. By the time we read them, they’re already dated. Think of Clueless, written and directed by Amy Heckerling, who was lauded for her teen dialogue. What made it so impressive and appealing was that it was invented, a reflection of teen talk and a step ahead, rather than copying current trends. What is on fleek today is totes dated tomorrow.

On the flip side, period dialogue that is sprinkled with contemporary phrases shows a lack of research and an inattention to detail.

A Picture Is Worth 1000 Words: I read a wonderful article recently (which I would link to here if I could find it!) that showed a page long scene between an arguing man and woman, and then cut the dialogue in half, and in half again, and finally down to just a couple of lines. The more they cut, the more dynamic the scene became. Less words meant more room for subtext conveyed in description. It upped the emotion of the scene with what we saw the characters do rather than what they said. With each cut, the scene became more intense emotionally.

The real power in dialogue is often is what goes unsaid. Less truly is more. And action does speak louder than words. Subtext – conveyed by a character’s expression, gesture, or glance – intensifies the spoken word and underscores the meaning of the moment.

Button Up: Effective scenes have a clear high point and then cut to the next scene. Time and again, writers give us the line with the most impact, whether it’s a comedic punch line, peak conflict, or a big reveal, yet diminish the resonance off the moment by adding a few more lines after. Know the scene’s button and cut out on that for maximum effect.

The Last Word On Dialogue

Great dialogue has a rhythm and flow that becomes the heartbeat of the story. It mirrors the structure of the script. Initially setting the tone, revealing character, and conveying exposition, it goes on to accelerate as the conflicts escalate. It supports the scene in tone and pace. It becomes a vibrant element of the story, working in harmony with description to elevate the entire script.

More articles by Barri Evins

Dialogue Freedom: Getting Away with Writing Lengthy Dialogue

Script Gods Must Die: Writing Dialogue – The Cut Instinct

Script Expert Q&A: Meet Barri Evins of ‘Breaking & Entering’

Download tips on writing stellar dialogue with Karl Iglesias’ on-demand webinar Master Aaron Sorkin’s Dialogue & Scene Techniques

[thewritersguardianangel-blog]

Hi! I have trouble with sentence flow. Like when I write something and read it afterwards, the order of the paragraphs don't really add up. It causes an awkward jumping to one topic to another. Any tips? :)

Hi!

Flow is an interesting concept. Most people can identity good flow or bad flow when they see it, and yet it’s so hard to define the elements that make it so. 

There is also the matter of deciding where the problem with the flow is happening, since flow could be referring to several different things. It could be:

1. Sentence flow: How each sentence sounds, and whether or not they make sense in the order that they are in. 

2. Paragraph flow: How each paragraph connects to the next, and whether or not they make sense in the order that they are in.

3. Conceptual flow: How each idea connects to the next, and whether or not they make sense in the order that they are in.

And then, for each of those things, there is the matter of whether or not some of those elements need to be there at all, or whether they are just slowing down or confusing the rest of the scene.

I know you state sentence flow, but the rest of the question makes it sound more paragraph or even conceptual. For your benefit and for the sake of being thorough and a little bit Extra™, I’ll briefly go over some tips for all three potential issues. Due to the fact that it’ll probably be long I’m gonna do a Read More.

Sentence Flow:

Every category in the world of writing and writing advice always has subcategories as well. For sentence flow, I’m going to call the subcategories sentence structure and sentence concepts. 

Sentence Structure: This is the logical side of how the sentences fit together mechanically. The best example I have seen displaying this concept is Gary Provost’s “This Sentence Has Five Words”:

“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.”

If you are worried about the sound of your flow, do a simple trick: read it aloud. Does it sound okay, natural? Or does it sound choppy? Are there run on sentences where you have to take a breath?

Besides length, another thing that can cause problems with sentence structure is the actual words used. Avoid using words in a way that causes an information overload: “She picked up the lovely little old rectangular green French whittling knife.” That’s a lot information to swallow all at once, and it really isn’t even that important. But you also want to avoid being too flat: “The ceremonial knife was cool looking” leaves you wondering how and what makes it cool looking. “The ceremonial knife was decorated with elaborate script-like engravings” is better.

Sentence Concepts: Sentence concepts are the messages being delivered by each sentence. Obviously, it is when you put sentences together that you get a story, which means if you want the story conveyed clearly,the sentences have to flow in a logical order. You can’t say “I opened a can of Pringles. I was hungry. I went into the kitchen,” without being confusing. “I was hungry I went into the kitchen. I opened a can of Pringles,” is logical and makes sense. 

An example of where writers can go wrong is by doing things like backtracking. Backtracking is what occurs when you justify your statement after you have presented it. For example: “I put a Pringle in my mouth, after having gone into the kitchen and opened a can because I was hungry.” That happens sometimes, but it really makes things confusing when it is an ongoing and consistent habit in your writing. 

Another common problem with concepts is fluff. Fluff simply refers to the excess sentences that don’t necessarily need to be there. Ask yourself the purpose of each sentence. What does it serve to do? Advance character, advance plot, foreshadow future events, provide a key detail? As Chekhov says, “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

Paragraph Flow:

Since you get the general concepts with sentence flow, paragraph flow will be a lot shorter, since it’s basically the same thing on a larger level, once you get the sentences flowing together. Cutting the problems out on the sentence level is a great start to your paragraphs, but now let’s add on a couple more: transitioning and clarity.

When to Switch Paragraphs:

A new character enters the conversation or scene

A new event happens (a knock on the door, a bomb goes off, whatever)

A new idea is introduced (someone introducing something game-changing, fore example- puts emphasis on the new idea)

The setting changes

Dialogue (each time a different character starts speaking)

Time goes forward or backward

“The camera” moves

Whoa, what’s the camera? It’s basically what it sounds like- think about movies and TV shows, and how the camera shows you exactly what needs to be focused on- the person who is speaking, or the gun on the wall that’s going to go off in chapter 4. 

Clarity:

Like your sentences, you paragraphs have to have a logical transition between ideas and events, and they also have to be clear and concise, and cut the “fluff.” Now you have to think about this on a bigger level with a bigger context. This isn’t whether the sentence belongs in the paragraphs, but if the paragraph belongs in the scene. Maybe each sentence serves a purpose, but is the correct time to deliver this information?

Another thing that drags the paragraphs with too much information is the placement of your worldbuilding. I have mentioned before in previous questions about worldbuilding that it’s typically a bad idea to put it together in one place. That goes into the over=explaining category, sure, but it’s such a common problem that it merits its own warning.  

Incorporating your worldbuilding: (x)

Conceptual Flow:

As I said before, this is the flow of ideas. This is less structural than sentences and paragraphs. 

We want to try to be aware of our audience, but not too aware. Think about how your words come across to an outside perspective. You know how A connects to B, but the matter is how much you need to explain that. Over-explain, and you have too many words on the page that are not necessary, and that people will skip it and think it dull. Under-explain it, and you’ve left your reader confused. Use your intuition:

“I was hungry”—> “So I ate chips”

That’s logical and doesn’t need a lot of explanation.

“We are the Smith family” —> “So we planted bananas.”

That does. What does being a Smith have to do with bananas?

Another part of conceptual flow is the way the plot moves within a scene. This goes back to the idea of picking and choosing what information belongs within a scene- what is slowing down the momentum? When you read it all together, does it make sense? Is there any moments where you are “kicked out” of the scene? What is causing the roadblock? Is there anything that is detracting from the emotion?

If you are jumping from one topic to another, you may be losing track of the scene. If you have multiple plotlines going on, you still need to have each scene have its own focus. Even if the characters change the subject, make sure that change comes subtly, and doesn’t circle back around, return to previous subjects, or continue on to more and more. If your sentences sound choppy or irregular, try reading the words out loud to pinpoint the exact problem. 

The problem with writing the “stream of consciousness” or the flow of your thoughts means that it is, well, unedited. There is bound to be a lot that you can look back on and see that it was unnecessary or simply distracted because you got to thinking about something else. And that’s okay! That’s what editing is for, and it comes down a lot to just taking a second look and re-evaluating. Editing is well known to be one of the less fun parts of the writing process, so don’t feel bad if it’s tough.

“Flow” in Academic Writing (still has some relevant points for creative writing)

“What Writers Mean by ‘Flow’”

Key Points:

- If the way the sentences sound is the problem, read it aloud

- Check that all the information within the scene is relevant 

-Check that everything follows a logical pattern

Thanks for the message! I hope it helps you. Flow is a tough thing to understand, which is why it’s so hard to work with and hard to figure out where it may have gone wrong. But remember:

This is normal! The best way to get words on the page is to write without thinking. Editing can always come after.

All the best,

~Penemue

[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

What is guest blogging? A modern guide

The cameo is one of the most beloved pop culture references.

Whether it’s a celebrity dropping by SNL during the cold opening, a TV character making a cross-show appearance or a band bringing out a hometown rocker for an encore, the cameo is a guaranteed hit with audiences.

There’s also a version of this in content marketing: the guest blog. A format that’s risen through the years thanks to the internet, social media and other influences, guest blogging has become a go-to-strategy for marketers to accomplish any number of objectives, such as:

Driving traffic by leveraging a well-known name.

Providing thought leadership by using quotes from SMEs (subject matter experts).

Link-building by publishing on highly relevant industry sites.

Guest blogs are valuable marketing tools, but they must be well-thought-out to be successful. For all the spur-of-the-moment feeling a cameo has, most are well-planned affairs. In the same way, your marketing strategy needs to be detailed and comprehensive to maximise the value of posting guest content. A number of items must be addressed, including:

Site sourcing.

Blogging opportunities.

Performance metrics.

Networking relationships.

Linking rules of engagement.

Here’s a modern guide to guest blogging that will help marketers craft better goals and campaigns.

Guest blogging 101

For a more complete understanding of how guest blogging can complement your content marketing strategy, let’s examine a few important details:

What is guest blogging?

Guest blogging is a tactic that draws visitors to a brand blog or company site. A guest post is written by an outside contributor, often on a topic that has relevance to the featured writer and the website that eventually publishes the content.

Who writes guest blogs?

There’s no real limit to who can write a guest blog, but some of the most common sources include:

Business partners.

Social media influencers.

Subject matter experts.

Thought leaders.

Brand evangelists.

Industry executives.

High-profile names (think politicians, activists, philanthropists, entertainers).

Business and life coaches.

Knowledgeable freelancers.

Academics and researchers.

What’s the point of a guest blog?

Guest blogging is a content marketing means to different end, which makes it valuable and versatile. The tactic can be applied across a number of blog objectives, such as:

Improving organic keyword rankings.

Building a stronger reputation.

Becoming an industry authority.

Increasing brand awareness.

Advancing varying interests and causes.

Gaining referral traffic from external links.

Generating new social followers.

Increasing, over time, Domain Authority.

What does the guest blogging process look like?

When they’re incorporated into a larger marketing strategy, guest blogs can have a big impact in supporting the aforementioned goals. But a lot of work behind the scenes goes on before hitting publish.

The process usually looks like:

Prospective guest bloggers pitching an idea (or being recruited).

Topic ideation occurring pretty much simultaneously with the pitch.

Collaborating on a series of drafts.

Editing for a perfect product.

Publishing!

But that’s not the end yet: Bloggers and publishers then need to promote the piece through different outlets and networks.

Who reads guest posts?

A key goal in guest posting is bringing in diverse or first-time (READ: new) readers. While you might have a core group of followers, guest contributors can bring their audiences into the picture. The guest blog is a great platform from which to broadcast a broader signal across social networks, trade groups or industry circles.

Why even use guests?

An objection that might be raised is why even venture externally for blog posts if you have enough resources in-house? The argument for guest articles at that point is they can leverage knowledge, skills, reach or expertise that your site might not possess on its own. Guest blogging doesn’t have to be the dominant forum for posting but rather a complement to the main theme. Thinking outside of the proverbial box is a lot easier with guest blogging, and it may unlock hidden value for content marketing.

Success depends on a defined guest blogging strategy

Now that we’ve attended to the basics of guest blogging, the real fun begins. It’s time to get down to business and hammer out a strategy for guest blogging that enables content marketing success. The trick to guest blogging is while it may seem effortless, the planning going into it needs to be detailed and goal-oriented. These are five essential planks of a strategy to solidify before even seeing an article draft.

1. Purpose

The key to capitalising on guest posting is treating it like any other piece of your larger blogging strategy. That means, before anything else, a purpose must be established to direct all the other blog components that fall into place: topic, author, keywords, goals, metrics, etc.

For example, a blog that espouses thought leadership will be created and measured in different ways than a guest post that highlights a partnership or product.

2. Target audience

As much thought that goes into planning the blog should go into defining your audience. Without a target audience, an otherwise well-developed post could be lost on people who would want to read that blog, but didn’t know about it. Having an audience in view enables brands to get readers’ attention ahead of time and land the blog with a bang, not a whimper.

3. Shape

Guest blogs can be used for various intents, and thus can take different forms to fit the mission. One approach outlined in Hubspot by a guest blog — of course — is the staircase strategy. This technique is suitable for brands that are trying to establish credibility and entails devouring the low-hanging fruit of topics and keywords before scaling up the quality of topics, authors and featured outlets.

4. Promotion

Distribution and promotion of the blog are fundamental to a sound strategy. Social media is of great use here, being an easy way to share blogs and extend your reach with a boost from the guest poster. Using hashtags and sponsored posts can take the initiative further. Conveying the blog through other channels is also a good idea, and can be done through steps like highlighting the blog in an email roundup or sending to inbound site leads.

5. Outcomes

There’s vital importance in having set goals for the campaign, regardless of which metrics are used to gauge success. Having that end in sight can shepherd the project along the desired path. Consulting with guest blog stakeholders, including the writer, will help elucidate the core goals.

Standards help manage submissions and assure quality

In the end, the deciding factor will be the blog itself. While a strategy helps develop an ideal post, that’s just a framework or action plan. The actual writing can be another deal entirely, especially when working with outside parties.

Snags in the production process can be a big problem, however, and may result in scrapped titles, delayed editorial schedules or a rushed blog that doesn’t reflect the best possible effort. Creating submission standards that govern the process is the best way to eliminate production problems.

The primary objective of these guest blogging guidelines is ensuring quality and fit for your brand, your blog and your audience. You don’t want to go through the process of accepting a guest post only to have a wide editorial disconnect emerge through the drafting process. It’s best to get ahead of that situation by cutting off any submissions that don’t fit your guidelines before they get too far down the line.

Editorial standards also have the added effect of streamlining production workflows by eliminating unnecessary stages that would have otherwise been part of a less clearly defined process.

Some submissions points you want to be upfront with guest bloggers about include:

Your favoured blog types.

Your preferred tone and voice.

Your house style.

Your accepted forms for submission (word docs, for example).

Your linking policy.

Your promotion responsibilities.

This roadmap for working together helps keep the project concentrated by removing all the noise outside the creative process.

Conduct your own guest blogging

Guest blogging is inherently a two-way street: both parties reap the benefits of a well-crafted and well-executed strategy. In the same vein, content marketers aren’t beholden to just accepting guest blogs; they can pitch their own ideas and get the brand’s voice or message published in other forums.

Here are some of the finer points about the other side of guest blogging you need to know about before jumping in:

Research is critical: Coming up with a winning article means researching what your audience is reading, what the current coverage says and which publisher can best support your effort. Doing the legwork is all-important to coming up with a pitch that isn’t a dud.

When you know what your audience (existing or desired) is reading about, you can serve them a topic that will pique their interest. Understanding the commentary surrounding that topic allows you to be current, which builds credibility and authority. Becoming familiar with your potential partners means not wasting a great pitch on the wrong site, or rehashing a topic that’s been written to death.

Pitches need to be refined: The pitch is the guest blogger’s foot in the door, and it has to be perfected to come off right. You’ll get a sense for what your best pitch looks like over time, but some ideal components are a topic synthesis, an angle, a purpose and lots of information for how to get in contact. It’s a bit of a balancing act, having to sell yourself and the blog in what should be a short amount of words, but hitting on the specifics is a good way to start.

Outreach continues after rejection: The reality is not every pitch will end up on the page; so don’t be disheartened if one attempt falls flat. The pitch process — regardless of industry — can be a numbers game of throwing ideas like darts and seeing what sticks, and something always does. Remembering this fact can help you manage better relationships between blogging partners. Keeping an active and open dialogue means shopping topics back and forth, all of which might not become fully formed. There’s still value in having working relationships and a network of blogging peers to tap for future projects.

Mistakes to avoid in guest blogging

There are so many moving pieces involved in guest blogging that it can be hard to keep track of everything, which may lead to things falling through the cracks.

Small issues can become bigger problems, and you don’t get many do-overs in guest blogging. And we’re not talking misspellings here, which can be corrected. A lack of strategy is one thing, but an oversight like a lack of inbound links can tank a project otherwise destined for success. No links means no traffic being driven back to the guest blogger’s site, which is a giant waste of an opportunity.

Keeping the process tight and rolling means being aware of the most common pitfalls to guest blogging and avoiding them.

Underselling or distorting backlinks: Guest blogs are the perfect location for backlinks, but many authors could be hesitant to even include a link for fear they might be punished by search engines. Exaggerated links as a practice did lead to some algorithm changes, but backlinks remain integral. Bloggers have to be judicious and considerate in how they feature links in content: like what anchor text they use. Search Engine Journal has some great insight into how guest bloggers can have more natural-looking backlinks.

Forgetting to share on social: So let’s say you’ve got a great blog and are feeling confident about its quality — but nobody reads it, or not enough people do. A likely culprit is a lack of social shares. Don’t be afraid to advertise your content across all networks: Social discovery is a key way for blogs to gain new audiences. If you don’t have an account for one platform (like Pinterest), create one so you can share through the network and catch some fresh eyes.

Not tracking metrics: How well your guest blog post performs depends on what criteria you’re judging it by; and every strategy worth its salt needs to identify, define and track key metrics that are related to the overarching goals. If you want to push the blogs to rank higher for keywords, KPIs like Domain Authority and organic position are suitable metrics. If your goals are a little more intangible, like cultivating a new, broader audience, unique page views and pageviews per session could clue you into how engaged readers are with the content.

Remember the basics, but also innovate

Guest blogging is a formidable tool for content marketers to leverage in their campaigns. Used to accomplish diverse objectives, it’s an all-around means to growing an audience, improving SERP rankings and developing an authoritative and credible voice in the industry.

It’s also a team effort, meaning you and your collaborators have to be on the same page and aligned in goals. So long as you take your pointers from above, marketing success is well within reach.

from http://bit.ly/2NXzyaa

[thisdaynews]

Trump Pokes Fun at Himself. Why Do Only Some People See It?

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/trump-pokes-fun-at-himself-why-do-only-some-people-see-it/

Trump Pokes Fun at Himself. Why Do Only Some People See It?

There’s a common conception, among foes of Donald Trump, that the 45th president tweets every day in a kind of fevered state: alone by his bedroom TV set, wrapped in a smoking jacket or maybe a satin Snuggie, typing in fits of narcissism, defensiveness and self-aggrandizement. And maybe thatishis mood, much of the time. It certainly has been for most of this past week, as the president took to Twitter to attack the “degenerate Washington Post” and the “Impeachment Hoax”—and to drum up votes for “very loyal” Sean Spicer onDancing With The Stars.

But if you’re paying as much attention to all of his tweets,not just his angry, appalling and self-serving ones, you’ll find some striking moments when Trump isn’t just raging outward, but making fun of himself—even showing a wry acceptance of the caricatures favored by the left. He has challenged his followers to find the secret meaning behind his famed “covfefe” accidental tweet. He’s made light of the notion that he would seek a third term, joking about leaving office “in six years, or maybe 10 or 14 (just kidding).” In August, as he was floating the purchase of a certain Danish territory, he tweeted a picture of a gold-plated Trump hotel photoshopped onto a craggy shore, along with the words, “I promise not to do this to Greenland!”He makes cracks about himself in person, too; at a rally in Louisiana this week, he poked fun at the rambling rhetoric that sometimes gets him into trouble: “I do my best work off script … I also do my worst work off script.”

Story Continued Below

These were genuine, self-aware, sometimes even self-deprecating jokes—if you were in the mindset to receive them. Of course, many Trump opponents aren’t. And given his impeachment-triggering behavior and his penchant for crossing the lines of decency, it’s no surprise that many find Trump to be no laughing matter, or have trouble finding lighthearted spots in an ongoing stream of hyperbole and bile. OneNew York Timescolumn called his “A Presidency Without Humor.” Comedy writer Nell Scovell, who has written jokes for David Letterman and Barack Obama, once declared that if Trump does have a sense of humor, it’s confined to the instances when he “clearly chuckles at the misfortune of others.”

But Trump’s winking stance, jarring and inconsonant though it may be with the rest of liberals’ conception of him, is one of the essential, even primal ways the president keeps his base on board, laughing along. For Trump and his defenders, a little gentle self-mocking does more than just warm up a room. It can neutralize his opponents’ attacks. And it can let Trump off the hook even when he probably isn’t joking, as when Marco Rubio argued last month that Trump was only kidding when he declared that China should investigate Hunter Biden.

But it’s most powerful when it makes his supporters feel that they’re in on Trump’s jokes in a way the establishment isn’t. In a sense, this effect is an extension of the 2016 campaign formulation, likely coined by GOP strategist Brad Todd and popularized by Peter Thiel, that Trump’s supporters “take him seriously, but not literally.” Because Trump’s fans take him seriously, they recognize when heisn’tbeing serious, and laugh when his opponents miss the joke. In the same way “Fox and Friends” can make viewers feel as if they’re part of a knowing club, Trump’s jokes give his supporters a way to feel superior to the elites, to mock what they see as a humorless and predictable political establishment. After Trump’s Greenland tweet, one fan on Twitter captured that feeling: “I can picture President Trump sitting in the OVAL, after a productive day, chuckling as he tweets to trigger the left. BEST POTUS EVER!”

This split-screen reaction to Trump’s jokes—fans seeing a twinkle in his eye, opponents seeing creeping authoritarianism—happens offline, too. At a veterans’ event in Louisville last August, Trump joked about wanting to give himself the Medal of Honor: “I wanted one, but they told me I don’t qualify,” he said of his aides. “I said, ‘Can I give it to myself anyway?’ They said, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.” His foes freaked out, and some news outlets covered the crack as if it were a serious statement. But as the Louisville Courier-Journal, the local newspaper, reported from the scene, “Trump was smiling as he said it, and the crowd laughed.”

***

Throughout history,most presidents have displayed moments of wit—it’s part of the charisma required to hold the job—but few have tried as much as Trump to maintain a comic presence. In part, that’s because he holds so many performative, campaign-style rallies, where he revels in the crowd’s reaction. In part, it’s because he communicates so much on Twitter, a platform overloaded with amateur comedians, lobbing their best one-liners into the void.

On Twitter and beyond, Trump is best known for insult comedy, and for his tendency to pick demeaning names for his opponents. (The latest, for obvious reasons, is “Shifty Schiff”—which isn’t as clever as some of his opponents’ nicknames for him, like “Prima Donald” and “Cheetolini.”) Some would say it’s not comedy at all; most would at least agree that’s it’s on the less sophisticated end of the president’s humor attempts.

But even on days when he’s under attack, he often finds ways to slip in notes of self-awareness, sometimes accompanied by a built-in commentary on the political environment. In a recent press conference with the president of FIFA, he joked about wanting to “extend my second term” until the United States hosts the World Cup in 2026, then turned to the press and quipped, “I don’t think any of you would have a problem with that.” On the day of a contentious meeting with congressional Democrats, as the impeachment inquiry accelerated, Trump posted a photo of a frowning Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Steny Hoyer, accompanied by one line: “Do you think they like me?”

To be sure, Trump is not the first president to enjoy a little self-parody. But as with all aspects of his messaging, he prefers to do it on his own terms. Obama had an arsenal of dad jokes and good timing at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner; George W. Bush poked fun at his own malapropisms, even calling a White House meeting the “Strategery Meeting” after a “Saturday Night Live” joke. Trump, on the other hand, has griped about SNL impressions and skips the correspondents’ dinner entirely. If anyone pokes fun at Trump, it’s going to be Trump.

Self-mocking humor is riskier and harder to pull off than insult comedy—it requires better timing, more wit and a base of shared information between the teller and the audience. But it has also been a staple of American politics, says Gil Greengross, an evolutionary psychologist at Aberystwyth University in Wales who has studied self-deprecating humor. Greengross’s favorite example comes from Abraham Lincoln, who once, accused of being two-faced, shot back, “I leave it to you: If I had two faces, would I use this one?”

For a politician, self-deprecating humor serves some distinct purposes, says Frank McAndrew, a professor at Knox College in Illinois, who studies the psychology of social situations. Self-mocking is an icebreaker, a way to shrink the distance between a powerful politician and the general public, to give the impression that you’re approachable, despite your exalted address. It’s also a way to offset your foes’ most cutting attacks. McAndrew points to Ronald Reagan’s famous quip, in a 1984 presidential debate against Walter Mondale, in response to a question about his age. Reagan promised to not make a campaign issue out of “my opponent’s youth and inexperience”—a line that at once acknowledged Reagan’s major campaign weakness and neutralized the subject for the night.

With a self-deprecating joke, McAndrew says, “You lead with the thing they were going to trap you with. It takes away their ammunition.” Seen that way, Trump’s joke about the Medal of Honor, told to a room of veterans, was a kind of preemptive strike. A man who had never served in the military was making light of his weakness before an audience of people more deserving—neutralizing a line of critique that someone in the room could have raised.

But the power of self-deprecating humor goes even deeper, Greengross contends: You could actually credit it with helping to perpetuate the species. He points, as explanation, to a peacock. Females are drawn to males with vivid, symmetrical tail feathers, he says, because, on a biological level, a beautiful tail takes a lot of energy to produce. If a peacock with top-notch feathers can be healthy anyway, in spite of trading away some precious physical resources, he’s got to be especially strong; a catch.In the same way, a famous quarterback can afford to mock himself on TV; he has such an abundance of cool that he can afford to give some of it away.

In evolutionary psychology, Greengross says, this idea is known as the “costly signaling theory” or “handicap principle.” If someone with high status is able to thrive in spite of highlighting a weakness, he’s actually displaying strength. According to this principle, a joke from Trump about his political rivals’ hatred of him conveys more than a sense of humor. It also underlines the fact that Trump has become president of the United States while facing down deep hostility—and is now in a strong enough position that he can joke about it.

A decade ago, Greengross conducted a study at the University of New Mexico, where he worked at the time, to test whether self-deprecating humor fit the “costly signaling” framework. Participants listened to audio recordings of people repeating stand-up comedy routines. Some of the joke-tellers were identified as having high status in society; some were described as low-status. Some of the routines were self-deprecating; some were full of put-downs of others. Then, participants were asked to rate the comics on various measures of attractiveness, from intelligence and presumed physical allure to potential as a sexual partner. The study’s subjects consistently ranked the people who used self-deprecating humor as more attractive—but only if they were also described as having high status. If a teller was seen as weak, the act of putting himself down just reminded the audience of his weaknesses.

This is what happens to Trump, it’s clear, when he drops his self-aware jokes on an unwilling audience. In September, for instance, Trump tweeted what seemed like a winking reference to his much-maligned description of himself as a “very stable genius”—followed by a cryptic “Thank you!” It was clear, from the volume of “Mr. Ed” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” memes in the responses, that while some people were laughing with him, a lot were laughingathim.

Evolution might also give a reason, beyond some kind of innate humorlessness or “Trump derangement syndrome,” that Trump’s opponents aren’t inclined to laugh him off. Yes, liberals see Trump as dangerous, which makes them more likely to take his jokes about thwarting democracy at face value. But they also see him as low-status—undeserving of the presidency— so his jokes about himself only confirm their low opinion. He thinks of himself as a peacock; they think of him as a turkey.

In front of a friendly crowd, though, Trump is free to unleash his self-mocking self, knowing he’ll get the reaction he wants—provided the subject is right. It’s notable, after all, that Trump’s moments of self-aware humor tend to stem from subjects where he feels on top: his ability to plop a Trump hotel in any location; his ability to win an improbable election; his ability to grab attention with a single, well-placed tweet. These are areas where he can afford to take himself down a notch, and revel in the roars of his supporters.

So far, he hasn’t made many cracks about impeachment.

Read More

[danschkade]

ANALYSIS -- PETER PARKER: SPIDER-MAN, VOL.2, #13 (January 2000)

SCRIPT: Howard Mackie

PENCILS: Lee Weeks

INKS: Robert Campanella

COLORS: Gregory Wright 

LETTERS: Troy Peteri for RS & Comicraft

EDITORIAL: Ralph Macchio, Bob Harris (EIC)

PETER PARKER: SPIDER-MAN #13 is an interesting parallel to last week’s BATMAN: GOTHAM ADVENTURES #17. It was made at roughly the same time, and occupies a similar place in its series run (the series’ second years, after the look and feel of both books had been established). This leaves both issues to preform similar duties — not to open up new ground or bring everything to a close, but to keep the ongoing macronarrative afloat with exciting, well-made, meat and potatoes storytelling. Both series are secondary titles, rather that the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN or BATMAN books that serve as the flagship titles of their respective lines, and therefore they have a certain latitude to explore different stories those main books don’t or can’t. And like Scott Peterson, Tim Levins and Terry Beatty, Howard Mackie, Lee Weeks and Robert Campanella are lean, dynamic storytellers with intimate, hard-earned understanding of the technology of comics. 

The differences are few, but significant. GOTHAM ADVENTURES is a publication explicitly targeted at younger readers, while PETER PARKER is aimed at the slightly older mainstream Marvel audience — its storytelling is meant to be denser and more interconnected to ongoing story threads. GOTHAM ADVENTURES is drawn from animation-informed character models, while PETER PARKER is drawn in the more illustrative Marvel house style. Which brings us to a final, somewhat abstract but sometimes very important, difference; GOTHAM ADVENTURES is a DC Comic, where PETER PARKER is very much a Marvel Comic.

With that, let’s get into 2000’s PETER PARKER: SPIDER-MAN #13 — “LIVING IN OBLIVION!”

And please, feel free to check me on any mistakes I might have made, add your own commentary, or share similar examples of good comics done well.

PETER PARKER: SPIDER-MAN #13 and all characters contained therein are property of Marvel Comics, reproduced here solely for educational purposes.

COVER

This cover is not only powerfully simple, it also sets us up for a gutpunch visual at the end of the issue. Note the great anatomy on the crumpled Spider-Man at the bottom, apparent even with half of his costume reduced to matte black. The sketchy black in the Carnage face is a little messy for my tastes, but the face would’ve been too insubstantial without it. Maybe if the Face had been expanded to huge, nightmarish Jack O’Lantern proportions, it could have stood better on its own.

PAGE ONE

This opening splash is great. The dialogue clearly introduces all three characters by name, and the staging immediately shows how powerful Carnage is. The absence of background is compelling — we want to know who’s saying these things, and to see how Spider-Men gets out of this mess. The barely hinted-at grass they’re kneeling in give the scene just enough of a sense of place to make the it feel real.

PAGE TWO-THREE

POW! What a followup splash! Only it isn’t actually a splash, is it — it’s a five-panel page, expanded to twice its normal size by stretching it across the real estate of a double page splash. Such a power move... you can only pull this kind of thing off every once in a while before it gets gimmicky, and they decided to come out the gate swinging with it. The way this forces you to physically rotate the book even ads impact to Carnages laterally sweeping blow, which your eye immediately goes to, since it’s aligned with the fold of the page. Weeks made sure the blow wan’t QUITE centered on the page, however, since that would make it disappear into the fold, defeating the whole point. With one move, Carnage knocks Venom away from us while sending Spider-Man sprawling towards us, making him seem even stronger. The double-sized page also allows the scene-setting panels one and five, which would come across as tiny on a normal page, to seem wide and immersive. We also get our first close-up of the issue in panel two — Carnage, establishing this as HIS show.

The one weakness of the double-page format is actually evidenced in my scattered commentary above — because your eye is drawn immediately to the center of it, you end up reading the page in pieces rather than the top to bottom, left to right manner pages are drawn to facilitate. Fortunately, the action on this page is really less sequential than it is scene-setting, so nothing is really lost. This time.

PAGE FOUR

I love the little circuit of panels one though three. Introducing the incongruous element of the baton hitting the fence in panel one sticks in your reading flow, twisting your understanding of the space and adding to the weird atmosphere of the scene. More glamour shots and close-ops of Carnage — we start getting the inkling that this might not be his show so much as his fantasy.

PAGE FIVE

Panel one repeats the pose of the close-up in the last panel of the previous page, indicating the shift from fantasy to reality. We now see the face was Carnage’s — aka Cletus Kasady’s — weird tech-inflected jail cell. Weeks consistently stages Cletus in the background, making him smaller (and implicitly weaker) than the guard at all times. This does a couple of things for us; 1) it shows us the cruelty of the guard in charge of Cletus, giving us a nice mini-boss for his part of the story. 2) It catches us up on why Cletus doesn’t have his alien costume anymore (and if you didn’t know what that was when you picked up the comic, you can intuit everything you need to know from what you saw in his fantasy). 3) It establishes an enmity between Carnage and Venom, which may come into play later. And finally, 4) even without his costume, Cletus Kasasy is clearly dangerous, unhinged, and patient.

PAGE SIX

This page is… muddy. Weeks and Campanella do a good job of setting up the geography of May’s apartment, but Wright’s colors make it difficult to delineate between middle and background. The BING of the elevator is way too dark, disappearing into a tangent with the ceiling. Jill and Arthur aren’t well established until we see them in panel five, which makes Jill’s crying seem even more sudden and forced, and the phone-drop in panel six is really over the top. It’s possible the script for this page was re-worked after the art came in for some reason or another, but the end result is just not that great. Totally kills the momentum from the previous pages.

Now, you shouldn’t point out a problem if you don’t have a solution, so here’s an easy, non-structural fix for at least some of this: put the phone in May’s hand in panel two, and then move May’s first two lines from panel three to panel two. In script form, it might look like this:

PANEL TWO — MAY answers the phone, glancing over at the door as she hears the elevator bing.

MAY: Hello! Parker Residence. May Parker Speaking. MAY: Oh my… someone’s coming up in the elevator, too! MAY: Could you hold on for one moment, please?

PANEL THREE — JILL and ARTHUR STACY enter the apartment. MAY looks over at them as they enter, covering the mouthpiece of the phone.

MAY: JILL and Arthur STACY! What a pleasant surprise. I’ll be with you in a second. I just answered the phone and—

I think this is more natural, and gives the vaguely useless panel two some activity. It also makes the whole point of panel three “Jill and Arthur enter the room,” which does a better job of introducing them. 

PAGE SEVEN

Weeks employs one of my favorite tricks here — conveying the physical freedom of a character by having them slightly overlap the panel boarders. You can see it in Spider-Man’s figures in panel two and four. Four is especially effective — having Spidey partially outside the panel helps give us the feeling that he’s dropping into a scene in progress. Note also how Weeks slowly brings Spidey closer to us throughout panels one and three, ending in a nice juicy close-up. We’re nearly a third of the way through the issue and this is the first time we’ve actually met our hero, so this is a good way to get acquainted with him this late in the game. Some nice relatable internal thought also helps us get on the same page as the titular Peter Parker; imagine this scene without any lettering and see how cold and remote our faceless hero becomes.

PAGE EIGHT

Mackie give us a fun superhero take on the “daydreaming about your vacation at work” shtick. Weeks maintains a nice rightwards line of motion from Spidey’s dive in panel one, tearing off the door in panel two, the look over the shoulder and down the right-reaching arm in panel three, and then changing course by having Spidey run towards us in panel four, away from the rightward trajectory towards danger in the first three panels. An annotated version of the page to demonstrate what I’m talking about, just in case I’m describing it clumsily: 

Spidey’s lean in the last panel is dynamic as hell.

PAGE NINE

The large black expanse of the bridge might seem like a waste of space at first, but it’s actually a way for Weeks and Campanella to stage the teetering bus high up in the panel and page, helping to sell the precarious verticality of the soon-to-fall vehicle. It’s kind of a static panel, which makes me think there might have been some more rubble and activity in the pencils that got lost in the inks. The ‘Department of Corrections’ label in panel four is a nice, natural way to establish the prisoner transport element of the scene without relying solely on the expository dialogue in panel five. It sets us up for the revelations of the rest of the scene and keeps the plot moving — another way in which this sequence is playing catch-up for being so relatively late in the issue. It’d be nice if Wright had used different colors between the uniforms of prisoners and the guards (established in the Kasady scene as grey and green, respectively).

PAGE TEN

The bus falling and exploding is a cool, kinetic way to put a button on this scene. I’ve been criticizing Wright’s colors so far, but he does dynamite work on this page. I love the blue figures in front of the brilliant blaze in panel three, as well as the glowing reverse angle on Spider-Man in panel four. Some heavy, but not too heavy, symbolism in panel five — the looming presence of Carnage hovering over a sleepy, unsuspecting city.

PAGE ELEVEN

This page is a fairly flat “people in a room talking in cliches” scene, but Weeks keeps it alive by changing up his camera angles, going from wide shots to close ups, and employing another favorite trick of mine by dropping out the background and panel borders in the panel three group shot. Note the use of the spiky houseplants as the visual shorthand for May’s apartment. 

PAGE TWELVE

Weeks and Campanella dwarf Spidey with flaming wreckage in panel one, selling the pressure and anxiety he feels at the prospect of Kasady’s escape. We cut to a relatively close shot of Spidey in panel two to smooth the transition to an extreme close up of Kas(s)ady’s empty prison uniform and cuffs in panel three. Dropping out the background and panel boarder in panel four emphasizes the immensity of the danger Spider-Man, and New York by extension, now faces.

(Trivia: Jack the Ripper’s bodycount is generally accepted to be a horrible -- yet ultimately modest in the grand scope of comic book super villains -- five.)

PAGE THIRTEEN

The close-in anatomy shots across the first four panels builds to a good full-body reveal in panel five. I’m not sure who the uniformed guys on the ground are supposed to be; I guess they’re cops? I can’t see a hardware store having armed security on hand. It’s just weird to use dead cops solely as serial-killer-escape potpourri. It makes the scene feel fake. They don’t even need to be there — the fact that the knife blade is the only part of Kasady that isn’t red indicates he’s covered entirely in paint, not blood, and it’s not like he couldn’t just be ranting to himself. Personal peev, and anyway, it’s very well drawn. I can’t find any one person “J.P. Bradford” might be. Who knows? Maybe it’s Lee Week’s brother-in-law.

PAGE FOURTEEN

Man, maybe I’m missing some context from other Spider-Man comics of the time, but these Aunt May scenes sure feel like a whole lot of nothing. Waiting by the phone in a well-lit apartment is just about the least dynamic thing you can put on a page. She’s literally napping in this scene. That said, panel three is really well drawn, and Weeks nicely ratchets up the intimacy in the last two panels by sacrificing some real estate on either side. 

(These Aunt May scenes are the exact reason for Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work.)

PAGE FIFTEEN

Weeks easily indicates that the vehicle Kasady jumps on in panel two is a limousine just by including those vertical ornaments in between the windows. Wright leaves the blue in his eyes, reminding us he’s just a crazy guy in paint right now, and not the alien death monster he’s still claiming to be. See also: the hair in his face, the wrinkles on his forehead, his toenails.

PAGE SIXTEEN

Probably just a coincidence, but Kasady’s slash in panel one follows the same motion as Carnage’s sweep on the page two-three double page. Very well-drawn Kingpin here, his intelligence indicated with subtle hand motions as opposed to Kasady and turtleneck goon’s broad pantomime.

PAGE SEVENTEEN

Panel two gives us another good look at the environment, making the following action feel more grounded and understandable. It’s generally a good idea to cut to a wide shot at the start of an action scene. Meanwhile, Weeks continues to be a stellar anatomist. 

PAGE EIGHTEEN

Including some onlookers in panel one helps sell the moment of Spidey getting blindsided by Kasady. Bit odd that Spidey couldn’t evade a manhole cover when he usually dodges bullets, but that’s a nitpick. The creative team keeps the fight personal by cutting to the closeup in panel two — this sequence is closing out Kasady’s story from the opening of the issue, and this closeup helps keep it his story. For this page, at least. 

PAGE NINETEEN

Now the tide turns against Kasady, as it must, and we switch back to Spider-Man’s internal thoughts. Spidey goes from a prop in Kasady’s story to Kasady becoming a prop in his. 

I gotta say, Cletus’ short-lived reign of terror leaves me pretty cold. Despite the work done to establish his captivity and his enmity with the blonde guard on page five, we never get any real payoff on it. His escape happens in between pages, and the guard is never seen again (it’s possible he’s supposed to be the guard Spider-man talks to on page nine, but even that’s some poor followup). For all the great buildup of Cletus Kasady as an enemy to make Spider-Man quake in his webs, the confrontation we ultimately get fails to live up to it. It’s shame, because as far as the Carnage stuff went, up to page twelve we were really cooking. 

The page ends with this gorgeous montage panel — Venom huge (and possibly even diegetic) in the foreground, while the Kingpin looms in the sky (definitely non-diegetic) like a malevolent blue moon. Spidey’s tiny form shows his childish declaration of independence to be just that; there’s larger forces in play than the desires of Peter Parker.

PAGE TWENTY

Speaking of Peter Parker, here he is at last. It may even be intentional that Peter’s been spending the whole issue as Spider-Man, unable to even end his thoughts without a crisis coming up. Weeks indicates Peter’s feeling of independence of personal empowerment by steadily increasing his size throughout the three panels, culminating in him literally clenching the Spider-Man mask in his hand, symbolically getting a hold of his life. Or so he thinks.

PAGE TWENTY ONE

Lot going on with this page, all of it good. Peter’s graceful, playful jump into the stairwell shows us his frame of mind as he heads into this heavy scene — knowing he’s in a good place will make his imminent descent into a bad place all the more crushing. As Peter enters the apartment, Wright does a good job of drawing our eye to Aunt May in the background with a warm yet menacing gold-orange light. Since we more or less know what Peter’s heading into, Weeks helps us feel the tension of his uncertainly by keeping us close to him in panel five. Great use of black negative space in panel six. Note that the action in the last three panels happens along the same axis, helping to build the tension further.

PAGE TWENTY TWO

Huge, empty splash page; they’re in shock, in pain, all alone, with only each other to hold onto. Like I said at the beginning, I think the cover thematically connects to this final splash page — the dark and bloody Spider-Man moment setting us up for the eventual sucker punch of the big empty Peter Parker moment.

Overall: A very well-drawn comic that suffers from a script that maybe relies a little too much on genre conventions and ultimately fails to pay off on its imaginative first half, as well as a few missed coloring opportunities. A lot to like from all parties involved, though. 

At the end of all this, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include the back cover, which is a stone cold comic book classic: 

Unimpeachable.