#not this bizarre maudlin shit

[sholb]

n*il g*iman going "or ig just stay away from the internet until july :((" and people saying it's a moral issue to not spread spoilers or else you'll break that poor man's heart 🥺 is so embarrassing yet funny. i want him to crytype

[contreparry]

happy friday ann!! from the couple prompts -- “All my choices lead me to you.” for whatever pair inflates your heart tonight. 😊

Here's some Dorian/Iron Bull for @dadrunkwriting!

Dorian didn't believe in fate.

It was all a load of shit, really. It was ridiculous to think that any being would have their entire future planned to the letter, that free will and the mortal soul meant nothing when compared to the cosmos' grand plans. And beyond all that, when Dorian was being particularly honest and maudlin, a single mortal soul held little importance compared to the enormity of all of time and space. In short, fate was bullshit, and fate held no power over him.

But choice, however... now that was an entirely different matter.

"It's an interesting philosophical conversation," Dorian drawled out as he stretched out languorously in Bull's bed. "At least, it is when you're a youth of fourteen and think that all of your thoughts are profound nuggets of wisdom."

Bull snorted, his rumbling laugh vibrating through Dorian's body, and he lazily nudged Dorian's side with his elbow. "Oh? Let me guess, you were a deeply profound boy, eh?" Dorian choked down a chuckle and turned his head to hide his grin. It had been so long since he had been teased in this way, a gentle ribbing with no bite to it, and Dorian was shocked to learn that he missed the ease and comfort of conversations when he didn't have to wield each word like a knife.

"Naturally," Dorian replied. "But truly. To think, if perhaps I went left instead of right one day, we could have met years ago." To know that they resided in the same city at the same time, and that they frequented the same taverns- truly it was a bizarre run of luck that they had never run into each other before this entire mess. Bull shifted beside him, stretched his arms up until they rested behind his head, and stared up as the afternoon sunlight filtered through the windows.

"Might have been for the best that we didn't run into each other, all things considered," Bull mused. "Wasn't exactly a friendly person back then." And Dorian could well believe it: a spy in Tevinter wasn't going to take any risks, and they weren't there to make friends in any case.

"And I had a worse mouth on me, if you can believe it," Dorian said. "And no filter." When he wasn't lost in his cups he was causing no small amount of chaos amongst his peers and rivals. Dorian Pavus, the perpetual headache of his class. Dorian Pavus, a rare talent with a knack for troublemaking.

"Boredom and rage. Bad combination," Bull murmured. "Guess we made all the right choices after all, if it led me here to you."

And wasn't that the sweetest thing a lover ever said to him? "Sap," Dorian muttered, and he turned his face away to hide the tears prickling at the corners of his eyes. "Unrepentant sap."

[histrionic-dragon]

December 16, 2016

Scrap from a story I never got anywhere with. Tony goes out to visit his parents’ graves because he’s having an attack of melodrama or maudlin-ness or something--I hadn’t established that context yet--and there’s somebody else there, talking to the headstone like a creep, or like they’re also having an attack of maudlin melodramatic guilt.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“…and I’m sorry I didn’t remember it.”

“I thought you said you remembered everything,” Tony said, harsh across the dark and snow. The other man started, and then turned around slowly.

“Not until Zemo asked for his damn mission report.”

“That’s not the way you said it.” “It’s what you wanted to hear.”

“The hell does that mean?”

“What else could I have said that wouldn’t make it worse?”

[?? Maybe just “Fine. What are you doing here?”]

“What are you doing here?” Tony demanded.

“I don’t know.”

“You’d better.”

Barnes looked away, down the row of headstones. “I can’t get drunk. Needed something to hurt.”

“Huh.” Tony wanted to not understand what he meant. It would be so much easier if this was a bizarre, callous intrusion, either totally selfish or meant to hurt him. It would be so much easier if that line of reasoning was incomprehensible. It would be so much easier if he didn’t hear Rhodey’s voice in his head asking him why he’d been in the workshop for 35 hours and his 20-year-old self snarl back, “You threw out my booze” like it was a logical reason, like it was the only logical reason.

“Long way to come for a pity party,” he said instead.

“It’s not that far,” Barnes said.

“Thought you were still holed up in definitely-not-Wakanda with T’Challa definitely-not-knowing what the UN was asking about.” Now he was being blatantly nosy, but what the hell. He wasn’t the one overstepping boundaries here.

“Not anymore,” Barnes said.

The wind gusted. Tony wanted to wrap his coat around him tighter, but years of board meetings—years of Obie—had taught him the importance of projecting confidence. Show no weakness, of any kind, ever. If you break any rules, be ready to show how it’s a strength.

“I’m not a time bomb anymore,” Barnes said abruptly. “They got that out of my head. Broke it.”

“That’s nice.”

“Means I’m not on the run anymore, not like before. I can actually do things now. I wanted to--to try and make up for what I did.” He looked back at Howard and Maria’s grave. “Turns out I have no idea how to start.”

“I built a flying suit of armor and blew up the people using my shit,” Tony heard himself saying. They both stared. Tony rallied first. “But I guess that’s not an option for you.”

“That’d be . . . go back in time and shoot myself in the head,” he said, and there was a flicker of something wry in his expression. “Yeah, just a few problems with that.”

“Assuming time travel even allows paradoxes like that,” Tony said.

“Plan B was do it without the time travel, for a bit,” Barnes said offhand. “But that doesn’t help anything, and Steve would be a disaster.”

Tony blinked.

[this-is-quite-homoerotic]

Another Janto AU idea I’ll probably never write

Okay, this one’s a bit weird. TRUST ME THOUGH, I WON’T LET YOU DOWN!

(Warning: there is no underage, I swear. In case it looks like that’s where I’m heading, I promise I’m not.)

I’ve been thinking about the Jack&Owen father/son dynamic and the Owen&Ianto brothers dynamic and.

No-aliens Modern day AU where a young Jack marries Owen’s mum after a short and tumultuous love affair when Owen’s a kid. The marriage doesn’t last, Jack starts growing out of love with her when he sees how she treats little Owen, who at this point would be 7 or so, and soon other flaws he’d been too enamoured to notice start becoming more and bigger issues until the couple breaks up.

Jack is in his early 20s, and if you’d ask him before he married he’d have told you he wasn’t anywhere near ready to be a father. That doesn’t stop him from imprinting on Owen within minutes of meeting him, however, and with the way Owen’s mother treats him, he actually ends up taking him in the divorce, after many rows and a few teary discussions, because he loves the kid, and he can see that she was not actually in the position to raise anyone, for a variety of reasons that I won’t elaborate on here. She does visit him, Jack is always happy to facilitate her visits with Owen, but not terribly often.

It takes a few years, but Jack eventually adopts him legally, with his mother’s blessings. He talks to Owen every step of the way, always listens to what he has to say, always respecting (within reason) what he wants. Through mutual agreement, they never change Owen’s last name.

Jack isn’t the best father ever, by any stretch. It’s a learning curve, and there’s a few big stumbles. But he loves that kid so much, and for the first time in his life Owen has an adult and parental figure who listens attentively to what he has to say, who always asks for his opinion before making any choices that affect him, who would kill and die for him, who loves him, unconditionally, and it makes a difference.

So Owen grows up with love and support, and once he hits puberty he’s only a tiny bit nervous to tell his father he’s bi since Jack has been dating people of all genders on and off since he divorced his mother. Owen was consistently suspicious of all of them, and privately thought none of them was good enough for his father, but he never said it. He did want Jack to be happy, after all. None of them last too long, and in the end it’s always just the two of them. Jack seems happy enough with it, so Owen doesn’t worry.

Anyway, his coming out goes great; Jack is so proud he cries a little and he insists on hugging him even longer than usual. (Jack is a hugger, Owen has resigned himself to it.) Owen huffs and doles out the eye-rolls and the ‘it’s-not-a-big-deal’s and ‘oh my god, dad, you’re so embarrassing’ but he’s secretly very pleased. Jack takes him to pride for the first time that very year, and it becomes a yearly tradition.

Owen befriends Ianto Jones by proxy at first: Ianto was in his group of friends and they ended up hanging out together a lot, first in a group and later more one-on-one. He’s alright, even if he is two whole years younger than him and a bit of a nerd. There is one (1) instance when Owen almost got mad at him, when Ianto asked if he’d been adopted (after another mate of his mentioned something about it). But after he’d replied defensively, he realised Ianto wasn’t trying to be mean about it. At all. 

“That must be great, though. You know for sure that your dad wanted you, was willing to fight to keep you.” That’s how Owen found out about Ianto’s not so great home situation.

So they became mates, and soon Owen starts inviting Ianto over.

Now, the problem with being raised by a young, stunningly attractive single parent, of course, is that all his friends are more likely to have a crush on his father than they are to like him that way. Not that Owen fancies Ianto or anything. But it’s weird, Jack is old.

Ianto, like most of Owen’s female friends and some of his guy friends, develops a crush on his father. Fucking hell. The little shit keeps sneaking furtive little glances Jack’s way, and whenever Jack actually addresses him, he smiles beatifically and pretends he’s not the acerbic juvenile delinquent he really is (as if Owen would hang out with him if he was that boring). He perks up whenever Jack is around; smiles all the time. It’s bizarre.

Jack doesn’t notice. Once the initial weirdness wears off, Owen thinks it’s hilarious that his father can’t see through Ianto’s polite, helpful little boy facade. So he doesn’t say anything. He just enjoys the show. It goes like this: Ianto comes over, they hang out for a while. Jack gets home from work, Ianto gets starry eyed and promptly becomes this alien perfectly-behaved A-student right in front of Owen’s very amused eyes. Ianto’s crush goes right over Jack’s head the entire time. Owen gets to laugh at Ianto being flustered and/or pretending to have perfect manners, and Ianto gets whatever dopamine rush he gets from staring at Jack. Win-win.

They keep in touch when Owen goes to uni and later when Ianto goes to a different one, but they don’t see each other very often and eventually grow distant. Yadda yadda, life happens and eventually they re-connect.

Ianto introduces Owen to a friend of his, Katie, obnoxiously telling her that while he isn’t as hot as his father, he’ll do. (Katie fully believes he’s joking until Owen brings her home to meet Jack. She still thinks Owen is hotter, but she can see what Ianto meant, certainly. “That’s love for you,” Ianto laments. “It blinds you.” Owen pretends to be offended.)

The thing is, Owen falls head-over-heels with Katie. He’s absolutely gone on her, and after discussing it a little to make sure she’s on the same page as him, he pops the question. Ianto is, of course, invited to the wedding.

So that’s how we get to 25-year-old Ianto seeing early-to-mid 40s Jack again for the first time in almost a decade. For the first time ever, Jack sees him right back.

Understandably, Jack feels a little guilty about noticing how nicely his son’s younger friend looks in a suit, but there’s no harm in looking, right? The ceremony is lovely, Jack cries (and so does Owen, though he glares when anyone mentions it), after which they swiftly move on to the party.

Deep into the night, late enough that the bride and groom have retired to start their honeymoon, Jack is having one more drink as he watches the mostly drunk guests dance and toast to the happy couple. He’s feeling old and maudlin and so happy for his son that his chest could burst, when Ianto makes his move.

Talking leads to snogging leads Ianto pushing Jack up against an out-of the-way wall and whispering all the dirty things he’d like to do to him in that sinful Welsh accent leads to them falling in bed together at Jack’s hotel room and staying there for the next several hours (not all of them spent awake).

Jack, having had no clue that Ianto had harbored an intense teenage crush on him and had been dreaming about this for literal years, figured it was just a one-night-thing brought about by loneliness or boredom.

The morning after, however, Ianto formally asks him out.

Jack protests (only a little, and with no real force behind it) that he’s almost twice Ianto’s age, surely he can’t mean to actually date him. Ianto assures him that he does.

They go out to have a very late brunch. It’s their first official date, and Jack has more fun than he’s had in years. Ianto, who’d only thought of Jack infrequently if still fondly during the years he hadn’t seen him, is positively giddy. Turns out seeing Jack again was all it took for the attraction to come roaring back. But now he can really get to know Jack as an adult, beyond the fantasies he made up as a hormonal teen. The real man holds up surprisingly well against the fantasy. 

Ianto confesses his teenage crush, confesses that he wondered what Jack might look like after all these years when he realised he’d be seeing him again at the wedding, but he never in a million years had expected Jack to somehow look even more delectable than he had back then. (Jack doesn’t blush, but he wants to. They end up right back in his hotel bed once they’re done with brunch.)

Truth is, Jack hadn’t expected it to last, not really. He’d hoped to have some fun with a gorgeous young man before said man got bored and moved on without him. He didn’t expect to fall in love. He certainly didn’t expect, wouldn’t have believed that sleepy morning when he’d woken up in the arms of a warm, sleep-soft Welshman who asked to take him out on a proper date, that a man young enough to be his son and handsome enough to have his choice of partner would be falling in love with him.

Owen choked on his own laughter when Jack told him Ianto had taken him out on that first date. “I cannot believe it. He did it. He actually did it. The absolute mad lad. It only took him a decade, but he did it. That crazy motherfucker. Fatherfucker. Oh my god, fatherfucker.” Then he started cackling again. Jack was too relieved he wasn’t upset about it to be offended. Despite Ianto’s reassurances that there had never been anything other than strictly platonic friendship between him and Owen, Jack still had the tiniest of worries that Owen might have harbored a crush on Ianto back in his teens. He’d invited Ianto more often than any of his other friends, and the atmosphere had always been different with him, though Jack had never managed to put his finger on how, back then.

Owen laughed even harder when Jack carefully broached the subject. “Are you kidding me? He was too busy ogling you to ever notice me, thank Christ. Would have been awkward if he did, I always saw him more as a little brother, really.” Well, didn’t that make Jack feel supremely awkward. His son saw his latest lover as a little brother. Weird, even by Jack’s standards. At least Ianto’s teenage crush confession was true. Still a bit weird, but flattering, now that that kid had grown into a gorgeous young man who still found Jack 'disarmingly attractive’ (his words).

“Of course you have my blessings,” Owen griped good-naturedly when Ianto called to ask. In retrospect, calling him during his honeymoon with the woman he loved who he’d only met because Ianto had introduced them had been a good tactical decision. He was feeling charitable towards him, and he was too high on love and sex to begrudge Ianto this.

“Thank you. You can call me ‘Tad’ if you want,” Ianto countered, because he was still a little shit with a sarcastic streak a mile wide and a penchant for annoying Owen even when he was technically begging for his blessing to date Owen’s father.

“Fuck off,” Owen told him, but there was no bite to it, he sounded amused if anything, and Ianto knew then that Owen had meant it.

“Of course. I won’t rush you. I can wait until it feels organic, son.”

Owen hung up on him. Less than a minute later, Ianto got a text message that said. ‘If you break his heart, I’ll kick your arse xoxo’. He sent back a string of heart emojis.

A year and a half later, Ianto called Owen to tell him he was planning to propose. Owen demanded to be his best man.

The year Owen turned thirty-one, Jack and Ianto adopted two siblings (a little boy and a baby girl). They named Owen their godfather (yes, both of them).

That day, as Owen was asked to sign the papers that would legally make him the children’s guardian in case anything happened to their fathers, he remembered the day he met Jack, when his mother had brought him over for the first time. He remembered, a bit blurry due to time, the talks Jack and his mother had had with him when they were in the process of splitting up, how Jack had fought to convince them both that he should be the one to raise Owen. He recalled, like a much-beloved photograph he took out to stare at when he needed it, the well-worn memory of walking into their new house for the first time, and realising that it was real, that Jack really did mean to adopt him, that he’d really be living with him from then on; that Jack really wanted him. He remembered all the times Jack had told him that family wasn’t blood, family was love, and trust, and commitment. And he remembered, with perfect, stunning clarity, a 15-year-old Ianto telling him he’d like to adopt when he was older, even if he ended up with someone who could get pregnant.

He also remembered a 15-year-old Ianto making heart eyes at his father in their living-room while Owen struggled not to laugh at him, and really, one had to respect a man who stuck to his convictions. Ianto certainly knew what he wanted and put in the work to get it.

At least he was pretty sure he could trust Ianto with Jack’s heart.

(Epilogue:

Because Ianto has a terrible sense of humour, he spends an entire summer calling Owen ‘son’ and ‘kid’ and ‘sport’. Owen makes a face the first couple of times, but he’s brought around pretty quickly between 1) the way Katie laughs whenever Ianto does this, and 2) the bewildered looks it gets them whenever someone hears it, because not only is Ianto younger than Owen, he also looks it. It makes for interesting situations.

So rather than be annoyed, Owen starts to enjoy it. He decides to lean into it, starts calling Ianto ‘tad’ and ‘dad’ and ‘father’, and one memorable time ‘the man who literally birthed me’. Katie chokes on her drink and laughs so hard her abdomen hurts for the next day. Jack actually falls off his chair laughing. Ianto looks like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, the little shit.

And they were a loving family who were disgustingly happy for the rest of their lives and never had tragedy befall them, not even once, the end.)

[omgthatdress]

How to make Cats a good movie.

I watched Cats, and once I got over the initial horror, I was actually pretty entertained and found myself enjoying the shit out of it. Like god bless it, for as nightmare-inducing as much as it was, Tom Hooper was clearly *committed* to his vision and you gotta give him credit for that. The scenery was actually really beautiful and the cinematography was frequently breathtaking. Like it really did have a lot of elements that really worked for it. But for every bit of genius, there was something terrible that the movie just couldn’t overcome. So let’s dive in.

First of all, you kind of have to understand Cats: the musical. It’s an adaptation of poems that T.S. Elliott of nihilistic lost generation fame wrote for his godchildren about cats. And the poetry is charming af and totally captures the nature of cats and why they’re so lovable. In the in the 1970s, Andrew Lloyd Webber did a shit ton of cocaine and decided to make a musical out of these poems. As a result, Cats has no plot. It’s a bunch of cats singing their songs about who they are and doing a lot of dancing. The thinnest of narrative devices is created with the “jellicle” ball and the deciding of which cat gets to ascend to heaven or some shit. So yeah. Cats is actually pretty controversial among theater nerds, it’s very much a you either love it or hate it thing. Is it stupid? Yes.  Is it going to make everyone happy? No. Does it lend itself well to film adaptation? fuck no. I get the feeling that Tom Hooper was really going for deep, meaningful poetic cinema here and trying to make another Les Mis (which was way overly long and ultimately sank under its own sheer weight as a movie and probably is better viewed as a play). I’m operating under the assumption that Hooper was going for ground-breaking cinema that would have made millions and swept up during awards season and cemented him as a legendary director and gone down in movie history, because every little detail of Cats is clearly meant for maximum impact. You kind of need to drop all expectations going into Cats, so once you’re there, you can have fun with it. So how do you make it a good film?

1. The HORRIBLE hyper-realistic cgi human-cat hybrids. YES, it’s a technical marvel, and the CGI artists who made it all deserve a ton of credit for the work they did. And I understand why the actors were kept in their human shapes: live dance is a huge part of what makes Cats work. One of the smart decisions made was hiring theater veterans for the filler roles in the cat chorus, so when you have the choreographed numbers, it’s really spectacular. It’s just the end result was way too uncanny valley and bizarre for any of the film’s good parts to ever rise above it. I think a minimalist approach would have actually worked best. Cat ears and simple costumes with clean lines that show off the dancer’s bodies. Go for the suggestion of cats, and kind of let the viewer’s imagination take over, and showcase the cat’s personality. A huge part of what I enjoyed was hearing the poetry and imagining these cats and how they all relate to cats I’ve known. The dance and the music helped heighten this experience, but hybrids kept reminding me of the joke: what do you get when you cross a human and a cat? An immediate cessation of funding and a stern rebuke from the ethics committee.

2. The schlocky, honestly amateurish attempts at slapstick humor. I’m gonna come out and say it and say that Hooper is pretty deeply entrenched in *dRaMa* and has no sense of how comedy works. There was a lot of added in comedic bits from Rebel Wilson and James Corden, and it was honestly terrible. I mean really, a crotch hit? That kind of lowbrow comedy is so crude and base that it’s actually really hard to pull it off well. Slapstick comedy actually lends itself to the whimsical tone, and slapstick done well can be utterly sublime, but Cats seemed satisfied that fat people falling over is the height of comedy and should be left at that. And a second note on the comedy? Weirdly fat-shame-y. A saw a post about how odd it is to see James Corden, who has been very frank about how he’s struggled with dieting and come to accept that his body is fat and can’t be made not fat, playing this role where fat is added to his body, his CGI vest strains at the buttons, and he’s literally stuffing his face with garbage. The theme of fat people as lazy, stupid, and slovenly carried over from Rebel Wilson’s role, in which she also plays a fat lazy cat who is leaned on heavily for comic relief. I know the role is about a fat cat, and gently laughing at a fat lazy cat who loves to eat is fine, but, speaking as a fat person myself, this felt like a gleeful exploitation of a nasty and cruel stereotype. James Corden and Rebel Wilson are both extraordinarily funny people who happen to be fat, and their comedic gifts were tremendously mis-used here, reducing them to simply two fat bodies to be laughed at.

3. Jennifer Hudson. She’s a talented actress who can sing and emote like a motherfucker. And emote she did. She was clearly GOING for that second Oscar. I really don’t want to call her performance bad. The same level of emotion, tears running and snot flowing, in another movie, would have been devastating (Hello, Viola Davis in Fences). But this isn’t Fences, it’s fucking Cats. You need a level of character depth and development that Cats doesn’t afford to make those tears hit. All the crying and misery was an odd maudlin and over-dramatic break in the fun and whimsy. With a subtler performance and a hint of self-awareness, it could have actually brought in an emotional anchor for this light-as-air film, but Cats doesn’t make any attempt at nuance, and as a result the scenes just hit you out of nowhere like a load of bricks. 

4. Francesca Hayward. Okay, before we go anywhere, I want to say that this girl is not un-talented. She’s the principal ballerina of the Royal Ballet, and has a very long list of ballets that she’s lead in. So it makes sense that she’d be hired for a role that’s primarily ballet. This girl is a really really great DANCER. But Cats was clearly trying to make an A-list actress out of her. They tried to make her into Florence Pugh, who has been acting for a while and is blowing up right now because she’s very talented. Like everything about Francesca’s role in the film said “This is a star-making role.” A new song was written just for her to sing as an addendum to Cats’s show-stopping signature song. But the song was just okay, it didn’t carry nearly the emotional weight or all-around beauty of “Memories,” and all in all felt wedged-in and totally unnecessary and really just felt like a grab at that “best original song” Oscar. Francesca’s voice is high, thin, and child-like. It’s not unpleasant, but next to the richness and depth of Jennifer Hudson’s voice, it crumbles, and it’s not the sort of voice that I want to seek out to listen to over and over again. As for her overall performance, she largely keeps the same look of wide-eyed wonder throughout her numerous close-ups, so much so that I found myself thinking of the the MST3K “dull surprise” sketch. But I don’t know if that’s really entirely her fault. There was an attempted romantic storyline with the magic cat, but again, because of the nature of Cats and its lack of real character development or depth, the chemistry fell flat. There really isn’t much of a chance to show off a lot of dramatic range, so to keep going back to her character, it kept reinforcing the one-notedness of her performance. Really, I just kept wanting to see Francesca dance. Ironically, I think they really blew an opportunity trying to make an A-list actress out of her. All she really need to make people want to see more of her is one spectacular dance number, but for some reason, she never really gets that show-stopping moment. 

5. Dignity? I guess this goes back to the whole CGI cat thing, but there were a lot of moments when I felt this tremendous wave of second-hand embarrassment hit me on behalf of the talented actors in this film. Watching Gandalf lap up milk from a saucer was a wholly uncomfortable experience, like come on, grant the great Ian McKellan some fucking DIGNITY here. Which goes back to whatI said earlier that a suggestion and interpretation of cats would have worked better than all-out just being a cat. Or it could again just be how much Cats just fails its attempts at comedy. But then again there was no fucking reason at all for Idris Elba to be that fucking NAKED. I guess they were trying to make him sexy? But his sexy smolder and just being Idris Elba wasn’t enough they had to make sure that we all saw his chiseled pecs and thick thighs. And then at the end when he’s dangling off of the rope of a hot air balloon and what’s supposed to be a funny scene, I think, I kept thinking “I’m so sorry this is happening to you, Idris.” 

There’s a bunch of other small, nit-picky things that I could go into. Those cockroaches would have worked so much better if they weren’t humans with an extra set of arms. Watching them get eaten was some horror movie shit. Taylor Swift’s Macavity song would have worked a lot better if the cat chorus full of cats we’ve gotten to know had sung it, but instead Taylor Swift is brought in as a new cat we don’t know whose only purpose is to sing the Macavity song? but of course a big oscar-bait movie needs to have that pop star that draws in the people who wouldn’t otherwise see it and making her a part of the cat chorus would have had her performing throughout the whole movie and she would have floundered the way pop stars tend to do when performing musical theater around a bunch of musical theater actors. So I guess I get why she was thrown in.

So.... yeah? Is there anyone else who found themselves enjoying it in spite of everything? I’m glad I have dogs and didn’t have to watch this mess with actual cats around me.

[animebw]

Binge-Watching: Gunbuster, Episodes 4-6

Aw fuck, this really kinda fell apart, didn’t it?

Full-Throttle Car Crash

You know, I tried to keep an open mind about this. For all the choices that irked me and attitudes that rubbed me the wrong way, I made a game effort to get on board with this OVA. Yeah, there was a lot in it I wasn’t fond of, but I could still have a good time with it, right? Sadly, whatever optimism managed to stick with me throughout the first three episodes did not survive the journey to the end, and now that it’s all over, I’m forced to realize that I really kind of don’t like Gunbuster. The whole thing’s just a giant fucking mess, and while its scattershot makeup occasionally results in an idea I like, those moments are far outweighed by the moments that just frustrate me. And the frustrations just kept piling higher and higher until they fully exhausted my ability to give a shit. Which sucks; I really wanted to like this one. But it seems for now, enjoying mecha anime has once again eluded my grasp.

The problem, really, is simple; Gunbuster is trying to do way too much, way too fast. Six episodes alone would be a pretty tight package to fit a whole-ass super robot action show into, let alone one with this many characters, locations, and ideas. But the problem’s even worse than that, because Gunbuster isn’t a six-episode OVA at all: it’s a four-episode OVA with two epilogues tacked on. Seriously, episodes 1 through 4 are a fully complete story all on their own, climaxing with Noriko finally getting over her fears, “manning” up, and piloting the iconic Gunbuster for the first time to save her friends, all wrapped up with the classic anime move of dropping the OP song into the final moments to give closure. And those final two episodes are both very different animals than the prior show, tossing in even more new ideas that didn’t exist before and both wrapping up in ways that could have just as easily ended the show there. Part of me suspects Gainax originally just planned four episodes, but somewhere down the line they tacked on another with a different ending, and then one more for good measure even further down the line. Because that’s the only way I can make sense of how bizarrely the entire thing fits together.

And therein lies the issue: with just four episodes to tell its story, Gunbuster doesn’t have nearly enough time to flesh anything out. But instead of adjusting its script to better fit that more movie-length time frame, it still tries to cram in everything it possibly can, and it squeezes the humanity out of everything in the process. Noriko’s embarrassingly rushed “romance” with Smith has maybe five minutes of build-up before the schmuck dies, and then she spends the entire next episode moping about it, and it’s just cringe-inducing after a while. We have no reason to care about Smith because we weren’t given nearly enough time to even start to know him, so using his loss as the big emotional crisis for Noriko to overcome and fulfill her character arc rings painfully false. There’s also that weird moment where Jung freaks out over a character named Linda dying, despite the fact that we never even saw Linda’s face for the ten seconds she was on screen, so there’s no way we could have any idea why Linda’s supposed to matter to Jung, and it once again comes off as maudlin and fake. Heck, even the big Gunbuster reveal is weirdly rushed; when was Noriko supposed to have found out about its existence? We were never given any indication she was even aware of what Coach chose her for, unless you count her breakdown in the Buster’s hanger at the end of episode 3. So it feels like she shouldn’t know that Gunbuster exists, but suddenly here she is pulling it out at the last moment, so I guess she did know about it, but then why were we not shown her finding out about it? The climax doesn’t work because none of its payoffs had anything close to proper setup, and they were never going to unless it was willing to pair back the amount of Stuff(tm) going on and retool the script to actually fit the time they were given.

Triple Ending Extravaganza

But what about the two epilogue episodes? Do they do anything to improve things? Well, yes and no. The first epilogue, episode 5, might actually be the worst episode of the bunch. See, now that the story’s wrapped up, it has to invent even more underdeveloped conflicts to drive the plot. And if you thought squashing all those developments into an hour and a half was a recipe for rushed storytelling, just wait until you see them try to cram an entirely new set of conflicts into just thirty minutes. Suddenly Coach has a terminal illness out of fucking nowhere! Suddenly Amane’s inexplicably in love with him, despite him being a middle-aged man and her still pretty much being a teenager! And suddenly that love is so strong and leaving him behind in time dilation is so painful that she turns into a sobbing schoolgirl and almost screws up the most important military mission yet, despite none of this being fucking established before this episode! Holy Christ, this episode fucking sucked. It’s just bad decision after bad decision all compounding into a spiraling black hole of awful. Why the fuck does this show base so much of its emotional drama around such god-awful romantic bullshit? And once again: HE IS MIDDLE-AGED. SHE IS A TEENAGER. WHY THE FUCK DID ANYONE THINK THIS WAS OKAY. Seriously, did anyone consider that they were asking their audience to root for something so fucking creepy, or were they too busy undercutting their moments of existential rumination with loose crop-top titty jiggles? I do not have Boos loud enough for this horseshit.

The final episode, thankfully, is nowhere near that agonizing, and it’s probably the best episode of the bunch. Switching to widescreen format and black-and-white animation was a pretty striking choice, and it cloaks the epic final battle in a very tangible sense of melancholy and oblivion. This is the first time the time dilation stuff actually struck a chord with me, the atmosphere amplifying the quiet melancholy of watching your friends and classmates leave you behind, the world you know vanishing into the time stream never to be seen again. That moment where Noriko’s reading Kimiko’s letter, and Kimiko’s voice-over ages up from teenager to adult as it really sinks in how much time has passed for her former best friend? Woof. Now she’s the one watching video messages from the people she’s left behind, uncertain if she’ll ever be able to answer their pleas to return. It’s easily the most powerful emotional moment of the show, and the apocalyptic battle that follows is equally impressive just for the sheer scale of it all. The way space-time shatters like glass when the ginormous bomb ship arrives was wicked cool, and once again, Anno reveals himself a master of turning budget crises to his advantage and somehow selling the majesty and chaos of a gigantic space showdown with nothing but expertly edited still frames. I have never seen another anime creative as able to make so much out of so little as Hideaki Anno; honestly, more people should learn from him in case they production they’re working on starts running out of steam too.

Busted

But for as enjoyable as that final episode is, it can’t wash away the frustrations that already tanked the OVA for me. Gunbuster is just a very, very, very confused project, caught between too many ideas in too small a package so they all mix and jumble together like the world’s worst Chex Mix flavor. It’s horrific existential dread played upon maudlin romantic bullshit that’s immediately followed by cheesy combining mecha nonsense that would feel right at home in a Saturday morning cartoon. And honestly, the most interesting thing about watching this OVA was realizing how many of the same ideas Anno would later perfect for Evangelion. Jung’s abrasive desperation to be validated by others (”He had his sights set on her from the start. Not me.”) is pretty much just a prototype for fellow redhead Asuka Langley Soryu. Noriko’s crisis over not being emotionally stable enough to pilot the big-ass robot was better when it was re-tooled into Shinji Ikari. Coach’s occasional moments of amoral callousness for the sake of the cause (”When you spill some milk, just pour some more.”) only remind me of how much better I liked this character when he was Gendo Ikari. There’s even a brief moment with a council of scientists speaking in a black room that couldn’t help but remind me of the Seele council. Yes, Gunbuster came well before Eva, so this is where Anno first started toying with all those fixations, but they’re perilously incomplete in this version, not yet given the space and depth to truly come to life. And now that Evangelion does exist, I just don’t see much need to ever go back to this OVA again. It’s a shame, but sometimes, classics really can be outgrown. I’ll leave Gunbuster to the folks who enjoy it; as for me, I can get better versions of everything it offers with almost everything it’s inspired since.

Odds and Ends

-”She’s bee dumped hard by her onee-sama.” Even the girls ship it, lol.

-”You’re the only one who can protect yourself, but that doesn’t mean you can sacrifice the lives of others.” He’s got good advice, I’ll give him that.

-Now that is a cool-ass comet.

-Jeeeeesus Christ, those organic space battleship designs for the monsters are sick.

-This dramatic “EVERYTHING GOES BLACK AND WHITE” sting whenever Noriko gets bad news is cringe as fuuuuuuck.

-DID THEY JUST FUCKING BLOW UP A PLANET-SIZED SPACESHIP SANDWICH ALRIGHTY THEN

-See, I get what you’re trying to do with the whole “she’s the Coach now” deal, but it’s still lame.

And that, sadly, is the ballgame. Gunbuster is an ambitious project with a handful of ideas that I do like, but it’s horribly compromised by its lack of editing, cramped pacing, and an inability to avoid slipping into unearned melodramatic hysterics. And I give it a score of:

4/10

Hopefully, Diebuster will be more my speed, yeah? See you next time!

[darnalearnstowrite]

where I follow, you’ll go

A/N: #46 from this post + damerey for @jjfantasy . Nothing too original, just a direct sequel to this one – the obnoxiously indulgent morning cuddles edition. :D

–

His first sluggish thought after drifting back into consciousness is that his limbs feel heavy and his head pleasantly light – as if he had slept well for the first time in… longer than he can rightly recall.

The second thought, creeping on him intently through basic instinct, is that there is another warm body in his bed.

Shit.

Holding very still, he carefully opens one eye.

“You snore,” says Rey, slightly cross-eyed from having her face so close to his on the pillow.

“I’m sorry,” he says automatically, opening both of his eyes now and blinking at her in bafflement. “No one’s told me.”

She smiles at that, impish and shy but oddly pleased. He suppresses a bizarre urge to kiss the dimple on her right cheek and inwardly shakes his head.

“I hope I didn’t also thrash around or steal the covers or… something.” He doesn’t dare to examine the ‘something’ more closely.

“No,” she smiles again, curling into a more comfortable position. “You were out the second you hit the bed and stayed still through the whole night. You must’ve been exhausted.”

Thank the stars.

“Thank you,” she goes on quietly. “For letting me stay here.”

Thank you for staying. Thank you for choosing to stay. With me. Choosing me. 

(He doesn’t say it out loud, but the way her eyes brighten makes him think maybe she got the gist of his thoughts anyway. From his expression or through the Force, he neither knows nor particularly cares. He has nothing to hide from her.)

*

“I did ask you to,” he reminds her with a smile of his own.

“Yeah,” she agrees with a sigh and bites her lower lip. “I’m not used to… this. People. Beds.”

“You’re not used to beds?” He can’t keep mild incredulity out of his voice. Her life on Jakku must have been even more terrible than he thought.

“I slept in a hammock,” she says matter-of-factly. “But anyway… What I wanted to say was…” She flushes prettily. “This was… nice. It felt nice.”

“Oxytocin,” he says helpfully and grins. “Better than spice – not that I’ve tried!” he adds quickly at her quirked eyebrow and she laughs, her body and the entire narrow bed trembling with it.

“But seriously, Rey…” He sobers, looking at her intently, hoping to convey the intended message without sounding like some old creep. “Touch is important. Not like… you know, sexual stuff. That too, of course, but… Just touch. We need it, all of us.”

She nods quietly and he dares to press on in complete sincerity: “Just you in the same bed made me sleep better than I’ve slept in ages. It wasn’t just the exhaustion.”

“You… don’t do this often, then?” There’s the shy, hopeful smile again and he tries hard not to read into it.

He laughs and turns onto his back, running a hand through his hair. “No. I don’t know what you’ve heard about me, but… No. I mean, Karé crashed with me sometimes before she got with Snap, and Jess sometimes when she’s drunk and maudlin and can’t sleep. But it was just that – sleeping.”

“I wasn’t judging,” she points out, but her grin is bright and he thinks she’s inched closer. He stretches out an arm above her head in what he hopes is a casual invitation and she snuggles into him after a moment of hesitation, breathing in deep.

“You smell nice,” she says. He laughs, a rumbling laughter deep in his chest that makes her press her ear to it with a happy grin. “I’m pretty sure I don’t.”

“You do,” she insists. “Like engine oil and stratosphere. Like flying.”

He wants to make a joke, but he knows exactly what she means. So he only lifts a hand to run his fingers lazily through her hair. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she says sleepily, nuzzling her cheek against his t-shirt. “And like the Force.”

*

He doesn’t get a chance to react to that before someone knocks on the door and it promptly hisses open.

“Hey, Poe, are you still sleeping?” Finn stomps in, absently chewing on a fruit. “Have you seen Rey? I can’t find– oh.”

He does not know whether he should feel caught, embarrassed, proud or some combination of them all. Or something else entirely. 

Neither does Finn, apparently, judging by the way his eyes first widen but a cheeky grin quickly replaces the surprise (though he doesn’t think he’s imagining the fleeting look of… not quite jealousy, but perhaps a sense of wistfulness and loss in his eyes).

So he shrugs with a wry grin, as if to say ‘what could I do, you know how she is’ and she stirs, lifting her head. 

“Finn! Hey,” she smiles brilliantly at him and sits up, but Poe notes she doesn’t hurry to get out of the bed or otherwise disentangle herself from him. So he leaves his arm to rest loosely around her waist as he sits up as well

“Does General Organa need me?” She stretches and throws a smile at Poe over her shoulder, a smile that makes him want to pull her against him again and kiss her soundly. But there’s a time and a place, and this is not it. 

He can wait.

“Yeah,” Finn says, struggling to get serious but still giving both of them a meaningful look. “You too, Poe. Something about… Yavin? I think?”

“Yavin IV? Tell her we’ll be right there.”  

He grins at both Finn and Rey. 

“We’re going home.”

–

[skylain]

Personal Info Taggy Thingy

Tagged by my favorite lesbian besides Kaci; Rae, aka @lesbiankairi!

Name: Mike

Nickname: Sora or Kenshin

Star sign: Capricorn

Height: 5′11″

Sexual orientation: Cishet scum

Hogwarts House: Being an ENFP, The Leader, I’m ya boy that ends up as a  Gryffindor, because I just suck like that, typical typical haha

Favorite color: Blue! 

Favorite animal: dOGS

Average hours of sleep: Depends, really.  On an ideal night? 10-12.  But I can go all the way down to none - 3 and still function.  I’m flexible.

Number of blankets: Presently?  1.  Because it’s fUCKING HOT SUMMERTIME BRO.  During the winter though?  NEVER ENOUGH

Favorite singer/band: Are you sure you’re ready for a question like this?  Because I really cannot ever give a solid answer.  However, some major tops are: Pink Floyd, Vampillia, maudlin of the Well, Kayo Dot, and Ayreon.  (Honorable all time classic mention to Linkin Park)

Dream trip: The fucking world, mate.  I literally just wanna see it all!  I wanna see what’s beyond my own self-contained world and bubble, experience the world and all the adventures it holds!  It’d be exciting as hell!

Dream job: Film artist/director.  Would LOVE to be able to do something I love in this regard.  I love all things relating to film, from editing to production, and would be happy in any measure in this field.  Would ideally love to be a director, but hey, whatever it is is what it is.  Music videos and shit?  Sure.  Artsy bizarre films ala Subconscious Cruelty?  Fuck yeah.  Commercials?  You got it.  I just really really would love to do this!

Current followers: As of this writing, 184

What made you create your tumblr? Memes

Tagging!  Gonna throw a tag at @sapphicvanille (my other favorite lesbian, she’s my grandma), @wayfindertrio, @anheiressofasoldier, @lilac-n-elderberries, @theeyeofdarkness, @waffle--kun, and @sanctuarygirl.  And also to anybody else who would like to do this!

[lavenderek]

What changes would you tell her to make?

oh man i was literally JUST monologuing at julie about this last night

first of all, the teenagers would act like teenagers. edward doesn’t spend every night watching bella sleep because he loses track of time reading a comic book or jerking off to something stupid. the cullens hide their relation to each other at school and have normal nicknames: one day jessica realizes with a weird shock that she’s never seen her friend allie’s house, and that she doesn’t know anything about her family. bella is the only person at forks high who calls eddie “edward.” and bella does obsess over tragic romance, which is telling, and she has a blog where she makes very maudlin posts about how misunderstood and intellectual she is. she tries to go by isabella when she first moves there, but everybody’s already heard all about little bella and won’t be swayed. she gives up by summer break.

second of all, as it is now, bella is a wholly unrealistic narrator and for the protagonist of the story, she doesn’t seem to have too vested of an interest in what’s going on if it doesn’t directly involve edward. while that does seem teenager-like, in reality i feel like teenagers are pretty likely to get caught up in their teen life bullshit - which is fine and totally normal! so first of all i would nix this “bella is mature for her age” shit. it’s more informed than demonstrated and it just makes her seem condescending.

and there’s the issue of her parents. A, why does she call her parents by their first names?? people who do that are few and far between, and i find it bizarre and alienating as a reader. she should call her mom and dad “mom and dad,” like everybody else. B, we are informed repeatedly that her mother is her best friend, but this is never demonstrated. in fact, bella’s actions suggest the exact opposite. she’s reluctant at best to even sit down and shoot her an email every once in a while. when she’s hit by a car (!) she doesn’t even wanna talk to her on the phone. that’s not normal best friend behavior. here’s my idea: bella and her mom are not close. in fact, bella cares very much about renee, but renee isn’t particularly preoccupied about bella. bella offers to move to forks to liberate renee, hoping she’ll be like “no honey stay!” but she does not, she just buys her a plane ticket. when bella arrives in forks, she immediately emails renee, and doesn’t hear back for two days. this might seem overly angsty, and it might be, but it would neatly remove renee from the narrative, explain why bella is so despondent about sequestering herself in forks, and act as a major force behind her staggering lack of self worth (which would in turn explain why she’s so utterly shredded by edward’s sudden and cold dismissal of her).

she’s still reeling from renee’s rejection when edward finds her, and she’s vulnerable enough to vent to the first person who asks her how she’s feeling - a thing that no one’s actually asked her yet. which leads to an emotional connection that lends itself to infatuation but has no basis for a longterm relationship. i.e. twilight. and this idea, by the way, is by no means against bella/edward (bedward? lol not if ed has anything to say about it), because by all accounts, when edward returns from his bella sabbatical of catatonic depression and destructive behavior, they can revisit their relationship with a little more perspective and communication.

of course, id also adjust steph’s treatment of bella’s depression, because idk about y'all, but i did not maintain pristine grades while i was massively depressed in high school.

and more, but i dozed off in the car and accidentally hit "post" too soon, so maybe another time.

[hatingwithfears]

MORRISSEY- I Am Not a Dog on a Chain REVIEW

At 60 years old, Morrissey has become the dog on a chain, sadly the chain isn’t tight enough. 50 minutes worth of this one-time great falling lower than ever before with ill-fitting electronics mashed together with his grossest and meanest lyrics yet (which is really saying something). 1992’s Your Arsenal might have been gross as well, but at least you could write off some of the hate as sly criticism, no luck now in 2020.

I Am Not a Dog On a Chain is a hate-filled diatribe of shit that goes nowhere fast. The first song has Morrissey pleading for another person to commit suicide, AND it’s one of the better songs on the album. Yikes.

The title song is one his worst yet, where he pretty much defends fake news (of course the artist would insist otherwise, but it’s pretty damn easy to read his lines about “newspapers being troublemakers” as anything less than what is sung). He’s disillusioned himself into plenty of corners over the years (I won’t even get into the mess he’s made of himself over the past few years in interviews (it’s not good)), and he seems determined to stay stuck in this self-imposed position throughout this album.

“What Kind of People Live in These Houses” has Morrissey thinking he’s much better than most people, criticizing people who watch TV (seriously). He strikes against animal hunters on “Love Is on Its Way Out”, a song that does allow for Morrissey to use his voice and get away with some of his lines. It’s a rare moment on the album that works. “Once I Saw the River Clean” has some Smiths-like guitar moments, and Morrissey’s lyrics are focused on his past, mentioning his family and the places he went and the music he was listening to (T Rex’s “Metal Guru” gets a shout-out (it’s a much better song than anything on this album)). The song is reminiscent of “Last Night, Maudlin Street”, and it’s the best damn song on the entire album, one of the few good ones.

“Darling, I Hug a Pillow” has some of Morrissey’s typical lines about not getting that booty, and even now, in our time of isolation, Morrissey’s “I can’t get no booty” track on this album falls flat thanks to Morrissey not going for it vocally, instead some backing vocals come in and muddle the mix during the chorus, not to mention the poor electronic sounds mixed in (they never quite work here), and the trumpets used were nice, but the mix should have place more emphasis on them.

“Bobby, Don’t You Think They Know” is a basic bit of nothing from Morrissey moaning the torture of hell or something, and the guest vocals by Thelma Houston just exist, and there’s a saxophone solo, a throwaway song that can’t be saved because Morrissey’s writing has failed again.

The man’s writing is not where it used to be, and “The Truth About Ruth” is a bad title, but the rest of the song is even worse. Beginner poetry with the most basic of rhymes. The song doesn’t make much sense, there’s names, and there’s almost a story somewhere, but not really. Are lyrics that hard? They must be, because on the next track, “The Secret of Music” does not reveal any secrets. With Morrissey going on about nothing, for no reason. Despite the title, the music is repetitive and there’s no reason behind most of the rhymes, making for another mess, only it goes on for eight minutes. He could have trimmed it down, but there’s no telling if that would make the song any better.

The final song, “My Hurling Days Are Done”, is any odd move, a sort of curveball that (almost) works. A ballad with some serious lines about life being fragile, and time moving on without you sound like Morrissey’s age is finally catching up with him. It’s an odd move for the final song, and it still feels like Morrissey doesn’t know how to really go for it here, not taking the opportunity to really sing.

Morrissey’s outlook on life doesn’t make sense, not in his interviews, not in his blog posts, not in his bizarre memoir, and not on his new album either. The anger found throughout Morrissey’s solo work has only gotten more bitter over the years, and I’m unsure if he can artistically recover from this mess of an album.

I’ve alway been a Morrissey fan. I’ve seen him in concert, and even have a ripped piece of his shirt that he threw into the crowd that night. But to see his views shift more and more into the far-right, as well as putting together albums of sub-par materials over the past ten years (I didn’t even listen to all of his covers album from a few years ago) have made Morrissey deeply irrelevant, and never more so than right now.

Rating: 2.7 out of 10.