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grimelords · 5 years

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I’ve finished my September playlist, only almost a month later. It’s got everything, The Weeknd, desert psychedelica from Niger, and Australian yodelling from 1941. What more could you want!

listen here

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XO / The Host / Initiation - The Weeknd: First of all Trilogy is a masterpiece. The Weeknd is a legend forever for this alone. Back when he was an anonymous character and before he tried to pivot to being a proper pop star and started beliving his own bullshit. This trio of songs for me is one of the highlights of the whole thing because this is where things really take a turn and it serves as a nice flipside to earlier songs like Glass Table Girls (even quoting some of the lyrics from it in a very cool reprise). Where most of the songs from House Of Balloons are about his own descent into this hedonistic life, by the time you get to Echoes Of Silence he lives there comfortably, and he's turned from cool, dark and tormented to coldly evil and calculating. He's the master of the dark palace and he's drawing this woman in. The chorus of XO is straight up cult language 'all we ever do is love, open up your mind you can find the love'. She's broke and addicted trying to escape her life and he offers her this community. Which is where Initation comes in and things get really dark. This song feels like the real truth of those stories you hear of Drake flying instagram models around and it's a masterpiece of the dark underside of the drugs money and models bragging you're used to.

Sociopath (feat. Kash Doll) - Pusha T: Get a load of this new Pusha song where he's got Rodney Dangerfield ghostwriting for him. I got a bitch that'll master your card.. my wife ova hea!! Also the funny gritted teeth way he says it cracks me up. He also says boop bop be boop bop. There's so many good moments in this very silly song from a man that is normally terrifyingly serious.

Ice Cream - Muscles: I suddenly remembered this song the other day and I'm so glad I did. A good example of how you can get so much feeling out of music that has no relation at all to the lyrics. In the right mood this song makes me so emotional and I can't even pin down why. The way he sings 'ice cream is going to save the day' somehow just makes the urban alienation of the verse even more pointed. It's such a silly little dance song and that's what's so strong about it. It's dancing at night and unsuccessfully trying to forget what happened today.

Running - Gil Scott Heron & Jamie xx: It’s extremely strange that this remix album ever happened, thinking back on it. Stranger still that a Gil Scott Heron song got remixed by Jamie xx and then remixed again by 40 and turned into a Drake song in I’ll Take Care Of U and all three versions rock. Anyway, this song and this whole album remain fantastic - it still sounds futuristic in a way where nobody else really followed Jamie’s sound, everything else went a different direction so this an In Colour feel more and more unique to me as time goes on.

Boyfriend (Repeat) - Confidence Man: I’m in love with this album. It’s the closest I’ve found so far to the level of absolute fun in dance music since Duck Sauce’s album. I love the the attitude of her lyrics, which carries through the whole album. I love when her Australian accent peeks out for a second on a few words. I love his rebuttals that almost but not quite put it over the edge into a comedy song. I love the big fading out leadup to the drop near the end where a huge throat singing drone just swallows the whole song for a second.

Ever Again (Soulwax Remix) - Robyn: Extremely hot remix alert!! Thankyou to Zan Rowe's Monthly Mixtape playlist for putting my onto this.Sometimes all you need is one ferociously hot bassline to make a life complete.

$50 Million - !!!: !!!’s new album has one of the best covers I’ve seen recently, I advise you to check it out. It’s interesting to be so far into your career (this is their 8th album since 2001) and still be writing songs about selling out, a concept which has largely disappeared from music discourse since musicians started making no money post napster. I vaguely remember the turning point being when Kimya Dawson, after blowing up via the Juno soundtrack, turned down a coke ad for a ludicrous amount and the blogosphere at the time turned on her and said she should have taken the money because she was living in a van at the time. Nobody gives a fuck about selling out anymore because bands make more from tshirts than streams so you’ve got to act like a brand just to make a living. Anyway I’ve gotten off track. This song rocks, especially for the breakdown near the end.

Tipped Hat - The Paper Scissors: A song I haven’t heard in over ten years that suddenly popped into my head the other day. I love the way this guy’s voice sounds, just completely committing to sounding like a hand puppet. I’ve been playing bass a lot more recently and so have developed the worst man habit of becoming more sensitive to and pointing out extremely hot basslines to people, so I’d be derelict in my duty to not share this one.

Heimsdalgate Like A Promethian Curse - of Montreal: I love this song about literally pleading with your brain to come good. Here’s a good quote about this album “I went through this chemical depression, and that's when I was writing a lot of the songs for Hissing Fauna. They're all songs about that experience. And I was experiencing it in the moment that I was writing the songs, and sort of asking myself: What the hell is going on? Why are you all of a sudden totally paranoid and plagued by these anxieties? And why is everything so distorted and confusing and fucked up? My lifestyle hadn't changed that much. And then I realized, well, there's something going on inside of me that I don't have control over, and then you realize how vulnerable you are to these things, these elements that you can't understand, or unless you go on medication and get it under control. It's like you're being betrayed by your body.” Something I really admire about this album is that the lyrics reflect black metal levels of mental anguish, he was absolutely going through it the worst anyone can go through it “I'd gotten to that point where nothing was working. I was borderline suicidal, and my relationship with my girlfriend had totally eroded and she'd gone back to Norway with our daughter and everything was totally fucked, and I was just like, What can I do? "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal" is about that.” But the music is one hundred percent committedly twee and I really admire the effect that that split mood gives. “The lyrics tell the story of what was really going on and the music sort of represents this other emotion that I wish existed. The music was really happy because I wanted to make something that would lift my spirits.”

Jesus Rabbit - Guerilla Toss: I love the wobbly weird bass sound in this weirdo UFO cult song. I love the bleepy bloop melody that runs through it and I love how fundamentally unstable the whole song sounds, like it’s made out of paperclips and foil and papier mache.

Suburbia - Press Club: I can’t believe I didn’t know about Press Club for so long. I only found out about them this performance https://youtu.be/bCmtc-T5Unk which I’m shocked to learn has less than 5k views considering it’s one of the very best TV performances I’ve ever seen.

Come For Me - Sunflower Bean: I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this song before and I’m probably going to say the exact same thing but who cares! This song fuckin rocks. I love how assured it is, like “if you’re gonna fuck me then stop fucking around and fuck me already.” It also feels so musically similar to I Can Hardly Make You Mine by Cults to me, which is a great excuse for me to listen to that song every single time I listen to this song.

Thousands - Club Night: This Club Night album is really really good. It's like a really nice middleground between midwest emo and Cymbals Eat Guitars. The way this song blows up halfway through with 'what if we want it!!' is so good. This whole band feels like they're from 2009 but in a good way, the tail end of indie and twee with these prog or postrock structures where the songs just go and go, and you can just get completely lost in it.

Cemetary - Brutus: The first thing you've got to know about Brutus is the drummer is also the singer. Normally who plays what is not really important but in this case I think it's very important because it makes the drums a lead instrument more than they normally would be. When she's not singing my focus is still on the drums because they're linked and I absolutely love it. This song is great and every song I've heard of theirs is just as good, I love Brutus and they're one of the best new bands I've found recently. Someone in the youtube comments said 'there's something really special about hearing a song for the first time and just knowing you're going to listen to it hundreds of times in your life.'

Enter By The Narrow Gates / Spirit Narrative - Circle Takes The Square: I think that I think of Circle Takes The Square as a household name just because they have such an outsized importance in my own life when they're definitely not at all. They're legendary for making The screamo (good kind) album in As The Roots Undo and then taking 8 years to make a followup, which is this album Decompositions, but I don't really know if they're well known outside of like, people who have opinions about what were the hottest music blogspots in 2010. I chose both of these because you can't really have one without the other, the whole album basically runs as one long piece of music and so this just kind of jarringly ends at the end of Spirit Narrative, sorry about that please listen to the entire album. Because of the status As The Roots Undo enjoys I feel like this album was kind of ignored, or overshadowed by the reputation it was trying to live up to, almost exactly like The Avalanches with Since I Left You and Wildflower, when just like Wildflower it's a more expansive, developed take on the original sound that trades some of the rawness for a more polished and considered approach and comes out arguably better than the orginal. I feel like I have so much to say about this album but I don't really know where to begin, just listen to it.

Vitrification Of Blood (Pt. 1) - Blood Incantation: I am by no means a metal scholar, but I know that when the word 'blood' is in both the song title AND the band name that means it's good metal. I love this song, and this whole album is great. It's very 'classic' death metal but there's touches (beyond the extreme length) of psychedelica as well that puts it on another level you can just get lost in. The way the guitar goes to space at 3:40, and again properly into orbit at 6:50 is just magical. The more I listen to this band the more I understand those guys who only listen to metal, there's a whole ecosystem in here and it's really got everything you need.

Out Of Line - Gesaffelstein: This whole song is basically intended as an intro for Pursuit on the album but it’s so powerful just on its own. I love imbuing weirdo lyrics like ‘a bitter sunken love in a bleach blonde submarine’ with such ominous power through the commanding delivery. I love the way the big grunting vocals on the offbeat build to sound like a summoning ritual. I love making a big processed bell the centrepiece of your extremely evil sounding song. It’s sort of a shame that Gessaffelstein has never really gone back to the vision of his first album and has spent his time since diluting it down for guest production on Weeknd songs and the like because it feels like there’s still so much more to get out of this sound. That he hasn’t gone back and dug deeper makes Aleph stand out more and more as a singular masterpiece as time goes on.

Kamane Tarhanin - Mdou Moctar: Turning to Mdou Moctar after the new Tinariwen album kind of disappointed me, with all it’s big name guests nothing really hit me. I love this song though and I think a big part of it is the sort of loping, 6/4 rhythm that combined with the drone gives it this feeling of endlessly tumbling over itself in place, especially as the guitar heats up.

Achabiba - Fatou Seidi Ghali: I know very little about Fatou Seidi Ghali except that I saw she was supporting Sarah Louise at a show. From some googling it turns out that she’s the leader of a Nigerois band called Les Filles de Illeghadad who you can probably look forward to seeing on next month’s playlist. I also learned that the demonym for someone from Niger is Nigerien or to minimise confusion with Nigeria, Nigerois (said in a french way). They play a sort of desert psych in the realm of Mdou Mocter or Tinariwen, but this song (also the only solo song she has on spotify) shows her acoustic side. I love the swirling melody over the drone as the hand percussion keeps it in place and I love the very delicate vocals, but a probably unintentional thing I love a lot about this recording is the unmistakable iphone locking sound near the very start that instantly removes so much of the mystic exoticism that these sorts of artists are often written about with and places it firmly in the same sprawling modern world we all live in.

Floating Rhododendron - Sarah Louise: I love Sarah Louise. She’s a phenomenal guitarist and has such a big love for traditional folk music with her side project House And Land, but unlike everyone else in the genre is also very interested in pushing guitar forward to new and strange places. Her latest album was super experimental layered electric guitars and voice that still managed to maintain the deep connection to nature that runs through all her work. I would also highly recommend following her on instagram because her passion runs over. She’s regularly just out in the woods somewhere explaining how wonderful a particular mushroom is. This song one of the first ones I ever heard from her, and it’s back when she was just doing very beautiful 12 string acoustic work, but she recently added it to spotify and it’s a very nice reminder of where she came from and how far she’s gone in such a short time.

Lark - Angel Olsen: The new Angel Olsen is absolutely great. I love how much she is just completely going for it on this album, absolutely unleashing. Taken against earlier songs of hers I’ve loved like White Fire, where the majesty was in her quiet power and the ability to absolutely command silence with a whisper quiet song, this song feels like the direct inverse, an about-turn into all the gigantic majesty of swirling strings and top of your lungs vocals - going all out and leaving nothing on the table. The way this song blows up about three different times until by the end you’re caught in this gigantic swirling maelstrom of screaming sound is just out of this world.

Door - Caroline Polachek: Caroline Polachek’s brain is huge. When I first heard the chorus of this song I couldn't believe it. Are you allowed to have a chant that runs in a spiral like this be the chorus of your pop song? Is that allowed?

North, South, East And West - The Church: The Church feel like they don't get enough respect. They don't seem to be in the same league as Cold Chisel and The Angels and all the other dad rock Australian bands from that era for some reason. They're very good though and I've been really getting into this whole album and this song specifically lately. Maybe what's working against them is just how much his voice sounds like Bono's in this song but surely that was a boon at the time!

Western Questions - Timber Timbre: This has become one of my new favourite songs to sing. The way the words fit together is my favourite kind of poetics where they just sound incredible, phonetically, and can mean anything you like for large chunks. Like “the gelatinous walls of the seeds that seldom remain / while the bulls are browsing needles through computer casinos / honour the name”. Especially “bulls are browsing needles through computer casinos” is just extremely nice to say. I love the character of this song and am yet to completely understand what it’s saying other than personifying some worldwide blackpilled spirit of nihilist evil. What I love is the experience of all encompassing evil in this song, like a worldwide conspiracy connecting everything together that makes it all make sense. It doesn’t make you happier but it makes it make sense. I also love the finality of the big fill near the end that ushers in the outro riff that ties everything up.

Cold Cold World - Blaze Foley: I got heavily into a country music thing this month and spent a bit of time trying to find ‘real’ country, which of course turns out not to exist at all. The entirety of country music is built on a false nostalgia for an imagined time long past when things were real, some unspecified time in the collective consciousness between cowboy times and coal mine times. I don’t say this to say ‘country music is a fraud’ but that it’s built on a foundation of myth and that’s what’s so good about it. It’s constantly reframing the past as it relates to the present and is energised by the friction between them. Blaze Foley is a good example of this in the modern era because he seems to exist more as a myth than a man. He had three studio albums, the master tapes of which all disappeared through various means (lost, stolen, seized by the DEA) and so the majority of his surviving material is live recordings or long-lost studio recordings that resurfaced decades after his death when his fame and mythology already preceded him. He also thankfully lives up to the myth, he was truly a great artist and it’s a shame more of him hasn’t survived.

Where The Golden Wattle Blooms / Why Did The Blue Skies Turn Grey - Shirley Thoms: Further to what I was saying about country music before, Australian country is a whole other thing. Transferring the myth and the mythmaking to a new location adds another layer of abstraction. Shirley Thoms was the first female solo act to record country music in Australia in 1941 and was most notable for her yodelling of which she is damn fine. This is a great song and a good a starting point as any in trying to trace the origin of country music in Australia. That it's so english in its identity, so evidently imitating an american style (which is in turn imitating a german yodel) is just more good evidence that nothing is 'real' and traditions of the past and future are malleable at all times.

Talkin’ Karate Blues - Townes Van Zandt: Townes Van Zandt is widely regarded as a songwriter’s songwriter and one of the best country songwriters to ever live, but like a lot of great country songwriters also has one or two songs like this - strange comedy songs about learning karate and getting your arm ripped off.

Strange Tourist - Gareth Liddiard: This album is a masterpiece on the level of Ys and it feels criminally underlistened in my opinion. Luckily in the last week or so some renegade has done up the wiki article on it to a couple of thousand words so that's a start. Because this is a song I've listened to one million times and love a lot, it's hard for me to write about it in a general way so instead I'm going to talk about something very specific and new that I've only begun to appreciate recently. The way he uses the vowels of the japanese words to create these assonant runs in lines like "Koda Kumi sang a coda pink as sarin gas / I took a trip to Nagasaki in a rented Mitsubishi / Then went camping in the Jukai under Mount Fuji" and "They found him frozen in a hollow in Aokigahara forest where them harakiri weirdos go" is really something, and a nice illustration of the two sides of Liddiard's songwriting: densely technical poetics in a song about living with a housemate who was a real freak.

I Dream A Highway - GIllian Welch: I’m not even going to go into the lyrics of this because it’s such an out of this world perfect song but I’m going to say this: it’s really something that this song goes for nearly 15 minutes, sits on the same three chords the whole time and never ever feels long. This song is longer than Emily by Joanna Newsom but doesn’t feel like an epic of the same scale at all. It’s just a mournful slow ode to change and decay that goes on forever and could keeping going on for twice as long if it wanted to.

Deep Water - The Middle East: The way the vocals in the verses are delivered, trailing off and mumbling bits and pieces is somehow magical, like it’s more interested in communicating the gist and the feeling than the actual words. You can just pick whatever part of it you like. Petrol stations and a copper mine, the kind of place I think I could die. This song also has two minutes of silence at the end for album reasons so enjoy that.

listen here

#playlists

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laurasauras · 5 years

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What do you think Homestuck believes in?

g, i love you, your interest in me infodumping is honestly such a delight. i can sometimes feel like i’m talking way too much, but you always make me feel special, it’s lovely!

this is long, so i’m going to use a cut. i’m so sorry, mobile users. blame tumblr. tl;dr? i think homestuck believes in love, hope, and fighting even when the stakes seem insurmountable.

so there’s a lot of like “core themes” in homestuck, but “what homestuck believes in” is such a lovely and specific way to phrase it, so i’m gonna go with what i think the most important ones are.

firstly: love. and more specifically, all love.

look, there are romantic parts of homestuck. and they’re often show-stopping.

(also homestuck does visual callbacks very well, there’s a reason that these two scenes are composed the same way.)

but the core of the story is these four kids, all of them starting from a state of isolation. they don't have "real friends", they feel disconnected from their guardians, they feel disconnected from everyone in the world they walk around in, but they go online and they have each other. and they're constantly joking and making fun of each other, but they're also checking in almost every time they achieve something, as if grounding their friends in their real life.

the story keeps progressing and getting more and more complicated, but it can never quite overshadow the beauty of the pesterlog conversations between friends.

i think that's a large part of what the audience of homestuck connects with—that feeling of connection online and the support that the characters give each other.

i also think that a lot of the time, the friendships and familial relationships in homestuck were given the same—if not more—importance as the romantic relationships, which is fucking uncommon to see in media! almost every character has to come to terms with how their upbringing shaped them, and you know what? that's the same of almost every person.

the conversation between dirk and dave before the final battle is one of the most important and touching moments of the whole story! two of the characters most concerned with their adherence to masculinity and appearing Too Cool For Emotions talk about their feelings and trauma before hugging it out. and it doesn't further the plot, it isn't part of the hero's romantic arc, but it's vital.

the second big thing i think homestuck believes in is the importance of doing what is right. in being a hero.

homestuck positions john and his friends as the main characters selected by the universe to play sburb and literally ascends them to god status.

they're empowered by destiny! they're going to beat the game, conquer the worst villain ever and bring humanity and trollkind back from extinction AND their new world isn't going to be under the tyranny of a genocidal fish alien!

but that empowerment is also a disempowerment.

look at how frequently dave falls into the reluctant hero trope. fate fucking kicks them around. when they are so destined to do all that stuff, can they really be said to have free will? and when they do seem to make a wrong choice in relation to their destiny, it's either something that furthers the plot OR it creates a doomed timeline and they're usually killed horribly.

and it's a story that is constantly reminding us that it's a story! you can definitely lose yourself in homestuck, you can zone into it and accept the rules and just read it as if it's a reasonable reality, but i don't think it was ever written that way, or when it is, i think that that's a result of hussie accidentally getting into the story as well!

like okay, we start off with this:

that's fucking bonkers. he's 13 and he doesn't have a name? but of course it's bullshit, it’s just a cool homestuck thing. because we never get a conversation that goes:

TG: so the big 13

TG: you get a name yet

EB: yup! let me formally introduce myself as john!

TG: i give that name 4/5 hats

no, dave just immediately calls john by his name. and likewise, until we're introduced to the other characters and learn their names, they're referred to by their handle abbreviations, but the second they're introduced it's first name basis time. because it's a story and our perception is what matters most.

then we have the ridiculous intermission, that starts out as what dave sees when he goes to mspa.com and which resembles problem sleuth enough that i almost thought it was just that, but then seemed to be an entirely new adventure, and then became a pretty vital subplot!

and then we have the author literally climbing into the story and we watch him type it. Don't Forget This Is All Written By Me!

the website changes format, there are the meta jokes, there's the way that caliborn raises the same complaints to hussie about the story being too long and confusing that some members of the fandom were. there's the way that pantskat happened! or they drastic changes in artstyle, often because someone else was drawing a panel!

so like, we've got these characters who seem to have goals that they've developed of their own volition and who seem to have their own ways of going about achieving them, who at times even act contrarily to how hussie says he wants them to act (remember how he attempted to propose to/revive vriska and how both she and caliborn at different times type into the narrative prompt "instead of" hussie) but of course ultimately! he wrote every word!

they don't have free will, they don't even exist! but on a different level, which any writer can understand, once you as an author have established a character, you trap yourself into writing them consistently, which can mean that while something might be best for the plot, the character metaphorically crosses their arms in your head and goes "i would literally never do that."

some characters of homestuck become aware that they are and we know they are, but most of them don't think that, they think that they're just living the life they have.

how the fuck are his characters supposed to go about their days when their author finds it funny to block their path with a giant bust of snoop dogg? and when they work for pages and pages and pages to get around whatever asinine thing andrew fucking hussie (or worse! his fans!) has come up with, there's another obstacle and maybe there's not even a point anyway!

how do you not just dismiss it as something like "hes just being weird/an asshole/etc”?

yeah, look, he might just be having a laugh. but so to might god.

sometimes you're walking along and something really stupid happens and it makes you for a second want to believe in god so that you can stare at the sky and say "really." :|

think about why detective stories are so popular. they give the illusion that if you're clever enough, if you collect the right data and link it together, you can trace back exactly what happened and solve impossible riddles and make sense of the world. you meet a man who has dust on his knees and you can deduce that he's been sneaking down to the basement of the shop he works at to tunnel into the bank next door. there's nothing magic about it, watson, it's just good detective work.

and we neeeeed that lie! but you know how it works in the real world? in the real world, police are baffled at a crime scene until a decade later someone discovers the fingerprints belonged to a fucking KOALA! that's more ridiculous than a snoop dogg bust in a hallway, or most of the other things hussie has written.

i think like that's a huge message behind the epilogues too, because john figures out he's in a story in candy and everything feels pointless.

but if that's the world he lives in, that's the world he fucking lives in. there's nothing pointless about living.

and i think that clicks for him towards the end when he talks to roxy and then rose. rose actually thanks him for choosing a path that allowed her to have the life she had, because she loves her wife and daughter. like it's insane, but she's happy, that's the life she lived and she doesn't want a more sensible one.

so what happens to us when we get that feeling like the world is pointless?

(which is A Major Fucking Side Effect Of Depression BTW and i still stand by my interpretation that ALL of john's shit can be put down to his depression, which is what makes it interesting)

for a generation with fucking terrifying levels of mental illness, when we start feeling like the world is too crazy and the odds are too high, and there's fucking war happening and our friends aren't even guaranteed to be on our side?

we just fucking fight anyway.

because we live in the world we live in and we just have to be grateful that we are who we are because of that.

every character in homestuck chooses this, again and again, so i have to read that as hopeful. alpha dave and rose knowing who hic is and that their kids are so far away? still gonna fucking fight and fight LOUDLY even though they know it won't change things. (on top of the fucking white house, in case the political allegory was too subtle lmao.)

there are so many messages in homestuck and honestly i feel like i’ve barely scraped the surface of them. but what does homestuck believe in? i feel that in my heart. homestuck believes in love and in doing what is right, even when it’s hard to figure out what right is, even when you might not make a difference.

homestuck is good, actually.

#long post #homestuck #my post

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twocoinarchive-blog · 7 years

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there are very few things i like about the n52 comics about harvey, and those things are, unfortunately, so easily overshadowed by the many things i loathe about the entire reboot

i like how we get a bit more insight about harvey’s relationship w/ gilda ( even if ! i’m disappointed by the fact that the writers forgot she’s a sculptor ,, rip ), and i like that they established ! that he has been bruce’s friend for a long time ( since pre - school, maybe even before, according to ba.tman and ro.bin : the big burn ) which is a stark contrast to new earth’s the long halloween where harvey and bruce only became acquaintances, barely even friends, and with harvey still showing disdain towards bruce

i do like that he’s been shown to be more, dare i say it, vain ( and a tad bit more selfish ) compared to his new earth counterpart, and while new earth will forever be my favorite version, it’s a fresh take on his character that i can enjoy

what easily overshadows this is, however, the poor backstory he was given. i can respect the writer’s making him striving towards, and becoming, a DEFENSE ATTORNEY ( at first, he later chooses to turn to the prosecutor route ), but they’ve done so in a poor way by making his entire character be spoiled by one, single thing — by making him a mob lawyer for the mckil.len twins. we’re speaking about harvey de.nt here, yall, harvey ‘ everyone who participates in mob business are immediately deemed as corrupt and almost just as bad as the criminals themselves, for they had a choice in whether they wanted to defend them or not ’ de.nt. i want yall to sit on that for a second. they took everything that had been established about harvey, a fair man whose sense of justice was immaculate and who breathed to put every criminal in goth.am behind bars, and made him into someone who worked for the mob. not even just the mob, but the WORST of the mob in the n52 universe.

couple this fact with the knowledge that n52 made harvey de.nt, not just two - fa.ce, but harvey de.nt into quite the asshole early on, really doesn’t sit well with the Morally Good and Ethically So - So Clean character we have been introduced to in new earth, and despite the fact he refuses to deal with the mck.illens later on, this is just one big mix for a character that, when boiled down, is really just Asshole Lawyer who Got Punished By His Former Clients. he really is an asshole in this continuity, though. a damn shame. i don’t personally want to read about an asshole lawyer, that’s not what i signed up for when i decided to dedicate myself to this character

anyways let me go back to the topic at hand, because while i do adore the relationships that has been established in this continuity, there are some instances where it really just brought a frown to my face. let me take as an instance:

his relationship with bruce seems to be build up more around the fact that harvey wishes to be more like him. these comics makes it seem like harvey is actively jealous of bruce’s life style and wishes to be more suave and charming, which contradicts his being in new earth, where it seems like he’s decently happy with his current way of life.

and

his relationship with jim gordon is nothing less but strained in this continuity. jim is shown as, get a load of this, quite the CORRUPT cop, which as well all know he truly isn’t in the older comics. but due to this we can see that jim ( along with bruce and gilda ) to drop some of his ethics, ethics that he still value in this run ( thank god ), in favor of making everything easier. it’s a bit dirty, isn’t it ? it doesn’t feel right and it doesn’t fit their new earth relationship, which had been shown to be good and honest ( before the courtroom accident ). also, he tried to encourage harvey to basically spill anything he had on the mckill.ens ( thus effectively violating the attorney / client privilege ) which, if found out, would absolutely damage not only harvey’s reputation, but his entire career, and i don’t know about you all, but that doesn’t sound very cop like of someone, especially not someone who, in prior continuities, harvey was able to place his trust upon. of course he might be trying to pressure harvey into spilling secrets because said mobsters had tried to assassinate the entire gordon family, but my point still stands.

of course i could spend another whole week ranting on about how upset i am about them killing off gilda. “would you die for harvey, mrs. dent ?” erin mcki.llen asks after breaking out a jail, and when gilda answers yes, she stabs her. anticlimatic, but not surprising, and yet it still stings. but this really just gives harvey the one motivation to become Angry and Resentful™ ( something that he has not shown to be before in n52 due to a lack of a tragic backstory alá. abusive dad, or a lack for a backstory at all ) that every other male character has by now in n52 — angst and a motivation for revenge because they fridged the most important character in his life. it’s a trope we’ve seen a billion times before and let me be honest here : i don’t like it. to think that this is the premise they’ve set up in order for him to become two - fa.ce ! the one thing i DO like about this is the ending of this particular comic arc ( the one where gilda dies ). it’s heartwrenching and despite my dislike for the comic in general, it make me choke up a little. that despite his anger and need for revenge, his first priority still lays with gilda, even if she has turned to death, and sorrow and regret begins to worm its way into his character. it’s amazing how much of a vital part of his character she was established as in n52 ( compared to the new earth version, which quickly got boiled down to her simply being a housewife )

ANYWAYS

what makes this even more funny to me, this whole n52 deal, is that there’s no downright reason for him to be so heavily dependent on The Coin as he is. there’s not anything spectacular, it’s not his dad’s old trick coin that was used in a sick nightly game, it’s not the lucky coin of a certain mr. maroni — no, what it is is but a single, coincidentalcoin that happens to have two heads which he had in a coin collection. that’s it. that’s literally it. i’m so confused as to WHY he decided to later on revolve his entire crime career around this silly little piece of silver. at no point in there entire run of n52 pre - tw.o - face harvey do we even SEE him dabble on the topic of chance and fate and duality. there’s no signs of prior mental illness either, everything pointing towards that the actual trauma of getting acid poured on his face and seeing his wife die within a matter of hours being the Culprit towards him developing schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder — which is a bullshit reasoning. the origin arc we are introduced to in The Big Burn falls completely flat as an origin story for tw.o - face, however, i must admit, it’s a huge leap as a story for harvey de.nt, despite its MANY flaws.

i don’t agree with many of the other works in n52 either.

however, i admit i am a sucker for the all - star batm.an story, My Own Worst Enemy. it gives a lovely little explanation for the inconsistencies in harvey’s and tw.o - face’s character throughout the years, and while her certainly is rather sadistic with literally no moral compass at all, something that doesn’t feel right, i can agree with a majority of everything delivered, even if it hits home a tad bit too hard with the fact that it’s revealed that harvey’s about ready to give up on life and fully willingly to let tw.o - face take control once and for all, a rather obvious sign of him not only being severely depressed, but also suicidal ( may i remind yall that he has quite literally shot himself in the head. he’s one lucky — i’m saying lucky loosely here — son of a gun ). if i may say it, it’s a part that hits a lil bit close to home

long story short n52 is still shit, i only read it for harvey and for the art, and for the fact that i rlly want to icon these Crisp n Clean panels

thanks for coming to my ted talk

#me: im just gonna make a short list over the things i dislike about n52 #me: absolutely demolishes n52 and everything it stands for #n52 / prime earth whomst ??? don't know her #this turned into a Personal Essay i fuckin h8 myself #╱╱ ･ﾟ��▐┊ — « ooc. »#im trying guys. im trying real hard to like n52 but it's #a Challenge #long post //#since i know tumblr mobile likes to heck over read mores !

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thedoctorisadhd · 7 years

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what's once on this island about?

i hope ur happy anon, bc this took me literally like six hours im not exaggerating even a little

short answer: so u take the original plot of the littlest mermaid and u plunk it down rIGHT in the middle of 1920s haiti, right

long answer (like, REALLY long answer. like REALLY long. im sorry i dont know how to summarize when there are so many good things):

“there is an island where rivers run deep…”

“where the sea, sparkling in the sun, earns it the name, ‘jewel of the antilles.’”

“an island where the poorest of peasants labor —”

“— and the wealthiest of the grand hommes lay.”

“two different worlds on one island!”

“the grand hommes, owners of the land and masters of their own fates.”

“and the peasants, eternally at the mercy of the wind and sea, would pray constantly to the gods.”

those are the four storytellers, beginning the play. lydia started the first line, then abby, then dori, then natalie, and repeat.

(oh yeah, also this is the jr version. also, i dont know everything bc i was backstage the majority of the time)

so the gods that the beach people / peasants are dancing to, theres 4 of them. asaka (played by lavanya in our production) is the goddess of the earth, erzulie (played by luke who’s closeted, so i change it to a god, erzulio) beautiful goddess of love. agwe (played by ian) is the god of the sea, and papa ge (eli, of course, and it’s literally pronounced papa gay), my personal favorite, is the sly demon of death

and this is all described in the first number “we dance”

stay tuned yo it gets better.

(its so good. dont ever listen to any version besides the chatham one i can guarantee you that any non-eli papa ge, any non-luke erzulie / erzulio, any non-lavanya asaka, any non-ian agwe, any non-lydia / dori / abby / natalie storyteller will not be as good)

so basically theres this storm, and in this storm is a little girl and the gods are like “no papa ge we’re not killing her you fuck” and they irresponsibly plunk her down in a tree

and so tonton julien (ben) and mama euralie (izzy) come along & are like “holy shit a kid” (and this girl is crying her eyes out of course bc as mr adam creatively put it to the girl who played young ti moune, “you were just dropped in a tree by some randos you’ve never seen before in your entire life”) but like theyre poor and dont have a lotta food and shit so they try to leave but the gods, showing some small modicum of responsibility, like, use the force to pull them back. so these peasants adopt ti moune and name her ti moune and theres a whole big number about her growing up called “one small girl” which i quite like actually

then ti moune is grown up (sammie) and she sings about like “whats my destiny yo” all naive in “waiting for life” and sees a car which is a big ol lead-in to the next number. which brings us to

so in the beginning of “rain” theres this HILARIOUS section of dialogue with the gods picking mangos and here it is bc i cant not include it man

asaka: 🎵 pick a mango! 🎵

agwe: 🎵 a juicy mango! 🎵

erizulie: 🎵 a lovely mango! 🎵

papa ge, being Himself: 🎶 a poison mango! 😈 🎶

[all of the other gods look at papa ge]

anyway, after that theyre all proposing things to do to get ti moune less naive, with such wonderful suggestions from these dumbasses as “splash her with a wave” and “scare her half to death”. and then erzulie is like “yeah u do that imma give her what she wants bye” and the other gods are like “????????????” and shes just like “You Heard Me” and just goes like “Love Can Conquer Anything!!!!!!! :)))))))) ❤️💞💕💚💛💙💜💝💘💗💖❣️” and papa ge is like “that’s bullshit this whole thing is bullshit that’s a scam fuck the love here’s like two reasons why” and they argue (and asaka remarks that this is “more amusing than mangos”) and the gods are all “HMMMM🤔🤔” and then they all go “A BET!”

and the gods all start like pitching in to set up this bet, so like erzulie gives her strength and asaka’s gonna guide her but then papa ge interrupts like “IM GONNA MAKE HER CHOOSE” and then johnny boy i mean ian i mean agwe then calls dibs on choosing the circumstances of the bet

and u remember that car right? well ian agwe is like “that. thats the place where the 2 worlds meet” and he creates a big ol storm and in the song he says (one of my favorite lines, actually) “rain makes the road such a dangerous place” (he did amazing in that song but i feel kinda bad bc like. he was overshadowed by the other gods who are all incredible singers, and parts of it were too low for him. like, eli can sing as high as he did, but ian really cant sing that low)

also they used the fish flags from the seussical two years ago when sammie’s sister sidne played the cat in the hat. i always found it hilarious that dori of all people they couldve chosen played a fish

ANYWAY. so the car is goin down the road and crash oh no a car accident. totally not what agwe was (shot)gunning for

and so ti moune pulls this guy outta the car right, and — by the way, now we’re in this super intense number called “pray” — and this song is real fuckin good alright.

my opinion upon this is based almost solely on the fact that within the first like ten lines of this epically long song a peasant, talking about the guy that got pulled outta the car (daniel, that’s his name), says, literally: “papa ge wants him!” i will remind you that papa ge is pronounced “papa gay” and what makes it even more astronomically fuckin funny is that both hank, the guy that played daniel, and eli, who as u may know played papa ge, are mlm.

anyway no one wants to help daniel even tho he’s Actively Dying bc Fuck The Grand Hommes, Am I Right Guys We Cant Do Anything Were Peasants And There Is Sanctity That We Must Never Talk To Look At Or Think About A Single Grand Homme, Ever™ but ti mounes gonna help him bc Fuck You Guys and she keeps him alive while tonton julien goes to find the guys family after she’s Finally persuaded the guy to do this

and ti moune doesnt sleep for Three Fucken Days by the way. thats important in the next number

also daniel is supposed to be good looking so of course ti moune Falls In Love With Him despite never having seen him before in her entire life, and also hes unconcious the Whole time. i dont understand the heterosexuals

anyway, tonton juliens at the gate to daniels family hotel and he’s like “pls let me in i need to speak to monsieur beausome!” and the gatekeepers like “get the fuck away my guy” and hes like “no but its urgent!!” and the gatekeeper SLAPS BEN [LAST NAME REDACTED]*

so ben i mean tonton recovers and like seriously gets down on his knees and begs and the gatekeeper is still like “FUCK! NO!” and then ben fucking [last name redacted]* SCREAMS SAVAGELY “I HAVE FOUND HIS SON!” HOO BOY

and then at the end of pray you hear a long high note and then one specific girl takes it HIGHER ????????? idk who it is for sure but im willing to put my money on lavanya bc jesus christ can that girl sing

*people always say bens full name when referring to him for some reason, so it’s not ben bc which ben? it’s not ben b. it’s ben [last name redacted].

so pray goes ge STRAIGHT into forever yours. not the reprise, thats later.

so. forever yours. in a STUNNING turn of events (sarcasm. absolutely the least stunning thing after the whole “papa gay wants him” in pray), the VERY fucking FIRST LINE IN THIS WHOLE FUCKING STUPID HEARTFELT SONG is literally ti moune saying “i am a tree, holding away the storm”. are you fucking serious. are you kidding me. you waste the first line on that monstrosity,

anyway basically what happens in this is ti moune is singing about tending to daniel here it is

i am a tree holding away the stormhere in my arms i’ll keep u safe and warmeven the gods wont dare to cross this linewhere my life is forever yoursand you are mine

and on that last word, “mine”, papa ge joins in and it is fuckin CHILLING, not LEAST bc eli has the voice of a fuckin angel (and sammie too, but i think eli’s is just slightly better)

so eli stalks in and the first thing papa ge does, in a True demonstration of the gay / ge agenda, is Drag The Het.

(then he goes on to say “this boy is mine”)

so eli’s also got a knife (a fake one) and this is another Important Thing so yeah

anyway sammie ti moune should “TAKE MINE FOR HIS.” (her life she meant) and papa ge is SHOOK. he just … stops. “wot”

so yeah. ti moune, in one of The most IMPRESSIVE displays of heterosexual tomfoolery and ridiculousness i have Yet Seen (scene), trades her life for this Complete Fuckin Stranger she pulled out of the car wreck whomst has not as of yet spoken a Single word to her bc HE’S BEEN UNCONSCIOUS THE WHOLE TIME!?

and heres another good line, the first gay daddy nico diangelo himself eli papa gay papa ge has had since “wot”: i am the road / leading to no return

(and this is also where eli goes REALLY high. like not for basically everyone else, but for him)

then daniels two dads apparently, grant and hugh, pick him up and take him back to the hotel and ti moune is like “NOOOOOOO” and makes mama and tonton let her leave to go find daniel, and frankly i am not very interested in this specific part of the song so fuck that i skipped it lmao lets get to lavanyas fuckin SOLO

alright. “mama will provide”. exactly what it says on the tin, taking it into account that asaka would be mother earth i guess

really all this one is is lavanya’s fuckin angelic voice and What Exists In Nature, and i cant very well put lavanya’s voice down on the page for yinz to hear can i? the only notable thing i can really think of besides this next piece a dialogue will share w u is in the beginning theres a bunch of ensemble doing weird repeating acapella and some hopping in like frogs. “COO COO coo coo cOO COO COOO” “SHAH shaSHA-ah” “buuuuu BUM! BUM! bum” its sounds slightly weirder than it is

anyway here’s the best dialogue:

everyone: MOSQUITOS??

asaka: HA!

ACT TWO HERE WE FUCKIN GO ALRIGHT

ok, so ti moune finds daniel who doesnt know who she is bc, you know, he was unconscious the entire time. she gets him to know she was the one who nursed him tho. and they go to the front of the stage and ti moune sits and daniel puts his head on her lap. again, poor hank

now, “human heart”. jesus. i have literally cried over this song.

so erzulie goes out on stage to where hank is slowly suffering, probably, and sings this GODS DAMN BEAUTIFUL SONG about like, love n shit i guess. the storytellers and the other three gods act as a sort of choir. that’s pretty much all there is to say about human heart tho. moving on

ok so for “pray (reprise)” the gossipers (which are apparently supposed to be the storytellers, but fuck that thats lame, give my Cool Hoes lianna and taylor parts tbh) go out on stage and sing about how daniel is spending all his time w a peasant and shes a witch and yadda yadda yadda. and then theres some lame romance shit that i dont have fuckin time for

anyway, the song culminates with daniel’s father comin out on stage (lmao). which father, u ask? he had two of em? well that was grant and hugh, this one’s iain. conclusion: daniel has three polyamorous gay dads. this is the gayest production of a play ive ever seen. i mean papa ge? “papa ge wants him”? the fact that tonton means uncle so mama euralie and tonton julien arent married? “this boy is mine” coming from daddy gay himself? the fact that daniels last name means beautiful man? the “beautiful god of love” (as luke said, refusing to misgender himself in his introduction U GO LUKE)? the fact that out of the main cast (the 4 gods, the 4 storytellers, daniel, ti moune, andrea, mama euralie, and tonton julien) there are literally eight (8) actors who Arent straight (id bet that two others arent str8 and or / cis as well but im not sure)? just change daniel to danielle and itll be perfect

ayway daniel’s 3rd dad comes out on stage and tells him to stop this nonsense, young man ANYWAY NEXT SONG

in “some girls” the rich guys at the hotel all are doing a really lame colorless boring dance. then this girl andrea (ava) comes out and sings about the rumors about ti moune, that she’s stupid or wild, and daniel tells her to stop, then ti moune arrives and andrea really condescendingly asks her to dance for everyone and daniel encourages ti moune

so ti moune does a slow lame dance and then it gets loud and wild and fun! then when she’s done andrea goes to daniel and is like “she’s in love with you you oblivious fuck if you care at all you’ll tell her —” (unclear about what he’s caring about) and andrea is interrupted by ti moune who’s like “HI I HEARD MY NAME WHATCHA WANT ANDREA” and daniel goes and breaks her fuckin heart right

how he does this is he’s like “oops sorry i thought u would realize that we could never marry bc andrea and i are already engaged (since we were babies)”. daniel demonstrates an amazing amount of calmness about being forced to marry this girl he’s known all his life, and an incredible amount of insensitiveness bc TI MOUNE WAS NEVER FUCKIN TOLD THAT HE WAS ENGAGED. honestly i loathe literally every single character in this play except for the gods and the storytellers lmao

OK NOW FOR MY FAVORITE FUCKIN ONE WOW :~)

the reprise of forever mine.

so. ti moune is alone on stage and she goes like “gods please are u listening help me” and then. u hear. eli’s fucking amazing evil laugh and the gay himself appears

and he’s like u gotta keep ur promise ti moune im here to collect on that Soul

did i mention elis voice is beautiful? no i dont care, im sayin it again, eli [last name redacted] has the voice of an angel

anyway he’s like “u gave him ur soul, now u have to PAY” (the line he used here is “i am the price you’ll pay” and that sounds cool as shit)

and so “father homosexual,” as he was dubbed by luke, takes out his knife and sings “your life is forever mine” and holds the knife to ti mounes neck and ti moune yells “PLEASE DONT” and and and

he stops.

“trade your life for his.”

so papa ge gives her the knife and tells her to go stab daniel and he sings “i am the road that leads to no return” as he walks to the left side of the stage, and erzulie appears at the right side and sings human heart as papa ge continues with his verse from the first forever mine as ti moune struggles towards and away from daniel, straining, being pulled by opposite forces, love and death, and the two unite in singing “forever mine!” and ti moune casts the knife to the floor and screams “NO!”

and the music stops

and daniel sees the knife and picks it up

and says “why?!”

(fuckin bitch shoulda stabbed him when she had the chance)

and ti moune gets cast out and like, withers away at the gate neither eating nor sleeping, and then daniel comes to the gate with andrea at his wedding and sees ti moune and gives her a coin when she runs after him, and she collapses and the gods, sOMEHOW GAINING SOME MINISCULE VIEW OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR FUCKIN ACTIONS, all start CRYING. (erzulie won the bet) and erzulie hugs ti moune and papa ges probably off somewhere feeling sorry for himself bc you cant fuckin see him in the footage (nah, he’s off at the side of the stage with the other two gods neither of whomst you can see either), and mama euralie comes to sing this sad and pretty number “part of us” and then tonton and baby ti moune arrive as well for some fuckin reason,

and mama euralie says,

“and then the gods blessed her and turned her into —”

and then the gods hit their staffs on the floor (ian a bit gentlier bc his was falling apart bc he wouldnt stop fucking licking the fucking ribbons, ian) “a tree!”

and the tree comes up, forwards this time thankfully (phew) and and the tree fuckin cracks the walls of the hotel, get rekt scrubs, and the tree fuckin stalks daniel i guess, and daniels son sits by the tree and looks up and theres a peasant girl in its branches, and ti moune touches everyones hearts and also their livers, and everyone starts singing “why we tell the story”

also, fun story real quick, ive never actually seen eli dab i dont think (that’s something i need to accomplish real soon), and the dance he went off to the side and did with like, lydia, and agwe and ben [last name redacted] and daniels son and hugh — i guess all the boys in musical theater and also lydia, and the dance they have to do looks pretty damn like dabbing, and like, eli’s holding his staff so he cant do a true dab, really, but he can do a one armed one — but no. his dancing looks more like fuckin waving. ben [last name redacted] is dabbing, daniels son is dabbing, im like 80 percent sure ian’s dabbing directly behind eli, gloria’s dabbing in the back, but no, nOT ELI. im pretty sure he’s deliberately avoiding it smh

anyway

whOOP exciting parts over. now it’s time for Sad Half Circle Around Tree Girl i guess

“the stories that we weave,” and the storytellers and daniel’s son and the peasant girl in tree moune’s branches all come to the front and —

“there is an island where rivers run deep…”

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trendingnewsb · 6 years

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5 Crazy Recent News Stories That Didn’t Get Enough Attention

Most people read the headlines of a couple of political stories shared by their most untrustworthy friend on Facebook and feel like they’re pretty well-informed. But the daily large-scale dramas of the Trump administration, mass shootings, Russian agents being assassinated, and the world generally seeming like a montage of newscasts from a ’50s sci-fi movie have overshadowed some utterly insane news that, in a different era, would have dominated headlines for weeks.

So here are five stories that have yet to receive the proper “Wait, what the fuck?!” reaction that they deserve.

The Government Said It Has Mysterious Alloys Recovered From UFOs

Two Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporters made public some fascinating footage captured by military pilots of an unidentified flying object zipping across the skies, making sharp turns and occasionally hovering like a helicopter, and all with no visible signs of propulsion. With the internet as it is, we should’ve been drowned in stories about how “Independence Day PREDICTED THE FUTURE” or whatever.

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The footage is odd, for sure. But it only makes up like 0.5 percent of the craziness within the New York Times article it came from.