#quote is from. The godfather novel

[angevinyaoiz]

“Make yourself the only person in the world that he truly desires not to kill him. He has only that one fear, not of death, but that you may be the one to kill him. He is yours then”

Some first pass at a Richard/Mercadier concept….

[howtofightwrite]

Followup: Oragnized Crime Recruitment

The Godfather book and the Mafia games, specifically the first Mafia game, are the closest examples of what the Original Asker wants for his game. Goodfellas is another potential example to base the process of one's recruitment into the criminal underworld. In general, recruitment in fiction is generally based on doing jobs and earning a reputation as to one's success at doing jobs. In Goodfellas, Henry Hill started off doing simple, legal-ish errands for the local mafia before the gangsters saw his potential and entrusted him with more illegal jobs. Original Asker's character could therefore be someone who is affiliated with a mobster, but not part of the inner circle until the character pulls off jobs which makes them someone worth recruiting to the organization. Or one could go the Tommy Angelo route and save a mobster's life. -ironwoodatl01

So, it's worth remembering that Goodfellas is (in broad strokes) non-fiction. Henry Hill was a real person. (1943-2012) He was an associate of the Lucchese family. There are some historical, “inaccuracies,” with the film. Though, his arrest in 1980 for narcotics, and turning state's witness is historically accurate, though the film skims over the part where he was ejected from the witness protection program in 1987. Goodfellas was adapted from Nicholas Pileggi's non-fiction book, Wiseguy. I haven't read the book, but it's plausible that some of the historical discrepancies may have come from the book.

In this case, the OP specifically wanted to avoid a background where someone grew up in the neighborhood. Which, I mean, that is their choice, but it is a very popular recruitment method, in part because it's very effective at screening out potential cops, or even recruiting potential tame cops down the line.

Ironically, thinking back now, Mafia, the original Saints Row, and Franklin's arc from GTA5 are all potential reference points for what the OP wanted, and thinking back on it now, they were asking for input on a game, rather than prose, so I should have factored that in with the original ask. The tricky thing about each of those examples is that they're dependent on a lot of very specific moving parts in their respective stories. (Though, to be fair, I barely remember the original Mafia.) None of them are strictly realistic, but they're all internally plausible, when you start factoring in the various character motivations at work.

For some reason, I'm reminded of the Thieves Guild recruitment in Skyrim, which is one of the goofiest criminal recruitments I've seen in a non-parody. Brynjolf grabs some random psychopath wandering through and says, “ah, yes, you must be a master of pickpocketing and interested in a life of crime.” Does it make any sense? Nope. Does it go a long way towards explaining why the Thieves Guild is falling apart? Yeah, kinda, when you think about it. Does the introduction work? For some players, yes.

If the player wants to get into a questline, the justification can be pretty flimsy and still work for that player. Usually we talk about suspension of disbelief like it's a universal constant, but it's individual per member of your audience. Normally, you want to do whatever you can to ensure the suspension of disbelief is as strong as possible. However, in a game, the player's own emotional investment can help shore up weak points.

I'm going to take a quote out of context (a little), but I'm reminded of a quote from Richard K. Morgan about Halo, “[it] is full of these bullshit archetypal characters and there's no real emotional effect.” And, while he was certainly dragged for that quote (and, really the entire interview, it was a mess), he wasn't wrong. The writing in Halo isn't what does the heavy lifting, a large part of that is the player's effort to get through the story. And, in basically any other medium, this would be an exceptionally bad thing.

You won't make your novel better by forcing your audience to complete reflex tests before they start each chapter.

But, with video games, the gameplay interludes, can actually build emotional investment for the player. Even on very flimsy premises.

I've often written about how writing in different mediums requires different approaches and has different strengths. If you want gorgeous combat, then live action or animation are the best forms for you story. If you want visually striking images that linger, comics might be the right choice. If you really want to get into a character's head and live there, prose will let you do that with a level of fine control that is difficult to replicate. (And, note, there's a lot of different pros and cons, so this isn't an exclusive list.) The funny thing is, if you want your audience to do the heavy lifting for suspension of disbelief, that's one of the places where video game writing really shines.

And so we loop back to the Skyrim example. Brynjolf's approach to finding new talent is absolute clown shoes, but it's something you might not notice if this is why you wandered into Riften. It only becomes a problem when you're just there to snuff Grelod the Kind, or are looking for someplace to unload all this garbage you picked up while delving into a Dwemer ruin up in the mountains.

This doesn't mean you should abandon the idea of good writing, but if your player is on the same page as you, you won't need to worry about having something completely believable. For example, the plot-line of Mafia, or (the original) Saints Row.

-Starke

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[saturn-c]

Hi I love your blog so much! Thank you for making so many epic posts for the tgf fandom!!

Now my question: what are your favourite scenes from the books?

I looove the 'actually everything is personal' quote from Mike right before he leaves to kill Sollozzo. The prosaic style of the novel is equally stupid and brilliant and that's what make it a great read IMO.

“Tom, don't let anybody kid you. It's all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it's personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. He took my going into the Marines personal. That's what makes him great. The Great Don. He takes everything personal Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes? Right? And you know something? Accidents don't happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.”

[savwrites]

YOUR MOTHER, MY FATHER - WIP INTRO

"When the police informed me that Dad was found dead in a parking garage with – my brain filled in the sentence, pictured Sasha’s limp body curled up in the driver’s seat. It would only be fitting for Dad to die next to his best friend, the two of them fossilized into perfect amber cartridges by the warm cradle of the car’s heat."

Your Mother, My Father is a literary fiction novel about grief, queerness, and soda.

current word count = 13k

expected final word count = 60k-ish

blurb = Robert Peace and Miranda Smyth are found dead together in the front seats of a running car: overdosed peacefully in their sleep, serenaded by the radio, snow falling outside the parking garage.

But their relationship is a mystery, and so are the final moments before their deaths -- the task falls upon Petra, the estranged only child of Robert, and Ryan, the only member of Miranda's family to truly understand her.

Petra and Ryan recount the end of their parents' lives, their complicated familial pasts, and the decades worth of hidden trauma and history that united the two in secret -- until death did they part.

characters =

Petra Peace is a transgender artist pursuing higher education, recently coping with the death of her beloved father -- one she hadn't connected with in years due to her fears that he wouldn't accept her.

Ryan Smyth is a teenager soon to graduate high school. He and his mother struggled with parallel mental health issues, but now, his shoulder to cry on is long gone.

Robert Peace was a successful professor and historian. Intellectual and curious, he went on many adventures and made many friends, but few understood the complexities of his past.

Miranda Smyth was an overworked and erratic mother of four. After losing her identity to domestic responsibilities and worsening paranoia, she nor her family could predict her actions.

Sasha Petrov is the former best friend to Robert and honorary godfather to Petra, the person she named herself after; however, after his sudden falling out with Robert, he hasn't been seen in years.

extra = this is my very first wip intro!! I hope to post more quotes from the novel, update about its progress, and hopefully find some cool mutuals to hold me accountable and talk about writing with :^) Thank you so much for reading!

[anghraine]

Darcy & Wickham backstory headcanon (1/?)

PART ONE, in which Mr Darcy (senior) meant well, but

I’ve always thought this quote from Elizabeth, about Wickham and Darcy, is really interesting:

“There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education of those two young men. One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it.”

Jane argues that this isn’t wholly accurate or just. Darcy did not ever seem devoid of goodness to her. But because the dialogue moves on without narrative comment, it’s not clear whether we should interpret this as Jane being Jane, or as a suggestion that Elizabeth has never really been fair to Darcy (which is how she takes it), or as something else.

The point about education is intriguing, though, given that this is a novel deeply concerned with the education of young people and parental failures, and that Darcy does end up attributing his flaws to his parents’ influences, but with very careful phrasing to avoid really blaming them for anything in particular, and no mention of Wickham.

This is more in the realm of headcanon than canon, but I think an interesting possibility is that ... Elizabeth is right. Maybe there was some pretty substantial mismanagement with both the younger Darcy and Wickham.

There’s no indication that Lady Anne, less amiable though she may have been, ever had much to do with Wickham. He mentions her name, but only to connect Lady Catherine to Darcy. The person who impacted both Darcy and Wickham was the late Mr Darcy, Wickham’s (allegedly) beloved godfather and Darcy’s father.

Mr Darcy was apparently a great guy: principled, upstanding, lovable, generous, kind, everything amiable. Nobody has a word to say against him apart from Darcy’s generalizations about “my parents” and their collective mistakes, and even then he stops to stress how great his father specifically was.

And yet, something went wrong.

It’s one thing with Darcy, who turned out basically okay even before his character growth. He was the heir, he was spoiled, there might be an implication that his parents taught him basic principles but kind of left him to do his own thing, insofar as that was possible. None of this is shocking for that kind of family and it doesn’t have to reflect that badly on any of them.

But there’s also Wickham, who did not turn out okay, and we don’t actually know why. According to him, he was raised at Pemberley in the mansion. He and Darcy were “objects of the same parental care” and they spent their boyhoods together. He even claims that he was often given preference over Darcy. Now, this is all coming from Wickham, who is a very dubious source, so it’s worth looking at what the other people involved have to say.

It turns out that Wickham was, indeed, raised by Mr Darcy at Pemberley (Mrs Reynolds says so). Mr Darcy had a miniature of Wickham painted, and treasured it with pictures of his own children so much that, five years after his death, Darcy still hasn’t had the heart to get rid of it despite everything Wickham has done. Darcy describes Wickham as the companion of his youth and “the acknowledged favourite of my father.” This doesn’t incontrovertibly back up Wickham’s account because “favourite” had multiple meanings and didn’t necessarily refer to parental favoritism, though it could and frequently does in P&P. At any rate, it’s not a contradiction.

That’s why this is ultimately a headcanon matter. There’s really no way to know if Wickham is lying about Mr Darcy’s favoritism because his story mixes truth, lies, and a bunch of deceptive omissions. He doesn’t tell many outright falsehoods in his story, but there are a couple, and Darcy is not clear on this point, so it’s basically up to the reader to decide which alternative they want to go with.

As for my own headcanon? I think Wickham actually is telling the truth about this, to a point.

Okay, I realize that my relentless Darcy stanning could make my judgment somewhat suspect. I do have reasons other than woobifying Darcy, though—I think that Wickham genuinely being the favorite actually fits really well into the overall backstory and explains quite a few things about them both.

So, jumping fully into headcanon land: let’s go back to 28 years before P&P. Mr Darcy and Lady Anne have been married for an unknown period of time. Her sister, Lady Catherine, is married to Sir Lewis de Bourgh, while Mr Darcy’s steward, Mr Wickham, is married to the extravagant Mrs Wickham. All three women are pregnant.

I speculated in a recent post that Lady Anne and Lady Catherine may have shared some kind of genetic issue that led to difficulties bringing pregnancies to term. We don’t know this, but we do know that Darcy was an only child for a long time (potentially the entire 12 years between him and Georgiana) and that Lady Catherine’s daughter is truly an only child. To go by the plot to unify Rosings and Pemberley through Darcy and Anne’s marriage—planned when both were infants—it doesn’t seem that the Fitzwilliam sisters expected Lady Catherine to ever have another child.

My headcanon is that both sisters had suffered multiple miscarriages by the time that Darcy and Anne were conceived, that few people around them expected these pregnancies to turn out any better, and the fact that they were able to carry both pregnancies to term, that they did so at around the same time, and that the children turned out to be a girl and a boy, looked a lot like Providence to them.

I don’t imagine either thought very much about the Wickhams’ baby at the time. But it was different for Mr Darcy.

Darcy says in his letter that he is nearly the same age as Wickham, which technically doesn’t have to mean Wickham is older, but IMO suggests it. There’s leeway here, but I imagine that Wickham is about six months older than Darcy. When he’s born, Lady Anne is already pregnant with Darcy, but neither Mr Darcy nor anybody else yet realizes she’s not going to miscarry this time.

So the birth of the Wickhams’ son is somewhat bittersweet—Mr Darcy is a genuinely kind-hearted man with considerable affection for his steward, so he’s happy for them, but doesn’t know if he himself will ever have any children. And he understands that a child will strain the Wickhams’ finances and that Mr Wickham certainly won’t be able to provide much in the way of formal education or career opportunities for this child. Mr Darcy is touched at the request to stand as godfather and eager to do whatever he can for the baby. Mr Darcy does have a lot of other things going on, but baby Wickham is extremely adorable and he wants to do more.

We don’t know when he took on responsibility for Wickham’s upbringing and it doesn’t seem like he tried to sever Wickham from his birth parents, since the Wickhams already lived at or near Pemberley. Nevertheless, Mr Darcy takes on a very big role even for a godfather, and it’s possible that he offered to raise Wickham and had significantly bonded with him before Darcy was even born.

All the while, Lady Anne’s pregnancy is progressing—perhaps with difficulties, but obviously, she makes it through and delivers a son. Mr Darcy is undoubtedly thrilled, he goes along with naming the baby after her family (I think Darcy owes his first name to Fitzwilliam pride, not Darcy tradition), and while Mr Darcy is not directly involved in the Darcy/Anne engagement plot, he’s okay with it (Wickham is actually the first to mention it in P&P, so it seems to have genuinely been accepted or at least under discussion at Pemberley). The arrival of their son is more complicated than it would otherwise have been because of baby Wickham, but obviously, Mr Darcy is capable of loving two different children and he does.

As the babies grow into young boys, though, things become even more complicated. Wickham is open, outgoing, and lively. I suspect he somewhat mimics Mr Darcy’s manners—not out of childish malevolent intent, but because that’s who his role model is as a child, and it comes to him easily. In any case, I think it’s possible that this is the sort of person that Mr Darcy prefers in general, given that at the end of his life, he ends up selecting Lady Anne’s 25-year-old younger nephew (who has a similar temperament if more intelligence and morals) to act as the executor of his will and co-guardian of his 11-year-old daughter.

But their own son is ... different.

If you’ve followed me for much time or run across many of my Darcy-centric posts, you probably already know that I am adamantly opposed to the idea that reducing all of Darcy’s social issues to his arrogance is the best reading of him, much less the only correct one. Additionally, my personal headcanon is that he isn’t shy but is neurodivergent—specifically, that he’s on the autism spectrum. This interacts with his later arrogance but does not contradict or diminish it. So that’s part of this headcanon, too.

We don’t know a whole lot about very young Darcy, but we do know that he’s four when Mrs Reynolds comes to Pemberley, and that she notices he never speaks crossly to her, even then. She seems to consider this pretty amazing in a child of that age. There seems an unspoken contrast going on there—perhaps just with other children in general, but possibly, circumstances offered a very obvious contrast in Wickham.

I’m not suggesting that four- or five-year-old Wickham was already monstrous, because that’s not the case. But given that Mrs Reynolds believes that children’s natures give a decent idea of what they’ll become as adults, and that she also believes Wickham is “wild,” I suspect that young Wickham and young Darcy struck her as very different personalities from the first, and that she preferred Darcy’s.

For Mrs Reynolds, Darcy never expressing irritation towards her, even as a tiny child, is a sign of his virtue and good nature. And certainly, that’s part of it. But it may not be the only part.

Adaptations tend to make Darcy into a visibly brooding and somber sort of person, but Elizabeth never really sees him that way. Her characterization of his usual demeanor in the first half of the book is “sedate.” Charlotte actively looks for signs of his interest in Elizabeth when they’re in Kent (interest which we know he feels), but can’t tell from his expression if he’s interested or just absent-minded. He admits that he has trouble looking interested in people he’s unfamiliar with and in catching their tone of conversation.

Even when he’s actively working to be as agreeable as is humanly possible for him at that point, with the Gardiners, there’s something about his air that strikes them as formal and lacking liveliness (though it’s not a big deal for them). He tries to compliment Mrs Bennet late in the book, and even to Elizabeth, his manner comes across as cold. Nobody guesses that something went on during his and Elizabeth’s multi-mile engagement walk, because Elizabeth’s feelings are complicated before talking to her parents and because Darcy is so inexpressive in company. Later, Elizabeth ends up shielding and guiding him through the social occasions around their engagement.

So, my headcanon is that part of the reason four-year-old Darcy doesn’t ever speak crossly to Mrs Reynolds is that he’s a sweetheart, yes, but part of it is that he has trouble translating what he feels into tone and expression anyway. Consequently, we’ve got Wickham, who is energetic and open and dramatic and charming, and then there’s Darcy, who is demonstrative through action more than demeanor.

He’s quiet, quick at his lessons, and if you’re in a position to notice, sweet and generous in a way that Wickham apparently never has been—but there’s something peculiarly stiff about Darcy’s mannerisms and how he talks (when he talks at all), even by the standards of the time. He’s off-putting to many of these eighteenth-century people around him. Towards his parents, his manner seems respectful but not all that affectionate, especially by contrast to Wickham (though in fact, Darcy idolizes his father, and loves his mother and extended family).

I think Darcy’s father may well have simply found young Wickham more endearing, more conventionally boyish, and easier to bond with. He wasn’t unkind to Darcy by any means, but he did have a stronger rapport with Wickham and this would only become more marked as they grew older and their personalities became more pronounced.

But I also headcanon that Mr Darcy felt pretty guilty about preferring Wickham to his own child—his only son and heir, no less, and at the time, his only biological child. He felt even guiltier because his preference didn’t really have anything to do with some clear misbehavior that could be addressed. And it’s not like he didn’t love him. So, far from being harsh as a father, his affection and guilt led him to over-correct his approach to his son. He indulged Darcy, and while he took care to teach him the things he considered important for Darcy to learn and carry on as his heir, he otherwise mostly gave him his way and left him to do whatever he wanted.

At the same time, he didn’t want to penalize Wickham for being more likable, so he also was indulgent towards him, and on top of that, didn’t take as many pains to impart his principles because a) Wickham seemed to have them naturally and b) Wickham wasn’t the heir.

I think B ended up being really important for the development of both of these boys in such radically different directions. Mr Darcy essentially treated Wickham like another son, but at the end of the day, Wickham was not his son. No matter how engaging, how personable, how endearing, how beloved Wickham might be, he was never going to be the heir. He’s the oldest, he’s the favorite, he’s the most likable, but Darcy is still going to get everything.

It’s not like Mr Darcy was planning on just treating his godson like another son and then leaving him out to dry. Wickham essentially gets the younger son treatment—a good education to prepare him for a career in the church that will socially make him a gentleman. I don’t think Wickham was seething with resentment over this at, you know, eight or nine years old, but it was old enough for him to understand that their expectations were very different, and all the favoritism in the world was not going to change that.

I think it’s additionally possible that Wickham’s very virtuous father, who was also in the picture in some capacity, was deeply grateful, and expected young Wickham to also be grateful. But for Wickham, the obvious point of comparison in terms of his expectations was not the children of other servants, it was Darcy.

Wickham claims in P&P that Darcy was jealous of his father’s preference for Wickham from early in life, despite their boyhood friendship. Darcy, on the other hand, says that it would have been a depravity to do nothing for Wickham because he was the favourite of Darcy’s father and had been brought up as a gentleman but was completely dependent on the Darcys. Even though Darcy thinks quite poorly of Wickham’s character by age 23, he feels obligated to do something for him and hopes, even if he can’t quite believe it, that it’ll turn out okay.

I don’t think Darcy’s reasoning here sounds at all like someone given to jealousy, honestly. I’ve seen it occasionally suggested that he is jealous of Wickham, actually, or that in some more nuanced earlier draft of P&P that he was jealous and Wickham was less awful and blahblah, but I don’t think so. I think this is where the deception on this issue lies. Wickham was indeed the favorite, but Darcy wasn’t that jealous of him. He was jealous of Darcy.

It wouldn’t be horrible if Darcy had been jealous, to be clear. It would be a very understandable emotion for a child in this situation to feel. Nevertheless, he doesn’t really seem to have been.

I think part of this is that he’s not a particularly jealous person by temperament (fandom sometimes assumes he is, but I disagree). Part is that he tends to process things in his own very particular way that doesn’t always follow the paths you would expect. But part, I think, is that while he was somewhat hurt by the situation, what jealousy he might have felt was headed off very early.

There was another important figure in all this, after all: Lady Anne.

[uglypastels]

i dont agree with the anon that your fics are unreadable, but it is weird you dont use "double quotations" especially since you're like an English major or something right?

+ No, but why is punctuation suddenly so hard?. everyone knows you use double quotes when characters speak. its like writing 101. you're just not using them right. learn and get over it.

ok, i saw writers getting shit about this on TikTok months ago, and it already pissed me off then. there is no one way of quoting things, and its so narrow-minded to think so.

Let's do a lil exercise shall we

[below cut] Here's the first page of The Godfather by Mario Puzo, published in four languages - English, Dutch, Polish and French.

Let's find the differences:

In the English edition, the dialogue is written between "double quotations"

In Dutch, it's 'singular'.

— Polish uses em-dashes.

And in French spoken words are between «guillemets»

Isn't that fucking fun? I speak, write and read in 3 of these languages, so I grew up with all that. So did plenty of other people around the world because these differences aren't just per one country. If one way speaks more to you than the other because that's what you know? then go for it. These are all perfectly fine and normal ways to write and I'm sure there are even more out there that I'm not aware of.

But yes, you're right, I am writing in English, and I do study it, so I should learn how to use quotations properly, shouldn't I 🥺. Well, let's see some of the books I had to read this year.

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby:

Oh damn. Uses 'single quotes'.

Spring by Ali Smith:

Uses — and then doesn't even use quotations??? Just speaker indicators??? Yeah. you can even switch styles mid-novel because who cares.

But it gets better. As an example, here's a page from Sally Rooney's Normal People:

Rooney said fuck yall quotations. You can figure it out yourself.

Are some easier to read than others? Sure. But they're not fucking wrong either.

[dan6085]

Determining the "top" movies of all time can be subjective and vary based on personal preferences and critical opinions. However, here is a list of 20 widely acclaimed movies, each with a brief description:

1. **Citizen Kane (1941):** Directed by Orson Welles, this film is often regarded as one of the greatest in cinema history, exploring the life of a wealthy newspaper magnate.

2. **The Godfather (1972):** Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, it's a crime epic chronicling the Corleone crime family, based on the novel by Mario Puzo.

3. **The Shawshank Redemption (1994):** Directed by Frank Darabont, it follows the story of a banker who is sentenced to life in Shawshank State Penitentiary and forms a strong bond with a fellow inmate.

4. **Pulp Fiction (1994):** Directed by Quentin Tarantino, this film weaves interconnected stories of crime, violence, and redemption in a non-linear narrative.

5. **Schindler's List (1993):** Directed by Steven Spielberg, it tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved the lives of more than a thousand Polish-Jewish refugees during the Holocaust.

6. **Casablanca (1942):** Directed by Michael Curtiz, this classic romantic drama set during World War II stars Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and is known for its memorable quotes and iconic scenes.

7. **Gone with the Wind (1939):** Directed by Victor Fleming, this epic historical romance film is set against the backdrop of the American Civil War and Reconstruction era.

8. **Lawrence of Arabia (1962):** Directed by David Lean, it portrays the World War I experiences of T.E. Lawrence in the Arabian Peninsula.

9. **The Wizard of Oz (1939):** Directed by Victor Fleming, it's a musical fantasy film based on L. Frank Baum's novel, following the adventures of Dorothy in the magical land of Oz.

10. **The Godfather Part II (1974):** Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, this sequel further explores the Corleone family saga, juxtaposing the story with the rise of patriarch Vito Corleone.

11. **One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975):** Directed by Milos Forman, it depicts life inside a mental institution and stars Jack Nicholson as a patient who rebels against the oppressive nurse.

12. **Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977):** Directed by George Lucas, it's the first installment in the original Star Wars trilogy, introducing iconic characters and a galaxy far, far away.

13. **Seven Samurai (1954):** Directed by Akira Kurosawa, this Japanese epic follows a group of samurai warriors defending a village from bandits, exploring themes of honor and sacrifice.

14. **Apocalypse Now (1979):** Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, it's a war film set during the Vietnam War, loosely based on Joseph Conrad's novella "Heart of Darkness."

15. **The Matrix (1999):** Directed by the Wachowski siblings, this science fiction film explores the concept of reality and artificial intelligence in a dystopian future.

16. **Schindler's List (1993):** Directed by Steven Spielberg, it tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved the lives of more than a thousand Polish-Jewish refugees during the Holocaust.

17. **The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003):** Directed by Peter Jackson, it's the final installment in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, based on J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy novel.

18. **Raging Bull (1980):** Directed by Martin Scorsese, it's a biographical film about the life of boxer Jake LaMotta, starring Robert De Niro in an Academy Award-winning role.

19. **Goodfellas (1990):** Directed by Martin Scorsese, it's a crime film based on the life of mobster Henry Hill and his involvement with the Italian-American mafia in New York City.

20. **Forrest Gump (1994):** Directed by Robert Zemeckis, it follows the life of a man with low intelligence (played by Tom Hanks) who unwittingly influences several defining historical events in the 20th century United States.

These movies have received critical acclaim for their storytelling, direction, performances, and impact on cinema.

[authenticjust]

Red dragon

#RED DRAGON MOVIE#

#RED DRAGON SERIAL#

#RED DRAGON FULL#

I think Anthony Hopkins has established his superiority as Hannibal Lecter.Īs mentioned in the subject line would love it if this book was re-recorded with a more skilled narrator.

#RED DRAGON MOVIE#

It was if the narrator wasn't really sure how he wanted to approach the performance.Ĭould you see Red Dragon being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be? And he failed miserably at any attempts at southern accents. Though the narrator has a good voice for audible books he failed to give each character some definition in order to tell when each character was speaking or if they were actually speaking out loud, or voicing a thought in their head. How did the narrator detract from the book? I would be hard pressed to recommend the audible version due to the narration. I would probably recommend the print version to a friend. Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not? Would love to see (hear) this book re-recorded Unfortunately, I feel Harris completely lost his way after those two novels. If you've never read either Red Dragon or Silence of the Lambs, you're in for a real treat. The narrator has a professional voice, but I found it to be soulless. Yet through it all we are introduced to the real FBI, efficient, brave, persistent and genius. The element of terror this book induces is like no other book I have ever read, except perhaps, Silence of the Lambs. There is a overwhelmingly human aspect to the monstrous violonce he reigns on his victims. But like Silence of the Lambs, the killer is not some evil genius, but rather a severely abused, mentally ill man convinced he is beoming something that will overcome the world. Of course it introduces Hannible to the world, adding dark humor into a very serious manhunt. It was the first book I ever read that highlighted the brilliance of the FBI, rather than making them out to be egotistical boobs. It was that quote that persuaded be to purchase the paperpack some 30 odd years ago. Stephen King claimed Red Dragon the best American novel since The Godfather. I am off to listen to Silence of the Lambs. This READER is especially good and his excellent VOICE and story come together for a 5 STAR audio book that is first rate. WE tie The RED DRAGON who we find has a very abused child hood and we understand how a MONSTER CAN BE CREATED. the details of both the crimes and solving it keep you glued from the begining. WE go inside the mind of Will Graham the agent left barely alive by Lecter after his capture. The Red Dragon is busy communicating with Hannibal Lecter and is a FAN. ADDED fun is a cheap sheet reporter for the National Tattler used by both the Tooth Fairy and Will Graham. Now Will Graham is busy discovering clues to help "prevent" the death of a third family.

#RED DRAGON FULL#

having killed 2 families ~ HOW DID HE CHOOSE HIS VICTIMS? The Red Dragon aka the Tooth Fairy carefully chooses his victims by a clever means and stalks on the full moon.

#RED DRAGON SERIAL#

He is drawn back into service when the "Tooth Fairy" a serial killer who bites his victims. PLOT: 2 Families are killed and slaughter by the same serial killer~ how DOES he find his victims?~ Will Graham is the "FBI agent" who helped capture Hannibal the cannibal~ is retired in Florida. SERIAL Killer ~ how does he choose his victims?

[thatscarletflycatcher]

What's your opinion on Andrew Davies's fixation on the Mr. Knightley-Emma age gap (through Mr. Knightley's repeated comments about holding Emma when she was a baby) vs. his apparent lack of interest in dealing with the Col. Brandon-Marianne age gap? Why does he want us to think Mr. Knightley is creepy but Brandon isn't?

Oh, anon, I'm gonna answer you and then digress terribly, forgive me, but ITV's Emma is one of my favorite Emma adaptations and it's very interesting that way (and unlike S&S 08, we have a making of book!).

The main reason, IMO, is that I don't think Andy cared about S&S as a story at all. It is true that the quality of his screenplays has decayed with time too, but this one gives me a lot of "I don't care about this" vibes. He did care more about P&P, but I think Emma was the one he had OpinionsTM on. S&S was a paycheck and as it is a novel that has a lot of leeway for adaptational choices, he just Davies-ized Brandon and Edward into his vision of idealized masculinity and called it a day.

You can tell by just watching ITV's Emma that there were things he wanted to make plain, like his interest in putting the class divide, the poor and the servants at the forefront. It's the only adaptation you can tell that Robert Martin resents Emma and doesn't forget what she did. Even if it is a couple silent shots, he's given awareness and as much agency as his position allows him.

Reading the companion book this becomes even more evident because he says a lot of things about the characters, and some of them are surprising. For example he says that Emma wants to be "the artist" and "God and move the pieces around the board" and that he pities her because she never goes far from home and ends up marrying one of the three guys she met in her life. He thinks Jane is a passionate creature repressed by circumstances (he sees a hint to this in her musical talent and preference for Italian music). But also Andy HATES Frank Churchill. I need to quote this because it's something:

"Frank Churchill is both disturbed and dangerous in my view. His mother went and died on him and his father handed him over to his aunt, who has treated him appallingly, so he really has it in for women. He plays to them. I think he's a clever, dangerous mysoginistic charmer --dangerous because he's taken the trouble to work out how girl's minds work. He treats Emma badly, but he treats Jane worse because he is terrified of Jane's power over him. He just has to be in control of the game." In the harvest fest the comment about Frank is "He will flirt with other women, he will probably make love to a lot of other women, he will parade it, he will confess, he will expect to be forgiven, he will make her life a mysery."

Make of that what you will XD

But when it comes to Knightley... his opinion of the character is overwhelmingly positive: "I thought it would be nice to think of Knightley as a person whose authority was so secure that he could roll up his sleeves and join in with the men". He writes him as someone that is kind and attentive to everyone, and the one to offer some sort of bridging to the social gap with the harvest fest: "we show Knightley as an ideal old-fashioned landowner who wanted to share and celebrate with his tenants. I hoped this would form a nice contrast with the Eltons" "The Georgians depended quite a lot on the Knightleys of this world, though few were probably as enlightened as he was." In the screenplay he's first described as "vigorous, animated, decisive". We are told that "Emma smiles most of the time he's here. He cheers her up, she likes his sense of humour and his forceful manner. But apart from that, it's an odd sort of relationship. He's a bit like a much older brother, a bit like an uncle, a bit like a godfather, a bit a father figure." But also a few scenes later his heart melts when he sees her carrying little Emma and she's presented as looking like a young mother. "He always likes to hear Emma sing and to admire her appearance". at Box Hill "he can't bear her to let herself down like this". There is no judgement in either the book or the screenplay about the age gap or the cringy exchange during the proposal scene. And the only reason I can find for that is the disturbing notion that to Andy that's spicy and kinky rather than disturbing. I'd love to hear if someone else has a better theory.

Still, there's quite a bit about this version of Knightley that I think is very clever and interesting and that has its repercusions in Emma 2009 and 2020. But that's topic for another post.

[maxwell-grant]

Is it weird that your article on the Grand Guignol (sp?) made me think of that Peter Chushing quote about how, he doesn't think of the films he's famous for as horror, but rather as fantasy, and that he tends to see crime and war movies as more deserving of the moniker?

Strangely, I wasn't aware of this before, so I'm pasting some of the quotes he's had to say on this below so others can read them in full as well:

“It isn’t that I object to it. I just feel it’s the wrong adjective as applied to the films I do. Because horror to me is, say, a film like The Godfather. Or anything to do with war, which is real and can happen, and unfortunately, no doubt, will happen again some time. But the films that dear Christopher Lee and I do are really fantasy. And I think fantasy is a better adjective to use. I don’t object to the term horror, it’s just the wrong adjective!”

“I don’t really care for the adjective “horror”. I think the films are fantasy as much as anything. Horror is concentration camps, war, murder, real things. It’s car accidents and plane crashes.”

[regarding the fan mail he was getting] “What they say in their letters is that the horror films of today, they repel you and you’re sickened. And the Hammer ones that we did make you shiver and shake and cuddle each other to feel comforted, but they never repelled.

And that is, I think, frightfully interesting coming from young people who must be so immune now to seeing these terrible things on the news – football fights and Ireland and South Africa – it’s just dreadful, isn’t it. One has become so used to that as part of everyday life that I think watching a Dracula picture made 25 years ago must be rather like watching Noddy in Toyland.”

I think this is an interesting example of how sometimes opposite truths can exist at the same time. I have questioned myself quite a bit on just how much "horror" does a fantasy narrative need to have before it changes it's genre label from "fantasy" to "horror". And I've come to learn a lot recently just how fluid, ambiguous and debatable the very concept of "genre" is and how it's hardly even consistent within itself globally or historically.

On one hand, obviously the films Mr Cushing's been a part of are called horror films because they are part of the horror genre as it's been defined, and I don't think anyone's going to stop calling Dracula a horror story anytime soon, and of course horror and fantasy are not mutually exclusives. A horror story doesn't stop being a horror story just because you are not affected by what it's depicting, just as a comedy doesn't stop being a comedy because you don't find it funny. Mary and Max and Texas Chainsaw Massacre are two incredibly different movies that both shook me deeply on a first watch, and Mary and Max's material affected me much more deeply, but that doesn't mean I'm going to call it a horror film even if it did horrify me much more than Texas Chainsaw (Mary and Max is a genuinely incredible film, to be clear, but I never want to see it again)

But on the other hand, horror is a catch-all label that frays and tears at the seams the more you look at it, and he's right that the label in itself is just an adjective often tacked to pretty straightforward fantasy stories that happen to revolve around monsters and murderers and whatnot. And he's absolutely right that there's a world of difference between horror in fiction through fantasy, and horror in fiction through depictions of real, stark things we can call "horrors", and that this separation is incredibly important.

I'm thinking back to Bogleech's review of It: Chapter Two where he briefly touched on why the film's usage of homophobia for a scare was crude and misguided and tonally at odds with what the rest of the film, and the horror genre, strives for:

Some people with innocent enough intention will say that the shock and horror of the sequence is a good thing; that the audience should be disgusted by what they see happen here, which is certainly true. They might also point out that being horrified is exactly what you pay for when you go to see a horror movie, and that the scene gives context to the nature of a town possessed by pure evil.

There is, however, a very big difference between a spooky, imaginary boogiemonster and a regular, realistic hate crime. The boogiemonster is an entertaining, exciting kind of horror because it isn't real. The hate crime is something that could really happen to someone walking in and out of that same movie theater that same night, which is not the fun, entertaining or cool kind of scary. Killing off gay people is also nothing new to the horror genre at all, and there's a point at which it stops feeling like a social message and starts feeling more like a cheap prop, like the dog or cat you know is only present so we'll get to see how mean the villain really is.

Don't get me wrong, there have been horror narratives that explored the subject of hatred quite well, but it ISN'T ever explored any further here. In fact, it's never mentioned again and leaves no impact on the storyline other than the fact that it is how Mike discovers that IT has returned. Almost anything could have served this purpose, and the scene is even stripped of additional context and relevance it had in the novel. Ultimately, it just feels poorly handled, overshadows the rest of the film's horror, and didn't do much to really move the narrative forward.

And I can speak from experience that I've definitely seen and met way too often people who don't quite know how to tell the difference and it shows, it really shows in a way that doesn't just cheapens the works they are making but also makes them more, I guess the word I'd use is "childish", like it's coming from a deep lack of understanding or reference point or even a desire to further understand what exactly the things being depicted are or why they are terrible or why they affect people so deeply, the kind of stuff that, if you've lived through or seen or bonded with people who've been through them, kinda bleeds through your art even when you don't intentionally set out to portray them.

And to an extent I think that's where Peter Cushing's coming from, as someone who did indeed experience great horror and tragedy, who lived through the Great Depression and both World Wars and the Korean War and lost the love of his life when he was 48, and made a career playing villains, of course he's gonna look at the word "horror" applied to what he's doing and think that it's not at all horror, that's not what horror looks like to him.

But, to an extent, that's also a big part of what horror is supposed to do in the first place, as a distraction from the horrors of reality, a mirror upon said horrors, and an outlet for the experiencing of emotions attached to tragedy and horror, but nobody's getting hurt and you can get something out of it without having to live through it. It's a deeply, deeply important thing regardless of what you call it.

And I'm starting to wonder if, in the future, labels like "horror", "fantasy", "pulp" and "superhero" aren't going to fray and lose meaning further and further until we have to start coming up with new ones to retroactively define history through, something we already do, and even myself am guilty of.

So I guess it's not impossible that Cushing's going to have been ultimately right in his assessment.

[simonettastefanelli]

“He walked with her up the hill, her mother close behind them. But it was impossible for the two young people to keep their bodies from brushing against each other and once Apollonia stumbled and fell against him so that he had to hold her and her body so warm and alive in his hands started a deep wave of blood rising in his body. They could not see the mother behind them smiling because her daughter was a mountain goat and had not stumbled on this path since she was an infant in diapers. And smiling because this was the only way this young man was going to get his hands on her daughter until the marriage.”

[grandhotelabyss]

Above is J. G. Ballard’s review of Dune, as discovered recently by Twitter user 0x_flaneur. I quote it climactically in my own essay on Frank Herbert’s epochal science fiction novel. While I think Ballard—who preferred inner space to outer space as the proper topos of science fiction—captures a genuine literary flaw not so much in Dune but in the kind of novel that it is, I also enjoyed Dune more than he did, got swept up in the epic sandstorm, as it were. Here’s one of the hotter parts of my essay, on the novel’s controversial politics:

At this moment in the essay, I am supposed to denounce Herbert righteously for his “cultural appropriation,” since his Fremen are a melange (if you will) of existing cultures, histories, and languages, mainly Arabic and Native American. But the idea that culture is “owned” is itself only coherent if we accept the dubious reduction of culture to ethnos. I don’t find Herbert’s Orientalism any more—or, more to the point, any less—ethically and politically questionable than Puzo’s conscious exotification of his “own” Italian milieu. And how different is Dune, really, from the major multicultural novels of the subsequent two decades in American literature, such as Mumbo Jumbo, Ceremony, Song of Solomon, Love Medicine, or The Joy Luck Club? It’s nearly the same story in each case—redemption through a return to some more rooted way of life—and in each case, the more relevant political issue, whatever the “race” of the author, is that we find middle-class artist-intellectuals bored and disgusted with the contemporary and offering us a highly aestheticized “ethnic” substitute in novel form.

I enjoy reading such stories as much as anybody else, but I also think it’s a doubtful gambit, both when the ethnicities of author and character don’t align and when they do. Herbert’s many cautions throughout the novel that we are reading a tragedy and not a heroic epic honorably offset the atavist tendency, as do the sophisticated and more exquisitely literary metafictions of Reed, Silko, Morrison, et al. No great novel, nor even a very good one, can pose for long as the untrammeled expression of what Herbert calls “race consciousness,” because great art is the product of the individual imagination, not some organic collective.

Please read the whole thing over at my main site.

P. S. I didn’t have room, nor did I think it was necessarily interesting to the general reader, to include the following idea in my piece. I wondered as I read Dune if one narrative technique of popular fiction—Puzo uses it too in The Godfather—should be welcomed back into the literary novel. Many popular authors claim the old Tolstoyan freedom of omniscience, allowing us to overhear what each character is thinking in each scene; while we heirs to modernism have been languishing for over a century in the toils of the Jamesian commandment that point of view must be strictly controlled, that only one character should be allowed to think at once, a technique that has since decayed into the mannerism of free indirect discourse and which today’s authors seek to escape only by resorting to the first person. (Amusingly, there is a formal corollary in comics, with Alan Moore and Frank Miller having killed off the thought balloon with their innovative narrative captions just as surely as James killed off novelistic omniscience.) I remember a decade ago when a reviewer of David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet complained that the novel was not literary because Mitchell reports characters’ thoughts in italics, just as in airport paperback novels; except that airport paperback novels aren’t haiku-styled like the prose in what may alas have been Mitchell’s last good book, which tells me that using such a technique need not mean abandoning high formal ambition. In sum, maybe it is time for us to reclaim these old narrative freedoms; and if we need modernist precedents—I often feel I do—then we can reread Mrs. Dalloway and Light in August.

[acrossthewavesoftime]

Hi, so I've been looking through your blog and want to clarify: you enjoy the history of the Graves family (not fiction)? Can I ask why and how??

Personally, I did a similar thing when I had to write a 75 page fiction piece for my literature class and wrote it about the 7th captain of the USS _Constitution_ Isaac Hull during the War of 1812. There was a TON of drama between him and (self proclaimed) Commodore William Bainbridge.

(also history is just cool in general, I fired a 3 pounder light infantry cannon with the Royal Artillery in New Hampshire last Sunday)

Hi there!

Of course you can, questions are always welcome! It's a somewhat wild ride, so please buckle up. :-)

The Graves were indeed all real people on whom I do some research in my spare time. That said, my interest in them started with a work of fiction: Once upon a time, someone recommended TURN: Washington's Spies (2014-2017) to me, and I started researching the history behind the series.

I don't know if you're familiar with the series, so I'll just sum it up briefly as an essentially a largely fictionalised, dramatised story built around a real-life spy ring during the American Revolutionary War. The main villain on the show was a fellow called John Graves Simcoe, who was at one point my main reason to continue watching- I tend to have a soft spot for the particularly badly-written, hilariously over-the-top villains.

TURN's Simcoe treating the Geneva Conventions like a personal bucket list got me to research him; after all, the man can't have been that bad in real life, right?

And turns out, he wasn't. In fact, I was soon surprised how much info was out there, and how much I was able to learn about the show character's historical counterpart- who was the exact opposite of the, to quote from the show "cold, murdering bastard" on screen.

Via John Graves Simcoe, I quickly fell into a rabbit hole (or rather, a rabbit hole system the size and extent of the Paris Catacombs) and researched the entire extended family.

The more I learned, the more my interest focussed on his godfather Samuel Graves and the latter's second wife, Margaret. Having taken a look at my blog, I guess you've already read a couple of my posts about them and the family they built for themselves. Margaret and Samuel are each fascinating in their own right; outwardly, they were the model Georgian couple, but upon closer inspection, they were rather unconventional for the time.

At this point, where I know Samuel's niece's favourite jam flavour, his godson's pets' names and have collected all sorts of information on them, they've just become a fascinating research interest.

(via imgflip)

Haha, I wish my assignments would have been that much fun! Since I do love myself a good naval novel (as evidenced by some of my other posts), have you shared your work anywhere for public consumption?

And that's so cool! I'm not a re-enactor, but have always been curious about the hobby. May you always have dry, rain-, hail- and snow-less weekends on campaign! :-)

[hekatepoetryxxwriting]

How is the transgression of boundaries explored in ‘The Bloody Chambers & Other Stories’ by Angela Carter and ‘Carmilla’ by J. Sheridan Le Fanu?

In ‘Carmilla’ by J. Sheridan Le Fanu and ‘The Bloody Chambers & Other Stories’ by Angela Carter, the idea of female oppression being thwarted by the women’s self-awareness of their sexuality and their ability to use it as a form of power is explored through various boundary transgressions in both novels. ‘Carmilla’ be Le Fanu was influenced by real life Countess Elizabeth Bathory and was the predecessor to Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’. ‘Carmilla’ is also referenced in Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Bloody Chambers’ (it is the name given to one of the Marquis’ previous wives), thus linking the two novels together.

In another one of Carter’s stories, ‘The Company of Wolves’, there is a transgression of gender roles regarding the girl in the story. In the Gothic genre, women usually fall into three types: The Trembling Victim, The Femme Fatale, and The Crone. However, the child in this story is none of these, and displays strength that defies the stereotypes in her confrontation with the werewolf as seen when she ‘burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat’[1], which is itself is sexual symbolism that makes the ‘meat’ a metaphor for the sexual objectification of women’s bodies, which she rejects by laughing. Her laughter is also a mockery of the patriarchal expectation of submissiveness that men believe all women possess. It suggests that the girl is aware of the power her sexuality carries, much like a femme fatale. The same could also be said for ‘Carmilla’, where Laura’s father ‘won’t consent to you leaving us’[2]even though he has no familial ties to Carmilla. In both stories, the fathers seem to be in a superior position within the family, and evidence of this can be found not only in that quote from ‘Carmilla’, but also from the line ‘Her father might forbid her’[3]in ‘The Company of Wolves’. The verb ‘forbid’suggests that he hold powers over his daughter and is able to control her actions. This is a reflection of the patriarchal family systems which were in place up until the late 1970s, when men were considered the breadwinners. Angela Carter, a feminist, was part of the movement that broke down those family systems; Carroll Davids referred to this in her review of Angela Carter; “Angela Carter’s portrayal of husbands and fathers not only reflects the ideals of her time, but also contradicts them on occasion with the femininity of the men.”[4]

There is also a transgression of gender through the empowerment of female characters in ‘Carmilla’ and ‘The Werewolf’. In both of these texts, the female character succeeds through her own means, rather than relying on a man to support her. In ‘Carmilla’, it is through death that Carmilla is able to gain power. This idea is strengthened through Laura’s speech to Carmilla in Chapter 4, where she asserts that ‘Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes’[5]. The use of this metaphor suggests that girls are only free of the constraints that surround women when they have died, a suggestion that is supported by Colleen Damman’s analysis of the novel “as a woman, Carmilla can only claim her sexuality after death. Thus, vampirism is the only way she can express her own carnal desires. Besides marriage, becoming a vampire is one of the only ways that female sexuality is licensed in the Victorian era”[6]. Meanwhile, in ‘The Werewolf’, the child represents the New Woman and is pitted against her grandmother, who represents the generation of women who have fallen under the thumb of a patriarchal society. The final line states ‘Now the child lived in her grandmother’s house; she prospered.’[7]which implies that the child benefits from the downfall of the previous generation and is able to live happily without a husband or children. This conclusion suggests that women can live complete and fulfilled lives without needing to be married. Angela Carter’s feminist views on empowerment were controversial during her lifetime, including negative reviews for her book ‘The Sadeian Woman’ due to its defence of the Marquis de Sade, who wrote violent erotic novels that many consider sexist and inspired the word ‘sadism’. In regards to the empowerment in ‘Carmilla’, Elizabeth Signorotti states that “Le Fanu allows Laura and Carmilla to usurp male authority and to bestow themselves on whom they please, completely excluding male participation in the exchange of women”[8].

The inclusion of the female ‘Monster’ in ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ and ‘Carmilla’ also transgresses the boundaries placed around gender and the roles women play in society. The Countess is a vampire, much like Carmilla, and bears similarities to Elizabeth Bathory, the acclaimed ‘Blood Countess' who was rumoured to be a relation of Vlad the Impaler. The Countess in Carter’s tale embodies the idea of a Gothic Femme Fatale through the description ‘Everything about this beautiful and ghastly lady is as it should be, queen of night, queen of terror’[9]- the repetition of ‘queen’ places emphasis upon her position within the story. She is the highest authority within the text, being the queen, and is not subject to male dominance. In ‘Carmilla’, the monster is humanised at its death by Laura ‘a sharp stake was driven through the heart of the vampire, who uttered a piercing shriek at the moment, in all respects such as might escape from a living person in the last agony.’[10]and a simile is used to liken the monster’s pain to that of a human’s, implying that Carmilla is not actually that different from human beings. It seems that Le Fanu, like Carter, is suggesting that women who are free from male dominated societies are not monsters but are in fact just as human as everyone else. Le Fanu’s decision to focus on a female vampire may have been influenced by the legends he would have known growing up, namely the stories of the Leanan Sidhe and the Dearg-Due. These myths revolved around female vampiric creatures that preyed upon Irish youths and left a lasting effect on the victims even after the creature’s death (Laura never fully recovers from the effect of Carmilla, and often imagines she will return.). A connection between Le Fanu and the myths of the Leanan Sidhe and the Dearg-Due can be made as his mother read Irish folk tales to him when he was a child.

The continued transgression of gender moves onto the reversal of gender roles in ‘The Erl King’ and ‘Carmilla’. In ‘The Erl King’, the titular character defies the stereotypical role of men in literature as it states that ‘He is an excellent housewife.’ -[11]Carter ironically using the feminine spousal term for him. Aside from this, he has long hair he frequently combs and he takes part in activities that were frequently considered feminine, such as cooking, basket weaving and collecting flowers. Carter may have taken elements from the traditional Pagan god ‘The Green Man’ and his myth; he completed a loop in which he would conceive a child with ‘The Goddess’, die, and then be reborn as the child he created. Certainly, the Erl King is similar in appearance, as well as the narrator of the story stating ‘I would lodge inside your body and you would bear me’[12]. This is a metaphorical reference to birth, something only females are capable of, which juxtaposes the idea of the Erl King birthing the narrator. ‘Carmilla’ does the opposite, as Le Fanu gives Carmilla masculine qualities, the most obvious being her inhuman strength ‘and unscathed, caught him in her tiny grasp by the wrist.’[13]The use of the adjective ‘tiny’juxtaposes the power Carmilla is able to demonstrate. Moreover, a less obvious trait of masculinity is Carmilla’s lesbianism which was , in Le Fanu’s time, sinful in Ireland, and sexual desire for women would have only been acceptable from men. The inclusion of homoerotic features in ‘Carmilla’ points towards Le Fanu’s possibly relaxed view of homosexuality, as pointed out by Christy Byks, who states “Le Fanu, one of the godfathers of Gothic, appears to draw upon features that women would not have been given during his era, and his writing of Carmilla and her inability to fit in with most female Gothic characters would likely have been a topic of controversy within Ireland, a country ruled by religion.”[14]. This idea is supported by the introduction of Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’, which takes many ideas from ‘Carmilla’. Many literary theorists suggest that Bram Stoker wrote ‘Dracula’ as an answer to the female centric ‘Carmilla’, choosing to re-focus the story upon men, with women being forced back into smaller, weaker roles.

Further transgressions of boundaries, including the transgression of religious boundaries, can be viewed in ‘The Company of Wolves’. This story mocks religion through an intrusive narrator who informs you ‘you can hurl your Bible at him and your apron after, granny… and all the angels in heaven to protect you but it won’t do you any good.’[15]This is the intruding narrator mocking the two key aspects that Carter believed held women back, that being the ‘Bible’and the ‘apron’, which is a not just a symbol of stereotypical femininity; a feminist literary study showed that almost every female character in a fairy-tale wears an apron, referencing their roles as the housewife. seems to be Carter herself, who openly stated that she thinks “Mother Goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.”[16]Rather similarly, in ‘Carmilla’, Le Fanu presents Carmilla’s aversion to religion, and portrays a fight between Carmilla and Laura’s father, which could represent an argument about nature versus God. Carmilla speaks against Christianity ‘”Creator! _Nature! _” said the young lady in answer to my gentle father. “And this disease that invades the country… and under the earth, act and live as Nature ordains? I think so”’[17]. The caesura used between the words ‘creator’and ‘nature’ not only symbolises her anger, but in placing a caesura here, Le Fanu separates God from Nature, and therefore denies religion the claim of creating everything. This scene contrasts with Le Fanu’s own background, whose father brought up the entire household with strong Catholic beliefs.

This questioning of religion perhaps suggests why there is also a transgression of moral boundaries in both texts. The ‘Trembling Victims’ within ‘Carmilla’ and ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ are Laura and the Soldier. Both texts include a similar juxtaposition of feelings towards the ‘monster’. In ‘Carmilla’, Laura portrays the Gothic feature of ‘The Uncanny, in people’s reaction to her; “but there was also something of repulsion. In this ambiguous feeling, however, the sense of attraction immensely prevailed.’[18]This shows that Laura subconsciously knows that something is wrong with Carmilla, because like most Victorians of the time, she reflects the belief that the appearance of a person was an indicator of their moral standing. Carter’s ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ has a similar scene in which ‘Her huge dark eyes almost broke his heart with their waiflike, lost look; yet he was disturbed, almost repelled, by her extraordinarily fleshy mouth’[19]The descriptive imagery and modified noun phrases work to emphasise the Countess’ appearance and how the soldier is affected by this, and it also represents the notion of the ‘Male Gaze’, the theory presented by Laura Mulvey, that women are either sexual objects there to satisfy men, or the housewife. The two notions are represented in the Gothic genre as the Femme Fatale and the Trembling Victim, and the Countess in ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ has facial features that are stereotypical of both women. Her ‘huge dark eyes’ and ‘waiflike, lost look’ are used often in the description of innocence, whilst her ‘extraordinarily fleshy mouth’ is a sign of sexualisation. Freud’s theory of ‘The Madonna and the Whore’ also comes into play here, as the Countess and Carmilla both bear qualities (both physically and metaphorically) of innocence and sexuality. The presentation of the soldier as a Trembling Victim links with Angela Carter’s view that not only should women become more masculine, but that men should also embrace femininity.

Laura in ‘Carmilla’ transgresses the sexual boundaries placed around her by choosing to refuse medical treatment from her father and the doctor. In doing so, she rejects the idea of curing her illness, which is a metaphor for lesbianism, and becomes free to make her own decisions in regards to her body. She takes on the dominant role in saying ‘I would not admit that I was ill, I would not consent to tell my papa, or to have the doctor sent for’[20]by making her own decisions regarding her wellbeing. The first-person pronoun ‘I’ is used so that the readers understand that Laura is the sole maker of these decisions. Through this illness, she has been able to gain freedom from her father. According to Christy Byks, Laura’s illness is a visualisation of what Victorian’s believed homosexuality was: a disease that needed to be cured. Byks says “Two ideas are at work in this passage. First is Laura’s father’s attempt to control the women who are becoming “ill” and dying; the men want to “cure” her (Laura) by making her well and keeping her among the living, for it is in death that the women break free… By making these interactions with Carmilla a medical problem, the situation can be contained and defined, thus still under the control of men”[21]. Angela Carter also provides transgressions of sexuality when placing women in the dominant position. In ‘The Company of Wolves’, it is the girl who makes the first move towards sexual intercourse, as suggested by the removal of her clothes in the extract ‘The thin muslin went flaring up the chimney like a magic bird and now came off her skirt, her woollen stockings, her shoes, and on to the fire they went, too, and were gone for good[22]’. A simile is used to present the girl’s clothes as a ‘magic bird’, and this personification of her clothing suggests that by removing her clothing, the girl, like a bird, is free to go wherever she wants to. The use of listing used within this quote also suggests that layers are being removed, eventually revealing the girl’s real desires beneath. Angela Carter herself believed that women were not given an equal role in sex, as stated in her book ‘The Sadeian Woman: The Ideology of Pornography’. In her comparison of Justine and Juliette, she states “Women do not normally fuck in the active sense. They are fucked in the passive tense and hence automatically fucked-up, done over, undone.”[23]and it is clear that this idea of a preference of submissive women over dominant ones had a large influence on how Angela Carter shaped her female protagonists and their attitudes to sexual desire, especially in regards to ‘Wolf-Alice’, who’s title character, like the Marquis De Sade’s Justine and Juliette, was originally housed in a convent after being found with the wolves.

The portrayal of the convent in ‘Wolf-Alice’ itself does not conform to the traditional view of religion, and instead transgresses religious boundaries by presenting the nuns not as kind, helpful religious figures, but instead as oppressive matriarchs; the nuns’ only purpose in the story is to attempt to integrate Wolf-Alice into the human society they live in, evidenced when ‘The nuns poured water over her, poked her with sticks to rouse her’[24]and ‘Therefore, without a qualm, this nine days’ wonder and continuing embarrassment of a child was delivered over to the bereft and unsanctified household of the Duke’[25]. When they find they are unable to manipulate her into becoming like everyone else, their choice is to pass her off to a male figure instead, whose house is described as ‘bereft and unsanctified[26]’, which is ironic, as it means the nuns, extremely religious beings, abandon their ward in a house that is considered unholy. This irony serves the purpose of being a metaphor for how society treats outcasts as whole, by isolating them from those considered normal. Angela Carter herself believed religion to be mythical, and stated “I’m interested in myths because they are extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree”.[27]The second transgression of religious boundaries in ‘Carmilla’ is during the funeral scene where Carmilla states ‘Besides, how can you tell your religion and mine are the same… everyone_must die; and all are happier when they do.’[28]and uses a caesura, perhaps to indicate the way she views life. The use of ‘Why you must die--_everyone_must die’[29]indicates how short life is, and the suddenness of death is reflected in the caesuras. Furthermore, the use of ‘your religion and mine’ seperates the two, and conflicts with Victorian ideas of religion. Christianity was considered the one true religion, and therefore Carmilla suggesting she followed another religion would have been heresy. As well as this, her pain at hearing religious hymns in the line ‘”There! That comes of strangling people with hymns!”’[30]presents the idea of a supernatural aversion to religion and foreshadows the reveal of Carmilla’s vampiric nature.

In conclusion, the varied transgressions presented within the two novels provide solid evidence of both authors’ awareness of the problems that are faced by females within traditional literary roles, and both Carter and Le Fanu are able to present their arguments using a variation of language features and characters whilst managing to keep a strong theme of female sexuality at the forefront of their stories.

[1]‘The Bloody Chambers & Other Stories’ by Angela Carter [2]‘Carmilla’ by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [3]‘The Bloody Chambers & Other Stories’ by Angela Carter [4]Carroll Davids on: How Does Angela Carter Deconstruct Conventional And Repressive Gender Identities In The Bloody Chamber [5]‘Carmilla’ by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [6]Colleen Damman on: Women's sexual liberation from Victorian patriarchy in Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla [7]‘The Bloody Chambers & Other Stories’ by Angela Carter [8]Elizabeth Signorotti on: Repossessing the Body: Transgressive Desire in Carmilla and Dracula [9]‘The Bloody Chambers & Other Stories’ by Angela Carter [10]‘Carmilla’ by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [11]‘The Bloody Chambers & Other Stories’ by Angela Carter [12]‘The Bloody Chambers & Other Stories’ by Angela Carter [13]‘Carmilla’ by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [14]Christy Byks on: Women's sexual liberation from Victorian patriarchy in Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla [15]‘The Bloody Chambers & Other Stories’ by Angela Carter [16]‘The Sadeian Woman: The Ideology of Pornography’ by Angela Carter [17]‘Carmilla’ by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [18]‘Carmilla’ by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [19]‘The Bloody Chambers & Other Stories’ by Angela Carter [20]‘Carmilla’ by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [21]Christy Byks on: Women's sexual liberation from Victorian patriarchy in Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla [22]‘The Bloody Chambers & Other Stories’ by Angela Carter [23] ‘The Sadeian Woman: The Ideology of Pornography’ by Angela Carter [24]‘The Bloody Chambers & Other Stories’ by Angela Carter [25]‘The Bloody Chambers & Other Stories’ by Angela Carter [26]‘The Bloody Chambers & Other Stories’ by Angela Carter [27]Angela Carter on: Religion by SlideShare [28]‘Carmilla’ by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [29]‘Carmilla’ by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [30]‘Carmilla’ by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

[hp-fanfic-archive]

an introductory rec list (that no one asked for) to some of my favorite ships: wolfstar [1/10]

First fic I read for the pairing: Where Rain And Smoke Mingle by smallestbird [1k,T] It doesn't matter if they've disowned you, they're still your family. It doesn't matter how often you walk away, it still hurts. [it’s a bit dreary, but the writing style is so nice and i’m a big sucker for hurt/comfort]

Fic that really sold me on the pairing: Of Brothers and Boyfriends by Amuly [38k,E] There’s no summary on the fic, but, essentially, Remus and Sirius’s secret relationship gets found out and things get… complicated. (warning for homophobia) [My note on my ao3 bookmark pretty much sums up how I feel about this fic: Honestly one of my favorites (and one of the stories that really got me hooked on Wolfstar tbh) and I've read it at least eight times. However, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the homophobic James Potter (even though he does come around).]

Absolute favorite fic(s) for the pairing: Text Talk by merlywhirls [141k,Not Rated] Sirius is in boarding school, Remus is in hospital, and they don't know each other until Sirius texts the wrong number. (warnings for homophobia, mentions of abuse, and homophobic language) [One of the earlier fics I read and it’s always just been one of my favorites, even though it’s been 3 years since I read it for the first time.] Harry Potter and the Live Laugh Love Sign in the Basement by loudestfandomsoftheworld [24k,T] Harry spends his summer with his fugitive godfather and his former professor who is a jobless werewolf. It's probably the best summer he's ever had. [The humor, the characterizations, their relationships, it’s all so fucking perfect!!] Go East [+Podfic] by xinasvoice [84k,E] Remus has been running for a long time. Eventually, he runs into a strange castle built by a wizard and his young apprentice. The longer he stays, the more secrets he uncovers...and the less he wants to leave. This is a novel-length adventure story that loosely follows the plot of Howl's Moving Castle. It does not require knowledge of the HMC book or movie to enjoy it. [it made me laugh, it made me cry, and it’s plot is based on one of my all time favorite movies? 11/10] Of Queries and Quarantines by MoonCat457 [51k,E] LUPIN.RJ: James, WHY? POTTER.JF: Because you’re the one currently doing the job, so it makes sense that you’d be the one to train the person hired to take your place. LUPIN.RJ: No, I mean why is Monty hiring a new editor in the middle of a fucking pandemic? POTTER.JF: An old friend of mine is in a tough spot and needs a job, so of course, dad is helping him out. - - - - OR A story set in the middle of the pandemic in which Sirius is hired at the Potter’s publishing company and Remus is responsible for training him. Lots of texting, lots of video calls, lots of mutual pining, and a lot of really bad literature quotes. [i’ve largely avoided quarantine au fics, but sometimes they’re so well-written and hilarious and also a texting fic and i accidentally fall in love with them, so here we are.]

Most recent fic I’ve read for the pairing: There Is No Man, However Wise by enigmaticblue [87k,T] It’s 1988, Sirius has Harry, and possession is nine-tenths of the law. [i adore a good raising harry au and i also adore the premise of the series this is in and i also adore the writing story and characterizations. 10/10]

Favorite AU(s) I’ve read for the pairing: High School AU: Likewise Variable by ssstrychnine [28k,T] James has plans, Peter is the nurse, Sirius keeps fake blood up his sleeves, and Remus just tries to stay alive. [i first read this fic in 2017 and it still lives rent free in my mind. it’s hilarious, a perfect characterization of the marauders (even tho it’s a muggle modern high school au) and adding shakespeare? just icing on the fucking cake. it’s excellent.] University AU: Wannabe Your Lover by Maraudererasmut & shadow_prince [15k,M] Somewhere in America, Fall of 1997 - Returning to University, James refused to room with Sirius in the wake of The Great Cheez-it Battle of '96. They must adjust to living with someone new, Mr. Potter worried they'd both get scurvy, James unsuccessfully continued trying to court one Lily Evans, Snape got what was coming to him, and Sirius was the most confused of them all. [this is the university experience we all wish we had, lowkey. aside from the hilarity that comes from having the marauders in a fic, it’s just cute and well-written and i love it (and southern remus??? it’s everything i never knew i needed.] Alternate Sorting AU (Slytherin Remus): Half Agony, Half Hope by Barry_Manilows_Wardrobe [21k,E] A tale wherein Sirius Black loses 750 House Points for Gryffindor. But it’s totally worth it. [listen, if, before i read this fic, you asked me if remus could’ve been a slytherin, my answer would have been “perhaps but probably not.” now, however, yeah. 100%. it’s hilarious, it’s novel (which i love to see), but it’s still the same remus and sirius and it’s excellent.] Haunted House AU: Another Day in the Sun by REwrites [19k,T] Is it haunted? I suppose that depends on who is telling the story. [really really excellent and a little haunting (pun entirely intended). it’s romantic and sweet and a little bittersweet but i adore it.]

WIP(s) I really love for the pairing: We Were Infinite by WolfstarPups90 [336k,E] “The Marauders aren’t something that will just go away once we graduate.” James continued, taking a more serious tone and addressing not only Remus, but the fear that they all had found recently in the back of their minds about what may become of them outside the walls of Hogwarts. “We’re a family. We’ve proven that again and again, haven’t we? We’re forever. Unstoppable. We’re infinite.” The full story of The Marauders from September 1st 1971 - October 31st 1981. (Heavily centered around Wolfstar and Jily in later chapter) [the first WIP i ever read (usually i stick to completed works, but this was being pretty regularly updated when i started reading it and also it’s fucking iconic so what can i say?)] Of Leaves and Stars by irrationalmoony & LadyAmina [273k,T] Almost a year out of Hogwarts, Lily finally manages to convince Sirius and James to get more acquainted with muggle technology and buy phones. Sirius, of course, texts the wrong number. [everyone is queer! (as they well should be). also: is it complete? no. has that stopped me from reading it twice? also no.]

Favorite Series for the pairing: TransVerse by picascribit [30k,E,2 works] Canon-divergent AU in which Remus is a transgender boy instead of being a werewolf. (warnings for underage, transphobia, internalized transphobia, bullying, self-harm) [i am a trans remus stan and this series is iconic, but also heed the tags kids.]

Longest fic I’ve read for the pairing: Once in a Blue Moon by FullMoonDreams [408k,M] In a world where Remus never received his Hogwarts invitation and Sirius wasn't accepted by the Gryffindors the two lonely boys become friends. A story beginning in their first year, and continuing right through Hogwarts and beyond. RLSB. [this fic emotionally ruined me,,, but like,,, in a good way, you know? i will probably never reread it because i cried for hours the first time, but the plot does live rent free in my mind (and i do have a playlist of songs that remind me of it).]

Fic(s) with some of my favorite tropes: Matchmaking: Pining, Parchment, Plotting, and Pranks by KayBee1762 [12k,T] “Idea parchment,” James said. He unfolded it and smoothed it out. “You want to get them together, right? That’s why you came to me?” “Yeah,” Lily huffed, which was ridiculous because he was right, that’s why she came to him. But it was supposed to be her idea, because she wanted to help her dear friend Remus, not James or Sirius. But it was so nice to be able to talk about this with someone, and James looked so pleased and excited. “Good,” James said. “Good, because they need to get together, they would be so happy and so good together, and Sirius will stop sighing like a lovesick puppy and just snog him instead.” In which Lily considers changing Houses, James blushes a lot, Sirius is his usual dramatic self, Remus mopes, and Peter knew everything all along. [the marauders (especially james and lily) trying to play matchmaker is one of my favorite instances of the classic matchmaking trope.] Road Trips + Bed Sharing: Of Comets and Counter-Examples by Woldy [5k,T] If the past is a foreign country, can travel help to resolve a troubled history? Dumbledore assigns Remus and Sirius a mission to explore three European cities, or perhaps to find each other. [a lovely tale of travel, reunions, comfort, friendship, and self-rediscovery. plus, travel, bed sharing, and friends to lovers??? yeah] Matchmaking (again): In The Middle by Blossomwitch [3k,Not Rated] James is the natural confidant of both Remus and Sirius. When they both swear him to secrecy on the same topic, James is stuck watching his friends pine for each other without being able to say a word to bring them together. A lesser man might shrink from the challenge of finding a way to break his promise without breaking his promise, but not James Potter! [i already did a matchmaking trope fic i know but what can i say other than the trope fucking slaps and so does this fic.]

[antigonick]

While racist Whites [critics] enjoyed [Zora Neale] Hurston’s depictions of every Negro “who isn’t so civilized that he has lost the capacity for glory,” to quote a reviewer from the New York Herald Tribune, Alain Locke, the godfather of media suasion, demanded that Hurston stop creating “these pseudo-primitives who the reading public still loves to laugh with, weep over, and envy.” Richard Wright, drowning in all of his cultural racism, unable and unwilling to see her missives of antiracist feminism, and unable to see the politics of her love story, said the novel “carries no theme, no message, no thought.” It only exploited the “quaint” aspects of Black life. It was like a minstrel show in a book, Wright maintained, satisfying the tastes of White readers. Hurston did not need to respond to these Black male critics. “I am not tragically colored,” she had already told the world. “There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it.” But the sobbing school was selling out books. By the end of the decade, Their Eyes Were Watching God was out of print, and Hurston had to find work as a maid. Hurston was ahead of her time. When her time came in the 1970s, long after her death, and antiracist feminists rediscovered Their Eyes Were Watching God, they fittingly partook of their own self-defining love affair, like Janie. They self-defined the novel’s greatness in a literary world rejecting it, unabashedly thrusting the once-rejected novel into the conversation as one of the finest—if not the finest—American novels of all time.

Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning