#real uncommon in that era of kids movies!

[mossspond]

So glad im not the only one with Surf’s Up brainrot in this house

[selamat-linting]

related to my last reblog, i remember there was this movie that was meant to depict the torture you'll get in the afterlife. my mom and neighbors bring me to watch it at night. i dont remember it to be particularly graphic, but the screams. like, i remember this guy was whipped and beaten and he was screaming for mercy and then there was fire and then the screams got so much agonizingly loud. i was a gullible eight year old so i believed it was real instead of some dramatized recording. i was inconsolable just hearing that. and im the type of kid who never gets scared. i love my parents but they fucked up big when they told me to watch that film.

also, as a child, my parents were convinced that the apocalypse will happen in my lifetime. they dont even hide that stuff from me. even if i was taught how scary the years before the end of times was. how everyone living in those eras would probably go to hell forever because they would fall for satan's trick and suffer from the most terrifying worldwide disaster. it really fucks with my mental health. i still couldnt say anything mildly blasphemous or negative without compulsively praying for forgiveness.

and every single week trashy shows on tv would put up scary music over natural yet uncommon occurence, turning an entire generation into paranoid intellectually incurious assholes who believed the rapture is coming soon. im still not an atheist but holy fucking shit communists had a point when they say religion should be supressed by the state.

[willnicholson-french-new-wave]

Blog 5

The French new wave was truly a film movement that was before its time. In an era where the world just ended a global conflict and traditional Hollywood movies just weren't cutting it anymore, the French new wave paved the way for a new style of film to blossom. In a book by Richard Neupert, he discusses the main reasons that directors were inspired to create something new. "By the middle of the 1950s, angry young critics were using the term 'tradition of quality' to deride the mainstream output. The phrase now connoted old-fashioned costume epics out of touch with modern life." (Neupert 2007)

To me, one of the most impressive aspects of the French new wave was the way the directors had to make everything else work like the script and themes of their films as they did not have the funding that big-time studios had. In an article by Filmmaking Lifestyle, they talk about some of the experimental techniques that directors in the new wave used when they say "The films were often shot on location with non-professional actors...In addition, they often employed techniques like hand-held cameras and jump cuts – something that had not been regularly done before French New Wave."

The film that I wanted to discuss that encapsulates everything I have talked about so far is The 400 Blows. I know that it is the second time that I have talked about this film but there are so many sources out there to back up how good this film is that it is worth talking about again. It is also my favorite film of the French new wave.

In an abstract from a book by Frank McLaughlin, he discusses why the film is important to learn due to its uniqueness. "In the film, a powerful image of the terrifying isolation that the adolescent, Doinel, experiences is presented through repeated camera shots of symbolic barriers in his environment--his cramped and cluttered apartment-home, the drab decay and gloom of the inner city, the selfish preoccupation of his teacher and parents, and, finally, the immense and impersonal ocean." (1967)

I have already talked about what happens in the film so I will go more into why the film is considered to be a part of the French new wave. The first and obvious reason is that the film takes place in the time period declared the French new wave. Another example is the main character of the film Antonie. This is one of the first times where we saw a child be considered the main character instead of a side character as the story is all about his life and his journey. This was very uncommon at the time. We also see in this film how we are going through Antonie's everyday life and how there is really nothing that is outstandingly special about him. He is just a kid and we are viewing his story. We also see examples of abstract camera angles throughout the film that are a staple of the movement. Here is an example of one below where the actors are looking directly into the camera.

In the video below there is another example of the filming and camera work techniques from this film being non-traditional. In this scene we see Antonie being questioned about things he has done throughout the film. This is the same shot for 3 minutes with a couple of fade transitions. This is an example of the directors not having a budget for multiple cameras so instead they rely on the actor's ability to make this scene feel real.

Finally, I wanted to talk about one of the most discussed scenes in cinema, the final shot of this film. In this shot we see Antonie escaping and running where he eventually ends up on a beach. The shot is long and does not have many cuts. For most of it, it's just one continuous shot of him running. Then he finally reaches the beach and walks around for a little, he looks right into the camera and the film ends on a freeze frame. Here is said scene

In an article by Susannah Bragg McCullough and Julian Cornell, they discuss why the scene ends on a freeze frame and why it is important. "I love that The 400 Blows ends in a freeze frame...He’s escaped from juvie. He’s going to get caught and brought back — we’ve already seen what’s happened with the other kids, and that’s what’s happening to him eventually...Part of what’s going on in the French New Wave is reorienting the relationship between the artist and the audience – making it much more intimate, interpretive and collaborative in a way. Respecting the audience" (McCullough, Cornell)

I love this quote because it shows what the directors and the French new wave in general were trying to do. This isn't a happy Hollywood ending that audience members have been accustomed to seeing. There is no clear-cut ending to this film, just the actor looking into the camera. I also like that they made the point that this is probably not going to work out for Antonie. He is probably just going to get caught as he is on the beach and doesn't have a plan. That's what the directors of this film and other new-wave films want though. The point of these films is to be real and show that in life, some stories end with no true happy ending or one that is easy to comprehend.

Overall The 400 Blows is a great film and one of the best examples of what the French new wave was trying to do with their new and inventive films.

Sources:

The Take (Final Scene)

Princeton Film Society

The Teachers Guide to Media and Methods (book)

Filmmaking LifeStyle

A History of the French New Wave Cinema (book)

[intoxicatingimmediacy]

‘We All Die Young,’ Justice Smith, Idris Elba, Taylour Paige In Daveed Diggs-Scripted Pic On 25-Year-Old Rapper’s Midlife Crisis

What better to liven up a quite Toronto Film Market than a package for a movie set in the rap arena, that has stars and a slam dunk a top-selling soundtrack?

[...] “The film follows a rapper who reaches the ripe old age of 25, which in rap years, if you ask any of us who participate in the culture, starts to feel like you’re entering a different era,” Diggs told Deadline. “He’s had regional success but when we meet him he’s on the verge of his big crossover hit and is going to become a bona fide superstar. The life he’s leading is at odds with everything he grew up living. There is a cognitive dissonance between where you grew up and where you find yourself and you start to wonder why and how you got to this place. It’s not unique to rappers, but when you talk to these young kids who are blowing up real fast, you start to recognize this is the dilemma they deal with: how to speak to the culture they come from, living the life they’re living.

“Our character is at a place where he can’t create anymore,” said Diggs, who is the vocalist in the experimental hip hop group Clipping. “He launches onto this insane world tour, the biggest thing he’s ever been on, taking him all over the world and interacting with all kinds of new people. He can’t stop and he can’t make new music. And everyone wants new music. In order to deal with these demons he develops a Lean addiction, it’s also called Sizzurp. It’s prescription cough syrup that is often mixed with sweet soda.”

He meets a young women (Paige) who convinces him to take a breath, which puts him at odds to the owner of the record label (Elba) who raised Marcus and is his mentor.

“He stops the tour, and in the middle of the desert, builds himself a compound and tries to make the next great rap album, hoping that fixes his problems,” Diggs said. “We witness the unraveling of this very brilliant young man. Jake and I have been thinking about this a long time. We actually had a band together and when we were in Berkeley High School, Jake was my first music producer and is a big part of why I started making music. It’s an artistic mid-life crisis, like in Fellini’s 8 ½, but in the world of these young rappers where you grow up so much faster and sometimes in the communities we come from, you don’t live much longer than 25 or 26. That crisis tends to come a lot earlier. That’s the part that hits home for me about today. We’re a really interesting place in the rap world. It feels wide open, the music is interesting and the personalities that are blowing up are so all over the board, but we’re not seeing a decrease in the fragility of the life of young Black men who participate in the culture. There are countless numbers of young rappers killed every year, by addiction, by gun violence, all sorts of ways. That’s one of the really interesting things about this, an artist trying to cope with his mortality, and what do you do with that? It’s not an uncommon art story, but I don’t think it has been seen before through this lens. Jake has worked with everyone and viewed this life through his work with Kanye West, Chance the Rapper, and Benny Blanco who’s on board and has worked with the biggest rappers in the game, and YG who’s one of my favorite rappers of the moment. Our main character is from Los Angeles and YG will help add authenticity to this. I’m excited about the team.”

[...] Said Diggs: “When we look at rappers, we don’t treat them like artists. We assume the telling of street stories is somehow innate and all we do is spit reality. But these people are creating art and the art of creating is really hard to do. It’s really, really hard to make a hit song and a true artistic endeavor.”

[shirlleycoyle]

How 9/11 Became Fan Fiction Canon

Every fictional character you can think of has experienced 9/11 in fanfiction.

A Clone Wars veteran with two lightsabers is on United Airlines Flight 93 and prevents it from crashing. Ron and Hermione get caught up in the chaos as the towers fall. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and her friends watch the attacks unfold on TV from Sunnydale. We have spent 20 years trying to process what happened on 9/11 and its fallout, and that messy process can be tracked through the countless, sad, disturbing, and sometimes very funny fanfiction left across the internet.

Many of the fanfics written in the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks seemed to directly respond to the news as it happened, processing the tragedy in real-time through the eyes of characters they loved. In the absence of a canon episode where Daria Morgendorffer paid respects to those lost, writing fanfic about these characters also experiencing trauma helped fans cope.

One YuGiOh fanfic published on fanfiction.net in May 2002 could have been ripped exactly from what this writer experienced that Tuesday morning. “It started as a normal day,” user Gijinka Renamon wrote. Yugi and his friends were in school, where their teacher informed them of the attacks and sent everyone home from school.

“After reading people’s 9/11 fics, I decided to write my own, and put a certain character in it. And Yugi and his pals were my first choice,” the author's note reads, explaining the connection they felt to United flight 93 and the World Trade Center attacks. Given that they lived in Pennsylvania, and “it’s close to New York, I felt really sad about it.”

Stitch, a fandom journalist for Teen Vogue, told Motherboard that this reaction to 9/11 is not at all uncommon in fandom.

"Fandom has always been a place that positions nothing as 'off limits,'" she said. "Historical tragedies like the Titanic sinking and atrocities like… all of World War 2 show up regularly across the past 30 years of people creating stories and art about the characters they love. So, on some level, it makes sense that 9/11 and the following 20-year military installation in the Middle East has joined the ranks of things people in different fandoms turn into settings for their fan fiction."

Reactions depicted in a handful of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfics published in the weeks after the attacks ring a little truer to the characters. “Tuesday, 11th September 2001,” written by Anna K, almost echoes the lyrics from “I’ve Got a Theory,” one of the songs in the musical episode that aired in November 2001. “We have seen the apocalypse. We have prevented it. Actually, we’ve prevented quite a few. So we know what they look like,” they write, before taking a darker turn. “They look a lot like…New York today.”

Killing demons and vampires doesn’t phase the Scooby Gang, but when preventable human death is brought into the picture, it’s gut wrenching.

“What am I supposed to do…When I can’t do anything to save the world?” Buffy cries  into Spike’s chest, watching the attacks unfold on TV in a fanfic the author described as being “about feeling numb and helpless.”

In “Blood Drive,” Kirayoshi writes about Buffy and her friends saving a van full of donated blood meant for victims of the attacks from a group of thirsty vampires. One Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic even takes a blindly patriotic turn, where noted lesbian witch Tara McClay helps Xander hang an American flag from the window of the magic shop to make Anya feel better.

Experiencing 9/11 as a young teenager was overwhelming not just because of the loss of life. Almost immediately after the event itself, it was as if the entirety of American culture re-oriented itself towards an overtly jingoistic stance. As we get distance from the attacks, seeing the tone of television and movies from the early 2000s is jarring, and some have gone viral on Twitter. In the world of pop music, mainstream musicians like the Chicks, formerly known as the Dixie Chicks, were blacklisted from the radio while Toby Keith sang about putting a boot up the ass of terrorists. On the Disney Channel, a young Shia Labeouf reading a poem he supposedly wrote about the events. The poem concludes with the line, "it's awesome to be an American citizen."

In a world so completely saturated with this messaging, it is not surprising that fanfic authors started including 9/11 in their work so soon after the event. Even The West Wing had a strange, out of continuity, fanfic-esque episode where the characters reacted to 9/11. In some cases, it made sense that the characters in the stories would be close to or a part of the events themselves.

"For characters like John Watson or Captain America, the idea works to an extent," Stitch told Motherboard. "In the original Sherlock Holmes works and the 2011 BBC series, Watson had just returned from Afghanistan. For Captain America and other Marvel heroes, 9/11 was something that was addressed in-universe in The Amazing Spider-Man volume 2 #36. Technically, 9/11 is 'canon' to the Marvel universe."

In “Early Warning: Terrorism,” a fanfiction for the TV show Early Edition in which a man who mysteriously receives tomorrow's newspaper, predicting the future, avoids jingoism, but tries to precent 9/11 from happening. This fanfic remains unfinished; it’s unclear if the characters successfully prevent 9/11 in this retelling.

Largely in fanfic from the era just after 9/11, when many young authors were trying to emotionally grapple with it, the characters don't re-write or undo the events themselves. It's this emphasis on the reaction to tragedy that colors the fanfiction that features 9/11 going forward.

Although fanfiction authors have been writing about 9/11 consistently since soon after the event, whenever that fanfiction reaches outside of its intended audience, it looks bizarre.

A screenshot of a Naruto 9/11 fanfic on the Tumblr subreddit comes without any context, or even more than two lines and an author's note. It’s impossible to suss out if this falls into the category of sincere fanfic without the rest of the piece or a publication date, but modern-day commenters on the Reddit thread see it as classic Tumblr trash.

Screenshot from r/Tumblr

“Bin Laden/Dick Cheney, enemies to lovers, 10k words, slow burn,” one user joked in the replies, underscoring the weirdness of Naruto being in the Twin Towers by comparing it to a What If story about Cheney and Bin Laden slowly falling deeply in love.

It’s hard to tell how much of the 9/11 fanfic and fanart starting a few years after the attacks is sincere, and how much of it is ironic, and trying to make fun of the very concept of writing fanfiction about 9/11.

A 2007 anime music video (in which various clips, usually from anime, are cut together to music) that combines scenes from The Lion King with Linkin Park’s “Crawling” and clips from George Bush’s speeches immediately after the attacks feels like the perfect example of this. Even the commenters can’t seem to suss out if this person is a troll or not.

There’s no way that My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic 9/11 fanart could be serious, right? Especially if the description pays tribute to “some of the nation's most memorable buildings,” and features five of the main characters as child versions of themselves. The comments again are split between users thanking the artist for a thoughtful remembrance post, and people making their own headcanon for why Twilight Sparkle is surreptitiously absent from the scene.

Screengrab via DeviantArt

There’s Phineas and Ferb fanfic that combines a 9/11 tribute concert with flashbacks to Ferb being rescued from the towers as a baby, written on the 10th anniversary of the attacks. It jumps from introspection to lines like, “‘Quiet Perry the Platypus. I’m trying to listen to these kids singing a 9/11 tribute.’”

The author's notes make it more likely that they meant for this to be a tribute piece, but it doesn’t quite make sense until watching a YouTube dramatic reading of it from 2020, fully embracing the absurdity of it all.

“For me, 9/11 is synonymous with war. It completely changed the course of my life," Dreadnought, the author of a Captain America fanfic Baghdad Waltz that sees Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes fall in love over the course of the war on terror, told Motherboard. "It’s the reason I joined the military, and I developed deep connections with people who would go on to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq. These very much felt like my generation’s wars, perhaps because people I graduated high school with were the youngest folks eligible to serve at the time.”

Dreadnought told Motherboard that although they didn't deploy, their career has kept 9/11 and the trauma from it in their mind. After seeing that people who fantasize about Steve and Bucky getting together seemed particularly interested in reading fanfiction that related to 9/11, they decided to try their hand at it.

"I had to do something with all of that emotionally, and I’m admittedly a bit emotionally avoidant. So I learned through fic that it’s easier for me to process those feelings and the knowledge of all the awful stuff that can happen in war if I can turn it into something creative," Dreadnought said. "Give the feelings to fake people and then have those fake people give the feelings to readers!"

To Dreadnought, who is a queer man, the experience of researching and writing this was more cathartic than they first expected, especially as a way to navigate feelings about masculinity, military culture, and queer identity. But they said the research they did, which included watching footage of first responders at ground zero, was what helped them finally process the event itself.

"It was like a delayed horror, and it was more powerful than I expected it would be." Dreadnought said. "When I was eighteen, I was pretty emotionally divorced from 9/11; I just knew I wanted to do something about it. So coming back to it in my 30s while writing this fic, it was a very different experience. Even the research for this story ended up being an extraordinarily valuable exercise in cognitively and emotionally processing 9/11 and all of its second and third order effects."

Fanfiction that features 9/11 provides an outlet for people who still grapple with the trauma from that day. But Stitch warns that the dynamics of fandom and how it relates to politics can also create fiction that's less respectful and more grotesque.

"With years of distance between the stories written and the original events of 9/11, there seems to be some sort of cushion for fans who choose to use those events as a catalyst for relationships—and Iraq and Afghanistan for settings," Stitch said. "The cushion allows them room to fictionalize real world events that changed the shape of the world as we know it, but it also insulates them from having to think about what they may be putting into the world."

The tendency of turning these events into settings or backgrounds for mostly white, male characters to fall in love has the unintended effect of displacing the effects that the war on terror has had on the world over. Steve and Bucky might fall in love during the war on terror, but they would also be acting as a part of the American military in a war that has been criticized since it started. Fanfic writers in other fandoms have come under fire for using real world tragedy as settings for fic before. In the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake Supernatural fanfiction about the actors Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki going to the island to do aid became controversial within the fandom. There have also been fics where characters grapple with the death of George Floyd that is written in a way that displaces the event from the broader cultural context of race in America.

"A Captain America story where Steve Rogers is a 'regular' man who joins the US Army and 'fights for our freedom' post-9/11 is unlikely to deal with the war’s effect on locals who are subject to US military intervention," Stitch said. "It’s unlikely to sit with what Captain America has always meant and what a writer is doing by dropping Steve Rogers into a then-ongoing conflict in any capacity."

After enough time, “never forget” can even morph into “but what if it never happened?” A 19k+ word Star Wars alternate universe fanfic asks this question, wondering what would have unfolded if someone with two lightsabers was on United Flight 93. This fic, part of a larger fanfic series with its own Wikia, considers what would have happened if Earth was a military front in the Clone Wars.

In this version of events, a decorated general who served in the Clone Wars is able to take back control of Flight 93 before it crashes, landing safely and preventing even more tragedy from happening that day. In the end, all of the passengers who made harrowing last calls to their loved ones before perishing in a Pennsylvania field survive thanks to the power of the Force, and are awarded medals of honor by President Bush.

Twenty years after the attacks, it’s painful to think about what would have happened if people got to work 15 minutes later, or missed their trains that morning. There weren’t Jedi masters deployed to save people in real life, but for some of the fanfic writers working today, the world of Star Wars might feel just as removed as the world before September 11, 2001.

Fiction serves as a powerful playground for processing cultural events, especially generational trauma. The act isn't neutral though; a decade's worth of fanfiction that takes place on or around 9/11 shows how our own understanding of a traumatic event can shift with time.

How 9/11 Became Fan Fiction Canon syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[akwardlyuncool]

Without Consent (1994) - Review

TW/CW: This movie features talk of mental illness and suicidal-ideation in ways that I feel teeter on a very fine line. There is use of straight jackets as well as bed restraints, among other antiquated medical practices, including unecessary sedations. Yes this movie was made in the nineties and not 2021, however recognizing context of the time period doesn’t free it from not being triggering.

I also acknowledge that there are several real life conversations going on at the moment surrounding youth treatment facilities, not so far separated from this fictional one and how traumatizing that are. (Paris Hilton and Bhad Bahbie are just a few of the voices talking about them.)

I’ve been on a teen Lifetime Movie kick these last few days and this one always seemed to come recommended right after the others that I watched, so I figured why not give it a shot. Now it wasn’t technically a Lifetime movie, from what I can gather, however it was a made-for-tv film, so I’m gonna just lump them all together, cause the shoe fits and this movie is gonna wear it.

Laura (Jennie Garth) is slipping down the wrong path. She’s flunking out of school, making out with boys while her parents are out for the evening and she’s even failing to fill out her college applications. She has a dismissive attitude when she talks to just about any adult figure in her life. Home isn’t great either and the relationship she has with her parents, especially her mother is a rough one. Needing to be anywhere else, she goes and has a few drinks with her “boyfriend” Eric, but since he’d rather hook-up than be the friend she needs, Laura leaves his place intoxicated and drives drunk. After the accident, her school and her parents feel like they have no choice but to send her to Meadowbrook, a teen treatment facility for troubled teenagers.

We know how these movies go, we know how overdramatic and sensationalized they make them on purpose and we know that even at their wildest, for some reason we still continue to watch. Maybe the early 90′s had that edge to them, but I feel like this movie in particular was a bit less cringe than the other one’s I’ve seen recently, that were made in the early to mid  2000′s. Maybe this one had more depth or something cause I was just so engaged the whole time. Even when I saw parts that could have been fleshed out more or things that I thought were trash altogether, I still thought better of Without Consent as a whole. In the genre, this one was for sure decent and actually had me on the edge of my bed for a moment. (I’m telling y’all that I literally went from laying down, chillin, to sitting all the way up, ready to see some ish go down.) Definitely want to dive more into the 90′s era of this edgy, teen, made-for-tv (Lifetime movie) genre, cause apparently as much as I liked the 2010′s, this one has them “newbies” beat.

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Spoiler(esk) Thoughts and Gripes Below:

My first main gripe with this film or rather the story progression of the movie, was the ending. You know I sat up cause ish got real and then they just decided to skip past everyone’s favorite scene. You know the part, the one where they usually handcuff all the dirty, crooked bad guys and we watch the wild look they get on their faces as they’re being placed in the back of the squad car, headed for many years of hard time to be spent behind bars. It would have been far more satisfying had it ended that way.

My second main gripe, which wasn’t the fault of the movie, but more of the times themselves, was the fact that a lot of these places, were over-diagnosing kids like Laura. It wasn’t just the doctors either, it was parents and other adult figures as well. Like first she’s alcoholic and then she’s depressed and then I think at the end they tried to say she had a personality disorder. Specifically to this movie, there was just so much, but we also know that wasn’t uncommon back then. It was easier to medicate and diagnose a supposed problem, then to actually talk to these kids. It was so gaslight-y.

My third main gripe lol, is that we don’t really know who Laura is at all. I can make the assumption that she might be a little burnt out and depressed on life, but beyond that I don’t know much about her actual personality. So yeah it could have also been a more well rounded movie, had they given her anything really. Does she like candy or walks in the park? Maybe she’s really into songwriting? ANYTHING? Just give me something because everyone finds themselves at some point realizing that they don’t know who Laura is or what she actually wants, but they still don’t stop to even ask.

All the adults were hella creepy and there were a few times were I thought old Dr. Winslow was going to inappropriately touch Laura, especially when he was talking to her while she was drugged and restrained to the bed. I know they wanted to keep people sick so that they could make more money off of them, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if that kind of assault took place as well.

I’m glad she didn’t move back home after being “freed” from the second trip to Meadowbrook. Laura’s parents did “rescue” her, but they were never great at listening to her in the first place and chose pawning her off somewhere to get help instead of once asking her anything legitimately real that wasn’t tied to her 5 year plan.

The whole treatment facility was gross, but her parents were straight trash for not even touring the place or asking real questions before sending Laura away. Like you could find a way to believe that this is the best place to get your daughter some help, but at least walk the halls first.

Laura’s roommate at Meadowbrook was also trash for selling Laura out in the escape and for that snake attempt at the end there too. We knew snitching got you points, but acting like you’re all tough while doing it is shady.

[hellhoundsprey]

professor castiel likes his freshman student sam uncomfortably amount

By the time I realized how dark I could have gone with this I was already headed to fluff-town, so have some wholesome idiots ❤.

warnings: age difference, teacher student relationship, drunk sex

includes: college!au, professor!castiel, student!sam, mutual pining, error 404: no stereotypical top/bottom dynamics found, blow jobs, deep throating, face fucking, hair pulling, cas is a domestic soft old man, stanford era

 ~

  “Wait, so—not ever?”

“Not ever.”

“That—wow.” Sam frowns adorably. Measures Cas with his eyes, and Cas hopes he’ll accredit the blush with the unholy small amount of vanilla coke in this cup of vodka.

“Is, is that—so weird? Am I weird?” he blabbers, the fool, and startles together with Sam as someone tackles the beer pong table behind them with the exact outcome you’d expect.

“It’s—I dunno, uncommon?” tries Sam, always so polite, even when obviously intoxicated. Could converse with pretty much everyone except his boring old professor; the pretty blonde making bedroom eyes at him since Cas can remember Sam sitting down with him, for example.

Cas shrugs, pointedly ‘cool’. “It’s just not my cup of tea.”

Sam considers, “Huh,” and takes another deep drink from his red cup. (Sam’s a freshman but Cas wouldn’t still get invited to his students’ house parties if he had any sort of problem with underage drinking.)

“It’s just,” Sam tries again, so puzzled that he cannot let the thought go, and Cas dream-sighs on the inside, chin in his hand and elbow on his knee, now. “Like—how can you not have watched a single one of them? Like, zero? Niente?”

“Pop culture just doesn’t sit well with me,” and Sam smiles—surrendering and pitying but it’s a smile, and Cas will take that without complaint.

“But it’s…Marvel, sir. That’s like—Disney.”

Cas takes another sip from his drink.

Sam’s eyes narrow in suspicion.

“I—have watched Disney movies,” assures Castiel, hopeless idiot and academic, three doctorates. “The one with the—the dogs? I watched that one.”

Sam gives him the look that spells out how he doesn’t want to accuse Cas of lying but that Cas is making it pretty hard on him.

Sam lives on campus. Was supposed to be the designated driver tonight but his friends vanished early on, and he told Cas how difficult things are at the moment with his family and his scholarships and the new environment and so on and so on. Cas has heard it many times before. It’s a shame he can’t do much more than listen and give smart-assed advice from his privilege-built ivy tower.

Except for, y’know, “You can crash at my place. It’s safer than hitching an Iber at this hour.”

“Uber,” corrects Sam, and, “is, uh—I mean, are you sure? Is that okay?”

“Why, yes.” Cas frowns, confused. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

Oh, vodka. The devil’s juice.

It takes another five minutes of persuasion until Sam finally gives in.

As said: the devil’s juice.

Cas doesn’t have much family left to turn up their noses at his ‘undignified housing situation’. It’s a house and the roof barely leaks, so it clearly does its job (and he’ll get the roof fixed this fall, promise). It has a bathtub and an adorable built-in kitchen from the sixties. Castiel fell in love with it the second he found the listing.

He informs, “Here we are,” uselessly because it’s obvious, they’re taking their shoes off and everything. “Just put it with the others,” he helps upon Sam’s hesitant posture with his sneakers in his too-big hands.

God, they’re big hands, aren’t they?

Anyhow. “Are you hungry? I could go for a snack.”

Castiel is already at the fridge, grabbing whatever is nearest, as Sam catches up. “That’s—I’m okay, you really don’t have to…”

“Oh, be my guest. They pay me well, I can get more groceries if I want. Another fridge, if I want.” He closes the fridge door with a swivel of his hips and unloads the content in his arms over the kitchen counter. “Take a seat, why don’t you. There’s wine, too, if you want.”

Sam assures, “I’m good,” and plants himself at Castiel’s kitchen table.

Cas turns towards him, knife in hand. “Crust on or crust off?”

“Off,” mumbles the kid, and Cas can’t help but smile along with him.

The sandwiches are successfully put together and diminished within minutes. Sam definitely eats like someone who hasn’t had a decent meal in a while, and Cas has to hold back very hard not to urge him into seconds (or thirds).

As he already plucks the too-many pillows from his couch, Cas inquires, “Is this okay with you?” and Sam, of course, nods rapidly.

“Of course, yeah. Thank you, sir.”

“It’s ‘Cas’,” offers Cas, who doesn’t need to be reminded of his age or status this frequently.

If he wasn’t Sam’s professor…God.

Things could be different.

If he had become a librarian, maybe. He can’t think of many other places or occasions to otherwise run into Sam. Always studying, cramming; such a hard-working student. Cas sees himself—burying himself in books and thoughts. Everyone has their ways of escaping real life.

Cas doesn’t leave him without a spare toothbrush before he makes his way upstairs. Takes care of his bedtime hygiene (or, the shortened, drunken version of that) and falls into bed. Worms out of his pants, somehow, but that’s as far as things will go, and that’s okay. Not that he has a say in that.

Castiel falls asleep as soon as he closes his eyes.

~

“Mr. Novak.”

“Hm.”

“… Mr. Novak?”

Cas smacks his lips, turns his head to face the wall.

“… Cas?” and again, louder, “Cas?”

“Yes? I? Oh, lord.” Cas groans, rubs at his face. “What time is it?”

“Don’t know,” murmurs Sam, and Cas realizes it’s still night. “I’m sorry for waking you…”

Cas blabbers, “Is everything okay?” and, yeah, definitely still fucking drunk. Jesus.

Sam begins with, “I,” but can’t seem to find the rest of the sentence.

Cas’ eyes adjust to the spinning room, to the shadow-y figure of Sam Winchester sitting hunched over on the floor, right next to Cas’ bed. He looks upset, to say the least.

“Did something happen?”

“Just, a—a nightmare.” Pale, Sam tries a thin-lipped smile.

“Oh. Well—”

“I tipped the—the lamp? By the couch? It broke.”

Castiel supplies, “Ah,” and tries to remember what fucking lamp Sam means. Did he put a lamp there? He might have put a lamp there.

“I couldn’t find a dustpan or nothin’. There’s shards all over the carpet and—”

“Oh my, did you hurt yourself?”

“Just a—no,” corrects Sam, and not-so-subtly as his own intoxicated brain might be telling him he’s doing it pulls the too-long sleeve of his hoodie further over his hand.

It’s not a thought, it just happens. “Let me see,” and a reach, a grab—Sam’s hand, rough skin, the warmth of it.

Castiel holds on harder just because he does not (cannot) admit his foolish embarrassment.

Studies the (truly minor) cuts with a frown and decides, overly fatalistic: “Bathroom. Iodine. Bandaids.”

“It’s really nothing, sir…”

“Sam, do I have to drag you? Because I will.”

Sam’s mouth closes, presses thin in defeat.

The kid trots after Cas, who has yet to let go of that hand, and doesn’t take note of said fact until they’re already in the bathroom and he raises that treasure up to his eyes for medical purposes.

Huge hands indeed.

Beautiful, beautiful hands.

Cas clears his throat. It doesn’t help.

Sam stands awkward. Pulled his jeans back on or never took them off? Barefoot. Cas is still in socks.

And boxers.

Cas clears his throat again.

“You do this a lot?”

Cas contributes, “Huh?” and his eyes flicker from where he’s applying iodine up to those magnificent, now-hooded eyes—tired and swimming and god he’s probably so soft. Clearly huggable.

“You’re good at that,” adds Sam, the angel, the puppy, with his tiny mouth trying for another smile.

“I—well, I.” Have a messed-up family? Too many clumsy siblings? Helper syndrome? “Yes.”

The tiniest of chuckles. Cas’ stomach does things that probably would feel great if he hadn’t poisoned himself with this much vigor.

Sam tells him, “You’re great,” and Cas feels heat rising to his face.

The intense stench of iodine doesn’t help. “I’m just…a guy. Who owns too many books and knows too many things.”

“Exactly: great.”

Cas scoffs, helpless, eyes on his task at hand because otherwise he’d stare into Sam’s face until they inevitably make out for the next consecutive twenty-four hours. “I’m, I, there are much greater people out there. I’m just a—”

“Professor.”

Cas looks up, which is a mistake. Right into those eyes, which are too kind, too close. Wait, when did they get so close?

Cas manages a coarse, “Correct,” before Sam’s mouth overcomes the last (miniscule) distance.

Castiel hadn’t thought about how long it has been since he’d last been close with someone like this; the last time someone kissed him, the last time he kissed someone.

That someone’s hand cupped his face, or his hand touched someone else’s face. Held on, maybe breathing, maybe not.

Castiel presses their foreheads together; tips of noses squished as well and Sam makes the smallest of noises. Relief, maybe. God, he’s tall.

Cas hears, “I’m sorry,” before he kisses the kid again. And again.

It takes a while for him to be present enough to toss the tweezers and iodine-soaked cotton ball into the sink, and only does that because he requires two hands to get a hold of the kid like he needs to.

He’s somehow got Sam with his back to the door, breathing at least as heavy as him and his hair is too-soft, it shouldn’t be this soft, this easy to bury his fingers in and hold onto.

Sam sucks his own lip behind his teeth once Cas gives them a break and Cas is painfully, suddenly aware of what is happening, and what is going to happen, if Sam doesn’t—

“Tell me to stop.”

Cas is panting, horrified.

He repeats, “Tell me to stop, Samuel,” and Sam uses that opportunity to dive back for Cas’ mouth.

Cas has got a not-his-own hand down his boxers before he can even vocalize his request for the bedroom.

Feels so fucking out of it, surreal with that over-strong hand just holding on, twisting, so capable. He can barely walk.

They get Sam’s jeans off easy enough; the hoodie is more of a challenge and Cas makes a deep-stomach happy noise for the musk, the worn-out band tee hiding underneath—faded and thin and Sam’s very visibly hard nipples that he has to work his thumbs over, if only for the sliver of arousal in Sam’s face.

The fucking hunger. “Can I suck you off?”

“Uhm, whu—?” is all Cas gets to say, because Sam’s already dropped to his knees, already yanked Cas’ boxers down mid-thigh. More accurate, “Jesus Christ,” and hands back into that mop of hair and Sam’s already swallowed him down to the fucking base.

Holy mother of—

“God,” stammers Cas, knees dangerously weak and oh lord that throat, the fucking precision and casual perfection and he doesn’t have a say in how his hands force Sam’s head despite the obvious willingness; allow him to pull him in and grind deep.

It’s a mistake again to open his eyes and look down because Sam’s right there to meet him, eyes tearing up now but he doesn’t even gag; moves despite Cas’ brutal hold on him and tears at his own hair to bob his mouth up and down the length of Cas’ cock—cheeks sucked in, no teeth, not a hint of ’em.

“Oh God, Sam, wait, wait—”

And Sam does. Pulls off, hand wrung tight around the now-wet base of Cas’ dick and sounding a different kind of drunk; breathless, dark. “You okay?”

Cas half-laughs, “Better than okay,” and Sam’s perfect mouth pulls into a tiny, mean smirk.

“Gonna blow?”

“Yes, give me a second.”

“I can fuck your face if you want.”

“I—a-absolutely,” and Cas didn’t know they were so close to the bed that one harsh push of Sam’s arm would send him on it back-first.

The springs inside his mattress creak with the unfamiliar stab of Sam Winchester’s knees.

Above Castiel, the kid rids himself of his wonderful-smelling t-shirt, tosses it god-knows-where, and Cas already feels breathless.

Kinda accepts that this is reality, somehow, when Sam holds him down with the weight of his eyes alone, the practiced tug on his underwear that gets his dick out; strokes it once, twice.

Cas can hear how wet he is.

“Sorry,” ponders Sam, kneeing his way further up to straddle Cas’ face right, “It’s kinda big.”

Cas would say something along the lines of ‘oh, that’s fine’ or ‘you’re fine’ or ‘please, God, get it in me’, if he wasn’t so busy getting his mouth on that fucking beautiful cock.

Cut and huge and Cas’ jaw won’t open as far as it probably should, but judging by the way Sam groans and makes himself comfortable halfway down Cas’ fucking gullet, he doesn’t seem to mind it much.

Cas’ throat gets pounded all strict nearly immediately, and he can’t do much more than scramble his hands to hold onto Sam’s ass and figure out how to acquire any oxygen. Any, at all.

“Fuck, your throat,” and that shouldn’t sound loving, dreamy; not that rough around the edges, hissed through gritted teeth and there’s balls slapping Cas’ chin and it’s—so—good.

Cas has to spank Sam’s ass pretty hard for him to notice and give him a breather (literally). Lets him cough up and swallow back down the worst, make a slut-sound before Sam laughs, angles back in.

“You like it?”

Cas groans something resembling a, “Uh-huh,” around too many miles of cock, eyes closed and Sam’s nails digging into his scalp, tipping and tilting him like he needs, wants.

“Fucking love it, don’t you?”

Cas would nod. Somehow, he’s sure Sam gets it either way.

Cas’ forgotten dick drools over his happy trail. Still so fucking hard and Sam’s spit has dried all the way now and Cas wouldn’t dream to get a hand on himself if he can keep them on Sam’s tight little ass instead.

“Wanna come on your face.”

Cas makes a heart-broken noise.

“Yeah? You want it?”

Cas gets a chance to rasp his, “Yes,” and misses the fucking violence of that cock immediately, waits patiently and gulping for air for Sam to finish himself off.

Just a few strokes and there it goes; they both groan.

Cas feels more discomfort over how much he doesn’t care that it gets into his lashes, his nose, than the fact itself.

“Fuck, your eyes. Sorry.”

“First drawer,” and Cas is barely done saying that by the time there’s already a tissue wiping over his face.

Sam kisses him. Lets Cas lick the taste of his own cock over his tongue and growl-laughs.

“Where do you want it?”

“Want what?” chuckles Cas, halfway into cuddle mode with Sam’s comfortable lightweight on top of him, the gentle attention to his hair.

Sam fixes him with his drunk-dark gaze. Edges his thumbnail along Cas’ cheek, the corner of his mouth.

“My mouth?” and, Jesus Christ, “My ass?”

“Jesus—Christ, I—”

Sam inquires, “Condoms?” before Cas can shut him up with his mouth on Sam’s.

Can rake his fingers through the now-mess of all that hair, dwell in the light of all of this kid’s post-orgasmic bliss.

Sam laughs, “What?”

“You’re beautiful. Do you know that?”

Sam laughs more.

“You’d really let me…?”

“Hell yeah. But no pressure.”

“I really liked what you did before.”

“Mouth, then?” and Cas smiles, nods, and Sam licks another wet kiss into his mouth before he crawls down the sweaty, crumpled mess that is Castiel still in today’s white dress-shirt.

“You do that a lot?” asks Cas, softly petting through that hair while Sam takes good care of him—mouths along the length, now, and it’s even better/worse than the spectacular deep-throating from earlier. Just tender and teasing.

It’s not gonna take a whole lot to get Cas there anyway, at this point.

“What, suck cock? I dunno.” A broad lap of tongue, a casual puckered suck on the frenulum. “Not lately, no.”

“You are magnificent. At it and in general,” and that earns him another humbled noise.

The pillow talk dies off in favor of Sam wrapping his lips around the crown of Cas’ cock. Of him swallowing the entire length, again, working him with muscles Cas is very sure couldn’t have been placed without this exact use in mind.

Cas’ hands hold on, don’t want or need to direct anymore. His hips counter-work him inside that wet-tight clutch and Sam doesn’t pull off once Cas warns him.

Just takes him and Cas has no other choice than emptying down that darling throat, groans and hitches his hips and eventually has to push at that forehead to dislodge the kid.

Explains, “Sensitive,” groggy and slurred and Sam just crawls back up and smothers him in kisses. Blankets him and Cas gets to put his arms around him, finally—the muscled, skinny width of that back, sweat-slick and rising-falling with his slowly calming breath.

Cas sighs, beyond contented.

He wakes to an elbow in his face, the hiss of his own pain.

Curses, “Jesus,” and Sam blinks awake to that, scrambles like he’s terrified until he apparently remembers where he is, who Cas is.

Rushes, “Shit,” and, “Sorry, you okay?” and yeah it hurts but the idea of a black eye doesn’t exactly faze Cas.

He’s had worse. “’M fine,” he promises, but lets Sam get up on one elbow, examine him for damage.

The focused, guilty frown. The precision of his fingers, searching, feathering over Cas’s skin.

Cas feels himself breaking into a smile. Sam scoffs, “What?” and allows to be nudged down for a kiss.

Gonna be day outside, soon. Birds begin to chirp. The dog collar of Mrs. Smith’ Pomeranian jingling from down the street.

Sam lies back down so they can cuddle up right. Lets Cas pet through his hair, try (and fail) to tuck it behind one of those darling, secret ears.

Inquires, with Cas’ pinkie learning the shapes of the beauty marks on the right corner of his chin, “You do this a lot?”

“Elaborate,” hums Cas, harboring desires to not leave this bed until either his kidneys fail or he has to go to work again on Monday. And how he might convince Sam to bear him company.

“Fuck your students?” and Cas laughs.

“’Not lately, no’,” he teases, but ultimately assures how, “No, Samuel. I don’t.”

“It’s pretty illegal,” muses Sam. “We’d get into so much trouble.”

Cas raises an eyebrow, all conspiracy. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

Sam laughs in a tone of comfort that helps Cas forming the thought of how things are probably gonna be alright.

[mayonakazkrazy]

Soooooooo I wanna talk about an Animated Movie

One night recently, I may have been watching a show that started giving me too many... ‘too real life’ vibes, when what i needed in the moment was ‘taking a break to mentally and emotionally recharge’ time. SOOOO to redirect my overstimulated brain I changed over to a ‘safe’ non threatening movie, Monster House.

Spoilers below the cut in a sort of review as well as some random details that i noticed that make me go ‘... well that got real fast...’ and one tangent/character dive i been wanting to get into toward the end.

Also fair warning about my run on sentences... they’re not going anywhere

Monster House is... a CG movie that oddly enough gives off Claymation vibes... at least to me from certain style design choices. I honestly feel that sort of works in it’s favor since the CG of the mid 2000s was.... terrifying if care wasn’t take in the process. Not good if you want you film to be taken seriously, buuut this movie manages to tow the line because a) it IS supposed to be at least a little scary to kids... haunted house? and b) even though the characters take things seriously enough the writing itself doesn’t try TOO hard to pretend it’s more than it is.

As it stands, the movie is Ok - in the best possible vein of ok. Not some epic, groundbreaking thing but I think it warrants being on people’s list of fun movies to play on Halloween. Visually interesting and funny, you can tell that the people who made the movie at least had fun working on it; and cared more about the project than some other kids’ movies that get put out purely for the easy cash grab via paint by numbers. (I found out that this movie was nominated for Best Animated Feature apparently?! like... i like this movie but... i don’t know, i’ll have to see what other movies came out that year cuz while i like it i’d like to reiterate that i don’t know if it’s BEST (animated/kids) movie of the year material...)

I can honestly say that it was at the Start if not ahead of the ‘remember the 80s?’ fad in movies. Again, not to the film’s discredit. It’s less concerned with smacking you over the head with ‘EIGHTIES!’ and is more set in the time period to make things more plausible. Ya got kids running around unattended for hours without parental guidance, and a number of other 80′s tropes that are, easily ignored at worse and make story elements more believable at best. I mean... .when ELSE would you believe that kids could run around basically unattended for HOURS just before Halloween....hell one kid ACTUALLY STEALS an amount of cold medicine that would have you on MULTIPLE investigative lists even 15 years ago. And NOT just because “the parents are just bad parents”... there’s arguably only one ACTUALLY bad parent in the film who’s only mentioned off-hand but i’ll talk about in a little bit. The rest are parents with semi justifiable reasons for either not believing their respective kid about the haunted house or not thinking they’re NOT unattended (ie. someone’s supposed to be babysitting one of these kids but SURPRISE! she’s in the “selfish teen is a disinterested babysitter spending more time talking to or about boys than ACTUALLY doing the job she’s paid to do” trope)

TLDR on that paragraph, this movie spends so little time being WE”RE THE 80′S! that i wasn’t even sure WHEN it was supposed to take place if it wasn’t for the lack of iPhones and the stationwagons all over.

ANYWAY. some details that tend to stand out to me with this movie tend to be the things that we just get to hear about briefly and are arguably meant to encourage conversation if someone NEEDS to know more about it rather than just getting EVERYTHING explained for no good reason. So enjoy me conversing with myself here.

First up, Chowders family life is kind of sad. Like i said earlier there’s only one or two parents to the three main characters of the movie that people would likely consider ACTUALLY bad. 

The lead’s, DJ’s, parents go out of town at the start of the movie and could reasonably be expected to think that their kid was being watched by the babysitter (see trope rant above). 

The mother of the token female character (Jenny) is Maaayyybe a bad parent but that is to be argued as we only have a few reasons to believe so and some can be explained by the aforementioned 80′s era lack of parental awareness. All we really know is that, this girl is walking around selling candy on her own, gets nearly eaten by the Monster House, and when she calls her mother to tell her about it, the mom doesn’t believe her as no parent ever does about monsters. Sooooo while she does get points off for her kid not even having someone with her during the candy selling, we also don’t hear from or about her again for the rest of the movie until just, coming to pick her up at the end. She get’s a *shrug* on the scale of good or bad parenthood.

Then there’s our secondary male character, Chowder The Dumb One Comic Relief. He’s the one with arguably the most complicated family that we get any insight to. and it’s pretty much just from his off-handed comments on it and a single snipet of a phone call we get to overhear. Literally, what you are about to read, my brain managed to over think from these freakin context clues... SO, it WOULD be SUPER easy to miss what we get about this family and just chalk it up to ‘OH those kids movie parents and their rampant absenteeism and DEATH’ but no. Chowder’s family life is... a little sad if i’m honest. we only hear about 2 calls regarding these kids and their parents. One is when Jenny calls her mom to try to tell on the House for eating her and the other is when Chowder’s dad calls looking for his son. NOW, Chowder himself tells DJ (and the audience) that his Dad is working at a Pharmacy the night Chowder goes over to DJ’s house and nearly gets himself eaten by the Monster House. The boys end up spending the entire night after that, watching the house to see if anybody or anything else gets attacked. Chowder’s dad doesn’t call DJ’s house to find out where his kid is until morning, so we’re lead to believe that his lack of knowledge about the boys’ impromtu sleep-over because he works the graveyard shift (or at least late enough that he would assume Chowder’s in bed until waking the next morning). 

The somewhat sad part comes with the second bit of information we get from Chowder after he tells DJ that his dad is at work that evening and it’s, “Mom is at the movies with her personal trainer”. 0.o ooooooh the scandal... i mean, yeah in general cheating spouses isn’t exactly the most uncommon occurance....anywhere. but isn’t it just a little sad that part of the reason that this is not only the reason that Chowder is home alone (making it SUPER easy for him to just leave when DJ calls). But she’s also apparently gone long enough to ALSO be out so late as to not notice that her kid is GONE all night. Looking at it nowadays just... reminds ya WHY there were ads in the 90′s asking parents where their kids were at 10pm.

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE

well not about the cheating Chowder’s mom part.

More like the WHOLE thing that got me wanting to type about Monster House in the first place.

A sad story with more potential doom than maybe even the film intended.

YOU SEE

A major plot twist of the movie is WHO is possessing the house. DJ and crew initially believe to be the someone they kind of know - the house’s owner, Mr. Horace Nebbercracker. At first glance, Nebbercracker is obsessively protective of his house, literally the first scene of the film is him SCREAMING in a little girl’s face and confiscating her tricycle when she accidentally ends up on his lawn (again, where are her parents?). He’s literally Mr. “Get off my lawn”.

So it’s not difficult to imagine that he’s the one haunting the place when the house seems to come life immediately after his sudden heart attack. (PS. WTF to the writers cause we AND THE TWO TEENAGED LEADS see the heart attack happen real time and the boys may have even contributed to it!! THERAPY FOR EVERYONE) Especially since Dj’s babysitter invites over her.....boyfriend? maybe. who reaffirms that Mr. Nebbercracker has been screaming at kids and confiscating toys for YEARS. yeah, super easy to see this dude sticking around after death and continuing his time honored tradition of AGGRESSIVELY dealing with trespassers. Only now as a house that WILL eat you just for stepping on the grass.

So as you may have already guessed, this later gets proved to NOT be the case. As Horace ends up returning in the climax alive and well (enough to sneak out of the hospital and steal an ambulance LIKE A BOSS).

Throughout the course of the movie, we and the kids find out that this creepy old man once had a wife but not only is she not around, rumor has it that he ATE her. for some reason. When the kids go into the house to try to ‘kill’ it and stop the house from eating people, they find a bunch of old pictures inside that at least confirm there was a wife at some point. When they end up in the basement among the piles and piles of stuff that’s landed in the yard over the years, the ALSO find a shrine to Mrs. Nebbercracker. Which is also her final resting place (a spot where she was apparently covered completely with cement).

DJ puts 2 and 2 together pretty quick when Mr. Nebbercracker returns and starts trying to calm the house. Mrs. Constance Nebbercracker is the one haunting the place, not Horace. That’s when we unlock Horace’s Tragic Back Story:

Sometime in the 1930′s Horace (a former demolition man) fell in love with Constance. Constance was being exploited as an “attraction” at a circus/freak-show at the time (during the height of just being abnormally tall, short, or obese made you a relevant ‘freak’). This place made her sleep OUTSIDE IN A CAGE and you know people were happily entertaining themselves by throwing things at her and laughing at both her weight  ‘freakishness’ and helplessness.

So to follow a simple love story, the sweet skinny boy sneaks her away, his feelings are reciprocated, and the two start their life together. They’ve gotten to that nice, building their own house stage when everything goes terribly wrong.

For me, this is sort of the start of my opinion that... things for the Nebbercrackers weren’t likely to go well anyway. Like we got the impression from their wedding photos that they managed to have SOME normalcy in their honeymoon phase but when we see the beginnings of the house, Horace is JUST THEN taking apart the cage/cart that Constance was kept in. i’m presuming he was originally gonna use the various parts in the house but dear christ that means that not much time may have past between leaving the circus (guess they at least didn’t care enough about her ‘as property’ to keep the couple on the run?) to getting married and going on a vacation to buying the land and beginning construction.

That said, the mid-twentieth century isn’t exactly known for it’s forwardness on mental health, and oooooohhhhh boy, if this poor couple aint a fitting example that “and they lived happily ever after” doesn’t happen often. Halloween happens to come around and kids get up to their traditional mischief by, what else? Egging what little of the Nebbercracker house existed at the time. 

(Disclaimer i am an expert in nothing so i may get somethings wrong here but this IS just me hashing out an idea i have) When we first see Constance, we see someone actually throwing food and trash at her while she’s “on display”. And when we see her at the skeleton of the Nebbercracker house, she get VISIBLY upset at the children throwing things at the house, she seeks out her husband telling him that those monsters ‘are attacking [their] house and they’re hurting [her]’. In my mind, she and Horace likely haven’t really dealt with her trauma from the circus. Yes Horace removed her from the bad situation and stopped the trauma, but as of good ole 1935, i doubt they really talked about it much, let alone saw a therapist. Both likely just trying to power forward INTO their future.

Horace’s confusion when Constance becomes triggered by the children throwing things and laughing like assholes shows us that he likely hadn’t seen or had to deal with a situation like this before. He does try to get her to focus on him and remind her that she’s with him and not back at the circus, so maybe he’s had to reassure her (like after a nightmare or maybe he got small panics when in more crowded areas - thus the house that’s likely on the edge of town since they don’t have close neighbors). But the course of events indicates that he’d never seen such a STRONG episode from her. 

Perhaps she’d just finally gotten comfortable with being truly free since they could build their own home and so the perceived ‘attack’ on her home became an attack to her safety and happiness. When she goes to her husband, her savior, and (in her eyes) he doesn’t fix it/ he doesn’t get the chance to. When that egg hit HER BODY. it was game over.

Constance tried to take matters into her own hands, remove the ‘threat’ herself.... with the axe Horace was holding. Now it’s a kids movie so no children come even close to getting hurt, but one could take this to mean that, if constance had lived, she may have only gotten more violent as time went on if she didn’t get the help she needed... help Horace may not have been able to give or get for her.

We’ll never know since the way you get a haunted house is... pretty obvious. In a desparate attempt to stop Constance from likely maiming some kids or hurting herself, Horace causes constance to fall into their uncovered basement. As she falls, she tries to grab the cement mixer for stability and ends up dumping the load on top of herself in the basement (making for a VERY creepy site for a shrine). Horace’s guilt compels him to finish the house and he stays there.

Now such a violent, angry moment right before death MEANS THAT SOMETHIN’S GETTING HAUNTED. SO Constance’s spirit possesses the house and begins “defending” itself from the people of the growing town that happen to get too close. ESPECIALLY on Halloween... ya know one of the nights where EVERYBODY goes out and willingly approaches people’s front doors.

Throughout the rest of the flashback we Mr. Nebbercracker trying to keep people away with more and more desperation. Likely because DJ and Chowder haven’t witnessed the first of Constance’s victims. As the movie’s climax pics up we see how Horace talks to the house, trying to placate the angry spirit by taking care of the house and trying to be the first responder when someone enters the lawn before Constance gets to use HER WAY.

From here, Horace’s relationship with the House begins to look...pretty abusive actually. When he gets back home from the hospital he’s grumpy to the kids, but then we see him pause, he’s apprehensive as he turns to get back to the house. From the expressions the house is given and the way Mr Nebbercracker responds, it’s TELLING him to get HOME NOW. He’s timid, and fearful, and the kids begin to get the idea that if he goes into the house now, he may not come out again. And when the house LITERALLY GETS UP AND STARTS CHASING PEOPLE, he’s desperate. He tries soothing her, he tries to redirect her away from the targets of her anger - the kids. 

Can you just imagine the 45 years leading up to this? Horace having to isolate himself from the whole town until it’s just him and this angry house under the pretext of “IF YOU DO NOT DEFEND HOUSE THEN THE HOUSE WILL DO IT”. He even get’s the heart breaking line of “then i’ll have nobody”. Like so many victims that feel they CAN’T leave their homes. I like to imagine that the house is PRIMARILY motivated by the rage and fear that was driving Constance in her final moments but like... what if she hadn’t? Even if she didn’t kill those kids from 45 years ago, would they have been able to get her the help she needed? Like so many back in those days, Constance and Horace likely would’ve only had the option to self medicate or get her institutionalized (ie. Imprisoned again). Would that have devolved into Constance manipulating Horace with things like “i won’t make it without you” and similar tactics. Would have maybe gone the other way? with Constance still not technically being free because Horace would (intentionally or unintentionally) encourage her dependence on him... 

Anyway, when pleading to the house to just leave the children alone fails, he makes the decision to stop her. with dynamite from his Demo days. 

Constance does not take this well.

From there we get the exciting confrontation where the main characters destroy the house WITHOUT the self-sacrifice that Mr. Nebbercracker may have been planning. We even get a nice little moment where constance’s spirit (unattached to the destroyed house) get’s to move on after a quick goodbye to Horace. And now we get our kids movie happy ending with DJ, Chowder, and Jenny helping Mr. Nebbercracker begin redistributing the pile of toys still in what’s left of the basement to trick-or-treaters and the living things that the house ate somehow climb out of whatever pocket dimension they were trapped in. Nobody seems to question why Nebbercracker’s house is just a crater now....and that this old man that left the hospital without a discharge is now homeless....

Buuuuuuuut i’ve been typing for like 2 hours now. I still have thoughts about other side characters and maybe more exploring the dynamics of technically being in a relationship with a haunted house. buuuuut i need to sleep.

Stay nerdy fellow overthinkers.

[raeynbowboi]

Dating Disney: Pinocchio

I won’t lie, this is far from a personal favorite. In fact, I don’t particularly care for this film. I would say I haven’t seen it in at least ten years. But, I got a private ask wanting me to do a Dating Disney on it, and I like to please my fans so here we go.

The Origins

The Adventures of Pinocchio is an Italian children’s book written by Carlo Collodi in 1883. That means the story was 57 years old when Disney adapted it into a children’s movie. The book, as is common with Disney films, is far darker than the movie. Pinocchio is extremely ill-behaved, being a full blown brat, whereas the Disney version is a generally good kid making bad decisions. No sooner than he’s created, the book version kicks Geppetto, gets him arrested, and then throws a hammer at the Talking Cricket and kills it. Geppetto gets released from prison, and Pinocchio promises to go to school, but the following day sells his school books to buy a ticket for a marionette show. On his way home to give the money he has to Gepetto, he’s stopped by a Cat and Fox who decieve him into thinking that if he plants the gold coins in the Field of Miracles that they’ll grow into gold trees, then use his money to gorge themselves on a feast and ditch him, only to return disguised as bandits and hang him from a tree. The Turquoise Fairy (renamed the Blue Fairy in the movie) retrieves his body, stating that she is dead and waiting for a hearse. The fairy invites Pinocchio and Geppetto to live with her in the forest cottage, but on his way to meet up with his father is met by the cat and fox again who remind him of planting his coins in the Field of Miracles. Pinocchio does so, and the Fox and Cat dig up the coins and flee. Pinocchio tries to report them, but is sentenced to four months in prison for foolishness. After he’s freed from prison, he tries to return to the fairy’s house in the woods, but stops to steal some grapes and is caught in a weasel trap and forced to be a guard dog. He stops weasels from stealing the farmer’s chickens and is rewarded by being set free, and makes his way to the good fairy’s house where all he finds is a gravestone, believing her to be dead. A pigeon gives Pinocchio a ride to the shore to meet up with his father, but his father is eaten by The Terrible Dogfish, and Pinocchio goes to the Island of Busy Bees for help, but can only earn food through labor. There, he meets the Turquoise Fairy again, this time looking old enough to be his mother. She tells him that if he’s a good boy for a full year, he’ll become a real boy. He studies hard to rise to the top of his class, but his jealous classmates trick him into playing hookey, and a fellow student is harmed by one of Pinocchio’s books despite him not throwing it. He meets Candlewick who takes him to the Island of Toys where boys never have to work or study, and they wake in the morning to find themselves turned into donkeys. Pinocchio is sold to a circus but is sold when he sprains his leg. The man throws him into the sea, but fish eat the donkey skin, leaving Pinocchio a puppet again.  Pinocchio jumps back into the sea where the Terrible Dogfish swallows him, and he finds Geppetto has been living inside of the beast on a wrecked ship. The pair escape, and pass the cat and fox who have become beggars. They find a home with the Talking Cricket, and Pinocchio finds work with a farmer. After months of hard work, he’s saved up money for a new suit, but hears that the fairy is ill, and uses the money he saved up for medicine for her. He awakens to find he has become a real boy, a new suit has been left for him, a fresh stack of school books, and his forty pennies are newly-minted gold coins. Normally, I don’t tend to go into the original version, but unlike the original versions of Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, not as many people tend to talk about the original version of Pinocchio, so I figured it was worth sharing how utterly messed up 19th century kids stories are.

Clothing

Both Pinocchio and Geppetto appear to be wearing Lederhosen, which originated in Bavaria, and were commonly worn as typical young boys’ clothes in Germany, but also appeared in Austria, Switzerland, and northern Italy, though less common in Southwestern Germany and Switzerland.

Jiminy Cricket can be seen wearing tailcoats, cravat, and waistcoat with a top hat. Tailcoats, waistcoats, and cravats rose to popular fashion between the 1840s to the 1850s, and Top Hats saw popularity between the late 1700s until the middle of the 1900s. We later see Honest John and Giddy wearing top hats as well, meaning they are currently popular.

Technology

Geppetto is packing a blunderbuss pistol, known as a dragon. By the mid 19th century, the blunderbuss had fallen out of use as a military grade firearm, but still saw private civilian use as a protective firearm, as we see Geppetto use it.

Geppetto’s workshop is full of clockwork music boxes and cuckoo clocks. Music Boxes date back to the 19th century where they were predominantly built by skilled watchmakers, with the first factory popping up in 1815. They were produced primarily in Switzerland. Cuckoo clocks, first invented between 1740 and 1750, are often falsely attributed to Switzerland, but flourished primarily in Germany.

We see Geppetto playing an offshoot of the accordion called the Concertina, first invented in 1844. The smaller size, however, seems to be more in the English style than the bulkier German style.

On Pleasure Island, we see a number of wonders, including a Ferris Wheel, a carousel, a roller coaster, and a pool hall. The Ferris Wheel was first constructed in Chicago in 1893. The first steam-powered Carousel was invented in 1861, though the one in the movie looks more like the kinds that came in the 1870s. The modern roller coaster popped up in Coney Island in 1885, before being patented in 1886 by LaMarcus Adna Thompson. The boys are playing Eight-Ball Pool, an American subtype of the pool game likely invented in 1900 (first documented in 1908). The boys arrive on Pleasure Island via a Steamboat, which date back as far as the 1700s.

Conclusion

Although the fairy tale itself is Italian, there are a lot of German elements in the story. However, I feel as though the movie seems more-so set in Switzerland, as the production of both cuckoo clocks and music boxes is more oft attributed to Switzerland than Germany, even if it’s incorrect. Although Lederhosen are less common in Switzerland, Pinocchio and Geppetto are the only characters seen wearing them, making them plenty uncommon. Although the wearing of Tailcoats and Cravats is seen with Jiminy Cricket, most characters seem to be wearing slightly later period clothing, though a bit harder to place. However, I would place their clothing as belonging to the later half of the 19th century. Eight-Ball is the most modern element, but is a bit of an outlier from data that really points harder at the 1880′s, so I’ll place in the movie in 1885, as Pleasure Island has many rides seen at Coney Island, and the Roller Coaster appeared at Coney Island in 1885. The presence of the Ferris Wheel also pushes for the movie to be set later, but the 1890s is a little late for this movie, so I’ll chalk it up as just an anachronism. While the film could be set in Italy as Lederhosen was worn there, the abundance of German elements with Geppetto leads me more toward saying it takes place in Switzerland, although Geppetto could be a Swiss immigrant living in Italy, as he and Pinocchio are the only two with German and Swiss characteristics.

Setting: Switzerland Kingdom: The Swiss Confederation Year: 1885 Era: Victorian Era (1837-1901) Language(s): German, French, and/or Italian

For whatever reason, the Dating Disney I did for Mulan doesn’t tend to show up when I search for it in my archives, so for anyone having trouble finding it, I’ll link it right [here].

[f4liveblogarchives]

Fantastic Four Vol 1 #222

Tues Apr 27 2020 [08:12 PM] Wack'd: HERE WE GO. AFTER LIKE EIGHT MONTHS. THE AUSPICIOUS RETURN. [08:12 PM] Wack'd: FANTASTIC FOUR VOL 1 NO 222 [08:12 PM] maxwellelvis: Sound the music [08:13 PM] Umbramatic: huzzah! [08:15 PM] Wack'd: So! We are almost at the John Bryne era, but before we get there, Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz have like ten issues in 'em. [08:16 PM] Wack'd: We open with, uh. Sue Storm giving her increasingly preteen looking son a horsey ride while wearing a full pantsuit and pearls.

[08:16 PM] Wack'd: It's a choice! [08:18 PM] Wack'd: It's weird seeing Reed being playful...

[08:18 PM] maxwellelvis: Franklin shrank like two feet between cuts here. [08:18 PM] Wack'd: This, though. Weirder. Definitely weirder.

[08:19 PM] maxwellelvis: If I were a gambling man I'd say Franklin got kidnapped by Skrulls or something in the night and hasn't yet realized it yet. [08:21 PM] Wack'd: Reed heads out to the library and Ben joins him since he's on his way to the movies. Reed is very insistent they take a train rather than a cab, because he's worried about finances, but also [08:21 PM] Wack'd: *cough* [08:21 PM] Wack'd: IT'S NINETEEN EIGHTY [08:24 PM] Bocaj: There are trains? [08:24 PM] Wack'd: So we cut directly from this talk of personal finances and energy shortages to

[08:25 PM] Bocaj: I remember it going differently but go off I guess [08:25 PM] Wack'd: Nah she did that [08:26 PM] Bocaj: Dang [08:26 PM] Bocaj: Tough love [08:26 PM] Wack'd: In that annual where he nearly traumatized Franklin to death [08:27 PM] Wack'd: Meanwhile, Johnny's out in Jersey doing some racing! [08:28 PM] Wack'd: Johnny you've had like three love interests since then, also she cheated on you

[08:28 PM] maxwellelvis: Damn you, Pavlov [08:29 PM] Bocaj: With Quicksilver [08:29 PM] Bocaj: Like fuck [08:30 PM] maxwellelvis: I've no idea what she saw in him. [08:30 PM] Bocaj: That’s just. That’s sad. And then she cheated on Quicksilver with a random real estate agent. It’s like a race to the bottom [08:30 PM] maxwellelvis: The only rungs left down from there are like, Blackheart and Irving Forbush. [08:31 PM] Wack'd: Okay Sue two things: 1. his powers aren't the only things he's suppressing, he watched you die like 20 issues ago, take this kid to a therapist

[08:31 PM] Wack'd: 2. "So long as nothing traumatic happens" is just asking for it [08:32 PM] Umbramatic: yeeeeeeeeeeeep [08:33 PM] Wack'd: SPEAK OF A GUY WHOSE NAME IS LITERALLY NICK SCRATCH, YOU KNOW, LIKE THE DEVIL

[08:34 PM] Wack'd: Gdi Sue and Reed, you just left to the door to the *Negative Zone open in a house with a child? Next you're going to tell me you leave guns lying around or put cleaning chemicals in easy-to-reach places or don't put plastic plugs over unused electrical outlets [08:35 PM] Bocaj: They’re bad parents [08:35 PM] Umbramatic: they leave guns in the cleaning chemicals with no plastic plugs over them [08:35 PM] Bocaj: You gotta keep your doors to the antimatter universe locked. That’s just common sense for raising a child [08:36 PM] Wack'd: ...HEY DOES THAT DRAWER HAVE A LOCK ON IT?! I WAS JOKING ABOUT THE GUN THING!!!

[08:37 PM] maxwellelvis: It's 1980, Wack'd; childproofing doesn't exist yet. [08:37 PM] Bocaj: Its juuuuuust a flare gun [08:38 PM] Wack'd: Oh so Franklin can just shoot a ball of fire, cool [08:38 PM] Bocaj: When has a child ever killed anyone or burned down a library with a flare gun [08:38 PM] maxwellelvis: Yep. No seatbelts or booster seats in the Fantasticar either. [08:40 PM] maxwellelvis: Unsafe at Any Speed was published in 1965 and I think by 1980 people still had yet to take it seriously. By the Clinton administration, that changed somewhat... [08:40 PM] Wack'd: Lorrie, you're not missing anything, he was gonna spend the entire time imagining you as his ex

[08:40 PM] maxwellelvis: Must be nice to not have to have a secret identity. [08:40 PM] Bocaj: Saves time [08:41 PM] Bocaj: Don’t have to think of excuses or find a phone booth [08:42 PM] maxwellelvis: What's not so nice is having a secret identity, but your enemies know who you are anyways. S'why Rita Repulsa would have been way more dangerous if it wasn't a kids show. [08:43 PM] Wack'd: 

[08:43 PM] Bocaj: “Oh no, he’s become a teenager!” [08:44 PM] Wack'd: "Easy, Susie, you don't know what you're saying! It's entirely possible that is Franklin, he says weirder shit than this all the time" [08:44 PM] Bocaj: True [08:45 PM] Wack'd: Wow. Uh. Probably not a good sign when the murderous spirit of a dead witch is cheering on your behavior!

[08:45 PM] Bocaj: I see the attempted ironic echo [08:45 PM] Wack'd: (Also, speaking of Franklin saying weirder shit than this, the "I like watching you and momm smooch--yeah [08:45 PM] Bocaj: But both situations were creepy so [08:45 PM] Wack'd: Yeah [08:46 PM] Wack'd: So Reed sends Johnny to fetch Dr. Strange as Franklin starts, uh

[08:47 PM] Umbramatic: FLOATING GUNS [08:47 PM] Wack'd: I swear to good I didn't read this ahead of time. I literally had no idea when I said the gun thing that I was being ironic [08:48 PM] maxwellelvis: To be fair, all the locks in the world would probably have done no good with Franklin's power and Scratch's magic combined. [08:48 PM] Umbramatic: Okay, i believe you. [08:48 PM] Bocaj: Hey Dr Strange! Both he and Reed always think they’re right [08:48 PM] Bocaj: It’s gonna be a hoot [08:48 PM] Umbramatic: (i actually do belive you i just had to link that) [08:50 PM] Wack'd: "I could do it. I could leave him to die. I could let Franklin murder him. I would be blameless...and I would be...free..."

[08:51 PM] Bocaj: HAH! [08:51 PM] Mousa The 14: Sue get possessed too? [08:51 PM] Wack'd: I think she's just in shock. [08:51 PM] maxwellelvis: No, I think Scratch just broke the Franklin Button [08:52 PM] maxwellelvis: He shouldn't'a did that. [08:52 PM] Mousa The 14: Tends to be poor form to possess a child right before his mother’s eyes. [08:53 PM] Wack'd: So Strange is out of town, naturally. But as Johnny leaves a redhaired lady named Desadia spies on him, and places a cryptic phone call to a Nick-Fury-looking guy called Gabriel. That will probably be important later. [08:53 PM] Umbramatic: probably. [08:53 PM] maxwellelvis: There's nothing ominous about those names at all. [08:54 PM] Mousa The 14: Desadia is definitely an uncommon one [08:55 PM] maxwellelvis: If her last name is Marcus, RUN [08:55 PM] Wack'd: Back at the Baxter, Reed snaps Sue out of her shock, which, like. I was honestly hoping she was mad at Reed for hitting her? Or something? [08:55 PM] Mousa The 14: Someone should be [08:55 PM] Bocaj: I’ll be [08:55 PM] Wack'd: I get that it's her kid but it's also Reed's and he's fine! Going into shock is not just a thing women do! [08:56 PM] Mousa The 14: How does Hank “has had some head issues” Pym never live it down but Reed “Man of Action” Richards just gets to do this whenever [08:56 PM] Wack'd: Marvel's First Family [08:56 PM] maxwellelvis: Grandfathering [08:57 PM] maxwellelvis: Nobody wants to be the one who broke them up for good. [08:57 PM] Wack'd: Johnny returns and he has a solution which is also the only solution he has to most problems [08:57 PM] Mousa The 14: Burning it? [08:57 PM] maxwellelvis: FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! [08:57 PM] Wack'd: He just...melts the entire fucking room to slag, yeah [08:57 PM] Wack'd: Because hey, no more weapons, right? [08:57 PM] Mousa The 14: God dammit, Johnny [08:57 PM] Mousa The 14: I mean yes that’s technically true but [08:58 PM] Mousa The 14: Other people are around [08:58 PM] Wack'd: Then they do what they only didn't do from the beginning because gotta make Sue look weak [08:58 PM] Wack'd: Shove Franklin in a force field and shoot him fulla sedatives

[08:59 PM] Wack'd: Some exceptional faces on Franklin this issue, gotta say [08:59 PM] Wack'd: Though he kind of has a Little Lord Fauntleroy thing going on in that first panel [08:59 PM] Bocaj: Maybe reed should try lobotomizing him again [09:00 PM] Bocaj: Worked out fine the first time [09:00 PM] Umbramatic: reed's face there reminds me of seasons greasons [09:00 PM] Wack'd: We don't talk about Conway anymore. 😛 [09:01 PM] maxwellelvis: Has Scratch given any indication that he's the one possessing Franklin? [09:01 PM] Wack'd: Not really [09:01 PM] maxwellelvis: Like announced his presence? [09:01 PM] Wack'd: But they figure they should bring him to Agatha's anyway. [09:01 PM] maxwellelvis: So for all they know he just did this on his own. [09:01 PM] maxwellelvis: FINALLY [09:04 PM] Mousa The 14: It’s a possession even if it’s not old scratch they know they need a magical solution [09:04 PM] Wack'd: I love that Reed starts this page having a séance around a pentagram and ends it declaring that actually this is all highly scientific

[09:04 PM] maxwellelvis: I just mean why's she second? [09:04 PM] maxwellelvis: "HAIL SCIENCE!" [09:04 PM] Wack'd: Also we're just going to trust this guy who none of you have ever met who just wandered in here out of nowhere, that's cool [09:05 PM] Mousa The 14: Yeah that’s weird. [09:05 PM] Mousa The 14: Like what are his credentials? A single eye and a white streak? [09:05 PM] Wack'd: In fairness that's more than Dr Strange has [09:06 PM] Mousa The 14: If he’s not blonde, in a trench coat, with a working class accent then this is not the man you’re looking for [09:06 PM] Mousa The 14: Good point, Wack’d [09:06 PM] maxwellelvis: Yeah, but Dr. Strange looks like Vincent Price [09:06 PM] Mousa The 14: However Dr. Strange has a doctorate [09:06 PM] Wack'd: A Doctorate Against the Dark Arts [09:06 PM] Mousa The 14: Hah! [09:06 PM] maxwellelvis: Daimon Hellstrom has a pentagram on his chest and goes around at all times without a shirt on, AND his hair goes up in devil points. [09:06 PM] maxwellelvis: 🥁 [09:08 PM] Bocaj: Look if you want to fight demons you gotta ditch the dead weight like shirts [09:08 PM] Wack'd: Why was this guy necessary? What was he doing that Agatha couldn't have? Just from a sheer plot construction point of view I don't understand what this man's utility is besides "someone besides a woman fixes this problem"

[09:09 PM] maxwellelvis: I guess we'll find out next issue? [09:09 PM] Mousa The 14: Maybe this is his backdoor pilot for a comic that never took off [09:09 PM] Wack'd: You know what, that seems likely [09:09 PM] Wack'd: He's got kind of a Gary Seven energy to him [09:09 PM] Mousa The 14: They did that quite a bit with the FF if I recall [09:10 PM] maxwellelvis: Namor, the Black Panther, those are just the examples that worked. [09:10 PM] Mousa The 14: Using the some of the  2 in ones or whatever to help enhance whoever’s book was failing [09:10 PM] maxwellelvis: The Inhumans too. [09:10 PM] maxwellelvis: @Mousa The 14 Or to conclude a series that was cut short prematurely. [09:10 PM] Wack'd: Anyway, next issue: field trip to New Salem! [09:10 PM] Mousa The 14: Indeed [09:10 PM] Wack'd: Speaking of series cut prematurely short, it's letters page time! [09:11 PM] Wack'd: Our first letter is from Chris Wells of Brooklyn, who was apparently very concerned that we's never find out what happened to Dr. Sun from Nova! [09:11 PM] Wack'd: Because as we all know, Fantastic Four would never forget about a plot point involving an evil golden robot. [09:11 PM] Bocaj: Return of the revenge of new Salem [09:12 PM] Wack'd: He also was happy to see HERBIE go even though he didn't hate him as much as he thought he would. And wants Johnny and Dazzler to hang out more. [09:13 PM] Wack'd: The next letter is all praise for Bill Mantlo. Folks...really liked HERBIE's heroic death? Even though it was a relic of a plotline that really never went anywhere and only existed because of a crossover with a book no one seemed to like [09:14 PM] maxwellelvis: And involving a character I thought nobody liked, too. [09:14 PM] maxwellelvis: Guess it's all in the telling. [09:14 PM] Wack'd: Every letter on this page is just "I hated HERBIE, but his death made me cry!" [09:14 PM] Wack'd: No accounting for taste I guess [09:15 PM] Bocaj: That’s what happened with Cipher too [09:15 PM] Wack'd: Adric Syndrome [09:15 PM] Bocaj: Not bill, Doug [09:15 PM] maxwellelvis: Forced to kill him off, she made sure EVERYONE felt bad about wishing him dead. [09:16 PM] maxwellelvis: How DID Cipher die, anyway? [09:16 PM] Wack'd: Tragic sign language accident [09:19 PM] Bocaj: He got shot with a bullet from a gun [09:19 PM] Bocaj: Saving Wolfsbane I beleive

[chiseler]

Puttin’ on the Ritz

No fame is more fleeting than the showbiz kind. Some entertainers are just too much in and of a particular time. In the 1920s Harry Richman was a big star, billed as the Greatest Entertainer In America. He could sing and play piano, dance and act a little; he ran a hugely successful nightclub, was the toast of Broadway and, very briefly, a star in Hollywood; he wrote or introduced several songs that are still sung. But most of all he just personified the Roaring Twenties. He was the sleek, rakish, vaguely smarmy bon vivant in top hat and tails who was enjoying the decade's non-stop party as much as you were. It's been said that he was to the 1920s what the Rat Pack were to their era. Harry's career peaked just as the party crashed to a halt at the end of the decade, and he faded out in the 1930s. If his name comes up at all today, it's probably less often as an entertainer than as a footnote in aviation history.

He was born Harry Reichman in Cincinnati in 1895. His dad, a Russian Jewish immigrant, started out peddling eyeglasses door to door, carrying all his equipment on his back. He worked his way up to a prosperous wholesale business and real estate empire, and developed a taste for the high life. It killed him by the time Harry was an adolescent. In his thoroughly entertaining (sometimes suspiciously so) 1966 autobiography A Hell of a Life, Harry paints himself as a fecklessly scheming kid who grew up quick. At nine, he writes, he was a weekend ticket taker at an amusement park, shortchanging every customer he could because he was saving up to marry his childhood sweetheart. One night he showed off his ill-gotten riches by taking the girl out on the town. They stayed out too late to go home, so Harry got them a hotel room. When the cops burst through the door in the wee hours they found the kids sleeping fully clothed on separate beds. A doctor confirmed that the girl's honor was intact. Her dad put the kibosh to their romance anyway.

Harry's mother bought him piano lessons, dreaming he'd be a concert pianist, but like most kids at the time he was more interested in ragtime and jazz. He left home at around fourteen and headed to Indianapolis. There he and a kid who played fiddle went door to door in the kind of neighborhoods where an upright in the parlor wasn't uncommon. They'd bang out a few popular tunes for spare change. As Remington & Reichman they were soon touring the very small-time Webster circuit of vaudeville theaters in the Dakotas and Canada, known to vaudevillians as the Death Trail. Harry kept working his way around the west, singing at the piano in saloons and whorehouses, working as a singing waiter in restaurants, as part of a "Hawaiian" hula act in a circus sideshow. At the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco he was in a musical act that opened for Harry Houdini, fifteen shows a day. Playing in Los Angeles clubs favored by the movie crowd he got to be pals with Charlie Chaplin and Al Jolson, whom he idolized. Jolson got him a shot at Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic, the late-night club revue that gave Eddie Cantor his big break. Harry raced to New York, but flopped and was canned after only one night. He was so despondent he ran off and joined the Navy.

He arrived back in New York in 1920, just when Prohibition did too. Now he and the city were ready for each other. On vaudeville stages he found work as an accompanist for headliners like the singer Nora Bayes and the beautiful twin Dolly Sisters, and for a while was Mae West's on-stage pianist and straight man. He was reluctant to speak lines at first because he had a lisp that he could hide more easily when singing. West convinced him it was a distinguishing feature. He soon got top billing on his own on the Keith-Albee circuit. He also played at ritzy speakeasies like the Beaux Arts, where, he claims, Prohibition's hostess with the mostest Texas Guinan stole her signature line "Give the little girls a big hand" from him.

Nils T. Granlund, known as NTG, was both a radio pioneer and the publicist for Marcus Loew's movie theater empire. He hired Harry to headline live radio shows from Loew's State Theatre, the movie palace in Times Square. Harry plugged new songs on air, like Billy Rose's "Does the Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?" With NTG's help he opened his own Club Richman just behind Carnegie Hall. Harry made it one of the most opulent and exclusive nightclub/speakeasies in town. A lot of Broadway and movie stars became regulars, as of course did Mayor Jimmy Walker, and the Vanderbilts and Whitneys, and foreign royalty -- you saw everybody who was anybody there.

Or wanted to be somebody, like the chorus girl Lucille Le Seur. Accounts vary as to how Lucille got into the swank club. In one version, she convinced NTG, her sugar daddy at the time, to get her a spot in the club dancing the Charleston. NTG introduced her to Loew, who arranged a screen test at MGM, where she'd get her first tiny roles in 1925. Studio chief Louis B. Mayer decided her name sounded like Le Sewer, so the studio ran a publicity campaign in which the fans got to give her a new name: Joan Crawford. She never liked it.

For his part, Harry claimed that he discovered Crawford. He did have an eye for the beauties. He was one of the first to spot Jean Harlow, Sally Rand and Maureen O'Sullivan. Harry was an infamous ladies' man, bedding a long line of beauties from chorus girls to socialites to Harlow, maybe Rand, and Clara Bow. According to Harry, his office at the club had a secret door for sneaking them in and out while their husbands or dates drummed their fingers at their tables thinking they were just taking a long time powdering their noses. He says that the Hollywood Bowl couldn't hold all the women he had, and classes himself "a specialist in man's favorite sport."

Between the club and his other gigs Harry minted money and became the playboy nonpareil. He wore the finest bespoke suits and carried a gold cigarette case with his initials on it in diamonds. He commuted in a Rolls from Manhattan to his big house out on the water in Beechhurst, Queens, where he had a yacht and threw Gatsby-like parties for celebrities, beauties and millionaires. He learned to fly and kept a growing fleet of planes at nearby Flushing Airport. Harry worked hard, played hard, drank oceans of booze and smoked whole fields of tobacco. Everyone marveled at his stamina and joie de vivre even in that over-the-top decade.

In 1926, while still playing the host at his club, Harry got a featured role on Broadway in George White's Scandals, one of several knockoffs of the Ziegfeld Follies. After a boffo year it toured other cities, including Cincinnati, where, he notes ruefully, it tanked. In 1930 he headlined Lew Leslie's International Revue, where he introduced "On the Sunny Side of the Street." And in 1931 he made it, finally, into the Follies as well. He got his choice of songs to perform, including "Lullaby of Broadway." He was at the top of his career in those shows, the king of Broadway; his friend Eddie Cantor memorably said he wore Broadway like a boutonniere.

He didn't do so well in Hollywood. He starred, playing himself as "Harry Raymond," in the 1930 musical Puttin' on the Ritz, in which he introduced the song by his pal Irving Berlin. The movie did mediocre business then and is barely watchable now except for that number, Harry gliding around in front of an army of dancers with his top hat tilted over one eye. His recording of the song, which some consider the best, was a hit. (Among his other records are Berlin's "Blue Skies," his own "Muddy Waters" and a pretty wonderful Jolson-ish rendition of "Ain't She Sweet.") While in Hollywood to make the film he met Clara Bow. Teamed up at first for publicity purposes only, they became a hot item and got engaged. Then she suddenly married someone else. Hearing the news, he says, was the only time in his life that he fainted.

He'd make only two more feature films and one short. He sums them up this way: "All were forgettable. It became clear to me that whatever I had was best projected in person, either on the stage or in a night club." By the time he made the last film, released in 1938, he was well past his prime. When the Depression hit and then Prohibition ended, guys like Harry, icons of the Roaring Twenties, just didn't fit the new reality. To his credit, he didn't hang around like some other ghosts of the 1920s did. He left New York and settled in Miami, which was booming and lousy with new nightclubs where he could coast for a few years on his dazzling past. He went fishing with Hemingway and played with his airplanes.

His real fame in the 1930s came in fact as a flyer. In the mid-1930s he'd set altitude and speed records. Then in 1935 he and the pilot Dick Merrill made the world's first round-trip transatlantic flight in a single-engine plane. They filled the plane with tens of thousands of ping-pong balls as flotation devices should they land in the soup. Harry being Harry, after reaching Wales on the outward leg of the trip, they flew on to Paris to party all night with Maurice Chevalier before making the return flight. They landed upside-down in a Newfoundland bog, but they made it. It wasn't as big a deal as Lindbergh's one-way crossing in 1927, but Harry calls it the high point of his life.

Harry didn't make much news after that. He played some clubs through the 1940s, his looks and voice rough from all that carousing and smoking. He still had lots of friends in the show business who tried to engineer comebacks for him, but the public had long since forgotten him. By the time A Hell of a Life came out in 1966 he'd spent the millions he'd made in his heyday and was living alone, quietly and frugally, in Burbank, an old guy who'd gone full-tilt as long as he could, had a hell of a lot of memories and not too many regrets. He died in 1972.

by John Strasbaugh

[fromtheringapron]

Scary Wrestling Stuff from My Childhood

Every Halloween season, it’s not uncommon for wrestling fans to reminisce about the moments in our great sport that genuinely scared them, and I’m certainly no exception. At the end of the day, wrestling is still a fantasy world that’s seen plenty of dark, suspenseful, and even at times supernatural bullshit. In fact, one of its biggest stars is The Undertaker, who has been in turns a mortician, a zombie, a Satanic cult leader, a desert biker, and some strange hybrid of all those characters at once.

Truthfully, nothing in wrestling scares me anymore. Well, at least not in kayfabe. Real life still provides a lot of fright in and out of the ring. When I see a wrestler get legitimately injured in the ring, you bet I’m concerned. The depressingly common trend of premature wrestling deaths is a terrifying subject on its own. But when you’re a kid, where even the most ridiculous thing in wrestling can seem real, there’s a lot in kayfabe to be scared about, and you don’t even known what the hell the term “kayfabe” even means.

So, to get in the spirit of the spooky season, I’ll give you a quick rundown of some things that personally scared me shitless watching wrestling as a youngster:

Evil Doink the Clown: Doink is usually associated with everything wrong in WWF’s New Generation era⏤one-dimensional gimmickry, cheesy beyond belief, and worst of all, out of touch. But it’s a reputation that isn’t quite deserved. The original Doink character was that of an evil clown, brilliantly brought to life by Matt Borne. As someone who churned out many rewatches of WrestleMania IX as a child, which features the character at its peak, you better believe I was terrified of this wrestling clown with lime green hair. If evil Doink’s sudden mood swings and aggression weren’t unsettling enough, the entrance music is fucking horrifying to this day. Far scarier than Pennywise and the Joker could ever wish, complete with maniacal clown cackles. Yikes, yikes, yikes. It sounds like the soundtrack to a haunted carnival episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? on Nickelodeon. Given the rise of creepy clowns in recent pop culture, evil Doink would still get over now, and scare a whole new generation of kids to boot.

Kane, Circa ’97/‘98: Hear me out: the video package to Kane and The Undertaker’s clash at WrestleMania XIV is one of the best ever. The music, the footage, and even the random Michael Cole narration all flow together perfectly to create something goosebumpingly epic. But, damn, as kid? This was some terrifying shit. Considering I was too young to stay up and watch every episode of Raw in full, that package was like a highlight reel of pure horror. Kane has become known for taking part in some of the most infamous and illogical storylines in WWE history, but it’s often forgotten how effective a job was done to build him up as a monster upon his debut. Remember when he lit that random dude on fire on Raw? Holy fuck. Not even the Wicked Witch of the West setting fire to The Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz shook me up quite like that. The eyes peeping out of his mask was, to me, the most frightening part of his appearance. Total nightmare fuel. Generations more familiar with bald, mask-less Kane could never quite know the trauma.

Papa Shango’s Sega Genesis Theme Music: Okay, this a fairly obscure one, but my brother and I would play WWF Royal Rumble on Sega Genesis back in the day. The game was complete with cute little 8-bit versions of each wrestler’s entrance themes. The Crush theme, in particular, is a minor masterpiece. The other piece of music that made an impact on me is the version of Papa Shango’s theme. I didn’t have too much footage of Papa Shango in my childhood wrestling VHS collection so he held some mythical status to me. The original theme is creepy enough, but the Genesis version really takes you to an dark, murky swamp where Shango is hexing his latest victim. It scared me so much that I’d speed ahead the character selection screen in the game so I wouldn’t have to hear it. You can scoff at me now all you want, but I must speak my truth.

Zeus and Randy Savage Attack Hulk Hogan and Brutus Beefcake: If you’ve watched Survivor Series 1989, you may remember a segment where Mean Gene interviews Hulk Hogan and Brutus Beefcake about their upcoming match at No Holds Barred. That’s not scary at all, but it’s what happens as the interview unfolds that, for whatever reason, really tore me up when I’d put my copy of this show in the VHS. Sensational Sherri crashes the interview, with the most wild-eyed glared you could imagine, shouting at Hogan and Beefcake in her dark, garish makeup. She then throws handfuls of powder in their eyes, allowing Zeus and Randy Savage to attack them. It’s so hard to describe what’s so scary about this. No Holds Barred, both the movie and the pay-per-view, were pretty notorious failures so it’s not even like it’s remembered as a major angle or anything. If anything, I gotta think it has something to do with the sudden tonal shift from a goofy babyface interview to an all-out assault, which can be pretty striking for any young viewer.

Mick Foley, Hell in the Cell: I don’t really need to say any more, do I? The Hell in the Cell match at King of The Ring 1998 is something that warrants a post of its own, as its undoubtedly one of my favorite matches of all time. But I cannot stress this enough: watching a human being do what Mick Foley does in this match, no matter how pre-planned, is some seriously distressing shit. As an adult, you realize you’re watching this man single-handedly take years off his career. But even in kayfabe, there’s true terror in watching the full extent of Mankind’s threshold reveal itself. The dude literally fucking smiles to the camera as he’s concussed and his mouth bloodied into steak tartar. If that image alone doesn’t stay with you, I don’t know what will. Mick Foley turns this match into a mini horror movie. Years before people tuned in droves to watch Saw and Hostel, they watched Mick Foley torture himself. In the match’s most chilling moments, he turns Mankind into a character like Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees⏤just when you think he’s been completely broken in half, he’s up and ready for more.

Early Undertaker: I can’t possibly go on without mentioning The Undertaker. When you really think about it, some of things I’ve mentioned already wouldn’t have been possible without him. It seems a little cliche to even bring him up for a topic like this, but he’s the OG of cheesy wrestling horror. Plus, it needs to be said: The Undertaker, in first couple years of his WWF career, could easily scare kids. It definitely scared the kids who grew up watching that version of the character, at least. I watched Survivor Series 1990 countless times growing up so, as you could imagine, I was one of the fortunate/unfortunate children. One of the more brilliant touches of The Undertaker’s early character, outside of the creepy glare and slow approach, was the various shots of mortified children in the crowd. It seems like a minor detail, but it went a long way in establishing him as a genuine monster. Not to mention, there were things the Undertaker did during that era that, even by the family-friendly standards of early ‘90s WWF, were pretty messed-up. How about that time he locked The Ultimate Warrior in a coffin? Or when he worked with Jake Roberts to terrorize Randy Savage and Miss Elizabeth? Make no mistake, those first few years were critical in letting us know for whom the bell tolls.

And that about does it for my own personal horrors. Maybe you think mine are silly, but what about wrestling scared you growing up? Does it still scare you? Does it still give you nightmares? As you ponder, I’ll be looking over my shoulder, hoping I’m not attacked by Zeus.

[buildridernews]

[Review] Kamen Rider Build (Overall thoughts)

It's that time of the year where Rider fans become emotional, potentially sad, potentially thinking about the future. Here, we’ll be talking about the setting, characters, plot, and really dig into that ending. 

But I guess first off, I’ll say one thing here: If you’ve followed the blog closely, you know that I really fell behind on the show a lot. That has nothing to do with the show, it’s just a me thing. When I watched, I was enjoying every episode, and kicking myself for letting so many episodes go by without watching it. 

With that said, let’s get into the reasons why I found it entertaining. 

Kamen Rider as a whole has all of these tropes and recurring themes going all the way back to the Showa era, and while Build has those things, it creates a unique setting around it. 

We're introduced to the world of Build after what is essentially a post-apocalyptic event, at least for Japan. The Skywall left them separated, with hints of a war in the midst due to the item that would grant any one of them absolute power.

At best, most Rider shows have a mysterious event took place in the past, more often an isolated incident that doesn't really have that much of an impact until the end of the show. This feels like a more impactful version of Kabuto's "A meteor previously destroyed one of our cities" opening premise, as it gives us a very unique setting where Japan is split into three types of nations, with robot sentries and abnormal mutations running around. 

More importantly, we aren't even halfway into the show when a status quo hits us and we're put into a proper war between the nations. It leaves us with empty cities for most of the show's run.

I know I commented on this a while back, and I kinda feel like it needs a followup now that the show is over: The show was dabbling in a lot of what I call "Real world monsters". Back when Gaim was going on, I recall thinking it was unexpected for a character to comment so realistically about how humans are always at war with each other, because it seemed like a heavy subject for a kid's show. Fast forward to Build where that's just the entire show. 

We spent the last year with a kids show dabbling in war and conspiracies, and when it became apparent that they were leaning heavily into these subjects, I wondered if maybe the show would take a much different direction in the end, causing us to go “Yeah it was weird when the show talked about war for about 1/3 of the story”. But as it turns out, that theme stuck and resonated in the characters. They go through a lot over the course of 49 episodes.

It's not uncommon for a Rider protag to be affected by a death, but Sento actually causes the death of a human and is legitimately haunted by his actions, not to mention the baggage of being the brainwashed creator of a combat system that started all of this fighting. It's also not uncommon for the protag to frequently hit an emotional rut that leads them to a newfound resolve, but I feel like this show really justifies it.

Sento frequently struggles with the idea of heroism because he keeps being challenged by these contradictions about himself, and the idea of heroism is constantly being mocked by the more cynical enemies he faces - even so, he kept fighting. He was once a member of Faust, he lost control and took a life, his father turned out to be one of his enemies for a bit... The dude went to hell and back, and I feel like his final form debut - as late as it was - felt so earned because of all he went through.

And this is to say nothing about his genius! I love Sento because he lives up to the hype. Before Build began, they talked about how Sento was the smartest of all the Heisei Rider leads, and it shows. He not only made his own Rider gear, as well as gear for other people, he also FREQUENTLY displayed his intelligence by planning ahead outside of battle. The dude would plan ahead by a couple episodes, even. He accounts for a lot of things and it's so satisfying to watch him get the upper hand, especially knowing just how much emotional baggage he has to carry. It’s beautiful catharsis. 

When it comes to the amnesia angle, followed by the Katsuragi reveal, I figured it was a nice twist. It makes more sense once you get further along in the show and learn more about who Blood Stalk was and why he had these powers. It was also interesting to have Katsuragi exist in Sento’s head after a while, giving him more staying power than I actually expected. I also must commend them for not only doing the “Katsuragi remembers who he is” subplot, and doing it for more than one episode. I’m just overall really pleased with how those things all worked out. 

It also must be said that the show did a great job sticking to this "The hero is created from evil" trope from the original Kamen Rider. They said from the start that this show would be focused on that idea, and they never strayed from it. Pretty much all the Riders (save for the villain) are kind of a different flavor of that idea. Just in general, I think it can be said that the show was consistent. 

And I can't talk about Sento without immediately talking about Ryuga. Along with the things mentioned about the main character, they also said that this show would be about “the feelings between these two men!” (context~), and once you see the first couple of episodes, you get what they mean. It's clever to have two leads who are such opposites, the classic Brain VS Brawn. The two played well off of each other til the very end.

Ryuga was also nice to have in the cast due to the (at the time) lack of background for Sento. The main character already had his origin story a while back, so most of the early episode were just about him doing his usual hero thing. Ryuga, on the other hand, gave us an on-screen origin story. We actually get to see his transition from a selfish hothead to a hero who wants to fight for the sake of others, and by the end of the show he goes out of his way to sacrifice himself like Sento would’ve.

Knowing where the plot eventually went with Evolt, it makes so much sense why Ryuga got this much focus, right down to the winter movie teaching him more about why a Kamen Rider fights for the sake of others. It just all worked out so well.

Kazumi was a character I was super interested in. I loved the actor in Kiva, and when he was introduced, it seemed like he’d be playing a charming character once more. But as we learned more about him, I think he turned out to be a character with more depth. Don’t get me wrong, Otoya is the best thing about Kiva, but I think of him as a cartoon character with some hidden depth, whereas Kazumi feels like a human being. 

I was a little uncertain on what they were gonna do with him at first - he was treated as a soldier of sorts who had amnesia like Sento, and his trio of Hard Smash bros seemed upset that he didn’t remember them. But as you kept going, you learn that he was just pretending to have amnesia for a reason, which is clever. 

Kazumi is tough, but you realize that he has heart once you see his friends get killed off one by one. He will show no mercy towards the people who caused him to lose his only friends, and that sense of heroism eventually made him a part of the team. 

The transition from antagonist to hero was natural, and I loved the character, whether he was being comical or serious. The actor knew how to play both. 

Gentoku is where things get a little more shaky. 

I’m sure I’ve said before, but Gentoku was a character I didn’t put much stake into because his role as Night Rogue was obvious, and to me, Night Rogue’s role in the story was obvious: He was the strongest villain we had as of episode 1, meaning he would be killed off by the first power-up Build obtains. That being said, the character stuck around, which makes sense in retrospect since Build’s not about killing. 

Gentoku went away for a while, then came back as an edgelord. While I found some part of him interesting and thought he rocked that look pretty well, the backstory was just a little too over-the-top edgy for my liking. It honestly felt pretentious in a way. I kinda just let him do his thing. 

Then they did something interesting with him, revealing that once he became Rogue, the nebula gas that made him so villainous was wearing off, and he was now starting to show some heroism as he rescued his father from the people he was taking orders from. Then once his father died in his arms, his transition into a hero would begin. 

And, okay. Okay. The comedy they use on him at this point is a bit out of place, as fun as it was. It’s one of those things where, if you want to you can form a headcanon to make sense of it, but it’d be nice if they addressed it themselves. When he was just being a good guy, I found him really endearing. 

Oh and since he was palling around with the gear bros, I guess I’ll just say that... I said what I needed to say about them in their last episode. They were badass but a little too cool to have any personality outside of being a duo, so they didn’t do much for me as characters. But they looked cool. 

Utsumi is a character i don’t have as much to say about, but since I’m talking about Riders I guess I’ll reiterate what I said before. 

Like Gentoku, I didn’t have much stake in Utsumi at first, but I figured since he was working with Gentoku, he probably had something to show. When he ended up getting shot and fell off a bridge, I thought it was a lil weird he came back without seemingly being hurt. Then that one episode addressed it by saying he was a cyborg now, a twist I was not expecting, but it was an interesting choice. 

I was honestly hoping that Utsumi would come back as Rogue, only because it’d be fitting if Night Rogue got killed off by Utsumi using a name stolen from him. But it made sense for Gentoku to be Rogue, of course, and Utsumi had some fun moments as the man giving him orders. 

Once he turned to Evolt, after seeing his mentor die, I thought it was a liiiittle forced, and honestly thought he just cracked. But once again, that one episode addressed it by revealing that he was still loyal to his mentor’s cause and was... kind of a secret hero all along. 

Utsumi turned out to be more interesting than expected, and it’s a bit of a shame he’s-- well I guess he’s fine now thanks to the ending, but I wouldn’t have minded him being fixed if we weren’t aiming for that kind of ending. 

Now... we talk about this guy. 

Okay, so, Isurugi is an interesting character on his own. He’s an astronaut! He makes coffee now! He has red shades! He was a super fun supporting character, and I think it was brilliant(ly heartbreaking) for him to turn out to be a villain. It makes up for how obvious Night Rogue was. 

Blood Stalk was definitely the more interesting villain to follow because he was playing a much different game than the other groups in the show, and he seemed to have a lot of power on his side that wasn’t totally explained for a while - a friend and I figured he was actually an alien just screwing with humans, and I can’t believe that was such a perfect prediction. 

I suppose once his role as Evolt is revealed, he sorta sssstops being interesting in that regard, because he’s no longer mysterious. A good way to put it, which I saw going around, is that he feels like a Dragon Ball Z villain. Not too much depth, just an uncomfortably strong guy that’s toying with people and will be destroying this planet once he’s had his fun. And I’m fine with that I suppose, I like a DBZ once in a while. 

About this point in the show, I saw some fair criticisms about the pacing of the plot that suggested it was getting dragged out, aaand I kinda see that but kinda disagree? It definitely feels like Build and Evol keep getting the upper hand on each other, but I think of that as a display of their intellect. They’re playing this big game of chess, and sure, that can elongate a plot, but I found it entertaining at least. 

Now if there’s any criticism I have about the show by this point, it’s that we never really get a true followup on Isurugi once Evolt leaves his body. Like, we know that he was chilling out in the hospital, unconscious, but the next time we see him is in the ending when everything has been fixed. 

Supporting characters next. 

Misora is a character I don’t have a whole lot to talk about, she was fun when she delivered deadpan comedy, her connection to Isurugi (and thus, the villain) was interesting, found the Mii-tan stuff a little unnecessary but it provided some fun banter with Kazumi... decent gal. It was heartwarming seeing her live a normal life in the ending. She’s been through as much emotional turmoil as the Riders. 

Sawa was interesting, because I expected her to just be a journalist, but she turned out to be a huge player in the villains as a spy. She was eventually caught, and I thought it was both surprising and impactful when she remarks that she was actually supposed to kill herself at one point and couldn’t bring herself to it because spending time with the heroes made her realize what it was like to have real friends. She was used cleverly, even if her backstory seemed pretty crazy. 

As for other characters, man there’s a lot. I think it’s enough to say that what I talked about in previous reviews is still applicable now. Namba was interesting, and the way they bring back previous victims is clever. I don’t think there’s anyone that didn’t serve a purpose. 

Hoo boy, been going for a while... I think it’s time we wrap this up and talk about the ending. Well, at least saying things I didn’t talk about in the last review. I’ll assume you know where all the characters are as of this change in their timeline. 

It was THE cathartic moment for the show, because leading up to the final episode, you really see everyone drop like flies. Kazumi knows his fate and goes in for one last rodeo, Utsumi sacrifices himself, Gentoku tries to live up to his father’s legacy as a man of the people, and Ryuga attempts to send Evolt away for good. Even Sento started to get some of that death aura in the final battle... 

A common complaint for a Rider show is the undoing of death. The best known example of this is in W, and I’d also put up Fourze. That moment when they kill off a character in a big dramatic way only to undo it in the next episode. It’s a tad cheap, and while you could say Build did that, I think it did it well - it creates a new world where all our favorite characters didn’t go through all this turmoil, while still making it a bit sad by not having them know each other. In that sense, they did die, but at the same time, they live. 

I guess the first thing I wanna bring up is... wow we did the Ryuki ending, huh? Ryuki is like 2002 so it should be okay to spoil. Unlike Ryuki, the protag(s) remembers what happened, so that makes things more interesting and opens the way for future crossovers, albeit without a huge cast. 

Zi-O is using time travel to work in Build (so they just went to a time when Build and Cross-Z were still rocking their first forms), we don’t know what the upcoming winter movie will be doing, so all we can look forward to for the moment is the Cross-Z movie. Very interested to see how that goes. 

I will also address that there’s some weird implications to this new timeline that unfortunately haven’t been addressed in the show, and I HOPE they do in the movie because this is a big burning question: Is the technology still the same, and did the Mars mission still happen? Because without Evolt’s presence, Mars would presumably still be a planet with life on it. 

Well, okay, I’ve done some thinking and can kinda address that, but not really. 

Namba was involved with Japan’s unmanned space probe. As we see in this new world... I guess Namba is a non-military company now, meaning they probably wouldn’t have contributed to the space mission? I dunno, that’s my best guess. It’d probably also explain why we don’t see Guardians. 

It’s a bit of a stretch if that’s the intent, just arbitrarily retconning Namba, but I guess it serves as an explanation. Still, unless life on Mars just ceased to exist a long time ago, someone has to have seen something when they looked into a telescope. 

With that burning question out of the way, I dunno if there’s much else to talk about with this new world. It exists, and I wanna see what they do with it. 

And that... finally, is all there is to Build. 

I enjoyed the hell out of this show. It was dark, it was emotional, it was funny when it wanted to be, and it was solid all the way through. Well, okay, like any show, it has flaws. But I think that when a show has so much positive stuff going for it, that can negate the flaws. I consistently had fun from start to finish and I don’t always get to say that. 

Whenever a Rider show ends, I come back to my little list of shows. I’ve seen all of the Heisei Kamen Riders, so I like to make a list of which ones are my most favorite to least favorite. Here’s the top 5 of that list, in descending order. 

Gaim - Solid story, solid characters, just a fun trip all around.

Build - Unique premise, strong characterization, consistent.

W - Nicely written plot with fantastic monsters and memorible characters.

Ex-Aid - Great concept, good characterization, pretty solid execution.

Den-O - Fun and funny, interesting cast, compelling story.

It’s really lucky that the shows I’ve made blogs for are ones that I enjoyed enough to put so high above the others. And as I’ve said in the past, I’ll be stepping away from doing new blogs, especially since a big crossover show would be insanity to keep up with in the style of blog I like to do. 

With Build basically over, I’ll pop in now and again to do an occasional review of the movies/bonus material. 

Thank you for following up to this point. It’s been a fun ride. 

[therewillbesparkles]

mangas

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Some Quick Thoughts on Peathers

I promise that my analysis of Heather Chandler is almost done. I’ve finished drafting, so it’s in the editing stages now. But I had to take some time out of my day to show myself some self-hatred, and watched the pilot episode of Peathers.

And in case if you’re worried about it being bad, don’t worry - it is.

--> This show is horrendously tone deaf. I mean it was already there since it was punching down on those  rotten kids!! for using social media to be involved with social justice issues and being politically involved especially in such a divisive era, but in the aftermath of Parkland, everyone involved just seems like real assholes or just super ignorant. Now, that isn’t necessarily the show’s fault that a school shooting occurred just days before it was dropped, but it’s not an uncommon occurrence, unfortunately, and the people involved should have known that when picking up the work, considering the role of violence in the story. Not to mention that the teens in real life are working hard to organize these events to have their voices heard on an issue that effects everybody.

--> I actually kind of enjoyed the opening scene with Shannen Doherty upon a first watch. It took me a moment to understand what was happening, but once I did, I actually got kind of excited. The tone of it felt much closer to the original movie than the musical did (the movie being much more surreal and bizarre, the musical campy and over the top), so I was hoping for a return to form there. This was also considering some of the teasers they dropped (with some great cinematography, I’ll add), but oh man did they know how to kill any good will they built up. JD later drops the story of what happened to Veronica SO IF YOU HAD NO IDEA WHAT HAPPENED, HE SPELLS IT OUT FOR YOU, DON’T WORRY!!! :):):):):):):)

  --> And let’s talk about JD for a second - he is, without a doubt, the weakest link in the cast. Movie JD was charismatic, aloof, and difficult to read. He drops his mother’s death on Veronica at random, before being amused by a song on the radio and shooting at it. TV JD is that one kid in high school that I initially thought was creepy, but was nice to and sort of became friends with, and then learned, no, he is that creepy. TV JD drops his mom’s backstory, because. That’s it. Just because. I guess they want you to relate to him and feel bad for him but I really don’t. Take his “labels don’t really matter” speech - of course he feels that way. He wouldn’t be bullied in reality for being white or a dude. He doesn’t have to worry about hiding his sexuality (he tells his dad that he’s going to have sex with Veronica, which made me shrivel up and lose ten years off my life) or even struggle to understand what his sexuality is.

--> And then there’s his connection with Veronica. They have none. Seriously, they have a couple of conversations together, but no serious indicators that they’ve entered a relationship until after they’ve killed Heather Chandler. Both in the movie and musical, JD and Veronica sleep together, so when they do kill Veronica, she has more conflict over the situation because they’re involved together. She has no reason to go along with his plan other than the fact that she hates Chandler. Veronica likes that JD is a “rebel” when he’s actually a twelve year old in a seventeen year old’s body thinking that “eDGY” humor is still funny. And they have no chemistry together. As much as I hate Musical Veronica and JD, there was still something there. The only scene I liked with Peathers JD and Veronica was when they were in Snappy Snack Shack having their party with the bubble gun, and that was more for the shot itself rather than the characters.

--> By far the worst thing about this episode is its pacing. In addition to the horrible handling of JD and Veronica’s relationship, there’s Betty’s rise to power, the non death of Chandler, Mac vs Duke... it’s like they tried to rush through as much of the first act as possible so that they could get to their own original ideas. I know that they’re excited to show off what they have in mind for this retelling, but they throw so much at you and expect you to believe it all. For example, Betty becoming the new Chandler. This might have been an interesting idea, if they took more time to establish Betty’s character, outside of being slightly bitter at Veronica. What are her skills and goals? What does she excel at? How is she regarded in school? The movie has maybe a quarter of the amount of time the show will have, and it gives you enough insight into Duke’s character to see how she becomes Chandler 2.0. The escalation, here, on the other hand, is meant to be a “shocking” twist because “oMG THAT DIDNT HAPPEN IN THE ORIGINAL”. Twists have to be earned, guys.

--> The fact that we’re supposed to feel bad for the cishet white girl because she feels like she has “no identity” because everyone identifies themselves using labels, and she can only cling to the “half-Jewish” label.  This especially doesn’t work later when she calls Chandler “fatty” and we’re supposed to believe this was an accident. Like, no, I really don’t, because she knew Chandler long enough to know that would hurt. 

It looks like this show is gonna go full-on Riverdale after this, which I am not interested in. If I wanted that, I would just go and watch Riverdale, but I don’t hate myself enough for that.