#reviews when it comes out. and then 5-10 years later all the critics admit that they think they’re flawed or out and out bad. the world of

[waugh-bao]

[comrade-meow]

‘Sex work’ advocates and the Nazi propaganda playbook

Last month Nordic Model Now! was asked to participate in a University of Exeter student debate on the proposition that “This house believes that sex work is real work.” As a group, we are ambivalent about taking part in such debates. On the one hand, they are seldom a conducive forum for understanding nuanced and complex issues – but on the other hand, if we don’t participate there is a risk that the audience won’t hear the feminist analysis of prostitution. No one else in the group was able to take part that night, so reluctantly I agreed.

From the comments on social media during the debate, it appears that most of the students were won over by the arguments of the two proponents of the proposition – even though it was clear to me that they both had powerful vested interests in a booming sex industry, that much of what they said was palpably false and much of their argument relied on ad hominem attacks on myself and the other speaker against the proposition.

I was awake much of that night wondering why the students at one of the top universities in the UK appeared to be so unable to see beyond the self-satisfied veneer of the two speakers for the proposition. By the morning I’d resolved to analyse the arguments for the proposition and place them in context, with the aim of providing some help to those coming to similar debates in the future. This article is the result.

The Nazi Manual of Propaganda

Yale professor and expert in the history of fascism, Timothy Snyder, talks of the 1924 Nazi manual of propaganda that advised finding simple slogans and repeating them over and over and framing opposition as disloyalty or worse. Many people, he says, have taken up these tactics in recent years, leading not only to an erosion of the understanding that politics should be about reasoned debate leading towards constructive and informed policy, but also to politics being viewed as a battleground between ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’.

You would need to be blind to not recognise that these tactics have become increasingly common in the UK and US in recent years, and how they have been used to manipulate the public into support for policies that are not in their best interests and that might have catastrophic consequences. Depending on the arena, dissent is framed as hatred, ‘anti-science,’ or not ‘evidence-based,’ and this acts as a powerful silencing force that shuts down critical thinking and coerces acceptance of what is often little more than hot air.

These tactics obscure who are the real beneficiaries of the propaganda – usually people who gain power or who benefit in financial or other ways from whatever is being promoted. Bizarrely, we can observe these practices on both the right and left of the political spectrum.

These tactics were on display in the University of Exeter Debating Society debate. It was by no means the first or only such debate I have taken part in or observed, and nor was it the first time that I saw those promoting the idea that ‘sex work is real work’ consciously or unconsciously using tactics from the Nazi propaganda playbook.

You don’t have to take my word for it. You can read the transcript of the debate and I’ll illustrate my claims through an analysis of the key arguments used by the two speakers for the proposition.

Jerry Barnett

The first speaker for the proposition was Jerry Barnett, who’s the author of the book, Porn Panic. He regularly writes on sex and the ‘economics of sex,’ and runs a YouTube channel called ‘Sex and Censorship.’ In other words, the sex industry indirectly provides his daily bread and butter.

After introducing himself, he defined work as: “A voluntary exchange of time or labour for money or some other payment.” He didn’t mention that this definition deviates significantly from the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition, which is based on mental or physical activity, and he didn’t explain how you can exchange time for money.

One of the key arguments against prostitution being considered normal work is that although it involves some mental and physical activity (pretending the punter’s a great guy, cleaning up afterwards, etc.) the core feature of prostitution is that he uses her body – he gropes and penetrates her. This is not about her being actively engaged in mental or physical activity but someone doing something to her.

What other work involves someone doing something to you while you lie back and endure it? The only thing that I can think of is participating in medical trials – but that’s not considered work – even though you might be paid for taking part.

So, he sneakily expanded the definition to make it easier to argue that a man penetrating your orifices is a normal form of work – although of course he didn’t mention penetration because, like most sex trade lobbyists, he buries such fundamental realities in euphemism and obfuscation.

Interestingly, he did admit that it is invariably men who are the customers (or punters as we call them) and nine or more times out of ten it is women who are being penetrated – or earning an income from ‘sex work’ as he euphemistically described it.

His arguments hinged around two key contentions: First, that ‘sex work’ is well-paid, enjoyable work that has short hours and is particularly suitable for anyone who needs flexibility. I will leave aside the questionable ethics of promoting such a skewed reality to an audience of impressionable young women and men.

Second, that opposition to ‘sex work’ is based on false statistics, the conflation of trafficking and consensual ‘sex work,’ and moralistic values from people who are anti-sex and who attack women’s rights, and refuse to “listen to sex workers who say it’s empowering.”

Most of the time, he expounded on one or other of these claims, all presented with utter conviction, while implicitly framing anyone who disagreed with him as the enemy – the enemy of women’s rights, of rational debate, of men, of more or less everything that he considers good in life.

He dismissed my arguments as “anecdotes” even though most of his were based on wishful thinking rather than hard evidence – while at the same time claiming they were “evidence-based.”

For example, I mentioned that the murder rate of women involved in prostitution is the highest of any group, including in the UK, and that where prostitution is legalised, the murder rate of women in prostitution usually remains high.

His immediate response?

“Anna is good with anecdotes but when she tries to use statistics, they don’t seem to add up at all. I think the last time I looked, the professions with the highest [murder rate] were police and fast-food delivery people who are overwhelmingly men. But yeah, the anecdotes stack up, the statistics don’t.”

I didn’t manage to respond to this until much later in the debate, when I quoted a senior police officer who, when giving evidence at a Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry in early 2016, said:

“We have had 153 murders of prostitutes since 1990, which is probably the highest group of murders in any one category, so that gives the police cause for concern.”

I didn’t have the stats for police murders at my fingertips but I looked them up later and found data that suggested there had been about 28 murders of police officers in the UK during the same period (1990-2015). So, there were more than five times as many murders of women involved in prostitution as police officers. I couldn’t find any data on fast food delivery drivers other than a few isolated press reports.

So much for his grasp on statistics. But the damage had been done.

Charlotte Rose, the other speaker for the proposition, compounded the damage by asserting more than once that there had been no murders recorded of women involved in prostitution in New Zealand, where the sex industry is fully decriminalised.

But again, this is untrue. The German women who run the Sex Industry Kills project have documented 10 murders of prostituted women in New Zealand since the sex trade was decriminalised in 2003 along with a number of attempted murders. That is a significant number given New Zealand’s small population (currently less than 5 million).

One of my key arguments was that the sex industry normalises and eroticises male dominance and one-sided sex, and feeds men’s entitlement and reduces their empathy – which are the very attitudes that underpin the current epidemic of rape, child sexual abuse, and other forms of male violence against women and children.

Jerry’s response? That there was not an epidemic of male violence against women. He based this assertion on another made-up definition centred on “a steep sustained increase” – unlike the Oxford Dictionary, which centres the definition merely on a disease being widespread.

He said that not only was there not an epidemic of male violence but that the prevalence of such violence has been on a steep decline for 50 years.

But this is not true. Research has shown that male violence against women has risen significantly in the UK since 2010 and that new forms of gender-based abuse are increasingly prevalent. Even the UN describes male violence against women as a pandemic – which is an epidemic that has spread to cover multiple countries.

I mentioned that the judge in a judicial review about Sheffield Council’s relicensing of Spearmint Rhino (a lap dancing club) had castigated the council for rejecting a large number of objections from women and community members who said that the club had made the streets less safe on the basis that these objections were nothing more than “moral values.” The judge was clear that the objections were not about morality but were issues of equality.

Jerry responded as follows:

“There was briefly the anecdote about Spearmint Rhino and that women didn’t feel safe in the area. The fact is I’ve been involved, I’ve got stripper friends who’ve been involved in these campaigns to keep the venues open and these claims are false. They come up over and over again – that the presence of a strip club in an area makes women less safe. This has been de-proved, debunked, using evidence over and over and over again. So, the idea that women don’t feel safe in the area is a different thing.

Unfortunately, if women don’t feel safe, that’s sad but then they should acquaint themselves with the facts that actually the presence of a strip club in an area does not lead to an increase in sexual violence. And yet these kinds of things are continuously claimed to make it look like this is a woman’s rights movement rather than a morality movement, which it is.”

As for his claim that the increased violence in the vicinity of lap dancing clubs and similar has been “debunked” many times, well I couldn’t find any clear evidence that supported that. Rather I found much to the contrary. The Women and Equalities Select Parliamentary Committee in its report on its inquiry into Sexual Harassment of Women and Girls in Public Places, accepted the considerable evidence that sexual entertainment venues, such as lap dancing clubs, “promote the idea that sexual objectification of women and sexual harassment commonly in those environments is lawful and acceptable.”

But that is not good enough for Jerry. He sticks to what he knows is effective, and repeats sound bites that are simply not true while dismissing solid evidence and presenting any opposition as irrational and the work of moralistic enemies.

As to a man telling women they are being irrational to fear male violence, what can I say? I am not sure anything I would like to say is publishable.

Charlotte Rose

The second speaker for the proposition was Charlotte Rose, who was wearing a t-shirt advertising Fan Baits, a new commercial sex industry advertising platform. She introduced herself as, “a former multi-award-winning escort, current radio presenter and advocate for decriminalisation of sex work.”

She went on to say:

“I just want to discuss something that may affect your moral judgement. How do you all feel when I mention people who work in abortion clinics, abattoirs, factory farmers, nuclear power station workers? To name just a few. For me I do not like it. But just because we do not like what these people do, it doesn’t give us the right to state that their work is not legitimate.”

Since when have people campaigned against factory farming or nuclear power because they didn’t approve of the people who work in those industries? Eccentrics aside, the arguments are always around the impact of those industries on the environment, human and animal health and welfare, and other wider issues – and any personal disapproval is reserved for those who, knowing the damage caused, profit from those industries.

The inclusion of abortion clinics in this list is a sneaky attempt to associate our opposition to the commercial sex industry with extreme anti-woman protestors against abortion. This is a classic example of suggesting guilt by association. For an audience of students whose average age is likely to coincide with the peak age for abortions, this is particularly reprehensible.

Charlotte then said that “until you’ve worked as a sex worker, you’ve got no right whatsoever to dictate anything against [sex work].” This is an argument that we hear repeated over and over in true propaganda playbook style, making people lose their critical faculties and the ability to say, hang on a minute, I’m entitled to have an opinion on factory farming and nuclear power and other industries that have a wide impact, why on earth can’t I have an opinion on the sex industry?

And the truth is, of course you can have such an opinion, and indeed as a concerned citizen, you should – but they don’t want you to. Because once you really look at the sex industry, it’s hard to ignore the rampant abuses and negative impacts on us all, particularly young people.

Like Jerry, Charlotte expounded on how “consensual sex work” has nothing to do with sexual abuse, exploitation and trafficking. But of course, it does. There is no separate market for trafficked women – they are on the same street corners and in the same brothels and so-called massage parlours as women who may have made some kind of choice to be there. From the outside you can’t tell what led a woman to that place – nor what is holding her there.

As we have written elsewhere, most pimping meets the international definition of human trafficking and most women involved in prostitution have one or more third party (i.e. pimp) feeding off their prostitution. And the evidence of the violence inherent in prostitution is overwhelming.

Charlotte may not be a male chauvinist pig as all the evidence suggests that Jerry is, but she was equally happy to misrepresent our arguments and frame us as hateful and dangerous. She claimed several times that we want to “delegitimise” her work. (What work? Didn’t she say she was a former sex worker?)

In an attempt to convince everyone that her work really is real work, she went into a long explanation of what it entails: dealing with emails (80 a day), text messages (120/day), phone calls (50), notifications, advertising, website SEO, updating her photos, social media and special offers, booking hotels, etc.

She then asked whether that sounded like work – which of course it does. But that was missing the whole point of the debate because she didn’t mention the core aspects of prostitution – sexual intimacy with a stranger who pays you to have his every whim and fetish met with a smile.

She claimed that “delegitimising sex work” damages her credibility and means men won’t see it as legitimate work and means she “can’t get a mortgage by writing down that I’m a sex worker.” But later when she was asked why she was against legalisation of the sex trade (she favours full decriminalisation), she said:

“Legalisation is what happens in Amsterdam, but women, or sex workers […] have to pay for a licence. So, first of all, they’ve got to give a large amount of money to be able to get a licence to give them the ability to work and be in a legitimate premise.

Number one, they cost a lot of money. Number two, their details are known so there’s no anonymity. If someone wants their business not to be known to the government, then unfortunately they won’t be able to work. So, these two massive factors are why we don’t want it to be legalised.”

But hang on a minute… Isn’t she arguing for ‘sex work’ to be considered ‘real work’?

And isn’t one of the things that distinguishes ‘real’ – or legitimate – work from scams, drug dealing and other illegal activity, that when you earn money from ‘real work,’ you fill out a tax return and inform the government about where your income comes from.

So actually it sounds like she doesn’t want it to be regular ‘real work’ after all.

She made other arguments that were equally dodgy. She claimed several times that by expressing our views, we are causing actual harm to sex workers:

“One of my morals is not to cause harm to other people. I would never use my morals to cause harm to anybody. Your moralistic view is causing harm to sex workers.”

She is talking about an industry in which women involved in it have an extremely high murder rate – almost invariably by male punters and pimps – and yet she suggests that the problem is naming and describing this reality.

I explained that our position is that nothing can make prostitution safe and so we need to reduce the amount that happens. Anything that normalizes it means it will increase – it will increase men’s demand for it and more women will be sucked in and be hurt. As her position is that prostitution should be legitimised and become a normal job, you could therefore argue that her position will cause harm – like she claims about us. However, we prefer to argue on the facts and actual evidence.

Conclusion

Judging by the comments on social media, the young audience were swept along by Charlotte’s glamorous and suave act – in the face of which our attempts to focus the debate on the depressing realities of prostitution appeared about as alluring as a school assembly address by Miss Trunchbull on a bad day.

But reality is what we must deal with. Basing public policy on wishful thinking and propaganda invented by those with powerful vested interests is a recipe for disaster. You only need to consider Brexit to understand that.

The Brexit debate was dominated by sound bites and hot air underwritten by hedge fundies and other capitalists salivating at the prospect of looser and weaker regulation of business and commerce. But large sections of the British population were swept along by the propaganda and were blind to the likely dangers. It is only now, four years later, as the actual reality of Brexit is becoming impossible to ignore that opinion polls are showing the majority turning against it and realising it is almost certainly a terrible mistake.

You can’t help wondering in this context why schools and universities are not educating students about the dangers of propaganda and how to recognise and resist it. All of us, but especially young people, need to understand how to identify vested interests, easy answers and soundbites that oversimplify complex subjects, attacks on opponents and unevidenced assertions that they are motivated by hate or worse, and to see these as red flags.

Much of life is complex and messy and inequality and abuse of power is rife. There are no easy answers. Real solutions require hard work and challenging powerful vested interests – not following them like sheep.

[fromtheplanethexagon]

the robot problem: a critical look at tobecky, 5 years late

hello wordgirl fandom i am back :) and i have a lot of thoughts that i never got around to expressing before i moved on from the show. so be aware that everything i'm saying is based on my experiences during the 2012-2016 era of the fandom & state of tumblr in general, and i am not familiar with more recent fan content.

it's been over five years since the show ended, and @ifbrd​ reminded me (along with some great analysis) that while tobecky was super popular since before the show technically started (thanks to the play date shorts), it's pretty unhealthy in a lot of ways that tend to be excused or flat out ignored in fanworks. i'd like to reflect on that a bit (a lot); specifically, how both the show and the fandom approached this enemies-to-lovers ship, and how easily this ship can slip into uncomfortable territory if we're careless about how we interpret the ship and create fan content of it.

i will admit, i'm mostly writing this as a response to past me and my old creations - though i moved on from the show as a whole years ago, i do like taking the time to reflect on old interests once in a while, and reevaluating my thoughts on them. and this ship is probably the biggest one that still lurks in the corners of my mind once in a while, so let's go.

cherish is the word: a short positive note before a much longer negative one

i wanted to start this essay off with some positivity, because i am going to be very negative after this. tobecky was, in some ways, cute. it's obvious from the very beginning that these two characters are on pretty equal ground, even if one of them isn't aware of it. and that's part of the fun - the irony of how unaware tobey is that his nemesis/crush/person that pretty much always wins against him is someone that he completely dismisses as incompetent. i want to point this out because honestly, in general i don't like enemies-to-lovers because a lot of them use a power imbalance within the dynamic, and i hate power imbalances, especially when it comes to actual life-or-death scenarios (at least, as much as cartoons can do that). in most episodes, becky is never actually forced to go along with his wishes. she's not held in a 'date' against her will, nor is she ever really outwitted by him. i bring this up because there is one huge, uncomfortable exception, which i will get to later.

another big plus to the ship is the fact that they just... get along? even when fighting? of course we get brief moments where they just hang out and talk about paintings or whatever, but i'm talking about how much they get each other, even if they don't realize it. like the word banter, for example. been there since day one. becky loves words, and while most other people in her life don't really care (ranging from 'eh, that's cool i guess' to her brother calling it annoying), tobey gives her a chance to show off and thus treats her as a worthy adversary as herself, not because of her more generic superpowers - something that we've seen in canon that she feels self-conscious about (see: her motivation in patch game). one of the less noticed examples, to me, is "it's your party and i'll cry if I want to", because it's just - okay. they both are excluded from a social event, and while it's obvious that tobey deals with it by destroying the city, it's also pretty obvious that becky also deals with her frustration by fighting in that battle. like, yes, realistically it's just objectively bad that he's destroying buildings. but they're also providing each other with a way to work through their frustrations, first by fighting and then by talking things out, and finally by hanging out together instead of dwelling on being excluded from the party.

so it makes a lot of sense to me that many tobecky fans gravitated towards writing far-in-the-future fic, usually by implying that some growth had taken place before starting to write the ship. (there are, as far as i'm aware, 2... maybe 3 exceptions, that take the time to attempt a real redemption for him, at least when i left the fandom.) because if you take away his worst moments, either by reasoning out that he was 10 years old and a mess, or that he was a cartoon character in a cartoon world where everyone's actions are over-the-top, or by just flat-out pretending that certain episodes never happened, there's some pretty solid ground to start a ship on.

go gadget go: we all do not see it, we simply close our eyes (review of canon)

when the show began, i was the same age as the characters. a lot of other people were, too - at least in my cohort of the fandom. i think it's pretty safe to say that many of us have fond memories of the show's earlier seasons, and held on to that interest as we got older, for whatever reasons. so like, not to be all 'as an OG fan...', but i remember seeing the shorts air for the first time in 2006. i have a diary entry in july of 2009 about how i, a 12yo with no concept of the idea of 'shipping', was disappointed in the new tobey episode because i wanted more tobecky interactions. (that was robo-camping, btw, lol.) and so i remember how exciting their rivalry felt, watching them as someone literally their exact same age, and then watching that again as a nostalgic 17yo, and then uh... growing up, to put it frankly, and realizing just how unhealthy most of their interactions were.

okay what i meant to say was, this section is an overview of the relationship's canon portrayal throughout the years.

first, we have early tobecky: this includes the shorts and the first few seasons. this is their classic relationship: he likes her and takes robots on rampages to get her attention, she majorly disapproves and has fun taking him down. we've all seen the show, you know what i'm talking about. his backhanded ways of trying to find out her identity often feature prominently in the episodes, which - sigh, i've mentioned this whole issue before, but it's kind of a grey area in the whole uncomfortable-factor thing, because while trying to find out her identity is VERY invasive, it's something that like... everyone in the show tries to do, even her canon crush (scoops). on the one hand, it's really not a great look, but on the other hand, this is a cartoon meant to parody a genre in which this trope is extremely common. so i just wanna say that i have Issues and Thoughts on this aspect of their relationship, but there are other things i find more important to discuss here.

second, we have late tobecky: this is seasons 7-8. this is... a very strange and huge shift from the previous dynamic, though it's not necessarily obvious. what i mean by that is that for some reason, the show writers made it so that half of tobey’s rampages have nothing to do with his crush on wordgirl, even though that used to be the sole reason for his villainy. seriously. we have the birthday episode, where he's upset because he feels left out; wg vs tobey vs the dentist, where he's mad that he has a cavity; and trustworthy tobey, where his robot goes on a rampage... after becky accidentally makes it malfunction. the two outliers are ‘guess who’s coming to thanksgiving dinner’ and ‘patch game’, but they still differ from previous seasons because 1) his destruction is isolated to a forest far away from the city, and 2) his motive is still to impress wordgirl, but his methods are relatively tame. also he completely gives up on the secret identity thing??? i may have missed some things but i think he straight up tells her 'yeah there's no way you're wordgirl, lol' and the subject is just dropped for the rest of the show.

i also want to include 'the robot problem' here, because it's one of two season 6 tobey episodes, and follows the 'doesn't destroy buildings to get her attention' pattern: in fact, he teams up with her to try and stop someone else from going on a rampage (even if his reasons are selfish, lol).

and finally. the other season 6 episode. we have go gadget go, the bane of my time spent in the fandom. because GGG is the single episode where tobey truly manages to take away her autonomy, and proceeds to abuse that power for an extended period of time, for his own amusement. it's bad. it's Very Bad. put in the context that it's a white boy doing this to an (ambiguously) brown girl, it's REALLY REALLY BAD. and the more i look back on it, tbh, the more weirded out i am that the show not only made it seem like she wasn't affected at all within the episode, it just... forgot about it (which is not unusual for shows and especially children’s shows, but WG does make some efforts to either retain continuity or create canon reasons for why things are forgotten about). it's the kind of thing that you can't excuse and honestly you can't redeem (like at this point, you gotta ask yourself why you're spending so much effort trying to redeem this guy when becky has several other possible ships that are nowhere near this unhealthy - violet, scoops, honestly even victoria if you want another hero/villain ship, my absolute fave rarepair rose, etc).

so if you want to still ship it you have to just pretend that it never happened. (i remember trying for weeks to write something exploring the aftermath of this episode, to try and make myself feel better about it, but the more i wrote the more i realized just how traumatic this event should've been, so i eventually just dropped it.) and i brought up my own timeline of experiences earlier to point out that this episode aired eight whole years after the show started. which means that when i saw it, even though i was a huge stickler for canon at the time, i'd built up my own idea of the show and characters strongly enough to go 'yeah, no, this episode sucks and i am going to pretend that it doesn't exist'. and i think a lot of other people did too, because i really saw like... no one mention it, ever, except for some rogue fanfics over on ff dot net that already liked dynamics like that.

because here's the thing, and i don't know if people nowadays are aware of it? but i'm 80% sure (cannot find a source, so the other 20% is that it was just a rumor) that the show was originally supposed to end after season 6. and even if it's a rumor, it makes a ton of sense, because we get 1) an 'ending' to tobecky, which is a bad one, 2) a permanent wordgirl identity reveal that significantly changes one of the major dynamics in the show, 3) an episode where TJ gets to work with wordgirl and get a nice potential ending for their sibling dynamic, 4) an episode where we see Two-Brains explore life without his henchmen... the list goes on, and idk how many of these are just major stretches. but the point is. if the show had ended there, that would've been a pretty solid ending for many things, including their relationship: aka, it would prove that it was only ever heading somewhere bad, and when tobey finally has his moment of triumph, he is truly evil about it. and this provides us fans who HATE go gadget go with an easy reason to dismiss it - we can say that it was an attempt to conclude things in a way that wouldn't have happened if the writers had known they'd get more time. but despite that... it is still a canon episode.

it is odd to me how dramatically the dynamic shifts after that, though, because we seriously go from 'worst case ever, tobecky is toxic, your ship is dead' to 'no actually they get along and hang out and get ice cream together and tobey isn't even pressuring her into it, she's happy to go along with it :)' like, immediately. i never knew much about the show writers, so i don't know if the writers changed in between these seasons, but i would absolutely not be surprised if they did.

the earlier episodes are definitely problematic as well (though they pale in comparison to GGG) but i think everyone who ships it is aware considering that tobey is, yknow, a villain. from memory, he destroys buildings to get her attention, lies to her about the level of danger that people are in to trick her into spending more time with him, blackmails her into reading his poetry, and he creates a robot based on her that’s supposed to be devoted to him (but of course, all of these things backfire). not great stuff of course, but like... he’s a villain, that’s the point of his character. and considering that he’s a child these are things that can be redeemed, if done thoughtfully.

anyway, to sum up this section, the show starts off with a pretty standard 'enemies with an unrequited crush' setup, takes a really dark turn for a single episode, and then for the rest of the show takes their dynamic in a direction that makes it much, much easier to ship. as long as you ignore a lot of previous content.

wordbot: where's becky's autonomy in all of this? (misogyny)

we've finally gotten to the fandom. i recognize that a lot of this is going to come across as hypocritical considering how active i used to be re: this ship, but like... i'm a very different person now. anyway. disclaimer i guess - i don't write this to accuse all tobecky shippers of being like this - i know a lot of us aren't/weren't! but boy do i have things to point out, so without further ado:

it is very hard to ship this without allowing some bit of misogyny to slip into it. very, very hard. the entire premise of the ship involves a girl falling in love with a boy that repeatedly pressures her to date him via threats to the safety of herself and people she cares about, which... it's 2020, i shouldn't have to explain why that's terrible & a terrible example to set for children (which is why i am glad they never made it canon, tbh). best-case fan content has tobey stop pressuring her and start working to redeem himself out of an actual change of heart, which leads to becky seeing him in a new light. worst-case fan content treats his incessant pressuring and sometimes outright threats as something romantic - and even worse, romantic to the point where he deserves her attention and love as a reward for not giving up or whatever. i did see this pretty frequently for a while, especially in the earlier 2010s (didn't read much, Not My Thing At All), but i don't feel like going into detail here because of how obviously problematic it is. one medium (but still bad) case is where the fan content makes him start his redemption, but treats her liking him back as a reward for not knocking buildings over anymore. another not great case is where she tries to fix him with her love, which is a very common and very dangerous romantic trope. both are just... so incredibly unfair to her.

in content where she tries to 'fix him'... yeah i feel like it's really obvious how misogynistic that is. girls and women should not feel responsible for the evil actions of men, plain and simple. idk what else to say here i just really hate that trope and hated it back then and it just sucks! so can we not do that anymore, thanks.

in content that treats her like a reward for good behavior, there really isn't much of an explanation for what she sees in him. if she just goes 'oh wow, you're good now, i am going to fall in love with you for it' the whole thing falls flat because it makes NO sense whatsoever. we get to hear so much about tobey and his feelings and why he likes her and how he feels about it, but where is that energy for becky? why does she choose to trust him, to spend time around him, what does she enjoy about his presence? where is her getting over scoops in the process of falling for tobey? where is her telling her friends about this, confiding in them, asking them for advice? where is her choice in the matter?

win a day with wordgirl: do you guys even like becky or do you just like the idea of her (misogyny... 2!)

it was pretty standard for all fandoms the early-mid 2010s, but that's still not a good excuse for why so many tobecky fanfictions centered specifically around tobey's feelings while refusing to give becky the same level of empathy and nuance. it is true that to ship them comfortably you have to redeem him to some degree, which means spending time figuring him out and trying to find ways to pull him to the light without feeling super OOC. but ships take two people??? and there was so much potential for fanfics to explore becky's complex feelings on the matter - because she is! complex! she's heroic and kind but she's petty and has a competitive streak, she easily befriends villains but also doesn't trust them and doesn't believe they can ever really change, she's the savior of an entire planet but has feelings of inadequacy as her civilian identity and struggles with feeling like she can be successful without superpowers, she's great at the straightforward meanings and uses of words and loves reading but struggles to write passages that aren't dry as hell, it can be easily headcannoned that she's neurodivergent (special interests, issues with fitting in with her peers, taking things very literally, etc)... seriously there is SO MUCH to explore about her character, and a lot of it comes into play when you add tobey into the mix (literally ALL of the things i mentioned are explored at some point using tobey as a parallel or foil), but i rarely saw fanfiction that explored her thoughts on things further than 'he's evil but... maybe good?' or 'he's evil but... i kind of like him anyway?'.

if you want her to fall for him while being a villain, explore it!! why does she go against her morals? does she lie to herself about it to feel better? does she feel like she has to 'fix him' as part of her superhero duties to the city, and if so, how does that affect her as she tries and fails to help him? does she fall for him when she believes that he's turning good, only to feel betrayed when he starts acting worse because he feels like he can get away with it? it's such a shame that fanworks spend so little time even considering these questions, and it is absolutely a product of how deeply misogyny is/was baked into how we approach media (especially back then).

tobey goes good: but wait, i thought this show was progressive (a conclusion, i guess)

ifbrd wrote a great meta recently about how the show is a bit misogynist, despite being progressive in several ways. honestly i don't have much to add, but i'd really recommend reading through this; it makes a lot of great observations about the ways that male and female characters are presented differently through the show

i have little to add, so i'd just like to conclude with a reflection on the ship from my current viewpoint. i do think part of the reason so many of us latched onto the ship, despite how obviously problematic it was, is that the show treats a lot of things that would be serious in real life as normal or even comedic - which is fine lol, i'm not going to pretend that it's not a show for little kids, so they have to keep the tone light.

but if we, as teens/adults, decide to engage with this content in a more realistic manner, we have to be prepared to confront how messed up so many of the things going on really are. and if you still want to ship it, there's nothing inherently wrong with that! there's a lot of interesting things to explore in this ship, no matter what stage of enemies-to-friends-to-lovers you write them at, and it can be really helpful to have a space where you can explore a dynamic such as this in fiction. (speaking from experience here tbh, writing some fic for them helped me deal with complicated feelings about some ex-longtime friends.)

so to write this ship at all means that there are canon issues that you need to deal with if you want to have them end up in a healthy relationship in any manner that makes sense (unless you create an AU where none of that is applicable, which, power to you then). and i’m not saying ‘write them with a healthy endgame or you’re Bad’, not at all lol. but at least please, please take a step back once in a while to examine the dynamic that you’re writing, and please be careful about whether you mean to be romanticizing whatever behaviors you end up portraying as good.

[marvellouslymadmim]

Hey! Aspiring fanfic writer here; I was wondering if you could talk a bit about your writing/editing process and how long it all takes.

Thanks!

Welp, roughly the same extremely long amount of time it takes to actually answer an ask, tbh 🙃

So...I only know how my brain works, and I can only tell you what works for me might not work for you, and that's OK. I'm breaking into two separate bits, because I almost never do writing and editing at the same time.

And as far as a timeline, honestly it just depends. On life factors, what my hormones are doing at the time (jfc like the week before my period, I have zero creativity, motivation, or attention span), if I'm having trouble with a particular scene, if I'm getting consistent positive feedback (yes, I can totally admit that I write faster when I know a particular reviewer is following along with every update), etc.

WRITING:

First, you gotta just...be fixated, I guess. Particularly if it's an AU, I sit with it for a long time before I ever write a word. I go over scenes, think about how the world changes, what stays the same, what *has* to stay the same to keep the characters true to their canon personalities. I sit with the characters for a long time, too--not just the main characters, but the supporting cast, too. In order to predict someone's future, you have to know their past. Most of our present actions are actually reactions to past events, when you think about it. The better you know your version of the character, the easier every other aspect of writing will be. I don't know how it is for other people, but I don't ever "feel" like I'm writing. I feel like I'm "witnessing", and the characters are simply doing whatever they wish. (***this is gonna be a thing during the editing process, too, so hang on to that)

Then once I have a general idea, I choose a title. Generally, I do not even start a word document until I have a proper title to put on it. The title is part of the theme and aesthetic to me, and it grounds me in the overall arc.

Once that's done, it's time for outlining. I generally wait until I feel this weird almost tingling in my left arm (weirder still bc I'm right handed) and I'm practically vibrating with a need to WRITE THIS STORY NOW. Then I put on some Bear McCreary (honestly, any videogame soundtrack will do, as they are literally designed to help you maintain focus and keep pace) and fucking go to town. For me, it helps to do this with pen and paper, so that I can go back up and squiggle little notes in the margin, rearrange the order, etc, far faster than I could on a computer.

Important note: the outline is not the end-all be-all. Some things don't make it to the final print. Some minor storylines get tossed or characters simply...take a different path than I expect. I will continue re-writing and updating the outline as I go along. On average, I usually have 5-8 outlines per story, and they're often 3-10 pages long. I also have a posted outline, which is a log of all the scenes that did make it to the final product. 

Then, it's the actual writing, at long last. I have found that I write best at the start of my day, before the noise and static of daily life comes in. So I wake up around 5am and spend 90minutes writing before beginning my workday routine. I have the Word app on my phone and may continue adding bits in throughout the day at work, if I get a moment. However, after 5pm my brain is usually fried and no more creativity happens. On weekends, I try to have one morning where I "sleep in" til 6am, and then write until at least 10am, sometimes 2pm, if I can get away with it.

The hardest part still is knowing when to transition and when to skip to the next chapter/scene/whatever. This is like...zero percent helpful, but I liken it to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography: "I know it when I see it." It may seem like a scene is circling, and sometimes it means you gotta leave the room a bit earlier bc the scene has already served its purpose. Other times, it means ya gotta stay with it a bit longer, because there's something the character is trying to say. Give them patience, and give yourself patience, too. Explore the scene and its dynamics. You won't know til you know and even then, sometimes you won't be entirely sure. That's ok, too. Part of the process. Remember editing will happen and you can decide then (hell, you can literally re-edit after it's been published, I've done that before too and added a note on the next chapter for any readers who might have read the first version 🤷🏻‍♀️ not ideal but still functional).

EDITING:

I do simple edits (spelling, grammar, etc) just about every morning as I reread what I wrote the day before, which is a refresher course for the day's writing session. But big "real" editing generally doesn't happen until right before posting.

Now, here's the ***issue from writing: sometimes, something just "doesn't work" in a scene. Again, you'll know it when you see it. The words a character is saying feels clunky. The pacing feels off. Something just...ain't right. More often than not, it means either I haven't truly sat with a character long enough to know their true motivations/backstory, or I am not giving characters the proper time/space/impediment to make the actions or say the things they're currently making/saying. I'm trying to force the flow, rather than letting it ebb and breathe when it needs to.

Absolute ProTip: You spent HOURS writing this scene. It's got some REALLY GOOD moments and lines in it. It doesn't work but you can't just delete it. It's your LIFE. I struggle with this A LOT, and I have found a solution: create a second "outtakes" document to cut and paste those scenes into. Sometimes I still keep moments or bits of dialog. Sometimes I later use bits in a later scene. Sometimes I never look at it again but I still feel secure in knowing that if I wanted to go back and use the original scene instead, I totally can. I don't think I've actually ever gone back to the original, tbh, but it reduced my anxiety about deleting the scene and starting over.

So back to the scene that doesn't work. I take it apart, figure out *at what exact point* it stops working, then work back up a few lines to see where the shift actually begins. More often than not, it's because I'm having characters express their feelings in ways they actually wouldn't. (people very very very rarely actually say what they're thinking/feeling, and you have to relay it in other ways). So I have to keep the internal monologue of what they're actually feeling/thinking, while figuring out how that actually translates via tone, body language, and what they do and don't say.

The "something ain't working stage" can take LITERAL WEEKS. I sometimes have to walk away for awhile, or tackle it only on days when I know I have hours upon hours to truly work on it. I keep circling back around, and eventually, the knot works itself out. Persistence, and insistence that "good enough" isn't actually good enough, are key. (this is why you have to fixated on the story you want to tell--because some days, it's going to take every ounce of that obsession to keep you going and keep you on the track of telling the story you wanted to tell, rather than settling or switching to an easier tack)

Sometimes, editing is a breeze. I don't change much, I may go a little more into the character's inner world here or there. Once you've been doing this for awhile, you'll just know when a story hits all its marks--and you'll also know when it's not, when it could be more or do more, and you can figure out how to get it there. There isn't a precise formula for it, it's more like cooking without an actual recipe to follow--a dash here, a bit there, you'll know it when you taste it.

And I'll leave you with this unsolicited bit: just write. Write often, write about everything, write what makes YOU passionate and happy, and absolutely write for yourself. Edit the fuck out of it, if you need to. Get a beta reader, if you need to. Get someone to just bounce ideas off, if you need to. And don't post it until you're truly ready and it's something you genuinely want to share. If someone gives constructive criticism, take in on the chin and move on (keep the notes, if you think they're valid, and toss em if you don't--you'll never be everyone's style of writer, so know that sometimes, people just won't be the target audience). Know that you'll grow and you'll learn and you'll find your own voice and like any skill, you'll develop a second nature about it--all those parts where I say "you'll know it when you see it" or "you'll feel it" absolutely come from spending a literal lifetime (28 years) writing stories, and thirteen years of writing fanfic in particular. It's ok if you don't see it or feel it right away. It takes practice. And you will have an audience at every skill level, no matter what (finding that audience? different story altogether...).

All totaled, this process can take anywhere from 3months to over a year. Stories are like children, I've found: they each develop at their own pace, and some may need more time and assistance than others. But they're still pretty wonderful. (except the bratty stories. they're the worst 🙄)

[asfaltics]

A brown moth fluttered.

  The curtain was down, and the carpenters were rearranging the “No, no, no! I can’t breathe       1       volatile I can’t breathe.” And such a fit of suffocating       2   “I can’t breathe,” she would sometimes say       3 and the minisnever! I can’t breathe it in fast enough, nor hard enough, nor long enough.”       4   and started up up. to return to the tent, only to check him No, I can’t breathe the same air self in the act as often as he started, with ye to-night, but ye’ll go into the he lost consciousness in uneasy dreams       5 meet me at the station. I can’t breathe in this wretched       6   “sickening down there — I can’t breathe!  I can’t stand it, Drewe! It’s killing me!” — Tears       7 struggling to altitudes that I can’t breathe in.  I could help him when he was in despair, but he is the sort who       8   sometimes I find I can’t breathe in it.  Perhaps some folks will say “so much the worse for you”       9 it seems if I can’t breathe in the house. not dared hope       10   “Well, I won’t wear ’em. I can’t breathe” “Sure! Blame ’em!” “I can’t breathe a square breath.” Oh       11 things I regret I can’t breathe.       12   bramble bush. I can’t breathe. I can’t eat. I can’t do anything much. It’s clear to my knees.       13 I can't breathe, I can't talk,       14   lying on its “I can’t stay here I can’t breathe” side, the cork half-loosened. A brown moth fluttered.       15 “I can’t breathe beside you.”       16   the needs of any reasonable young lady. “I can't breathe there,       17 I can’t breathe — I really need the rush of this wintry air to restore me!”       18   I can’t breathe no more in that coop upstairs . tablet ; two he said is what you need.” of flame shoots through a stream of oil       19 no friction. It’s friction—rub- / asthmatically.] “I can’t breathe deep — I can light and of reason. But I’ve a notion       20   out of it. I can’t breathe in the dark. I can’t. I / She withdrew       21 “I can’t breathe or feel in”       22   Up a flight of stairs, and there was the girl, sitting on the edge of an untidy bed. The yellow sweater was on the floor. She had on an underskirt and a pink satin camisole. “I can't breathe !” she gasped.       23 I can’t breathe in the dark! I can’t! I can’t! I can’t live in the dark with my eyes open!       24   One never gets it back! How could one! And I can’t breathe just now, on account of       25 that old stuff, I could shriek. I can’t breathe in the same room with you. The very sound of       26   don’t! I can’t — breathe.... I’m all — and bitter howling.       27  

sources (pre-1923; approximately 90 in all, from which these 27 passages, all by women)

1 ex “Her Last Appearance,” in Peters’ Musical Monthly, And United States Musical Review 3:2 (New-York, February 1869), “from Belgravia” : 49-52 (51) “Her Last Appearance” appeared later, “by the author of Lady Audley’s Secret” (M.E. Braddon, 1835-1915 *), in Belgravia Annual (vol. 31; Christmas 1876) : 61-73 2 snippet view ex The Lady’s Friend (1873) : 15 evidently Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924 *) her Vagabondia : A Love Story (New York, 1891) : 286 (Boston, 1884) : 286 (hathitrust) 3 ex “The Story of Valentine; and his Brother.” Part VI. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine vol. 115 (June 1874) : 713-735 (715) authored by Mrs. [Margaret] Oliphant (1828-97 *), see her The Story of Valentine (1875; Stereotype edition, Edinburgh and London, 1876) : 144 4 OCR confusions at Olive A. Wadsworth, “Little Pilkins,” in Sunday Afternoon : A Monthly Magazine for the Household vol. 2 (July-December 1878) : 73-81 (74) OAW “Only A Woman” was a pseudonym of Katharine Floyd Dana (1835-1886), see spoonercentral. Katharine Floyd Dana also authored Our Phil and Other Stories (Boston and New York, 1889) : here, about which, a passage from a bookseller's description — Posthumously published fictional sketches of “negro character,” first published in the Atlantic Monthly under the pseudonym Olive A. Wadsworth. The title story paints a picture of plantation life Dana experienced growing up on her family’s estate in Mastic, Long Island. Although a work of fiction set in Maryland, the character of Phil may of been named for a slave once jointly owned by the Floyds and a neighboring family. source see also the William Buck and Katherine Floyd Dana collection, 1666-1912, 1843-1910, New York State Historical Documents (researchworks). 5 OCR cross-column misread, at M(ary). H(artwell). Catherwood (1847-1902 *), “The Primitive Couple,” in Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science 36 (August 1885) : 138-146 (145) author of historical romances, short stories and poetry, and dubbed the “Parkman of the West,” her papers are at the Newberry Library (Chicago) 6 ex Marie Corelli (Mary Mackay; 1855-1924 *), Thelma, A Norwegian Princess: A Novel, Book II. The Land of Mockery. Chapter 12 (New Edition, London, 1888) : 432 7 preview snippet (only), at Ada Cambridge (1844-1926 *), Fidelis, a Novel ( “Cheap Edition for the Colonies and India,” 1895) : 289 full scan, (New York, 1895) : 261 born and raised in England, spent much of her life in Australia (died in Melbourne); see biography (and 119 of her poems) at the Australia Poetry Library in particular, the striking poems from Unspoken Thoughts (1887) here (Thomas Hardy comes to mind) 8 snippet view (only) at F(rances). F(rederica), Montrésor (1862-1934), At the Cross-Roads (London, 1897) : 297 but same page (and scan of entirety) at hathitrust see her entry At the Circulating Library (Database of Victorian Fiction 1837-1901) an interesting family. Montrésor’s The Alien: A Story of Middle Age (1901) is dedicated to her sister, C(harlotte). A(nnetta). Phelips (1858-1925), who was devoted to work for the blind. See entry in The Beacon, A Monthly magazine devoted to the interests of the blind (May 1925) a great-granddaughter of John Montresor (1737-99), a British military engineer and cartographer, whose colorful (and unconventional) life is sketched at wikipedia. 9 Alice H. Putnam, “An Open Letter,” in Kindergarten Review 9:5 (Springfield, Massachusetts; January 1899) : 325-326 Alice Putnam (1841-1919) opened the first private kindergarten in Chicago; Froebel principles... (wikipedia); see also “In Memory of Alice H. Putnam” in The Kindergarten-primary Magazine 31:7 (March 1919) : 187 (hathitrust) 10 OCR cross-column misread, at Mabel Nelson Thurston (1869?-1965?), “The Palmer Name,” in The Congregationalist and Christian World 86:30 (27 July 1901) : 134-135 author of religiously inflected books (seven titles at LC); first female admitted for entry at George Washington University (in 1888). GWU archives 11 OCR cross-column misread, at Margaret Grant, “The Romance of Kit Dunlop,” Beauty and Health : Woman’s Physical Development 7:6 (March 1904): 494-501 (499 and 500) the episodic story starts at 6:8 (November 1903) : 342 12 ex Marie van Vorst (1867-1936), “Amanda of the Mill,” The Bookman : An illustrated magazine of literature and life 21 (April 1905) : 190-209 (191) “writer, researcher, painter, and volunteer nurse during World War I.” wikipedia 13 ex Maude Morrison Huey, “A Change of Heart,” in The Interior (The sword of the spirit which is the Word of God) 36 (Chicago, April 20, 1905) : 482-484 (483) little information on Huey, who is however mentioned in Paula Bernat Bennett, her Poets in the Public Sphere : The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800-1900 (2003) : 190 14 ex Leila Burton Wells, “The Lesser Stain,” The Smart Set, A Magazine of Cleverness 19:3 (July 1906) : 145-154 (150) aside — set in the Philippines, where “The natives were silent, stolid, and uncompromising.” little information on Wells, some of whose stories found their way to the movie screen (see IMDB) The Smart Set ran from March 1900-June 1930; interesting story (and decline): wikipedia 15 OCR cross-column misread, at Josephine Daskam Bacon (1876-1961 *), “The Hut in the Wood: A Tale of the Bee Woman and the Artist,” in Collier’s, The National Weekly 41:12 (Saturday, June 13, 1908) : 12-14 16 ex E. H. Young, A Corn of Wheat (1910) : 90 Emily Hilda Daniell (1880-1949), novelist, children’s writer, mountaineer, suffragist... wrote under the pseudonym E. H. Young. (wikipedia) 17 ex Mary Heaton Vorse (1874-1966), “The Engagements of Jane,” in Woman’s Home Companion (May 1912) : 17-18, 92-93 Illustrated by Florence Scovel Shinn (1871-1940, artist and book illustrator who became a New Thought spiritual teacher and metaphysical writer in her middle years. (wikipedia)) Mary Heaton Vorse — journalist, labor activist, social critic, and novelist. “She was outspoken and active in peace and social justice causes, such as women's suffrage, civil rights, pacifism (such as opposition to World War I), socialism, child labor, infant mortality, labor disputes, and affordable housing.” (wikipedia). 18 ex snippet view, at “Voices,” by Runa, translated for the Companion by W. W. K., in Lutheran Companion 20:3 (Rock Island, Illinois; Saturday, January 20, 1912) : 8 full view at hathitrust same passage in separate publication as Voices, By Runa (pseud. of E. M. Beskow), from the Swedish by A. W. Kjellstrand (Rock Island, Illinois, 1912) : 292 E(lsa). M(aartman). Beskow (1874-1953), Swedish author and illustrator of children’s books (Voices seems rather for older children); see wikipedia 19 ex Fannie Hurst (1885-1968 *), “The Good Provider,” in The Saturday Evening Post 187:1 (August 15, 1914) : 12-16, 34-35 20 OCR cross-column misread, at Anne O’Hagan, “Gospels of Hope for Women: A few new creeds, all of them modish—but expensive” in Vanity Fair (February 1915) : 32 Anne O’Hagan Shinn (1869-1933) — feminist, suffragist, journalist, and writer of short stories... “known for her writings detailing the exploitation of young women working as shop clerks in early 20th Century America... O’Hagan participated in several collaborative fiction projects...” (wikipedia) a mention of St. Anselm, whose “sittings” are free, vis-à-vis “Swami Bunkohkahnanda”... “Universal Harmonic Vibrations”... 21 OCR cross-column misread (three columns), at Fannie Hurst (1885-1968 *), “White Goods” (Illustrations by May Wilson Preston) in Metropolitan Magazine 42:3 (July 1915) : 19-22, 53 repeated, different source and without OCR misread, at 24 below 22 ex Mary Patricia Willcocks, The Sleeping Partner (London, 1919) : 47 (snippet only) full at hathitrust see onlinebooks for this and other of her titles. something on Mary Patricia Willcocks (1869-1952) at ivybridge-heritage. in its tone and syntax, her prose brings Iris Murdoch to mind. 23 Katharine Wendell Pedersen, “Clingstones, A week in a California cannery.” in New Outlook vol. 124 (February 4, 1920) : 193-194 no information about the author. the journal began life as The Christian Union (1870-1893) and continued under the new title into 1928; it ceased publication in 1935; it was devoted to social and political issues, and was against Bolshevism (wikipedia) 24 ex Fannie Hurst (1885-1968 *), “White Goods,” in her Humoresque : A Laugh on Life with a Tear Behind it (1919, 1920) : 126-169 (155) 25 ex snippet view, at Letters and poems of Queen Elisabeth (Carmen Sylva), with an introduction and notes by Henry Howard Harper. Volume 2 (of 2; Boston, Printed for members only, The Bibliophile society, 1920) : 51 (hathitrust) Carmen Sylva was “the pen name of Elisabeth, queen consort of Charles I, king of Rumania” (1843-1916 *) 26 OCR cross-column misread, at Ruth Comfort Mitchell, “Corduroy” (Part Three; Illustrated by Frederick Anderson), in Woman’s Home Companion 49:8 (August 1922) : 21-23, 96-97 (hathitrust) Ruth Comfort Mitchell Young (1882-1954), poet, dramatist, etc., and owner of a remarkable house (in a “Chinese” style) in Los Gatos, California (wikipedia) 27 Helen Otis, “The Christmas Waits,” in Woman’s Home Companion 49:12 (Christmas 1922) : 36 probably Helen Otis Lamont (1897-1993), about whom little is found, save this “Alumna Interview: Helen Otis Lamont, Class of 1916” (Packer Collegiate Institute, Brooklyn, 1988) at archive.org (Brooklyn Historical Society)

—

prompted by : recent thoughts about respiration (marshes, etc.); Pfizer round-one recovery focus on the shape of one breath, then another; inhalation, exhalation and the pleasure of breathing; and for whom last breaths are no pleasure (far from it); last breaths (Robert Seelthaler The Field (2021) in the background).

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all tagged breath all tagged cento  

[snkpolls]

SnK Episode 67 Poll Results (for Manga Readers)

The poll closed with 254 responses. Thank you to everyone who participated!

Please note that these are the results for the Manga Readers’ poll. If you wish to see the results for the Anime Only Watchers’ poll, click here.

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RATE THE EPISODE 246 Responses

The response to this week’s episode remains overwhelmingly positive, with 97.6% of responses giving it a score of 3 or higher. 

This is the first episode where I have absolutely no criticisms, so im quite happy with how it turned out.

Voice acting was top tier

perfect

Emotional 

Great Job! I'm glad my favorite character's death was so emotionally misered.

Forget Attack on Titans, this episode was Attack on my Feelings ! 😭

I want to rate it a 1 because of Sasha but a 5 because of how well it was done... so 1.5

Absolutely loved it

Perfect

ASIDE FROM SASHA’S DEATH, WHICH MOMENT WAS THE MOST EMOTIONAL FOR YOU? 247 Responses

Connie’s heartfelt admission to Jean seems to have stolen the hearts of the plurality of responders (36%). That is followed by a tie of 18.2% responses noting Eren’s breakdown or EMA’S tense reunion as the most emotional moment for them. In third place is Gabi’s tragic declaration about her struggles with 11.3%. Other responses were, in order, Jean lamenting all of the deaths occurring, Gabi and Falco realizing that Zeke betrayed them, Hange scolding Eren for forcing the SC to intervene in Marley and Levi and Eren’s confrontation.

Connie telling Sasha and Jean that they're special to him made my heart hurt knowing what was going to happen mere minutes after. I honestly saw me and my two best friends through them, and it was gut wrenching seeing Connie and Jean's reactions. Even Mikasa's reaction broke me, to be honest. They all lost a huge light in their lives.

WHICH MOMENT SURPRISED YOU THE MOST? 222 Responses

So this question was meant to only go on the anime watchers poll and ended up here somehow. Thanks to the 222 who were good sports and responded anyway! :P The most shocking moments that took place in this chapter/episode was the revelation that Eren went rogue from the Survey Corps, that Zeke was collaborating with the Survey Corps, how the Survey Corps treated Eren, and that some Paradisians seemed to be turning to nationalism, in that order. 

Not sure why we're being asked as manga readers which moment shocked us the most since we already knew everything that was going to happen this week

HOW MUCH DID SASHA’S DEATH HURT YOU? 249 Responses

When it came to Sasha’s death, it would appear that it broke the hearts of the overwhelming majority of responders, with 81.1% giving it a rating of either 4 or 5 on the tragic scale. 

Broke my heart and I'm still crying over it three days later. Honestly though, it was greatly done. 

3 years later it hit me, Sasha is dead ;_;

Cried my whole soul and body. Rip sweet Sasha

I thought Sasha's death would've been more emotional.

WHOSE REACTION TO SASHA’S DEATH AFFECTED YOU THE MOST? 250 Responses

Sasha’s death elicited various reactions from the main cast. Two different responses tied at 36.4% noting Connie and Mikasa’s reactions to Sasha's death as the one affecting them the most. This was followed by Eren’s at 13.2%. The rest were, in order, Armin, Jean, Levi and Hange. 

I don’t cry at fiction much, but Sasha’s death got me more than I thought it would. I feel like seeing Armin and Mikasa’s reactions in particular is what got me.

The way they animated Armin and Mikasa bawling over Sasha's body and the inclusion of Call Your Name made it all the more emotional. I think by "Assassin's Bullet" they also meant a bullet through my heart because man did that hurt to watch. 😭🤧

WOULD YOU PISS YOUR PANTS IF LEVI WAS GLARING AT YOU WITH MURDEROUS INTENT? 248 Responses

A bit of a joke question, but we wanted to know if Levi appeared as threatening as he seemed. 80.2% seems to think so, admitting their incentive to piss their pants. In contrast, 19.8% don’t think the Captain’s such a scary guy!

THE FULL VERSION OF “ASHES ON THE FIRE” BY KOHTA YAMAMOTO (THE PREVIEW SONG) IS NOW OUT. IF YOU’VE LISTENED TO IT, WHAT DO YOU THINK? 236 Responses

“Ashes on the Fire” has been released to rave reviews, with 88.1% of responses giving it a 4 or a 5. Nobody gave it a 1, either. Yamamoto-san, thank you!

OVERALL, HOW WELL DO YOU THINK MAPPA ADAPTED THE MARLEY ARC? 251 Responses

In spite of the relatively vocal complaints about the adaptation of certain elements of the Marley Arc, it would appear that the overwhelming majority of responders seemed pleased with it, with 51.4% giving it 5 and 37.1% giving it a 4. 1s not present. 

I've been a bit bothered how Mappa follows the Manga like a slave, using the panels as scenes and not adding anything in between. Sure it works for Manga, but it feels weird to me to watch in Anime how Eren grabs Armins hand and they don't give a transition where Armin pulls him in, but just show him inside the airship next. Just little things, but bothers me a bit. Overall I'm really enjoying their choices.

The show looks BETTER

I was fine with the episode. The quality of animation dropped but I understand that every scene cannot be animated on highest level. MAPPA has done a great job with the Marley arc. They shown the character development and bonds between the warriors perfectly. We had some cuts here and there but overally was okay: 8/10 for me. 

I’m so pleased that MAPPA has taken the anime. I’m still more of a fan of this particular series’ manga than anime though.

DID SASHA’S DEATH AFFECT YOU MORE WHEN YOU READ THE MANGA, OR SEEING IT ANIMATED WITH VOICES AND MUSIC? 249 Responses

As noted above, Sasha’s death seemed to be a hard hitter for most. Comparison of the adaptation vs the original allows to discern which hit the readers/watchers the hardest. Just one percent shy of a majority (49%) thought that the anime made it much more tragic. 30.9% noted that the impact was roughly similar across both mediums. On the flip side, 10.4% thought that the initial depiction of it in the manga was the hardest hitter. There were also a couple of write-ins. 

I dont remember I sped run reading the manga, kinda regretting it

I knew it for the first time in the manga, so it had a more powerful impact (I cried for a whole week. Not kidding) and the anime managed to make me cry as hard as in the manga. Though, I already was aware and grieved so it wasn't as bad

Got Spoiled :( so kinda meh, saw it coming

When the music kicked in after Connie announced she was gone, my heart broke into a million pieces. 

Let's be honest, Sasha's role was over after she killed the titan in the village and saved Kaya. After that she was just there. She got zero development, zero important moments, zero depth. Her death effected many characters and helped them to develop. Sasha's death was sad but at least brought some important changes in others. 

Not a Sasha fan so I was not really that affected but having a death in the series always feels sour

I think for me, they're both even.....mostly. There's just something about having been waiting for the chapter leaks on reddit with a bunch of other people and most of us collectively grieving at the same time. Once bigger pages of the chapter started coming out, it made me cry. I didn't even cry during serumbowl when I first read it and that had plenty for me to be even more upset about.

Honestly while reading manga I hated that Sasha’s last word was „meat”, it seemed so ridiculous. I’m happy MAPPA made it look more serious with music. Actually everyone’s reaction for Sasha’s death had more impact on me than the death itself

HOW DID YOU FEEL WHEN YOU SAW GABI KILL SASHA IN THE MANGA? AND HOW DO YOU FEEL SEEING IT AGAIN NOW, KNOWING HOW GABI’S ARC DEVELOPS? 247 Responses

Gabi is perhaps the most controversial character introduced post-time skip. Whether you’re a proud member of the Gabi Gang, proud hater of the 12 year old or just a neural party, everyone can admit that. With Sasha’s death at her hands, many seemed to offer up their opinion on the kid, back then and now. A slight plurality, 31.2%, stated that they did not hate her back when 105 first released and they don’t hate her now. 23.1% note that although they were rather upset with her back down, they are not (upset/angry) any longer. On the flipside, 25.5% state that they still hate the kid, as they did back then. Finally, some were simply neutral. Classic. 

Quite a few write-ins, as well.

I hated her in the manga but after watching the anime, I’m not happy about it but I understand why she did what she did and don’t hate her as much anymore.

I was extremely upset about it before and am still extremely upset about it now, but for different reasons. I hate her less but am not any less annoyed by her brainwashed hatred of the Paradisians, although I understand her much better and realize and empathize that she's just a kid who's been used by her country in the worst way.

Gabi Braun Must Die

Broke my heart and was upset, but understood where she was coming from (thought about her perspective only)

Sasha shoulda killed this cunt while she had the chance

It’s war, she did as she needed to.  Her arc is fantastic 

love hate relationship 

I didn't like her but not because of Sasha death (that's war consequence) and it's the same now

I really hated her with my whole heart and soul, but now that it has been all explained, that she had character development, I even like her now

I used to be angry about it but I understand why now, Gabi is just a victim of Marley’s control just like anyone else is, it’s a shame this is the results of it. She’s still at fault but I can’t hate her so much for it

I feel tired of Gabi hate. I disliked her in the manga back then but now I feel neutral towards her, because she has changed. Yet, I wish she took less screentime. 

SORRY for ranting! I don't understand the hate on Gabe. Yes, I know she killed a Paradise character which was present in series since its beginning and I understand Sasha's fans are upset Sasha is not here anymore because of her. but those people do not analyse Gabe as they should be. Every character belongs to a different side and each side is blinded by what heir belives in. It is okay to not like Gabe but I don't tolerate hate on her. I THINK THIS QUESTION SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN INCLUDED AT ALL.

Initial hate, understanding after some thought

Understanding her situation I know I shouldn’t hate her, but I’m choosing to be petty and hate her anyway 

I liked her much more than I like her now. She was a much better character back then, her killing Sasha (a one-note comedic relief) was cool and brought some spice to the story. Now she just exists to spout themes and convenient exposition and to be an aimbot

i dislike her, even if i understand her

I dont like Gabi. Never did. It isnt because she killed Sasha tho. I just dont care for Gabi tbh BUT i can totally understand her actions and do not blame her for it after seeing the destruction and killings

I was and still am upset about Sasha's death, but from the start I blamed it more on the circumstances than Gabi.

I loved her then, I love her now and it probably wouldn’t change even if she killed my favourite characters. She’s my cinnamon roll

Gabi did nothing wrong, killing a soldier in the battlefield is not a crime.

See, I WANT to like Gabi since she's obviously changed, but knowing she killed Sasha nonetheless will ALWAYS prevent me from having any love or respect for her. She will always be my most hated character

MAPPA ADDED AN EXTENDED SCENE OF FLOCH AND OTHER SURVEY CORPS RECRUITS BEATING GABI AND FALCO. HOW DID YOU FEEL ABOUT IT? 240 Responses

MAPPA added an extra scene of Floch and Friends raining down copious amounts of gratuitous violence upon two 12 year olds (MAPPA is pro-child violence???????? Find out when 111 is adapted). 48.8% seemed to think that it was a decent addition, even if just for the SC’s characterization (or perhaps you enjoyed seeing that?). 22.5% thought it was a bit over the top to feature. Finally, 16.7% did not care. 

I didn't like it. But, it was def a believable reaction from them.

I just wish it was enough to kill her

I liked the additional characterization of Floch & co.

Great addition, it was implied in the manga so the scene fitted well. Still, it was horrifying to see how vile the scouts were to two kids

How about an option where we're glad Gabi got beaten to a pulp but not when Falco was?

ORA ORA thing, but we viewers get hurt too. 

Didn't feel bad about Gabi getting beat up, but I did feel bad seeing Falco get beat up. Poor boy didn't deserve that

A nice addition 

I thought it was a great choice to highlight the continuing violence and feelings of vengeance from both sides even more. and I thought it contrasted really well with Jean's decision not to throw the kids out of the airship.

The people glorifying this scene annoy the shit out of me

It's a good way to hint the "Yaegerist" perspective to anime onlies

MUDAMUDAMUDAMUDAMUDAMUDAMUDAMUDAMUDA

The Gold Experience memes are funny

It was an IC scene for people like Floch + I feel bad for the kids

The way they shot that scene made the recruits seem like mindless, gross-faced animals storming towards the kids to beat them up. I liked how they were dehumanised like that, considering that most faces amongst them belonged to the ones who support the rumbling. 

It hurt to see that but good scene though

Feel empathy for Gaby. Violence don't solve problems

Now THAT'S what I call fan service! Who needs big-boobed, big-ass females or shirtless guys with and when you can just have the most hated character get the tar beaten out of them xD

I can see why they did it. MAPPA's not dumb and I'm sure they anticipated a massive onslaught on hate towards Gabi specifically, so it was their way of trying to satisfy the haters. Falco didn't deserve it tho.

It was a good addition

GREAT JOB MAPPA

I hate Gabi too but that was too much beating up a child, yet it also showed how shit Floch and the others are.

Apparently some people never noticed that Gabi and Falco got beat up, probably because it happened in the background. So it was good for MAPPA to call attention to it.

I love Gabi but she had that coming. No need to hurt Falco though. :(

OVERALL, HOW WELL DO YOU FEEL MAPPA EXECUTED THE REVEAL THAT ZEKE IS A TRAITOR TO MARLEY? 240 Responses

The reveal that ZOOK has been working against Marley for years on end is one of the most important ones in the series, really. So it was important to have it be executed in a rather decent manner. The vast majority of the fandom thought that MAPPA did a fine job. 52.1% gave it a rating of 4, 27.5% gave it a 5 and 17.1% gave it a 3. The couple of the other respnders gave it a 2, with no 1s.

IN THE END, DO YOU THINK EREN’S ACTIONS IN MARLEY WERE ULTIMATELY JUSTIFIED? 242 Responses

A question to remember… Were Eren’s actions in Marley ultimately “justified”? A plurality, 44.6% seems to think so. In contrast, 24% disagree. And 31.4% still aren’t sure to this day.

SIMILARLY, DO YOU THINK THE SURVEY CORPS WAS ULTIMATELY JUSTIFIED IN TREATING EREN AS THEY DID? 244 Responses

When it comes to the SC treating Eren as they did, the division is much less pronounced however. The majority, 60.7%, think that the SC had quite the justification for treating Eren as they did. On the flip side, 19.7% think that there was such justification for behaving in such a manner towards Eren. Finally, the same amount of responses stated that still can’t be sure to this day.

NOW THAT WE’VE GOTTEN A CLEAR SHOT OF YELENA, DID MAPPA DO HER JUSTICE? 243 Responses

YELENA is here. Queen 👑. Or well, maybe not. Who am I to say? In any case, her appearance was received well. 52.7% thought MAPPA did very well and 33.7% went on to declare their love for her. Just shy of 10% noted that MAPPA could have done a little better though. 

Kinda wish her hair was like neon or something idk

Need more eps of her to decide, she didn't get much screentime and lines here. 

I don't like Yelena, but yeah I guess they did good.

In the manga she was a creepy-looking person. MAPPA made her unique, interesting and mysterious. I love her voice and her stoic, relaxed self. MAPPA did a good job.  

QUEEN!!!!!

Great adaptation but I still don't like her as a character

Don’t care about her 

don't really care

I hate her and I don't care about her.

WHICH SCENE FROM THE PREVIEW ARE YOU MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO? 247 Responses

Such a colorful chart for this one. It would appear that slightly over a quarter look most forward to seeing Crykasa at Sasha’s grace. Slightly less (21.9%) want to see Sasha enjoying Niccolo’s cuisine. In third place is the scene with Connie, Jean, Mikasa and Niccolo at Sasha’s grace. The rest are, in order from most to least, Onyankopon and Yelena teaching the Survey Corps about the Port, EMA talking at the shooting range and Hange and Armin learning about Marley’s technology.

HOW HYPED ARE YOU FOR THE UPCOMING TIMESKIP FLASHBACKS? 239 Responses

The time skip flashbacks seem to be a hit. A little over 51% are super stoked about seeing them animated. Slightly under 24% state that they’ll enjoy them, but are looking forward to other things more. In contrast, 22.6% are ready to go crazy (from a positive standpoint)! Wooo! 

Enjoying AND dreading it at the same time

I just want the centipede

Boring. The only thing what interests me is Historia teasing Mikasa about her crush on Eren. The rest is too jolly. 

I'm looking forward to see Yelena's insane self be animated. That, and more Zeke.

THE MOST RECENT LIST OF FUTURE EPISODE TITLES SHOWS THAT EPISODE 12 WILL LIKELY END AROUND CHAPTERS 109-111, LEAVING CHAPTER 112 (EMA’S ARGUMENT) FOR EPISODE 13. EPISODE 67 WAS ALMOST ENTIRELY ADAPTED FROM CHAPTER 105, PROVING THAT ADAPTING DIALOGUE-HEAVY CHAPTERS FAITHFULLY CAN EASILY REQUIRE THE FULL 20 MINUTES. WITH ONLY 16 EPISODES - AND SO MANY WHICH ARE DIALOGUE-HEAVY - DO YOU THINK THINGS WILL END OFF WITH THE INITIATION OF THE RUMBLING (CH. 122), AS HAS BEEN SPECULATED BY MUCH OF THE FANDOM? 238 Responses

The manner in which the Season will end is a mystery to even the manga readers. Where will it end? Will it have many cuts? These are the questions. 36.6% seem to think that MAPPA will somehow manage to both end it at Chapter 122 and cut as little as possible. 26.5% don't believe ending on 122 is possible. 12.2% do believe MAPPA will end the Season on 122, but only with many notable cuts. Finally, just a little under 20% are simply not sure. There were a few write-ins as well. 

I hope not, too many cuts would be required 

The is no way they're making it up to 122, at first I thought they were going to finish it off with Eren's head getting blown off in 119, but now that seems like a reach too. Now I think MAPPA is probably going to end this first half of the season with Eren and Pieck's "where is the enemy?" and the warriors arriving to Shiganshina 

I’m not sure right now so I’ll have to see for later episodes for the cut-off point, if it isn’t the Rumbling then it’ll be when Gabi shoots Eren

MOVIE

I'm conflicted. I'm sure they'll end at rumbling because it's the only reasonable point to cut it, but I feel like they're running out of episodes. Then again I'm feeling the same about the state of Manga, there's just too little chapters left to end things up well.

I don't really want to think too much about it, I just want to enjoy the anime lol

I fully expect 119 to be the end

What was the point of rushing Reiner's chapters if you are going to slow down later. Goddamn it MAPPA. 

It'll really depend on the pacing for the next couple episodes, but I'm with a bulk of the fandom that see Chapter 119 Two Brothers being the end point for The Final Season. IF they were to skip the opening and maybe the ending, I can see them transitioning from Eren's head getting blown off immediately into his transformation and the beginning of the Rumbling. But even that is quite farfetched. 

I have no idea, I'm a little worried now. Wouldn't be the first time a lot of content gets cut but if they insist on reaching ch. 122, I just don't see how you do that without butchering a lot. If that happens, it would probably lessen my enjoyment of the season.

Yeah, I think it will have a lot of cuts, but I believe that it will get there because Ymir falling in the tree was in the trailer

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS ON THE EPISODE?

It's amazing seeing how each week, something with SnK trends! ^^

It still baffles me just how much people insist on hating Gabi, especially when her arc has shown tremendous growth in the manga. Reiner was no better than her when he was a child and continued to insist that Paradisians are devils and chose to further destroy their lives even after sleeping under the same roof as the 104th for 3 whole years and forming personal bonds with them. Yet, his actions are forgivable but Gabi's are not? Both characters have shown remorse for their former beliefs and misdeeds against Paradisians. Both realized that they were in the wrong. The characters have forgiven Gabi. Why can't y'all do the same? People who want Gabi to suffer are no better than they accuse her of being. 

Well done episode which managed to capture the emotions of sasha's death perfectly

monke

I really appreciate Gabi as a character. She has spunk and a strong character arc in which she changes and grows more than anyone in the last 30 chapters of the manga, save maybe Mikasa (ignoring how Eren, Reiner, Armin and maybe a few others changed during the timeskip). It makes me sad seeing people wishing for her to die and praising Floch and the others for kicking her.

Gabi absolutely deserves the hate she gets

I absolutely love to see the anime-onlies mass hate of GabBitch, does my heart good xD

Boring ,too much Gabi she is annoying

Time to strap in: wild ride ahead!

Gabi Braun is the WORST character, her arc was poorly written and the moment she kills Sasha solidifies her rightful place as most hated character

No development has made me stop hating Gabi. The wound of Sasha's death will ALWAYS overshadow any crocodile tears Gabi may cry.

Kudos to Jean's and Connie's voice actors. Emotions were so raw and natural.

so good! they're really nailing down the emotional beats so far!

Dialogue-heavy but still amazing! Also the music was great

I didn't felt anything when Sasha died. Even the first time, in the manga. She hasn't enough personnality for me to care. Erwin and Bertolt's death were more saddening for me. Stop hating Gabi. She was in grief and she did what Marley brainwashed her to. And Sasha killed people right in front of her, so…

1 chapter was too little to be adapted for an episode, you could tell some scenes were stretched to fit the runtime

The music they chose for the scene of Sasha passing was also the same music they used when the Survey Corps first donned their capes and Eren found out Marco was dead... man, that song is gonna hit harder than ever now

It didn’t help with the overwhelming amount of hate Gabi is getting. I hope Mappa does her justice because she’s a great character but the Anime only seem to hate her because its a “funny” “popular” thing but it really isn’t... shows who really is paying attention to the story and the people who are watching it because it’s popular and trendy 

People who are hating on Gabi do not understand the themes portrayed in AoT

Pretty solid overall. Wonderful bits of animation such as the ODM bits and the solid character acting from Sasha going down, Mikasa and Armin is distress, personal highlight being Gabi's reload animation. Good ost choices, nice addition of Samuel and Daz to foreshadow their conflict later on in the story, and great work from Connie, Gabi and Eren's VAs.

Friendly reminder that just because we hate Gabi does NOT mean we don't "understand" the story or themes. We just don't care because Gabi is a bad character.

U mad at Gabi for what she did ? Did she kill Potato girl for no reason? Imgine a kid, at least 3 years younger than the 104th, made fighting on WARS and praised for it, brainwashed by Marley that Paradisians are devils, and these devils came in her home, killing her friends and this WOMAN killed in front of her eyes two people who tried to protect her. Don't be mad at Gabi. Grieve for Sasha, okay, but stop hating Gabi. You're the worst when you do it

Hey Gabiatans: as long as you're not threatening the VA or other RL p olle, it's PERFECTLY fine to hate Gabi. Period. We don't have to like her, and it's not like we don't "understand" her just because we hate her. I "understand" a lot of Germans were forcibly coerced into joining the Nazi regime, but I don't have to pity then for any consequences that came for them.

Leviiiiiii

I was surprised that Mikasa and Armin crying over Sasha had no voice over. I thought it was still effective but I'm not sure if I prefer it. Other than that, the character animation was amazing this episode. Gabi's hands as she reloaded the rifle and Armin crying were my favorites. Overall, everything was pretty perfect and I love it when a chapter gets adapted in full with basically no cuts. One of the best episodes in the series and a proper send off for Sasha.

Wonderfully done episode! They truly did Gabi and Falco's perspectives justice. Also, seeing Eren's expressions and reactions in animated format was clarifying and super well done, too!

WHERE DO YOU PRIMARILY DISCUSS THE SERIES? 227 Responses

Thanks again to everyone who participated! 

[luzdelmundo]

2020 in review

I was tagged to do this by the loveliest @unefleurofferte, thank you for letting me reflect on my life and for sharing your thoughts, stories and insights to your life, it was such a worthwhile read! <3 

I am tagging @maailmaonsun, @dunedjarin & @vinylchemist, feel free to do it if you feel like it! Sending you hugs and lots of warmth, I hope your 2021 will be a great year to you 🥰

Rules: answer the questions about 2020 and tag some people to pass it on!

5 favourite films you watched in 2020:

This is a��compilation has no particular order, but I did love them all. 

The Theory of Everything - I was a bit late to the party, but this movie was something special 

The Gentlemen - this movie has it all, a great piece of entertainment 

What Happened, Miss Simone? - such a powerful piece

Age of Adaline - I adore everything about this movie, even with many medical inaccuracies 

Happiest Season - because who doesn’t love a lesbian Christmas movie after the hardest year to date

5 favourite tv shows you watched in 2020:

This year tv shows were the main coping mechanism and I’m not even sorry about it. 

Killing Eve - do I need to say more? 

Haunting of Bly Manor -  Dani and Jamie are the blueprint, I love them with my whole heart 

Dead to me - this was my comfort show for the majority of 2020 

The Playbook: Coach’s rules for life - related to the subject of my studies, really helped me to come up with my own coaching philosophy 

Grey’s Anatomy - yes, really, I rewatched the whole thing 2 times this year 

5 favourite songs you listened to in 2020:

Spotlight by Jessie Ware - this songs takes me to another dimension, I love the ambience, it was also a song my friends called the ultimate aesthetic of mine

III by Foster The People - it’s one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard in my life, my heart belongs to that song

Sao Paolo by Lapti - the ultimate song for chilling, road trips, cooking and everything in between

Dog Years by Maggie Rogers - personal favourite for the 2nd year in a row, if I would ever describe my attachment style or love languages I would use this song 

seven by Taylor Swift - it was a song that made me realise certain childhood behaviours, it always makes me tear up and it is special, will always be 

Top 5 albums of 2020:

What’s your pleasure? by Jessie Ware - she has always been my favourite, and this album is truly something else. Best record of 2020, no doubt about it 

- Ugh, those feels again by Snoh Alegra - she’s been my biggest discovery of 2020 and I’m so happy I found her 

Fine Line by Harry Styles - he is my sweetheart, this album was definitely one of my most listened 

The S(EX) Tapes by FLETCHER - a queer breakup album? It’s everything I never knew I needed 

Iridescent by Ayoni - such a wonderful vibe, 10/10 

Top 5 books you read in 2020:

2020 was definitely not a reading year for me and I can openly admit it, although there were some pieces I will treasure for a long time 

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus - I love this man’s writing, it has been a favourite for a long time, but I kept coming back to this one to find the meaning for all that has happened 

The Rebel by Albert Camus - yes. another one from him. just because. 

Becoming by Michelle Obama - this is a Michelle Obama stan Tumblr 

The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth - being gay and coming from a Catholic background made this read a hard one, but worth it 

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt - Donna Tartt, that is all. 

How did you spend your birthday this year?

I spent it with my best friend, we went hiking, we had tacos & margaritas. It was a nice relief and an escape from the pandemic reality. It felt great. I also had a small family celebration later that weekend. 

What was your most memorable day this year?

Getting into the sports coaching school. I came home from the office I had an internship, I was tired, I was in a crisis//survival mode, I was tired of business, of who I was. My life had little to no meaning anymore. I was a robot, I thought the world has very little to offer. Then I suddenly got an e-mail I got in. The entire world turned upside down. I am happier, I glow here, I belong here. It makes me cry having to think about it. It was the biggest blessing of 2020, hands down. 

What was your most memorable meal you had this year?

There were many, but I think the most memorable and meaningful one was when my best friend baked a Ukrainian cheesecake and embraced her heritage. Also, making hummus with my new flatmates after moving to the dorm was a big one. Also, shakshuka became my comfort meal of the year. 

Did you find any new hobbies or interests in quarantine?

Quite some, yes! I started paining again, I became a plant mom and a gardening expert, I grew my own cucumbers and tomatoes. I started baking again and make aesthetic moodboards on Pinterest getting pretty big following!  It’s one of my favourite spare time activities now!

What was the last big event/thing you remember doing BC (before covid)?

Going clubbing with my friends, I miss going out and dancing my heart out. 

5 good/positive things that happened to you in 2020:

Getting into my dream school!!!! I will be a sports performance coach, it still feels like an actual dream 

Going to therapy and dealing with personal problems, it was one of the best decision of my life 

Coming out to myself and living my truth

Losing the feeling of having to prove things to people

Learning that I can’t control everything and that it is okay. Life goes on. And it gets better.

Biggest messages or lessons learnt from this year?

Life can change within seconds, everything flows and goes, it in constant movements. Your inner critic lies, it will be okay and you will find yourself, find your heart. Love is loud. Love is beautiful, love makes the world go round. Growth is hard, overwhelmingly hard, but it is so so so so worth it. Magic happens everyday. Your gut knows, trust it. Protecting your peace is crucial for your sanity. 

And what are you most looking forward to in 2021?

Living, simple as that. For me 2021 will be the year of presence - wherever I’ll be, I will be fully there. 

[travllingbunny]

The 100: 7x07 The Queen’s Gambit

I owe you all the reviews for episodes 7x07, 7x08 and 7x09, the only ones I didn’t have the time to write after the episodes aired. (I only posted My authentic live reactions to 7x07.) Now I’m on my annual leave (since yesterday... well, technically, from tomorrow) so finally I’m gonna post them before the show returns. During this mini hiatus, @jeanie205​ and me have been doing a joint rewatch of season 7, and we’ve reached 7x08 (which I’ll be posting a review of tomorrow).

Unpopular opinion - I quite liked this one. Roughly on the same level as the previous two episodes, maybe even slightly more as there was nothing major that really bugged me this time. I like it when the show takes a break from the plot and exposition to focus on characters, and this one had some character moments I really enjoyed (in particular for Emori, Octavia, Diyoza and Hope) and the show addressed some of the long-standing issues I’ve had with some of the previous events (such as Octavia’s beating of Bellamy in season 3 or Madi taking the Flame in season 5). It certainly helps that Emori and Diyoza have always been among my favorite characters and that Octavia has become one of my favorites with her amazing development over the last few seasons. One of those “addressing previous issues” things was the Becho flashback (as the lack of flashbacks for that relationship has been rightfully criticized) was OK and in line with what we know of this relationship. Even Nelson’s characterization made sense this time.

There are a couple of things I’m not sure how I feel about, and the big “reveal” at the end was hardly a reveal to anyone in the hardcore fandom, but was still necessary. The pacing of this season hasn’t been the best for sure, but I think I wouldn’t have had any problems if the momentum from the end of this episode - with Clarke and co. arriving on Bardo and learning about Bellamy’s “death”, followed by Cadogan being woken up from the cryo sleep -  and the backdoor pilot was followed by getting directly into present day action and involving Clarke and the rest of the Nakara group in what’s going on. I think it was mostly 7x09 and the completely unnecessary flashbacks that really ruined it and made me lose patience with the season.

I loved the mother/daughter conversation between the two Dizoyas in this episode, which was emotional and also touched on the show’s crucial themes of violence and morality. These two haven’t seen each other in what was just about a month for the mother, but 15 years for the daughter. Diyoza is treating Hope as a child, because that is what she is for her, which frustrates Hope - a dynamic that many will find familiar - though in this case, it’s a bit more understandable as Diyoza hasn’t seen Hope since she was 10, and secondly, she is right that Hope is still naive in some respects as she hasn’t had a chance to meet that many people and experience that much. But that is partly a consequence of Diyoza sheltering Hope from the knowledge about her own life before Skyring. (Hope even threw Dev in her face - explicitly calling him her father - as her other parent figure, one who did teach her to fight and try to prepare her for the real world.) And Diyoza getting upset that Hope came to Bardo to rescue her  - as she saw it her role to save her (“I was coming to save you”) was not logical - she knows how time dilation works, so she should know that Hope would have been long dead by that time, if she hadn’t come to Bardo. Hope was right when she pointed out that the real problem is that her mother wanted Hope to be innocent, the way she isn’t, and that she is upset to see that Hope has become a killer, too. Diyoza was driven both to protect Hope in the physical sense and to protect her innocence - and, as she finally admits here, she wanted Hope to see her in a different light than everyone else does. We’ve already seen in season 6 that Diyoza is really unhappy about her legacy and her past and the idea that everyone sees her as a killer and terrorist. I’ve never thought she should have paid much attention to what Russell Lightbourne of all people said her place in “history books” was (which history books? The Sanctum ones? He left Earth shortly after Diyoza was arrested), but it’s clear that the reason she took it so hard is because she herself feels bad about her past actions. She thinks goal was right, but her methods were not - as she ended up killing innocent people.  “Doing the right thing the wrong way isn’t doing the right thing”.  She is a jaded character who can do violence better than anyone - in a tactical way and only as much as necessary, rather than impulsively or out of bloodlust - and she still does it, but who hates it at the same time, which is why she puts hope (!) in her daughter to be different. When she tells Hope “Violence and rage will destroy your soul, revenge is a game with no winners”, it feels like this is the show working towards its final messages in its final season. 

If the prequel gets green lit, I hope we get more Charmaine Diyoza backstory in flashbacks and learn what was going in pre-apocalypse. In season 5, she said she was fighting a fascist government, and in this scene, we got a few more backstory crumbs, such as that everyone she loved died in wars, some of which “did not need to be fought”. I want to know what the Battle of San Francisco was - the one where Diyoza apparently saved people and was considered a hero for - and what later made her rebel against the government. We also get a McCreary mention when Diyoza finally decides it is time to disclose the full ugly truth to Hope - who and what he was and what he did, which the audience already knew, and the new info for us, that the reason why she had sex with him was to get him on her side during the uprising. (Which, I believe, is the first time anyone on the show has admitted that sex may sometimes be motivated by manipulative reasons.)

Octavia comforting Echo is a scene that got a lot of criticism. But I think this is a really good scene for Octavia and her character development. No, Octavia hugging Echo and telling her she is her family isn’t inconsistent with the fact that Octavia has never liked Echo (and was open about it in how she talked to Hope about her) or that these two characters were never anywhere near being friends, even when they stopped being outright enemies. This is simply Octavia letting go off all grudges and seeing herself and Echo as united in grief,, and is accepting Echo as family because she was in her brother’s life. And she is also now able to empathize with people instead of judging them, seeing the echoes of her how she herself felt after Lincoln’s death. 

What particularly meant a lot for me is that the show has finally addressed her beating of Bellamy in season 3 and that Octavia expressed regret about it. That’s something I had been waiting for, for 4 years. That controversial scene had become even more upsetting over time because of the amount of fanon built around it in fandom wars. Such as the Bellamy-haters attempt to justify it and claim that he “deserved it” and even attempt to blame him for Lincoln’s death, ignoring the fact that Bellamy had tried ti save Lincoln and turned his back on Pike after Lincoln, Kane and Sinclair were sentenced to death, and offered Octavia his help - but she distrusted him, knocked him out and chained him up in a cave and went to save Lincoln by herself. On the other hand, I’ve now seen people criticize Octavia saying “And he let me” and argue that he was “helpless” as he was chained up - which is again ignoring canon, since Miller and others wanted to interfere and stop the beating, by Bellamy kept telling them to stay away. It’s been argued that Bellamy let her do it because he felt guilty. but while there may have been some of that, I've always thought the main reason because he realized she needed it, she needed to blame someone else and take it out on someone else, and Pike was not around. And more importantly, she needed to blame Bellamy in order not to blame herself for failing to rescue him, in order not to think “If only I had done this differently..”. Bellamy started telling her in 3x13: "I came to you, I offered help. If you had only..." and then he saw her look and stopped himself and left, realizing what he was about to say. Octavia sees his motives the same way, saying he let her because she knew he needed it, but she isn’t using this to justify herself. She can now acknowledge her mistakes and take responsibility, and show compassion for someone in a similar situation. It’s not just about grief and losing a loved one - Octavia is now a different person and does not react to losing Bellamy (as she believes) in the same violent, desperate way. Octavia saw Lincoln as her “home” at the time. Echo saw Bellamy as her leader and made saving him her mission for 5 years, and Octavia realizes she must be blaming herself for failing at it. She tells her "It’s not your fault" because she blamed herself when she did not save Lincoln.

The show has been criticized (with good reason) for developing the Bellamy/Echo relationship off-screen during a time jump, and showing a flashback in season 7 could be seen as the show ticking off another box. But the flashback’s main purpose here is clearly to comment on Echo’s storyline this season - specifically, on the issue of loyalty as her main motive (or her tendency to always look for someone to follow, as she herself has said to herself through her hallucinations). The most important lines in the scene are Bellamy telling her “Loyalty is your weakness” and, after she replies it is not, “It is, when it makes us do things we know are wrong”. To paraphrase Indra from a previous episode - loyalty is not a weakness, blind loyalty is. (I will go with the least cynical of the several interpretations I’ve seen floating around of what Bellamy meant when he followed this with a question “Do you think you can be loyal to us?” I think he thought that, as a “shapeshifter”, as he called her, he and the Spacekru can influence her to accept their values and not be a ruthless killer as she was taught to be by Queen Nia.)

Still, there’s a lot that can be deduced from this scene regarding Bellamy’s mindset on the Ring and the Bellamy/Echo dynamic in general - though it’s more of a confirmation of the things we have noticed before. What strikes me the most about this scene is that it may be the least romantic first kiss scene I’ve seen, at least out of those that resulted in a long-term relationship. It feels more like a recruitment scene - and most of the dialogue is about Echo’s and Bellamy’s relative character strengths and weaknesses, and whether Echo can be a loyal part of Bellamy’s team. Echo does look softer and more vulnerable and insecure than we’re used to seeing her, and very surprised that Bellamy is forgiving her for things she herself was afraid he never would be able to (such as betraying him at MW - which led to his previous girlfriend’s death, or trying to kill his sister), let alone show interest in a relationship with her. But Bellamy is a far cry from the emotional man we see interacting with Clarke, either in seasons 1-4 or in seasons 5-6. He is calm, composed, he wants to move on from the past, and when he kisses Echo, it feels like a moment of decision. The Ring!Bellamy has spent 3 years in peace, without needing to protect anyone - as there are no outside threats. He has mourned Clarke, believing that she died saving them all and he left her behind. He feels that his sister is his “weakness” (”love is weakness” - Echo calls it his strength), but his guiding motivation is still to go back to Earth and reunite with her. It’s not the first time Bellamy has lamented the power that his feelings for his sister have over him - in season 4, he described himself as pathetic as always coming back after she had treated him so badly. (Is this a part of the reason why he’s only ever had romantic and/or sexual relationships with women that he doesn’t have such powerful feelings for - unlike Clarke, who is also his ‘weakness’  and the only person for whom he has feelings strong enough to rival those for his sister?) In season 6, Bellamy will criticize Echo for not being emotionally open as he said she was on the Ring. As we know, she was not fully emotionally open on the Ring, either, as she never told him her backstory (he notes here that she doesn’t like talking about herself), but I can kind of see what he meant - she was a lot softer, and going back to the ground and back into the center of action made her go back into the emotionless soldier mode, which is her default survival mode. And for Bellamy, going to the ground, on the other hand, meant being caught again in a swirl of all the emotions - learning Clarke was alive and reuniting with her, seeing a very changed Octavia, having to fight and kill and do things to protect people again - we saw him change from this laid-back Bellamy in 5x01 and become more emotional, throughout seasons 5 and 6. The Ring, with its 6 years of peace and boredom, was like a vacuum - and Echo saw it as something that was “not real” and their relationship as one that’s specific to the Ring and that wouldn’t survive on the ground. One thing that this flashback revealed is how long they had been dating - it seems that “forgiving” was synonymous with “starting to date” (they really spent no time being friends), which makes it all the more astounding that, after 3 years of dating, Echo had the exact same insecurities in 5x01, believing that their relationship would not survive on the ground. In this scene here, Bellamy wasn’t even trying to reassure her - he instead used a kiss to shut her up and make her ignore those concerns. There is a development in their relationship - as Bellamy here calls Spacekru a team, a unit, and wants Echo to be a part of it, and Bellamy in 5x01, three years later, calls them and Echo his “family”. He certainly started to care about her deeply. But at no point does he mention love, and he certainly doesn’t look like a man in love.

But while it’s clear what the main themes of Echo’s character arc are, I have to say that I have no idea where exactly this arc is going. Will she learn to have some sort of identity outside loyalty to Azgeda or Bellamy or anyone else? Can she stop being a soldier and a killer, or is the point of her arc that some people can never change? Will she ever examine the morality of her actions the way Clarke, Bellamy, Octavia have been doing, and as Diyoza does in this same episode? I can’t say I’m fully sure what the dramatic moment of Echo slashing her face Azgeda-style meant. All I can say is that it seems to point out that 1) she has been shaped as a person by her Azgeda warrior upbringing in her childhood and this is her main identity she will probably never let go off, and 2) the way she said the scars mean the pain has stopped but you will never forget makes me think she has revenge on her mind. But this wouldn’t be very different of what we already saw her do impulsively in 7x05. Everyone expects Echo to be out for revenge against the Disciples - so it might be more interesting if she really decided to fight for them because she needs that in her life.

We also see Gabriel’s recruitment - the episode’s opening scene, with a pretty straightforward combination of both carrot and stick: come join us and explore the universe, something you’ve been obsessed with for over a hundred years, and oh, the alternative is getting executed, and your friends potentially getting executed. Gabriel is driven by both his scientific curiosity and a wish to save Echo/Hope/Octavia. He genuinely wanted to save them, but he also took away their choice and did it against their will and feels bad about betraying them - another one of those tricky situations in the show where someone betrays someone out of the desire to save their life.

As the Disciples are sending Orlando’s body to Nakara, we see Gabriel do his own ritual of saying “Death is life” as he did for Josephine. Conspiracy theorists were very excited about the fact that we don’t see Orlando’s dead body, but I’d say that simply means the show didn’t want to call the actor back and pay him for appearing as a dead body for 2 seconds.

An unexpectedly funny moment was Anders saying, in reference to Orlando’s death: “I think we need to rethink our penal system” (ya think?) - Neal McDonough’s face was just perfect in that moment. And Gabriel is getting back some of his tendency for snarky one-liners that we haven’t seen much since the first half of season 6 (his only question about being a Disciple is “Do I get a robe?” )

I have no idea why the show, in the following episodes. treats the characters’ decisions to join the Disciples as a big mystery that needed flashbacks to be explained. Anders directly threatened Gabriel and Diyoza, Hope, Octavia and Echo thought they would be executed or tortured, until Echo realized they wanted to recruit them (which was becoming obvious from the nice treatment they were getting - Octavia was even allowed to read a book). It’s not like any of them had a choice, and joining the Disciples and pretending to be loyal is the obvious way to go. 

Another instance of the show commenting on its previous controversial storyline: when Jackson tells Madi that Bellamy convincing her in S5 to take the Flame was not right even though it was also true that it was the only way to save Clarke. Fans tend to take extreme positions on this one - either it was unambiguously bad or it was the right thing - so I’m glad to see the show admitting the complexity of that situation, and that some things can be both necessary and morally wrong - especially since season 5 seemed to treat Commander!Madi as an unambiguously good thing. Seasons 6 and 7 have since gone a long way to acknowledge that making the Grounder tradition of 12 old Commanders is pretty messed up.

I do wonder though, just like Emori did in this episode, since when is Jackson is shrink. He’s a surgeon, and neither he nor Abby have ever shown much in the way of understanding about mental health issues before.

I’ve always loved Emori - back when she was first introduced, because she was a morally ambiguous but sympathetic antiheroine with a developed backstory and because her relationship with Murphy initially subvert the “redemption for the love of a good woman” trope. Both she and the relationship have since developed and changed a lot. Emori started out cynical, distrustful of people and bent on her own survival, due to having such a tough life since she was a child cast out for the way she was born, but over the seasons, she has found love, a “family”, developed new skills, and learned what it is like to be cared, loved and respected by others - and she has become a much more idealistic character. She’s adapted to the new situation - having to pretend to be a Prime - much better than Murphy.  Murphy says (and Sheidheda later echoes that) that it is because she enjoys being worshiped - and I’m sure that’s a part of the reason (and is very understandable - as someone who was thrown away like garbage as a child and an outcast for most of her life, of course she would enjoy adoration, even if it is for directed at someone she is only pretending to be), but she is happily embracing her role mostly because she can use that newfound privilege and power to do something good - and to try to heal an old emotional wound,  trying to do reunite the CoG with their parents who rejected them for being nulls. She will never get a chance to learn if her own parents would be able to un-learn their own brainwashing, regret their actions and have an emotional reunion with her - but she clearly wants to believe they would. This episode may be hammering that point a bit too much with having Jackson analyze her actions - when it’s already obvious and she also straight up tells all that to Nelson, making a parallel between his and her fate, the “nulls” and “Frikdreinas”, both rejected as abominations for their DNA, (When Nelson does his angry-stubborn thing and tells her “You know nothing about me”, it reminded me of Emori’s conversation with Clarke in 4x07, when she said “You know nothing of my pain”.) Unfortunately - while Emori tells Murphy: “The way out of hell is paved with good deeds” - what happens ends up being in line with the proverb “The way to hell is paved with good intentions”. We see some of the old, sly Emori when she tricks Nelson into drinking so she could use his DNA to match him with his parents. But her new idealism makes her underestimate just how horrible people can be.

As I said in my immediate reactions, Nelson’s father is the worst. I really don’t want to judge if it is realistic that people can be so horrible and so brainwashed...  sadly, it probably is. And to be fair, everyone else at that event seemed to be OK, but it’s enough for one a-hole to ruin everything. In any case, that scene was quite strong and well-acted on the part of Lee Majdoub as Nelson (aka Sachin). Unlike in the last episode, Nelson’s characterization made sense this time. His reasoning does not (and Nikki - who is not an interesting antagonist but whose motivations at least make sense - points out the exact same thing I wondered about 7x06, what kind of justice is he looking for now that all the Primes are gone?), he’s not a very rational character, but you can see where he was coming from emotionally, reacting to what happened. 

It was weird, though, that he immediately started talking in the name of all Children of Gabriel and making decisions for them. In season 6, they seemed more like a bunch of people with different ideas who disagreed a lot, but now they seem to be another group that blindly follows a leader.

One thing I enjoyed better the first time were the Murphy and Sheidheda scenes. I really didn’t realize where it was going the first time I watched the episode, but knowing what it’s all about and that Shady is just stalling  - it makes sense, but it also makes these scene drag on during a rewatch. Yes, Sheidheda is portrayed as a master manipulator (I think he is the first antagonist in this show who can be said to be one), and he found all the right ways to get to Murphy - calling him out on his  desire to be a hero and desire to be loved (both of which Murphy always wants to deny), threatening his “queen” Emori, trying to play on Murphy’s concerns about the fact Emori is more adaptable than him, and, most of all, tricks Murphy into trying to play a mind game with him and prove something, try to outsmart him. But when you already know where it’s all going, it feels like those could have been a bit shorter. Maybe instead we could have had a couple more scenes showing what was up with Octavia, Echo, Hope and Diyoza, so they wouldn’t dedicate an entire episode (7x09) to that. But maybe putting a couple of flashbacks (around 5-10 minutes) at the beginning of 7x09 and then getting on with the present day Bardo action (i.e. whatever is gonna happen in 7x10) would have been an even better solution. 

As with “Hesperides”, I’m still not sure why this episode has the title it has and if I’ve been overthinking it. Surely it can’t just be so literal and refer only to Murphy’s move in the chess game between him and Sheidheda? I expected a metaphor about sacrificing a pawn, someone or something of yours that you see as less important, to gain something else, and/or empower your strongest player. I can’t really think of anything in this episode that really fits that. Unless it refers to something else that’s yet to happen this season.

One minor thing that doesn’t make much sense to me was Murphy mentioning Lexa to try to make Sheidheda feel bad, by pointing out her popularity (”everyone loves her”) and his unpopularity. I’m confused by this, because it feels like a big retcon, or a case of the writers starting to confuse Lexa’s popularity in the fandom with her status in-universe. It was a major plot point that everyone was turning against her in season 3 (Nia challenged her and all the other clan leaders sided with Nia and almost voted Lexa down, a Trikru farmer tried to assassinate her, her Flamekeeper was worried that her people would turn against her...) I suppose we’re meant to think her popularity has risen since she died - that seemed to be how it was portrayed in season 4 - but even if that were the case, how much would Murphy know about it? He was only in Polis for a short time in season 3 (pre-ALIE) and mostly interacted with Titus and Ontari, spent season 4 hanging out with Skaikru, was not in the bunker and never got to spend much time with Wonkru. Are we to think that he learned of Lexa’s popularity with Wonkru during these few days on Sanctum in season 7? But as we’ve seen, Sheidheda is not really universally hated among Wonkru and still has stans at least in his own clan, Sangedakru. Sheidheda, on his part, correctly points out that Lexa was killed by a Flamekeeper, just as he was. He says it was because they were afraid of his “ideas” - not explaining what ideas those were, and says Lexa also was... Which also isn’t exactly what happened: Titus was not afraid of Lexa’s ideas, he was afraid she was listening to Clarke and Clarke’s ideas too much. 

We get a minor Bardo time jump of 3 months in the middle of the episode. I have no idea at which point in the Sanctum timeline this or that part of the Bardo storyline happened - they are clearly not being shown chronologically, as the Bardo part of the episodes 7x05-7x06 probably lasted for a few (Bardo) hours. 

Gabriel is apparently now a Level 3 Disciple and works on the "cipher” team. I guess the Disciples value scientific people more than soldier Disciples, since Echo, Octavia and Diyoza still don’t seem to be even Level 1 based on the lack of symbols on their faces, and Levitt is somehow Level 11. Since they have been working on the codes for thousands of (Bardo) years, I’m surprised that the Disciples haven’t managed to do more. According to another team member, the last big discovery was before he was born and it was a 10 digit code that allows them to “harness the power of what you call the Anomaly. 

We get new info in this episode as the final code they are looking for is supposed to help them achieve “transcendence” aka “the final evolution of the species” (which they believe the beings who made the Anomaly Stones had done) and help them win the “last war”, and I assume that the transcendence has something to do with the white light that was seen when Becca typed the 7 symbol combination she only managed to find because she had the Flame in her head, and whatever she saw on the other side - which must be something different from the regular green light that appears when a bridge to another planet is opened. Cadogan’s questions to Anders after waking up were: "Have we cracked the code? Has the war begun?" It's a bit frustrating that the show keep withholding the info - what is the last war, who is it fought against? Is it even a physical war? I guess it must be at least partially, as they train and they want to recruit people like Echo, Octavia, Diyoza. But is that all?

Such a funny contrast between the star-struck, adoring Anders and an almost bored Cadogan, who first  asks, after seeing who woke him up: “You again?” Having seen 7x08, I wonder if maybe Cadogan is not impressed by people who worship him without question and try to please him -as his son did (as opposed to his daughter). Anders keep calling him the “Shepherd” and Cadogan says his trademark line “Call me Bill”. He must have told him that before, if Anders had already woken him up before. Or he just doesn’t like to be woken up more often than once in a few decades or a century, since he says he was woken up “this early”.

I really like the way Clarke’s reaction to hearing about Bellamy’s “death” was portrayed. There was some debate about the fact that Lindsey Morgan, the director of the episode, first wanted to have Clarke fall to her knees, and that Jason overruled her - and I have to say I agree with him. Focusing on Clarke’s face and seeing the shock and gradual realization on her face felt a lot less melodramatic and a lot more real.

A couple of interesting things I’ve noticed: Cadogan has a picture of pre-apocalypse “Polis” (Baltimore?) on Level 13 where his cryo is.

I was first under the impression that Madi’s drawing we see in this episode showed Becca going into the Anomaly, then when I saw it showed multiple people, that it was the Second Dawn members leaving Earth. But after rewatching Anaconda, I think this is the scene when Becca activated the Stone and everyone (Becca, Bill, Grace, Callie and Reese) stood there around it, talking about it. So, probably another one of Becca’s memories.

Rating: 7.5/10

[allie1804-fan]

Connecticut (Chapter 1)

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Chapter 1

“Is everything OK for you Mr Reeves”

 “Yes, it’s all fine, I’m fine thank you. I’m just going to get some shut eye thanks. I’ll push the button if I need anything”

 The air hostess smiled and walked away and Keanu leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. The “Secret Lives of Pippa Lee” script lay on his tray table but he felt too weary to pick it up. A two week promotional tour for Street Kings, involving some serious globe-trotting, had just come to and end and he was on his way now to Stamford, Connecticut to join the crew for his next film. He was excited to work with such a great bunch of actors but anxious that his jet lag and general fatigue from the tour would hinder his performance. Still, he’d had some great reviews for Street Kings and that had buoyed his confidence. Oh yes, he always said that what the crits thought didn’t matter and he was his own worst critic too, but he had to admit that this recent acclaim for his performance was truly gratifying. He felt he could stand tall and proud in front of Rebecca, Robyn and Alan, like he’d really earned his stripes.

He fell into a restless sleep on the 2 hour flight only stirring as the countryside around Stamford came into view. Everything was a verdant green, May’s fecundity bursting forth and Keanu relished the fact that they would be filming on location so there would be opportunities to spend time outdoors and explore a new place. He didn’t feel quite so weary now, the memories of the repetitive interviews with the press (“so how was it reprising your role as a cop?”, “Do you really think you’re cut out to play the bad guy”) fading. Time now for some more intelligent conversations, with people who knew what they were talking about when it came to art and acting.

 Once in the airport, Keanu was met by a young rep named Tom from the film company. He was jittery and clearly rather overawed to meet a star of Keanu’s calibre.  Keanu tried to put him at ease as they made their way to the baggage zone, asking questions about him to give him something easy to talk about rather than worrying about what he should and shouldn’t ask. Keanu saw his bag come into view and stepped forward to grab it.

 “Let me take that” Tom offered but Keanu would have none of it even when Tom protested that he’d been told to do everything he could for him.

 “Look, you’ll make me feel like a sissy girl if I let you carry my bag Tom so you can achieve their requests by letting me have my way OK? He smiled to reassure Tom that he wasn’t mad.

 “OK, OK” Tom muttered, slightly embarrassed but realising there was no way Keanu was going to play the role of pampered star.

 “As they headed down the interstate, Keanu asked Tom about how things were set up for the shoot, where everyone was staying, what the town was like and so on. The journey wasn’t long and they were soon pulling up at the Marriott where all the actors and the director were staying. Keanu assured Tom he could handle checking in himself and  breathed a sigh of relief to be nearer the point when he could just kick back alone in his room for a while before meeting with Rebecca Miler, the writer and director for dinner.

 There was only one receptionist on as he approached and she was dealing with an enquiry from a woman in gym gear. Keanu didn’t mind the wait since he got to feast his eyes on the woman’s tight ass which was covered snugly by a pair of grey shorts. She had her blonde hair up in a girlish, perky pony tail, her slender neck revealed as she tilted her head on one side whilst signing some papers. He felt his balls contract as he watched and shook his head to try and dispel his lustful thoughts. The woman turned to leave having finished her dealings and at that point, Keanu let his bag fall to the ground with a loud clatter

 “Grace ………….oh my god!”

 “Keanu! Hi! Wow long time no see eh?”

 Keanu could feel the flush creeping up his face as he remembered what he’d been thinking just moments before when he didn’t know who it was. He moved quickly and gave Grace a bear hug and a kiss on the cheek which gave his face time to resume its normal colour.

 “Wow! Wow! how amazing to see you, hey are you on this movie?’ he asked excitedly.

 “Yeah, yeah, that’s right. I haven’t been on a location shoot in so long and I thought it was about time I did. I was so glad when I saw you had signed on. She beamed.  Keanu beamed.

 “Gosh, what has it been , like 15  years since I saw you. And I don’t think I’ve heard a peep out of you for like 10!”  Keanu exclaimed.

 “Yeah, I know, I’m sorry about that, just life and stuff getting in the way, you know!”

 Now it was Grace’s turn to flush. She felt guilty for not keeping in touch. Maybe he’d understand if they got a chance to talk some time on the shoot.

 “Listen, I’ve just got here this minute as you can see and I’m having dinner with Ms Miller  at 7 but maybe we could meet later for a drink. I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to and just catch up.”

 “Yeah, yeah sure that would be just lovely – shall I meet you in the bar around 9?”

 “Yeah that should be fine – see you later”

 Grace walked to the lift and Keanu returned his attention to the receptionist to deal with checking in.

 Ten minutes later he was in the lift riding up to his room still shaking his head in mild disbelief at seeing Grace here. They had met on the set of “Speed” which seemed like an absolute lifetime ago. She was a make up artist and her task on set was to ensure Keanu was consistently oil and grease splattered between takes.  Her side job, and the reason they had got on so well, was to help him learn his part for “Hamlet” which he had done on set during the many breaks there were whilst setting up the buses for stunts. She had asked him one day what on earth it was he was reciting as he strode around the freeway loudly proclaiming the lines. There was often so much time to kill for everyone not involved with the stunt set up that she’d offered to help him with his practice and so a friendship began. They’d had a mildly flirty relationship but Grace was married so it was a kind of safe flirtation. She was only 23 compared to Keanu’s 29 at the time and he’d marvelled at how happy and comfortable she’d seemed in her relationship with Jim. She was already talking about starting a family and was not the least bit phased by the idea despite her youth. He was curious to find out what had happened in her life sine then – he guessed she probably knew the high (and low) lights of his life in the intervening period – hell didn’t everyone?

 The only word to describe Grace’s mood between seeing Keanu and meeting him again at 9, was “antsy”. She scolded herself

 “You knew he was in the movie, so surely you should have prepared yourself and you should have known he’d wonder why you lost touch” The truth was, she’d been avoiding confronting what it would be like to see him again. The strong attraction she’d felt at the time had been all but extinguished by her love and commitment for Jim. Now Jim wasn’t here and “boom” the attraction she felt but repressed hit her right between the eyes and then took a collision course straight down to her groin. My he’d aged well! And the crows’ feet around his eyes only enhanced rather than diminished his gorgeousness. Of course she knew all that from watching his career over the years. Since meeting him on “Speed”, she’d made a point of seeing all his subsequent movies, marvelling at how he’d developed his craft over the years. So she knew exactly how he looked these days but somehow seeing him in the flesh, being genuinely rather than vicariously on the receiving end of his mega- watt smile as he’d greeted her was a whole other matter. Grace took a shower and ordered room service for her evening meal and mused while she ate over all the things she’s need to fill him in on. Some of it would be hard for her to talk about and she had no doubt hard for him to hear but she was still glad that they had second chance to enjoy their friendship. Nine o’clock couldn’t come soon enough.

[weekendwarriorblog]

The Weekend Warrior Is Back!!! Raya and the Last Dragon, Chaos Walking and More

Welcome back to the Weekend Warrior!

This is probably going to be a little different from any of my previous columns, because New York City theaters reopen on Friday, and I swore that once they do, I would be writing about box office again. But this will also essentially be a previous column, so it will include reviews, it will include festivals and repertory series, and basically, whatever the hell I want to write about.

But let’s be realistic here. While there are a lot of movie theaters in New York City, not all of them will open, and they’ll all still have a capacity ceiling at 25% or 50 people in the larger theaters. Many of the larger multiplexes like AMC will be able to show films on two, three or more screenings to be able to make up for the limited capacity, but smaller theaters and those who have been doing well with the virtual cinema may remain closed. I know that the Angelika will be reopening to show some of the indies that haven’t had a theatrical release in NYC yet like Minari, and the IFC Center is reopening but with insanely strict protocols. (Don’t you DARE take off your mask even if you’re watching a three-hour movie! The good news is that they’re showing a lot of great movies on reopening including a comedy series that includes a number of Lynn Shelton movies.)

There’s also the issue of New Yorkers who are still petrified of being out in public, even those who have already been vaccinated and are possibly spending time in congregate settings that are just as likely to cause COVID spread than movie theaters. (I’m not gonna go on a rant about the egotistical and elitist film critics and journalists who have been ranting about movie theaters reopening for the past six months – for some reason, they think they’re as important as essential workers. Guess what, NAME REDACTED, you’re not.)

The big release of the weekend is the Disney animated movie RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON, which will hit probably around 2,400 theaters on Friday as well as be available for a premium on Disney+. I honestly don’t know a ton about this premium streaming release, but this is the second one after last year’s Mulan, which came out (better sit down for this) six months ago!

This magical fantasy adventure centers around Raya (a teen girl voiced by Kelly Marie Tran), who is trying to save her world that has been relegated to dust by the destruction of a valuable magical gem that contains destructive spirits imprisoned there by the legendary dragons. When Raya finds the last dragon, Sihsu (voiced by Awkwafina), the two of them must travel across the land collecting the separated pieces of the gem to reassemble them and restore their world.  Raya is thwarted along the way by her arch-nemesis Namaari (Gemma Chan) who wants to reunite the gem pieces to help her own city of Fang.

(Raya is preceded by the animated short Us Again, which is a nice wordless short about a cranky old man who reflects back on his younger days dancing with his wife. It’s okay, nothing particularly memorable.)

Raya and the Last Dragon, on the other hand, is pretty wonderful, a mix of action, adventure, magic and humor, directed by Don Hall (Big Hero Six) and Carlos Lopez Estrada (Blindspotting) in a way that blends those disparate elements in fun ways. I’ll freely admit that I was a little worried that Akwafina’s schtick was going to annoy me, but after a while her wise-cracking dragon grows on you. In fact there are actually so many other funny characters to add to the laughs that the more brought in the mix on Raya and Sihsu’s journey, the more enjoyable the film gets.

One of the reasons the film works as well as it does is that unlike last year’s Onward, it wasn’t just the two characters and what they had to offer but how their situation changes as it goes along and they visit different cities. I was pretty surprised by how well the film keeps you entertained and invested in the journey.

I also absolutely loved the score by Thomas Newton Howard, which may be even better than his score for News of the World, which I honestly think he’ll get another Oscar nomination for. This is a film that explores all sorts of emotions as well as its Southeast Asian myths, so I feel that I was always going to be a complete and total patsy for this movie since it combines a lot of things I like such as fantasy and Asian mythology. In that sense, Raya is also a nice companion to the recent Mulan, which made my Top 10 last year, but sadly never even got a nominal theatrical release.

So let’s talk about box office, something I haven’t done in almost a year. Last weekend, Warner Bros’ Tom and Jerry had a fairly spectacular opening of $13.7 million. Raya is the first new wide release Disney movie since Pixar’s Onward literally a year ago. That ended up opening to $39 million in 4,310 theaters but only grossed $61.5 million domestic after its legs were cut short by COVID one week later. Raya will likely open in about 2,500 theaters by comparison and that’s with limited capacity for safety, but it should fare decently against the second weekend of Tom & Jerry, and I could easily see it bringing in $15 million or even as much as $18 million, but again, we’re in the baby steps part of the reopening, and things are going to start slowly and keep building as the vaccine continues rolling out.

Being released theatrically by Lionsgate this Friday is CHAOS WALKING, the adaptation of Patrick Ness’ future-set young adult novel The Knife of Never Letting Go, which stars Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley. Holland plays Todd Hewitt, a young man living in a world with no women where men’s thoughts can be perceived by everyone around them. One day, he discovers a mysterious girl named Viola (Ridley), when she crash lands on this planet but her very presence puts Viola’s life in danger, so Todd agrees to accompany her to find her own people.

Yeah, where do I even begin with the latest film from director Doug Liman that was probably filmed two or three years ago and was being delayed even before COVID came along? That’s already a bad sign, but when see how “The Noise,” the way that we hear all of characters’ thinking emerges, it immediately feels like it’s gonna be a problem. Sure enough, it’s such an awkward plot device to watch smoke billowing from the heads of the various characters as we hear their thoughts that it takes most of the movie to get used to it, and yet, it’s still so comically inept a concept that you can’t help but laugh when Holland continually rants, “My Name is Todd Hewitt,” over and over to keep Ridley’s Viola to hear his pubescent teen boy thoughts on experiencing his first girl.

The thing is that the scenes with just Holland and Ridley aren’t bad, but when you have a movie with actors like Mads Mikkelsen, David Oyelowo, Demian Bechir and Cynthia Erivo, it’s disappointing that they can’t elevate the movie above anything other than the most obvious sci-fi (and Western) pastiches. Mikkelsen is the town mayor who is so obviously another bad guy, that he doesn’t bother to put too much into his performance cause we’ve seen him do it so many times before.

Liman is more than a competent filmmaker but he clearly is unaware of how watching clouds pool around the heads of characters as we hear and see their thoughts become material, and even the introduction of the particularly silly-looking aliens – called, get this, the “Spackle” -- makes you forget that this is a sci-fi film from the director of Edge of Tomorrow (or whatever it ended up being called). It’s not even particularly surprising when we find out what really happened to the women in Todd’s community.

I have a feeling that the problems within Chaos Walking come straight from the Patrick Ness source material and the fact that he decided to adapt it himself may have made him tone-deaf to how hard it is to make the film’s central premise work without eliciting guffaws even from the most dedicated or devout fans.

This is also opening in IMAX theaters this weekend, and when it comes to New York, that might be the ideal way to see it (if you so choose) since it’s generally bigger theaters with a maximum of fifty people. Honestly, I don’t think Chaos Walking will make more than $5 million this weekend even in what should be over 2,000 theaters and with the presumed star power of Holland and Ripley from their franchise work. This could be seen as counter-programming from the animated movie, although any teens ready to go back to the movies might stick with Raya as well. Honestly, how this didn’t end up getting dumped to streaming compared to some of this weekend’s better movies is beyond me.

Offering a bit of indie counterprogramming for the two (relatively) big studio movies is Eddie Huang’s BOOGIE, the directorial debut of the Fresh Off the Boat producer, being released by Focus Features into who knows how many theaters? (1,000 or less, I’d Imagine.) It’s a coming-of-age movie starring Taylor Takahashi as Alfred “Boogie” Chin, a Queens high school basketball ace who dreams of one day playing in the NBA but whose temper gets him in trouble with the scouts for college where he’s hoping to get a scholarship.

I was kind of looking forward to this one, because I generally enjoy Fresh Off the Boat, and I’m interested in what stories Huang has to offer as a filmmaker. The film has its merits but it’s not necessarily Takahashi, who isn’t strong enough to really keep the viewer’s interest.

On the other hand, Huang was wise to cast the amazing Taylour Paige (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) as Boogie’s love interest and even better than both is Pamelyn Chee as Boogie’s “Tiger Mom” mother who is sugary sweet when it comes to wooing possible recruiters but also is a complete nightmare to his ex-con father (Perry Yung).

Thinking back on the movie, I definitely didn’t hate it as there were character relations and dynamics I enjoyed, but not all of it clicked with me, and it’s hard to imagine this one connecting with audiences as well as some of the other movies out this week, unless you’re into college hoops, which I am not.

As far as box office, I’m not sure this will be in more than 1,250 theaters (if even that) and even if it plays in New York City (where it would normally find its biggest audience), I just don’t think there’s much awareness for the movie out there. In fact, I see it only playing in one movie theaters in NYC, and that’s way up in Harlem, presumably hoping to get the street ball fans, but I’m not so sure too many up there will be interested in an Asian-American story, so honestly, I don’t think this will make more than $500,000 or $600,000 tops.

Besides the reopening of movie theaters, the other big excitement this week is the launch of Paramount+, the relaunch, spin-off, rebranding of CBS All Access that I had also been considering checking out. It will launch on Thursday, March 4, with the animated family movie THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SPONGE ON THE RUN, which was supposed to be released by Paramount Pictures last year and did get a bit of a theatrical release in Canada while theaters were open there last year. This one involves SpongeBob and his buddy Patrick trying to retrieve SpongeBob’s beloved pet snail Gary, who has gone missing.

I generally enjoyed the first to SpongeBob movies, even though I never watched the show, and the regular creators and voice actors always seem to step up their game in terms of the wackiness whenever they’re given a chance to bring the lunacy to the big screen. In this case, it comes in the form of some of the guests including Snoop Dog and Danny Trejo in an odd Western section complete with musical number or Keanu Reeves introduced in the same section as a tumbleweed named Sage. (Oddly, this also features Awkwafina providing the voice of a robot, and I kind of liked her in more of a subdued role like this.) Although SpongeBob and his friends are CG animated, the movie doesn’t try too hard to integrate the live action in as fluid a way as last week’s Tom and Jerry – live actors just kind of show up – but it’s still pretty darn entertaining to watch another movie in which everyone involved, including director Tim Hill (who shockingly directed last year’s awful The War with Grandpa!), just going about making the movie as crazy and wacky as possible, something that should appeal to kids and… THC-laced adults (preferably not those watching with kids) … to get an overall enjoyable experience. Maybe it’s no surprise that I was particularly tickled with SpongeBob and Patrick’s adventures in Las Vegas.

Along with that, the streamer will have a new animated series called KAMP KORAL: SPONGEBOB’S UNDER YEARS, which is a CG-animated series that focuses on SpongeBob and friends when they were younger, which actually is one of the funnier bits in the movie as well.

There’s a lot of great stuff coming to Paramount+ that should make it a real player in the streaming world, and that includes all of the Paramount movies that will be streaming on it, both those that are getting a theatrical release this year and the studio’s absolutely vast library over the past 100 or so years.

And that’s not all! This weekend also sees the release of the sequel thirty years in the making, COMING 2 AMERICA, which will launch on Amazon Prime Video on Friday (after being sold to the streamer by Paramount, oddly), so yeah, there’s plenty of options to keep people home this weekend even with theaters reopening.

Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall are back as Prince (now King) Akeem of Zamunda and his trusty aide Semmi, and in fact, almost every character and actor from the movie has returned, as the duo return to America to find Akeem’s illegitimate son Lavelle (Jermayne Fowler) in queens, hoping to teach him the Zamundan way so he can take over as King after him.  Unfortunately, Lavelle is joined in Zamunda with his family which includes mother Leslie Jones and uncle Tracy Jordan.

Unfortunately, reviews are embargoed until Thursday, so I’m not sure I’ll get to review this one, but I did like the movie, more than I thought because my rewatch of the original 1989 movie led me to believe there was a good reason I hadn’t watched it in over thirty years. The sequel offers a lot of originality and humor in the forms of Leslie Jones and Tracy Jordan, but that’s all I’ll say about it for now.

Incidentally, you can check out an interview I did with director Craig Brewer over at Below the Line AND I also talked to the film’s make-up team, and after you see the movie, you’ll understand why I’m holding it until after people have seen the movie.

Another movie that would probably have gotten a theatrical release but now will be seen on Hulu is the Joe Carnahan-directed BOSS LEVEL, reteaming him with long-time collaborator Frank Grillo as a man who cannot die, because he’s living in a single day that’s being repeated over and over as he takes on a series of assassins sent to kill him.

This as a really fun action-comedy that never lets down in terms of either half of that genre, and it’s kinda groovy to see Mel Gibson playing a fairly key role since he became the master of that action genre with the Lethal Weapon movies.  But this really is Frank Grillo’s show as a leading man, and while I can understand some thinking him not having enough charisma for that sort of thing, I respectfully disagree.

We get into this high-concept premise pretty quickly as we watch his character, Roy Pulver, take on a string of assassins for his over 100th attempt to do so, and as per the title, it is a lot like a video game where Roy has to defeat all of the assassins on his way to the big boss, Gibson’s The Colonel. Apparently, Roy’s wife Gemma (Naomi Watts) has been killed by the Colonel or his thug (Will Sasso) so Roy is now on a quest for revenge. But first he has to survive the onslaught of killers, all of whom he’s given cute nicknames.

Easily my favorite of the killers is Selina Lo’s Guan Yin, a feisty swordswoman who proves to be the most formidable opponent for Roy. I won’t say how he bests her, but it does involve Michelle Yeoh, who has such a strange nothing appearance in one section of the movie, you wonder what she’s doing there. In fact, the movie does hit a slight lull after the initial concept is introduced, but it

Listen, I’ve long been a fan of Carnahan’s dark sense of humor and to some, it might seem mini-spirited, to me it harks back to one of my favorite movies he directed, Smokin’ Aces, a similar movie with a crazy ensemble cast, though maybe a slightly smaller budget. Still, Carnahan is a terrific action director, which makes this one of the stronger action movies in a while, and he finds a way to take a fairly simple premise and make it bigger in that Roy’s dilemma turns into something where he has to save the world, but also something more emotional and personal as he tries to bond with his son before said world ends. I guess in many ways, it’s hard to put into words what makes Boss Level so special, but I can only hope that Ryan Reynold’s Free Guy is as good as this after being delayed so many times, because this will be a tough act to follow for sure.

Over at the Metrograph, still closed physically unfortunately, they’re doing a series this week called “David Fincher/Kirk Baxter” which looks at the relationship between the director and his frequent editor, showing a series of movies over the course of the week:  The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network

The Metrograph has a lot of movies as part of its digital membership (just $5 a month) including Chloé Zhao’s very first film, Songs My Brother Taught Me, which was available to members through Wednesday night. (Sorry, I tweeted about it multiple times if you missed it.)

This week also launches the 26th annual “Rendezvous with French Cinema” up at Film at Lincoln Center, which was actually one of the LAST events to happen up there LAST year. This year, they’re keeping things safe by holding it virtually. It runs from March 4 through March 14, kicking off on Thursday with Sébastien Lifshitz’s Little Girl, which will be released by Music Box Films in the Fall. There’s a lot of fairly recent French films with an all-access pass available to rent all 18 films for $165. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen anything, so can’t really recommend anything but I’ll probably be checking out the free talk “How Music Makes the Film” on Monday, March 8.

Margaret Qualley (Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood) and Sigourney Weaver star in Philippe Falardeau’s MY SALINGER YEAR (IFC Films), based on Joanna Rakoff’s book. Set in New York of the ‘90s, Qualley plays Joanna, a grad school student who dreams of becoming a writer who gets hired as an assistant to literary agent Margaret (Weaver), whose biggest client is J.D. Salinger. Although Joanna’s role is more of a glorified secretary, she gets to go through Salinger’s fan mail from around the world, and she decides to start answering some of the letters to the author, an experience that helps her find her writers’ voice.

I wasn’t sure if this movie would be for me, but I find Qualley to be quite delightful, and this was a light film with a comedic tone from the Canadian filmmaker of the boxing movie, Chuck, and the Oscar-nominated Monsieur Lazhar. I enjoyed its look at the New York literary world of the 1990s, and it kept me quite invested even if I’m not particularly invested in Salinger’s work or an obsessive with The Catcher in the Rye as many are. Weaver is also fantastic as Joanna’s boss – think of a lighter version of Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada – and also enjoyed the tentative relationship between Joanna and her writer boyfriend Don, played by Douglas Booth.

Basically, Falardeau has created another generally wonderful and crowd-pleasing movie that sadly missed its opportunity at a festival run to build an audience after debuting at the Berlinale almost exactly a year ago. Presumably, this will open at the reopened IFC Center this weekend. (In fact, IFC Center released its reopening schedule and it’s a pretty cool mix of IFC Films movies from the past as well as some of the Netflix movies that weren’t released in NYC previously.)

Okay, let’s get to some other releases from the week, beginning with Ivan Kavanagh’s SON (RLJEfilms/Shudder), the latest film from the Irish director of The Canal, a fantastic horror film that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival about seven years back. In this one, Andi Matichak from Halloween plays a single mother whose son David (Luke David Blumm) suffers from all sorts of maladies but when she starts getting closer to a local detective (Emile Hirsch), he discovers that there’s a lot more to her past and to her son’s ailments.

Honestly, I do not want to say too much about the plot, because there are so many shocking surprises in the movie once you think you know where it’s going, although I will say that it has connections to films like The Lodge and shows like Servant, but it also does a good job fucking with the viewer’s head, so you never know what’s really happening and what might be in the characters’ heads.

I will say that the movie is very dark and quite disturbing with lots of gruesome gory sequences, but if you’re a fan of smart horror, you’ll want to check out Son. (I’ll have an interview with Kavanagh over at Below the Line next week.)

Sony Classics is finally releasing Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s doc THE TRUFFLE HUNTERS (Sony Classics), which has been playing on the virtual festival circuit all the way back to Sundance last year, so we’ll see how many people are left to see it. It’s set in the forests of Piedmont, Italy where a handful of 70-to-80-year-old men are on the hunt for the rare white Alba truffle, which has resisted all modern science to be cultivated.

For whatever reason, I procrastinated on watching this movie for most of last year, maybe because I’m not that big a fan of cinema verité docs, but this is infinitely entertaining between the various men featured – including a lot of real characters in there – and how the movie shows their close bond with their truffle-sniffing dogs. This is a genuinely enjoyable movie that I feel can appeal to a wide range of viewers, although be aware that is in Italian, so maybe one should consider that even with the cute dogs, this should probably be watched by teen or older rather than small kids. (I don’t remember anything particularly racy, but the movie is Rated PG-13.)

Staying in the dog realm, Magnolia Pictures is releasing Elizabeth Lo’s documentary STRAY on Friday, which documents the life of Zeytin, a stray dog living on the streets of Istanbul, and some of his dog frenemies. Actually, this was a pretty wonderful film that I quite enjoyed, although there were a few dog fight sequences that disturbed me a little bit.  But it’s a great look at Turkey through the eyes of some of the canines on the street, how they interact with the humans around them. Essentially, Stray is the dog version of Kedi, but I’ve seen other similar docs like this including Los Reyes – this one is just as strong as either of those movies, the images of all the beautiful dogs accompanied by gorgeous string music by Ali Helnwein that helps you understand the dogs’ complex emotions.  Seriously, if you like dogs, you can definitely do worse than the previous two movies mentioned. Stray is available via Virtual Cinema, including that of the Film Forum.

Filmmaker and EDM artist Quentin Dupieux (Rubber) is back with his latest, KEEP AN EYE OUT (Dekanalog), starring Belgian comedian Benoît Poelvoorde as police officer, Commissaire Buran, investigating a guy (Grégoire Ludig) who has discovered a dead body in a puddle of blood outside his apartment building. The prime suspect is then left alone with a one-eyed rookie, and if you’ve seen any of Dupieux’s other films, you’ll probably know to expect the unexpected as things get crazier and crazier. (I seem to remember seeing this last year at some festival, maybe FantasticFest, but I’ll have to watch again before remembering if this was one of Dupieux’s movies that I liked.)  This will be available in select theaters and also in virtual cinema this Friday. (Oddly Dupieux’s last movie, Deerskin, debuted at last year’s “Rendezvous with French Cinema” right before theaters shut down for a year, and I don’t want to be superstitious, but yeah, I’m worried.)

Barnaby Thompson’s Ireland-set crime thriller PIXIE (Saban/Paramount) stars Olivia Cooke (Sound of Metal) and Alec Baldwin with Cooke playing Pixie Hardy, a young woman who wants to avenge her mother’s death by pulling off a heist that will allow her to leave her small town. The crime goes wrong, and she’s forced to team up with a group of misfits including Baldwin’s Father McGrath.

Bradley Parker’s action-thriller THE DEVIL BELOW (Vertical) deals with a team of researchers who are investigating a series of underground coal mines in Appalachian country that have been on fire for decades where they discover a mystery. It’s getting a combined theatrical, VOD and digital release Friday.

Phil Sheerin’s directorial debut THE WINTER LAKE stars Emma Mackey (Sex Education) as Holly, a young woman with a secret that’s uncovered by her unstable neighbor Tom (Anson Boon from Blackbird) and the two of them are pulled into a confrontation with her father, who wants to keep the family secret buried. This will be in select theaters on Friday, On Demand on Tuesday, March 9 and then on DVD March 23.

Dylan McCormick’s SOMETIME OTHER THAN NOW (Gravitas Ventures) stars Donal Logue and Kate Walsh, Logue playing Sam who is stranded in a small New England town after his motorcycle crashes into the ocean seeking refuge at a run-down motel run by Walsh’s Kate, a similarly run-down and lost soul. When Sam learns that his estranged daughter Audrey, who he hasn’t seen in 25 years, lives in the town, he starts to learn more about why he ended up there.

Jacob Johnston’s DREAMCATCHER (Samuel Goldwyn) stars Travis Burns as Dylan aka DJ Dreamcatcher who meets up with two estranged sisters at the underground music film festival, Cataclysm, where they become entrenched in 48 hours of violence and mayhem after a drug-fueled event. Sounds delightful.

Some of the other VOD stuff hitting the ‘net this week include: 400 Bullets (Shout! Studios), Sophie Jones(Oscilloscope), Dementer (Dark Star PIctures), Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know (Giant Pictures)

That’s it for this week. Next week, theaters hopefully will remain open, and we’ll have some new movies to write about.

[amphtaminedreams]

Film Tier Ranking 2019: A Bad Year for Bird Films

Hi to anyone reading,

I’ve finally put it together: my 2019 film tier ranking! I know tier rankings are a bit 6 months ago but seeing British crisps sorted into god, good, mid and shit tier all over Twitter, the format really resonated with me and I was like I MUST USE THIS AT SOME POINT! And I guess since there probably isn’t much of an audience for crisp tier rankings on Tumblr, it makes more sense for me to do it with films instead, especially as doing a 2019 year in film review was something I previously claimed I would do; here’s to 2020 and following through on my proposals.

I think 2019 in general was an okay year for film, with the end of the year definitely outselling the beginning. One thing to bear in mind is that a lot of films that I would’ve been able to see in 2019, I.E Little Women and Parasite, didn’t come out until 2020 in the UK so they won’t make it onto this year’s list. It’s not a snub by any means. I more fall in line with the Elsie Fisher Film Awards school of thought than the Oscars, which have yet again disregarded several incredible performances this year: Florence Pugh in Midsommar, Taron Egerton in Rocketman, Lupita Nyongo in Us, and of course, Greta Gerwig’s direction of Little Women. I’m sure there are many more but those are the first few that come to mind. Oh to be in 2017 when nominations made fractionally more sense.

This list also includes films that weren’t necessarily released this year, but that I just got around to watching; there were a couple of disappointments but also a lot of films I can’t believe it took me this long to finally watch and have definitely made their way into my favourites. My goal for this year is to get through even more of the films on my verrrry long Letterboxd watchlist, and more specifically, watch said films without going on my phone, which is a really bad habit of mine. I find it hard to sit still! Let me live! 

I also want to try and put aside my prejudices about visual quality and watch more pre-2000s movies this year; it’s really bad but I never managed to get more than half an hour into Psycho, of all films, solely because I couldn’t deal with the black and white. In 2020, I am going to stop being a whiney Gen Z/cusp millenial-er and give older films the chance they deserve.

So, without further ado, here is my film tier ranking of everything I watched in 2019! If you make it til the end and have any thoughts or disagreements, let me know. I love to hear other’s opinions and get new perspectives on things and am totally open to any criticism. Happy reading:-)

God Tier

Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)

Knives Out. What a film.

I feel like I waited forever to see this at the cinema. They must have started showing trailers for it in, like, August, and I had to wait til mid-November to see it. How are you gonna just dangle a film with Toni Colette and Lakeith Stanfield in my face and then make me wait 3 months? Totally unethical.

But that being said, when it finally came around and I did see it, as much as I love Toni and Lakeith, there was one stand out and it wasn’t either of them: ANA DE ARMAS. I have to admit I’d never heard of her before but she acted the shit out of a role I feel I’d ordinarily find irritating and gimmicky. Daniel Craig, whose character seemed annoying as fuck in the trailer, was actually surprisingly funny.

Stylistically, it was a very cool film and I liked the subtle commentary on class that was running throughout. Also, I thought the ending was very clever. My issue with a lot of whodunnits is that they just pick someone who doesn’t make sense for shock factor *cough, Bobby Beale in Eastenders, cough* but the shocks here were more in the details. 

Hustlers (Lorene Scafaria, 2019)

There wasn’t one single moment of Hustlers I didn’t enjoy and it’s quite amazing that there wasn’t one single point in this film about strippers that I felt gratuitously sexualised women. THAT is why you fund female directors. It made the whole thing look like a calculated art form, which I think the unsexy amongst us can all agree that it is. Constance Wu was a fantastic lead, J-Lo was kind of robbed for a supporting actress nom, and Keke Palmer and Lili Reinhart were hilarious too. 

Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

Midsommar was such an experience that it took me a good few days afterwards to decide whether I actually liked it. I saw it the day it came out because I loved Hereditary so much and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I kind of had an idea of the way it was going to go, we could all kind of guess evil cult was the route that was being taken from the trailer, but I just didn’t realise quite how weird it’d get. 

The gore was great, the visuals were stunning and the character arcs were surprising and for that reason, I think this is another game changer for horror from Ari Aster. I didn’t love it like I loved Hereditary but it continues to play on my mind and 7 months later I still can’t resist a good “Things you Missed in Hereditary” or “Hereditary Themes Explained” Youtube video essay. That’s how you know a film fucked with you and that’s the ultimate goal of going into a horror for me. Put that on my headstone after I inevitably get myself into some mortally dangerous conflict because I want to “get fucked with” a little bit.

Booksmart (Olivia Wilde, 2019)

So here’s the thing with Booksmart: I was getting progressively more and more drunk throughout it so I might be a little biased when I say I loved it. That being said, worth revere seems to be a commonly held opinion so I’ll stick to my guns. Plus, movies like this, which just focus on girls living their lives, are few and far between. Why have we had to wait THIS long for the female Superbad?

IDK. But Kaitlyn Dever, Beanie Feldstein and Billie Lourd proved it’s definitely a genre worth investing in so hopefully we see more lighthearted female-led coming of age comedies. One Ladybird per year isn’t enough for me.

The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018)

I included The Favourite in my 50 Films You’ve Got to Watch that I made earlier this year so I don’t have all that much to say about it that I haven’t said already. To summarise, it’s an instant classic: the cinematography, the cast, the lines, it’s all perfection. 

Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino, 2018)

I also included Suspiria in my 50 Films You’ve Got to Watch list so sorry if I’m repeating myself, but I adored everything about it. If I had to sum it up in one sentence I’d say divine feminine energy, but inverted. Plus ballet. That dancing scene in the mirrored room will probably never leave my mind (if you’ve watched it, trust me, you’ll know the one I'm talking about), and if there were awards given out for creepy montages in horror, this would win all of them. It still blows my mind that Tilda Swinton played 3 characters in this film; 2 of them are so distinctly different, if anyone put two and two together without prior knowledge of this fact then I’ll blow my own head up too. This is why I got so mad when there was all that discussion around her being the new female Doctor Who and there were people asking who she was. How can you not know who Tilda fucking Swinton is!? She’s a legend! 

Sorry, is the wannabe film snob in me showing?

Annihilation (Alex Garland, 2018)

Though I initially watched it because it’s branded as a horror, Annihilation ended up being a surprisingly introspective take on human nature and our self-destructive tendencies. Nothing really went the way I expected it to, even though I was constantly trying to guess that trajectory from beginning to end. 

Visually, Annihilation is magnificent. Like, it’s tense, and where exactly the plot is going is shrouded in mystery, but most importantly, it’s super fucking pretty. Sure, the only thing that was mildly horrifying was the *SPOILER* end result of that bear scene but I didn’t mind too much because there was always that edge-of-your-seat possibility something like that would happen again. 

Also I realised that Gina Roduriguez is really hot in this! I would just say in general but that video of her saying the n-word kind of took away shot at real world magnetism. WHY SUCH A SHITTY APOLOGY VIDEO!? WHY?!

Assassination Nation (Sam Levinson, 2018)

So I didn’t clock until I was looking up directors that Sam Levinson, Euphoria director, also directed this, and suddenly everything makes sense in the world. They both have that dreamlike, exaggerated feel that perfectly captures the emotional rollercoaster that is being a teenager, only in Assassination Nation obviously the threats are a bit more...tangible. As in its actually other people trying to kill our protagonists this time round, not just angst. 

Not gonna lie, it’s not a patch on Euphoria because that show is probably the best thing I watched all year, but I did thoroughly enjoy it, even if I did feel the social commentary, despite how in your face it was, got a bit lost in translation at times. I think it’s the kind of film that, once again, would’ve felt more genuine coming from a female director, however that’s not to take away from how witty, modern, and completely relevant it still is as we move into 2020.

Sorry To Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018)

Right. WHAT THE FUCK!?

Why don’t more people talk about this film? Like it has Tessa Thompson and the world’s best earrings! Lakeith Stanfield getting more than 10 cumulative minutes of screen time! Armie Hammer being that bitch we all knew he was irl (probably)! Scathing critiques of late stage capitalism! It’s insane, in the absolute best way.

SPOILERS AHEAD: I had a mini paragraph written about the last hour of the film and the descent into pure unadulterated chaos, and how it’s like, the internet’s best kept secret, because ordinarily you lot can’t keep your mouths shut about a film or TV’s shows most crucial reveals for more than 5 minutes and THEN...My FBI agent must be feeling real cheeky because THIS tweet pops up on my Twitter timeline. 

Fuck this shit, I’m out. Onto the next film. MI5 stop peeping my drafts. 

Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham, 2018)

I don’t want to repeat what I said about Eighth Grade in my 50 Films you Should Watch list but Elsie Fisher’s performance in this is why I wish the Oscars also had some kind of rising star award category à la the BAFTAs. Honestly, every 13/14 year old should watch this; it’s a reminder that although feeling like an outsider is by its nature quite isolating, it’s prolific enough that a 29 year old man, 10 years out of “high school”, gets it.

American Animals (Bart Layton, 2018)

My sister and I absolutely loved this film so you can image our disappointment when we turned round to our parents at the end and our enthusiasm wasn’t matched...as in, I’m pretty sure they were both asleep for a lot of it. WHICH I DON’T GET. Because to me, there wasn’t a dull moment. American Animals is what happens when a group of university age boys with the finesse of the American Vandal Turd Burglar try and apply that to an Evil Genius stye heist, part Netflix, talking head abundant documentary, part live-action film. Splicing a stylistic reenactment with interview footage of the men who really attempted to commit the crime elevated what I probably would have put in the Good Tier™ to the God Tier™; seeing the guy Evan Peters is playing alongside Evan Peters playing him, now only the remnants of the arrogance we see in the reenactment left behind, sharply reminds you of the fall from grace these boys deservedly went through. Plus Barry Keoghan from The Killing of a Sacred Deer is in it, proving that unsettlingly stiff is NOT in fact his natural state. 

Gerald’s Game (Mike Flanagan, 2017)

I wish there was a shorthand way to say I wrote about this in my 50 Films You Should Watch list so I’m gonna keep it short but here we are! This was great! If The Haunting of Hill House isn’t proof enough, Gerald’s Game (not to take away any credit from Stephen King) is a reminder that Mike Flanagan is the king of subtle, niggling sensation in your stomach that something is about to go very wrong horror. I hear he and Ari Aster have a timeshare situation going on with the crown.

The Ritual (David Bruckner, 2017)

Okay, so this is the film that made me realise we should all be very scared of forests. Nope, all the documentaries into the Aokigahara Forest weren’t enough, apparently. I subjected myself to this too, as if my unfit, cold-blooded, bug-fearing, scared of the dark ass doesn’t already have enough concerns about my survival odds in the great outdoors. 

Really though, setting aside, this film maintains the sense of dread throughout and keeps you guessing what’s going on until the very end. Much like The Descent, the group dynamic and characters are realistic enough that it adds to the believability of a scenario I, in principle, know would never happen to the extent that I might keep away from vast, wooded spaces for a while just in case.

Dumbo (Tim Burton, 2019)

If film Twitter came across this post and saw I’d placed Dumbo in a higher tier than If Beale Street Could Talk I can only imagine the outrage. And sure, the latter is probably a much higher quality film. But sometimes a movie, for reasons you can’t quite put your finger on, gets you right in the sweet spot, and Dumbo did that for me. Maybe it was that the CGI elephant reminded me of my cat (I know, leave me alone), maybe I was emotional that day, I don’t know, all I know is that I cried like 5 times and was smiling for the rest of it-to be fair, the exploitation of animals for our entertainment is something that is still very much going on and that was something that was playing on my mind a lot whilst I was watching it. IRL Dumbos should be free too. Dumbo rights.

The VVitch (Robert Eggers, 2016)

This film taught me that there’s nothing wrong with joining a coven of young witches and getting naked and levitating around a fire. And that’s an important life lesson. Plus it gave us the quote “wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”, which is not only so perfectly creepy and simultaneously empowering that I had to get it tattooed but also, created ASMR. I just made that last bit up obviously but Black Philip getting his own ASMR Youtube channel?

The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2006)

For me, much like The Ritual, The Descent is a perfect horror film: it’s got the ghouls but the situation the characters find themselves in is also terrifying by its own merit. The reason The Descent made it onto my 50 Films list and the Ritual didn’t is because, let’s be honest, it’s 2020 and you can get mobile signal in most places. You could probably at least make a 999 call if you got lost in a forest. If you DID get stuck in an underground cave and it collapsed in on itself, you’d be pretty fucked; the idea of it makes me shudder and I will never set foot in an underground tunnel at any point in my life for any amount of money EVER after seeing this. Also, the women in this are great and the creatures in this are genuinely quite terrifying, especially the first time you see them. 

Chicago (Rob Marshall, 2003)

Ah, Chicago, the last film on the God Tier™, proving that this list is in no particular order. Because WHAT A FIM. WHY DON’T PEOPLE TALK ABOUT THIS MORE?! Like don’t get me wrong, I know it deservedly won Best Picture in 2003 but I’m talking about right now! I mean, fucking Titanic is still out here getting referenced left, right and centre and yet Chicago gets paid dust! Can you tell I’m mad and that I think Titanic is hugely overrated?! Is that maybe coming across?!

ALL the songs are bops, Catherine Zeta-Jones is hot (I saw someone on Letterboxd say that Catherine Zeta-Jones in this film was their bisexual awakening and honestly, if I hadn’t already known I was a raging bisexual, same, because I FELT things in that All That Jazz opening) and Cell Block Tango is the revenge fantasy anthem I never knew I needed. Smart, tongue in cheek, beautifully shot and makes men look like little bitches which is probably why my dad hated it but what did I expect.

Good Tier

Zombieland: Double Tap (Ruben Fleischer, 2019)

Onto the first film of the good tier, Zombieland: Double Tap definitely exceeded my expectations. I was super worried about the prospect of a sequel as I love the first one so much and assumed it would be crap. Obviously, it doesn’t match up to the original because the original WAS so original, but it was still a fun, easy, witty ride. And I was SO glad they didn’t *SPOILERS AHEAD* kill off Tallahassee at the end because I really thought that was coming and it seemed so predictable and unnecessary. Highlight was the introduction of the lookalikes at Graceland.

Judy (Rupert Goold, 2019)

So, this is the first of two consecutive rants I’m about to go on about Oscar nominations and people’s reactions online. Prepare yourself.

I’ll start with the underlying message: just because you think something else deserves the praise more, doesn’t mean the film/album/*insert whatever artistic medium you wish here* that IS getting the praise is shit. 

Like people are angry that Lupita Nyongo wasn’t nominated for best actress for her performance in Us which is COMPLETELY valid as she carried that film on her back. In the same vein, people are also angry that more women of colour haven’t been nominated for best actress. Also valid; I’ve yet to see The Farewell but I’ve heard great things about Akwafina’s performance and I love her so even though I haven’t seen it, I’m gonna take the general consensus that she should’ve been nominated too. The Oscars definitely has a problem with recognising the work of POC. BUT, because of this, people are angry that Renee Zellweger has been nominated for her performance in Judy, saying that it’s typical “Oscar bait”. I agree, it is typical Oscar bait. However, a lot of the people saying this will in the same breath say (or tweet rather) that they haven’t actually SEEN Judy. 

How can you possibly say that Renee Zellweger doesn’t deserve any of the praise she’s getting when you haven’t even seen the film? Don’t get me wrong, the film itself is good but not outstanding (hence its place in this tier), but you can see Renee genuinely put her heart and soul into this film; it was powerful, and it was sympathetic but it was also nuanced and subtle where they could’ve just capitalised on all the sensationalised stories of the actions of a woman clearly deeply suffering in her final years and had it be full of shouting and screaming. The Wizard of Oz has always kind of felt like home to me because of the childhood nostalgia factor and so I’ve always been interested in Judy and I think Renee captured her heart and her spirit in a way she would be deeply honoured by. Maybe the film itself doesn’t deserve the acclaim it’s getting but I think Zellweger definitely deserves the nom and I think most people who’ve actually seen it wouldn’t contest that. 

Joker (Todd Philipps, 2019)

Okay so second rant. I’m sorry. I have a lot of feelings. Most of them aimed at the annoying tendency of internet users, Film Twitter™ and Letterboxd users I’m looking at you in particular, to be wildly exaggerative. 

There just seems to be no nuance online. It’s not just yeah, I didn’t like the film personally and the message could be perceived in a certain way by certain individuals, it’s I HATE THIS FILM AND IT’S DANGEROUS AND THE DIRECTOR FUCKING SUCKS. I noticed this trend when La La Land came out (which if I had watched last year would certainly be in God tier for me). It’s like, if a film initially receives a lot of praise and buzz, there’s almost this wave of compensatory vehement criticism in response that’s usually disproportionate to how controversial the film actually is. People didn’t like that Joker was popular because they didn’t like Joker so suddenly it’s the worst film ever and the possibility of it getting any critical acclaim is wrong. I even saw people berating Todd Philipps for channelling Martin Scorsese as he’s the only person to ever be influenced and take direction from one of the most dominant figures in film of the 20th and 21st century. I mean, what’s wrong with that?! If it was any other director, it’d be called homage. But because everything has to be seen through this malicious lens, its copying. 

I think one of the few very valid criticisms about Joker was that it further perpetuates the idea that psychotic people are dangerous, and I can totally see where they’re coming from. At the same time, we have to accept that whilst the majority of people who are psychotic aren’t a danger to anyone apart from themselves, most “dangerous” people don’t just become dangerous because they thought, fuck it, why not? A lot of people in the prison system ARE suffering with some kind of mental illness. The character’s psychosis doesn’t make him dangerous, it’s his underlying resentment and sense of entitlement that grows throughout the film that makes him dangerous, and I think a lot of people seem to miss this point. They say that the way the film ends implies Philipps is justifying the actions of the films protagonist. However, we KNOW the Joker is an unreliable narrator, he’s one of pop culture’s most infamous villains and that being said, both in film and in the real world, few villains see themselves as the villain. Joker is about why HE thinks he’s justified in doing what he does, not why he IS justified in doing what he does because he’s not, and that’s pretty clear from the moment he shoots someone in the head on live TV. Honestly, I think there’s a bit of wilful misinterpretation going on because people don’t like that film

I liked Joker. It was gritty, it was interesting, and sufficiently dark. I didn’t think it was the best film of the year but I understand why it got the praise it did. Obviously, it’s okay that people disagree and DON’T like it. But can we please get a bit more well-acquainted with the middle ground?

It: Chapter Two (Andres Muschietti, 2019)

Okay, essays over. Back to regular scheduled programming of less impassioned reviews. Though I will say I deserved better than my Letterboxd comment of “so you can just fucking roast Pennwyise to death?” getting absolutely 0 traction. One day my grand total of 5 followers, one of which is my sister, will recognise my brilliance (lol).

It’s hard to say how much I really liked this as I think my perspective of how much I did enjoy it is warped by how much I disliked the first one. Child actors really aren’t my thing and the only cast members I warmed to in the first one were Finn Wolfhard and Jack Dylan Grazer whereas the cast here were a lot more likeable, imo. Bill Hader, Jessica Chastain and James Ransone were all great, with the only let down being James Mcavoy; I love him, don’t get me wrong, but I just think he was really miscast in this role. 

Another thing I enjoyed a lot more about this instalment was that due to the more episodic/anthology-like/Creepshow-esque structure with each character conquering different monsters from their past individually, the narrative felt like it had a lot more direction, and it didn’t drag as much despite it having a significantly longer runtime. I haven’t read the Stephen King novels and I don’t know much of the pacing issues are down to them so this is me coming at it from a screenwriting angle but it felt as if the climax of the first film just kept going on and on. Every time I thought it had finished there’d be another confrontation between the kids and Pennywise whereas Chapter 2 seemed to have a more definitive third act and I appreciated that.

Rocketman (Dexter Fletcher, 2019)

So, here’s one where I WILL agree with the general online consensus: if Rami Malek got nominated for playing Freddie Mercury last year and Renee got nominated for playing Judy Garland, why the fuck didn’t Taron Egerton get one for playing Elton John? Why didn’t Rocketman itself get a nomination when Judy did? Though I personally preferred Judy because I’m more interested in her story, technically and narratively Rocketman is the better film in my opinion.  This was so cleverly edited and sequenced and told with such a brutal honesty on Elton John’s part (it was co-produced by his husband David Furnish and he was heavily involved in everything from the set to the script), that I can only come to the conclusion that the obligatory biopic nomination only comes when the focus of said biopic is no longer with us as a kind of honorary thing. Whilst something like Bohemian Rhapsody was much more of an easy watch (which just goes to show how glossed over Freddie Mercury’s life was in the film), the way the story was told, by the time we got to I’m Still Standing that happy ending felt so earned.

Aladdin (Guy Ritchie, 2019)

You can hate all you want, Prince Ali and Never Had a Friend Like Me are fucking bops and somehow they were even better in this incarnation of the film. I was initially hesitant about Will Smith being cast but rather than trying to impersonate Robin Williams he went his own route and it really worked. He was the highlight of the film. It was undeniably visually stunning too. Madonna’s ex did good.

Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)

Ah, I feel so conflicted when it comes to Us. Like, there were some really strong points and it’s definitely a good standalone horror movie. It’s just you can’t help but compare it to Get Out, and with that unsatisfactory exposition dump ending, I left feeling so disappointed. It seemed to me that Jordan Peele got in a bit over his head here with trying to tie such a vague social metaphor and the actual in-universe plot together, and so ended up leaving both a bit half-baked. He tried to OutPeele himself and for me, it didn’t work. 

The doppelgängers were so scary as this ambiguous, vaguely threatening presence that if you are gonna give us a full blown, sit down explanation of why they exist it needs to be really bloody good. And this explanation didn’t make much sense. For example, *SPOILERS AHEAD* I imagine that the tethered just not being able to walk up the escalator into the “real world” was supposed to be some kind of metaphor for social mobility but it’s not fleshed out enough to work. In our world, there are REASONS why the idea of social mobility is flawed. In the film, it’s just like gee, if they chose to just walk up the escalator and go on this murderous rampage now, why couldn't they have decided to do it years ago back before they all lost their fucking minds? Why were they just copying the originals for all those years? HOW did they know what they were doing? See, the metaphor as I understand it is supposed to be that we depend on the oppression of others like us in order to maintain our social status, but not only is this kind of too general a statement to try and use a feature length film to make, I don’t really understand how this dynamic works within the narrative of the film. Technically, there's nothing to stop the tethered and the originals co-existing apart from the tethered deciding not to walk up the fucking escalator. We’re not talking a bourgeoisie-proletariat relationship here. The explanation of it all just being a “government project gone wrong” was too vague seeing as the plot working seemed prior to this to hinge onto something vaguely supernatural and the eventual plan of the doppelgängers seemingly had no purpose or application to the real world like the climax of Get Out did. It just left me feeling kind of like...why? Why did this all happen? When the ending and the twist was that predictable (the old Pretty Little Liars finale style twin switcheroo was blatantly obvious from the mother’s “it’s like she’s a different person” line near the beginning, let’s be real), I was expecting some final revelation that flipped my expectation on its head or at least felt helped things click into place. Instead, it seemed a bit hamfisted and like I was supposed to feel things were deeper and more significant than they actually were.

All that being said, I appreciate that if anyone other than the writer of Get Out had come out with this movie, I probably wouldn’t have these issues. Us was funny, it was fresh, and the concept of doppelgängers is something I’m so glad to see brought back into our modern pop culture database. The people are right, Lupita was incredible in this and it is a travesty that she didn’t get nominated. My sister, who was so creeped out by her vocal performance that she had her fingers in her ears every time Red spoke, still won’t let me attempt an impression of it. And that Fuck the Police sequence? Iconic. 

On the Basis of Sex (Mimi Leder, 2019)

I apologise in advance for the shittiest “review” I’ll ever write, but honestly I can’t remember all too much about this film other than it being good. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I’m sorry. You’re a cool lady.

If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins, 2019)

EURGH, THIS WAS SUCH A BEAUTIFUL FIM. The score, the shots, the rawness. I imagine it’s devastatingly real. Like, *SPOILERS AHEAD* you think there’s going to be a happy ending but there’s not. It should be disappointing but it’s an honest choice. And side note: fuck those annoying middle aged white ladies in the seats behind me and my friend who lost their shit and started giggling every time the N-word was used, JFC. I hate living in a Tory stronghold. 

Cam (Daniel Goldhaber, 2018)

So, as I said, I’m a fan of the whole doppelgänger thing. It freaks me out. The point in this film where the protagonist is approaching her bedroom door whilst she watches HERSELF livestreaming from inside that same bedroom had my heart in my mouth wondering what she was going to encounter on the other side. And you see, the ending of this was a lot more ambiguous than the ending of Us, so I should’ve had less questions. Whilst I’ve seen other people saying it WAS unsatisfactory and that they felt like we were owed more of an explanation, I liked the simplicity of the answer we got and the wiggle room it leaves for our own interpretation. The way I see it, given that we were told by the fan the protagonist meets with in the motel room that *SPOILERS AHEAD* it was a case of some kind of software copying these women’s likenesses to steal their viewers and thus their profits, is that Cam is a kind of a commentary on the capitalist exploitation of women’s bodies and the demand for (and desensitisation towards) sexually violent content; we don't necessarily need to know who is behind the virtual cloning, which is terrifyingly believable given how realistic some of the deepfakes I’ve seen are, because it doesn’t matter. We're basically told money is the motive and we know the kind of lengths some people will go, and someone DID go to in Cam, to in order to make a shitload of money and that’s as true in real life as it is scary. On the other hand, if you want to believe there’s a more supernatural presence behind the events of the film, there’s enough left to the imagination that you can go down that route too. Some films are better left un-exposition dumped and this is the proof. My one criticism, is that, like many films, it would be even better if directed by a woman; I’ve seen people say that its portrayal of online sex work isn’t entirely accurate and though I can’t say with certainty that women working in this industry weren’t consulted in the first place, I imagine a female director would not only be more likely to listen to their concerns but could translate the confusion and fear that comes with being expected to makes oneself sexually desirable to get ahead in the world but then shamed and used for doing so even more viscerally. A few tweaks and it’d be God Tier.

Colette (Wash Westmoreland, 2019)

The costumes, sets, and Keira were so, so stunning. Also it was just an inspiring, beautiful story. The navigation of womanhood, so called “deviant” sexuality and self-expression against the backdrop of early 20th century Paris with a load of Edwardian era tailoring thrown in, it’s everything I could possibly want and more; 10/10 moodboard content. 

The Boy (William Brent Bell, 2016)

I can’t believe this film was made in 2016, and it almost makes me move it down to mid tier based on the fact that a lot of the allowances I made for cheese factor I made on the assumption it came out earlier in the decade. BUT, that being said, I was creeped out for a good portion of this film. Most horrors I watch and I’m probably a bit too chilled (a head comes off or some witchy ass ghost screams into the camera and my only thought is some kind of judgement of the SFX), and yet I felt like watching this behind my hands. I don’t know what it is about dolls and puppets, Chucky was my childhood fear even though I never actually watched the film, but something about the uncanny valley of it all makes me just spend the whole time they’re on screen silently praying they don’t start moving or talking. So in a way, given the resolution of the film *SPOILERS AHEAD*, the premise of The Boy was actually a lot scarier to me than the reveal of what was really going on. Someone hiding in my walls? NBD. That demons are real and that they live inside creepy old dolls? Terrifying. Why does everybody I debate this with disagree!? You can't call the police on a demon! At least with a human being you can stick them with the pointy ending of something! Regardless, I enjoyed the journey and trying to work out how things would end and if there IS anybody secretly living inside my house right now, even if you are a supposedly dead murderous family member (last time I checked I didn’t have any of those so I should be all good), kindly vacate. Thanks.

Oprhan (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2009)

So the fact that this film is based on a real life case makes this all the more terrifying. It was a bit campy and tacky at times but the shot of *SPOILERS AHEAD* Esther taking off her makeup in the mirror and revealing her true age will always be iconic. Plus I love Vera Farmiga, even though I did struggle to see her as anyone other than Norma Bates. 

First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2018)

A hauntingly beautiful film with a lot of room for interpretation. There were so many gorgeous shots and so much subtext, this is proper 10/10 media studies essay material.

The Invitation (Karyn Kusama, 2015)

I would say the concept and implications of this film, which don’t fully hit you til the final shots, are a lot better than the film itself. It feels very realistic though and is definitely tense.

As Above, So Below (John Erick Dowdle, 2014)

I was so stoned when I watched this that a lot of the allegory and Dante’s inferno references went straight over my head, and it just seemed absolutely balls to the wall wild. I couldn’t buy that the characters would just KEEP GOING either when things began to get terrifying, like people in horror films really out here making the most nonsensical decisions and it drives me mad. But anyway, it was definitely entertaining and there’s a lot more to it in terms of plot and mythology than most similar quality horrors and I appreciate that 

Climax (Gaspar Noe, 2018)

Climax is an interesting one that I think I’ll have to watch again to judge how much I truly like it. As with Us, I know it’s a good film, but I think my expectations of what it was going to be left me slightly disappointed. See, when I read about the premise I assumed that the horror was going to come from seeing the perspective of the characters on said acid trip and that leaves so much room for any kind of terrifying visuals you want whether that be something based in realism or fucked up creatures of the imagination. Buuuuut, it wasn’t that at all; at no point does Climax take place from the first person perspective of any of the characters. Similar to Darren Aronofsky’s Mother, the horror comes from not being able to do anything but watch as everyone starts losing their minds and the situation gets increasingly more dire. It’s pure stress; the acting is so unnervingly good that you really do feel like you’re watching some unintentionally horrific incident take place. That’s not a bad thing-I like it when films make me feel something intense, whether that emotion be positive or negative. It was just a different viewing experience to the one I had precipitated. 

Mid Tier

Nativity (Debbie Isitt, 2009)

I find Mr.Poppy hilarious. Does that make me a child? Probably. I’m not really one for Christmas movies but this one’s alright.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (André Øvredal, 2019)

I get that it’s based off a book so it’s not exactly like the “monsters” were a secret in the first place, but for those of us who didn’t read the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books as a kid, my main beef with this film was that they basically revealed all of said monsters in the trailer. Like how It: Chapter 2 spoiled the scene with Beverly in the old lady’s apartment but with EVERY. SINGLE. CREATURE. The only one that wasn’t was the “jangly man” and the only takeaway I have from him is the “jangly in the streets, but is he jangly in the sheets?” Letterboxd comment I read afterwards. Like the creature designs are the selling point of this film and by showing us them all before we’ve even seen it, any anticipation that would’ve built up from their reveal was kind of gone. Plus, it definitely felt like the writers were trying to ride on the hype train of “It” when they wrote this-only they made it even more childish. I mean, I know it was classed as PG-13 in the US which is maybe part of the reason it was so tame but the Woman in Black was a 12 when it was released here and it could be the bias of my 13 year old brain but I remember that being terrifying to watch in the cinema.

Also, I found it weird how *SPOILERS AHEAD* a couple of the main characters died and there didn’t really seem to be any consequences? Idk, maybe that’s because I found them all a bit one dimensional but I’ve seen others make the same criticism so I don’t think so. 

Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t a BAD film. It just wasn’t super good.

Charlie’s Angels (Elizabeth Banks, 2019)

I’ve never seen the 2000s Charlie’s Angels so I really don’t have anything to compare to, but I don’t think this was THAT bad. I was fairly entertained throughout and I enjoyed Naomi Scott and Kristen Stewart’s characters. My main issue was the unnecessary inclusion of Noah Centineo, and that weird ass montage at the beginning of stock video shots of girls just...doing miscellaneous things. Why, Elizabeth Banks, why!?

Toy Story 4 (Josh Cooley, 2019)

In some ways, I see why Toy Story 4 was narratively necessary: co-dependency had been a running theme throughout and we needed to see Woody (I feel stupid saying this considering he’s a fucking toy but allow it) realise that he can exist independently of Andy, and that there’s more to life than pleasing somebody else. The way Toy Story 4 ended felt like a satisfying conclusion to his character arc, and as well as the animation being top tier, Forky was a hilarious addition to the cast. However, I don’t think it carried the emotional weight of the 3rd Toy Story, which I think people had accepted as the last instalment and had used to say goodbye to the franchise, and therefore the sceptic in me thinks that the obvious purpose of this addition was a cash grab. I don’t doubt that a lot of people worked incredibly hard on it-I’m just saying that the propelling force behind the film probably wasn’t “the people need to see Woody’s character growth” and that was quite apparent throughout.

Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

There were some really beautiful scenes in Doctor Sleep; the astral projection sequences in particular were magnificent and I loved Rebecca Ferguson as the villain. Stylistically, though I didn’t find out he was the director until I was writing this up, you can definitely tell it’s Mike Flanagan, and like I’ve said, he does horror very tastefully. Unfortunately, I just wasn’t all that interested in the premise and I wasn’t hugely invested in grown up Danny Torrance either. The execution was great and the return to the Overlook was brilliant, of course, but the story just wasn’t for me and nothing much sticks out as being a particularly intriguing plot point.

Mary Queen of Scots (Josie Rourke, 2019)

What to say about Mary Queen of Scots other than...yeah, it was alright. I mean, I really should’ve liked it more than I did, because these specific events were part of the Edexcel A-Level history curriculum (Can I get some Rebellion and Disorder Under the Tudors students representation up in here!?) and I usually love seeing history translated onto screen, plus it centred around Margot Robbie and Saoirse Ronan. It was just very...meh. I feel like there’s so much more complex a story here than was told. Both women were undoubtedly a lot more complicated than this film made them out to be and I think to reduce Mary Queen of Scots to a Mary Sue-ish heroine was a disappointing choice. Plus, if we’re gonna talk historical accuracy (which all the racists came out of their caves to discuss at the time), Mary and Elizabeth never actually met; I’m sure there was a more creative way to explore their dynamic than by forcing an interaction that never actually happened.

Apostle (Gareth Evans, 2018)

There were elements of this film I really liked; the mythology behind the cult, I.E what the townsfolk actually worshipped when you stripped away all the secrecy was pretty interesting. However, I felt it depended too much on atmosphere and not enough on plot, and I didn’t warm to any of the characters.

Searching (Aneesh Chaganty, 2018)

It’s difficult because technically, Searching is obviously an ingenious film. My issue is the way it ended, which was imo, super anti-climatic, and honestly pretty predictable in that it seemed like the writers just went out of their way *SPOILERS AHEAD* to make the culprit the person viewers would’ve ruled out by default for shock value, and then work out WHY that person was the culprit from there. I was expecting something a lot darker to be behind the protagonist’s daughter’s disappearance-irl, these situations usually are-and so maybe it’s just me being a bit of a sadist but I was disappointed by how things resolved themselves.

Deliver Us from Evil (Scott Derrickson, 2014)

So, this isn’t boring. It’s interesting to have a horror navigated through the lens of something as procedural as a police investigation. But ultimately, the acting isn’t great, there’s very few scary moments, and it’s a little cheesy. As horrors go, it’s pretty shallow-it is what it says on the tin.

Dumplin’ (Anne Fletcher, 2018)

I watched this right at the beginning of the year and I can’t remember all too much about it, but I remember not hating it? See, looking at the cast, Odeya Rush and Dove Cameron are both in it which would suggest I’d come away hating MYSELF instead but yeah...I got nothing. 

Lights Out (David F.Sandberg, 2016)

The concept is very scary, the execution not so much, and the actual storyline is a little cheesy. I found myself just being like OH MY GOD, IT’S BELLA’S DAD FROM TWILIGHT! And then *SPOILERS AHEAD* getting mad that they did Charlie Swan dirty like that by killing him off in the first 10/15 minutes.

The Goldfinch (John Crowley, 2019)

So I LOVED the book of The Goldfinch. I read it after the Secret History and even though most people seem to prefer the latter, the former hit me right in the sweet spot. The length was almost one of my favourite things about it; I felt by the end that I came to know the character so well he felt like someone I knew in real life. When I heard Ansel Elgort was cast as Theo, I was really happy; I’m not necessarily a huge fan of him as an actor, I've only ever seen him in shitty teen-y dramas which I forced myself to like at the time E.G. The Fault in Our Stars and Divergent, but he looks kind of exactly how I pictured Theo looking. Almost like an Evanna Lynch as Luna Lovegood situation. And then honestly, the actual film came around, and I found myself much preferring the young Theo sections. I get that Theo is quite a muted character and I hate to properly slate anyone’s performance, but Ansel as him felt a bit flat. The casting in general was pretty whack; I love Nicole Kidman but she didn’t feel right as Mrs.Barbour and it seemed that they added a lot to her character to the detriment of Hobie’s character who was a much bigger part of Theo’s life in the book. Also, can we talk about Finn Wolfhard as Boris? I’m sorry, but that accent was godawful. Really bad. Boris’ accent was always supposed to be kind of ambiguous but this was just butchered Russian. Another gripe that my friend and I, who also read the book, had with the Vegas section of the film (which was otherwise probably the best part) was that they never properly explored the complexity of Boris and Theo’s relationship. Obviously I’m not saying that I want 2 minors to shoot a sex scene but it could have been referenced when they reunite as adults because the kiss on the head when they part in Vegas seemed misleadingly platonic. It was heavily implied in the book that there was some kind of love that went beyond friendship between the two and I didn’t get that in the film at all. 

Ultimately, when you try and adapt a book as long as the Goldfinch, you’re always going to have some pacing issues and people complaining that things were left out or that X or Y character didn’t have enough screen time. But in ways, I think the fault here was trying to stay TOO faithful in the limited time available. They definitely could have focussed less on certain relationships and more on others, and when it comes down to it, I think we lost a lot of the grittiness of the original book for the sake of pretty visuals. 

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019)

Don’t get me wrong, this would 100% be in shit tier if it wasn’t for the last hour or so of the film and all the Manson lore which is so disappointing because I love Tarantino films and I love that era. As for the first couple of hours, I loved the vibe and I love Margot Robbie, and I think it was very respectful towards the Tate family (if anything radiated through the screen more than anything else it was Sharon Tate’s sweetness), but I just wasn’t that invested in Leo or Brad’s characters-it all just felt a bit pointless. I really like Brad Pitt and even that couldn’t really save it for me. Maybe if you took away the remaining 2 hours and 20 minutes of Leo DiCaprio making vague allusions to his own career to a girl only slightly younger than the combined age of all girlfriends past I’d enjoy it more but then I don’t think there’d be much footage left. I guess we should just be grateful that Tarantino managed to refrain from unnecessarily sprinkling the N-word into every other line of his script this time, right?

Also.

SO. MANY. FEET.

But then again, this did result in Brad publicly mocking Tarantino’s foot fetish during his speech at the SAG awards so...I’ll allow it. Sometimes kink shaming is okay. Especially when it’s this guy:

Isn’t it Romantic (Todd Strauss-Schulson, 2019)

I guess as romantic comedies go it wasn’t AWFUL because it was self-aware but still just not my cup of tea and it didn’t really make me laugh. Plus, I feel like it did just follow the plot of a conventional rom-com in the end so...what was it all for, you know?

Green Room (Jeremy Saulnier, 2016)

I think my disappointment with this film was a case of too high expectations. It wasn’t as gory as I hoped, in fact, there was very little on screen gore at all. I was just expecting something very messed up and I didn’t get that. But then again we did get Maeby from Arrested Development singing a fuck Nazis song so I guess that was a nice surprise?

Shit Tier

Birdbox (Susanne Bier, 2018)

First the disappointment of the Goldfinch, and now Birdbox (although they were chronologically the other way round but for the sake of this review, let’s just ignore that). It really is a bad year for bird films. 

It’s weird because when this first came out I remember everyone hyping it up and making memes about it and stuff and then I actually watched it and dear god, it was boring. Honestly, who paid you lot to pretend you cared enough about it enough to make content? And where can I get in on this action?

I mean it didn’t start off terribly but then they killed off SARAH FUCKING PAULSON and somehow managed to make SANDRA FUCKING BULLOCK unlikeable. How does one do that? The mind baffles.

Pet Sematary (Kevin Kolsch & Dennis Widmyer, 2019)

The kid acting was bad, the leads were meh and there wasn’t one creepy moment. This should be SO MUCH MORE hard hitting than it actually was given the subject matter and it just fell completely flat. I will say, though, *SPOILERS AHEAD* that the ending was appropriately doom and gloom and even though I’ve seen lots of others say they hate it it was probably the only thing I actually liked.

The Lion King (Jon Favreau, 2019)

Seth Rogen and Billie Eichner were the only good things about this which is sad because I fucking love Donald Glover and I was so excited when he was cast as Simba. Like, it was pretty but empty and unnecessary and I’m not one of these people who think CGI remakes always have to be this way-I loved Dumbo and I liked the live-action Jungle Book too! I just think the people who made this cared too much about good CGI and realism and less about heart. There was no personality whatsoever and it’s such a waste when you think about the fact that they had Donald and Beyonce on board. 

Red Sparrow (Francis Lawrence, 2018)

Eurgh, I hated this. I think Jennifer Lawrence is stunning and I usually love her films but every shot of her in this felt so male-gaze oriented, even the ones which were sexually violent, which I found to be completely unnecessary in the first place. At times it felt almost torture-porn-y which was not what I expected at all seeing as the marketing made it seem like some kind of female empowerment movie.

It Comes at Night (Trey Edward Shults, 2017)

I literally can’t remember fucking anything from this film. Clearly there is a very, very fine line between atmospheric and boring.

Warm Bodies (Jonathan Levine, 2013)

Maybe it’s because I watched this about 6 years too late and the whole human-girl-falls-in-love-with-supernatural-creature hype train has long since left the station but I couldn’t even finish it. Cutesy necrophilia ain’t for me, sorry Nicholas Hoult. Still love ya. You’ll always be Tony Stonem to me xoxo

Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2005)

I’m pretty sure this movie won a lot of awards so I’m sure this is a very unpopular opinion but the way this film ended was so...depressing. SO depressing. Did it have to be THAT depressing? The Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode outsold.

This is the range Oscar winning actress Hilary Swank wishes she had.

Would You Rather (David Guy Levy, 2013)

Started off well but became cheesy and predictable as it went on. The acting wasn’t great either plus there was another unnecessary attempted rape scene here too. 

Christmas with the Kranks (Joe Roth, 2004)

So I watched this movie in the run up to Christmas because my best friend and her mum were referencing it like it was this cult classic (which I guess for some reason it is?) and I’m sorry to her and her mum but what the hell is this shit?! It’s not even so bad it’s good. It’s just bad.

The plot, the characters, EVERYTHING, it’s ridiculous on every level. I wasn’t into it enough to suspend my disbelief that anyone’s neighbours would actually care THAT much that they weren’t celebrating Christmas. Go on your damn cruise, take me with you whilst you're at it, ease my seasonal depression! I wouldn’t mind so much if it was funny or if the protagonists were likeable but it wasn’t and they’re not. Nobody’s actions made any sense. It didn’t put me in the Christmas spirit at all it just made me angry that Jamie Lee Curtis’ agent made her do this shit. She’s a scream queen goddess and she deserves better.

ANYWAY.

I’m now realising that I should have started on shit tier and worked my way up to god tier because now this post has ended on the rather sour note of me getting worked up over Christmas with the Kranks, lol. As always, these are just my opinions and I love to hear other people’s; when it comes to something like this, it’s all a matter of preference and there really isn’t a right or wrong answer, so I’m open to discussion!

With the Oscars less than a week away now I rushed a little to get this out on time, so apologies in advance if anything doesn’t make any sense or there’s any typos, I will look back over it at some point over the next couple of days to check. 

But if you read to the end thank you! And stay tuned for my overview of Paris Haute Couture Week S/S 2020 if that’s something you’re interested in as that will most likely be next post!

Lauren x

[sophrosinn]

the (un)lucky ones

story description:

“the story’s great, but I think it would be better if the story ended like this”

Affronted at the audacity of the comment, she furiously replies, “then write your own story, asshole!”

word count: 2,048

a/n: happiest solar anniversary to one of my best girls @vanaera! thank you for being the bestest friend a girl could ever ask for. this short story, which is loosely based irl, serves as my gift to you. i hope you’ll like it! 

shout-out to @senfleurs for being the best gal and helping me out with this. she even stepped up and edited this omg, and i cannot stress how much I’m thankful, lol especially she made sure that I get to finish this on time

—

3.

In retrospect, she knows better than to let some dumb comment, especially from someone on the Internet, rile her up this much. Even her followers tell her as much: it’s unwarranted, insensitive even. One of her followers, hippopopo tries to take it a step further, justifying by saying, verbatim: It’s her story anyway!!! So only she knows how the story should end best, okay! 😤😠💢

(in actuality, she has qualms about that, mostly because she had read some books which she thought didn’t end well. but that would take time to unpack and this story isn’t about that, no. she’s flattered at the support, nonetheless.)

And yet, there she is at 8 in the morning, her fingers furiously gliding across her keyboard as she writes a spite-filled story in response. Oftentimes, her muse for writing comes from movies she watched with her family, or from songs she heard on Korean dramas, or those meet-cute scenarios she gushed about with her best friends. This time, however, spite’s her main gal.

She finishes at 10. Later at 4 in the afternoon, she posts it. About an hour later, she doesn’t even try to contain the smirk lighting up her face when a familiar notification pops up.

—

1.

The story starts with an inconspicuous like from a user named agust-d five months ago. Back then, she thought nothing of it. A day later, agust-d comments on a story from her drabble series. Since then, every day without fail, agust-d leaves a small token of their appreciation for her works; brief, concise comments such as, “nice job on the flower descriptions,” or “i liked it.” 

Belatedly, she wonders if agust-d is a person of few words, because why else would they leave comments with only six words or less, even on her works with over 30k words? Don’t get her wrong, of course she’s eternally grateful for all the support she receives from her affectionate dears. But sometimes, especially on days her self-confidence plummets and she’s in need of reassurance, she ponders if all her efforts are for naught. (of course not, never, she gently reminds herself.)

And each day, she resists the growing urge to reply: don’t you have anything more to say!!! (but alas, she isn’t a rude person—unless provoked—she can’t so she settles with letting her mind wander.)

Three months of this and she finally caves in. With her interest piqued, she browses through agust-d’s posts. After two hours, she learns that agust-d goes by suga online. Coincidentally, Suga is a male student at the same university she’s currently attending. For a moment, she briefly considers a possibility—what are the chances that they’ve met, have fallen into step alongside each other, have passed by him in the large hallways, or have shared her table with him at the library during exam season? The possibility of knowing someone without actually knowing them? 

(that’s the funny thing about the online world, she supposes. you may know all that matters about someone: their likes, dislikes, kinks, fears, and horrid taste in music, absolutely everything except that one thing that matters the most: their names.)

Suga, she eventually learns, is not a man of few words. In truth, he’s got a few words too many to say about a diverse range of controversial topics. In his words, his passion burns bright and clear, but for her, he doesn’t shine any brighter than when he talks about music. It shows in his blog, which consists of a myriad of album reviews across different genres (fascinating, she notes, their music interests align as well).

Occasionally, he posts his renditions of some popular rap music, and as sporadic as this happens, she admits that his covers are her favorite part of his blog. And naturally, she refuses to acknowledge that it has everything to do with her fascination with deep, raspy voices, which, (un)fortunately for her, Suga undoubtedly has.

After some serious debating with herself, she decides to not follow him back. But she makes sure to check his profile every other day for no real reason, really, her soul wallowing in denial. In her defense, when did anyone need a reason to stalk someone?

And so, it begins, her fascination with this stranger on the other side of the screen. Never in her whole life did she imagine herself harboring a (teeny-tiny, infinitesimal) crush towards someone on the Internet. Certainly, she knows there’s always a one-in-a-thousand chance that it happens in real life, it’s just that out of all the 7 billion people in the world, she wasn’t expecting herself to be the (un)lucky one.

—

2.

The fateful day begins like any other. She wakes up to a brand new day, at 7 am, and like clockwork, she begins to stretch atop her pink yoga mat. Halfway through her workout, her phone pings with a new notification. Immediately, her phone screen lights up: agust-d has left a comment on your work!

Her traitorous heart skips a beat in the utmost display of betrayal. It’s Suga!

Ever since she scrolled through his blog two months ago, she has been exchanging messages with Suga. Her covert mission to surreptitiously listen to his song covers ends miserably when she accidentally double-clicks on a post he made two years ago. A string of expletives followed as she stared agonizingly at the post. She attempts to remove her blunder, but soon accepts defeat as it doesn’t even take a full minute until she receives a message notification from Suga. The internal debate resumes as her finger clumsily hovers on the computer mouse and she hesitantly clicks. From thereon, the rest, as they say, is history.

She ends up following his account the day after.

Although, if she were being truthful, all they’ve been sending back and forth are pleasantries. Suga seems hellbent on keeping the conversations polite and distant. She doesn’t understand, it’s not like she’s flirting with him! All she just wants is a compelling conversation with someone (because the Lord knows how much she needs an intellectual to talk to; and suga seems like an intellectual, if his posts are anything to go by).

She unlocks her phone and throws herself onto her bed. Normally, her lips quirk up automatically in response to seeing his name pop on her notifications, but it is not the case for this time. Instead, a frown mars her forehead as she reads his comment.

agust-d: the story’s great, but I think it would be better if the story ended like this

For a moment, she can’t believe her eyes. She blinks a few more times in the hope that her eyes were just playing tricks on her. Nada, it remains the same. 

If there’s one thing to know about her, it’s that she meticulously plans out every detail in her stories. She even spends weeks to outline a draft, and even then, it must be decent enough before she puts it in writing. Publishing her works online, for all the world to see, still intimidates her even after all this time. Not knowing how people will respond to her works frightens her, but what is life without a little fear?

In addition, she’s receptive to constructive criticisms, but criticisms that come from those she looks up to? It’s a bitter pill to swallow sometimes. Suga—he’s become one of those people, and seeing his comment really hurt. She turns her phone off and does her chores for the time being. The moment she logs back in, she is taken aback by the multitude of comments expressing the same sentiment. 

bubbleboy: “Yeah, I agree, I think it would be best if the story ended in this manner.” 

She can’t help but feel the bubble of anger gradually rising. Another even started with, 

orange-gloss: “No offense, but the ending being suggested by others is kinda good.” 

The audacity and the entitlement in this comment! Asking her to not be offended when it is within her right to take offense is absolutely laughable. Furthermore, who are you to even tell me how I should react? 

When she reaches the 20th comment, she explodes. The next two hours find her furiously typing out a decent response disguised as a story, albeit with passive-aggressiveness, addressed to all of the comments, but primarily to the one left by Suga. She talks to the rude commenters with the sweet addition of a phrasing 101 lesson. In her contained rage, she ends with the note: remember, it doesn’t hurt to be nice, and if you have qualms about how I ended my own story, do me and yourself a favor and write your own story!

She makes up her mind to take some time off her blog for a while. But after a familiar notification pops up at 5 PM, she resists the urge to run away and instead, opts to open the messages he sent.

agust-d: i’ll admit, the way I said it was rude

agust-d: but I stand with what I said

agust-d: you should consider the possibility as well

seen

(In hindsight, she realizes that, for once, Suga’s comment surpasses 25 words.)

—

4. 

After the whole debacle with the barrage of rude comments and her consequent outburst, everything has never been the same. Understandably, some of her fans have left since then, but the majority stayed with her and for that, she’s eternally grateful. Although she still publishes her stories and interacts with her followers, a certain emptiness fills her at times. 

A part of her thinks it has a lot to do with Suga, who she doesn’t talk to anymore. She… doesn’t know how to respond to him after her outburst. In a span of a moment, she manages to both defend her honor and drag agust-d through the mud, which was never her intention to begin with. Okay, well, maybe just a little bit. But she’s hurt, so it only makes sense to retaliate.

If only she could easily strike back in her current situation. 

Unbeknownst to her, someone with the handle void-mayo tags her on a malicious post the night before, calling her out for being fake. Apparently, she’s a ‘copycat writer wanna-be with no real ideas of her own.’

She only discovers it when her followers start sending her messages of reassurance and appreciation. Of course, she checks the post at once, reading carefully and taking in everything that was written. (Shit, at least I have a better username, she muses). And not for the first time, she feels hurt, uneasy, and anxious at the same time. Void-mayo is already an established writer, with years of exposure under her belt and a large army of rabid fans at her disposal. Meanwhile, she’s just started her writing blog. And although she’s diligent, thorough, and ensures that each of her stories has its own personality and flavor, most of void-mayo’s fans wouldn’t care. She can’t risk losing her credibility over a baseless accusation such as this! 

And with that, she feels anger bubbling from the pit of her stomach. She doesn’t get the purpose behind the destructive post. She gets humiliated, her reputation tarnished, and worse just because she had written a similar scene with an ice cream . It certainly doesn’t help that others are quick to join in calling her names and ‘cancelling her’ without even bothering to check the facts. 

And as she contemplates on how to proceed with such a delicate situation, her dashboard refreshes. At the top, she notices that agust-d reblogs void-mayo’s post with the addition of his response and for once, the word count exceeds 100.

—

5. 

In a roundabout way of saying sorry and expressing her gratitude, she proceeds to write the ending Suga requested. And illuminated by the dim light of her laptop screen, she can begrudgingly admit that he does have a point; his version of the ending does make sense.

—

fin.

—

omake

agust-d: so am i forgiven yet?

you: i don’t know

you: maybe you’ll have to make it up to me

you: and get me some coffee first?

you: 😉

—

a/n pt. 2: happiest birthday to you again! i’m so grateful to have met you in this lifetime. truly, like you’re the best. even if your internet connection’s always shitty, you always find ways to join our chats and discord parties. just thank you, for all the countless laughs that i’ve had with (and because of) you, for the counsel with my writing, and for the stories and advice you’ve willingly shared with us. here’s to our three years of friendship and counting! i love you so much! enjoy this day and stay safe! 

p.s. keep rocking and keep writing! we’ll always be here with you! muah! ❤️❤️❤️

p.p.s. hihi 🦆🍄

[timeless-hollywood-classics]

Linda Darnell (born Monetta Eloyse Darnell, October 16, 1923 – April 10, 1965) was an American film actress. Darnell progressed from modeling as a child to acting in theater and film. At the encouragement of her mother, she made her first film in 1939, and appeared in supporting roles in big-budget films for 20th Century Fox throughout the 1940s. She rose to fame with co-starring roles opposite Tyrone Power in adventure films, and established a main character career after her role in Forever Amber (1947). She won critical acclaim for her work in Unfaithfully Yours (1948) and A Letter to Three Wives (1949).

Darnell was born in Dallas, Texas, as one of four children (excluding her mother's two children from an earlier marriage) to postal clerk Calvin Roy Darnell (1888–1977) and the former Margaret "Pearl" Brown (1892–1966). She was the younger sister of Undeen (b. 1918) and the older sister of Monte Maloya (b. 1929) and Calvin Roy, Jr. (b. 1930). Her parents were not happily married, and she grew up as a shy and reserved girl in a house of domestic turmoil. Starting at an early age, her mother, Pearl, had big plans for Darnell in the entertainment industry. She believed that Linda was her only child with potential as an actress and ignored the rearing of her other children.

According to her siblings, Darnell enjoyed the limelight and shared her mother's dream.[1]:19 Darnell once said: "Mother really shoved me along, spotting me in one contest after another. I had no great talent, and I didn't want to be a movie star particularly. But Mother had always wanted it for herself, and I guess she attained it through me." One elocution teacher recalled: "[Darnell] didn't stand out particularly, except that she was so sweet and considerate. In her theater work, she wasn't outstanding, but her mother was right behind her everywhere she went."

Unlike her husband, Pearl had a notorious reputation in the neighborhood of being "aggressive" or "downright mean". Despite some financial problems, Darnell insisted that she had had a joyful childhood and loving parents. Darnell was a model by the age of 11 and was acting on the stage by the age of 13. She initially started modeling to earn money for the household and performed mostly in beauty contests.

Before leaving school for Hollywood, Darnell was a student at Sunset High School, which she entered in September 1937, majoring in Spanish and art. She did not have a lot in common with her peers and usually spent her time at home as a teen, working under the guidance of her mother. In 1936, she entered the Dallas Little Theater and was cast in the southwestern premiere of Murder in the Cathedral. The same year, she was hired as one of the hostesses at the Texas Centennial Exposition.

In November 1937, a talent scout for 20th Century Fox arrived in Dallas looking for new faces. Encouraged by her mother, Darnell met him, and after a few months he invited her for a screen test in Hollywood. Arriving in California alongside Mary Healy and Dorris Bowdon in February 1938, Darnell initially was rejected by film studios and was sent home because she was declared "too young".

Although originally wanting to become an actress on the stage, Darnell was featured in a Gateway to Hollywood talent search and initially landed a contract at RKO Pictures. There was no certainty, though, and she soon returned to Dallas. When 20th Century-Fox offered her a part, Darnell wanted to accept, but RKO was unwilling to release her. Nevertheless, by age 15 she was signed to a contract at 20th Century-Fox and moved to a small apartment in Hollywood all alone on April 5, 1939. With production beginning in April 1939, she was featured in her first film, Hotel for Women (1939), which had newspapers immediately hailing her as the newest star of Hollywood. Loretta Young was originally assigned to play the role, but she demanded a salary which the studio would not give her. Darryl F. Zanuck instead cast Darnell "because he felt that the name would advertise her beauty and suggest a Latin quality that matched her coloring."

Although only 15 at the time, Darnell posed as a 17-year-old and was listed as 19 years old by the studio. According to columnist Louella O. Parsons, Darnell was "so young, so immature and so naive in her ideas" and was very loyal to her boss, Darryl F. Zanuck. Her true age came out later in 1939, and she became one of the few actresses under the age of 16 to serve as leading ladies in films. While working on Hotel for Women, Darnell was cast alongside Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert in Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) in June 1939. She was later replaced because the studio felt her role was not important enough. In an interview during production of Hotel for Women, which lasted until June, Darnell admitted that movie making was not what she expected: "I'm learning what really hard work is. At home in Dallas I used to sprawl on the lawn and dream about the nice, easy time the screen stars must be having in Hollywood, but the last two months have taught me quite another story."

Since the beginning of her career at 20th Century-Fox, Darnell had been very positive about her frequent co-star Tyrone Power. In a 1939 interview, she expressed her interest in starring opposite Power in Johnny Apollo (1940). Rationalizing why she was not cast, Darnell said: "It's a man's part and the girl's role is only incidental." Dorothy Lamour was cast, instead. Nevertheless, Darnell had her way, as she was assigned to the female lead opposite Power in the light romantic comedy Day-Time Wife (1939). Although the film received only slightly favorable reviews, Darnell's performance was received positively, with one critic saying: "Despite her apparent youth, [Darnell] turns in an outstanding performance when playing with popular players." Another critic wrote: "little Linda is not only a breath-taking eyeful, but a splendid actress, as well." Life magazine stated that Darnell appeared to be 22 and was "the most physically perfect girl in Hollywood". Following the film's release, she was cast in the drama comedy Star Dust in December 1939. The film was hailed as one of the "most original entertainment ideas in years" and boosted Darnell's popularity, who was nicknamed "Hollywood's loveliest and most exciting star". Variety said: "Miss Darnell displays a wealth of youthful charm and personality that confirms studio efforts to build her to a draw personality." Her studio contract had been revised to allow Darnell to earn $200 a week.

At first, everything was like a fairy tale coming true. I stepped into a fabulous land where, overnight, I was a movie star. In pictures you're built up by everyone. On the set, in the publicity office, wherever you go, everyone says you're wonderful. It gives you a false sense of security. You waltz through a role, and everywhere you hear that you are beautiful and lovely, a natural-born actress. You believe what people around you say.

After appearing in several small films, Darnell was cast in her first big-budget film in May 1940, appearing again opposite Tyrone Power in Brigham Young (1940), which was shot on location in mid 1940 and was regarded as the most expensive film 20th Century Fox had yet produced. Darnell and Power were cast together for the second time owing to the box office success of Day-Time Wife, and they became a highly publicized onscreen couple, which prompted Darryl F. Zanuck to add 18 more romantic scenes to Brigham Young.[13] The film's director, Henry Hathaway, in later life had only slight memories of Darnell but recalled that "a sweeter girl never lived." By June 1940, shortly after completing Brigham Young, Darnell achieved stardom and earned "a weekly salary larger than most bank officials."

In the summer of 1940, Darnell began working on The Mark of Zorro (1940), in which she again co-starred as Power's sweetheart in a role for which Anne Baxter was previously considered. A big-budget adventure film that was raved over by the critics, The Mark of Zorro was a box office sensation and did much to enhance Darnell's star status. Afterwards, she was paired with Henry Fonda for the first time in the western Chad Hanna (1940), her first Technicolor film. The film received only little attention, unlike Darnell's next film, Blood and Sand (1941), which was shot on location in Mexico and in which she was reteamed with Power. It was the first film for which she was widely critically acclaimed. Nevertheless, Darnell later claimed that her downfall began after Blood and Sand. In an interview she said:

People got tired of seeing the sweet young things I was playing and I landed at the bottom of the roller coaster. The change and realization were very subtle. I'd had the fame and money every girl dreams about—and the romance. I'd crammed thirty years into ten, and while it was exciting and I would do it over again, I still know I missed out on my girlhood, the fun, little things that now seem important.

The studio was unable to find Darnell suitable roles. In late 1940, Fox chose her for the main role in Song of the Islands (1942), a Hawaiian musical film which eventually starred Betty Grable. After Blood and Sand, she was set to co-star with Claudette Colbert in Remember the Day (1941), but another actress was eventually cast. Meanwhile, she was considered for the female lead in Swamp Water (1941), but Anne Baxter was later assigned the role. Darnell was disappointed and felt rejected; she later said: "Right under your very nose someone else is brought in for that prize part you wanted so terribly." Months passed by without any work, and in August 1941 she was cast in a supporting role in the musical Rise and Shine (1941). The film was a setback in her career, and she was rejected for a later role because she refused to respond to Darryl F. Zanuck's advances. Instead, she contributed to the war effort, working for the Red Cross and selling war bonds. She was also a regular at the Hollywood Canteen.

In early 1942, Darnell filmed The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe, another film that would not do much to improve her career. Meanwhile, she realized that Darryl F. Zanuck had lost interest in her, and she was overlooked for most film roles that suited her. Instead, she was cast in roles that she loathed, including the musical Orchestra Wives (1942). Zanuck insisted that she take the role, but she was replaced by Ann Rutherford after 12 days of shooting. The press reported that "Linda Darnell and Twentieth Century-Fox aren't on the best of terms at the moment." As a punishment, she was loaned out to another studio for a supporting role in a B movie called City Without Men. According to co-star Rosemary DeCamp, Darnell nevertheless was "very polite", and she was satisfied to work at a studio which did not treat her as a child. In April 1943, she was put on suspension, which meant being replaced in the Technicolor musical film The Gang's All Here (1943). By this time, Darnell had eloped, which caused Zanuck to be even more furious.

In 1943, she was cast, uncredited, as the Virgin Mary in The Song of Bernadette. By late 1943, Darnell was fed up with critics only praising her beauty rather than her acting abilities. Judging her performance in Sweet and Low-Down (1944), in which she co-starred with Lynn Bari, one critic of the Los Angeles Examiner wrote, "Lynn comes off the best because she has more of a chance to shine. Linda just doesn't have enough to do—but looks beautiful doing it." Darnell was reduced to second leads and was overlooked for big-budget productions. Matters changed when she was named one of the four most beautiful women in Hollywood along with Hedy Lamarr, Ingrid Bergman, and Gene Tierney in a 1944 edition of Look. Afterwards, the studio allowed her to be loaned out for the lead in Summer Storm. Portraying a "seductive peasant girl who takes three men to their ruin before she herself is murdered," it was a type of role she had never before played. In a later interview, Darnell commented:

I was told that such a violent change of type might ruin my career, but I insisted on taking the chance. This is one picture on which I am setting much store for the future. For eighteen months I did nothing in pictures. I pleaded for something to do, but nothing happened. The character in the Chekhov film is a wild sort of she-devil, which any actress would go miles to play. She's devil mostly—at times angelic—and perfectly fascinating to interpret. I'm counting on my Russian girl to give me a new start.

Released in 1944, the film provided her a new screen image as a pin-up girl. Shortly after, Darnell was again loaned out to portray a showgirl in The Great John L., the first film to feature her bare legs. Darnell complained that the studio lacked recognition of her, which prodded Zanuck to cast her in Hangover Square (1945), wherein she played a role she personally had chosen. The film became a great success, and with Darnell's triumph assured, she was allowed to abandon her upcoming film, Don Juan Quilligan (1945), which would have been another low point in her career. In January 1945, she was added to the cast of the film noir Fallen Angel (1945), which also included Dana Andrews and Alice Faye. Despite suffering from the "terrifying" director Otto Preminger, Darnell completed the film and was praised by reviewers so widely that there was even talk of an Oscar nomination. Because of her success in Fallen Angel, she was cast opposite Tyrone Power in Captain from Castile in December 1945 on the insistence of Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Although she looked forward to the film project, believing it would be her most important to date, she was later replaced by newcomer Jean Peters owing to scheduling conflicts, a decision she resented.

In 1946, Darnell filmed two pictures simultaneously, the expensively budgeted Anna and the King of Siam and Preminger's Centennial Summer. During the release of the latter, she was on location in Monument Valley for the filming of the classic Western My Darling Clementine (1946), playing a role for which she lost 12 pounds. She was assigned to a negligible role by Zanuck, which displeased the film's director, John Ford, who felt that she was not suitable.

In 1946, Darnell won the starring role in the highly anticipated movie Forever Amber, based on a bestselling historical novel that was denounced as being immoral at that time. The character Amber was so named because of her hair color, and this is the only major film in which Darnell—normally known for her raven hair and somewhat Latin looks—appears as a redhead. It was the most expensive film yet produced by Fox, and publicity at the time compared the novel to Gone with the Wind. Darnell replaced British actress Peggy Cummins in July 1946 at a cost of $350,000. Because $1 million had already been spent on production costs when Darnell was brought in, the pressure was intense to make the film a financial success. Her casting was a result of a campaign for stronger roles. Regardless, she was surprised to find out that she had been cast, because she had been intensively rehearsing for Captain from Castile at the time. Although she had to give up that role and work with Otto Preminger, she was delighted to play the title role and thought she was "the luckiest girl in Hollywood."

The search for the actress to portray Amber, a beauty who uses men to make her fortune in 17th century England, was modeled on the extensive process that led to the casting of Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara. Production demanded a lot from Darnell. She was again put on a diet and was assigned to a voice coach to learn how to speak with an English accent. In addition, she spent hours in fittings for costume changes. Darnell was certain that Forever Amber would be her ticket to stardom, and she told reporters:

My first seven years in Hollywood were a series of discouraging struggles for me. For a while it looked as though the Darnell-versus-Hollywood tussle was going to find Darnell coming out second best. The next seven years aren't going to be the same.

Darnell worked long hours at the studio during filming, and according to her older sister she started loathing Preminger, which did not ease production. This and the heavy dieting resulted in exhaustion and a serious illness in November 1946.[1]:100 Her shooting schedule lasted until March 1947, and she collapsed on the set twice. Forever Amber did not live up to its hype, and although it became a success at the box office, most reviewers agreed that the film was a disappointment. Darnell was disappointed in the film's reception; it did not gain her the recognition for which she longed.

The following year, Darnell portrayed Daphne de Carter in the Preston Sturges' comedy Unfaithfully Yours (1948), also starring Rex Harrison, and was then rushed into production as one of the three wives in the comedy/drama A Letter to Three Wives (1949). Darnell's hard-edged performance in the latter won her unanimous acclaim and the best reviews of her career. Darnell became one of the most in-demand actresses in Hollywood, and she now had the freedom to select her own roles. She longed for the leading role in the controversial film Pinky (1949), but Zanuck feared that her character would be compared to Amber by the audience, and A Letter to Three Wives co-star Jeanne Crain was cast instead.

Darnell had been widely expected to win an Academy Award nomination for A Letter to Three Wives; when this did not happen, her career began to wane. She was cast opposite Richard Widmark and Veronica Lake in Slattery's Hurricane (1949), which she perceived as a step down from the level she had reached with A Letter to Three Wives, though it did well at the box office.

Aside from her co-starring role opposite Richard Widmark, Stephen McNally and Sidney Poitier in the groundbreaking No Way Out (1950), directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, which she later called "the only good picture [she] ever made," her later films were rarely noteworthy, and her appearances were increasingly sporadic. Further hampering Darnell's career was the actress's alcoholism and weight gain. Her next film was a Western, Two Flags West (1950). Due to her allergy to horses, she loathed making Westerns, and in addition to her complaints about her "colorless" role, she disliked her co-stars Joseph Cotten and Cornel Wilde. She was even less enthusiastic about her next film, The 13th Letter (1951), which reunited her with Preminger, and she only took the role because it was an unglamorous one. Shortly after its release, she was put on suspension for refusing a role in the film The Guy Who Came Back (1951) opposite Paul Douglas and Joan Bennett because it felt "too similar." She later consented to take on the glamor role, but she refused to bleach her hair for it.

On March 21, 1951, Darnell signed a new contract with 20th Century Fox that allowed her to become a freelance actress. Her first film outside 20th Century-Fox was The Lady Pays Off for Universal Pictures (1951) after Douglas Sirk requested her for the lead role. She was responsible for putting the film behind schedule because on the fifth day of shooting she learned that Ivan Kahn, the man responsible for her breakthrough, had died. After The Lady Pays Off, Darnell headed the cast of Saturday Island (1952), which was filmed on location in Jamaica in late 1951. There, Darnell fell ill and had to be quarantined for several weeks. Because her contract required her to make one film a year for the studio, she reported to the 20th Century-Fox lot in March 1952 and was cast in the film noir Night Without Sleep (1952). It was the only time that she had to live up to this part of her contract, though, since she was released from it in September 1952, most likely because the competition of television forced studios all over Hollywood to drop actors.

This news initially excited Darnell because it permitted her to focus on her film career in Europe. She soon realized, though, that the ease and protection enjoyed under contract was gone, and she came to resent 20th Century-Fox and Zanuck:

Suppose you'd been earning $4,000 to $5,000 a week for years. Suddenly you were fired and no one would hire you at any figure remotely comparable to your previous salary. I thought in a little while I'd get offers from other studios, but not many came along. The only thing I knew how to do was be a movie star. No one expects to last forever in this business. You know that sooner or later the studio's going to let you go. But who wants to be retired at twenty-nine?

Before traveling to Italy for a two-picture deal with Giuseppe Amato, Darnell was rushed into the production of Blackbeard the Pirate (1952), which—much to Darnell's distress—got far behind schedule. She arrived in Italy in August 1952 and started filming Angels of Darkness (1954) in February of the next year. The second collaboration proved disastrous, and the next film was never released in the United States. Owing to a delay in the middle of production, she was sent back to Hollywood and there accepted an offer from Howard Hughes to star in RKO's 3-D film Second Chance (1953), filmed in Mexico. Afterwards, she flew back to Rome to complete Angels of Darkness, in which she spoke Italian. Upon returning to New York, she was under the misunderstanding that she would portray the title role in Mankiewicz's The Barefoot Contessa (1954), believing that the role could carry her to dramatic heights.[1]:138 Through trade papers, she learned that Ava Gardner assumed the part.

Because of her then-husband, Philip Liebmann (grandson of Charles Liebmann of Rheingold Breweries), Darnell put her career on hiatus. She returned to 20th Century-Fox in August 1955, by which time the studio had entered the television field. Darnell was eager to appear on Ronald W. Reagan's General Electric Theater. In 1958, Darnell appeared in the episode "Kid on a Calico Horse" of NBC's Cimarron City along with a cast of other guest stars, including Edgar Buchanan. That same year, she held the guest-starring title role in "The Dora Gray Story" on NBC's Wagon Train. The character of Dora is an attractive young woman trying to reach San Francisco who has inadvertently joined with a gun runner, played by John Carradine, to reach the west. Robert Horton carries the cast lead in the segment, and Mike Connors appears as Miles Borden, Dora's erstwhile love interest, a corrupt United States Army lieutenant bitter over his meager pay of $54 per month. Dan Blocker, more than a year before Bonanza, also guests in this segment.

In addition to television, Darnell returned to the stage. Her last work as an actress was in a stage production in Atlanta in early 1965. (At the time of her death a few months later, she was preparing to perform in another play.)

Since Darnell was underage when she arrived in Hollywood, she was tutored on the sets. She planned on attending graduation ceremonies at Sunset High School, but she was excluded from them and instead graduated from University High School in 1941. Her work schedules prohibited her from enrolling in a university.

In 1940, during the shooting of Star Dust, Darnell for a short time went out with teen idol Mickey Rooney. Her first love was Jaime Jorba, a Mexican whom she met while still in high school. They met again during production of Blood and Sand, but they drifted apart when Jorba announced he could not marry a girl who was in the public eye. Starting at age 17, Darnell dated her publicity agent, Alan Gordon, whom she allegedly married in a double wedding with Lana Turner and Joseph Stephen Crane on July 17, 1942. The report turned out to be false, and over the years Darnell became known as "filmland's most eligible bachelorette." Up to 1942, she dated Kay Kyser, Eddie Albert, George Montgomery, and Jackie Cooper, among others. At one point, she was set to elope with talent agent Vic Orsatti, only to report later that she was "concentrating on her career."

Although a well-loved figure on the 20th Century-Fox lot among the cast, crew, and lot workers, it was reported that Darnell made only one good friend in Hollywood, actress-singer Ann Miller, whom she met at a Catalina Island benefit. Darnell was very negative about the Hollywood social scene, finding it "nauseating". During her stay in Hollywood, her relationship with her mother, Pearl, worsened, as her mother was an unpopular figure on the lot because of her overbearing and possessive behavior. In 1940, Pearl accused her husband of having an incestuous relationship with Evelyn, one of her children, though he was not Evelyn's biological father. Following an intense fight between her parents in 1942, Darnell left home with her younger sister Monte and never returned. Out of spite, Pearl turned to the press, which gained Darnell some bad publicity.

In 1942, Darnell was plagued with extortion letters from an unknown person threatening her with bodily harm unless $2,000 was paid immediately. The studio asked the FBI to protect the actress, and eventually a 17-year-old high school student was arrested for the crime.

On April 18, 1943, at age 19, Darnell eloped with 42-year-old cameraman Peverell Marley in Las Vegas. Darnell and Marley started seeing each other in 1940, and the press dismissed him as her "devoted friend and escort." Most friends and relatives, including her parents, and 20th Century-Fox disapproved of the marriage, and Darnell was believed to look at Marley more as a father figure than as a romantic interest. Marley was a heavy drinker and introduced Darnell to alcohol in 1944, which eventually led to an addiction and weight problems. Neighbors and acquaintances recalled the drastic change she underwent in this period, becoming hardened and hot- tempered. In 1946, during production of Centennial Summer, she repeatedly met with Howard Hughes. Although she initially disregarded gossip of an affair, she fell in love with the womanizing millionaire and separated from Marley shortly after finishing My Darling Clementine. When Hughes announced that he had no desire to marry her, Darnell returned to her husband and cancelled divorce proceedings. Shortly after the reunion, her health worsened, caused by the tough production of Forever Amber (1947).

Because Darnell and Marley were unable to have children, they adopted a daughter in 1948, Charlotte Mildred "Lola" Marley (born January 5, 1948), the actress's only child. She also planned to adopt a boy within a few years, but nothing ever came of it. In mid 1948, she became romantically involved with Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the director of A Letter to Three Wives, and in July 1948 she filed for divorce. Mankiewicz, however, was unwilling to leave his wife for Darnell, and though the affair continued for six years, she returned to her husband. Though she called him the "great love of her life," Mankiewicz never acknowledged the affair; he only mentioned her to his biographer as a "marvelous girl with very terrifying personal problems." In 1949, Darnell went into psychotherapy for hostile emotions that she had been building since childhood. Darnell's romance with Mankiewicz influenced her personal life. When he left in late 1949 for on-location shooting of All About Eve (1950), Darnell fell into a depression and almost committed suicide. She continued to meet with him occasionally until production of The Barefoot Contessa (1954) started.

On January 25, 1949, Darnell went to court to sue her former business manager, Cy Tanner, for fraud. She testified that he stole $7,250 from her between 1946 and 1947, and Tanner was eventually sent to prison. On July 19, 1950, Darnell reportedly separated from her husband. Marley offered a quiet settlement—without mention of Mankiewicz—for a payment of $125,000. She agreed and lost almost all her money. When she filed for divorce from Marley she accused her husband of cruelty, claiming he was "rude" and "critical" towards Darnell and her family. Following a five-minute hearing, Darnell was granted a divorce and custody of Charlotte, while Marley was to pay $75 a month for child support.

At thirty-two, I can see tell-tale marks in the mirror, but the ravages of time no longer terrify me. I am told that when surface beauty is gone, the real woman emerges. My only regret will be that I could not have begun it earlier - that so many years have been ruined because I was considered beautiful.

— Darnell shortly after her divorce from Liebmann.

In her later life, she dated actor Dick Paxton and had an affair with Italian director Giuseppe Amato. She married brewery heir Philip Liebmann in February 1954. owing to her lack of interest in him physically, it was agreed that the marriage would be a business arrangement: she was to be his wife in name only and in return he would support her financially. After a while, she grew dissatisfied with this loveless marriage and detested her husband for allowing her to lash out at him as well as cheapening her by buying her lavish presents. In response, Darnell resorted to charity work, opening facilities accommodating 30 girls in the neighborhood of Rome in 1955. Liebmann attempted to save the marriage by adopting a baby named Alfreda, but the marriage ended nevertheless on grounds of incompatibility, and Liebmann kept the girl.

Darnell was married to pilot Merle Roy Robertson from 1957 to 1963. In 1957, she started drinking heavily and in November 1958 sank into a depression, but went into rehab, recovering for a while. In 1963, Darnell was granted a divorce from Robertson following an outburst in the courtroom, where she accused her third husband of fathering the baby of a Polish actress. She was promised alimony of $350 monthly until July 15, 1964, and then $250 until September 15, 1967.

Darnell died on April 10, 1965, from burns she received in a house fire in Glenview, Illinois, early the day before. She had been staying at the home of her former secretary and her daughter and had just received notice from her agent of three possible movie contracts. She was trapped on the second floor of the home by heat and smoke, as the fire had started in the living room.

The women urged the young girl to jump from the second-floor window. After her daughter jumped, Darnell's secretary stood on the window ledge, calling for help. She had lost track of Darnell and insisted the firefighters rescue her before she was taken from the window ledge. Darnell was found next to the burning living-room sofa and was transferred to the burn unit at Chicago's Cook County Hospital with burns over 80% of her body.

After her death, a man who said he was Darnell's fiancé identified her body. A coroner's inquest into her death ruled that Darnell's death was accidental and that the fire had begun in or near the living-room sofa and was caused by careless smoking; both adult women were smokers.

Darnell's body was cremated; she had wanted her ashes scattered over a ranch in New Mexico, but because of a dispute with the landowners that was not done. After the remains had been in storage for ten years, her daughter asked that they be interred at the Union Hill Cemetery, Chester County, Pennsylvania, in the family plot of her son-in-law.

[nikihawkes]

Title: The Stone Sky

Author: N.K. Jemisin

Series: Broken Earth #3

Genre: Fantasy

Rating: 4/5 stars

The Overview: This is the way the world ends… for the last time. The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women. Essun has inherited the power of Alabaster Tenring. With it, she hopes to find her daughter Nassun and forge a world in which every orogene child can grow up safe. For Nassun, her mother’s mastery of the Obelisk Gate comes too late. She has seen the evil of the world, and accepted what her mother will not admit: that sometimes what is corrupt cannot be cleansed, only destroyed. -Goodreads

The Review:

The Stone Sky left me shook.

I had so many mixed feelings after finishing it (…in 2017. I’ll explain). On one hand, there had been a lot of buildup in the previous two books and I wasn’t totally convinced I liked the direction the story headed for about the first 75%. I was worried it wasn’t going to live up to my incredibly high expectations. And then some of the most truly profound scenes played out and I can still feel the emotional reverberation every time I think about it even years later. This trilogy is brilliant.

I held off on writing a review for two reasons: 1. When I finished it, my feed was filled with countless solid 5-star reviews and I didn’t feel strongly enough about my criticisms to become a rallying counterpoint to all of that positivity (and didn’t really want to because of how special the series had been for me overall). And 2. It left me so confused that I didn’t know how to express my slight disappointment at the direction but at the same time emphasize the 10+ star scenes that still kind of haunt me to this day. Do I dock my rating for what I didn’t like? Or keep it a solid 5 because the amazing parts were strong enough to overpower everything else? I think with time and perspective, I can finally land on 4 as a rating for this specific book with the disclaimer that the series still feels like a solid 5-stars as a whole. There are so many things I loved about it, but my favorite element by far is the basis for why parts of the books are written with different POV styles (specifically the controversial second-person present-tense passages). It’s brilliant. Or did I say that already? 

Ultimately, even though the story didn’t go along with any of my theories, it still shattered me. It’s also my emphatic, quintessential recommendation whenever someone mentions “unique” or “cool writing styles” or “unconventional.” It’s truly a masterpiece. My only recommendation: experience it for yourself.

Other books you might like:

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Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley

The Shadow of What was Lost by James Islington

Child of a Mad God by R.A. Salvatore

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

The Name the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

by Niki Hawkes

Book Review: The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin Title: The Stone Sky Author: N.K. Jemisin Series: Broken Earth #3 Genre: Fantasy Rating: 4/5 stars…

[televinita]

Little Women: My Background

Hello and welcome to the prequel for my upcoming feature, “Little Women (2019) Film Review.” I can’t give any thoughts on this movie without explaining my history with the classic, which was such an important part of my childhood, and one of the stories I hold dearest in the world. Strap in for the 900 words about to come your way.

My first encounter with this book was when I received it as a gift, in this exact edition, inscribed to me by Mom & Dad on the occasion of my 9th birthday. I read it immediately and I loved it. 5 stars then, 5 stars now. The girls on this cover of the edition are the definitive picture of the March women.

(cover text: ”They were more than sisters...they were friends.”)

And because I can’t find a large enough image of that edition (photograph my own? lol), here’s an enhanced image of the painting from a slightly later edition:

I never read the sequels, because Young Me went from DELIGHTED to learn such things existed to going, aghast, "Little Men? Jo's Boys?? Gross, who wants that!" and never even bothered to open them.

I reread this book when I was 15 and loved it all over again, but I haven't read it since then, always so overwhelmed with love at the idea that I'm afraid to start, in case I accidentally read it when I'm in a bad mood and spoil the experience. Instead I’ve simply cherished the memory, tucked away, of it being a perfect book.

The 1994 Movie Experience

You should know that I loved this movie when I saw it, also at 9 years old, but then I didn't see it for over 10 years and by the time I was ready to rewatch it, I was GUTTED that I now recognized basically all the actors and the magic was broken. It's the weirdest thing, and this has never happened to me with any other film adaptation, but when I watched it as a child it WAS the book come to life. Those were really the characters. And now they aren't. I haven't watched it since because I can't bear to see all these famous people -- a few of whom I've grown to dislike -- just...PRETENDING to be my characters. I hate it and I mourn its loss but that's the way it is. I can never go back. So for that, at least, I am grateful a new adaptation exists -- it might become "mine." (Still holding out hope for the PBS miniseries to fill in that slot, though. I saw a short part on TV and I was excited by how faithful it was and how little I recognized people.)

Where I Stand On Shipping & Characters

+ Meg was always the kinda-boring, mom-like sister. I remember liking Jo a lot (because I also loved writing and had beautiful hair), though I couldn’t relate to the tomboy aspect. But my favorite was always Beth: she was quiet and shy and loved animals; she was me! She’s also why I wanted to learn piano.

(and like many people, I sobbed my eyes out when she died in the book and went crying to my mom about it, who of course knew what was going to happen and had known from the very beginning to prepare for my reaction)

+ Amy was a spoiled brat and I hated her. But in retrospect, I’ve come to think I will probably appreciate her character growth in rereads. I just had such disdain, as a child, for children who couldn’t be quiet and obey rules.

+ I do know that my heart broke as a kid when Jo didn't marry Laurie, but I don't remember how I originally felt about Bhaer. However, in the years since, I have become mostly okay with it because, well, how many other age-mismatched pairings have I fallen for like this, and student/teacher is kind of my thing (I know she's not actually his student, but the base of their connection is the same as WHY I like student/teacher pairings: a professional intellectual admiring the potential of a sharp mind, and vice versa. That they open a school together is the icing on the cake).

It still hurts that my two fave relationship tropes in the world go to war in the triangle from hell just because Louisa May got uppity, but I have to admit that keeping Laurie in the family by other means is really the closest it's possible to get to happiness by that point, so that’s kind of a genius maneuver there.

In Conclusion

This book is so important to me and my childhood joy that I frankly refuse to hear criticism about the story in any form, unless it’s being sassy at Alcott for her rudeness towards shippers (you just can’t go criticizing Professor Bhaer in the process, or I will physically fight you). I’ve looked at books of essays the library has about Little Women and I’m just like, nope. There will not even be critical analysis in my realm. No thinkpieces about gender/gender roles. This is an environment of welcoming, and you will love the story with the pure heart of a 9-year-old book lover or you will get the hell out.

And with that, are we ready to hear my movie thoughts?? Sit tight while I work on them.

[rwbyconversations]

DmC Devil May Cry- Six Years Later

A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay about Dante from the Devil May Cry series and his character development across his six mainline appearances. Doing it got me thinking about the franchise and got me to get around to finishing the DMC games I own in my possession- Devil May Cry 4, which has a great combat system but is let down by having far too few environments and missions, and DmC Devil May Cry, the black sheep of the franchise and one of the most controversial reboots of a franchise. Finishing DmC gave me a perspective that only finishing something yourself can provide. 

I’d owned a copy of the original launch version of DmC but found it dreary and sold it less than a quarter of the way into the game, before grabbing its Definitive Edition during a Christmas sale on really a glorified whim- sort of a “Let’s see how bad it can really get” vibe, but then I put it down and didn’t come back to it for three months because other games and other projects took prominence. But about a week ago I was bored and decided to knock the entire game out in one day due to a lack of anything better to do, and after a few days to mull on it, I decided to write an essay about DmC and how this oddball entry into an otherwise mostly beloved franchise has aged.

1) Pre-development

Devil May Cry 4 was a success for Capcom, selling about two million units in its first month of release when Capcom were hoping for 1.8 million by the end of the fiscal year. On a critical level too it walked away satisfied, with Metacritic rating both the PS3 and 360 releases of the game with 84/100, praising the fluid gameplay and intricate combat system, but knocking points off for a very repetitive campaign which saw Dante literally backtracking through Nero’s stages. But Capcom were hoping for more from DMC4. This was the debut of the franchise on not just the Seventh Generation of Consoles, but the franchise’s Microsoft debut, and the hopes were that DMC4 would be a smash success potentially on par with the numbers Western games like Call of Duty 4 or Halo 3 had made the year prior. 2.1 million was still good, but Capcom wanted more.

The mid-2000s marked a turn in Japanese game development, with the increased costs of HD modelling and Japan’s home market becoming more apathetic about buying games (some Japanese games reported only 10% of their total sales from Japan itself), while the West began booming. With the 7th Generation, gaming went mainstream for many people in the West- as an example of this, I’m sure we all know at least one person who went to college after 2007 and can share stories of nights spent playing Halo over XBox Live. The mass success of the God of War franchise in the West also told Capcom that this gold mine of a market was ready and willing to enjoy some classic hack and slash action gaming.

The decrease in local sales gave Capcom the idea that they needed to begin outsourcing their properties to the West so they could appeal to a larger market, which led to such projects as Lost Planet, Dead Rising and Bionic Commando being made by Western studios. This was largely the brainchild of Keiji Inafune, nowadays known for the utter disaster of the Mighty Number 9 Kickstarter game. Inafune had a mindset of “doing the same thing is going to get us the same results (if we’re lucky). Let’s try something from a different perspective.” Unfortunately for Inafune, his different perspective failed to set the world on fire, with only Dead Rising proving to be a success and making it into the 8th console generation when handled by Capcom’s new Vancouver team, and even that series has suffered some fatal blows due to the poor launch of Dead Rising 4. 

Even though Inafune cut ties with Capcom in 2010 (a month after DmC was announced), his idea of Westernizing several dormant properties was still in effect and Devil May Cry became one of the franchises that was outsourced. British company Ninja Theory, known for their games Heavenly Sword and Enslaved Odyssey to the West, were the company Capcom gave a phone call to. While known nowadays more for Hellblade, back in 2010 Ninja Theory were known for two very simply action games that relied more on their stories and usage of motion capture and facial captures to fill in the gaps. What didn’t help was that in the interim period between 4 and the reboot, DMC1 director Hideki Kamiya had since formed Platinum Studios and proven themselves to the West with Bayonetta, a game hailed by many as a spiritual successor to the DMC franchise. 

Capcom had faith in Ninja Theory to translate DMC’s vision to the west, and as such at TGS 2010, the first trailer for DmC Devil May Cry was released and... well the rest is history.

The fanbase’s hackles were immediately raised and knives were out within seconds of the launch trailer dropping. A series that had become known for its over the top cutscenes and wry sense of cheesy humor had been Westernized into another gritty, bleak product. Dante went from the goofball who quoted Shakespeare to a gravelly voiced methhead who smoked. And for a series that prized itself on action and combos, that no proper gameplay was shown at the reveal was a worrying sign. The reveal trailer tainted the whole game right out of the gate; alongside Ninja Theory’s less than stellar track record with action games the fanbase was ready to hate this game on principle if it followed what had been done to Capcom’s other franchises that went on a foreign exchange trip.

Being fair to Ninja Theory though, several extenuating factors must be addressed. Among them is series director Hideaki Itsuno’s admission that he didn’t want to do Devil May Cry 5 yet after having worked on three straight games for the series out of concern that he would suffer from burnout. He wanted to go off and finally make a passion project he had been dreaming of for years in Dragon’s Dogma, which launched in 2012. Additionally, Ninja Theory did try and make a more faithful rendition of Dante, one who even kept the white hair and vibrantly red jacket, but these initial designs were shot down by Capcom, who told them to “go crazy.” In fact one of the people who rejected the designs that were close to classic Dante was Itsuno himself, who saw little point in Ninja Theory just copying Dante’s look if the whole point of the project was a new approach on Devil May Cry.

But the fanbase at the time didn’t know that Capcom were actively encouraging Ninja Theory to experiment, and what didn’t help was the quotes coming from the game’s director, Tameen Antoniades, which would prove to be a series of disasters that plagued DmC’s PR campaign. Tameen, put bluntly, wasn’t ready for the backlash to the game and its visual style and shot back at the fans. When asked by Venturebeat how he felt about the fan reaction to the TGS trailer, Tameen “took a drag of his cigarette and without blinking or pausing to exhale the smoke from his mouth, said: ‘I don’t care.’” People began to mockingly compare Tameen to Dante as seen in the trailer, which caused some fans to question if Tameen had used his own likeness as the basis for Dante. 

And unfortunately for Capcom’s PR team, he didn’t stop there, mocking Dante’s original design in a later interview when saying that what was and wasn’t cool had changed in the years since DMC1: “If Dante, dressed as he was, walked into any bar outside of Tokyo, he’d get laughed out.” 

I’d like to remind you that Tameen as director of the project likely signed off om some of these alternate concepts for Dante and keep that in mind whenever Tameen or a Ninja Theory staff member talk about A) what is and isn’t cool B) Original Dante’s character design.

The fanbase didn’t exactly make a good case for themselves after the game’s announcement though, with Ninja Theory reporting that they received death threats from some more hardcore fans. It still doesn’t make Tameen admitting he didn’t care if his game sold “a thousand or two million copies” look stellar, nor his derisive attitude towards the original series and its depiction of women, mocking Lady and Trish as “prostitutes with guns.” Ironically, despite being insistent that he’d made the game he wanted to play, Ninja Theory did dial back on methhead Dante, redesigning his model to be more beefy and replacing his voice actor, alongside redoing some scenes to make Dante crack more jokes. 

On a technical level, hype was low from the hardcore fans due to simplified combat and, more egregiously, the game being locked to 30FPS on launch unless bought on PC which offered an upcapped framerate. For those unaware, all prior Devil May Cry games had run at 60FPS, including DMC4 which had come out some years earlier on the same console. 60FPS was a requirement by many pro players due to how it made animations silky smooth, so DmC being capped to 30 was an immediate red flag. Suffice to say, the fandom was ready for DmC to be a disaster at launch and began prepping their funeral pyres.

2) Gameplay

Early reviews for DmC were quite positive, with the game earning a Metacritic rating about even with DMC4, but the fanbase were far less forgiving. The 30FPS framerate lock outside of the PC port (which was admittedly one of the more polished ports of 2013, as covered by the late and great John Bain) had tainted the well pre-release and then came back with a vengeance to haunt the console launch in 2013. Without a lock on system, movement felt sluggish compared to the other games, hurting the flow of combat.

Difficulty was a major criticism of the game from long-term fans, particularly pertaining to how the style rank system rewarded damage done over pulling off varied combos. Whereas in the older games the player was punished for repeating moves over and over, DmC’s style ranks were so easy to abuse that so long as the combo was never broken due to taking damage, achieving a SSS rank was child’s play. Aquila’s Tornado and Arbiter’s Trinity Smash were especially broken in this regard. 

Being fair to the game, it did introduce several mechanics that were later incorporated into DMC 5 in 2019- enemies get a subtitle during their first appearance (taken from Bayonetta), weapons getting a slight glint when the player pauses to let them know they can launch a pause combo attack (also taken from Bayonetta) and a dynamic soundtrack that racketed up the higher your style rank got, alongside the killing blow at the end of a fight getting a cinematic camera angle. These are all features that were genuine improvements over Devil May Cry 4, and while Bayonetta likely paved the way for most of these improvements, DmC still served as a test-bed to experiment on their integration with Devil May Cry as a whole.

The level design was also a huge step up from the earlier games. Dante’s whip functions made platforming far more varied that it had been in prior games, and these new traversal mechanics allowed for the level designers to stretch their legs. DmC arguably has, even in light of 5, some of the best platforming in the entire franchise, and a gorgeous color palette in some areas when Dante is in Limbo. Gothic European cities were cited as a huge influence by the team, Barcelona in particular, and it shows whenever Dante is outside as he gets dragged into Limbo. The idea of the city itself being a weapon of Mundus that tries to kill Dante is inspired, with obvious homages to Inception, and allows for the designers to make environments that at the drop of a hat can try to kill Dante. The team did their best to bring their unique aesthetic mixture of grunge and color to life, and even goes through a full color script. The downside is that exploration is rarely allowed beyond side paths that lead to collectables, meaning the player is on rails for much of the game.

DmC’s largest gameplay addition is in Dante’s Devil Arms. As he progesses through the game, Dante absorbs angelic and demon weapons from the bosses, gaining Angel Weapons that serve as fast crowd control, and Demon Weapons that are single-target but heavily damaging. Both of these sets of weapons are accessed by holding a trigger button during combat, allowing Dante to fluidly switch between weapons as the situation calls for it. One of my personal favorite applications of this tactic was to use Rebellion’s opening two slices to lead into Arbiter’s Trinity Smash as it was easier for me to read the above-mentioned glint tell on Rebellion. Alongside Dante’s firearms, it gives the player eight different weapons to switch between in combat, allowing for some unique combo potential, albeit potential that isn’t as deep as the original games. Dante losing his styles from DMC3 and 4 alongside the unique moves from those styles like Royal Guarding and jump cancelling was a particularly heavy blow for the hardcore fans, to say nothing of the revulsion generated by the color-coded enemies who could only be hurt by specific weapons.

Another heavy blow for the fans was the handling of Dante’s Devil Trigger, which gives Dante his traditional color palette, slows time to a crawl and gave Dante an attack and speed boost, alongside automatically sending most enemies flying into the air upon activation. The air-boosted hurt the usage of Devil Trigger in the long run, as it reduced whatever encounter it was activated in a stomp for the player- even Dante’s basic combos could tear through enemy health with DT active. Devil Trigger in the original games was a mixture of emergency button and power boost, but here it just serves as an “I win” button on whatever enemy irks you today.

And yet for all that can be said of DmC at launch, it could have been worse. Despite being busy with Dragon’s Dogma, Itsuno still served as an executive producer of the reboot and often gave Ninja Theory advice on areas to improve the gameplay mechanically. One such story goes that Itsuno saw a design for an enemy with blades in its arms. Upon asking what purpose the blades served in combat and being told they had none, Itsuno ordered that the blades be removed. Capcom producer Motohide Eshiro later noted in a Famitsu interview that Ninja Theory had to be reigned in on several occasions in spite of the “go crazy” approach given to them in early design, in order to avoid the game receiving a rating that could potentially stonewall it being sold in physical stores in Japan.

Ultimately the gameplay failed to impress for DmC in 2013, which reflected poorly in its sales. Capcom initially hoped for DmC to break 2 million units like DMC4 had back in 2008, but then quietly lowered the projected sales to 1.2 million. Rumors circulate to this day that Capcom were so desperate to boost the game’s poor sales that when DmC was part of the PS+ membership offer in January 2014, Capcom counted PS+ downloads as part of the sales for the game. In a financial report for 2013, while not speaking of DmC by name, Capcom spoke of a "delayed response to the expanding digital contents market," "insufficient coordination between the marketing and the game development divisions in overseas markets," and a "decline in quality due to excessive outsourcing." Capcom would only report in June 2018, a full five and a half years post-launch, that DmC had met the original sale goals of 2.3 million units. But it wasn’t the gameplay that ultimately turned off the fans and prevented Capcom’s sales pitches from becoming reality. No, that matter fell to the story.

3) Story

DmC’s story isn’t so much a straw that breaks the camel’s back, as it is an anvil. Regardless of your opinions on the gameplay, the story is where DmC comes to a grinding, screeching halt and fails to capture any of the essence of what made Dante and characters from the original setting interesting or even cool. Before we dive into the narrative itself, we need to discuss what started the controversy back in 2010 at TGS, and that’s Dante.

Dante is simply not likable in the reboot. While the original Dante was a goofball and a bit of a jackass, he always backed up his actions with flashy deeds and was ultimately a good-hearted man. In this setting, Ninja Theory try so hard to make Dante cool and badass that it loops around and makes him look like a petulant child’s version of what’s cool- a hard-drinking loner who has threesomes with strippers in his trailer by the amusement park. Dante in DMC4 threw Shakespeare quotes out at Agnus, while Dante in DmC screams “Fuck you!” at demons and writes profanity on clipboards. Nothing about Dante carries that effortless swagger that the original had. His smug, IDGAF attitude tries to make him cool and more fitting for the gritty tone but it’s so different from the original Dante that the subsequent tonal clash makes Dante a much more poorly written character. Again, this is something that must be put at Capcom’s feet and not Ninja Theory, as they were the ones telling the developers to westernize Dante, but the end product stills fails to match up with what came before. 

While Dante does have an arc over the game that sees him develop concern for the people close to him and humanity as a whole, the characterization and framing regularly undermines his arc. Dante is written as the archetype of “Jerk with a heart of gold,” but as a direct violation of a core rule of this character- that they must be fun to view and see their antics as an audience member- Dante fails to meet this tenant and it makes his obnoxious, smug and asshole moments taint the character and make it difficult to care for his struggles. Rather than see Dante’s dark backstory that puts his behavior into context and makes you understand why he’s so sullen and bitter, the audience just sees Dante being a smug jackass, and one who takes himself too seriously to be fun like mainline Dante. The one time I buy that Dante genuinely cares for other people is at the Order hideout raid when he stays in order to guide Kat through being arrested, and stays with her as the SWAT officers shoot her and beat her unconscious. His facial expression sells his anguish at seeing Kat be brutalized like this and it contains the best acting from Tim Phillips.

Ironically, despite how hated Methhead Dante was, I do have to wonder what the game would have been like had the developers stuck to their guns and committed to their original idea for the character- someone with psychosis who has no clue if he’s actually seeing and killing demons or if he’s just a mass murdering lunatic. It might have been even worse or it could have made the game work. It’s probably for the best we don’t know what Methhead Dante would have been like, but part of me can’t help but wonder.

It’s important to understand all these problems with Dante, since as the protagonist, the story partly rests on his shoulders. While older Dante had the charisma in most of his appearances to be able to sell the weight of a story moment when he stopped fooling around, reboot Dante’s heavy angst focus means that feat is harder for him to accomplish, and it doesn’t help that his supporting cast are less than ideal.

I mentioned earlier Tameen’s “prostitutes with guns” remark aimed at the DMC female cast, and I think it’s amazing how little self-awareness he must have had to say that when his own story’s approach to female characters is frankly insulting. DmC has one of the most sexist stories I’ve yet seen in any media, and it’s galling when compared to the mainline entries, DMC3 in particular. Kat, Eva and Lillith are all plot devices, Eva being long-dead and existing just to give Dante motivation to kill Mundus, Lillith being the stereotypical sexy villainess who gets reduced to her womb, while Kat is basically the subject of a snuff film with how she gets brutalized by the plot and the camera makes sure you see all of her injuries in extensive detail. And this all goes without saying how the second act revolves around the two female characters in the narrative being traded like Pokemon cards only for Vergil to perform the now-infamous sniper rifle abortion. 

It doesn’t matter what joke you’re making in your head right now, it’s still not half as tasteless as this actual scene

Speaking of Vergil, his depiction in DmC is genuinely upsetting and while I’ve seen people argue for Dante’s arc in the reboot, Vergil is almost universally despised and seen as a black mark on the prime version of Vergil. Putting aside the sniper rifle abortion, Vergil is just not written well and he never gives the impression of being powerful. Vergil’s opening scene has him say point-blank to Dante “I’m powerless to stop you,” words that should never flow out of the mouth of anyone claiming to be Vergil.  It doesn’t get much better as throughout the game, Vergil hands all the major physical parts of the plan against Mundus to Dante to preserve the secret of Vergil’s Nephilim heritage. The problem with this is that Vergil subsequently never gets to show his stuff in a fight until the very end of the game when he fights Dante and suddenly has a lot of his moveset from the old series transplanted. It makes moments like Vergil hiding behind a barrier at the hands of one demon that Dante has to kill undermine his character and make him look like a coward, to say nothing of his awkward heel-turn which just shows up for the sake of having a final boss. Compared to the depiction of Dante and Vergil’s rivalry in Devil May Cry 3, which was amazing on a thematic and character level, DmC falls flat on its own shoelaces. And the character Vergil gains through his DLC is just further unpleasantness as he rips off Bleach and the Hollow Ichigo fight wholesale. Vergil is just a mistake in this game, and alongside Dante is the cardinal sin in its writing. 

Mundus represents a lot of the larger problems with DmC’s story, in particular its on-the-nose message and symbolism. The game is so focused on making sure you get the point that “Hey, we’ve seen this niche film called They Live and it’s the sickest shit also FUCK THE MAN, CAPITALISM SUCKS, WAKE UP SHEEPLE,” that Mundus doesn’t really get to be a proper villain. He’s just this stereotypical slimy corporation guy, with one slight hint to his character in that he’s obsessed with continuing his lineage. The problem is that his lack of writing makes him boring and one-note, a cliche rule-the-world dictator that’s been done to death. He’s not even a major threat in gameplay, his boss fight just being a giant blob monster. It’s visually drab and has the most boring boss fight in the game. Mundus may not have had much personality or screentime in the original DMC1, but he made up for it with a powerful presence that made him feel dangerous. This Mundus is just a bald guy in a suit. The only fear he puts in me is the fear that I’ll drop my controller when I fall asleep.

DmC’s story is a mess. While structurally well-put together, its dialogue is often weak and cringeworthy, most of the villains have no real staying power beyond Barbas, Vergil is a waste of the character name, Kat and Lillith are plot devices and Dante is just a jackass. It’s a cast of unlikable people being unlikable jerks to each other and when the story it’s making me sick with how repulsive it can be with its tone deaf themes and sexism, it’s putting me to sleep with how fucking dull it is. 

4) Definitive Edition

The post launch years of DmC weren’t kind to Ninja Theory or Capcom. Capcom retracted their Western development philosophy after a string of flops resulted from it, while Ninja Theory became the whipping boy of the action community for several years post-launch, which led to the now infamous GDC presentation where Dante was photoshopped onto scenes from Brokeback Mountain by someone who had no hand in designing Dante’s old costumes:

Revenge, evidently, is a dish best served cold

What didn’t help them was that 2013 also saw the launch of Metal Gear Rising Revengeance, Platinum’s take on the Metal Gear franchise that quickly gained the adoration of the action fanbase while leaving DmC in the dust. According to Dante’s voice actor Reuben Landgon, Itsuno apparently was extremely close to retiring after DmC, and Capcom had to offer him the chance to finally make DMC5 before he decided to not quit (though this story has been disputed by Capcom USA producer Matt Walker). 

Capcom, like many publishers, has taken Sony and Microsoft both refusing to have backwards compatibility in the PS4 and Xbox One as an excuse to re-release many of their old titles on the new console platforms, often slapping a new coat of paint onto the game and potentially adding achievement/trophy support and calling it a day. In the case of DmC though, the team went above and beyond in solving many of the mechanical problems that players had complained about in the following two years.

Released in March 2015, DmC Definitive Edition was handled more by Japanese side of the Capcom team, and they set to work on making DmC more mechanically in-line in with the mainline entries, as covered by this extensive changelog. 60FPS was an advertised feature on the box, Dante got multiple costumes that let players play with white hair, the style rank system was retooled to punish repetition more harshly and a slew of balance changes were made to the core game- some even based on PC mods players had made of DmC’s original PC port like a lock on function, though sadly the adventures of Donté, el exterminador de demonios didn’t serve such a function. 

Rest in piece, you brave soul.

The Definitive Edition goes leaps and bounds in solving the pressing issues of DmC. With the combat balanced and framerate bumped up, the combat had a much better flow to it. In particular the addition of a new mode, Must Style, where Dante can only damage enemies when he has an S Rank or higher, received a warm reception from the fans to the point where it was hoped that DMC5 would adopt it. With the DE upgrades, DmC goes from a flawed game with potential to being one of the best attempts by the West to emulate Devil May Cry’s frantic, stylish mode of gameplay while adding variety to how the combat and level design was handled. But even two years on, the damage had been done; while Definitive Edition was well-received by hardcore fans, it still failed to set the world on fire sales wise, and in fact was outsold by DMC4′s own HD remake that launched that year, even though the Special Edition was a digital only purchase outside of Japan. In fact, DMC4SE’s sales were so strong Capcom noted them as being behind the company having a good financial quarter during 2015, which many saw as an ironic nail in the coffin for any hopes for the DmC universe getting continuation.  

There was no saving the story unfortunately, barring removing Vergil’s laughably pathetic fedora and one especially cringeworthy line from Lillith (”The world is at last your bitch, as am I. Nothing left, but to grab it by the hair, bend it over and-”), which means that much of the issues that DmC’s story presented are still haunting the overall product. One new scene added in the game has Dante calling out Vergil for shooting Lillith and causing countless deaths from Mundus’s rampage, but the scene was itself criticized for missing the point in the fan anger to Vergil’s .50 caliber coat hanger. And the further away the player and time gets from DmC’s outdated-at-launch messages and symbolism, the more the script just fails to entertain or educate, leaving just apathy and the ability to mock it.

5) Conclusion- Left in Limbo

DmC Devil May Cry is... alright. It’s not the worst game I’ve ever played and there’s far too many good things here for me to even call it a boring game. The level design and color palette has real moments of beauty, the combat system is a decent showing from Ninja Theory with Capcom supervision and the Definitive Edition showed that the teams from both cultures acknowledged the feedback and made a more mechanically satisfying game to play. DmC is one of the best Western attempts at emulating the over-the-top action of Japanese games alongside Darksiders 2 and does deserve credit for being a satisfying experience to play.

Where it falls apart is whenever control is taken from the player. This story is just terrible and wrought with bad choices that haunt the entire experience and taint the game by association. DmC’s cutscenes are almost slimy in how detestable they are, and it is odd that they inspired such loathing from me on my first run while I was left feeling nothing towards the entire cast other than pity towards Vergil due to what had been done to him on a writing level. I must repeat that I have never played a game as derogatory in its depiction of women as DmC and I pray I never will. 

DmC is a flawed experience, perhaps one that you should experience yourself so you can formulate your own opinion on the matter. I wouldn’t recommend it for full-price but if you see it on sale for ten bucks, you can do worse- if nothing else, get some friends over and laugh at the story to get past the cutscenes and onto the mostly-decent gameplay. But you can also do a lot better, being honest. Ultimately DmC is this weird relic of Capcom’s attempts to branch out into the West, and one that ultimately just.. happened with no real lasting impact. Itsuno went on to make DMC5, Ninja Theory and Tameen redeemed themselves in the eyes of many with Hellblade and then got bought by Microsoft, while Capcom finally started to turn around and starting with the 8th console generation, made a concentrated effort to return to the “Capgod” reputation that they had before the 7th gen. Everyone came out of this story with a happy ending and got what they wanted, but that leaves DmC as this odd relic of a weird time in gaming, albeit one that certainly made... memorable experiences.

Thank you for reading.

I guess a million years just comes in at... about five or six.