#she literally for all of time is trying to be what the legion is cs she’s like. diet legionary

[jamessunderlandgf]

🖊 + ⚔🩸faustina🩸⚔

FAUSTINA was gifted her name by his holiness escribar. she was an orphan and didn’t have one, so he gave her the name faustina, which means “fortunate”— which. is ironic. because she certainly is not fortunate. he thought so as a sick joke, of course.

how fortunate for her to have been found and given purpose, praise the miracle, etc etc but she is NOT living laughing or loving cs she’s in a constant state of having to prove herself and not once has it worked in her favor. the single time that it does is when she’s DYING.

[rock-and-compass]

7.02 thoughts

Okay. Here we go. I’ve slept on this but it was written while I watched the episode.

Under the cut because of negativity

The suitably vague “Years Ago” – I don’t think we’re ever going to get an explanation as to why everyone’s ageing is funky and exactly how long has passed since Henry left town…

A bit of friendly sword-play turns into sulky teen pretty darn quickly – Henry doesn’t seem nearly old enough or mature enough to be leaving home… although I guess there is nothing like leaving home to make you grow up quickly. And boy does he grow up quickly!

“This isn’t an ending Emma, there’s more to come.” …You keep trying to tell us that A&E…

Hook and Emma are clearly planning on expanding the family and, I guess, not finding it so simple…. I think this is supposed to reinforce the “Emma is too pregnant to help” discourse that runs under the episode.

Good god, you just happen to have that magic message-in-a-bottle bottle lying around and just happen to mention it now. How many times would that little piece of plot convenience have come in handy?  dark swan; missing hook; wish world; baby Gideon . . . every other freaking time that a character has been missing, lost or trapped. The thing with fantasy is that it still needs rules – to make anything conveniently possible with a new magical item that is then never seen again undercuts the narrative and makes the story trite. If you want people to be summoned to other realms then establish a method via your story, not just produce yet another artefact that can miraculously do what you need done. One of the core tenants of this show was that travel between realms was hard – but they’ve broken that rule so many times while still pretending that it holds true that it has become ridiculous.

Another realm … more “years later” yep. Continue with the vague. And Henry’s “in love” already to the point where others are noticing. So no slow burn for Hella then.

Why would Henry say “Captain Hook” into the bottle? Surely is would be “Emma, Regina and Killian” as Henry has called him for, jeeze I don’t know the duration of the proverbial “years” that have apparently passed. But I guess this is why WishHook is suddenly also in this new realm…

And now we are suddenly in “Today” sheesh. The break-neck speed continues.

“Rogers” asking about Emma complete with CS theme has potential. Well Didn’t that turn out to be a big old tease?

“People should be given a second chance” Hello theme of the day.

Still don’t get why the step mother has so much control over Lucy. It’s annoying and doesn’t assist in building any interest in the Cinderella storyline.  The newcomers acting continues to feel contrived and pantomimic, particularly Lady Tremaine and Co.

Such clunky dialogue – “where’s my other mother?” not “where’s mum?” or even “where’s Emma?” Could they make it any more transparently obvious that this is an explanation session for those legions of new viewers that this spin-off has failed to pick up.  The writing really is subpar this season, even from Jane Espenson who I always thought was better than the rest.

Hmmmm – so Hook when covering for Emma’s whereabouts, lies to Henry, at Emma’s request, about “what really happened” so Henry doesn’t drop everything and go running back to Storybrooke but can “get on with his life”. I wonder when we will find out what this is . . . or is it meant to be the baby news. It’s very vague.  Still, nice to see Regina’s opinion that “Emma is wrong” get shut down so efficiently by Killian. If only people had done that more often in Storybrooke… One must suspect that Regina is not concerned with telling Henry the truth as much as she is desirous of using this information as a way of getting her son home…

What is with Weaver’s voice?

Who are these people???

Ugh. I really really hate that Wish World and everything associated with it – Wish Hook included! This is a massive stumbling block for me. I was on the fence before – if it had been Our Killian, I probably would have continued with the show. But not with this. I can’t go forward with a show when it has just become a mockery of itself. Killian and WishHook are NOT the same person. One is a bad joke taken too far. The other is a character that I genuinely love.  I can’t commit to WishHook even if he is magically made to resemble GenuineKillianJones. As WishHook himself says, with absolutely no logic to underpin his explanation, they may have had similar beginnings but life and experience took them in very different directions so nope, not the same person.

The biggest issue for me is that WishHook was created with a wish just a few “years earlier” in season 6 - he didn’t actually exist before this. HE DOESN’T HAVE THE HISTORY THAT THEY APPARENTLY WANT US TO BELIEVE HE HAS. HE LITERALLY DIDN’T EXIST BEFORE THE WISH WAS MADE. He is a theoretical construct created out of the malicious twisting of Emma’s once uttered wish that she was not the saviour. The Wish World was not factual. Emma would not have actually been that meek little princess if she had been raised by her parents – the WishWorld was an insulting, twisted fantasy that is now infecting the entire show and we are supposed to embrace that caricature, that glib joke of WishHook as our substitute Killian. Others might like it, but it’s not for me.

It’s like, in life, we are all products of our choices…. Let’s say you had a choice between two paths – Path A and Path B - you have to choose one and there is no going back. You pick choice A and follow that road until the next set of choices presents itself. Path A becomes your path and effects and influences the person you become.  All the possibilities from choice B cease to exist. That path is closed and all the potentials it offered become purely hypothetical. There is no alternate “you” walking down Path B. But this is what this stupid premise wants us to accept and the upcoming episode titled “The Garden of Forking Paths” would seem to confirm this. And it might make sense if there had been time travel involved but there wasn’t – it was a wish and a new wish at that.

And didn’t Regina discover that WishRobin was not “her” Robin - HE WAS NOT THE SAME PERSON and he ended up going back to the wish world where he belonged. So sorry, I can’t accept the Killian and WishHook are “the same person” as a justification for reinvesting in the show.  I was invested in Killian Jones, not a very poor wish-born imitation. Unfortunately, it smacks of the writers wanting their cake and to eat it too – they want Colin/Hook in the show but they also want to facilitate Emma’s exit and preserve CaptainSwan’s happy ending.  So okay, I’ll take the slice of CS cake and go away and eat it, but as a consequence, I’m good and full – I can live without the slice of WishHook.  

Colin is great as Killian but his “officer Rogers” is kinda bland and underwhelming. Sorry. I know I’m the minority on that one. Lol.

Ugh Rumple.

No. no one would pay $550 to see a kiddie ballet concert. And all this Hyperion Heights stuff is just a bit . . .  boring.

Gaaaaaaah how could a recently created wish version of Hook have a daughter????? Sorry I can’t buy any level of care for this silly plot contrivance. There is no logic at all.  And it all feels so emotionally manipulative – they tell us Emma and Hook are having a baby but we’re never going to see that one come to fruition so they fob us off with WishHook and his freaking WishDaughter trying to make mileage off the fact that mush of the audience would have loved to have seen Emma and Hook as parents.

Lol. Regina is such a loser. She can’t find a life outside her adult son. One might theorise that she isn’t truly happy living a ‘good’ life… And Henry continues his pattern of being the parent in this relationship when he suggests she stay in the new realm.  Yeah, another reason I exit at this stop. And she was added by CGI into the goodbye scene. Hilarious.

Oh Jaysus… the exposition in that final WishHook/Henry scene at the bar – we didn’t have time to show it all so we’ve got to tell it (and add in a dash of completely superfluous Roni in for good measure)

Final thoughts: The episode was underwhelming and not an appropriate tribute to Emma Swan.  I’m happy that Emma and Killian are happy in Storybrooke – though it would be nice to at least know the name of their baby. I’m glad they are free of Regina and Rumple and that the whole town gets to live in peace and far away from those two utterly horrible people. I wish the story was continuing in Storybrooke, not Hyperion Heights. With no Emma and no Killian in Hyperion Heights, it’s just not a place I’m interested in. But, can I just add that I was prepared to keep watching if it had been the real Killian in Storybrooke. Yep, I know that would have meant that Emma and Killian would be separated yet again, that the CS baby may not have been hatched . . . but you know what it would have given me?

Hope.

…Hope that one day there was a chance, ever so slim or remote, of seeing Emma Swan again. Rogers would have automatically bee an altogether more compelling character because he wouldn’t be an imposter – he would have been our Killian, with an opportunity to have a story outside Emma but also to keep her as an important part of the story, even in her absence. That would have got me back. As the story stands, with the ending we were given, I have literally no hope or expectation of ever seeing Emma and Killian ever again. I do feel the choice not to keep authentic-Killian in the story will cost them in the long run – I think it was a short-sighted narrative choice that allowed them to exit Emma with no fuss or consequence.  So yeah, for me, personally I would have preferred to have seen Killian and Emma as part of the curse (I would have made Emma an inanimate object ah la Beauty and the Beast or as a swan or a cat or whatever – They promised us that whoever cast this curse learnt from the previous one so what could have been a more important lesson that neutralising the saviour.) Yes the fandom would have been furious but they still would have had a reason to watch – I mean, those OQ fans are still begging for Sean to return… but they’ve exited Emma and Killian in a way that effectively silences the fandom.

I’ll accept the nice ending because it means that Emma and Killian get to live on elsewhere, but unfortunately, it also means I’m done with the show.  

[newstfionline]

For foreign reporters, hints of ‘House of Cards’ in ‘Trump Show’

Linda Feldmann, CS Monitor, July 14, 2017

WASHINGTON--Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller--all are players in the palace intrigue known as the Trump White House. And they’re all household names ... in China.

Chinese TV viewers can’t get enough of the “Trump Show,” and coverage of America in general, says Ching-Yi Chang, White House correspondent for Shanghai Media Group.

“They’re interested in everything--your entertainment, your politics, how your system functions,” Mr. Chang says. Chinese people “very much enjoy ‘House of Cards,’” he adds, by way of explanation.

But if any parallels between the Netflix drama and real life are a bit overdrawn--even in a week of stark revelations in the Trump-Russia saga--there’s no doubt that the Trump presidency has gripped the imagination of a global audience.

And as with their American counterparts, foreign correspondents who cover the White House call it the story of a lifetime--profound in its implications for their home countries, and a fascinating window into the experiment called American democracy.

The story isn’t just about a flamboyant businessman who improbably winds up in the White House, and sends a legion of investigative reporters into high gear, however. It’s also about the small towns and cultural diversity of a vast nation.

Like France’s Alexis de Tocqueville and Ilf and Petrov of the old Soviet Union, international observers have long found America an endlessly fascinating subject for study and exploration. When Akiyoshi Mitsuzawa, a reporter for the Japanese newspaper Seikyo Shimbun, came to the US recently on a two-week reporting trip, he spent only a day in Washington and more time in the middle of the country.

Probe more deeply, and members of the foreign press corps in Washington marvel at Americans’ abiding sense of patriotism as they salute the flag, sing the national anthem at ballgames, and thank military veterans for their service.

Branka Slavica, US correspondent for Croatian TV, says her countrymen are impressed that, after 241 years, America “still celebrates its birthday in such a beautiful way.” She went to the National Mall on July 4 to interview Americans who had come from all over the country to watch the parade and the fireworks.

“People were really, honestly excited about the Fourth of July,” says Ms. Slavica, who has been based in the US for 12 years. “They are every year. It doesn’t matter who is the president.”

Among the foreign correspondents based in Washington, many escape the capital when they can--out of their own curiosity and their bosses’ desire for coverage that captures the richness of America.

“We try to look at the world and America from a bit more of a helicopter perspective” than the beat reporters in Washington, says Jorgen Ullerup, US correspondent for the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. “We go to a lot of places where people are crazy about Trump.”

Mr. Ullerup and his wife just spent a week in Kentucky looking into the opioid epidemic. Ullerup has also spent time with a fundamentalist snake handler in Tennessee, and visited the Nevada ranch of the rebellious Cliven Bundy (who, Ullerup discovered, has Danish ancestry).

But Trump is like a magnet, says Ullerup. “I travel the country to do other stories, but somehow it always comes back to Trump.”

“Today I did a correspondent’s letter about staying at the Trump hotel in Las Vegas,” he explains. “I’ve done a whole lot of Russia stories. Yesterday I wrote about the GOP and health care... The other day I wrote about Spicer.”

Not that he much minds. President Obama had gotten kind of boring. When Ullerup first arrived seven years ago--long before a President Trump was on anyone’s radar--he was struck by how divided America was. In Europe, Mr. Obama was seen as a superstar, but here, Ullerup found “everybody was blocking him.”

“In Europe, people are a little bit surprised that there’s so much negativity about Obama, because it looked like he had gotten America out of the economic crisis much faster than Europe,” Ullerup says.

“What we didn’t focus on was that people had felt forgotten, that their wages didn’t rise,” he says. “People were talking about the unemployment rate going down, but paying less attention to the people who were leaving the labor market.”

Today, he says, America seems more divided than ever. Trump’s campaign talk of NATO as “obsolete” only added to Danish (and European) anxiety about US dedication to the alliance. Ullerup speaks of a recent trip to Virginia Beach for Warrior Week, in which 35 Danish veterans from the Afghan and Iraq wars participated.

“When they came into a restaurant, people would clap or say, ‘Thank you for your service,’” he says. “That never happens in Denmark.”

Ullerup rarely makes it to the White House briefing room. But for other foreign correspondents, being on scene is where it’s at.

“In the first few months, it was a bit chaotic,” especially compared with the orderly and opaque Obama White House, says Philip Crowther, White House correspondent for France 24 TV since 2011.

Mr. Crowther says he’ll never forget the first full day of Trump’s presidency, when Mr. Spicer came out and “literally shouted at us” about the crowd size at the inauguration.

“The podium was way too big for him,” Crowther says. “The next day, I saw them wheeling it out of the West Wing, and replacing it with one that would suit him better.”

During the campaign, foreign reporters were shut out of Trump campaign events, and they feared their White House press passes would be deactivated after Trump took office. That didn’t happen.

Crowther just finished a year as president of the White House Foreign Press Group, a group of about two dozen foreign correspondents from all over the world committed to maintaining a daily presence in the White House.

“You basically have to remind the White House that you’re there,” says Crowther, a native of Luxembourg with British and German citizenship.

Today, foreign reporters get called on at briefings, as they did under Obama. Though with only one seat in the briefing room reserved for foreign press, most are left standing cheek-by-jowl in the cramped space. But they’ll take what they can get.

German radio correspondent Sabrina Fritz is packing up to leave after six years in Washington. And like her foreign colleagues, she is struck by the evolution she has witnessed.

When she first arrived in the US, Ms. Fritz says, the country seemed “very open to everything”--gay marriage, people of other religions, fighting climate change, more vegetables at schools.

“I liked this spirit--all those very, let’s say, European values,” she says. “You have to pay here for your plastic bags, and I thought, wow, a lot of things are changing.”

Over time, Fritz saw that nothing is as simple as it seems. She has traveled the country, talking to workers involved in fracking in North Dakota and cowboys in Wyoming. Like many reporters, she read “Hillbilly Elegy,” the J.D. Vance memoir that offers a window into the lives of the white underclass.

Fritz also made multiple trips to Detroit, and saw a once-great city begin to revive. For her, Detroit’s nascent comeback reflects a glass-half-full attitude that is quintessentially American. “You are a nation of survivors,” she says.

Still, she worries about the future of US-European trade, and about Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord. “There’s a danger that the US will fall behind, and become more isolated.”

Is America still a beacon of democracy, as it likes to see itself? TV reporter Chang smiles and quotes “House of Cards” character Frank Underwood: “Democracy is so overrated.”

Chang grew up in Taiwan, “a very vibrant democracy,” he says. “But there are always drawbacks to democracy.”

Sometimes “the people” make the wrong decision, he says, pointing to UK citizens’ decision to leave the European Union. In Washington, expansion of the metro system has been chugging along slowly for years. In China, a project like that would be finished in six months, he says.

Others point to the transparency of the American system as admirable. Slavica of Croatia marvels at the televised open hearing last month of James Comey, the fired FBI director.

“I also love confirmation hearings,” she says. “Whoever the president chooses has to go through a public hearing. That’s a nice test.”