A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.
Diane Arbus
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Why Dev Patel failing to jump out of a window is so cool
This era of movies tends to skirt the line of satirizing so much as to stand for nothing. The tradeoff of sincerity for meta humor is not in a ratio I recall voting for. I get wary every time a story possibly maybe makes fun of me for caring about it, and I've come to accept that I think of sincerity as a fragile thing. But fragile is not the same as meaningless.
Let's talk Monkey Man. Bobby/The Kid/Dev Patel is trying to get out of a building and leaps sideways into a window, ready to smash through it and land on the street. He clunks against it, he falls to the floor out of frame, the window remains fully unscathed, and the action music cuts out. A beat. Then he gets up, the chase keeps going, and the music kicks back in. In a lesser movie, this choice is saying, "Aren't action movies stupid? Anyways I guess here's an action movie." On the other side if nothing is ever changed, it's saying, "Aren't action movies perfect already? Anyways I guess here's more of the same." It's great when you can subvert expectations in a way that doesn't undermine everything else, so here's why this isn't undermining its premise and even enforces it.
First off, after coming back in, the music keeps playing and being a legitimately exciting beat underscoring the rest of the scene. The joke knows when it's over and gets out of the way. Second, this trope is a great target for this bit; windows are so much more reinforced than this genre ever credits. But then the magic is that the entire rest of the movie is consistently brutal. The window bit comes from a unified authorial voice that also earnestly digs into the action before and after it. A deliberate drawing attention to the difficult realities of action only works if the rest of your action does hit harder than the fare of movie you're invoking.
And Monkey Man delivers. Every henchman takes so many hits before going down, and the hits are bloodier, closer, and quieter than Hollywood action. And the last thing that makes it work is that it only happens the once. It brings up John Wick and rather explicitly claims this movie will be smarter, and it does the joke with the window to ask you to take the violence seriously. Every time a movie distances itself from its genre, it's making sincerity take so much more work every other minute. Lots of movies give up on it entirely. This movie chooses the work.
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What’s something that should be innocent that turns pervert Beel on?
Nsfw!
Kinda basic ik!! But watching you eat-
Especially stuff like cream puffs or éclairs it’s almost painful for Beel to watch but he just can’t pull his eyes away from your lips, the way your cheeks puff out a bit when you take an extra big bite and a bit of cream drips onto your lips. It takes all of Beel’s self control not to cream, heh- come in his pants.
Even watching you eat other stuff likel a banana, or suck on a popsicle, even a sucker- sucking yk-
Beel’s busy imaging how fuckin’ hot you'd look with his cock stuffed in your mouth instead. he really hopes you don’t notice the way he stares at you, and his cheeks bright red too-
I already mentioned popsicles, but it’s even worse for poor Beel if you’re like me and you love creamsicles!!! wide eyes following the way your lips move, the way you take it deeper ‘n deeper down your throat, the little bit of cream dripping down from the corner of your mouth and the way your tongue darts out to lick it away.
Beel is burning all of it into his memory- he has too for when he’s jerking off later, moaning your name and picturing you on your knees in front of him, looking him right in the eyes and licking his cum off your lips just like you did with the creamsicle earlier~
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Dr. Spencer Reid: Lily, I’m begging you. Will you please get out of the pool?
Lila Archer: Really, Spence, you should live a little.
Dr. Spencer Reid: ‘Live a little’? I’ve known you forty-eight hours, I feel like I’ve already aged ten years.
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qsmp has accidentally stumbled into a psychology experiment that would make the stanford prison experiment sob in fear. they’ve gotten a bunch of cc’s, and tens of thousands of viewers, to be deeply emotionally connected to pixel eggs. in doing so they’ve presented a problem:
how the fuck do you get outta this
the eggs were obviously never intended to be permanent (logging on every day to do tasks isn’t feasible to upkeep forever) and they were even given a vague limit of When Mama Dragon Comes Back (and then, of course, the “6 days til they die” thing). now you’ve made it so quackity (and his team) have a big ol dilemma, where two things are true: 1) they can’t keep the eggs forever since it’s not sustainable 2) you can’t take away the eggs without, oopsies, emotionally damaging your friends that you invited to have fun on your server.
turns out, when you give a group of humans all their own fully-realized individual who presents as a (weak, vulnerable) child that is in need of care from them, whatever instinct has kept us alive for generations goes “!!!!!” which is both really cool and compassionate, but also kinda concerning!
because, well: not sustainable! and if the eggs aren’t sustainable, what’s the alternative? killing them?? no! just look at jaiden’s reaction to bobby “losing” a life, even when it wasn’t his last one. or bad’s genuinely heart wrenching reaction to dapper losing a life. or how quiet and angry phil got after chayanne and tallulah had a “nightmare,” before it was resolved. that’s not acting. that’s real. what the hell will they do if the eggs actually die? from what i see, the cc’s are taking the “6 days til death” thing as something that’s avoidable. a threat that can be overcome. and for their sake, i hope it is.
ever played a dnd game where you actually feel insulted bc of smth someone’s pc did? yeah. that x20 because there’s SO much overlap between “streamer persona” and “literally just who they are”. and this level of roleplay character bleeding is cool, but i hope the eggs are handled carefully, or all those involved might end up actually hurt.
there’s also the whole added element of fans, many of whom only tune into the streams for egg content. the plot is very egg-centric. the roleplaying and characterization that the cc’s are doing is all centered around the eggs in one way or another. it’s been going on for a month, but it does not feel at all resolved, and plot-wise it would completely mess up so many plot threads happening if the eggs were all to go (charlie’s unresolved deal with lil j, quackity’s goal to bond with tallulah, the trial, etc etc) so if you take away the eggs, you risk messing up the whole vibe they’ve got going on, and facing backlash from fans who are also emotionally compromised by pixel eggs
we inherently want to protect the cute and vulnerable, and by god are these eggs cute and so very fragile. (then, there’s another layer of people’s own issues that they project onto the eggs. be it desire for paternity, some kind of maternal instinct, or, even in the matter of chayanne, using chayanne as a sort of way to cope with loss by making connections between chayanne and technoblade. which is beautiful and very sweet but would give chayanne dying some additional emotionally charged elements which i think should be avoided at all costs). there’s a reason that movies and other media generally do not kill named children characters—audiences really hate it. it’s taboo for good reason.
which leads us to
schrodinger’s egg: until sunday, they r both alive and dead. and this is both good and bad. god help us all
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