#somehow the vision was both vivid and unhelpful

[hollywoodsargeant]

finally finished the lol fic i started a thousand million years ago… Yes. liam vs oscar returns but this time logan is more cunty than slutty idk i never know what to write here. it’s porn

[rubykgrant]

I’ve been re-watching A Wrinkle In Time, and there is this one part of the movie that got changed from the book (and I know, books-to-movies is a whole can of worms), and it isn’t that I just don’t like the change... it is sort of weird that it was changed at all

(putting this under the cut for mentions of abuse. also, this is totally just the thoughts in my head, not a serious judgement on what is right or wrong with the movie)

If you haven’t seen the movie OR read the book (please do, one or the other, if you have the time); A Wrinkle in Time is about 3 children who go on a journey through time and space, traveling to other planets and not only learning about the science that makes all this possible, but also deep lessons about emotions. Two children are siblings; older sister Meg and her little brother Charles Wallace. One reason for the journey is to rescue their father, who has worked out a way to travel long distances in short amounts of time, but has become trapped on a planet controlled by an evil entity. The other is a boy Meg’s age named Calvin. The children also have companions, 3 characters who go by Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which. They aren’t human, and sometimes they don’t have physical forms at all, and perhaps the best way to describe them is living embodiment of stars or guardian angels. The children themselves are very important because they each are capable of different ways of thinking, and even qualities that they feel are unhelpful at home make them unique on their journey

OK, some SPOILERS now, in regards to a change the movie made from the book...

Movie- Calvin is a good-looking, athletic, and generally popular boy at school who gets good grades and seems to fit in easily. Meg has trouble at school, and doesn’t understand why a boy like him even wants to spend time with her. Calvin remarks he is pressured to stand-out and go above and beyond what he’s capable of. In some scenes of the movie, we see that his father constantly yells at him when he’s home, insisting that he needs to get perfect grades and be the perfect son. Calvin’s father bullies his son rather than motivate him, and as no other family is mentioned or seen, it could be that Calvin’s mother has died (or left his father) and Calvin is an only child, thus the only one for his father to focus on

Book-Calvin is again is a good-looking, athletic, and generally popular boy at school who gets good grades and seems to fit in easily. Meg has trouble at school, and doesn’t understand why a boy like him even wants to spend time with her. This much is the same. However, Calvin mentions that he is one of 11 children. He often is forgotten at home, and even says nobody there really cares about him. At one point, a vision shows Calvin’s mother in her home, where she picks up a wooden spoon to smack one of her children with. Calvin also tells Meg (and the rest of her family) that at school he has to hold himself back. If he were to truly be himself, he might be so exceptional he’d be considered strange by adults and other kids

This was an odd change to me. This is nothing against the narrative of a parent pushing a kid too far to perform, because yeah; that happens in real life, and it is terrible. Stories like that definitely need to be told so other people can understand situations like that, and so hopefully some people might notice patterns like that in their own lives and see how harmful it is (not too many people will watch a movie and have a sudden change in personality, but I’ve actually known a few who watch a movie/read a book and the message hits them really hard).

However, stories about other forms of abuse are important as well. I personally think that it is especially important to see one with a kid who seems like what many adults would call “perfect”. Plays sports, gets along with people, fits in, gets good grades. Nobody would think a kid like that has any problems. Obviously, that isn’t true. Anybody can come from an abusive home. Just because you see a child that looks happy doesn’t mean they are never sad. There is also something to be said of adults who ignore abuse because “Well, my parents hit me, and I turned out great”

The 2 main reasons this change bugs me is... well, for one; I don’t get it. One type of abuse isn’t exactly more important than another (there might be an argument for certain situations and how extreme actions were, but in general; verbal/mental/emotional/and physical abuse is BAD). Calvin being pushed and yelled at is not a better story than Calvin being neglected and hit. If it were reversed, and the movie changed the story the other way around, I’d still say it isn’t needed to amp-up Calvin’s abuse from verbal to physical, because BOTH ARE BAD. This change doesn’t really make sense to me. There might be something to the idea that “well, one might have been to harsh to show in a kid’s movie”, and in that case we could have not had a scene where a child is struck (but still implied somehow). The movie already has several scary action scenes and violence, and I think one of the important points of the story is creating similarities between extreme problems and mundane problems (a planet where everybody is forced to act and think identically thus robbing them from any real identity, and how Meg feels at school where she is looked-down on for not being “perfect”)

The other reason I don’t like this change is purely personal; I related to book-Calvin in this regard. He also mentions that even though his family doesn’t care about him much or even hurts him, he still loves them. Both of my parents hit me. I’d stand up to them often (which they considered to just be bratty back-talking), resulting in me getting yelled at or hit again. I still loved them. I won’t say that being hit for the majority of my life didn’t create any negative behavior in me (because hey, trauma can mess you up as a person), but one thing that never happened was me becoming submissive. My parents would insist that hitting me was “the only thing that worked”, yet they had to keep doing it. The results sure didn’t add up. I also have a vivid, and especially upsetting, memory of my last few years of high school. My parents were fighting, they were both taking it out on me, and I could not even be bothered to think about school work. One teacher wanted to know why I hadn’t kept track of my grades, and noticed I was failing, and asked for make-up work. I didn’t really tell my teachers much about my home life, because I was very aware of the fact that if my parents ever got arrested, I’d get placed in some other house somewhere. I liked my home. This time I was about 18, so I actually tried to be honest and explain how upset I was. The teacher told me “I’ve seen you laughing in the hall with your friends at lunch. You don’t have any problems”. I told a lot of lies as a little kid, usually because of a self-esteem problem or because I didn’t trust people. Now here I was, pretty much an adult, being brutally honest, and being disregarded. Not just that, disrespected

I know, TMI, but that is why this is just my personal reason. I probably had the most in common with Meg in the book (feeling like you aren’t good at anything, not getting along with other kids at school, having absolutely no filter when it comes to crying), but even when I first read A Wrinkle in Time as a child, I saw the relevance in Calvin’s character. I’ll also say, just from a story point of view, we don’t see characters with his life too often in recent movies. Or, if we do, it is the back-story of a villain. All in all, this isn’t a change that alters the main theme of the story, so it might not matter too much, but it just kinda bothered me

[traditional-with-a-twist]

Socratic Method

Day 5 - College AU

After two days of research and compilation, Izzy was finally composing the email containing his most relevant results, when his phone went off. He sighed when he saw the caller ID. Sorry, Matt, you’ll have to wait a little longer… “Hello, Mother, do you need something?” She knew he was working tonight, so it had to be urgent...

**********

Well, he wasn’t wrong.

“But I don’t know anything about Russian literature, Mother!”

“Oh, Izzy, you’re so smart; I know you’ll think of something brilliant. Please do this for your mother? I couldn’t find anyone else on such short notice. I just hate to cancel class. My poor students will be so disappointed. And I simply must be there for my dear friend. We’ve known each other since we were children, and this is her only daughter…”

It wasn’t as if he could say no when she asked like that. A two hour seminar on War and Peace was hardly a strain on his resources for his real studies, after all, and Matt had almost cut him out of the project when he’d suggested getting help, so his mother had no idea about the extra demands on his time. It was inconvenient, but he’d manage somehow.

Izzy almost didn’t bother with research. After all, it was halfway through the semester; surely even undergraduates would have learned enough about the Russian literature they were reading by now that there would be no point in trying to catch up in less than twenty-four hours. He would just have to make his mother’s apologies and explain that he was merely there to moderate the seminar’s discussion and record it for his mother, so the pace of the course would not slacken too much by her unexpected absence this week. He didn’t need to participate and he would surely only embarrass himself if he tried.

This decision carried him through the completion of his email and a few rabbit trails before a thought struck him. Why hadn’t he seen it before? This was an opportunity! Izzy scrambled to find the relevant files on his computer and opened them all at once. After he’d started the print queue, he navigated to his favorite journal repository to do a little last minute investigating on Tolstoy. All of a sudden, he couldn’t wait to oversee his mother’s seminar.

***************

The bemusement on the undergrads’ faces when he rushed into the room, barely on time, didn’t faze Izzy at first. He was too busy stacking his printed notes as they’d been somewhat jumbled in his bag on the way over. This topic would likely be a bit divergent from whatever discussion his mother had been leading, but her students would surely appreciate the expansion of their knowledge base. He opened his laptop and began to read his prepared introduction.

“….and so, I will be overseeing today’s dialogues, taking notes on your contributions and reporting them back. Therefore, please report your last names before any statements.” An audible creak rustled through the students’ chairs. Izzy paused, tilting his head, but he forged on when no further response was forthcoming. “I have prepared a series of questions concerning the material to help direct the conversation. To begin: War and Peace is somewhat unusual among fiction for the time in its free intermixing of both imagined characters and actual historic personages. It raises the question of whether such a writing style allows the reader a more vivid view of the historical world the author portrays.” Izzy looked at the front row expectantly, fingers poised over his keyboard to note which students contributed the most.

The silence stretched for one minute, and then two. Izzy frowned and looked at his notes, revising the questions in his head. “To put it another way, every book is a window into a certain reality as envisioned by the author. Does a greater correspondence with the mutually experienced reality of history allow readers to experience fictional realities more fully?” He could see the students in the back exchanging glances. Perhaps this group would be unhelpful after all.

Finally, a girl in the back raised her hand. “Ummm, Ikusawa. It may have mattered to Tolstoy’s contemporaries, but I don’t think all that really makes a difference these days.”

The hand of the boy next to her shot up. “Shibayama. I agree! There’s no difference between made-up people and dead people to those of us who are reading this stuff today.”

“Hmmm… Any other thoughts?” Izzy prompted the class. To his regret, his question only prompted a cascade of students falling over themselves to jump on the bandwagon. He cast his eyes upward to the clock on the opposite side of the room. He only had himself to blame for raising his hopes….

Another hand waved in his peripheral vision. He nodded at the exchange student, who’d been outed by her exceptionally pale blond hair and foreign features. “Pasternak! I have a question… This class, we are reading a translation of Voyná i mir. So it is not only the vision of Tolstoy we read but the translator, also?”

Izzy’s fingers froze on his keyboard. The translator… Of course! Any changes to the text could have an impact on the result… The transformation wrought by a translation would hardly be negligent. There had been foreign books among the possible suspects. He couldn’t wait to share this breakthrough with Matt. His mouth finally caught up with his racing thoughts.

“That’s a fascinating question, ummm...” He fixed his gaze on the girl.

“I am Sonya Pasternak,” she announced, giving him a bright smile. She pointed back at him. “And you are the professor’s son, Koushiro Izum—oops.” She covered her mouth with one hand, blushing.

“Ah, yes, Sonya.” For some reason, his mouth was suddenly dry. “Th-thank you for your question. I would agree that one should certainly take the translation into account when considering the text. Could you, uh, perhaps say more on the subject?”

She tilted her head, her smile faltering. “I do not know how to explain the difference but it is different what I read in Russian. The pictures of the…..you say… world?” She gestured, but Izzy could not begin to guess what she was miming. Still, even what little she said confirmed that pursuing this avenue of inquiry could be fruitful.

“Incredible…” he breathed. Murmurs from the other students broke into his thoughts. “Ah, yes! Unless anyone had anything else to contribute to this particular subject, we can move to the next question—” The sighs of relief left no question of the students’ feelings on that and killed the last of Izzy’s aspirations for getting any more insights here.

Still….

***********

“Thank you so much, Izzy. You’re a wonderful son, you know.” He couldn’t help but smile at his mother’s voice. “You’ve helped me so much. I’ll certainly be back in time for next week’s meeting, so you won’t have to take the time again. I do hope that it wasn’t too much trouble for you.”

“Oh, no, of course not, Mother.” Izzy adjusted his headset so she could hear him better, suddenly nervous. “I would greatly appreciate if you could do me a favor in return.”

“Oh, Izzy, you know I would be happy to. What is it?”

“Well, one of your students--” He paused to clear his throat. “I was particularly intrigued by her comments during the discussion, and I was hoping that you might help me arrange a time to converse—”

“Izzy!” Why did she sound so delighted all of a sudden? “If I had guessed…Tell you what, sweetheart, as soon as I get back, I’ll offer to host a dinner for the seminar students. You’ll have plenty of time to talk to her then!”

“Well, that sounds agreeable.” He didn’t know why he felt that this conversation had derailed when his mother was only acquiescing to his request.

“I would never want to rush you in these things, Izzy, but I’m so very happy! You’ll have to tell me who it is right away! What’s her name?”

“It’s Sonya Pasternak.” He was definitely missing something here. Hadn’t she said she would just invite the whole seminar? Perhaps she wanted to account for logistics. It would all be rather pointless if that particular student had a scheduling conflict.

“What a good choice! She’s lovely, Izzy. I’m sure you two will hit it off.”

“….What?”

“Sorry, darling, I had better go now! My friend is calling me for something. I’ll call again soon! And you can tell me everything when I get home!”

Izzy stared blankly at his computer screen as the call disconnected.