#sometimes original trilogy men are there but not often which is strange

[victorian-nymph]

Sometimes I will go on tiktok and I see a slideshow like "Star Wars men >>>>>>>>>>" and I think hell yeah they have some truly beautiful men in the originals, prequels, sequels and spin-off shows, and then I'll scroll through we have the standard Anakin, Obi Wan, Din Djarin, Poe, and I think yeah baby, and then I am jUMPSCARED by kylo ren being there. And then I want to throw OP off a bridge. Take him OFF that slideshow immediately he doesn't deserve to be amongst the ranks of men that I would let do some truly depraved things to me.

[matthiasschoenaertsdaily]

Matthias Schoenaerts full interview for De Morgen Magazine (original in Flemish, translated into English by @matthiasschoenaertsdaily​)

Interview by Els Maes, published on November 28, 2020

Even a global pandemic will not destroy the optimism of actor Matthias Schoenaerts (42). Because he knows from his own experience how much beauty can emerge from the most hopeless situations. "I've had my back against the wall often enough, I'll always find a way out."

A bleak autumn day on a concrete square. There is lukewarm coffee, lukewarm Chimay and rolling tobacco. At dusk we see the silhouettes of fat rats that shoot past our ankles. And yet Matthias Schoenaerts will tell us in a glowing argument that this, here and now, is the very best place to be. That there is so much beauty to discover, he says. Le paradis c'est ici. As long as we want to see it.

"It's strange to say in this unpleasant period, but I've enjoyed the past few months enormously. It's the first time in ten years, since Runskop actually, that I'll be home for a long period of time. This is so beneficial: I am photographing, painting, writing. I can devote time and attention to the very simple things we'd otherwise race past."

"Seriously, look at that," he says, picking a leaf off the ground. "Those colors, that pattern. I can spend hours looking at the pure beauty of the things that surround us."

Above us a pigeon is wreaking havoc between the thinned out foliage. "While you are singing about the wonderful beauty of nature, that animal is going to shit on our heads," I say. "And that too will be a s-p-l-e-n-d-i-d moment," Schoenaerts answers.

Matthias Schoenaerts is Belgium's most successful international film star. But here and now, on a bench in his hometown, he is a technically unemployed actor, an all-round searching artist, but above all: fighter of cynicism. "I refuse to go along with all negativity and fear. The true battle today is cynicism versus courage. And I always choose the latter."

We're on the Oudevaartplaats, the square that everyone knows as the Antwerp Bird Market, and where Schoenaerts' childhood memories are waiting to be picked up. It comes into the conversation just like that: Brando, the cute chow chow that little Matthias got from his mom on this square, when here on the bird market puppies were still sold. "My dogs were my great loves. The home situation was often difficult, and with my dogs I found security. We had three chow chows, those fluffy lion dogs with a blue tongue. Brando was the first, I loved that animal."

"We lived in a small apartment with three dogs, anything but ideal. One day we let them go, to people with a large estate. That was heartbreaking."

There is a beautiful lesson in that, about love and letting go. It would have been selfish to keep your dogs if you could give them a nicer life elsewhere, wouldn't it?

"Absolutely, but I obviously didn't process that departure properly. Brando still appears in my dreams, after all these years. Then he returns home unexpectedly, and am I mad with joy.

"I often dream about my parents too: that reunion is so intensely beautiful and warm. Oh, there you are, finally! Those dreams are true to life, and the awakening is rock-hard."

Is that one of the reasons why you like being here in Antwerp, because here you feel more connected to the people that you loved?

"This is my home, my zero, I can't imagine a place in the world where I would rather live. When my mom was alive, and especially when she got sick, in between filming I tried to be with her as much as possible here in Antwerp. In the meantime I have an apartment here, my first permanent place of my own, but I've hardly been there in recent years. Now I can finally enjoy my home, I find peace, tranquility and inspiration there. I have seen fantastic sunsets on my roof terrace in recent months. So much beauty, and you can just admire it there, every day, for free. As long as you take the time to enjoy it.

"Normally I would have started filming again in April, and left for a hectic ride of at least two years, with projects that would follow each other quickly. I was at my limits, sooner or later I was going to bang my head against the wall. I feel how beneficial it is to slow down for a moment. David Lynch said that: 'Just slow things down and it becomes more beautiful'.

"As an actor you have to work in a big machine, according to a tight schedule. I have now discovered the pleasure of creating things for myself very spontaneously in my own cadence."

Is that work something you ever want to go public with?

"I want to do something with my photography someday, but I'm in no hurry. I'm also writing a film script, I've had an idea for a trilogy for a long time. It's a very personal project, and it takes time for it to crystallize into something very pure and proper. Maybe those films will come within ten years, maybe never.

"The most important thing is to keep busy. You have to look for something, anything, on which you can focus your passion, love and attention. Of course I would like to return to set, and those projects will come back later. But if I can't change anything about a situation, why worry about it?

"From a very young age I learned that there are not many certainties in life, I adapt easily to unexpected circumstances. There is one thing I can't stand, and that is feeling powerless. I never want to be the victim of a situation, I will always think: what can I do myself? Which way can I go? I have often enough stood with my back against the wall, I will always find a way out and take matters into my own hands."

So Schoenaerts decided to use this period to put Zenith - his artist name as a street artist - to hard work. Since the lockdown he has already created nine impressive murals, including one in the courtyard of the Oudenaarde prison, and one at the beginning of this month in the Antwerp Begijnenstraat, on the bare walls that form their furthest horizon for the prisoners. A moving event, he says. Not only by the touching conversations with inmates, and the forty-minute applause with which the prisoners welcomed him. "The mural contains a poem by my father. While I am there painting those beautiful words of my dad on the wall, I suddenly remember that my mom used to give meditation lessons to the prisoners there in the Begijnenstraat. I had completely forgotten about that until I stood there. How beautiful that is. Suddenly I felt my parents very tangible, very close to me."

It's a bit funny: a long time ago you were arrested for graffiti, now they invite you to prison to make a mural.

"I used to tag a lot, but I really don't like the vandalism that sometimes comes with graffiti. Defacing a facade, that's just ridiculous. But trains, bridges, tunnels.... frankly I think that's the max. Soon I'm going to do another oldskool graffiti wall, with some friends, back to the roots. But with permission, yes."

Scary dudes

The problems of the Belgian detention system are well known: outdated infrastructure, overcrowding and a system of pre-trial detention which means that some people are innocently stuck for years. Schoenaerts: "These are human lives that are destroyed by the Belgian state, isn't that scandalous?"

Schoenaerts' engagement started years ago, after meeting Hans Claus, prison director in Oudenaarde, who contacted him when he wanted to organize a screening of Le Fidèle, the film by Michaël R. Roskam starring Schoenaerts. Claus has been fighting for many years for a reform of our detention system, among others with the non-profit organization De Huizen, small-scale centers that are more focused on rehabilitation and reintegration of the detainee. How does Schoenaerts see his role? "Those murals are a kind of lubricant for me, to get attention for this problem. I am not the expert and I am certainly not a politician. This injustice touches me as a human being, and my message is clear: please listen to the people who have been working hard for decades to reform the system from the inside."

In The Mustang, your last feature film to be seen here before the lockdown, you take on the role of a prisoner who learns to tame wild horses and his demons. Has that role changed your vision?

"That rehabilitation program with mustangs really exists, and the chance of recidivism is almost zero percent. I had a conversation in the Begijnenstraat with the minister of Justice Vincent Van Quickenborne (Open Vld, ed.), and he told me that the chance of relapse here is 40 to 50 percent. Isn't that madness?

"That's what fascinates me most of all: what do we do with those detainees while they're stuck? How can we help to break the destructive patterns that put them in prison? Imprisonment is a punishment in itself, but someday we'll send those people back into society, so let's mainly support them in their self-development.

"In preparation for The Mustang, I visited prisons in the U.S., and talked to men who had been detained for 20, 30 years. Heavy guys: Aryan Brotherhood (powerful crime syndicate of neo-Nazis in American prisons, ed.), Mexican gang leaders... real scary dudes. You know what those say to me? That they live in fear every day, but they must not show weakness. Psychological counseling and things like that have their value, but that's often very cerebral. I especially believe in the healing power of art. Imagine that inmates can express all those fucked up emotions through art: I think that there is an enormous potential in this."

I heard you're playing with the idea of giving acting lessons to inmates?

"That's not a concrete plan yet, but I would love it if people from the creative sector would commit themselves to this: musicians, sculptors, dancers. Or writers who help prisoners put their own story into words.

"The cultural sector needs to start sticking its neck out. The sector is lying flat, and that's terrible. But we have to keep moving. We can all do something for the community, without being paid for it. Planting small seeds, doing something good for your fellow man, something beautiful always comes out of it."

Had you been to a prison before The Mustang?

"To visit friends, yes. In Merksplas, Hoogstraten, Hasselt, Dendermonde... We shouldn't talk about that any further. A prison is deep tristesse. Who dares to call that 'a hotel', shame on you."

This summer you painted an impressive mural in Paris in honor of George Floyd, murdered by American officers. And in Ostend last week a new mural was unveiled, with a 'decapitated' Leopold II. Is activism an important part of your street art?

"Graffiti used to be more of a style exercise for me, you want to create things that get noticed within the scene. But gradually I felt like communicating with a wider audience. I like to incorporate a lot of symbolism in my paintings, such as the cracks I photograph all over the world and then magnify them in another place. And the praying hands, a universal image of hope and faith in yourself. Art has the power to speak to our deepest emotions, and that is what binds us to the other. Connectedness, empathy, harmony, solidarity, that's the essence for me."

The corona crisis is one big exercise in empathy and solidarity. Sometimes we seem to lack that.

"I refuse to surrender to cynicism, and I surround myself with positive people who do beautiful things for others. This period would lead us to insights: how do we deal with each other? Do we help each other, or is it every man for himself? A human is such a wonderful creature, but we mess it up so much for ourselves.

"Yeah, I know. Some people who read this will think: this guy is smoking too many joints. (laughs) I don't smoke joints, and I'm not an unworldly idealist. But I will always focus my attention on the good, in spite of everything."

If you always want to see the good in people, are you sometimes disappointed?

"Yes, of course. I'm not a naive brat, I've learned to guard my boundaries. I can't please everyone all the time, and I don't let anyone rush me. I react badly when people put pressure on me because they want things from me. The perception of me that others have of me, I can't control. I don't let myself put out of balance easily anymore."

I saw that on your Instagram Stories you warned about fake profiles on social media, of people pretending to be you. That made you visibly angry.

"Really, that makes me angry. Every day I receive screenshots from people who have been tricked by crooks who approach innocent victims with my name and my pictures. There are stories of fans who have paid thousands of euros because they were promised a meet-and-greet with me. How disgusting is that? One person has transferred 14,000 euros to someone who pretended to be my manager.

"Of course, that raises questions about how gullible some people can be. But I've seen those chat conversations for myself: those criminals are terribly sneaky. They know how to play on the vulnerabilities of their victims in a very cunning way. This is manipulation and swindle of the filthiest kind.

"Really, I get physically unwell when I think about it. How can someone be so mean? If I ever catch these guys, I'm gonna bash their skulls in, I'm not kidding. Sorry."

Or: those crooks get a jail sentence, where you're going to give them acting lessons.

(laughs) "Okay, let it be clear that I think everyone should be punished for their crimes. My commitment to the prison system is not a plea for impunity, and I certainly don't want to romanticize crime.

"But when someone abuses innocent people's trust in such a cunning way, the question is: how did you derail so morally? And above all: how can we initiate a transformation in that person? Surely you can't lock someone up and expect that person to suddenly make better choices years later? First such a person has to take responsibility for his own actions."

Do you have something criminal on your conscience?

"No." (Thinks for a second) "No. Thank God. I couldn't live with that.

"I've probably hurt people in my life, like everybody else. Sometimes we just hurt people because of who we are, or because we can't fulfill what others want from us. But I have never harmed anyone consciously or criminally, no."

As a teenager you sometimes came into contact with the juvenile court, for vandalism. Do you think you could have ended up on the other side of the bars?

"Probably, a life can take strange turns sometimes."

What made you sit here today, and not get on the 'wrong' path?

"Wait... that's a good question. There's the one terrible dramatic event that caused a total turnaround in my life: when my dad went into a coma after a psychosis, and I was told he only had 24 hours left to live.

"I was 21 then, thrown out of school for the umpteenth time. I was doing graffiti and wanted to find my way creatively. But I was messing around, going with friends who... Anyway, there was latent danger, it threatened to go a little bit the wrong way.

"And then I got that phone call: come and say goodbye. Bam. The relationship with my father had been sour for years, we hardly saw each other. Until I stood there at his deathbed in intensive care... I only felt love, a wave of emotions that I had pushed down very deeply. That realization was rock-hard: this was it. My father and I will never get the chance to figure shit out, I thought.

"Long story, the rest is known: after 72 hours my father woke up from a coma against all odds. Like a plant: he could not speak, reacted to nothing or nobody. According to the chief psychiatrist, we had to accept that his condition would never improve. That was without the fighting spirit of my mother and me.

"It's because of that unlikely event that I've changed my whole lifestyle. For eight months, my mother and I went to visit my father every day. We talked to him, but he seemed to look straight through us. For hours we sat with him at the psychiatry department of Stuivenberg, how desperate those first months were also. We continued to fight, taught him to talk, to eat, to walk. A miracle, the doctors called it. Bullshit of course. It was love, dedication and stubbornness. Especially thanks to my mother, the lioness who kept fighting for him. And see how much beauty came out of it. My life then received an entirely different impulse.

"I suddenly think of an anecdote I've never told before. After a while we were allowed to take my father to the cafeteria once in a while, or to the garden. But he was absolutely not allowed to leave the hospital. Fuck it. I hid a bag of clothes for him, secretly dressed him in the toilet and took my father to the city. By bus, because I didn't have a driver's license. I wanted to stimulate his senses, test if any memories would come back. He was fond of Our Lady's Cathedral, so that's where I wanted to take him."

Matthiaske, why am I crying?

He plays it out. The written version here is only a dead script compared to the lived-through performance, right there on that dark square, just around the corner of the Arenbergschouwburg, where Matthias made his stage debut as a 9-year-old boy next to father Julien, as The Little Prince.

Matthias shows how he supported his frail dad, and how they shuffled in small, careful steps towards the cathedral. Dad looking at the ground to be sure not to fall. "I say, 'Dad, look up'. He looks up, and I see the tears rolling down his cheeks. I had never seen my father cry. 'Matthiaske,' he says, 'can you tell me why I'm crying?'

"I had already decided then that I would take my father into my house. Overconfident, yes, at that age, but they have become the most beautiful years of my life. Mom came by every day to help. Suddenly we were a bit of a family again, something we had only been for a short time when I was young."

It was at that time that you decided to become an actor. Why did you decide to become an actor?

"I had always resisted following in my father's footsteps. In my youth I mainly wanted to break away from my father, and seek my own path. I didn't want to have anything to do with him and all those loudmouths around him in the theater world. But most of all I was terrified that compared to the great Julien Schoenaerts I would never be good enough.

"Only now do I understand why I then decided to go to the conservatory. Not to become an actor, but to understand my father. We had so many years together, and now that we had been given a second chance, I wanted to get to know him as well as possible. By acting, maybe I could get closer to him." (pauses)

Sentimental fuss

He banishes the tears. It's one of the many things he has in common with his father, he says: they're both very emotional, but they hate sentimental fuss. "Come on, Matthias: breathe," he commands himself.

"Voilà, see how much beauty can come out of misery. What a chain of beautiful things came out of the fight my mother and I put up in the most hopeless situation. Who knows how differently my life would have turned out?"

"There are so many lessons in that. If we just talked about the rehabilitation of detainees, for example. It takes commitment. Not a workshop of two hours. You have to persevere, even in the event of a setback, with no guarantee of a happy ending. That's why I think it's so important to keep telling that story about my dad. Those are the values I believe in: dedication, stamina, attention, love. You can apply that to everything in life. Love is the fuel."

You often talk about your parents as if you want to keep them alive with your words.

"Because my mom and dad are the people I've loved most. With them I shared the most important moments, built the most beautiful memories. That loss is enormous. Life has been really fucking tough since they've been gone.

"That's what grabs me so much in this period. How many people have died of corona in Belgium?"

According to Google, today, on the day of the interview, the counter stands at almost 14,000 deaths.

"Fourteen thousand! Imagine how many people that has an impact on? How many people have suddenly lost their mother, father, brother, sister, best friend or neighbor? Behind those figures lie tens of thousands of poignant stories, of people who see a loved one torn from their lives. That is a mountain of unresolved grief, and far too little attention is paid to it."

Earlier during our conversation a guy had walked past coughing and maskless. It pissed Schoenaerts off: "And whining about masks or strict measures. Grow some fucking balls. Having to say goodbye to a loved one, that's the worst thing."

"Isn't that what this period teaches us? That our time here is limited? And what really counts in life: sharing moments of beauty with the people you hold most dear. All the rest is wallpaper. Having success, making movies, that's all fun. But the day you lie on your deathbed, you really don't think about the professional successes on your resume. No way."

[thetypedwriter]

The Captive Prince Trilogy

The Captive Prince Trilogy Book Review by C.S. Pacat 

Now, one of my absolute favorite things to do is to re-read. 

Many people find this strange. 

How do you enjoy a book you’ve already read? They say. You already know what happens, isn’t it boring?

In short, the very simple, very concise answer is: no. 

I adore re-reading my favorite books for several reasons. 

One, it’s comfortable. I love slipping back into a world flush full of characters I cherish. It’s like slipping back into a warm bed on a cold morning. Re-reading the Harry Potter series for me, for example, is the same sort of reasoning people watch Friends over and over again or whatever amenable show of their choice. 

It’s easy, it's familiar, and it’s beloved. 

Second, often with re-reads you are able to pick up on things that you missed the first time you read through, or even the second. There is symbolism, foreshadowing, and minute details that become glaringly obvious in retrospect and whenever I discover one of these tidbits I become overwhelmingly jubilant. 

Third, sometimes nothing else sounds good. If I’m having a book lull and nothing seems to catch my attention, I know I can return to a treasured novel or series and that it’ll satiate whatever reading needs I have at the time. 

This happened to me very recently. As my to-read pile dwindled down to books given to me by others that I held trivial interest in, I resorted to re-reading a book series that I love to death: All for the Game trilogy. You can find my review of this series here. 

More commonly known as the first book in the series, The Foxhole Court, these books have continually given me merriment and joy every time I’ve read them, including this time. I read all three novels in about four days and I enjoyed every single second of it, even though this is the third time I’ve read the series start to finish. 

After finishing The King’s Men, I was once again bereft of reading material and woefully bored. Hence, as any normal person does, I resorted to fanfiction and to looking up books that people found were similar to The Foxhole Court. 

To my surprise, on every list was a trilogy I had never heard of called The Captive Prince. Scoffing in skepticism-how could something even compare to my beloved foxes? I decided with circumspect that I would “try” out this series. 

I was very much right. The Captive Prince trilogy almost had nothing in common with Nora Sakavics’s The Foxhole Court other than the hate-to-love trope (but it’s not like Nora invented that by any means) and slow-burn romance. 

That being said, I very much enjoyed the series. 

The trilogy was first self-published by author C.S. Pacat in 2013, the same year that Nora Sakavic self-published The Foxhole Court. What a good year for literature. In all candor, the authors and their backgrounds seem to have more in common then their series do. 

The Captive Prince revolves around Damen, the true and rightful heir to the throne of Akielos, being sold as a slave to the prince of Vere, Laurent, by his own brother who has usurped the throne after the untimely death of their father. 

Thus unfolds a truly complex and intriguing series involving intricate world-building, political machinations, Damen’s lofty goal of trying to go back home and take his rightful place on the throne, Laurent’s ongoing war with his uncle, the current Regent of Vere until Laurent comes of age, and some truly surprising twists and turns. 

This trilogy took me blissfully by surprise. 

Is this trilogy a romance? Yes, it is. Very slow burn and with the aforementioned enemies-to friends-to lovers trope that we’re all enamored with (don’t even pretend otherwise). I saw the synopsis, caught wind of the word “slave” and almost gave in and tossed this book away permanently. 

I don’t like relationships with unbalanced hierarchies of power. In truth, it makes me uncomfortable because I truly think the relationship can’t be mutual, equal, or consensual when one person in the relationship inherently has more influence and control over the other. 

I thought Captive Prince was going to be another smutty, cheesy, poorly written rendition of a “slave” being given to a prince and low and behold, they fall in love anyway despite the numerous and lengthy immoral implications within that framework. 

Much to my surprise, the Captive Prince took its own turn. 

Number one, while Damen is sold as a slave to Laurent, there is nothing explicitly sexual in nature that occurs between them (much) until further later on in the series. This is mostly because of Laurent himself, who loathes Damen for reasons that I won’t get into. 

The society they live in, however, does not have the same chaste control that the Prince of Vere does, but instead of coming across as lascivious and self-serving, the gratuitous display of sex and sex slaves in the novel actually serves more of a commentary of being toxic and something that Laurent wants to change once he is properly king. I appreciated this commentary. 

Secondly, Damen and Laurent’s relationship was genuinely good to me. Often with books of this romantic and superfluous nature, the relationship seems fake, forced, or like I said before, inherently unbalanced and therefore coerced. 

However, Pacat does a very good job of insisting that while Damen is technically Laurent’s slave in status, he is never actually Laurent’s slave in action, belief, or treatment. It was very refreshing to see how much power Damen amassed, even with his slave status, and the control he was able to wield and hone. 

Laurent and Damen also authentically compliment each other. Where Laurent is cold and calculating, Damen is warm and trusting. Where one is manipulative with mind games another is strategic on the battlefield. They meshed well together. A fact that Pacat showed time and time again. They made each other better. And in the end, they both realized this as well. 

Thirdly, this series was truly well written and didn’t focus solely on the romance. For a trilogy found under the romance section at Barnes & Noble, I was chagrined to find that for the most part, politics, war, scheming, and an overall plot heavy series dominated most of the pages. 

While Laurent and Damen’s relationship does have focus, it wasn’t the only focus, and if anything, their relationship played well and clearly into the events that were going on around them. 

That being said, similar to The Foxhole Court, please be warned that there are triggering aspects of this book. Namely rape, slavery, prostitution, drugs, violence, torture, etc. If this is something that is concerning to you, please research the warnings and risks attributed to this novel before diving head first. 

Lastly, people, the sheer vocabulary of this series was astonishing. I had to look up so many words that I didn’t know. Instead of being annoying, I loved this. I love learning new words. 

However, reading YA most of the time does not stretch my vocabulary limits. This book certainly did and I wholeheartedly appreciated it. Some words included: chamois, dishabille, chicanery, sobriquet, nascent and damascened. I will be very impressed if you know all these words without having to google them like I did. 

I know I should have probably written separate reviews for all three books in the trilogy, but because I read them one after another and in such a short amount of time, the whole series kind of blended together for me in one gargantuan novel. 

I can’t say that I hated that. Lengthy books are an absolute prize when you’re enjoying them. In addition, Pacat released short stories with differing material, one is an epilogue type of deal and most of the others show insights into side characters from throughout the series. They’re all very fun to read if you needed something more like I did once I was finished. 

Recommendation: The trilogy as a whole was really fun and surprisingly well-written. Damen, Laurent and other characters were continuously fleshed out and the writing itself was nuanced, symbolic, and just fun to read. The world-building, while not the most incredibly original thing that’s ever surfaced, was still gripping and entertaining. 

It was almost like a fantasy take on Ancient Rome or Greece, which is very much up my alley anyway. The romance wasn’t cheesy, but was instead fluid, dynamic, and situated well within the plot as a whole. It wasn’t the Foxhole Court, but that’s okay, because what can be? Better off to be something new and distinct than trying to copy something or someone else. 

As Oscar Wilde once said, “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.”

Indeed, Mr. Wilde. 

Score: 8/10

[twilightofthe]

@nerdgatehobbit Hey! Thanks for the question! Ik you asked this to my main but imma respond on my SW blog if that’s okay?

So whew that’s a big question. Do I honestly think that Dave kept Obi Wan and Padmé and then Anakin and Satine from interacting in the TCW show because they didn’t want shipping wars?

(Remember, these are all just my personal opinions. I do me and you do you!)

Short version? Yes and no. Long version? Under the cut because I can never shut up.

Firstly, I don’t wanna say this was all Dave’s decision. He was one of the top guys in charge of TCW, yes, but he was far from the only one, there was an entire creative team working on the project, and during the time of TCW’s original six seasons Lucasfilms was not owned by Disney yet and George Lucas himself had a very large amount of creative control over the entire show. So I don’t really think it’s fair at all to point fingers at any choices the show made and go “yep that’s completely 100% Dave’s fault alone”.

I also don’t quite think they were concerned about shipping wars in the way ATLA had them. Avatar’s shipping wars were so absolutely toxically rancid that they legit drove me right out of that fandom. I’m still hesitant to come back during the current renaissance because of them. Star Wars, prior to the Sequel Trilogy, never had shipping wars close to that calibre of pure nastiness. The fandom was a godawful cesspool that fought to the death on most aspects of the franchise, this has always been true, but shipping, if I’ve read right, was somehow never really one of those hot button issues within fandom. I don’t think Lucasfilms kept the Clone Wars four apart because they were afraid of fans fighting over ships.

That being said, Lucasfilms HAS always been Very Strict on how they want their characters to be seen, romantic-wise, way back to when they would terrorize Original Trilogy slash shippers back in the 80’s and 90’s with threats of legal action. It’s part of why they were Very Firm in their insistence that they had absolutely nothing to do with all the Luke/Mara Jade EU stuff. You either abided by LF’s canonical romances or not at all in their world. So yes, in the case of Obi Wan and Padmé, I absolutely think the writing team’s decision to keep the pair of them apart was almost entirely so fans didn’t ship them together.

Why do I think this? Because there is no other rational reason why Obi Wan and Padmé haven’t had a single second of screentime in TCW that hasn’t had either Anakin or Satine also in the room as a buffer. Not when Revenge of the Sith EXPLICITLY portrays their relationship as relatively close friends who care about each other. So nope, I genuinely think the show just doesn’t want the fans to consider any other relationship for Padmé besides Anakin.

But why would they do this just to her and Obes? Obi Wan and Padmé both have other friends of different genders, why don’t they worry about us shipping THEM? Well for Obi Wan’s case, it can be excused that he flirts with everyone, so we’re conditioned to think that it’s never anything serious, and none of the other characters are married to the main character of the series. This is entirely because of Padmé’s position. Yes, she has other male friends, but either they’re nonhuman and not conventionally attractive so the series doesn’t see them as a threat, they’re Clovis, who they actively show Anakin going into a jealous fit over, or they’re Bail, who can be excused by the fact that he’s already married and also because he’s never actively shown as in competition with Anakin for anything, so he’s not threatening either.

Obi Wan, on the other hand, is a major threat to Anidala in the show’s eyes. They already constantly make a point to compare him and Anakin in almost every opportunity. Which is strange, the show’s decision to force them into the role of narrative foils to each other when in the movies that isn’t the case at all— Obi Wan is much more of a foil to Sidious and Anakin’s foil is Luke —but yeah, the show very often has Obes and Ani going through similar situations with competing viewpoints— ESPECIALLY their canon romances, and I won’t rant about how the show’s attempted Anidala and Obitine parallels fall apart under scrutiny right now but if yinz want the rant sometime let me know.

Obi Wan also has the canonical ability to charm the pants off of literally everyone he meets. Nearly everyone in canon is in love with him, 80% of the fandom at least is in love with him, and I KNOW most of the crew was in love with him too. Anakin, on the other hand, has a very abrasive personality and is much easier to dislike. The show was ALREADY terrified of the fans not liking or wanting to root for Anakin to the point that they reworked his entire personality to make him more palatable to his critics from the movies. Plus, Obidala fans already existed! Since the first and second PT movies, a big group of people already shipped these two because they already thought Obi Wan was a preferable match to Padmé than Anakin. The studio did not want to encourage this.

So yes, I think it was a combination of the show’s tendency to already try and get the fans to compare Obi Wan to Anakin for everything else plus their insecurity in Anakin’s image and likeability as it was, that they did Not want the handsome charming not-future-evil guy around the leading lady and threatening her canon romance by existing as a possibly better option. So Obi Wan and Padmé got no stories together, just kinda throwing the opening ROTS left them in the garbage ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The worst part is, there is so many potential places in TCW where Obi Wan and Padmé could talk to each other, like during her investigation into her friend’s murder, during the Clovis arc, bits during the Malevolence arc, the earlier Naboo crisis arcs, even the one time where she’s just hosting a damn party and wants to invite her friends gahhhhhhhh

Anakin and Satine, I also think yes, but this is also a case of half and half because Satine isn’t nearly as major a character as the other three are, and out of the nine episodes she appears in, she only has more than a singular line in seven of them, and out of those seven, only two of them aren’t revolves entirely around building her relationship with Obi Wan. So really, there is a defence for the writers here in noting that there’s not as much room to explore Satine’s character as it is, let alone trying to shoehorn in a scene with Anakin.

Except no, I’m not gonna give them that defence because in the two episodes where she only has a speaking line or less— Obi Wan’s funeral and the Ahsoka and Lux meet Death Watch ep —I can already easily think of ways she and Anakin could have really meaningful interactions in them both. Y’all have already heard my bit on how they could have a real important conversation at the funeral, but y’all HAVEN’T seen my idea for a rewrite of the Carlac ep where it’s a two-parter, Anakin comes with Ahsoka and Padmé to the negotiations on Mandalore, and it ends up with a subplot of Anidala chasing after Ahsoka and Lux with Satine as the put-upon third wheel and we get foreshadowing to Satine being Bo Katan’s sister, so when the reveal happens the next season it actually means something.

So yeah, it was partially because of timing constraints, but it was also DEFINITELY in part because they didn’t want Satine being shipped with Anakin— which ppffffft, if they were brave enough to actually try writing these two in a conversation in-character, they’d understand how much of a not-worry this would be xD —because the show is set on the fact that despite maybe there being other flings at some point, Obi Wan and Satine are each other’s one true tragic love (Or, at least Obi Wan is Satine’s. He’s always had more freedom and decision than she has in this narrative, and that’s always kinda bugged me). So, that means Satine can’t interact with any men unless they’re gonna betray her trust and try to kill her by the end of the episode, because the show needs Obi Wan to have a loyal, steady, good girlfriend because he is a good man.

(And yes, before anyone says it, I have heard the more unpleasant rumors behind why exactly Obi Wan was given a girlfriend in the show, but as I’ve yet to see any official proof of them besides fandom salt, I’m not gonna spread them because those are hefty accusations to throw around).

So yeah, Satine can’t talk to Anakin partially because time constraints, but also because she isn’t allowed to talk to any other nice men besides Obi Wan and her son (no I don’t particularly like the Korkie Kenobi thing, but it is blatantly obvious that that is what the show was implying and I’m not gonna pretend otherwise), and Obi Wan and Padmé can’t talk to each other entirely because the show saw Obidala as a threat to Anidala.

Again, just my opinions and things I noticed, y’all are more than free to disagree and discuss with me.

[strawberrysoup]

Let’s Review || Chapter 10

Peter Parker knew that his big sister would do anything for him to be safe and happy. She’d given up everything for him twice over already and would do it again in a heartbeat. And that’s why, when the criminal mastermind Tony Stark started inextricably following him around, he didn’t say a word. Because he knew without a doubt Penny would do whatever she had to if it meant keeping Peter safe. He had to protect her, just like she always protected him. He never considered what would happen if Stark decided both Parker siblings were worth taking. Never considered who else in Stark’s inner circle would agree. He just wanted to protect her and yet somehow, they both ended up with needles in their necks.

relationship: Steve Rogers/Original Female Character/Bucky Barnes, background Peter Parker/Tony Stark rating: Explicit/18+ warnings: Dark Steve Rogers, Dark Bucky Barnes, Dark Tony Stark, Dark Avengers, kidnapping, non-con/dub-con elements, underage Peter Parker, emotional and psychological abuse, very dark 

Penny never had difficulty sleeping. She was exhausted 90% of the time, between three jobs and everything that went into raising Peter, and could take a nap whenever the opportunity arose. It was a joke amongst all of her coworkers, that if you gave Penny an idle 10 minutes, she'd find a place to curl up and nap. She could sleep 16 hours straight happily if given the chance. 

Insomnia wasn't a part of her life. It was why finding herself unable to sleep was shocking to her entire system. The day of her punishment she took a nap and that was the last time she slept more than an hour at a time for the next three days. She wasn't sure if it was the fear and anxiety or the stress or any other combination of things, but she simply couldn't sleep. 

She didn't know if her kidnappers had noticed, strangely enough. They watched her constantly, tracking her movements and making notes of her habits, but never mentioned her sleep patterns. Or her eating patterns, for that matter. 

When Steve got up in the mornings, she waited about half an hour before getting out of bed herself. While he went for a workout, she pulled all of the curtains back from the floor to ceiling windows in the living room and laid on the floor in the sunshine. It was the only time she really slept soundly for longer than 20 or 30 minutes. By the third day, when she got up and went into the living room, the curtains had already been pulled back and the couch cushions were arranged like a pallet on the floor where she usually lay. An apple, which she had a tendency to grab in the mornings to hold her over until breakfast because half the time the only kosher food in the kitchen was fruit or vegetables, was already washed and cut and set on the coffee table. 

They never said anything about what she ate, even when Bucky made large, intricate meals and she avoided most of it. The first night he made spaghetti and meatballs with a side salad and she'd only eaten the salad. The second night had been pork chops and pasta salad— she'd dug out the last of the salad from the previous meal and a bit of the pasta before realizing there was bacon in it. Honestly she was starving, there was hardly anything kosher in the apartment and she was living off vegetables. 

Her captors were strange dudes. Sometimes they seemed chivalrous to a fault, set in some sort of bizarre gender stereotype; they would never sit before she did or start eating until she took her first bite. But Steve didn't like when she cursed or rolled her eyes and Bucky told her smoking wasn't ladylike when she asked for cigarettes. There was a weird dichotomy where they desperately wanted her to be happy in her imprisonment but simultaneously wanted to micromanage her behavior. 

After the fourth near sleepless night, she’d once again retreated to the living room once she was sure Steve had left. The spot in front of the windows was comforting for some reason, the warmth of the sun was encompassing like a hug but didn’t require touch. It felt safer than anywhere else in the apartment. 

She slept for at least an hour and only woke up to the sound of JARVIS playing a chime every few seconds, the noise slowly increasing in volume. As she blinked, slightly disoriented by the sound, and realized she was no longer laying on the cushions. At some point while she was asleep Bucky had managed to wedge his way beneath her, leaving her to lie on his chest. His arms were raised on either side of her head like he was holding something over her and the top of her head brushed his chin. 

At that point, her body didn’t even bother to instinctually tense. Even after such a short period of time, the panic response had lost its grip in the face of resentful acceptance. 

“Good morning, doll,” Bucky’s voice was a rumble beneath her more than a sound and she heard a page turning above her, “I can see why you like to lay here.” 

Penny didn’t bother answering, tired eyes tracking his movements as he lowered his arms and put a book on the floor. He didn’t look tired at all with his hair carefully pulled back into an artfully messy bun, fully dressed despite the fact that it couldn’t have been past 7 am. It was unfair how attractive they were, considering the position they had put her in. She’d never even considered a man bun atttractive before for fucks’ sake. After a short moment, his hands came back up to cup her face. 

Knowing the kiss was coming didn’t make it any easier to process or mentally prepare for. She didn’t want him to, it was disgusting, how dare he kiss her— but it was also so nice. Bucky was a really good kisser, both of the soldiers were, and it sent tingles down her sprine every time. The warmth from the sunshine was amplified by the feeling until it seeped into her veins and rendered her boneless against him. 

“Really good morning,” Bucky smiled against her lips, brushing his nose against hers as he pulled away enough to look at her, “Steve’s gonna be out of the shower in a few and we’ll head up to breakfast. Go get dressed.” 

Penny nodded in response, dazed, and let him pick her up and set her to the side of the pallet where it was easier to stand. The bedroom was still mostly dark, the heavy curtains drawn and the only light coming from the partially open bathroom door. The shower was running and she could hear Steve moving around as she walked to the dresser. 

There was a drawer dedicated to the softest clothing they’d purchased for Penny and she was especially taken with the shirts in it. They felt like ultra thin, soft cotton but were actually rather thick and warm. She pulled out a black one with long sleeves and traded it for the t-shirt she’d slept in. The same pair of jeans she’d worn the previous day followed and she tugged off her socks, prefering to go barefoot just because she could tell it bothered Steve. 

She stepped past the blond in question just as he came out of the bathroom, pretending not to notice the once over he gave her. The assholes weren’t exactly subtle, probably didn’t see the need to be. Bucky was waiting by the elevators when she walked into the living room, motioning over with the metal hand.

It had been days but she still hadn’t gotten up the courage to ask about the arm. Steve and Bucky both treated it like a completely normal arm, as if it wasn’t a super strong and incredibly high tech prosthetic, and she was afraid to mention it. Instead she tried to make sure she didn’t look at it for too long, or hesitate when he touched her with it just in case it made him angry. 

“Ready for breakfast baby?” He wrapped the arm around her shoulders and tugged her into his chest, ducking his head down to kiss her cheek. 

“Yeah,” Penny murmured, eyes tracking Steve as he also left the bedroom and crossed the room, kissing them each soundly before calling JARVIS to bring the elevator.

Penny had forced herself to become comfortable with any display of affection that came directly before getting to see Peter, just in case they decided to throw a hissy fit at her rejection and refuse to take her to breakfast. Despite the fact that she'd been promised she could see her brother multiple times a day, it had been limited to breakfast. She asked at least 20 times a day, can I see Peter now? I want to see Peter. I want to see my brother. They brushed her off every time, made some sort of excuse. 

It was part of their plan to make the siblings 'adapt' to their new lives. Penny could read between the lines and knew they didn't want them together too often to avoid any plotting. If they couldn't communicate enough to make an escape plan, they probably wouldn't try. It made sense, the clever bastards, but not being able to see her brother was wearing her down. Combined with the lack of sleep, she was beginning to feel more and more distraught. 

JARVIS was a small, unexpected saving grace. She wasn't sure why, but the AI would give her updates on Peter if she asked. Is Peter okay? Yes, Ms. Parker, he is currently in the lab. Is Peter okay? Yes, Ms. Parker, he is taking a nap at the moment. Is Peter okay? Yes, Ms. Parker, he is watching the original Star Wars trilogy. 

As they rode in the elevator up a few levels to what she'd come to realize was Stark's floor, she could see a very small red light in the upper corner. JARVIS was always watching, monitoring things like heart rate and temperature. He understood Hebrew if she spoke in it and would answer in kind, giving her a sort of privacy from the men boxing in her. The AI wasn't on her side per say, but the little things he did helped keep her from going crazy. 

When the doors opened, Penny didn't wait for the men to move before she began on her way to the kitchen. She would sit in a chair, despite the incredible amounts of pain it caused after her punishment, but would be transferred to someone's lap almost immediately. Likely Bucky, since they seemed to take turns and Steve had held her yesterday. They wanted to hold her and feed her. It restricted her movements, kept her farther from Peter, and drove her batshit insane. 

She quickly sat in the chair closest to her brother, forcing herself not to wince in pain and reached out for his hand. Peter was coping much better than she was, it was plain on his face and otherwise in his appearance. He didn't look happy necessarily, but he was sleeping and eating regularly. There was no visible cringe when Stark touched him, which she assumed meant the man hadn't hurt him. 

Penny had been considering for days what she would do if she walked into the kitchen one morning and found Peter injured. She was about .02 seconds from losing it at any second as it was, if she ever suspected Peter was hurt she would go ape shit. The goal would be to take Stark out as efficiently as possible— she'd likely only have one chance. She was pretty sure shoving a fork through his eye would be as effective as anything else. 

"You know, you get a very particular look on your face when you're considering killing me." 

Penny looked away from Peter just in time to see Stark before he swept her up out of her chair and sat down with her in his lap. Being as small as she was, it made manhandling her pretty easy in comparison to say, Peter, who despite being skinny was tall and ungainly to lift and carry around.

"Tony," Bucky sounded displeased but Stark waved him off. 

"My turn Winter Wizard," the older man snarked, tugging her snugly back against the line of his chest, "I love Penny too." 

Love. Stark didn't love Penny. She was half convinced he didn't even understand the concept, had it so thoroughly confused with obsession that he couldn't comprehend what love was. Love was selfless and unconditional, it was supposed to bring joy and comfort. Nothing about Stark's actions were any of those things, didn't provide a feeling of happiness and safety. Sitting in his lap was like sitting on a live landmine.

"What're your plans for today sweetheart? Peter wants to spend some time in the lab with Bruce— honestly I think he likes biology more than engineering, can you believe that?" 

Penny didn't answer, watching from the corner of her eye as Steve and Bucky sat down in the chairs around them. Steve sat opposite of Peter at the head of the table while Bucky took a seat to the teenager’s right, across from Penny and Stark. There was another comprehensive breakfast spread across the table, a quiche, pancakes, scrambled eggs with cheese and ham, fresh fruit, sausage and bacon.

Every time they loaded plates for her, Penny found herself turning her nose up at at least half of it. She was pretty sure they were unaware that the siblings were Jewish, either that or they were too stupid to realize there were dietary restrictions involved in the religion. Peter was more lax than Penny, he didn't remember their parents as much and aunt May and uncle Ben hadn't been religious, but she still ate kosher about 75% of the time. Plus, most kosher foods just felt more ethical and humane. 

Not that the mother fuckers who'd kidnapped them had any idea what it meant to be ethical. Or humane for that matter. 

"Penny, words," it wasn’t an order necessarily but she'd come to realize over the few days she had been in the tower that Steve's tone left no room for disobedience. 

"I don’t have any plans," she tried not to overtly grit her teeth in irritation. 

Any other day she'd be at the daycare until 1ish, taking care of the babies. After that she'd go to her barista job and after that, she went to the grocery store to stock shelves over night. Penny didn't have downtime, she didn't have hobbies, she didn't do anything during the day other than work. Maybe that's why she wasn't sleeping at all; she wasn't doing anything. Certainly not half as much as usual. 

"Well, what would you like to do? What do you do for fun?" 

Simmering anger began to build under Penny's skin but before she could answer (and potentially get herself into trouble), Peter jumped in, "Penny used to knit. And you liked gardening, right? When we lived in the house you had all those plants and the garden out back." 

"Ma's garden," Penny twitched her nose, the movement preventing a facial expression from settling and giving away her emotions— she tried not to think of the garden, or the house they'd lived in before the accident, it made her too sad. 

"Bite, sweetheart," Tony directed when she went quiet, refusing to elaborate. 

The food on the fork was a piece of the quiche, something with spinach and cheese and bacon, and Penny shook her head. The bacon was bad enough, but putting dairy with it as well was too much for her to stomach. Stark hesitated for a moment before sighing heavily and putting the fork down, forcing Penny to turn slightly in his lap to face him.

"You have to eat, sweetheart," he looked just a shade short of irritated and a thrill ran through her, a mix of fear that he might hurt her if he got mad enough combined with dark satisfaction that her actions were having an effect on him even if unintentionally, "you're too skinny as it is and you can't keep refusing food."

"I won't eat it," she stated quietly, resolution in her tone.

The only things on the table she would truly be willing to eat were the fruits and the pancakes. The quiche had cheese and bacon, the eggs had cheese and ham, and the individual meats were pork. For some reason, the bites of food she wanted were few and far between compared to the dishes she couldn't eat. 

"It's not an option baby," Bucky's voice was soft and imploring. 

Irritation climbed up her throat. She wasn’t on a hunger strike, she wasn’t being difficult. They were the ones who'd snatched her up against her will without considering her needs and wants. They were the ones at fault and fuck if she was going to— 

"That's not kosher," Peter quickly pointed to the quiche, followed by the scramble,  "that's not either. The pancakes might not be either depending on the eggs. Penny will eat the fruit." 

"You guys eat kosher?" Bucky and Steve both looked startled and she'd bet Tony did too. 

She didn't realise they were all considering what they knew about Peter; Tony had taken the boy out to eat multiple times in the months before bringing the siblings to the tower and there'd never been any sign of a special diet. They were Jewish, yes, but Tony could clearly remember the teenager eating bacon cheeseburgers and shrimp alfredo. 

"I don't but Penny does."

Since they'd brought her into the apartment, the soldiers hadn't paid too much attention to what she ate. Salads mostly, pasta. They hadn't focused on what she was eating, just the quantity of what she ate. 

"Ms. Parker regularly checks with me before consuming anything," JARVIS announced to the silent room. 

Maybe part of the reason Penny wasn't sleeping was because she was hungry. Honestly she was always sort of hungry, Peter having plenty to eat was more important than her eating regularly, but she'd been really hungry over the past few days.

"Penny why didn't you say anything?" Steve looked stricken and Bucky's face was ashen; he'd even talked to Wanda about kosher foods before they'd assumed the Parker's didn't eat a specific diet. 

"Why didn't I tell my kidnappers that I follow a religious diet? I wonder."

The words were scathing and spoken with a hiss of disdain that had their shoulders raising automatically. Bucky and Steve both shrunk back slightly and Stark went still behind her. She even managed to get out of his arms without a fight, standing up and heading for the elevator without hesitation. 

"...Penny?" 

"I'm going to take a shower, leave me alone!" 

She was so angry and fucking exhausted and hungry. Irrationally, it felt like storming off after having an argument with family instead of the true life villains she was surrounded by. She felt like a teenager storming off after fighting with her parents. Shockingly, they really let her go. The elevator doors opened and closed for her, even though she was alone. 

"Shall I bring you to your apartment Ms. Parker?" 

"It's not like I can go anywhere else," her voice was tearful and she bit the inside of her cheek, refusing to cry. 

But instead of moving, the elevator stayed still for an abnormal amount of time. She assumed JARVIS was waiting for the soldiers to arrive. 

"Perhaps you would like to go to the kitchens, miss?" 

"The kitchens?"

"Yes miss, I've spoken to one of the chefs who is more than happy to make all necessary adjustments to the kitchen to facilitate a kosher diet. New equipment is being brought in to prevent cross contamination and an order was sent to the runners for kosher foods which should arrive in less than an hour. In the meantime, Chef Cohen is gathering the necessities to make a kosher breakfast from what is currently on hand." 

Penny immediately burst into tears against her will, entirely overwhelmed. The tower was a goddamn nightmare, she was trapped and more often than not separated from her brother, but JARVIS was slowly becoming one of her favourite people (even if he wasn't really a person) in the world. Because JARVIS talked to her in Hebrew and told her about Peter when she asked and helped her figure out what she could eat and played movies on the wall all night while she was stuck in bed. 

He couldn't help her escape, he was a computer program at the mercy of his protocols, but he did more for her than anyone else. 

"Yes please JARVIS," Penny managed to get out through her tears, pressing her palms against her eyes gently, "thank you JARVIS." 

"You are most welcome Ms. Parker, your happiness is my priority." 

"It is?"

"My protocol is to make sure Mr. Parker and Master Stark are happy. In order to do so, I must make sure you are happy miss." 

Penny wasn't smart. She didn't have a high IQ, never finished college, would never qualify for anything more than a dead end job. But she was good at reading between the lines. Finding unconventional solutions to problems was a skill of hers. JARVIS might not be able to intentionally help her escape, but he might help her on accident without even realizing it.

It wasn't a plan, not yet, but it was a tool in her arsenal she never expected to have. And she would use it to her advantage as soon as possible. 

"Sir, Ms. Parker is currently on her way down to the kitchens were Chef Cohen is preparing a kosher meal. He has also compiled a comprehensive list of kosher foods to be kept in the kitchen at all times." 

"He made a list? Why didn't you do it J?"

"He's Jewish," Peter answered before JARVIS had a chance, shrinking back slightly when three pairs of eyes leveled on him suddenly. 

"Have you met him? He shouldn't have come up to this floor."

Sometimes Peter forgot that gentiles didn't recognize Jewish surnames, "he… didn't. His last name is Cohen. That's one of the most Jewish names I can think of." 

He couldn't be sure, there was a high chance that Peter was hallucinating, but it was possible that Tony Stark was blushing. Like, it was possible but Peter was pretty sure his eyes must've been playing tricks on him. Tony made him blush a million times a day, it was never the other way around. A small thrill ran through him, had he made Tony turn red? 

"Peter, is there anything else like this that we should know?" 

Steve's voice drew him out of his reverie and Peter directed his attention at the blond, "like what?" 

"Like things Penny doesn't like, or will upset her?" 

Peter nodded in understanding, "like abducting her and keeping her against her will?" 

"Peter!" Tony was trying to admonish him but his tone was full of laughter.

Bucky leveled the teenager with a vaguely amused expression, "Tony was the one who kidnapped her."

"Yeah but she hated him on principle before that, you guys she learned to hate." 

"Okay, moving on," Tony waved his hand dismissively before the soldier could respond, "J, let Cohen know he's officially Penny's personal chef. I want him available any time she's hungry, any time she wants a snack. I'll up his pay, but if Penny gets up at 3am and wants some ridiculously complicated meal, he'll be dragging his ass out of bed to make it." 

"Understood sir."

Bucky absently stared towards the doorway Penny had disappeared through, "I could figure out kosher cooking." 

"Let the professionals handle it, Bucky Bear," Tony snorted slightly before turning his attention to Peter, "is she allergic to anything?"

"I'm not sure, we think she had an allergic reaction to something a while back she never went to the doctor or anything," Peter took a huge bite of his pancakes.

"She hasn't been to the doctor in a long time has she?" Bucky frowned, considering the implications. 

"Or the dentist," Peter nodded. 

"We'll have Bruce do a complete work up, just to be safe. We’ll get dentist in here too. J?" 

"Dr. Banner would be happy to see Penny anytime today and I am sending a request to your own dentist sir."

"Tell Bruce we'll head his way once Penny finishes eating," Steve had a tendency to look up at the ceiling occasionally when speaking to JARVIS despite knowing he wasn't up there, "will you let us know once she's done? I want to give her some time to calm down."

"Once she has finished her meal I will direct her Dr. Banner's lab—" 

"J, you'll tell them when," Tony ordered, quickly noticing the way his AI tried to steer his words, "the soldiers will accompany her. Going down to the kitchen by herself was a stretch, she can't be wandering around unattended this soon."

"She was hungry, sir." 

Steve and Bucky exchanged a glance; the AI sounded defensive but there was a derisive tone to him as well, aimed at the soldiers. They were the ones supposed to be taking care of Penny and yet she was hungry. JARVIS was unimpressed with them and had a surprisingly strong attachment to Penny after such a short time. 

"Yeah, yeah, J, just let them know a few minutes before she's done eating," Tony turned his attention to Peter, "baby, why don't you go take a shower before we head to the lab?" 

Peter felt his eyebrows furrow in confusion. Usually, showering before going to the lab was sort of a waste. They'd get sweaty and gross by the end of it and need another shower anyway. He hoped he wasn't blushing— usually Tony took a long bath with him when they were done in the lab. 

"We're still gonna take a bath together baby, don't look so sad," the salacious look on the older man's face had Peter quickly darting to his feet, face on fire as he ran off. 

Tony waited until the teenager was out of earshot to turn a very dark look on the soldiers, "wanna explain how the fuck you haven't known for two full fucking days that Penny won't eat anything that's not kosher?"

"Tony—" 

"No, actually," he waved his hand before Steve could finish speaking, "I don't care what you have to say. You're going to listen." 

He wasn't older in literal years, but Tony's consciousness was older than the soldiers' and in that moment he felt those years. He stood from the table, coffee mug in hand and took a few steps towards the counter. In general, Tony considered his friend’s to be his family. They were important to him, he wanted them to be happy and healthy and cared for. But Peter was his world and because of that, Penny was too. Her happiness usurped theirs. 

“I gave you both the opportunity to take Penny, the way I took Peter,” he took a sip of coffee, tapping his fingers against the expensive marble countertop, “I knew from the way you talked about her, that you loved her the way I love Peter. But I didn’t want to. Honestly, I wanted to keep her tucked away where I can keep her safe and happy. I knew I could do a better job than you, but I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt.” 

Tony dumped his coffee into the sink, setting the mug in after and running some water into it. Around 10am a housekeeper would come in a clean up after breakfast, leaving the dishes that lived in the house and taking the rest down to the kitchens. He liked to keep everything as spotless as possible because his brain was a pretty big disaster at the best of times and clutter didn’t help. 

“You’re very quickly losing it,” he held his hand up when Steve went to speak, “shut up, I don’t want to hear it. Right now you’re listening. This is strike one. Penny is upset and she’s been hungry for the last two full days. Somehow, despite being around her constantly, you didn’t realize that. You better figure out what else you’re not realizing because if I feel like Penny isn’t thriving, I’m going to take her back whether you like it or not.” 

[son-of-alderaan]

There’s a desert valley in southern Jordan called Wadi Rum, or sometimes “the Valley of the Moon.” There are stone inscriptions in Wadi Rum that are more than 2,000 years old. Lawrence of Arabia passed through there during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. More recently, J. J. Abrams went there to film parts of the latest Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker, because it’s largely uninhabited and starkly beautiful and looks plausibly alien, and one of the things that has always made the Star Wars movies feel so real—as if they had a real life of their own that continues on out beyond the edges of the screen—is the way they’re shot on location, with as few digital effects as possible. George Lucas shot the Tatooine scenes from A New Hope in southern Tunisia. For Skywalker, it’s Wadi Rum.

They don’t do it that way because it’s easy. Abrams and his crew had to build miles of road into the desert. They basically had to set up a small town out there, populated by the cast and extras and crew—the creature-effects department alone had 70 people. The Jordanian military got involved. The Jordanian royal family got involved. There was sand. There were sandstorms, when all you could do was take cover and huddle in your tent and—if you’re John Boyega, who plays the ex-Stormtrooper Finn—listen to reggae.

But in a way that’s the whole point: you’re out there so the world can get up in your grill and make its presence felt on film. “It’s the things that you can’t anticipate—the imperfections,” says Oscar Isaac, who plays the Resistance pilot Poe Dameron. “It’s very difficult to design imperfection, and the imperfections that you have in these environments immediately create a sense of authenticity. You just believe it more.” When Isaac arrived in Wadi Rum for his first week of shooting, Abrams had set up a massive greenscreen in the middle of the desert. “And I was like, ‘J. J., can I ask you a question? I notice we’re shooting on greenscreen.’ And he’s like, ‘So why the hell are we in the desert?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah!’ And he said, ‘Well, because look: the way that the sand interacts with the light, and the type of shots you would set up—if you were designing the shot on a computer you would never even think to do that.’ There’s something about the way that the light and the environment and everything plays together.” It’s that something, the presence and the details and the analog imperfections of a real nondigital place, that makes Star Wars so powerful.

It was powerful enough to bring 65,000 people to Chicago in April for Star Wars Celebration, a fan convention where you could see a giant Stormtrooper head made out of 36,440 tiny Lego Stormtrooper mini-figures, which is a world record of some kind, though I’m not sure exactly what, and where people were dressed up as Muppets who were themselves dressed up as Star Wars characters. But the main event was the launch of the trailer for The Rise of Skywalker, which was held in a 10,000-seat arena and was such a big deal that even though the trailer was going to be released on the Internet literally seconds after it was over, I—an at least theoretically respectable member of the media—was not only tagged, wristbanded, escorted, and metal-detected, but sniffed by a K-9 unit before I could go in.

J.J. Abrams, alongside Stunt Coordinator Eunice Huthart, directs the Knights of Ren; elite fearsome enforcers of Kylo Ren’s dark will.

I sat down with Abrams a couple of hours later. For the occasion, he was wearing a suit so black and sharp, he could have been doing Men in Black cosplay, but his most distinctive feature is his dark curly hair, which is upswept in a way that is only slightly suggestive of devil horns. Abrams talks rapidly, as if he can barely keep up with the things his racing brain is telling him to say. When I told him that not only was Star Wars the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter, but that all 10 of the Top 10 trending topics were Star Wars–related, and that he personally was No. 5, he was visibly stunned.

Then he recovered enough to say: “Well, I aspire to No. 4.” (For the record, No. 4 was the late Supreme Leader Snoke, who frankly did seem beatable. If you’re curious, No. 11 was pro golfer Zach Johnson, who had just accidentally hit his ball with a practice swing at the Masters. Life goes on.)

Disney executives talk about how important it is to “event-ize” Star Wars movies; i.e., to make them feel not just like movies but like seriously momentous occasions. They won’t have much trouble with this one: The Rise of Skywalker isn’t just the last movie in the Star Wars trilogy that began in 2015 with The Force Awakens; it’s the last movie in a literal, actual trilogy of trilogies that started with the very first Star Wars movie back in 1977, which began the saga of the Skywalker family. The Rise of Skywalker will finally, after 42 years, bring that saga to an end.

FIRST LOOK Vanity Fair reveals Keri Russell as the masked scoundrel Zorri Bliss, seen in the Thieves’ Quarter of the snow-dusted world Kijimi.

We all thought the story was over in 1983 with Return of the Jedi, and then we really thought it was over in 2005 with Revenge of the Sith. But Star Wars has always been an unruly beast, too big and powerful (and profitable) to be contained in one movie, or even in a trilogy, or even in two trilogies, let alone numberless novels, TV shows, comics, video games, Happy Meals, and so on. Now Abrams has to gather all those threads and bring closure to a story that was started by somebody else, in an America that feels a very long time ago indeed. “That’s the challenge of this movie,” Abrams says. “It wasn’t just to make one film that as a stand-alone experience would be thrilling, and scary, and emotional, and funny, but one that if you were to watch all nine of the films, you’d feel like, Well, of course—that!”

Like a lot of things that we now can’t imagine life without, Star Wars came really close to never happening in the first place. In 1971, Lucas was a serious young auteur just five years out of film school at U.S.C. He had only one full-length movie on his résumé, and that was THX 1138, which is the kind of visionary but grindingly earnest science-fiction epic that only the French could love. (They were pretty much the only ones who did.) Everybody expected Lucas to go on and make serious, gritty 1970s cinema like his peers, Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola. At the time Lucas and Coppola were actively planning a radical epic set in Vietnam with the provocative title Apocalypse Now.

FORCE MAJEURE First Order leaders General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) and Allegiant General Pryde (Richard E. Grant) on the bridge of Kylo Ren’s destroyer.

But Coppola would have to finish that one on his own, because Lucas went a different way. “I had decided there was no modern mythology,” he said in 1997. “I wanted to take old myths and put them into a new format that young people could relate to. Mythology always existed in unusual, unknown environments, so I chose space.” Lucas tried to acquire the rights to Flash Gordon (that would’ve been a dark timeline indeed), but when he couldn’t, he came up with his own original science-fictional epic instead. He called it The Star Wars. Like The Facebook, it would have to shed a direct article on its way to glory.

Even though American Graffiti had made Lucas a bankable director, Star Wars still came together slowly. In the first draft, Luke was an old man, Leia was 14, and Han Solo was “a huge green-skinned monster with no nose and large gills.” Fox executives were baffled by Star Wars, and they squeezed Lucas relentlessly for time and money. We forget now how jerry-rigged the first movie was: the cantina aliens weren’t finished, and the monumental Star Destroyer that dominates the opening shot is, in reality, about three feet long. The Death Star interior is basically one set re-arranged several different ways. To make Greedo’s mouth move, the woman in the Greedo suit had to hold a clothespin in her mouth. “What I remember about working on the first film,” says John Williams, the legendary soundtrack composer, “is the fact that I didn’t ever think there would be a second film.” (He also, like everybody else, thought Luke and Leia were going to get together, so he wrote them a love theme.)

But wherever real mythology comes from, Lucas had gone there and brought something back alive. People wanted movies that gave them something to believe in instead of relentlessly autopsying the beliefs that had failed them. We’d had enough of antiheroes. We needed some anti-antiheroes. “I realized after THX that people don’t care about how the country’s being ruined,” Lucas said. “We’ve got to regenerate optimism.” Like American Graffiti, Star Wars is a work of profound nostalgia, a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate anthem of longing for the restoration of a true and just power in the universe—the return of the king. And at the same time it’s a very personal hero’s journey, about a boy who must put right the sins of his father and master the strange power he finds within himself, and in doing so become a man.

Star Wars is also an incredibly enduring vision of what it’s like to live in a world of super-advanced technology. Science fiction often ages badly, turning into kitsch or camp—just look at Flash Gordon—but Star Wars hasn’t. More than any filmmaker before him, Lucas successfully imagined what a science-fictional world would feel like to somebody who was actually inside it—which is to say, it would look as ordinary and workaday as the present. He even shot it like it was real, working close-in and mostly eschewing wide establishing shots, more like a documentary or a newsreel than a space opera. “It feels very grounded,” says Naomi Ackie, who’s making her Star Wars debut in Skywalker playing a character named Jannah, about whom she is allowed to say literally nothing. “There’s the kind of spectacular-ness, and the supernatural move-things-with-your-mind magic stuff, but then there’s also this really grounded, rugged nature where everything is distressed and old and kind of worn out and lived-in. And I think playing with those two ideas means that you get this feeling that it could almost be real. Like, in a galaxy far away, it could almost be the case that you could have this.”

When Lucas made the first Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, he cheekily labeled it Episode V, then went back and re-labeled the first movie as Episode IV, as if the movies were an old-fashioned serial that the rest of us were all just tuning in to. Around that time, he also started talking about Star Wars as a nine-part epic—so in 2012, when Lucas retired and sold Lucasfilm to Disney, it wasn’t exactly heresy that Disney announced more movies. At the time, Kathleen Kennedy had just been named co-chairperson of Lucasfilm, and she tapped Abrams to direct the first Disney-owned post-Lucas Star Wars movie. It was a bit like saying, Make the lightning strike again, please. Exactly here, if you could. Oh, and could you also earn back that $4 billion we just spent to buy Lucasfilm? (Narrator voice: He could.)

At first blush, Abrams’s debut Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, looked like an elaborate homage to the original. Just like in A New Hope, there’s a young Force-sensitive person on a poor desert planet—that’s Rey, played by Daisy Ridley—who finds a droid with a secret message that’s vital to the Rebellion (or wait, sorry, it’s the Resistance now). There’s a villain in a black mask, just like Darth Vader, except that it’s his grandson Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), né Ben Solo, son of Han and Leia. Kylo has a planet-killing weapon, much like the Death Star but way bigger, which becomes the target of a desperate attack by Resistance X-wings. There’s even a bar full of aliens.

Abrams also insisted on keeping to the analog aesthetic of the original trilogy: those aliens had to be latex and yak hair, not bits and bytes, and everything possible was shot on location using film cameras, not digital ones. Even Lucas had abandoned that approach by the time he made the second Star Wars trilogy, but many fans consider those movies to be a cautionary tale. “Famously, the prequels were mostly greenscreen environments,” Abrams says. “And that was George himself doing that, and it ended up looking exactly how he wanted it to look—and I always preferred the look of the original movies, because I just remember when you’re in the snow on Hoth, when you’re in the desert on Tatooine, and when you’re in the forests of Endor—it’s amazing. If you put a vaporator here, there, all of a sudden almost any natural location suddenly becomes a Star Wars location.”

But the more interesting thing about The Force Awakens and its successor, The Last Jedi, written and directed by Rian Johnson, was how they subtly complicated Lucas’s vision. Thirty years have gone by since the ending of Return of the Jedi, during which time the newly reborn Republic became complacent and politically stagnant, allowing the rise of the reactionary neo-imperial First Order, whose origins we will learn more about in Skywalker. “It was almost like if the Argentine Nazis had sort of got together and actually started to bring that back in some real form,” Abrams says. Just like that, the rules of the Star Wars universe changed. It wasn’t all over when the Ewoks sang. Obi-Wan Kenobi and all those Bothans had died in vain. Even Han and Leia split up. It’s all a little less of a fairy tale now.

The feather-haired godling Luke suffered the trauma of having a Padawan go bad on his watch. It’s an echo of what happened to his old mentor, Obi-Wan, with Anakin Skywalker, who became Darth Vader. But where Obi-Wan made peace with it, waiting serenely in the desert of Tatooine for the next Chosen One to arrive, Luke’s guilt curdled into shame. He hid himself away, so that his Chosen One, Rey, had to spend most of The Force Awakens searching for him, and then another whole movie convincing him with the help of Yoda’s Force ghost to keep the Jedi Order going at all. Star Wars arrived as an antidote to the disillusionment of the 1970s—but now, in its middle age, Star Wars is grappling with disillusionment of its own.

DESERT POWER Joonas Suotamo (Chewbacca), Ridley, Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), and John Boyega (Finn) await the call to action for a chase scene.

By dint of advanced Sith interrogation techniques, I was able to obtain valuable advance information about The Rise of Skywalker. Here it is: common emblem.

Anthony Daniels, who plays C-3P0, is the only actor who has appeared in all nine movies of the Star Wars triple trilogy, so if anybody’s entitled to leak, it’s him. Daniels says he loved the script for The Rise of Skywalker, but he didn’t get it until the last minute, right before shooting started, and for some reason he just couldn’t memorize his part. “My first line would not go in my head!” he says. In person Daniels is like a C-3P0 whose preferences have been reset to charming and voluble. “The line that I couldn’t say was two words: ‘common emblem.’ Common emblem, common emblem—I would say them thousands of times. My wife would say it back. I just couldn’t say them!”

Fortunately C-3P0’s mouth doesn’t move, so he could add the line in postproduction. Anyway, there’s the big scoop: “common emblem.” I don’t know what it means either. (Also I 100 percent guarantee that they will change the line before the movie comes out so that this scoop will end up being fake news.) Daniels also told me that C-3P0 does something in this movie that surprises everybody—but he wouldn’t say what. “He keeps his clothes on. It’s not like he suddenly does this thing, but …”

The only other member of the old guard on the set this time was Billy Dee Williams, who plays the charismatic Lando Calrissian. At 82, Williams has lost none of his roguish charm, but now it comes wrapped in a kind of magisterial dignity. People tend to remember Lando for the deal he cut with Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, rather than for his redemptive comeback in Return of the Jedi, and Williams appears to have spent the last 45 years defending him. “He’s a survivor. It’s expediency for him,” Williams says. “You know, he was thrown into a situation which he didn’t look for and he had to try to figure out how to deal with an entity which is more than just a human.” And, he adds, with the weary air of somebody who has spent way too much time justifying the behavior of a fictional character, “nobody died!”

HOT TAKE Members of the crew shade and shine Daniels, the only cast member to appear in all nine of the Skywalker films, while BB-8 looks on.

Chewbacca is still here, too, but it’s not the same man in the suit. The original actor was Peter Mayhew, a seven-foot-three-inch gentle giant who was working as a hospital orderly in London when Lucas cast him in the first movie. Mayhew retired after The Force Awakens, and he died on April 30 at 74. His replacement is Joonas Suotamo, a fresh-faced former professional basketball player from Finland who always wanted to be an actor but was hard to cast because he’s six feet 11 inches tall. “When I first met [Mayhew] he told me I was a wee bit too skinny,” Suotamo says. “But we also had a Wookiee boot camp, which lasted for a week. He told me all kinds of things about the moves that Chewbacca does, how they came to be and his reasoning behind them.” Suotamo has now played Chewbacca in four movies and enjoys it about as much as I’ve ever seen anybody enjoy anything. “It’s very much like silent-era film, with Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin,” he says. “He’s a mime character and that’s what he does, and I guess in that minimalism comes the beauty of the character.”

Other things we know about Skywalker: We can safely assume that the Resistance and the First Order are headed toward a final smash, which will be a heavy lift for the good guys because, at the end of The Last Jedi, the Resistance was down, way down, to a double handful of survivors. They’ll face a First Order who suffered a stinging but largely symbolic loss at the Battle of Crait, and who, I feel confident, have learned something from the previous eight movies. The Empire built and lost two Death Stars. The First Order has already lost one super-weapon in The Force Awakens. Presumably it won’t make the same mistake twice, twice.

But the stakes go even higher than that, cosmically high. Sources close to the movie say that Skywalker will at long last bring to a climax the millennia-long conflict between the Jedi Order and its dark shadow, the Sith.

HORSING AROUND Finn and new ally Jannah (Naomi Ackie), atop hardy orbaks, lead the charge against the mechanized forces of the First Order. “It’s extremely surreal to be in it,” says Ackie, “and see how it works from the inside.”

STAR CROSSED Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and Rey battle it out with lightsabers in a stormy confrontation. Their Force-connection—what Driver calls their “maybe-bond”—will turn out to run even deeper than previously revealed.

The hottest area for speculation, however, is the identity of the titular Skywalker, because at this point there aren’t many Skywalkers left to rise. One is General Organa, the former Princess Leia, Luke’s sister—but Carrie Fisher, who plays her, passed away in 2016. That was a deeply painful loss for Abrams personally, but it also presented him with an impossible choice as a filmmaker. He needed Leia to tell the story, but Abrams didn’t feel like a digital Carrie Fisher could do the job, and there was no way Lucasfilm was going to re-cast the role.

But then a strange thing happened. Abrams remembered that there was some footage of Fisher left over from The Force Awakens, scenes that had been changed or cut entirely, and he dug them up. “It’s hard to even talk about it without sounding like I’m being some kind of cosmic spiritual goofball,” Abrams says, “but it felt like we suddenly had found the impossible answer to the impossible question.” He started to write scenes around the old footage, fitting Leia’s dialogue into new contexts. He re-created the lighting to match the way Fisher had been lit. Bit by bit, she found her place in the new movie. “It was a bizarre kind of left side/right side of the brain sort of Venn diagram thing, of figuring out how to create the puzzle based on the pieces we had.” Fisher’s daughter, Billie Lourd, appears in the movies as a Resistance officer named Lieutenant Connix, and at first Abrams deliberately wrote her out of the scenes in case it was too painful—but Lourd said no, she wanted to be in them. “And so, there are moments where they’re talking; there are moments where they’re touching,” Abrams says. “There are moments in this movie where Carrie is there, and I really do feel there is an element of the uncanny, spiritual, you know, classic Carrie, that it would have happened this way, because somehow it worked. And I never thought it would.”

The only other member of the surviving Skywalker bloodline—that we know of!—is Leia’s son and Luke’s former Padawan, the fallen Jedi Kylo Ren. Kylo probably isn’t capable of actual happiness, but things are definitely looking up for him: by the end of The Last Jedi he has taken control of the First Order and killed or at least outlived his actual father and both of his symbolic fathers-in-art, Luke and Supreme Leader Snoke. Sources at Disney also confirm that his long-rumored Knights of Ren will finally arrive in Skywalker. “And then he had been forging this maybe-bond with Rey,” Driver says, “and it kind of ends with the question in the air: is he going to pursue that relationship, or when the door of her ship goes up, does that also close that camaraderie that they were maybe forming?”

SANDBLAST Camera operator Colin Anderson readies a take for a chase sequence spotlighting the heroics of Chewbacca, BB-8, and Rey.

Darkness in the Star Wars movies tends to come from fear: for Anakin Skywalker, Kylo’s grandfather, it was his fear of losing his mother and his wife. After two movies it’s still not so easy to say exactly what Kylo Ren himself fears, even though he’s as operatically emo as Vader was stoic. He’s fixated on the past—he made a shrine to his own grandfather—but at the same time the past torments him. “Let the past die,” he tells Rey in The Last Jedi. “Kill it, if you have to. That’s the only way to become what you are meant to be.”

Presumably whatever’s eating at Kylo started in his childhood: maybe being the kid of literally the two coolest people in the galaxy isn’t as fun as it sounds. Driver—who has obviously thought this through with a lot of rigor—points out that, as cool as they are, Han and Leia are both obsessively committed to lifestyles (smuggling, rebelling) that don’t leave much room for kids. He also points out that, unlike Luke and Rey, Kylo never got to go on a nifty voyage of self-discovery. Instead he grew up under the crushing pressure of massive expectations. “How do you form friendships out of that?” Driver says. “How do you understand the weight of that? And if there’s no one around you guiding you, or articulating things the right way … it can easily go awry.” By the emotional logic that governs the Star Wars universe—and also our own—Kylo Ren is going to have to confront the past, and his fears, whatever they are, or be destroyed by them.

Where Lucas’s trilogies tended to follow the roots and branches of the Skywalker family tree—their personal saga was the saga of the galaxy writ small—the new movies have a slightly wider aperture and take in a new generation of heroes. There’s Rey, of course, who sources say will have progressed in her training since the end of The Last Jedi to the point where it’s almost complete. With that taken care of, all she has to do is reconstitute the entire Jedi Order from scratch, because as far as we know she’s the Last One.

If Kylo Ren can’t be redeemed it will almost certainly fall to Rey to put him down, in spite of their maybe-bond. Their relationship is the closest thing the new trilogy has to a star-crossed love story on the order of Han and Leia: a source close to the movie says that their Force-connection will turn out to run even deeper than we thought. They’re uniquely suited to understand each other, but at the same time they are in every way each other’s inverse, down to Kylo’s perverse rejection of his family, which is the one thing Rey craves most. “I think there’s a part of Rey that’s like, dude, you fucking had it all, you had it all,” Ridley says. “That was always a big question during filming: you had it all and you let it go.”

PUNCH IT! In a historic reunion, Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) retakes the helm of the Millennium Falcon, joined by Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), Chewbacca, D-O, and BB-8. “He’s a survivor,” Williams says of Lando.

Rey is also, according to totally unsubstantiated Internet theories, a leading candidate to be the Skywalker of the title, pending some kind of head-snapping reveal about her ancestry. (For the record, the other leading unsubstantiated Internet theory has the “Skywalker” of the title referring to an entirely new order of Force users who will rise up and replace the Jedi.)

Rey seems ready for it all, or as ready as anybody could be. “It’s nice having that shot at the beginning of the teaser,” Ridley says, over avocado toast at a fancy Chicago hotel, “because I think it’s quite a good visual representation of where she is now: confident, calm, less fearful.… It’s still sort of overwhelming, but in a different way. It feels more right—less like inevitable and more like there’s a focus to the journey.” Focus is a good word for Rey: on-screen Ridley’s dramatic eyebrows form a wickedly sharp arrow of concentration. I asked Ridley what she’s thinking about when Rey is using her Force powers, and it turns out Rey seems focused because Ridley is actually seriously focused. “I literally visualize it. When I was lifting rocks I was visualizing the rocks moving. And then I was like, Oh, my God, I made it happen! And obviously there’s loads of rocks on strings, so, no, I didn’t. But I visualize that it’s really going on.” (That scene, which comes at the end of The Last Jedi, is another example of classic nondigital Star Wars effects: those were real rocks. “It was actually really amazing,” Ridley says. “It was sort of like a baby mobile.”)

There’s also Finn, the apostate Stormtrooper, played by the irrepressible Boyega, who in person practically vibrates with energy and speaks with a South London accent very different from Finn’s American one. In some ways Finn has gone through a complete character arc already: he confronted his past—by beating down his old boss, Captain Phasma—and found his courage and his moral center. He has had a tendency to panic, if not actively desert, in clutch situations, but at the Battle of Crait he proved that he was past that. “I think he’s just an active member of the Resistance now,” Boyega says. “Episode Eight, he couldn’t decide what team he was fighting for. But since then he’s made a clear decision.” (Cast members tend to refer to the Star Wars movies by their episode numbers: four is the original movie, seven is The Force Awakens, and so on.)

Finn still has to make a clear decision about his romantic situation, though. As Boyega put it at Star Wars Celebration: “Finn is single and willing to mingle!” The movies have been teasing his emotional connections with both Rey and the Resistance mechanic Rose Tico, played by Kelly Marie Tran, with whom he shared a fleeting battlefield kiss in The Last Jedi. Rose seems like the more positive choice, given that she stops Finn from deserting early in the movie and saves his life at the Battle of Crait, and that the precedents for romantic involvements with Jedi are extremely bad. Tran is the first Asian-American woman to play a major role in a Star Wars movie, and she has been the target of both racist and sexist attacks online. But she has come through them as a fan favorite: when she appeared onstage in Chicago, she got a standing ovation.

Finally there’s Poe, who has mostly struggled with his own cocky impulsiveness, because he’s a loose-cannon-who-just-can’t-play-by-the-rules. Poe will have to step up and become a leader, because the Resistance is seriously short on officer material. In fact, some of that transformation will already have happened where The Rise of Skywalker picks up, which is about a year after the end of The Last Jedi. “There has been a bit of shared history that you haven’t seen,” Isaac says. “Whereas in the other films, Poe is this kind of lone wolf, now he’s really part of a group. They’re going out and going on missions and have a much more familiar dynamic now.” Star Wars has always been about friendship as much as it is about romance, and as of the end of The Last Jedi, Rey, Finn, and Poe are all finally in the same place for the first time since The Force Awakens.

The Rise of Skywalker introduces some new players, too. There’s a tiny one-wheeled droid called D-O and a large banana-slug alien named Klaud. Oh, and Naomi Ackie, Keri Russell, and Richard E. Grant have all joined the cast, though, again, we know practically nothing about who they’re playing. Going from being outside the Star Wars leviathan to being right in its belly can be a dizzying experience for a first-timer. “I actually tried to do this thing while we were filming,” Ackie says, “where I’d go one day, walking through London without seeing a Star Wars reference somewhere. And you can’t do it. You really can’t. So it’s extremely surreal to be in it and see how it works from the inside.

WELL MET Jordanian locals play the Aki-Aki, natives of the planet Pasaana.

If anything, Star Wars is only getting more omnipresent. The franchise under Lucas was a colossus, but he still ran it essentially as a private concern. He could make movies or not, as his muse dictated—he was beholden to no shareholders. But Star Wars under Disney makes the old Star Wars look positively quaint. Between 1977 and 2005, Lucasfilm released six Star Wars movies; when Skywalker premieres in December, Disney will have released five Star Wars movies in five years. “I think there is a larger expectation that Disney has,” Kennedy says. “On the other hand, though, I think that Disney is very respectful of what this is, and right from the beginning we talked about the fragility of this form of storytelling. Because it’s something that means so much to fans that you can’t turn this into some kind of factory approach. You can’t even do what Marvel does, necessarily, where you pick characters and build new franchises around those characters. This needs to evolve differently.”

A useful example of that fragility might be the relatively modest performance of Solo: A Star Wars Story in 2018. Solo was a perfectly good Star Wars movie that has made almost $400 million worldwide—but it’s also, according to industry estimates, the first one to actually lose money. In response Disney has gently but firmly pumped the brakes: the first movie in the next Star Wars trilogy, which will be helmed by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, the duo behind Game of Thrones, won’t arrive till Christmas of 2022, with further installments every other year after that. There’s no official word as to what stories they’ll tell, or when a second trilogy being developed by Rian Johnson will appear.

But even as the movies pause, Star Wars continues to colonize any and all other media. In addition to video games, comics, novels, cartoons, container-loads of merch, etc., there are not one but two live-action TV series in the pipeline for Disney+, Disney’s new streaming service: The Mandalorian, created by Jon Favreau, and an as-yet-untitled show about Cassian Andor from Rogue One. I have personally tried a virtual-reality experience called Vader Immortal,written and produced by Dark Knight screenwriter David Goyer. At the end of May, Disneyland will open Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, a massive, 14-acre, $1 billion attraction where you can fly the Millennium Falcon, be captured by the First Order, and drink a blue milk cocktail (it’s actually nondairy) and Coca-Cola products out of exclusive BB-8-shaped bottles at the cantina. It’s the largest single-theme expansion in the park’s history: Take that, Toy Story Land. The Disney World version will open in August.

You realize now that, under Lucas, Star Wars always slightly had the brakes on—we were always kept a little starved for product. With Disney driving, we’ll really find out how big Star Wars can get.

ENCORE Composer John Williams conducting the Star Wars score, drawing on themes and motifs he has woven across four decades. “I didn’t think there would ever be a second film,” he says.

When people talk about the new Star Wars movies, they tend to talk about how faithful they are to the originals. What’s harder to say is how exactly the new films are different—how movies like Skywalker keep their connection to the past while at the same time finding a way to belong to the world of 2019. Because regardless of whether or not Star Wars has changed since 1977, the world around it has, profoundly. “There’s a loss of innocence, a sense of innocence that existed in the 70s that I don’t think to any extent exists today,” Kennedy says. “I think that has to permeate the storytelling and the reaction to the stories and how they’re set up. It has to feel differently because we’re different.”

We know things, as a people and as an audience, that we didn’t know back then. For example: back then it felt sort of O.K. to like Darth Vader, because even though he was evil he was also incredibly cool, and the kind of fascism he represented felt like a bogeyman from the distant past. But now fascism is rising again, which makes the whole First Order subplot look super-prescient, but it also reminds us that fascism is not even slightly cool in real life. “Evil needs to feel and look very real,” Kennedy says, “and what that means today may not be as black-and-white as it might have been in 1977, coming off a kind of World War II sensibility.” In the Star Wars–verse, Dark and Light are supposed to balance each other, but in the real world they just mix together into a hopelessly foggy, morally ambiguous gray.

But the changes are liberating too. Star Wars doesn’t have to stay frozen in time; if anything it’s the opposite, if it doesn’t change it’ll die. It will turn into Flash Gordon. For Abrams, that means he can’t go through this process so haunted by the ghost of George Lucas (who is of course still alive, but you get what I’m saying) that he winds up doing a cinematic Lucas impression. At some point Abrams has to let Abrams be Abrams.

The Rise of Skywalker might be that point. “Working on nine, I found myself approaching it slightly differently,” he says. “Which is to say that, on seven, I felt beholden to Star Wars in a way that was interesting—I was doing what to the best of my ability I felt Star Wars should be.” But this time something changed. Abrams found himself making different choices—for the camera angles, the lighting, the story. “It felt slightly more renegade; it felt slightly more like, you know, Fuck it, I’m going to do the thing that feels right because it does, not because it adheres to something.”

There are a lot of small subtle ways that Abrams’s Star Wars is different from Lucas’s, but if there’s a standout, it’s the way that the new movies look at history. Lucas’s Star Wars movies are bathed in the deep golden-sunset glow of the idyllic Old Republic, that more civilized age—but the new movies aren’t like that. They’re not nostalgic. They don’t long for the past; they’re more about the promise of the future. “This trilogy is about this young generation, this new generation, having to deal with all the debt that has come before,” Abrams says. “And it’s the sins of the father, and it’s the wisdom and the accomplishments of those who did great things, but it’s also those who committed atrocities, and the idea that this group is up against this unspeakable evil and are they prepared? Are they ready? What have they learned from before? It’s less about grandeur. It’s less about restoring an old age. It’s more about preserving a sense of freedom and not being one of the oppressed.”

FROM THE ASHES Mark Hamill, as Luke, with R2-D2. Speculation is rampant about who will “rise” as the Skywalker of the movie’s title—and how that choice will reflect the way the world has changed since Star Wars debuted in 1977.

The new generation doesn’t have that same connection to the old days that Luke and Leia did. It’s not like their parents destroyed the Old Republic. We don’t even know who their parents were! They’re too young to remember the Empire. They’re just here to clean up the mess they got left with, the disastrous consequences of bad decisions made by earlier generations, and try to survive long enough to see the future. Is any of this resonating with 2019? Might there possibly be a generation around here somewhere that’s worried about the consequences of its own decisions for the future? Star Wars has never been and probably never should be a vehicle for political arguments, but to paraphrase Ursula Le Guin, great science fiction is never really about the future. It’s about the present.

You could even—if you’re into that kind of thing—imagine the story of the new Star Wars trilogy as a metaphor for the making of the new Star Wars trilogy. In fact, I was totally prepared—because I am into that kind of thing!—to try to push this overthought metafictional hot take onto Abrams … but I didn’t have to. Abrams got there ahead of me. “The idea of the movie is kind of how I felt going into the movie as a filmmaker,” he says, “which is to say that I’ve inherited all this stuff, great stuff, and good wisdom, and the good and the bad, and it’s all coming to this end, and the question is, do we have what it takes to succeed?”

Kylo Ren has it all wrong: you can’t bring back the past and become your own grandfather, and you can’t kill the past, either. All you can do is make your peace with it and learn from it and move on. Abrams is doing that with Star Wars—and meanwhile the Resistance is going to have to do that, too, if they really are going to bring this saga to an end. Because we’ve been here before, watching a band of scrappy rebels take down a technofascist empire, and it seemed to work fine at the time—but it didn’t last. The same goes for the Jedi and their struggle with the Sith. To end this story, really end it, they’re going to have to figure out the conditions of a more permanent victory over the forces of darkness. Their past was imperfect at best, and the present is a complete disaster—but the future is all before them. This time, finally, they’re going to get it right.

[gffa]

Every time I try to sum up why I love STAR WARS fandom and the fic so much, I’m just sort of at a loss and can only flail wildly in the direction of about three dozen different fics to encompass everything that is just so good. Sometimes I want happy fic, sometimes I want fic that will break my heart further, sometimes I want to focus on the characters that don’t get enough story (LEIA ORGANA AND PADME AMIDALA BOTH DESERVE MORE STORY, ALSO PLEASE TELL ME MORE ABOUT APHRA AND BREHA AND MORE) or I want to roll around in shippy feelings, sometimes I want to read time travel fix it fic, sometimes I want a completely different universe! And Star Wars fic really provides so, so many different things, that there should hopefully be at least something for almost everyone, no matter what you’re here for! I have a lot of love for this fandom and I just want to share it with everyone! So, here, please read a bunch of fic and cry from feelings with me. STAR WARS FIC RECS: PREQUELS RECS: ✦ The Uses of a Sandwich by Laura Kaye (laurakaye), obi-wan & qui-gon & oc & cast, 17.6k    A few months after being taken as a Padawan, Obi-Wan Kenobi faces a challenge: meeting his Master’s first apprentice. ✦ Ghosts of the Present by randomlyimagine, plo & aayla & jedi & cast, 5k wip    Every single Jedi killed during Order 66 becomes a Force ghost, often before their bodies even hit the floor. ✦ Soaked by CJinn, obi-wan & cast, 1.8k    Little Obi-Wan Kenobi is left behind in the garden during a rainshower. Oneshot. ✦ Night Shift at the Temple by ReneeoftheStars, oc jedi & cast, 1.8k    A Jedi Temple Guard sees all, speaks to few, and has attachments to no one. One must be prepared for any threats that may arise, especially at night, while most of the Temple sleeps. ✦ Problems with the Neighbors by spaceyquill, obi-wan & ahsoka, 1.1k    Ahsoka visits Obi-Wan for the first time on Tatooine and gets wrapped up in a sudden scheme against the local Jawas. ✦ Frayed At The Edges by zed_pm, obi-wan & anakin, 1.5k    Anakin counts Obi-Wan’s wounds. ✦ Jedi of Light by Sannah, obi-wan/anakin/padme & mace & yoda & plo & even & jocasta & cast, 7k wip    Out of irritation with the war and with permission from the Council, several talk show hosts create a show that airs weekly about the Jedi. They name the show *Jedi of Light,* and go around following Jedi and asking them questions. ✦ Every Moment Points Toward the Aftermath by HiNerdsItsCat (HiLarpItsCat), obi-wan & anakin/padme & palpatine & mace & cast, 5.9k    In a strange sort of way, this is the story of how, in the final days of the Clone Wars, Mace Windu saved the galaxy by taking a nap. ✦ untitled by elfpen, obi-wan & qui-gon, 3.1k    Anonymous asked: if you’re still accepting prompts: smol padawan obi-wan letting slip his law abiding exterior and letting loose the terrifying intensity beneath it. preferably in defense of qui-gon or something. ✦ Shadows of Dathomir by Artemis1000, asajj/padme, 3.5k    Hunted by the Emperor, Padmé Amidala needs a sanctuary for herself and her newborn twins. Asajj Ventress is an unlikely protector and Dathomir an even more unlikely sanctuary, but beggars can’t be choosers. It’s a sensible arrangement. Padmé certainly hadn’t expected that she would ever care so much. ✦ Falling Upwards by Pandora151, obi-wan & anakin & ahsoka & cast, 1.8k    He didn’t exactly remember how he ended up here. He remembered returning to the apartment after a long Council meeting. He remembered thinking about making himself some tea because of the headache that pounded in his skull. ✦ Sith of Old by esama, obi-wan & anakin & asajj & ahsoka & rex & asssassin’s creed characters, crossover, 22.6k wip    In which generals Skywalker and Kenobi investigate an Ancient Sith Temple and Desmond Miles isn’t really a Sith, promise. ✦ still burning by skatzaa, ahsoka/kaeden, 2.9k    “Sith spit,” she hisses, reaching out and jabbing at the far wall of the ‘fresher with her free hand until the water turns off entirely. The skin on her arm and shoulder is tender and inflamed when she steps out into the rest of the room, dripping water on the durasteel floor. ✦ untitled by stonefreeak, yoda & ellé & cast, 1.2k    Worried, Yoda is. Brought up a terrible thought, his conversation with young Skywalker and Tano did. ✦ yoda would vape send tweet by destiny919, yoda & mace, ~1k    A few years before even the Battle of Naboo, Master Yoda agrees to retire as Grand Master of the Order. ✦ To Live and Die and Live Again by AriesOnMars, ahsoka/barriss, 12.9k    Ahsoka has escaped from the Sith Temple with the knowledge of who Darth Vader truly is and she begins to seek help to understand what it was that could change him so completely. Intel leads her to believe Barriss is still alive and Ahsoka goes to find her, thinking that by undestanding her former friend’s fall from grace she can better understand her Master’s. ✦ The will of the Force by Lysore, obi-wan & yoda & qui-gon, 2.7k    Obi-Wan piqued Yoda’s interest early on, except the Grand Master of the Order had known for just as long that the Initiate was destined to be Qui-Gon Jinn’s Padawan. OBI-WAN/ANAKIN RECS: ✦ Alcohol and demonic rituals don’t mix by anecdotalist, obi-wan/anakin, supernatural au, modern au, 1.4k    Written for the prompt: “Do you guys hear the demonic frat-chanting outside too?” ✦ Bedroom Hymns by JediMistress, obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, spanking, bondage, bdsm, d/s, 16k wip    Anakin Skywalker is a young student with some kinky interests, and his search for a Dom leads him to Obi-Wan, a former professional. Obi-Wan has retired, but their purely professional kinky relationship changes the lives of both men. How long can they keep it professional? And what happens when they start falling for each other? ✦ One touch and I ignite by Paper_cut, obi-wan/anakin & ahsoka & padme & cast, nsfw, 59k    Anakin makes a bit different choices, and learns better communication. So does Obi-Wan. Eventually. ✦ Passionate Reunion by bluebell26, obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, 2.4k    Obi-Wan comes back to the Jedi Temple after a dangerous mission. In the privacy of their shared apartment, he meets with Anakin, with whom he shares a secret relationship, and passion ensues. ✦ Upfall by bell (belldreams), obi-wan/anakin & anakin/padme & obi-wan/satine & ahsoka & cast, NSFW, 27.2k wip    Anakin is doing just about everything he can to hold himself together; it won’t last. ✦ Across the Darkness by xpityx, obi-wan/anakin & anakin/padme & clones & cast, 12.4k wip    Obi-Wan knew they had hit the temple’s inner security measures when Anakin went from calm to clutching both Obi-Wan and his lightsaber between one step and the next. ✦ Drums in the deep by liv_k, obi-wan/anakin & cast, 6.5k    On the inside, Anakin was devoured by his own inner fire. A moth to the flame, Obi-Wan knew that sooner or later he would be caught in the firestorm too. ✦ Maintenance by orphan_account, obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, spanking, ~1k    Written for the FFA 1000 Prompt and Fill Fest. Obi-Wan ends up with Anakin over his lap and learns a new trick. ✦ Stability by SingManyFaces, obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, mild d/s, mild bondage implied, ~1k    Anakin loves it when Obi-Wan quiets the noise in his head, Obi-Wan loves taking care of him after. ✦ You Don’t Know the Hair of the Dark Side by SmileAndASong, obi-wan/anakin & luke & leia, modern au, 3.5k    Obi-Wan comes home one night and discovers that Luke decided to give Anakin an impromptu haircut. Why? To defeat the dark side, of course. ✦ Penciling in sleep by anecdotalist, obi-wan/anakin, 2.6k    It’s two years after the Battle of Geonosis. Obi-Wan Kenobi is the Jedi War General and leads the GAR. Anakin Skywalker had just been Knighted 6 months ago after completing supplemental healer training under Master Che and is now the Commander of the Relief and Support Forces. He’s just returned from a trip and learned that Obi-Wan has not been taking care of himself so he takes matters into his own hands. ✦ untitled by subskywalker, obi-wan/anakin, NSFW, 1k    Obi-Wan kissed his shoulders as he settled behind him. “Oh, dear one, you’re so very beautiful like this. You’re such a good boy for me Anakin.” ✦ Rumpled Collar by Corde_And_Dorme, obi-wan/padme (/anakin?) & cast, white collar fusion, 3.4k    The White Collar! AU that absolutely NOBODY asked for except one Discord channel like… months ago. ORIGINAL TRILOGY RECS: ✦ cinched by spookykingdomstarlight, aphra & padme, 4.7k    The woman leaned forward and folded her hands over her knees. “What would it take? For you to tell me about him?” ✦ Coming Home by Ljparis, bail/breha & leia, 1.4k    Wherein Bail returns home to Alderaan from Coruscant and brings with him surprises for both his wife and daughter. ✦ Endings and Beginnings by AngelQueen, bail/brehan & leia & cast, 2k    Leia is four hours old the first time Bail holds her. ✦ The Forking Path by McBangle, obi-wan & leia & cast, 1.6k    Leia Skywalker had long known there was more to Ben Kenobi than her Uncle Owen had told her. Once she realized that her aunt and uncle didn’t want her to ask about the strange hermit, she was too stubborn not to track him down. ✦ The Joy of Cooking by victoria_p (musesfool), obi-wan & anakin & leia & kanan & finn, 1.5k    “Cooking is like flying. Once you’ve got the basics down, you just do what feels right.” ✦ Salvage by celeste9, obi-wan/owen/beru & luke, 1k    Luke takes to rescuing the abandoned droids of Tatooine, much to the perplexity of his guardians. ✦ At Sunrise on the Forest Moon by victoria_p (musesfool), luke & ahsoka, ~1k    She finds her way to Luke’s side at the site of Vader’s pyre, after the flames have died down to embers. SEQUELS RECS: ✦ Coins, Flasks, Sabers, Staves by Meggory, rey & chewbacca & r2-d2 & lando & maz & hondo & cast, 5.8k    Chewie and Rey set out from D'Qar to find Luke Skywalker, but that bantha’s arse can wait, because Chewie has something he has to do, first. ✦ a gate to many wonders by melannen, luke & yoda & han & anakin & ben & cast, force ghosts, 3.6k    Dying, for a Jedi Master in the line of Yoda, was a gentle thing. or “Hi, Not Listening To This Anymore,” Han said, appearing suddenly. “I’m dead.” ✦ Mother and Child Reunion by victoria_p (musesfool), leia & ben, 1.3k    “I’m your mother and I will always love you, but I can’t save you from this path you’ve chosen. Only you can do that.” ✦ out of the dust by maplemood, han & rey & chewbacca & ben, 3.1k    He drops by Jakku for a steal on old engine parts and leaves with a half-starved, more than half-feral child. FULL DETAILS + RECS HERE!

[narwhallove]

Behind the Curtain: Interview with Romy Writer Ludi-Ling

House of Cards actually started out as a random smut scene that burgeoned into something far, far more.

@ludi-ling goes meta in our final interview about her writing process; how the Romy fandom’s changed over the years; alternate universes (AU); and the role of smut for Romy fans. (Spoiler alert, our heroes are hot.)

No surprise that it’s a pleasure interviewing Ludi. I kept sending her more questions (25 total!) because her responses fascinated me and inspired me to ask more. It’s a rare person who writes visceral, startling prose and can also talk about her work with clarity, intelligence, and an affection for her characters that doesn’t occlude good writerly judgment.

The superlatives don’t end there. Anyone who knows the community knows that Ludi is a friend to her readers and to her fellow writers. As we all enter a heady 2019, reading Mr. and Mrs. X together, Ludi is someone to cherish.

If you haven’t read our other interviews, please check out: Part 1 of interviews: X-men Origins Part 2 of interviews: Going Dark

As a scholar of fan studies, do you believe Romy fanfiction fulfills needs that Marvel never can? What needs might those be, for Romy fans?

Certainly I think that fanfic is built on the premise of filling in the gaps, scribbling in the margins (to quote the seminal fan studies scholar, Henry Jenkins!) and fixing perceived wrongs. Comics are unique in that regard because the characters and stories within them continue for years and even decades. Comics continuities are convoluted and complicated, and there is a constant churn of writers working on them. Many fans have followed characters for far longer than the writers, and may know the characters more intimately than the professionals. Comics are full of retcons and contradictory takes on the characters. And I think fanfic is an important medium for allowing fans to “fix” that, to negotiate it. Because of the ongoing nature of comics, and because the futures of the characters are always going to be nebulous and subject to the whims of Marvel and the writers indefinitely, I think it’s going to continue to be important. Romy may be married in the comics, but there will still be plenty to write about—kids, divorce, a reconciliation . . . who knows? ;) 

What do you think Romy readers seek out when they read fanfiction? If it’s wish fulfillment, what kinds of wishes are being fulfilled? If it’s looking for “gaps” that the comics skip over, what have you found to be the most common sorts of gaps?

I think Romy is a very interesting example of the “wish fulfillment” function of fanfiction. Because part of the mystique of that ship (no pun intended) is that they can’t touch, they can’t consummate their relationship . . . And fanfic is a way that fans can get them to touch, to work out that angst. I think that one of the staples of Romy fic is the sexual tension between the two, and how they resolve that; the push and pull between them. Sometimes these take place in epic, superheroic backdrops, sometimes in AUs, where they have no mutant powers and where the tension between them is born from other factors (such as already having significant others, or being enemies, or in illicit lines of work).

What draws you to AUs? Your stories aren’t a case of fanfiction filling what’s “between panels”; you tend to shift characters and relationships to entirely different settings, whether it’s a Strange Days–like world or another genre, like a Southern gothic procedural. Can you talk about AUs and how they play out in your imagination?

What I’ve always liked is world-building. One of my first large-scale writing projects was a fantasy trilogy called The Legend of Elu. Most of the fun I got from that was actually building the world, the kingdoms, the mythology, the theology, the languages, the history of that story. That definitely bled into my fanfic.

Now I tend to write canon stuff as one-shots, and novel-length stuff as AUs, because they give me more space to play with world-building. That was something I realised I enjoyed more when I wrote Threads. Writing all those little worlds in a series of one-shots felt too “small.” HoC was originally an expansion of the Threads tale Touch and Go, but it grew into something else, and since then, I’ve preferred to go the AU route for the longer-form stories. :)

We’re living in peak Romy times—I think we’re still reeling from the wedding! Let’s say you had the power to go back in time and drop a pin into an earlier moment in the Romy timeline that you felt truly represents what Romy means to you (which isn’t the same as when they’re happiest!). When and in what universe? Why this choice?

There are so many iconic moments from Romy’s past, but, for me personally, I always go back to their time in Valle Soleada (in X-Treme X-Men). That’s not because they’re happy per se, but because I think that that period was the perfect example of how great they worked together on every level, and was proof positive that they were a good match. I often say it, but I will say it again here, because it’s the truth, and y’all can fight me to the death over it—if there was a time they would’ve got married and I would’ve bought it 100%, it would’ve been in Valle Soleada.

On Tumblr, it seems a large contingent of Romy fans are women in their 30s who discovered Romy at a tender age, thanks to the animated series. This includes you and me! There are exceptions, of course. What’s it like for you to have been in the fandom from the early aughts? What changes in the fandom have you noticed between 2003 and 2018?

I really joined the fandom at an exciting time for Romy—they’d just got back together properly after all the turmoil of the Trial of Gambit. X-Treme X-Men was a treat for Romy fans, and Claremont wrote such a great dynamic between them. As fans we were all excited and happy and well-fed on all that Romy goodness.

So it was weird (not to mention disappointing) when the 2004 reboot happened, and Marvel did everything they could to tank Romy. Which is one thing, and I can stomach it if [it were] logically and well written, but it was just so terribly done that I think many of us just tapped out of the fandom completely. I’d say 2005–2018 were fallow years for the Romy fandom. Most (if not all) of the fan friends I made at that time completely left the fandom. For myself, as someone who enjoys writing AUs, it was the perfect time to branch out from writing in canon and fitting Romy into my own world.

Who are your influences? What writers do you feel a particular affinity for? Are there writers whom we might be surprised to discover informed your work, but you feel have, despite appearances?

I was heavily influenced by the dark, modern fairytales of Angela Carter about the time that I was writing Queen of Diamonds and Threads. She had a really magical way with words—her prose was lyrical, sensual, and unbelievably rich. She was a huge inspiration, but later I moved away from her tone, firstly because I felt I was doing a poor imitation of her, secondly because it wasn’t really appropriate for the direction I wanted to move my fics in, and lastly because I was becoming self-conscious of my insane verbosity and wanted to pare down my prose. That’s something I’m still working on!

At some point during the writing of House of Cards, I finally got round to reading Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and I think it was Douglas Adams who convinced me to move away from Carter’s beautiful but too-flowery prose. I loved the way his narrative just sizzled. I’m bad at capturing that energy—but I do think that from HoC onwards, I’ve tried to learn to be more economical with my words—which is hard for a florid soul like mine. 

Threads—structurally at least—was influenced by Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, and later, by David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. 

Let’s say you can pair your fiction with other works of art—of all forms, films, paintings, music, etc.—as if you were pairing wines to foods. What other pieces of art might you say go along with yours?

Wow! OK—that’s hard. Threads I’d probably pair with Cloud Atlas (the book, not the film, which I haven’t yet watched). HoC—I don’t know that there’s any one thing I would pair it with, but you can bet a load of post-apocalyptic stuff was thrown into that stew, along with a bit of The Matrix and probably some Inception.

52 Pickup was influenced a lot by Asmus’s Gambit run, cos I really wanted to write a heist fic with Remy and Rogue rather than Remy and Joelle (who I freely admit kicked ass). But if I had to pair it with a piece of media, it’d be with the video game Remember Me, which dealt a lot with themes of how memories inform our identities, and the ethical concerns of having memories essentially become “documents” that are uploaded and shared digitally through the cloud.

This is a good segue to talk about high-low culture. We may not want to believe in a hierarchy of culture, but we can certainly talk about the differences between fanfiction and “regular fiction.” When you read fanfiction, do you approach it differently than you would regular fiction? Are your expectations for form, reading pleasure, or anything else different? If so, how so?

Interesting question! I don’t know whether I approach it differently per se, but I think that readers have different expectations of fanfic. Hopefully we all read “regular fiction” for the same reason we read fanfic—for pleasure. But I don’t think there’s really a binary between regular and fanfiction. I think both exist on a continuum. There is a lot of “regular fiction” (I prefer to call it “profic” or “professional fiction,” because I think that’s where the binary between the two exists) that is actually very close to fanfic, and vice versa. By that I mean that there is plenty of fanfic that is epic in scope, deals with serious themes, and might be considered “classics” if they weren’t fanfiction.

And there is also profic, like romance, that is more similar to fanfic in terms of the kind of functions that it serves. There is an illicit pleasure to reading romance—for example, it’s not the kind of thing you’d openly read in public! There’s a similarity between that and fanfic, and I think, as readers of fanfic, we anticipate some level of illicitness when we approach it—even if the illicitness is only in the format (i.e., it’s fanfiction!), not in the content.

Fun question: What role do you think explicit smut functions in a fic? How do you deal with smut in your work? There’s an interesting moment that’s not in HoC, in which you write about Gambit and Rogue’s first time having sex in his point of view. It’s a separate chapter that exists as its own entity on your fanfiction.net page. Notably, it is much more explicit than the scene in Rogue’s perspective. Can you talk a little bit about this decision?

Well, I do think that fanfic is a safe space for writers to explore their sexuality (and I think that’s a huge part of the reason why fic is looked down upon), and smut plays a significant role in that. And smut certainly plays a part in my own fics. HoC actually started out as a random smut scene that burgeoned into something far, far more. Generally, I do try to make the sex scenes have a purpose in the plot (’cos I’m kind of anal about plot structure!), but in the particular case of Slow Burn and the other HoC vignettes, those are more self-contained one-shots where I could explore things that I couldn’t explore in the main story. So I could indulge in the smut a bit more! And let’s be honest—Gambit’s dark sexuality makes it thrilling to write smut from his perspective—of course his “thoughts” are going to be more explicit! ;)

But I also think that it’s interesting to write their individual perspectives on their sexual encounters, because of that tension between their characters. Rogue is the quintessential virginal Southern Baptist gal who’s inexperienced; whereas Gambit is the sexually aggressive alpha male who’s probably never had a woman turn him down in his life. That makes for a very combustive love affair between the two, and makes it fun to write that love affair (and all the smut in-between) from both their points of view.

[adishake-blog]

Time Mess : How Time Travel Lifted Cinematic Plot-lines

Have you ever woke up and felt like it’s the same day repeating just to be later revealed that you’ve been stuck on a loop?  Or you ever got a chance to help your nerd face dad back in his days to tighten up the loose pants.Well if something like that hasn't happened to you yet, then damn-good to be ready for the future collapse where the fate of humanity lies on your shoulder as our Interstellar.Hah, by the way very lately I got offered one of those stacky little avenger bracelets on wrist for  scrutinizing the very heart-coming lift of time-traveling marks on our very own cinematic ocean. And speaking from the future 2049, I’m really very filled to present you the harmless report on the year 2019.Ta da!

Popularised by H.G. Wells on his sci-fi novella

“The Time Machine”

on 1895, the idea got more cantered after 1889 when Mark Twain’s

“A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”

came out. If we go back in time like further to search about prior time travel concepts, then there are various beliefs across different mythologies like certainly in Hindu mythology there is a story of King

Raivata Kakudmi

where he visits heaven to meet the Creator lord Brahma, but after returning he’s surprised to learn that many ages have passed. Most popularly there is a story on Japan about

Urashima Tarō

who after an adventure of 3 days inside ocean comes back, he gets mind-numb to see 100 years have passed.

It’s not about how the history dealt with time-travel or how fascinatingly the fiction treated the concept, what really leaves a mark on minds about time-travelling is it’s connectivity with reality, or let’s just say relativity.There was a German physicist most popular for his work on modern physics, named Albert Einstein. The very importance of his whole career was weighed by his theory on space and time, which had just change our whole perspectives about time and space for ever, he introduced us to “theory of relativity”, the void to some major next philosophical discoveries on earth.4

th

dimension, wormholes, gravitation wave, the power of the atom, the expanding universe, quantum physics  and then comes some really high level shit.It’s too often to wonder where his theory has led us to.The one vision which then after interference of tons of other figures like Edwin Hubble and Stephen hawking became a surreal discovery in reality, addition of their attitudes towards the big q mark –

“Is it possible to Time Travel?”

Now, there are a bunch of popular ideas and theories explaining how to time travel in reality, most of them starting

like we’re already time travelling in the moment in the speed of 1 minute per minute to the future

, that’s bullshit...first you’re like whoa, then you’re like that is shittest shit ever.

Science do suck sometimes but in fiction it tangels and blends within even if it do suck, whether if it’s some great robo-head chasing you down from the future or your hot tub on your bathroom leading you to some other point on time. Hollywood had some really great time with time-lapse, from some greatest plots, storyline and cinema topography, they made some best of the best masterpieces ever.

It’s more like a glue which sticks them together, the effective story-telling and blowing up ideas. Hollywood have done mind-flattering explosives and Time-plots are one of those.

Well not just the sci-fi genre got benefited by individual standings, it loaded off some of the greatest franchisees to use it as a base-plot too, and for filling things up I made a list of top 5 franchisees using time travel as an additional element for glue on pot

5. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III] (1993)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was the first succeeding franchisee to use time travel plot with different origin concept. And of course they haven’t stopped surprising yet as they bring their very impossible collab with Batman on their next movie Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2019).  

4. X-Men: Days of Future past (2014)

Wolverine of course, How the hell in the world can you stop him from travelling back in time to stop the death of Trask leading to the creation of Sentinels. And wait who else is gonna time travel back to the past if Wolverine doesn’t.

3. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

I’m not a big Harry Potter fan but I’ve witnessed some and I dare you to meet one, like some original potterheads with great collection of anonymous stuff related to Harry Potter, And this third installment in the series adds up “Time-Turner” to those collections.

2. Men in Black 3 (2012)

One of the best Time Travel Movies, I was like a very great fan of MIB and from the last installment of the trilogy we had great expectations, which it stood upon. The MIB 3 craved out as the best movie in the trilogy with such a great culmination, After all peaking off the Buildings is not certainly a good idea but definitely if you wanna save your friend from a Prison-Break Dark-side, you gotta pull up your shoes.

1. Avengers: Endgame (2019)

Endgame of course, Proving the long time fan theories true Avengers Endgame is about to became the Highest Grosser Ever with what else it comes up along time mess. What clever move they use in Time Travel is putting things back as they were to minimize the effect on the altering universe. With very comforting explanation the movie added higher greatness to Time-Mess structure in Hollywood.

[Note: I’d of course mentioned Deadpool 2 cause the movie do had a great Time-travel Terminator like story-line but it didn't actually contributed much to Time-travel's life span, neither it did much with Time-Messing, A Cheerful Applause to the credit scene of course but still doesn't hits the mark to be called as a Time-Messed plot-line movie rather then being called The Greatest Shithole movie ever]

What really works is the connectivity with human minds, the idea connects so well about time messing, life is so reliable with time is known by ages. A living with consciousness can not be more familiar to anything rather than time, cause it is what gives... it is what  takes, Our perception and conception about time is so vivid that even if you’d forget how to breath you’ll remember how time flew away in the past. The another gate how it connects is Depaysement, the feeling of being an outsider, if you ever noticed how being on a other time on the same lace feels, you know the place well, you know the roads you know the everythings but it’s different , which arises a very different feel of Depaysement. Through fiction or it maybe the movies, it’s just how you are Teleported to a different world with real feelings. Effective story-telling involves mindful connectivity with takes the reader or viewer to a other fantasy, no-matter how strange or impossibly different it is from the reality, as longer as much it connects with the audience it does magic. That is how time-travel works so good, cause it connects so good.

And it’s frankly noticeable what most of the Time-Travel movies work-out as a goal, -

“A Better Future”

of course

That’s why it works, cause everyone needs one,

Everyone has one...

the same desire.

[bewitching-elizabeth-olsen]

Press: Secrets of the Marvel Universe

  VANITY FAIR – After a decade of unprecedented success, Marvel Studios is at a pivotal moment: the looming farewell to some of its founding superheroes, and the rise of a new generation. Kevin Feige, the creative force behind the $13 billion franchise and a slew of Marvel stars, discusses its precarious beginnings, stumbles, and ever-expanding empire.

  On a sweltering October weekend, the largest-ever group of Marvel superheroes and friends gathered just outside of Atlanta for a top-secret assignment. Eighty-three of the famous faces who have brought Marvel’s comic-book characters to life over the past decade mixed and mingled—Mark Ruffalo, who plays the Hulk, bonded with Vin Diesel, the voice of Groot, the monosyllabic sapling from Guardians of the Galaxy. Angela Bassett, mother to Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther, flew through hurricane-like conditions to report for duty alongside Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Brie Larson, Paul Rudd, Jeremy Renner, Laurence Fishburne, and Stan Lee, the celebrated comic-book writer and co-creator of Iron Man, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men.

  Their mission: to strike a heroic pose to commemorate 10 years of unprecedented moviemaking success. Marvel Studios, which kicked things off with Iron Man in 2008, has released 17 films that collectively have grossed more than $13 billion at the global box office; 5 more movies are due out in the next two years. The sprawling franchise has resuscitated careers (Downey), has minted new stars (Tom Hiddleston), and increasingly attracts an impressive range of A-list talent, from art-house favorites (Benedict Cumberbatch and Tilda Swinton in Doctor Strange) to Hollywood icons (Anthony Hopkins and Robert Redford) to at least three handsome guys named Chris (Hemsworth, Evans, and Pratt). The wattage at the photo shoot was so high that Ant-Man star Michael Douglas—Michael Douglas!—was collecting autographs. (Photographer Jason Bell shot Vanity Fair’s own Marvel portfolio shortly afterward.)

  But it wasn’t Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury or even Chris Evans’s Captain America who assembled Earth’s mightiest heroes. They came for Kevin Feige, the unassuming man in a black baseball cap who took Marvel Studios from an underdog endeavor with a roster of B-list characters to a cinematic empire that is the envy of every other studio in town. Feige’s innovative, comic-book-based approach to blockbuster moviemaking—having heroes from one film bleed into the next—has changed not only the way movies are made but also pop culture at large. Fans can’t get enough of a world where space-hopping Guardians of the Galaxy might turn up alongside earthbound Avengers, or Doctor Strange and Black Panther could cross paths via a mind-bending rift in the space-time continuum. Other studios, most notably Warner Bros., with the Justice League, have tried to create their own web of interconnected characters. Why have so many failed to achieve Marvel’s heights? “Simple,” said Joe Russo, co-director of Avengers 3 and 4. “They don’t have a Kevin.”

Before Feige, Marvel Studios wasn’t even making its own films. Created in 1993 as Marvel Films, the movie arm of the comics company simply licensed its characters to other studios, earning most of its money from merchandise sales. (The popular 2002 Sam Raimi-directed Spider-Man movie, for example, was made by Sony’s Columbia Pictures.) Feige was part of the team that pushed for the studio to take full creative control of its library of beloved characters, a risky move at the time. “For us old-timers—me and Robert [Downey] and Gwyneth [Paltrow] and Kevin—it felt like we were the upper-classmen,” Jon Favreau, director of the first two Iron Man movies, told me shortly after the photo shoot. “We were emotional . . . thinking about how precarious it all felt in the beginning.”

  Feige has never really forgotten that feeling of uncertainty. He confessed that he experiences pangs of anxiety “multiple times” on every film, and told me he often wonders, “What is the movie that’s going to mess it all up?” But, as the vaunted Marvel Cinematic Universe enters its second decade, perhaps the more pressing question is: What’s the movie that’s going to keep it all going?

  After Avengers 4, an ambitious multi-franchise crossover movie slated for release in 2019, at least some of the original characters who sit at the center of the billion-dollar Avengers team will be hanging up their capes and shields. That’s partially because the Marvel contracts with the actors who play them—Evans (Captain America), Ruffalo (Hulk), Downey (Iron Man), Johansson (Black Widow), Hemsworth (Thor), and Renner (Hawkeye)—are coming to an end. Meanwhile, DC Comics’ Wonder Woman, one of the top-grossing films of 2017, proved that Marvel doesn’t have a monopoly on beloved superhero icons.

  Disney promises that Marvel has at least another 20 years’ worth of characters and worlds to explore—for starters, the studio is finally delivering films with black and female heroes at the core—but declines to offer up any secrets of that ambitious slate. Moviegoers, for now, will simply have to trust in Feige. Luckily for Marvel obsessives, the 44-year-old studio executive is one of them. “At the heart of Kevin is a real”—Scarlett Johansson paused before using the same word everyone does to describe her boss—“fanboy.”

  THE FANBOY

  On the morning of the premiere of the latest Avengers film—Thor: Ragnarok—Kevin Feige sits in his office on the second floor of the Frank G. Wells Building, on the Walt Disney Studios lot. Alongside a shelf of his trademark baseball caps, some stacked four deep, Feige’s walls and tables are adorned with reminders of the characters, narratives, and modern-day myths he’s brought to the big screen. But when it comes time to tell his own origin story, Feige smiles warmly at me before . . . pretending to fall asleep.

  It’s not that he’s told the story too often—Feige rarely talks about himself in interviews—he just finds his own journey deeply uninteresting. Mark Ruffalo thinks this is actually the key to Feige’s success: “The people that I think are great, like Daniel Day-Lewis, don’t make it about them—it’s about the material,” he said. “You don’t see Daniel Day-Lewis trying to show you how fucking great Daniel Day-Lewis is, and he’s our greatest actor. Kevin’s like that.”

  Feige obligingly zooms through his biography for me: childhood in Westfield, New Jersey, in the late 70s and 80s, an obsession with blockbusters (Superman, Star Wars, Star Trek, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future), terrible grades in junior high, movies at the local theater every Friday night. Comics were O.K., but movies were his thing. Feige’s grades improved in high school, and he got into the University of Southern California—his goal since he was 11 or 12 years old—only to be rejected from its selective film school five or six times before he got in. All he wanted to do, his entire life, was make films.

  As he relaxes in the interview, Feige’s storytelling instincts kick in, and he begins to infuse his own narrative with touches of destiny or, as he calls them, “Can you believe it?” moments.

  The first of those moments came years before when Feige landed a college internship working for director Richard Donner and his wife, producer Lauren Shuler Donner. Later, when each Donner was looking to hire a full-time assistant, Feige thought the choice was clear. Richard Donner, who directed Superman, was one of Feige’s idols. (“Superman was formative,” he says.) But he ultimately decided to work for Shuler Donner—the busier of the two—and set himself on the road to becoming a producer. Which is how he found his way to Marvel and an important lesson in risktaking.

  Shuler Donner was a producer on, and a driving force behind, X-Men, a 2000 Fox film starring Marvel characters. One day on set, Shuler Donner and Avi Arad, then head of Marvel Studios, watched as an exasperated stylist, at Feige’s insistence, sprayed and teased actor Hugh Jackman’s hair higher and higher to create the hairstyle that would become the signature look of the character Wolverine. The stylist “eventually went ‘Fine!’ and did a ridiculous version,” Feige recalls. “If you go back and look at it,” he admits, “he’s got big-ass hair in that first movie. But that’s Wolverine!” The experience stuck with Feige. “I never liked the idea that people weren’t attempting things because of the potential for them to look silly,” he says. “Anything in a comic book has the potential to look silly. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to make it look cool.”

  Feige’s passion and geeky attention to detail caught Arad’s eye. (He affectionately refers to Feige as a Trekkie.) Arad hired Feige and sent his new employee to studios that licensed Marvel characters to monitor the company’s intellectual property, offer helpful notes, and generally serve as a Marvel ambassador. Feige watched directors like Sam Raimi with fascination and others, occasionally, Favreau noted, in “frustration” in the era of films such as Daredevil, Ang Lee’s Hulk, and The Punisher. Feige’s advice was sometimes ignored, and many of those films became notorious flops. “The answers,” Feige still says, explaining why comic-book adaptations go wrong, “are always in the books.”

  By the time Arad had a financial plan in place for Marvel to finance its own films, Hollywood had turned its back on the superhero genre. Even Marvel’s most popular character, Spider-Man, disappointed at the end of his trilogy in 2007. “Some people were giving last rites” to the genre, Favreau said.

  Feige downplays it now, but like Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls, Marvel Studios bet everything on the first roll. Borrowing money by offering up film rights to its biggest characters as collateral and tirelessly pitching the idea to skeptical foreign buyers, Feige and Arad finally hired three directors to make movies for Marvel Studios: Favreau for Iron Man, Louis Leterrier for The Incredible Hulk, and Edgar Wright for Ant-Man. (Only Favreau would become part of the enduring Marvel legacy.) “People forget Iron Man was an independent movie,” Feige says.

  The gamble paid off. Iron Man premiered to rave reviews and a huge box office in 2008, giving Marvel the financial cushion and industry credibility it needed to forge on with its strategy. Meanwhile, as the ranks of Marvel Studios swelled beyond a skeletal operation, its C.E.O. decided to depart. “You can talk to my friends and enemies, and they’ll tell you my weakest point is I’m a one-man show,” Arad said. Not wanting to deal with the infrastructure that comes with launching a major franchise, Arad stepped down before the first Iron Man hit theaters but not before anointing his heir apparent. At only 33 years old, Feige was officially in charge of the first significant independent studio since DreamWorks.

  BIRTH OF A UNIVERSE

  Marvel’s run as an indie studio didn’t last long. The Walt Disney Company had been looking for a producer of “tentpole” films that could expand its audiences beyond family-friendly fare and the girl-centric princess line. Marvel, with its built-in audience of young men, fit the bill, and Disney acquired the company in 2009 for $4 billion. (Another “Can you believe it?” moment for Feige, who spent annual childhood vacations at Disney theme parks.)

  Even with Disney’s deep pockets, Marvel continued to run a lean operation. Up until four years ago, Feige operated out of a series of unassuming offices—one shared with a kite company in West Los Angeles, one above a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Beverly Hills, and one Manhattan Beach office that, even after the success of The Avengers, was “cheap” and “dreary,” as Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn remembers.

  On the wall of one of those early, drab offices hung a 1988 Technicolor poster by Marvel artists Ed Hannigan and Joe Rubinstein, crowded to the margins with hundreds of characters from all different story lines with the words MARVEL UNIVERSE emblazoned across the top. Feige would challenge visitors to find the smallest figure in the scrum.

  Feige said he had long believed in the storytelling potential of weaving together Marvel’s superheroes and plots—in essence bringing that Marvel-universe poster to life. His hunch was validated by the media coverage around the astonishing $ 98 million opening weekend of Iron Man. Samuel L. Jackson’s brief appearance in that movie as Nick Fury, director of a counterterrorism agency central to the Marvel universe, initially was meant as an Easter egg, a knowing wink, for die-hard fans. “We put it at the end so it wouldn’t be distracting,” Feige said of the post-credits stinger that launched a decade-long trend. But after he saw how audiences—not just devoted comics fans—responded to Fury’s appearance, Feige knew the idea of cross-pollinating characters and movies had legs.

  One early challenge was getting actors to sign up for Marvel’s ambitious vision. A character might star in one film, be part of an ensemble in another, and just make a goofy guest appearance in yet another. Jackson signed an unheard-of nine-picture deal with Marvel shortly after Iron Man came out, ensuring his participation in the subsequent Avengers movies and other Marvel properties. Feige found it particularly challenging to secure Chris Evans as Captain America, a character who acts as leader of the Avengers. Evans, who’d previously tackled the comic-book genre as Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four movies, was hesitant to sign a long-term deal that would prevent him from doing other projects. Evans asked for a weekend to make his decision—Feige cited those few days as among the most nerve-racking of his tenure—before committing to six movies. Once Hemsworth agreed to play Thor, another foundational Avenger, Feige’s grand plan was under way. (It doesn’t hurt that Marvel contracts can be supremely lucrative. Robert Downey Jr. reportedly made $ 80 million in 2015, thanks largely to his work as Iron Man.)

  Still, it wasn’t until a celebratory night in Rome in 2012, on the Avengers press tour, that the Marvel extended family really understood what its boss had planned. “I’m socially awkward,” Feige said. (“He’s short on kibitz,” Downey likes to say.) “So I talked about what we can do next.” As the hotel staff shushed them and the hour grew late, Feige pulled back the curtain on his master plan—or at least some of it. “I would like to take all of the comics and start to build the Marvel universe,” Feige declared. “We’ll have 15 productions in the next two years!”

  THE MARVEL WAY OR BUST

  Marvel’s first decade of moviemaking has not been without its misses and heartaches. Neither Iron Man 2, which came out in 2010, nor 2013’s Thor: The Dark World won critical raves. Two prominent directors—Edgar Wright and Joss Whedon—very publicly parted ways with Marvel after squabbling with the studio over artistic control. Wright, who wrote an early draft of Ant-Man but left the project in 2014 before filming began, declined to comment for this story. Whedon, who wrote and directed two Avengers movies and severed ties with Marvel in 2016, did not respond to requests to talk about his departure. But in published interviews both men have said they felt they had to sacrifice their own vision to serve Marvel’s interests.

  The exodus of two admired artists (Wright was known for his genre send-ups Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Whedon for creating the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series) was not a good look for Marvel, which until then had enjoyed a fanboy-friendly reputation. From inside the family, James Gunn, Anthony Russo, and Evangeline Lilly, an Ant-Man star, described this period as a messy “divorce” and the tone around the studio as “uneasy.” Some critics argued that Marvel’s success spawned so many big-budget copycats that creativity didn’t stand a chance in Hollywood. Even one of Feige’s childhood heroes, Steven Spielberg, took a public shot at the glut of comic-book movies.

  Feige doesn’t deny that directors need to play by a set of rules when they join Team Marvel, especially now that the concept of a single cinematic universe is non-negotiable. “Filmmakers . . . coming in understand the notion of the shared sandbox more than the initial filmmakers did because the sandbox didn’t exist then,” he said.

  At the same time the studio seems increasingly willing to let directors be experimental and original in other ways. “Guardians is probably the best example of the audience validating even our more esoteric instincts,” Feige said. The unabashed goofiness of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies and the gonzo tone of Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok signal a radical departure from, say, the staid bleakness of Thor: The Dark World. Director Ryan Coogler’s upcoming Black Panther movie marks another major shift for Marvel: in February, the studio will launch its first movie with a black actor, Chadwick Boseman, in the lead. Captain Marvel, starring Brie Larson in the title role of a female air-force captain with superpowers, opens in 2019. “I can’t think of anybody [at Marvel] that hasn’t directly approached me and had very, very in-depth conversations about Panther,” Boseman told me.

  LIFE WITH IKE

  It seems like more than happenstance that Marvel’s emphatic inclusiveness coincides with a long-overdue 2015 management re-structuring by Disney that put Feige firmly in control of the studio and quietly sidelined Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter, Marvel��s controversial chairman and former C.E.O. Perlmutter is a shadowy but essential figure in the world of Marvel. The 75-year-old mogul helped rescue Marvel Entertainment Group from bankruptcy in 1998, when he merged it with Toy Biz Inc., a company he co-owned. Though Perlmutter endorsed Marvel’s decision to make its own films, he clung to outdated opinions about casting, budgeting, and merchandising that ran counter to trends in popular culture, sources close to the studio said. For example, Perlmutter, citing his years in the toy-making business, reportedly made the decision to scale back production of Black Widow-themed merchandise in 2015 because he believed “girl” superhero products wouldn’t sell.

  Director James Gunn chalked up every conflict he had making Guardians of the Galaxy to Perlmutter and the Marvel “creative committee”—a legacy of the studio’s early days—which read every script and gave writers and filmmakers feedback. Said Gunn, “They were a group of comic-book writers and toy people” who gave him “haphazard” notes. The committee, for example, suggested Guardians of the Galaxy ditch the 70s music that the film’s hero loves. (The movie’s soundtrack, featuring retro hits, would later go platinum.) Members of the creative committee declined to comment for the story. Perlmutter also declined to comment, but a person with knowledge of his approach said, “Ike Perlmutter neither discriminates nor cares about diversity, he just cares about what he thinks will make money.”

  In August 2015, a few months after rival Warner Bros. earned serious feminist bragging rights with its announcement that Patty Jenkins would direct Wonder Woman, Disney confirmed that it had changed Marvel’s management structure: Feige would report to Alan Horn, chairman of Walt Disney Studios, ostensibly as part of an effort to integrate Marvel into the bigger Disney film family. Perlmutter remains chairman of Marvel Entertainment. An early Trump supporter, he also advises the White House on veterans’ issues.

  Critics sometimes forget that Feige announced Captain Marvel and Black Panther in 2014—during the Perlmutter era. Instead they focus on how Marvel missed the chance to make the first female-led superhero movie of the modern era. I asked Feige if he wished Marvel had gotten there before Wonder Woman. “Yeah,” he answered carefully. “I think it’s always fun to be first with most things.” Ever the fanboy, Feige got chills recounting the heroine’s powerful stand in No Man’s Land for me in his office. “Everything’s going to work out,” he said cheerfully. “Captain Marvel is a very different type of movie.”

  THE AVENGERS, AND EVERYTHING AFTER

  One week before the Marvel 10th-anniversary photo shoot, on the set of Avengers 4, I watched Marvel’s biggest stars lounge on comfy couches under a canopy in the long stretches between takes. Mark Ruffalo scratched Scarlett Johansson’s back, while Johansson, Chris Evans, and several other Avengers hunched over their phones in a competitive game of Words with Friends. I reached for a camera to record the moment—some of the most famous faces in the world lit up by phone screens just like the rest of us—but the ever vigilant Marvel security team had wrapped my phone in layers of protective tape. Later, Chris Hemsworth mentioned that very moment to me. “I thought, Could somebody take a photo of this? We’re all aware that this is going to be the last time we get to hang out like this.”

  And yet the actors who have contributed so much to Marvel’s past successes have little doubt about the studio’s future. “I feel a lot of joy for the next generation,” Johansson said. “It’s a bittersweet feeling, but a positive one.”

  In true Marvel fashion, members of the original Avengers team will help pave the way for the new guard. The latest Captain America introduced fans to Boseman’s Black Panther while Downey’s Tony Stark mentored Tom Holland’s Peter Parker in Spider-Man: Homecoming—“serving at the pleasure of young Master Holland,” Downey said with characteristic flair. Spider-Man’s return to the Marvel fold is a coup for Feige, who helped orchestrate a hero-sharing arrangement with Sony.

  To hear Disney C.E.O. Bob Iger tell it, Marvel’s next wave is just beginning. He notes that the studio has rights to 7,000 characters, who can travel anywhere their creators wish to take them. “We’re looking for worlds that are completely separate—geographically or in time—from the worlds that we’ve already visited,” Iger explained.

  Both Iger and Feige hinted at how the franchise will expand into different realms, with James Gunn working in close collaboration to possibly spin off some characters from the extraterrestrial world of the Guardians of the Galaxy. Marvel is “22 movies in, and we’ve got another 20 movies on the docket that are completely different from anything that’s come before—intentionally,” Feige said.

  While Feige refused to reveal any details about the characters and stories Marvel has yet to introduce, he did promise a definitive end to the franchise that built Marvel. Avengers 4, he said, will “bring things you’ve never seen in superhero films: a finale.” This may mean a lot of dead Avengers at the hands of the villain Thanos, who has appeared sporadically and tantalizingly since the first Avengers movie back in 2012. But the Marvel Cinematic Universe will live on. “There will be two distinct periods. Everything before Avengers 4 and everything after. I know it will not be in ways people are expecting,” Feige teased.

  “Everything after,” without these Marvel mainstays, will be hard work. The studio constantly needs to cast new actors, develop surprising new narratives, and risk looking a little silly—as Feige did with Wolverine’s hair—all under the harsh glare of millions of fans and detractors watching the studio’s every move. Feige, however, has no worries about Marvel’s longevity, a point he illustrated by quoting one of his personal heroes: “On opening day, when people asked Mr. Walt Disney if Disneyland was finished, he said, as long as there’s imagination in the world, Disney will never be complete.” And as long as people are willing to watch superheroes save the world, Marvel—and Kevin Feige—won’t be done, either.

Press: Secrets of the Marvel Universe was originally published on Elizabeth Olsen Source • Your source for everything Elizabeth Olsen

[iamdanielyoon]

Blade Runner 2049 Review

***/*****

B-

80%

  9:30pm

2D Digital

10/17/17

 --------------------------

Notes:

Mostly empty theater but there were possibly 15 people in the 160 seat theater.

Got seats in row C, seats 11 and 12. Smack dab in the middle and a place where the screen was close enough to fill most of my field of vision.

 ------------------

Audiences, and critics, called the original Blade Runner an esoteric film. Never before has a film been characterized so aptly. Wes Anderson is niche. David Fincher is focused. Steven Spielberg is talented. J.J. Abrams is new cinema. I hate to be so condensed in my perspective of them, but I’ll chalk it up to the short attention spans present in the online world. I hope I got my point across, though. All of these attributes I attributed to each of these accomplished directors can be seen as positive or negative. I, personally, am a fan of all of the directors I mentioned. I haven’t loved all of their works, or even seen all of their works, to be honest, but I do acknowledge their ability in crafting stories (although I have finished viewing the filmographies of J.J. Abrams and David Fincher). Their narratives have a distinct flair and I respect the craft they bring to the industry.

The connotation attached to the term ‘esoteric,’ however, was that the film was meant for those who liked noir & sci-fi stories. The film is not like Looper (2012) or Star Trek (2009), far from it. So don’t expect anything like that sort of thing going into it. The film is, at its core, a detective story. In terms of mature film, the Coen brothers can be comparable in terms of pacing, I suppose. But where the Coens have fascinating dialogue and well-executed editing, Blade Runner (1982) was more of a plodding crime story. It meanders and it doesn’t pander. It is for a specific set of people yet the film has been a major influence in the sci-fi genre, in all mediums. In this rare instance, the scathing, often empty, certain critiques of CinemaSins on the film were accurate. The fantastical visual imagery of its time nonetheless does not make a sufficient story, a well-told narrative or a propelling plot. Critics and audiences complain about that in cinema to this day and yet they gladly overlook those faults in this film.

So let’s get my thoughts on the original Blade Runner out of the way. I watched The Final Cut (2007): the one recommended by Blade Runner 2049’s director Denis Villeneuve. Like films of the past that had dark, gritty, grimy, seedy sci-fi worlds, Blade Runner had great production design. Ridley Scott is a flawed director, one who has had his fair share of duds and head-scratchers, but one thing you cannot deny is the man’s attention for detail and his extensive use of practical effects. The props used in The Martian (2015) were gorgeous. Blade Runner is no different. To cut my thoughts on the original short, here are my thoughts in a nutshell: Overrated; interesting sound design; weird parts; strange change in atmosphere/tone in final act (something I believe CinemaSins touched on) and overall a mediocre experience.

What’s lovely about this film is the fact that this film remains grounded within a future of that universe. Time has not been altered or changed to reflect modern tastes. Touch screens and head-up-displays that are prominent in our modern cinema have very little to do with the established world of Blade Runner. The Voigt-Kampff test is a technology that was interesting in the sense that it remains iconic and fascinating from a filmmaking perspective. And this film adds new vehicles, weapons and a great cinematographer to its established universe and polishes out the rough edges that were present in the original.

Blade Runner 2049 stars Ryan Gosling in his second role in which he actually gets to show that he can act (the first being La La Land (2016)). Most of the time, people submit that acting, in its best (see Oscars) form is subtle. Other times they suggest that powerhouse, extremely emotional performances like Hugh Jackman’s from Prisoners (2013) is what constitutes a great performance. While I do realize that acting requires immense talent, incommensurate kinds of methods for getting into character, a cooperation between all the major filmmakers involved, and more, I lean more towards James Franco’s performance in 127 Hours (2010) than Colin Firth’s in The King’s Speech (2010). #JamesFrancowasrobbed. But rarely do I say that the casting for a film was impeccable. Sometimes certain performances win over the people, sometimes it’s a great chance for actors to branch out, sometimes there are surprises from left field, but in a few rare cases, it’s hard to see anyone else in a role. Ryan Gosling is great for K, Harrison Ford returns in good form as Deckard, Bautista brings something truly unexpected in his role and there is an integral character with a small role overall that is pitch perfect. After I saw her and Robin Wright’s subtle acting it cemented my thoughts on the film in the acting sphere. It’s superbly cast. The small important character was the actual performance that I was most pleased by in this film, however. Jared Leto was interesting as the eccentric, blind, rich man… I think.

Hans Zimmer’s talents are squandered in this film. He’s been able to collaborate to great effect in films like The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), as flawed and bad as it was, and the first two Kung Fu Panda films (2008 & 2011). But instead he’s to do his rendition of the original film’s compositions. He’s got to do Vangelis, again. Thirty-five years later. I get it. People like the original’s score. People worship Zimmer and Blade Runner, sometimes they happen to do both. For the original Blade Runner, that composer’s sound was an iconic part of it, sure. Doesn’t mean it was timeless. Hans Zimmer got a lot of flak for making his own version of the Batman theme in The Dark Knight trilogy, and the world is all the better for it. Here, he is boxed in the world of Blade Runner. Here, he is chained by the fans of the original. The film suffers because of those fans. Instead of going in new directions like Giacchino for Jurassic World (2015), Star Trek (2009), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) or Rogue One (2016); instead of bringing back the composer that he previously collaborated with in 2015 for Sicario, Johann Johannsen, we are given a bland fan offering. There are moments when I notice the film’s music is about to head to something great, and then it veers towards synth sci-fi. Film score snobs, music critics and whoever else may heap praise upon Zimmer and his Dunkirk (2017) collaborator Ben W. for this film, but I won’t be one of them. Zimmer and his new buddy (Zimmer worked well with Junkie XL in Batman V Superman (2016); Junkie XL previously crafted a great score for Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)) are forced to placate the appetites of voracious fans instead of going in bold, new directions. I dislike the music. You might like it. And you’re free to do so. Music, I find, is a far more divisive medium concerning tastes than film. So go nuts and go crazy for all I care. Yo Yo Ma spoke about music that sounded good to him. The music in the Blade Runner universe doesn’t sound good to me. For more perspective on how the original film’s sound and soundtrack are layered and the like, you can see Nerdwriter1’s video on the matter.

The cinematography is so darn good. When used right, the visuals in a film can heighten the action, improve the pacing and make meaning of everything. The locked camera of Jackie Chan and Hong Kong directors make the action far more interesting than in Hollywood blockbusters with people flailing around in darkness (See EFAP’s video on Jackie Chan). Blade Runner 2049 reunites director Denis V. and cinematographer Roger Deakins. I’m just going to state for the record that I’m a fan. A big fan. I want to watch every film Deakins has ever done because seeing his work in this century’s films, I’m truly blown away. Directors need to work with a bunch of people to block and all, but a cinematographer like Deakins makes the final product that much better. Everything moves with purpose. The camera work is streamlined and masterful. I can’t really express in words how he does what he does besides a few interviews Deakins has done himself and a video by Tony Zhou (Every Frame A Painting, a truly artful man with a way with words. And a quick message to Zhou, if he somehow stumbles across my writing: Please come back to your channel and continue to do video essays. Please. We all miss you. Come back. Please.). The visual artistry of this film is profound. Denis and Roger should continue to work together for as long as possible.

The story of Blade Runner 2049 has a similar progression to its predecessor, in certain aspects. Its broad narrative is an investigation with mystery in a sci-fi setting. Whereas the previous film meanders, wastes time with its groundbreaking visual effects (there are shots of the iconic buildings that are just viewed from different angles with synth music blasting) and overall the plot devolves in its final act (turning into a slasher film, as noted by CinemaSins, I’m not calling CS good or critic-worthy but they occasionally do make some valid points)—this film is much more focused. This film finds a solid story progression but it too finds ways to slow down its story. There are lulls in between the acting, the spectacle, the visuals and the narrative. Although the argument can be made that the lulls are necessary, how you react to them can be a large indicator of what kind of moviegoer you are. If you perceive The Revenant (2015), Memento (2000), No Country For Old Men (2007) or Gravity (2013) as niche, indie, weird, dumb or boring, Blade Runner and its sequel are definitely not for you. Of note: all the previous films I mentioned in that sentence are ones I enjoy. Note: I enjoy them. You don’t have to. You can have your own dang opinion. You’re free to express that... For the most part. Anyways, on the bright side the film finds philosophic ideas to explore, interesting sci-fi settings to discover and the like… but I found it to be more of a specifically satisfying affair. Like the original Blade Runner, Rogue One, Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), Captain America: Civil War (2016), The Avengers (2012) and Terminator (1984), I understand why people like this film. But it doesn’t mean that I have to. I respect the craft and artistry. I do. But it’s not something that connects with me. It’s not that it falls flat. It’s just that the sum of its parts do not add up to a greater whole. I shouldn’t be analyzing a film based on math but I’m just trying to make a point. BR 2049 is exceptional filmmaking… but it’s rare in its appeal. It’s finely tuned, for the right group.

TL;DR: Not for me, but I respect the craft. 3/5 stars

[petty-crush]

An open letter/retort to the “honest trailer” for “Alien Covenant”

Of course people can disagree and of course this is a sarcastic video. But since this contains a lot of knee jerk, being negative for views comments, (and because people may get fooled by just watching this video)I think this is a good place to dissect frogs.

My bias; I think “Covenant” is a truly great film. Spectacular in ideas, behaviors, visuals, and pure fun. I loved it. I am clearly willing to die on a hill for it

The main gap is that it’s really a different series, under the mask of the “Alien” series. It actually veers closer to the 1932 film “Island of lost Souls”. Ship of survivors representing normal veer into uncharted territory; a mad scientist bending the rules of biology encounters and clashes with them; the monsters he creates go to war with the ship. And in this film evil wins.

It also contains genuinely great performance(s) from Fassbender, grand sketches of gods wrecking the cosmos, humanity abandoning its children to go after unanswerable questions, and more that harken back to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” sandbox of sci fi.

To me, this film is all about David. The humans are cannon fodder for them. Which justifies their characterization. Also, he’s clearly a stand in for Ridley Scott and the work + wonder of being an artist, film director in particular.

I love this. I can see others liking it less, but is beautifully realized, staged, and executed.

So what are people looking for? Well…

[quotes around their words, mine by themselves]

“From Ridley Scott, one of the best directors… And one of the worst”

-first off, I think an artist is judged by their best work, not overall average

Scott can be quite varied. I personally favor going to cosmos than staying in your lane. Sometimes that make mistakes, but interesting ones.

Make no mistake though: “The Counselor” is a first rate film, acidic in the extreme, but so totally gonzo that it makes you breathe a different air. It’s the kissing cousin to “Covenant”, and both show a director willing to try new ideas and tones, and pulls it off spectacularly. Both have no interest in making the viewer feel good or flatter them, which definitely pushes some people away

“There are now more bad alien films than good ones”

-first off, where is “Prometheus”? Isn’t it an alien film? If not, and “covenant” is clearly a sequel to it, then maybe this film should be judged apart from the Ripley saga.

-I have wondered at times if calling it “Prometheus: Covenant” would have cut down on the confusion

-“Alien 3” is a spectacular film. It fully commits to the idea of Ripley having courage and purpose to her life as she knows she will die. It is completely different to “Aliens”(which may have been its problem concerning reception,as we will see) and “Alien”, it forms a perfect trilogy. Fincher may hate how fucked he got by the system, but it is a beautiful and wonderful film

“Alien resurrection” less so. But it is an odd, French splatter cartoon; certainly worth watching, not at all bad.

The “vs predator” films are largely minor, and I have no qualms with considering them less successful films.

-What makes the alien series great is that with each film the xenomorph changes to be what the film needs it to be. It’s flexibility storytelling wise is impressive. The problem comes when a audience only wants one type of story done

“When Ridley Scott wanted to talk about the meaning of life, he wanked for two hours”

-“Prometheus” has nothing to do with life, and everything to do with death. The characters in the film want to know about life (particularly Shaw since she can’t give birth) but they are punished at every turn, showing the universe to be uncaring.

Disagree with that statement or not, that is the rule that “Prometheus” and “Covenant” is abiding by.

Hell the first shot of “Prometheus” is an engineer killing himself. “Covenant” starts with life and realizing how the creator will die. There is consistency in this film universe.

And it also totally vibes with “Alien”.

“Save the philosophical stuff for ‘Blade Runner’, I want a short haired girl, in a tank top, fighting a xenomorph, who kills it by sucking it into the vacuum of space”

-and now we come to the real discussion/thorn in the side; this film isn’t a damn thing like “Aliens”

One thing that makes the alien series so fascinating is how it allowed two totally different filmmakers to make their masterpiece.

Also, it’s the rare series where the sequel brought in a bigger and wider audience.

I bet money that most people really only like “Aliens”. And that’s no shame, it’s a brilliant film. It’s strengths are the set pieces, the use of xenomorph as locusts, and characters that are simple but snappy and endearing.

In comparison to “Alien” which is cold, weird and slow moving (and brilliant) “Aliens” charm is more warm and dynamic. It doesn’t ask you to wait, it asks you to hold on. It gets kids in the door with Newt, it sets up a deep chord with Ripley giving her mother like affection , and it also makes Ripley more feminine and kick ass (she was wonderfully butch and joyfully selfish in “Alien”)

Cameron said it best in his critique of “Covenant”; “ I don’t like films where you invest in a character and they get destroyed at the end.”

Some people share that opinion. Ridley Scott does not. (Nether do I)His films generally have had the protagonist go through hell and often destroyed them. I admire that in him.

But that point of view explains why “Aliens” is so successful; it makes us love the characters and be sad when their friends die. Cameron is a genius, and is warm with his characters. Scott is also a genius, and picks their wings off like a cruel child.

Every alien film post “Aliens” has had to bear that cross, of creating such lovable stock characters. “Alien 3” didn’t give a shit, and made a impressive gathering of detached male prisoners. “Resurrection” came close with goofy space pirates, but were weird as shit.

In my opinion, if “Alien” came out after “Aliens” it would have not been as warmly received, because, got damn, is it cold and weird and hurts its people. It’s suppose to. The reaction to “Prometheus” and “Covenant” shows that all too clear.

Finally, Scott clearly does not give a shit about any alien film after his. I don’t think the Prometheus saga will show the queen alien because it came after Scott and he considers it invalid.

With this in mind, I can see how people are upset. Cold, hateful, sadistic are what “Covenant” are. And I love it for that.

I love mean films with a purpose and artistic flourish. And the Prometheus saga does it so well.

If you came to “Covenant” to root for its human characters, you are fucked (and kinda an idiot). Scott is making big budget sci fi epics about the mass murder of nature and survival of artists.

You can hate that, but call a spade a spade.

“In a franchise full of unforgettable characters”

(Shows only “Aliens” characters)

What about Dallas? Ash? Clemens? Golic? Call? Elgyn? Gediman?

There exists good characters other than the second film, guys

Once again, this love for “Aliens” blinds people to everything else

“Forget the humans”

Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

-but also, that slipping on blood part was (intentionally) hilarious

“Freshman philosophy class…two versions of same pretentious professor..flute”

-why do I get the feelings that the people who say stuff like this never study philosophy and just consider anything even slightest bit about talking about feelings and ideas just stoner shit, because they are the only people that talk about those subjects they let in their social circle?

I dunno, the idea about humanity killing its children for vague reasons, someone trying to better himself against cruelty and going mad himself, and finally having the courage to create something even when everyone else tells him to stand down sounds pretty universally relatable and human to me.

And even if it was pretentious, that is what art is, to subtract the distractions, and focus on what you want the world to be

-to me, David is sad Walter cannot create, like Scott is upset younger directors don’t get to make original universes and material. But David is also a fucking maniac who will stop at nothing, to whom other lives means nothing. That kind of grand vainness is perfectly at home in the world and its what art leisure to create out of whole cloth

But all of this gets in the way of watching strong men blow things away with guns, doesn’t it? (“aliens” did this to show how ineffective the marines were, not to worship them)

-the flute adds to the fantasy element, of the pied piper trying to lure others away, to their doom

Plus, it’s just fucking funny

“Snickers at 'I’ll take care of the fingering’”

See? This film is just so much fun

“I was not expecting this much flute playing”

I love it when films surprise me. I adore it when filmmakers follow their strange urges and give us scenes I never saw coming.

I love the scene of David tempting Walter with the flute.

I marveled at the scene where David drops his black plague on the engineers(who look totally different).

I looked around as David played the fucking theme to “Prometheus” on his flute. I starred at the other audience members, as if to ask “is this the real life?”

I laughed uproariously as just when you think it’s safe the xenomorph tracks the two pilots shower sexing, like it’s 1982 slasher time.

As soon as the humans delver us to David, I could see who this film was about. And really, the humans are just for showing his gentle and different Walter is.

Ridley Scott delivered a new horror classic, with a eye towards the 70’s and 30’s, but both feet in the present, with the score and design to make it work.

The first victim convulsing and back blood shooting. David acting as satan. Terror of trapped in the sick bay. The aforementioned shower scene. The cross bearing xenomorph rejects. The puppet master pulling the strings of the first post face hugger.

This is a brilliantly conceived, written, directed, and persevered treat for horror fans. I loved every second of it.

“Thrill of seeing the xenomorph move. In full daylight. Which just looks…wrong”

This is the best point of the video, though I disagree with the conclusion.

It is weird and against the vibe of the Ripley saga for the xenomorph to be a servant. But clearly these creatures are the hounds to mr burns. Satan. Evil mad dr Moreau.

It definitely gave the the film a totally new vibe. As did all the green life. But isn’t that what films are about, showing new images?

It just looks so damn different. I like different. Different and great-even better.

“Cgi Ripley?”

That would be pretty weird. But since I more or less wash my hands of any continuity, why not?

It’s probably just a spur of the moment statement. But also incredibly funny

“It asks [x] questions but leaves you wondering [y]”

Mac, the real question is, do you like to create? That’s all this film is about. The joy of creation. Of weaving something new out of something old.

Like, Ridley is literally exploiting his own creation. It’s surreal and the best.

“Compares terminator series to Alien series”

This is more apt, but in a different way.

For both series, The first film is a stand alone classic. A low key masterpiece. The second is an expansive blockbuster which really really skewed expectations for future films.

The comparison ends there though. Sigourney Weaver has way way more character to work with. Poor Schwarzenegger had so so directors to work with, while the Alien series put down the work of real filmmakers making challenging art.

I enjoy the terminator series, but it’s clear that it’s so much the work of one man (James Cameron) so no one else can make it work. But the fluidity of the xenomorph makes every single film worth watching and honestly essential.

The second film in both series cast a long shadow. But while the following films in the terminator series really don’t hold up if stand alone, the following xenomorph films all showcase a different side to hubris and death

Which is honestly the best way to approach this film. Something new, vibrant, and bizarrely personal

Respecting and knowing horror and monsters films for what they do helps too

“Me at the idea of six more alien films”

I love it. I usually get tuned out after a few films, but this Prometheus saga just works. The possibilities are endless.

Ridley Scott deserves the highest kudos for turning this series into greatness

In a certain way, “Alien” is “Halloween”, perfect in its execution and of its singularity.

Prometheus saga is Friday the 13th series. Messier, off to an odd start, but a snowball of its own delights that fosters an utterly nihilistic universe. Like Jason, David is too good for just one film, and we need those eight films of him. It may indeed prove to be the essentials space monster-mad scientist series, just like Jason is the essential slasher killer.

Is this pizza to a steak? Yes, but each have their own pure delights, and like a certain pie, it just gets better and beautifully blurrier with each dizzying bite

Long live Prometheus saga; may it rule in hell for an eternity. Just as “Covenant” does in my heart.

[ramajmedia]

10 Things In Sci-Fi Movies You Didn't Know Were CGI | ScreenRant

From early pioneers like Tron and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, to game changers like Episode 1: The Phantom Menace and The Matrix trilogy, CGI has been used to augment the ideas and themes presented in science-fiction films. Science fiction as a genre provides different perspectives on how we think of everything from the future of our race, to the perils of technological advancement and the complexities of space travel. Computer graphic imagery and the advancements in that field help filmmakers realize their visions in ways that weren't possible with practical effects alone.

These days, CGI is more prevalent in science-fiction films than ever before. We're used to seeing the big spectacle of space battles in the latest Star Wars film. We've become accustomed to the exotic aliens of Star Trek films. But what about when CGI is used so subtly you don't even notice it? Or for things other than giant spaceships and strange extraterrestrials? Below you'll find ten things in sci-fi movies you didn't know were CGI.

10 Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Sometimes the CGI in sci-fi films is used not for huge battles or giant creatures, but to fix mistakes or recreate common objects. CGI has become a staple in the latest Star Wars films, especially for obvious things like ships, planets, space. But it was also used rather subtly and to great effect in The Force Awakens.

RELATED: Star Wars: Kylo Ren's 10 Best Moments (So Far)

The dialogue between Supreme Leader Snoke and Kylo Ren about Ren really being Ben Solo, Han Solo's only son, was meant to be later on in the film. Therefore, it was filmed with Ren's helmet off. JJ Abrams decided the reveal should come sooner, and the scene had to be reshot, with a CGI mask placed over Adam Driver's face. You can't tell it isn't a real helmet.

9 Deus Ex Machina

Deus Ex Machina is a genre film that relies more heavily on ideas than visual effects, as implied by the nature of its title, which implies a plot contrivance. Alicia Vikander stars as the cybernetic artificial intelligence unit that is created by the minds of a brilliant programmer and a Dr. Frankenstein-like engineer.

While in many scenes it appears Vikander is wearing some sort of suit that might simulate her cybernetic bodyform, she isn't. Only her face, hands, and feet are her own; everything else is CGI. It moves with such synchronicity to her own body movements as to appear virtually indistinguishable.

8 E.T.

One of Spielberg's landmark films, E.T. didn't make a flashy use of CGI in 1982, with the renowned filmmaker electing to use puppetry and practical effects wherever possible (save of course for the iconic bicycles-to-the-moon-shot). All bets were off when it came to the 2002 DVD release, however.

RELATED: Steven Spielberg's 10 Best Movies, According To Rotten Tomatoes

Spielberg had often said that if he could go back and "fix" anything in the film, it would be the guns used by the police who go after the escaping kids. He felt it was distasteful for officers of the law to draw weapons on children, and used CGI to swap the guns for walkie-talkies.

7 Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park is known for pioneering some incredible CGI effects, many of them the result of blending techniques used in stop-motion film making with modern innovations in computer graphic design. But the dinosaurs weren't the only things being rendered that way.

In the scene where Dr. Grant, Dr. Sattler, and John Hammond's grandchildren are forced to escape into the air ducts of the Visitor's Center, Lex nearly plunges to her doom. The moment where she nearly falls from the edge of the duct to the hungry velociraptor below featured a stunt girl that inadvertently looked into the camera. CGI had to be used to put the actress's face over hers rather than reshoot the scene.

6 War For The Planet Of The Apes

While audiences know that the talking bipedal apes featured in the new Planet of the Apes trilogy aren't real (and also not all played by Andy Serkis), they may not know how CGI is utilized in the rest of the films. Some of the most impressive uses of it are featured in the third film, War for the Planet of the Apes.

While CGI specialists were busy using programs to individually create strands of ape hair, they were also using them to create individual droplets of water, and leaves on trees. A great deal of the forest the apes used as their hideout area, as well as the terrain featured during the battle sequences, was entirely made of CGI despite looking incredibly life-like.

5 Children Of Men

Children of Men was a universally celebrated sci-fi movie when it debuted, in large part due to its visceral vision of a dystopian future. In a time when children aren't born due to infertility reasons, one man must protect the last child of humankind and defend it from a myriad of dangers.

RELATED: 10 Sci-Fi Movies To Watch If You Like Children Of Men

The last baby that Clive Owen's character protects wasn't a real baby at all due to the hazardous nature of the scenes it was featured in (especially him running and jumping across rooftops or amidst gunfire). Therefore it was necessary to use a CGI baby that's so life-like it fooled audiences completely.

4 Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull

While most wouldn't classify Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as a sci-fi film, the ending would solidly place it in that category. It features the beginning of the Atomic Age, and positions Indy in a world that's beginning to become completely immersed in what lies among the stars.

RELATED:  Indiana Jones 5: 10 Scrapped Ideas From Previous Sequels It Should Use

In the opening sequence involving two hot-rods racing (a 1950 Ford Deluxe Army Staff Car vs a 1932 Ford Model B Roadster), one of them rides over a gopher hole. The little critter almost gets himself decapitated by the Model B, before scampering off. That gopher was entirely CGI...for some reason.

3 Waterworld

Waterworld was an ambitious project, some would say too ambitious for a sci-fi film. It was plagued by every conceivable problem on set, had an incredibly bloated budget, problems filming on oceanic locations, as well as hazardous working conditions. It also spent a hundred thousand dollars on making the ocean CGI.

Despite the fact that aerial shots exist, there are scenes in Waterworld where the ocean is CGI, and while it looks fantastic, this contrasts pretty spectacularly with shots of the real thing. This is why the budget ballooned from $100 million to $175 million.

2 Supernova

It's General Hospital, in space! Or it's Supernova, a sci-fi thriller that positions a hospital ship in deep space. Their continuing mission? To answer intergalactic 911 calls. When the Nightingale 229 answers a distress call from another ship, the survivor they bring on board and his alien artifact may trigger a supernova that will wipe out the galaxy.

RELATED: 10 Weirdest Places That Movie Characters Have Sex

Before that catastrophic event happens, there's time for a little hanky-panky. In zero gravity, Angela Bassett and James Spader's character have a sex scene, except they weren't on set to do it. It's really their co-stars, Peter Facinelli and Robin Tunney, with Tunney's skin tone altered in post-production to match Bassett's.

1 Return Of The Jedi

While some Star Wars fans found things to gripe about in the original trilogy's third installment it was, on the whole, a fitting climax to one of the most beloved saga's in sci-fi history.  George Lucas would later come out with a trilogy of prequels for Star Wars fans to complain about and, armed with new advancements in CGI, he would go back and alter their beloved film. If you've never seen any other version of the film, you may think the alterations were normal.

When Luke takes Vader's mask off so he can see his son with his own eyes, we see that Vader has no eyebrows in the 2004 Blu-Ray edition. This is because Lucas felt they should've been burned off on Mustafar where he sustained the injuries that put him in the mask to begin with, so CGI was used to remove them. Too bad he didn't stop there...

NEXT: 10 Amazing Movie Scenes That Did Not Use CGI

source https://screenrant.com/sci-fi-movies-cgi-surprise/

[robyduncan]

Astronauts Who Won’t Fly and Killers Who Won’t Kill: William Peter Blatty and the second Exorcist film that wasn’t.

Overshadowed by its Exorcist siblings, the middle child of Blatty’s “faith trilogy” pries darkness out of the Devil’s hands and stabs it into the heart of men. __________

The Ninth Configuration is a special sort of triple-threat we don’t get to see very often in film: it seizes control of your visual field, bangs on your funny bone, and while doing so, raises questions about life, sanity, and faith that are hyper-relevant to our times. Now, this is a bold statement, given that most people have never heard of the film, much less seen it, and it ought to come with some sort of back up, so it doesn’t read like a bunch of pretentious, movie review hyperbole, right? Well, that is exactly the thing that makes this film so tricky… it is hard to capture in language. We’re all familiar with the concept of The Elevator Pitch: you try and trim all the fat and gristle off the concept of a story, and drive the remaining sharpened bone-spike directly into the mind of the person you’re talking to, in the hopes that it will stick. Usually, it is a pretty simple X-meets-Y-with-a-pinch-of-Z affair, but not with this film. The Ninth Configuration is a movie that seems very comfortable laughing in the face of every reasonable attempt to contain it in an elevator pitch. “It’s a film about the lunatics taking over the asylum. Only they aren’t lunatics. The staff are. Sometimes. Maybe.” Or perhaps “It’s an anti-war comedy, set in a gothic horror locale. With guys in Superman costumes. And… bikers.” Or maybe even “It’s the film that was supposed to be in between The Exorcist and The Exorcist III, but it was written before The Exorcist, and then rewritten after, and then filmed. But it’s about faith… and war… and astronauts… and… mistaken identity. But still about faith!” Given enough time in said elevator, attempting pitches to summarize The Ninth Configuration, one could reasonably expect to be carried off in a straightjacket, still talking about dogs performing Shakespeare and Superman rescuing Julius Caesar from assassination. And not only would it would all be true, it would  somehow be oddly understandable to anyone who’d seen it. So, we can safely say The Ninth Configuration is a strange film. I don’t mean strange in the usual artsy, incomprehensible way, that leaves you feeling dumber and less hip for having watched it and not understood . It does the dance of a late ‘70s/’80s anti-war comedy while infesting the plot of a military insane asylum story, being filmed on the set of a gothic vampire movie, where the director is having gaseous LSD pumped through the vents at intervals. And it appears to be all of these things in a tight, competent way, but I say appears because at its twisted heart, The Ninth Configuration is really a film about faith, inner demons, and maybe redemption. Maybe. But the consistent “What the Hell am I watching?” quality of the film can easily blind to you to the complexity going on under the surface. And… can, and has, made it hard to popularize via word of mouth.

On a first viewing – and this is definitely a film you should give yourself at least two runs through, if only to be sure you don’t miss anything while you’re laughing, cringing, or theorizing—Configuration seems to be a dark comedy about a military mental hospital full of officers who have either mysteriously lost their minds, or who have faked mysteriously having lost their minds: either way, the Pentagon wants answers to the “what”, and more importantly the “why” of their condition. Unsurprisingly, the military doesn’t like officers they can’t send to the field. We enter the story to find a veritable vaudeville cast of crazy patients, all awaiting the arrival of the new head psychiatrist for the facility, one Marine Colonel Hudson Kane. Kane, masterfully played by Stacy Keach  (known for his role as ‘80s TV detective Mike Hammer, and more recently for roles in Prison Break and The Bourne Legacy), manages to be calm, genial, and restrained, while also being tense, monotone, and menacing- he’s the ultimate blank slate that not only the patients, but the audience, winds up projecting their theories and interpretations on to… at least for the beginning of the film. 

A Monty Python-esque cast of crazies create a dark burlesquey backdrop for the interaction between Kane and the bombastically mad Captain Cutshaw, an Air Force astronaut who cracked in the capsule while waiting for launch on a moon mission, and had to be dragged screaming from the launch pad. Cutshaw is an amazing character, manic and cunning, played by Scott Wilson (who has been remarkable in everything from In Cold Blood to The Last Samurai, and currently plays one-legged Hershel Greene on The Walking Dead), and has set himself up as the ringleader of the circus that is the asylum. He enters into a  hilarious and infuriating therapeutic relationship with Kane, in which the more Kane manages to coax him out of his madman routine and get him talking, the more Cutshaw and the rest of the patients-slash-inmates of the asylum begin to suspect that Kane may be the least sane out of all of them.

A perfect example of this is what we’ll call “The Hammer Scene.” When Kane stops an enraged, hammer-wielding patient from knocking holes in a stone wall to find out what he is doing, he doesn’t bat an eye at being told that the wall’s molecules are disobedient, and therefore need to be punished. Instead, Kane responds by suggesting that the hammer is the source of the problem, and requests in a creepily calm, unphased monotone, that he be allowed to take it for study. In that moment, we see the line between sane and insane start to blur: is the patient really demented or just a faker? Is Kane just playing along to get the hammer, or is he really considering the possibility of disobedient molecules? The only answer we get is a silent stare at the camera from the now hammer-carrying Kane, and a building suspense that pushes us closer to the edge of our seats.

THE HAMMER SCENE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi5D03-KARM

As the film plays on, Kane and Cutshaw’s states of mind are revealed to us a piece at a time: tense and heavy dialogue here, a psychedelic visual display of delusion there, and a dream sequence, or is it a flashback, fitted in to keep our heads spinning. Through it all, the story of Cutshaw’s launch pad breakdown is pieced together, and the cracks in Kane’s stony façade begin to grow, until we wind up caught in a disturbingly funny vortex of mistaken identity, demented therapy techniques, battlefield trauma, and an absolutely brutal biker gang bar brawl. What start out as chuckles at the antics of the inmates begin to become nervous, slightly uncomfortable laughs: slowly, a scene at a time, the realization dawns that nothing is quite what it has seemed. A story that felt familiar, about how man’s actions can destroy his psyche, and how helping others might be able to repair it, begins to become something else. Give the film a second watch, and the pieces start to fall into a different pattern… especially if you know a bit about the making of the film, which is arguably as crazy as the plot itself.

Written and directed by William Peter Blatty, best known for having penned The Exorcist films, or at least the original and third, The Ninth Configuration was written before, and rewritten during, the writing of The Exorcist. Like The Exorcist, it was originally written as a script, even before the novels were written: Blatty was a screenwriter first and novelist second, quite literally. This is extra-weird, because according to Blatty, The Ninth Configuration should really be viewed as the “middle-child” of his Faith Trilogy, sandwiched between The Exorcist and The Exorcist III, two straight up horror films with little of the comedy we see in Configuration.A former co-writer on Pink Panther films, Blatty manages to bounce from horror to comedy and back artfully, which winds up making Configuration a sort of a “film negative” version of the concepts at work in The Exorcist. Rather than a film about boundless supernatural evil directly impacting the lives of innocents until faith and sacrifice save the day, Configuration is a film about personal evil, how one copes with it, and how personal sacrifice can sometimes save a person’s faith. Or at least, it might be that, depending on how you hold it up to the light, and how hard  you shake it. Where William Friedkin’s direction of The Exorcist conveys Blatty’s plot and theme with a needle point, Blatty’s direction of his own work in Configuration is a more spastic-with-a-shotgun affair, which he still makes work.

Armed with these details, the movie hits the mind’s eye differently. The  insane Captain Cutshaw (rumored to be the same astronaut character that Devil-possessed Regan from The Exorcist told he would die “up there” ) fights tooth and nail to avoid talking about why he aborted his trip to the moon, all the while deflecting by harassing Kane for his open Catholic faith. To Cutshaw, Kane seems deluded: the old classic problem of evil, of how there can be good in a world so full of violence and suffering, makes Kane’s quiet faith seem ludicrous. To Cutshaw, strapped to the top of a rocket, staring up at the dark, the stars and spaces between are not some beautiful, almost-out-of-reach features of Creation… but a cold, lonely place to die.

WHY WON’T YOU GO TO THE MOON: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfHH6mWPTRY

Kane, who has his own tortured reasons for being obsessed with the healing of the patients at the asylum,  sees care for others as the only path away from evil, and potentially the only path to redemption out of his own darkness. Watching the comedic banter fly back and forth between them, we get to see Blatty recreate the essential trying-not-to-crap-your-pants  tension from The Exorcist, but without the need for a Devil or God at all. Both men have inner demons aplenty to drive the plot, and the weapons used this time around are wit and banter instead of Bibles and holy water.

Managing to be funny and brutally honest at the same time as being deeply philosophical and chillingly creepy is a Hell of a hard thing to pull off, but Configuration pulls it off. In addition to all the mental fuel you need to get your brain spun up and twitching, you also get a script full of almost endless quotables, trippy visuals, and a deviously twisty plot. Totally worth the time invested to take it in, but remember, you’ve been warned: try not to explain it in elevators.

[differentkindapiratemovies-blog]

Narrative Theory Essay

Discussing the perceived oversaturation of narrative archetypes in modern media with reference to Joseph Campbell’s monomyth theory.

“As the old saying goes, there’s nothing new under the sun. For fans of movies and TV, that means that every story that can be told already has been. But sometimes, the movies that seem to be retelling a well-known story TOO closely are singled out, accused of being a ripoff, copycat, or unoriginal. There's no more famous (or successful) example than James Cameron’s Avatar: a story of a human being welcomed into a native tribe, who betrays their trust, but eventually saves the day by fighting on the good side in the end. As soon as the movie hit theaters, people dismissed the billion-dollar blockbuster as a ripoff of Fern Gully, or even Pocahontas before it. The truth is... it’s telling the same story told by dozens, even hundreds of famous films. But that’s not a reason to attack it, or any other re-skinned movie myth.”

It’s common to have the notion after coming out of a movie theatre that the experience was strikingly similar to the previous time you went. There is a common thread line throughout all of movie and storytelling history. Since the dawn of man, the human race has used narratives and stories to communicate ideas and emotions with each other - usually either trying to capture a part of history or with the purpose of fictional entertainment value. However, primarily I believe narratives are there for communication, being carefully crafted by storytellers of all different generations. Cave men used to draw on the walls of their caves and their fire would illuminate the images, causing them to flicker back and forth to create the earliest animation and stories recorded. Some of the most prominent fictional stories ever created, including religious texts such as the Bible, are stories we haven’t stopped recreating in two thousand years. I refuse to believe that it is the only formula that works despite being undoubtedly effective. Some might think of it as a stale structure.

Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, first theorised in Hero Of A Thousand Faces, and Tzvetan Todorov’s structure of narrative are commonly combined to create a story that seems to resonate with the majority of an audience and seemingly never ceases to fail. Movies such as The Matrix and Star Wars use both these theories in order to make up a successful story. (Although debatably the whole original trilogy acts as the entire journey seeing as Luke Skywalker, the main character, is at his lowest in the finale of the second movie resulting in a pitfall ending). George Lucas, the creator and director of the first Star Wars film, considered Joseph Campbell to be his friend and mentor.

“My last mentor was Joe... who asked a lot of the interesting questions and exposed me to a lot of things that made me very interested, a lot more in the cosmic questions and the mystery… and I've been interested in those all my life but I hadn’t focused it the way I have until I had got to be good friends with Joe.”

George goes on to say he took the mythological and religious ideas behind narratives and simplified them for a modern audience. Perhaps it would be beneficial to drop religion altogether when writing stories for the modern and less religious generation.

The Dragon Quest video game series also follows these rules with the main character literally referred to as “The Hero”. The journey of a character rising up, facing hardships, being at their lowest then being born again for their worlds to be restored to equilibrium is something I think people either feel like they can relate to or, probably closer to the truth, is fantasised about and idealised. Everyone would like to be hero in the story, overcoming their problems and saving the world. Joseph Campbell says this in his book Hero With A Thousand Faces.

“The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realisation. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realisation transcending all experiences of form - all symbolisations, all divinities: a realisation of the ineluctable void.”

There’s something gripping about watching this structure play out, and it is engaging for an audience - but they’ve seen it thousands and thousands of times before. As much as I appreciate movies that put a creative spin on the traditional structure of narrative, I really respect and love movies that go against the curve. Obviously this happens quite frequently but probably not at your local Odeon cinema - mainstream media is often streamlined for the purpose of easy consumption. For example, I enjoy films from the Marvel universe, but all too often they all play out in the same format. You could argue that companies have monopolised certain narrative structures and have a tendency to recycle them.

However, films like Richard Linklater’s 1991 day-in-the-life-of debut Slacker go against traditional “hero journeys” and plot point one/plot point two narratives, instead working like a series of loosely connected vignettes; in each scene we spend time with a different character and closely follow events occurring in their lives in real time. There’s no arcs, no beginning, middle or end. No rebirth, just a movie about strange characters hanging out in Austin, Texas, on a sunny day. It’s not an art film or particularly experimental. It’s just that, well, nothing happens. It’s an accurate depiction of reality. It's what real life actually is. I don’t wake up every day and go through a hero’s journey. We may develop as people and these situations can occur, but nine out of ten times life just isn’t like that. We wake up and things stay the same and in life, at moments when the credits are supposed to roll after we’ve achieved something, after we’ve overcome something, it just kind of keeps going. Life moves on and our “arcs” and problems to overcome reset, or new ones appear like a constantly stream of wildly uneventful sequels. New problems come up and sometimes they’re never solved and sometimes people don’t change. In my short film “Campussies!” I was really interested in trying to capture a kind of nothing day and interactions with strange people - not really making anything particularly interesting or high tension. The short was also influenced by Linklaters’ other seminal film Dazed and Confused, however that follows a slightly more traditional take on story telling, depicting a character develop throughout the movie. Jim Jarmusch is another director who often uses abrupt endings and whole scenes that literally stop moving forward. A lot of people say there’s almost an amateurish fine line however I believe this to be completely intentional.

In my narrative-based website I recreated the story of Homer’s Odyssey, a very classic tale that has been recreated and re-skinned many times over many years. Through the website, I make you, the person, interact with the story and go on the hero’s journey by yourself. There is only one correct path however the “reincarnation” implies you are constantly reborn until you get it right. Little is told about the situation in my narrative purposely, so that you can project what you would like onto it. It’s about a person, you, traveling from somewhere dangerous, perhaps enemy territory of some kind, and getting back home safely, set in a nonspecific period of time. However the roads are dangerous - filled with sword wielding enemies and no consistent place to be safe from the elements.

There’s other forms of narratives we’re told in between the lines in media such as what we’re told about certain people; these are pervasive narratives. On television we are exposed to poverty porn, depicting that all low income people are a certain way - intended to give the viewer a sense of superiority. In eighties movies we’re told that punks are ruffians and troublemakers. There’s an endless list of mainstream movies from that period showcasing punks as “bad guys”, such as The Terminator (a movie chock full of visual cues) and The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2). Of course there were movies made with more of a punk rock sensibility, such as Return Of The Living Dead, and exploitation movies of the time in which punks were portrayed as the “good guys”. This was most likely due to the media’s take on punks during the movement in the late seventies. The papers themselves named these angry kids “punks” and they wore it as a badge of honour in response to the criticism - that they were a bunch of violent thugs who held switchblades, beat you up and stole your lunch money. Their anti-establishment ways often had them the basis for dystopian movies. In actuality, it wasn’t really like that at all and personally I would feel safer if I saw a gang of whatever the modern day equivalent of punks are. Although I would agree with the anti-establishment sensibilities, most aren’t true anarchists. They’re not gonna mug you.

Again, another example of pervasive narrative we are consistently exposed to is the connotation between women and make up. Media tells us that it is the norm and it’s heavily tied to what is considered the standard of beauty for women. However, anyone of any gender can choose whether or not to wear make up. In my photography piece “Three Studies of a Woman in the Sun” I photographed my subject both wearing make up and without, one subverting the expectations of a photographed woman in modern media and one showing how she often feels comfortable. I often wonder why women choose to wear make up and why it improves their confidence. Do they truly believe that it makes them feel more in touch with their identity, or perhaps we live in a misinformed society in which it is more acceptable for one gender to present themselves a certain way, when in reality it doesn’t really matter and there’s not much of a difference. John Berger had this to say about the representation of women and their identity in the media.

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

My three portraits as part of my DCMP Photography brief are of my friend and artist Katie. Shot on a Canon, I wanted to capture her identity through three images. The middle image you see in the three panels on my blog is her in a natural environment and utterly neutral. That one is relatively light in tone due to the summers day behind her, however she's looking off and something implies it’s more melancholy than the photo lets on. Perhaps the uplifting summer isn’t enough to hold her inner more negative emotions, or that maybe the summer is no longer a good thing in light of the summer getting hotter and hotter each year. Maybe this isn’t a summer of celebration, but one of the end of the world. The bottom one is a real captured moment of her closing her eyes perhaps to imply her shyness in an industrial area, somewhere I often find comfort due to high containers and is generally aesthetically pleasing to me almost because of how not pleasing it is. The top one is how Katie would usually be and dress in her own environment, the lighting highlighting how she expresses herself through her own image. I like how the darkness is almost bleeding in around the edges of the photograph. I experimented with lighting a lot with this one and took several different photos that were the contender for the third portrait. Here, now she is herself, she seems to project more confidence looking directly into the camera like this time the camera is invading HER space as opposed to the other ones where she’s almost a part of the scenery. Now she’s out of the sun, she is the one who is shining. Notice how she also seems to fill up the frame the more comfortable she gets.

Unseen stories hide in advertising and movie posters. In these places you will find signs that speak to us sub-consciously. The movie posters for most horror movies will always use the colour red. Why? Our brain tells us when we see red that there’s danger and that the film will most likely contain plenty of blood. We understand what genre the movie is without even being told so due to semiotics. This can be seen on the movie poster for Shaun of the Dead where the doors our main character is standing behind are red, with white text to pop and in other iterations red text. You see he is surrounded by zombies, hoarded by them, most likely foreshadowing to what the movie is going entail. This is the same in food advertisements. If you watch a television ad about food the colours and aesthetics used often will tell you about the product. Most of the time, fruits and vegetables will be wet, to make them seem fresh and often whoever is starring in the ad or the dialect of the voiceover is who that product is for. If there is a voiceover speaking in a cockney accent then it’s marketed toward the working class, but it’s all just an illusion using stereotypes to manipulate the sub-conscious and the masses into relating to it. It does this all without ever actually telling us.

I wrote a short science fiction script called “The Great Hydration War” and shot a scene from it. In this scene, I did my best to make every shot tell us something. I played around a lot with power dynamic and it’s constantly changing using nothing but visual clues. When our main character thinks they are in control, the camera angle is low, making them seem large and powerful, but when the villain gets the upper hand you’ll see that they have the power. When they are both pointing guns at each other you’ll see that they’re both at the same level and share the power of the scene because it could go either way. Jazoor, the main character from the script who is from outer space, sees a figure after returning to Earth for the first time in years. Unsure of who it is, we see them in a wide shot, impersonal and unidentified. But when they stand up and Jazoor realises that it’s her twin from back when she grew up on the now ancient Earth. “It’s you!” Jazoor exclaims. With what she knows she gains the power to deal with the situation. She’s got this. However she’s flooded with doubt; “You sure?” Says the Dryborg, an evil futurist cyborg whose one weakness is water. The camera swoops up, leaving the character feeling vulnerable with no idea what kind of situation this is now. Then she brings up her gun, bringing the power back to her. I did this throughout the entire scene and tried my best to make sure I was expressing the characters feelings and positions in the scene through the camera angles even though obviously it’s quite a non-sensical script and a mildly ridiculous scene. I thought about the lighting, as the scene was based on an alternate reality Earth in the past where the sun is blue so I made sure all of the scenery were glowing in this blue light which I managed to do in post-production. The costumes were designed by myself and my friend who played the characters. I wanted something science fiction-esque, but obviously I had no budget and not a lot of time, so I decided to try to take the comedic route and rely on it having more charm than actually trying to make the audience believe what was going on. The scene is a pivotal part of the larger structure and story that I had written, however the storyboards for the scene were in fact drawn before I wrote it.

Even when I wrote the script I realised I sub-consciously loosely followed the hero’s journey, most likely because I take so much inspiration from movies. Even when writing, I instinctually had thoughts like “yes, now this kind of scene has to happen”. It was very condensed but it’s still there. We begin the story introducing our hero Jazoor, she continues to go on a journey across the universe before falling and being at her lowest in the third act before facing off her demon she’s been fearing the whole film. She overcomes the Dryborg but not in the way she probably thought. However, I did forget to film the character limping throughout the scene.

Everything is a journey, our lives are one. They’re not always structured how we want them to be but they’re a journey. Every day when we wake up we begin a new micro journey, a new chapter in a much bigger story that is how we view our lives. Stories are almost telling us how to live and that what we’re doing is okay. In my opinion modern mainstream cinema is stale, and I find it hard to believe that in just over a hundred years of film (and a few thousand for storytelling as a visual medium), storytelling has already dried up of all its originality and that we just keep repeating ourselves. Perhaps it's time we took a look at how we structure and create our characters and stories and try to make something more relevant and authentic. Stories reinforce our sub conscious beliefs behind our morals, between good and bad. People don’t want to be seen and thought of as the bad guy within society, hence why most stories are in fact about what we perceive as the “good guy”, the hero. I always find something to latch on to when enjoying a film, something to reassure me that I have my humanity or reassure me when I feel like I don’t have it - and that it’s okay if I don’t.

I don’t like to talk about the internet or politics in context of any work because I feel like those are things that have tainted some elements of different art forms. The only issue with making movies people can relate to is that also means you don’t want to offend anyone, which almost seems like an impossibility in recent years. Too much is focused on these subjects but perhaps that’s why people like movies. Social and political commentary have made many movies hits throughout all of time, but I believe a lot of the time story and characters are being sacrificed out of fear of offending or not being politically correct. It doesn’t seem to matter which stance you take within media, there will always be people that disagree. The internet has given everyone a loud voice and usually it's used for criticism. In terms of relating to a movie, I don’t think it should be a case of representation of sexual orientation or race, it should be about values and character - although I suppose it is human nature to want to relate to something or something who appears like us. Whatever the case, we need to relate to character as a person, and become engaged in the narrative. I think that is is why Campbells and Tzvetan’s theories and myths are continued to be used to this day, because they work.

I would personally love to see more change and experimentation in mainstream and modern cinema, and not to have to constantly and actively seek it out. Even recent movie posters are directly copying each other with the use of colour and framing, which directly relates to the signs we use to communicate information with an image. It would be refreshing to really open up the limitations and possibly of narratives - or in some cases close them off completely.

Bibliography

The Matrix. (1999). [video] Directed by L. Wachowski and L. Wachowski. United States: Warner Bros.

Star Wars. (1977). [video] Directed by G. Lucas. United States: 20th Century Fox.

Shaun of the Dead. (2004). [DVD] Directed by E. Wright. United Kingdom: Universal Pictures.

Slacker. (1991). [DVD] Directed by R. Linklater. United States: Orion Classics.

Dazed and Confused. (1993). [DVD] Directed by R. Linklater. United States: Gramercy Pictures.

The Terminator. (1984). [DVD] Directed by J. Cameron. United States: Orion Pictures.

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. (2019). [DVD] Directed by G. Miller. Australia: Warner Bros.

The Return of the Living Dead. (1985). [DVD] Directed by D. O'Bannon. United States: Orion Pictures.

Campbell, J., 1949. The Hero With A Thousand Faces. 1st ed. United States: Pantheon Books.

Square Enix. 1986. Dragon Quest. Video Game. Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft.

Berger, J., 1972. Ways Of Seeing. 1st ed. United Kingdom. Penguin.

George Lucas. (1999). “George Lucas in Conversation With Bill Moyers”. Bill Moyers. George Lucas Tells Bill Moyers About the Mentors in His Career.

Dyce, A.D. 2016. How Every Blockbuster Movie Tells The Same Story. [Online]. [8 July 2019]. Available from: https://screenrant.com/how-all-movies-same-secret-truth/

[topicunknown-blog]

The Great Star Wars Wikipedia Debate

“Other debates become epic struggles with different sides emerging.”

Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites on the internet. When people say they are going to Google something, most of the time they are using Google as a middle-man. The end result is often Wikipedia or some other popular wiki. Wikis are a huge part of the internet, providing free and endless knowledge to any individuals online.

And yet the behind-the-scenes struggles and debates largely go ignored by most Wikipedia readers. But behind that article on the Power Rangers series you just read are endless debates and conversations. Today I’m looking at one large debate on one Wikipedia page. This is the war over Episode VII.

For those who don’t know, Wiki talk pages are areas where users can discuss, suggest and debate edits to Wikipedia articles. Many talk pages are filled with a few entries. Maybe a couple debates or suggestions. The Star Wars Force Awakens talk page is much larger than that. The entire Force Awakens script is right around 25,000 words. The Force Awakens talk page is easily 4 times as big.

The talk page is filled with debates and recurring characters. And I want to share some of the best parts of this epic story.

Digging into the talk page can be tricky. These pages were never intended for mass public consumption. Most people who click on a Wikipedia article never even notice the tab at the top labeled “talk”. These pages are laid out haphazardly --  like an old internet forum.  And within these pages users hammer out the details that will appear in every Wikipedia entry on the site.

I’m not entirely sure, but my guess is that when people put together Encyclopedias, they probably have similar conversations. But probably done by people with less silly usernames.

Debates in the Star Wars page are varied. A small debate occurred on November 29th 2015. It was about which was the best way to order the actors names. Someone suggested it go by importance, but this was shot down by other users who believe this wasn’t “objective” enough. Which is fair. And that small conversation ends a few weeks later with very little said.

Other debates become epic struggles with different sides emerging and new battles occurring after the first loss.

-------

  “I know you people are not gonna listen to me..”

On November 6th 2014, Milchama stated that the new film is simply called Star Wars: The Force Awakens and does not include Episode VII in the official title.  

“It doesn't look the the Episode number will be in the film's title.” Is how Michama ends their post.

Only four minutes later "ShadowUltra jumps in and agrees with Michama. ShadowUltra believes that Lucasfilm and Disney are following the same naming convention as the Original Trilogy. But two minutes later The Wookiepeedian jumps in. He shares a link to the official site which says the title of the film actually includes Episode VII.

Now it’s on.

A few minutes later Favre1fan93 shares TWO links to The Hollywood Reporter and Variety which show the logo as just Star Wars: The Force Awakens, no VII. A minute later The Wookiepedian responds.

“That is only for marketing purposes, a la The Original Trilogy.” But Favre doesn’t buy it and responds with a few simple words. “Seems pretty official to me.” The Wookiepedian takes almost 10 minutes to respond but finally explains that a website got official word from Lucasfilm that Episode 7 is in the opening crawl. The thread goes quiet for a few hours. It seems Wookiepedian has won. The title is Star Wars Episode VII The Force Awakens.

Just around 3 hours later a new person jumps into the conversation, Jason1978. He believe that the number does not appear in the title. His evidence? The logo, which doesn’t have VII in it and the original announcement of the title by Disney, which omitted Episode 7 from the title. He concedes that, yes, the number will appear in the opening crawl, like the other films. But that unlike the prequels, Force Awakens won’t officially have VII as part of the title.

The Wookiepedian’s response comes a few hours later.

“Yes, this is basically what I meant.”  And to be fair, that’s what he argued. He believes that the title would be Force Awakens, but that the 7 would be seen in the crawl. The debate is about how to name it on Wikipedia.

At this point Emperor001 slides into the conversation and begins talking about the marketing behind the original X-Men films… but the point is that marketing sometimes does its own thing. He explains that posters for X-Men Last Stand called it simply X III. But the actual name of the film was X-Men Last Stand.  He believes that just because a few posters and logos leave Episode 7 off the title, doesn’t mean it isn’t called Episode 7. He also points out that “Everyone already knows this film as Episode VII.”

An hour later Adamstom97 jumps in and tries to reach a compromise. He definitely believes the page should not call the film Star Wars Episode VII The Force Awakens, even it appears in the crawl. He points to Star Trek Into Darkness which has a small section explaining the confusion over the name. Hoping for compromise, Adamstom97 tries to figure out a way to appease both sides.

“A voice of leadership and reason against the Episode 7 team.”

Wookeipedian is having none of Adam’s compromise. Instead he leans HARD into Emperor001’s point that everyone already knows the film as Episode 7.

“The common name for the film for the past two years (not to mention the 30-odd years it was merely a rumor) has been Episode VII. Removing that from the title will confuse general readers as to which film this is.”

This comment goes unchallenged for 12 hours. And then Popcornduff decides to lay down the Wikipedia law. Popcornduff, or P duff as I call him, believes that Wikipedia should use the film’s official title, which he believe is Star War The Force Awakens. He goes on to say “We can’t pretend the title of the film is something else just to make it easier to understand.” 

But even before Popcornduff could lay down what they believed was the law, changes had already been made.

Alien Putsch resistant responds with shock and disbelief. “They’ve moved it to ‘Star Wars Episode VII The Force Awakens.’ Which is crazy.” But later he seems to have a change of heart, explaining that due to upcoming spin-offs the 7 is needed to help keep the main saga separate from the spin-offs. But he seems defeated with his final sentence. “I know you people are not gonna listen to me..”

Favre1fan93 returns hours later. He seems fed up with Wookiepedian’s ideas and others who believe the movie’s title includes Episode VII. He references multiple publications and logos along with Tweets from Disney and the official Star Wars website. But to appease those who disagree he adds a sentence in the Wikipedia article explaining that the film is also known as Episode 7. It seems like a level headed approach and maybe the end of this debate.

But no...not even close.

A few moments later ggctuck decides to throw some gas on this already already burning debate. He feels the old films should have their Wikipedia titles changed to reflect Favre’s comment. About 10 hours later Favre responds to ggctuck’s comment. Basically ggctuck has no idea what they’re talking about. Those old films already had the titles changed.

But The Wookiepedian sees an opening. “What about the prequels?” he asks. He wonders If they are only using subtitles on Wikipedia and not numbers,  why does it say Star Wars Episode I The Phantom Menace. “It looks strange to use episode numbers for 1-3.”

 “It remains to this day, a monument to their victory..”

Favre continues to stay firm. “The Prequels officially titled themselves using the Episode number. So even if it looks strange, those are the official titles of the films.”  Wookiepedian begins to wonder how they are even determining a movie’s title. He then explains how each Star Wars film crawl includes the number.

This seems to go against his earlier posts where he admits that the films’ official titles are without numbers. Yet now he wonders how they are deciding the title of the Wikipedia page for Force Awakens. It’s clear: Many believe that the official title should be the name of the page, regardless of the crawl. But Wookiepedian isn’t so sure.

Darthbotto pops up and throws their hat in with the Episode 7 folks, but only a few minutes later is shut down by Farve who has become a voice of leadership and reason against the Episode 7 team.

At this point the conversation begins to die down, a few pop in and voice concern but are quickly quieted. The No-Number team has won. But weirdly someone points out that Wikipedia France had a similar debate and ended up putting the number in the title. But this isn’t enough to change the overall feeling in the thread. Star Wars Force Awakens is the title, but Episode 7 will be mentioned in the article text. The end..

Almost…

Months later, 4TheWynne starts a new thread talking about the title. But our old buddy Favre1fan93 is quick to point him to the large thread that happened months ago.

Okay, now it’s over- Nope!

I’m not going to dig into the next big debate over the title,but Farve presents a final argument for and against including Episode 7 and people voice their support or lack of support. A vote happens and after 30 days the vote is counted and while some argue the exact wording, the Episode 7 team finally wins. They include the numbered title in the opening sentence. It remains to this day, a monument to the victory of people like Wookipedian, ShadowUltra and others. They held strong in their position that Episode 7 needed to be part of the title and ultimately had it added to the very top of the page.

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Despite thousands of words being written about this topic by dozens of users over months and months, the original poster of the first epic thread never really shows up again. Milchama kickstarted this massive debate and sadly we never get to see their reaction to the end result. Hopefully they saw it and smiled.

I can only hope.