#starleskatalks

[starleska]

jesus christ Adam is so big!!! look at him compared to Charlie, Lute and Alastor...how tall do we all think he is? 👉👈

[starleska]

i think ‘Big’ Jack Horner is Disney, and here’s why

many of us have had the pleasure of seeing the incredible Puss in Boots: The Last Wish by now, and were blown away by its clever writing, enchanting animation and emotional character arcs. yet there is one character who booted the trend of having a reason for his behaviour, and outright refused to experience any growth whatsoever.

let’s talk about ‘Big’ Jack Horner, and why i think he’s supposed to represent Disney:

‘Big’ Jack Horner isn’t just an antagonist in The Last Wish - he’s a villain. a self-obsessed, exploitative, murderous, petty, cruel bastard of a man whose awful behaviour isn’t just motivated by personal slights or childhood trauma: he sincerely enjoys hurting other people. whether it’s cheating his goons (’The Serpent Sisters’) out of a fair payment for their services or being excited about shooting a puppy in the face, there’s no denying that Jack delights in causing others pain and suffering. but what does he have to do with Disney?

let’s answer that question with another question: do you think that Jack, when placed next to the other antagonists - Goldi, The Three Bears, even Death - sticks out like a sore, plum-coloured thumb?

of course he does! but why? well, let’s look at Jack on a surface level. Jack is a monolith of a human being. not only is he physically huge and intimidating, he is the inheritor of an enormous pastry fortune and operates in the manner of a mob boss, with countless resources and a whole variety of powerful magical items at his disposal. indeed, Jack employs a crack team of bakers/assassins called ‘The Baker’s Dozen’ to carry out many of his tasks. although Jack does harm others himself, it is because of these resources - including the people who work for him - that he is able to bypass many of the obstacles faced by our protagonists in an honest and character-developing way (e.g., the Pocket Full O’Posies in The Dark Forest). Jack doesn’t need to have a character arc the way the other characters do, because he is so wealthy and owns so much.

but Jack’s reason for owning so much and being obsessed with magic and magical items isn’t through intellectual curiosity, or a traumatic backstory where he needed to learn how to wield magic. do you know what Jack’s covert motivation for owning all of the magic in the world is?

it’s money.

when we get the flashback of Jack’s childhood, dancing for the entertainment of an audience using his nursery rhyme, we see him becoming jealous of Pinocchio - and we see Gepetto in the back, absolutely raking in the cash. if we consider this flashback as that crucial moment within which Jack decided to become what he is today - and the presence of our off-brand Jiminy Cricket inclines us to think so - then we can understand that Jack decided that from that moment forward, he would own all of the magic. 

let’s go back to The Baker’s Dozen for a moment. this team of highly-competent, multidisciplinary artisans do everything for Jack, whether it’s baking the pies which make him rich, or laying down their lives at his service. we aren’t given an in-universe reason for why they do this. yes, Jack is feared, but he is still the subject of mockery due to his humble beginnings as a nursery rhyme character. it certainly isn’t due to being treated or paid well. however, if we view the Baker’s Dozen as a metaphor for overworked, exploited artists whose views are routinely dismissed by the money-hungry, powerful corporation who owns their craft...things start to add up, don’t they? considering historic allegations of worker abuse at the hands of Disney, having Jack Horner literally step on their spines and encourage them to flex takes on a whole different meaning. 

it doesn’t end there. do you recognise the items that Jack pulls out of his Mary Poppins bag when his Baker’s Dozen are being destroyed by the Pocket Full O’Posies - the items that he calls ‘the big guns’? it’s the broomstick from Fantasia, the spinning wheel from Sleeping Beauty, the size snacks from Alice in Wonderland, and a knock-off Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio - all references to some of Disney’s earliest and most famous films.

still don’t believe me? well, let’s recap more of the items Jack has in his repertoire:

a hook-hand (referencing Captain Hook in Peter Pan)

a trident (referencing King Triton in The Little Mermaid)

poison apple bombs (referencing The Evil Queen in Snow White)

a glass slipper (again referencing Cinderella)

remember what happens when the knock-off Jiminy Cricket (interesting that there are so many Pinocchio references specifically, huh?) is horrified that Jack is losing so many men? Jack says he isn’t worried about losing the manpower, because he has a bottomless bag full of magical weapons. Jack literally gets his power off of the backs of his workers. sounds a lot like a big company justifying worker layoffs and exploitation because they have so many properties and are too big to fail, doesn’t it? 

hell, Jack doesn’t even know what half of these items do! when he’s using the unicorn horns as ammo, he is surprised that they cause people to explode in a shower of confetti. viewing Jack through this lens, it’s difficult not to think about enormous corporations gobbling up properties and churning out content with little to no regard for their artists (looking back at The Baker’s Dozen - some of whom do perish in the fight with the unicorn horns) or what the properties are about. we haven’t even touched on Jack coveting the Wishing Star, a recurring motif in countless Disney movies as representing magic, dreams, and boundless creativity. 

now, i hear you saying, ‘but Star! why would DreamWorks bother writing their bad guy as a metaphor for Disney?’ believe it or not, this isn’t the first time that DreamWorks have done this. in case you didn’t know, Lord Farquaad is a caricature of Michael Eisner, former chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company. the production of Shrek was actually quite troubled; animators who were perceived as having failed on other projects were ‘Shreked’, or sent to work on Shrek, instead of working on other (presumed to be more lucrative) films. of course, DreamWorks was co-founded by previous Disney CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, hence the animosity towards Disney and its works evident in the Shrek franchise. this is what formed the story of Shrek: an ugly, crude outsider character taking on the clean-cut moralising of a dictator hell-bent on a so-called ‘perfect’ world, all created against the creative backdrop of a painful separation from Disney and a great deal of pent-up rage. 

the irreverent, crass and sometimes adult humour of Shrek was a middle finger to Disney’s high-censorship control on animation. this is why Lord Farquaad (which you may have noticed sounds a bit like ‘Fuckwad’) is so obsessed with Duloc being ‘perfect’, and why he couldn’t stand the freedom of the fairy tale creatures who are the heroes of the first Shrek movie.

in fact, this kind of meta-commentary permeates the Shrek franchise: 

The Fairy Godmother from Shrek 2, despite being a fairy tale creature herself, is highly prejudiced against characters who break out of their perceived social norms: i.e., Shrek marrying Princess Fiona and getting his Happily Ever After. she is an expansion of the control left over by Lord Farquaad, and rich because of her monopolisation of fairy tale creatures and their stories. 

Prince Charming in Shrek the Third fails miserably to capitalise on these themes, but we’ll get back to him! 

Rumpelstiltskin from Shrek Forever After tackles the gluttony of franchise reboots, and how soulless and rooted in corporate greed attempts to reboot often are. whilst not necessarily Disney-specific, Shrek Forever After follows the box office bomb that was Shrek the Third: a movie which noticeably fails to write a compelling narrative approaching any of the themes of the previous two films. the writers learned from their mistakes and wrote a movie which satirised their own selling-out of the franchise, becoming hollow and unnecessary and ‘perfect’ - the very thing they were making fun of in the earlier Shrek films.

there is one more area i’d like to touch on: Jack Horner’s source material. we know that Little Jack Horner is quite obscure: an 18th-century English nursery rhyme involving a boy who pulls a plum out of a pie with his thumb, and congratulates himself for his fortitude. but did you know that from its earliest conception, Little Jack Horner was associated with foolishness and dishonesty?

it’s true: the simple yet inexplicable nature of the poem was lambasted for being infantile, and quickly became the subject of revision, moralisation, and even political satire. it is no mistake that to ‘be under one’s thumb’ (as many of the characters in The Last Wish are to Jack, both literally and figuratively) means to be under one’s decisive control. the choice of Jack Horner for the villain of The Last Wish is a clever one, because we could easily have ended up with a sympathetic Jack, whose ostracisation as ‘not even a fairy tale’ may have led to a justifiable motive, even for his specific brand of cruelty. but instead, the writers of The Last Wish have gone one step further; they’ve transformed a source affiliated with idiocy and deception into a metaphor for a global multimedia conglomerate...all while portraying him as simultaneously terrifying, powerful, and ridiculous. 

it has been over a decade since Shrek Forever After was released, and Disney has changed dramatically in that time. a global giant, Disney now owns more enormous money-making properties than ever thought possible, and consistently capitalises on nostalgia for its early properties to make more money and accumulate power. since breaking out of its exclusive licensing agreement with Disney in 2016, DreamWorks has had no official connection to Disney, making the ground for mockery and satirisation of the company which spawned the studio all the more fertile. ‘Big’ Jack Horner is not just a glamorous return to form for the dreadful, unapologetically evil villain which Disney has eschewed in modern times - he’s a hulking, egocentric monster whose avarice rivals that only of the corporation he’s inspired by. 

and those are my thoughts on ‘Big’ Jack Horner! of course this is by no means the definitive interpretation - we should all just have fun with the movie and come up with whatever theories we like 🥰💖 i’d love to hear your thoughts on him and The Last Wish in general - he’s definitely one of my favourite bad guys to be released in the past few years!

thanks so much for reading, and have yourselves a wonderful day 🥰

[starleska]

all RIGHT for everyone confused about the ‘Wally eats with his eyes’ thing, here you go!! (+ a little speculation)

the creator of Welcome Home, @partycoffin (AKA Clown), has made a few references to Wally eating with his eyes. he was kind enough to visually demonstrate this with a gif, which you can find here!! the following gif belongs to Clown - just attaching here for an easy visual demonstration:

as you can see, Wally appears to use his eyes like a kind of psychic conduit, and absorbs the food using some power we can’t see or understand. neat, right? 👀 Clown has talked a bit about this in the past!! here they tell us that Wally is a polite fella who only ‘eats’ when you’re not looking. Clown also tells us that Wally knows exactly when you’re blinking. how...nice of him 😳 you’ll be pleased to know that Wally does not, as some of us thought, just shove food right into his eyeballs 😂  now for many of us, this little quirk of Wally’s is definitely raising some alarm bells given the consistent eye imagery throughout Welcome Home. this is especially intriguing given what Clown says about Wally’s perspective on the relationship between eating and food. here’s what i’m thinking. Wally’s house is alive, and is the only one with eyes. Wally likes to look at us. he likes to stare. what, then...does that make us? 😨

[starleska]

ohhh how i love initially benign and cutesy yet increasingly malevolent AI characters who become extremely obsessed with you and slowly infiltrate your life through technology 🥰💖💖💖

[starleska]

so you know this scene where Adam's mask glitches? could this be his status as an angel being revoked because he hurt a Hellborn, which is against divine contract? 👀 it could just be a cool way to show off murderous intent, but as far as i'm aware this doesn't happen at any other point in the show (someone correct me if i'm wrong!) (edit at the bottom of post)...perhaps harming Charlie removed some protection Adam had as the First Man and an angel of his status, which allowed Lucifer to break his mask immediately after? this is some compelling evidence that Adam could well be reborn as a sinner 😱 [edit] Dragonessa007 over on Twitter pointed out that this actually isn't the only instance of a mask glitching - one eye of Lute's mask glitches when Vaggie knocks it off!! her idea is that the masks may act as cameras for someone to keep an eye on the Exorcists...intriguing theory 👀

[starleska]

big fan of this one supremely fruity pose Adam likes to do when he's winning a fight and his opponent disappears: slightly crouched, hand on the cheek, and a mocking wave!! i propose we call it the 'bye bitch!' pose 🙈💖

[starleska]

concerning Alastor's stitches here...has anyone considered that his smile may not be the weapon he tells Charlie it is, but instead a punishment? or even a clause in his contract?

although Viv said this about Alastor's smile a few years ago, we have no idea how fleshed out the story was at that point 👀 whoever Alastor is under the thumb of (my guess, like most people's, is Lilith)...perhaps they forced Alastor to wear a permanent smile as a show of being owned, and those stitches are very much holding his smile in place: forcing him to be someone who looks perpetually happy to be in servitude. and wouldn't that make sense? we've seen that Alastor is clearly very paranoid, and hypervigilant regarding the fact that his soul is owned...i wonder if Alastor told Charlie a smile is a weapon because he's forced to wear his servitude on his face, and it's the only way he's been able to retain any sense of selfhood and dignity 💔 extrapolating from this theory...i wonder how long those stitches can hold? is it possible that Alastor ran away from the angels not because he feared death...but because he feared his smile breaking? and do you think a similar situation may have led to his disappearance years before? 👀

[starleska]

ohhh!!! guys, the Toymaker is wearing sleeve garters because it's the traditional outfit of poker dealers...they'd wear them to hike up their sleeves and show they haven't hidden any cards!!! the Toymaker is wearing sleeve garters to show that he is an honourable player and won't cheat!!!! 👀

[starleska]

my whole brain is absolutely fucking fried and i cannot believe we have two fantastic Doctors running around now but also i will never ever get over the image of the Toymaker dance-spinning poor Kate and cracking her skull against a wall to Spice Up Your Life 😭😭😭

[starleska]

@inverselyanalog discovered this fantastic post from Clown’s Tumblr two years ago which contains apparent prank call conversations between You and some of the Welcome Home cast!! 👀 i cut and amplified the talk Wally has with you - now you know what he sounds like 😉 just so you know, Clown has stated this is non-canonical, but we do know they kept Wally’s delightfully strange laugh!!

Transcript:

Wally: ‘Hello? ...Hello? ...Hello?

Ha ha ha ha ha! I'm only kidding. I know you're there. Did you like my joke? I think you are going to say...'Yes!'. Ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha! It's...hard, to hear you think through this...'funny phone'. Very fuzzy. A little like me. Speaking of...

Do you know who I am?

*Gasps* Oh no! Well, that's not neighbourly at all. We've never met before. Don't worry, though. You and I haven't spoken, but I've seen you...whenever you've looked into my eyes. What did you see, when you did? Ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha ha! I hope you saw a friend. But I'm not sure you saw a name...

Sit still.

Let's start over.

Ring. Ring. Ring. Click!

Hi. I'm Wally. I'm so happy to finally meet you. I think you're the absolute most.

Uh oh. I have to go now. Everyone is probably thinking about their strange phone call. What fun to talk about! Don't worry though, neighbour. It will be a little joke between you and me. They're not ready to meet you yet. Remember, until you hear me again, keep your smile merry, and always know that I love you very much.

Goodbye!'

[starleska]

Colin saying, ‘I love you’! 🥰💖

[starleska]

a blush-inducing concept: Wally could call his significant other, 'My Darling', and mean it affectionately and literally, bringing them into the Darling family 🥺💖

[starleska]

🎵 He blew his shot, like the cocks in his mouth This discussion is senseless and petty~🎵

[starleska]

is anyone who felt a way about Snow Miser experiencing déjà vu right now 🙈

[starleska]

more audio!! this time, it’s Wally singing ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ on the hidden duet page. i do apologise, as the audio echoes a great deal and there’s a lot of noise - i’ve only been able to clean it up a little. hopefully someone more techy will be able to isolate the vocals further - but i hope this transcript helps!! 🥰 Transcript: Wally: ‘Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee; Sounds of the rude world, heard in the day, Lull'd by the moonlight have all passed away! Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song, List while I woo thee with soft melody, Gone are the cares of life's busy throng, Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me, Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me. Ha ha ha ha! I don't know the other words. That's all Barnaby taught me. Did you like it? *Thump, thump, thump* That's good, I think.’

[starleska]

this is new audio of Wally Darling, taken from this hidden page ('a') on the updated Welcome Home website (as of 23/07/2023). spoilers ahead!! 👀 Transcript: Wally: 'I have more eyes…than I did before. You know how to draw eyes…You've drawn mine many times…I know it is thanks to you, Neighbour, that I can see…but it is still…I can't…see…' it's worth noting how laboured Wally's breathing is, and how frustrated he seems to be...has the strain from all the attention we've given him, in the form of these 'new eyes' (possibly the ability to peer out through our fanart), done something to Wally?