#that and clearly a director/creator who deeply cares about the story and characters

[paris-geller-was-straightwashed]

okay so, having now seen furiosa: a mad max saga opening night and having Ruminated on my thoughts, I am going to give my two-pence on the movie even though nobody asked or wanted it - you're getting it anyway!

but before going into the full thing, I actually re-watched fury road today, bc I just wanted to contrast it now that we know furiosa's full story that lead her to her trek in fury road, and I just had mad max on the brain (and also I love that movie).

spoilers under the cut below!!

first, I already knew before seeing the prequel, that that scene in fury road where furiosa breaks down after learning about what happened to 'the green place,' was going to now hit 2x as hard once we learn what really happened the moment she was ripped away, and...yeah, it's super painful to watch. it was already a very emotional scene, but now having known how much pain and struggle it costed her, how many times furiosa desperately made her bet to get back home and fell short - you can really feel her grief

funnily enough though, I was shocked to find myself tearing up not during that scene, but when furiosa was reunited with the last of the many mothers. having just watched her ripped away so unfairly as a defenseless child, her whole world destroyed and clinging onto this dream of one day, getting to embrace her family - you can't help it!! I started tearing up when the other woman rushed to furiosa, embracing her with the gentle touch of their foreheads, 'this is our furiosa' 😭 like..she did it!! she made it home!!! - also, I learned in the credits - that woman was actually the same little girl, valkyrie, in furiosa who was her friend!!! that girl saw her friend get snatched and pulled away from their home, and then finally, both grown, they reuinite! I just thought that was sweet

what max says to her about hope in the scene after they find the mothers, 'if you can't fix what's broken..you'll go insane.' - my mind immediately jumped to dementus. we get this glimpse that he once had a wife and child(ren) he loved, that were either taken from him or killed, and he tells furiosa in their stand-off more or less how that destroyed him mentally, further plunging him into this hateful madman who acts so cruelly to others. he couldn't 'fix' it by getting them back ('I want them back!!' 'I can't!!'), the one thing he loved that kept him sane, and so he lost his humanity.

I saw a post of someone saying how ricktus's death (immortan joe's son) is 10x more satisfying after having seen what he (nearly) did to child furiosa...abso-fucking-lutely (though, I think with that in mind, furiosa should've gotten a part in it..)

also, max & and furiosa's dynamic after knowing about her & jack...the parallels! the parallels!! their gradual bond of trust, how fluidly they work together to kill/fight the enemies of the citadel akin to her and jack vs. dementus and gang, etc.

this saga, of course, is about hope and redemption, alluded to in both fury road and the prequel. in fury road, max says (I think in his opening monologue) how he was once strived to be a 'righteous warrior', who could do good and help others. later, when one of the wives finds the warboy nux, he's distraught bc he thinks his chances for greatness are gone, but then she tells him that maybe, he's destined for something greater - and that would be, of course, later sacrificing himself to save her and the rest by crashing the rig into the war party. in furiosa, jack says how his parents were valiant warriors, and how he hopes one day, he could be the same - also, later, fulfilling that by sacrificing himself so that furiosa might escape dementus and the destroyed gastown. it's just such an amazing string of parallels - all three men, looking to do something great, and then, through furiosa, they're given that chance and achieve something good even amongst the destruction!! but it's only bc of furiosa, this harbinger of hope, that they do so - she's the tie between them all, the embodiment of that goodness!!! it's! just! so! good!!!

honestly there's probably way more parallels out there I'm sure ppl will bring up, but those were the things that struck me. now, onto my actual thoughts on the prequel.

--I'll start by saying I was unbelievably excited to see this movie. I'm annoyed though, bc despite knowing about it and wanting to see it once it was released, I literally only learned it was coming out a week before the release date. straight up, the press for it was so poor, not once did I hear about it before the trailer randomly crossed my feed one day - and considering how popular fury road is, I find that bizarre (but, I'll bet you a good couple bucks, that the press/hype was deliberately poor bc of the movie company execs, due to this being a female lead film 😠) - but it did mean I didn't have to wait too long, and that I did watch the trailer about 13 times on my own accord until then..

--having read the reviews, I do agree, it is a bit slower then fury road - but, that's really only bc it's a character story instead. fury road takes places in the current time of the film and the actions that follow, whereas the prequel is specifically about furiosa, so it's honed less to the action and more about a certain character, in my opinion. but it's just as good for a character story! it does an excellent job of unfolding furiosa's journey, and really, if you're gunna compare everything in the franchise to fury road, it's never gunna live up. that said, there's still excellent action and real nail-biting moments.

--I will say though, that I found it almost...darker, then fury road? fury road is definitely intense and there's of course violence, but it never openly tips into anything past pg-13; the darkness that is there, is more or less touched upon by the narrative (like, we can get a sense of what must've happened to the wives (ie assault) and why they escaped once we see how immortan joe regards them as property, the suffering furiosa must've went through by the pure vitriol look she gives him when their cars are side-by-side and later, 'remember me?' before killing him (my favourite scene)). but it's never explicit - furiosa is. from the torture of her mother, to that scene right after the max cameo when he drops furiosa off at the citedel's underground where I literally had to cover my eyes and ask my friend to say when it was done..there's an overtone of darkness that gives to the tragedy of furiosa, this child molded from pain (not to mention, again, that scene of ricktus and her as a child which to me, was the most nerve-wracking moment). fury road gives you a glimpse, but furiosa doesn't hold back.

--chris hemsworth, meanwhile, made an excellent villain. not just as an actor, but dementus as a character was fantastic. he's got lots of great lines and brings in a lot of humor - he's both deranged and erratic, while also clever and simultaneously childish, and mostly, cruel. he's wonderfully dynamic. bringing in a backstory of losing his wife/child was a great added piece to his story (I love a good backstory), and the way he takes the loss of his kid and tried to mold it around furiosa, tries to fill that empty piece inside, was a great choice in terms of their dynamic. it made him more then just a mad-man who stole a child for yuks - he had a deeper desire to tote furiosa around, almost as a security blanket in the same way the teddy bear also acts as one. his final monologue was great - the ramblings of a hateful man, but it was, in the end, what got furiosa to see past vengeance, and become better - to choose hope, and not destruction.

--anya taylor-joy did a great job I thought - while I wish furiosa had more lines, she made up for it in just the facial expressions and how full they were, really giving us a glimpse of what furiosa was feeling. even still, it would've been nice to have known what was going on in her head, or even hear her talk about her past - the green place, and then dementus, are the pure driving force of her character, yet she doesn't ever mention or grapple with her grief around these things, simply stays silent (except for the final confrontation with dementus). I would've loved maybe, if she had confided in jack, or maybe even one of the wives, to give more depth to her feelings.

--I also wish furiosa could've bonded with someone else besides jack, or at least before him. it would've been nice for to have had at least one ally, or, I dunno, a friend? like that war boy who had dwarfism - she seemed almost sad, when realizing after the battle that he was dead. instead, she's alone, but a fellow misfit friend could've been nice.

--speaking of jack, loved him! thought he was great! it's unfortunate his part was so short, would've loved delve into his background (also, I'm as gay as they come, but he's like..an objectively Good Looking Man, so well done all around).

--I was really nervous, for how they were gunna do the romance. I was against it initially, bc the great thing about fury road, was that romance was not at all forced into the narrative - you can read that between max & furiosa if you want, but for one of the very, very few times when a woman and man team up, romance wasn't forcefully wedged in, and instead they could be respected allies. so I was skeptical - and then I totally fell for them. they were so sweet! the two actors had great chemistry - their bond was just so soft. the way, after they crash and are caught by dementus, furiosa, who can barely stand, gently leans herself into jack's shoulder, sweetly muttering to each other as he leans his forehead back against hers, like 😩😩 it was so lovely, and so tragic. you could really feel the respect and care they had for each other; it was so organic, bc jack genuinely wanted to help furiosa. he respected her and asked nothing of her - he was a purely good man, and through that, furiosa was able to open up to him and trust him. it's the great curse of the mad max universe though - no romance can escape it's claws, same with how nux and one of the wives were torn apart. in my heart of hearts though, there lives a little AU fic where dementus doesn't catch them, and they make their way back to the green place and live happily ever after with a kid perhaps, and maybe, furiosa and him go back to later rescue the wives (they say, like they're not thinking of already writing that very fic...).

--one more thing about furiosa I wanted to mention, if I can call back to earlier saying how she becomes a beacon of hope for the various men that enter her life (and the women too, when you think of the wives..) - that, despite all this horror handed to her, at the very end of the rope, she gives into her hero's heart. time over, we see, even as the destruction of the wasteland chips away at her, furiosa can never quite betray her heart. she runs back to her mother even after being pushed to leave, she goes back for jack despite having the perfect escape to finally make it back home, and in the end, takes all her hurt and anger wrapped up in dementus, and turns it and him into something that can bring good into the world. it's about choosing good, above all!! a hero's heart, even in the darkest of worlds!!!

--the trailer really emphases the green place, but we only see it for like...a couple minutes? I was looking forward to more lore about it, maybe seeing some of it's inhabitants like the mothers. but furiosa is taken immediately and then her mother starts her hunt after her, and that's it. kinda a bummer.

--there's a couple inconsistencies here and there - like, when furiosa is first brought to where the wives are kept, there's gotta be about 20 women in there, roughly. but then, as she becomes a young adult, we see at the very end her approach the 5 wives from fury road (I was expecting a call-back, so loved that) and it looks like there's only them there - what happened to the rest of the women??? did they all die in childbirth?? also, when furiosa runs away and hides herself as a warboy/mechanic, how did no one know she was gone?? it seems odd, since immortan joe specifically picked her out and probably has a mental line-up of all his 'treasures', you'd think he'd notice. or how, later on, the new 'imperior' with jack looks oddly similar to that young girl ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

--also, I wanna know how furiosa got away with being the only female imperior - you'd think immortan joe might snag her away instead to be a wife bc she's young and viable, or that she'd be either dismissed or preyed upon by his sons/the other men. maybe because she was partnered with jack it was easier, but that was kinda confusing.

--final thing, bc this post is already too long - my last gripe is mainly about furiosa's dynamic with immortan joe. in furiosa, her revenge is purely motivated towards dementus, but then, switching to fury road, she now holds contempt and anger towards the warlord. part of what I wanted to see in the film, was her past with immortan joe; we didn't know initially how furiosa got to the citadel, but my interpretation, was always that possibly (because she was branded with the logo on her neck) she was brought on as a wife, inevitably abused by him, and then something happened where she was no longer useful as a wife (maybe an accident that cost her her arm) but was still useful as a tool. but, immortan joe isn't really looked at in the prequel; he's here and there, but doesn't show any particular cruelty or act towards furiosa that I was expecting. that vitriol she shows in fury road, and of course, 'remember me?', makes you think there was something there to fuel furiosa's revenge. instead, nothing really occurs between them - of course, furiosa is brought on to breed him children and then is expected to do his every bidding in getting supplies, so, I think we're supposte to assume that she has seen how cruel he is up close, and so acts against him. still, I was expecting something deeper there.

all in all, I loved it and had a great time. fury road will always be one of my favourites, but this is a great addition. fury road is great on all fronts; a fascinating world, great characters, amazing action, a well-made and clearly cared for story, but the thing I love most - is that it's about hope. it's about choosing, every day, despite the horrors around you, to get up and hope for something better. to do something better, even at your own cost. it's about hope and what we mean to each other when we extend it. and I just love that so much

go see furiosa! support it! it's a great time!

[button-man-herald]

Dev Diary #1; Africville Research

Last week, Ron, Sam and I (Jordan) went to the Africville Museum as part of our week long survey of Halifax for visual inspirations and to get some historical context straight. It was a somewhat dreary day; gray skies and windy bluster, but the replica church in which the museum is held was warm and inviting.

Although Button Man takes place in a fictional city called "Kingsport", it is heavily influenced by and in places, replicating, Halifax. For instance, the Halifax Explosion is called "The Great Explosion" in our game, and it's influence on the socio-economic character of the city is inspired by the reality of that event. However, the geography of the city, the layout of streets, the mayors, the companies etc are a mixture of reality and fiction.

This is all fine and in the spirit of inspired creative license, but if not careful, this flexible use of fiction could lead to very real erasure of significant communities in the area. The story of Halifax is inexorably tied to Africville, Turtle Cove, George's Island, and McNabs Island, among others. We are not the creators, nor is this the correct project, for exploring the seriousness of the violence, discrimination, imprisonment, or betrayal of the people in those places, but we can be better citizens by staying informed of the real stories that shaped our community. We might not be the right people to tell a story that seriously and deeply engages with this material, but we can do some justice to those communities by representing them in our game.

Avoiding plot spoilers, there are a handful of important figures in the plot of Button Man who come from our analogue community to Africville. Their motivations, although held at arms length from our protagonist, can be understood to be in defence and service of their at-risk home. The grimy interplay of politics and big money are prominent in our rendition of the story, whereas in real life the issue was clothed in the language of social justice, despite the "solution" providing anything but.

After a few minutes of looking over the modest displays, chronicling the history of the since-bulldozed community, we were joined by the museum's Executive Director, Juanita Peters. We sat down to a wonderful conversation about personal origins and community, when the reason for our visit, as research for our video game, came up. Juanita lit up and asked us to check out the museum's own educational board game, then asked us if we would consider looking over the game and providing the museum with a quote for converting the board game to digital format.

Just a note about Juanita; she was a joy to speak with. She is clearly a wealth of information and stories, and was more than happy to impart some wisdom from her ~40 year career in film and television with three dudes making a video game. We asked her how she got the position as Executive Director, and despite her somewhat coy suggestion that it was largely circumstance, it was clear that her deep, motivating love for her community, sharing their stories, and immortalizing the lessons of Africville's destruction are why she became the Executive Director.

Given that my background in gaming is specifically from tabletop board games, I am very excited to dive in. I believe strongly in the idea that games are every bit as academic, artistic, and commercial as movies or television, but the opportunity to work on a game that also feels like a genuine contribution to your community is a bit rare. Such a project lacks any of the cynicism that so easily worms its way into just about any gaming endeavor, no matter how removed from the world of lootbox and crypto scams.

Today I opened the education kit and have started analysing the pieces-- but unfortunately they forgot the instructions! Oh well. Tomorrow I'll pick it up and take a look into what this project may take. Its not a given, but I'm certainly excited to get started. (Images were taken a few days after, so the weather was much more cooperative!)

What a beautiful park!

[aion-rsa]

Midnight Mass Ending Explained

https://ift.tt/39I2zkp

This article contains spoilers for Midnight Mass.

Ending a horror story is hard.

Perhaps no one knows that better than Mike Flanagan, the writer-director behind horror hits like Doctor Sleep, The Haunting of Hill House, and The Haunting of Bly Manor. After observing the occasional less-than-enthusiastic reaction to the endings of some of his other projects, Flanagan decided to end his latest, Netflix series Midnight Mass, on his own terms.

“I didn’t want to come up with an ending that I thought would please people,” Flanagan told Den of Geek and other outlets prior to Midnight Mass’s premiere. “I wanted to come up with the ending that would have the most to say down the line.”

So what, exactly, does the ending of Midnight Mass have to say? Let’s explain just what goes down in the conclusion of Midnight Mass and assess what it all means. 

What’s Up with Mildred Gunning and John Pruitt?

Monsignor John Pruitt a.k.a. Father Paul (Hamish Linklater) was, by all indications, a good Christian man. 

“The thing we kept coming back to is that authentically, through-and-through evil people are very rare. We’re all way more complicated. The humanity of Father Paul was something that was baked in relatively early,” Flanagan says.

Though Pruitt is not a bad man, per se, he is a deeply flawed one. A long time ago, before the “war” (probably World War II or The Korean War), Pruitt hooked up with the married Mildred Gunning and fathered their daughter Sarah Gunning out of wedlock. That is obviously a big no-no for a priest and Pruitt lived with the guilt of denying his daughter for decades. 

Pruitt finally got a chance to alleviate that guilt when he came across a curious creature in Damascus. In this fictional universe where the concept of a vampire is clearly not well known, John Pruitt made the understandable mistake of confusing a monstrous vampire for an equally monstrous angel. After all, the angels of the bible are so visually terrifying that they make a habit of telling those they visit “be not afraid.” 

Pruitt thought this angel had granted him the gift of eternal life, just like the Bible promises. He then decides to share that gift with his congregation. The priest’s major sin here though is pride. He didn’t share the angel’s gift with his congregation out of pure benevolence. He did it because he wanted many more years of life in his prime with Mildred and Sarah at his side. Catholicism means everything to Pruitt. And yet, he would cast it all aside for another chance to have the family he wanted. 

“If you showed up and asked me, I would have taken this collar off and gone with you. Gone with you anywhere in the world,” Pruitt tells Mildred after she’s been vampirified. 

That’s a touching sentiment from the artist formerly known as Father Paul but it’s unfortunately a destructive one.

“When it became clear that Paul could do bad things with pure motives, the show came into clearer focus. There’s only one character in the whole show who I think is evil and it’s not Father Paul,” Flanagan says.

Only one character who is evil? Who could Flanagan be referr….ohhh.

What Were the Vampires’ Plans?

Flanagan actually never confirms which character he sees as evil, but Bev Keane (Samantha Sloyan) seems to be the best fit…unless we count the angel, and he just seems to be a hungry, growing boy.

Bev is, let’s say, a real piece of work. As beautifully depicted by Sloyan, Bev Keane is the officious church lady who can’t keep her nose out of other people’s business. After Mildred talks some sense into John Pruitt, he understands that he and his congregation “are the wolves” and refuses to participate further. That leaves a power vacuum at the top, which Bev is more than happy to step into. 

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Now that Bev has a veritable army of superpowered vampires what does she intend to do with them? The same thing that all Bevs want to do: make more Bevs. Bev represents the worst of colonial Christianity and its historical penchant for converting all to its kingdom of heaven…through any means necessary.

When Erin Greene (Kate Siegel) finds out that Bev and friends have merely disabled the boats and not destroyed them, she realizes that their ultimate plan is to eventually take their vampire party to the mainland and create a whole planet of enlightened Christians who just happy to have an insatiable taste for blood and a severe UV-ray allergy. 

What Happens to Crockett Island?

Thankfully, Bev’s ultimate goal never comes to pass thanks to the careful plotting of the handful of human beings left in Crockett Island. Erin Greene, Sarah Gunning (Annabeth Gish), Sheriff Hassan (Rahul Kohli), and Annie Flynn (Kirstin Lehman) get to work on finishing the destruction that Bev started.

Ironically, it’s part of Bev’s plan that eventually dooms her and her kind. When one of Bev’s lackeys proposes putting out a fire that the human crew started because the whole island could burn to nothing like in ‘84, Bev’s eyes light up.

“I mean…the church didn’t burn in ‘84,” she says.

Surely this is Revelation. And Revelation means a hale mixed with fire and blood. There will be a flood of fire that ends the world and St. Patrick’s church will be the arc. That’s a great plan and all…as long as something doesn’t happen to the arc.

Welp. Sarah Gunning burns down St. Patrick’s and Sheriff Hassan and Erin Greene (with an assist from Hassan’s son) burn down the rec center. As if burning a church designated as an arc wasn’t symbolically compelling enough, recall that the rec center next to it is equally as symbolic of Bev’s greed. It was Bev who convinced Crockett Island to take the oil company’s money for ruining their island rather than pursuing litigation. And all they got out of that settlement money was that stupid rec center.

With the church and the rec center gone, there are no man-made structures for the vampires to hide from the sun in the coming morning. And that’s how an entire island of 120-ish vampires perishes simultaneously when the sun rises. 

Why Do Leeza and Warren Survive? 

All of Crockett Island perishes save for two actually. Warren Flynn (Igby Rigney) and Leeza Scarborough (Annarah Cymone) are spared thanks to some quick thinking. Putting the only two remaining non-vampirized children in harm’s way is not an option for Erin, Sarah, Hassan, and Annie. Thankfully, Warren knows of one secret canoe to reach the “Uppards” that Bev’s crew wouldn’t know about. 

The canoe doesn’t take Warren and Leeza to the mainland but it does get them away from the carnage to come. The last shot of the series is Warren and Leeza floating peacefully and Leeza announcing that she can no longer feel her legs. This means that the last bit of “angel” blood has likely left her system and with it Pruitt’s vampire legacy is over. 

Saving Warren and Leeza has practical, emotional implications for Midnight Mass’s characters but it also has some symbolic ones as well. The concept of witnessing and witnesses themselves are very important in the Bible. As a second-hand text (though purportedly with every word inspired by God) there would be no gospel without witnesses. Good news is only half the battle. Someone to witness and report on the good news is the other half. Now Warren and Leeza can report on the ultimate good news that the world is saved.

The fact that the kids survive while the adults succumb to their own adult nonsense has some major implications for Midnight Mass’s creator 

“That last moment of the next generation looking out at the ashes of what the grown ups made – that’s what my kids are gonna get no matter what,” Flanagan says. “That’s what all of our kids are gonna get. I wish it wasn’t as on fire as it it. But it really is. We’re never going to be able to explain adequately to our children what happened to the planet they inherited.”

What Happens to the Angel?

With all of Crockett Island burned to the ground, the world’s vampire nightmare is over, right? Well that depends on how well you think an angel can fly with torn wings. No, that’s not an aphorism or a poem, it’s the real question facing the end of Midnight Mass.

As if saving Warren and Leeza and upending Bev Keane’s plans weren’t enough, Erin leaves one last little gift for humanity before she dies. While the angel attacks her and drinks her sweet, sweet blood, Erin begins systematically, yet carefully cutting holes in its leathery wings. At first the angel is kind of annoyed but his hunger supersedes any level of discomfort or pain he’s feeling. 

Later on, while Warren and Leeza watch their home burn they see the angel flying away but in a halted, loopy pattern. The kids aren’t sure if the beast will have time to find shelter before the sun rises. According to Flanagan, if Midnight Mass is a parable (and he assures us it is) then the ultimate lesson of all this isn’t too hard to glean. 

“The angel doesn’t represent vampirism or horror but corruption in any belief system,” he says. “It represents fundamentalism and fanaticism. That’s never gonna go away. You might chase it away from your community for a minute. You might send it off to the sunrise and hope that that corrupting ideology will disappear. But it won’t. And the show could never show the angel die for that reason.”

With that in mind, the angel’s flawed flight pattern isn’t so much Inception’s spinning top but rather a promise that evil will find a way. And then we puny human beings will just have to find a way to stop it all over again. If that’s not Biblical then we don’t know what is.

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All seven episodes of Midnight Mass are available to stream on Netflix now.

The post Midnight Mass Ending Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[zandracourt]

I’ve been reflecting a lot on Cas’ recent confession of love and the responses I’ve been seeing across tumblr and Twitter. As a Destiel fic writer, I am thrilled to see this become canon and as a queer woman, also really touched to see how much Misha has embraced this as a really significant thing. I already ordered my Only Love merch. So I’m content with it all as much as it is. SPN has never made queer representation its issue. SPN *has* responded to its fanbase, who have both pushed the importance of representation and also brought the actors into a realm of growth over queer issues that they may never have come to without this show and this fandom. For that reason, I don’t think it’s helpful to be mad at Jensen or the Showrunners for Destiel not being perfect. You don’t have to celebrate them as allies, but the anger and vitriol just doesn’t help, in my opinion.

BUT...where my thoughts have been going is around what it means to be an actor in a ‘ship and what the impact of the story has on the actors, the fandom, and the constant dance of who controls the story because I think this has been something that even with straight characters has had serious impacts on how fans feel about an ending.

My first fandom, Starsky & Hutch, was mostly written by a gay man who wrote “straight” characters because that was what they had to be in 1974. The characters and show plots were such that the actors felt the love underneath the words and acted accordingly. Back then, it wasn’t so much queer baiting as queer coding. I find it amazing that my parents never thought for a minute Starsky and Hutch were gay, but even as a 7 year old, I knew they were in love and saw them that way. And anyone who watches the show now, it’s so clear that it’s almost laughable. When their show won the Peopel’s Choice award in 1977, David Soul said in his acceptance speech that the best part of being on this show was that people saw two men who “could be anything”. He knew that queer folk read their characters as gay and that straight folks saw them as straight and he was happy for both to be true. While the show never had an explicitly romantic declaration, the characters held hands, hugged, and in the final episode, their final scene is Hutch crawling into Starsky’s hospital bed with him, something done with amusement, but was completely coded to mean something else. It was never “canon”, but the ‘ship has lasted 46 years with new fic being written even now.

In the new SW films, actor Oscar Isaac was not at all quiet about his feelings that his character, Poe Dameron, was in love with Finn. He stated he played him that way (and was not directed otherwise) and he even explicitly asked for that ship to be made canon. He was told no and that is not how the story ended. The romance plot was instead focused on two other characters. Some fans liked that. Many didn’t. In general, though, the story is open-ended enough that shippers could have Stormpilot be their ship and there is nothing that really contradicts that. In that scenario, Oscar had his sense of who this character was and felt strongly about that, but in the end, it wasn’t his story, so the ending was what it was.

Hawai’i Five-0 ended its 10 year run last spring. Actor Scott Caan said in an interview during the show’s 5-year mark that he wanted to see his charcter have a romantic story line with his other lead, Steve McGarrett. And while Scott did not go so far as Oscar Isaac did to say he made his acting choices based on that, watching him and Alex play their characters, there was definitely some intention to show their characters as loving one another. Actor Alex O’Loughlin voiced a few times over the years that he felt his character would not get back together with Catherine, a woman his character was on-again, off-again with, because he felt Steve had reached his limit with what Catherine had done to him. The series made a decision to end with Steve leaving Hawai’i behind and flying away with Catherine. Neither actor has commented much about the show’s ending, but clearly it went against what both actors had publicly expressed in the past. Again, they don’t control the story, but they do understand their characters after playing them for so many years and they are invested in that. In that sense, the actor’s subsequent silence about how the show ended says quite a bit. And McDanno fans were very unsatisfied with the show’s ending, myself included.

So we come to Destiel. Over the years, this ship has been very controversial in part because one actor (Misha) has clearly been OK with his character being perceived as being in love with Dean, while the other actor (Jensen) has not. At times he has been very negative about it, and that has been taken by some fans to imply how Jensen feels about homosexuality in general. I’m not convinced it does, but I understand why people feel that way. Over the 12 years since Cas’ introduction on the show, there clearly has been a shift from the writers and showrunners avoiding the topic entirely, to talking about it, and now to having Cas confess his feelings of love to Dean in canon. In the days since, Misha has been unequivocal in saying Cas is romantically in love with Dean and that he has played him that way, at least for this season and likely longer. Misha is proud that he was able to advocate for Cas to be gay and he clearly understands why it is important for the show to have made this choice. For Jensen’s part, however, he has stated he has not played Dean that way and from video clips of him talking about the show’s ending, it appears that he needed some convincing to accept this as the story. To his credit though, once he was convinced that this was something show creator (Eric Kripke) could envision as part of Dean’s character arc, he was on-board with this ending and feels statisfied with it. And I think some of the frustration folks feel stems from both in how the actors portrayed their characters and in which takes were chosen to be in the final cuts of episodes. In that way, the show has fed this ship, whether the actors realized it or not, and that is why Destiel has felt particularly painful at times. The fanbase has been gaslighted for seeing it at all (from actors and showrunners) while the directors have seemed to go out of their way to choose shots where the actor’s choices were more tender and affectionate and write lines where characters make explicit statements about Dean and Cas as romantic. I can’t help but wonder if Jensen really didn’t see Dean as being in love with Cas, but that we saw Jensen’s own affinity for Misha bleed through in their incredible chemsitry together or if Jensen has just been in denial of this ‘ship having teeth for his own personal reasons. I don’t know and so far, he hasn’t been willing to talk about that. Maybe he will once it’s over. Maybe he won’t and I’m not going to be angry with him for it. He’s an incredible actor and he’s lived this character for 15 years, so he has a right to who he believed Dean is and isn’t.

The issues of representation continue to be pressing and what I see happening with Destiel and these other ‘ships is exciting because it shows growth on all sides. We have audiences able to voice not only how they perceive characters without shame but can express a desire for characters to be together. None of that is new for straight characters, but it is for queer characters. We have actors who not only can see these same things, but feel enough ownership of their characters to expresss what they believe their characters would do or feel. And we have showrunners who are going to make their story, sometimes in response to feedback from their fans and actors, and sometimes in spite of it.

What Destiel becoming canon gives me hope for is that as new shows come into being, characters that take off, actors who have unexpected chemistry, and ‘ships that gain a life of their own, will lead to shows that are less inclined to care if those ships are queer or not and just go with what fans respond to. That it will normalize that people can (and do) come out an all different times of life, even after being het-married, having kids, or presenting as straight to everyone else for 40 years. That it will reflect that sometimes, it’s not about having been queer or straight from the beginning, but be about that ONE relationship that just is different, special, or grows into a deep love regardless of the genders of the people. I hope we can get to a place where deep intimacy between same-gender characters doesn’t have to be a war over romance vs. platonic and the story can just develop without the pressure of representation because queer characters will be so prevalent that we don’t have to feel like we must cling so tightly to every one we get. I hope we can come to a place where sometimes relationships don’t go romantic because one person (regardless of gender) just doesn’t feel that way, because that is very fucking true in real life. I want to watch shows where the sexual identity of any character doesn’t have to be etched in stone from the word go, never to change ever because that’s boring and limiting, and honestly, not real life.

I am deeply grateful for actors like Isaac, Caan, and Collins who are willing to see characters outside the heteronormative lens and to advocate for queer romantic arcs. I’m thankful to showrunners who are making shows with greater queer representation than ever before. And I’m grateful to actors like Ackles, who while it wasn’t who he thought his character was, was able to expand his view enough to go where the story was going to go. The arc of the universe does bend towards justice, and we will get there. Until then, there’s fic. And thank God for that.

[recentanimenews]

SPOILER-FILLED REVIEW: Talking About That Evangelion 3.0+1.0 Ending

  A note on safety: The following movie review undertook the strictest of safety procedures to watch the anime film in cinemas in Japan, including washing hands with disinfectant before and after, sitting in seats apart from others, going to a cinema outside of the busy metro area, and wearing a mask during the entire runtime of the movie. We strongly urge everyone to follow the recommended safety protocol in your country and always wear a mask when in public — not just for your sake, but everyone else’s as well.

  For those who are outside of Japan and want to know how the latest (and final) Evangelion film stacks up, we have already published our completely spoiler-free review. For those that want to know more, please read on.

    After the airing of the NHK documentary which followed Hideaki Anno and the four-year production of Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, the unofficial “spoiler ban” was lifted by Studio Khara on March 22. This means, as much as Khara is concerned, we are free to discuss anything and everything Evangelion: 3.0+1.0, like how [omitted for spoilers] kills [spoilers] and LCL [spoilers]. 

  Seriously though, if you don’t want to read any spoilers for Evangelion: 3.0+1.0, then leave. Immediately. Close the tab, don’t scroll down.

  This is a warning.

  I’m not kidding.

    I’m putting an image here as a buffer. It's sweet right?

    If you scroll past the next image you will be spoiled for everything in the film. This is your last warning.

  "Asuka" as a kid

  Welcome to Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time where I may have lied in my previous review, cause things go tumbling down — but in a good way. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t recall the exact right terminology here on out: between the Doors of Guf, the hundreds of Evangelion models and ships we see, and that ending, it’s hard to keep it all in one head. That’s why this film has four directors. 

  If you’re already here, you’ve probably read the synopsis going around the internet right now. Yes, it explains what happens on screen, but experiencing it is a different story. Evangelion 3.0+1.0 takes a lot of cues from The End of Evangelion in its final act, but prior to that it is mostly a story of growth for Shinji, where he rejects being depressed (after a heart to heart with black-suit Rei, who then turns into LCL), learns that things aren’t 100% his fault. Shinji goes on to tackle his source of depression head-on; owning up to his past mistakes and taking down his father, who is now literally just a vessel of his own desires.

  Unholy Gendo

  Something truly missing from Evangelion 3.0, and one of the reasons I loved Evangelion 2.22, was just the gang hanging out together and interacting with the — very scarred — world around them. That scar has vastly grown throughout the 14 years Shinji was missing from the actual 3rd impact (the one at the end of 2.22 was a “near-impact event”) which saw the world covered in the red haze we saw in 3.0. Luckily, WILLE has purification pods that keep the core-ification of the world at bay. We saw that being used in the 12-minute preview, but throughout the film, they’re used extensively to keep the Evangelion wandering the landscapes on the red earth away from the villages that are helping the WILLE cause. They need to get food from somewhere.

  This is where we spend a lot of time learning how the characters from Shinji’s class all survived, got paired off, and that Asuka is staying (and is probably in love) with Kensuke. She confesses to Shinji that she loved him when they were kids, but 28-year-old Asuka can’t keep loving someone who hasn’t changed in 14 years. Shinji does accept the confession, saying to her that he loved her too, and she turns into LCL — though that’s in the Anti-Universe and after Asuka meets the “original” Asuka (I’ll get into that). As I said, it’s The End of Evangelion 2.0.

  Rei discovering herself in the village

  One of the nicest parts of the film is black-suit Rei discovering human emotion and society in the village. Being a clone that likely spent all of her time locked in her room (and without the love of the now inhuman Gendo, which original Rei got), it was unlikely that she learned anything that makes humans human. The concept of “hello” and babies from Toji and Hikari confuses her as she finds a place herself in this village. Admittedly, it was sad to see her go and turn into LCL (from a lack of LCL exposure), but serving as the catalyst for Shinji to get over himself and face his demons was worth it … I guess?

  After this, Shinji grows up. Even Mari on a re-introductory sniff claims as much. During his time in the village, he discovers how the settlement stays afloat and that the 14-year-old son of Misato and Kaji (the latter perished in the real 3rd impact) helps keep the village alive. A picture of Shinji and Kaji Jr. helps warm Misato’s chilled heart and gives her the confidence to let Shinji pilot Unit 01 again, much to the disdain of multiple members of the WILLE crew.

  All of this is nice. Unlike the despair and hopelessness felt in 3.0, the entire first three parts of the film are uplifting and bring moments of joy. Seeing black-suit Rei smile as she came to terms with herself was just utterly beautiful.

  Then Shinji decides to get in the robot. 

    This is where I’m going to get into the Hideaki Anno talk, because this film, as well as the rest of the anime versions of the Evangelion franchise up to this point, is basically just a self-examination of the man’s mental state. In the spoiler-free review, I called Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 the antithesis of Evangelion: 3.0. And that’s true, but it is also an antithesis to The End of Evangelion: A rejection of the depression Anno felt while creating the 20-plus-year-old film. There’s no doubt in my mind that the journey of Shinji through these Rebuild films is the journey of Anno creating Evangelion, with 3.0 being the lowest point.

  But this isn’t just felt in the story of 3.0+1.0, it’s also felt in the way it was presented. The entire final act of the film is basically a happier version of the “tumbling down” scene from The End of Evangelion, just with some more interesting aspects to it along with some inventive filmmaking — including making Lillith’s face live-action. That was haunting.

    This includes the above scene, which got a lot of flak on social media for being very poorly animated when it appeared in a trailer. Even I was confused over the inclusion of such poor animation in what is one of the most hyped anime films of all time. Funnily enough, it was Anno trolling. The scene comes from the ending, where the two Eva’s fight through the history of Evangelion, with this scene either representing a testing stage for CGI or one of the many Evangelion video games. The poor animation makes sense in the film … mostly.

  Over multiple film-like sets, the two Evangelions duke it out — one with Shinji, the other Gendo — over their ideals. This takes them to Misato’s apartment, the school, and even where Pen-Pen (or his offspring, I don’t know how long Penguins live) resides in 3.0+1.0. Before cutting to each of the different scenes, an Eva smashes through the set wall and onto a production stage. 

  I also said in the spoiler-free review that Anno “takes everything he knows about animation and filmmaking to deliver the perfect end to Evangelion,” and it shows when you see the (animated) production stage filled with props, miniature cities, and controls that you’d probably see on a production stage for a live-action Evangelion. Again though, this part is animated.

    Mari at the End

  The surrealness doesn’t end here. When Shinji “wins” and chooses to reset the world without Evangelion, the animation breaks. Shinji devolves into key animation, then layouts, then into a storyboard, which is then broken by Mari bringing color back into Shinji’s world on that beach. No “how disgusting” here, only happiness.

  The film ends with an adult Mari and an adult Shinji at Ube Station. As the music of Hikaru Utada’s “One Last Kiss” swelled up through the speakers, the animated backgrounds slowly transitioned into a live-action drone shot of the area surrounding the hometown of Hideaki Anno. 

  A poster for Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 showing Shinji on the tracks outside Ube Station, which I discussed when the poster was first released. 

  This is how I know Hideaki Anno is done with Evangelion. While yes, he has said he is done and feels no personal connection to the franchise anymore, the end of the film is a deeply personal one that clearly shows the anime creator cares about his creation and is now happy enough to see leave home and become its own thing — if anyone else chooses to pick it up.

  Shin Evangelion (the Japanese name for the film) is the true form of Evangelion that Anno set out to create over 25 years ago. While it wouldn’t have looked anything like it does now, the emotion poured into one of the longest animated films ever made makes that point as clear as the bright blue sea.

  Some other various interesting spoiler points:

  I’m not sure if character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto was lying about him not knowing Mari’s story and just making that one-shot chapter of the Evangelion manga on a whim or whether Anno took what Sadamoto wrote and expanded on it, cause Mari was right there in school with Gendo and Yui exactly as the chapter laid it out. Unless she’s also a clone...

There’s a really good shot of CG Asuka trying to force-feed Shinji, which was a direct evolution from this test footage back in 2018.

On the topic of Asuka, she had a small version of a purification pod in her eye that, when opened, unleashed an angel, and in turn let her meet her “original.” It’s not explained whether the original is Langley Soryu from the TV anime series or not.

Also, she’s a clone, like Rei and Kaworu as part of the “Shikinami” series. Interestingly, Mari Makinami also has “nami” in her name...

Ritsuko did nothing but shoot Gendo, mimicking the scene from The End of Evangelion. The shot was as useless as her character arc in the Rebuild films.

This film has to be set in at least the third continuity of Evangelion, as the TV series is directly referenced in the production stage and thrice does mean three...

Sakura is one of the most grounded characters in the film, with her asking the true question of “why the heck are you letting him in ANOTHER Evangelion?!” Let’s hope the live-action world she is now in is good to her.

      Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time is currently showing in theaters across Japan, there’s no word on an international release at this stage.

        Daryl Harding is a Japan Correspondent for Crunchyroll News. He also runs a YouTube channel about Japan stuff called TheDoctorDazza, tweets at @DoctorDazza, and posts photos of his travels on Instagram. 

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features.

By: Daryl Harding

[grigori77]

2019 In TV - My Top 10 Shows

This past year may have sucked balls in a lot of ways, but we certainly never got short-changed when it came to our TV.  There was an absolute WEALTH of truly cracking TV around, both on regular networks and on the various on-demand platforms, and so here is my pick of the best, my absolute favourites of 2019.

10.  WATCHMEN

Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof brings us a blinding sequel to comic book legend Alan Moore’s legendary graphic novel with a delightfully trippy, ruthlessly efficient rug-puller that seems pretty tailor-made for HBO.  Old faces return in interesting ways, while there are some cracking new “masks” on offer, particularly Regina King’s Sister Night and the always-brilliant Tim Blake Nelson as morally complex antihero Looking Glass (in some ways very much the show’s own answer to Rorschach).  It never goes where you expect it to go, and refuses to give easy answers to the questions it raises, effortlessly paving the way for more next year ...

9.  THE BOYS

Amazon offers up its own edgy, thoroughly adult superhero property with this darkly funny antiheroic gem based on the cult Garth Ennis comic, expertly adapted by Supernatural creator Eric Kripke.  Karl Urban dominates as Billy Butcher, the foul-mouthed, morally bankrupt “leader” of a makeshift crew of mercenaries, hitmen and psycho killers devoted to “taking care of” superheroes when they inevitably go bad.  Season 1 ultimately serves as an origin story, showing how the team come together, laying quality groundwork for the incoming sophomore tour that promises to open the already fascinating world out significantly.

8.  PREACHER (SEASON 4)

More Garth Ennis, namely this blinder of a closing season for AMC’s consistently impressive adaptation of his best known series for Vertigo comics.  Surprisingly epic, deliciously subversive and constantly, darkly hilarious, this thoroughly non-PC series from showrunners Sam Catlin, Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen (yes! I Know!) certainly went out on a high note, providing its loyal followers with perfectly-pitched bow-outs and sometimes heartbreaking goodbyes for all its players, especially its dynamite leads, Dominic Cooper, Ruth Negga and, in particular, Joe Gilgun as unapologetic bad boy vampire Cassidy.  A worthy end to one of my all-time favourite TV shows.

7.  THE WITCHER

While it’s clearly taken its look from the wildly successful video games, Netflix’s second most ambitious long-form offering of the year takes its lead from the fantasy book series by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski that started it all.  With its somewhat episodic set-up and decidedly twisted narrative timelines, it take a few chapters to get the hang of it, but there’s plenty to draw you in, from the exotic world-building to the frenetic action and compelling collection of richly crafted characters.  Henry Cavill is the titular hero, lovably grouchy mutant monster-hunter Geralt of Rivia, but the real scene-stealer is co-star Anya Chalotra as roguishly self-serving mage Yennefer of Vengenberg.

6.  CARNIVAL ROW

One of the year’s two big sleeper hit TV surprises for me was this inventively offbeat allegorical Amazon fantasy series from The 4400 creator René Echevarria and screenwriter Travis Beacham. Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevigne are the star-crossed lovers at the heart of this intriguingly dark and dirty murder mystery thriller set in Victorian London-esque city-state the Burgue, in which humans struggle to co-exist alongside a struggling disenfranchised underclass of fae (fairies, fawns, centaurs and the like).  The racial turmoil undertones are writ large throughout, but this is far more well-written and lavishly appointed than you might expect on first glance, and almost ridiculously addictive viewing.

5.  LOVE, DEATH + ROBOTS

My other big TV surprise was this wonderfully bizarre sci-fi anthology series of animated shorts from Netflix, mostly adapted from an eclectic selection of short stories from a wide range of top-notch literary talent including Peter F. Hamilton, John Scalzi, Marko Kloos and Alastair Reynolds (a particular favourite of mine).  As you’d expect from the brainchild of Deadpool director Tim Miller and producer David Fincher, this is edgy, leftfield stuff, frequently ultra-violent and decidedly adult, and the wildly varied nature of the material on offer makes for a decidedly uneven tone, but there are some absolute gems on offer here, my favourite being Suits, an enjoyably simple tale of salt-of-the-earth farmers on an alien world utilising clunky mech suits to protect their settlement from rampaging giant xeno-bugs.

4.  THE DARK CRYSTAL: AGE OF RESISTANCE

The show with the biggest cinematic wow factor in 2019 had to be this long-awaited prequel series to Jim Henson’s classic fantasy movie masterpiece, created for Netflix by, of all people, Louis Leterrier (yes, the director of The Transporter, Now You See Me and Clash of the Titans, if you can believe it). The technology may have evolved in leaps and bounds, but there’s a wonderfully old school vibe in the delightfully physical puppet effects used to bring the fantastical world of Thra and its denizens to life, so that it truly does feel like it’s based in the same world as the film.  This was EASILY the most visually arresting show of 2019, packed with exquisite character, creature and set design that perfectly complements the awesome work done by Henson and Brian Froud on the original, while the writers have created a darkly rich narrative tapestry that makes Thra seem a more dangerous place than ever.

3.  THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY

I was a HUGE fan of My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way’s magnificently oddball alternative superhero comic, so when I learned that Netflix were adapting it I was a little wary because I knew how spectacularly hard it would be for ANY showrunners to get right.  Thankfully Steve Blackman (Fargo season 2) and Jeremy Slater (The Exorcist TV series) were the right choice, because this perfectly captured the outsider nature of the characters and their endearingly dysfunctional family dynamic. Ellen Page, Tom Hopper (Black Sails, Merlin), David Castañeda and Emmy Raver-Lampman are all excellent as the more “functional” Hargreeves siblings, but the show is roundly stolen by Misfits star Robert Sheehan and Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn’s Aidan Gallagher as nihilistic clairvoyant Klaus and the old-man-in-a-child’s-body sociopath known only as Number Five. Consistently surprising and brilliantly bonkers, this was definitely the year’s most wonderfully WEIRD show.

2.  STRANGER THINGS (SEASON 3)

Writer-director duo the Duffer Brothers’ ultra-nostalgic 80s-set coming-of-age sci-fi horror series remains the undisputed jewel in Netflix’s long-form crown with this consistently top-drawer third season expertly maintaining the blockbuster-level standards we’ve come to expect.  This year the cross-dimensional shenanigans have largely been jettisoned, replaced by a gleefully nasty through-line of icky body horror that would make major influences like David Cronenberg and Stuart Gordon proud, as perennial teenage bad boy Billy Hargrove (the fantastically menacing Dacre Montgomery) becomes the leader of an army of psychic slaves under the control of the Upside Down’s monstrous Mind Flayer.  The kids are all brilliant as always, Winona Ryder and David Harbour really get to build on their strong-yet-spiky chemistry, and the show is almost effortlessly stolen by Joe Keery as one-time golden boy Steve Harrington and series-newcomer Maya Hawke as his nerdy new foil Robin Buckley, who were very nearly the cutest couple on TV in 2019.  Another gold standard season for a true gold standard show.

1.  GOOD OMENS

Sadly, legendary author Terry Pratchett died before he could see the adaptation of one of his most beloved novels (and one of my all-time literary favourites too) see the light of day, but at least his co-author Neil Gaiman was around to bring it to fruition with the aid of seasoned TV director David Mckinnon (Jekyll, Doctor Who, Sherlock), and the end result sure did him proud, perfectly capturing the deeply satirical voice and winningly anarchic, gleefully offbeat and gently subversive humour of the original novel.  David Tennant and Michael Sheen could both have been born to play Crowley and Aziraphale, the angel and demon nominally charged with watching over the young Antichrist in preparation for his role in the End Times, even though they would both much rather the world just went on quite happily the way it is, thanks very much. This is about as perfect an adaptation as you can get, the six hour-long episodes giving the surprisingly complex story time to breathe and grow organically, and the result is the most fun I spent in front of my TV this year.

[alexanderlee1012]

Reflections on Mulan

It took me a long time to cherish my Taiwanese-American heritage. Growing up in the United States, it wasn’t a facet of my identity that I attached any importance to. As a child, I even actively denied that part of me. Whenever my family went out to eat Chinese food, I threw a temper tantrum and would only eat if we stopped by fast food first. I didn’t bother speaking Chinese; I replied to my Mom’s Mandarin in English and I consistently repeated the entry level class for my Saturday Chinese-school until I was not compelled to go anymore. The only attempt to understand the vast history and traditions of my culture was acknowledging the bare minimum to profit off of the New Years. 

While there are many reasons for my delayed acceptance of my culture and identity, the portrayal of Asians in Western Society was definitely a significant factor. Similar to many young children, I was deeply impacted by television and movies. My weeks were organized by TV show airtimes and the few times I was able to go to the movies were momentous occasions. I idolized the heroes on screen, wishing to become just like them. However, what I saw on the screen never closely resembled me. Almost all Western media featured white protagonists, and in the few moments there was somebody of Chinese descent, they were essentially a one-dimensional caricature that was completely unrelatable (for men, choose either kung fu master or a super nerd, and for women, choose an exotic hypersexualized love interest or submissive wallflower). Many values are actively defined and imprinted at a societal level, and this one was no different. The messaging from Hollywood was loud and clear: there is nothing valuable about being Asian American; this culture only deserves to be simplified to basic tropes. 

To my delight, as my own relationship with my culture deepened and flourished over the decades, it seemed that the media’s portrayal of Asians were finally evolving as well. First starting on the fringes, with Asian-American content creators using new platforms such as YouTube to reach directly to their audience, then slowly creeping into the mainstream, with sitcoms and major blockbuster films. Finally, Asian-Americans can be cast as characters that were complex and interesting. Their only defining feature wasn’t just that they were Asian! Similar to white actors and actresses, it was just another part of their identity. Witnessing Asians star in these multifaceted roles has been amazing given how the landscape was just a few years prior. 

I also understand that at the end of the day media is a business, and for this movement to not be temporary, Asians need to throw their full support when these things happen. Personally, I watched Crazy Rich Asians four times (two times in theaters, once on a plane, and then renting again at home to show my mom), and I’ve been subscribed to Wong Fu’s Patreon ever since I’ve learned of it. So of course, given this momentous live-action remaking of Mulan, I’ve been at the edge of my seat, excited and ready to support. 

Especially given the cultural phenomenon that was Black Panther, I was ecstatic that Disney was going to take on Mulan again. While many were bemoaning the exclusion of Mushu, Shang and those classic songs, I actually grew more excited since the director stated that she made those decisions to be more faithful to the original legend. The anticipation kept growing and growing as the pandemic forcibly pushed back the release again and again. Until finally, this past Friday’s release on Disney+, where I eagerly paid the additional $30 premium access to be among the first to support the movie. 

My disappointment was immeasurable.

While there are many major flaws to dive deep into regarding this movie (especially the superpowers that weaken the narrative of a woman fighting to be seen as an equal in a patriarchal society), I wanted to spend some time to speak on some smaller details that yanked me out of the immersion by how grossly misrepresented it was. In life, it’s the small actions that build up to communicate your intent. Love is shown by showing care and consistency in the tiniest of details; however, in this case, the small details accumulated to disrespect and disregard instead. These cultural details clearly didn’t matter to the people designing this film.

Warning slight spoilers ahead, but nothing too major if you’re familiar with the story.

The villagers from Mulan’s hometown all lived together in a Tulou (土樓), a circular earthen hut that can house many families. However these buildings are a facet of the Hakka people living in Fujian originating from the 12th century. Mulan’s story takes place in the Northern Wei Dynasty; which occurs during 386 to 534 AD and is, as the name describes, in the northern part of China. Not only is it geographically inaccurate, but there is a time difference of 600+ years there! That would be akin to placing a modern skyscraper penthouse into the Renaissance.

As someone who is learning more about Chinese tea to connect to their culture, the teapot used during the matchmaking scene was equally jarring. The teapot was a Yokode kyusu, a teapot that has a side handle 90 degrees from the sprout. While Japanese tea culture was originally imported from China during the Song Dynasty, the cultures have significantly diverged. Each has their unique vessels, tools, and processing techniques worthy of celebrating (matcha vs pu’er, sencha vs oolong, yokode kyusu vs yixing). However, maybe to the creators of this movie, east Asian culture is just all the same to them. 

The phoenix was a central character in the movie, and to the chagrin of many fans of the original, Mushu’s replacement. As the Hua family’s ancestral guardian spirit, it provided a nice symbolism for Mulan, as her character’s male persona dies and she is reborn as Hua Mulan. What is egregious is that Phoenixes are not even an animal within Chinese folklore, that’s a Western (Greek) myth! While some may point out that there is a Chinese mythical bird called the Fenghuang (鳳凰), these are immortal birds that only choose to visit regions when there is peace and prosperity. What it definitely is NOT is a reincarnating bird leading warriors into the heat of battle. Sure, Fenghuang are genderfluid and that does match Mulan, but why was the only emphasized trait of the bird the aspect from Greek lore? Why bother taking out Mushu to be closer to the original if it’s replacement is a Western myth?

Finally, I have to bring up the obvious change in accents that happened when Mulan changed from a kid to an adult. Why cast a child actor with an American accent if the main character has a Chinese accent? There is no way that any other movie with a 200M+ budget would have allowed a white child actor to speak with an American accent, to then change it to a British accent when that character grew up and not even acknowledge it. Are we just supposed to be okay with it since they’re at least both Chinese looking?

No movie will ever be picture perfect in representing any culture, trade-offs are inevitable. However, I can’t see how those choices above added anything. Why would you make the villagers live in a Tulou? Was it critical to the plot? Every other Mulan adaptation is fine without a Greek Phoenix, why make it so necessary to this re-telling? Those small details exposed the attitude that I was all too familiar with growing up: who cares about representing actual Chinese culture?

After watching that movie, it felt as if the creative process was a room of white people gathered together, cherry-picking what fit their own narrative, sprinkling some Asian artifacts throughout, shrugging and saying to each other “That’s Chinese-y right? Good enough for me!” Imagine my lack of surprise when I checked to see that none of the screenwriters, producers or director had an Asian background. Chinese culture is the longest continuing culture in the world. It deserves to be shared for what it is (warts and all), not to be trivialized into a simplified palette that’s easiest to digest. Chinese representation in Western media should be about collaborating with us as peers, not to be used as a tool to extract the growing affluence of the Chinese and it’s diaspora.

I so badly wanted this to be a celebration, but now it’s a lose-lose situation. I wouldn’t want the younger version of me to watch this. It would have pushed me further away from my culture; I would either not relate to the characters alluding to “honor” every other sentence, or I would see that my culture isn’t worth even having just one person in this $200M major blockbuster film correct the gross cultural inaccuracies. On the other hand, I also don’t want critics to point at bad numbers and proclaim that Asian representation isn’t worth the investment. 

I just wish for us to be portrayed as who we truly are. 

[0utatnight]

Avengers Westworld AU

Jane is creative director for the company, always working on making more realistic hosts for the park until she creates what she believes to be her magnum opus- Thor. Darcy works in Narrative and Design and often in tandem with Jane, as she is very particular about the direction her creations are meant for.

Tony is an investor and engineer for the park, and enjoys dipping in and out of it himself. Bruce is head of programming with a bad temper, and though he and Darcy get along they very rarely work side by side- different parks, different creators.

Natasha is a popular host- a spy –as well as Clint, in Heroworld. Fury is the driving force behind the story, and they rotate villains in and out as it suits them. Bucky is a new addition to the Captain America storyline, which has been flagging of late. Darcy has picked up on the fact that all people coming to the park want to do now is bone the big blonde hunk and she knows her Captain America is better than some sort of sex toy. She puts way too much work into Steve’s story to have it ignored (Bucky is his cornerstone brought to life).

The Black Panther storyline is also new and Darcy is working in tandem with a creator (Shuri, who Darcy can tell cares deeply for her work) from Pharaohworld to integrate T’challa’s character into the park.

When disaster strikes in Westworld and they lose contact with the park, Shuri and Darcy start to notice an odd recurring glitch with some of the more popular hosts. Bucky starts becoming self aware as Steve starts glitching. Darcy is horrified to think they’ve created a sentient AI considering all the things they and the guests have put the hosts through and she and Shuri quickly begin helping dismantle the system she had a hand in creating when Bucky snaps.

~*~*~*~

~*~*~*~

“I’m sorry,” she said, and pressed a hand to her ear. The tech that masked her flickered, revealing a glimpse of the much younger face beneath. Natasha leveled the gun with an absurd calm as she pulled back her wig and dropped her disguise, “Did I step on your moment?”

The rage that shook Pierce was tangible. “You bitch,” he snarled. He lunged forward, intent on the woman who’d turned the tables so quickly-

“Alright, freeze all motor functions.”

-and halted in his tracks.

“Wait, it’s not done!” Patrick scrambled from his seat at the side of the room, just far enough away from the spectacle. The distance didn’t matter much, of course; the guns weren’t loaded and all held by hands that were very much incapable of pulling the trigger. The only way the shootout he’d scripted was going to happen was if their team leader let it. 

Which of course she wasn’t. Darcy abhorred bad writing almost as much as she did unnecessary cleanups. 

“Yeah, I got that. Couple questions and then we can move on to why you think ‘you bitch’ is new and exciting dialogue in this the year of our lord. How long has Pierce been an agent?” Darcy Lewis did not need to look down at her tablet to double check the stats; she wrote them. Patrick however, was madly scrolling through his own.

“Uh, just about- I think it was-“

“Right, since he graduated college. And he’s been a double agent since?”

“Uh…” the scrolling was clearly not going to stop. 

“Since he was forty-six,” Darcy ground out, “Pat, if you can’t keep up with the details of your character, how the hell are you supposed to write them? You really wanna tell me Alexander Pierce, double agent of thirty-one years Alexander Pierce, is so shocked by a double cross that he loses his cool?”

Patrick cast a desperate look back to his coworkers who were all studiously avoiding eye contacting. Nobody was about to grab the anchor of a sinking ship. “…He doesn’t?”

“Exactly what part,” Darcy pondered, “of ‘he charges for the gun’ is Pierce being chill?”

It was a rhetorical question, true, but the silence that filled the lab did nothing for her mood. Darcy resisted the urge to facepalm the irritation away. “The answer is none, guys; you’ve made Grandpa Spy over here into, like, the nazi version of John McClane.”

“I liked Die Hard,” Ramjee piped up from the peanut gallery. 

Darcy pinned him with a stare. “Not the point. Look, Pierce got by for so long because he was patient, and he was smart. This? This whole bit reeks of too much Bond and not enough Tomas Harris.” 

The blank looks were not at all encouraging and she went back to her tablet with wholly new intent. 

“Cool, so I’m sending you guys out with some homework today and I need you all gone from my sight in the next minute before I self immolate,” Darcy swiped the last article into the email and sent it off as her lackeys hurried to gather their things. “Patrick, I need to see a rewrite from you by tomorrow afternoon and we’re gonna skip the ‘bitch’ discussion because I have the barest shred of hope you can figure it out yourself. Am I giving you too much credit?”

“Absolutely,” Farah murmured as she brushed past Darcy for the door. 

Darcy stifled a grin and called after her best writer to date; “Hey, good job with Nat today. I like where she’s headed.”

Sure to be at the pool bar in the next hour, Farah barely even glanced back. “You know I always take care of my babies, Darce.”

The others followed suit, scurrying past...

[firelord-frowny]

I don’t really talk about ~fandom~ stuff, mostly because I kinda find the entire concept of “fandom” to be ridiculous and annoying. When I talk about the things I’m a fan of, it’s in the context of my own enjoyment and no one else’s. But I’m gonna talk about fandom shit bc I’m Annoyed and all up in my feelings. 

What I kind of can’t stand about ~fandom culture~ is this weird-ass phenomenon where people will proclaim to be die-hard fans of something, yet turn around and want to bash the creators/writers/directors/whatever any time they do anything at all that that they Don’t Like, and yet STILL turn around again and want to demand more content from these same creators/etc who they clearly don’t actually respect. 

So, right now there’s a bunch of uproar about ATLA bc “Bryke,” the original creators, decided to walk out on the live-action netflix adaptation due to the proverbial ~creative differences.~

Cue ATLA fans foaming at the mouth and insisting that without Bryke, the netflix adaptation will suck for whatever their favorite reason happens to be. Cue a bunch of useless speculation about the reasons for their departure and assumptions that Bryke must have put their foot down about Awful Things that netflix wanted to do with the series. 

And I mean, sure, maybe there were actual ~problematic~ things that pushed them to leave. That’s possible, and maybe even likely. 

But what I find annoying as shit is that I’ll bet a huge majority of these people throwing a fit over Bryke’s departure were the same people who turned their nose up at Bryke for not doing as good a job as they thought Bryke should have done on LoK, whining about how Bryke must actually suck as writers/storytellers bc ~if LoK had the same staff of writers that worked on ATLA, it would have been amazing~ and just. Generally bashing and condemning Bryke. Which, obviously people are welcome to think LoK sucks for whatever reasons they like, but that doesn’t mean they get to fucking riot over it and suddenly become hostile toward people who, five seconds ago, were being praised and hailed. 

So, they all turn their backs on Bryke and insist that Bryke is Bad, but now that Bryke left the live-action adaptation, people wanna be upset about that and suddenly act like they didn’t just spend the last decade slinging shit about Bryke being Bad whatever reason? Make up your damn minds. Either you respect their work and their vision and accept their flaws as human beings, or you don’t. Either you think Bryke is what makes or breaks a good story, or you don’t. Either you believe their involvement is critical to a show being Good, or you don’t.

Obviously, OBVIOUSLY the beauty that was ATLA was not created soley by Bryke. They had a vision, and they had a team of amazing people to help bring that vision to life. That’s not unusual. That’s not cheating. That’s just HOW IT WORKS. That’s how Beyonce works. That’s how James Cameron works. That’s how Christopher Nolan works. That’s how all of these large-scale creative projects work, and claiming that Bryke ~isn’t all that~ is as meaningless as claiming that literally any other successful creator or performer ~isn’t all that.~ None of them are ~all that~ without gifted people supporting them. And no matter how amazing somebody is at something, sometimes they’re going to not quite hit the mark. It doesn’t suddenly mean that they were never talented. It doesn’t mean that all the great things they were part of before somehow don’t count anymore, or that it must have been solely other people’s work that made it great. 

It’s just. Fucking dumb and it honestly offends me as a writer/storyteller when people hold these ridiculous black-or-white and entitled opinions about creators and their work, as if building an entire world and filling it up with character and story and emotion isn’t a deeply personal endeavor on the part of the creators (AND THEIR TEAMS, DUH). I promise you that whatever your favorite show/movie/game/whatever means to you is not even a FRACTION of what it means to the people who actually built it from the ground up. I promise. 

And lastly???

I literally do not care about Bryke having ~mocked~ Zutara. It honestly still baffles me to this day that anyone at all ever brought theirself to be upset about something so dumb. If you get all up in your feelings because anyone at all says anything remotely not flattering about your ~ship~ then you really just need to grow up. It’s not that serious. Like jeez, even as a kid I knew it wasn’t even close to being a big deal. ~oh nooooo someone thinks the hypothetical fictional relationship I’m enamored with is dumb.~ PLEASE. 

I ALSO do not care about katara allegedly ~being reduced to a trophy wife.~ Sorry, but when it comes to the continuation of storylines, sometimes your favorite characters are going to get left behind. It’s disappointing, but it doesn’t suddenly make the people who chose a different path ~bad writers.~ It means they had a different vision from the one you hoped for. Tough, but you’re not entitled to a damn thing. You’re not entitled to a certain kind of Katara or a certain kind of Toph or anyone. It’s not up to you to choose which characters get elaborated on and which ones don’t. TV shows have a limited amount of ttime and money and resources. They have to pick and choose what to cram into a tiny time slot. They do their best, but they cannot satisfy everyone. You’re free to not like it. But it’s honestly ridiculous to go so far as to be angry at anyone over it.

It just. Really offends me as a writer when people have the fucking gall to claim to love something while showing not one single ounce of respect for ALL of the people without whom the beloved thing would have never existed. ALL of them, with all of their flaws and imperfections and shortcomings. 

Feel how you feel about whatever you want to feel it about, but you don’t have to shit on anyone to do that. You don’t have to disrespect someone else’s vision because the story they made wasn’t the exact one you wanted. 

[maneaterwithtail]

I was answered TWICE in this Q&A

Helps also put in perspective their production, aims, and the influences

Helps as really unpacking along with @pirateshenani and @cartoonemotion the influence and differences and aims with the adaptation

Thanks to all the Toonzone Forum Members for submitting questions to the Fangbone! Fan Q&A! Your questions were awesome and so were the creators’ answers! We hope you enjoy reading through the answers as much as we did. Participating in the Answers portion of the Fangbone! Q&A were the creator and book series writer, Michael Rex and the tv showrunners Simon Racioppa and Richard Elliott. (Editor’s Note: Questions asked were edited for brevity and clarity.) Will Fangbone! be renewed for Season 2? (superkeegan9100 and SparkleMan) Simon Racioppa and Richard Elliott: By Grom’s bottomless dimples, it shall be so! (we hope) Michael Rex: Fingers crossed! --- Will Fangbone! air on any additional countries, networks and in other languages? (Ryan, RandomMe, NeoplanDan, I.R. Shokew) Simon Racioppa and Richard Elliott: Absolutely. Fangbone! will appear across the world in a multitude of tongues in a multitude of places – that are too numerous for us to list (or remember). Perhaps one of our many traveling salespeople who criss-cross the world with a suitcase full of Fangbone! might chime in here… In all seriousness, Fangbone! Distributor DHX Media, has currently sold the series into Disney XD US, South East Asia, Taiwan, and Latin America. Hope to announce additional countries in the near future. Stay posted. Will the books be translated into other languages? In what other languages/regions can we expect to see the books published? (RandomMe) Michael Rex:Right now, there are no plans for translating the books. I’m hoping as the show starts playing in different countries, the publisher, Putnam, will solicit the books to foreign markets. --- If you could be one of the characters on the show, who would you be? (D-nice is the man) Simon Racioppa: Drool’s giant badger monster. He’s clearly just misunderstood and trying his best every day for an unappreciative master… Richard Elliott: I would definitely be a Shadowstepper – skulking in the shadows and outwitting barbarians sounds like a good time to me. Michael Rex:I’ve always thought of myself as Bill. At the end of 3rd grade, my school closed down, and I was sent to a new school. Literally all of my closest friends went to another school. So, when 4th grade started, I was very lonely and desperate for a best friend. Eventually, a boy named Mark moved into my hometown in New Jersey, and we became great friends. He was fun, and a bit wild, and had long black hair. We’re still friends today. Will Fangbone! have Christmas and Halloween episodes? (Ryan) Simon Racioppa and Richard Elliott: Skullbanians don’t celebrate Christmas or Halloween. But they do have many other holidays – like Troll-smasher’s Eve and The Feast of Stoneback’s Feast. Endless possibilities for fun and adventure as you look at, compare and try to understand how Skullbanian’s celebrate versus how we do things here on Earth. What would Fangbone! think of Halloween? What would a Holiday Tree look like in Skullbania? Stay tuned. --- Does Fangbone! have parents? (Eggy) Simon Racioppa and Richard Elliott: He has the mightiest of parents! But they are away in far off lands on an epic quest. However, those of you with the eyes of a blood-eagle may catch a glimpse of them in an upcoming episode. If you do not have the eyes of a blood-eagle, they nest on sharp mountain peaks. But be careful – they peck! Michael Rex:Yes. They’re on a great quest somewhere in Skullbania. Also, how did Venomous Drool become Fangbone! and Bill's worst enemy? (Eggy) Simon Racioppa and Richard Elliott: If someone was keeping your detached big toe from you and wouldn’t give it back, you probably wouldn’t be pals with them either… Michael Rex:They’ve got his toe, and he needs it back. And, they keep beating him, and they’re only kids. It drives him nuts. --- How do you take an episode from concept to it airing? (martikhoras) Simon Racioppa and Richard Elliott: Let us explain… No, there is too much. Let us sum up. First, five or six NERDS gather in a small room and try to imagine what insanity could happen to Fangbone! this week. They argue and fight and cry and hiss at each other until the showrunners (that’s us!) are satisfied they’ve worked their butts off to come up with the best of all possible stories in the universe and beyond. They’re sent away to dank dark holes to write their scripts, which are then torn apart by the rest of the nerds and reassembled until they’re so full of adventure and comedy that they leak all over the floor. Then trumpets are sounded and ACTORS assembled in a recording studio – where they ACT with such passion it drives everyone to tears (of joy). At the same time, ARTISTS design all the new locations, characters, and props that the writers say they desperately need (liars!) to make their script work. Then trumpets are sounded again and the finished script, designs, and recorded actors are handed over to a story-bored artist… Sorry, story BOARD artist – who listens to the writers explain how amazing their script is, then drinks enormous amounts of coffee and draws PANELS from the script one by one, matching the recorded actors and making that ‘amazing’ ‘script’ and ‘amazing’ ‘acting’ even better. Those panels go to the DIRECTOR, who along with an EDITOR, assemble it into an animated and voiced storyboard that we call a LEICA on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and an ANIMATIC on Tuesdays, Fridays, and the weekend. When the animatic/leica makes everyone giddy with excitement, it moves onto ANIMATION, where thousands (twenty-five) animators fight each other to animate the most exiting scenes – matching the animatic as closely as possible. The episode gets a few more passes to make it even better (fix all the mistakes) and then moves on to the real stars of the show – sound effects and music – who make everything approximately one million and a half times better. Then it’s a final pass for last minute mistakes and TA-DA! One finished Fangbone! episode ready for people to share for free on the Internet (please don’t share it for free on the Internet). What are your favorite parts of the show’s creative process? (Harley) Simon Racioppa and Richard Elliott: Seeing a goofy idea that started in the writers’ room as a “what if…” become a real finished episode. Also, the creative process of deciding what to order for lunch. Then the creative process of regretting what we ordered for lunch. --- As a fan of the tv show, how familiar will jumping into the book series feel? (jfoley85) Simon Racioppa and Richard Elliott: As familiar as traveling to an alternate reality where everything’s kinda the same but your parents are snakes. So mostly familiar with some specific differences. Michael Rex:They’re actually pretty close. One of the things that I am most happy with about the show is that it IS the books. While the stories in the books are a bit more involved than an 11-minute episode, the entirety of season 1 goes much deeper than the books. On the down side, the books don’t have a cool song at the beginning. Every adaptation is a challenge from visuals, to performers depictions, and direction and framing. I'm noticing some changes from the two GNs (1st and 3rd) I've read to the episodes I've seen (pretty much up to Back of Stone). What would you say has been added, changed, or dropped and what is the purpose of these changes? (martikhoras) Simon Racioppa and Richard Elliott:While the books are wonderful gateways into imagination, there’s only three of them. The television series is a hungry monster that requires more. Always more... MORE characters. MORE stories. MORE episodes. MORE human sacrifices to GROM! Michael Rex:Everything that has been added was done to open up the show, and allow for more varied stories. Skullbania doesn’t get much time in the books, but the creative team felt that it needed to be a big part of the show. Twinklestick was created as a way for Fangbone! to stay a bit more connected to his home world. Drool was greatly expanded on as well. He only lurks in the background in the books. Even though his actions are constantly felt, he doesn’t really get to do much. --- What did you read and watch as a kid? What were the inspirations for Fangbone! and Skullbania?(martikhoras) Michael Rex:Growing up the early 70’s, “Planet of the Apes” was everywhere. 5 movies, a TV show, and an action figure line made it easy to get wrapped up in. “Star Wars” came out in 1977 and it affected me deeply. Like many others in my generation, it felt like my 9 year-old imagination had been transported directly to the screen. I started reading about movie making, and I tried to understand the mythology Lucas was using in his films. (As a 10 year old, Joseph Campbell was a tough slog, but I tried.) Fangbone! is directly inspired by the 1982 film, “Conan The Barbarian,” which I saw in 8th grade. It was funny, gritty, violent, and exciting and I just loved it. Conan had always been around when I was younger, I’d see his comics and cheap paperbacks in drugstores, but I didn’t know much about him until the film came out. When I was older, I eventually got around to reading the Conan books by Robert E. Howard. As I was gearing up to write the first Fangbone! book, I devoured a huge pile of Marvel’s “Savage Sword of Conan.” Oddly, now that I think about it, Skullbania’s vast deserts and rocky vistas are probably inspired by “Planet of the Apes.” It’s hard to escape those early influences.

[sol1056]

the consequences of unexplored implications

One of the hardest things to do in writing (above and beyond all the regular hard things) is recognizing the unexplored implications. Some of these can be more obvious with some simple stats: how many characters are male vs female? how many white characters get speaking parts or are named, vs how many non-white? 

Others take a bit more thought, like realizing the only female characters are unnamed prostitutes, or the only Hispanic characters are janitors. Sometimes it means untangling a well-meaning attempt to subvert a racist trope (ie uncivilized/inferior primitives) that actually ended up unwittingly in a completely different but equally racist trope (ie the noble savage). 

And then there’s a really tricky one to realize, that at least in my experience needs a big-picture view of the entire story. Only then can you see how seemingly independent parts, when overlapped, result in unfortunate implications. 

It’s this last one that I’m starting to twig on, in VLD. And it comes from a combination of a particularly pernicious trope in American media, the canonical relationship between Keith and Shiro, and the purpose of repetition in stories.

the bury your gays trope

Basically, this trope shows up when a story establishes a happy queer relationship, and immediately decides one of the two must die. 

Often, especially in older works (to the extent that they are found in older works, of course), gay characters just aren't allowed happy endings. Even if they do end up having some kind of relationship, at least one half of the couple, often the one who was more aggressive in pursuing a relationship, thus "perverting" the other one, has to die at the end. ... Nowadays, when opinions on sexuality have shifted somewhat, this justification will often be attempted via Too Good for This Sinful Earth. Sometimes it's because the Magical Queer has died in a Heroic Sacrifice so that the straights may live. 

(Also, for some reason, it’s a particular favorite to have one-half of a lesbian couple killed by a stray bullet. Google it.)

Honestly, this trope is so pervasive, it’s damn hard watching popular media. You end up constantly braced for the inevitable death (sometimes followed by the surviving partner going totally evil, a la Willow in BtVS). Well, unless the relationship is toxic or controlling, and then the implication is that het relationships are the only healthy ones, but that’s a slightly different trope. 

In short: if you’re queer, happy endings are not for you. And if you do manage to get a happy ending (ie Bill in Dr Who), you had to suffer ten times as much as anyone else to get there. Compared to het relationships in the same story, it’s always the queer couples that suffer the most. One way or another.

canonical and word-of-god Shiro/Keith

Assumption: Keith and Shiro have an emotional bond much deeper than any couple we’ve seen on-screen. The very least one could say is that they have a deep relationship, albeit presumably platonic. (I should also note that I do consider ‘platonic’ love to be an equal to ‘romantic’ love; it’s just a different type of consummation.) 

Apart from that, there’s word-of-god: the EPs’ comments (ie “beloved mentor”), VA interviews, and various directors/artists posting sheith images with romantic vibes. Yes, that’s all non-canonical, but the message is: if you read this platonic as simply pre-romantic, well, the series’ creators are there with you. 

I will note, I don’t consider this as representation. In canon or it doesn’t count! (Looking at you, Rowling.) Still, word-of-god is clearly impacting the fandom’s interpretations of the relationship.  

using repetition in stories

The try/fail cycle and repetition have a core element in common: an event repeats until the character learns what they need to achieve victory/resolution. The difference is that in try/fail, the character should move up each time. In repetition, the character must re-experience a lesson they failed the first time.

To compare: 

try/fail: the antagonist has a black belt! get white belt, challenge antagonist, fail. okay, green belt! challenge antagonist, fail. next belt!

repetition: the antagonist has a black belt! test for white belt, fail. test for white belt again, fail. test for white belt again... 

When the overall plot’s try/fail is too similar, readers will see the protagonist as too stupid to quit (or change tactics). Repetition works best as a recurring motif: event A, parallel event B, character learns and changes, we have development, and this happens in support of, or alongside, the plot’s try/fail cycle.

Example: if Lance were to flirt with ten different girls and they all shot him down, that’s try/fail. His development is via repetition: it’s a repeating pattern with Allura, until he learns to take a different approach.

Here’s the important thing: like try/fail, repetition is a lesson to be learned. Most readers assume repetition means the previous instances were failures. If the character does the exact same thing and this time it goes beautifully, expect some side-eying from your more astute readers. 

But at the same time, if the character had no control over the outcome in previous instances, expect frustration instead. Readers will intuit the story is indulging in a kind of victim-blaming: the character had no power to ‘do it right’ before, yet the repetition implies that failure was their fault.

And that brings us to how these three parts, combined, make me see some seriously unfortunate implications in VLD.

all three together

So we have sort of this gray-area kinetic-platonic, potential-romantic, relationship. And twice now, one-half of that relationship has been, well, not killed, but sort of killed. Gone, vanished. The other half is left behind, grieving. It’s implied Keith fell apart the first time, and then we got to see it on-screen, the second time. 

It doesn’t actually matter whether S3/S4 Shiro is the ‘real’ one. If he’s not, then we have a third loss. If he is -- but compromised as a tool of the empire -- then it’s still a loss, if a psychological one. He’s there, it’s just not... him, anymore.

In other words, three times that a potential-queer relationship has been put through a Kill Your Gays maneuver that ended up being just a ploy. 

Done once, it could’ve been a subversion of the trope. Aha, the writers could say, we didn’t kill anyone, instead, we brought him back! Yes, one-half of the couple (and later, we find out, both halves) suffered during the separation, but since that’s mostly backstory, it’s all good, they’re happy now. Carry on, Jeeves.

Done twice, the writers not only re-triggered a possible KYG interpretation, they also tripped over the issue of repetition. Remember, the repetition is a lesson -- something must be learned, to prevent its recurrence. 

The problem is removing Shiro leaves Keith to experience the aftermath. By default, he takes the protagonist’s role, and according to the literary convention, he has to learn something to prevent a repeat. But in neither instance -- the Kerberos mission, or Shiro’s disappearance from Black -- does the story give any indication that Keith had a direct impact on the outcome. He did nothing to cause either, therefore there’s nothing he could feasibly do to fix either. 

That makes it especially infuriating that the third time around, one could conceivably say: gee, Keith kept looking, until he found this not-Shiro. If not-Shiro does any damage, that can be traced back to Keith. 

On its own, that could be an interesting dilemma. Taken in light of repetition, not so good. The unfortunate implication is he should’ve learned from the previous two times, and his failure to do so is the reason he ended up here.   

what’s the lesson, then?

Is it: stop caring for this person? Is it: loving someone that much means you have to suffer? Is it: you can’t just be happy? Is it: if you want to try for happiness, you have to earn the right to it? 

How is it that Lance can just flirt, make peace, and develop a deep friendship with Allura -- and neither are forced to undergo repeated trauma in the process? Or that Pidge has just one scene of implied loss, and it’s over and resolved in the same episode? Yet meanwhile Keith -- the only one with a same-sex relationship of significant depth -- has to lose, and lose, and lose? 

Maybe the writers figured: well, it’s not really death, it doesn’t count, let’s go ahead and yank that chain a second and third time. The story is blind to how their plot-twists aren’t all that better. It's still the same old bullshit: if you’re queer, you don’t get the happy ending. And if you do, it can’t be the simple meet-like-love of a het relationship. You’ve got to suffer for it.  

But the story they’ve written, and the choices they’ve made, tell me: these implications are not on their radar. Worse, I end up feeling like they don’t care enough to even put it on their radar.

That’s why it really bothers me when the EPs say they’re pushing for queer representation. Because if the writers can’t even see the implications of doing this to a deeply caring platonic relationship between two people of the same gender, like hell if I want to see what they’d do to an actual, onscreen, queer relationship. 

If you are rising up right now to insist ‘this is what the story demanded!’, I strongly recommend you go read this post: this is a jar full of major characters. Yes, that post is talking about black characters vs white, but it goes for any marginalized group, including lgbtqia.

Bottom line: no story demands anything. You’re the goddamn writer; you control the story. If you write shit, you’re a shitty writer. 

Think harder. Dig deeper. Do better. 

[shanedakotamuir]

Taylor Swift’s “Beautiful Ghosts” might be the best part of the Cats movie

Universal Pictures

The new song Swift wrote with Andrew Lloyd Webber has a lot to teach us about cats, “Memory,” and fangirls.

“Beautiful Ghosts,” the song that Taylor Swift put words to for Tom Hooper’s upcoming Cats movie, has arrived — and guess what? Swift might be Cats creator and famed Broadway composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ideal lyricist.

Lloyd Webber, a.k.a. ALW, is the man who brought the world Phantom of the Opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, and one of the most recorded songs in theatre history, “Memory” from Cats. (Estimates for the number of artists who’ve covered the song range from 150 to 600+.) ALW is notorious for writing musicals with beautiful music and weak lyrics. But “Beautiful Ghosts” makes a compelling argument that what every ALW musical needs is a shrewd lyricist who was once a teenage girl — and who, consequently, is not embarrassed to embrace the gushy romantic heart of his music.

The song was released November 15 as promotion for film ramps up ahead of the movie’s December 20 release date. And while the new trailer that followed sent us into a grim, slow meltdown, “Beautiful Ghosts” is a good song that suggests niceness can still emerge from this trainwreck of a film.

Here are five reasons “Beautiful Ghosts” is worth a second listen, or several.

1) It adds to our understanding of Victoria, the White Cat

Believe it or not, this cat you’ve never heard of before is our main character.

“Beautiful Ghosts” isn’t a showy end-credits pop song; it’s a new song inserted into the plot of the show. I use “plot” very loosely. Cats the musical is based on the work of great modernist poet T.S. Eliot, set to music by ALW. It’s about ... cats choosing who will go to cat heaven. (Yes, really.)

Not many people remember how weird the plot of Cats is because the only Cats detail most people care about is “Memory,” — a song that musicologist Jessica Sternfeld summarized as “a hit song of massive proportions, by some estimations the most successful song ever from a musical.” But “Memory” itself is such a weird song.

It’s performed by a character named “Grizabella, the Glamour Cat,” a lone, starving alley cat who was once a famously beautiful cat (?!) before she became a friendless, down-on-her-luck feline sex worker (?!?!). She “haunted low resorts” and was exiled by all the cats, until her depression and despair, articulated in “Memory,” finally provokes their sympathy — for which her reward is ... getting to die.

Yup. That’s Cats!

“Beautiful Ghosts” will follow “Memory” in the upcoming film. The cat who sings it, Victoria, is principally a dancer, and in the musical her character is creepily portrayed mainly through her dawning sexual awakening. But in Hooper’s film, Victoria has a bigger role: Now, the entire story is framed through her point of view, and Victoria is a younger mirror of Grizabella.

In “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria echoes “Memory” and reflects on Grizabella’s tragic life, as well as her own. “Memory” keeps calling for “new life,” while through “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria transitions from “Memory’s” sadness to a joy that’s all her own — through the realization that she loves the life she has. Where “Memory” is fuzzy, with vague hints of former happiness, “Beautiful Ghosts” weaves a mini-narrative of Victoria’s life: Cast onto the streets, apparently by cruel former owners, she distrusts other cats, but eventually befriends them and comes to love her life. With this one song, she goes from being opaque and silent to having depth, complexity, and a backstory that doesn’t involve her being a sex object.

2) It helps us understand “Memory”

Even though “Beautiful Ghosts” is sung by Victoria to Grizabella, it also gives us crucial insight into Grizabella’s life. When Victoria sings lines like, “Should I take chances when no one took chances on me?” she’s simultaneously referencing her own life and Grizabella’s: Grizabella at least knew a time when she was loved and admired, and had human companionship to look back on. Victoria has only known rejection.

Taylor Swift has clearly asked herself, “How can I bring more coherence to “Memory,” a weird-ass song about a cat who is also a sex worker who is also dying and friendless and stuck with her memories of having once been very hot?” The solution, which she provides in “Beautiful Ghosts,” is to give Grizabella slightly more of a past.

In a recent radio interview, Swift described her approach to creating the song — which involved contrasting Victoria’s life with Grizabella’s:

‘Memory’ is Grizabella singing about how she had all these beautiful, incredible moments in her past. She had these glittering occasions and she felt beautiful and she felt wanted and now she doesn’t feel that way anymore.

This is fanfic on Swift’s part. While this glittering history can be implied, it’s not literally in the lyrics to “Memory,“ or anywhere else in Cats — the most concrete detail “Memory” offers is that Grizabella once enjoyed “days in the sun.” It’s a huge bonus to see Grizabella given a more concrete backstory that has nothing to do with her, uh, hanging out in brothels.

“Beautiful Ghosts” explains that Grizabella was “born into nothing” but now has memories of “dazzling rooms” and a time she was not just beautiful, but loved. In essence, Swift has not only crafted a satisfying character song for Victoria — she’s deepened Grizabella and “Memory” too.

3) It’s clearly a song that could be sung by a cat

This is hard! “Memory” couldn’t manage it — the song does not remotely sound like as if it’s sung by a character who is a cat. But from the first line of “Beautiful Ghosts” (“follow me home if you dare to”) the song feels like one that could be sung by a cat — one who has wandered the streets, hearing the voices of its fellow cats in the dark. Victoria sings of the “wild ones” who “tame the fear” within her as she longs to “get let into” the rooms inhabited by the humans she once knew and yearned for love from. These are bittersweet lyrics, but more importantly, they’re lyrics that pretty clearly describe the life of a cat.

The extent to which Swift has thought about how cats feel becomes increasingly apparent when you realize that “Beautiful Ghosts” is a hymn to found family and the alley cat existence, the freedom of a life lived on the streets, and the beauty of, well, a gang of stray cats. (If this is also maybe starting to sound like a metaphor for marginalized communities finding strength in each other after being turned out of their homes, well, nobody knows how to appropriate queer pride like Taylor Swift.)

4) It hints at what a new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical could be like with a smart lyricist who embraces his romanticism

The typical trade-off with Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals is that his lush, lofty melodic lines take priority over lyrics. This approach works to make his songs popular — after all, studies have shown that sweeping, ascendant melodies make people feel intense emotions. But if the lyrics are weak — for example, if characters say lines that feel overblown, generic, or irrelevant to the story they’re in — then the musical as a whole can suffer.

The general wisdom among musical theater fans is that ALW was only truly great when he was composing with his earliest collaborator, the brilliant lyricist Tim Rice. The ALW/Rice shows (Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Evita) are fantastic — witty, satirical, and incisive, ranging from complex political themes to rollicking whimsy and charming pastiche. But as good as they are, it’s obvious that they weren’t the kind of shows ALW really wanted to write, because after the team split up, ALW wrote a series of increasingly sentimental shows, from 1982’s generically sad Song and Dance to 1989’s bonkers melodrama Aspects of Love (which I love).

ALW’s later shows’ scores were often gorgeous, full of beautiful melodies. But the plots were often too soapy, and he bounced around between lyricists who frequently paired his music with asinine words. When ALW was working with someone equally as or more talented than he was, he managed to create popular, lasting shows, including Cats and Phantom of the Opera, helmed by the late great director Hal Prince. But ALW didn’t always work with equals who could rein him in. And so he only kept getting more extravagant in his desire to combine deeply emotional musical motifs with schmoopy, overblown storylines. In other words, post-Rice, ALW has always been hampered by his own self-indulgence and the lack of a lyricist as good at writing lyrics as ALW is at writing music.

That’s why a Taylor Swift-ALW collaboration is genuinely exciting. In the annals of ALW collaborators, Swift may be the first lyricist with the range, experience, and stature to stand alongside Rice. But more importantly, she clearly loves Cats, loves the music, and loves actual cats. In that interview quoted above, for example, she discussed Victoria’s cat psychology at length. I cannot imagine any circumstances in which Tim Rice would say, as Swift did in that interview, “I got you. I know what that cat would say.”

And that may be what so many previous ALW musicals have lacked: the enthusiasm of a smart, savvy songwriter who’s also not afraid to unironically love and embrace her subject matter. Taylor Swift isn’t just a brilliant songwriter who credits the lyrics of Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz for teaching her to write music with sharp edges and blatant emotive power. She’s also a fangirl. And fangirls know how to deliver deep, smart character studies while amplifying the emotional core of the stories they love.

That combination of shrewd songwriting and passion is what propels the final verse of “Beautiful Ghosts” into something truly great.

5) “Beautiful Ghosts” has a surprise twist ending

Taylor Swift learned a lot from brilliant country songwriters, and one of the common country song traits she likes to carry forward is the “twist.” That’s when the final stanza upends the original meaning of the song and shifts the refrain into something new, surprising, and even richer.

Throughout “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria has emphasized the fact that Grizabella still has her memories: “at least you have something to cling to ... at least you have beautiful ghosts,” she sings, and the ghosts are the memories of Grizabella’s life of being beautiful and adored.

By contrast, Victoria herself has always lived on the streets, eventually taken in by the stray cats she eventually began to see as family. Initially, she describes the strays as voices she can only hear in the dark, while she wanders the streets, “alone and haunted.” Later, they become “phantoms of night,” as they lure her into her new exciting life.

Finally, when Victoria has her epiphany that she’s happy with her friends, and she loves her alleycat life, she shifts from singing enviously to Grizabella about the “beautiful ghosts” of her memories. Instead, she sings, “So I’ll dance with these beautiful ghosts.”

The ghosts at the end of the song are the cats! Victoria’s ghosts are flesh and blood, and also have you ever met a cat, cats are clearly ghosts, with their silent paws and their eerie glow-eyes, and their ability to vanish into thin air. (Holy shit, the ghosts are the cats!)

Only Taylor Swift could turn a metaphor about lost memories into a literal description of cats that is also a metaphor for found families and friendship. Don’t argue with me, this is perfect.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/338d6zM

[aion-rsa]

It’s a Sin: the Single Line That Hints at a Tragic, Unspoken Backstory

https://ift.tt/2OfO8Ni

Warning: contains spoilers for the It’s a Sin finale

Five-part 1980s-set AIDS drama It’s a Sin would have been three hours longer if creator Russell T Davies had his way. Speaking at Damian Barr’s Literary Salon, as reported by the Huffington Post, the screenwriter confirmed that there were originally plans for eight instalments, another housemate with their own story, and a final episode that would have revisited the characters in the present day. 

Given the opportunity, Davies says he would have shown Lydia West’s Jill in her mid-50s going to visit an elderly Valerie Tozer (Keeley Hawes), the mother to Olly Alexander’s lead Ritchie.

It’s hard to imagine a final confrontation between Jill and Valerie more memorable than the one Davies gave us in the actual finale. The pair meet on a bleak English coastline, where Valerie has been nursing son Ritchie through the final stages of an AIDS-related illness, and refusing his best friends access to him. Having been summoned to the meeting by Valerie, Jill is hopeful that the hostility has thawed and that she and Omari Douglas’ character Roscoe – who’ve decamped from London to be near Ritchie in his dying days – will finally receive an invitation to see the man they love. 

Jill and Roscoe don’t get an invitation. Instead, Jill is told that Ritchie died a day earlier, and that he was alone when it happened. Jill is winded by the news, and by Valerie’s defensive repetition that, though she may not have handled it well, none of this was her fault. 

The previously conciliatory Jill, an ally and stalwart for Ritchie and countless other gay men infected with HIV, launches an attack on Valerie. It is your fault, Jill tells her. She raised Ritchie to feel such shame about his sexuality, Jill says, that he lived with his illness in secret and endangered the lives of other men because he was unable to come to terms with the truth.

“Because that’s what shame does, Valerie,” says Jill. “It makes him think he deserves it. The wards are full of men who think they deserve it. They are dying, and a little bit of them thinks, yes, this is right. I brought this on myself.”

In Jill’s speech, she’s not only addressing Valerie as an individual but as representative of a mainstream culture that inculcates a sense of shame around LGBTQ+ identities. The casual bigotry and homophobia that Ritchie grew up around, combined with his parents’ blinkered attitude to who their son really was, left him self-hating and unable to take proper care of himself and others.

Read more

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It’s a Sin Review: Russell T Davies AIDS Drama is a Soaring Tribute

By Louisa Mellor

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It’s a Sin’s Doctor Who Crossover Pays Tribute to Remembrance of the Daleks Actor

By Louisa Mellor

Part of Jill’s ire comes from knowing through her own loving and accepting parents, that while Ritchie’s home life may have been common for many gay men, with more effort and understanding it could all have been very different. She tells Valerie as much when she says, “I don’t know what happened to you to make that house so loveless.” 

By this point, viewers have a shadow of an idea as to what happened. A single line spoken earlier by Valerie to Ritchie hinted at the circumstances that may have shaped the mother she became – loving but repressed, frozen with shame and filled with rage. In Ritchie’s bedroom, Valerie breaks off mid-anecdote to ask him if he remembers his grandfather. “He was a terrible man,” she says quietly, and then changes the subject. 

Davies has confirmed that, in his original conception of the finale in which a modern-day Jill visits an aged Valerie in her care home, she would have discovered “the sexual abuse at the heart of the Tozer household and how Valerie ended up like she did.” 

Ritchie’s mother, we can infer, was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse committed by her own father. Living with her own deeply held sense of shame and suffering, Valerie’s conception of familial love became warped. She lived with what she saw as a terrible secret, and it held her back from having a truthful relationship with the son she clearly loved but whose dying wishes she cruelly ignored. 

Part of Russell T Davies’ scriptwriting genius (that’s not hyperbole. It’s the only word for it) is that he, actor Keeley Hawes and director Peter Hoar did manage to tell the story of Valerie’s abusive childhood in the version of It’s a Sin we watched. They may not have had that three extra hours, but it was done with a single five-word line that spoke volumes. 

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It’s a Sin is available to stream now on All4 and HBO Max.

The post It’s a Sin: the Single Line That Hints at a Tragic, Unspoken Backstory appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3dXTRC8

[corneliusreignallen]

Taylor Swift’s “Beautiful Ghosts” might be the best part of the Cats movie

Universal Pictures

The new song Swift wrote with Andrew Lloyd Webber has a lot to teach us about cats, “Memory,” and fangirls.

“Beautiful Ghosts,” the song that Taylor Swift put words to for Tom Hooper’s upcoming Cats movie, has arrived — and guess what? Swift might be Cats creator and famed Broadway composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ideal lyricist.

Lloyd Webber, a.k.a. ALW, is the man who brought the world Phantom of the Opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, and one of the most recorded songs in theatre history, “Memory” from Cats. (Estimates for the number of artists who’ve covered the song range from 150 to 600+.) ALW is notorious for writing musicals with beautiful music and weak lyrics. But “Beautiful Ghosts” makes a compelling argument that what every ALW musical needs is a shrewd lyricist who was once a teenage girl — and who, consequently, is not embarrassed to embrace the gushy romantic heart of his music.

The song was released November 15 as promotion for film ramps up ahead of the movie’s December 20 release date. And while the new trailer that followed sent us into a grim, slow meltdown, “Beautiful Ghosts” is a good song that suggests niceness can still emerge from this trainwreck of a film.

Here are five reasons “Beautiful Ghosts” is worth a second listen, or several.

1) It adds to our understanding of Victoria, the White Cat

Believe it or not, this cat you’ve never heard of before is our main character.

“Beautiful Ghosts” isn’t a showy end-credits pop song; it’s a new song inserted into the plot of the show. I use “plot” very loosely. Cats the musical is based on the work of great modernist poet T.S. Eliot, set to music by ALW. It’s about ... cats choosing who will go to cat heaven. (Yes, really.)

Not many people remember how weird the plot of Cats is because the only Cats detail most people care about is “Memory,” — a song that musicologist Jessica Sternfeld summarized as “a hit song of massive proportions, by some estimations the most successful song ever from a musical.” But “Memory” itself is such a weird song.

It’s performed by a character named “Grizabella, the Glamour Cat,” a lone, starving alley cat who was once a famously beautiful cat (?!) before she became a friendless, down-on-her-luck feline sex worker (?!?!). She “haunted low resorts” and was exiled by all the cats, until her depression and despair, articulated in “Memory,” finally provokes their sympathy — for which her reward is ... getting to die.

Yup. That’s Cats!

“Beautiful Ghosts” will follow “Memory” in the upcoming film. The cat who sings it, Victoria, is principally a dancer, and in the musical her character is creepily portrayed mainly through her dawning sexual awakening. But in Hooper’s film, Victoria has a bigger role: Now, the entire story is framed through her point of view, and Victoria is a younger mirror of Grizabella.

In “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria echoes “Memory” and reflects on Grizabella’s tragic life, as well as her own. “Memory” keeps calling for “new life,” while through “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria transitions from “Memory’s” sadness to a joy that’s all her own — through the realization that she loves the life she has. Where “Memory” is fuzzy, with vague hints of former happiness, “Beautiful Ghosts” weaves a mini-narrative of Victoria’s life: Cast onto the streets, apparently by cruel former owners, she distrusts other cats, but eventually befriends them and comes to love her life. With this one song, she goes from being opaque and silent to having depth, complexity, and a backstory that doesn’t involve her being a sex object.

2) It helps us understand “Memory”

Even though “Beautiful Ghosts” is sung by Victoria to Grizabella, it also gives us crucial insight into Grizabella’s life. When Victoria sings lines like, “Should I take chances when no one took chances on me?” she’s simultaneously referencing her own life and Grizabella’s: Grizabella at least knew a time when she was loved and admired, and had human companionship to look back on. Victoria has only known rejection.

Taylor Swift has clearly asked herself, “How can I bring more coherence to “Memory,” a weird-ass song about a cat who is also a sex worker who is also dying and friendless and stuck with her memories of having once been very hot?” The solution, which she provides in “Beautiful Ghosts,” is to give Grizabella slightly more of a past.

In a recent radio interview, Swift described her approach to creating the song — which involved contrasting Victoria’s life with Grizabella’s:

‘Memory’ is Grizabella singing about how she had all these beautiful, incredible moments in her past. She had these glittering occasions and she felt beautiful and she felt wanted and now she doesn’t feel that way anymore.

This is fanfic on Swift’s part. While this glittering history can be implied, it’s not literally in the lyrics to “Memory,“ or anywhere else in Cats — the most concrete detail “Memory” offers is that Grizabella once enjoyed “days in the sun.” It’s a huge bonus to see Grizabella given a more concrete backstory that has nothing to do with her, uh, hanging out in brothels.

“Beautiful Ghosts” explains that Grizabella was “born into nothing” but now has memories of “dazzling rooms” and a time she was not just beautiful, but loved. In essence, Swift has not only crafted a satisfying character song for Victoria — she’s deepened Grizabella and “Memory” too.

3) It’s clearly a song that could be sung by a cat

This is hard! “Memory” couldn’t manage it — the song does not remotely sound like as if it’s sung by a character who is a cat. But from the first line of “Beautiful Ghosts” (“follow me home if you dare to”) the song feels like one that could be sung by a cat — one who has wandered the streets, hearing the voices of its fellow cats in the dark. Victoria sings of the “wild ones” who “tame the fear” within her as she longs to “get let into” the rooms inhabited by the humans she once knew and yearned for love from. These are bittersweet lyrics, but more importantly, they’re lyrics that pretty clearly describe the life of a cat.

The extent to which Swift has thought about how cats feel becomes increasingly apparent when you realize that “Beautiful Ghosts” is a hymn to found family and the alley cat existence, the freedom of a life lived on the streets, and the beauty of, well, a gang of stray cats. (If this is also maybe starting to sound like a metaphor for marginalized communities finding strength in each other after being turned out of their homes, well, nobody knows how to appropriate queer pride like Taylor Swift.)

4) It hints at what a new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical could be like with a smart lyricist who embraces his romanticism

The typical trade-off with Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals is that his lush, lofty melodic lines take priority over lyrics. This approach works to make his songs popular — after all, studies have shown that sweeping, ascendant melodies make people feel intense emotions. But if the lyrics are weak — for example, if characters say lines that feel overblown, generic, or irrelevant to the story they’re in — then the musical as a whole can suffer.

The general wisdom among musical theater fans is that ALW was only truly great when he was composing with his earliest collaborator, the brilliant lyricist Tim Rice. The ALW/Rice shows (Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Evita) are fantastic — witty, satirical, and incisive, ranging from complex political themes to rollicking whimsy and charming pastiche. But as good as they are, it’s obvious that they weren’t the kind of shows ALW really wanted to write, because after the team split up, ALW wrote a series of increasingly sentimental shows, from 1982’s generically sad Song and Dance to 1989’s bonkers melodrama Aspects of Love (which I love).

ALW’s later shows’ scores were often gorgeous, full of beautiful melodies. But the plots were often too soapy, and he bounced around between lyricists who frequently paired his music with asinine words. When ALW was working with someone equally as or more talented than he was, he managed to create popular, lasting shows, including Cats and Phantom of the Opera, helmed by the late great director Hal Prince. But ALW didn’t always work with equals who could rein him in. And so he only kept getting more extravagant in his desire to combine deeply emotional musical motifs with schmoopy, overblown storylines. In other words, post-Rice, ALW has always been hampered by his own self-indulgence and the lack of a lyricist as good at writing lyrics as ALW is at writing music.

That’s why a Taylor Swift-ALW collaboration is genuinely exciting. In the annals of ALW collaborators, Swift may be the first lyricist with the range, experience, and stature to stand alongside Rice. But more importantly, she clearly loves Cats, loves the music, and loves actual cats. In that interview quoted above, for example, she discussed Victoria’s cat psychology at length. I cannot imagine any circumstances in which Tim Rice would say, as Swift did in that interview, “I got you. I know what that cat would say.”

And that may be what so many previous ALW musicals have lacked: the enthusiasm of a smart, savvy songwriter who’s also not afraid to unironically love and embrace her subject matter. Taylor Swift isn’t just a brilliant songwriter who credits the lyrics of Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz for teaching her to write music with sharp edges and blatant emotive power. She’s also a fangirl. And fangirls know how to deliver deep, smart character studies while amplifying the emotional core of the stories they love.

That combination of shrewd songwriting and passion is what propels the final verse of “Beautiful Ghosts” into something truly great.

5) “Beautiful Ghosts” has a surprise twist ending

Taylor Swift learned a lot from brilliant country songwriters, and one of the common country song traits she likes to carry forward is the “twist.” That’s when the final stanza upends the original meaning of the song and shifts the refrain into something new, surprising, and even richer.

Throughout “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria has emphasized the fact that Grizabella still has her memories: “at least you have something to cling to ... at least you have beautiful ghosts,” she sings, and the ghosts are the memories of Grizabella’s life of being beautiful and adored.

By contrast, Victoria herself has always lived on the streets, eventually taken in by the stray cats she eventually began to see as family. Initially, she describes the strays as voices she can only hear in the dark, while she wanders the streets, “alone and haunted.” Later, they become “phantoms of night,” as they lure her into her new exciting life.

Finally, when Victoria has her epiphany that she’s happy with her friends, and she loves her alleycat life, she shifts from singing enviously to Grizabella about the “beautiful ghosts” of her memories. Instead, she sings, “So I’ll dance with these beautiful ghosts.”

The ghosts at the end of the song are the cats! Victoria’s ghosts are flesh and blood, and also have you ever met a cat, cats are clearly ghosts, with their silent paws and their eerie glow-eyes, and their ability to vanish into thin air. (Holy shit, the ghosts are the cats!)

Only Taylor Swift could turn a metaphor about lost memories into a literal description of cats that is also a metaphor for found families and friendship. Don’t argue with me, this is perfect.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/338d6zM

[gracieyvonnehunter]

Taylor Swift’s “Beautiful Ghosts” might be the best part of the Cats movie

Universal Pictures

The new song Swift wrote with Andrew Lloyd Webber has a lot to teach us about cats, “Memory,” and fangirls.

“Beautiful Ghosts,” the song that Taylor Swift put words to for Tom Hooper’s upcoming Cats movie, has arrived — and guess what? Swift might be Cats creator and famed Broadway composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ideal lyricist.

Lloyd Webber, a.k.a. ALW, is the man who brought the world Phantom of the Opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, and one of the most recorded songs in theatre history, “Memory” from Cats. (Estimates for the number of artists who’ve covered the song range from 150 to 600+.) ALW is notorious for writing musicals with beautiful music and weak lyrics. But “Beautiful Ghosts” makes a compelling argument that what every ALW musical needs is a shrewd lyricist who was once a teenage girl — and who, consequently, is not embarrassed to embrace the gushy romantic heart of his music.

The song was released November 15 as promotion for film ramps up ahead of the movie’s December 20 release date. And while the new trailer that followed sent us into a grim, slow meltdown, “Beautiful Ghosts” is a good song that suggests niceness can still emerge from this trainwreck of a film.

Here are five reasons “Beautiful Ghosts” is worth a second listen, or several.

1) It adds to our understanding of Victoria, the White Cat

Believe it or not, this cat you’ve never heard of before is our main character.

“Beautiful Ghosts” isn’t a showy end-credits pop song; it’s a new song inserted into the plot of the show. I use “plot” very loosely. Cats the musical is based on the work of great modernist poet T.S. Eliot, set to music by ALW. It’s about ... cats choosing who will go to cat heaven. (Yes, really.)

Not many people remember how weird the plot of Cats is because the only Cats detail most people care about is “Memory,” — a song that musicologist Jessica Sternfeld summarized as “a hit song of massive proportions, by some estimations the most successful song ever from a musical.” But “Memory” itself is such a weird song.

It’s performed by a character named “Grizabella, the Glamour Cat,” a lone, starving alley cat who was once a famously beautiful cat (?!) before she became a friendless, down-on-her-luck feline sex worker (?!?!). She “haunted low resorts” and was exiled by all the cats, until her depression and despair, articulated in “Memory,” finally provokes their sympathy — for which her reward is ... getting to die.

Yup. That’s Cats!

“Beautiful Ghosts” will follow “Memory” in the upcoming film. The cat who sings it, Victoria, is principally a dancer, and in the musical her character is creepily portrayed mainly through her dawning sexual awakening. But in Hooper’s film, Victoria has a bigger role: Now, the entire story is framed through her point of view, and Victoria is a younger mirror of Grizabella.

In “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria echoes “Memory” and reflects on Grizabella’s tragic life, as well as her own. “Memory” keeps calling for “new life,” while through “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria transitions from “Memory’s” sadness to a joy that’s all her own — through the realization that she loves the life she has. Where “Memory” is fuzzy, with vague hints of former happiness, “Beautiful Ghosts” weaves a mini-narrative of Victoria’s life: Cast onto the streets, apparently by cruel former owners, she distrusts other cats, but eventually befriends them and comes to love her life. With this one song, she goes from being opaque and silent to having depth, complexity, and a backstory that doesn’t involve her being a sex object.

2) It helps us understand “Memory”

Even though “Beautiful Ghosts” is sung by Victoria to Grizabella, it also gives us crucial insight into Grizabella’s life. When Victoria sings lines like, “Should I take chances when no one took chances on me?” she’s simultaneously referencing her own life and Grizabella’s: Grizabella at least knew a time when she was loved and admired, and had human companionship to look back on. Victoria has only known rejection.

Taylor Swift has clearly asked herself, “How can I bring more coherence to “Memory,” a weird-ass song about a cat who is also a sex worker who is also dying and friendless and stuck with her memories of having once been very hot?” The solution, which she provides in “Beautiful Ghosts,” is to give Grizabella slightly more of a past.

In a recent radio interview, Swift described her approach to creating the song — which involved contrasting Victoria’s life with Grizabella’s:

‘Memory’ is Grizabella singing about how she had all these beautiful, incredible moments in her past. She had these glittering occasions and she felt beautiful and she felt wanted and now she doesn’t feel that way anymore.

This is fanfic on Swift’s part. While this glittering history can be implied, it’s not literally in the lyrics to “Memory,“ or anywhere else in Cats — the most concrete detail “Memory” offers is that Grizabella once enjoyed “days in the sun.” It’s a huge bonus to see Grizabella given a more concrete backstory that has nothing to do with her, uh, hanging out in brothels.

“Beautiful Ghosts” explains that Grizabella was “born into nothing” but now has memories of “dazzling rooms” and a time she was not just beautiful, but loved. In essence, Swift has not only crafted a satisfying character song for Victoria — she’s deepened Grizabella and “Memory” too.

3) It’s clearly a song that could be sung by a cat

This is hard! “Memory” couldn’t manage it — the song does not remotely sound like as if it’s sung by a character who is a cat. But from the first line of “Beautiful Ghosts” (“follow me home if you dare to”) the song feels like one that could be sung by a cat — one who has wandered the streets, hearing the voices of its fellow cats in the dark. Victoria sings of the “wild ones” who “tame the fear” within her as she longs to “get let into” the rooms inhabited by the humans she once knew and yearned for love from. These are bittersweet lyrics, but more importantly, they’re lyrics that pretty clearly describe the life of a cat.

The extent to which Swift has thought about how cats feel becomes increasingly apparent when you realize that “Beautiful Ghosts” is a hymn to found family and the alley cat existence, the freedom of a life lived on the streets, and the beauty of, well, a gang of stray cats. (If this is also maybe starting to sound like a metaphor for marginalized communities finding strength in each other after being turned out of their homes, well, nobody knows how to appropriate queer pride like Taylor Swift.)

4) It hints at what a new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical could be like with a smart lyricist who embraces his romanticism

The typical trade-off with Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals is that his lush, lofty melodic lines take priority over lyrics. This approach works to make his songs popular — after all, studies have shown that sweeping, ascendant melodies make people feel intense emotions. But if the lyrics are weak — for example, if characters say lines that feel overblown, generic, or irrelevant to the story they’re in — then the musical as a whole can suffer.

The general wisdom among musical theater fans is that ALW was only truly great when he was composing with his earliest collaborator, the brilliant lyricist Tim Rice. The ALW/Rice shows (Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Evita) are fantastic — witty, satirical, and incisive, ranging from complex political themes to rollicking whimsy and charming pastiche. But as good as they are, it’s obvious that they weren’t the kind of shows ALW really wanted to write, because after the team split up, ALW wrote a series of increasingly sentimental shows, from 1982’s generically sad Song and Dance to 1989’s bonkers melodrama Aspects of Love (which I love).

ALW’s later shows’ scores were often gorgeous, full of beautiful melodies. But the plots were often too soapy, and he bounced around between lyricists who frequently paired his music with asinine words. When ALW was working with someone equally as or more talented than he was, he managed to create popular, lasting shows, including Cats and Phantom of the Opera, helmed by the late great director Hal Prince. But ALW didn’t always work with equals who could rein him in. And so he only kept getting more extravagant in his desire to combine deeply emotional musical motifs with schmoopy, overblown storylines. In other words, post-Rice, ALW has always been hampered by his own self-indulgence and the lack of a lyricist as good at writing lyrics as ALW is at writing music.

That’s why a Taylor Swift-ALW collaboration is genuinely exciting. In the annals of ALW collaborators, Swift may be the first lyricist with the range, experience, and stature to stand alongside Rice. But more importantly, she clearly loves Cats, loves the music, and loves actual cats. In that interview quoted above, for example, she discussed Victoria’s cat psychology at length. I cannot imagine any circumstances in which Tim Rice would say, as Swift did in that interview, “I got you. I know what that cat would say.”

And that may be what so many previous ALW musicals have lacked: the enthusiasm of a smart, savvy songwriter who’s also not afraid to unironically love and embrace her subject matter. Taylor Swift isn’t just a brilliant songwriter who credits the lyrics of Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz for teaching her to write music with sharp edges and blatant emotive power. She’s also a fangirl. And fangirls know how to deliver deep, smart character studies while amplifying the emotional core of the stories they love.

That combination of shrewd songwriting and passion is what propels the final verse of “Beautiful Ghosts” into something truly great.

5) “Beautiful Ghosts” has a surprise twist ending

Taylor Swift learned a lot from brilliant country songwriters, and one of the common country song traits she likes to carry forward is the “twist.” That’s when the final stanza upends the original meaning of the song and shifts the refrain into something new, surprising, and even richer.

Throughout “Beautiful Ghosts,” Victoria has emphasized the fact that Grizabella still has her memories: “at least you have something to cling to ... at least you have beautiful ghosts,” she sings, and the ghosts are the memories of Grizabella’s life of being beautiful and adored.

By contrast, Victoria herself has always lived on the streets, eventually taken in by the stray cats she eventually began to see as family. Initially, she describes the strays as voices she can only hear in the dark, while she wanders the streets, “alone and haunted.” Later, they become “phantoms of night,” as they lure her into her new exciting life.

Finally, when Victoria has her epiphany that she’s happy with her friends, and she loves her alleycat life, she shifts from singing enviously to Grizabella about the “beautiful ghosts” of her memories. Instead, she sings, “So I’ll dance with these beautiful ghosts.”

The ghosts at the end of the song are the cats! Victoria’s ghosts are flesh and blood, and also have you ever met a cat, cats are clearly ghosts, with their silent paws and their eerie glow-eyes, and their ability to vanish into thin air. (Holy shit, the ghosts are the cats!)

Only Taylor Swift could turn a metaphor about lost memories into a literal description of cats that is also a metaphor for found families and friendship. Don’t argue with me, this is perfect.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/338d6zM

[thirdmagic]

n-nasu thoughts...?!?! boy we’re on a roll with this sorta discussion tonight

So this is a really fantastic piece of writing that articulates really really well what I've been frustratingly saying for YEARS since I first played F/sn about what makes it so unique an experience and as a visual novel, and simply as a piece of media and a work of art-- like trying to express how much I agree with this will probably make me sound a sycophant but it really does articulate very well what F/sn as a story is all about, the value in it, and how its structure and characters and every element of its design is a means to an end to explore the many, many themes and concepts it centers on. How it uses the structure of a three-route visual novel to carry across a story in a way that all wraps up together in the end in a really excellent way, by making three entirely separate routes actually the three chapters of a linear story that examines a bunch of concept from all different possible angles, and why I love it for all these things.

Like I keep wanting to write like... a 20k meta on this very topic like I've been wanting to do since I read it when I was 14 because I'm still not over how much symbolism this game runs on and how much thought was put into the thematic elements of it and in making them come together, and how that shows EVERYWHERE, from major characters like the Shirou/Rin/Sakura trio, to characters like Sasaki and Medea and even the shitty Matous, to how the symbolism is everywhere, from the Emiya house to the Matou and Tohsaka mansions to the whole goddamn city to Shirou's shed being a reflection of himself and... honestly there's so much to write about there.

But what I wanted to add to this specifically is on the topic of Nasu and his writing, because I've been thinking about it a lot for the past few good years and came to some conclusions and I both agree with what Lance says here on what makes him so unique and also want to add my own reasons... specifically what I feel that really makes and defines him as a writer and why I still really love and enjoy a lot of his work despite that there's no few reasons I shouldn't.

Now, first off, let me be upfront: when it comes to straight male priveleged writers, I tend to define them into three categories: those who think with their dicks when they write, those who think with their heads and occasionally dicks (sometimes subconcious) but with no feeling or heart or emotional sincerity, and those who write entirely with their hearts/emotions. The first two are pretty much classic fuckboy writers, tho the second comes in many varieties (I'd put early Urobuchi, at least in F/Z, in this category but I really think he's improved a fair bit in this sense over time!), but the third is like... writers who are artists and creators beyond all things, whose writing and creation comes straight from the heart, and they come in many varieties too, good ones and bad ones! And the point is: it's where I'd put Nasu.

What makes me come back to his writing time and time again, what really, really makes F/SN for me? Is that I feel like his are stories written with love. This may sound like, terribly cheesy and saccharine but I really do think that he is a guy who writes from the heart. I read F/sn and it's just... so obvious to me that this was made and created by someone who loves and cares for these characters. It's why everyone feels so alive and rich in character, it's why there's something to love in even the most undeveloped characters or the most messily written ones. Like... he cares about these people. He cares about them, he wants us to care about them and love them, and he goes out of his way to not just stick us in Shirou's head through the whole thing, despite how much of the VN is indeed in first person POV from him?

Because look: there are so many interludes from so many different points of views, there's the First Person POV sections for Rin, there's interludes which are in third person but still very clearly in the heads of a specific character- Sakura and Saber have many such scenes, and I remember Sakura getting a brief first person scene too. Anyway, the point and the reason I emphasize this is what this tells me is that not only does Nasu love and care about these characters, and really wants to deeply explore them and their heads and thought processes- he wants us to see into their heads too. He doesn't stick them into the story as plot devices, or for them to just be There and revolve around the main characters. No, he makes sure that they all feel alive and human, that we see into their heads and the way they think, reason, feel, and experience the world. Every character gets a chance at this-- with a few exceptions, and some get only one chance and not much more, but none of these people are cardboard cartouts. He wants us to get to know them and understand them. He wants them to feel alive and human because these are the characters he created.

But what he lacks, I think, as a writer? Is simple technique. I'm also absolutely 100% on board with him being a good thematic writer, because when it comes to the symbolism and themes and how they all work and come together he really shines and he KNOWS how to make it work. But I think it's less that he's not a good character writer than just... he doesn't have the skill in writing technique you need to be a good character writer. I get the sense that the characters in his head are truly really rich and deep ones, but when he puts it down on paper, tries to actually write them as they are in his head as concepts, it just doesn't work out, and not for a lack of trying, but because writing is just about technique and knowing how to create and make the character on paper the same person you see in your head. That takes skill, in writing, in plotting, in knowing how exactly to make the plot and story elements come together. Here is where he's on shakier ground because while I feel he really tries he just... doesn't have what it takes to recreate those characters in paper.

And I wouldn't call him a bad writer for that, exactly? I know that it sounds like I'm saying this bc I'm saying that he lacks writing technique, but I mean that more in the sense that the /technical/ aspect of writing is where he's weaker. Honestly what it all comes down to is that he's fantastic in creating really good concepts, and genuienly tries really hard to carry them across on paper but just doesn't have the skills to. That's not, like... some sort of moral failing or fault of his. Different people are good at different things! His talents lie in thematic elements and creating those characters and knowing how to input them into the story, in creating a story centered around themes and how to make them work and examining these themes in very thorough ways! He excels when it comes to the bigger picture, is what I’m saying. The best way to describe it, really, I think... is that his true talent lies in being a storyteller. Hell maybe even a director- he knows how to create and tell a story, but the technical aspect of writing down the script is where he tries really hard but just isn't where his skills lie.

What I mean about the technical aspect is things like- pacing, plotting, working out what character x should do in situation y and how to figure that into the plot and how concept x should carry across in terms of the plots and events happening. Things like that. It's a fair bit more technical and requires a different sort of imagination-- a sort of ability to temper your creativity into something more practical and grounded, in taking a concept and figuring out how you'll carry it across. It's like someone who's excellent in composition and ideas and concepts and may even have fantastic taste in color and wants to create really colorful stuff... but just doesn't have the talent for, you know, the actual technique of drawing/painting.

Going on with this pretentious analogy, I think Nasu knows this but he has so much fun with drawing and painting anyway despite this that he goes through with it. And here's where I also agree that everything he creates is just.. so much fun and easy to be swept into because you can tell that he's having a blast making it. It gives his work a sort of unexpected charm? I can say for myself that all of the Nasuisms like endless unnecessary exposition often put and phrased awkwardly and characters reusing phrases over and over and all those expositions being endless and repetitive, and the often awkward/weird dialogue and speech patterns... what I once saw as a flaw has just become a trademark of his at this point. I mean, sure, objectively it is a writing flaw but I look at it and I don't get irritated. I just sort of sigh fondly at Nasu's love of writing Too Many Words and putting Too Many Metaphors and his flowery language and excessive symbolism and just go, Oh, Nasu, You And Your Nasuisms in this sort of fond way. It's just so endearingly him at this point.

And all this comes down to the fact that he writes from the heart. Everything he writes he pours a lot of sincerity and love in it- sincerity about the story, about what he wants to carry across, about how much he wants us to love it too. It's extremely self-indulgent but that too is the way his love and sincerity comes across in his work. And a lot of his self indulgence comes into things like, overly long cooking scenes and super Extra fight scenes and flowery prose and these don't make for classical literature but I can't really hate it because it's just really harmlessly self indulgent. I look at it and go, oh Nasu, you go on having fun, you. And when I gripe about how he uses Too Many Words and doesn't know how to put together a scene without it going on forever I do this with a sort of... fondness I can't descibe, like I can't be angry because it's just another super Nasu trademark of his.

Now obviously it doesn't end and begin there. Sometimes his self indlugence goes into really weird fucky areas, and yeah, sometimes it goes into directions that make even me, a Self Proclaimed Problematique, raise some eyebrows. There's a fair bit of stuff in all the games he wrote that makes me groan and eyeroll and sometimes I want to walk up to him and shake him a bit and go please stop doing these things!! And we can talk forever about his writing with regards to sj topics and feminism because there's so many different and mixed factors going on there that he's like, found some weird perfect middle where he's not either a Feminist Male Writer Icon but also not a Thinking With The Dick Straight Dude Fuckboy Writer but has aspects of both that mixed together in this weird indescribable result that's very distinctly him that I still adore.

But just... for all these things he's still someone I'm very fond of as a writer and he really does have a way of drawing you into his world in a very unique way, and I always enjoy the experience. So to me it's hard to describe him as a bad or good writer. He's just sort of in a league on his own because everything he writes and makes and his attitude towards so many things is very distinctly him and you can't really define him as a writer with either such terms. Even as there are no small amount of things I hate, and even as they are just as many if not more things I adore... it's for reasons that are distinct to his style of creation and writing, and more about categories or classifications such as good or bad. He is what he is, and what he is can't be defined!

... Anyway, that's basically all I wanted to say, I think. I would like to apologize for how corny and unnecessarily cheesy a lot of this sounds but I've been stewing over those thoughts for like, years, and I felt this is a perfect opportunity, in relation to this post, to finally put them down in writing.