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devilsskettle · 3 years

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oh man i have a Lot of thoughts about the autopsy of jane doe, both positive and critical For Sure, i'd be SO excited to see your analysis of it! definitely keeping an eye out for that 👀

thanks! i'm working on something article-like to talk about the film and i don't know what i want to do with it yet lol but if i don't post it on here i'll definitely link it. it's mainly a discussion of gender in possession/occult films in the same way that carol clover describes in men, women, and chainsaws - that there are dual plot lines in occult films, usually gendered masculine and feminine respectively, where the "main" feminine plot (the actual possession) is actually a way to explore the "real" masculine plot (the emotional conflict of the "man in crisis" protagonist). typically the man in crisis is too masculine, or "closed" emotionally, where the woman is too "open," which is why she acts as the vehicle for the supernatural occurrence as well as the core emotions of the film. the man has to learn how to become more open (though if he becomes too open, like father karras in the exorcist, he has to die by the end - he has to find a happy medium, where he doesn't actually transgress gender expectations too much. clover calls this state the "new masculine," and we might apply the term "toxic masculinity" to the "closed" emotional state). part of the "opening up" feature of the story is that it allows men to be highly emotionally expressive in situations where they otherwise might not be allowed to, which is cathartic for the assumed primary audience of these films (young men). another feature of the genre is white science vs black magic (once you exhaust the scientific "rational" explanations, you have to accept that something magic is happening). the autopsy of jane doe does this even more than the films she discusses when she published the book in 1992 (the exorcist, poltergeist, christine, etc) because the supernaturally influenced young woman who becomes this kind of vehicle is more of an object than a character. she doesn't have a single line of dialogue or even blink for the entire runtime of the movie. the camerawork often pans to her as if to show her reactions to the events of the movie, which seems kind of pointless because it's the same reaction the whole time (none) but it allows the viewer to project anything they want onto her - from personal suffering to cunning and spite.

compare again to the exorcist: is the story actually about regan mcneil? no. but do we care about her? sure (clover says no, but i think we at least feel for her situation lol). and do we get an idea of what she's like as a person? yes. even though her pain and her body are used narratively as a framework for karras' emotional/religious crisis, we at least see her as a person. both she and her mother are expendable to the "real" plot but they're very active in their roles in the "main" plot - our "jane doe" isn't afforded even that level of agency or identity. so. is that inherently sexist? well, no - if there were other women in the film who were part of the "real" plot, i would say that the presence of women with agency and identity demonstrate enough regard for the personhood of women to make the gender of the subject of the autopsy irrelevant. but there are none. of the three important women in the film, we have 1) an almost corpse, 2) an absent (dead) mother, and 3) a one dimensional girlfriend who is killed off for a man's character development/cathartic expression of emotions. all three are just platforms for the men in crisis of this narrative.

and, to my surprise, much of the reception to the film is to embrace it as a feminist story because the witch is misconstrued as a badass, powerful, Strong Female Character girl boss type for getting revenge on the men who wronged her, with absolutely no consideration given to what the movie actually ends up saying about women. and the director has said that he embraces this interpretation, but never intended it. so like. of course you're going to embrace the interpretation that gives you critical acclaim and the moral high ground. but it's so fucking clear that it was never his intention to say anything about feminism, or women in general, or gender at all. so i find it very frustrating that people read the film that way because it's just. objectively wrong.

there's also things i want to say about this idea that clover talks about in a different chapter of the book when she discusses the country/city divide in a lot of horror (especially rape-revenge films) in which the writer intends the audience to identify with the city characters and be against the country characters (think of, like, house of 1000 corpses - there's pretty explicit socioeconomic regional tension between the evil country residents and the travelers from the city) but first, they have to address the real harm that the City (as a whole) has inflicted upon the Country (usually in the forms of environmental and economic destruction) so in order to justify the antagonization the country people are characterized by, their "retaliation" for these wrongs has to be so extreme and misdirected that we identify with the city people by default (if country men feel victimized by the City and react by attacking a city woman who isn't complicit in the crimes of the City in any of the violent, heinous ways horror movies employ, of course we won't sympathize with them). why am i bringing this up? well, clover says this idea is actually borrowed from the western genre, where native americans are the Villains even as white settlers commit genocide - so they characterize them as extremely savage and violent in order to justify violence against them (in fiction and in real life). the idea is to address the suffering of the Other and delegitimize it through extreme negative characterization (often, with both the people from the country and native americans, through negative stereotyping as well as their actions). so i think that shows how this idea is transferred between different genres and whatever group of people the writers want the viewers to be against, and in this movie it’s happening on the axis of gender instead of race, region, or class. obviously the victims of the salem witch trials suffered extreme injustice and physical violence (especially in the film as victim of the ritual the body clearly underwent) BUT by retaliating for the wrongs done to her, apparently (according to the main characters) at random, she's characterized as monstrous and dangerous and spiteful. her revenge is unjustified because it’s not targeted at the people who actually committed violence against her. they say that the ritual created the very thing it was trying to destroy - i.e. an evil witch. she becomes the thing we're supposed to be afraid of, not someone we’re supposed to sympathize with. she’s othered by this framework, not supported by it, so even if she’s afforded some power through her posthumous magical abilities, we the viewer are not supposed to root for her. if the viewer does sympathize with her, it’s in spite of the writing, not because of it. the main characters who we are intended to identify with feel only shallow sympathy for her, if any - even when they realize they’ve been cutting open a living person, they express shock and revulsion, but not regret. in fact, they go back and scalp her and take out her brain. after realizing that she’s alive! we’re intended to see this as an acceptable retaliation against the witch, not an act of extreme cruelty or at the very least a stupid idea lol.

(also - i hate how much of a buzzword salem is in movies like this lol, nothing about her injuries or the story they “read” on her is even remotely similar to what happened in salem, except for the time period. i know they don’t explicitly say oh yeah, she was definitely from salem, but her injuries really aren’t characteristic of american executions of witches at all so i wish they hadn’t muddied the water by trying to point to an actual historical event. especially since i think the connotation of “witch” and the victims of witch trials has taken on a modern projection of feminism that doesn’t really make sense under any scrutiny. anyway)

not to mention the ending: what was the writer intending the audience to get from the ending? that the cycle of violence continues, and the witch’s revenge will move on and repeat the same violence in the next place, wherever she ends up. we’re supposed to feel bad for whoever her next victims will be. but what about her? i think the movie figures her maybe as triumphant, but she’s going to keep being passed around from morgue to morgue, and she’s going to be vivisected again and again, with no way to communicate her pain or her story. the framework of the story doesn’t allow for this ending to be tragic for her, though - clearly the tragedy lies with the father and son, finally having opened up to one another, unfortunately too late, and dying early, unjust deaths at the hands of this unknowable malignant entity. it doesn’t do justice to her (or the girlfriend, who seems to be nothing but collateral damage in all of this - in the ending sequence, when the police finds the carnage, it only shows them finding the bodies of the men. the girlfriend is as irrelevant to the conclusion as she is to the rest of the plot).

but does this mean the autopsy of jane doe is a “bad” movie? i guess it depends on your perspective. ultimately, it’s one of those questions that i find myself asking when faced with certain kinds of stories that inevitably crop up often in our media: how much can we excuse a story for upholding regressive social norms (even unintentionally) before we have to discount the whole work? i don’t think the autopsy of jane doe warrants complete rejection for being “problematic” but i think the critical acclaim based on the idea that it’s a feminist film should be rejected. i still consider it a very interesting concept with strong acting and a lot of visual appeal, and it’s a very good piece of atmospheric horror. it’s does get a bit boring at certain points, but the core of the film is solid. it’s also not trying to be sexist, arguably it’s not overtly sexist at all, it’s just very very androcentric at the expense of its female characters, and i’m genuinely shocked that anyone would call it feminist. so sure, let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water, but let’s also be critical about how it’s using women as the stage for men’s emotional conflict

also re: my description of this little project as “a film isn’t feminist just because there’s a woman’s name in the title” - i actually don’t want to skim over the fact that “jane doe” isn’t a real name. of the three women in the film, only one has a real name; the other two are referred to by names given to them by men. i’ll conclude on this note because i want to emphasize the lack of even very basic ways of recognizing individual identity afforded to women in this film. so yeah! the end! thanks for your consideration if you read this far!

#the autopsy of jane doe #men women and chainsaws #horror #also to be clear i'm not saying that the exorcist is somehow more feminist because. it's not. i'm just using it as a frame of reference #you'd think a film from 2016 would escape the ways gender is constructed in one from 1973 but that's not really the case #i actually rewatched the end of the movie to make sure that what i said about the girlfriend's body not being found at the end was accurate #and yeah! it is! the intended audience-identified character shifts to the sheriff who - that's right! - is also a man #the camerawork is: shot of the dead son / shot of the sheriff looking sad / shot of the dead father / shot of the sheriff looking sad /#shot of jane doe / shot of the sheriff looking upset angry and suspicious #which is how we're supposed to feel about the conclusion for each character #the girlfriend is notably absent in this sequence #anyway! this is less about me condemning this movie as sexist and more about looking at how women in occult horror #continue to be relegated to secondary plot lines at best or to set dressing for the primary plot line at worst #and what that says about identification of viewers with certain characters and why writers have written the story that way #i think the reception of the film as Feminist might actually point to a shift in identification - but to still be able to enjoy the movie #while identifying with a female character you need to change the narrative that's actually presented to you #hence the rampant impulse to misinterpret the intention of the filmmakers #we do want it to be feminist! the audience doesn't identify with the 'default' anymore automatically #i think that's actually a pretty positive development at least in viewership - if only filmmakers would catch up lol #oh and i only very briefly touched on this here but the white science vs black magic theme is pretty clearly reflected in this film also

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wellfine · 3 years

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hey, I love fanfic, big props to everyone who writes it, but uhh... fanfic authors, please know that not everything exists on the Internet to be fodder for your writing

I have had multiple uncomfortable experiences of people either implying or outright stating that they wanted to/planned to take the concepts I explored in my art or my comics and reuse them for fics. not as in they were inspired by me, or that they were going to ask me to collab with them, but just... “I am going to take this idea and turn it into a fic”

That’s. That’s plagiarism? and you shouldn’t do it lmao?

I know the line between being inspired by another person’s content and straight up just reproducing it in written form can be a fine one, and you may ask “but how can you tell if something is inspired by someone else’s work?” and to that I say, well, the AUTHOR knows, lmao. if you KNOW you have been inspired by someone’s fanart, fan designs, or especially fan-comics, then the LEAST you can do is credit that someone, and what you really SHOULD be doing is asking them permission first. And accepting it if they say no, because, again, creators don’t share their content with you just to serve as your next story idea.

Like, if I took your fanfiction and turned it into fanart or a comic without asking you, and oftentimes without even crediting you, just presenting it as something “inspired by some story I read”... that would be stealing. And you could rightfully be pissed off with me (whether you personally think you would be or not), even though the medium/genre has changed. Because it’s still your idea that I took from you without any acknowledgment.

If I wanted something to be a written story then I would write it that way. Comics in particular take a lot of work, and are... I mean, they’re already a written work. Just because I’ve executed an idea in a different medium doesn’t mean it’s free real estate for you to reproduce and present as if it were your own idea, your own baby.

Again, the line here is very blurry, and I’m not saying you’re never allowed to spring-board off of someone else’s fan-content to create something several degrees removed just because they share one common idea. Everyone borrows from someone, and I don’t think anything I’ve ever made has been unique. But what I am talking about here is the sentiment of “this very specific, intricate concept is now Mine” that reproduces my work so closely it’s basically a transcription, not its own work, or even a transformative work.

I’ll also say that I HAVE had people reach out to me to say they’ve written things based on/inspired by my work, and asked if they could share it, and each time I’ve said yes! And I love reading those things!! But a big part of it is that they acknowledged they were taking something from me, and that my content wasn’t just free for them to pick over and use for themselves. It became sharing instead of stealing, which I wish I saw more of, instead of tags/reblogs/replies saying “I’m totally using this for my next fic!” as if the idea just fell out of the sky from some prompt generator and into their lap and wasn’t, you know, a concept someone already put their time and feeling and work into.

Anyway. Love fics. Love to stay up til 3 AM on my phone reading them when I should be sleeping as much as the next guy. And I have nothing but respect for the amount of work, skill, and effort that goes into them. But I wouldn’t steal from you, so please don’t steal from me just because we both choose to communicate our ideas through different mediums. Please!!!!!

#if you are one of the ppl who has reached out to me please know this is not about you at all!!#this is about the tags/replies that are basically just like yoink! :3 and I'm like... haha.... but don't actually please?#the only reason I started making and sharing fan content was in order to express my ideas #the idea behind my art is the most precious aspect to me. if you take that and use it as your own it cuts deep #it really really helps if you ask first #personally I credit anyone who inspires my art even if the end product has no signs of it lmao #I just feel like it's the right thing to do... and if you love someone's art enough to be inspired by it then why not?

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neocatharsis · 3 years

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Ten on his new Represent capsule, grappling with creativity, and evading genre lines.

As Ten Lee - a vocalist and dancer in K-pop groups NCT (with whom he debuted in 2016) and Super M, and Chinese group WayV - is musing over his proclivity for partnering music or visual styles in a way that others deem strange, he veers off on a tangent. “Anything can be matched… except juice and coffee,” he says, suddenly. “Those two should never be.” Ten is infamously anti-fruit. It stems from a mistaken process of association in childhood where “I had the image of a spider and the image of fruit mixed up,” he laughs awkwardly, “so now whenever I put fruit in my mouth, I think there’s spiders in my mouth.”

Random abstractions such as this pepper his rapid-fire conversation, like small fireworks fizzing through the dark. Excitable, enthused and sharply alert, if Ten’s energy was visible it would be a shimmering mantle of gold and silver dust. As a dancer, he moves with a sinuous, controlled power that can shift from elegant to explosive on a single beat. As a visual artist, the Bangkok-born, multilingual 25-year-old recently added the title of designer to his growing list of achievements, launching an already sold out collaboration with the bespoke merch platform Represent.

Aptly, he named his collaboration “What is ??? THE ANSWERS”, for although being a chameleonic artist is one of Ten’s greatest strengths, the personality traits that enable this created within him question marks around how he saw himself fitting into the world. “People ask me, ‘What kind of music do you like?’ And I say, ‘I like R&B but hope it sounds rock’. And they’re like, ‘That doesn’t make sense’.” It was troubling to Ten that people began telling him who he was and how he should be, instead of accepting him as is.

In a recent Instagram Live, the myriad of Ten’s contrasts tumble forthwith. He’s the doting cat-dad. His inner emo, who loves rock music, shows off dried roses, with the stern, black, geometric lines of the large tattoo on his inner right arm sometimes visible. But he’s also delicate in a way, with his butterfly tattoo and hair lightly permed, who names daisies as his other favourite flower, and plays Fousheé’s breathy TikTok hit, 'Deep End'.

“Have you seen the image where I have my name in a cross in lots of different languages?” He pulls the image up on his phone. The design sits on his Represent long sleeve tee. “I was thinking [about this], like, what you’re saying... Ten has this luvvie flower side and a very ‘rawwrr!’ side. I’m always like, ‘Ten, what kind of person are you?’ I do ask myself that, too, because everything I like is so different [to the other].” He could have conceded, and reined himself in. He’s pushed back instead. “I thought, ‘I can be anything I want, I can be this in the morning and this at night. I can be any person I want to be’. And that’s what makes me comfortable and happy.”

On his Instagram, Polaroids feature scrawled messages, like “Don’t tell me what to do!” and “Whatever! I’ll do it my way”. The designs of his collaboration seek to challenge being boxed in by other people’s standards, thus limiting ourselves. The recurring symbol of a cross tipped with arrows is a nod to the Chinese letter for 10, but doubles as a plus sign. He’s added it to his Instagram, writing “TEN_+•10” in his bio. “A plus sign can mean that you’re adding on and growing.” He points to another version of the arrow-cross, one with short diagonal dashes between its points that symbolise light. It means, he says, “that I’m radiating. I’m burning, I’m active, I’m doubling myself.” He touches his forearm, where crowning his geometric tattoo is a blazing sun. “I have this, like, if you want to be the light, you have to burn. I relate to that.”

This isn’t to say Ten’s self-exploration is complete. While celebrating his strengths, the artwork also portrays parts of himself not yet conquered. He admits to being a chronic overthinker: “Even very small things that happen to me, I rethink a thousand times, and I get stressed out because of the things I do. Like, the main theme [here] is me overthinking but trying to find an answer even though it doesn’t have any answer.” Fittingly, spiral shapes dominate his designs, looming large amongst bright, bold shapes that evoke 80s Pop Art and graffiti, though Ten shies away from defining himself as “fully an artist, I’m not in the position to say things like that yet.”

“I’m still learning and trying new things. You learn by getting different elements from different people and I’m in that stage now.” He enjoys wandering the infinite halls of Instagram and Pinterest where he screenshots art that he likes, lost in the images, often for hours. He explains that he’s mostly influenced by whatever his current visual obsession is. “I’m interested in tattoos lately so my paintings look like tattoo designs. I’m that person who, when they see stuff, it goes into my brain and instantly comes out from my hands,” he laughs.

Ten’s introduction to art and design was through his mother, who believed music, art and sport were more important in a child’s development than traditional academia. “She didn’t care if I got an A* or not, just don’t get an F or a D,” he grins. Like any kid forced to do something, Ten railed against spending his weekends at art school. He attended but he didn’t draw. He befriended his teacher and other pupils and, as they worked, he chatted. “I was a very talkative kid! When I came to SM Entertainment (in 2013), I had a lot of my own time because my parents were in Thailand and I was alone. I had to absorb all the new culture and adapt to a new environment.’” When he felt surrounded by “negative energy”, he began drawing, enamoured with the space and freedom it offered because in art, as he often says, “there’s no right answer.”

There is, however, sometimes a middle ground. His goal was to make the Represent collection accessible to his diverse fanbase. “I wanted to make things that people can easily wear because it was my first project to make something with clothes and it’s a collab. If you go too far out, no one will get it. If you go too far back, people won’t reach for it. So finding the middle ground is important but that’s the hardest thing to do. If it’s my own project, I’ll be like, ‘I’m the president of this brand, I’m gonna make all the weird clothes that I can imagine!’”

He sought second opinions to ensure his designs landed the way he hoped. “I have a lot of good friends around me - my choreographer, (SHINee and Super M member) Taemin hyung, my manager. I randomly ask people I’m comfortable with and have known for a long time, like Mark (Lee, of NCT and Super M). Mark has the same kind of perspective as me, but I’m a person who is arrghhh!” He waves his hands in the air. “And he’s very calm. I need a person who is opposite of me because when I’m in a mood, I talk nonsense - ‘I wanna do this, I wanna do that, I wanna make this!’ - and Mark’s like,’Bro, calm down’,” he says in a rather uncanny impression of the Canadian-Korean.

Ten works fast when he’s drawing. He has to. He describes his personality as someone who can't wait until the next day to do something. “I’m very impatient,” he smiles. “If I’m going to paint or draw, I’m going to finish it in, like, two hours. I can’t sit down for three hours.” When inspiration hits him, it’s off the back of deep contemplation, sometimes about the mundane - “Like, why do the cats come to me when they’re hungry only? Is it selfish or instinct? - at other times, something affecting him emotionally.

But whereas his job as a singer and dancer sees him project his energy outwards, art offers the opposite. He’s often alone in his room when he works. As is for many artists, the right mood is fundamental. “When I’m in a good mood, I can’t draw,” he half-sighs. It’s also a multi-sensory process. “Smell or the temperature of the room, that really helps me draw. I light three or four candles. And when I draw, it’s kind of heavy, the feeling,” he explains. “It feels like you’re sinking into something, into yourself, and everything seems so small. Everything narrows down into me, my pencil, the paper.”

The more work he does in different creative mediums, the less Ten’s desire is to keep them separate. His art, dance and music influence each other, whether it’s customising his own collaboration pieces, a choreography video in an art gallery or dancing underwater with a film crew. When someone tells him that something won’t work or match up well, he refuses to let the idea go until he’s attempted it.

“I’ve had that since I was young. I think everything is possible. If you don’t try, you don’t know. When people say it’s impossible, like dancing in water for three minutes, I’m like, then let’s make it possible. You don’t need to walk a straight line [in life], you can walk this way,” Ten says, pointing along an invisible line before switching sharply in direction. “Then go back on track, go that way, come back. No one should tell you to walk in a line, I don’t see the point of that.”

#nct #wayv #Ten

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lucemferto · 3 years

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WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT PH1LZA (or Why Philza is a Victim of Narrative Circumstance)

Heyo! Per request I am posting the script to my video of the same name here on tumblr. I must warn you that just reading the script will probably not give you the full experience, so I would encourage you to watch the video (linked above).

There might also still be a lot of grammatical errors in the text, because I don’t proofread.

Intro

LAST TIME ON LUCEM FERTO

Okay, so! I don’t want this to turn into a reaction channel OR a Dream SMP channel for that matter! [echo]

Well, I lied.

[Intro to “Luc is pretentious about the funny blockmen. Episode 2”]

I swear, I’m working on other stuff. It’s just that my dumb lizard brain has only capacity for one interest at a time!

So, something you might not know about me, is that I am on tumblr – who am I kidding, most of you will know me from tumblr. Before starting this whole YouTube thing, I thought that website died years ago – but as per usual reality proves me wrong. I’m also on Twitter and Reddit, but I get the most engagement on tumblr – by far! – and I need those sweet, sweet numbers for the serotonin!

Anyways, one of my favourite past-times on tumblr is to razz Philza Hardcore Minecraft – that’s his full name – for being a frankly awful father [clicking away] – wait, wait, no! Philza fans, this isn’t a hit piece on him, I promise! Please come back!

This is video is meant to be a companion piece to my previous video about Technoblade and the Doomsday event – you can tell by the shared nomenclature – so you should probably watch that one before you proceed. Unless you don’t want to, which is also perfectly understandable.

DISCLAIMER: This video is mostly about the character Philza plays on the Dream SMP. Whenever I talk about the content creator Philza, I will say so properly. Also, Spoiler Warning for Dream SMP Season 2.

… What is that? You’re wondering what the Dream SMP is? Well, if you had just watched the other video like I told you to do, you would know, because I explained it pretty well there. But in case you don’t know, here’s the cliff notes.

Dream SMP is the hottest New Media Series on Twitch right now! It has it all: gaslighting, child soldiers, Machiavellian political intrigue, Hamilton roleplay, desecration of the dead, shounen protagonists, SO! MUCH! AMNESIA! Filicide, furries, a red egg that’s definitely homophobic and teenagers inventing nuclear warfare. And it’s all done in Minecraft – yes, the funny block game where the only way to emote is to crouch.

And you say the perfect brief doesn’t exist!

Now, you might be wondering, why do I want to talk about this? Well, it’s because Content Creator Philza is one of least controversial internet personalities that I can think of. That man exudes pure comfort. So, it’s just very, very amusing to me that his character became one of the most controversial figures on the SMP, only outshone by Tommy and Technoblade.

And it’s not just amusing, it’s also extremely interesting! I want to dig deep to uncover and discuss the dynamics behind why that is. How did it come to this point? How did a man who appears genuinely so pleasant create a character that inspires so much discourse!

Now, if you watched that Technoblade video – like I told you to twice now! – you might know, that I am the resident character analyses hater of fandom! And that impression is false and slanderous! Don’t tell other people that I hate character analyses! I love them!

It’s just that, in the Dream SMP in particular, there is an abundance of character analyses! Every streamer has at least two very good essays written about them, exploring every possible angle to view their characters and backgrounds and everything. All I’m saying is: I don’t have anything to add on that front.

So, instead I want to pursue a different approach – something, that I feel is a bit underrepresented in the fandom! And I’m not just talking narrative analysis – that’s right, this episode we’re going even more pretentious! – I’m talking Transtextual Analysis!

Now, what is Transtextuality? Well, unfortunately it has very little to do with actual Trans people – #transrights, just in case that wasn’t obvious – but instead describes a mode of analysis with which to put – to quote French literary theorist Gérard Genette – “the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts”.

Basically, you know how the L’Manburg War of Independence heavily quotes and borrows from the hit musical Hamilton? That’s transtextuality! A lot of the analyses surrounding how Tommy mirrors the Greek hero Theseus, who was invoked by Technoblade multiple times in the series, are already doing transtextual analysis! So, it’s really not something that’s new to the Dream SMP fandom.

But how does this apply to Philza and how he is looked at and judged by his parental skills? Well, there are multiple forms of transtextuality, two of which we will discuss today.

But before we continue, I gotta do that annoying YouTuber thing. I know these videos don’t look like much, but I spend a really long time making them. I work fulltime and I try my best to keep up, but sometimes I can’t. So please, like, subscribe, comment to give me some algorithm juice – I really need it – and most importantly share it! Share it with your friends, share it with your family – I’m sure Grandma is very interested in what I have to say about Philza Minecraft.

And I’m trying to be better! If I sound at all different for this video, it’s because I finally bought a new pop filter, so I can hit my plosives without it sounding like there’s a thunderstorm in my room. I hope it makes a difference; it was a very cheap pop filter, so maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it sounds worse – that would be bad!

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, CHILD NEGLEGT!

Intertextuality: Why is Dadza?

You know what’s really interesting about the Dream SMP – aside from, you know, most things about it? Very few of the characters have concrete, fleshed-out backstories – and that’s pretty weird! In no other medium or genre could you get away with something like that – at least for long-form storytelling!

So, how does Dream SMP get away with this? Well, it’s because every character on the Dream SMP is basically a self-insert – and I don’t mean that in the “This character is based on me”-kinda way, but in the “This character, for all intents and purposes, is me!”-way. This, like many things that are fascinating about the Dream SMP, is owed to the fact that this series didn’t start off as a continuous drama – it started off as a Let’s Play.

And while we can talk about how someone’s on-camera/on-mic persona is in some ways a character, it’s still miles off of being an actual, fully-realized, separate character in a storyline.

This is where Intertextuality comes in.

Intertextuality is a subset of Transtextuality. It describes how the hypertext, which is the text, you’re currently engaged with, uses another text, the hypotext, to supplement itself. The interconnection the hypertext establishes with the hypotext, through stuff like allusion for example, uh-hum [Hamilton], can colour how an audience interprets the hypertext. Basically, Hamilton and Theseus are the hypotexts; the Dream SMP is the hypertext.

So, what does this have to do with backstory? Simple: The backstories of the characters in the Dream SMP consist basically of nothing but intertextual references. Through intertextuality their content effectively substitutes their character’s backstory.

You can see it everywhere. Wilbur’s and Schlatt’s relationship and rivalry is hugely enriched, if you are aware of their shared history like SMPLive, for example – I think anyway. I haven’t watched SMPLive, because … there’s only so many hours in the day and I cannot keep up with the Dream SMP and catch up on SMPLive and live a healthy life – which I already don’t do, so…

BadBoyHalo’s and Skeppy’s relationship, which has become the crux of the Crimson-Storyline of Seasons 2 and 3, is hugely supplemented if you know that they’re also very close as streamers and in real life.

Another great example of intertextuality is basically Technoblade’s entire deal. If you just look at him completely within the text of the Dream SMP and try to transplant his entrance to any other medium: It would be extremely weird! Like, he’s just this guy that comes in in the middle of a very climatic arc, no build-up, no explanation what his deal is, and he’s treated like he has always been there. In any other medium that just wouldn’t work – at least not without a flashback or some sort of exposition!

But because of stuff like Minecraft Mondays, the Potato Wars, his Duel against Dream and SMPEarth, we understand that he is a Big Deal!

Anyways, to bring all of this back to Philza Minecraft: What kind of hypotext informs how the audience sees his character? Well, this is where I will have to talk about SBI.

SBI is an acronym that stand for State Bank of India, the 43rd largest bank in the world and…

It also stands for Sleepy Bois Incorporated. Sleepy Bois Incorporated is a loose assembly of content creators, consisting of Philza, Wilbur Soot, TommyInnit and Technoblade. It is most well-known for its very endearing family dynamic – a dynamic that is frequently acknowledged and played up by the creators involved. Tommy is the youngest brother, Wilbur and Techno are the two older brothers and Philza is of course the dad. And when I say, it’s played up, I really mean it! Wilbur seems to be especially enamoured with the idea and leaves no opportunity untaken to bring it up – which we will come back to.

And I’m not saying that they’re faking this and this is somehow an act. While I know none of these people personally, it appears to me, that this is genuinely how they interact – if a little exaggerated for the streaming experience. Even when they’re not consciously playing into the family dynamic, their interactions still very much lend themselves to that interpretation by the viewers.

Philza especially just radiates Dad-Friend energy – so much so that it has become a huge part of his brand identity – yay, I can bring that back (check out my Christmas video if you want to hear me ramble about that). The nickname Dadza stuck even before SBI was a thing.

So, even if we completely disregard SBI – which we shouldn’t for reasons I’ll get back to – Philza has cultivated an image of strong paternal guidance. He is, in my opinion completely deservedly, regarded very positively. He is highly respected and in turn seen as a voice of reason.

All of this would eventually inform the hypotext of the character Philza within Dream SMP.

Interlude: Before Dadza & November 16th

Okay, so now we have established that a) Dream SMP heavily hinges on intertextual readings by the audience to supplement character backstory and b) that Philza’s entire deal is that he’s the dad-friend – more specifically that he’s the dad of SBI (not the bank). I think you know where this is going.

So, yeah, ever since it was on the table that Philza could join the Dream SMP, it was immediately assumed that he would take on the paternal guardian role all these traumatized people on that server so desperately needed – and with good reason! Like I said before, the audience at this point was trained to take intertextual interpretations as basically canon or at the very least canon-adjacent.

I want to emphasize that this is most likely not done deliberately. I’m sure content creators Wilbur and Philza didn’t sit there and said: “Yes! We will rely entirely on the audience’s inclination to interpret our characters intertextually to define character Philza!”. Like, obviously that did not happen.

But it’s also important to remember that unlike with traditional media and the fanbases cultivated there, the separation between the Dream SMP and its audience is almost non-existent – and purposely so. The story events are streamed live, Chats are acknowledged in canon and even outside of livestreams creators are extremely involved with the fandom. So, the weight of fan-expectations is equally amplified and will more likely be incorporated into the writing process. Case in point:

[Wilbur “I miss Philza”/Philza about Wilbur]

During Wilbur’s villain arc, even before his official involvement, Philza became a prevalent point of discussion. The hope that he would be the one to snap Wilbur out of his downward spiral was not only wish-fulfilment on behalf of the fans; it also very much played off of the intertextual reading of the SBI-dynamic in relation to the Dream SMP.

Of course, this still doesn’t make Philza and Wilbur canonically blood-related – but it definitely used the “paternal”-dynamic of SBI to build-up tension and drama.

And that ultimately brings us to November 16th. The Grand Finale of Season 1 and Philza’s first canonical appearance on the SMP.

Now, for this I want to pull back from the transtextual analysis and talk about simply narrative analysis: What is Philza’s narrative purpose on November 16th?

Philza serves as the last threshold on Wilbur’s Villain’s Journey – to appropriate Vogler’s version of the monomyth for a minute here – he is what Vogler calls the “Threshold Guardian”. He is the last enemy the Hero faces before completing his quest – in this particular case Wilbur’s quest is to blow up L’Manberg. Multiple people have at this point tried to dissuade him from this course of action: Tommy, Quackity, Niki and others. So how come this Philza moment is not redundant in terms of dynamics compared to these prior scenes?

Well, it’s through our intertextual understanding of Wilbur’s and Phil’s relationship. Because Philza does not just occupy the role of the Threshold Guardian – he is also implicitly the Mentor. Before Phil there was no character in the storyline that held a higher position of moral authority than Wilbur – Dream and Schlatt, while at points more powerful in terms of actual authority, were never positioned by the narrative as Wilbur’s superiors in the same way as Wilbur was to Tommy, Tubbo or even Niki.

Before November 16th all challenges Wilbur faced were from people narratively subordinated to him. But that trend is broken with Phil. That is why he is the Threshold Guardian, why this confrontation is at the climax of Wilbur’s arc. Because Phil is the last thing tethering Wilbur to whatever morality he held before his villain arc; Phil is the last, moral obstacle Wilbur has to discard before gaining his reward.

And, just a quick sidenote, because I’ve seen it around the fandom a bunch: When I’m referring to Wilbur denouncing his morality, I’m using that in terms of narrative analysis. I’m mentioning it, because Wilbur’s character can very easily be read as mentally ill or neurodivergent and some people have – rightly! – pointed out that the excessive vilifying when talking about his character is … problematic, to say the least.

So, I just want to make clear, this isn’t a character analysis, I’m being purposely broad when talking about Wilbur and Phil.

In the end, Wilbur takes that final step and gets his “reward”: As his final request his mentor takes his life and vanquishes the evil – the dragon of Wilbur’s story slays the dragon of L’Manburg. It’s very Shakespearean in its tragedy – but beyond the larger theatrics it’s not really used to further characterize Phil – at least in the context of Season 1. There’s not a lot of focus on his characters internal conflict during November 16th.

Phil, like Techno, is very utilitarian in how content creator Wilbur writes him: He serves as a moment of hype; an obstacle Wilbur has to face; a participant in the tragic climax of Wilbur’s character and ultimately takes on his implicit and expected role of mentor and guiding figure to the rest of L’Manburg.

I think not a lot of people talk about how Philza does not join Technoblade during November 16th. He takes the side of L’Manburg – he fights against the withers and he joins Tommy, Tubbo and the others at the L’Mantree, thus framing him as loyal to the L’Manburg administration – even though Season 2 would make his loyalty to Techno central to his character. But more on that later.

What’s also important about November 16th is that this is the day when the general intertextual interpretation became canonized text.

[You’re my son!]

Wilbur is made Phil’s canonical, biological son. The intertextual interpretation of SBI as it pertains to these two characters on the SMP was completely reinforced by the narrative. Or to put it in Fandom terms: The headcanon became actual canon. At least when it came to Wilbur … but what about Philza’s “other” children?

Well, that leads to our second form of transtextual analysis:

Paratextuality: Is Dadza?

These titles are just getting better and better.

The Paratext is defined as all those things in a published work that accompany the text. It comes in two forms: One of them is the Peritext, which are non-diegetic elements directly surrounding the text – like chapter titles, author’s notes, and stuff like that. Translated to the medium of the Dream SMP, it would be stuff like this:

[Examples]

And, trust me, I could make a whole separate video about how people on the SMP use their peritext as a tool for storytelling – I’m looking at you, Ranboo – but that’s not what we will talk about in the context of Dadza.

Instead, we will focus on the second form of Paratext, the Epitext, which consists of all authorial and editorial discussions taking place outside of the text. That’s stuff like interviews, private letters or J. K. Rowling’s Twitter Account – you know, before she decided to become a full-time asshole.

[Wilbur: Transrights]

After Season 1 ended, Wilbur indulged pretty heavily in providing epitext for the Dream SMP, something he had not done prior to November 16th. His paratextual additions ranged from the playful, like assigning DnD alignments to various SMP members, to the extremely impactful, like the whole three lives system!

You probably think, you know where this is going. Wilbur provided some epitext about how Tommy and Techno either are or are not biologically related to him … and I have to be honest I thought that too. But then I began looking into the impenetrable web that is the SBI-canon on the Dream SMP and found this!

[Ghostbur explains family]

So, it wasn’t paratext, it was just straight text. Said in character, in canon, without any implication that we the viewers should question this. The text of the SBI family dynamic was explicitly linked to Dream SMP-exclusive lore, namely Fundy being Wilbur’s and Sally the Salmon’s son. This is as clear as Philza’s anguished declaration on November 16th in establishing the intertext as text. And because Wilbur also had a very heavy hand in the discussion of paratext around that time, it gave his character’s words even more “canonical” weight. Metatextually speaking, this very much read like the author giving exposition through his character – exposition that we should understand as reliable.

And, by the way, before I continue, I need to give a huge, huge shoutout to kateis-cakeis on tumblr, I hope I pronounced that right, who was just so quick in providing me with these crucial clips. Without him I would have looked for days because these people don’t archive their shit! And the Dream SMP Wiki was NO help, by the way! I love what you guys do, but stuff like this belongs in the Trivia section on characters’ pages!

Anyways, basically during the entirety of early Season 2 the SBI family dynamic was basically canon to the SMP. Sometimes it was only alluded implicitly, again letting the intertext fill out the rest.

[Philza clips]

But just as often it was just explicitly talked about – both in the text and in the paratext.

[Fundy clip/Wilbur “Twins” clip/Tommy clip]

So, I know what you’re thinking: “Why is this part called paratext, if the entire family tree is just textual”. Well, that last clip might give you a hint, as to what I will talk about. Notice how Tommy, one of the people most directly impacted by the canonization of SBI lore, is both unaware of and seems generally unenthused about it, to put it nicely? Well, that would soon turn out to be a much bigger deal than anyone could have imagined as he wasn’t the only one.

[Technoblade decanonizes SBI]

Yeah …

This happened on 20th of December. Regular viewers of this channel will remember that I put out a 90-second joke video, where I complain about this very development. And while I was mostly kidding around, the core idea is still true. The paratext provided by Technoblade and established text were in direct contradiction with one another – and that brought a lot of confusion into the fandom. Confusion, that would soon be followed by frustration.

Because Techno only decanonized himself as part of the SBI family dynamic – but what about Tommy and Tubbo, the latter of which was incorporated into the dynamic exclusively within the lore of the Dream SMP. Was this still canon or wasn’t it?

What followed was a muddled mess of contradictions, intertextual implications, text and paratext in conflict with each another. It was for the most part inscrutable to figure out how Tommy and Philza related to one another. I’ll spare you every comment made about this – mostly because I want to spare myself from looking for all of them.

In the end, the current status is that their familial relationship is … unclear. Philza said, again in paratext, that it’s ultimately up to the writers to decide, whether or not Tommy is his son … which, I personally think he and Tommy should be the ones to establish that, but I’ll come back to that later.

But why is all of this important anyway? Why would this ambiguity create such an uproar, such controversy – especially when it comes to Tommy’s character? What makes Tommy’s and Philza’s relationship such a target for discussion in the fandom?

Well … this is where we will have to talk about the storyline of Season 2.

Interlude II: Tommy’s Exile and Dadza in Season 2

Okay, Season 2. This is where the spoilers are, so I will just sneakily drop this again. It took me five seconds to google this gif and I will milk it for every penny it’s worth!

At the beginning of Season 2, Philza’s narrative role has not changed much from where Season 1 ended. He is in L’Manburg dispensing earthly wisdom, being a paternal figure to Fundy, Ghostbur and Tubbo, helping with the nation’s rebuilding efforts; just generally occupying the role of the mentor.

[clips]

And then came … the Exile. The Exile Arc took place between December 3rd and December 15th during Season 2 of the Dream SMP. It revolves around TommyInnit getting exiled from L’Manburg and slowly getting psychologically tortured and broken down by Dream. It’s a really great arc, at least in my opinion, that explores and deepens a lot of Tommy’s character relationships, whether that be Tommy and Dream, Tommy and Tubbo or Tommy and Ranboo. One relationship, however, is noticeably missing.

So, yeah, Philza spends basically the entirety of the exile doing pretty much nothing of consequence. And that’s not a problem specific to him – One big criticism I would levy against the Exile Arc is that a lot of characters are left spinning their wheels. Which is why we get zany stuff like El Rapids, Drywaters, Eret’s Knights of the Roundtable, Boomerville – anyone remember Boomerville, that was a thing for 5 seconds, wasn’t it? – basically a lot of storylines are started and then unceremoniously dropped. Now, I will talk more about this, when I make a video about Season 2 of the Dream SMP … in ten years, look forward to it.

In the case of Philza, this inaction was especially damning, because at this point it was still a considered canon that he was Tommy’s dad. So, the fans were left with a situation, where just a few weeks prior Philza was occupying a paternal role for Fundy and Ghostbur … but now, that his youngest son was in a very concerning predicament – to put it lightly – he was nowhere to be found.

So why is that?

Well, the most obvious answer is that Dream and Tommy didn’t write him into the storyline. We’ve seen that Tommy wasn’t particularly interested in exploring a familial relationship to Philza, at least at the time. And it would just not fit in with what Dream and Tommy tried to do with the Exile Arc: they wanted to tell the story of Tommy being isolated, completely under Dream’s mercy, slowly worn down and manipulated. If Philza had been constant presence for Tommy during that time, it would have definitely shifted the narrative focus. That doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have done that, it’s just a matter of fact that they didn’t.

This also reveals another truth about content creator Philza’s character work, that I think is extremely crucial: He takes what the writers give him. Outside of a few choice moments, he doesn’t seem particularly interested in expanding or even solidifying his character on the SMP.

What I’m saying is that he is very go-with-the-flow: Wilbur wants to enact a Shakespearean tragedy? Philza’s up for it. Fundy wants him as a parental figure and mentor? Philza’s here for him. Tommy, conversely, doesn’t want him as a paternal presence, even though it would make sense for Philza’s character, as it was established so far, to be there? Philza will oblige.

The reason I’m mentioning this is because, while Tommy and Dream were unwilling to utilise Philza in their storyline, someone else was more than happy to. Which leads us back, like it always does, to everyone’s favourite Porky Pig-kinnie in a crown: Technoblade.

Technoblade and Philza, from everything I’ve seen of them, seem to be very good friends – and they share a lot of history even outside SBI. So, it’s commendable that they would collaborate on a storyline together.

A consequence of that, however, is that Philza’s narrative purpose shifts completely with very little transition. His entire character changes from being the Mentor-figure of L’Manberg to being pretty much exclusively defined as Technoblade’s ally; his man on the inside. It is a very sharp turn from the end of Season 1. Their relationship is once again informed via intertext – this time the Antarctic Empire on SMPEarth serves as the hypotext – but there isn’t a huge effort made to smoothly integrate that aspect of Philza’s character into the larger narrative framing around him.

How much the narrative utilisation of Philza has shifted can be very easily observed through the Butcher Army event on December 16th, a story event that I like less and less the more I think about. Here Philza is used to show just how corrupt and violent Tubbo’s administration has becomes. He is no longer the respected mentor, he is now the stand-in for the oppressed populace, similar to Niki’s role in Season 1. On a narrative level, he is here to prove a point.

If you’ve seen my Technoblade video, you know how I feel about … just that entire storyline, so I will not reiterate too much on it. I just want to make clear that I’m not principally against this development – if they wanted to truly explore Tubbo going down a dark path and getting corrupted by power, so much so that he would even treat the person who effectively raised him like a prisoner, I would be extremely here for it, I cannot stress that enough.

The problem I have is that it’s just so sloppily done. It is not coherent with how these characters behaved and, more importantly, how they were narratively framed prior to the Butcher Army event. Fundy gets one token line about Phil being his Grandfather – a far cry from the very emotionally complex relationship they had established at the beginning of Season 2 – and Phil then callously disowns him.

The major problem simply is that we don’t see how Philza changes from Mentor-figure to embittered, oppressed citizen. And there was enough time to build to that. During the entirety of Tommy’s exile Tubbo was pretty much spinning his wheels and Quackity and Fundy were opening up plot cul-de-sacs that didn’t end up going anywhere. This is time they could have spent on developing their relationship to Philza and the dark path they were going down – but again, Season 2 video.

There is not much to say on Philza’s narrative purpose and framing beyond the Butcher Army event. He remains pretty much exclusively Techno’s consigliere with his role as Mentor to L’Manburg a distant memory. He has some cute character moments with Ranboo, because content creator Philza is just big dad-energy whether he wants to or not, and whenever he and Ghostbur share a scene suddenly the narrative remembers that there are people other than Technoblade that should exist in Philza’s inner world. But aside from that, Philza’s storyline in Season 2 remains … pretty definitive is the nicest way I can put it.

Most importantly his relationship with Tommy continues to be completely unexplored – whether by chance or choice – and that combined with ever vaguer paratext leaves “Dadza” in a very peculiar situation.

Conclusion: Is Dadza a Good Dadza?

So, the question to end all questions. The big, obnoxious text, that I will probably have put in the thumbnail – I haven’t made it yet, but I know myself. The honest answer is: I couldn’t tell you.

I have, in the past, been expounding the virtues of narrative analysis. That is because I feel that Narrative Analysis and Textual Analysis, like in this video, can provide certain tools that Character Analysis lacks. Often times I see people trying to get at a writing problem or query and getting frustrated because they’re not using the toolset, they need to figure out what they want to figure out.

But I’d be a hypocrite if I pretended like everything could be solved through the modes of analysis I prefer. And I think the Dadza-issue is exactly such a case.

I set out to explore why the Philza-Tommy-“Dadza”-relationship has become so controversial. It’s a combination of expectations build up through intertextual readings, that were partly canonized – something that is very common for the Dream SMP – conflicting pieces of paratext, which only serve to muddle the issue further and a text that is not only completely uninterested in actually exploring Tommy’s and Philza’s relationship – as it stands right now they might as well be strangers, narratively speaking – but also completely changes Philza’s narrative purpose as it relates to characters like Fundy or Tubbo about half-way through with little to no transition.

That is why I say, that Philza’s character is a victim of narrative circumstance. Because unwittingly, through all of these factors and decisions, there is not coherent reading of Philza that frames his parental skills in a particularly kind light.

The question of how we can judge Phil as a paternal figure ultimately falls within the purview of the character analysis – and that’s a very multifaceted issue, highly dependent on which POV you focus on and how you interpret the other characters in that POV’s periphery.

To put my cards on the table, I think that Philza is a very flawed father/father-figure – and I find that absolutely okay. Flaws are the spice of character building. He is not Cinderella’s Evil Stepmother – but he’s also definitely not Mufasa. If we were to read Philza as a paternal figure, then he would have made a lot of mistakes and decisions to the detriment of his “children” – least of all everything that happened on Doomsday.

But I also have sympathies for Philza fans who are tired of the Dad-Debate and would like to have his character judged independent from his relationship to Ghostbur, Fundy, Tubbo and Tommy.

Ultimately, to bring it all to a point, I’d like to end with saying, that I think that Philza, out of all the characters on the SMP, has the potential to be on of the most intriguing, multifaceted ones. There are all of these different patches of story, character moments and narrative and transtextual implications, that, if brought together, could create a beautiful tapestry of the character Philza.

You have his relationship with Techno, which holds the potential for so much emotional conflict and vulnerabilities, you have his time as mentor of L’Manburg, which is just criminally underused; the complex relationship between him and Ghostbur/Wilbur; and – for me, personally – most intriguingly this weird, almost uncomfortably distant non-relationship with Tommy. That last one is intriguing to me, because it contrasts just so much with our intertextual understanding of the characters and streaming personas – and it just holds the potential for so much conflict, so much drama, so much angst. Which I live for!

And, yes, I do believe that most of this is narrative happenstance, that this was largely not intended by Philza or really any of the writers. It’s just what happens when hybrid-roleplay-improv a long-running, livestreamed storyline in Minecraft.

But I want them to realize the potential they have on their hands, because it could – with barely any adjustments – turn Philza from a victim of narrative circumstance to a champion of it!

Outro

Thank you so much for watching this video. Usually, I don’t record outros this standard, but after this beast of a video I felt it necessary. I hope that whether you’re a Philza fan or a Philza critical or just completely uninvolved in the whole thing, there is at least a little entertainment you could get from this.

I want to take this opportunity to say that my next few videos will probably not be Dream SMP related – a sentence which undoubtedly lost me a bunch of subs – simply because I don’t want to burn out on it. I genuinely enjoy watching the SMP and being exhausted by it would be something I wouldn’t want to force on myself.

But who knows what will happen? The Karl Jacobs video was something I did spur of the moment because the idea just came to me – so I can’t guarantee that the next video won’t be a three-minute joke about Purpled or whatever.

Anyway, my concrete plans for future Dream SMP videos are essays on Season 1 and Season 2 as well as one for Tales from the SMP.

Before that I have a longer video in the works, which I’ve already teased a bunch, so I hope it will finally be finished sometime. And I also may be working on something … eboys-related? Maybe. I’m not making any promises!

117 notes · View notes

letterboxd · 3 years

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Careful How You Go.

Ella Kemp explores how film lovers can protect themselves from distressing subject matter while celebrating cinema at its most audacious.

Featuring Empire magazine editor Terri White, Test Pattern filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford, writer and critic Jourdain Searles, publicist Courtney Mayhew, and curator, activist and producer Mia Bays of the Birds’ Eye View collective.

This story contains discussion of rape, sexual assault, abuse, self-harm, trauma and loss of life, as well as spoilers for ‘Promising Young Woman’ and ‘A Star is Born’.

We film lovers are blessed with a medium capable of excavating real-life emotion from something seemingly fictional. Yet, for all that film is—in the oft-quoted words of Roger Ebert—an “empathy machine”, it’s also capable of deeply hurting its audience when not wielded by its makers and promoters with appropriate care. Or, for that matter, when not approached by viewers with informed caution.

Whose job is it to let us know that we might be upset by what we see? With the coronavirus pandemic decimating the communal movie-going experience, the way we accommodate each viewer’s sensibilities is more crucial than ever—especially when so many of us are watching alone, at home, often unsupported.

In order to understand how we can champion a film’s content and take care of its audience, I approached women in several areas of the movie ecosystem. I wanted to know: how does a filmmaker approach the filming of a rape and its aftermath? How does a magazine editor navigate the celebration of a potentially triggering movie in one of the world’s biggest film publications? How does a freelance writer speak to her professional interests while preserving her personal integrity? How does a women’s film collective create a safe environment for an audience to process such a film? And, how does a publicist prepare journalists for careful reporting, when their job is to get eyeballs on screens in order to keep our favorite art form afloat?

The conversations reminded me that the answers are endlessly complex. The concerns over spoilers, the effectiveness of trigger warnings, the myriad ways in which art is crafted from trauma, and the fundamental question of whose stories these are to tell. These questions were valid decades ago, they will be for decades to come, and they feel especially urgent now, since a number of recent tales helmed by female and non-binary filmmakers depict violence and trauma involving women’s bodies in fearless, often challenging ways.

Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, in particular, has revived a vital conversation about content consideration, as victims and survivors of sexual assault record wildly different reactions to its astounding ending. Shatara Michelle Ford’s quietly tense debut, Test Pattern, brings Black survivors into the conversation. And the visceral, anti-wish-fulfillment horror Violation, coming soon from Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer, takes the rape-revenge genre up another notch.

These films come off the back of other recent survivor stories, such as Michaela Coel’s groundbreaking series I May Destroy You (which centers women’s friendship in a narrative move that, as Sarah Williams has eloquently outlined, happens too rarely in this field). Also: Kata Wéber and Kornél Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman, and the ongoing ugh-ness of The Handmaid’s Tale. And though this article is focused on plots centering women’s trauma, I acknowledge the myriad of stories that can be triggering in many ways for all manner of viewers. So whether you’ve watched one of these titles, or others like them, I hope you felt supported in the conversations to follow, and that you feel seen.

Weruche Opia and Michaela Coel in ‘I May Destroy You’.

* * *

Simply put, Promising Young Woman is a movie about a woman seeking revenge against predatory men. Except nothing about it is simple. Revenge movies have existed for aeons, and we’ve rooted for many promising young (mostly white) women before Carey Mulligan’s Cassie (recently: Jen in Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge, Noelle in Natalia Leite’s M.F.A.). But in Promising Young Woman, the victim is not alive to seek revenge, so it becomes Cassie’s single-minded crusade. Mercifully, we never see the gang-rape that sparks Cassie’s mission. But we do see a daring, fatal subversion of the notion of a happy ending—and this is what has audiences of Emerald Fennell’s jaw-dropping debut divided.

“For me, being a survivor, the point is to survive,” Jourdain Searles tells me. The New York-based critic, screenwriter, comedian—and host of Netflix’s new Black Film School series—says the presence of death in Promising Young Woman is the problem. “One of the first times I spoke openly about [my assault], I made the decision that I didn’t want to go to the police, and I got a lot of judgment for that,” she says. “So watching Promising Young Woman and seeing the police as the endgame is something I’ve always disagreed with. I left thinking, ‘How is this going to help?’”

“I feel like I’ve got two hats on,” says Terri White, the London-based editor-in chief of Empire magazine, and the author of a recently published memoir, Coming Undone. “One of which is me creating a magazine for a specific film-loving audience, and the other bit of me, which has written a book about trauma, specifically about violence perpetrated against the body. They’re not entirely siloed, but they are two distinct perspectives.”

White loved both Promising Young Woman and I May Destroy You, because they “explode the myth of resolution and redemption”. She calls the ending of Promising Young Woman “radical” in the way it speaks to the reality of what happens to so many women. “I was thinking about me and women like me, women who have endured violence and injury or trauma. Three women every week are still killed [in the UK] at the hands of an ex-partner, or somebody they know intimately, or a current partner. Statistically, any woman who goes for some kind of physical confrontation in [the way Cassie does] would end up dying.”

She adds: “I felt like the film was in service to both victims and survivors, and I use the word ‘victims’ deliberately. I call myself a victim because I think if you’ve endured either sexual violence or physical violence or both, a lot of empowering language, as far as I’m concerned, doesn’t reflect the reality of being a victim or a survivor, whichever way you choose to call yourself.” This point has been one many have disagreed on. In a way, that makes sense—no victim or survivor can be expected to speak to anyone else’s experience but their own.

Carey Mulligan and Emerald Fennell on the set of ‘Promising Young Woman’.

Likewise, there is no right or wrong way to feel about this film, or any film. But a question that arises is, well, should everyone have to see a film to figure that out? And should victims and survivors of sexual violence watch this film? “I have definitely been picky about who I’ve recommended it to,” Courtney Mayhew says. “I don’t want to put a friend in harm’s way, even if that means they miss out on something awesome. It’s not worth it.”

Mayhew is a New Zealand-based international film publicist, and because of her country’s success in controlling Covid 19, she is one of the rare people able to experience Promising Young Woman in a sold-out cinema. “It was palpable. Everyone was so engaged and almost leaning forwards. There were a lot of laughs from women, but it was also a really challenging setting. A lot of people looking down, looking away, and there was a girl who was crying uncontrollably at the end.”

“Material can be very triggering,” White agrees. “It depends where people are personally in their journey. When I still had a lot of trauma I hadn’t worked through in my 20s, I found certain things very difficult to watch. Those things are a reality—but people can make their own decisions about the material they feel able to watch.”

It’s about warning, and preparation, more than total deprivation, then? “I believe in giving people information so they can make the best choice for themselves,” White says. “But I find it quite reductive, and infantilizing in some respects, to be told broadly, ‘Women who have experienced x shouldn’t watch this.’ That underestimates the resilience of some people, the thirst for more information and knowledge.” (This point is clearly made in this meticulous, awe-inspiring list by Jenn, who is on a journey to make sense of her trauma through analysis of rape-revenge films.) But clarity is crucial, particularly for those grappling with unresolved issues.

Searles agrees Promising Young Woman can be a difficult, even unpleasant watch, but still one with value. “As a survivor it did not make me feel good, but it gave me a window into the way other people might respond to your assault. A lot of the time [my friends] have reacted in ways I don’t understand, and the movie feels like it’s trying to make sense of an assault from the outside, and the complicated feelings a friend might have.”

Molly Parker and Vanessa Kirby in ‘Pieces of a Woman’.

* * *

A newborn dies. A character is brutally violated. A population is tortured. To be human is to bear witness to history, but it’s still painful when that history is yours, or something very close to it. “Some things are hard to watch because you relate to them,” Searles explains. “I find mother! hard to watch, and there’s no actual sexual assault. But I just think of sexual assault and trauma and domestic abuse, even though the film isn’t about that. The thing is, you could read an academic paper on patriarchy—you don’t need to watch it on a show [or in a film] if you don’t want to.”

White agrees: “I’ve never been able to watch Nil by Mouth, because I grew up in a house of domestic violence and I find physical violence against women on screen very hard to watch. But that doesn’t mean I think the film shouldn’t be shown—it should still exist, I’ve just made the choice not to watch it.” (Reader, since our conversation, she watched it. At 2:00am.)

“I know people who do not watch Promising Young Woman or The Handmaid’s Tale because they work for an NGO in which they see those things literally in front of their eyes,” Mayhew says. “It could be helpful for someone who isn’t aware [of those issues], but then what is the purpose of art? To educate? To entertain? For escapism? It’s probably all of those.”

Importantly, how much weight should an artist’s shoulders carry, when it comes to considering the audiences that will see their work? There’s a general agreement among my interviewees that, as White says, “filmmakers have to make the art that they believe in”. I don’t think any film lover would disagree, but, suggests Searles, “these films should be made with survivors in mind. That doesn’t mean they always have to be sensitive and sad and declawed. But there is a way to be provocative, while leaning into an emotional truth.”

Madeleine Sims-Fewer in ‘Violation’.

Violation, about which I’ll say little here since it is yet to screen at SXSW (ahead of its March 25 release on Shudder) is not at all declawed, and is certainly made with survivors in mind—in the sense that in life, unlike in movies, catharsis is very seldom possible no matter how far you go to find it. On Letterboxd, many of those who saw Violation at TIFF and Sundance speak of feeling represented by the rape-revenge plot, writing: “One of the most intentionally thought out and respectful of the genre… made by survivors for survivors” and “I feel seen and held”. (Also: “This movie is extremely hard to watch, completely on purpose.”)

“Art can do great service to people,” agrees White, “If, by consequence, there is great service for people who have been in that position, that’s a brilliant consequence. But I don’t believe filmmakers and artists should be told that they are responsible for certain things. There’s a line of responsibility in terms of being irresponsible, especially if your community is young, or traumatised.”

Her words call to mind Bradley Cooper’s reboot of A Star is Born, which many cinephiles knew to be a remake and therefore expected its plot twist, but young filmgoers, drawn by the presence of Lady Gaga, were shocked (and in some cases triggered) by a suicide scene. When it was released, Letterboxd saw many anguished reviews from younger members. In New Zealand, an explicit warning was added to the film’s classification by the country’s chief censor (who also created an entirely new ‘RP18’ classification for the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, which eventually had a graphic suicide scene edited out two years after first landing on the streaming service).

“There is a duty of care to audiences, and there is also a duty of care to artists and filmmakers,” says Mayhew. “There’s got to be some way of meeting in the middle.” The middle, perhaps, can be identified by the filmmaker’s objective. “It’s about feeling safe in the material,” says Mia Bays of the Birds’ Eye View film collective, which curates and markets films by women in order to effect industry change. “With material like this, it’s beholden on creatives to interrogate their own intentions.”

Filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford is “forever interrogating” ideas of power. Their debut feature, Test Pattern, deftly examines the power differentials that inform the foundations of consent. “As an artist, human, and person who has experienced all sorts of boundary violation, assault and exploitation in their life, I spend quite a lot of time thinking about power… It is something I grapple with in my personal life, and when I arrive in any workplace, including a film set.”

In her review of Test Pattern for The Hollywood Reporter, Searles writes, “This is not a movie about sexual assault as an abstract concept; it’s a movie about the reality of a sexual assault survivor’s experience.” Crucially, in a history of films that deal largely with white women’s experiences, Test Pattern “is one of the few sexual-assault stories to center a Black woman, with her Blackness being central to her experience and the way she is treated by the people around her.”

Brittany S. Hall in ‘Test Pattern’.

* * *

Test Pattern follows the unfolding power imbalance between Renesha (Brittany S. Hall) and her devoted white boyfriend Evan (Will Brill), as he drives her from hospital to hospital in search of a rape kit, after her drink was spiked by a white man in a bar who then raped her. Where Promising Young Woman is a millennial-pink revenge fantasy of Insta-worthy proportions, Test Pattern feels all too real, and the cops don’t come off as well as they do in the former.

Ford does something very important for the audience: they begin the film just as the rape is about to occur. We do not see it at this point (we do not really ever see it), but we know that it happened, so there’s no chance that, somewhere deeper into the story, when we’re much more invested, we’ll be side-swiped by a sudden onslaught of sexual violence. In a way, it creates a safe space for our journey with Renesha.

It’s one of many thoughtful decisions made by Ford throughout the production process. “I’m in direct conversation with film and television that chooses to depict violence against women so casually,” Ford tells me. “I intentionally showed as little of Renesha’s rape as humanly possible. I also had an incredibly hard time being physically present for that scene, I should add. What I did shoot was ultimately guided by Renesha’s experience of it. Shoot only what she would remember. Show only what she would have been aware of.

“But I also made it clear that this was a violation of her autonomy, by allowing moments where we have an arm’s length point of view. I let the camera sit with the audience, as I’m also saying, as the filmmaker, this happened, and you saw enough of it to know. This, for me, is a larger commentary on how we treat victims of assault and rape. I do not believe for one goddamn minute that we need to see the actual, literal violence to know what happened. When we flagrantly replicate the violence in film and television, we are supporting the cultural norm of needing ‘all of the evidence’—whatever that means—to ‘believe women’.”

Ford’s intentional work in crafting the romance and unraveling of Test Pattern’s leading couple pays off on screen, but their stamp as an invested and careful director also shows in their work with Drew Fuller, the actor who played Mike, the rapist. “It’s a very difficult role, and I’m grateful to him for taking it so seriously. When discussing and rendering the practice and non-practice of consent intentionally, I found it helpful to give it a clear definition and provide conceptual insight.

“I sent Drew a few articles that I used as tools to create a baseline understanding when it comes to exploring consent and power on screen. At the top of that list was Lili Loofbourow’s piece, The female price of male pleasure and Zhana Vrangalova's Teen Vogue piece, Everything You Need to Know about Consent that You Never Learned in Sex Ed. The latter in my opinion is the linchpin. There’s also Jude Elison Sady Doyle’s piece about the whole Aziz Ansari thing, which is a great primer.”

Sidney Flanigan in ‘Never Rarely Sometimes Always’.

Even when a filmmaker has given Ford’s level of care and attention to their project, what happens when the business end of the industry gets involved in the art? As we well know, marketing is a film’s window dressing. It has one job: to get eyeballs into the cinema. It can’t know if every viewer should feel safe to enter.

It would be useful, with certain material, to know how we should watch, and with whom, and what might we need in the way of support coming out. Whose job is it to provide this? Beyond the crude tool of an MPAA rating (and that’s a whole sorry tale for another day), there are many creative precautions that can be taken across the industry to safeguard a filmgoer’s experience.

Mayhew, who often sees films at the earliest stages (sometimes before a final cut, sometimes immediately after), speaks to journalists in early screenings and ensures they have the tools to safely report on the topics raised. In New Zealand, reporters are encouraged to read through resources to help them guide their work. Mayhew’s teams would also ensure journalists would be given relevant hotline numbers, and would ask media outlets to include them in published stories.

“It’s not saying, ‘You have to do this’,” she explains, “It’s about first of all not knowing what the journalist has been through themselves, and second of all, [if] they are entertainment reporters who haven’t navigated speaking about sexual assault, you only hope it will be helpful going forward. It’s certainly not done to infantilize them, because they’re smart people. It’s a way to show some care and support.”

The idea of having appropriate resources to make people feel safe and encourage them to make their own decisions is a priority for Bays and Birds’ Eye View, as well. The London-based creative producer and cultural activist stresses the importance of sharing such a viewing experience. “It’s the job of cinemas, distributors and festivals to realize that it might not be something the filmmaker does, but as the people in control of the environment it’s our job to give extra resources to those who want it,” says Bays. “To give people a safe space to come down from the experience.”

Pre-pandemic, when Birds’ Eye View screened Kitty Green’s The Assistant, a sharp condemnation of workplace micro-aggressions seen through the eyes of one female assistant, they invited women who had worked for Harvey Weinstein. For a discussion after Eliza Hittman’s coming-of-ager Never Rarely Sometimes Always, abortion experts were able to share their knowledge. “It’s about making sure the audience knows you can say anything here, but that it’s safe,” Bays explains. “It’s kind of like group therapy—you don’t know people, so you’re not beholden to what they think about you. And in the cinema people aren’t looking at you. You’re speaking somewhat anonymously, so a lot of really important stuff can come out.”

The traditional movie-going experience, involving friends, crowds and cathartic, let-loose feelings, is still largely inaccessible at the time of writing. Over the past twelve months we’ve talked plenty about preserving the magic of the big screen experience, but it’s about so much more than the romanticism of an art form; it’s also about the safety that comes from a feeling of community when watching potentially upsetting movies.

“The going in and coming out parts of watching a film in the cinema are massively important, because it’s like coming out of the airlock and coming back to reality,” says Bays. “You can’t do that at home. Difficult material kind of stays with you.” During the pandemic, Birds’ Eye View has continued to provide the same wrap-around curatorial support for at-home viewers as they would at an in-person event. “If we’re picking a difficult film and asking people to watch it at home, we might suggest you watch it with a friend so you can speak about it afterwards,” Bays says.

Julia Garner in ‘The Assistant’.

But, then, how can we still find this sense of community without the physical closeness? “It’s no good waiting for [the internet] to become kind,” she says. “Create your own closed spaces. We do workshops and conversations exclusively for people who sign up to our newsletter. In real-life meetings you can go from hating something to hearing an eloquent presentation of another perspective and coming round to it, but you need the time and space to do that. This little amount of time gives you a move towards healing, even if it’s just licking some wounds that were opened on Twitter. But it could be much deeper, like being a survivor and feeling very conflicted about the film, which I do.”

Conflict is something that Searles, the film critic, knows about all too well in her work. “Since I started writing professionally, I almost feel like I’m known for writing about assault and rape at this point. I do write about it a lot, and as a survivor I continue to process it. I’ve been assaulted more than once so I have a lot to process, and so each time I’m writing about it I’m thinking about different aspects and remnants of those feelings. It can be very cathartic, but it’s a double-edged sword because sometimes I feel like I have an obligation to write about it too.”

There is also a constant act of self-preservation that comes with putting so much of yourself on the internet. “I often get messages from people thanking me for talking about these subjects with a deep understanding of what they mean,” Searles says. “I really appreciate that. I get negative messages about a lot of things, but not this one thing.”

Michaela Coel in ‘I May Destroy You’.

* * *

With such thoughtful approaches to heavy content, it feels like we’re a long way further down the road from blunt tools like content and trigger warnings. But do they still have their place? “It’s just never seemed appropriate to put trigger warnings on any of our reviews or features,” White explains. “We have a heavy male readership, still 70 percent male to 30 percent female. I’m conscious we’re talking to a lot of men who will often have experienced violence themselves, but we don’t put any warnings, because we are an adult magazine, and when we talk about violence in, say, an action film, or violence that is very heavily between men, we don’t caveat that at all.”

Bays, too, is sceptical of trigger warnings, explaining that “there’s not much evidence [they] actually work. A lot of psychologists expound on the fact that if people get stuck in their trauma, you can never really recover from PTSD if you don’t at some point face your trauma.” She adds: “I’m a survivor, and I found I May Destroy You deeply, profoundly triggering, but also cathartic. I think it’s more about how you talk about the work, rather than having a ‘NB: survivors of sexual abuse or assault shouldn’t see this’.”

“It’s important to give people a feel of what they’re in for,” argues Searles. “A lot of people who have dealt with suicide ideation would prefer that warning.” While some worry that a content warning is effectively a plot spoiler, Searles disagrees. “I don’t consider a content warning a spoiler. I just couldn’t imagine sitting down for a film, knowing there’s going to be a suicide, and letting it distract me from the film.” Still, she acknowledges the nuance. “I think using ‘self-harm’ might be better than just saying ‘suicide’.”

Mayhew shared insights on who actually decides which films on which platforms are preceded with warnings—turns out, it’s a bit messy. “The onus traditionally has fallen on governmental censorship when it comes to theatrical releases,” she explains. “But streamers can do what they want, they are not bound by those rules so they have to—as the distributors and broadcasters—take the government’s censors on board in terms of how they are going to navigate it.

“The consumer doesn’t know the difference,” she continues, “nor should they—so it means they can be watching The Crown on Netflix and get this trigger warning about bulimia, and go to the cinema the next day and not get it, and feel angry about it. So there’s the question of where is the responsibility of the distributor, and where is the responsibility of the audience member to actually find out for themselves.”

The warnings given to an audience member can also vary widely depending where they find themselves in the world, too. Promising Young Woman, for example, is rated M in Australia, R18 in New Zealand, and R in the United States. Meanwhile, the invaluable Common Sense Media recommends an age of fifteen years and upwards for the “dark, powerful, mature revenge comedy”. Mayhew says a publicist’s job is “to have your finger on the pulse” about these cultural differences. “You have to read the overall room, and when I say room I mean the culture as a whole, and you have to be constantly abreast of things across those different ages too.”

She adds: “This feeds into the importance of representation right at the top of those boardrooms and right down to the film sets. My job is to see all opinions, and I never will, especially because I am a white woman. I consider myself part of the LGBT community and sometimes I’ll bring that to a room that I think has been lacking in that area, when it comes to harmful stereotypes that can be propagated within films about LGBT people. But I can’t bring a Black person’s perspective, I cannot bring an Indigenous perspective. The more representation you have, the better your film is going to be, your campaign is going to be.”

Bays, who is also a filmmaker, agrees: representation is about information, and working with enough knowledge to make sure your film is being as faithful to your chosen communities as possible. “As a filmmaker, I’d feel ill-informed and misplaced if I was stumbling into an area of representation that I knew nothing about without finding some tools and collaborators who could bring deeper insight.”

Carey Mulligan and Bo Burnham in ‘Promising Young Woman’.

This is something Ford aimed for with Test Pattern’s choice of crew members, which had an effect not just on the end product, but on the entire production process. “I made sure that at the department head level, I was hiring people I was in community with and fully saw me as a person, and me them,” they say. “In some ways it made the experience more pleasurable.” That said, the shoot was still not without its incidents: “These were the types of things that in my experience often occur on a film set dominated by straight white men, that we're so accustomed to we sometimes don’t even notice it. I won’t go into it but what I will say is that it was not tolerated.”

Vital to the telling of the story were the lived experiences that Ford and their crew brought to set. “As it applies to the sensitive nature of this story, there were quite a few of us who have had our own experiences along the spectrum of assault, which means that we had to navigate our own internal re-processing of those experiences, which is hard to do when we’re constructing an experience of rape for a character.

“However, I think being able to share our own triggers and discomfort and context, when it came to Renesha’s experience, made the execution of it all the better. Again, it was a pleasure to be in community with such smart, talented and considerate women who each brought their own nuance to this film.”

* * *

Thinking about everything we’ve lived through by this point in 2021, and the heightened sensitivity and lowered mental health of film lovers worldwide, movies are carrying a pretty heavy burden right now: to, as Jane Fonda said at the Golden Globes, help us see through others’ eyes; also, to entertain or, at the very least, not upset us too much.

But to whom does film have a responsibility, really? Promising Young Woman’s writer-director Emerald Fennell, in an excellent interview with Vulture’s Angelica Jade Bastién, said that she was thinking of audiences when she crafted the upsetting conclusion.

What she was thinking was: a ‘happy’ ending for Cassie gets us no further forward as a society. Instead, Cassie’s shocking end “makes you feel a certain way, and it makes you want to talk about it. It makes you want to examine the film and the society that we live in. With a cathartic Hollywood ending, that’s not so much of a conversation, really. It’s a kind of empty catharsis.”

So let’s flip the question: what is our responsibility, as women and allies, towards celebrating audacious films about tricky subjects? The marvellous, avenging blockbusters that once sucked all the air out of film conversation are on pause, for now. Consider the space that this opens up for a different kind of approach to “must-see movies”. Spread the word about Test Pattern. Shout from the rooftops about It’s A Sin. Add Body of Water and Herself and Violation to your watchlists. And, make sure the right people are watching.

Brittany S. Hall and Will Brill in ‘Test Pattern’.

I asked my interviewees: if they could choose one type of person they think should see Promising Young Woman, who would it be? Ford has not seen Fennell’s film, but “it feels good to have my film contribute to a larger discourse that is ever shifting, ever adding nuance”. They are very clear on who can learn the most from their own movie.

“A white man is featured so prominently in Test Pattern as a statement about how white people and men have a habit of centering themselves in the stories of others, prioritizing their experience and neglecting to recognize those on the margins. If Evan is triggering, he should be. If your feelings about Evan vacillate, it is by design.

“‘Allies’ across the spectrum are in a complicated dance around doing the ‘right thing’ and ‘showing up’ for those they are ostensibly seeking to support,” Ford continues. “Their constant battle is to remember that they need to be centering the needs of those they were never conditioned to center. Tricky stuff. Mistakes will be made. Mistakes must be owned. Sometimes reconciliation is required.”

It is telling that similar thoughts emerged from my other interviewees regarding Promising Young Woman’s ideal audience, despite the fact that none of them was in conversation with the others for this story. For that reason, as we come to the end of this small contribution to a very large, ongoing conversation, I’ve left their words intact.

White: I think it’s a great film for men.

Searles: I feel like the movie is very much pointed at cisgender heterosexual men.

Mayhew: Men.

White: We’re always warned about the alpha male with a massive ego, but we’re not warned about the beta male who reads great books, listens to great records, has great film recommendations. But he probably slyly undermines you in a completely different way. Anybody can be a predator.

Searles: The actors chosen to play these misogynist, rape culture-perpetuating men are actors we think of as nice guys.

White: We are so much more tolerant of a man knocking the woman over the head, dragging her down an alley and raping her, because we understand that. But rape culture is made up of millions of small things that enable the people who do it. We are more likely to be attacked in our own homes by men we love than a stranger in the street.

Mayhew: The onus should not fall on women to call this out.

Searles: It’s not just creeps, like the ones you see usually in these movies. It’s guys like you. What are you going to do to make sure you’re not like this?

Related content

Sex Monsters, Rape Revenge and Trauma: a work-in-progress list

Rape and Revenge: a list of films that fall into, and play with, the genre

Unconsenting Media: a search engine for sexual violence in broadcasting

Follow Ella on Letterboxd

If you need help or to talk to someone about concerns raised for you in this story, please first know that you are not alone. These are just a few of the many organizations and resources available, and their websites include more information.

US: RAINN (hotline 0800 656 HOPE); LGBT National Help Center; Pathways to Safety; Time’s Up.

Canada: Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centers—contacts by province and territory

UK/Ireland: Mind; The Survivors Trust (hotline 08088 010818); Rape Crisis England and Wales

Europe: Rape Crisis Network Europe

47 notes · View notes

hobeemin · 4 years

Text

Pick of the Patch

🍂 Genre: Fluff, Romance

🍂 Pairing: Kim Taehyung x (f) Reader; Yeontan appears 💜💜

🍂 Rating: pg13

🍂 Warning(s): Light cursing, feelings of uncertainty,

🍂 Word Count: 1.9k

🍂 Credits: A huge thanks to @taerseok for reading this over and giving me great feedback. Thank you so much!! Resources for banner provided here

🍂 A/N: to the lovely @chillingtae I hope you enjoy this just as much as I did writing it for you darling 💜🥺

Another lazy Sunday.

You sat on the bed after cleaning the apartment, relaxing against the pillows. Yeontan jumped up on the bed to join you giving a little yip for to you give him a few scratches behind his ears. Giggling you obliged, settling in as the next episode of your drama began. Yeontan snuggled close to your side yawning as he got comfortable. You focused on the screen nearly jumping out of your skin as your boyfriend kicked the door open in surprise. Yeontan barked before jumping off the bed and hiding under it. You clutched your chest as you glared at him, body frozen in shock. Your face twisted into a scowl as the stupor dissipated.

“Tae! What the hell is wrong with you?!”

Taehyung grinned running up to you with a laugh. “Sorry, Jagiya. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

You swatted his hand away still scowling. “Don’t just apologize to me. Tannie is under the bed.”

The look of horror crossed his face. Not his baby! Taehyung dropped to the floor coaxing his dog out with soothing words. Eventually, Yeontan came out and Taehyung scooped him up in his arms cooing to him like a baby. You watched shaking your head. “Tae?”

“Hmm?” He said, occupied with rubbing Yeontan’s belly.

“Why’d you come crashing in the house?”

His eyes widened in confusion as if registering why he came in the first place before a smile spread across his face. “Oh! Yeah. I’m taking you somewhere.”

Your brow raised. “When?”

That boxy grin formed on his face. “Today.”

You glanced down at your clothing. Donned in one of his baggy shirts and some leggings, you had planned to chill the remainder of the day. Now that you noticed, he was dressed up more than usual. He wore dark jeans, an emerald sweater, and a comfortable brown jacket. His light brown hair was hidden under a newsboy hat.

“Tae–”

“Jagiya,” he cooed, wrapping you up in his arms and kissed your forehead, “Come with me. You’ll have fun, I promise.”

The ice around your heart cracked away as you rolled your eyes. He could always make you smile, even when you didn’t want to. Grumpy or not, Tae put up with you. With resolution, you sighed giving him a quick kiss on the lips.

“Oh alright. Let me get dressed.”

He cheered kissing all over your face. “You’re the best girlfriend ever!”

Suppressing a smile, you rolled your eyes playfully at his remark, your mood becoming lighter as you swatted him away to change. “Yeah. Yeah.”

🍂🍂🍂

Taehyung drove carefully down the road singing at the top of his lungs. That dorky man. You joined in adding the melody to one of your favorite songs. Yeontan howled along from the backseat. You never felt so much at home in this moment as you all sang together. Tae chuckled hearing his adorable dog, reaching over to squeeze your knee as the song ended.

“Thank you for agreeing to come out with me, Jagiya. I know things have been stressful, but I promise this will help you take your mind off some things.”

You smiled slowly as the blush crept into your cheeks. Were you really this lucky? Tae hummed as the scenery changed from urban to suburban to rural. The hammering in your chest grew loud as you looked around. Like him, being outside was something you loved most. Being in the city was nice, but something about being close to nature soothed you. You couldn’t help but bounce in your seat as Taehyung turned in a winding road that led to what looked like a farm.

“Tae!”

His grin widened as he drove under an arch with the words ‘Heritage Farms’ twisted in the iron. Your mouth dropped glancing at your boyfriend. “Are you serious?”

He chuckled as he easily parked the car in a grassy field. “I know you miss doing this with your grandparents, so I thought we could make some memories as well.”

Tears threatened to spill as you sat in the car. Going to this farm filled you with so many emotions. It had been a humongous part of your childhood. Coming here with your Gram and Pop Pop was a treat. The smells invaded your nostrils as Taehyung opened your door and pulled you out of the car. With his other hand holding Yeontan’s leash and the other wrapped around yours, you both walked to the open area.

The gazebo was just how you remembered it, green roof, wrapped in decorative leaves. A sign with the word ‘Pumpkins’ stamped across. The small white house with green trim on the hill came into view as you both walked down the path. Tae pointed towards the fork in the road.

“Apples or pumpkins?”

You tapped your chin thoughtfully, brows furrowed in thought as you made your decision. “Pumpkins please!”

He gave you his famous boxy grin and ran with you down the path. Yeontan yipped running ahead on his leash. Your eyes rounded as the pumpkin patch grew closer. It was just as you remembered if not more. The pumpkins were even bigger in size.

“Oh my gosh Tae! Look!”

He grinned gesturing to them. “Go ahead, jagiya.”

You squealed and ran over running through the pumpkin patch giggling at the brightly colored orange shaded orbs. They sat among the leafy vines shining under the sun. The nostalgia came crashing down on you so suddenly almost making you tear up. You bent down taking one into your hands and held it close, shutting your eyes and swaying side to side. You barely heard the camera shutter go off as you opened your eyes to see Tae propped against the fence taking your picture.

An endearing pout formed on your lips, with your hands placed on your hips. “Taehyung!”

He chuckled, giving you a wink. “What? That was too cute to pass up.”

Rolling your eyes, you glanced down at Yeontan sniffing around at the pumpkins. “Tannie.” The Pomeranian’s ear perked up at his name being called and he looked at you curiously, eyes wide and round and just the most lovable.

“Your daddy is lucky I love him otherwise he’d get a punch to the eye.” You huffed, a teasing smile on your face before it hit.

Both your eyes widened at the confession. Your cheeks flushed looking down at the dirt. You hadn’t discussed the L-word quite yet even though you’d been dating for over two years. Embarrassed out of your mind, you walked further into the patch exploring the different types of pumpkins and squashes to pick from, trying not to look in your boyfriend’s eyes, even if it was tempting. Taehyung stood in surprise feeling his heart beat loud in his chest.

“Tan Tan, you heard that right?”

Yeontan barked pawing at the dirt.

“Yeah I thought so too,” he replied scratching his nose.

He gulped nervously, grabbing his camera, and continued taking pictures of the farm, sneaking more pictures of you when you weren’t looking.

After picking a few choice pumpkins to decorate your place with, you found a spot near a wagon decorated with hay bales. Yeontan followed you wanting some attention and you agreed wholeheartedly. With a soft chuckle, you stroked the top of his head relaxing and enjoying the fresh air, humming a quiet tune before the events replayed in your head.

“Oh Tannie, I think I messed up,” you mused. “I’ve never said I love you before. Sure we live together, but like, does he feel the same?” You glanced down at the dog inquisitively. “This is new territory. I just came out. Damn it.”

You wanted to kick yourself. You didn’t do sentimental stuff normally. It wasn’t until you met Taehyung that he brought out your sweet side. Hell, he was the first partner you agreed to move in with, though quite scary in the beginning, eventually, you both got used to each other and found a happy medium.

But this ‘i love you’ business. It felt so natural, even if you hadn’t said it prior. You looked off in the distance not noticing Taehyung plop down next to you. He reached over and placed a gentle kiss on your cheek causing you to jump.

“Hiding from me?” he teased.

You blushed looking away from him. “N-No, just needed to be alone,” you whispered.

Taehyung pouted slightly, taking your hand and squeezing it. “I hope it wasn’t something I did to scare you off.”

You shook your head turning to him. “What?! No Tae! Gosh, I-I...damn,” you looked up at the sky trying to get the words out. Why was it so hard to say? “I’m sorry. You’ve been perfect. All this to cheer me up. I can’t believe you remembered that story I told about this place. I don’t even know what to say except how grateful I am to have and Yeontan in my life.”

You felt his large hand engulf yours and you squeezed it giving him permission to speak.

“You mean so much to me. Jagiya, you don’t have to be scared of how you feel,” he smiled at you softly. “I was a little surprised, but that doesn’t change how I feel about you. In fact, it makes me fall in love with you even more.”

Your eyes widened in surprise. “Really?”

Taehyung's smile spread as he pulled you close to him. “Are you kidding? I’m crazy about you! Even though we've been together for only two years, I feel like I’ve known you longer. I love you Y/N always and forever.”

You choked out a sob as the tears trickled down your cheeks. Taehyung picked up Yeontan and held him up at eye level giving him a cute voice to speak. “If you’ll have us.”

“T-Tae?”

He put Yeontan down with a laugh. Visibly nervous, he wrung his hands looking anywhere but at you. With a deep breath, he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a tiny box wrapped in black velvet. His cheeks dusted in pink, whether it was from nerves or the autumn chill, you weren’t sure, but the determination filled his eyes as he stared at you.

“I knew you were the one since the first day we met. You remember? That rainy spring afternoon near the Han River. We got soaked on our bike ride and found a tree to hide under the downpour stopped. I wasn’t sure about being set up on a blind date and I could tell you weren’t happy either, but we sat there and talked about everything under the proverbial sun. The way you laughed, or how you would touch your eyebrow when you were talking about something you were passionate about. It made my heart race. I knew then I couldn’t be without you. You’re my better half. I love you so much.”

He opened the box to reveal a moonstone set in rose gold. You cried silently as he slipped it on your finger. He chuckled bashfully. “I may be jumping the gun, but would you marry me? It would make me the happiest man alive.”

You nodded, speechless for a few seconds, and wrapped your arms around his neck. “Yes. Yes I will,” you answered, voice barely above a whisper. “Tae, I love you so much. Thank you for being there for me.”

He bent down to kiss your lips sweetly. “This wasn’t exactly how I planned this, but do things ever go our way.”

“Never,” you said with a laugh. You picked up a pumpkin and twirled it with your hands standing on your tiptoes to kiss your new fiancé on the cheek.

Yeontan barked, jumping between the two of you and you patted his head. “Yep Tannie. My words exactly.”

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yolkyeomie · 3 years

Text

Trade Off of Gifts | Bang Chan

summary — no one knows the world of an artists as well as you do, at least that’s what you thought until he decided to show up one day

word count — 1.7k words

pairing — chan x gender neutral!reader

genre — fluff, artist!reader with a tiny hint of musician!chan (even tho he’s already a musician???)

disclaimer — just something tiny for all your fast and short topher needs !!

Being someone who is artistically gifted has its perks, leaving you to be more creatively thoughtful than most of the people around you.

The world and its people was one big incomplete painting to you, splashes of colors being splattered into its surface as you began to maneuver through it. You were the artist who determined what colors were allowed to stay and what colors no longer fit the narrative you were trying to create. It was a tiresome and even lonely job when you had to pick up a brush and bring a new color into your final masterpiece, but it was a rather exciting process nonetheless.

Different colors meant different things and different shades indicated different tones. Sometimes they’d change meanings and sometimes they’d stay the same, it always depended on how you felt that day. You could never explain exactly what everything meant to you, thinking of it as some innate feelings you were born with.

You never bothered trying to help outsiders comprehend what you meant either, as it was easier to keep it to yourself instead of giving your thoughts and feelings for the world to see.

But then somehow, you were stumbled upon by someone who shared the same views as you. Someone who saw the world in a rather similar artistic and dreamy light as you did, and they weren’t even an artist who puts pen to paper.

“That’s a nice drawing,” the stranger told you, hovering over your shoulder like a hawk to its prey. You scrambled to your feet almost immediately, pressing your art to your chest in a defensive manner. You didn’t like it when people hovered over you while you were drawing, entranced in this magical world of fantasy and possibility when you doodled on whatever surface you.

Usually, people would interrupt you when you weren’t finished, commenting on how odd everything seemed and how empty your art looked.

But then it clicked in your head, the stranger didn’t make any sort of ignorant comment on it. He simply said it was nice.

“Thank you,” you managed to say, your eyes darting down to the sketch you had created.

It wasn’t anything special, a half-done headshot of one of your friends from memory. It didn’t really look like any of your friends at the time either, there wasn’t enough detail on the features for it to be recognizable of who it was. “I mean, it’s not really done or anything so it’s not the best I’ve ever created but—“

“Really?” He questioned, his eyes widening to show off the little twinkling stars in his eyes and his mouth gaping open at your response. You couldn’t help but chuckle at his expression, nodding your head as an answer. “You’re a really good artist, you know that? Not many of my friends can even pick up a pencil if we really wanted to, but I guess that’s not really a compliment. Is portraits the only thing you draw?”

You lifted an eyebrow as he spoke, cautiously eying him and the choice of his words. He definitely wasn’t new to the whole artist thing, there was no way he was that knowledgeable on what artists liked to hear and what they didn’t like to hear and wasn’t an artist himself.

He even called you an artist instead of a “drawer”! If that wasn’t a dead giveaway of the fact that you were in the presence of an artistically gifted person then you don’t know what was.

“Not always,” you answered him, shrugging your shoulders as you tried to come up with a decent answer. “It really depends on my mood, but I like drawing portraits of people more than anything. It gives me an excuse to look at others without seeming… creepy? You know?”

“Oh…,” he nodded, a smile donning his face as he looked up at you. “So you’re a people watcher?”

“Not exactly,” you corrected him, “I just enjoy looking at people’s faces. You know, to catch every little detail that makes them unique to themselves. Everyone’s got something about them that’s different from everyone else and drawing lets me capture their uniqueness in a form that can be treasured forever.”

“That just sounds like an over-exaggeration of people watching,” the boy insisted, a laugh escaping his lips when he caught your frustrated glare digging daggers into his skull. “I’m kidding I promise! I completely understand what you mean. So who were you drawing just now then?”

Your expression immediately falls into a grimace, hesitantly peering towards your unfinished work to your friend. “Ah… this?” You ask him, trying to stall time from explaining your latest creation to him.

Through when you looked up to the boy he only nodded at your question and gave you the brightest smile he could. “It’s… it’s a drawing of a friend. He didn’t ask me to make this or anything, but I was just using him to practice faces.”

“You’re only practicing?” the boy gasped, scooting closer to you to steal another peek of your sketch from before. “That’s crazy, I would have thought you were working on an actual project and trying to get to the final piece!”

“You flatter me too much,” you joked, giving your sketch a half-smile. You appreciated the compliments he was showering you with, but there was no way you were actually living up to those expectations in your head. Being artistically gifted had its perks yet also had its more major downfalls: creating unattainable standards for yourself that you constantly set yourself up for failure was one of them. “I still have a long way to go before I can get anywhere near where I want to be.”

“I think where you are now is a great place, you should help yourself to the compliments when you get them. You deserve them,” he commented, a wide grin stretching across his face. Watching his lips turn into a smile made you so do the same, the atmosphere around him too addicting to go to waste. “Plus, I can tell you like it when people praise you.”

“Shut up, you ruined the moment,” you hissed, jumping to your feet to shove him out of your range of sight. The boy giggled at your reaction as he forced himself to stay put, not moving a singular inch no matter how hard you pushed him. “Leave! I don’t want you around me anymore, you ruined the moment!”

The boy thought about your words for a moment, as if he was trying to determine whether or not he wanted to leave you alone. “How about this,” he offered, spinning on his heel to face you. It caught you off guard for a moment, stumbling back on your feet as he shined that same smile from earlier on to you. “I’ll leave you alone now, but you have to let me come back and talk to you about your art more.”

You snorted, “I don’t even know you, why would I do that?”

He nodded in understanding, considering your comment before holding his hand out for you to shake. “Okay then, hi! I’m Bang Chan and I want you to let me come back another day and talk to you about your art. Does this make up for the lack of acquaintanceship?”

“Hi, I’m Y/N,” you humor him, shaking his hand before sliding out a slightly impolite question from your lips, “Is Bang Chan asking to hang around me because he wants me to give him a free drawing? If so I’m sorry but I’m not confident enough in my skills to even make you anything if I wanted to. There’s a reason I’m practicing here you know.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he clarified, slumping back onto the ground and laying back with a content smile. “I don’t want free art, I just want to hear you talk about your art. Maybe people watch with you from time to time.”

“I’m not a people watcher.”

“Sorry,” Chan nodded, “maybe not-people-watch with you then.”

You went silent for a moment, looking down at the sketch in your hands and glancing back towards the boy. “So that’s all? You just want to… hang out with me while I draw? No strings attached? You’re not going to ask me to draw you for free in the future or make fun of my unfinished work at all?”

He nodded in response and pointed a finger at your head. “The mind of an artist is a very interesting place to explore because not every artist has the same thought process when it comes to their creations. I want to see how we differ from each other.”

“So you’re an artist as well?” You question, your eyes widening as you slowly began to realize what he had said.

“Wouldn’t exactly say an artist,” Chan laughed, downplaying his statement as much as possible. “More of a… musician? I guess? I make songs, but that’s nothing compared to being someone who puts a pencil to paper.”

So your hunch was correct, Chan was artistically gifted! Of course, it wasn’t exactly in the way you had thought before but the mere fact that he was like you made much more sense now. “A musician is still an artist,” you tell him, “just because you’re not creating art in that sense doesn’t mean you aren’t an artist. Art comes in many different forms you know, you can’t limit it to one medium.”

“Well my form of art isn’t very… how do I say this, it isn’t—“

“—You’re embarrassed.” You finished. As expected the boy came up with as many excuses as possible, trying to drill the false act into your head but utterly failing. All you could do was laugh as you spoke, “don’t worry! It’s normal to be closed off about the things you create, I’m embarrassed to show off my art to people all of the time.”

Chan nodded, nervously fidgeting with his hair as he tried to play off his flustered actions. “I guess that’s one thing we have in common right?”

“Make that two things,” you corrected him. He turned to you with a confused glint in his eyes as you held up two fingers and grinned at him as you explained, “we’re both artists and we’re embarrassed to show people our creations. Oh the woes of being artistically gifted, am I right?”

He nodded in agreement, a cheeky smile appearing on his face once again as he repeated, “oh the woes of being artistically gifted.”

#stayhavennet #kpop imagines #kpop #kpop scenarios #kpop fluff #kpop au #stray kids #stray kids imagines #stray kids chan #skz imagines #skz fluff #skz chan #skz #bang chan imagines #bang chan #chan x reader #bang chan x reader

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dotthings · 4 years

Text

Now that there’s a good bit of S15 already aired to ponder, I’m going to revisit some more Dabb quotes about S15. This is from Variety, October 7, 2019.

Concerning Sam, Dean, Cas, and Jack as a unit: “ultimately this is a found family, and they have deep emotional bonds”

This point is pretty straightforward. The current showrunner regards the four of them as a family, and that’s been reflected in the story. While SPN has never been only Sam and Dean, in this era of SPN, the family they assembled has become more important than ever.

On the overall emotional approach of modern SPN:

“This is not just true of this season, this has been true for awhile, but we can devote a lot more time to the emotions of the guys. In the beginning of the show they were always on the road, but since they’ve been able to be settled, we’ve been able to see their lives beyond just the next monster.”

This quote is so interesting to me, and matches a lot of what I’ve been saying for a while on various platforms about how the characters and story evolved. The importance of the bunker, the importance of their expanded family becoming more and more a constant. I’m not watching SPN for the plot ultimately, I’m watching for the characters and their emotional life, with monsters, demons, angels, and mytharc to keep things lively. This is a big reason why I love genre. The monsters and mytharc are fun, but it’s the monsters and adventure and wild plots as a wonderful springboard to explore and reveal characters. Late run SPN is embodying this balance really well. I could also list off a number of shows I love that operate under this principle. So much of genre TV operates under this principle.

About how TV has changed and SPN has changed:

“I think you really get an evolution of TV as a medium. When this show started it was a very different show than where it will end, and the same thing about television generally. And I think what’s allowed the show to stay on as long as it has is that it’s been able to adapt.”

Gosh it’s like a show that’s been on for more of a decade will evolve or something! What a half-baked notion, who gave this guy the keys and put him in charge? LOL. I’m sorry I have to laugh at the rage in fandom over the mere fact that SPN didn’t stay frozen in amber carbon dated S2 and why anyone is surprised by that. It’s not just SPN itself changing, it is TV industry changing around it and SPN had to keep pace. SPN would not have survived to S15 without being adaptable. Now you can say it all sucks so you think it should have ended when Kripke left, but you can’t brag about SPN’s longevity and then dump all over the things that helped get it there, knee jerk rejecting necessary change on a hard core level. As if change itself is the reason you’ve got criticisms. It’s not. Execution of the story would be a reason to criticize, but not change in and of itself. We can all differ on the effectiveness of that execution, but there’s plenty of fans who are loving Dabb era just fine, just as there are fans who exist who despise it.

On “fan service”

“I hope we’re speaking to the majority of our fans. There’s definitely episodes where we do address things that come out of the fandom and out of social media, but in terms of how the story ends, in terms of bringing back certain characters, it was [about] what makes sense for the guys on their journey and in this story at this point. To some extent, all television now is fan service, but it’s not about direct fan service in that way; it’s more about what is going to get us to the emotional conclusion that we want for these guys.”

Notice the “I hope.” There’s no assumption here that absolutely everyone will love what they do, there never has been, from anyone at SPN in fact. They try to tell the best possible story they can that will appeal to the most fans. “All television is now fan service” is a very interesting statement, and Dabb doesn’t elaborate, but I want to try and unpack what he could mean.

In this era of social media and so many different possible delivery platforms, the scrutiny all shows fall under, the heavy interaction between creators and fans, and TV being by its nature, in its creation, a collaborative medium to begin with, it’s unrealistic to think any show could survive and operate in a bubble that completely ignores fan responses or disregards industry changes happening around it. That doesn’t mean spn or any show has to alter things at the mere whiff of every negative or positive fan response. Social media can also be a bit of a funhouse mirror of fan response, or provide a far too selective idea of fan response. For every SPN fan shouting that it’s wrong for SPN to listen to fan responses, there’s a fan response saying the same thing to shut down the opposing lane. Who do they listen to? What does it even mean to protect the sanctity of the story in this era of TV?

SPN fandom currently has multiple lanes claiming to be the arbiters of what “everyone” wants, and the reality of the fandom is very different, it actually looks like chaos. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Remember that for a long long time SPN fandom wank focused around brosonlies who kept saying caring only for Sam and Dean was the 99% and anyone who had any concerns for Sam or Dean’s autonomy in the story, who loved Cas, female characters, found family, and who cared about diversity on SPN was the 1%. It’s been obvious for a while now that TPTB are much more astute about the actual make-up of the fanbase than that false narrative. Over time the wanking got less locked into a few clear-cut lane divisions and now it’s a mess of internal lane conflicts and 3-5 lanes in opposition at any given moment, lanes within lanes, subsets within subsets. I don’t think that’s because SPN sucks. I think it’s because a) we’re approaching the end so people’s emotions are really really jacked up and heightened and b) a natural evolution of what would happen when a show like this goes on as long as this one has.

It’s funny how at the time this interview came out, fandom narrative ran with that quote as Dabb saying SPN is all fanservice when he’s saying the opposite to that. “It’s not about direct fan service” “it’s about what is going to get us tot he emotional conclusion that we want.” They aren’t bringing back familiar characters merely because fandom loves them, although he’s not denying that as a benefit to it, they’re back because they serve a story purpose. They don’t do anything just to service fandom. “Fan service” as a term is mis-used in SPN fandom so often it’s lost all meaning. “Fan service” in SPN fandom means anything the angry fan doesn’t like, no matter how much build-up it’s been given, no matter how logical it is for the character to return, no matter how tied into the major core themes of the show for umpteen years already certain reltionships are, they will be yelled down as “fan service” just because there’s a bunch of fans who love it, while fans who don’t are mad about it, therefore “fan service.”

PR is a lot of smoke and mirrors a lot of the time, but the reason this is relevant is so many Dabb’s quotes are reflected in the actual execution and tone and focus of canon.

SPN revolves around Sam and Dean and Cas and found family, and has for a very long time. Sam and Dean are the most central figures, but Cas is part of the central hub of that pov, and the show isn’t just about Sam and Dean, or just about Sam, Dean, Cas, it’s them...and their familiy. SPN has always been about family. That’s...the show.

#spn #supernatural #spn meta #andrew dabb

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davidmann95 · 3 years

Note

So... Crossover #1: any thoughts?

Anonymous said: You seemed not to think much of Crossover #1 on Twitter. Your full thoughts?

wcwit said: So Cates' Crossover #1, best bad comic of the year or just regular pretentious trash?

An incidental note upfront: What you’re seeing there is the apparently SUPER-RARE SECRET VARIANT COVER I unwittingly picked up at the store - at first glance indistinguishable from the standard cover, the kid getting four-color-fucked by mysterious comic book rays is in fact themselves reading a variant cover of the book, rather than the main cover again in an infinite painting-within-a-painting sort of deal that’s the standard.

So I wasn’t gonna get this: my initial post on the comic and what an obviously awful idea it was back when we only knew half the premise and it was known as Pray The Capes Away actually got some out-of-nowhere traction recently, and I’ve grown rapidly tired of Cates’ Marvel work. Even learning that it was going to be Image’s biggest debut in decades - Jesus fuck, how and why - mostly just made me wish it was Commanders in Crisis getting those kinds of numbers. But Sean Dillon/@deathchrist2000 and Ritesh Babu both got early looks at it and assured me that I, specifically, needed to see the last page, so in I dove. I’ll be posting my reaction to the last page below because I recorded it for their amusement, and below that I’ll talk about said last page. It may surprise you, however, that that wasn’t my main takeaway from the issue.

Let’s accentuate the positive first! This book is gorgeous. Geoff Shaw was terrific back with Thanos Wins, but this is an incredible stylistic level-up aided and abetted by Dee Cunniffe’s colors: it’s rote as hell to say “They mix the elevated and the mundane so well!”, but even beyond the obvious ben-day dots stuff there’s such a tangible sense that the comic book beings don’t belong here, that they’re of higher, misty, platonic stuff and we squishy non-paper-people inevitably crumble and break and bleed in their wake, communicating that big idea so much more powerfully than the actual loads of text on the subject. And if we’re talking good things, I’ll concede it’s possible that there could be subtleties that play out in more interesting ways as it goes on, and that not everything is meant to be taken at face value: a smart friend who actually did like it mentioned being interested in it as clumsy but potentially effective exploration of ‘what if the fun hobby you had inadvertently became contaminated and stigmatized by forces beyond your control?’ In a post-Comicsgate world where we recently ended up inches away from the Superman logo almost certainly becoming a fascist propaganda symbol ala the Punisher skull for at least a generation, that’s a defensible lens to view this book through.

For all Donny Cates’ legitimate talents however, I don’t think an expectation of subtlety is gonna work out with this one.

Okay first off getting into the rest of it the main characters’ name is Ellipsis because “Those three little dots...they can become anything”, so there’s that. More importantly, in the world of this story where comic fans face social oppression after superpeople materialize and fuck up Colorado, they face EVERY KIND OF OPPRESSION: there are clear parallels drawn in here to the violence and harassment faced by people persecuted for their religion, people seeking abortions, queer people, and people of color; this motherfucker even drops a “hates and fears” to let us know comic collecting basically makes you one of the goddamn X-Men. Which in theory could be a purely misjudged allegory rather than stemming from actual, obscenely inflated to the point of disgusting fears of ‘nerd oppression’, except that the book literally opens with a quote from Wertham. If Cates didn’t want to make the message “Hating comics? That’s bad. Like, racism bad”, he utterly, grotesquely failed by inextricably intermingling imagery of real-world bigotry with systemic, deluded fanboy paranoia, at least as of this first issue that’s supposed to meaningfully convey the premise. As a queer dude I think I’m somewhat in my lane to say it’s too blunt and broad and dopey to be particularly offensive, but the co-opting of oppression is what this is rooted in.

The idea of ‘comics good no matter what people think, ain’t it?’ extends to the last traditional local comic store standing in this world: much as superheroes are the primary cause of suffering in this world but the point of the story is still supposed to reveal the beauty in them, part of this is that the comics community isn’t perfect but it sure is great. Which is expressed here via Ellie’s boss Otto, a loveable asshole who yells at people coming in trying to sell the wrong kind of comics to fuck off, but at heart is we’re supposed to understand a good enough dude that the shop he runs is “the only home a lot of (the benighted nerds) have left” (because I guess in this alternate universe the physical stores are still the main hub through which comics fans talk with one another?).

So here’s a story of my very own! That’s me in 2013, it must’ve been some kind of special day because I’m wearing a shirt with a button. I’d at that point only frequented one of what would be my thus far four regular comic shops. The first was a great place, and while to say I had a sense of community there would be overstating it a bit, I was on really good terms with the owner and we regularly chatted when we had the time. When I left for college my store there wasn’t as well-stocked, and for some damn reason all variant covers were double-price, but I got along really well with the owner there too. The third I wasn’t so lucky; the guy regularly behind the desk was never overtly hostile, but clearly wanted to wring my neck every time I asked when a missing comic might get in or if I could update my pull list, and given I’m in the ‘ideal’ demographic for being a comic book store regular and was dropping a solid lump of money there every week, I wonder how others were treated there (the store nearly went under, was saved on the last day of operation by another store that wanted to incorporate it as part of its franchise, then shortly afterwards DID go under and is now I believe a beef jerky place). My current store is fine, I didn’t chat much with the folks behind the counter even before we all had medical incentive to get in and out of places fairly quickly but it almost always has what I’m looking for.

Just because those were my regular stores of course doesn’t mean those are the only ones I’ve ever gone to. About a year before that picture was taken - it’s the closest I could find - when I was 17 my store didn’t have something or another I was looking for, so I head across town to see if another place I had looked up had it. This other place didn’t have what I was looking for either, though I distinctly remember picking up a few issues of Hickman’s FF while I was there since I had foolishly fallen off, hence my remembering the year. I bought a couple issues, but hung around for a bit looking to see if I might grab something else out of a dollar box, setting my comics down. Without realizing it, I’d set my books down on top of another issue, and when I decided I wasn’t getting anything else, I just picked that up along with the rest of the pile and was about to walk out before the owner stopped me. He explained what I had done though assumed it had been deliberate, and because I was a good-hearted little geek I even recall thinking “Well, he’s gonna chew me out, but I guess I deserve it. I’ll try and take this to heart as a learning experience.”

Then he pulled up his shirt a little to show me the gun on his belt. He pointed at the security camera monitors at his desk, and explained to me that if I ever did something like that again, he would have it on tape, and he would pull that gun on me and hold me there while he called the cops.

As it turned out, the comic was free.

The whole thing was so sudden and bizarre and unexpected I didn’t actually freak out until the drive home. It wasn’t until weeks or maybe months later that I managed to tell my dad about the experience, because I *had* nearly stolen a (free) comic and my guilt was mixed in with my nerves and I guess I was somehow too close to register just how disproportionate his response was. It wasn’t until now, nearly a decade later and thinking about it for the first time in a long time as I write this, that I wondered if that might have gone differently - especially living in the midwest - if I hadn’t been a white, squeaky-voiced 17-year-old.

So, minor spoiler, when our cantankerous but well-meaning LCS owner yells to call the cops and grabs and yells at a small kid for pocketing a comic (and later displays fantasy racism towards said kid), I am not filled with nostalgic love for the brotherly safe space that is comic book stores, where this guy while not meant to be seen as perfect is still framed in part as a charming, witty representation of Why We Love These Places, And This Community, And This Genre, And This Medium. Cates is clearly drawing on real time at his local stores, but he equally clearly has a very different takeaway from those experiences than me. And I am, again, in a demographic - white, cis-male, abled, bi but more interested in women, disposable income, a lifelong collector - that the industry and a lot of the guys who sell it to us contort themselves around catering to, even if I had a single very negative experience and later an ongoing low-key uncomfortable one to help disabuse me of any notions of the purity of the dork community. In the world of Crossover as of #1, toxicity is intertwined, deliberately or not on the part of the creators, with what we love on the cosmic and small business scales alike, but at least in the latter case it’s the whole picture that’s beautiful, not any single kernel that needs to be worked on to be dug up.

So underneath is my video reaction to the last page of Crossover #1. Very minor spoilers because I mutter the last two words of the comic to myself, but under the video I discuss said final page and some other scattered thoughts. Whether you read that or not, my takeaway is this: I’m fascinated with wherever the hell this thing is going, I’m glad my dad liked it well enough to want to keep getting it because now I’ll get to see where it heads, but my first impression is that this is at heart meant as cheapass Oscar-bait for people who only read Batman. It’s big and high-concept but also small and intimate! It’s meta and about how great you, the reader are for your consumption, especially the consumption of this! It’s going to be in large part about a forbidden love between a couple divided across impermeable social lines (a couple where they’re a seemingly straight white man and woman, but one likes comics)! Maybe it’ll become Not That, and I’m sure it’ll do at least something interesting along the way because Cates has done good stuff before and there are some inherently interesting big ideas for him to play with here, but for the love of god if you’re thinking about getting this buy Commanders in Crisis too or instead, it’s another new book out of Image about superheroes dealing with the collapse of the multiverse but that one is really fucking good.

So the final page splash reveal is that when the comic book child discovered in here got out of Colorado, which has had an impenetrable energy shield erected around it by one of the heroes for years, she and others were ferried out of there...by Superman, as the narration declares that “This is a story...about hope.” They don’t say the word, but she sketches her savior, Ellie and Otto freak out and go “Is that---” when they see it, and on that last page we see that while a crude drawing it isn’t a rough analogue character, it’s a guy with a cape and trunks with an S on his chest. Surprisingly, I don’t have much to say: it’s just another blunt signifier that superheroes rule and are the best, paired with the most utterly devalued notion as of late of what makes Superman special in ‘hope’. I mean, I’m perversely excited to see whether this is building the entire series on a hook it can never deliver on, or if Cates actually has talked DC into an intercompany crossover; believable given they’ve done a bunch of those over the last several years, and why else would Mark Waid be supervising as ‘story editor’ on this? I guess it’ll shake out one way or another with #6 given Cates has said it “has one of the more epic and — I would argue historic — sequences in comic book history in it.” But I’m far less convinced this is gonna truly go into the meaty question of “What does Superman mean and what makes him unique in this world where superheroes in general are indisputably either failures or monstrous bastards given the scale of destruction their presence has brought about, and he himself failed to stop that?” than as some kind of holy grail of how great superheroes are despite how dang violent they’ve gotten these days for the crew to chase after, whatever additional twist will surely be placed upon it. At least he’s kinda helping an immigrant kid get over a wall, if that’s deliberate?

Random final thoughts:

* If I wrote the opening essay and turned it in in a college course, I would be expelled for plagiarizing Grant Morrison. This is not a joke.

* If mainstream American superhero comics ended January 2017 in this universe, its own last ‘crossover’ was Civil War II, which is hilarious.

* God, please tell me if it takes the dive after all that this isn’t somehow tied into whatever Waid’s Superman project is.

* I wouldn’t normally crap on issues with the finer details of worldbuilding, but A. This is rooted in a nominally ‘real’ world playing by recognizable rules, B. I’m ragging on this anyway so what’s the harm, and C. It’s really obvious. So: Why is one of the racists against the superheroes the guy who loves superheroes so much he’s the last holdout in the entire world still selling comic books about them? How does this modestly-sized shop exist long-term with apparently a significant regular customer base if there are no new comics or even reprints to restock with, ever? Who’s buying the serialized cop/cowboy comics that the U.S. government apparently created pretty much overnight (nobody, it’s just another Wertham dig)?

* The solicit for issue #3 proclaims “Don't miss this one, folks. If you do, it just might drive you...mad.”, so now I fear some kind of Ultra Comics riff.

* “Kids love chains” is the most metal-ass quote of all time and I hate that it’s being wasted as an arc title on this book.

#Donny Cates #Geoff Shaw #Dee Cunniffe #John J. Hill #Mark Waid #Me #Superman #Opinion

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