#the author whose work I have BEEN obsessing over for a solid year

[grassbreads]

What the absolute FUCK

[almostgenerallyalways]

cross my heart

Pairing: Jake Seresin x fem!reader (pilot!reader - callsign: Savannah) Category: smut / NSFW (18+), fluff because I want everyone to be happy always Word count: 3,6k  CW: language, allusion to past bad sexual experience (non explicit), me not having any idea how the navy works, literally googled “aircraft carrier diagram”, don’t expect any actual details about the mission lol Author’s note: first time writing tgm and went a lil off the rails. shoutout to @callsignvalley​ @seasonsbloom​ @ohcaptains​ @clints-lucky-arrow​ @steadfastconviction​ and like, a lot of other amazing writers in this fandom whose fics I obsessively read in October Summary: On the eve of what may be the biggest mission in your naval career, the answer to your problem comes to you in the form of Lt. Jake Seresin

Squeezing into the squad galley at a quarter to nine on the eve of the mission, Jake is surprised to see you sitting at the steel high-top table, still in uniform. Days on an aircraft carrier generally start early and end early, and considering the stakes of tomorrow’s mission, the rest of the squad retired to their bunks immediately after dinner.

“Hey, Vanny, still up?” He enquires, noting the way you’re slumped over the counter, head in your palms. He flicks the switch on the electric kettle sitting on the small counter.

After a moment, you look over at him. “So are you, Seresin.”

He gestures to his outfit, sweatpants and a white t-shirt. “I tried to sleep, still too wired. Thought I’d come make myself an herbal tea.”

That makes the corner of your mouth twitch, to his relief. “Can you make me one?”

He sets to work, and a short while later, sits down on the stool next to you, handing you a steaming mug. You mumble a thanks, and both of you sip chamomile in silence for a minute, before you apparently grow tired of Jake staring a hole in the side of your head.

“What?” you glare at him.

He smiles, amused. “Just wondering what’s keeping our unflappable Savannah up the night before a mission. Nervous?”

You stare at the wall. “No.” You take a sip of tea, then concede: “Yes. I guess. In a way.”

He goes a little soft at the way your cheekbones color slightly, and tentatively reaches out to rest his hand on your wrist, still holding your mug. “It’s okay, you know. I know you haven’t done as many of these as some of us, but don’t think anyone flying tomorrow isn’t feeling nervous. Or scared.” He rubs his thumb over the protrusion of your wrist bone, soothingly, he hopes. “I still get scared.”

He wouldn’t say that to just anyone on the squad, and he thinks you know it. In preparation for this mission you two were paired up often, and there’s a trust between you that can only come from eight weeks of preparing for life-or-death together. You’re a good pilot, a great one: not as much of a risk-taker as some of the squad, but solid and dependable, immaculate in your execution, and a stealthier flyer than anyone there. The number of times you snuck up on him and had him locked on your radar before he even realized you were anywhere in the vicinity is, frankly, a little embarrassing to him.

Though you didn’t know each other beforehand, you having been a few years behind him at TOPGUN, he feels like he knows you now – what makes you tick.

So it’s all the more flooring when you turn to him, and after a moment of seeming to examine him, brows furrowed, you ask: “Seresin, will you have sex with me?”

He chokes on his tea, a little, takes a deep pull of air and pulls back his hand from your wrist. He must have misheard you, so he asks, in a tone much higher-pitched than he would like: “Excuse me?”

You don’t seem bothered by his reaction, continuing to fix him with those big eyes, jaw set in a determined look he’s come to know all too well over the past weeks, on the tarmac, in your jet. Never here, in the cramped squad galley past bedtime, looking at him like you’ve made up your mind. “I asked if you’ll have sex with me. Tonight, to be clear. Now, ideally, considering we’re up at 5 AM.”

He turns towards you more, opens and closes his mouth once or twice, before settling on: “Vanny, I need a bit more context here.”

Feels a little like he should kick himself for not just saying yes, Savannah, please, lead the way.

You turn away your gaze from him again, and the color in your cheeks heightens, but he’s not sure he likes it this time. He watches you swallow, before you speak, not sounding as sure of yourself as a minute ago: “I’m not scared, exactly, for tomorrow. Or maybe I am. In any case, I don’t have any illusions about what’s at stake. I know we might not come back.”

And there it is again, the determined set of your jaw: “And for some reason, and trust me – I know it’s ridiculous – for some reason the idea my brain is stuck on is that the last time I had sex was fucking terrible, with my fucking terrible ex who made me feel small and worthless, and I just… don’t want his to be the last hands on me.”

And if that doesn’t fucking break his heart in two, because you deserve – so much more. Everything, Jake thinks, one hand somehow already on your thigh, and it’s all he can do to stop himself from tangling the other one in your hair straight away, from burying his face into your neck, because he needs to know one last thing: “Vanny, why me?”

You’re silent for a beat, and his eyes snap up to yours. He doesn’t know what you see in his face, but it must be good – you smile that wry smile of yours, the one that always feels like a reward to him. You reach out and run the back of your fingers over the side of his throat, and he swallows hard. “Well, Seresin, I’m not going to lie – First of all because you’re here, and I thought you might say yes.”

Then your eyes soften a little, and if he had any hesitation before, you wipe it out altogether: “But mostly because I trust you. Completely. And if you said no – which I would totally understand – I know you’d still get it. That you won’t hold it against me.”

You can’t know, he thinks, how much that means to him. You weren’t around for his more volatile Hangman years, rarely even use his callsign. He’s matured a lot since then, has learned to put the squad before his ego, but still – his reputation follows him. But you never – never held that against him. He started with you from a clean slate.

“Alright, jeez.” He says, grinning, trying to keep his tone light, probably undermined by his now desperate grip on your thigh, the urgent way he’s already pressing an open-mouthed kiss to your jaw, the fact that he feels his sweats straining against him. “Could’ve bought a guy a drink first, but fine, Savannah, I’m in.”

* * *

You stumble back to Seresin’s bunk – as a higher-ranking officer, he has private quarters, while you share with Halo and Quicksand, who are hopefully long since asleep. You try to make as little noise as possible, in the narrow, echoing steel hallways, because you don’t need anyone finding out about this: fraternizing is strictly off-limits, even more so within the same squadron, and your CO would boot both of you off the mission without a second thought.

More likely they’d just boot you, because Seresin’s got double insignia to your single, and he’s a man; this is still the Navy, and you’re a realist. So you try to be quiet.

But it’s real goddamn hard with Seresin’s hands under your shirt, burning trails up the side of your ribs, and his body flush with your back, nose pressed behind your ear. You fumble with the doorhandle, and you feel, more than hear, his hot chuckle as he nips at the skin over your pulse point. “What’s the matter, baby girl, do you need help?”

You shoot him a glare over your shoulder, but it cannot be convincing, at this point. The latch finally clicks, and he scoops you up, depositing you in the cramped, windowless room.

He locks the door behind him, and for a second you just stare at each other, by the low light of the reading lamp left on over his bunk. The carrier creaks around you, the sounds of its merciless progress through the high seas ever-present, seeping up from the engine room three decks below, reminding you that every minute brings you closer to the inevitability of tomorrow’s mission.

All day it’s been making your skin crawl, but right now, with Jacob Seresin looking at you like that, you think you wouldn’t notice if you were down in the engine room itself. Or standing in the middle of I-5.

One more beat, and it’s like someone’s fired a starting pistol: his hands cradle the side of your face, and he’s bearing down on you, finally kissing you in earnest. Your brain blanks out for a hot second.

Somewhere in the back of your head, it occurs to you that you’ve never been kissed like this before, and it would almost be sweet, the way he’s pressing his forehead to yours, roughly tangling his fingers in your hair, if it wasn’t for the hard length of his erection pressed into your abdomen.

He's talking to you, cursing incoherently under his breath, and of course he’s a talker – of course he never shuts up – and you have to grin, pull back for an instant. “Damn, Seresin. If I’d known you’d be so into the idea, I’d have asked you back on base.”

He chuckles darkly, hands never leaving your hair. “It might surprise you to learn, Vanny,” he presses another kiss to your mouth, to your throat, “that I’ve thought about this a fair amount. I mean, I’m willing to bet every guy on the squad has, but I’m definitely bringing up the average.”

It makes your knees weak, thinking about him thinking about you, and you need to take back some semblance of control, so you make quick work of the buttons on your shirt, shrugging out of the fabric. You’re just wearing a black sports bra, because everything on the carrier has to be functional, not pretty, but still Seresin seems to come up short for a moment, eyes drinking you in.

As if snapping out of it, he groans. “Baby girl. You gotta give me some warning before you pull stuff like that.” He kisses you again and guides you back, insistently, until the back of your thighs hits the edge of the bunk. His calloused hands roam the planes of your exposed skin, your arms, your stomach, your sides.

“You’re so beautiful, Vanny,” he’s murmuring into your ear, seemingly almost trembling as your hands find their way under his shirt, travel up the solid muscle of his back. “Tell me what you want, sweetheart. I’ll give you anything you want.”

You meet his eye, but find you suddenly can’t get the words out. You don’t know if you’re just getting shy (and how inopportune that would be, right now, with Jake Seresin’s thumbs hooking under the stretchy material of your bra, your nipples responding immediately, goosebumps appearing on your skin), or if it’s the intensity of his gaze that has you at a loss for words. You open your mouth, close it again.

“I’ll tell you what I want then, Vanny,” he says, kissing you again, hard, one hand traveling down to grab your ass. “I wanna make you forget anyone else ever had their hands on you. I wanna make you feel so good you won’t remember ever feeling small.” His hands fumble with the button on your khakis, and your head buzzes with the feeling of him, face pressed into your neck, speaking directly into your ear. “I wanna make you cum so hard you won’t remember that guy’s name, alright, Vanny? Is that what you want?”

You already feel like you’re about to explode, but you manage to wrench his face into your field of vision, meeting his eyes. Standing your ground. So he knows you really fucking mean it when you say, “Yes, Seresin. I want all of that.”

The devil himself couldn’t slap away the smirk that spreads over his face, as he looks down at you, his hand finally dipping into your soaked panties. When his fingers make contact with your clit, your knees buckle, and his other arm wraps around you, holding you up. “Alright, baby girl.” He inhales deeply, into the skin of your throat. “But you’re gonna have to call me Jake.”

* * *

You lose track of time shortly after he makes you cum on his tongue. You think you may cry, you’re not sure, because you feel like your brain is on reduced capacity as Jake comes up to grin down at you, as he rubs his thumb over your cheekbone, kissing you tenderly as if he didn’t just make your entire body short-circuit. “You taste so good, baby girl,” he’s saying, dragging his mouth along your jaw. “You look so pretty coming for me, Vanny, I wanna make you feel good always, wanna hear you say my name-”

“Jake,” you interrupt him, holding him by the back of his neck, forcing his eyes to focus. Your hand goes to the front of his sweats, where there’s a dark stain of pre-cum, and your brain doesn’t know what to do with that information.

You trace your palm down his length, impossibly hard, and he groans, closing his eyes, so you call him back to attention: “Jake. Please tell me you have a condom.”

And of course he does, you wouldn’t have expected otherwise. He stands up to get it, takes the opportunity to step out of his sweats. Your mouth goes a little dry.  

His pupils are fully blown as you nudge him back onto the thin mattress, move to take him into your mouth, but you barely get the chance to run your tongue down his length before he’s pulling you up by your hair, gently, restrained: “Baby girl. Vanny. I’m not gonna last three seconds if you do that right now.”  

He takes the condom from you, tears it open and rolls it down his cock, and for the first time since you crossed the threshold into this room you have a second and a half to really look at him, to think, and you think:

Fuck.

Because somewhere between your proposition in the squad galley and this moment, right now: you sitting on Jake Seresin’s thighs, watching him laying down before you, glistening with sweat, looking up at you like you’re the only thing that could possibly matter in the world, something changed. You know it. You can’t bear to let yourself wonder if he knows it.

Then he’s pulling you in towards him, almost dragging you down for an open-mouthed kiss, and you’re gripping the base of his cock, letting yourself sink down onto it, going slow to accommodate the stretch of him.

All the while, he’s speaking lowly, frantically, directly into your mouth: “Vanny, Vanny, Vanny, fuck, baby girl, my girl, feel so good, feel so –”

Cuts off when you bottom out, and the expression on his face would make you laugh if it wasn’t for everything else that is happening right now. As it is, your heart does a funny little jump, and all you care about right now is making him feel good, make him feel like he’s made you feel.

You tentatively roll your hips, and he groans, so you keep doing that, supporting yourself with a hand on his shoulder, finding your rhythm, and it’s not long before his fingertips are digging into your hips so hard you think he may leave marks, and you want that, want to go up into the sky tomorrow with his fingers printed on your skin; proof that this happened, that for this moment deep in the cavernous steel halls of this Nimitz carrier, Jake Seresin made you feel just like this.

“Vanny.” He’s saying, and you brush your hand over his jaw, feeling like this whole ship could sink right now and you wouldn’t care. “Vanny, beautiful girl,” he brings his palm to your clit, presses his fingers between your bodies, “You’re doing so good, Vanny, I can’t fucking – I’m gonna – I need you to come, baby girl, you’re so good for me, you feel so good on me, you look fucking perfect on top of me, I can’t –”

“Jake.” Your voice breaks, and you’re there, right where he wants you, right where you want to be, and your whole brain stutters and whites out, and you’re kissing him desperately as you come, emotion high in your throat.

Feel his shaky hold on your hips, fucking into you erratically now, any sense of control gone. It’s only a few more moments before he’s groaning into your shoulder, a guttural sound that hits somewhere deep in your chest, and you ride him through it, burying your face into the side of his, telling him how good he’s been, how perfect.

It takes a minute or two for either of you to breathe anywhere near normally again, and then you’re drawing yourself gently off him, and he takes a second to wrap the condom in a tissue before he’s pulling you back down to his chest, pressing kisses to your temple. “Holy shit, Vanny,” he rasps, and he seems delirious with it, and you’re glad it’s not just you – you feel absolutely stupid with it.

You prop yourself up on one elbow to look down at him, and you can’t help the grin that breaks out across your face at the sight of him. You wipe a bead of sweat off his brow, leaning down to kiss the hollow of his throat, his mouth, his cheek, murmuring thank you, thank you, thank you.

He wraps his arms fully around you, so you collapse against his chest again, groaning: “Knock it the fuck off, Savannah, I swear to God if you say thank you one more time –”, but the rest of that sentence is forgotten as he buries his face in the crown of your head.

“Stay a little while.” You hear him say, muffled. “I know you have to wake up in your bunk, but just… don’t leave yet, baby girl.”

And you’re fairly fucking sure you’d give him anything he wanted right about now, so you stay, letting him rub circles into the skin of your back. After a while he murmurs, voice heavy with sleep: “I’m glad you’re not my wingman tomorrow. I don’t think I could’ve done this, if…”

He trails off into nothing, but you get it, understand what he’s trying to tell you, and you wrap your arm around his waist a little tighter, keep on laying there listening to his heartbeat until its slowing rhythm tells you he’s fallen asleep.

* * *

The mission is fucking terrifying, but you do what you do best: shut the non-Navy part of your brain off and fly like you’ve been trained to. Don’t think, just do.

“Hell fucking YES, Halo!” You shout, as you clear the last danger zone, heart in your throat, and she laughs, exhilarated. You and her are a well-oiled machine, completely in tune, playing off the beat of each other’s actions and reactions.  

It’s intoxicating as always. There’s something about being up in the air, hitting every mark exactly as planned, then abruptly changing gears, accounting for the unaccountable – it makes you feel larger than life. Makes you feel like you were born to be up there.

You take a few seconds to enjoy the feeling, now that you’re safe to do so, and follow your lead fighter in the direction of the carrier. Clear skies all the way there.

It’s also fucking exhausting. By the time you climb out of your jet and hit the searing tarmac of the flight deck, you’re exhausted, drenched in sweat. You feel like you’ve used all the available adrenaline in your body, and you’re ready to keel over.

Then Jake’s wingman comes in, closely followed by Jake himself - the very last jet to land.

Always with the penchant for the dramatic.

You chug water, waiting for him to emerge, trying to calm the frantic beating of your heart. People are excited now – the last pilot safely on deck, minimal damage. Mission accomplished. There’s something charged in the air, relieved, exhilarated even.

You watch Jake take his helmet off, his eyes immediately searching the throng of people around him, before he spots you.

When he starts towards you, pushing past engineers and pilots and LSO’s with the widest fucking grin you’ve ever seen on his face, you know you’re in deep trouble. Your stomach swoops. It doesn’t stop your own smile from spreading.

He comes to a halt in front of you, too close for propriety. The proximity makes your skin flush, which is a feat, considering you’ve just spent the better part of an hour roasting in the cockpit of a Super Hornet.

“Seresin.” You look up at him, telling yourself you can’t kiss him. You really can’t kiss him right here in the middle of the flight deck, if you have any sense of self-preservation left for your career, you remind yourself; but the point is moot when he lifts you, extra fifteen pounds of flight gear and all, into his arms.

You let out a surprised laugh, and over Jake’s shoulder, you see Halo giving you a look, like: really?, but after another second passes, the corners of her mouth twitch up, and she nods at you almost imperceptibly.

And Jake, his sweat-drenched face pressing into your neck, is whispering: “Alright, Vanny, seeing as how you’re still alive, will you still need me?”

So you slide your hands into his damp hair and look down at him, grinning, hoping your face conveys all the things you can’t yet say: “You better count on it, Jake.”

  ----

omg thank you bb for reading if you made it this far 

almostgenerallyalways’ masterlist

[elyn-does-stuff]

Yoooo a Reddit thread (on LOTRmemes) landed me a rec for this book:

[ID: A black book cover with the title “Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis” by author Michael Ward. There is a single planet on the cover. EndID]

I’m SO psyched to read it. The basic premise is that each book of the Narnia series is based off of one of the seven planets acknowledged by medieval scholars. For example, Prince Caspian is a book loosely themed about War; the its planet is Mars (and I think this is even mentioned by the dwarf tutor whose name escapes me!!) as is the mythological god associated with it.

I wouldn’t be even remotely surprised considering what I know of Lewis, and I’m really curious to see how the author unpacks these connections and which books correlate to what.

But I also realized that my slowly-increasing medieval science/history/art kick might have something to do with the fact that I cut my teeth and obsessed over the Chronicles of Narnia/C.S. Lewis for a solid like 6 years of my late single-digits and early teen years. I’ve been slowly working my way through another book called “The Light Ages” about medieval science, on top of going to our local art museum more often (and Chicago’s when I’m there for work) and spending a lot of time with the early and medieval Christian wings.

And all of THAT was kicked off by one of the older surgeons who just hopped onto our org’s admin team who has been a gentle reminder of how important the saints who have gone before and our medieval heritage are to our practice of faith today.

give me more

[egelantier]

Tian Guan Ci Fu

where is it and what is it

it’s a chinese webnovel by mxtx, the same author who did untamed; it exists as a webnovel, finished and kindly translated here, the manhwa, the donghua (animated adaptation) happening right now, and there’s a live action adaptation in plans, directed by the same guy who did untamed. the donghua is gorgeous, the adaptation i’m unsure about but prepared to be hopeful, the manhwa seems to be very pretty. but all the adaptations only cover the very beginning of the novel for now, so i went ahead and read the novel, and i have no regrets. it helps that the translation is very good - not without awkward translatorese, but it has consistent and engaging flow and style, and it’s also pretty good at conveying mxtx’s humor without awkwardness. it reads pretty well.

what’s it about?

the world is split into two parts: mortals and various ghosts and demons and entities share the land, while ‘heaven officials’, aka gods, live in the heavenly kingdom in the sky. pretty much anybody can become a god if they do something really heroic or memorable and/or cultivate (meditation, training, virtuous behavior) really hard. when above, the gods rule their domains and fulfill their believers’ wishes; they work sort of like pratchettian gods, dependent on their followers’ beliefs and getting influenced by them. heavens are strictly hierarchical, with their own economy and pecking order, and the gods aren’t particularly sinless or benevolent; mostly it’s a question of scale.

our hero, xie lian, is a prince of a prosperous kingdom who’s been on a fast track to ascension for most of his very short life; he’s talented, he’s virtuous, he’s kind, he’s strong, and his only peculiar flaw is (somehow naive, but well-meaning) obsession with equality and value of human lives and so on. he becomes a god, unexpectedly, at seventeen, after slaying one especially dangerous god, and rises in heaven at the peak of his faith, influence and happiness.

…and then he finds out about drought and incipient trouble in his own kingdom, and, being a young and righteous god too close to his mortality, eschews heavens and returns to save everybody. it, to put it lightly, does not go well. at all. in fact, it goes catastrophically wrong, and, having lost everything, xie lian ascends again, only to get into a fight with the heavenly emperor, and get banished again, this time for good. he roams the mortal lands for next eight hundred of very lonely, luckless and hard years, technically immortal but not invincible, with his powers and his luck stripped away, and leans to make do, eking out a living as a scrap collector. his temples are desecrated, his name is forgotten, his kingdom is long gone, and - well. so it goes.

so it goes! until one day, to everybody’s great surprise, he ascends once again: a humble, gentle, immune to embarrassment, unflappable man, an embarrassment to heavens, a 'laughingstock of three realms’ who just wants to be left well enough alone. he’s Tired.

instead of rest, he gets sent to investigate a dangerous ghost stealing brides who pass through its mountain, and there, during the course of the interrogation, has his first (he thinks) meeting with a terrifying, old-powerful and vengeful ghost king named hua cheng, who likes to terrorize heavens from time to time. but said ghost king seems to be very benevolent and very interested in helping xie lian, and xie lian is pretty instantly smitten… with knowing what’s the cause of such interest.

…and meanwhile, in the beginning, there'was an unlucky boy, born under the worst stars, whom xie lian saved from falling once, while still mortal, and promptly lost track of. a lot of things happened to this boy, who wanted to be the most devoted worshipper to xie lian the god of the sword and the flower. as one does, you know.

that’s the beginning! from there on: investigations, heavenly secrets, old friends and enemies and acquaintances, thematic parallels, old tragedies, more pining than you can shake a stick at, grand acts of love.

is it good?

it’s very, very good. it’s the first fantasy cnovel i read (aside from the hilarious one about a guy traveling back in his own timeline and becoming a sugar baby to a mafia boss, which was in a very different league), so i don’t know which things are baseline and which things are unique, but it had a very solid foundation: ambitious multilevel, multi-timeline plot coming together in the end both events- and emotions-wise, beautifully iddy main relationship, maybe multifaceted characters who change and grow and clash together in fun ways, a clear and heartfelt understanding of its own core themes.

it’s also, unexpectedly, very funny, in this visual, slapsticky, begs-to-be-adapted way - i found myself laughing out loud over it a lot of times, and it possesses this gift of swerve between understated but earnest emotions and all-out jokes that i associate with… a bit of prattchett and a bit of gintama, honestly. take it as you will.

(oh my god the mecha. i will laugh over this one until i die.)

it also made me cry several times; granted, it’s not like it’s this time, but those were very heartfelt tears.

and the main duo?

first let me say that xie lian was lifted out, wholesale, out of my deepest character preferences. he fell really, really far, and did some bad things, and some very horrible things were done to him, and by the time we meet him he went through everything and achieved this effortless kind of traumatized, humble, accepting, wryly self-deprecating, utterly competent chill that makes a character incredibly appealing to me. he’s kind, and he’s sweet, and he’s gotten any possible embarrassment at least a couple of centuries ago, and he kinda made peace with himself and kinda didn’t. i love him.

and, thankfully for me, hua cheng, the ghost king, loves him a whole damn lot, a ridiculous amount, an epic, over-the-lifetimes, life-shattering amount, and he’s a terrifying presence to everybody else and a shy, protective, sweet dork to xie lian, and every time they’re together on page my entire heart is just. it’s AMAZING. he’s a great combination of playing the obsessive protective yandere stalker-lover trope straight and putting it on its head, by making hua cheng not just revere but respect xie lian, in all his good and bad decisions.

they are just so - good for each other, holy shit. they get each other so well. they’re the best ever power team. i love them.

(the rest of canon is various character reenacting “really? in front of my salad?” meme at them. it’s hysterical, and it’s the best. everybody teams up to tell xie lian that his boyfriend is Problematic way, way before xie lian clues into the fact that he does have a boyfriend, and he’s having none of it. i love it.)

and the themes?

okay, so. roughly half of this novel is ridiculous iddy pining, and a fourth of it is various tropes (off the top of my head: soulbond, sex pollen, body switch, de-age, various shades of identity porn… crossdressing…) played very shamelessly. but it also really benefits from having an overarching set of ethical questions, and while it deals with them a bit shounen-style, it still deals with them, and it makes the whole text fresh, and sweet, and bold.

is it possible to save everybody? should you try to save everybody? if you lack the powers to back your convictions, does it make you complicit? when is it possible to stop the cycle of suffering, what can you do if you want to but can’t? if you tried and people you failed turned on you, whose fault it is, where does the blame stop?

Detailed spoilers begin from here, and i would REALLY advise to stay unspoiled, because the domino reveals are very fun

i loved the various ways the novel sets all those pieces up and then overturns them and then returns to them. xie lian wanted to save everybody and it was arrogant naivete of an untried, untested, privileged young man who never had a real challenge before; his presence made things escalate quicker, and yet everybody around him pretended it was his attempt to make things better that ruined everything, and not a combination of factors outside of his control. and yet he accepts the blame, because it dovetails with his shame at not having enough powers to back his intent up; and yet his triumph over bai wuxian is that he doesn’t, after all, renege on his initial drive to help people.

my most favorite part of this novel is that its turning point, the lynchpin of the whole novel, the moment that keeps xie lian’s soul and safety intact, is not his personal purity and drive; it’s not even hua cheng’s devotion and sacrificial love. it’s just a moment of little, grudging, human kindness from a little, petty, rude man whom the history will sweep away soon. the bamboo hat in the rain. the rest of the plot keeps twisting and turning and coming back to itself, but this? this was unquestionably, beautifully clear, and i loved it. it’s never about the gods, it’s all down to - fallen human is human, ascended human is human, and human is not some state, virtuous or sinful, you get stuck with - it’s a multitude of choices, and there’s never a final one.

and incoherent spoilery screaming for people who read it already

oh my god i had SO MUCH FUN. i’ve been flailing on meme for days, because somebody just finished reading there too, and i’m still bursting with ALL THE FEELS. ruoye origins oh my god! that hat! jin wu’s backstory and ultimate end! e-ming’s praise kink! pei ming’s little shippery 'hoho’! hua cheng’s horribly handwritten stick and poke tattoo of xie lian’s name! the lanteeeeeeeeeeeeerns. feng xin and mu qing on the bridge, making up with each other and with xie lian! hua cheng trying to explain to xie lian that his habit of using himself as bait and pincushion at any given moment is deeply emotionally upsetting to him, and succeeding! banyue’s learning from xie lian to be a truly horrible cook! the entire deal with shi qingxuan and he xuan and the wind fan in the end. THE CAVE. THE GIANT MECHA. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa and aaaaaaaaaaaaa and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa and i am beset, beset by feelings. come scream with me.

[x0401x]

Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun: Ghost Hotel’s Café (Part 2)

Revealing the secrets of the menu, such as “crushing muffins so they will look like earth”! Interview with the staff of Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun GHOST HOTEL’S CAFÉ.

GHOST HOTEL’S CAFÉ, the collaboration café of “Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun” – an on-going manga from Monthly G Fantasy (Square-Enix) by Aida Iro-sensei –, was held in Ikebukuro, Tokyo at AniPara CAFÉ for a limited period from December 5 to February 11. Here, we have carried out an interview with the staff behind the planning and production of “Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun”. We have discussed things in detail, from the background of the collaboration café’s presentation to the public to the secret stories behind the development of the food and drinks that reflect ideas from the author, Aida Iro-sensei!

Interviewees

Square-Enix café organizer: Ookubo Kana-san

Square-Enix editor in charge of “Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun”: Imanishi Chiharu-san

Grounding Lab café planner: Andou Minako-san

Grounding Lab café planner: Nakayama Natsuko-san

Andmowa café menu creator: Aizawa Kanto-san

AniPara CAFÉ manager and menu creator: Shirato Kouhei-san

The collaboration café of “Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun” is entirely supervised by AidaIro-sensei!

——How was it decided that “Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun” would have a collaboration café?

Ookubo: The cue was that, while the café planning members were talking about what café to hold next, we were introduced to “Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun” as the most highly recommended title of our company.

Andou: There are a lot of young people in the staff of AniPara CAFÉ and most of them knew “Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun”, so by the time SquaEni-san talked to us about it, we gave them the one-sentence reply of, “By all means!” and asked them to let us do it. *laughs*

——This is the third time that “Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun” earns a collaboration café, so how were the fans’ reactions?

Imanishi: Since this is the third time, there were many reactions of concern about the very concept of “how will it turn out next?”. Thankfully, the responses were good and we received many warm messages such as “it was fun”!

——How was AidaIro-sensei’s reaction when it was decided that yet another collaboration café would be held?

Imanishi: They were very pleased. An event that the readers can enjoy is a rare opportunity, so they were hyped about many things, such as, “I wonder what we will do~!” and, “How about this?” (laughs).

——The theme of the collaboration café is a “ghost hotel” this time. How was it conceived?

Ookubo: This time’s theme was proposed by AidaIro-sensei.

Imanishi: In the first time, I think it is orthodox that the characters are made into café waiters, but since this is the third one, Sensei suggested that they felt like displaying them in yet another a different light, and that they wanted to make it so that both the people who would be attending for the first time and the people who had already attended before would be able to enjoy it in a brand-new way.

G Fantasy carries out a project of giving away color spreads as presents every year along with the commemorative issue of its launching, and the theme for the color spread of “Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun” on the 25th anniversary was “ghost hotel”. There was also the fact that the readers’ response to it was very positive, so Aida Iro-sensei decided, “Let’s go with a ghost hotel this time!”.

When it comes to “Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun”, you cannot miss out on ●●●!

——Did you get any menu or decoration suggestions from Sensei?

Ookubo: They granted us the base ideas of the menu and supervised the whole thing. They also chose the names of all the menu items. Writing “holy” in English was one of Sensei’s ideas. *laughs*

——The shop’s interior has a wonderful decoration perfectly fitting of a “ghost hotel”, with spider webs and mini characters hiding everywhere.

Andou: When we were thinking about how to reproduce the worldview depicted by AidaIro-sensei, we thought it was perfect... so we left it there (laughs)!

Ookubo: That spider web is amazing, isn’t it? The first time I looked at it, I thought it was a perfect fit for the café’s mood!

——The BGM that plays inside the shop is also a perfect fit for a “ghost hotel”.

Ookubo: We choose after listening to lots of tracks, so hearing that makes me happy! This time, Sensei gave us proper suggestions regarding the worldview, so the interior design parts were easy to picture.

Imanishi: There is a fun to it that is similar to riding on a horror attraction, even if you are inside a café. I think we were able to create this atmosphere exactly because its worldview is solid.

Ookubo: Also, since this is “Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun”, we would like everyone to check the toilets, by all means! I want people to see at least this with their own eyes.

——The toilet is a checkpoint that people cannot skip. The illustrations for the café were made by AidaIro-sensei this time too, but do the numbers written on the keys of each character have a meaning?

Imanishi: In this thematic setting, the employees (the characters) live and work in the ghost hotel. The numbers on the keys are the numbers of the rooms where the employees live, and they increase like 1, 2, 3... when you see them lined up in order, you will know who is whose neighbor and which of them are in the floors below or above. This is linked to the nature of the characters’ relationships, so please give it a check.

——Sensei did not just write the story but also story cards.

Imanishi: There might be people amongst the readers of G Fantasy who know about the 25th anniversary illustration, but I believe most of them will be seeing it for the first time. Since it could be difficult to understand what the story of this ghost hotel is and what the characters are doing, so we introduce them in the story cards and in-store PV. This method is easy even on people visiting for the first time, so we would like them to come hang out with friends here (laughs).

Aizawa: Quite a lot of the people who come to the shop are young, and on Sundays, it is not rare for families to fill up the seats. Amongst them, we have received a call from a father who had never been to a collaboration café before, telling us, “I want to make a reservation for my daughter; how do I do it?” and we have also been asked, “My daughter wants your goods; are they still not sold-out?”.

Andou: We have also been told, “I’ll save up my allowance to go there!”. Hearing things like these makes me think that it is great that we managed to implement a wonderful café, and I want people to enjoy it by any means.

“We crush the muffins to make them look like earth.” “The pot-au-feu is always chamfered.” – The secret stories behind the cooking of the collaboration menu are revealed!

——You have quite a quirky menu, with things such as the “GHOST HOTEL’S CAFÉ Afternoon Tea”, which comes with a written invitation to the Ghost Hotel; Hanako-kun’s favorite food, the “Hanako-kun Floaty Doughnuts”; the shinny “Mokke’s Delightful Candy Cake”, which is modeled after candies, Mokke’s stable food.

Andou: “Mokke’s Delightful Candy Cake” is quite a painstaking piece of work...! Of course, it is delicious, but I think being able to have fun taking pictures of cute food is a point that everyone looks forward to in a collaboration café, so we prepared a menu that everybody would be able to enjoy from their eyes too. When we were planning it out, we had about thirty suggestions for the menu in total, and from there, the team narrowed them down through discussions until the menu took the form it has now.

Nakayama: When it comes to Mokke, I think the image that comes to mind is of candies, do after a bit of devising, I came up with a cake that looks like candy. I am happy that, thankfully, the fans also had positive reactions to it!

——The “Edible Plots of Nene from the Gardening Club” shows quite a bit of uniqueness. Having a dessert inside a vase had a lot of impact.

Ookubo: The “Edible Plots of Nene from the Gardening Club” consists of muffins in flower vases, and the sight of the vases lined up in rows in the kitchen is quite surreal (laughs).

Shiratsuchi: We crushed chocolate muffins for them to look like earth and made them dirt-like. As a cook, I am also conflicted as to whether it tastes good to eat it like that, so while obsessing over the reproduction of its appearance, I break muffins into pieces every day, in order to combine them with a definite deliciousness.

——(Laughs) “Nene’s R•A•D•I•S•H Pot-au-Feu” is a warm and comforting dish, perfectly fitting for this time of the year.

Imanishi: This is actually the menu item that requires the most work out of the other collaboration foods.

Ookubo: The radish used in “Nene’s R•A•D•I•S•H Pot-au-Feu” is not a ready-made one that we warm up, and instead we cook the radish in the shop every day. On top of that, since the ingredients do not absorb the taste when cooked in the normal way, we chamfer (thinly scraping a vegetable so that it will take a round shape) the radishes one by one, so this is a menu item that takes up a lot of time. It costs 880¥, so when people ask, “Is this the quality of a collaboration café?”, I think it is in the good sense (laughs).

——My! The people who visit the shop should totally try this out, then.

Aizawa: We want them to! This desire is quite strong in us, but since it is a hassle to prepare that menu item, it would be a problem if too many people ordered it (laughs).

Shiratsuchi: While I was happy that everyone said, “It’s delicious~” during the sample food meeting, this item made me think, “I might’ve created something terrible (in a laborious sense)” (laughs).

All: (Laugh).

Ookubo: The cooking team really created the collaboration menu with a lot of passion. We make the crust for the “Clock-Keeper’s Tart ~with fruits~”, which is from the latter half of the menu, by hand every day in the shop. We fill it up with layers of berries, chocolate cream and wiped cream one after another... It gives us so much work that it could make people think, “Are you really serving this at a collaboration café?!”. I believe that even people who have only ever been to regular cafés and never to a collaboration one can also enjoy it.

Imanishi: The menu for the latter half of the collaboration has quirky and cute items, such as the “Mad-Risky Soup”, as in a “pretty dangerous” soup, and a limited number of the “Pipe Dream Cake”, so I think anyone can enjoy it, be it the people who visited during the first half or the people who are visiting for the first time during the latter half.

By the way, AidaIro-sensei’s top recommendation was “Kou’s Specialty Omelet Rice”! This rice omelet has caponata (boiling of fried eggplant) inside, so the flavor is unlike that of any other collaboration café. The fact that these secret gems exist is part of the wonderful levels of consideration from the cooks’ side.

——All the foods looked delicious, and every drink was wonderful too, so I was indecisive about which ones to order.

Ookubo: “Nene’s Welcome Cocktail” is also in the story that AidaIro-sensei posted on Twitter before the café’s opening. I recommend it as the first drink to the people who are visiting the collaboration café for the first time.

——By the way, are there any menu items that were rejected?

Nakayama: There was a legendary menu item named “Hanitarou Sandwich”, right?

Imanishi: There was! There is a character named Akane-kun who uses a haniwa as a protection charm, and I suggested a meal based on him – a “haniwa” coppe bread.

During the planning stages, I thought it was possible and tried reproducing it, but the cost turned out pretty high and its appearance was a haniwa through and through (laughs), so I wondered if anyone would order that... There was also the fact that Akane-kun is not much of a “haniwa stan”, so it became a legendary menu item (laughs).

Andou: I had suggested “Hanako-kun’s Doughnut” with the image of a school cap at first, but then the talk turned into, “Rather than a hat, I want it to have the appearance of a cute and tasty-looking doughnut”, so the cap version was rejected.

Ookubo: I also tried to produce a book-shaped cake, with the image of Tsuchigomori-sensei’s Four O’clock Library, but it seemed the price value would be too expensive, so it was unfortunately rejected.

——So there were menu items that were cast aside as “legendary” ones! This means you have created quite a number of items, but how do you come up with those ideas?

Nakayama: We were already collecting information from Instagram and Twitter and analyzing what the costumers were after. We deepened the conceptions from there to plan out the menu a lot.

Andou: Also, we think first-thing about what will be suitable for the costumers’ age range. In these occasions, rather than thinking about it as the menu of a collaboration café, we tried coming up with tasty-looking stuff as a regular food and drinks menu, and from that point, we created many things that drew close to the characters.

——It seems you were very conscious of the “showiness” of several menu items this time, so is “showiness” an indispensable element for your needs?

Andou: That’s right. Of course, the menu has to be delicious, but I think that, if it also turns out good for taking pictures, it will be posted on Instagram and Twitter, and become a cue for the fans to interact. The people who know the series will obviously do that, but I would be happy if this menu could become a trigger for even the people who don’t know it to talk about it, like, “That’s wonderful”, “What series is this?”.

Ookubo: We believe that the collaboration café’s menu is important for the original work’s side as well, so we take many requests, such as, “I want you to make this kind of dish” and, “I want to put this illustration card on it”, and the side that plans out the cooking does their best to give them form, so a wonderful menu is birthed every time, and as a result, it turns out as something that the fans can enjoy.

——It seems the people who will visit the store are quite young, so have you devised anything for the flavors?

Aizawa: We added a bit more variety to the taste of “Nene and Mokke’s Broccoli Gratin XD” during the planning stages, but we reviewed it in order to make it match the palate of young people better.

Ookubo: The “Mokke Curry”, which appears in the latter half of the event, was a green curry at first, but we changed it into a normal curry so that it would match the young ones’ tastes.

——On the topic of creating menu items that suit the customers’ age group, were there any difficulties or things you obsessed over?

Aizawa: The biggest hardship in making the menu of a collaboration café is the items’ appearance. Even if we deepen their image, we often worry about how to bring out their colors.

We repeatedly have conflicts such as, “I have to use this ingredient for bringing out this color, but this ingredient doesn’t fit this menu. Then how do I reproduce this coloration?” so it’s a relief when we eat the finished products and calm down with a, “It’s surprisingly good now that I’ve given it a try!” (laugh). Also, when we are feeling confident, the ideas soon flash into mind, but when we are in a slump, we get distressed.

Shiratsuchi: There was also a difference of views between the cooks’ side and the original creators’ side, so there were times when we thought, “We’ve made something really good!”, the original creators would say, “This won’t do!” (laughs). In regards to the menu, it is purely an insight race, so it made us happy when good flashes of inspiration took form and received approval.

——Anything from this menu that gave you an especially hard time?

Aizawa: As expected, that would be “Nene’s R•A•D•I•S•H Pot-au-Feu”, which we talked about earlier (laughs).

——Lastly, please leave a message for the readers.

Imanishi: New menu items will be added in the latter half, so I believe it has turned out as a café that people can enjoy no matter how many times they come. We want them to eat, drink and have fun. Also, the coasters that they can earn by ordering foods and drinks have wonderful designs, so I hope people will take them as a memory, by all means. I think you will definitely enjoy it, so please come over!

Aizawa: There are many attractive menu items, so do not forget your cameras!

——Thank you very much!

[dangermousie]

Heelo mousie! Love your blog! Do you mind recommending some of your favourite Chinese BL novels or shows?

I've seen the untamed and read it. I'm currently reading heaven's official blessing and I saw the donghua. Anything other than these two?

Awww, thank you!

Novels: I am gonna be lazy and literally copy/paste the entire danmei section of my top 10 web novels post (except MXTX’s stuff since you are already reading it.) Let me know if you need help finding any of these.

Lord Seventh - I am only partway through this so far, but it’s already on the list because it’s smart and somehow intense AND laid-back (not sure how this works, but it does) and is honestly just a really really solid and smart period novel, with the OTP a cherry on top of a narrative sundae. Plus, I love the concept of MC deciding he is not going for his supposedly fated love - he’s tried for six lifetimes, always with disaster, and he’s just plain done and tired. When he opens his life in his seventh reincarnation and sees the person he would have given up the world for, he genuinely feels nothing at all. (Spoiler - his OTP is actually a barbarian shaman this time around, thank you Lord!)

Golden Stage - my perfect comfort novel. Probably the least angsty of any danmei novel on this list (which still means plenty angsty :P) It also has a dedicated, smart OTP that is an OTP for the bulk of the book - I think you will notice that in most of the novels in this list, I go for “OTP against the world” trope - I can’t stand love triangles and the same. Anyway, Fu Shen, is a famous general whose fame is making the emperor   antsy. When he gets injured and can’t walk any more, the emperor gladly recalls him and marries him off to his most faithful court lackey, the head of sort of secret police, Yan Xiaohan. The emperor intends it both  as a check on the general and a general spite move since the two men   always clash in court whenever they meet. But not all is at is seems. They used to be  friends a long time ago, had a falling out, and one of the loveliest  parts of the novel is them finding their way to each other, but there is  also finding the middle path between their two very different  philosophies and ways of being, not to mention solving a conspiracy or  dozen, and putting a new dynasty on the throne, among other things. It always makes me think, a little, of “if Mei Changsu x Jingyan were canon.”

Sha Po Lang - if you like a lot of fantasy politics and world-building and steampunk with your novels, this one is for you. This one is VERY plot-heavy with smart, dedicated characters and a deconstruction of many traditional virtues - our protagonist Chang Geng, a long-lost son of the Emperor, is someone who wants to modernize the country but also take down the current emperor his brother for progress’ sake and the person he’s in love with is the general who saved him when he was a kid who is nominally his foster father. Anyway, the romance is mainly a garnish in this one, not even a big side dish, but the relationship between two smart, dedicated, deadly individuals with very different concepts of duty is fascinating long before it turns romantic. And if you like angst, while overall it’s not as angsty as e.g., Meatbun stuff, Chang Geng’s childhood is the stuff of nightmares and probably freaks me out more than anything else in any novel on this list, 2ha included.

To Rule In a Turbulent World (LSWW) - gay Minglan. No seriously. This is how I think of it. it’s a slice of life period novel with fascinating characters and  setting that happens to have a gay OTP, not a romance in a period  setting per se and I always prefer stories where the romance is not the only thing that is going on. It’s meticulously written and smart and deals with  character development and somehow makes daily minutia fascinating. Our   protagonist, You Miao, is the son of a fabulously wealthy merchant,   sent to the capital to make connections and study. As the story starts, he sees his friend’s  servants beating someone to death, feels bad, and buys him because, as  we discover gradually and organically, You Miao may be wealthy and  occasionally immature but he is a genuinely good person. The person he buys is a barbarian from beyond the wall, named   Li Zhifeng. It’s touch and go if the man will survive but eventually he does and You Miao, who by then has to return home, gives him his papers  and lets him go. However, LZF decides to stick with You Miao instead, both  out of sense of debt for YM saving his life and because he genuinely  likes him (and yet, there is no instalove on either of their parts, their bodies have fun a lot quicker than their souls.) Anyway, the two  take up farming, get involved in  the imperial exams and it’s the life of prosperity and peace, until an invasion happens and things go rapidly to hell. This is so nuanced, so smart (smart people in this actually ARE!) and has secondary characters who are just as complex as the mains (for example, I ended up adoring YM’s friend, the one who starts the plot by almost beating LZF to death for no reason) because the novel never forgets that few people are all villain. There is a lovely character arc or two - watching YM grow up and LZF thaw - there is the fact that You Miao is a unicorn in web novels being laid back and calm. This whole thing is a masterpiece.

Stains of Filth (Yuwu) - want the emotional hit of 2ha but want to read something half its length? Well, the author of 2ha is here to eviscerate you in a shorter amount of time. This has the beautiful world-building, plot twists that all make sense and, at the center of it all, an intense and all-consuming and gloriously painful relationship between two generals - one aristocratic loner Mo Xi, and the other gregarious former slave general Gu Mang. Once they were best friends and lovers, but when the novel starts, Gu Mang has long turned traitor and went to serve the enemy kingdom and has now been returned and Mo Xi, who now commands the remnants of his slave army, has to cope with the fact that he has never been able to get over the man who stabbed him through the heart. Literally. This novel has a gorgeously looping structure, with flashbacks interwoven into present storyline. There is so much love and longing and sacrifice in this that I am tearing up a bit just thinking of it. If you don’t love Mo Xi and Gu Mang, separately and together, by the end of it, you have no soul.

The Dumb Husky and His White Cat Shizun (2ha/erha) - if you’ve been following my tumblr for more than a hot second, you know my obsession with this novel. Honestly, even if I were to make a list of my top 10 novels of any kind, not just webnovels, this would be on the list. It has everything I want - a complicated, intricate plot with an insane amount of plot twists, all of which are both unexpected and make total sense, a rich and large cast of characters, a truly epic OTP that makes me bawl, emotional intensity that sometimes maxes even me out and so much character nuance and growth. Also, Moran is my favorite web novel character ever, hands down.

Anyway, the plot (or at least the way it first appears) is that the evil emperor of the cultivation world, Taxian Jun, kills himself at 32 and wakes up in the body of his 16 year old self, birth name Moran. Excited to get a redo, Moran wants to save his supposed true love Shimei, whose death the last go-around pushed him towards evil. He also wants to avoid entanglement with Chu Wanning, his shizun and sworn enemy in past life. And that’s all you are best off knowing, trust me. The only hint I am going to give is oooh boy the mother of all unreliable narrators has arrived!

The novel starts light and funny on boil the frog principle - if someone told me I would be full bawling multiple times with this novel, I’d have thought they were insane, but i swear my eyes hurt by the end of it. I started out being amused and/or disliking the mains and by the end I would die for either of them.

The Wife is First - OK, this one did not make my top 10 web novels but it’s a sweet, fun gay cottagecore fest. Our ML, a royal prince, and his spouse, a smart if delicate aristocrat, keep house, eat noodles, play with their pet tiger, make out and spoil each other rotten, while occasionally fighting battles and outwitting their court enemies. It’s so very mellow. That couple redefines low drama - they are both nice and functional and use their brains. It’s as if a nice jock and a nice nerd got together and then proceeded to be wholesome all over the place.

I mean, the set up could be dramatic - our ML the prince, lost his fight for the throne and is about to be killed. The only person who stayed loyal to him is his arranged husband the aristocrat guy who ML never treated nicely since he resented marrying him (marrying a man in that world is done to remove someone from the ability to inherit the throne.) And yet the husband stood by him not out of love but beliefs in loyalty blah blah. Anyway, he transmigrates back into the past right after their wedding night and is all “I got a second chance OMG! I don’t want the throne what is even the point? I want to live a good long life and treat the only person who stood by me really well!” And he proceeds to do so to the shock of the aristocrat who had a very unpleasant wedding night and generally can tell the man he just married would rather eat nails than be married to him. But soon enough (no seriously, it’s not many chapters at all) he believes the prince is sincere blah blah and then  they get together and they pretty much become cottagecore goals.

In terms of dramas, I only do period dramas (or novels) so I am not the person to be able to recommend any modern BLs. There is a flood of upcoming (hopefully) period BL dramas but it’s relatively thin on the ground now. The two I will recommend is Word of Honor (which is AMAZING) and Winter Begonia (which I just started watching but which owns me already.) I have a tag for both - the one for the former is huge and I cannot recommend either strongly enough. I’ve heard good things about The Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty, but I am not big on mysteries so haven’t watched it for myself.

In terms of the upcoming BLs, the ones I am most looking forward to are Immortality and Winner Is King, but The Society of the Four Leaves also looks promising.

[heinzpilsnergonewild]

Vegeta’s Character Analysis Looooooooooong Read

Oh my, what can I say? I just really love to write long essays in a language that isn’t even native to me, lol.

Well, nobody’s perfect, I guess. ... Were you expecting a Cell joke here? I may not be perfect, but that doesn't mean I have to be that predictable.

Ahem, anyway.

This isn't exactly a psychological analysis of the character - more like, hmm, a storytelling analysis. Or something in between, really.

You may not find anything fundamentally new in this text, but I definitely had fun writing it, haha.

It's mostly amateur. I have a useless psychology degree, but not a literature one.

My classic rant about vegebul fics is included, of course.

Summary: proper psychological analysis requires a single continuous personality, which Vegeta simply doesn’t have.

The more I think about Vegeta, the more I come to the conclusion that he is only pretending to be a consistently evolving character.

In fact, he's a bit like 10 different characters in one, which abruptly replace each other (and that's without considering the difference caused by the voice actors’ approach and the changes in his looks). Essentially, Vegeta's a collection of disparate images, arbitrarily lined up by Toriyama and hastily glued together. And the beginning of this line is so far from the end of it that these two extreme images cannot be perceived as belonging to the same person. Well, because human psychology just doesn't work that way.

(Not that Vegeta is unique in this respect – it’s a common feature of characters in long stories that authors compose as they write. Still, his case is quite extreme and interesting as example.)

I mean, take Vegeta in the Saiyan or the Namek arc. He's a complete psychopath. He clearly doesn’t suffer at heart from the unnecessary violence (as, for example, Guts from Berserk). His behavior looks like something natural for him, not an unhealthy defensive reaction. He enjoys it, he smiles happily, killing and torturing weak innocent people. And such a degree of psychopathy is not something that can be healed by a couple of deep personality crises or years of peaceful family life. Vegeta's redemption arc works through strong emotional impact and forgetfulness of the audience, but makes very little sense when viewed in retrospect.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Perhaps the biggest, hmm, splitting of the personality occurred with Vegeta right after the Namek arc. Toriyama had already made a small retcon of the character’s motives before (to include Vegeta in the context of the Freeza army after the Saiyan arc), but it didn't feel that drastic.

You see, until Vegeta was invited to Bulma’s house…..

(Gosh, Toriyama, you could’ve done it more subtly, really. Vegeta killed Yamcha, threatened to kill Bulma, gutted Zarbon in front of her eyes, slaughtered an entire Namekian village... Oh well.)

…Ahem, anyway, right up to Bulma's invitation, Vegeta looked to me like a character who, hmm, has a life of his own? I mean, you have always felt that his motives and behavior were generated by the bizarre social system, not related to the little world of Goku and his friends. Simply put, Vegeta was a natural product of the big space civilization, an organic part of it. His whole personality was formed by it, all his plans, motivation and ambitions were associated with it. And although in the Saiyan arc, he gave the impression of an independent entrepreneurial chief at the head of a small hierarchy, in the Namek arc it was revealed that Vegeta is actually far from independent. He lost his throne and his people, he was in slavery to the tyrant all his life, and wants to take power for himself. So, his social background and the motives caused by it post factum get much more complex. But in short, Vegeta wanted a highest possible position in the hierarchy he knew. In this way, he was… social? His belonging to the Saiyan race was only a small (although important) part of the overall picture. Because the Saiyans were dead, but the Freeza Empire was alive.

But when Toriyama realized Vegeta's popularity and decided to keep him in the story after Namek, it came as a blow to the character's personality. Apparently, the author simply couldn't come up with an elegant way that could keep the character in all its complexity around, and therefore did a very clumsy thing. He roughly cut Vegeta out of his social context and almost forcibly glued him to the main character group like a poorly done appliqué. But although you see rough edges and glue drips, the story moves on rapidly, distracting you with Freeza and Future Trunks, and you don't stop to think about what happened. This is how, almost imperceptibly, Toriyama changed Vegeta's motives (and, consequently, the basis of his personality). Yes, Vegeta's saiyan pride was also significant part of his character previously, but when it became his sole and central motivation after Namek, you feel like a very big and important piece of him has been arbitrarily cut off. This wouldn't have happened if Toriyama had followed the logic of previously established social motives, rather than his desire to make Vegeta a convenient figure. Now, bound hand and foot by the author, the character is forced to behave as the plot requires.

Still, all this can be justified by the fact that Vegeta experienced a deep emotional shock as a result of death, which forced him to rethink his life priorities and wait for Goku (especially in the manga, where he just lived with Bulma for a whole year after Namek, without even trying to use dragonballs) ... And then he waited for the androids (despite the final death of Freeza and his father, which was an excellent chance to try to take over the decapitated empire). Anyway, this rationalization doesn't negate the fact that the character, as a result, has lost a significant part of the fire that he demonstrated in the Namek arc. His new energy, the energy of obsession with surpassing Goku, turns him into a new character – bitter, marginalized and focused on training.

(Ironically, the very splitting that made him a less attractive character in my eyes allowed vegebul to take place. After all, imagining the romantic relationship of the nice Bulma and Vegeta at the height of his villainous ambition is really difficult. That just would be a psychologically implausible story.)

In the Android and Cell arcs, after brief glimpses of the SSJ superiority, Toriyama turned Vegeta into a plot tool, whose personality flaws he could use to spoil the situation favorable for the heroes. As a result, Vegeta continued to be an angry and unhappy character who has lost most of his charisma, but on top of that, he also started to be really annoying. ... Still, also kinda amusing thanks to his truly impressive inability to draw obvious conclusions from the ego bruises he gets.

(If you ask me, the character's biggest contribution to the Cell arc was to ignore the existence of condoms, lol. Although strictly speaking even it was an achievement of Future Vegeta (RIP). But seriously, Vegeta's relationship with Trunks turned out to be one of the few things that I was really interested in about this part of the story.)

And then there was Goku’s death and the 7-year-gap. ... At the end of which Vegeta still didn't look like a happy man who has found his place in the world. Even though he had seven whole years (and a spaceship) to change something. I mean, this is the case when it'd be logical to expect changes in the character, but for some reason they didn't really happen (or they did, but veeery quietly and unstable). I mean, Vegeta trains with Trunks, yes. And he's married to Bulma now, apparently (which we learn only at the end of the arc though). And he hasn’t killed himself yet, which means that he sees some meaning in his existence. Hurray, I guess?.. The problem is that when we first see Vegeta after the timeskip, he keeps walking around with such a sullen expression, as if Goku had died just yesterday. (Remember Vegeta in the Saiyan arc? He smiled quite often. For the wrong reasons, but hey.) Basically, Toriyama tried to sit on two chairs at the same time here - 1) keep Vegeta as recognizable as possible (because he hasn't decided what to do with him yet) and 2) keep him around (which doesn't make sense for the character if he hasn't undergone significant changes during the timeskip). And the result of this hesitant approach is an undesirable effect - it feels as if Vegeta hasn't built a new life for himself all these years, but only waited for Goku to return.

As if the man is unable to evolve without Goku's influence. Until Kakarot does or says something, or is just around, everyone else in Vegeta's life and his own reflection has little or no meaning. Old social ambitions? His wife and child? New insights gained from life on Earth? Pffft. Goku is able to destroy the seven years’ worth progress (no matter how small it may seem) in one day, and at the same time, one fight with him is enough for Vegeta's character development to jump forward explosively. It sounds like a solid ground for shipping, but In fact it’s just a direct consequence of the author's poorly chosen narrative structure.

The thing is, Toriyama tend to avoid romance and slices of life, and shows Vegeta's personality mainly through fights and their consequences. And at the time Goku just turned out to be the only significant character for Vegeta, the fight against whom could be used as an excuse to develop the character in front of the audience. Well, Toriyama couldn't get Vegeta to fight Bulma or himself, you know.

I believe that the plot structure chosen by the author (rapidly changing action events immediately after a long timeskip) is not a very good basis for a redemption arc. For a good redemption, a character had to have screen time during which small changes accumulate gradually, between the big points. And Vegeta simply didn't have it. Besides, the scheme by which Vegeta develops is really messy. Because at first, Toriyama kinda froze his development at the neutral point (thereby partially devaluing the influence of Vegeta's family on him). Then in one moment, the author abruptly reversed even this the-end-of-the-Cell-arc development with Majin Vegeta (this time completely devaluing the family factor, because the betrayal was Vegeta’s conscious decision). God, how I hated the Majin Vegeta idea. And in the next scene, the author made a quick retcon, which gave the family’s influence the status of a ground for Vegeta’s personal growth again for no apparent reason. It's as if a huge bundle of family values was post factum squeezed into the character in defiance of everything that we just saw with our own eyes. This is a complete narrative mess.

But... oddly enough, Vegeta's redemption still manages to work, and work spectacularly. My guess is that it's because by that time the audience is already SO sick of Vegeta, frozen in his bitter anti-heroism, that it desperately wants the author to finally do something new with the miserable guy. Well, at least get him out of his misery. So people are willing to accept it in any possible form.

... And the author chose the form of a powerful emotional catharsis. The explosion was legendary, haha.

I don't even know if this is a good reason to call Toriyama a genius (after all, he found a very clever way out of a difficult situation, in which he found himself thanks to his own bad decisions.)

The only thing I'm sure of is that despite everything I was very sad because of Vegeta's death. I didn't even realize that I had become emotionally attached to this asshole until he made such a spectacular exit, lol. As if something had broken inside of me, and all the analyticity of my mind couldn’t prevent it. I was surprised when I found myself crying really hard - usually my emotions don't reach this level due to fictional stories. (Well, maybe it was due to the fact that my own father was dying of cancer at that time, and the moment just triggered my emotions. ... Oops, it seems a little too personal, doesn't it? Well, at the end of the day, this fact is an integral part of my unique dbz experience. Come to think of it, in dbz, fathers die regularly).

But while this scene greatly affects emotions and forces a new viewer (or reader) to truly reconsider their attitude towards the character for the first time, the absence of a neat gradual movement towards this moment weakens its influence somewhat.

At this point, Vegeta’s character splits once again (perhaps the last time within DBZ). You simply cease to understand who this man really is and who he was before.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now, when I look at all the images of Vegeta in general, I come to the conclusion that I like this character the most in the first two arcs and in the end of the last arc. Two directly opposite moral poles.

(Funny enough, because my initial reaction to Vegeta and Nappa was annoyance: "Well hello, the next stereotypical villains who like to chat and laugh maliciously instead of simply killing their victims." (Still, against the background of Freeza, Vegeta turned out to be a much lesser evil in every sense, haha). You see, usually I'm not a person who likes villains. Basically, I only distinguish such characters from others as a result of romance or redemption. It’s only after that I begin to see aesthetics in their villainous charisma as well.)

And now, in retrospective, I believe that at the beginning of the story Vegeta is at the maximum of his vitality and charisma. Especially compared to his ever-crisis moody version (who supposedly lives happily with a loving family). In the Saiyan arc, he's objectively the most powerful character (Freeza didn’t even exist in Toriyama's head at the time). Vegeta is domineering, playful and unpredictable, but most importantly - his self-confidence is fully justified. Oh well, it was good while it lasted. He's really in control. These are, if I may say so, quite exciting qualities in a man, haha. Even if he looks like an evil dwarf in stupid armor and bullies some weaklings. I'd even say his demeanor in the Saiyan arc (especially with the voice of early Horikawa) is suspiciously easy to translate into a sexual context (well, until he loses control and gets hysterical, lol).

The Namek arc, placing Vegeta in a broader context, somewhat spoiled his original image (after all the big words, it turned out that he was running errands for Freeza all this time), but gave him a more interesting background and a strong drive. He had ambitions and a socially significant goal, and he actively and passionately fought for them against a clearly superior enemy. In addition, his inability to defeat Freeza by brute force forced him to use his brains from time to time, and not just pull another power up out of his ass, as is now traditionally done in DragonBall. (Needless to say, I consider high intelligence to be one of the most attractive traits). All this made his position in the plot as interesting as possible. He literally sparkled with energy.

Well, we know what happened next. Brain Death, an eternal chase after Goku, and an off-screen family life on a backwater planet that Vegeta is supposedly happy with. Until he suddenly became a really beautiful character without a proper justification for this (well, at least the explosion was spectacular). Really, I like the general concept of redemption, and yet... the way Toriyama portrays it in the story just doesn't work convincingly enough for me.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Another point I’d like to cover in this already too long essay ahhh I'm a monster is Vegeta’s personality in fanfiction.

Reproducing (?) Vegeta is a bit like playing with a lego set - his personality and behavior is always the result of a conscious reconstruction, which is based around a specific point on the long contradictory line. Depending on which end of the spectrum the chosen point is, the author is forced to shade facts related to the opposite end, or to give new context to Vegeta's past (or future) actions. It's always noticeable when the author extends the later, sympathetic Vegeta's image to an earlier segment of the story. Apparently, it's possible to kill the person who raised you (with an evil smile on your face) just because the situation was too stressful lol. Likewise, when the authors allow Vegeta to remain a charismatic psychopath, the story wouldn't work without ignoring some parts of the later canon.

(And, of course, there is always a "medium" type of Vegeta - Vegeta from the 3-year-gap, whose personality is almost entirely based on anime fillers. Yay, here comes the promised vegebul rant

Honestly, I'm pretty tired of this "gravity room exploded again woman grrr" type of Vegeta.

Because if you take the manga, we have no idea how Vegeta actually behaved with Bulma and her parents, what his training regimen was, and what he did in his free time besides unprotected sex. People elevate his rudeness and irrational self-torturing to the absolute because of all these filler patterns, but this is just one of the possible versions of the events and the character's behavior during this time (albeit partly canonical). But... there are also alternatives. There are smart Vegeta, curious Vegeta, civilized Vegeta. Honestly - I don't think Bulma would've married him later if there was nothing in his personality that’d make communication with him enjoyable. I mean, she's a rich modern woman, she doesn't need a husband just for convenience and Vegeta is a marginal freeloader anyway. And if we subtract good looks (which people often attribute to Vegeta) from the equation, then the idea that he has no interest in anything other than training and cannot maintain an interesting conversation becomes completely unconvincing. Toriyama clearly didn't attach much importance to the fact of their marriage, and generally avoided romantic scenes as if they were on fire (and, perhaps, did the right thing), but these two just had to be capable of adequate and mutually pleasant personal interaction in order to take this step.

In general, Toriyama's lack of attention to most aspects of the characters' lives other than fighting and training, on the one hand, can be considered a drawback of DBZ, but on the other, it creates a lot of room for fans' imagination. But not everyone uses it. Most authors generally repeat the same tropes over and over again and don't try to look at the three-year-gap from a new angle, although the canon provides all the possibilities for this. Because of this, fics in this genre often seem boring. But in fact, it's not the setting itself that is boring, but only dusty formulas in the heads of the authors.)

Ahem, so where were we?.. Oh yes.

Actually, Vegeta's inconsistency is a very handy character trait for the authors, as it minimizes the chance of accidental OOC. Indeed, it's quite difficult to make someone to behave out of character if he has many different canon versions of himself, lol. On the other hand, this leads to the fact that the character seems to... kinda disintegrate. You never see his whole face, because he simply doesn't have it. As a result, Vegeta turns into a mosaic that must be reassembled each time. And I keep staring at this crazy kaleidoscope like an idiot.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Well, that's... quite a lot of contradictions in my relationship to Vegeta, haha. Still, life without contradictions would be somewhat boring, I guess.

Thanks for your attention I suppose?..... lol, as if someone really got to this point

The End.

P.S. 1: The antisocial version of Vegeta who doesn't understand stupid human rituals and hates crowds, but puts up with it for the sake of his family is my spirit animal, haha. This is just so damn relatable to my autistic personality. Maybe I'm an alien myself.

P.S. 2: Actually, my favorite dbz character is Piccolo. Yep.

[frazzledsoul]

So lately I've been thinking more and more about getting into the Gilmore Girls fandom again, which is cute, because the fandom is nonexistent, pretty much (even though the show is actually pretty popular on Netflix even all these years later) and I kind of wanted to talk about how I fell out with it.

I updated a story this week I had not touched for a year. It's my monstrous fic about Jess being Rory's baby daddy and it's 26 chapters so far and I kind of feel it went off the rails about seven or eight chapters ago but Lit fans seem to like it. Literati is not really my ship: I love them, but I also love Rory with Logan and I have written for both and see the merit in both ships. So I'm emotionally detached from it to a certain extent which is not the case with Luke/Lorelai. And I did not really get along or agree with what I thought the "official" opinions were from a lot of L/L fic authors that the fandom as a whole was encouraged to have.

The fact that I no longer talk to a lot of those authors/fans is partially (okay, mostly) my fault. There were a lot of cultural/political/lifestyle differences that couldn't be reconciled, but also a really wide gulf in fandom opinions that couldn't be reconciled, either. The fact that I was not a nice person about certain things last summer didn't help. I've blocked people on here about stuff I now consider petty and have retracted it but basically....I think sometimes online friendships need to stay in certain places and not be placed in toxic environments like Twitter and Discord where things can easily get out of hand. But when you're on a rage-blocking spree it can be hard to talk yourself down from it.

I guess the point I want to make here is that when the show was going on it had a considerable fanbase that was somewhat morally/culturally conservative. I don't think actual politics here is the issue (ASP was pretty clear about where she stood on that one) but if you were uncomfortable with Lorelai sleeping with Christopher while he had a girlfriend and never acknowledging that what she did was wrong and stupid it was okay to say that. If you didn't think it was okay for Rory to be involved with Dean while he was technically married to Lindsay it was okay to say that (not an opinion I share, but it was out there). If Lorelai sleeping with Christopher was a complete deal-breaker for you and you felt you couldn't sympathize or like her anymore after that and that what she did couldn't be justified, it was okay to say that. I feel that in 2016 with certain L/L fans and fic writers dominating the conversation, it wasn't okay anymore to express those types of opinions. Lorelai sleeping with Christopher is just a stupid thing Luke has to get over while we obsess over and over about how Luke failed Lorelai by not giving her the perfect wedding she wanted. It was perfectly okay for her to shove that knife in as far as she could if that's what she needed to do to feel that things were "over".

At the same time, the dominant L/L opinion that we were all encouraged to have was....intensely traditional in places. We were encouraged to believe that Lorelai's need to get married outweighed every other consideration, moral or otherwise, that marriage was going to immediately solve her and Luke's problems even though eloping ASAP would solve virtually none of them, and that Luke once again failed Lorelai by never proposing in the years between the OG series and AYITL despite the fact that it's explicitly stated several times throughout the revival that she did not want that. The dominant opinion here neither respects fidelity or has any room for a nontraditional arrangement, which is an odd combination to have.

There were other issues here, such as the time three popular fanfic writers decided to write stories one after the other about how Luke wearing jeans to dinner at Emily's did not mean he did not have any money and how they had to disabuse Emily of that notion right away because....how dare Luke actually be a person who could not afford nice dress pants. Being poor isn't a moral failure, people, and neither is wearing jeans to dinner. And yeah, fic writers can write anything they want and if I don't like it I don't have to read it and blah blah blah, but I think it's just another example of the "fandom" kind of laying out what opinions one was and was not allowed to have and how one often felt like an outsider for liking Luke *because* he was a redneck.

The thing is that when I go back and read older stories written by fans who were watching the show while it was airing or even fans who write for multiple ships I feel they...understand it more? The older stories understand why Lorelai's actions were so devastating and felt like such a betrayal. There's a writer who wrote in both time periods who has a story where it's explicitly stated that whether Lorelai was technically cheating or not doesn't matter, because it was still a horrible thing to do and she knows it and she's sorry. I honestly never felt as vindicated and validated as I did when I read that take on it. I feel this is S7's view on the situation. It's not like Lorelai tries to argue the point or anything: she knows pretty much right off that it was horrible. Yet the "modern" writers and fans seem to believe that Luke expressing any anger, even temporarily, is worse than what she did. And I feel intensely uncomfortable in a fandom where that is the dominant opinion.

Most of this isn't found in the fics themselves, for the most part, but in the publicly expressed opinions of the writers. And I feel this is a problem, in fandoms: you have your beloved fic writers and your thought leaders and they control the conversation and no one is really allowed to challenge them. Which is kind of why I feel fandoms in and of themselves are toxic: it's unhealthy to let only a few people decide what can and cannot be accepted. Sometimes it's better to let fics stay on the page and not know too much of what the writer's fandom opinions are....or at least, not to the point where it is considered the *only* opinion.

I just have one final thing to say, which is that I feel having the dissenting opinion that cheating is bad and not getting married is not a tragedy if you do not want to do it is something I feel has come back on me when I tried to write my take on L/L: I have a long, angsty story that I needed to write to get it out of me and let Luke say the things he needed to say about what had happened. I went round and round with some of these established writers in the reviews, because there were some very popular and influential fic writers who did *not* like my take on the subject. So there's some pretty solid evidence beyond my feeling that only certain takes on this ship were allowed other than my own insecurity. I feel all of this is unnecessary, and those who sympathized more with Luke than Lorelai should have a space to say why they feel these things.

But any rate, most of this is over now. The only stories really being written are AUs these days (the most prolific L/L writer working now is someone who never watched the revival and whose stories definitely have a more old skool take on things as far as the moral issues go) so all of the stuff in the past that we fought over doesn't matter.

But in case anyone cares....I'm probably updating that angsty fic next week. And it's going to have Jess in it. And he might be a (temporary) manwhore. So I'm sure I'll get some of those reviews again.

[popculturebuffet]

Darkwing Duck Quadruple Feature! (Beauty and the Beet, Whiffle While You Work, Jurassic Jumble, Something Fishy)

Welcome back! It’s been a bit since I visited St. Canard and my march to watching Just Us Justice Ducks by watching one episode, with the exception of Megavolt the first chronological appearances of, each member of the Justice Ducks and Fearsome Five. The Megavolt exception was so I could, by comission, cover the one and only appearance of the OTHER Negaduck if you were curious.So far besides Negsy and Volty, i’ve covered both of Morgana’s first chronological episodes, Liquidator’s and (SIgh) Gizmoducks. But with only 6 left to go.. I put the seires on hiatus to work on ride of the three cabs and my minty fresh retrospective of life and times. At the TIME it didn’t seem like a bad idea, I could get to this any time and what not.. but in hindsight.. yeah putting an almost finished project on hold till two much larger projects, that at the time of this review have 10 and 13 installments left, WHILE also starting two more projects... was not my best move, especially since I have a comission, and an episode needed to properly review that comission AND a valentine’s day episode to review.. all of which come AFTER Just Us Justice Ducks chronlogically and 2 of which involve Negaduck. So yeah I whiffed it bad on this one and this mini-marathon is my way of fixing that, finsihing up the last few episodes before the big event. The episode i’ve waited almost a decade to watch and one of the most loved in the series history: Just Us Justice DUcks, which is coming up next week. Then LIfe and Times will be right back where it was and I promise to get that out weekly. But yeah with logisitcs out of the way and 4 episodes to go, I don’t know how to go slow so let’s get dangerous shall we?

Beauty and the Beat:The Misplaced Batman the Animated Series Villian

We open with one of the first Darkwings I watched via my old Darkwing Duck DVDS, rewatched a while back and easily one of my faviorite episodes and the first apperance of my faviorite Darkwing Duck Villian, though Liquidator and now Quackerjack are giving him a run for his money. But yeah I love Reggie and part of it is he’s something far diffrent than what Darkwing normally fights. 

While he still fits in with the Rouges gallery: someone with either powers or a good gimmick whose intresting, engaging and most importantly to this show, Reggie is still diffrent in that he’s an inherently tragic figure. While the rest of the rouges have sympathetic qualities theier still not really good people: Quackerjack chose to lash out at what drove him out of buisness instead of starting over again, Megavolt is your standard wants money bad guy, and Liquidator was a massive asshole. And if you add in the other villians i’ve covered, Taurus Bulba was basically Marvel’s Kingpin as a bul and Splatter Phoenix while having a noble goal of funding her arts does so via framing an innocent child and stealing. They aren’t unsympathetic, some of them anyway, but they are still ruthless because they choose to be.  Reggie.. didn’t get that choice. We see from the start of this episode his life has just been being everyone elses punching bag: His boss dosen’t respect him, his cowowkers not only don’t respect him but actively bully him and only the newsest researcher has ever paid him the time of day much less told the two assholes, Gary and Larson, a nice shout out, to stop. And given I reviewed Wonder Woman 84 yesterday i’ts NICE to remember a version of a “geek becomes a supervillian’ story that’s.. actually good. This is basically the same sorry, a disrpsected scientest trnasforms and gets revenge.. just you know done right. 

And SOMEHOW Reggie’s life only gets worse as asshole one and asshole two sabotage his work, he gets fired and is forced to experiment on himself. While that’s a classic mad scientst and supervillian trope what’s notable is Reggie didn’t go immiedtly to world domination. He just wanted to cure world hunger and get some respect. He just wanted to be treated like a human being for once. Instead he got turned into a plant and despite this being a miracle.. he gets MOCKED by gary and larson and runs away, feeling like a freak. And since after that the transformation has clearly made his brain unstable.. he goes from a sweet, put upon guy who just wanted help to people.. to an obsessive plant monster.. who still just needs HELP. He needs therapy and a warm blanket and to turn his life around. And his motivation.. is just not being alone. While his kdinapping of the one scientest who liked him, and he assumes has feelings for him, is bad, and selfish.. it’s clear by that point Reggie is just not himself anymore. He’s Bushroot now. He’s lost himself and were this a diffrent show maybe he could’ve gotten the help he needed and some empathy.  But what adds to the tragedy is Darkwing himself. This episode really showcases one of Darkwing’s biggest weaknses: his inablity to see crime other than in black and white terms. To him it’s just a game of heroes and villians. Nothing more nothing less. Villians can become heroes, as he hopes for Morgana, but to him there’s just good guys ,him and bad guys, everyone breaking the law. For someone whose often seen as an outlaw himself.. he still can’t see things in any other terms. However instead of just being lazy writing... it’s a clever character quirk, at the center of this episode and our final one, as well as one that pops up a little in Stegmutt’s first apperance. It nicely parodies/deocnscruts the whole good guy badguy dynamic by making it clear that sometimes while the person may be doing bad things.. they have a reason for it and sometimes the law just dosen’t work. It’s something I do wish they’d dug into more but given this was more of a comedy, I get why they didn’t, but what they did with it is great and it adds to this episode tremendously: Darkwing just sees Reggie as another villian to stop and not as a very unstable man who needs his help, but also needs tobe stopped for his own good. It’s why this is such a good episode, besides some great comic set pieces: it has a really tragic and moving story that , with some tweaking woudln’t of been out of place in batman the animateds eires. It’s still a bit goofy in places, as it should be giving the show it’s in btu at i’ts heart it’s just a relaly godo really tragic supervillian origin story. 

Whiffle While You Work: The Saving Grace of an Okay Episode This one’s more of a mixed bag. For the good... Quackerjack is fucking awesome. While I already loved him from the comics, I hadn’t met his more lightehearted tv counterpart yet.. but boy was he a delight. From his it’s play time catch phrase which despite being repeated a LOT never got bored to his really invenitve use of toys. While a vilian with a toy gimmick is not new, Toyman has been around for.. 80 years? Damn. I should do some Superman TAS episodes this year to commemerate that. Point is between him and the joker the gimmick isn’t “New” but Quackerjack still feels unique from using actual jacks, to a motorized hula hoop, to a GIANT CRYING BABY DOLL TO FLOOD A CITY. Jackie is just a delight every minute he’s on screen, and his motivation is solid: wanting to get revenge at the Whiffle Boy video game and i’ts insuing phenmonin and merchandise deals for squeezing him out of buisness. It makes him mildly symathetic enough to be intresting but not enough to override his terrible actions. He’s just fun to watch, and Micheal Bell is phenominal in the roll. easily one of my faviorite vilians thus far and it’s easy to see why he showed up quite a bit. 

Sadly the rest of the episode.. is not very intresting. It starts with your standard “Adult gets child away from the video game only to play it” plot which is belivieble, my dad was a gamer back during my childhood and probably still plays games ocasionally to this day. He fucking loved Starcraft, Ultima ONline, Super Metroid, Warcraft II and III.. and swearing. He really loved swearing at the games. And the idea of the episode isn’t bad, Drake is jealous that Gosalyn is in the limelight for once.. the issue  being a grown man competing with his own daughter just makes Drake really unlikeable. He at one point tries to use his parental authority to take her out of the contest, lies about being in the competition, and dosen’t apologize or learn enough to make up for his being a dick about this. THe episode really suffers from Launchpad not being around to be a buffer between the two and as ssuch it’s just uncomfortable. Hell Gos threatens to reveal Drake’s identity to .. someone.. but she still comes off sympathetic as when Drake presses her on it.. it’s very clear she made the threat on the spur of the moment out of hurt. 

Also the whole Whiffle Boy game craize extending to a city is delightfully batshit, and plausable given i’m pretty sure if nintendo could afford their own city we’d have it over in japan and for a video game episode in the 90′s, this one isn’t all that bad. It actually seems to get games on SOME level, and seems based more on an arcade game, which drake plays whiffle boy on at one point and the 80′s arcade competition craze, and since arcade comeptitions were still a huge thing in the 90′s, it’s very clear this si written by people who actually know what a video game is and don’t just fear it as some strange doodad their kids are into. Trust me I’ve been around animation so long this plot has become tiresome. So not a BAD episode, just held back by drake being written even more dickishly than usual.  P.S. there’s apparently an ultima level to the game.. so either Lord British is finally putting Chuckles down or someone needs to know what’s a paladin. 

Jurassic Jumble: Two Great One Shot Characters that Taste Great Together Well okay Segmutt does get one more episode but this is still his only episode on his own just like Neptuina next, so I count it well enough. Point is this episode is pretty good. It does have some weaknsses: It starts with Drake not beliviing Honker’s theory about a recent theft of acountants, one he’s only on the scene for because he happens to really need help with his taxes because, contrary to what Wesley Snipes thought, Superheroes still need to pay taxes. He dosen’t belive it’s dinosaurs.. he dosen’t belivie it’s dinosaurs despite the foot prints, honker being smart and HAVING FOUGHT A DOG MADE ENTIRELY OF WATER. 

I just get annoyed when superheros in a superhero universe don’t hav ea logical reason for dismissing something.. or random citizens.. it was fine if reptitous in the stan lee days because it’d been 20 years, at the time, since superheros were active and people can be stupid but it gets grating when someone says somethin’gs not possible in a superhero universe. Given we’re currrently dealing with an outgoing president who refuses to accept an election is real and his followers who think masks are a polical issue i’ts not exactly unrelasitic, dosen’t mean it’s enjoyable to read or watch. 

Still it works here because it splits the plot nicely and Gosalyn’s disbleif is less grating as she just wants it to be martians and dosen’t bully her friend or anything over it, just makes a few snyde remarks. The episode also wasn’t helped at first by the fact there’s a really reptitive bit where Darkwing bungies down to investigate the crook he thinks is responsible, but is actually just chilling at his minium security prison. It’s just not funny and takes up too much of the episode. But the episode picks up towards the second half when we meet our dinosaur: Stegmutt, a dumb but kind and friendly child like former janitor turned stegasaurs, whose unwittingly kidnapping people for his “friend” Dr. Fossil, the professor who turned him, and genuinely is not a bad soul and likes gosalyn and honker. He’s just clumsy and destructive and working for someone he dosen’t know is evil.  Speaking of which.. Dr. Fossil is really damn awesome and i’ts a shame he never came back in the comics or cartoon and hopefully Frank does him better in the reboot. Seriously he’s enjoyable, a bit nebbish but delightfully insane, deciding to wipe out all non dino life because he’s tired of getting panicked screams in the street and of all the dino merchandise like those puzzles with the pieces missing. He’ sjust delightfully nutty, with his love of saying bin bang boom and his having to put up with Stegmutt’s antics, as well as the whole joke that he TURNED HIMSELF INTO A DINOSAUR, yet gripes about being a dinosaur and acts like it’s humanity’s fault , balking when Gosalyn suggests he just.. turn himself back. Plus Ptetrodacytl’s are awesome so tha’ts a bonus. Seriously his showing up turns the episode from okay to fucking amazing. Seriously bring him back for the reboot.. and get Rich Fulcher to voice him. Seirously Bob Fossil as Dr. Fossil... it’s too perfect NOT to do casting gag wise, and he frankly perfectly fits the charcter down to the nasily voice. Plus Rich does voice acting quite a bit, so he’s already likely in Frank’s Rolodex. 

Stegmutt himself is also not too shabby, your standard child like moron, but he’s got a sweetness and niceness to him and we get some good gags like his habit of breaking off handles, his opening sodas with his tail and Fossil getting rid of him by telilng him to check if he left the bathroom light on...

And the climax with Darkwing.. turning.. into this

I don’t get it either but i’ts still a fun climax. Also forgot to mention Dr. Fossil can do that blow you away by flapping his wings thing Storm Eagle can do. Neat. All in all while not the series BEST outing, it has some flaws holding it back, it’s a damn fun one and one I highly recommend. Okay one more. 

Something Fishy: The Better Submariner This is a simple but good one: St. Canard beach has gotten trashy.. literally there’s trash everywhere. And while Drake is ambilent to it, Gosalyn is taking up the crusade to take out the trash and the garbage people... and gets her dad beaten up over it by dumping trash on some guys head but frankly, he deserved it.  Things go up a notch though when some sea creatures invade and .. clean up the beach and beat up darkwing. And while they destroy some property.. they aren’t exactly wrong? This is where that flaw I mentioned comes in though. Drake just.. can’t see things in shades of grey and insits he must be the good guy and whoevers doing this must be stopped.  However it becomes clear when we meet the antagonist that while her methods are wayy to extreme.. she’s in the right. Neputina is an awesome character, easily one of the series best and esaily horribly underulitized. She was a simple fish who thought a toxic waste barrel was a new friend.. and learned the hard way by becoming a sexy fish woman. Yeah I said it. But her motive is understandable thanks to her origin and just how BAD it’s gottne, with piles of trash all underwater and the laws Drake cites agianst this sort of thing not doing squat. It’s a nice take on the old enviornmental message , something I dreaded going in as it makes a valid point; sometimes diong things the “right” way isn’t enough.. but it still dosen’t justify harming innocent people in the process, as Nep’s ultimate plan to flood the city would.  Launchpad ends up being the voice of Reason as drake is too caught in his games of good guy bad guy to get Neptuina ISN’T a bad person, just one fed up with people hurting those she cares about. Neptuina is a unique villan in that unlike Morgana, who while having a sympathetic motive was out for herself, Stegmutt, who didn’t reailze he was on the wrong side, and Gizmoduck.. wellll

Neptuina.. is just misguided. She has the right idea but the wrong methods and Darkwing’s too stubborn to admit it.. but he’s also seen as in the wrong with Launchpad realizing DW just.. isn’t the good guy this time, but in the best scene of the episode talking Neptuina down by pointing out innocent people will get hurt. It’s a good, nuanced episode about envrionmetnalism with a throughly charasmatic and intrersting, acted wonderfully by Sussan Silo, antagonist. Neptuina is a better version of Marvel’s namor the submariner: she goes against humanity.. but I don’t want to punch her and dosen’t have one of her constnat character traits as “I want to bank your wife richards BANG YOUR WIFEEEEE”

So overall.. a good batch of episodes. Only Wiffle While You Work was all that weak, and even it had it’s charms and Quackerjack. It shows the series overall quality: even the just okay episodes here are still really fun to watch. It’s just a solid show overall and whie not without flaws is a classic to this day for a reason. Next week we’ll wrap this up with JUST US JUSTICE DUCKS! Until then stay safe and goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. 

[waltwhitmcn]

has there been any author whose style you’ve resonated with? admittedly that’s oddly phrased but like.. for me i jive best w dostevsky’s style cos of how it appears to b driven by whim of thought

oh yeah def!! the first time i really noticed an author’s style was when i read on the road, the fast-paced jazzy rhythm of kerouac’s prose spoke to something within me, although i’m not quite sure what. probably the restlessness that i feel at night. later on i fell in love with joan didion, especially her personal essays. i never read anything like it. i spent a year writing my own personal essays afterwards, although not as well as her. i can definitely feel her influence in the way that i turn my sentences though, the way they bend and dip. once she said something along the lines of “grammar is a piano i play by ear” and it’s silly but it’s a lot like it for me too. i’m not a native english speaker but i did not learn through grammar lessons, i learned through music &literature. i never learned the rules, never felt the need to. i think i have a certain understanding of the way the language is supposed to flow, and that’s how i work it, and english has so far allowed me to bend it to my will, so our agreement’s pretty solid. but to be more precise, because i fear i strayed a bit from the og question, i like didion because of the way she obsesses over order in the midst of chaos. that’s a funny way to live one’s life, but one i understand well. she anchored her ankle to a stone in the middle of a sea storm, and i think somewhere along the lines i probably did the same. for kerouac it’s a bit different. there are parts i take, and others i leave to the rest. but i know his need for spirituality as the one beneath my own breast, &the way it feels when you hear the call from some mystical foreign place, be it real or some mind-place, whatever. sorry if that was incoherent, or conceited?? i do enjoy the sound of my own voice a tad too much at times. thank you for the ask! and know that you made me want to give dostoevsky a try sometime soon, it sounds like an interesting experience!!!

[bighousela]

MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world; the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller and Michael Minas the most expensive living artist of all time, as they cut their path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain.

WRITER’S STATEMENT Peter Fuller was my late father and I wrote this Biopic screenplay based on his memoirs, private letters and journals from the archive held at the TATE. This project has allowed me a dialog with the father I never knew. The story really came together when I created the character of Michael Minas out of Peter’s best friends and rivals, and my own adaptation. Comparisons have been made to two of the most popular streaming series this year; THE CROWN, which has brought a context to 20th Century British political and cultural history like never before. And breakout series QUEEN’S GAMBIT which has popularized the game of chess, an otherwise niche field, whose participants are obsessive and yet the story is entirely character driven. These are equally the aims of MODERN ART. 2020 has only proven we need art, now more than ever. Peter Fuller was like a punch in the guts to the art world from 1969 to 1990. I want for this film to reach the person walking into an art museum for the first time knowing nothing about the paintings in front of them and hit them emotionally just as hard as the collector with five Picassos on their wall. This is an inside look into a world that is a closed door to the average person, I want to kick that door down with this piece. Laurence Fuller, 2020

SYNOPSIS INTERVIEWER: Michael Minas, your latest piece, a car wreckage made of solid gold at Deutscher Galleries, has made you the most expensive living artist of all time. Can you tell our readers what you believe is the state of Modern Art? MICHAEL: This moment, as we all know, is missing someone. He was my oldest friend and greatest adversary. Thirty years on and we still feel his absence stronger than ever. He pulled himself to the centre of this carousel and watched the horses dance for his pleasure, wincing at the neon lights. PETER FULLER… This is all your fault. When my assistant found Peter’s journal in my studio this morning, there was no more hiding the origins of my work. The radical 60s; John Lennon plays guitar with Che Guevara, Vanessa Redgrave rallies a protest in Trafalgar Square, Peter and I were there for it all and we had the scars to prove it. Shaggy hair and anarchy everywhere. Art was the centre of this game and art was radical. It was time to question everyone and everything. And yet, Peter was struggling to find his voice amongst so many competing agendas. Peter was a terrible painter, I kept encouraging him to write instead, none-the-less he insisted on having a solo exhibition, for which he sketched his first wife the sensual COLETTE as the Venus De Milo. The show was a critical disaster in all the papers across England, I should know, I wrote one of them. Peter’s confidence as a painter was shattered, but it was that day a critic was born. Britain didn’t need another painter, it needed a writer. I connected him with the revolutionary journalist Tariq Ali who inspired him with the words “Write our revolution. Seize the time.” Peter’s fierce and prolific columns inevitably led him to JOHN BERGER. There was no greater critic at the time. After an invitation to join Berger at his home in France, they talked for days, Peter became fascinated by the man, who became his surrogate father. I am ashamed to admit it now, but I was jealous. The three of us locked in a power struggle: Two brothers fighting for the father’s approval. At Berger’s request to find out which side he’s really on, he asked me to keep an eye on Peter. I watched him in the hungry hours of the art openings. I watched him feed his demons at the late night whipping houses and horse tracks where he spent his last pennies on the strangest hopes. Little did I know, he was watching me just as closely. I took it upon myself to steal his journals. I could not do this alone. I had to enlist the help of the person closest to him, Colette. As I read them feverishly, of course I knew it was wrong, but what was he hiding? I was obsessed with trying to figure him out.

Anxiously I read in Peter’s journals how he wrestled with his father in the tormented dreams of his childhood where we first met at boarding school. The older boys could be unusually cruel back then. Failing to comply with their authority we were tied to a fence in a bull paddock and whipped within an inch of our lives. Reading his account again inspired me to create the exhibition MINOTAUR’S SONG in 1986. I knew I could never beat Peter with words, but my art would torture him and force him to rebel against us. And he did by publishing brutal columns. John felt as though he had lost his son, he turned to me. Colette could no longer bare Peter’s anguish and the marriage was ripped apart, she turned to me. Peter went mad with jealousy and confronted Berger and myself at the exhibition. Our next debate was televised and it was merciless. Peter turned his back on all of us. He was black listed across the entire art publishing trade, except for his own passionate glossy MODERN PAINTERS. The magazine tore the entire establishment apart on both sides of the divide. There, revealed at its centre, was Peter holding the curtain open to the dying light of beauty. At the launch neither Berger, nor I were spared in the most intense debate I have witnessed let alone been a part of, as nobody could use language as a weapon like Peter. Finally, he had undeniably found his voice. I did not see his final letter until after the car crash which claimed his life so abruptly. Of course Peter’s final move in this game is a crescendo which reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. Who better to deliver me this message than my assistant, but did she know more than she was letting on? George Mackay Michael Minas MICHAEL MINAS - 30s Caucasian Male (British), Peter’s lifelong best friend, though rougher round the edges, the two are locked in a constant cycle of camaraderie and rivalry. The emotional rollercoaster of their relationship escalates from adolescence through the revolutionary 60s, into passionate televised debates of the 80s, sensational art openings and betrayals of love and loyalties, played out on the art world’s stage. LEAD JOHN BERGER - 40s-50s (British), a handsome man with a large presence and a wisdom that is expressed in the lines of his face and the openness of his heart. John Berger was the leading art critic in England throughout the 20th Century. Notorious and internationally recognized for his controversial perspective on art criticism which was also deeply personal and autobiographical. He was Peter’s mentor and over time his surrogate father as their intense relationship sent ripples throughout the art world. LEAD

Modern Art Script Trailer

[bbclesmis]

Andrew Davies on Les Miserables: ‘I’m rescuing it from that awful musical’

Give Andrew Davies a piece of classic literature and he will show you the erotic desires and deep-rooted anxieties that lurk beneath. Think of the passions he unleashed in the nation’s living rooms when he sent Mr Darcy for a dip in his full-blooded 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, or the consternation he provoked when he inserted a spot of incest into War and Peace in 2016.

Yet even to Davies, a new adaptation of Les Misérables – which he claims “will rescue Victor Hugo’s novel from the clutches of that awful musical with its doggerel lyrics” – posed a challenge. Perhaps the biggest question was how to represent the sexuality of its two principal characters: Jean Valjean, the prisoner who breaks his parole (played by Dominic West); and his nemesis, Javert (David Oyelowo) the policeman who hounds him until the end of his days.

Over tea in central London, Davies tells me that he was surprised to discover that, in Hugo’s 1862 novel, neither character mentions any sort of sexual experience, leaving the 82-year-old screenwriter wondering, at least in the case of Javert, whether it was indicative of a latent homosexuality.

“His obsession with Jean Valjean represents a kind of perverse, erotic love,” Davies says. He doesn’t stop there. In capturing the febrile atmosphere of post-Napoleonic France, he also shows how the innkeeper’s daughter Eponine (Erin Kellyman) expresses her desire for the earnest student Marius (Josh O’Connor).

“One of the best things Hugo does is to have Eponine tease Marius with her sexiness because he is a bit of a prig,” says Davies. “So I have introduced a scene where Marius, even though he is in love with Cosette [Valjean’s adopted daughter], has a wet dream about Eponine and feels rather guilty about it. I think it fits into the psychology of the book.”

Another problem that needed solving was Cosette, “a pretty nauseating character in the book”, whom Davies has made “strong and optimistic, rather than just an idealised figure who doesn’t add anything at all.” In the past, he has spoken about how he has turned the more saccharine depictions of 19th-century womanhood he has found on the page into women with the power “to disconcert men”, by injecting into them a little of his own mother’s character. I ask if she also makes her presence felt in Les Misérables. “I don’t think so. Was she like Madame Thénardier?” he wonders, referring to the sometimes violent innkeeper’s wife, here played by Olivia Colman. “No, that would be awful. Although she was quite keen on smacking people. The women in this book are not terribly complicated.”

I suggest that this might not sit well with modern viewers. “Well, I suppose Fantine goes on one hell of a journey,” says Davies, effecting a cod-American accent. “She develops a sort of animal ferocity and that is all because of how she has been treated.”

Davies’ childhood sounds rosy by comparison. No sooner had he started at his Cardiff grammar than he wrote a naughty poem about two of the modern language teachers, which went around the whole school in samizdat. He recites it for me:

He kissed her, she kissed him      

back.  

He took her knickers off and put    

them in a sack.

She took his underpants and put    

them in her bag.

He said: “Excusez-moi, but may I    

have a shag?”

After that, his writing career settled into a slow burn. He studied English at University College London, then moved to Kenilworth, where he met his future wife, Diana Huntley (they have been married since 1960 and have two children) and began teaching literature at the Coventry College of Further Education. He wrote the odd TV play and a whole host of radio scripts – sadly, now all deleted. One 1972 play about wife swapping, Steph and the Single Life, received complaints from those who denounced it as “obscene, disgusting rubbish”.

More solid success came to Davies in the Eighties, most notably with his greatest original work, A Very Peculiar Practice, based on his experiences at Warwick. Heavy on existential gloom, it concluded with the campus being sold to a private American company, which turned it into a defence research base. Never has a series ended to quite such a peal of mirthless laughter and its extraordinary scheduling (9pm on BBC One) was, thinks Davies, a mistake.

At that point, it was hard to imagine that Davies would, a few years later, be the person to turn costume drama into sportive heritage TV. His Middlemarch came first, in 1994, and was followed 18 months later by Pride and Prejudice, one of the most popular TV series of all time. I wonder how he feels about Nina Raine’s forthcoming small-screen adaptation.

“I am very excited about it,” he says. Then he adds, “even though I wish her all the best, I hope it’s not as popular as my one. It gives me so much pleasure when people say, ‘I was feeling rotten and so I just went to bed and put on Pride and Prejudice’. People use it to get over bereavements – I’m better than a priest!”

This is not arrogance. Davies may be sharp, naughty and ironic, but he is embarrassed by anyone who makes a fuss over him. He worries that this month’s documentary about his work, Rewriting the Classics, is “a bit effusive”, and he seems too pragmatic to be affected by writerly insecurity. Is he sensitive?

“I am much less sensitive than I used to be. I remember being cast down when I had a play that went to Broadway,” he says, referring to 1980’s Rose, which starred Glenda Jackson as a schoolteacher and closed after only 68 performances. “Column after column was spent saying how terrible it was. I couldn’t eat solid food for a week.”

He had a similarly bruising experience with the film industry. A decade ago, Davies admitted that he was disappointed that his movie career had not been more buoyant (Bridget Jones’s Diary was a rare success). Talking to me now, however, he is more sanguine.

“And that’s because the writer is king in TV. In film, all the stories that people say, that they pay you a lot of money and treat you like s---, are true in my experience. I have been sacked from several movies without being told. You meet someone at a party and you say you are working on a picture and they’ll laugh and say, ‘No, you’re not.’ It’s not terribly nice.”

Two more Davies adaptations will be shown next year – of Austen’s fragment, Sanditon, and of Vikram Seth’s epic A Suitable Boy. He would love to adapt more 19th-century classics (Dickens’s Dombey and Son and Trollope’s The Barchester Chronicles are top of his list) but before that, we can look forward to his version of the Rabbit Angstrom novels by John Updike, an author whose perceived misogyny might not seem an obvious fit in today’s cultural climate.

“There are a lot of grim things said about Updike at the moment, but he is a wonderful observer of how we all behave,” says Davies. “I don’t think writers are there to be role models, they are there to say what the world is like from their point of view.”

If the number of irons he has  in the fire makes it sound as though Davies is spreading himself too thinly, he displays an air of toughness despite his advancing years and a recent double hip replacement. “I don’t feel old. I had my one-year check-up yesterday and my surgeon pronounced that he was pleased with his work. My hips are good for another 10 years.”

As well as his prolific adapting, I wonder whether Davies has the desire to tell the story of his own life. “I really ought to,” he says. “I would like to start with my parents’ lives, in the early days of their marriage, because something went wrong there.” I ask why and Davies lowers his voice almost to a whisper.  “I think it’s probably something to do with sex.”

Ben Lawrence, The Telegraph, 22 December 2018 (x)

[dweemeister]

Joker (2019)

On March 30, 1981, John Hinckley Jr. shot and nearly killed United States President Ronald Reagan, wounded a police officer and Secret Service agent, and permanently disabled Press Secretary James Brady (whose death in 2014 was ruled a homicide from the gunshot wound thirty-three years prior). Found not guilty due to insanity, Hinckley obsessed over Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) while planning his actions. Like Taxi Driver’s protagonist Travis Bickle, Hinckley plotted to assassinate a famous politician. Besotted with Jodie Foster (who starred in Taxi Driver) and disappointed by not attracting her attention after stalking her, Hinckley planned the assassination attempt to impress the actress.

Hinckley and Taxi Driver were both on my mind when watching Todd Phillips’ Joker. Not only do they share thematic connective tissue and similar color palettes, but both films have been plagued by discourse about whether they will inspire someone to commit horrific violence – I respect Taxi Driver as one of the best films released in the 1970s, but it is not something I could rewatch easily. Filmmakers, indeed, should have a sense of social responsibility in their creations. Joker, as a character study first and foremost, paints its politics in broad strokes – preferring to submerge, as character studies should, the audience into the mindset of its protagonist. Joker invites the audience to empathize with a tortured soul who, failed by the state and refusing to hold himself responsible for his worst actions, consciously moves beyond redemption. That point, where the Joker is beyond redemption, is found where Batman fans know him best: murdering only to see if that murder is funny. Whether he reaches that point within the bounds of this film is up for debate.

It is 1981 in Gotham City. The city belches with urban malaise. A garbage collectors’ strike roils the city; socioeconomic inequality is rife; “Super Rats” plague the streets; the municipal services are overwhelmed. Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is a clown-for-hire living and caring for his aging mother, Penny (Frances Conroy). Money is sparse and one of the few joys Arthur and Penny have is Murray Franklin’s (Robert De Niro in a role not far removed from his turn in 1983′s The King of Comedy) primetime talk show. Arthur suffers from random paroxysms of laughter (a real-life affliction known as emotional incontinence, among other names) that, at the very least, invites disdainful looks from strangers who then avoid him. Arthur is seeking help for his depression and other unspoken problems, but Gotham’s social services are soon defunded by the city government and various other events force him to his breaking point.

Also featured in this film are Arthur’s hallway neighbor Sophie (Zazie Beetz) and cameos from Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), a young Bruce Wayne (Dante Pereira-Olson), and Alfred Pennyworth (Douglas Hodge).

The film does not glorify any of its hideous violence, but those who are not critical consumers of media will interpret this film how they will. Nevertheless, Joker is less on the side of its protagonist than the likes of Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange (1971) and will likely result in a similar reverence once this film has exited theaters. Within the film’s confines, there is nothing surprising about any of its violence; how the violence happens is shocking in its immediacy and realistic ferocity. It is contextualized as being the inevitable result of a sociopolitical system that cares not for the downtrodden, the mentally ill – to reiterate, Phillips is painting with broad political strokes. Arthur, who keeps on seeking professional help and ways to quell his silent rage, is attempting to stay his destructive behaviors long after his first homicide (as the film does not glorify violence, it also does not target those with mental illness; it directs its ire towards those without sympathy for the mentally ill). Those efforts are stymied by factors beyond his control – an almost-plot twist to shock even ardent Batman fans, the idolization of an unnamed clown who has executed three members or accomplices of Gotham’s elite.

It is here that Joker separates itself from the social cynicism and post-Vietnam War disillusionment and of Taxi Driver; it is here that Philipps’ film becomes just as much a reflection of the era it was released in and the nation of its origin as Scarface (1932 original with Paul Muni), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and The Dark Knight (2008) once did. Those films respectively capitalized on fears of Italian and Irish mafias making urban centers their criminal playgrounds, countercultural diehards claiming free-wheeling Jazz Age outlaws as their own, and a vast surveillance state crafted to declare war on terrorism. For Joker, the societal diagnosis by Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver (2010′s The Fighter) is double-sided, damning those with and without power. The film decries individuals and groups who deify charismatic or compelling figures claiming their actions and/or rhetoric to be indicative of the common person’s interests. These revered figures incorporate grievance into their persona, weaponizing the language of victimhood not only to bring attention and (justifiably or unjustifiably) force change on a problem, but to absolve themselves of their personal sins. They are, dare it be written, populists. Beware those who invoke “the people” to vindicate their crusades.

Arthur Fleck, as an underemployed clown, does not ask for the attention of the masses. He wishes, “to bring laughter and joy to the world,” yet finds fulfillment in making a handful of children’s hospital patients smile. During Arthur’s first appearance as Joker, he assumes the accidental and public mantle that has set Gotham aflame – legitimizing the homicides he has committed and the public’s brutalization of authority figures by playing victim. He is consumed in self-pity; his words become a simplistic screed. Notice how appealing his words are, how rapidly rhetorical animosity precludes political violence. In Joker’s darkest sequence, the protagonist will destroy the last remnants of Arthur Fleck and become the popular icon of violent upheaval rarely seen in any of his depictions in DC Comics. This is Joker at its most dangerous, if only because of how violence – whether in oppression or in resistance – is as integral to the United States as political compromise.

We hear these beats of populism elsewhere, too, mixed with capitalist can-do. It is present in Thomas Wayne’s television appearance announcing his candidacy for Mayor of Gotham City – “I alone can fix it,” this man of wealth implies. This is a departure from otherwise sympathetic depictions of Bruce Wayne’s father over the decades in Batman comic books. As a plot development, it (along with the “almost-plot twist”) seems unnecessary if only to ground Joker in the Batman mythos. Contrast this to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where ill-intentioned, humorless capitalists operating within the military-industrial complex are repelled by the wisecracking “good” capitalists within that same system (see: Tony Stark). Murray Franklin, as a talk show host, concocts a scheme to bolster his ratings by humiliating someone in a worse life station – no background checks needed, let alone any semblance of attempting to understand his subject. Thus, Gotham is subject to personality- and grievance-based politics wrung through the corporate avarice of Network (1976). Joker may not have to space to critique capitalism in its entirety – it is a character study, after all – but the entire apple barrel seems spoiled here.

The least controversial element of Joker is Joaquin Phoenix’s magnificent lead performance. Phoenix has made a living playing men whose lives contend with inner turmoil and unsympathetic worlds. His work in The Master (2012) remains has career-defining role, but as Arthur Fleck and as Joker – through the pained laughter spells, his bodily contortions with his ribcage jutting from his frame, and a brooding nature tempered by an initial gentleness – this will be the role that crosses artistic and popular boundaries that segregate filmmaking. Phoenix may now be defined by this role, as Cesar Romero (a solid contract actor for 20th Century Fox despite being typecast as a Latin lover) and the late Heath Ledger (whose work in The Dark Knight overshadows the rest of his filmography) have been.

Director Todd Phillips, best known for The Hangover series, does an excellent job making Gotham City a character. So often consigned to be the faceless and unfortunate city wracked by domestic terrorism from curiously-named villains, never in a film has Gotham seemed like a place with its own history and haunts. The scenes on mass transit alone sell the city. Phillips’ indulgence for slow-motion (with cinematographer Lawrence Sher’s fawning camerawork) during dance sequences and almost constant dollying can be irritating. One montage between Arthur Fleck and Sophie – specifically, when he enters her apartment, confirming how unreliable a narrator he is – displays a lack of trust in the audience to make their own inferences.

Icelandic cellist and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir has crafted a score for her second film for a major American studio. Guðnadóttir’s career has been defined by an unpleasant mix of bass strings, percussion, and synth, droning repetitively, lacking the emotional catharsis that the films she has worked on are striving for. Her work on Joker is an improvement, but this is as difficult a listen as Joker is to watch. The score is almost entirely texture, not melody – melody is for those older films with sugary sentiment and Hollywood endings that do not reflect life’s ugliness, we are increasingly told. Outside of those with an ear for experimental classical music or instrumental music that groans amelodic passages rather than combining lyrical voices, this music has almost no life outside of the movie. Finally, Guðnadóttir’s style fits the film she has scored for.

As a psychological character piece, the only way that Joker could have secured a wide theatrical release in 2019 would be to tie it to bankable comic book lore. Even as Phillips pitched the idea, Joker faced stiff resistance from Warner Bros. executives – including former chairman Kevin Tsujihara and Greg Silverman – who still had the 2012 massacre in Aurora, Colorado on their minds (that tragedy took place during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises). Warner Bros. noting how poorly Zack Snyder’s vision of DC Comics adaptations was faring, needed to extricate itself from Snyder’s adolescent approach.

In the months before Joker’s release and even within the film, Warner Bros. has embraced its past. Of all of Hollywood’s major studios, Warners always seems to be the most conscious and celebratory of its history*. During the 1930s, Warner Bros. became known for the darker content of its films (its rivals MGM, Paramount, and Fox preferred spectacle, maximizing production values, and prestige pictures). The studio became the spiritual home of the gangster film and hardboiled dramas that pushed the boundaries of violence in American cinema – but not for the sake of depicting violence. Even in their musicals (a genre stereotyped as pure escapism), Warner Bros. layered progressive social commentary amid economic depression. Joker – though its own commentary could be more focused and succinct – inherits the legacy of The Public Enemy (1931), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), and its numerous Warner Bros. ancestors.

How curious that a drama with origins from superhero comic books has been little praised for not following the assembly line production methods of numerous films from similar source material. Cinephiles fret, correctly, that movie theaters are becoming a home to superheroes/villains and explicitly-for-children animated features to the exclusion of everything else. The mid-budget character piece is endangered; certain genres have vanished from theater marquees. Joker, to some consternation, has it both ways. It is an excellent, arguably irresponsible, work to be seen with wary eyes.

My rating: 8/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

* Okay, okay you classic film buffs who have already recognized Joker’s references. Modern Times (1936) and Shall We Dance (1937) are from United Artists and RKO, respectively. But both films have long been part of Warners’ library by acquisition.

[kkintle]

The Art of the Good Life by Rolf Dobelli; Quotes

Is it better to actively seek happiness or to avoid unhappiness?

Living a good life has a lot to do with interpreting facts in a constructive way.

That money can’t buy happiness is a truism, and I’d certainly advise you not to get worked into a lather over incremental differences in price. If a beer’s two dollars more expensive than usual or two dollars cheaper, it elicits no emotional response in me whatsoever. I save my energy rather than my money. After all, the value of my stock portfolio fluctuates every minute by significantly more than two dollars, and if the Dow Jones falls by a thousandth of a percent, that doesn’t faze me either. Try it for yourself. Come up with a similar number, a modest sum to which you’re completely indifferent—money you consider not so much money as white noise. You don’t lose anything by adopting that attitude, and certainly not your inner poise.

The most common misunderstanding I encounter is that the good life is a stable state or condition. Wrong. The good life is only achieved through constant readjustment.

As the American general—and later president—Dwight Eisenhower said, “Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.” It’s not about having a fixed plan, it’s about repeated re-planning—an ongoing process.

The truth is that you begin with one set-up and then constantly adjust it. The more complicated the world becomes, the less important your starting point is. So don’t invest all your resources into the perfect set-up—at work or in your personal life. Instead, practice the art of correction by revising the things that aren’t quite working—swiftly and without feeling guilty.

First: constantly having to make new decisions situation by situation saps your willpower. Decision fatigue is the technical term for this. A brain exhausted by decision-making will plump for the most convenient option, which more often than not is also the worst one. This is why pledges make so much sense. Once you’ve pledged something, you don’t then have to weigh up the pros and cons each and every time you’re faced with a decision. It’s already been made for you, saving you mental energy.

The second reason inflexibility is so valuable has to do with reputation. By being consistent on certain topics, you signal where you stand and establish the areas where there’s no room for negotiation. You communicate self-mastery, making yourself less vulnerable to attack.

So say good-bye to the cult of flexibility. Flexibility makes you unhappy and tired, and it distracts you from your goals. Chain yourself to your pledges. Uncompromisingly. It’s easier to stick to your pledges 100 percent of the time rather than 99 percent.

Very few people simply accept reality and analyze their own flight recorders. This requires precisely two things: a) radical acceptance and b) black box thinking. First one, then the other.

“Nothing is more fatiguing nor, in the long run, more exasperating than the daily effort to believe things which daily become more incredible. To be done with this effort is an indispensable condition of sure and lasting happiness,” wrote mathematician and Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell.

Accepting reality is easy when you like what you see, but you’ve got to accept it even when you don’t—especially when you don’t. 

By themselves, radical acceptance and black box thinking are not enough. You’ve got to rectify your mistakes. Get future-proofing. As Warren Buffett’s business partner Charlie Munger has observed, “If you won’t attack a problem while it’s solvable and wait until it’s unfixable, you can argue that you’re so damn foolish that you deserve the problem.” Don’t wait for the consequences to unfold. “If you don’t deal with reality, then reality will deal with you,” warns author Alex Haley.

A basic rule of the good life is as follows: if it doesn’t genuinely contribute something, you can do without it. And that is doubly true for technology. Next time, try switching on your brain instead of reaching for the nearest gadget.

“There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no bold old pilots.”

Pros win points; amateurs lose points. This means that if you’re playing against an amateur, your best option is to focus on not making any mistakes. Play conservatively, and keep the ball in play as long as possible. Unless your opponent is deliberately playing equally conservatively, he or she will make more mistakes than you do. In amateur tennis, matches aren’t won—they’re lost.

disease, disabilities, divorce. However, countless studies have shown that the impact of these factors dissipates more quickly than we imagine.

It’s not what you add that enriches your life—it’s what you omit.

Because our emotions are so unreliable, a good rule of thumb is to take them less seriously—especially the negative ones. The Greek philosophers called this ability to block things out ataraxia, a term meaning serenity, peace of mind, equanimity, composure or imperturbability. A master of ataraxia will maintain his or her poise despite the buffets of fate. One level higher is apatheia, the total eradication of feeling (also attempted by the ancient Greeks). Both—ataraxia and apatheia—are ideals virtually impossible to attain, but don’t worry: I’m not asking you to try. I do, however, believe we need to cultivate a new relationship with our inner voices, one distanced, skeptical and playful.

So take other people’s feelings very seriously, but not your own. Let them flit through you—they’ll come and go anyway, just as they please.

People are respected because they deliver on their promises, not because they let us eavesdrop on their inner monologs.

Two thousand years ago, the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote: “All those who summon you to themselves, turn you away from your own self.” So give the five-second no a trial run. It’s one of the best rules of thumb for a good life.

It’s called the focusing illusion. “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it,” as Daniel Kahneman explains. The more narrowly we focus on a particular aspect of our lives, the greater its apparent influence. 

Take the longest possible view of your life. Realize that the things that seemed so important in the moment have shrunk to the size of dots—dots that barely affect the overall picture. A good life is only attainable if you take the occasional peek through a wide-angle lens.

By focusing on trivialities, you’re wasting your good life.

As you can see, if it’s the good life you’re after then it’s advisable to show restraint about what you buy. That said, there is a class of “goods” whose enjoyment is not diminished by the focusing illusion: experiences.

Material progress was not reflected in increased life satisfaction. This revelation has been termed the Easterlin paradox: once basic needs have been met, incremental financial gain contributes nothing to happiness.

Money is relative. Not just in comparison to others, but in comparison to your past.

Buffett’s life motto: “Know your circle of competence, and stick within it. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.” Charlie Munger adds: “Each of you will have to figure out where your talent lies. And you’ll have to use your advantages. But if you try to succeed in what you’re worst at, you’re going to have a very lousy career. I can almost guarantee it.”

“Expect anything worthwhile to take a really long time”

What matters is that you’re far above average in at least one area—ideally, the best in the world. Once that’s sorted, you’ll have a solid basis for a good life. A single outstanding skill trumps a thousand mediocre ones. Every hour invested into your circle of competence is worth a thousand spent elsewhere.

“You don’t have to be brilliant,” as Charlie Munger says, “only a little bit wiser than the other guys, on average, for a long, long time.”

“One of the symptoms of approaching nervous break-down is the belief that one’s work is terribly important,” wrote Bertrand Russell. This is precisely the danger of a calling: that you take yourself and your work too seriously. If, like John Kennedy Toole, you pin everything on the fulfilment of your supposed vocation, you cannot live a good life. If Toole had viewed his writing not as his only possible calling but simply as a craft for which he happened to have a special knack, he would probably not have ended up as he did. You can pursue a craft with love, of course, and even with a touch of obsession, but your focus should always be on the activity, the work, the input—not on the success, the result, the output.

So, what to do? Don’t listen to your inner voice. A calling is nothing but a job you’d like to have. In the Romantic sense it doesn’t exist; there is only talent and preference. Build on the skills you actually have, not on some putative sense of vocation. Luckily, the skills we’ve mastered are often the things we enjoy doing. One important aside: other people have also got to value your talents. You’ve got to put food on the table somehow. As the English philosopher John Gray put it: “Few people are as unhappy as those with a talent no one cares about.”

So liberate yourself. Here’s three reasons why you should. First, you’ll be spared the emotional roller coaster. In the long run, you can’t manage your reputation perfectly anyway. Warren Buffett cites Gianni Agnelli, the former boss of Fiat: “When you get old, you have the reputation you deserve.” You can fool other people for a while, but not a lifetime. Second, concentrating on prestige and reputation distorts our perception of what makes us truly happy. And third, it stresses us out. It’s detrimental to the good life.

That’s why one of my golden rules for leading a good life is as follows: “Avoid situations in which you have to change other people.”

Without memory, the experience is perceived as entirely valueless. This is surprising, and it makes no sense. Surely it’s better to experience something wonderful than not—regardless of whether you remember it. After all, in the moment you’ll be having a fabulous time! And once we’re dead, you and I will forget everything anyway—because there’ll no longer be any “you” or any “I.” If death is going to erase your memories, how important is it to schlep them with you until your very final moment?

So don’t be surprised when somebody else judges you “incorrectly.” You do the same yourself. A realistic self-image can only be gleaned from someone who’s known you well for years and who’s not afraid to be honest—your partner or an old friend. Even better, keep a diary and dip back into it every now and again. You’ll be amazed at the things you used to write. Part of the good life is seeing yourself as realistically as possible—contradictions, shortcomings, dark sides and all. If you see yourself realistically, you’ve got a much better chance of becoming who you want to be.

I’m sure you recognize the sentiment: “When I’m on my deathbed, looking back on my life…” A magnificently lofty idea, but rather nonsensical in practice. For a start, almost no one is that lucid when they’re on their deathbed. The three main doors into the afterlife are heart attack, stroke and cancer. In the first two cases, you won’t have time for philosophical reflection. In most cases of cancer, you’ll be so stuffed to the gunnels with painkillers that you won’t be able to think straight. Nor do those afflicted with dementia or Alzheimer’s achieve any new insights on their deathbeds. And even if you do have the time and wherewithal in your final moments to reminisce, your memories won’t (as we saw in the previous three chapters) correspond fully to reality. Your remembering self produces systematic errors. It tells tall tales.

“If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”

Not getting bogged down in self-pity is a golden rule of mental health. Accept the fact that life isn’t perfect—yours or anyone else’s. As the Roman philosopher Seneca said, “Things will get thrown at you and things will hit you. Life’s no soft affair.” What point is there in “being unhappy, just because once you were unhappy”? If you can do something to mitigate the current problems in your life, then do it. If you can’t, then put up with the situation. Complaining is a waste of time, and self-pity is doubly counterproductive: first, you’re doing nothing to overcome your unhappiness; and two, you’re adding to your original unhappiness the further misery of being self-destructive. Or, to quote Charlie Munger’s “iron prescription”: “Whenever you think that some situation or some person is ruining your life, it is actually you who are ruining your life… Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life.”

Plato and Aristotle both believed that people should be as temperate, courageous, just and prudent as possible.

The circle of dignity draws together your individual pledges and protects them from three forms of attack: a) better arguments; b) mortal danger; and c) deals with the Devil.

Is it worth the price? That’s the wrong question. By definition, things that are invaluable have no price. “If an individual has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live,” said Martin Luther King. Certainly not to live the good life.

If you don’t make it clear on the outside what you believe deep down, you gradually turn into a puppet. Other people exploit you for their own purposes, and sooner or later, you give up. You don’t fight any more. You don’t hold up to stresses. Your willpower atrophies. If you break on the outside, at some point you’ll break on the inside too.

Your circle of dignity, the protective wall that surrounds your pledges, can only be tested under fire. You might lay claim to high ideals, noble principles and distinctive preferences, but it’s not until you come to defend them that you will “cry with happiness,” to paraphrase Stockdale. 

Say you’re in a meeting and somebody starts going for you, really getting vitriolic. Ask them to repeat what they’ve said word for word. You’ll soon see that, most of the time, your attacker will fold.

For most people, the circle of dignity is not a matter of life and death but a battle to maintain the upper hand. Make it as hard as possible for your assailants. Keep the reins in your hand as long as possible when it comes to the things you hold sacred. If you have to give up, then do so in a way that makes your opponent pay the highest practicable price for your capitulation. There’s tremendous power in this commitment. It’s one of the keys to a good life.

One: fetch a notebook and title it My Big Book of Worries. Set aside a fixed time to dedicate to your anxieties. In practical terms, this means reserving ten minutes a day to jot down everything that’s worrying you—no matter how justified, idiotic or vague. Once you’ve done so, the rest of the day will be relatively worry-free. Your brain knows its concerns have been recorded and not simply ignored. Do this every day, turning to a fresh page each time. You’ll realize, incidentally, that it’s always the same dozen or so worries tormenting you. At the weekend, read through the week’s notes and follow the advice of Bertrand Russell: “When you find yourself inclined to brood on anything, no matter what, the best plan always is to think about it even more than you naturally would, until at last its morbid fascination is worn off.” In practical terms, this means imagining the worst possible consequences and forcing yourself to think beyond them. You’ll discover that most concerns are overblown. The rest are genuine dangers, and those must be confronted. Two: take out insurance. Insurance policies are a marvelous invention. They’re among the most elegant worry-killers. Their true value is not the monetary pay-out when there’s a problem but the reduced anxiety beforehand. Three: focused work is the best therapy against brooding. Focused, fulfilling work is better than meditation. It’s a better distraction than anything else. If you use these three strategies, you’ll have a real chance of living a carefree life—a good life. Then perhaps even in your younger years or, at least, in middle age, you’ll be able to chuckle over Mark Twain’s late-in-life insight: “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.”

The Greek and Roman philosophers known as the Stoics recommended the following trick to sweep away worry: determine what you can influence and what you can’t. Address the former. Don’t let the latter prey on your mind.

Not always feeling like you need to have an opinion calms the mind and makes you more relaxed—an ingredient vital to a good life.

First: accept the existence of fate. In Boethius’s day, people liked to personify fate as Fortuna, a goddess who turned the Wheel of Fortune, in which highs and lows were endlessly rotated. Those who played along, hoping to catch the wheel as it rose, had to accept that eventually they would come down once more. So don’t be too concerned about whether you’re ascending or descending. It could all be turned on its head.

Second: everything you own, value and love is ephemeral—your health, your partner, your children, your friends, your house, your money, your homeland, your reputation, your status. Don’t set your heart on those things. Relax, be glad if fate grants them to you, but always be aware that they are fleeting, fragile and temporary. The best attitude to have is that all of them are on loan to you, and may be taken away at any time. By death, if nothing else.

Third: if you, like Boethius, have lost many things or even everything, remember that the positive has outweighed the negative in your life (or you wouldn’t be complaining) and that all sweet things are tinged with bitterness. Whining is misplaced.

Four: what can’t be taken from you are your thoughts, your mental tools, the way you interpret bad luck, loss and setbacks. You can call this space your mental fortress—a piece of freedom that can never be assailed.

Stop comparing yourself to other people and you’ll enjoy an envy-free existence. Steer well clear of all comparisons. That’s the golden rule.

So wisdom isn’t identical with the accumulation of knowledge. Wisdom is a practical ability. It’s a measure of the skill with which we navigate life. Once you’ve come to realize that virtually all difficulties are easier to avoid than to solve, the following simple definition will be self-evident: “Wisdom is prevention.”

The fact is, life is hard. Problems rain down on all sides. Fate opens pitfalls beneath your feet and throws up barriers to block your path. You can’t change that. But if you know where danger lurks, you can ward it off. You can evade all sorts of obstacles. Einstein put it this way: “A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.” 

Wisdom is prevention. It’s invisible, so you can’t show it off—but preening isn’t conducive to a good life anyway. You know that already.

if you want to help reduce suffering on the planet, donate money. Just money. Not time. Money. Don’t travel to conflict zones unless you’re an emergency doctor, bomb-disposal expert or diplomat. Many people fall for the volunteer’s folly—they believe there’s a point to voluntary work. In reality, it’s a waste. Your time is more meaningfully invested in your circle of competence, because it’s there that you’ll generate the most value per day. If you’re installing water pumps in the Sahara, you’re doing work that local well-diggers could carry out for a fraction of the cost. Plus, you’re taking work away from them. Let’s say you could dig one well per day as a volunteer. If you spent that day working at your office and used the money you earned to pay local well-diggers, by the end of the day you’d have a hundred new wells. Sure, volunteering makes you feel good, but it shouldn’t be about that. And that warm Good Samaritan glow is based on a fallacy. The first-rate specialists on site (Médecins Sans Frontières, the Red Cross, UNICEF, etc.) will put your donations to more effective use than you could yourself. So work hard and put your money in the hands of professionals.

you’re not responsible for the state of the world. It sounds harsh and unsympathetic, but it’s the truth. Nobel Prize winner in physics Richard Feynman was told much the same thing by John von Neumann, the brilliant mathematician and “father of computing”: “[John] von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of von Neumann’s advice. It’s made me a very happy man ever since.” What Feynman means by “social irresponsibility” is this: don’t feel bad for concentrating on your work instead of building hospitals in Africa. There’s no reason to feel guilty that you happen to be better off than a bombing victim in Aleppo—your situations could easily be reversed. Lead an upright, productive life, and don’t be a monster. Follow that advice and you’ll already be contributing to a better world. The upshot? Find a strategy to help you cope with global atrocities. It doesn’t have to be one I’ve suggested here, but it is important to have a plan. Otherwise getting through life will be tough. You’ll be constantly torn between the things that still have to be done, you’ll feel guilty—and ultimately you’ll accomplish nothing with that burden.

Four: be aware that focus cannot be divided. It’s not like time and money. The attention you’re giving your Facebook stream on your mobile phone is attention you’re taking away from the person sitting opposite. Five: act from a position of strength, not weakness. When people bring things to your attention unasked, you’re automatically in a position of weakness. Why should an advertiser, a journalist or a Facebook friend decide where you direct your focus? That Porsche advert, article about the latest Trump tweet or video clip of hilariously adorable puppies is probably not something that’s going to make you happy or move you forwards. Even without an Instagram account, the philosopher Epictetus came to a similar conclusion two thousand years ago: ‘If a person gave your body to any stranger he met on his way, you would certainly be angry. And do you feel no shame in handing over your own mind to be confused and mystified by anyone who happens to verbally attack you?’

What does focus have to do with happiness? Everything. “Your happiness is determined by how you allocate your attention,” wrote Paul Dolan. The same life events (positive or negative) can influence your happiness strongly, weakly or not at all—depending on how much attention you give them. Essentially, you always live where your focus is directed, no matter where the atoms of your body are located. Each moment comes only once. If you deliberately focus your attention, you’ll get more out of life. Be critical, strict and careful when it comes to your intake of information—no less critical, strict and careful than you are with your food or medication.

Avoid ideologies and dogmas at all cost—especially if you’re sympathetic to them. Ideologies are guaranteed to be wrong. They narrow your worldview and prompt you to make appalling decisions.

When you meet someone showing signs of a dogmatic infection, ask them this question: “Tell me what specific facts you’d need in order to give up your worldview.” If they don’t have an answer, keep that person at arm’s length. You should ask yourself the same question, for that matter, if you suspect you’ve strayed too far into dogma territory.

imagine you’re on a TV talk show with five other guests, all of whom hold the opposite conviction from yours. Only when you can argue their views at least as eloquently as your own will you truly have earned your opinion.

think independently, don’t be too faithful to the party line, and above all give dogmas a wide berth. The quicker you understand that you don’t understand the world, the better you’ll understand the world.

In several studies, Dan Gilbert, Timothy Wilson and their research colleagues have shown that mental subtraction increases happiness significantly more markedly than simply focusing on the positives. The Stoics figured this out two thousand years ago: instead of thinking about all the things you don’t yet have, consider how much you’d miss the things you do have if you didn’t have them any longer.

Speculation is more agreeable than realization. As long as you’re still weighing up your options, the risk of failure is nil; once you take action, however, that risk is always greater than zero. This is why reflection and commentary are so popular. If you’re simply thinking something over, you’ll never bump up against reality, which means you can never fail. Act, however, and suddenly failure is back on the cards—but you’ll gain new experiences. “Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted,” as the saying goes.

the next time you’re about to make an important decision, mull it over carefully—but only to the point of maximum deliberation. You’ll be surprised how quickly you reach it. Once you’re there, flick off your torch and switch on your floodlight. It’s as useful in the workplace as it is in the home, whether you’re investing in your career or in your love life.

No matter how extraordinary your accomplishments might be, the truth is that they would have happened without you. Your personal impact on the world is minute. It doesn’t matter how brilliant you are—as a businessperson, an academic, a CEO, a general or a president; in the great scheme of things you’re insignificant, unnecessary and interchangeable. The only place where you can really make a difference is in your own life. Focus on your own surroundings. You’ll soon see that getting to grips with that is ambitious enough. Why take it upon yourself to change the world? Spare yourself the disappointment.

Not believing too much in your own self-importance is one of the most valuable strategies for a good life.

The upshot? There is no just plan for the world. Part of the good life is to radically accept that. Focus on your garden—on your own everyday life—and you’ll find enough weeds to keep you busy. The things that happen to you across the course of your life, especially the more serious blows of fate, have little to do with whether you’re a good or a bad person. So accept unhappiness and misfortune with stoicism and calm. Treat incredible success and strokes of luck exactly the same.

“There’s an infinite number of winners,” Kevin Kelly has said, “as long as you’re not trying to win somebody else’s race.”

The upshot? Try to escape the arms race dynamic. It’s difficult to recognize, because each individual step seems reasonable when considered on its own. So retreat every so often from the field of battle and observe it from above. Don’t fall victim to the madness. An arms race is a succession of Pyrrhic victories, and your best bet is to steer clear. You’ll only find the good life where people aren’t fighting over it.

As Warren Buffett says, “It’s better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.”

Constantly distinguish between “I have to have it,” “I want to have it” and “I expect it.” The first phrase represents a necessity, the second a desire (a preference, a goal) and the third an expectation.

Seeing desires as musts will only make you a grumpy, unpleasant person to be around. And no matter how intelligent you are, it will make you act like an idiot. The sooner you can erase supposed necessities from your repertoire, the better.

A life without goals is a wasted life. Yet we mustn’t be shackled to them. Be aware that not all your desires will be satisfied, because so much lies beyond your control.

The Greek philosophers had a wonderful expression for the things we want: preferred indifferents (indifferent here in the sense of insignificant). So I might have a preference (e.g., I’d prefer a Porsche to a VW Golf), but ultimately it’s insignificant to my happiness.

Bearing Sturgeon’s law in mind will improve your life. It’s an excellent mental tool because it “allows” you to pass over most of what you see, hear or read without feeling guilty. The world is full of empty words, but you don’t need to listen. That said, don’t try to cleanse the world of nonsense. You won’t succeed. The world can stay irrational longer than you can stay sane. So concentrate on being selective, on the few valuable things, and leave everything else aside.

Recognize bullshit for what it is. Oh, and one other rule, which in my experience has proved well founded: if you’re not sure whether something is bullshit, it’s bullshit.

One: self-importance requires energy. If you think overly highly of yourself, you have to operate a transmitter and a radar simultaneously. On the one hand, you’re broadcasting your self-image out into the world; on the other, you’re permanently registering how your environment responds. Save yourself the effort. Switch off your transmitter and your radar, and focus on your work. In concrete terms, this means don’t be vain, don’t name-drop, and don’t brag about your amazing successes.

the more self-important you are, the more speedily you’ll fall for the self-serving bias. You’ll start doing things not to achieve a specific goal but to make yourself look good. You often see the self-serving bias among investors. They buy stocks in glamorous hotels or sexy tech companies—not because they’re solid investments but because they want to enhance their own image. On top of this, people who think highly of themselves tend to systematically overestimate their knowledge and abilities (this is termed overconfidence), leading to grave errors in decision-making.

If you stress your own importance, you do so at the expense of other people’s, because otherwise it would devalue your relative position. Once you’re successful, if not before, other people who are equally full of themselves will shit on you. Not a good life.

As you can see, your ego is more antagonist than friend.

Stay modest. You’ll improve your life by several orders of magnitude. Self-esteem is so easy that anyone can do it; modesty, on the other hand, may be tough, but at least it’s more compatible with reality. And it calms your emotional wave pool. Self-importance has developed into a malady of civilization. We’ve got our teeth into our egos like a dog into an old shoe. Let the shoe go. It has no nutritional value, and it’ll soon taste rotten.

definitions of success are products of their time.

Once you’ve attained ataraxia—tranquility of the soul—you’ll be able to maintain your equanimity despite the slings and arrows of fate. To put it another way, to be successful is to be imperturbable, regardless of whether you’re flying high or crash landing. How can we achieve inner success? By focusing exclusively on the things we can influence and resolutely blocking out everything else. Input, not output. Our input we can control; our output we can’t, because chance keeps sticking its oar in.

“Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.”

Whichever way you look at it, the truth is that people desire external gain because it nets them internal gain. The question that suggests itself is obvious: why take the long way round? Just take the direct route.

“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” (Munger, Charlie: Wesco Annual Report 1989.)

authors Minkyung Koo, Sara B. Algoe, Timothy D. Wilson and Daniel T. Gilbert write: “Having a wonderful spouse, watching one’s team win the World Series, or getting an article accepted in a top journal are all positive events, and reflecting on them may well bring a smile; but that smile is likely to be slighter and more fleeting with each passing day, because as wonderful as these events may be, they quickly become familiar—and they become more familiar each time one reflects on them. Indeed, research shows that thinking about an event increases the extent to which it seems familiar and explainable.” 

“Charlie realizes that it is difficult to find something that is really good. So, if you say ‘No’ ninety percent of the time, you’re not missing much in the world.” (Otis Booth on Charlie Munger, In: Munger, Charlie: Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Donning, 2008, p. 99).

“You’ll do better if you have passion for something in which you have aptitude. If Warren had gone into ballet, no one would have heard of him.”

They were all things that were simply a matter of deciding whether you were going to be that kind of person or not… Always hang around people better than you and you’ll float up a little bit. Hang around with the other kind and you start sliding down the pole.” (Warren Buffett quoted in: Lowe, Janet: Warren Buffett Speaks: Wit and Wisdom from the World’s Greatest Investor, John Wiley & Sons, 2007, p. 36).

“If you want to guarantee yourself a life of misery, marry somebody with the idea of changing them.”

Buffett: “We don’t try to change people. It doesn’t work well… We accept people the way they are.”

If social change is your mission, you’ll end up tangling with thousands of people and institutions who are doing everything they can to uphold the status quo. Ideally, you want to keep your mission narrowly focused. You can’t rebel against all aspects of the dominant order. Society is stronger than you are. You can only achieve personal victories in clearly defined moral niches.

“‘Don’t worry, be happy’ bromides are of no use; notice that people who are told to ‘relax’ rarely do.”

Mark Twain: “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.”

Howard Marks: “I tell my father’s story of the gambler who lost regularly. One day he heard about a race with only one horse in it, so he bet the rent money. Halfway around the track, the horse jumped over the fence and ran away. Invariably things can get worse than people expect. Maybe ‘worst-case’ means ‘the worst we’ve seen in the past.’ But that doesn’t mean things can’t be worse in the future.”

“Then at dinner, Bill Gates Sr. posed the question to the table: What factor did people feel was the most important in getting to where they’d gotten in life? And I said, ‘Focus.’ And Bill said the same thing. It is unclear how many people at the table understood ‘focus’ as Buffett lived that word. This kind of innate focus couldn’t be emulated. It meant the intensity that is the price of excellence. It meant the discipline and passionate perfectionism that made Thomas Edison the quintessential American inventor, Walt Disney the king of family entertainment, and James Brown the Godfather of Soul. It meant single-minded obsession with an ideal.”

“Our happiness is sometimes not very salient, and we need to do what we can to make it more so. Imagine playing a piano and not being able to hear what it sounds like. Many activities in life are like playing a piano that you do not hear…” (Dolan, Paul: Happiness by Design, Penguin, 2015, E-Book Location 1781.)

Should you find yourself in a chronically-leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.” (Greenwald, Bruce C. N.; Kahn, Judd; Sonkin, Paul D.; van Biema,

As you age, change your modus operandi: become highly selective. There’s a lovely anecdote from Marshall Weinberg about going to lunch with Warren Buffett that’s worth repeating here. “He had an exceptional ham-and-cheese sandwich. A few days later, we were going out again. He said, ‘Let’s go back to that restaurant.’ I said, ‘But we were just there.’ He said, ‘Precisely. Why take a risk with another place? We know exactly what we’re going to get.’ That is what Warren looks for in stocks, too. He only invests in companies where the odds are great that they will not disappoint.”

Even the notorious U curve of life satisfaction is connected to false expectations. Young people are happy because they believe things can only ever improve—higher income, more power, greater opportunity. In middle age, between forty and fifty-five, they reach a low point. They’re forced to accept that the high-flying aspirations of their youth cannot be realized. On top of that they have children, a career, income pressures—all unexpected dampers on happiness. In old age, people are reasonably happy once more, because they’ve exceeded those unrealistically low expectations.

John Wooden: “Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.”

from Epictetus, the Stoic: “A life that flows gently and easily.”

“Why, my dear friend, do you do it all? If I had all your millions, I’d spend my time doing nothing but reading, thinking and writing.” It wasn’t until I was on the way home that I realized, oddly startled, that that’s exactly what I do. So that would be a definition of the good life: somebody hands you a few million, and you don’t change anything at all.

[forest-of-stories]

“They Won’t Let You Remember”: Obsession Before Fandom

[This is another round of extremely personal spelunking into my own fannish past that I sometimes do on this and other platforms, including Dreamwidth, which is where I first posted it.  Content warning for digressions into Fannish Discourse, and also brains - mostly mine - conflating fiction and reality in sometimes unhealthy ways.]

Not long ago, my mom asked me on the phone if I was aware that a new Men in Black movie would be out later this year. I told her that I knew, and added, “If I see it with other humans, they might have to hear how the original was one of the root causes of my mind control feelings.” Not the root cause, I should emphasize: those feelings could have come from any number of sources, but that number is probably greater than “one.” We both knew why she had brought up this particular franchise. There is a file cabinet in my childhood bedroom that once contained many, many handwritten stories – some co-written with middle school classmates, though most of them weren’t – that featured the titular secret organization, the protectors of the Earth from the scum of the universe, as the bad guys. I wrote those in order to deal with the sharp turn that my already present Mind Control Feelings took when a silly science fiction comedy featuring giant space bugs encouraged me to root for characters who maintained the status quo by erasing memories from ordinary people – people like me – on a regular basis. Some of you might be asking, “Wait, you knew it was only a movie, right?” And my answer would be, “Yes, but…” Since time and emotional distance have both clarified and obscured my understanding of how I used to think and behave, here is the best (and probably most long-winded) way that I can answer that question for both myself and others: I was an imaginative and overwhelmingly anxious child. On the one hand, my imaginative side desperately wanted magic and aliens and Weird Stuff to be real, which I still don’t think was always a bad thing. On the other hand, during my preteen and teenage years, my anxiety (which wouldn’t be linked to a diagnosis until much later in my life) manifested as “what if?” scenarios that were at least as convincing as reality… even if they were based in speculative fiction. Even if I didn’t believe that they would happen, I spent a lot of time telling myself stories about what might happen if they did, or even just thinking, “What if this is how the world is supposed to work, even if I don’t like it or want it and you can’t make me?” So, although I knew the difference between fiction and reality by the age of twelve, knew that Men in Black was Only A Movie, my “what if?” reflex kicked in hard the more I recognized its world as being much closer enough to my own than my previous, limited encounters with memory erasure in fiction. According to the rules of that world, if the Weird Stuff were real, I wouldn’t even know, and, according to the text, shouldn’t know. “Wasn’t the next line of the theme song ‘They won’t let you remember’?” Older Sister asked, the last time we talked about it. Yes. Yes, it was. The immediacy is right there in the song’s refrain (which, by the way, is still an earworm and a half). At one point, Tommy Lee Jones’ veteran agent character insists that, while Earth is constantly under extraterrestrial threat, humans can only live our lives peacefully if we don’t know about it. (Keeping in mind that humans do a pretty solid job of threatening life on Earth ourselves, I feel like that statement is also linked to questions about the supposedly blissful ignorance of privilege, which go beyond the scope of this post, but are still worth mentioning.) Maybe I reacted so strongly to that bit of dialogue because I believed that it wasn’t true, or because I feared that it was. I’m pretty sure that it was the combination of that scene and its message, with my recurring issues around authority and self-control, and my growing self-awareness about my misbehaving brain, that set my anxious imagination spinning. I would guess that I was wondering something like, “What if the only way that I could have peace of mind was if somebody or something else edited my thoughts and memories without my knowledge or consent?” That idea scared me. It made me angry. And since I was not mature enough to have any filters or sense of other people’s boundaries, I talked – loudly and incoherently – to anybody who would listen, and quite a few people who wouldn’t, about how scared and angry it made me. A lot of the things that I said and did are now difficult for me to understand (one might almost say… alien), and I’m not sure whether they helped with my worries or just made them worse. I do know that this was neither the first nor the last work of fiction about which some of my loved ones told me to shut up because I was too obsessed, resulting in screaming fights, sneering mockery, and tears. I was also old enough, you see, to understand that I wasn’t responding to fiction in the same way that a lot of my peers were, and to, perhaps, start feeling like there was something wrong with me. Not that this was enough to shut me, in fact, up. But I did something else, too: I started to write the stories that I mentioned above. Some of my point-of-view characters were disillusioned agents, others were characters from other media that I enjoyed; the more sources I could pull from, and the more surreal I could make the mix, the happier I was. Still other POV characters were authorial avatars who started out as innocent bystanders and narrowly escaped having their memories wiped. (A few of those self-insert fantasies also involved my earliest fictional crush, who just happened to be an alien from a certain book series that I loved at the time. I quite happily imagined scenarios in which my very knowledge of his true nature was forbidden and yet our love conquered all in the end, but I never put any of those scenarios on paper. I kind of wish I had.) Some of the storylines fizzled out after a few chapters, while others ended with my protagonists riding off into the sunset with their minds, for the time being, safe. I should stress that even my writing wasn't necessarily integrated into my life in a healthy way: I scribbled during my classes (yes, I got caught at least once), I wrote scenarios that crossed the line from nonsensical into offensive (why so many “man in a dress” jokes, younger self? Why even one?), and I buttonholed friends and classmates as audiences and even collaborators despite their probably being much less interested than I was. Even though I was discovering a third option besides “shut up forever” and “shut up never,” it would take several more years, at least two more obsessions, and the discovery of online fandom (I only somewhat knew what “online” was in the late 1990s, and “fandom” was nowhere near my vocabulary) before I sorted out the appropriate time and place for each of those options. But I was on my way there, even if I didn’t know what “there” was. When I questioned and pulled apart an established narrative to turn the heroes into villains and shine a light on viewpoints that I thought the original creators had overlooked, I was writing fanfiction, whether I knew it or not. When I finally did find my way to fandom communities, it was thanks to the Harry Potter books, whose world-building also relies on what TV Tropes calls “The Masquerade.” (If you look up the page for that trope, guess whose quote is right at the top? Yeah.) Which led me to recognize it in certain versions of X-Men, and The Incredibles, and Torchwood and The Vampire Diaries and and and… The more I saw of organized efforts to conceal the existence of Weird Stuff from the Oblivious Masses, the more I understood that the audience was meant to feel like we were in on the secret, but I couldn’t stop sympathizing with the people who weren’t. I still dislike and distrust that trope to this day, even in works that I otherwise enjoy, and storylines involving memory erasure – consensual or not, narratively endorsed or not – still push both good and bad buttons, sometimes both at once. And I believe that my explorations of mind control in fiction, from the beginning until now, have partly been informed by questions like, “What if I couldn’t trust my own mind, and was asked to believe that this was for my own good and/or the good of society?” And, since it bears mentioning: I hope that nobody interprets this recollection as, “A storytelling device warped Nevanna’s understanding of reality, and therefore stories can reprogram people’s behaviors and problematic fiction should be eliminated!” First of all, I object to that kind of black-and-white thinking, as a librarian, a writer, and someone who tries to thoughtfully consume media. Secondly, it’s more accurate that the dysfunction in my own brain once warped my understanding of reality; that even then, I was still responsible for my own actions; and although I have a history of giving fictional constructs an unhealthy amount of power over my own life, I grew out of it. And even though I have mixed feelings about the debate over Problematic Fiction, and I certainly do not condone harassment and shaming – because I’ve been there and done that, on both sides – I try to maintain that it is not my place to stop people from having negative emotions about stories. Even if I don’t agree, even when their objections make me uncomfortable, I can disagree with what they’re saying or doing without invalidating what they might be feeling. And I try to be better at doing so, because I am the last person in the world to deny that stories spark powerful emotions and thoughts, that sometimes they go against the creators’ intentions. Part of becoming a responsible consumer of media and participant in fandom is learning to manage those emotions constructively and make space for other people’s feelings and needs. I used to be angry at my younger self for being unable or unwilling to do that. I’m not anymore. That said, one of the differences between preteen Nevanna and thirty-something Nevanna is that nobody has to hear me talk about mind control unless they want to. (Although I’m happy that a noticeable number of people usually seem to want to.) I never saw the original Men in Black in the movie theater. I think it took me several tries (much to Younger Sister’s frustration) to sit through it on home video, and the ghost of who I was back then, as much as if not more than the actual content, has kept me from revisiting the 1997 movie in the intervening years. If I wanted to watch it again, I think that I would want (and here I'll paraphrase a fantasy series, also about aliens, that more or less avoids the Masquerade altogether) to prepare myself emotionally. I still haven’t watched the sequels or had much interest in doing so, and I never posted any fanfiction set in that universe. It has occurred to me that I might end up writing fic for the 2019 reimagining, if I see it (it wouldn’t be the first time in the recent past that I revisited fictional worlds from my childhood in new and surprising ways). But if I do write anything – and maybe even if I don’t – I will continue to feel pity and compassion and gratitude for the twelve-year-old believer in Weird Stuff who heard, “They won’t let you remember,” and responded, “What if I did anyway?”

[sophiehunteroctopussyblog]

As Benedict Cumberbatch returns to screens big and small, he tells Craig McLean the secret to building a blockbuster body – and why his Sherlock co-star is wrong to fret about the fans

The last time I met Benedict Cumberbatch he was wearing only a pair of trunks, eating wine gums and worrying about the size of his abs. It was April 2017 and we were on the suburban set of The Child in Time, the first drama from his production company, SunnyMarch. In the lead role as a children’s author overwhelmed by grief following the disappearance of his daughter, Cumberbatch was preparing to shoot a scene in a bathtub – and was painfully aware that his toned torso looked out of place.

Shortly after the five-week shoot, the actor explained, he was due to fly to America to reprise his part as the disarmingly buff, dimension-bending Marvel superhero Doctor Strange. The year before, his stand-alone Doctor Strange movie had taken almost half a billion pounds at the international box office – and when it was announced that the character (also glimpsed briefly in Thor: Ragnarok last autumn) would be making a prominent return in this year’s Avengers: Infinity War there was no question of Cumberbatch returning to the role without first hitting the gym.

By the time we met, the actor’s pre-shoot fitness regime – which he described as “pretty full on… but a mental sorbet” – was well under way; hence those abs.

Fast forward to April 2018 and Cumberbatch – a 41-year-old father of two – is in front of me once again, in a London hotel room, midway through the global press tour for Infinity War. This time, thank God, he is fully clothed (in blue linen, denim and suede), but he’s still eating sweets.

Bulging with stars (Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Zoe Saldana and Josh Brolin for starters), the biggest Marvel film to date promises to be a superhero Greatest Hits, featuring all of the Avengers, Spider-Man, Black Panther and the Guardians of the Galaxy. Such is the secrecy surrounding it that I’ve only been shown 25 minutes, all superhero banter and ear-splitting battles against Brolin’s intergalactic villain, Thanos.

Doctor Strange appears to be the main goody, no less. Coiled in his chair, Cumberbatch admits that, after all those hours in the gym, he “bristled” earlier in the day when a journalist commented that his Doctor Strange “wasn’t very brawny”.

“How dare he?” he tuts now in mock-outrage, “Didn’t he see my shirt-off scene? Just hours before we shot it, I was told to do nothing but drink coffee and eat Skittles. ‘What,’ I said, ‘you want to turn me into a trucker?’ But they said it’s about dehydrating – if you have that much of a sugar- and caffeine-hit, the skin ‘shrink-wraps’ round your muscles”. He grins toothily. “And it worked!” He frowns. “I would never advise it, though.”

Still, however Doctor Strange’s physique looks on screen, one place the Oscar-nominated, Harrow-educated star can count on his character having rock-solid abs is on the associated merchandise, from T-shirts to figurines. “It’s the lunch box moment,” says Cumberbatch, wryly.

He tells me about a recent visit to the home of his friend and co-star, Tom Hiddleston (“Hiddlebum”) who has been a member of the Marvel family since 2011 when he appeared as Loki in the first Thor film. “I went into his kitchen and I just said: ‘Holy s---, you’ve been merch’d: you are on the lunch box.’ And he went: ‘I know, it’s great, right?’ And, yes, it is great. It’s also slightly terrifying. I thought: ‘Oh, is that one of the hurdles? Is that a Hiddlebum moment or a McAvoy moment?’” (another peer, James McAvoy, got his “lunch box moment” with the X-Men films). That is: does the actor have to make peace with being turned into a moulded plastic souvenir?

He does, and Cumberbatch evidently has. “It’s terrible but I actually look for kids wearing Marvel gear,” he admits. “And there are very few Doctor Strange lunch boxes or backpacks.” Ten years and 19 movies into the Marvel Cinematic Universe – and with this year’s Black Panther receiving unprecedented critical acclaim – does Cumberbatch think the time for snobbery about superhero movies is over?

If, say, Eddie Redmayne asked him if he should put on cape and tights, would he encourage his friend? “I’d say he’s got his plate quite full with wizardry right now,” he chuckles, referring to Redmayne’s role in J K Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts franchise. “But, yeah, if you really are bored of that, come and join the party!”

With great franchises come great responsibilities, however. Recently, Cumberbatch’s Sherlock co-star, Martin Freeman, grumbled to me about the oppressive level of expectation created by the series’ obsessive fans. “Being in that show, it is a mini-Beatles thing,” the actor who plays Doctor Watson said. “People’s expectations, some of it’s not fun any more. It’s not a thing to be enjoyed…”

Did the fans’ obsession with Sherlock kill the fun for Cumberbatch, too? “Mmm, not really ’cause I didn’t engage with it that much,” he says. “I’m very grateful for the support, but that’s about it.” His attitude is that fan fervour becomes a separate, uncontrollable force, that “it takes on its own thing. But that happens with every franchise or entity like this.”

He pauses, frowns, then continues with what sounds like a bracing criticism of his co-star. “It’s pretty pathetic if that’s all it takes to let you not want to take a grip of your reality. What, because of expectations? I don’t know. I don’t necessarily agree with that. There is a level of it [where] I understand what he means. There’s a level of obsession where [the franchise] becomes theirs even though we’re the ones making it. But I just don’t feel affected by that in the same way, I have to say.”

He is similarly forthright on the subject of Patrick Melrose. In David Nicholls’s forthcoming five-part television drama, adapted from Edward St Aubyn’s autobiographical novels, Cumberbatch plays the lead, a character who, on the page, can appear to be an unlikeable, heroin-taking posho. “Well, your words not mine,” he replies. “I don’t think he’s unlikeable at all. I think he’s fiercely funny, erotic, charming and dangerous. And incredibly, incredibly damaged. So you should feel for him.

"The posh bit? I mean, what, you think people who are sexually abused by their father from the age of five to 10 aren’t worthy of our attention because they’re posh? You need to go back to ethics school, surely. That’s a terribly shaky moral position to hold. So,” he concludes briskly, “I don’t bounce with that.”

Neverthelesss, I suggest, it’s hard to imagine that Melrose’s life – from childhood abuse to the drugs with which he self-medicates to escape his pain – will make easy viewing. “I think at heart it will be a really enjoyable watch,” says Cumberbatch. “But it’s not for the faint-hearted. It is a story of salvation. But it is blisteringly funny. That’s the real hook for me. Even among the depth-charge moments of abuse, you’re kind of mesmerised by Hugo Weaving’s David Melrose [Patrick’s father], as you are in the books. He’s a really magnetic character.”

While researching the part, Cumberbatch talked to counsellors and former addicts. Was he also able to draw on his own school days? Surely, at Harrow, he wasn’t short of classmates weighed down by their heritage. “Well there was a prince of Jordan, so that brought a level of weirdness. But the more English version? I didn’t get an intro much into that world. I was very privileged to be at Harrow, but there’s not some part of Wiltshire that belongs to the Cumberbatches.

“We have our past – you don’t have to look far to see the slave-owning past, we were part of the whole sugar industry, which is a shocker,” he says of the revelation four years ago that an 18th-century forebear was a Bristolian merchant who established plantations in Barbados. But, no, he didn’t know “Lord and Lady Such and Such”.

His only ennobled classmate was Simon Fraser, whose father and uncle died “tragically close to one another in our last year,” making him the 16th Lord Lovat. “He suddenly became titled, and we didn’t even know. “The point is,” he continues, “weird though it might be [given] the perception of me out there, I had to push some to get to the right level of class for this. And that was a very important part of the process. Because Patrick Melrose is very much a study of class, and the disintegration of the moneyed, landed gentry to cash-poor, still possibly land-rich idiocy. Their hypocritical, cynical, back-stabbing, malicious, ironic unsympathetic behaviour is really exposed with a scalpel in this.”

Speaking of men behaving badly, if things had gone according to plan, we would by now have seen Cumberbatch’s performance as Thomas Edison in the historical epic, The Current War. At one point mooted as an Oscar-contender, the film’s original release was scrapped after its producer Harvey Weinstein (with whom Cumberbatch had previously worked on The Imitation Game) fell spectacularly from grace. Cumberbatch sounds far from disappointed.

“If it takes us not releasing our film for a couple of years just to be rid of that toxicity, I’m fine with that,” he says, adding that he wants “to step back and be as far removed from that influence as possible, both as filmmaker and as human being.”

He recalls being on the Avengers set when the Weinstein story broke. “You could feel people going: ‘This is important and this will change things…’ And that’s terrific,” he says. “But having worked with the man twice…” he exhales heavily. “Lascivious… I wouldn’t want to be married to him… Gaudy in his tastes, for all his often-brilliant film-making ability ...

But did I know that was going on? A systematic abuse of women, happening through bribery, coercion, trying to gain empathy, to physical force and threats, physical and to career? No. No,” he says firmly. “That was the true shock. That this has just literally happened. And it’s  been covered up by an entire body of people through lawsuits and gagging and money – hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to silence victims and survivors.”

He shakes his head, aghast. “That truly was a revelation. I have a film company. Our head of development is a woman. There are two women running the television side of SunnyMarch. Adam [Ackland, his SunnyMarch co-founder] and me are the only men in the office. Countless times I’ve brought up issues of equal pay and billing. And so to realise that this attitude is so deeply culturally ingrained – that was my rude awakening. We have to fight a lot harder.”

That’s toxic masculinity dealt with; now bring on Thanos!

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/benedict-cumberbatch-privilege-marvel-muscles-martin-freemans/

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Mr. Hypocrite in action. Seems lying is his second nature now. Everthing for the image. What Martin said about Sherlock days ago is pathetic? Riiiiiight!

Sure it was controversial but pathetic?!

For those of you who think there will be another season of Sherlock: Think again!

And BC didn't know about Weinstein's "methods".

Doing a "Meryl Streep" here BC?!

I'm going with Martin here: