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lavenderdreams205 · 2 months

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spn thoughts as requested

tw & spoiler warning

they should have kept the grungy filter and aesthetics from the early seasons

bring back the southern / midwest gothic vibes

dean would've listened to and loved 90's & 2000s grunge - I know that the whole "there's no good music past '79" is a key part of his personality but pre series/early seasons dean is soo nirvana / Weezer / smashing pumpkins coded

there is too much flannel in the later seasons - I miss the carhartt and leather jackets so bad

BRING BACK DEANS JEWELRY

there's so much about cas that we don't know. there's all the episodes where he just isn't there and they never tell the viewers what he's doing or where he went

on the same note, cas's personality isn't nearly as flushed out as sam's or dean's are. who is his favorite musician? what's his favorite place to travel to? why does he like the pimpmobile so much? does he actually like the trench coat or does he wear it just because it's there?

so many people characterize cas as a little guy, and while he is cute, it's important to remember that he's also an incredibly powerful eldritch horror who leads angelic armies and brands Michaels vessel just because

dean is bisexual and in love with cas - I won't take the time to list all of the reasons here, but you can definitely find those reasons somewhere

i would've loved for them to use the handprint as a physical manifestation of their bond instead of having it be just a scar that fades with time

i'm actually really ok with the way cas dies, I think it makes sense for his character and provides closure (for him, at least, not for dean)

the parallels of cas and dean meeting in a barn and then dean dying in a barn

cassie is deans first love, cas is his last

the imagery of the empty as cas's wings in 15x18

why do the subtitles spell cas as cass, its awful

there's a few lines in the early seasons that seemingly reference dean getting roofied / sa'd and are subsequently played for laughs, Jensen Ackles confirmed that dean would've done underage sw when John didn't leave them with enough money. I believe that this trauma is a major reason that dean never accepted his sexuality

the way deans alcoholism is overlooked and joked about is actually insane

having dean be completely ok after 15x18 is also insane, especially after the widower arc where the show specifically shows it's viewers how deeply dean grieves cas when he dies

deans death is literally so stupid. I get that the show is trying to make a really meta point about the characters not having plot armor anymore because chuck is gone, but dean deserved to find peace. if the events of the show had never happened and pre series dean had never gotten pre series Sam back into hunting it would've ended the exact same way - dean dead on a hunt and Sam dying from old age

dean spends as much time on earth as he did in hell, and while he would never be the same, I like to believe that if he had been allowed by the narrative to live longer he would've gotten back a little of the twinkle in his eyes that he had before hell

in 15x20 Bobby says that cas helped rebuild heaven but if he was there he would've gone to see dean. additionally, there's no way cas should have been able to escape the empty. this is such a glaringly obvious plot hole and it drives me nuts

I would've liked to see cas's wings in the show - not just the shadow of them

the only time I tolerate serious discussion of wincest is in the context of ethel cain

i am a Sam disliker - while he does have many positive qualities, I have a really hard time getting past him not looking for dean when he was in purgatory and him joking about deans alcoholism and other traumas

i like Sam the best when he's with Eileen, I think they're adorable together and I'm mad they killed her off

I am a chronic jack defender, that boy has done nothing wrong

it would be interesting to explore cas and jacks relationships with their respective genders

there's no way being forced to murder the dean clones didn't affect cas, we only saw him kill the last one but the first few he had to kill had to have been devastating

i'm really disappointed by 14x13 Lebanon, we get the scene with John and Sam but I would argue that dean has significantly more reasons to be upset with John and it's unfortunate that the episode just glossed over this - I believe a screaming match between the two would have cleared the air a bit and been at the very least cathartic for dean

i'm fairly sure that it's canonical that John sent dean away on his 17th birthday to kill lesbian ghosts. my personal hc is that John suspected that dean was bi and sent him to teach him a lesson

i saw a post on here comparing hunting culture to biker and cowboy culture and viewing those things through a queer lens and I thought it was fascinating - there's so much spn could've done if it cared about the show more than money and losing viewers

every time cas and dean beat the shit out of each other, it serves as further proof of their relationship rather than discrediting their relationship - ie demon dean and cas fighting in the library is used to parallel Cain and Collette. it could even be assumed that their love is stronger because Cain killed Collette but dean left cas alive

The purgatory love triangle was so silly

once dean worked through all of his trauma and toxic masculinity he would've been a swiftie

all of the main characters have old / vintage cars but in like season 13/14 dean sam and cas just collectively own and use this really ugly silver truck from the 2010s. its such a small detail but it absolutely ruins my viewing experience every time I see it

dean is actually really smart but most of the fandom overlooks it because Sam is characterized as the smart one. if you know anything about cars you know it takes an insane amount of brains to build a car from scratch (he did this with baby multiple times throughout the show) also he just makes an emf meter using basically nothing. if dean had been given the same opportunities he gave Sam, he would've been an engineer or something

i will always be a John hater, if this man has 0 haters, I am dead

#spn #supernatural #dean winchester #castiel #sam winchester #destiel #ethel cain #grunge aesthetic

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cinemaocd · 3 months

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Jenny's ongoing list of films watched 2024

February

January list, here.

Inland Empire (2006)*** It took three attempts to get through this long, confusing film. Like Mulholland Drive or the Season Three of Twin Peaks, Lynch films improve on repeat viewings even if meaning remains elusive. That is part of the joy-- sometimes you just vibe with it.

Death of Stalin (2017)**** One of my favorite films of the last two decades. A harried farce with the bloody-mindedness of Macbeth. Like the Scottish Play, we know how its going to come out, but the fun is in watching the articulate villain, played with delicious malice by Simon Russell Beale being outdone by a team of bumbling, petty bureaucrats and one very bad ass soldier. The Boyfriend (1970)*** Ken Russell's surreal tribute to the burlesque musical genre makes the most of its setting in the 1920s by putting his star Twiggy in iconic psychadelic reiterations of the flapper dress. If you opine the fact that drop waist dresses come back into style every 15 years or so, then this movie is as much to blame as anything. Poor Things (2023)*** Emma Stone gives a wild and convincing physical performance as Bella, a baby's brain in the body of her dead mother and Mark Ruffalo as typical 19th Century Rake Getting His Comeupance iscasting I didn't know I needed. I loved the yearning Godwin (Willem Defoe in truly amazing Frankenstein's monster makeup) and though I haven't read the book, I was drawn into the grotesque, ai generated world of the film. The aesthetics of this movie are as engrossing as the story and characters. Adventures of a Dentist (1965)** The Soviet version of the live action Disney comedies of the 70s, where a humble person is given magical power. Here a dentist is given extraordinary, almost magical abilities to perform dentistry without pain. He becomes a celebrity and his fall from grace involves him giving in to the decadent trappings of being a popular dentist. The humor has a darker edge than Disney though I wouldn't go so far as to call it a black comedy. Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (1973)** This Spike Milligan film plays like a double episode of Dad's Army, not least because of the presence of Arthur Lowe who plays practically the same character here as he does on the tv show. That is not the end of the world however and this is easy to like farce with Milligan's ascerbic, anti-authoritarian bent that is grittier than anything on the sitcom. The Master (2012)** I had high hopes for this, one of Phillip Seymour Hoffman's final films and his last collaboration with director Paul Thomas Anderson is loosely based on the origin story of Scientology. Joaquin Phoenix plays a shell shocked veteran who drifts into the path of the cult leader played by Hoffman. Amy Adams gives a chilling performance as his much younger, controlling wife who is the real power behind the cult. I think I would have an easier time with this film if Anderson hadn't gone around giving interviews saying that Scientology and it's founder L. Ron Hubbard had "helped a lot of people." Of course, this is PTA and Phoenix's character isn't helped at all and he makes the cult worse by being a violent enforcer for the leader's enemies. The levels of whitewashing involved in making a deeply misogynistic cult into a secret matriarchy is just...ugh. However, the homoerotic tension between Hoffman and Phoenix makes the film worth looking out. Murder of Quality (1991)** Made for TV adaptation of John Le Carre's second novel. Denholm Elliott plays Smiley as more doddering and anti-social than Alec Guinness' iconic version of the character. This early Smiley story is more a traditional English village murder mystery, ala Miss Marple, with Glenda Jackson playing Ailsa, Smiley's war buddy that runs a women's magazine. Christian Bale plays one of the students at an elite prep school that forms the economic backbone of the town. Le Carre is merciless in his portrayal of the toxic, petty characters, the wealthy and wannabe wealthy swamp dwellers who run rings around the local constabulary until Smilley steps in and withstands their slings and arrows long enough to solve the case.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)*** Sometimes you sit down to watch a movie with such low expectations that you are pleasantly surprised that it doesn't totally suck. The excitement of things not being as bad as you feared can blot out some of a movie's excesses. At the end of the day this is Billy Wilder, physically incapable of creating a boring movie throwing the whole bag of tricks at this faux biography of Holmes starring Robert Stephens and Colin Blakely. There's farce and physical comedy, verbal gymnastics and exotic locations. Holmes' possible homosexuality is tastefully hinted at and attempts to create a sensationalist account of his drug use, amount to little before the mystery gets rolling. One of the big delights is Christopher Lee as Mycroft whose scenes with Robert Stephens are bitchy queen pissing contests. Genevieve Page does a turn as a would be damsel in distress who turns out to be a worthy opponent to Holmes similar to Irene Adler.

Irma La Duce (1963)*** For some reason between this and Poor Things I ended up watching two movies about Parisian brothels this month. Billy Wilder based this pastiche of 1950s travelogue adventure films like To Catch a Thief and Charade on a French stage play. A strange attempt to weld the success of the Apartment with Some Like it Hot, reconfiguring a Marilyn Monroe vehicle as a reunion of Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. Like the Apartment, Irma LaDuce is tinged with melancholy while avoiding a lot of the cliches about sex work that wind up dating so many films on this topic. The main complaint I have about Irma LaDuce s that it's about 45 minutes too long, a common complaint about many films of this period. (Damn Lawrence of Arabia and all who sail in her).

Witness for the Prosecution (1982)*** A made for tv adaptation of the classic courtroom drama, which credits Billy Wilder's screenplay of his film version. Ralph Richardson and Deborah Kerr star in this remake and honestly their chemistry is just off the charts and we're left to wonder how they never managed to make a film together before. Wendy Hiller, Diana Rigg and Beau Bridges round out the amazing cast. Lacks the tension and edge of Wilder's film but I'm having too much fun with Ralph to care.

The Major and the Minor (1942)**: Billy Wilder's first film as writer and director has some of the hallmarks of his later, greater works: farce, trains, mistaken identity, and queer themes in the form of a lesbian coded sister of Ginger Roger's romantic rival. That all the fuss is about fairly bland Ray Milland is easy enough to overlook as Wilder makes the film about toying with Rogers image as sophisticated, sexy, dancer. Typical Wilder inside jokes about the film industry abound, such as a craze for Veronica Lake hairdos among the tween set and swipes at Hollywood actors like Charles Boyer Rogers' childish masquerade to avoid paying full adult fare is preceded by a series of calamities where she's pursued and objectified by a lot of nasty older men. Hoping to escape their advances as well as the ignominity of turnstyle jumping, she maintains the charade through a long weekend with a lot of handsy tween boys until Milland's fiancee is discredited as a controlling social climber. There is a bizarre side track into her home town where Rogers also impersonates her mother before revealing her grown adult self to Milland. No one ever accused Billy Wilder of being restrained I guess.

The Children's Hour (1961)**** This classic of queer cinema was necessarily a scorched earth tragedy at the time of its release. William Wyler's dreamy, restless camera drags you into the warm, cozy life of this female partnership between Shirley Maclaine and Audrey Hepburn that seemingly has the potential to be a romantic partnership. When nasty gossips and spoiled children start a rumor that they are a couple, the scandal destroys their business and standing in the community. Terrorized by the homophobic townspeople, they are eventually "cleared" of the crime of being gay for each other, just when Maclaine's character comes to the brutal realization that she really is in love with Audrey Hepburn's character. It's hard to watch her grief and shame as she admits that the bullies have discovered a truth about her that she didn't know herself. A fact so many queer people can find relatable. The film is based on a play by Lilian Hellman which used the topic of homosexuality to expose the cruelty of female narcissists who bully their way into power. There is much in common with Hellman's The Little Foxes in that way, but the film, perhaps owing to Wyler's inherent romanticism has more of a Romeo and Juliet quality than the play. One feels that Audrey Hepburn has perhaps realized the truth in the lie, just a few moments too late.

Sweet Charity (1969)*** Directed by Bob Fosse, starring Shirley MacLaine and Sammy Davis Jr and Chita Rivera this classic musical combines the best of Fossee's signature choreography, sixties pop show tunes and the psychadelic aesthetics of the late 60s. This and the Boyfriend have a lot in common, though I think the music in Sweet Charity is more solid and the contemporary setting makes it a tad edgier. MacLaine plays yet another flavor of sex worker, a dancehall hostess and paid companion who seeks to be elevated out of her life into respectability through marriage. The fiancee here is uptight and lacking in appeal and when he finally just flakes out in the final reel it's no great loss to the film.

Thief (1981)** Atypical heist film starring James Caan and Jim Belushi, directed by Miama Vice creator Michael Mann. You can see the beginnings of that iconic 80s TV show, in this movie which favors long scenes of action being edited to music with sparse dialog. Caan squares off against Tom Signorelli a local mob boss who dares to threaten Caan's wife played by Tuesday Weld.

#february 2024 #Jenny's Film Odyssey

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luxicides · 1 year

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a femcel's guide to films ˖⁺ ⋆ ୭

hi. 2022 is (sadly? thankfully?) coming to a close - and i've watched quite a number of films this year. i think.

and, as a ~film student~, i think it only fitting that i ever so kindly share with you, fellow tumblr user, the top 10 most female manipulator lana del rey gone girl jennifers body effy stonem girlblogger2008 manic pixie dream girl movies i've watched so far.

if you're anything like me (read: anxiety-riddled, deftones listener, lana del rey fanatic, pinterest addict), perhaps you'd find these films enjoyable.

(don't take this too seriously. but do. because my taste is great. kidding.)

the virgin suicides (1999) dir. sofia coppola

girl, interrupted (1999) dir. james mangold

black swan (2010) dir. darren aronofsky

gone girl (2014) dir. david fincher

ginger snaps (2000) dir. john fawcett

palo alto (2013) dir. gia coppola

buffalo '66 (1998) dir. vincent gallo

ex machina (2014) dir. alex garland

sucker punch (2011) dir. zack snyder

birds of paradise (2021) dir. sarah adina smith

i'm aware this list is very basic and really that's because i'm just a bad film student. lol.

this list is not in any way serious - this part, however, is (ish).

as much as we all love categorising media into neat little aesthetic categories à la tiktok and its constant outpour of increasingly niche aesthetics, whittling films and really any piece of media into just an aesthetic is, honestly, kind of strange.

yes, films can have elements that are inherently aesthetic. and, yes, tone and vibe does contribute heavily to a film's quality. but a film is so much more than just that.

i'm aware that a vast majority of people don't actually watch a film for solely its visual aestheticism. and i don't mean to attack anyone who watches a film simply because they are attracted to its aesthetic quality. i'd be lying if i said i haven't done that either.

okay, i give up on pseudo-analysis. i don't really know where this is going. i guess that's it from me.

xoxo

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metawatts · 1 year

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Justice League x RWBY: Super Heroes and Huntsmen Part One

I've been workshopping this review for a week it is 9 fucking pages but anyway: It's dangerous to go alone! Take this!

Table of Contents

#1. Introduction: Not for DC Fans

#2. Starting off: “The Good-

#3. Propping Up RWBY over the Justice League

#4. The Texas Character Massacre

#5. Oh boy lets talk about the writing

#6. Other General Notes: -The Bad, and The Ugly”

#7. Final Scores!!

TL:DR- They better not make the 'part 2'. Let's get into it.

#1. Introduction: Not for DC Fans

Let’s get this out of the way: this is a movie made for RWBY fans. It’s made for people who are familiar with RWBY, with the characters, with the worldbuilding, and it’s made with the idea that the people watching are RWBY fans, with DC fans as the backburner. The first reason why I think this? The DC characters get a lot more exposition on who and what they are, while the RWBY characters get to exist and be ‘cool’.

The second reason? This movie is, lets face it, mean-spirited towards DC. And yeah whatever, a DC comic writer wrote this, but to be fair with the state of comics nowadays that says absolutely nothing about respect given to the characters that are popular and well-known (hint: it’s not RWBY). This movie is drenched in schoolyard meanness. It’s all about pointing and laughing at the DC characters. Our introductory scene to this film involves Superman being systematically humiliated in his first scene (unable to use his powers, having his hero codename be mocked, etc.), and that sets the tone.

Meanwhile, the RWBY characters are introduced with action set pieces and knowing about the world they are in. The DC characters are the ones who are comedic relief, who need to be ‘taken down a peg’, who must struggle and prove themselves to RWBY to get the ‘honour’ of working with them, while RWBY doesn’t have to struggle and instead gets to just be ‘cool’. And that’s detrimental to the RWBY characters as well too, by the way, so don’t think I’m being unfair. No one in this film has a character arc, except Jessica, supposedly, and Batman, unfortunately, and you would think that coming off the back of volume 9, often called the ‘character development’ volume, people would be complaining that RWBY and JNR are quite flat, in how they progress through the film.

Basically: The RWBY characters are set dressing; the Justice League are punching bags. With that as our thesis, let’s review this movie. (warning for spoilers)

#2. Starting Off: “The Good-

Now, I won’t pretend this movie was enjoyable for me by any means, but I’m not unreasonable, it had its positives. Four, specifically.

The first one is obvious: the Spectacle Fight Scenes. This movie had a bunch of fights packed away in it, and the overall quality of them was on the whole, in the higher tier of rwby’s Maya fight scenes. Bar a few bits of wonkiness and the general writing surrounding the fights, they were fun. A particular shout-out to my favourite one at the end, Hacked!Flash vs Everyone, that one was fun and fast and highly enjoyable.

Number 2: Batman’s semblance. I’ll fully admit that I’m pretty sure my enjoyment of this power implementation was purely because I like Batman: Arkham Asylum, and this is literally just ripped right from that down to the aesthetics, but, well- I like Batman: Arkham Asylum, and therefore I like Bruce’s Detective Vision semblance and how it was used pretty creatively compared to most other semblances.

Third times the charm: Superman was my shining light, my beacon of hope in this film. He was kind, he was polite, he was supportive and brave and friendly and also, surprisingly for RWBY, managed to do all this without being spineless, he was willing to stand up for himself when he thought he was being treated unfairly (at least, 80% of the time). I wouldn’t even normally consider myself a massive Superman fan, I like when he’s well-written and I notice when he isn’t, but this movie had me actively rooting for any time where he was on screen, he was my absolute highlight in this film, love him even if his fit is fuckin ATROCIOUS. (and his voice acting was, by and large, one of the strongest performances, beyond Kilg%re and Hacked!Barry, who were just clearly having a delightful time villain monologuing)

Number four: the idea of Grimm absorbing dust. It’s a brilliant idea that really ups the stakes in RWBY fights, considering dust is their go-to offensive weapon and literally powers all their bullets, and, amazingly, it was also a cool idea that was carried throughout most of the film. Every Grimm in this film had the ability, more or less, and they used it often and to great effect. Very nicely implemented.

(Final tiny shout-out: the Justice League’s superhero outfits in their own world, that we regrettably only see in a few flashback images, looked GOOD. I wish they kept them instead of getting the outfits in the film proper)

But alas, this film really did have a lot more negatives than positives, so lets get into the first big flaw, and the one I would consider the movie’s biggest failing:

#3. Propping Up RWBY over the Justice League

I mentioned it in the intro, but this movie is consistent in how it utterly devalues the Justice League characters and does everything in its power to showcase RWBY and JNR as ‘better’ in every way. Now, the argument is that this is intentional, seeing as the villain deliberately nerfed the JL characters into being teenagers to weaken them. To which case I point at probably what is probably the most referenced episode of the Justice League cartoon in regards to this movie, the one where they’re turned into literal children, appropriately named ‘Kid Stuff’, and I’ll also point out the lesser known episode of Justice League Action called ‘Trick or Threat’, which had the added bonus of wiping the JL character’s memories of being superheroes.

Now, why am I bringing these up? Its because both of these episodes had the same villain idea as this movie: de-age the Justice League to weaken them, and both of these episodes also did something that the movie failed to do: keep the characters in-character and acting their age, and treat them with respect. I’ll get to the character issues in the next section, but the idea of treating characters respectfully is not done in this film.

Superman, as stated prior, is nerfed, his name is made fun of, he’s talked down to constantly, he’s insulted, he’s distrusted, and not just by team RWBY. But he is not the only one. Wonder Woman has a mishap when trying to get the hang of her new abilities and Blake and Yang laugh at her. Flash, Vixen, Cyborg, and Green Lantern spar against JNR and despite still maintaining most of their adult memories beyond the immediate, and supposedly their skills minus powers, end up on the defensive. Against JNR, not even against the main team RWBY or against Pyrrha. They are outclassed by the side-character team. Batman, the hand-to-hand specialist, is outclassed by Weiss in close-quarters and then a few random SDC guards, Wonder Woman and Superman mostly escape unscathed, beyond the new drawbacks of their semblances, but it’s telling that most of the fight scenes are more focused on the cool things RWBY and JNR do instead of the JL characters (bar the Big Three). Cyborg’s biggest combat moment that’s given any narrative weight is him powering up Nora. Vixen doesn’t even get a moment, and Flash’s only moments come when he’s being the Villain and not Flash. The JL characters are supporting characters in a movie that’s supposed to be about teamwork.

Second point: they really hype Grimm up as scary, even stating ‘Grimm aren’t like your normal monsters, they’re soulless beings that only care about destroying and killing’. And it’s treated as a big moment of internal revelation and horror for the Justice League. Let me say that again, the fact that monsters only care about destroying things, is played as horrifying. For the Justice League. The guys who faced down, canonically in this film: Vandal Savage, an immortal sadistic genius who literally just wants to destroy the world consistently, and Brainiac, a hyper-intelligent alien android who’s goals range from ‘destroyed krypton in some continuities’ to ‘hobbies include horrifically mind controlling people to do evil and shrinking Actual Cities for his snow-globe collection’.

But yes. Grimm are scary now. These are the same Grimm that basically act as cannon fodder in all of RWBY’s actual run time, bar one-offs, and exist just to give the protagonists something they can guilt-free rip their way through to show off. Those Grimm. Those are the scary ones now, supposedly. Despite this artificial attempt to make RWBY seem more badass then the league for fighting monsters, the Grimm are still cannon fodder, the movie doesn’t stray that far from RWBY’s conventions.

Finally, there’s a consistent running theme that ties into the leadership qualities of Ruby vs Clark, but mostly ends up as ‘the Justice League try to come up with ideas and plans, and team RWBY and JNR yell at them for daring to tell them what to do’. Most particularly, it’s Wonder Woman, Superman, and Batman who actually spark Team RWBY into realising that there’s a problem that needs solving. It’s them that comes up with 90% of the plans, and its them that put their money where their mouth is on being not only a good team and smart heroes, but also as friends (more on that later). But instead, whenever they come up with good ideas, it’s shut down, mostly by Nora, and also Yang, as ‘I’m not going to listen to you/don’t tell us what to do/you’re not the boss of me’.

There’s a very big sense of undeserved ego there, especially since the RWBY characters haven’t actually given a reason why they shouldn’t listen beyond general contrariness. But also, it’s a sentiment that does not work on a battlefield, and it does not work in a movie that tries to have a theme of ‘coming together’. Mostly because in a standard plotline about ‘working together’, the disagreements usually require resolving, or meeting in the middle. There is none of that here. The Justice League just bends the knee and goes with being mistreated by teenagers who have not shown their chops as heroes, but it’s still given the ending of ‘we’re all friends now’. The first of many character assassinations throughout this film.

#4. The Texas Character Massacre

This one’s a doozy. No one escapes. Not even Superman, who is almost entirely spared, even he gets a dose of a ‘RWBY Heroic Speech that is just Empty Token Hero Stuff’ (AKA the thing that’s been plaguing Ruby since vol4). But I’ve used Superman already a lot, and he’s probably the least egregious of what happens here, so let’s get into the meat of this topic.

Everyone and their mom on twitter has been commenting about how Batman does not feel like Batman in this. And it’s true. Batman, the self-admitted ‘I haven’t been a kid since I was eight’, the man who is so obsessed with Gotham City it will one day kill him, the man who, even if in this continuity is not a father of 4-8+ adopted children, still has Alfred who he would die for and would die for him, the man who in the current comics run of RWBY in the DC universe says with his mouth ‘I don’t want this semblance, relying on it is detrimental in the long-term’. This Batman. Wants to ditch Gotham because he has wings and powers now.

‘Batman getting powers’ is not new ground, by the way, but the absolute moping this version of Batman does is not only annoying and actively unlikable, it also makes no sense. In the span of ten seconds, in the same conversation, he goes from ‘I want to go home’ to ‘I want to stay where I have powers’. This isn’t presented as a conflict of interest either, by the way. He just completely switches his mind because Weiss said ‘hey stay here’. There’s no consistency, there’s no internal character motivation, it felt like they just wanted to have one character conflicted about leaving HoloRemnant and decided just to throw a dart at a board without caring who it fit. So yes, Batman? Massacred.

Wonder Woman also got severely screwed over too. I had this in my notes that Wonder Woman only acted in character when she was reuniting with the rest of the Justice League and was allowed to show kindness and compassion. The rest of the time, Wonder Woman, a character defined by her love for the world (and was created to showcase feminine power, btw), is a Strong Female Character, and I do mean that in the Negative Way. She’s literally got a Batman Growl on her voice for 99% of her lines, she talks about how tough she is, about the ‘warrior’s life’, and she’s the first character to get violent in a situation. Yes, even beating out Yang ‘punch first, talk later’ Xiao Long. This feels like a parody of Wonder Woman written by someone who read the Whedon Wonder Woman script and took ‘some crazy strong bitch in a tiara’ as their entire central concept for the character. It’s not a Wonder Woman who believes in anything, she’s just a sidekick for the bees to prop themselves up with as ‘warriors’. I could write a million thinkpieces on what makes Wonder Woman an excellent hero character, but all I’ll say is this film’s Wonder Woman would not count.

Green Lantern will get her own post on how this movie handled her so fucking badly because that would balloon this review to a massive size when it’s already a Longk Boi, but suffice to say: she was whitewashed, her anxiety was mishandled, and fucking HELL I miss Simon Baz, why are we erasing Jessica’s friendship with Simon for some screentime-sucking white boy. (Racism and islamophobia, the answer is racism and islamophobia)

Cyborg, Flash, and Vixen all aren’t really characters in this movie as much as they are there to fill out the cast, but suffice to say, they were handled badly. Flash was at his most interesting when being visibly possessed by the villain because beyond that he was just entirely forgettable to the point that you will not notice he has been written out of a fight scene until Vixen goes ‘where’s Flash’. Vixen herself literally is the most sidelined of all the characters in this film, she doesn’t even get a Cool Action Moment, and has just two character traits: Sassy and Vaguely Animalistic Sometimes, not just because she’s a faunus, but her first scene we’re introduced to her sniffing a paper plane for what is literally the only ‘plot point’ she’s involved in, namely, that Flash ‘smells wrong’. And Cyborg. Man, Cyborg. They literally handed the hacking plotline to Weiss with the excuse of ‘the tech here is weird’ and instead shoved Cyborg into some weird jealousy triangle where he was so disrespected by Ren and Nora that even his goodbye to them is met with disdain. Cyborg and Vixen deserve so much better, guys.

Now, onto team RWBY and JNR. Remember how I said they were flat characters? Yeah, this bit’s gonna be a bit shorter. Ruby had probably the most ‘characterisation’ in the film, in that they literally just took volume 9’s idea of ‘Ruby has self-doubts’, slapped it on her, explored nothing, and then Clark gave her a quick Friendship Speech and she’s all smiley again. Weiss has a bit of flirting with Batman, suddenly gained hacking abilities out of nowhere, and is mainly the ‘nice but snobby’ archetype she’s been in main RWBY for ages. Actually, Weiss, Blake, Yang, and Jaune all mainly exist to serve plot points in some way. Weiss and her little storyline with Batman is just designed to reveal the villain, Jaune is there to push Jessica’s storyline of getting her powers back by Literally Curing Her Panic Attacks, and Blake and Yang? Well, they get Wonder Woman to the places she needs to visit, first Beacon, then Atlas, and then Vale again. Oh, and they have Moments. Your mileage may vary on if that’s good or not, it’s mainly superfluous to the film overall. Ren and Nora don’t actually contribute anything, beyond Ren being jealous of Cyborg and Nora, and Nora getting mad at both of them for being overly protective (I think it’s meant to be pushback against misogyny but. It’s poorly handled).

Actually, I lie. Blake does have at least one big thing of characterisation. But I’m going to put it in the next section, because it’s more of a writing problem. The final other characters in the film are Kilg%re, our villain, who is laughable, and the simulated versions of Glynda, Kali, Jacques, Ozpin/Oscar, and Pyrrha. All of whom are there just to… show that it’s a simulation, or something. They don’t do anything beyond Pyrrha being so obviously a trap for Jaune and Jessica that of course only Jaune ignoring Jessica’s common sense could have made it worse. Now, Onwards!!

#5. Oh boy lets talk about the writing

So. The Faunus racism plotline. Listen. It’s bad. We all know its bad. I’m not going into it because there are a million people smarter then me who already have done elaborate and well-thought analyses on why its bad. Can we just accept the Faunus plotline is horrendous and go from there? Okay? Okay.

So: Blake introduces the concept of faunus by describing her own race as ‘humans with ears or a tail’. As I saw someone else put it when the movie dropped, ‘people don’t describe themselves as a white person with darker skin’. Anyway, the faunus plotline. It’s not really touched on in this film beyond Jacques being racist towards Bruce and Blake being generally weird about it, and the idea that ‘the animal-themed superheroes are faunus now’, but it’s a plotline that RWBY will never escape and therefore must be mentioned as having some impact.

So lets talk about the actual racism in the movie and mention how the black woman is a Sassy Side Character, the two men of colour are shoved into a jealousy plotline over a white girl (again, reiterating: Weiss and Bruce have the hacking plotline), and the Latina girl has a white boy solve her mental illness for her after her character design was whitewashed. While I don’t think it’s intentionally racist, it is a bit of a pattern for all of RWBY’s stuff that characters of colour are either written off, villainised, or sidelined. I also want to mention: Oscar shows up in this literally just to get slammed hard into a pillar by Wonder Woman. They really can’t go five minutes without beating up this kid). This movie is not kind to the characters of colour, whether its by Actively Fucking Whitewashing Them or by just making them non-characters, and it’s just, unfortunately, exactly what was expected from a piece of RWBY media.

The mention of Oscar above reminded me: the simulation characters are… handled oddly. Ozpin is the most obviously fake, even before he starts glitching between his old self and Ozpin. But what’s strange is that out of all the simulations, Jacques of all characters has the most personality of them. Kali was always a side character, Glynda just creates exposition and sets up a fight scene, Ozpin isn’t even given a character he’s just Creepy Hologram, and Pyrrha has about one minute of ‘no wait its totally me’ before she goes The Most Evil (sidenote, they keep bringing Pyrrha back just to be evil, I hope that’s not another pattern). It’s just… strange. The way the whole villain thing in this film works is strange. Which leads me to:

Kilg%re. When I found out who the villain of this film was I went on the mother of all rants on discord. And I will post it here for posterity, just so you know exactly what the gut reaction was.

As for why this reveal sucks: well. I mean, first of all, if you introduce the concept of your surprise villain as a joke earlier in the film, which they did, then it doesn’t really make them feel all that villainous. Sure enough, it gave Kilg%re a chip on the shoulder in his villain monologue, where he was whining about being ‘the one who finally trapped the Justice League’ (bestie they’re a superhero team from comics, they get trapped once a week and twice on Sundays, you’re not special, babe, sorry). And a character desperately yelling at the screen that ‘no I’m really cool trust me’ is not… fun. It’s just sort of awkward. Sorry, Kilg%re, they treated you badly. Also, they didn’t reveal the second villain on Remnant’s side beyond saying ‘he’, even when setting this during the Vol7 Montage, so I guess that’s a mystery for the next movie, if it’s ever made (personally I’m hoping for Dr Merlot, why not).

On the flipside of villains being written badly, this film also has romance written badly. It’s just jealousy and love triangles, jealousy and love triangles. Not even interesting love triangles either, just ‘character A shows interest in character B, which makes character C get really possessive and (in all but one case) mean to B’. The As: Cyborg, Yang, Bruce. The Bs: Nora, Diana, Weiss. The Cs: Ren, Blake, Diana (again). It’s not cute, and it’s especially not cute when it’s repeated three times in the same film. It’s just boring.

Finally: and this is the thing that truly, genuinely, made me want to write this whole thing because of how rage inducing it is, is this monologue given to us by Blake:

"They sound lucky. They've never had to worry they were gonna die just from going to school. To train like your life, or worse, your friends' lives depend on it. To have to live with the fact that there's a real chance you're gonna lose them. They had a childhood."

Lets count it down, people!!

Superman: literally an allegory for illegal immigrants, refugee orphans (an alien who was adopted and raised in America after his home was made unsafe) and in many case Jewish people, what with all the Moses Allegory. Had to hide the fact that he was an alien all his life, starting from childhood.

Batman: watched his parents get gunned down in front of him at age 8. This is so integral an event that it is a fulcrum point not only of his character, but also of most of the main Dc Universe that Bruce’s Parents Die.

Flash: his mother was murdered in front of him by a time-travelling speedster and his father was arrested for it. Barry grew up with the stigma of having a murderer for a father who he is generally seen as visiting constantly in jail.

Cyborg: he is a disabled black man whose father fused him with alien technology to keep him alive after a near-death experience that also completely replaced 90% of his body and meant he had to give up on his dreams of being a sports star. Usually also has a dead mom around there too.

Green Lantern: a Latina woman who had a decent childhood by most accounts in the comics, but had the unfortunate luck of witnessing gangsters hiding a body while out hiking with her friends. Watched her friends get gunned down around her, spent the next four years extremely agoraphobic to the point of never leaving her apartment because of her trauma and the fear that the gangsters would finish the job. Family’s alive, but that was only the start of the ‘Jessica Has A Bad Time’ train.

Vixen: Mari’s backstory is a bit more nebulous as long as the main points of ‘was born in an African village, got the tantu totem, moved to America and became a superhero and usually also a model’ is met, but she also tends to have a dead mom or dead parents floating around too most of the time, whether that’s by poachers, warlords, or some other awful human-caused tragedy.

Wonder Woman: raised on an island that was in comics literally called 'Paradise Island' by her loving mother, trained with all her Amazon family to become a warrior, the island is explicitly protected from all of the evil of Man’s World by magic, and willingly chose to leave to go do good and protect people.

So we have one princess raised on a paradisal island ethnostate with loving, caring parents telling another princess raised on a paradisal island ethnostate with loving caring parents that ‘yeah your friends have horrific backstories, but they were lucky because they didn’t do what we did and WILLINGLY sign up for a job as a monster killer where we get four years of training and preparation and also are paid well for our actions instead of freelance vigilante work for charity, so if you think about it, us RWBY kids are the real victims/warriors here’.

Just in case anyone was wondering why I think Wonder Woman’s OOC in this film.

Oh also this monologue is an allegory for gun violence and school shootings, as confirmed by the writer in this article and I am including the quote for posterity and also so people can’t say I made it up: https://animemojo.com/other/exclusive-interview-with-justice-league-x-rwby-super-heroes-huntsmen-writer-meghan-fitzmartin-a14773#gs.w1iou8

“These kids are warriors and these RWBY kids are a really good look at what we’re putting a lot of kids through today. There’s a statistic I saw recently that said 1-in-5 kids will die in gun violence in America. That sucks. That’s the level of warrior stuff we’re putting our kids through and it’s a good example of what’s happening to this current generation. I wanted to make a point of saying, ‘What does that do to us?’ Looking into the leadership or what these characters go through, it’s interesting to see what they have to give up to give future generations a chance. I think that resonates a lot with kids today.” - Meghan Fitzmartin

Just. In case anyone else wants to be angry about this with me. Hey, RWBY, you can’t have the actual tagline of your show be ‘it’s also a gun’ and then go ‘gun violence is bad tho’ because oh man then your main characters look like real monsters for all the times they pull guns on people (such as all the unarmed civilians or people who they pulled guns on first who then pulled out their own guns in self-defence). Also, if this is one of the themes of the movie, then this is also the only time it’s touched on. The concept of ‘being a warrior’ becomes instantly watered down to mean ‘badass fighter’ and not ‘person carrying constant fear of death by rising gun violence’, so it’s also a really shallow use of an actually serious theme, which is par for the course with RWBY but is also still very annoying when it happens.

#6. Other General Notes: - the Bad, and the Ugly”

The music in this film was very weak. No hate to the composer but it’s barely noticeable and doesn’t really have anything of note. Normally I find a lot of DC stuff has decent music and RWBY in particular is praised for it. This was disappointing, audio-wise

The designs: Listen, RWY and JNR were fine, the Beacon designs are serviceable even if they aren’t my favourites overall. But anyway, lets rank the Justice League, best to worst!

#1. Vixen: even, somehow, in the world that is RWBY modelling, Vixen slays. She simply cannot look bad, ever. The focus on black and orange contrast instead of a million eye-searing colours, the sleekness of the jumpsuit, the fact that it’s not overly complicated, and that she actually has hair with curls in it? If not for the tail and the fact that it is literally just Harriet’s model, top points. You cannot keep a bad bitch down.

#2. Cyborg: Listen. It could have been worse. It could have been. So much worse.

#3. Wonder Woman: girlypop’s gonna cut someone on that chin, and her arm muscles look like braided bread. The ponytail would be passable if not for the way they modelled her hair tendrils, and the outfit… also could have been worse.

#4. Superman: The babyface and the way his hair is plastered to his head does not work, but I like how expressive his eyes are. The outfit is an atrocity to god but they all are from this point so at least his boots are cute and the whole denim jeans and denim jacket would work if they didn’t have that massive gold S on the shirt or the Fake Cape.

#5. Batman: ugly as sin. He has No Hood, Cowl, or Mask, his hair is bad, the scar on the eyebrow is the one cool thing, his outfit is awful, and when it’s folded up it looks like Weiss is swinging around an empty pizza box. Gotta say, at least the ears in the comic were kinda cute, the bat wings are just bland in comparison.

#6. Flash: Sir your zipper is in the shape of a zigzag and it’s very cringefail of you. The one redeeming feature is the visor but like, the hair? No. The scarf? No. The way they placed the colours on his outfit? Yikes. Throw the whole man out, Kilg%re did.

#7. Green Lantern: they put her in a blender with Ben 10 and hit ‘emulsify’ (this is insulting to Ben 10 which I am very sorry for, Ben 10 didn’t deserve this but then again neither did Jess). Her long curly hair is gone, her melanin is gone, her cute jumpsuit is gone, her brown eyes are GONE like I had my issues with the comic designs but at least it was a design and not just Ugly Bad Wrong.

Final note: they really want us to believe that Batman beat up a guy and stole his tuxedo to blend in but during the entire time he was changing out of his hero costume and into a suit he somehow didn’t notice a pair of big honking WINGS on his back. Yeah right.

#7. Final Scores!!!

Plot: 2/10

Characters: -100/10

Spectacle Fights: 4/10

Themes: 1/10

Overall score, not including the points for ‘characters’: 2.5/10

Do NOT make another fucking movie with this premise. (I will write up Jessica's personal meta in the future, keep an eye out).

#rwby #rwde #rwby x justice league #rwby spoilers #justice league x rwby #jl x rwby #rwby x jl #justice league rwby #rwby-meta #mod watts

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ghostdrinkssoup · 2 years

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okay so I watched ouef (s1 ep4) last night and I only vaguely remembered it as the episode with the lost boys and the creepy family dinner, but now that I’ve rewatched it I’m losing my mind over how much it actually sets up/foreshadows mizumono, especially thematically. considering this, it’s surprising how little this episode is talked about so I’ve decided I’m gonna unpack it myself because I honestly see it as mizumono’s necessary counterpart. it’s first half, if you will

so let’s talk about oeuf

I think part of the reason why a lot of early s1 isn’t discussed as widely as the rest of the show (especially late s2 and s3 in general) is because of the prescriptive use of genre conventions that underpin the “monster of the week” format that, upon first glance, makes s1a seem a little less interesting. it strongly follows the rules and expectations of the standard crime procedural that we’ve come to expect from a show like this: first there’s a murder, then our cast of characters go to investigate, slowly unravelling the mystery while learning some lesson along the way, until finally they catch the bad guys and the episode ends with justice prevailing, resolving the initial injustice of the crime. overall we’re left feeling satisfied, but it’s nothing to write home about

nonetheless, it is very important that nbc hannibal follows this formula in s1 because it allows it to meet audience expectations while also setting up the building blocks for its later acts, which, as we know, (mostly) abandons this scaffolding entirely. you can’t break the rules unless you know the rules, and s1 proves this by luring us in through its promise of convention. you could argue that, in its own way, s1 is the show’s own person suit

that’s not to say the “monster of the week” formula completely hides the show’s gothic side. beyond the show’s visual aesthetics (dark colours, artistic murders, etc) and the almost supernatural quality of will’s empathy, each episode/murder so far has had an underlying “fairytale-like” quality to it that’s achieved through the use of specific allusions/familiar images. first it’s will describing abigail as willy wonka’s golden ticket, then it’s the mushroom garden, then sleeping beauty wakes from her coma, and now we have peter pan and the lost boys. considering how the rest of the show plays out, especially s3 where hannibal literally describes the italy trip and his perception of life as a fairytale, this seems intentional to me. I mean, he and will literally adhere to the beauty and the beast archetype, with both fitting either role depending on what aspect of their relationship you’re looking at

that’s all to say, it’s notable that mizumono acts as the literal gateway between the familiar world of s1 and 2 and the phantasmagoric beauty of s3, stripping both its main characters and the show itself of their person suits, which isn’t as jarring as it should be due to the particular way s1 is structured

which takes us back to what I really want to talk about: ouef

the episode opens in baltimore, where will tells hannibal this:

as will speaks, we see his house, lit up and observed at a distance in the middle of nowhere, caught in the vast, misty darkness he describes. linking the house with the boat is important, since this dual image develops throughout the rest of the episode. thematically, ouef is about family, as is represented through the monster of the week: the woman kidnapping the lost boys and manipulating them into killing their families. but as we said before, this scaffolding is designed to set up character specific concepts and themes that’ll be relevant later. for now, will’s home is only a safe space for him at an observable distance — only “safe” because it looks like a boat at sea, which is a positive association for him

houses traditionally represent the self. it’s an image commonly linked to identity, both on a literary level and oftentimes when interpreting dreams. and of course, when talking about the house we naturally think of family. will can only appreciate the intimacy of both himself and his personal connections from an observable distance. he does not feel safe doing otherwise. it’s why his house is located so far away from the rest of society: he’s in hiding

from here, hannibal is quick to change the subject, stating that will “stood in the breathing silence of garret jacob hobbs’ home”, or, metaphorically speaking, hobbs’ identity. in episode one, will saw the truth of hobbs more so than he’s ever seen (or embraced) the truth of himself. he was not at a distance. he was not safe

then hannibal asks, “did they speak to you?”

and will responds, “with noise and clarity”

he then follows this by saying he “tried so hard to know garret jacob hobbs. to see him” beyond the police tape and dead girls and photographs, all of which he considers superficial details. this particular phrasing is significant, since it directly parallels what hannibal later tells will in mizumono after he learns of his betrayal: “I let you know me. see me.” this scene lays out the dominoes for this chain reaction, all of which results in s2’s climactic moment, by showing hannibal’s desire to be seen, even if he doesn’t fully realise it yet, and will’s desire to connect with others like himself, if they even exist. as I’ve said before, will does not think monstrosity and humanity are separate concepts

so, by wanting to see beyond hobbs’ person suit, which in of itself is a metaphor for conformity, expectations, and the false self, will set aside his own denial and discovered something very ugly about himself. he murdered hobbs in his own home and, for the briefest moment, caught a glimpse of the truth of himself. “see?” haunts will for this reason. it’s something he carries for the rest of his arc

it’s important that this all happened in the kitchen, but I’ll get to that later

but returning to the scene. hannibal asks will how he felt seeing marissa, the girl hannibal killed last episode. there’s an unspoken question here: did you try hard to get to know me too? did you know me? see me? would I ever allow you to do so? under the copycat guise, and the person suit, is knowing me even possible? as we learn in mizumono, the answer is yes

will says he feels guilty and I don’t think he’s lying here the same way he lied when he told abigail murder is the ugliest thing in the world last episode. there’s a difference between feeling guilt and feeling remorse. he thinks he caused marissa’s death, and he feels guilty because he knows he isn’t feeling (or reacting) the way he should be. killing hobbs felt good, remember? he saw hobbs, and in turn himself, with “noise and clarity” and had a moment of chilling self awareness he can’t shake. this is what he feels guilty about. it’s not about “not saving her” it’s about the threat of his self-destructive nature burning everything around him, which is what he fears. he feels monstrous inside, due to his own sense of vindication and inclination towards righteous violence

for the rest of this scene, I’m going to pick apart the dialogue in a kind of skeleton structure so we can take what information we need from what they say. their conversation goes as follows:

“sometimes I felt like we were doing the same things at different times of day. like I was eating or showering or sleeping at the same time he was.”

→ will feels like he’s doing the same things hobbs was (showering/sleeping/eating) even after he was dead because he’s now sensing hannibal, the copycat. or rather, his own copycat/foil. they’re already connected and they already feel the same (he feels like he killed marissa even though hannibal killed marissa)

“even after he was dead?” / “even after he was dead.”

→ so it’s hannibal he’s connecting to now, even subconsciously

“like you were becoming him?”

→ the introduction of the “becoming” motif which, as we all know, is a central theme and another reference to their foil dynamic (hannibal has already said he and will are the same). note hannibal’s tone when he says this: he’s speaking quicker, unable to stop questioning. there’s another conversation happening just below the surface of this one. he’s curious about will and his ability to connect, which was established earlier in episode 2

“I know who I am. I’m not garret jacob hobbs”

→ links back to the first episode where will, out of his own free will, chooses to shoot hobbs. remember that in the opening scene of that same episode he himself tells his students that, according to his own worldview, by understanding the murder, we understand the man. this isn’t a matter of confusing his identity with that of a killer: will knows exactly who he is, and that’s what scares him. he’d rather stay in denial

it’s also noteworthy that will’s refusal to be seen as hobbs, or a copycat of him, mirrors hannibal’s refusal to be associated with him too, as we saw in episode three when he tells abigail “I am nothing like your dad.” it implies that reading either of these characters as a mirror of someone else (other than each other, of course) would be a misstep. for both will and hannibal, hobbs is just another layer of the person suit. something that’s brutally stripped in mizumono, as I said before

we learn all this in one scene alone. like I said, this episode is complex and packed. the rest of the episode simply expands on the concepts introduced in this one conversation. I won’t go into every scene because this post would turn into an academic paper, but I do want to spend time dissecting a few key scenes which I feel directly link back to mizumono specifically and highlight why this episode is so important: the family dinner scene, hannibal breaking into will’s house, will’s therapy sessions with hannibal, and hannibal and abigail making breakfast together

how will analyses the family dinner, as well as what we learn from this scene, adds to our understanding of how these characters interpret family as a whole. after all, this episode is about “the lost boys” which, to me at least, will and hannibal both are. it’s their lack of real connection that causes them to treat abigail in the idealised way they do, similar to how the woman tries to make her own found family with the kidnapped boys (although this parallel better fits hannibal than will)

within his reconstruction of the crime scene, will sits at the head of the table, saying he’s “brought his family to this home invasion.” of course he’s impersonating the killer here, but this use of the home again (and family) is enough to pay attention to

power and control is also brought up in this scene. will says he controls the turners with “threats of violence. threats that turn to action” which is how hannibal operates (although more psychologically considering his demeanour, he doesn’t seem threatening at first and rarely loses his cool) but he can’t control people that way, least of all will. in the end threats of violence don’t even work, because the more worked up you get the less in control you actually are

will then shoots mrs turner, who, as we later learn, forgives the act since she loves her son. forgiveness (and acceptance) being synonymous with love literally underpins the conflict of s3, which is triggered by hannibal asking will if he’ll forgive him for murdering abigail in mizumono, but it’s first shown here, of all episodes, in the story’s set up. because of this, hannibal killing abigail and stabbing will recalls this episode, perhaps more as an echo than a direct link, but is strengthened nonetheless by this subtle build. added to this, it’s notable that the threat of violence here is also due to a type of betrayal (“family dinner, I wasn’t invited”) but the lost boy sits at the head of the table anyway, where he belongs, much like hannibal does, both at the end of this episode and as the “paternal” father figure throughout most of the show

as will says, this whole sequence portrays family values. twisted ones, but values nonetheless. it’s why I’m more inclined to connect this episode to the s2 finale than I am the s1 finale (although it’s still relevant) because this episode is so strictly about family. mizumono is the same but in reversal: the ideal family hannibal dreams and tries to take control of, since he had no control of his own as a boy, is shattered before his eyes

the other largely significant moment in this episode is when hannibal breaks into will’s house and pierces his thumb on the hook, tying the fishing/boat imagery back to the house again and foreshadowing will as the “lure” (his s2 persona)

what’s important about this scene is that hannibal enters will’s world (his isolated identity) to plant the evidence that’ll later frame him for all the s1 murders, leaving traces of himself on will so that, for a moment, will too becomes the copycat. again, not the exact truth of him or his nature, but a fragmented replica. inauthentic. fake. another layer of the person suit, except this time it’s hannibal’s forced on will

but what’s interesting is that hannibal also gets caught in will’s web. there’s a lot of focus on the hook specifically, and the camera lingers on the feathers, which hannibal takes the time to touch and look at, until finally, he pricks his thumb and draws blood

the irony is that in this moment, before the game even really begins, hannibal loses. he’s already hooked himself. we saw hints of this in the first scene of this episode, how his fascination with will is unlike any other attachment, or lack of attachment, he has, and it encapsulates the whole reason for his downfall: his attachment and obsession. it’s beyond his control (“you cannot control with respect to whom you fall in love”) and humanises him in darkly twisted way. he cannot control his feelings, and he doesn’t know what to do with this

his fate is sealed in this episode, but he doesn’t realise it until mizumono

again, the boat imagery is another interesting thing to note. fishing/boats/anchors are all introduced in this episode as mild, safe things (seeing the house as a boat makes will feels safe, wanting to teach abigail how to fish, hannibal saying will needs an anchor, will and his dad at the boatyard, etc) but fishing has an insidious side, too. one hannibal isn’t aware of. it has a meek mask, and in its own way, acts as another type of security. does will feel safe within his own sense of control, too? that’s the whole point of the person suit, isn’t it? it’s an important question, because the fallout is explored in mizumono. like I’ve said all throughout this analysis: everything here is being set up for a single climactic moment

will also sails to florence later in a boat he builds. he returns to hannibal’s home in s3, sitting in the kitchen with abigail’s ghost, but it isn’t home if hannibal isn’t there, so he sails to find him. I hate to say it, but will’s insane little sailing trip to italy is actually symbolic too if you interpret hannibal as will’s home, and by going to find him will, in turn, is also going home

the scene ends with hannibal sucking the blood from his thumb, before we transition to the blood streaked family portrait, opening the next scene. having the frame of hannibal bleeding being immediately followed by the bloody family portrait seems deliberate to me, since, as we know, he kills abigail later and destroys their “family” because will “makes him bleed”. again, tying the events of mizumono back to the family values introduced in this episode

also, in the script the sound hannibal makes when he sucks the blood from his thumb is described as “not unlike a quick kiss” which is an odd way to phrase it within the literal context of this scene, but makes a lot of sense when you consider what it means symbolically. it’s a small detail, but it recontextualises will “luring” him in as a romantic act, as well as a romantic betrayal

continuing on, what family means to hannibal and his desire to both connect with will and manipulate abigail are both interweaved as the episode progresses. hannibal says that “children transport us to our childhoods”, reframes the idea that will’s family, who will jokingly refers to as a pack of strays, also includes abigail (and without saying it, himself) and that the woman who’s kidnapping the lost boys is engaging in a “perversion” of motherhood. all these things evidently reflect hannibal himself, and the specific trauma he experienced losing his parents and, more to the point, his younger sister. we don’t learn the specifics of this backstory until much later on in the story, but his behaviours (and the trajectory of his character arc) are influenced by it regardless

in contrast, will doesn’t seem all that interested in the concept. he sees family as an “ill fitting suit” (yet another reference to the person suit) and it’s an entirely foreign concept to him (it’s foreign to hannibal too, since they’re the same, but I digress). still, he tries to connect to abigail anyway, but this isn’t motivated by a want for authentic family or someone who understands him, but rather an ideal. will doesn’t want to see the truth of himself, it scares him. he doesn’t want to see the truth of abigail, either. he doesn’t want to see her as her father’s lure (again, fishing imagery) but as something innocent and divorced from what he knows of himself. he ironically buys her fishing gear in this episode (although he never gives it to her) in an attempt to associate her with the same meek mask we discussed earlier. but as we know, this “safety” too has layers

buying abigail a gift also mirrors what hannibal says to will in mizumono: “I gave you a rare gift, but you didn’t want it.” the rare gift is family, which is given value when will says “I can’t give them back what they just gave away” in relation to the lost boys and their dead mothers. it’s again another part of the family values introduced in this episode: family is a rare gift, but it’s not something you can force, which both hannibal and will try to do with abigail (like the mother tries to do with the lost boys)

the “I can’t give them back what they gave away” is particularly important, since it implies permanency and an inability to reverse the action. the gift of family and connection is only rare because once it’s taken from you you can’t have it back; you can’t reverse time; you can’t take back control

this is the crux of hannibal’s entire arc. the belief that he is in control of his life, since, in his mind, he’s godlike and exists beyond human folly and attachment, underpins every single one of his actions leading up to mizumono. for this reason, it’s significant that the teacups are introduced in this episode as a means (and symbolic prop) to control abigail. they are later related back to time but this is meant to be a symbol of hannibal’s power. he directly says that he wants to give abigail her ‘power back’ earlier in the episode, but he’s really just empowering himself. he projects his attachment to mischa onto her, something he pretends doesn’t affect him and he is above of (his approach to dealing with trauma is clear through his interactions with abigail — he thinks she shouldn’t be immersed in the tragedy of the past and should just ‘move on’)

in truth, hannibal wants to recreate the moment of tragedy (both his tragedy and abigail’s tragedy) in order to reverse time and have the perfect family, despite being incapable of this. he’s trying to escape how his trauma makes him feel powerless by attempting to take power back, no matter how futile it is

he attempts to do this here, in his home, by making them breakfast, since in his mind by feeding abigail the same (and last) meal she had with her family, he is in turn engineering a kind of ‘rebirth’ for her. he reassures that although this was the last meal she had with her family, it’ll be the first with him, and tries to take away her bad memories by replacing them with positive associations. the reversal of time is even clear in how he makes breakfast for dinner, flipping literal time on its head for his amusement

for the audience, in this scene we learn he’s a more skilled manipulator than the woman who took the lost boys, since he’s forcing this “blur” between abigail’s father and himself through the use of psychedelics and fostering dependency. he wants to replace hobbs without necessarily becoming him. again, he’s his copycat, not his replica

the fact that this all takes place in the kitchen is also important. it’s the same place hannibal will later kill her, proving he can’t reverse time and he isn’t in control, and that she was never reborn, and he was never her father. and returning to the beginning of this analysis (I said I’d come back to this) will also killed hobbs in his own kitchen, where he finally sees the truth of himself. in mizumono, a reversal occurs: hannibal is now confronted with the truth of himself and, like will, accidentally finds something very ugly by exposing himself

the episode ends with will separated from the ‘family’ and resting with his dogs, similar to how mizumono ends with will lying in his own blood, alone. in summary, oeuf quietly introduces and foreshadows key plot, character, and thematic elements through the conventions of the crime genre, and it’s fascinating to me how many links can be made between this episode and the bloodbath in mizumono

even down to the episode title: the newly formed egg and all the consequences that are to follow its hatching

#I’m feeling so insane guys #can anyone hear me #each meta is longer than the last LMAO #I wrote a whole damn essay but it was worth it #this episode is such a gem like *screams into the abyss*#this was basically the serious analysis side of the notes I took #alongside the meme ones I’ve been sharing recently <3 #the duality of man #anyway I’ll keep unpacking episodes as I go along if I get brainrot this intense again 👍#and if anyone is interested in more long analysis stuff like this #hannibal #nbc hannibal #will graham #abigail hobbs #hannigram #hannibal meta #long post #ghost speaks

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burningexeter · 8 months

Text

[HEADCANON/FAN THEORY]

The Venture Bros. and its finale movie Radiant Is The Blood Of The Baboon Heart takes place in the same large shared universe as many other media ranging from movies, TV shows and video games that deal with several different types of unconventional protagonists and ensembles not just facing the odds but fighting against the highest stakes ever imaginable with Venture Bros. occurring over the course of 2016 to 2018 thanks to a certain prediction that Dr. Orpheus made coming true with Action Man at the end of the Morphos Trilogy.

In Chronological Order:

• Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal

• Far Cry Primal

• Clash Of The Titans (1981)

• Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

• Apocalypto

• Wolfwalkers

• Pirates Of The Caribbean Trilogy

• The Mask Of Zorro

• Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes Duology

• Deathwatch (2002)

• The Mummy (1999)

• Where Eagles Dare

• Overlord (2018)

• Inglourious Basterds

• The Exorcist (1973)

• Exorcist III: Legion (1990)

• The Nice Guys

• Thief (1981)

• Big Trouble In Little China

• Tales From The Crypt Presents Demon Knight

• Heat (1995)

• Blade (1998) and Blade II

• Trick r Treat

• Breaking Bad Trilogy

• Sons Of Anarchy Duology

• Alan Wake (2010) and Alan Wake II

• Attack On Titan (the first two seasons)

• Krampus

• Control (2019)

• The Invisible Man (2020)

• Wrath Of Man (2021)

• Wildwood (2025)

• Upgrade (2018)

and finally

• The DOOM Series (1993 OG, Hell On Earth, 3, 64, 2016 and Eternal)

Notes/Details/Trivia:

• Whatever you don't see here, it ain't canon here to help streamline things and better yet help keep the quality consistent. Then again, Blade Trinity and The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor not being canon isn't a bad thing at all really.

• This universe, even though it's headcanon just for fun, explores the multiple different perspectives to this world with their own different and distinct tones, styles and aesthetics cause that's part of the fun. You can have something that's huge in scale, insane and fantastical but cynical like The Venture Bros. but you can also have something that's dark, grounded and gritty like Breaking Bad.

• Another thing that helps connect them all including The Venture Bros. is that no matter how epic, insane, violent, out-of-control etc. as they all get, they always remain either somewhat grounded or grounded to some degree.

• It all culminates into the events of the DOOM series, serving as I guess what you would say is the Infinity War and Endgame to this universe with the Doom Slayer being the last one standing to finally put an end to this all that started way back in the prehistoric ages with Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal.

• Now this should be an interesting take to anyone who reads this - if they are all in the same insane universe with the highest body count ever than what, does Ezekiel "EZ" Reyes know any of the heroes and villains of The Venture Bros. or does Jesse Faden know Walter White? To answer that, the answer is a very painfully obvious "No".... BUT EZ knows OF the heroes and villains of The Venture Bros. because they're all famous like how he knows of Brad Pitt, George Clooney or Angelina Jolie cause they're famous while Jesse Faden knows OF Walter White because he's infamous like how she knows of Pablo Escobar, the Unabomber or Osama Bin Laden because they're infamous.

• Now last but not least, with the first two (and BEST) seasons of Attack On Titan being the only canon things here with it, you're probably wondering with the series finale on its way how does it end in the Venture Bros. Universe if that's what we're calling it?

Well here's how it ends in this universe —

It ends with Mikasa Ackerman and Historia Reiss, now an official romantic couple, looking out into the sunset on the beach shore and what they say to each other in that awesome fanart from Larkei are the final lines of the series.

Oh, and the Funimation English Dub is the canon version because it's way too good to not be.

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yooniesim · 1 year

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I think one of the things that makes it so hard to find new creators (that are free) is how insular paywall/early access cc creators are. I literally can't remember the last time any of them used their massive platforms to support newer creators and they only seem to reblog content that features their own stuff or other creators they're close with. They are literally only concerned about their "brand" instead of actually participating in the community that provides them with their livelihoods. If you're looking for content, you're going directly to these creators first and maybe you'll look through finds blogs if you're more invested. To a point, I understand that's how popularity works, but they could be doing so much more.

Plus, since the early access model is so popular, I do think there's a push for new creators to switch to that. You get an initial burst of engagement when you first post and then another when your content is free, instead of just posting once and getting what you get. Also, I do think there's an unspoken rule that "early access creator" = "professional". So, if you want to be taken seriously, you'll imitate what the "professionals" are doing.

I'm sorry you're discouraged trying to find new creators. It's actually insane how much damage the popularity of paywalling has done to this community.

Hey nonny, thanks for sending this and also for your sympathy! I agree with everything you said, and I'm just gonna ramble a bit in a semi related way.

I think the point you made about professionalism is especially poignant. Creating cc is less a hobby now and more a setup for your own "business". But in this marketplace, there are no standards or regulation whatsoever- and many people here are just bad at what they do in various ways. It seems as if they either have the aesthetic & business model down, but are terrible to their customers and/or make terrible product, or they make a good product but can't quite grasp how to play the "game" to work the system to its full advantage. Sometimes you get people bad at all of it, yet they still charge. Because the only consistent thing about this community at the moment is that everything absolutely has to have a price, no matter how shitty it is. And there's absolutely zero consequence for being a gigantic douche nozzle.

This is a mostly disconnected side note, but when I think about these creators, it's just unbelievably depressing. I have thought about what it would be like to try early access a few times over the years, and honestly even the thought gave me such a burst of anxiety I immediately dismissed it. Just releasing cc for free is sometimes an anxious feeling for me, I just can't imagine having to base a business around it. The thought of possibly disappointing people and not consistently providing a quality product that is worth their money is a shameful thought for me. I have gotten a few $1 donations to my patreon over the years and even then i feel bad for not being able to create cc for a while because of my mental health, and not being better at cc making in general. And yet there's people that provide the most lazy, shit items I've ever seen without blinking. Stuff they never tested that doesn't work in game, two second conversions, no hat chops, no lods, gigantic poly, etc. They don't even know how to make cc and admit to that but still charge. I think I would die of shame. I'm sitting here thinking about, do they feel guilt over it, in the back of their mind? Does the stress and the anxiety gnaw at them like it does me? Even just uploading to curseforge for me, causes a bit of anxiety, even though no one pays for it directly. But CF is just another tool to be used to most- now people use patreon, but once its unlocked, the download link leads to CF so they can double dip. So it must not be bothersome to them at all. It's difficult for me to wrap my head around.

...I've gotten so far off track, again. Here's the part where I re-read your ask and try to get back on topic lol. Sorry, my mind runs a lot these days.

I'm glad you mentioned the part about how insular paywallers are. But I think there's even more to this than just popularity. They do not break from their circle, except in the very rare case someone new becomes very popular and they want to do a boring collab with them, and even then it seems limited. I'm pretty sure they have a server (or multiple) where they share people's urls for the purposes of chain blocking them. They also, without a doubt, share people's personal info to one another in order to ban their accounts from their patreons (at the very least). I have witnessed this multiple times. There are several doxxing rings besides the ones that were exposed, at least one exclusive to early access creators. They don't allow new people in/trust others easily because of this. This is why I don't trust paywallers as a rule; not because I think custom content should never be monetized under any circumstances, but because the lack of standardization and consequences for privacy violations makes it unsafe.

I've read through your ask again, and it made me think of something else, so bear with me haha. But the point about how you find newer creators, and how some will go to finds blogs. The fact of the matter is that popular finds blogs have the potential to be compromised as well. I have been blocked by mmccworld ever since EA temporarily banned paywalling and I reblogged a post that had a list of people intending to continue paywalling after that, and they happened to be on that list. They were one of the more popular finds blogs in the community, but I obviously won't be reblogged by them like I was in the past. Now, this isn't that relevant anymore since they're definitely not as highly regarded as they once were, but think about tumblr's lack of algorithm & what you said about how people find newer creators. If you aren't reblogged, you aren't found. And it makes me wonder how many other creators are blocked at a finds blog's discretion. I mean, this isn't necessarily a bad thing; you can filter people how you like, for example I don't reblog from paywallers on mine, or known bigots etc. But it's something to think about, and I think is a smaller example of how simblr works. If you don't play the game and fall in line, if you question the wrong person, you won't get exposure. And to most, in our current system, exposure equals money. Of course you're going to toe the line- no one wants to be publicly shamed, or worse, have a drop in potential income.

This has gone on far, far too long, so let me stop lol. But thanks again for sending this and allowing me to ramble in response, nonny... not that you had a choice 🤣

#asks #anonymous #ceci speaks #negative #the patreon issue #ceci speaks a lot more #long post #nonny complaints

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cutie-keebs · 6 months

Text

2023 End of year keyboard review

Hi yalls!

So we're approaching the end of the year. Since then, more keyboards have entered the market and I've managed to build some of them. At the same time, group buy orders managed to arrive. I'm so happy that I've been able to expand my collection with these items.

Honourable mentions

Due to how expensive the keyboard hobby is, I couldn't grab everything that was released this year. At the same time, I had to sell some of the keebs that I used to own due to a variety of reasons.

For starters, the QK and Jris series have been super amazing for opening doors for high-quality budget options in the market. I own the QK75 and remade my first keyboard build and I swear to god the improvement is immaculate.

Next is Mode Designs. They have released a bunch of high-quality boards and boy howdy, I wish I could own them all. The Envoy was well-loved in the community and the release of the Loop is so cute. I wish I could grab my hands on it, but I'm satisfied with my Sonnet, which is still available to this day and now has new colour options.

Lastly, it's the established keyboard companies like Asus and Razer as they've released some hotswap keyboards. The one that caught my eye the most is the Azoth. I would trade in my old Corsaid K70 for that keyboard. If anyone is willing to do so, hit me up.

Now, here are my top 5 boards.

5. The Dreamscape build

We all know how I've felt about this build. It took 2 years and it's finally here. I love this build for the soft aesthetic and I'm so glad I can finally use this keyboard. It's such a shame it took so long because there were times I was losing hope and was considering giving it a different build.

Specs:

Ikki Aurora x EPBT Dreamscape

EPBT Dreamscape

Gazzew Bobagums

Artisans from Namong and From Scratch

As for the use and feel, it's nice. A bit mushy cuz of the switches. But at least no one will get mad at me when I type during meetings because apparently, they can pick up my typing sounds. Its the ultimate dream silent keyboard.

I'm just happy this build is finally complete cuz omg, imagine if this went on to 2024. I would lose my sh*t.

4. Rama Thermal

Getting used to the HHKB layout has been a challenge. Fortunately, I ended up getting used to it after a few months. I do miss my arrow keys but using function + WASD was a good alternative. I will admit that my productivity at work did slow down during the first few weeks.

Specs:

Thermal by RamaWorks

Osume Winterglow Eve

Clackbits

Artisans from Tulipclay

While Rama might have some controversies, it's actually a really nice board. Has a really unique look it, something that I'm after when I buy keyboards. However, after comparing it to other builds, it's not really great. The sound quality feels hollow (despite tape modding it), and the keycaps and switches sound output doesn't help at all so I ended up rebuilding it.

Right now, as of writing, I'm using temporary parts for a later build and it's going to take a while for me to find the right combo. I will update you once I made something worth showcasing a sound test. I am interested in trying out the Akko Penguin Silent Switches so hopefully a muted build is what this build needs.

If there is something I learned from this keyboard - DON'T BUY FROM RAMAWORKS.

3. The Nordic Build

The boards may look good but their reputation sunk so bad. I had to file a bank complaint just so they could reply and get this board shipped (mind you, it was a in-stock item).

Originally, the keyboard that I wanted to use was the Loki65. But thanks to Mechs and Co, that was heavily delayed. I've always had eyes on the Fuji keyboard series since I started this hobby in 2021. So thanks to the Keebs For All Marketplace, someone was selling theirs for a good price and I got it.

Specs:

Fuji 65

EPBT Scandi

Hera Switches

Artisan from EzKeys

Aesthetics-wise, it looks pretty good. All the colours complement each other and I'm quite happy. The reason I wanted to make this build is that my favourite country is Iceland and I wanted to build a keyboard inspired by my trip there in 2019. The only flaw with this build is that the switches sound scratchy. But that's because I didn't lube them. Could be fixed if I do that.

I look forward to the day when the Loki65 gets shipped as I think my thoughts will change when it arrives.

2. The Tofu Build

Believe it or not, this was the first keyboard I built this year and I'm quite happy with how it turned out. The reason why built this keyboard is because I was inspired by Magic The Gathering - Kamigawa Neon Dynasty and this build resembles that trading card set.

Specs:

Tofu 60 (the original)

PBT Fans Kabuki-Cho

Tecsee Ruby Switches

This keyboard is THOCKY. It's not as thocky compared to modern builds but it has that low-profile sound that was highly sought after during the pandemic. I can see why this was a beloved build back in the early days of the keyboard hobby.

While the Tofu has increased in price over the years, I believe it's a testament to how the hobby has changed. I'm glad to have a piece of keyboard history in my collection.

1. The Sonnet Build

This has to be my newest go-to keyboard. From the looks, sound, and aesthetics, it was worth it. It took a while for me to figure out which keycaps to use since it originally had Osume Dusk. I think the greys from the Hooties are much better.

Specs:

Sonnet from Mode Designs

GMK Hooty

Popu Linears

Artisans from Hibi.MX and Geekkey

Using this board has that 5/5 experience. The sound is so satisfying, the feel is really nice. The artisans complement the board so well. And the fact that the Sonnet is a really good quality keyboard adds extra points. I highly recommend getting the Sonnet when you have the chance to do so.

#mechanical keyboard #custom keyboard #technology #keyboard #mechanical keyboards #cute keyboard #review #keyboard review #end of year #end of year review

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faorism · 2 years

Text

[very long post featuring a food truck turned tattoo ot3 au with mentions of former gang involvement, paying off loans, and carceral system including parole]

toby, instead of a cooking school for kids, works with incarcerated people and recent parolees. eliot has history with bike gangs and didnt snitch on anyone, but he always kept clean; they could never pin anything on him except some low level nonviolent crimes. eliot went through the program while doing time. he had a little bit of savings he kept aside, plus what he made working with toby after getting out. he got a dinky used food truck with all he had.

because the truck was bought rundown but cheap, he needs to take it in a lot to the shop closest to his mcsweetens. the best mechanic they have for a truck like that is parker. when she meets eliot, she squints and asks, hey dont i know you? and eliot flips through his mental rolodex and places her: sterling your parole officer too? which shes like oh yeah! that guy sucks right? so, about your truck blah blah. (she has had a hard life, in and out of juvie and foster care growing up for general nonviolent thievery. sterling nearly had a blood vessel burst in his forehead when she told him she got a job at a mechanics shop; she just smirked at him and said that her carjacking days were when she was a minor and hence, sealed.)

eliot puts out good food consistently until eventually, he gets traction and then he gets included on a show like diners, drive-ins and dives. his food truck gets HOT to the point that he can expand to a second truck, which parker offers to help him shop for it so he doesnt end up with another clunker. eliot is like, isnt that bad for business? and parker gives him a look and thats how eliot knows its real friendship between them. he may also kinda sorta maybe be attracted to her, but hes desperate for friends and also eventually she mentions having a guy in her life, so eliot doesnt bother.

then, a few years in, it may be ambitious with two (very busy!) trucks already out, but toby is willing to put in seed money for eliot to open up a brick and mortar, where eliot can have more freedom to experiment with his menu. eliot takes him on even as parker complains that he should replace his first truck first.

her suggestion comes back to haunt eliot when the truck dies right after hes signed the lease for the building. he feels DOOM but parker suggests that he can save on interior design by using the old truck parts for decoration. for all the years of steady customer devotion, she will chop it up for just the cost of materials and even that will be at retail price. which. feels like love really really deep camaraderie right there! (i think nate and sophie are used car salespeople who also have the side hustle of selling used parts, so they are parkers source for fixing the truck plus who she brings eliot to for the second truck)

it's a big expense to replace the truck and start up the business at once, but... eliot had a vision. he takes on loans which gives him a lot of anxiety, but its okay! his businesses continue to be successful, he can make his payments, and overall, he feels settled financially. so while not everything is smooth sailing, he's just really proud of what he's done and he wants to maybe have that reflected with how he relates to his body maybe. so. to celebrate paying off one of the loans and/or hitting an important anniversary of some kind, he wants to confront the fact that hes been wearing long sleeves since hes turned his life around because he has tats from his gang and prison days. it fits a marketable aesthetic, but he wants to move on.

he knows parker has a few tattoos of various quality: random things like a herseys bar and toucan sam. but her newer ones she's got since hes known her are very good, including a stuffed bunny toy on her thigh and (lately) her favorite tools down her back. he asks for who did, and she excitedly sends him to nana divine's tattoo parlor and piercing.

looking through the artists at nana's, he comes across a photo that stops him dead. its a gorgeous photo of sleeves: from the shoulders, citrus spills looking so plump and ready to eat in vibrant yellows, reds, whites, and greens on black skin. the fruit and leaves transform into circuit boards at the person's wrists. (alec, btw, has plans for an elaborate fandom space themed back piece; he has the outline for the enterprise already. also, on his legs he gets flashes by favorite artists plus newbies at nana's parlor who need to work on people flesh)

eliot sees that while the artist he was looking at (an alec hardison) didnt tattoo those specific tattoos, he did design them for himself. they... are gorgeous. and they inspire eliot like nothing else hes seen, and alec has done similarly thoughtful designs on light skin as well, so he's versatile. he says hes willing to do cover ups AND he prefers to work on large pieces/collections, and eliot is like yes. okay. okay. perfect.

eliot makes an appointment with alec, who is just so friendly and nice. hes younger than eliot expected considering his skill, but alec has been around nana's so long as her foster kid that he's moved past apprentice early. eliot talks about himself, more than he usually does with strangers. says how he is now a chef, and he wants to get vegetables and herbs, maybe some kitchenware or even truck/engine stuff if alec needs filler.

eliot says he is thinking just the arms and upper chest and shoulders since thats the most people see, since he wants to wear tank tops. he wants alec to plan it all at once.

(alec during this first meeting is straight with him: i dont recognize a lot of these, maybe cuz youre from way out of town. I won't refuse taking you on for this, but I need to know now if any of these support fascism or white nationalism. eliot sputters absolutely not, man. the fuck. which is nice! for sure!)

this is a dream scenario for alec, who is in love with the idea and likes the challenge of including coverups as part of the plan. he works not only with eliot for reference shots, but with parker. (parker, who he met because she has gotten her recent pieces from nana and who he has settled into a FWB situation, which slowly slowly slowly is progressing into Friends With Romance as parker warms up to him at a measured pace. parker helps with the engine stuff obviously. parker is very excited to work on something for eliot, who is happy to have her involved too.)

alec gets super into drawing the map for eliot. and then during his spare time, just.... keeps going on his tablet. he makes a separate copy of the file and just doodles the rest of what would be eliots chest and his back and down to his upper thighs,, and while alec's on the legs might as well keep going. it's a masterpiece that would take years and a fuck ton of money to complete. but obviously alec would definitely not show this because that's not fair and not what eliot asked for. this is just for alec.

when alec and eliot are doing a sit down to discuss the draft on alecs tablet, eliot is like wow. fuck this is. amazing. he asks if alec can print out a copy since he's more of a paper guy, so alec calls over shop grunt bre to print it out. hes like, theres the one that's flat and a separate file that's warped to a body, make sure to get both. when she comes back and hands eliot the paper, he goes silent.

and alec is like something wrong? and eliot turns the paper over to reveal that bre accidentally printed out alecs doodles for a full body map. its... honestly, a masterpiece. there would be a garlic braid down eliots spine. across the chest would be a "statement necklace" of chefs knives. his arms carry a bounty greens that he uses for his main recipes. theres the hint of machinery but also brick peeking out from strategic places, and its just beautiful.

alec is so absolutely embarrassed and guilty and he apologizes so hard. but eliot is like. so. i'll pay you for the full design hours. ill need to work out a budget thatll be extended over time so obviously no way this can be right away, even if we could fit it all in quickly with your schedule. you should probably make sure the design works with the rest of my tats but.... fuck man, eventually i want this all. i never would have thought to ask for this but... you have time to walk me thru it all? i can come in again if... alec is like omg yes.

eliot and alec spend a lot of time together. parker, knowing her two favorite people are together, join them when she can to hang out. eventually, eliot just starts asking parker when she's free to make sure if he has a session, she can join. alec makes a group chat for coordinating that quickly becomes chaos, memes, and begging eliot to come over to alecs to cook for them before they die of scurvy.

and as i said, eliot realizes two or three years like, fuck, i... i... really like this person @ parker. he wishes it was just wanting to have sex with her but nope, he's all i wanna kiss her and cook her breakfast. BUT he values their friendship too much to follow up on those feelings. and then he meets alec, and then he meets alec and parker, and eliot spends all this time with them, and eliot falls deep. plus, he doesnt want to make alec uncomfortable with his attraction to either him or parker, so eliot just tries to bundle it all up.

but theres only so much they can play themselves. i am not sure of the exact moment things tumble over for the three, but they do. they do, and they confess. parker makes sure to tell eliot that duh, of course she wanted him. like:

parker: okay but I clearly came onto you like. Years One and Four and you just weren't interested

eliot: ....what. no.

parker: yes i did

eliot: no, you didn't

alec: i distinctly remember her checking in around that time your two's Year Four about potential open relationship stuff if there was someone she really really liked.

eliot: absolutely not

parker then reveals she had asked eliot what she should order from the food truck sometime in Year One, thinking it was a very clear sign of interest and trust, and Eliot got the trust part of it, and fed her something delicious and even created a dish after he bought the storefront that exactly suited her tastes, but no, no he did not detect """"interest"""" at that or any other time.

eliot, turning red: hey! that aint nothing! how was i supposed to know!

parker: it worked on hardison

alec: damn eliot you could have been in this (points between eliot and parker) and maybe eventually this (points between all three) years ago

parker: so sad you didnt read the very clear signs 😔

eliot: (lip twitch)

and they have fun and alec keeps working on eliots tats with parker chilling in the room. eventually, once alec is Finally Done, he brings eliot to tat conventions for awards/display, which he of course wins. by then they are all together to the point of basically being married so there's a bit of, Look At My Beautiful Babe Who I Love. (eliot cannot help but preen a little.)

eventually, eliot gets alec to sign his canvas with his initials plus parker's, since she helped and because Eliot Is Like That, and ill just let you guess where those ended up 👀

#eliot spencer #parker leverage #alec hardison #leverage #leverage ot3 #thiefsome #faorism headcanons #faorism writes fic #faorism work #maybe ill draw this one day

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max1461 · 2 years

Text

So I've talked before about how there's something about the aesthetic sensibilities of the 50s, 60s, and 70s (in the US at least; not sure about elsewhere) that really turns me off. And how I think it might have something to do with mass-produced plastic goods.

Like, the 50s were when mass-produced plastic goods first really became a thing, and I think it took some time for the culture to metabolize this and settle on an interpretation of what plastic goods were going to Mean. In the early days plastics were marketed as something high-end, an atomic age wonder material that was superior to everything that had come before. Plastic was durable, it was high-quality, it was fancy. And, you know, it took a few decades before people realized that the ultimate defining feature of plastics, culturally, was going to be that they were cheap. Mass market consumer goods from the 50s and 60s really feel dissonant to a modern sensibility, because it feels like they're totally unaware how trashy they now appear.

I think the 70s was sort of a transitional time, and then by the 80s we had sort of, you know, figured out what mass-produced plastics were gonna be, culturally. We'd devised a cultural niche for plastic goods, rather than trying to slot them into a pre-existing cultural niche for which they were an ill fit. Or something. And so I kind of look back on 80s aesthetics as, you know, trashy, but trashy in a fun way, a way that feels consonant to my modern sensibilities. Whereas the 50s, 60s, and 70s feel trashy and unaware of it. Trashy while genuinely thinking they're high class. Or something. It's dissonant.

At least that's my perspective, as someone who didn't live through any of these periods. And I don't know how widespread the perspective of plastics as "high quality" really was at the time, or if that's just based on a garbled understanding of the culture that's been successively misremembered by several generations at this point. But, you know, this feels like a reasonable explanation. Maybes it's a little bit bullshit.

Anyway, I've said all this before. What's new to this post is that I kind of have the feeling that where they were in the 60s or so with regard to plastic, we are with the internet. Maybe it's not exactly isomorphic, but, you know, it's close.

So, I don't think the internet has ever been culturally understood as high class. But it was understood, in its early phases, as something else that we admire: subversive. The internet was wild, scary, the domain of hackers and anonymous weirdos doing who-knows-what. This is the terminology the internet was understood in when I was growing up, and I think to a certain degree people still talk about it that way (though much less so). And the increasing corporatization of the internet has been talked about a lot, but something that really strikes about the internet as it currently exists (you know, like, clickbait and youtube thumbnails and instagram influencers and all that) is that it's... well, kinda trashy. It's a bunch of cheap nonsense. It isn't just the corporatization, though probably that's part of it. It's that the internet is to media what plastic was to manufacturing: a cheap substrate on which to put anything that you think might have a chance in hell of selling. You can churn out a bunch of mostly empty, but sort of eye-grabbing or momentarily appealing crap, and you know, it might just turn out to be worth the extremely low cost of entry.

And I want to be clear that I don't think this is bad, inherently. Having low barriers to entry for things, being able to make things cheaply, is great for creativity and for encouraging the existence of weird and interesting stuff. I think it's basically good, at it's core. In fact, mass-produced plastics, if they didn't happen to be so bad for the environment, would be good in this way too. Being able easily and cheaply execute any random idea that comes to you is kind of great, actually. But you have to understand that it is going to result in a lot of crap. Probably far more crap than it results in hidden gyms. And cultural has to like, metabolize that crap somehow.

So, the people who were initially thinking of plastic as the fancy space age material back in the early 50s, I don't really blame them. It seems naive now, but it's almost charming. How could they have known better? When it was first invented, it was kind of a crazy space age material. I think something similar about the first generation of internet users. Like, for that brief moment, it really was kind of a wild west. But I think at this point we're well into the phase where it's clear that the internet is mostly going to exist as a vector for trashy bullshit, that, you know, that was maybe always its destiny, and the culture just has to catch up. We have to develop an idea of "internet trash" the way we've developed an idea of "injection molded plastic crap", and like, really internalize it. And maybe then we'll get to the 80s, where the proper cultural framing has allowed the stuff to become charming in its own right, unabashed in what it is. Or something.

Or, again, maybe this is total bullshit. I don't know. I think the average person has access to a lot of stuff online that isn't trash, if they go looking for it, stuff that could really only exist online. This feels different than cheap plastics, in the sense that there are relatively few uses of plastic that an everyman is going to encounter that rely on some property of the material other than that it's cheap. Like there are legitimate cases in, I guess, chemistry and stuff where plastic is the best choice of material no matter how much money you have, just because of its inherent properties (acid resistance or whatever, etc.). But in most cases in everyday life, the only reason something is made of plastic is that it's cheaper than any other material, and maybe also more light-weight. If you felt like spending the money the same thing made with a different material, you'd probably feel that it was "higher quality". With the internet, not so. There's a lot of stuff online that really does need to be online, inherently, for it to work. Stuff that's not crap. So that gives me the sense that maybe things will go a little differently for the internet.

But I still think most stuff online is trash, and that's probably how it's going to be from now on. Unless the barriers to entry get higher, which is, unfortunately, also a possibility. And it's worth noting that I say "trash" in kind of a loving way here. A lot of the stuff I like most is trash, in one sense or another. I mean sometimes trash is bad. But anyway, its all more complicate than some simple value judgement.

I don't know, those are just some thoughts I've been having.

#navel gazing

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