#the other two are only very vague sketches but they will be done! eventually!! someday!! im working on it dhhd

[shadowofaghost5]

Give us all your money :)

(Stanuary Week 2: Connection - I saw the word connection and this song started blaring in my head soo… I can not be blamed for this.)

[ziracona]

What does Philip do after ilm? Does claudette ever end up starting her own nursery?

Claudette does indeed! After college, she opens a nursery, and she also gets a little lab and spends a lot of time studying plants and looking at more and more herbal medicine and also just recording plant biology and uses too, for posterity. Philip goes with her, and works at the nursery too. He attends school locally (rather than audit) and gets an Associates/2-year Degree in engineering, just becuase it was a thing he never got the chance to do, and feels very accomplished having done—it was something his mother really wanted for him, the opportunity to get a degree. He spends a lot of time researching history and various cultures and their accounts of mythology, legend, and lore, trying to find a way to both return to the realm someday and to kill the Entity. All the survivors work on that project, to varying degrees, but Philip is one of the most dedicated. His own cultural magic and Vigo’s are the two he saw work practically the most, and since they’re both old systems, he mostly studies old magic—as in old, old, so old it almost stops being magic and just starts being human culture magic. Blood magic, basic wards, hallowed ground. Simple and fairly universal concepts, and he works backwards from there, employing what he knows of how the realm works too. Adam, Claudette, Quentin, Benedict, Nancy, and he all study personally a lot of the realm artifacts/Entity DNA stuff, as well as Alex (although in a capacity of course that doesn’t hurt her at all—and while she hates being forced to sit still for a long time, she is always given so many rewards after letting people look at her under a microscope that actually eventually the crow looks forward to or will try to initiate these sessions, similar to the way my dumb (read: wonderful) dog has learned that if I don’t see her and bump into her with my leg or something, I will go “Oh no I’m so sorry!” and give her a treat for causing accidental pain, and now intentionally commits insurance fraud 24/7 on me for faked injury treats. Jane studies as much research as the actual science crew, but she doesn’t have the time to learn as much like, microbiology, so her area is more reading through reports and helping allocate research/the steps that come after the microscope itself.

Philip also travels with the group, and sees the living members of his family as much as he can, plays a lot of DnD, very painstakingly learns guitar from Kate (and, especially since he & Quentin live in the same apartment or house most of the time, practices a lot with Quentin who is also very slowly learning/building on his in-realm lessons), and just kind of does whatever he can. He never stops journaling once he starts again, although it becomes a little scrapbookish, especially after Meg and Susie give him an instant camera a few years in, because it’s so easy to tape those to a page recording a good day. I think he does this with the hope/intention of someday getting Vigo back, and being able to show him life he missed and should have been there for, like Claudette did for him, recording all the memories he lost. Philip feels in a lot of ways like he’s living the life Vigo should have had, since he accomplished Vigo’s goal, and he’s very grateful to be alive and happy and out, but I think he clings a little desperately to the fleeting possibility of being able to give back what should belong to someone he loves. Even as good as things have turned out, he’s definitely still afraid to hope, so I don’t know how much he thinks he will ever really be able to save Vigo, or even if he’s really sure he’s not gone-gone/didn’t flee the void and pass on to death when the rest of the void did, but there’s definitely a part of him that feels sure he’s still there and that he will get back there too himself someday. I think the possibility of that not happening is both terrifying and too awful for him, so he doesn’t think about it at length ever, becuase it wouldn’t help anything anyway. He still talks to Vigo sometimes when he’s alone, though. I think all his apartment mates heard him do it maybe once, but probably had no idea what they heard/still don’t really know, but Claudette has heard him do it in the nursery several times when he thinks he’s alone, and she really wishes she knew what to say to him. She doesn’t though, and is a little worried maybe she isn’t supposed to know, so she just tries extra hard to work on research too, and to try to make sure he feels loved. While Isa, Philip’s brother, is the only person that Philip has talked about his relationship with Vigo with (well, Benedict & Sally too somewhat i guess, but that on a what-you-already-knew level, not a new-info one), Claudette eventually did ask him about Vigo once when she was a little worried, and became the only other person to have at least a vague idea of the part of their history Philip knows. While Philip doesn’t recover any stolen memories, he does sometimes see fragments like he used to, in dreams, and at Claudette’s suggestion, he starts trying to draw them, and Nancy works with him and Claudette to try to help quickly sketch a realistic portrayal of whatever image he had, and then Claudette tries to help him look up what it might be. This isn’t the incredible memory flood trigger they wish it was, and usually it’s hard to tell, or it’s something basic, like, he’ll have remembered a very specific looking (and not survivor standard) campfire, or an oddly mangled hand that is definitely not his, a syringe with something unusual in it, etc—occasionally something more useful, like a Sami drum—but even if it’s like finding a photo album of nothing someone else took and trying to use it to figure out who they were, it’s a lot better to Philip than no fragments. It makes him feel like he’s still at least got little pieces of things he lost, and that makes them his and damaged instead of just gone. It’s comforting, and he deeply loves and appreciates Nancy and Claudette for doing it with him. They also kind of make it just a normal fun part of the breakfast ritual, so it feels just kind of okay and expected and nice. A good part of life, and progress, rather than a hopeless task or a sad one.

[theconservativebrief]

Every week, we pick a new episode of the week. It could be good. It could be bad. It will always be interesting. You can read the archives here. The episode of the week for November 25 through December 1 is “Battle of the Sexes,” the fifth episode of the third season of Netflix’s F Is for Family.

Netflix’s F Is for Family is a weird little hybrid of a show. It’s sometimes very funny, and it’s sometimes very sad, which isn’t that unusual for a comedy — even an animated comedy — in 2018. But what makes F Is for Family notable is how both its sadness and its humor stem from exactly the same spot.

It would be tempting, if you only watched a single half-hour episode of F Is for Family, to conclude that it’s a series lamenting the rise of “political correctness.” Set in the ‘70s, it centers on a loud-mouthed white guy named Frank who’s at least vaguely threatened by women demanding something more like equality, and by the growing sense that the social order he stands atop is slowly eroding right beneath him.

What’s more, Loudmouthed white guys threatened by change aren’t unusual TV protagonists, either for comedies set in the ‘70s or for animated sitcoms. But F Is for Family’s spin on the type is defined as much by his sputtering frustration and total lack of confidence in himself and his abilities as it is by his anger. When Frank (voiced by series co-creator Bill Burr) shouts at his kids, F Is for Family doesn’t want you to laugh at how times have changed as much as it wants you to feel how limited he can be by his narrow range of emotional expression.

Yet the series isn’t afraid of occasionally dropping the hammer, of leaving viewers wondering where some darkly emotional turn came from. And so goes the end of “Battle of the Sexes,” the third season’s fifth episode.

Frank is covered in dead goose, and that’s all you need to know. Netflix

Coming at the exact midway point of a 10-episode season, “Battle of the Sexes” sends the season’s two big plots crashing into each other.

In the first plot, Frank has essentially been trying to woo new neighbor Chet (Vince Vaughn) to be his new best friend. Chet’s an Air Force pilot who married Nguyen Nguyen (Eileen Fogarty), a woman he met in Vietnam. Frank, who never met a cocky dude he couldn’t immediately try to emulate, begins spending more and more time with Chet, who offers to build a new room for the baby Frank and his wife have on the way.

But throughout Chet’s time on F Is for Family, the show drops more and more hints that he’s not the “great guy” Frank keeps insisting he is, especially when Chet suggests that both men cheat on their wives. (Frank refuses.) What’s more, the sheer number of times that both Chet and Frank say Chet is a “great guy” should lead most astute viewers to conclude that Frank knows, on some level, that the guy’s a fraud and Chet is compensating for something in hanging out with him.

Meanwhile, in the second plot, Frank’s wife Sue (Laura Dern) is reeling from the theft of her salad-tossing invention, which has made $1 million for another woman in town. She throws herself into trying to find a “second once-in-a-lifetime idea,” even as she’s balancing a pregnancy and trying to preserve a marriage she found herself more and more ambivalent about in season two. (It’s not uncommon for animated family comedies to suggest that their central husbands and wives are unequally yoked; only on F Is for Family do you suspect that such a marriage might really dissolve someday.)

Her second big idea arrives in the form of a weird kitchen multi-tool that contains a fork, spoon, knife, pizza cutter, and spatula, among other things. She and her friend Viv sink a fair amount of money into developing prototypes, but nobody else likes the idea, and Sue watches her grand ambitions slowly circle the drain, knowing that a baby will arrive soon and suck up plenty of her time and attention.

There are other storylines circling these two central ones — mostly featuring Frank and Sue’s three kids — but the center of the season stems, as is always the case when the show is at its best, from the ways Frank and Sue are limited by their histories, their frustrations, and their emotional limitations.

Frank, in particular, is a pitch-perfect sketch of a certain kind of male neediness. He at once longs to be as seemingly cool as Chet, while also feeling a bit thrown by how little another neighbor, the ultra-confident neighbor Vic (Sam Rockwell, doing a Sam Rockwell impression), seems to care about typical social niceties. (Season two revealed that much of Vic’s confidence is thanks to cocaine, which feels about right.)

But Frank is also unable to see beyond his own nose. He understands that Sue feels an immense frustration at the way her life has turned out, but he’s largely unwilling to dwell on how he’s played a big role in that frustration. Similarly, his relationship with one of his best friends, black co-worker Rosie (Kevin Michael Richardson), is defined by how often Rosie has to point out that Frank can’t understand Rosie’s frustrations, because Frank is white.

Season three of F Is for Family does soften Frank just a touch. He’s really trying in his marriage to Sue, whom he does love deeply, and he’s horrified when Chet suggests cheating on their wives. And when Rosie gets passed over for a promotion at work, Frank is upset for reasons beyond how much more work it’s going to make for Frank (though, to be fair, he’s mostly upset about the amount of work it will mean for him). But if Frank is softening, the world around him isn’t, necessarily.

Sue learns something horrible about Chet and Nguyen Nguyen’s marriage. Netflix

The center of “Battle of the Sexes” is an impromptu neighborhood hangout at Frank and Sue’s house. Frank and Chet have been planning to work on the baby’s room, which leads to the other guys in the neighborhood dropping by. Sue, meanwhile, gathers her friends to offer feedback on her new invention. The kids hang out in the other room, too, watching the titular “Battle of the Sexes,” a jai alai spin on the 1973 tennis match of the same name.

Eventually, the three parties blend together in the largest group scene F Is for Family has ever done, according to series co-creator and showrunner Michael Price, as all of the characters gather around the television to watch a woman and man face off on the sacred courts of jai alai. As everyone watches the match play out, they crack jokes, both to diffuse the tensions that have built up throughout the night and to underscore the existing social order. A final bet from Sue ensures that if the woman jai alai player wins, the men in the room will do their respective household’s chores over the next week.

But the bet is masking a darker turn. Later, as Sue walks over to Chet and Nguyen Nguyen’s house to return a casserole dish, she hears Chet threatening Nguyen for the jokes she made at his expense earlier, then telling her she’s not allowed to leave the house the next day. Sue listens, then turns away — not returning the dish — presumably to go home and tell Frank.

This is a standard F Is for Family move. The show will frequently deploy a standard trope of the animated family sitcom subgenre — like a dad who shouts loud and abusive things for “comedy” reasons — then look at how harmful those tropes can be in other contexts. Frank’s bluster is funny because he’s ultimately not going to do anything about it. He’s just loud and angry, and he takes his family for granted, but he loves them too much to do anything except shout. Chet is very different (as, we learn later in the season, was Frank’s own father).

This willingness to dig into the darker subtext at play in its universe is what makes F Is for Family worth watching. The show has an immense amount of empathy for every character that lives in its little neighborhood, but it also understands how the limitations that keep them all in place manifest in traumas that travel down family trees.

And yet they don’t have to. Frank might bluster, but he’s not his father, and we can see the ways that his own sons won’t be like Frank when they grow up. And F Is for Family doesn’t pretend its “politically incorrect” elements depict the world as it really is, or something facile like that; rather, it focuses on the ways that Frank and guys like him created a whole system designed to flatter themselves into believing they are — or at least were — the kings of the world.

In season three, especially, F Is for Family is about a nation in transition, where Irish and Italian families are increasingly secure in their positions of power and privilege relative to other racial minorities and ethnicities, but where they still have recent memories of being cast out of the American mainstream (to the degree that a side character on a show that Frank’s kids watch is a very broad Irish stereotype). And yet the characters increasingly try to make things better, here and there, around the edges of their lives, if never quite at the center.

Okay, yeah, that makes the show sound more like a dark drama than an animated sitcom. And at times, that description fits F Is for Family — a funny show, but one that will never sacrifice a character moment, heartfelt or depressive or otherwise, in the name of a joke. It’s a long, boozy story, told by a very funny comedian, late at night, right before the bar closes. And you start out laughing, but then you’re just smiling, and then finally you’re realizing this guy has seen some shit. And then the story’s over, and the lights come on, and everybody goes home, through quiet streets.

F Is for Family is streaming on Netflix.

Original Source -> Netflix’s F Is for Family examines the dark core of the angry sitcom dad

via The Conservative Brief