#then in the film all english-speaking characters talk in french but french people also still speak french haha

[lulu2992]

Hi lulu, so i was wondering if have you played Far cry new dawn in French, does roger talk in another idiom?

In spanish he stills talk in french

Hi! Yes, I played New Dawn in French and Roger has the same Québécois accent he has in English. It even seems he’s played by the same actor, Vincent Leclerc, whose name appears among the other French voice talents in the credits.

As for some of the (Canadian) French words he uses, such as “osti”, “tabarnak”, or “caulisse”, they’re typical slang/swear words from Québec that we don’t use in France, so they kept them in the French version and they sound as funny and exotic as they do in English.

It’s rare that Far Cry characters who speak with a non-American accent end up also having an accent in the French version of the game, but Roger thankfully kept his!

[wwouldvecouldveshouldve]

KEYSSS my dear mutual congratulations on 1K likes aaaah you deserve all of them! May I henceforth ask for a platonic BSD matchup? I go by she/her and I don't have a preference for which gender I want to be matched up with :3

Personality: I personally don't know what my mbti is, so I'll just give a short description of my personality. I find myself to be more of a listener, but with the right type of person (really quiet or someone chaotic) I can talk for hours. People say that I'm nice and smart, but I doubt myself sometimes. I am physically affectionate with my friends, and often flirt with them only if they're not in a relationship. My friends like to banter with me and I like to tease them/make them laugh, but if they like to sit in silence then I'm perfectly fine with that as well. Sometimes I am too sacrificial and am bit too much of a people pleaser, but I am working on setting down boundaries and saying 'no'

Hobbies: I like to read books more than I like gaming and watching videos. I also like to learn new things, no matter how hard they are, because I am quite curious about a lot of matters. I can speak English and Mandarin, and I am partially fluent in French. I also love to play the piano because I find it calming <3

Topics I like to discuss: Honestly I can talk about anything as long as it's not something that I'm uncomfortable with (which I only have a few). I normally like to discuss history, books, travelling, and any funny things that happened recently in life

Things I hate: I don't hate a lot of things because I am a firm believer of the quote that love transcends all animosity, but what I really do hate are people who willingly do bad things and do not feel sorry for it. I normally am quite forgiving, but once somebody crosses that line too many times without genuinely trying to improve, then they've lost their chance

Something that makes me unique: I'm actually more of a classics person than a contemporary person. What that means is that I prefer classic books, classical music, classic movies, and old history etc. I do like watching a modern film every now and then, but I find that nothing captivates me more than the antique things. I'm probably one of the few girls my age who is more caught up with the 1700-1900s than the 2000s ahaha. I also am more of a jewellery girl than a clothing girl, and my favourite jewellery is silver jewellery :)

Preference: I'm okay with being matched by a character that commits crime, but as long as they aren't too crazy about it

What I value in others: I value loyalty, respect, and communication in others, as I believe that those are the three key points of any relationship. Bonus points if I find them fun to hang around with, and that they won't twist my morals and lead me down a darker path

Something I can't stand in others: Honestly anything that makes a toxic relationship; dishonesty, disrespect, and not listening to what I have to say

Remember to take your time my dear, and once again congratulations on 1K likes! Let's get that to 1K followers >:D

SILVER I'M SO SORRY IT TOOK SO LONG!! I was almost done with it and then it was literally all lost, but I still got it done. thank you so much, darling, and I hope you don't mind the wait.

I match you up with Tetcho! he's a silly little man, please take care of him.

He loves listening to you. There is nothing he would rather do than listen to you talk about the things that you are interested in, and he is not affected by what other people have to say about your interests. He would be ticked off at anyone that judged someone for their preferences in media and entertainment. He would not force you to try his food, but if you do like any of the combinations he would be glowing with happiness for the rest of the week. He is always a little sunshine, though, and is nothing but supportive. He loves what makes you strange, and he loves that you love what makes him unique, too. He would not let harm befall you. He would rather be stabbed a thousand times than for you to get a paper cut, and would be even more devoted to justice after meeting you because he would want to make sure that no filthy criminals can hurt you. He would not let Jouno make fun of you or your friendship. He would probably stab his ass again, and would start doing it more if you found it funny. Either way, Jouno will eventually make peace with you. He would love to listen to you play the piano, and might even pick it up himself if he has the time. He could also learn another instrument solely so he could teach it to you. He would be a non-judgemental teacher but he would definitely be a little strict. Secretly, he is a little scared that he is too overbearing when teaching you things. Overall, he would value similar things to you in a relationship. He is an honest man who communicates well, if not sometimes too bluntly, but he would do his best to always respect you. If someone else is to disrespect you, however, all hell breaks loose. Jouno and the Huntings Dogs will obviously get lighter punishments, though, and I don't expect them to cross any lines. He would, without a doubt, try to keep you as far away from his occupation as possible. Your safety is his priority, and he could not live with himself knowing that he was the reason why you were targeted by a criminal group. He gets anxious about how you are doing, so he will send a variety of texts about how you are doing throughout the day. It's a little heartwarming knowing that you're always on his mind. Because of his constant worrying about your safety, he absolutely loves to hold you in his arms so he knows that nobody can hurt you. Sometimes, though, he just wants you to hold him instead because he is always dealing with things for other people and he just wants someone to do the same for him.

that's all for today, I hoped you liked it darling! <33 have a wonderful day or night :)

[infinitelytheheartexpands]

Henry V (1989 film version with Kenneth Branagh): Reactions, Part II

let us continue!

once again, we love us some OLDE MAPS!!!

“plsssss i don’t want my boyfriend to be executeeeeeeed :(“

this guy is taking no shit

tfw your former buddy is about to get executed right in front of you

“how could you let this happen to me??? :(“

“…did i fucking tell you to go rob a CHURCH???”

✨uncomfortable foreshadowing in the flashback✨

honestly, getting hanged for robbing a church is…not out of character for him!

well at least you want them all to treat the villages and villagers fairly but uh…didn’t you literally just talk about sticking babies on pikes a few scenes ago?

in keeping with the tennis stuff: the ball is now in france’s court

well, he’s nothing if not a good catholic boy i guess

chorus is just like “well! that happened!”

stop comparing horses and armor and go to SLEEP y’all have a BATTLE tomorrow

or don’t. knock yourselves out i guess.

once again: royals and nobles have nothing better to do than wander around in disguise! always a treat in media

calling your countryfolk “your bosom” i guess

kissing one’s dirty shoe? okay good for you i guess

yeah y’all shouldn’t be talking so loudly right before the battle you never know who’d be listening

the elizabethan version of “if all your friends jumped off a bridge would you do the same?”

and he likes speaking about himself in the third person

ooh damn this guy’s got a good point (that the king might have some reckoning to do if this war is not just)

no, what he’s saying is that what if they shouldn’t have died in the first place. keep up, henry

OHHHHHHHHHHH SHIT HE JUST CHALLENGED THE KING TO A DUEL

(he doesn’t know he’s the king but STILL! DRAMA!!!!!)

he’s considering…

“okay but surely i’m not responsible for EVERYTHING in my people’s lives??? right??? RIGHT???”

and the question surely on both of our minds: but where is the line, especially in this case???

ooooooooooooooooof.

okay but this brings up a good question: so if his dad murdered the guy before him, it may not be right to punish the son for the sins of the father but uh. is his claim to the ENGLISH throne even legit, let alone the FRENCH throne??? has he legitimized it through his penitence and devotion (in more than one sense)??? much to think about!

BATTLE DAY IS HERE!!!

whack whackity whack whack

FIVE TO ONE?!?!?! oh lord help you all

oh hey here’s the other thing i know: the st. crispin’s day speech!

come on y’all KNOW it’s iconic

“we few, we happy few, we band of brothers…”

i mean come on. it’s just so uplifting and strong and has GREAT vibes.

“dude. we do not need to have this discussion AGAIN.”

can’t help but respect henry right now even if you don’t like him!

here we go…

dude how did you just show up in the middle of the battlefield lmao

“ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck that is a lot of people coming at us at once ohhhhhhhh boy”

also i love how they’re just cutting to all these WILDLY different reactions on all these english leaders’ faces lol

HERE WE GO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

oh yeah i do remember learning about this. how the longbows were taking ALL the french out and how it was an example of important military tech development during this time or something like that

gotta respect a leader who fights alongside his soldiers

this is gory and graphic as FUCK omg

can’t even tell half these english dudes apart but oof that HURTS (are these people even english???)

sucks to be y’all

oh hey again baby christian bale!!!

WHERE IS THE HIGH PITCHED SCREAMING COMING FROM

oh my god. oh my god. THE FRENCH WENT AFTER THE FUCKING KIDS????????????????

i’m gonna need a sec. hold on. gonna need a sec.

he gets it!!!

oh BUDDY 😭

“I WAS NOT ANGRY SINCE I CAME TO FRANCE, UNTIL THIS INSTANT!!!” MOOD. FUCKING MOOD.

this, imo, is an appropriate reaction

reasonable request though

i mean with all the carnage everywhere it’s entirely understandable to not know what the FUCK is going on

well at least the english won i guess

but, and i could be wrong here, weren’t they retreating anyway? so either way technically they lost the war. this just means their army didn’t get hacked to bits or something i guess. idk. could be wrong.

oh buddy…

did you not look at your map before you came here. it would’ve told you this place was called agincourt

okay but why is this so adorable

MISTRESS QUICKLY DIED????????? nooooooooooooooo rip to the “reverenza” queen

the only french guy in here: wait TEN THOUSAND french people died??????? like, ONE SIXTH of the entire army???? 😳

ONLY TWENTY NINE (29)????????????

(i mean, presumably the boys are not being counted, and goodness knows how many of them, but maybe they are???)

his line reading is just *chef’s kiss*

HENRY IS CARRYING THE BOY STOOOOOOOOOOOP DO YOU WANT TO MAKE ME CRY AGAIN

also this is really beautiful music

like. there’s so much to unpack here. and it’s a beautiful moment, and some GREAT camera work. 10/10 the movie could end right here but apparently there’s another 20 minutes

annnnnnnnnnnnnnd i’m crying again

oof.

so it looks like war devastated our buddy henry, so maybe let’s go for peace instead?

flashback time!

what have we all lost?

also unrelated but what happened to the guy who challenged henry to a duel? i hope he’s having a good day

ah yes, making a woman your demand. *sigh* yeah i know this is how politics and arranged marriages work, and she seems to not hate him, but still.

okay but: gorgeous

this is awkwaaaaaaaaaard

“i already tried to be the enemy and that didn’t work so i guess…france’s friend???”

he’s trying!!! and it’s honestly kinda cute

and it seems like he’s giving her a choice, so good on that

annnnnnnnnnnnnd there it is!

ah, peace.

annnnnnnnd bringing the frame back

henry may have been brilliant, but…history has a way of complicating things.

anyway this was AWESOME, 10/10 definitely recommend

[la-pheacienne]

What are your favourite greek classics? or in general from the greek literature canon? I'm not greek so i confess that i only know the ones that date back centuries that i needed to study from my classic greek classes :) I read antigone and i like it

And, aside from les mis, have you read any other french classics? or any that are now encapsulated as "european" (spanish, polish, romanian etc?

Sorry if any questions sound weird. Do not need to answer if they make you uncomfortable

No it's not weird at all, thank you for asking!!!

Unfortunately, I have read far less greek classics than I would like. My first response will be kind of basic, I think one should always, always, start with Homer (with a slight preference for Odyssey). Odyssey is truly magical. There is nothing quite like it. Thematically, conceptually, narratively, stylistically it is just so flawless. It is like a dream of adventure, love, monsters, good and evil, loyalty and treason, and longing for home of course.

Then since you have read Antigone you could try Oresteia, this is a trilogy (I think the first trilogy ever created?), so it's three consecutive tragedies, and it's amazing, I think this one particularly appeals to someone who is looking for a more, let's say, morally dubious world. It's less idealistic, it's a story about a rotten royal family tearing itself to pieces. What's cool is that every single POV has more or less valid reasons for doing what they are doing, and your opinion on the characters really changes when you go from one tragedy to the next. Everyone is partly right and partly wrong (some more than others), but in the end the gods intervene to settle this affair once and for all. It's really cool. Then Oedipus Rex has of course the OG "trying to change my destiny and making it happen instead" arc which is a really powerful theme, used consistently ever since in any type of modern media, films, tv shows and books.

But since you ask about Greece, in case you are interested in reading modern greek literature, I have a soft spot for the Murderess of Alexandros Papadiamantis (you can find it in Amazon), I think it's the best modern greek novel honestly. It's about an old woman who slowly becomes deranged and starts killing little girls, starting with her newborn granddaughter, because she feels that girls bring only misery to their families (and will only experience misery themselves). Then I will also include this quite niche recommendation (this one will be more difficult to find but an english translation does exist), its The End of Our Small Town by Dimitris Hatzis, it's a book with many beautiful and heartbreaking short stories/portraits of different social types of people in Greece during the period between the first and the second World War.

So, from Europe I have read french, russian, and english literature. And also Kafka, that's it. So I can only speak about this. From french literature, I would recommend a less talked about novel of Balzac, Le Cousin Pons, that is one of my absolute favourite books. Balzac is the contrary of Hugo in the sense that Hugo is a Romantic, he talks about society but aiming to inspire people, to put it simply, while Balzac is a Realist, so he wants to present society exactly as it is, and it is not a good portrait. Where Hugo is hopeful, Balzac is resigned, so it is a really depressing book. But still, hands-out the most in-depth portrait of french society, 100 percent relevant today, and the appeal of it is that it makes the modern reader feel akward cause the things he criticizes are still prevalent in the modern way of thinking. I guarantee that you will find people you know that are exactly like some characters in that book. It is the story of an antique collector that is ignored and scorned by his superficial bourgeois family because he's weird and he only cares about his hyperfixation (his collectables) until they realise the true value of his collection and they construct a plan to steal it and basically destroy him in the process.

[reggieisme]

Intro

about me

an agender bisexual

also asexual

they/them

big cat person

i’m polish pfff

i speak polish, english and french (learning welsh bc i want to)

the funniest person ever! #laughoutloud

interests ig

i like reading. reading is fun. i said it. reading is fun if you are reading something you are enjoying

marvel is amazing. it’s literally so good it’s SO GOOD. been a proud fan since childhood and i’ve been an andrew garfield spiderman supporter since DAY ONE people. DAY ONE.

star wars! i grew up on the star wars movie and i’ve always enjoyed them. also disneys a wimp for not allowing poe and finn to have a romantic relationship.

the queens gambit. ong i love this show i cannot tell you how much i love the show. AND THE BOOK. OH MT FOD UTS SO GOOD.

dead poets society- love the movie and it makes me fucking sob every single time.

i have a passion for writing. i love making stories and creating things and daydreaming about characters i’ve made and shaped.

the umbrella academy AHHHHH. it’s such a good show please go watch it if you haven’t

DAREDEVIL. OH AHHHH. I COULD MOAN ITS LITERALLY PERFECTION.

TICK TICK BOOM! im a huge musical fan i love musicals. i love tick tick boom especially, and not only bc of andrew garfield.

THE HUNGER GAMES. i make sure to read the books every single year at least once and watch the movies. i cannot explain how much i love this franchise

harry potter- literally my childhood. we, ofc, don’t speak of the author, but i love the magic you feel when you watch the films and read the books. also my wand collection is growing at an alarming rate and i’m not worried. (remus lupin is my favorite character btw. also huge marauder stan. #wolfstar)

maze runner! i like the books and i love watching the movies. favorite character is probably newt or minho. it’s something about those two i swear. also newtmas, i’m sorry but yep. btw i don’t hate teresa

BBC SHERLOCK. OH CHRIST I COULD TALK ABOUT THIS FOR HOURS.

Peaky Fucking Blinders. my heart goes out to this show. much love istg

dune. i have all of the books and i have seen the new movie which i rlly enjoyed. i understood it, surprisingly and i need to read the books

LITTLE WOMEN. I ABSOLUTELY LOVE THE BOOK AND THE MOVIE. I COULD LITERALLY TALK ABOUT IT FOR SO LONG ITS NOT EVEN FUNNY.

i’m a big chocolate fan. many ppl have told me i act like remus lupin which i ADORE. remus is honestly just so great i’m sorry i love him sm.

big music fan. i love music

i skateboard fun fact. i have a longboard and a large penny board? i broke my skateboard so i’m stuck with these two bad boys (i’m rlly bad at tricks)

FRIENDS. i love friends so much omg. (chandler’s my favorite)

Shadow and Bone! really good show and the books are good

Six of Crows! Literally the best.

SNOWBOARDING. it’s so fun i love it. the thrill, the snow, everything omg. it’s so unbelievably fun

ICE SKATING. my mom fortunately forced me to learn ice skating at a young age AND I WAS GOOD AT IT. I WAS SO GOOD AND THEN I QUIT BC IM A WIMP. i can still skate just can’t do the tricks i used to be able to do sadly

[isagrimorie]

Spyfall 2

Commentators: Jodie Whittaker, Sylvie Briggs (Ada Lovelace), Chris Chibnall

Much like the Doctor doesn't like being alone, Jodie also isn't keen on doing scenes alone.

Chibnall actually did consult with his brother in law, who is very knowledgeable in aviation, about landing planes without a cockpit. And it is possible to do so remotely, people will be surprised how a lot of modern planes are actually flown by a computer. I'm not surprised, my dad's a pilot and he told me a lot of modern aircraft are actually flown more by the computers than the pilots. It's a two edged sword tho because then the pilot becomes too over reliant on the autopilot, and that's when accidents happen.

The scene with Ada and Thirteen meeting in the Kasaavin dimension was actually Sylvie's (Ada Lovelace) final day. Her first day was waking up in 'Paris' with Thirteen.

Interesting comment about how the Doctor's rhythm and speech changed dictated by the period of time she's in. It's modern but enough to sound period.

The hall the Doctor and Ada are in is a school, the dining hall.

The Master and his Top Hat! Jodie and Sylvie are both admiring how Sacha commanded the room and how genuinely terrifying he was. 'He (Sacha) rehearses in a way physically you kinda know what he's gonna do but emotionally its different.'

Jodie: "We're the same height, well you can see it 'cause we are but what is really ace is bein' able to eyeball somebody, because very often when you have a standoff with someone there's usually one's looking up, one's looking down or whatever but to be absolutely--"

Sylvie: "Because that changes the power dynamic."

Jodie: "Yeah."

Chibnall: "I never clocked that."

[snip]

Chibnall: "But I wonder if that's what makes it feels so much like your Master, your antagonist, your nemesis. It's like... that's interesting about the eyeline."

Jodie: "Cause in the scene obviously with Lenny outside like this (does something we can't see) and I like doing that thing of scrunching up and kind of, y'know, I suppose the.. doing that thing that kids do headstrong where the body leans forward. But with this two its (growls)."

Chibnall was uncertain about writing the kneel scene, Jodie agrees and didn't like it, Sylvie mentions that it feels epic to her. Chibnall:"There's something about your perfromances that makes it feel epic. But it's just that two-hander."

In the kneel scene, when they were filming, to keep the secret of the Master's identity, Jodie called Sacha 'Myka' instead of Master.

Jodie: "I like my bowtie." Chibnall: "Are you angling for the return of the bowtie?"

Jodie: "Every set, I try to knick something." LOL.

I love how Jodie compliments Sylvie, and I agree she fits the era very well. And an instance where costume (corset especially), and the hair all tied back helps get into character.

Ada really had episodes of paralysis, and one of the jumping off points for Chibnall's story.

Sylvie and Jodie comment on how lovely it was to have scenes with three women and not about 'Hey three women! Let's talk about being women! It's (their gender) is absolutely irrelevant to it but it is really lovely to have just three women. The kind of craziness Doctor Who brings with Ada in period clothes, the Doctor in a tux, and Noor in her period appropriate clothes.

They go on to discuss the Master's SS uniform and how it makes them (Sacha included) shudder because of what the uniform represented. And it's more of a reflection of the Master because he just treats wearing the SS uniform as a dress up without accounting for the implications and history of it. An alien tourist playing dress-up. [ED: I think the optics of this is still problematic I think it's something we need to acknowledge..]

There really was a point where Jodie and Sylvie were under the floor boards with people walking above them, and they held each other's hands because that experience was awful. On page it was very cool, but in execution. (Ed: I love that scene the whole way where there's a tense standoff between Noor and the soldiers, and the Master. And the steeliness of Noor just staring them down even with the soldier strafing the floor.) Chibnall wants several films with Noor Inayat Khan.

OMG. There was a point in the shoot where the Doctor was supposed to speak in perfect French, and Jodie joked that she already didn't speak English very well, and so she practiced speaking her line just to get the accent perfect... only for it to be cut for time. I WANT DELETED SCENES NOW.

Scanning through the Spyfall 2 script there's no mention of the scene where the Doctor speaks in French which really just confirms my suspicion that the scripts are not the shooting scripts, or at least the copies the actors use.

So, Chibnall gave the production several possible locations hoping to bring the budget to manageable scale and then he started writing and he got to the scene where the Doctor and Master spoke and the Master asked where they'd meet and then the Doctor answered; "Where d'you think?"

And Chibnall goes: "Oh they've got to meet in the Eiffel Tower. Production is going to kill me!"

Also, by this it confirms to me that Chibnall, like all of the showrunners is a Doctor/Master shipper, which I should've known already because Jack and Captain John were very much Doctor/Master lite.

Jodie loves doing duologues and is hoping for more two handers in the future, and Chibnall is taking note of that. Two handers where the other person has more of the dialogue... LOL. I guess Jodie really loved The Timeless Children.

[ED: Ada and Noor were such good companions. I want a historical companion for Thirteen next please. Thirteen, Yaz, and a historical Companion!]

Sylvie is so fascinated with the Doctor and Master's relationship, about how complicated it is.

One of the advises RTD gave Chibnall is that 'you can save anything in a line.' LOL. Apparently some of the Master's trauma across 77 years involved tailoring.

Jodie comments on how exciting it is being involved in the costuming, between herself and Sacha, they get to build their Doctors and Master's look and shape them. Also Jodie really loves cropped pants.

Jodie and Sylvie love the power walk, the big iconic, backlit smoke walk. The Big Exposition speech.

The scene where the Master arrives in Kasaavin dimension, same day filming for Jodie, and Sylvie too.

Jodie loves all the engineering and carpentry work, and any practical work.

They did do a shoot where they moved forward to a scene where Noor died, but in the edit found a better ending in the one that was broadcasted, and IMO, that was the right choice. Chibnall wants it more that Doctor Who will inspire people to read up more on Noor Inayat Khan and same Ada.

Chibnall didn't want to rob Ada of her agency, that the Doctor helped her discover computers or suggest that she didn't come up with it, everything Ada did she came up with herself.

The scene where Thirteen is alone and contemplating what happened to Gallifrey, Jodie comments how this was one of the few times where she's just very still.

Chibnall: "This is second series Thirteen, the place you take a character once you've done the first act, done in the beginning of your Doctor's second act."

Jodie and Sacha made sure that they're there in person for the scene in the TARDIS because having a stand-in would change the energy and performance of the scene.

Chibnall: "That performance from Sacha, the layer he brings to the Master there, of emotional truth and pain is so fantastic. It's a gift for a writer, and opens up the Master as well. And opens up your Doctor, I think, the trauma's so personal."

Hang on. Chibnall: "Is that the first appearance of the jumper? [ snip] They've come in this second series, its the first jumper. Little tiny changes you and Ray figure out." Are they implying there were more Doctor wearing only her long sleeve jumper we didn't get to see???

Chibnall: "And you got your Doctor theme but also it's the first time you [speaking to Jodie], it's interesting, I deliberately kept them back in the first series so that when you say them here, it's like you're saying 'Gallifrey', 'Kasterborous', 'Master for the first time."

Jodie: But its good that it ends with a: [using the same steely, angry voice]: 'Questions?' Like: 'Back to business, c'mon.'

Chibnall: (watching Thirteen's face subtly change when Yaz asked if they can visit, and it changes from a broken void to a forced smile). "Ohhhh. Why won't you tell them?" (LOL a writer asking his character.)

[historic-old-guard-lover]

How many languages and which of them would the cast speak if we’re going to be completely historically accurate ?

This a great question that I can’t quite answer, but I spent six hours researching to give it a shot. I think that there’s a broad range of plausible languages and you’ve got leeway to choose how many. The first part is that different people have different affinities for languages. Some people can speak ten different languages fluently (or near-fluency), while others will struggle juggling three different ones in their brains. The range in the languages can affect this, too: it’s easy to mess up between similar languages. I personally have trouble speaking Spanish because in the middle of the sentence, I’ll drop a French word without even realizing it. The same thing doesn’t happen to me in other languages like German, though. By the same token as I’ve discussed before, similar languages are easier to learn. Going from English to Russian with the Cyrillic alphabet? More difficult than English to French, which makes up about a third of modern English. These are languages that are still in the same family (Proto-Indo-European, PIE), though, so it holds nothing to the difficulty of going from English to a language like Mandarin.

I’m breaking this answer into two parts: 1) how many?; 2) which ones? and I’m going to get carried away because I’m me so it’s below the break to spare you if this comes across your dash and you’re not a nerd...

PART 1: What’s a realistic number for them to speak?

I think that each member of the old guard probably has a certain number of languages which they’re comfortable with, a few more that they can understand/get by in, and a few that they may only know phrases from. The number of each isn’t the same for everyone. The average human being is able to speak ~1.5 languages. The most talented polyglots can speak upwards of 50 languages, maybe one guy even spoke 65 (mostly I want to mention he loved translating the phrase “kiss my ass”). This hyperpolyglot, Kreb aka “Kiss My Ass” Stan, had his brain dissected after his death and it showed a lot of “abnormalities”. That leads neuroscientists and me to believe that being able to study and learn 65 languages is either 1) a major skill that rewired his brain because he was flexing it so much; or 2) very abnormal and facilitated by his brain differences. Since their powers don’t make them stop being limited by the human brain (they can forget), I would say that it is unlikely that one of them is fluent/near fluent/comfortable in more than ~65 languages.

Getting past twelve languages is considered a feat, so I think only Andy, Quynh, Nicky, and Joe could be anywhere near the upper-bounds of languages. Remember, these hyperpolyglots spend their entire lives studying languages and often need refreshers. The members of the Old Guard don’t have the luxury of reading grammar books all day, and they also have to remember a bunch of combat training. You can argue that a lot of fighting is “muscle memory” aka located in the cerebellum and nowhere near language processing areas, but there’s still things like math, navigation, etc. that they need to remember. I doubt they have a list of their safe houses just lying around. The older members can speak more languages by virtue of being around longer and having that time to learn, but if we’re being realistic they should probably speak no more than ~45-55 languages comfortably. This doesn’t mean that they only *know* that many, but the other languages would be more like bad high school Spanish in America than able to wax poetic. Aside: that Joe is able to be poetic in what is AT LEAST his fourth or so language is very impressive and we should talk about that more.

How Many Each Member is Maximally Proficient In/Knowledgeable Of at the end of the film/Opening Fire comics run:

Lykon (comics): proficient in ~15, knowledgeable of ~30*

Lykon (movies): proficient in ~45, knowledgeable of ~80*

Andy: proficient in ~50, knowledgeable of ~100**

Quynh | Noriko: proficient in ~51, knowledgeable of ~90**

Joe: proficient in ~30, knowledgeable of ~80

Nicky: proficient in ~30, knowledgeable of ~80

Booker: proficient in ~10, knowledgeable of ~30

Nile: proficient in ~2 (maybe 3), knowledgeable of ~5

*In the comics, he is younger than Andy and Quynh and I assume he dies young. In the movie, it is strongly implied that he was the oldest. The reason why his numbers are not larger, however, is because at some point there were fewer languages as humanity had not dispersed as much as it eventually did. He’s also long before written language which facilitates learning for most people. RIP Lykon.

**I’m not saying that Quynh is smarter than Andy, just that she comes after written language and it should be slightly easier for her to pick things up. I’m giving Andy access to more languages, however, because PIE alone covers Europe, Central Asia, and South Asia. More on this later.

PART 2: Which languages would each of them speak?

I’ve covered this question a little in a previous post that was broadly about proto-indo-european/Andy-centric (check it out if you want), but I’ll give a broader survey of each character here.

A Quick Aside on Lykon: We don’t know enough about this character, and the fact that the comics and movie diverge so sharply does not help at all. I’m going to headcannon that he was from Eastern Africa, where most archaeologists agree that modern humans first appeared in the Horn of Africa aka modern Ethiopia and Somolia and neighbors, and predates Andy by ~3,000 years. For future purposes below and assuming a birth date for Andy in the range ~5,000BCE - 4,000BCE, this puts his birth at around ~8,000BCE - 7,000BCE. This is wild speculation, however. Maybe the early immortals should be spaced by warfare types (Stone Age, Bronze, Iron, Steel?) or maybe they pop up once a cultural region reaches a certain historic point or maybe they just sorta pop up and then live for six or seven thousands years. I’m working off the last assumption because it’s the simplest. The only thing I’m certain of is that Greg Rucka probably didn’t sit down and think this pattern through. If I’m wrong, oh well. I’m mad at him for all his historical inaccuracies. With dating from ~8,000BCE - 7,000BCE, I’m having trouble finding a name for the cultures that scientists/historians know were living there at the time. It’s probably because the region has been continually occupied since the first humans, which one can safely assume makes abandoned and undisturbed sites hard to fine.

A Quick Aside on Quynh | Noriko: I like the film better, so I’ll be working with Quynh. If there’s enough interest, I can add on Japanese for Noriko. I’m going to date Quynh to be ~1,500 years after Andy (maybe this should be the new date system, before Andy “BA” and after Andy “AA”). This puts her in the time range of ~3,500BCE - 2,500BCE which could place her in either the Đa Bút neolithic culture of modern-day Vietnam or the Phùng Nguyên bronze age culture of modern-day Vietnam. Those names are archaeological in nature, based on the location where sites have been found and dated to those ranges.

Other Origins: Because we have diverging cannons, I’m going to just state the backgrounds that I’ve assigned. Joe is from 1066CE with a background in the Arab-controlled Maghreb (more specifically, modern-day Tunisia and Northern Algeria). Nicky is from 1069CE with a background from the Italian maritime republic and city-state of Genoa. Booker is from 1770 southern France. Nile is from 1994 Chicago in the United States. Andy is from ~5,000BCE - 4,000BCE in the Caucasus (modern-day Georgia and Azerbaijan) or the South Western Eurasian Steppes, probably the Shulaveri-Shomu culture assuming that location.

The first language everyone learned, their “mother tongue” or “native language” is one that they definitely speak. It’s the language that they think in and would be hard-pressed to lose. This even includes now-dead languages, because, again, it’s the one that they learned to think with. Of course, it is possible to lose a language when you have no one to speak it with if you wanted to do something tragic, but I think that these things are too deeply ingrained for it it to happen by accident.

What Each One’s First Language Would Be:

Nile: American English, possibly African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) at home

Booker: Provençal/Occitan, possibly “standard French” (school and other places outside the home)

Nicky: Genoese Ligurian/Zeneize

Joe: Tunisian Derja/Tunisian Arabic/Tunisian, and possibly one of the dialects of the native Zenati language group based on where more precisely you place him

Quynh: Proto-Viet–Muong (which isn’t well documented because it’s so old)

Andy: Proto-Indo-European (PIE), but if you’re curious the Classical Scythian Language for which she is probably named is only off by a factor of 10 (4000 vs 400 BCE) *cue distressed sighing*

Lykon: Proto-Cushitic (also suffering a lack of documentation from being old as heck)

Other than their first languages, what else they learn depends on where they go. People learned languages back then for the same reasons that they do today: to communicate (and to read, after the invention of writing). 

Additional Confirmed or Likely Cannon Languages:

Nile: Spanish because of the American school system for sure. French is listed on the IG account, but she probably speaks only Spanish or French to a degree of fluency, definitely one better than the other. Very Basic Pashto, which we see her use some obviously-memorized phrases with in the film.

Booker: The IG promo things asserts that he knows (modern, standard) Italian and Greek. Why not? He also probably knows Spanish depending on where more specifically in southern France he is from. He’s probably also picked up on at least Very Basic Arabic from Joe and Nicky, but actually learning the language would take commitment from him. He also clearly speaks English.

Nicky: Other Italian dialects, and it would be fairly easy for him to have picked up modern Italian. He definitely reads Latin. If he was from a wealthy family, he probably also speaks Greek. If he was from a trading family, he probably speaks the trading pidgin of Sabir. The IG account confirms Arabic (vague, but okay I’ll be generous and say modern standard Arabic) and Romanche (they meant to write Romansh). I think Romansh is poorly chosen to characterize him in Northern Italy, but I’m feeling generous. He also clearly speaks English.

Joe: He definitely speaks standard Arabic to have been able to communicate with other Arabic-speakers in Jerusalem.  Genoese Ligurian/Zeneize because of the love of his life, which also means he probably picked up modern Italian at some point. The IG account confirms Farsi (they call it “Persian” *cue screaming*), which works if he was a merchant who traveled far to eastward on the Silk Road...and if you go with the comic cannon makes more sense. I’m going to say that he speaks the Mediterranean trading pidgin Sabir because of his location in Tunisia. If he was from a wealthy merchant family and could afford schooling, he probably learned Greek and maybe also Latin. There’s a good chance that he knows conversational-levels of other native Zenati languages thanks to colonialism discouraging their usage. He also clearly speaks English.

Quynh: We don’t actually know if she speaks English, but it’s safe to assume she does speak at least some of it. She’s probably learned Vietnamese and Mường because of her mastery of their proto-language. Because I see her returning to modern-day Vietnam to fight the Chinese colonization, I think that she might know Cantonese or Mandarin. Based on her travels with Andy, I’d like to propose Greek, Latin, and Mongolian. I’m sure that Andy and her share a language, but who knows which one they were each speaking when they met!

Andy: The IG account says “all,” but I’ve discussed this elsewhere (*major eye rolling*). She almost certainly picked up Scythian and Greek based on her chosen name. Latin isn’t as likely as you’d think, but is possible. I’d like to think that she’s also partial to learning Russian (or some earlier form of the language), Mongolian, and Armenian. Based on her travels with Quynh, I imagine that she speaks Cantonese or Mandarin and Vietnamese or Mu’o’ng. There is some mystery language shared with Quynh, too. She also clearly speaks English.

Lykon: I really don’t know enough about him to hazard any guesses. He should share at least one language in common with Andy and Quynh. If his date of death is ~2,000- 1,000 BCE like I’m supposing, there’s a good chance that he only speaks one or two currently-named languages. Sorry, OP.

[vagabondedlife]

Kei Fujiwara’s name is hardly recognizable to most fans of Japanese cinema despite her crucial role in director Shinya Tsukamoto’s early cult classics. As Tsukamoto’s “right hand” woman in the 1980s, Fujiwara became closely involved in his underground theater troupe, Kaijyu Theater, and contributed to the productions of the experimental and DIY films The Phantom of Regular Size (1986), The Adventures of Denchu Kozo (1987), and Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989). Her credits include actress, cinematographer, prop artist, makeup artist, and set-designer (her apartment was used as a primary set). She also engineered Tetsuo’s iconic phallic drill.

Born in Kumamoto in 1957, Fujiwara moved to Tokyo in her early twenties and discovered theater troupe director Jūrō Kara, who became her mentor. After a decade, she created her own troupe called Organ Vital, which underwent a series of evolutions but remains her life work. Her new project this year is Ibunkitan, a form of micro-nomadic theater, whose kanji characters mean “strange-listen-machine-story.” A private person now living in the reclusive mountains of Nagano, Fujiwara rarely gives interviews, but seemed excited to talk about her rarely discussed directorial debut, Organ (1996).

An avant-garde exploration of violence, pain and pleasure with an operatic amount of coagulated blood and extrasomatic body horror, Organ follows two detectives after they break into an organ harvester’s warehouse and collide with yakuza gangsters, a drugged doctor, and his eye-patch wearing sister Yoko, played by Fujiwara herself, who also produced and wrote the film. A cherished work among hardcore fans of Japanese cult cinema, Organ is still ripe for rediscovery. The film’s offerings of a full-bodied sensorial experience and an abusive questioning of cruelty prove tirelessly relevant.

Fujiwara’s work was recently revived at FFFest in New York City with a double feature of Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Organ. Fujiwara prepared a special statement that was shared as an introduction. Following the screening, we had the opportunity to speak to the artist about her life, practice, and ideals in more depth. The conversation was held over the phone in Japanese.

NOTEBOOK: Is Ibunkitan a new Organ Vital?

KEI FUJIWARA: Yes, it’s a new Organ Vital. When I was young, I lived in the rural area. I always just read theater but never had the opportunity to see state-of-the-art theater. When I was in high school, I was always reading, and I picked up an Antonin Artaud book that featured this French term. It meant the vessels of life. When translated to English, I’m told it just becomes, “vitals of organ,” or something, but in Japanese it is called gozōroppu and to me signifies the corporal. That’s the name of my theater company, and it has always been that for me. Born into this three-dimensional world with bodies, we sense and express. That’s what’s interesting in life. Ibunkitan can be done in a very small space. We’ve done it in temples, in the corner of a shop, in salons. Our first performance was in March, and we’re planning to do another in November. We've been invited to perform my new Jomon-inspired piece in a live-house in the mountains in Nagano, so we’re preparing some woodwork for that now.

NOTEBOOK: You were working in Shinya Tsukamoto’s Kaijyu Theater production between working with Jūrō Kara?

FUJIWARA: Jūrō Kara, my mentor—when I was in Jōkyō Gekijo [Situation Theatre], he took a liking to me and wrote roles for me. A lot happened, and Kara said he would make a new troupe with me, but I had other plans, so I left once, and he said, “As my mentee, you can leave but wait for me to come get you.” That’s when I went to work with Shinya Tsukamoto on his plays and films. It was after Tetsuo: The Iron Man [1989] that Kara started the new troupe “Kara-gumi” and I returned to work with him.

NOTEBOOK: How was it that you began working with Tsukamoto?

FUJIWARA: I had just left Kara and after a while a friend said that Tsukamoto was looking for someone to act in his plays. He was Tsukamoto’s classmate and an actor, and he made the introduction. I found Tsukamoto interesting and talented. So, I began working diligently as his right hand after that.

NOTEBOOK: I wanted to ask you about Tsukamoto’s 1987 film, The Adventures of Denchu Kozo.

FUJIWARA: Denchu Kozo and Tetsuo were actually both shot in my apartment where I was living at the time. You know all those cats? I couldn’t rent a normal apartment, so I had to live in a cheap nagaya tenement house on the verge of getting demolished. I just needed a place to live that permitted pets. Denchu Kozo and Tetsuo’s interior shots are all at my place.

NOTEBOOK: Are the scenes projected in the TV monitor in Tetsuo from Denchu Kozo?

FUJIWARA: Yes. They’re from Denchu Kozo.

Above: Organ

NOTEBOOK: What turned you onto making Organ, if you were always only interested in theater?

FUJIWARA: That was because of my experience filmmaking with Tsukamoto. It prepared me for how arduous it would be. Theater is an impermanent art, and that’s why it’s such a luxurious art form. But film is like capturing a world in a crystal ball. The joy of creating film is like making your own universe. My staff members at the time— six men other than myself—were all talented, and I thought, “Everyone’s here, why don’t I just make it?” So, all the staff also became the actors, and that’s how we started filming. But it was so difficult at first. We used the atelier space we had and reformed it over and over and shot it like that. It was time-consuming. It became the warehouse set, the school set. It kept on transforming. We did it all in the same space.

NOTEBOOK: That seems like a very theatrical way of using space.

FUJIWARA: Yes.

NOTEBOOK: But first, you started writing it?

FUJIWARA: Yes, I first started writing it. I’m actually not very good at planning. I just think that if I put my mind to it, I can make it happen. So I wrote the script, and had the staff pool in their savings. Between the seven of us we had 200,000 yen, so I thought, “Great, if we have 200,000 yen and one reel of film is 5,000 yen, and even if we bought lights, we can make 30 minutes of footage.” As for the equipment, there are countless aspiring-filmmaker boys who have camera equipment lying around collecting dust, so we borrowed from them. As for the set, we were all used to making it for our theater. We were good at foraging free stuff to make things. That warehouse set in the beginning of Organ was made with an extremely cheap budget. Then we started filming. All those organs in that scene were worked from what was supposed to be our dinner for the day [laughs]. We used real food. We took some gelatin- and konjac-noodles and thought, “This can look like veins!”

NOTEBOOK: And then you had it for dinner?

FUJIWARA: Well, we ended up not being able to, because it was covered in fake blood! It was all about how little money we could spend and still make something, which was a valuable lesson for me.

NOTEBOOK: You’ve mentioned the Kenji Miyazawa poem, Ame ni mo makezu1.

FUJIWARA: Yes, I just really like Kenji Miyazawa. I like the way he thinks, and his philosophy. He’s a Buddhist, and as I haven’t studied Buddhism properly, I cannot say for sure, but I think his seimeikan, or view of life, is on par with that of Osamu Tezuka. Osamu Tezuka and Kenji Miyazawa are two gods with the same perspective regarding seimeikan. No matter how great their art is, Yoshihide Otomo and Hayao Miyazaki can never reach Osamu’s level. Osamu’s core is love. There’s only love. The way they think about life is totally different. I was reading manga before I was literate [laughs]. I like Osamu Tezuka, but also Sanpei Shirato. And in my teens, I liked Daijiro Morohoshi. He’s an extremely interesting person.

NOTEBOOK: Do you think that your films need to be discovered?

FUJIWARA: They need to lock in perfectly with someone’s desire to watch it, or else watching it has no meaning. It just appears as a confusing, grotesque film.

NOTEBOOK: Please tell us about your make up and special effects.

FUJIWARA: Since Tetsuo, my method is always the same. I don’t have any background knowledge of special effect makeup. I just have a gut feeling of what can and can’t be used. Tsukamoto had these drawing storyboards for Tetsuo, like the steel body and the drill penis. For the latter, Tsukamoto just wanted to make something simple and said it would be enough if we could just pretend like it was moving, but I thought it would only be interesting if it actually moved. I didn’t have any hi-tech skills, so I thought, “That’s it!” I took the nearest working electric fan, dissembled it down to its core, used all the rubber and tape I had at home, sprayed it up and got it to go, vroom [laughs]! It was the same for Organ. I used household products, mostly kitchenware.

Above: Organ

NOTEBOOK: What about your cinematography?

FUJIWARA: I had no background knowledge. The first time I started shooting was on Tsukamoto’s set. A lot of people who graduated film school and wanted to help were there, but Tsukamoto didn’t trust any of them. Just because you have technique doesn’t mean you can shoot well. He thought that the person wielding the camera needs a certain amount of power, of energy. So I, who had never touched a camera in my life, was given the camera and told where to press to get it rolling, and shot all of the scenes Tsukamoto was in.

NOTEBOOK: Do you still shoot with a camera lately?

FUJIWARA: Rarely.

NOTEBOOK: As the occasion for this screening was FFFest, Female Filmmakers Festival, could you comment about your experience as a female filmmaker?

FUJIWARA: Something men don’t have—there are two types: female filmmakers who focus their perspective on their immediate surroundings and daily lives, and those who focus on creating a worldview from the even more intimate bodily perspective. That’s what’s a little different from male filmmakers. Even in theater, most female directors write familial narratives, although I don’t [laughs].

NOTEBOOK: The podcast Ladies Horror Night, on the occasion of this screening, recorded an episode that raised the question of why you, a female filmmaker, didn’t include more female characters. I’m not sure about this pressure for female filmmakers to represent female subjects, as I think there’s power in the female filmmaker re-writing the male-centric story. Can you speak on this and how you came to write the police story in Organ?

FUJIWARA: When I think about seimeikan—our view of life—it appears to me that the moral judgment of good versus bad is not something universal, but just a rule that protects our lifestyle in society. It’s a regulation. We make regulations to protect ourselves. That takes the form of “good” and “evil.” But that’s not the good and evil that holds ground in nature. Animals kill other animals for their own predation, right? Humans, too, in the context of war, can kill other humans and become heroes. The concept of zen-aku, or the notion of good and evil, is just a societal regulation. The police represent upholders of this regulation. And then there are those who defy this regulation, who lie in a realm completely different from this conventional morality. Organ is a clash between these two groups. That’s how I formed the police narrative. As for why there are few female characters, well… In the case of females, expressing them requires—for many, not all—a focus on the micro world, the micro perspective, that is, if you pay attention to their priorities. In other words, if you have a goal and you want to finish something, but she says she needs to take a bath at this certain time and cannot participate, there’s nothing you can do. In my theater, only men can keep up with me. Because of this standpoint, if a woman were to express a woman, she would need to create a micro world. But when describing a police story, a macro worldview, the direction would lose focus.

NOTEBOOK: It would become more internal?

FUJIWARA: Right. That’s why there aren’t as many female characters. But the wife of Numata represents the reality for women. And also the female teacher who approaches the criminal but gets killed. Woman participated in this way. But it’s hard for them to take leading parts for the narrative. It’s hard to let them be there and have their perspective be represented, because their perspective is in a different dimension.

NOTEBOOK: What about the character you play, Yoko?

FUJIWARA: Yoko is outside of that realm. She’s an outlier. She doesn’t represent family or the household or the joy of daily life, because she didn’t enjoy any of those things. That’s why she can exist there.

NOTEBOOK: How did you direct your actors in Organ, was it different from how you usually direct them in theater?

FUJIWARA: It’s the same. The only direction I gave them in Organ was that they only get one shot. I don’t give actors multiple takes. If there’s a camera or equipment problem that requires another take or two, I’ll do it. But I won’t do it for the actor. The actor has one chance, the take. But, on the offhand that the actor makes a mistake and requires a take two, I tell them they need to buy their own film roll. That was the rule. So, no one ever made a single mistake. They were all dead serious, completely focused. They’re all broke and have no money to buy film.

NOTEBOOK: In that sense it’s theatrical.

FUJIWARA: Right, and I had one actress tell me that that it was brilliant. She said, “I do lots of work for TV and film, but everyone is so lukewarm and they do take after take, and think about it so leniently. But there’s none of that here. The one take is the real thing.”

NOTEBOOK: So, that urgency was good for the actors?

FUJIWARA: Right. They said they couldn’t afford to buy their own film.

NOTEBOOK: If you give theater actors the same direction for film, how does that work? The performances in Organ don’t come off as exaggerated; I doubt a viewer without knowing would assume they are all theater actors.

FUJIWARA: There’s no difference. In theater, my scripts are like music scores. The lines come out and dance, modulate, sing, calling on the innate sensation playing the instrument that is yourself on stage. The actor, with this music-score-as-script, has a multitude of possibilities of how to play it. In film, the scripted character is a part of the environment. They are simply material for the scene. I didn’t need to explain this to them, they naturally just became materials for the scene.

Above: Organ

NOTEBOOK: That’s a good transition into my next question: can you talk about your music and sound design direction?

FUJIWARA: Music is difficult. What I say doesn’t get across, because I was working with new people. They hadn’t even seen any of my theater. I like German bands, something strong and hard. But even if they mimic the Germans, the Japanese can’t avoid making music that doesn’t sound soft and weak. One day I said, “Make it more powerful, something that alludes to the power of nature, more animalistic and sturdily-built,” and they said, “Okay.” The demo they brought to me literally had animal sounds, like elephants wailing and dogs barking, and I was like, “…That’s not what I meant” [laughs]. It didn’t get across. But there were some interesting sound bites that I could use. But Japanese band musicians can’t get over their own softness. I think what they have is different.

NOTEBOOK: So you’re not happy with the results?

FUJIWARA: Well, I’m the type of person that thinks, que sera, sera. So I wasn’t satisfied, but…

NOTEBOOK: You’ve mentioned that you a very easily scared person. But in Tetsuo and Organ, your characters say, “I won’t be afraid.” How do you interpret this difference?

FUJIWARA: When I came to Tokyo in my twenties, the first theater directors I met said they’d never met anyone as weak and sensitive as myself. They didn’t think I could live on a few years longer, much less do theater, and that I might find myself drugged up in a brothel in the near future. Kara was the only person that ever said to me that I was the strongest person he’d met. In other words, the fear and strength that I have appears to others as a weakness that can barely withstand life, but it’s just my highly sensitive nature they see. In actuality, I’m very strong. I feel very easily, so that seems weak, but my capacity for empathy is just very large. I feel others’ pain and sadness so strongly that I throw up thinking about them. That’s why I don’t watch TV or read the newspaper. Or else I would be crying all day [laughs].

NOTEBOOK: Watching Organ feels like you’re making the audience feel this extreme pain you describe.

FUJIWARA: Yes, that’s the result of the film. My second film, ID [2005], is even more so.

NOTEBOOK: In addition to fear and pain, pleasure is another large theme. After the screening, someone told me your film was grotesque but something about it was so pleasurable. How do you maintain that balance?

FUJIWARA: I think humans, in order to live, can’t cut those away from existence. If you deny desire, you’re not human. The existence of such things causes our misery, too. Thus, desire and slaughter are inescapable. My fear and sorrow regarding this, and my questioning what are they anyway. That’s what I wanted to portray.

NOTEBOOK: What’s interesting about your portrayal of violence is that Yoko uses the gun as a weapon but doesn’t shoot from it. The one time she tries to shoot at her father, it wasn’t loaded. She mostly hits with it.

FUJIWARA: When I act a role, it needs to be real for me to imagine it. I can’t shoot a gun just like that. I need to feel it. Whenever I do something I feel a corporal build-up that can’t just be released by shooting away.

NOTEBOOK: Shooting it would be too easy?

FUJIWARA: An action needs to be taken. The body and the heart are connected. It’s not that easy.

NOTEBOOK: What was the biggest challenge in shooting Organ?

FUJIWARA: The most difficult challenge was the first scene, in the warehouse. When the doctor and yakuza fend off the police while trying to dissect the man. That shoot was in the middle of summer, but we had to close off the warehouse because it was a night scene. It was hot, smelly, only men, and everyone’s body odor was suffocating the room. That was really difficult. At the time there were seven of us, and now there are three of us, just Takahashi, Mori and I. In Organ, all the actors take on multiple roles. Whenever they weren’t onscreen they were doing lights or shooting. We shot it scene by scene in order. I remember towards the end of the film, during the scene in the tunnel, when my role Yoko comes in on a bike and there’s a fighting scene, we couldn’t get a permit to shoot. We were able to shoot outside the tunnel on the road but not inside. But I badly wanted to shoot inside so we went at midnight, and the characters got all bloody and we were shooting, and the police came. They thought it was a real yakuza fight and took off the safety on their pistols and were about to shoot at us. We thought we were done for. The character Yasuda, who later falls into the ditch and gets stabbed with a Japanese sword, was responsible for getting the permits and he had all the documents on him. So, he came out from the ditch all bloody and with a sword in him, screaming, “We’re shooting a film!” terrifying the police even more. While he was negotiating with them we finished shooting the scene. The police just told us to be safe and left, but it was all thanks to him for putting his life on the line. We really thought we were going to get shot. Usually film shoots have large crews and it’s obvious, but in our case, all the crew were also the actors, so it was hard to tell, and the lights were hidden.

NOTEBOOK: What about the camera?

FUJIWARA: Yes, but it was a small 16mm Scoopic, and the police were so focused on the bloody actors they didn’t notice it. The police were terrified, but it was a great location and I just needed to shoot there no matter what.

[thexfridax]

Translated snippets

Adèle Haenel in 2017

// Additions or clarifications for translating purposes are denoted as [T: …]. I did something different here, and extracted quotes from three articles as these were quite similar, and frankly, l wanted to make my life a tiny bit easier... but here you go! //

About learning to speak German

[T: As a child she knew some German,] ‘but these were rather useless things’ […] ‘Set the table, for example.’ [T: About German lessons in school] ‘That's the way it is in France. After seven or eight years of teaching, you are totally incapable of building a correct sentence. So I couldn't speak German at the end of school.’ [T: However, she told her agency that she was proficient in the language, and would just learn it when the time comes…]

‘When I met Chris, I could neither speak German nor English. So he had to trust me’ […] ‘I like to learn something new or again. I expected it to be like Latin or math - something to train your brain. I never thought it would be so emotional.’

‘It's weird what it does to the soul to be a foreigner’ […] ‘Even if you understand everything well and can express yourself, you are mostly silent, because you are holding back. That's where your personality changes.’ [T: Learning her father’s language showed her] ‘that I also have an Austrian soul. I always thought I was fully French.’

About the legacy of Nazism

‘My father ran away from Austria in 1966, because this past was still boiling here’ […] ‘I really like the way Thomas Bernhard wasn’t very kind to Austria in this regard.’ [T: see here or here]

About her character Zazie in ‘The Bloom of Yesterday’ and her co-partner Lars Eidinger

‘I don't think it's the artist's job to say what other people should do. What counts is to be honest in your own fragility.’ […] ‘For me, all the characters are stones on my artistic path’ […] ‘They correspond with each other, but they don't answer the same question.’ [T: At the core of ‘The Bloom of Yesterday’ is] ‘fragility and absolute love.’ […] ‘At the end of the day, it's about the encounter between two destructive people and their feelings, which are greater than them.’

‘Zazie is extreme in her feelings. To play that, you have to let go – but I had to do it in a controlled way: because if I let go completely, I speak French and not German.’

[T: Lars Eidinger called Adèle his ‘female counterpart’, a sentiment she shares; also see here] ‘It was the best experience I've ever had. What I like about him is that he wants to invent everything. It's like walking and in the meantime, we're inventing the way.’

‘I always see acting as a martial art,’ […] ‘When someone [T: like Lars Eidinger] is at a higher level, you have to try to improve.’

About the humour in ‘The Bloom of Yesterday’

‘It's not about making shocking jokes’ […] ‘It's about having humour so we can endure our heritage.’

‘Traumatic themes are the heart of humour’ […] ‘Humour makes life easier, and [T: director] Chris Kraus' way of laughing isn't very easy.’

About her character in ‘The Unknown Girl’ and how she chooses her roles

‘I wanted to play a character that is not a character. She is not a heroine; she shows the bare minimum of humanity: we cannot let someone disappear without feeling guilty.’

‘It was important for me that this doctor has no reason to do what she does. Her obsession is just a human obsession.’

‘I never think: How was this person before the film, how will they be after the film? It's so complicated to understand yourself - how can I say what kind of character that is? A character comes into being when an idea falls in a certain time’ […] ‘I play how I feel.’ […] ‘Do I want to make this film? It's not about reasons, it's about emotions.’

[T: Adèle has no desire for stereotypical female roles, and they are no longer offered to her, as her feminist stance is well known in the industry.] ‘The possibilities for women in cinema are super-narrow’ […] ‘Femininity is always associated with being patient, nice and helpful, and I don't like that.’

‘The problem is that many lack imagination. The classic feminine roles are always the same. To think that women must behave like women and men like men is a cowardly way of thinking: you don't have to risk anything. For me, it was never a question that I could do anything.’

About the role of films and French cinema

‘Film has a political responsibility. But a film should ask questions, not give answers. It should be moral in the sense that it does not marginalise people.’

‘I feel like there's a lot to do here in French theatre and cinema’ […] ‘I don't feel like going to the United States.’ […] ‘What I like the most is when a young person comes up to me and says, ‘I saw your film, and then I read your interview and read the books you talked about.’ If it's only two people I've been able to spark up, that's a good thing’ […] ‘then I can retire.’ [T: I hate to say it, Adèle, but I think you exceeded your target! 😄]

—

Articles:

Adèle Haenel, „Schauspielerei ist immer auch Kampfsport“, Angelika Prawda/APA, in: Tiroler Tageszeitung, 10th of January 2017

Adèle Haenel: „Ich spiele, wie ich fühle“, Katrin Nussmeyer, in: Die Presse, 12th of January 2017

Adèle Haenel: "Nicht geduldig und nett", Alexandra Seibel, in: kurier.at, 14th of January 2017

Picture: © Nicolas Spiess

[shinymooncolor]

It’s Thursday, I’ve got a long weekend - so here’s a new sweater weather chat!

@lumosinlove is the mastermind behind these hilarious characters. I just play around and pretend my life is half as exciting as these guys’ lives are.

@wxlfstxrx and @siriuslyqueer are my best bro’s and always support my crazy ideas with no hesitation. 🙏🏻

If you have prompts - let me know! 👀

Sweater weather chat #4

Dumo panics. Celeste is disappointed. Tyler’s mom is thirsty. Logan has heard too much. Leo is scolded. Kuny is hungover. Nado has been dumped. He is also the king of nicknames. Walker brags. We spend another Sunday in the bat cave. I want to live there now.

———-

Wednesday, 4.32 pm

Nadotheman: @talkiewalkie I’m now at a record 8200 viewers for my live workout. 💪🏻👀

Talkiewalkie: whatever. I’m still more ripped than you.

Russiangod: I read blog. I think old ladies like

Tylerthemighty: my mom asked for your number. 61 y/o divorcee. Her book club wants to come to next match. I gave them tickets 🤓🤓🤓🤓

Eliascookie: 😂 thirsty housewives

Prongstar: nado got them old ladies. Sure you could learn a thing or two!!

Nadotheman: I am epic and my sexual encounters are epic

Russiangod: 5 minutes epic? Americans are strange

Siriously: savage

Nadotheman: fuxk off Evwhiny, Not my fault you’ve struck out for three fucking months. Remmy gotta worry about that wrist of kun(t)y’s

Fruitloops: leave me out. Also @prongstar stop changing my name.

Fruitloops changed their name to remuslupin

Prongstar changed remuslupin to fruitloops

RussianGod: not three month. Ur mom here last week. Show her good time.

Timmyforrealz: 😂😂😂 fucking got you there Nado.

Nadotheman: I hate you all. And he didn’t fuck my mom he’s scared of her. Bitch

DumoDad: language. And fruit loops is cute.

——-

Saturday 11.27 am

Dumodad created a group.

Dumodad named the group: grabby teen boy alert.

Dumodad added: talkiewalkie, newt-leo, carbo’hara, loganTremblayzzz, nado the man, RussianGod

Dumodad: first of all. This group does not exist. You know nothing. Celeste must not know anything.

Newt-leo: dumo you alright?

Dumodad: No! drove Adele to the mall. She said she was going out with friends. When I got home Celeste says it’s a date. She is 14?!?!?! My baby is in the mall with a perverted football player called Chuck? Someone has to go to the mall. NOW. I will give you my 1954 Stanley cup game puck. I cannot leave. Celeste has me under strict supervision.

CarbO’Hara: were already at the mall. @nadotheman got dumped so we’ve gone to watch a movie.

Nadotheman: I was not dumped. I ended things. I don’t get dumped.

RussianGod: she said sex was fine. She not call back. You were dumped also she winked at me when she tied shoes. Also u want buy her stuff. She just using u. Better off no girls. Poor baby Nado.

Nado the man: traitor. I didn’t sleep with that fan you took back to the hotel in philly or tell on you. So what they’re using me? I get more action than the rest of you babies combined. (Not you Dumo, don’t think I haven’t noticed those scratch mArks)

DumoDAD: I married well. Go back to rescuing my girl from that deprived creep. A footballer. Of all the idiots in that school and she chooses a footballer. Merde.

Logantremblayzzz: NO! DONT TALT ABOUT THAT he’s like my dad 😫😫😫

RussianGod: grow up. Where u think 4 baby come from? 🍆🍆🍆

DumoDAD: go back to looking for my daughter and leave my (active) sex life out of it

Talkiewalkie: @russiangod you dog!! Roadie one nighter. I’m so proud. Also go dumo!!!!

Nado the man: she was hot. No idea how he got her. Also @talkiewalkie like you’ve ever had the balls for a one nighter

Talkiewalkie: @nadotheman back off man, you’re just a baby compared to my epic sexual history

Nadotheman: @talkiewalkie huh you didn’t even play the v-card until you were 17

Talkiewalkie: @nadotheman not true. That was my first fan. V-card was my JUNIOR prom with the head cheerleader (she was totally a senior)

Dumodad: @walkietalkie no one cares you lost your virginity in the back of a Buick. My daughter is out there with a BOY. ALONE.

Talkiewalkie: @dumodad wrong username and it was a CAMRY and she was a SENIOR

LoganTremblayzzz: were at the mall. Finn and Leo scouting food hall. I’m covering first floor. @nadotheman any luck on second floor?

RussianGod: someone having sex in the bathroom

Logantremblayzzz: @newt-leo @CarbO’Hara behave. Also don’t leave me out.

Newt-leo: she’s in the food court. Also @russiangod they’re not having sex they’re fighting

Dumodad: IS HE TOUCHITN MY NAB GIRLv

Newt-leo: stress texting? Calm down they’re just talking

Newt-leo: okay he’s got his arm around her

CarbO’Hara: abort abort she saw us

—-

Saturday 11.54 am

Adele: MAMA! Leo and finn and kuny are stalking me. You promised not to tell dad. Charlie is terrified and he wants to leave and he didn’t ask me to prom

Mama: sorry mon Cherie. Your dad is in big trouble. Please call me

——

Saturday 12.01 pm

Carb’OHara: @russiangod just got scolded by guard for sitting without a tray and Adele is yelling at him too 😂😂😂😂😂😂

*pic of kuny sitting looking guilty while tiny Adele is shouting*

Dumodad: gentlemen. Why is my daughter calling me, crying cause you scared off her date? I don’t care what my imbecile of a husband has told you. You are all going home and you are all going to think about this. And NO DESSERT FOR ANY OF YOU. I am sorry you got dumped @nadotheman. @talkiewalkie don’t brag about losing your virginity in a car.

Saturday 2.43 pm

Logantremblayzzz: shit! Celeste is furious. Dumo is def sleeping on the couch. Oh fuck. She’s grounded him 😂 this is hilarious.

RussianGod: 😛

Logantremblayzzz: don’t have to worry about baby #5. He’s in the dog house for a month 😂😂😂

Dumodad: she wasn’t kidding. I’m banished to the couch for the foreseeable future. Don’t think you’re not in trouble, Logan. She wants to talk to you now.

RussianGod: nice knowing u Logan.

DumoDAD: 😬🙏🏻🥺😫

—

Saturday 3.44 pm

Celeste: Leo, I am very disappointed.

I expected this from the others but I thought you were better.

Leo: I’m so sorry!!

——-

Sunday 11.34 am

Kuny: my head hurts. I need food

Nado: it’s your own fault dumbass. Chucking vodka like it’s fucking water. Not gonna feel bad for ya

Kuny: I was homesick. U not feel bad today?

Nado: nah I can handle my liquor, you sad excuse for a Russian. What if I told your fellow countrymen you’re currently whining like a baby...

Kuny: I drink better than u. No one believe that.

Kuny: need water pleas. Also want fries

Kuny: pleas i pay.

Nado: stop texting me, I’m trying to watch a movie. Also you’re disturbing my sexting go away

Kuny: who u sext? Girl from bar? Pretty one or scary one?

Nado: I’m not telling you and maybe it’s both. Also quit texting me. Can’t keep this clever dirty talk up when I have to deal with your whining.

Kuny: I can help

Nado: you’re not helping me fucking sext now go back to sleep you big baby

Kuny: stupid also don’t wank with door open

Nado: then go fucking close it you ungrateful dick. Also you know wank but sergei and I had to sit there and help you fucking answer interview questions. Your little game of pretending not to know English is sad. Also your whole “baby face Russian giant with cute accent” bit is getting old.

Kuny: my accent is cute and I know wank cause walker told Me. Am not ungrateful u are. I not tell team lots of things

Nado: oh don’t even go there.

Kuny: I thought u busy sexting

Nado: u fucking ruined it ok. Are you clothed? I’m coming in there now.

Kuny: not naked also u lie about sexitng girls. He he. now bring me food. And Diet Coke.

Nado: ungrateful fucking hungover Russian waste of space. I hate you.

Kuny: u love me. Bring more blanket for room we can make fort and see Disney. I like little green eye

Nado: ordered some French fries and shakes now. In season. So naughty. Also We’re not watching monsters inc again. You’ve got a weird obsession with that film. Moana or the Scottish one.

Kuny: rude. Ok. Just bring food and blanket.

——

“You’re such an ungrateful roomie, scoot over you big lump. You’re hogging my blanket”

“No am not. U love me - DONT TOUCH MY CURLY FRIES”

“Funny you can speak English when people are stealing your food. Stop yelling. I don’t love you. I tolerate you”

“Shut up. Funny chicken, look like peanut When he drink”

“I’m telling him you said that”

——

Did they build a massive blanket fort in their epic cinema/game room? You bet. Does drunk Leo look like the chicken from Moana? I think he does.

[houseofsannae]

A Fistful of Munny - Extended End Notes

Notes for A Fistful of Munny that don’t fit within the character limit under the cut!

Please, read the fic before reading this post

           All right! Welcome to the extended notes, in which I go into excruciating detail over a bunch of stuff that doesn’t matter, because I like the sound of my own voice!

           Let’s start with some more broad stuff that didn’t make the exclusive end notes space. To do the Fistful of Dollars homage, I needed a place where I could have two villainous factions intersecting for Strelitzia to play against one another. After some brainstorming and asking for help from other people working on the Entwined in Trine Sorikai zine (and ultimately ignoring all their very good suggestions (Sorry, guys!)), I eventually realized that the Wasteland from Epic Mickey was a perfect place for this story, both in the sense of having mooks to destroy without Strels committing actual murder, and in the thematic sense of forgotten characters. There was just one issue.

           I hadn’t played Epic Mickey.

           And that is how I spent my summer, playing both Epic Mickey games. Both, because I was looking for a good location to set the story in in-world. Since the Wasteland is based on the Disney theme parks, I was hoping to find one based on Frontierland, their Western section. Such a location did exist – Disney Gulch – but only in the second game. Which meant I had to play Epic Mickey 2, as well. (The first one is a better game, but that’s not really the fault of the developers; they were not given the time they needed to make it as good as the first one. Here’s a video with trivia about the series that goes a little into the development.) I also needed to learn the Mad Doctor’s ultimate fate, since I wanted his Beetleworx/Blotworx to be one of the two villainous factions. In the game, depending on whether you chose the Paint (Paragon) or Thinner (Renegade) path, the Doc is either redeemed… or dead. Neither of which was helpful, so I had to invent.

           But let’s talk about characters and why I picked them in order. The short version for why these choices, at least on the Final Fantasy side, is set-up for later. Obviously I can’t go into detail why. Before that, let’s talk about the Beanie Baby.

           Chi is, as I hope you were able to guess, Strelitzia’s Chirithy. I’ve brought it up several times, but I personally do not like mascot characters. There are a few exceptions, but Chirithies are not one of them. Like I said, KHUx isn’t what happened in this AU, so you’ll have to wait for in-universe answers on why it’s a cat now. Out-of-universe reason is this was the only way I could make it palatable for myself. I arbitrarily decided on a gender for it because as a real cat, it would have a sex. Canonically Chirithies appear to be genderless, and in Japanese refer to themselves with the gender-neutral (but masculine-leaning) boku. I would’ve left Chi that way, save for the fact that he’s a completely normal cat now. (And before you ask, no, not every real cat that appears in KHΨ from this point on is a Chirithy.)

           As for Strelitzia herself, it’s hard for me to pick up a character’s voice when they’re… not voiced. Intonation and cadence do a lot for me mimicking the way a character talks, so it’s a bit more difficult when they don’t technically speak. I tried for a mix between Sora and Kairi, while still keeping her defining character traits of being shy, but also impulsive.

           You may notice that while she’s started remembering faces, if not names, the Player’s name and face still eludes her, despite her (canonical. Deal with it.) crush on them. There is a story reason for this, and will become clear once Luxu takes centre stage.

           The name “Jane” was chosen with more consideration than just “Jane Doe” being the standard name in (at least my corner of) the English-speaking world for a woman of unknown identity. See, the Man With No Name actually has three names. In A Fistful of Dollars, he is referred to (by one character in one scene, once) as “Joe”. “Joan” might have been a more clear homage, but I figure Jane makes sense. And as you might guess, in the next fic, Strels will be going by a different name, still not her own. She’ll remember her name… eventually.

           One might think I could’ve picked any old Cid, and one would be wrong for reasons I can’t explain yet. In fact, I can’t explain much of anything surrounding him yet. What I can say is no, Cidney Aurum is not dead, she’s just not related to Cid Sophiar in this fic verse. An unfortunate consequence of where I wanted to put each of them in the narrative; making them not be related was the only way it made any sense, geographically speaking.

           Hyperion on the other hand, I can talk about. He’s one of the Gremlins in Epic Mickey, and… wait, first things first. Gremlins are from an abandoned Disney film based on a Roald Dahl book, itself based on the cryptids that supposedly haunted airplanes and caused them to malfunction, the earliest known written-down mention of the concept being from the 1920s. The film never got made, but the designs Disney would have used were adapted into a second printing of Dahl’s book, and they were later used in Epic Mickey. Hyperion is, like the publishing imprint that Disney owns, named after a street that Walt Disney used to live on. In-game, Hyperion is in Bog Easy (based on the Haunted Mansion), not Disney Gulch, but his name stuck out to me as being particularly fun, so I picked him instead of trying to figure out what Gremlins actually are in the Gulch (they have names in the files of Epic Mickey 2, but not in the actual game, so it would have been a hunt).

           Regardless of where the setting ended up, for the second villainous faction, I was always going to plop down the good old Don. More things I can’t talk about. For everything FF7, know that I’m always going to be pulling from a mix of the original game, Remake, and Machinabridged. Hence, Corneo’s outfit is a mix of his original and Remake designs (which basically just means he’s wearing blue jeans instead of brown). I didn’t think bringing in his three lieutenants from Remake was necessary, especially since this was supposed to be a kind-of small operation.

           Leslie is picked up and dropped from Remake pretty much unchanged. I needed someone to do the murders Strels couldn’t, and even if he’s not a complete asshole, he’s still mostly an asshole. Have we ever seen small, Materia-like balls used to cast magic before…?

           Onto the fun bits, which is the Disney characters. We’ll start with Percy, who is from a Goofy short called “How to Ride a Horse”, from 1950. And that’s about it. The conceit in Wasteland is that all of the Toons there were basically actors, and they wound up in Wasteland if they were forgotten (that’s not exactly correct, but I’m generalizing). This is interesting, since two of the Toons in Epic Mickey are Horace Horsecollar and Clarabelle Cow, both of whom… are residents of Disney Town in Kingdom Hearts, having shown up in Birth by Sleep. So that’s an interesting continuity snarl that I’m going to just ignore.

           Persephone and Pluto, on the other hand, are from an earlier short called “The Goddess of Spring”, from 1934. It was one of the projects Disney tried as practice for Snow White. If you’re about to protest that his name should be Hades, not Pluto, then you’re going to need a time machine so you can tell them back in the 30s. The Goddess of Spring is a musical, in the sense that every single line is sung. Watch it for yourself. There’s a video with better quality floating around YouTube, but for some reason it’s the French dub. And that’s why both of them sing most of their lines. I tried matching the meter of their actual parts, but Persephone’s doesn’t actually follow a syllabic pattern that I could make out. I eventually gave up and just gave her the meter from the start of the short. Pluto’s was easier to manage (and more consistent).

           The skeletons are Disney veterans, presumably the same ones from “The Skeleton Dance” (1929), but more specifically they’re mimicking what they did in “The Mad Doctor” (1933), the first appearance of our other villain. They’re fun.

           The original Mad Doctor was supposedly named “Dr. XXX”, according to the name on his door. This was before the modern film rating system was put in place; it was a different time. In the original short, the Mad Doctor kidnaps Pluto (the dog) with the intent of cutting him in half and putting his front half on a chicken For Science!, and Mickey follows him to his castle to rescue the purloined pooch. The short wasn’t a musical in the same vein as “The Goddess of Spring”, but… the Mad Doctor’s only spoken lines were a song (aside from evil cackling). While I had already decided to do the “Toons that sang in their short can only communicate through song” with Persephone and Pluto before starting on Epic Mickey 2, I hilariously discovered that the game developers had done the exact same gag with the Mad Doctor, most of his lines in the game being sung. (In Epic Mickey there were no fully voiced lines, so he speaks as normally as anyone else does). Which made it easier to write his songs here, since I could just rewrite his songs from the game. I used to write alternate lyrics for songs back in high school, so this was an interesting trip back in time for me. They were stuck in my head for weeks afterwards, but it was worth it.

           I believe that’s everything for the characters. Let’s talk about Keyblades.

           It irks me that three people in KHUx have the same Keyblade. Ephemer, Skuld, and Strelitzia all have variations of Starlight. Now, in KHΨ, there is only one Starlight, and it belongs to Luxu, so I’m going to have to decide on different Keyblades for each of them. (Ephemer’s has already been decided, and I haven’t started brainstorming for Skuld yet. No I do not need suggestions, thank you). Pixie Petal bears a noted (by KHWiki) resemblance to one of Marluxia’s alternate scythes, so that tangential connection was enough for me. Both siblings have flower-themed Keyblades – it makes sense to me.

           You might notice a few disparities in the magic. These are on purpose, and will eventually make sense. And that’s all I can say on that at the moment. ;)

           Oh, yes, one important thing I probably should have said on the main notes: I’m not going for a realistic depiction of amnesia here. Anything I got right was entirely accidental, and I’m fairly certain there’s not much. There might be a story reason for why it works the way it does… and it might be the same reason why other people from KHUx have or had amnesia in the present day…

           You know what’s funny? Although Orcuses look more impressive than Invisibles, their stats in Days are actually worse. I’m fairly sure that this is because the only time we see an Orcus, it’s actually an illusion cast over Xion so that Roxas will fight her to the death. There are no other stats for them (according to KHWiki), since they’ve never been used elsewhere.

           A friendly reminder that Apprentice Xehanort invented the term “Heartless”, which was why Aqua didn’t know what to call them until Mickey told her. Thus, nobody from the era of the Keyblade War should know the term “Heartless” without being told by someone in present day. “Darkling” was the term they used instead. I’m fairly certain KHUx ignores the continuity on this (so why should we trust its continuity for anything else, hmm?)

           I think that covers everything! Or at least everything I’m willing to share at this point. If you’ve read this far, thank you! I appreciate your dedication! ^_^

[theelliottsmiths]

So anyway, Mein Herz Brennt Making of liveblog, one of my favourites

First of all, I do take any use of piano MHB as a slight towards my tiny hands. -1 point

I really would love to visit this place, it's beautiful

I love that Oli introduces it and then Till is straight in there talking about murder and stabbings. Trust that to be what intrigues him. I feel like 'smells like murder' isn't a direct translation but that's purely because I spent like ten minutes trying to work out what words he says. It rhymes, which is suspicious.

Oh this was before he let his chest piercing reject all the way out in the grossest way

When schneider says Krankenhaus it sounds very Geordie and I'm convinced that kind of thing is why Auf Wiedersehen, Pet was created

Richards eyes light up when he's talking about the room he's in and it's one of those looks where it's just. I would love to listen to anything anyone has to say when their eyes have that sparkle.

"the scavengers had already been here" cue Paul talking about his criminal past thieving from there. See, another example everyone forgets of him being the biggest bastard of them all. The smile is a front.

One of my favourite ever Rammstein things is the combined joy and mockery from Paul when Richard is revealed to be wearing the bird mask and it wiggles as he nods. He looks like a little black cockatoo. Richard looks embarrassed to be wearing it but Paul is having the time of his LIFE.

The way is echoes in his mask makes him sound like he's clucking

Flakes glasses perching in his cone make him look like that sesame Street doctor or scientist

They all suit this make up so much and I wish they'd consider it as a stage look

Peck. Not intimidated.

Considering the nightmares Till has/had, ouch

Richard looks so much like a little vampire prince but like, a character from what we do in the shadows. He makes his own smokescreen entry/exist and everything.

Melanie!!!

Richard has many tendons in his neck huh.

The sounddd. I used to always be curious as to whether or not people in music videos were making the sounds it looks like they're making and now I know and I'm uncomfortable. This and also later when till does the heart

His laugh is never what I expect it to be

That uh. That doesn't look like he's in pain the way the injection sounds implied. At all. Not that I'm complaining but it gives mixed messages.

I'm so sure Richard is the only one I've ever heard use the word quasi. It makes sense for him if true but maybe I only notice because of the tone he uses? His is quite a punchy nasal tone it might just be more noticeable.

Till with kids is always the most adorable wonderful thing. He's really helping to keep them relaxed despite the creepiness of the stuff they're shooting.

"if you look at the cover then you'll recognise a morbidity to the whole thing" till, my darling, do you think people don't already ~see the morbidity~?

I googled and the lady doesn't pronounce renaissance with a g like Till does and that interests me. In fairness I have to assume it's like in Norwegian how words like restaurant are pronounced with a g sound because it's closer to the French sounds? It's not like we in English donut the French way either but the Google translate lady does. This is why I always suspect that when I'm learning a language I'm learning the language wrong and at some point I'll find out there's a Real, For Adults version if the language that's totally different. This is irrelevant. Accents are fun and I like being able to notice them.

It feels so strange seeing this knowing what Eugenio did

Paul taking pictures because he knows better than them

Something about a child saying "ah yes, I know Till and Flake very well" is hysterical.

You can feel the dismay and disapproval radiating off till as he tries to be diplomatic about the Spanish understanding of linear time. He struggles to find a positive and only comes up with the fire walls. "It should have gone out before we filmed anything because they were fucking around with the playback so long but it didn't" is his only compliment.

The German word for French is wild.

Do they know they could have hired an interpreter? Interpreters existed in 2012 I know this

This whole thing with Melanie is beautiful you can't deny that the arm Eugenio made with then was lovely.

Till in the dress with Melanie in his lap. I don't off the top of my head remember seeing it in either video so I simply must assume that it was just what he was wearing that day when he showed up. She's so tiny on his knee I'm glad they're still friends.

"you're left in a state of trauma when everyone stares at you all the time" did this need to get so heavy? It's interesting that he focused more on her voice than her appearance there, though in fairness it's pretty high

They all love her so much and it's totally understandable.

Mit rock n roll und cola trinken

I have to skip the screaming the secondhand embarrassment is too much.

Part 2

Again, this liveblog is so long

Sometimes Oli speaks like his body isn't used to talking.

I want, so badly, to know if Richard was having memories of his dreadlocked youth The tiny cup in his elegant hand is so pleading and then you look left and. It sure is something.

Are they freckles or acne scars across Tills shoulders?...cute. The first set of arm/chest wounds, not so much. I do spy his lil tummy scar

Richard does look like he almost swooped in for a kiss and then changed his mind because of the camera. Paul turns his head that way and then Richard tries to save with a step back and face rub (his own). Just saying.

The fact that a few of them have taken pictures on their personal phones warms my soul it's such a nice reminder that they're good friends outside of work and My Heart

Schneider and Paul ready at a moment's notice to be Dumbasses. J'adore.

What if Zoran was more of a background character tho actually

God, schneider is beautiful. An ethereal, pure beauty that exists no matter how he's being styled.

See okay how is flake almost taller than Oli right now he's not even doing his standard open legs and swan spine thing

It must be so hard to find Oli sized clothes. Flake is also tall and slim but he's a lot more leg, whereas Olis height seems largely to be torso. I have to assume a lot of his stuff is tailored or custom made now.

I always forget about the marks on tills back when he's in the nightmare dress

The child staring with great confusion at a bright red flake reading. I would love to know what his favourite books are.

The childs plural poking and prodding at a very patient Oli, who gracefully bends his spine in ways I've never seen a human do before. I wonder if he's ever dressed up as Lurch from the Addams family.

The actress playing the woman in this half is so beautiful and has a power her younger counterpart lacked when she was threatening him with her weapon.

I am a dummy and was like weird why is Paul speaking Norwegian. I know full well he wasn't saying unnskyld because I've heard Germans say their equivalent before and I assume Entschuldigen either sounds like that fast or shortens so what the fuck, rhi

Till guiding people through him murdering them is truly one of life's greatest pleasures. They trust him so completely. I would like to watch them dance the elegance would be astounding.

Paul lurking watching with what I choose to see as pride as till slaughters an old woman.

Paul being critical (again, as always, rightly so) of the hallway mouthing the lyrics decision.

"for this in prepared to make compromises" he says, hating every bitter word of it

I would like to know what he wanted to say about till and then see him get into trouble over it.

I would like to see till in a bouncy castle. He's adorable jumping into the comfy pit I want to see him in a bouncy castle. Child, utter child.

Paul takes every opportunity to say how hot he thinks they all are and I love that about him. Sometimes your friends are all hot and everybody needs to understand that fact.

Their approaches to pretending to play cello are all so uniquely them. Flake and Richard are taking the time to try and understand what they're being told, whereas Paul just fucking. Lays into it, attracting the weirdest looks from Oli. Richard looks beautiful with that cello and I think he should learn to play. For fun not for work. It's not just that he looks so handsome, but I think that's the easiest way to convince him. I think he'd be good at it, and not being the lead at something might be good for him.

I appreciate that Oli is skeptical because yeah they do all look like they've never held a cello before.

They do, however, all look lovely in their dresses. I'm trying but actually I can't not say that Schneiders little sternum dip makes it seem like he has breasts in that dress and it's a good look for him.

Till singing it in such a high voice, more like his speaking voice, is both interesting and lovely. Oli is trying... So little compared to the others. Laughably incorrect

Why yes, I am laughing at the sheer length of the spikes. They're just... They're so fucking long. So long.

Paul is actually probably the best one there, ironically. They're all comically out of time. They're professional musicians. I know they aren't used to bowed instruments I do understand and I don't want to be uncharitable but also they are struggling. I want to see cellists react to this.

Pretty dresses! And the nightmare but with the most awful and worst fingers! Like the Grinch but goth.

Both Schneider and Richard had the same neverending shoot idea and I am Intrigued.

Till waiting for Schneider with the umbrella :)

Wir brennen! Paul is always so happy to play with fire.

[fiaba]

I just finished Into the Night and honestly I am suprised no one is talking about it!

So brace yourself, some spoilers ahead!!!

Correct me if I am wrong but Sun (or other star) was killing people not once in films and series but here the emphasis is on day. The night, usually connected with danger is survival. It doesn't mean it is safe, but it gives hope while sunrise means death.

My biggest issue is with soldiers from and general with episode 2. I think is was too easily resolved and I still did not feel connected to Gabrielle (flight attendant) to make her being left behind painful as it was intended. Deaths of others were even less significant. Also some of the background stories were stereotipical, while others (Ric or Zara) on point and giving true inside into characters' mind. I was also missing true griving moment. They had a lot of time to think during long flights between airports.

Having said that, I enjoyed very much those 6 hours and since I was in minute 15 of first episode in each break, all I could talk was the series.

There are many things I enjoyed:

Background stories (yes, despite my issues with them)

Terenzio not turning into superhero after confirmation of his words.

Ric arc: his is still ass, but his story is so well written. I am buying it 100%

Ayaz not being super villan after whole story with gems and his reaction to Ric's story.

Sylvie saving the night while Mathieu was out of action. It was nice to see her growing confidance, especially after conversation with Mathieu. I hope they won't push them into anything romantic. Their forming friendship is enough.

At the end everyone had hers/his big moment. The least exposed character was Osman.

As a Pole, I am always super happy to see polish actors in foreign productions and to hear my language. I checked part of the cast and I appriciate its diversity: polish, italian, german, dannish and others nationalities were represented. I think it gives a good look into our europeen community.

Also I just really love how in europeen productions not everyone is super handsome or beautiful.

Bonus: I watched it in original french version. Out of curosity I checked ep 2 with english dubbing to see how they resolved whole Jakub not speaking english situation. Boy, they did not.

[weirdthoughtsandideas]

People who started watching Violetta after it stopped airing

Hi! I am one of those who actually saw it while it was airing, and so I thought I could share some of my memories of that.

”There’s so many episodes, how did they have time to air them all?” Well, easy. In some countries they aired five episodes a week (Monday-Friday) and in other countries three episodes a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday). That way, a season could be done airing in only a few months!

For the countries that had three episodes a week, they aired both ep 79 and ep 80 at the same time.

They had concerts. Like, all over Latin America and Europe. The show was so popular they got to have concerts. The concerts even got recorded on TV once.

God the MERCH. If you lived anywhere in Europe or latin America at the time, chances were high there were Violetta merch everywhere. They had magazines, in some countries a COMIC BOOK, they had a ”Violetta’s diary” book where it just was Violetta writing in her diary about the events that happened in the show, they had fucking schampoo bottles with Vilu’s face on them... it was massive and it was everywhere.

Since some of us in Europe had to wait for episodes to air, there were some channels on youtube kind enough to show us spanish clips with, get this, ENGLISH SUBTITLES. We lived life spoiling ourselves of everything that was gonna happen

Literally every single scene from the show you can find. If you can’t find it in spanish, you will find it in italian, french, german, or just any other language. Though, it took a while for english scenes to show up, so if you didn’t speak any language you just had to guess what they were saying (if there weren’t subtitles)

The Leon VS Tomás dramas was big... and god, don’t get me started on LEON VS DIEGO dramas. People cared so damn much about who Violetta would choose

Though most of us just collectively agreed on German/Angie, which, even if I do ship them, I just find it a bit strange with your aunt marrying your dad. But maybe that’s me

YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW THE DRAMA THAT WENT ON ON THE VIOLETTA WIKI. People literally made up that the actors had children and that they were dating but broke up, etc. Of course, some actors did have children and some actors did date, but the ones they wrote about never had any children and never dated

Also some people started to write their OC’s on the Wiki, causing them to start ANOTHER Wiki just for OC’s, but also they had the canon stuff there aswell, so you could read about some canon episode and then just see ”OC by user Tinista05 appears in this episode and falls in love with Jorge Blanco”

Remember that the fandom consisted of 90% girls between the ages of 8-13, AKA: Children that should not have access to the internet, also no one is fluent in english, so we all just had fandom drama with each other riting inn brocken englisch

In Scandinavia, they had this thing on the weekends called ”Violetta the scoop” where a swede, a norwegian and a danish girl talked about the show and what was gonna happen next week. It was very cheesy, but fun. As they were talking they showed clips in english, and so sometimes they would use the english names like Herman and Jeremiah. And it bugged me, because in the dub I grew up with (swedish) they had the OG names (Germàn and Jeremias)

It was an excitement to see how the english dub would translate the spanish songs. Sometimes they did a good job, and sometimes I feel like they could’ve dubbed it better. Nonetheless, it was fun to see how it would sound

Where I live, Violetta got so popular that, when they were gonna air season 2, they showed a SNEAK PEEK of it in theatres like 3 weeks before the season aired on TV. Which meant, they showed the first episode of season 2 and then there were dubbed interviews with the actors, who talked about the new season. They did the same thing for season 3, but I only saw the s2 sneak peek

Do you know how many european children who’s not fluent in spanish that has learned every single Violetta song in spanish? A lot. We may mispronounce a lot, but I can proudly say I could sing the entire chorus of Como Quieres without dying of toung twisting

How many other people took spanish in school because of Violetta? 🙋🏼‍♀️

The cast was so sweet. There was literally no drama (atleast, not what I know of) and it seems like most of the cast has only good memories of it.

The fact that Martina Stoessel was like 14 when they started filming while everyone else was like 19-20 or older still surprises me lol. She’s one of the few people who plays a character older than herself. Though, she really does look like she’s the same age as everyone else (especially in the later seasons)

Violetta was literally a lifestyle, I ain’t joking.

[tomhiddleslove]

The screen and stage star is making his Broadway debut as the bottled-up husband wearing a “mask of control” in Harold Pinter’s romantic triangle.

[ By Laura Collins-Hughes

Aug. 21, 2019, 5:00 a.m. ET ]

Tom Hiddleston was posing for a portrait, and the face he showed the camera wasn’t entirely his own.

That had been his idea, to slip for a few moments into the character he’s playing on Broadway, in Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal”: Robert, the cheated-on husband and backstabbed best friend whose coolly proper facade is the carapace containing a crumbling man. And when Mr. Hiddleston became him, the change was instantaneous: the guarded stillness of his body, the chill reserve in his gray-blue eyes.

“It’s interesting,” Mr. Hiddleston said after a while, analyzing Robert’s expression from the inside. “It gives less away.” A pause, and then his own smile flickered back, its pleasure undisguised. “O.K.,” Mr. Hiddleston announced, himself again, “it’s not Robert anymore.”

It was late on a muggy August morning, one day before the show’s first preview at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, and Mr. Hiddleston — the classically trained British actor best known for playing the winsomely chaotic villain Loki, god of mischief and brother of Thor, in the Marvel film franchise — had been in New York for less than a week.

He’ll be here all autumn for the limited run of the production, a hit in London earlier this year, but he wasn’t going to pretend that he’d settled in. “I literally have never sat in this room before,” he’d said at the top of the photo shoot, in his cramped auxiliary dressing room, next door to the similarly tiny one he had been occupying.

He’d had nothing to do with the space’s camera-ready décor. So there was no use making a metaphor of the handsome clock with its hands stopped at 12 (“Betrayal” is famous for its reverse chronology; far more apt if the clock had run backward), or of the compact stack of pristine books that looked like journals, with pretty covers and presumably empty pages: a bit off-brand for Mr. Hiddleston, who at 38 has a model-perfect exterior with quite a lot inscribed inside.

Take the matter-of-fact way he said, in explaining that he’d first encountered Pinter’s work when he studied for his A-levels in English literature, theater, Latin and Greek: “It was a real tossup between French and Spanish or Latin and Greek. I thought, I can always speak French and Spanish, I can’t always read Latin and Greek, so I’ll study that and I’ll speak the other two.”

Though, to be fair, he only said that because I’d teased him slightly about the Latin and Greek, and I’d teased him — not a recommended journalistic technique — because he was so disarmingly good-humored and resolutely down to earth, chatting away as he waited for the photographer to set up a shot. It didn’t seem like it would ruffle him. He laughed, actually.

From a one-night reading to Broadway

In this country, Mr. Hiddleston is mainly a screen star, known also for playing Jonathan Pine in the John le Carré series “The Night Manager” on AMC. There are plans, too, for him to bring Loki to Disney’s streaming service in a stand-alone series.

But at home in London, he has amassed some impressive Shakespearean credits, including the title roles in Kenneth Branagh’s “Hamlet” and Josie Rourke’s “Coriolanus,” and a turn as Cassio in Michael Grandage’s “Othello” — a production that Pinter, saw some months before he died in 2008. That was the year Mr. Hiddleston won a best newcomer Olivier Award for Cheek by Jowl’s “Cymbeline.”

Jamie Lloyd’s “Betrayal,” which has a staging to match the spareness of Pinter’s language and a roiling well of squelched emotion to feed its comedy, is Mr. Hiddleston’s Broadway debut. Likewise for his co-stars, Zawe Ashton (of Netflix’s “Velvet Buzzsaw”), who plays Emma, Robert’s wife; and Charlie Cox (of Netflix’s “Daredevil”), who plays Emma’s lover, Jerry, Robert’s oldest friend.

Beginning at what appears to be the end of Robert and Emma’s marriage, after her yearslong affair with Jerry has sputtered to a stop, it’s a drama of cascading double-crosses. First staged by Peter Hall in London in 1978 — and in 1980 on Broadway, where it starred Roy Scheider, Blythe Danner and Raul Julia — it rewinds through time to the sozzled evening when Emma and Jerry overstep the line.

The most recent Broadway revival was just six years ago, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Daniel Craig as Robert, Rachel Weisz as Emma and Rafe Spall as Jerry. It might seem too soon for another, let alone one with sexiness to spare — except that Mr. Lloyd’s production is also marked by a palpable hauntedness and a profound sense of loss.

Reviewing the London staging in The New York Times, Matt Wolf called it “a benchmark achievement for everyone involved,” showing the play “in a revealing, even radical, new light.” Michael Billington, in The Guardian, called Mr. Hiddleston’s performance “superb.”

What’s curious is that Mr. Hiddleston, so good at bad boys, isn’t playing Jerry, the more glamorous role: the cad, the pursuer, the best man who goes after the bride. But Mr. Lloyd said that casting him that way was never part of their discussions.

Last fall, when Mr. Lloyd persuaded Mr. Hiddleston to read a scene with Ms. Ashton for a one-night gala celebration of Pinter in London, part of the season-long Pinter at the Pinter series, there was no grand plan. Having asked Mr. Hiddleston about a possible collaboration for years, since “just before he became ridiculously famous,” Mr. Lloyd said, this was the first time he got a yes.

“I just really admired his craft of acting, the precision of his acting, as well as his real emotional depth and his real wit,” Mr. Lloyd said. “And he’s turned into what I think is the epitome of a great Pinter actor. Because if you’re in a Pinter play, you have to dig really deep and connect to terrible loss or excruciating pain, often massive volcanic emotion, and then you have to bottle it all up. You have to suppress it all.”

This, he added, is what Mr. Hiddleston does in “Betrayal,” where characters’ meaning is found between and behind the words, not inside them.

“Some of the pain that he’s created in Robert, it’s just unbearable, and yet he always keeps a lid on it,” Mr. Lloyd said.

The scene Mr. Hiddleston and Ms. Ashton read at the gala appears at the midpoint of “Betrayal”: Robert and Emma on vacation in Venice, at a moment that leaves their marriage with permanent damage. Within days, Mr. Hiddleston told Mr. Lloyd that he was on board for a full production.

‘What remains private’

Photos taken, back in the faintly more lived-in of his Broadway dressing rooms, Mr. Hiddleston opened the window to let in some Midtown air — and when you’re as tall as he is, 6 feet 2 inches, opening it from the top of the window frame is easy enough to do. Then, making himself an espresso with his countertop machine, he sat down to talk at length.

“I’m always curious about the presentation of a character’s external persona versus the interior,“ he said. “What remains private, hidden, concealed, protected, and what does the character allow to be seen? We all have a very complex internal world, and not all of that is on display in our external reality.”

He can tick off the ways that various characters of his conceal what’s inside: Loki, with all that rage and vulnerability “tucked away”; the ultra-proper spy Jonathan Pine, in “The Night Manager,” “hiding behind his politeness”; Robert, a lonely man wearing “a mask of control” that renders him “confident, powerful, polished,” at least as far as any onlookers can tell.

In “Betrayal,” each of the three principals has an enormous amount to hide from the people who are meant to be their closest intimates. It’s a play about power and manipulation, duplicity and misplaced trust, and what’s so threatening about it is the very ordinariness of its privileged milieu. This snug little world that once seemed so safe and ideal — the happiest of families, the oldest of friends — has long since fallen apart.

But to Mr. Hiddleston, Pinter’s drama contains two themes just as significant as betrayal: isolation and loneliness.

“The sadness in the play — it’s not only sadness; because it’s Pinter, there’s wit and levity as well — but if there is sadness in the play,” he said, “I think it comes from the fact that these betrayals render Robert, Emma and Jerry more alone than they were before.”

Trust and self-protection

One-on-one, Mr. Hiddleston was more cautious than he’d been during the photo shoot, surrounded then by a gaggle of people affiliated with the show. Still, when I asked him about betrayal, lowercase, he went straight to the condition it violates.

“To trust is a profound commitment, and to trust is to make oneself vulnerable,” he said, fidgeting with a red rubber band and choosing his words with care. “It’s such an optimistic act, because you’re putting your faith in the hands of someone or something which you expect to remain constant, even if the circumstances change.”

“I’m disappearing down a rabbit hole here,” he said, “but I think about it a lot. I think about certainty and uncertainty. Trust is a way of managing uncertainty. It’s a way of finding security in saying, ‘Perhaps all of this is uncertain, but I trust you.’ Or, ‘I trust this.’ And there’s a lot of uncertainty in the world at the moment, so it becomes harder to trust, I suppose.”

An interview itself is an act of trust, albeit often a wary one. And there was one stipulated no-go zone in this encounter, a condition mentioned by a publicist only after I’d arrived: No talk of Taylor Swift, with whom Mr. Hiddleston had a brief, intense, headline-generating romance that, post-breakup, she evidently spun into song lyrics.

That was three years ago, and I hadn’t been planning to bring her up; given the context of the play, though, make of that prohibition what you will. Mr. Hiddleston, who once had a tendency to pour his heart out to reporters, knows that he can’t stop you.

“It’s not possible, and nor should it be possible, to control what anyone thinks about you,” he said. “Especially if it’s not based in any, um —” he gave a soft, joyless laugh — “if it’s not based in any reality.”

That’s something he’s learned about navigating fame — about being put on a pedestal that’s then kicked out from under him. He knows now “to let go of the energy that comes toward me, be it good or bad,” he said. “Because naturally in the early days I took responsibility for it.”

“And yes, I’m protective about my internal world now in probably a different way,” he added, his tone as restrained as his words. He took a beat, and so much went unsaid in what he said next: “That’s because I didn’t realize it needed protecting before.”

Even so, he doesn’t give the impression of having closed himself off. When something genuinely made him laugh, he smiled a smile that cracked his face wide open.

And the way he treated the people around him at work — with a fundamental respect, regardless of rank, and no whiff of flattery — made him seem sincere about what he called “staying true to the part of myself that’s quite simple, that’s quite ordinary.”

That investment in his ordinariness, as he put it, is a hedge against the destabilizing trappings of fame, but it doubles as a way of protecting his craft.

It’s also of a piece with his insistence that vulnerability is a necessary risk to take, at least sometimes.

“If you go through life without connecting to people,” he asked, “how much could you call that a life?”

[iheartsunset]

Can I have some headcanons about deano

Papa Louie Deano HC

-Deano Abbadeli is a 34 year old gondolier and salesman who lives with his wife, Katherina; his son, Matteo; and his daughter, Bianca, in a small Portallini house. While he had wanted to become an opera singer in the past, he met Maximo Del Mare in his adolescence and was inspired to take on his gondoliering after high school.

-Deano is a charming gentleman who while extremely average, always attempts to make himself a larger character than he actually is. His voice and mannerisms are similar to broadway actors or someone in a kids’ show, which make people either laugh or silently cry. After a hard day’s work, he has the tendency to be much grumpier and quiet, though this immediately melts away when he finally gets to see his family again.

-He is also the one to boat Utah and Doan to and from their workplace and to the train stations, which puts extra pressure on them to make his orders amazing. This is also due to Edoardo telling them a scary story about people who wrong Deano suddenly ending up in a waterfront “accident”. In all actuality, Deano’s too nice of a guy to be that petty (and Utah reminds him too much of his own daughter to ever be rude to her). Besides, why would Deano commit homicide for undercooked pasta?

-Much like a radio, if you ask him to whistle you a song, he will. He can also whistle for extremely long amounts of time. He wants to actually sing, but his voice isn’t very good and it disturbs the guests, so he just whistles. When his voice gets too tired, he just talks about his family or let’s the guests tell stories.

-He doesn’t eat all his food at the Pastaria so that he could take some home and bring it to Bianca since she loves gnocchi.

-He met Maximo when he was still in high school. He took the gondola one day after being made fun of again in choir for his awful singing. To be honest, Maximo usually just smiles and nods when guests tell stories because he doesn’t care, but Deano wouldn’t stop crying, so he got too emotionally invested in the story. He decided to cheer Deano up by showing him how to work a gondola, which inspired the boy to become his apprentice. They had a very close relationship and Maximo was even the father in law for both Deano’s kids. Deano misses Maximo very much, but runs the gondola business in his honor.

-When he got bullied by the kids in choir after school, he’d scrape barnacles off the bottom of the gondola and throw them at them. A lot of them left him alone after that, which was also because Katherina (who was his classmate at the time) protected him.

-He can speak Italian, English, Spanish, Japanese, German, and French. This is so he can better connect with his clients when giving them tours or having conversations with them.

-His favorite thing to do is stroll on Portallini’s bridge at night and look up at the stars and street lights. He sometimes does this with Utah and Deano after they’ve all had a particularly exhausting day. They all find it very relaxing.

-His favorite movies are silent movies and black and white films. He likes to imaging how their voices sound and what the actual colors of the screen would be. He’s mostly forced to watch rom coms or animated movies with his family, but he likes those too.

-He and Akari have sort of a rivalry because of their chosen vehicles. It actually doesn’t make sense, the whole boats vs motorcycles thing, but they don’t really like each other. She’s also much too sassy and brazen for his liking while he’s too much of a coward in her eyes (not on Hacky Zak level though).

-Sienna brings him pumpkin and apple pies on Thanksgiving as thanks for always helping her travel. He likes to make her a turkey in return, but it’s almost always raw in the center or dressed up with absurd ingredients, so she always secretly throws it away.

-He is probably singlehandedly keeping the hat shops alive because he keeps having to buy hats after his blow away. He never learns to just take the hat off or to just not wear a hat altogether.

-If you rock the boat on purpose to be silly, he will hit you on the head with an oar or throw a barnacle at you. Utah and Bruna can definitely attest to that.

-Sorry, my headcanons here are kinda weak. Deano used to piss me off when I first started playing Papa’s Pastaria solely because of his shirt, I hate big blue vertical stripes. Also because his hat looked like it was about to fall off and I don’t like feeling anticipation when looking at someone. Despite this, Deano seems like a cool dude.