thepreciousem

[goatsandgangsters]

I’m gonna be honest, I’m not sure what’s more exciting for me: watching episode 8 or finally being able to remove this show from my blacklist when I’m done.

those GREY SQUARES of BLOCKED CONTENT have been TAUNTING ME because I want to lOOK AT THEM SO BADLY but I know I SHOULDN’T but now I will finally be free to look at everything until my heart’s content

also my queue is about to d i e under the weight of everything I’m about to put in it

I love that Jesper is the #2 Milo Stan. I say #2 because I am the #1 Milo Stan

ohhhhhhh Angry Fedyor, I like it

THE SIMULTANEOUS “WHAT” FROM MAL AND INEJ. ohhhhhh they can be friends and hang out at the annual ravkan/ketterdam holiday party

“I’ll have to give that speech again now” OH HE’S SUCH AN ASSHOLE I LOVE HIM

AWWW INEJ AND ZOYA, I LIKE THAT INEJ IS MAKING FRIENDS WITH THE WHOLE RAVKA CREW HUH

well. almost the whole ravka crew.

“it will take more than this” is that… lampshading?

I hope Inej specifically gets That Particular Knife back and whoever it is currently, I hope that’s the one she renames Sankta Alina

GGGGIIIIRRRRRRRLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!! oh I love Alina so much I’m so prouuuuuuuuuuuud

OH GOOD did she absorb the antlers? Do we not have to see That for multiple seasons? thank god, because that was gross. that was like. super gross. NARRATIVELY, I LOVE IT, BECAUSE IT MEANS AMPLIFIERS HAVE A HIGHER STAKE AND MORE OF A COST THAN JUST “pretty jewelry of fuck shit up” but like. good god. again I say, if I wanted to watch gross body horror with antlers, I’d watch Hannibal

I LOVE THAT HE JUST STRAIGHT-UP DECKED MAL. the dude’s got untold depths of power and he just went right for the punch. I love that.

Nicely dodging accusations of Bury Your Gays by only having the mlms attack each other I see (I mean........ Ivan’s alive status is ambiguous at the end of the first book too. and he makes it until Siege and Storm. so I’m gonna hold out HOPE because book characters are more disposable than actors?)

the only thing more luxurious than ben barnes’s perfectly coiffed hair is ben barnes’s perfectly coiffed hair getting completely mussed up

AGAIN I SAY, DARKLING MAL SCENES STAY WINNING. LOOKS LIKE THERE’S A NEW COMPELLING NARRATIVE FOIL DYNAMIC IN TOWN.

oh I see the ravkan/ketterdam fambly dinner parties are canon now. love to kick things off with a fun little camping trip

OH DISREGARD WHAT I SAID EARLIER, THE ACTUAL SANKTA ALINA KNIFE HAS ARRIVED

The deal! is the deal! Leonardo Pointing Dot JPG!

AW ZOYA ALINA HUG !!

I just really want them all to be friends okay

JESPER REALLY SAID MAYBE THE REAL MILLION KRUGE WAS THE FRIENDS WE MADE ALONG THE WAY

AND JESPER’S RIGHT

y’all, we need to revisit the brunch seating charts. because Milo has to come too. the restaurant is like “no pets allowed, you can’t bring your goat in here” and Jesper just puts his hat on Milo and goes “how dare you call my friend a goat. he happens to have a skin condition” and Milo just bleats merrily 

ooooooooooOOOOOOHH NICHEVO’YA BE LOOKIN COOL AS SHIITTTTTTT !!! 

also I like that Alina calls him the Darkling in the final voice over because I had a FEELING they might start Actually Using That in season two once things have gone off the rails. but it’s so fascinating that they gave us his full name FIRST in season one and now it seems like they’re going to switch to the Darkling. it makes sense narratively but it’s such an interesting inversion. I know they didn’t want to call him that in season one so that they could humanize him, but now we get to see the humanity falling away aND I JUST THINK THAT’S NEAT

anyway this show was really good and I feel like I immediately want to rewatch it again start to finish

season 2 when

N I K O L A I  W H E N

[mayajadeart]

How to make Justice League good (or at least not as terrible) Part 1: Introduction.

     As some of you may remember, a little while ago I saw Justice League, and liveblogged the whole thing. I figured when I was done that I’d write a review, explaining my opinion on the movie and why I felt that way. I did start writing this review, but it was less of a review and more of a long ramble about how many ways it could have been good but wasn’t, and eventually it became clear that I should just make that post instead of trying to articulate some kind of score for the movie based on my ramblings. This will be the first of a series of posts where I lay down my plan for how Justice League should have been made. In this part, I’ll be summarizing the key issues with the movie as it is, and establishing the rules I’m imposing on myself to make the process more interesting.

     I want to make a disclaimer that I’m not nor have I ever been a super huge DC fan-- I watched some of the old Justice League cartoon, I’ve read some classic Batman comics, and I feel generally positive towards DC’s various superheroes, but most of my familiarity with the source material comes from having friends who were super into it. With this in mind, my analysis won’t refer to the comics more than passingly for extra information, and my suggestions for improving the movie won’t necessarily align with the lore of the comics. Finally, I don’t intend to hide any important plot points when talking about the movie, so if you care about spoilers, keep that in mind.

The Problems:

     If we’re going to be fixing this movie, we do still have to be aware of exactly what’s wrong with it, and while there are many minor details that detract from the movie’s overall quality, the single biggest problem that I could identify with the film is that it failed to make me care, and there are a number of reasons why I think that happened.

     First, there’s almost no setup for the heroes. Out of the six main heroes, only three are pre-established, and only one of those has been able to elicit any real positive reaction from audiences (that being Wonder Woman, love of my life and hero of my heart). Despite this 1/6 ratio of characters we don’t give a damn about, the movie makes no effort to convey to its audience who these characters are and why we should care, instead bizarrely presenting them as though they’re already established, to the point where I actually thought there must have been a TV series or something where The Flash had already been introduced (there was a show, but it’s not canon with the DCEU and this is a completely different Flash). The result is a bunch of people we don’t know running around acting in ways that we don’t really understand for reasons that we were never really informed of, and the movie expects us to be able to get invested in this. Bad.

     Second, on a similar note, the villain receives no setup whatsoever. Who the hell is Steppenwolf? What the hell does he want? Why is he bad? The movie doesn’t properly establish why a victory by its main antagonist would be bad. Steppenwolf isn’t one of the more recognizable villains from the comics, and from what I can tell he really doesn’t have much going for him aside from being related to Darkseid, but the movie treats him like he’s some heavily anticipated baddie. At no point does an audience avatar step up and ask those questions that I posed at the beginning of this paragraph, and I had to go to Wikipedia to get the answers, so clearly the movie didn’t do a very good job of organically revealing them. With no context for who he is or why he’s bad, how am I supposed to care that he’s trying to take over the world and root for the heroes to take him down? It’s a wonder that I even remembered his name.

     Third, the movie seems to care more about cool fight scenes than it does about giving us a plot that makes sense, and that’s a really poor direction for this movie to be taking. Criticisms against previous DCEU films haven’t been that they were too boring or didn’t have cool action scenes, it was that the plots made no sense, the characters were bullocks, and they were so needlessly grimdark that they forgot to give the audience a reason to give a shit. They have responded to complaints about Batman v Superman being too long by limiting Justice League’s runtime to two hours, but the problem isn’t that people don’t like long movies, it’s that people don’t like being forced to sit through a movie they don’t like for two and a half hours. The way to save this movie isn’t to make it shorter and more action-packed, it’s to shift gears, take time to focus on the characters, and give us a story that makes some fucking sense for once.

     And here’s how I’d do that.

The Rules:

     As everyone and their mother named Martha has already pointed out, Justice League has a huge strike against it before it even starts production simply because of the other movies in the DC Extended Universe being both few in number and poor in quality, and the obvious solution would be to trash every single movie in the franchise except Wonder Woman and start over from there. But not only would that be an unrealistic expectation for a company that cares about making a profit, I also don’t give enough of a shit to try and rewrite the entire DCEU in a blog post. Therefore, the major constraint for my improved version of Justice League is going to be that it has to start from the same place as the real version, and it has to accept Man of Steel, Suicide Squad, and yes, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice as canon, though it can make minor retcons to these films in order to ensure that it flows well and makes internal sense. I’d place a budgetary constraint on the movie as well, but considering that the movie already cost $300 million, making it one of the most expensive films ever made, I don’t think that will be much of an issue. The real challenge will be making the movie look like it cost that much.

     Of course, just because the other movies happened doesn’t mean we can necessarily rely on them to have fulfilled their purpose, and a major hurdle that Good Justice League has to overcome is that in addition to establishing all the new characters it introduces, it also has to establish all the things that the previous two Superman movies failed to do. It’s going to have to set a completely new tone and reinvent its pre-established characters into people who we can actually enjoy and care about in order to have any hope of being decent. It has a lot of ground to cover, and retaking that lost ground is what I’ll be focusing on in Part 2, so stay tuned!

Continued in Part 2: Electric Boogaloo