#unknown soldier 1997

[ufonaut]

“And who are the enemy?”

“Those who oppose the American will. The crimes I spoke of, the genocide I witnessed in the camps, ensured it would be so. Ultimately, we are always right. And everything we do is right. This is my legacy to you as an American soldier.”

Unknown Soldier (1997) #4

(Garth Ennis, Kilian Plunkett)

[holly-fixation]

Seraphic and Sinister

Summary: Sephiroth learns that he has a child, a lab made specimen existing under the same terrible conditions he was raised in. In a moment of pure rage, he rescues his child. However, his fate has long been sealed, but the child’s fate is unknown. 

Never did he expect the cadet that killed him to take responsibility for the heir of His planet. 

Inspired by various asks to @rottenpumpkin13 

Please Enjoy.

…

Chapter 1: Violation

Hojo's laboratory. 

The unwelcoming decor was an unwanted second home to the Silver Soldier of Shinra. The sterile air, the artificial light, the deep echoes of the halls. He hated it. He hated being here but it was required. Every attempt to convince the higher ups that this was not necessary ended in complete failure and laughter from the scientist he hated most. 

These monthly appointments were not his choice. The board made that explicitly clear.

Worst of all in this terrible laboratory, he hated seeing the specimens, the creatures and monsters created to either die or be observed. Every ounce of their suffering was monitored twenty four hours a day. These hallways and these creatures remained within memories for as far as he could recall them. Each tile on the floor was mapped to perfect recollection after all his years. Medium cages, examination room, training room, large mako tanks, large cages, electric pipelines, monitors, sealed cages-

He stopped in his tracks.

But this observation glass was new, as was the darkened screen between the window and the door. Normally he would turn away in disgust at this new experiment, to ignore it and hope its usefulness ended soon for its own sake. But he didn't. He felt a churn in his stomach. A weight in his chest. Something pushing him toward the control pad beyond what he could call ‘curiosity’. All new experiments were in the back of the lab, so why was this added in the main hallway?

The screen brightened with the usual Shintra log in page, both the username and password fields left blank. He didn't know Hojo's information, however, he input his own credentials despite the threat that said doctor could discover his attempt and use it against him. 

The screen immediately opened to a document application, white light reflecting on his skin. A new folder appeared within his personal pages without the cloud icon beside it, one that did not belong and did not make sense to him. Only one word titled the folder: Theory. Checking within he found dozens of seemingly new reports. What were these? Why were they there?

He opened one.

Each line captured his attention no matter the horror that laid behind it. 

Pregnancy continuing with expected complications. Monitor for sudden nutrition loss. 

Host uninjured at 30 weeks. Chances of successful production promising.

Child born July 7, 1997, 07:07. A healthy female. 7 pounds, 3 ounces. Unexpectedly vocal.

Host returned to home in [REDACTED]. Monitor residence and continue pension until host expires or conspires to spread word of the child. 

Under direct presidential order, the child's designation must be similar to the designation of its father. (Since the oaf apparently cannot tell the difference between a fully grown masterpiece and a new experiment)

Child's designation agreed upon: Seraphina. Discontinue use of “Girl” and “Soldier”. Previous designations used only during negative reinforcement. 

Child portrays signs of scotopia. Disable emergency lights at PM to encourage proper rest.

Child reaching 120.3 decibels. Install sound panels. 

Child begins walking. 

Presidential three month review. Deemed nothing of note. Project to be discontinued if results continue at current rate. 

Implementation of mako in diet. Child's eyes begin displaying common symptoms within seven days. 

10 mL mako injection through shoulder. Constant protest. Consequences earned. To be repeated every four weeks until further notice.

Child fully healed in 23.4 hours. 

Diet transferred to commercial protein shakes until solid food can be consumed.

Child's strength becomes difficult to manage. Separate child from active lab tables. 

Child maintains current record of 120.3 decibels whenever reacting to impact. When older, remedy this. 

Technicians arrived to child sitting on a work desk beside activated soldering iron. Child showed no reaction to tool. Child held photo snatched from the current desk: A selfie of a technician's offspring with a cardboard cut out of Sephiroth. The offspring is smiling.

Child cracked glass with latest scream when photo was removed. Consequences distributed as necessary. 

Child suddenly becomes silent. Literacy and mathematic skills difficult to judge with minimal reactions. 

Child cries at night. Child exhibiting signs of nyctophobia despite scotopia. Note: habit must be removed by age three. 

Child is given a Second Class sword. Child shows promise with a weapon. 

Child is shown video of Sephiroth training at age twelve. Child is thoroughly engaged. Child attempts to copy technique. 

Presentation for president confirmed. 

Six month presidential review begins. Child referred to by name with president's approval. 

Child is placed in room with a single robotic arm as room size slowly decreased. Child is severely injured but defeats robot. 

President Shinra demands an alternate display of abilities. 

Pain endurance trial begins. 

Child endures 5X volume of [REDACTED] than average adult human male before losing consciousness. 

Project permitted to continue. 

Wound heals. Child unable to walk properly. Signs point to lingering [REDACTED] in child's body. 

Three day recovery period begins. Check status every three hours.

Sephiroth couldn't stop reading every horrible detail on the page, every memory of his own childhood rushing him at the thought of another- no, not just another child- his child: one made without his knowledge or consent. He felt his hands click links to further documentation, his eyes scanning every detail dangerously before an image opened. 

A video. No, not a video, live footage of the blacked out room before him. A small part of him expected to see his silver hair on a tiny child, to finally see the trait on someone other than himself. 

But he didn't. Even through the shading greens of dark vision recordings, he could tell her hair was black, tiny specks interfering with the recording as if pixels glitched exactly where her hair portrayed through the screen.

The child was trying to walk, and only when she turned did he see the thick bandages around her thigh. Back and forth she limped through the room, never acknowledging the thin sword on the ground, the stacked weights by her crib, or the books on her desk. ‘Her’. None of it was truly hers. Every inch of her life belonged to Shinra and Shinra alone. She did not ask to be brought into this world. Hojo forced her mother, forced her, into this den and left with gil in hand as she wailed in abandonment. And he, her father, stood behind glass after six months of the same agony he suffered. 

He put his PIN into the digital keypad by the door. 

Access denied. 

He tried again, slower, deliberate, confirming each and every input to follow his code. 

Access denied. 

He was given access to the files. Why couldn’t he enter the room? Why was Hojo continuing with these useless mind games? His chest boiled. His brows were furrowed. He brought his shaking hand to his heart and bowed his head, trying to remember the feeling of the locket once kept there, wanting guidance before he made a decision or one was made for him.

He was…angry. No. No- it was much more than that. This child didn’t deserve his suffering. His child didn’t deserve this imprisonment or the genocide missions that laid before her.

She deserved a normal life. 

He summoned his blade to his side and slashed the metal door. The lights above shifted to crimson and a siren blared in his ears but he refused to stop. He refused to allow Hojo another violation into his life and the life of his child. He attacked until there was nothing but a pile of debris between him and his daughter.

Sephiroth took his first step into the room to find the child holding her own blade against him as her body shook with the struggle to maintain his old battle stance, standing against the crib. Why was a child- no- not even a child- why was a baby forced to learn these instincts? 

Why wasn’t he enough to stop this from ever happening again?

He hoped it wasn’t too late.

She looked different than he expected. Her skin was a few notches paler than his own. What he assumed were failing pixels in photos and in videos were actually her hair; a codominant display of his silver piercing through solid black. It reminded him of stars shimmering in the night sky, the vast expanse she was never permitted to see. 

No matter what, that changed today. 

He returned his sword and held both his hands in open caution as he kneeled down, making himself smaller and hopefully less threatening. He tried to soften his expression. She was so delicate. He couldn’t be harsh with her. He didn’t want to be harsh with her. “I will not hurt you. Do you know who I am?” 

The recognition in her eyes only elevated his rage, the smallest nod of her head. She glanced down and her eyes rapidly searched the air around her. Her mako blue, cat like eyes; slit pupils against the soldier trademark. If there was any doubt in his heart that this was only another one of Hojo’s tests, it vanished completely. 

“It’s alright. You’re safe.” 

The hard look in her eyes did not change. He wanted to strangle the scientist. 

“You don’t have to say it the right way. Hojo’s not here. He won’t punish you and I will never let him see you again. Say what you think is right. Don’t think about-”

“Dada…” 

Time froze. His heart skipped a beat. 

She looked embarrassed and afraid, her voice weak and tiny and barely above a breath. He hated that he was correct. She said it again as if finally feeling the slightest drop of freedom. “Dada…?”

He nodded softly. “That’s right. I’m your father. And I’m saving you from this place, Seraphina.”

Maybe he overestimated her understanding because she just kept staring at him.

“You can put your sword away.” He made a small sheathing gesture with his hands. “We have to go. We have to leave right now and you will never see this horrible place again.”

She suddenly waddled up to him and he almost flinched as she tried to wrap her arms around his leg, her weapon forgotten on the floor.

The silver solider lifted the baby into his arms, and she clenched the straps across his chest so tight her knuckles were white. He sheathed her sword and protected her with his right arm. He had already wasted so much time, but he already knew he would never regret this first moment. 

He could never return Shinra, to the memories it held or the friends he made. But they didn’t matter now. All that mattered was her safety. 

All that mattered was his family.

.

.

.

.

To be continued…

Chapter list here!

Note: Okay I know the starry night/multicolored hair is very ‘original character do no steal-y’ but I promise it will be part of the plot and not just a neat detail. This is also my first time writing out an OC for someone ELSE (Hi Pumpkin!) so I’m trying to stay true to the multiple asks this AU spans. So welcome to my newest ‘Sephiroth with a child’ AU and say thank you to Pumpkin for letting me write this!

[johndpg]

SPANKING ON TV #5

The Drum (1938) d. Zoltan Korda

We’re off to the British Raj this time. 14-year-old drummer boy Bill Holder gets into trouble when he’s caught smoking in the barracks. He’s been warned before, so the Sergeant Major bends him over the end of his bed, turns his kilt back and whacks his bare backside with one of his own drumsticks. Pretty hefty whacks too by the sounds of it!

Publicity stills:

The basic plot of the film is jingoism of the highest order, with the Brits trying to track down smuggled shipments of arms on the Northwest Frontier of India to head-off a full-scale rebellion. When the peace-loving ruler of Tokot, a key kingdom in the region, is assassinated, his son Prince Azim goes into hiding. Somewhere along the way he meets and befriends Bill who teaches him how to play the drums. Later Azim is therefore able to bang out a danger signal that saves the British forces from an ambush.

The film went down well with British audiences of the time, no doubt fondly remembering the days of Empire with a tear in their eye, but caused near riots when shown in Bombay and Madras (as they were then called).

It is unknown exactly when the practice of wearing no undergarments under the kilt began. The earliest reference to the tradition was during Waterloo in 1815, but underpants were certainly forbidden by the time of the Raj in India. Indeed, during the First World War, Scottish regiments were inspected by a senior officer who used a mirror to look under kilts; any soldier found wearing underpants was sent back to take them off! We can be confident, then, that the intention is that poor Bill gets his bare arse spanked by the Sergeant Major.

Prince Azim was played by Sabu, a teenage Indian actor who found success in Hollywood during the 1930s and 40s. He was 14 at the time.

Desmond Tester played Bill. He was 18 but had a reputation for playing younger. Previously he was cast by Alfred Hitchcock in Sabotage (1936) as a short-trousered schoolboy called Stevie even though he was 16. He doesn’t get spanked in that film but he is blown up on a bus after being tricked into carrying a bomb by an enemy agent planning a series of attacks on London. Although somewhat slow by today’s frenetic standards, the film was considered shocking at the time. If only they’d known what was coming.

Here's the link to The Drum. Fast forward 9 mins to see the Sergeant Major going Phil Collins on Bill's backside.

And here's another link to Sabotage. It doesn't end well for Stevie at the 54 min mark.

And finally here's a bonus Black Watch soldier giving everybody an eyeful in Hong Kong in 1997.

[fabslikestron]

RUBY CHARACTER INFORMATIONS

„he didn’t protect us…he betrayed us too…“

Name: Ruby

Aliases: Little ISO, Pain in the ass, Sis (by Fixt)

Gender: Female

Origin: TRON System

Resides: Argon City

Species: ISO

Age: unknown (physical age 20)

Physique: Small built, curvy woman

Hair length and colour: Long and white

Eye colour: Light blue

Suit colour: White and grey, black (black guard disguise)

Circuitry colour: White, orange (black guard disguise)

Height: 149 cm | 4ft 11in

Weight: 49 kg | 108 lbs

Occupation: Soldier

Weapons: Identity Disc, Baton, Staff

Hobbies: Bullying some black guards, travelling, exploring

Mother: unknown ISO (deceased)

Father: unknown ISO (deceased)

Partner: Dyson

Offsping: -

Allies: Dyson, Clu (occasionally), Java, General Tesler, Paige, Linux, Fixt

Enemies: Dyson (formerly), Clu, Java (formerly), Pavel, Paige, General Tesler, The Renegade, Mara, Zed, Able, Kevin Flynn, Ava Flynn, Sam Flynn, Fixt (formerly), Eclipse, Tron, Biju, Querty

BACKSTORY

DISCLAIMER: my AU is built up differently, TRON: Uprising plays AFTER TRON: Legacy, plus they find Kevin in 1997, not 2010!

Ruby is an Isomorphic Algorithm that was created by two other ISOs. Together with her parents and her younger brother Fixt they would try to go to Argon City and try to continue living their lives in peace yet as programs saw them as enemies it wasn’t easy, until one day an angry mob tried to harm them in which they succeeded, derezzing Ruby‘s parents, being able to flee from the scene yet losing sight of her brother.

Over the cycles, Ruby would be taken in by a sympathetic program and gain some experience with fighting, until her guardian was derezzed when black guards discovered that they were hiding an ISO, ending up on killing the killers of her protector. From that day on, the young ISO despised Tron for not protecting them properly on that day and Clu for slaughtering her species as they were seen as an imperfection, swearing to avenge her parents and her ISO friends.

Ruby would occasionally go onto General Tesler‘s ship and try to challenge his guards and himself, which started off as a fun thing but ended up on being a true cat and mouse game, being wanted for basically being a nuisance, especially when Dyson arrived in Argon City, annoying the highest ranked soldier to the point where Ruby would start to have some kind of love-hate relationship with him as his anger intrigued her.

Eventually Ruby was sent to the games after being successful caught, yet winning after facing off several black guards and the Empress herself, which led to a repurposing process to make her being part of Clu‘s army…

PERSONALITY

Ruby mainly is a person driven by vengeance which can make her quite reckless and make her do decisions which aren’t that wise, but other than that she truly cares about the people that she likes, especially her brother although at the beginning of their reunion they weren’t really happy to see each other.

artwork by me!

[shinecrystalmoon]

Rin Shirayuki

VITAL STATISTICS

Age : 23

Race : Human

Gender : Female

Birthday : 13 September 1997

Height : 167 cm (5'6")

PROFESSIONAL STATUS

Affiliation : First Shibuya High School (formerly)

                Japanese Imperial Demon Army

                Gracefield Entertainment

                Shadow Empire

Section : Moon Demon Company

             Brooklyn Squad

             Crystalis

             Shadow Secret

Occupation : Student (formerly)

                 Soldier

                 Idol

                 Agent

Figure Skater

Rank : 2nd Lieutenant Colonel

CURSED GEAR

Series : Unknown

Demon : Lyrius

• PERSONAL STATUS

Status : Alive

Relatives: Yuri Shirayuki (Older twin-sister)

PERSONALITY

Kind, Beautiful, Athletic, Multitasker

[elipheleh]

Walt Whitman

Continuing my series of learning about things referenced in the book, I'm looking at things Alex references when he talks about engaging with queer history. These are all tagged #a series of learning about things that are referenced in the book, if you want to block the tag.

Walt Whitman, born May 1819, is one of America's influential poets. He is best known for Leaves of Grass, a poetry collection initially published in 1855 but continually amended until his death in 1892. It grew from 12 poems to over 400.

He has been described as a queer pioneer, and his work spoke to and inspired many queer men of the same time, including Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker. His poems often referenced queer love, although did so in ways that allowed him to deny it, and that signalled as queer to those of his own community. "The affection he felt toward these soldiers, his descriptions, seem to speak to a gay readership," Gooch said. "He wrote about 'comrades' a lot. He seemed to be writing in a sort of code."

Whitman's sexuality is, as is common with historical figures, debated. The theories range from Whitman being bisexual, to his relationships with men being deeply loving but platonic. Whitman did appear to have relationships with women, having a romantic friendship with Ellen Grey - an actress - in 1862, and he later referred to her as "an old sweetheart of mine." [Callow]

However, his relationships and encounters with men are also prevalent. Oscar Wilde was quoted as having told George Cecil Ives (a homosexual-rights activist) "I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips." [Stokes] Peter Doyle, a bus conductor, met Whitman in the mid 1860s, and they were inseparable for several years. When Doyle was interviewed in 1895, he said of Whitman: "We were familiar at once—I put my hand on his knee—we understood. He did not get out at the end of the trip—in fact went all the way back with me." [Kaplan] Another relationship Whitman had was with Harry Stafford, which lasted over several years. When writing to Whitman about the ring he had given Stafford, Stafford wrote "You know when you put it on there was but one thing to part it from me, and that was death." [Folsom]

-----

A very brief example of some of Whitman's poetry that has been read as queer:

Song of Myself (1892 version) 13 His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over his hip-band, His glance is calm and commanding, he tosses the slouch of his hat away from his forehead, The sun falls on his crispy hair and mustache, falls on the black of his polish’d and perfect limbs. I behold the picturesque giant and love him, and I do not stop there, I go with the team also.

15 The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat, the gate-keeper marks who pass, The young fellow drives the express-wagon, (I love him, though I do not know him;)

"Live Oak, with Moss" VIII Hours of my torment—I wonder if other men           ever have the like out of the like           feelings?  Is there even one other like me—distracted           — his friend, his lover, lost to him? 

XI For an athlete loves me, and I him-But           toward him there is something fierce           and terrible in me,  I dare not tell it in words—not even in these           songs.  

See also; We Two Boys Together Clinging A Glimpse

Sources: Callow, Philip. From Noon to Starry Night: A Life of Walt Whitman Folsom, Ed (April 1, 1986). "An Unknown Photograph of Whitman and Harry Stafford". Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. 3 (4): 51–52. Kaplan, Justin (2003). Walt Whitman: A Life. Stokes, John, Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles and Imitations 1996 Wikipedia: Leaves of Grass Wikipedia: Walt Whitman

Additional Reading: Schmidgall, G. (1997). Walt Whitman: A Gay Life. Dutton. Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: Just the Gay Parts Making Queer History: Walt Whitman - note the warning for anti-Black racism & nationalism Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. 1999

[mattnben-bennmatt]

Matt Damon's interview w/ Vanity Fair (December 1997)

Meet Matt Damon

Three of Hollywood’s top directors have decided that 27-year-old Harvard dropout Matt Damon is a star: Francis Ford Coppola gave him the lead in the latest Grisham adaptation, The Rainmaker, Steven Spielberg cast him in the title role in Saving Private Ryan, and Gus Van Sant directed him in Good Will Hunting, which the actor co-wrote. But, David Kamp discovers. Matt Damon himself is not so sure.

By David Kamp

-

This is how it works: a script is first sent to Chris O’Donnell and Leonardo DiCaprio. They pass. Then the secondtier actors reconvene, exchange familiar nods, and audition for the role that they hope will elevate them from their current station. Usually this role isn’t even any good, merely a preen-and-shout exercise in an expensively produced Hollywood infliction. But the actor who secures the part is assured offers and choices, while the also-rans are forced to scratch around for other work: made-for-cable movies, TV pilots, independent films about small-town white ethnics who wear their shirts untucked and say things like “Cut the shit, Frankie!”

Matt Damon was one of these also-rans, a scrubbed young kid with an Andover face who played schoolboys and soldiers in movies that were O.K. but never quite took. He was in School Ties, in which Brendan Fraser played a Jewish football recruit at an elite New England prep school, and Courage Under Fire, the Denzel Washington drama about the Gulf War.

By now, given the circumstances that bring us all together here, you’ve surmised that Damon is no longer an also-ran, and that something wonderful has happened to him. What happened was that he became the beneficiary of Francis Ford Coppola’s whim to cast an unknown as the lead in The Rainmaker, the latest film adaptation of a John Grisham book. On top of this, Damon stars as a character named Will Hunting in a movie entitled Good Will Hunting, Gus Van Sant’s first picture since To Die For, and plays Private Ryan in Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming World War II epic. So Matt Damon is suddenly big news, a star in the making, Hollywood’s face of tomorrow, etc., etc. There is “buzz” about him, and it’s my duty to observe that his career has “caught fire,” that he is “hot.” People who work in entertainment are already slurring his name nonchalantly, “M’daymun,” as if they’ve said it a million times and are exhausted by the sheer burden of advance-word knowingness. Matt Damon. M’daymun. Matthew McConaughDamon. He’s probably a wanker. Let’s find out.

‘Oh, hey, man, how you doin’? . . . Naw, I’m just here watching the game with the guy from Vanity [belch] Fair. . . . Yeah, look, I promise I’ll reread it, but if you want an answer now, I’m telling you probably not, because I read this script on the plane that blew me away, and it’s supposed to go at the same time as yours. It’s about a compulsive gambler. It’s written by a guy who is a compulsive gambler, I think. . . . No, so I think probably not, but look, this is for just this film, O.K.? Let’s keep talking for the future, O.K., man? ’Cause I’d��like to work with you.”

He hangs up, dumbfounded. “I can’t believe I’m in a position where I have to turn down work. This has never happened,” he says. He’s of compact physique, with broad shoulders, sharp features, and short, mussed hair—he looks like an early Heisman winner.

“When did it start happening?” I ask.

“Just this past weekend,” Damon says. He is only recently back from England, where Saving Private Ryan is being filmed. We are drinking beer and watching football, and, appropriately, there is an air of beer-commercial wish fulfillment afoot, the kind of deal where two knuckleheads in a dorm room slam down their brewskis on top of the console and are magically transported poolside, where butlers and multiple facsimiles of Jayne Mansfield attend to them. Only it’s not nearly that decadent—we are simply luxuriating in a fancy hotel room in New York City on the dime of Miramax, which is releasing Good Will Hunting. Knucklehead Damon is not blasé about his four-star accommodations, self-consciously ordering “overpriced room-service food that I would never pay for myself” and reveling in the junkiest stuff in the mini-bar—the whole jar of cashews, the entire box of Lindt chocolate squares.

Knucklehead No. 2 is Ben Affleck, Damon’s best friend since their high-school days in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the star of the recent, well-received independent films Chasing Amy and Going All the Way. Affleck is also in Good Will Hunting, playing, in fact, Will Hunting’s best friend. He joins us in Damon’s room, settles in with a beer, and trades stories with his buddy about the day’s big experience: getting fitted for their first-ever complimentary Movie Actor suits. They are attending a function the following evening. “The Gotham Awards? The Gotham . . . Independent Film . . . something?” says Damon. “I don’t know what it is, but they’re giving Harvey and Bob Weinstein some kind of award and we’re being brought along as sort of, you know, Miramax mascots.” The free suits are part of the deal.

Affleck has been to the V.I.P. showroom of Emporio Armani, where he was surprised to encounter a locked glass door with a receptionist behind it who at first wouldn’t let him in. “She motioned for me to pick up this phone on the wall to tell her who I was,” he says. “They’re afraid of Cunanan copycats—that’s my theory.”

“I went to Calvin Klein,” says Damon. “They tried all these things on me and said I looked very ‘fash.’ They promised me that I’ll look ‘fash.’”

The conversants are wearing jeans and dorky shoes—not so much bad style as pre-style: Hollywood taste hasn’t imposed itself on them yet, and their clothes still look mother-bought. They’re new at this, and it’s endearing. You come in prepared for the worst, a Stephen Dorff situation, wherein the hyped kid in the hotel room is sulky and has an off-duty goatee and smells of Gauloises and sits with such an extreme slump that his head is at armrest level and his groin points out at you. It’s nothing like that. These boys are nice knuckleheads.

Good Will Hunting is proof that Damon and Affleck are also intelligent knuckleheads—not an oxymoron, but an apt way to describe a 27-year-old and a 25-year-old who are by all appearances regular guys (neither emits imaginary Keith Haring rays of star quality, as Matthew McConaughey does), and who happen to have written the screenplay for the film in which they star. Yes, they are writer-actors, an uncommon skill combo among filmdom polymaths, and Good Will Hunting—the first thing they have ever written—is now a Gus Van Sant movie.

Will Hunting, Damon’s character, is a troublemaking Irish-American kid from South Boston who is discovered to be a math prodigy. An awed M.I.T. professor (Stellan Skarsgård) wants to take Will under his wing. He gets his chance when Will, on the brink of being jailed for his latest criminal offense, is sprung by the judge on the condition that the professor supervise him and enlist a psychotherapist to set the boy straight. Will resists the touchy-feelyisms of various therapists, until he meets his match in Dr. Sean Maguire (Robin Williams), himself a product of South Boston. This kid, you see, he’s . . . goodwill hunting.

It’s strangely gentle territory for a serial subversive like Van Sant, whose previous films are rife with casual criminality and sexual deviance. “I haven’t really had anyone I’ve shown it to not like the film, which is really unusual for me,” the director says. “I guess that before, I felt that portraying something out of the mainstream was a powerful way of telling a story. But this time the story itself was enough.”

Good Will Hunting is an engaging, comfortably inhabited small movie. That anyone has even bothered to make a film about two of Boston’s prominent milieus— its academic community and its most famously insular neighborhood—is gratifying enough, but Damon and Affleck have transcended the homeboy-homage genre of indie film that has given us Trees Lounge and Palookaville. The screenplay’s realistic handling of townie-student resentments is buttressed by the time Damon spent at Harvard; originally a member of the class of ’92, he remains two semesters short of graduating. As actors, Damon and Affleck avoid vanity shtick, and the cast responds in kind—particularly Williams, soothing and bearded as he was in Awakenings, and Minnie Driver, who plays Damon’s love interest and has since become his real-life girlfriend.

“To me it was just an extraordinary script,” says Williams. “It was quite shocking when I met Matt and Ben and saw how young they were—I was like ‘May I see some ID?’”

The Rainmaker I can’t tell you about with any authority, because it wasn’t finished at the time of this writing. But I can tell you what Mickey Rourke has told me. Mickey’s in The Rainmaker—mark my words, Mickey’s back—and he says, “Matt worked his ass off. Matt walked the walk. And Francis showed a lot of love on the set. Francis is good with young kids.”

It’s not all leather trousers and kissing Bridget Hall, being a boy actor. The road to The Rainmaker was paved with near misses and self-worth crises. “I’d have taken Robin,” Damon says, alluding to Batman Forever. “Hell, I auditioned for it. When they first offered it to Chris O’Donnell he wanted more money, so they had auditions and I did a screen test for Joel Schumacher. Primal Fear—you know the Edward Norton role? It more or less came down to him and me, and he pretty much put a smokin’ on me. To Die For I lost nearly 20 pounds to audition for, but Wock got it.” (“Wock” is his friend Joaquin Phoenix.)

Damon’s first role of consequence was in School Ties, in 1992. A poor but not altogether worthless cousin of Dead Poets Society, the movie had a young cast that also included Brendan Fraser, Chris O’Donnell, Randall Batinkoff, Cole Hauser, and Affleck. Damon was effectively first among the featured performers, playing a moneyed “legacy” student whose anti-Semitism and resentment of Fraser’s character bring about the film’s climax. But he was not to be the first of the gang called up from the minors.

“Scent of a Woman happened right during School Ties. The whole cast went down to audition for it,” says Damon. “Chris O’Donnell was a business major at Boston College, and he’s a very savvy businessman. So the way I found out about the part is, I’m checking in with my agent, to see if anything good has come in, and my agent says, ‘Here’s one with a young role, and . . . Oh my God, it’s got Al Pacino in it!’ So I go up to Chris and say, ‘Have you heard about this movie?’ and he says [curtly] ‘Yeah.’ So I say, ‘Do you have the script?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Can I see it?’ ‘No—I kinda need it.’ Chris wouldn’t give it to anybody. Later, Ben, me, Randall, Brendan, Anthony Rapp—we’re all commiserating about our auditions, talking about how they didn’t go well. Except for Chris. Chris used to play things close to the vest. We asked him how his audition went, and he just said [highpitched, Hibernian singsong], ‘Ohhh, it was all right.’ And we were like ‘Dude! Just tell us how it went!’ And he would say [singsong again], ‘Ohhh, I don’t know.’”

While O’Donnell went on to become Hollywood’s literal and figurative Boy Wonder, Damon and Affleck found themselves in a wilderness of spotty work and tenuous finances, sharing a two-bedroom apartment on Curson Avenue in L.A. with a third friend from Cambridge. Affleck and two other School Ties veterans, Hauser and Rapp, found jobs playing oily adolescents in Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater’s winning evocation of the mid-70s. As a result there developed an overlapping School Ties—Dazed and Confused coterie of underemployed young actors: Damon, Affleck, Hauser, Rory Cochrane (the latter film’s lovable stoner), and Matthew McConaughey, dead-on as Dazed and Confused’s over-age, breezily malevolent parasite on the town’s high-school scene.

“When Matthew got A Time to Kill, we all went nuts,” says Damon. “It was such a feeling of vindication—that one of our peer group, someone not on the A-list, got the part.”

Damon’s ticket out of obscurity was last year’s Courage Under Fire, in which he delivered an attention-grabbing performance as a soldier who witnesses something horrible in Kuwait and, thus traumatized, becomes a heroin addict. Damon lost 40 pounds for that role and became, literally, anorectic. “I was under 2 percent body fat,” he says. “I remember seeing Lou Diamond Phillips”—whose boxing-ring scenes in the movie reveal a perfectly sculpted torso—“and thinking, God, if I looked like that I wouldn’t take my shirt off. I thought he looked fat!” He produces an unsettling snapshot of himself from this era, smoking a cigarette and holding up a packet of ExLax. He looks like Chet Baker about to die.

Health be damned, Damon believes that the extreme measures for Courage Under Fire were well worth it. “It was a business decision,” he says. “I thought, Nobody will take this role, because it’s too small. If I go out of my way to make something of this role . . .” At this point he cites the punchdrunk performance of Benicio Del Toro in The Usual Suspects. “He’s killed early into the movie and he probably has, like, nine lines. But I found it the most memorable performance of 1995. The guy just goes out and thinks, No one’s gonna understand what I’m doing except for me, but I’m a fuckin’ genius. For me, I was sick of reading scripts that Chris O’Donnell had passed on, and I was looking for something to set me apart: ‘Look what I’ll do, I’ll kill myself!’ Directors took note of it.”

Indeed, Damon’s performance impressed Coppola enough that he cast him in The Rainmaker. The out-of-nowhere notoriety this accorded Damon prodded Miramax to push Good Will Hunting into production. And when Good Will Hunting was shooting on location in Boston last spring, Williams invited Damon along to visit Spielberg, who was in town to film scenes for his slave-ship-revolt movie, Amistad. “I’d auditioned by tape for Saving Private Ryan, but Steven thought I still looked like I did in Courage Under Fire,” Damon says. “So when he actually saw me, he saw that I didn’t look that way anymore, and that’s what made the difference.”

Inevitably the topic of nascent stardom arises and, equally inevitably, Damon demurs. It’s a “lofty assumption,” he says, that the Coppola—Van Sant—Spielberg trifecta will make him a star; it could all blow over in a year’s time. “I won’t be Matthew McConaughey,” he says. “I’m not as good-looking as him. I’m certainly never going to be anyone’s sex symbol.”

Here the conversation takes a turn for the meta-, becoming all about the impact of this article and the photos that will accompany it, and how celebrity is lovely if it helps you get better work, but is also a tricky bugaboo larded with unseemly implications. Ed Harris, Damon concludes. That’s the kind of life he’d like, being a good actor like Ed Harris, well regarded but not overpaid or stalked by anyone. Damon makes no attempt to veil his disdain for Hollywood, proclaiming himself “an East Coast person” who will one day settle down in his native Boston area; for now, he has no fixed address and lives in Cole Hauser’s apartment near L.A.’s Griffith Park.

You could argue that Damon is being pre-emptive, just in case things don’t work out these next few months. But his conviction strikes me as genuine. He can’t fathom, for example, the notion of eightfigure salaries. “Chris O’Donnell made $10 million last year. [Again, more deliberately] Chris . . . O’Donnell . . . made 10 . . . million . . . dollars last year. Now, if I made $10 million last year, I would not be sitting here with you. No offense. Unless you and I were friends and you wanted to hang out with me and help me spend my $10 million. Shit, man, give me five million bucks once—that’s $500,000 a year for the rest of your life if you invest it. I can’t spend that much money. Not the way I live.” (For the record, Damon says that his average take-home pay for The Rainmaker, Good Will Hunting, and Saving Private Ryan was “significantly under half a million per picture.”)

Damon’s upbringing was progressiveliberal even by Cambridge standards. As a child, he was taken on tours of South Boston by his mother’s longtime boyfriend, who had driven one of the hated buses that delivered black kids to white schools in Southie in the mid-70s. When Damon was 10, he, his mother, and his older brother, Kyle, moved into an experimental cooperative house. “About six families bought a broken-down house in Central Square and rebuilt it,” he says. “It was governed by a shared philosophy that housing is a basic human right. Every week there was the three-hour community meeting, and Sundays were workdays. My mom put little masks on me and my brother, gave us goggles and crowbars, and we demo’d the walls.”

Damon positively beams when he speaks of his mother. When I ask if I can give her a call, he agrees and advises me that she is “nice, you’ll like her, she’s really touchyfeely”—which I later surmise to be his way of saying I love her dearly, but her value system skews somewhat to the left of mine.

Damon’s mother, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, is a professor of early-childhood education at Lesley College in Cambridge, and she forthrightly discusses her discomfort with her son’s impending celebrity. “I’m not happy about it, particularly,” she says. “What happens in a consumer society is that people become objects of attention in a way that doesn’t seem healthy to society. I’m happy that Matt is happy in his work, but I’m not convinced he has to be on the cover of a magazine about it. It’s a little hard for me to accept. It’s all so out of the ordinary that I worry he might not grow as I want him to.” For an unreconstructed leftist whose son has pledged allegiance to the Entertainment State, these difficult quandaries arise frequently. “It was hard for me to go to the set of Courage Under Fire,” she continues. “I was deeply against the Gulf War, and I didn’t know how the film was going to pan out politically.”

So it’s settled then. We have come here to celebrate the launch of Matt Damon, actor, not Matt Damon, celebrity. We shall not torment him with shallow appraisals of his love life. We shall not murmur that he looks kinda fat or suspiciously thin in that photo we saw in People magazine’s “Star Tracks” section. We shall leave him alone to develop his craft and indulge him in his use of that word, craft. We shall take into account that he is still learning.

“I think Marlon Brando has done more to destroy this generation of actors,” he says, referring to his own generation, “because, with the whole marble-mouth thing— the I-don’t-give-a-fuck mentality—what people overlook is that when the dude was my age he was the hardest-working man in show business. He was onstage, he was busting his ass with Stella Adler, he was obsessed with acting. When people say, ‘I just want to be fat and live in Fiji and have everyone tell me I’m a genius,’ they’re not looking at what it actually takes to get there.”

[kummatty]

For the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), however, the survey's primary significance lay in its ability to shed light on the area's biblical past (see Besant 1895: 11-12). In other words, the motivations for the nineteenth-century PEF survey were twofold: it was part of the larger project of mapping and empire building. Officers from the British War Office carried out the fund's initial projects, generating cartographic knowledge understood from the outset to be of strategic and administrative value. (It should be noted that this was just a few years after the completion of the Suez Canal and, perhaps even more important, at a time when the British were anticipating the imminent demise of the Ottoman Empire.) Simultaneously, the survey was an undertaking situated within the broader project of the scientific study of religion in nineteenth-century Europe. Through the practices of science, based upon the accumulation of empirical facts, these soldiers and scholars sought to demonstrate the historicity of the Bible. This was the "Land of the Bible," and, in their view, science would "recover" the country itself, and its history would be made plain for the observing eye. As articulated by Frederick Jones Bliss, "recovery precedes discovery... if by recovery we mean the bringing again to light of a sight or monument lost, but known to have existed; and by discovery the adding to our knowledge of facts unknown to us before" (1906: 2).

The contrast that Bliss drew between recovery and discovery points to a distinctive aspect of the project of surveying and mapping Palestine, which invokes a very specific colonial imagination. On the one hand, the Ordnance Survey of Western Palestine must be situated within the broader history of mapping and empire building as it occurred in other parts of the (soon to be) colonized world. As Matthew Edney has argued, "imperialism and mapmaking intersect in the most basic manner. Both are fundamentally concerned with territory and knowledge" (1997:1). Territorial knowledge was essential to governance, which was as true for the "characteristic modern state" (Hobsbawn 1990: 80) that emerged in mid-to late-eighteenth century Europe as it was for European colonial administrations abroad. Systematic territorial and statistical surveys, which were essential for administrative purposes and powerful in developing conceptions of a "territorial [and national] self" (Edney 1997: 35-36; see also Hobsbawn 1990), proliferated in the increasingly centralized European states in the post-1750 period.

Geographers never limited themselves to making territorial maps, however. Charting the world entailed generating "natural and political descriptions of other lands" (Cormack 1997: 15), not just obtaining topographical knowledge of places, geographical formations, and routes. In effect, geographical practices embodied the desire to produce what Mary Louise Pratt has called a "planetary consciousness," through which the world as a whole would be known (1992: 29). And knowing the world involved conquering it literally and figuratively. Surveying and mapping proved indispensable to advancing the various components of both the colonizing project and the imperial imagination; they were necessary to exploration and conquest and were prerequisites to any knowledge and conception of, and interest in, the colonies among the public back home (see Murphy 1948; Markham [1878] 1968; see also Edney 1997; Pratt 1992, Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Cosgrove 1999). As Pratt and others have argued, those scientific explorations mapped the unknown world into Western (forms of) knowledge. They created a general map, through which the world as a whole was perceived, and more specific maps, through which particular places within it were charted and "framed" (Edney 1997: 9), thus allowing them to be conquered and ruled (see also Cosgrove 1999). As Matthew Edney has written with respect to the beginnings of the British colonization of India, the East India Company undertook "a massive intellectual campaign to transform a land of incomprehensible spectacle into an empire of knowledge at the forefront of which were geographers who mapped the landscape and studied the inhabitants" (1997: 2, emphasis added by author).

Palestine, however, was never considered incomprehensible. Nor was it, strictly speaking, unknown. For archaeologists, biblical scholars, explorers, and officers engaged in the fund's survey projects, Palestine was not a terra incognita. Rather, contemporary Palestine would ultimately be brought, through mapping, back into a historical geography they already knew. Cartography and archaeology were linked from the very start. Ancient Palestine, much like the concept of Hellas for nineteenth-century Europeans, was to be recuperated, as it was understood to be the foundation of (or in the case of Hellas, to be the exemplar of) modern European(-Christian) civilization. For these Christian scholars and officers, the Holy Land was a "political [and cultural] article of faith" (Herzfeld 1982: 12), as was Eretz Yisrael for contemporary and later Jewish colonial nationalists settling in Palestine and living in Europe. All that remained was to identify signs of cultural continuity and to render the historic past materially visible on maps and on the contemporary landscape.

from Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, Nadia Abu El-Haj

[secondworldwarremembrancedays]

Official ceremony of lighting the sacred Eternal Flame at the unveiled Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

May 8, the eve of the Great Victory, marks the 57th Anniversary (unveiled in 1967) of the official ceremony of lighting the sacred Eternal Flame at the unveiled Tomb of the Unknown Soldier memorial architectural ensemble in Alexander Garden near the Moscow Kremlin Wall.

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier serves as a symbolic monument to honour frontline soldiers killed in action during the Great Patriotic War. It was proposed by officials in 1966, on the 25th anniversary of defeating Nazi forces near Moscow. On December 3, 1966, the remains of a Soviet soldier killed near Zelenograd were laid to rest in Alexander Garden.

In 1997, the President of Russia issued an executive order to establish a guard of honour post near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In 2009, another presidential executive order granted the status of a nationwide military glory memorial to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, in order to preserve the historical and cultural heritage of the Russian Federation. The memorial was included in the State List of Particularly Valuable Cultural Heritage Landmarks and Sites of Russia’s Peoples. On December 3, 2014, the day when the defender of Moscow was buried in Alexander Garden in 1966, was proclaimed the Day of the Unknown Soldier.

[planckstorytime]

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: A World Beyond Anger (Part Four)

IV. Crisis on Infinite Aeriths

Let’s get this out of the way: this game should not have ended at the Forgotten Capital. It makes little sense from a dramatic perspective. I defended the decision to center the entire first chapter around Midgar, because although that arc does not nearly comprise one-third of the original game’s length, it nonetheless fits well as the first act of a grander story. Additionally, Midgar contains a miniature three-act structure in itself: reactor bombings (act 1), meeting Aerith through the plate collapse (act 2), and the raid on the Shinra building (act 3). Rebirth doesn’t share this structure, partially because it’s adapting only part of the “road trip” that constitutes the second act of FF7. This results in a narrative that feels meandering, particularly because it cuts off prematurely.

The lowpoint of the original game – and consequently, where the second act really wraps up – is not Aerith’s death. It’s the Northern Crater. Cloud surrenders to Sephiroth’s control, believing all of his memories to be false. Sephiroth acquires the Black Materia and summons Meteor to eradicate all human life on the planet. The Weapons awaken to wreak havoc on the terrified populace. A cave-in sends Cloud tumbling into the lifestream, his fate unknown. Tifa and Barret awaken in custody of Shinra, awaiting public execution. Now that’s a cliffhanger!

But with all the “changing destiny” nonsense from part one, the flower girl’s fate became a central focus of fan speculation, and as such, an obnoxiously large part of the marketing.

As the “big payoff”, the developers naturally felt inclined to conclude Rebirth with the (very dumb) answer to this question. Catering to hype culture comes at the expense of a well-paced story. Several of the key setups within Rebirth, such as the destination of the robed men, could’ve been resolved had the game gone just a bit further. The same goes for the photographer that snaps a picture of the visiting SOLDIERS during the first hour. Proper pacing would’ve provided a bookend with the reveal of the real photo, and Cloud’s subsequent meltdown. In failing to reach the Northern Crater, the central axis of story just spins in place until it comes to an abrupt halt. Progressing to this point would’ve doubtlessly necessitated the developers to make a chunk of more content. However, they could’ve easily pivoted their priorities away from any of the open world locales, sidequests, or minigames to facilitate this. Hell, they could’ve trimmed down some of the critical path in order to get us there – they already omitted Wutai, Rocket Town, and Bone Village, after all.

Missteps like this robbed us of a perfect opportunity to face a delirious, indoctrinated Cloud as the final boss. I think that would’ve been more heartbreaking and impactful than yet another tedious Sephiroth fight. As with Remake, the silver-haired villain’s portrayal fails to instill any semblance of fear or danger. His overuse has ballooned to critical mass, turning him into Final Fantasy VII’s very own Poochie. It should be obvious that for every time a villain shows up and fails to impede the protagonists, fails to slay his targets, fails to turn the emotionally frail to his purpose, he comes across as less and less competent. By the time you’ve beaten the now-multidimensional quasi-deity again, he literally flies away, promising to do better next time. It’s simply baffling how poorly the creative leads have handled Sephiroth throughout this project, and how little they understand the proper escalation of stakes.

He’s far from the only bungled character, though. Cid Highwind always posed a challenge to adapt, due to his verbal and emotional abuse of his live-in assistant, Shera. Heroically framing a domestic abuser would not fly as easily today as it did in 1997, so I understand the need for changes. But they didn’t need to change everything about him. Original Cid’s pathos comes from the fact that he, like much of the rest of the cast, carries the burden of a life destroyed by Shinra. The rusting hulk of his derelict rocket, once the source of his dreams, anchors him to a life of lingering regrets, reminding him of his failures. This is the immutable foundation of his character. Square could’ve expressed his anguish in any number of ways: depression, self-loathing, alcoholism, whatever.

Instead, their solution to avoid him abusing Shera was… getting rid of Shera. There’s nothing in Rebirth to suggest his background as a failed astronaut. Instead, he’s a “free flier” – literally the opposite of what he’s supposed to represent. His abrasive attitude has been toned down. He’s now a right proper gentleman, if a bit cocky. I’m sure that the third game will reintegrate Rocket Town and Shera in some capacity, but I can’t reconcile the new Cid with anything that might resemble his designated arc for the future. The man doesn’t even smoke anymore, despite his omnipresent cigarette previously serving as a running gag. God forbid we depict a good guy using tobacco; what would the children think?

In general, the remake games have shied away from their characters having grit to them. Cait Sith no longer holds Marlene hostage to gain leverage over the party. Avalanche’s members all commit themselves to strictly non-violent terrorism… despite getting booted from the main branch for their extremist tactics. Players face several instances of my least favorite trope in all of media: the protagonists’ refusal to kill the villains responsible for countless deaths, even though they have no qualm with slaughtering dozens of nameless mooks that get in the way. It’s not crossing some moral threshold for them, so instances where they object to killing President Shinra, Rufus, Hojo, and the Turks all feel forced and bereft of meaning. Far more stories are guilty of this than just the FF7R titles, but it drives me nuts every time I see it.

The fact remains that these two games consistently come across as insecure in their portrayal of violence and death, as if they’re worried of upsetting the audience. Remake was admittedly much worse about this sort of thing – refer to the evacuation of all named NPCs and countless others in Sector 7, or the omission of Sephiroth’s bloody rampage through the Shinra building. Rebirth’s still worried about those content rating guidelines, though. So no deaths among the Shinra-8’s crewmen, no explicit suicide for Dyne, no hanging from the neck, and no on-screen impalement. Individually, I don’t think any one of these faults are particularly egregious, but once you see the pattern, it becomes difficult not to roll your eyes at the constant sanitization.

Which leads us, at last, to Aerith’s death scene. Or whatever that was.

Whereas the ending of part one left me shaking with anger and repulsed by its pretentious, hypocritical, and indulgent messaging, the finale of Rebirth had me cackling like I was watching a Neil Breen movie. “Trainwreck” does not convey the fiasco’s enormity. Imagine a Rube Goldberg machine comprised of trains. Imagine some messed up Ouroboros train, perpetually crashing into its caboose, forever. That’s the ending of this game. In the span of an hour, we visit no less than four alternate dimensions, swap around an interplanar orb, subvert Aerith’s anticipated death (obviously), subvert that subversion, cut back and forth between a potential alternate timeline/hallucination throughout a bombastic Jenova fight, merge worlds (whatever that means and however it happens, your guess is as good as mine), fight Sephiroth with Zack in a fanservice brawl, fight Bizarro Sephiroth prematurely across three planes of existence, enter another world to be joined by Aerith’s Jedi ghost and clobber Sephiroth once more, then skip her funeral scene because who cares about that shit at this point?

Reactions to this conclusion have been mostly negative, which at least makes me feel less lonely in my criticisms than I did last time. The developers hoodwinked fewer folks this go around, and you’ll see fewer people calling this a “bold step in a new direction” than a “colossal fucking mess.” I almost admire how Square managed to unify the divided fanbase with this approach. Those who wanted Aerith to live this time got baited and shafted, and those who wanted the story done justice received a pandering succession of winks and gotchas that robbed the moment of its crucial meaning. A part of me wants to think the creators aimed to please both sides and failed miserably, but creative director Tetsuya Nomura seemed to know what they had on their on hands:

“But with Rebirth, I honestly cannot imagine what players will be thinking. For example, I set up the direction of the final scene in FFVII Remake that you asked about. I can’t really talk about it now, so I’ll just say that the final scene of the next game will have a very… different impact to the previous one. I’m even more nervous about how people are going to react to some of the things in Rebirth than I was for Remake.”

Any change to a sacred moment would have elicited controversy. I mean, who has a more iconic death than Aerith? Jesus, maybe?

Some might defend these choices, arguing that the sudden brutality of her demise and instant shock of having a loved one taken from you, as in the original, could not be replicated. Therefore, changing the plot here was necessary. I object to this premise on two points:

1. That’s an absolutely cowardly way to view art. It betrays a lack of confidence in your storytelling ability if you can’t think of ways to connect to the audience without resorting to ostentatious stunts.

2. If the original scene truly is inimitable, that does not automatically vindicate the execution of the new rendition. Ardent defenders of the FF7R titles tend to frame their arguments around a false dichotomy, where the only choices available were either a 1:1 remake or the precise end product that we received. Obviously, this isn’t the case – I can appreciate the improvements to Yuffie and Red XIII’s arcs without endorsing the plot ghosts or the Zack fanservice. I can, at all moments, visualize a game that could do better. Plenty of remakes tastefully walk the line of creative embellishments. Look no further than Resident Evil 4 (2023) for a work that worthily adapts a classic for contemporary audiences.

With strong source material to draw from, adaptations begin with half their work done for them. This boon comes balanced by the burden that any deviation will inevitably be compared to the original incarnation, and would need to justify its existence against that. As such, it’s completely fair to judge such choices strictly, especially if they result from foolhardy risks that don’t pay off. Bravado does not excuse failure.

What inspired the creative team to alter this specific moment, when the overwhelming majority of Rebirth follows a trodden path? Would that consistency not make Aerith’s death the natural culmination of events? If you’re keeping the story mostly the same, why make such a massive exception for a pivotal scene? I regret to say that I don’t think this decision arose from any genuine passion to enhance the piece, but rather a much more cynical philosophy.

Games take too long to make these days. The commitment to graphical fidelity, expansive worlds, and potentially hundreds of hours of content has stretched production times to untenable levels. Longer development cycles mean ballooning budgets. Ballooning budgets demand bigger returns. Bigger returns necessitate mass market appeal, which results in scope creep. And the cycle repeats. It’s an unsustainable path for the industry. These more distant deadlines aren’t the results of more ethical working conditions, either; crunch culture still dominates the workforce. Employees just crunch longer. In the past few years, we’ve seen several big projects throughout the entertainment sphere bring in hundreds of millions of dollars, only to financially disappoint. Many AAA games have swollen to such unwieldy sizes that they can’t conceivably make the cash they need. Since investors ubiquitously demand growth each quarter, audience retention is paramount.

But again, games take too long to make. Four years passed between the releases of Remake (2020) and Rebirth (2024). In that same amount of time, old Squaresoft gave us Final Fantasy VII (1997), VIII (1999), IX (2000), and X (2001). Obviously, a very different market landscape produced these titles, and I do not wish to imply that Square Enix’s employees are lazy or inefficient in any way. But how can you maintain not just brand interest, but also investment in an episodic story when installments are so spaced out? For comparison, the entire Mass Effect trilogy wrapped up in just over four years (late 2007 – early 2012). Few things can hold mass audience attention for so long without updates or unfeasible marketing.

Controversy to the rescue! By eliciting controversy, speculation, and discourse, companies can keep material fresh in fans’ minds for years, especially in the age of social media. Arguing with pedants on Twitter and making an ass of yourself in the process is among the most cherished pastimes – and the one most likely to get you invested in future outcomes! Folks will never move on as long as they’re bickering, and they’ll bicker as long as there’s divisive stuff to bicker about. In this way, writers can cater to the larger economic forces at play. This might explain why Remake concludes on such a provocative note, only to amount to little beyond the following game’s last minute encore. An interview with Julien Chièze revealed that Kitase wished for audiences to scrutinize and debate the endings and the potential upcoming changes (despite all of this supposedly leading back to Advent Children anyway). Varietyalso conversed with Hamaguchi, who said:

“Now, we anticipate having various conjectures about this ending and many different interpretations from players as this game is released, which will create some healthy debate. I will also be observing the players’ responses, which will allow us to perhaps feed those into, you know, as we look to create the third title as well.”

I suspect that these alterations did not originate via a natural evolution within the narrative, but as a gimmick to perpetuate consumer interest. It’s the classic “mystery box” formula returning to wreak havoc. After seeing this engineered controversy, I wish this project had not been divided into multiple parts.

Most of this financially alluring speculation revolves around the nature of the other “worlds” (delineated by Stamp, the dog mascot) showcased throughout the finale, and whether or not Aerith survives in one of them. To make sense of what we witnessed, enthusiastic players have resorted to complicated diatribes or digital cork board charts, such as this popular one by Reddit user Recklessavatar:

Audiences must be fatigued by multiverses at this point, I feel. Specifically, I’m referring to stories where characters interact with alternate versions of themselves, or travel in between a plethora of divergent continuities, all butterflying away from one another. It’s been the big thing to do in popular media for the past several years – particularly because it allows for stories with “infinite possibilities”, which usually just means an absence of consequences. Superhero stuff, in its waning cinematic renaissance, focuses on multiverse narratives more than ever: the Marvel Cinematic Universe kicked off the “Multiverse Saga” with films like Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022); Sony Pictures graced us with Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse (2018) and Across the Spiderverse (2023); and Warner Bros vomited out The Flash (2023) as a desperate continuity reset. Let’s not ignore the prevalence of the concept in shows like Rick and Morty (2013-ongoing), or its encroachment into otherwise concluded series like Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake (2023). Multiverse mania even wormed its way into an Academy Award Best Picture winner with Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Recent games certainly haven’t escaped this trend. Mortal Kombat 1 (2023) masquerades as a series reboot (again), before turning into a clash between all past continuities and innumerable alternate worlds. Bayonetta 3 (2022) dives headfirst into the concept as well – unfortunately, it’s proven to be an increasingly shallow sea. You’re bound to break your neck if you do that.

It’s not hard to see what makes this premise so attractive to producers. You can connect to older media properties and past interpretations of characters. The tangled web of continuity canonizes old stuff that you liked, baiting that nostalgia cortex in your Lizard Brain and assigning proverbial “required reading” to those less familiar. Existing content can be recombined to generate spin-offs ad infinitum. This phenomenon extends to mushy conglomerates of IPs, where characters are removed from their original context and absorbed into some kind of media katamari. Ready Player One (2018), Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021), MultiVersus (2022), and the various Lego movies (2014, 2016, 2018) count among these. And hey, Final Fantasy VII is connected to Disney through Kingdom Hearts (2002-ongoing)…

The point is, multiverse junk has saturated popular culture lately. Not all of these works are bad, but patterns emerge between them the longer you stare. Common blunders include the erosion of stakes, selective continuity, and the collapse of cohesive worldbuilding. The worst offenders foreground the notion that, inherently, nothing in the diegesis matters whatsoever.

The introduction of several parallel universes to Final Fantasy VII would prove exhausting even if it was implemented well. Piling science-fiction-timeline-balderdash onto a deeply spiritual world of transcendent knowledge and ethereal souls promises to poke holes in the worldbuilding. But it’s not just sloppy – it’s antithetical to the fundamental themes of FF7. In a game about the fragility of life and the frailty of our planet (we only have one of each), you can’t suddenly introduce distinct, alternate versions of the same people across an endless ocean of permeable realities. It annihilates everything for which the original stood.

When I think about this sort of thing, I fear that my pessimistic instincts might’ve been right all along. I worry that I’m somehow betraying myself for finding any value in Rebirth.

All that said, I do see a narrow path forward. Building off my previous psychoanalytic reading, I came to an interpretation of the ending that’s somewhat more palatable, and might even save the franchise for me.

FULL ESSAY: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2024/05/11/final-fantasy-vii-rebirth-a-world-beyond-anger/

[ufonaut]

He wasn’t what I’d been expecting at all. He totally terrified me. His eyes burned into you. Everything about him, his stance, his voice-- it was so full of... of disdain. It was like he operated on some terrible, godlike level. He loathed mixing with us, working with us... because we just couldn’t imagine the things he’d had to do.

Unknown Soldier (1997) #2

(Garth Ennis, Kilian Plunkett)

[fantasyfantasygames]

The Anarchist Cookbook RPG

The Anarchist Cookbook: The Roleplaying Game, anonymous, 1997

For those who aren't familiar with it, The Anarchist Cookbook is one part a treatise on the author's version of anarchism, and (more notoriously) several parts a set of directions for making explosives, drugs, and poisons, as well as some suggestions for methods of sabotage. It is of... mixed accuracy on all topics and is widely considered an instruction manual for having a really bad week. Its author repudiated the book about five years after writing it, but it remains in print. There's more info at the link above.

The Anarchist Cookbook went out of print in 1991 thanks to a change of company ownership. The text continued to circulate on the early internet, which, as you may know, became An Extremely Big Deal in the late 90s. At that point, someone (identity still unknown) decided to create a roleplaying game based on it.

That game is a RIFTS clone.

The Anarchist Cookbook: the Roleplaying Game (TACRPG) lacks mega-damage and has perhaps a more reasonable approach to skill percentages, but it's still clearly RIFTS with the numbers filed off. The attributes are the same. The bizarre stat bonuses are the same. There's large focus on Mechanical Aptitude. The skill list still strongly incentivizes you to take Boxing so that you can get extra actions you can use to shoot guns.

The setting is our world. You play a group of people who have Had It With This Shit and are going to do something about it. The writer recommends figuring some of that out out-of-character and some of it in-character. In a very rare moment for 1990s game design, there are suggestions that you not use in-game consequences to deal with out-of-game behavior. If TACRPG were a different game, I might imagine that this is because the in-game consequences of sabotage, bombings, and drugging the water supply are likely to be pretty harsh. However, the game assumes that the PCs are going to get away with what they do and continue it as long as you feel like playing the campaign. There's an assumption of incompetence on behalf of law enforcement at all levels. I'm not going to disagree, I just think it's assuming the wrong type of incompetence. This is a pre-Trayvon game.

Because it's a RIFTS clone, TACRPG is class-and-level-based, with XP handed out for a variety of non-combat actions. Every level gives you some skill points to allocate in your existing skills. Classes (OCCs in RIFTS parlance) include some fairly direct copies of the Vagabond, City Rat, Rogue Scholar, and other low-level options. RIFTS itself was already up to World Book 11 before this was published (plus Dimension Book 3 and various other miscellanea), so there was a lot to draw from. They're all reskinned to be semi-believable experts in our own world: doctors, computer hackers, ex-military, ex-special forces (who have the exact same stuff as "ex-military" plus more), chemists, well-connected environmentalists, no-science hippies who are somehow pharmaceutical experts, etc.

I would probably not play this game. Part of that is because I'm not a fan of the RIFTS system. I think there are many, many better options for this game in the modern day. However, the bigger part is that it doesn't feel realistic. It so, so wants to be realistic, and it's just not. This is not a game where you can say "But I'm throwing a fireball, why are we worrying about realpolitik?" (Do not get me fucking started on the utter arrogance of "realpolitik".) This is a game set in our world, dealing with issues that are more important than most people realized in 1997, and it feels like you're bashing plastic soldiers into one another. It's an uncanny valley. I'd rather be more on the fantastical side, or more on the authentic side.

The original Anarchist Cookbook is back in print, but TACRPG circulates only in HTML2 form. Most versions have been wiped from the internet. Not intentionally, mind you. There was no IP battle, and no one went on some sort of deleting spree. It's gone just because old BBS servers are gone and people lost their e-mail in hard drive crashes. If you find a version with images, that's an even-more-unauthorized second edition, with additions clearly written by a different author.

[dear-indies]

Hi y'all! I'm so sorry, I know you've gotten this ask before (I feel like I remember seeing it!), but after doing a search for the keywords and scrolling a bit, I just can't seem to find it! Do y'all happen to have suggestions for a WOC with a kinda ~alternative~ vibe? Preferably could pass for 20-25? Thank you so so much! Again, I'm so sorry that you're getting this ask again!

Lyrica Okano (1994) Japanese - in The Runaways.

Coty Camacho (1995) Mixtec and Zapotec - is pansexual.

Adeline Rudolph (1995) Korean / German - in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Resident Evil.

Sasha Lane (1995) African-American, Māori, English, Scottish, Sorbian, French, Cornish, distant German, Italian, Belgian Flemish, Russian, and Northern Irish - is gay and has schizoaffective disorder.

Sophia Taylor Ali (1995) Pakistani / Sicilian Italian, Danish, Norwegian, German - in Uncharted.

Mei Pang (1996) Malaysian-Chinese.

Chase Sui Wonders (1996) Tahitian, Chinese, Japanese, and Unknown White - in Generation.

Tati Gabrielle (1996) Korean / African-American - in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Uncharted.

Juliette Motamed (1997) Iranian - in We Are Lady Parts.

Kiana Ledé (1997) African-American, Swedish, Mexican, Cherokee - in Fear Street.

Rico Nasty (1997) African-American / Puerto Rican.

Andy Blossom (1998) Chinese. 

Erin Kellyman (1998) Afro-Jamaican / Irish - is a lesbian - in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

Hey anon! I think THIS is the masterlist you're looking for and I'll put it on my navigation for ease of access and I'll put suggestions here too!

[longlistshort]

Pictured above- Call Me Mrs. Mary E. Pleasant: The Midas Touch by L'Merchie Frazier- a portrait of entrepreneur, civil rights activist and benefactor, Mary Ellen Pleasant who made a name and a fortune for herself in Gold Rush era San Francisco. Her timeline from 1814 to 1904 begins in racial slavery as an indentured servant girl with no formal education. She ascended to a self-made millionaire, amassing a fortune in her lifetime of over $30 million, ($900 million today).

The second image is A Good Soldier: Thomas C. Fleming, America's Longest Serving Black Journalist by Rosy Petri- At the time of his retirement in 1997, California journalist Thomas C. Fleming was the nation's oldest Black journalist with the longest consecutive period of publication.

Both of these quilts are from Black Pioneers: Legacy in the American West at The James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art. Organized by historian, artist, and curator Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi, it includes 50 pictorial quilts created by members of Women of Color Quilters Network, a group founded by Mazloomi in 1985.

Mazloomi's statement at the exhibition entrance-

American history is incomplete without the stories of African American men and women, from our enslaved ancestors to our societal challenges. The role of African Americans in the movement toward westward expansion has been largely overlooked. This exhibition of original pictorial quilts brings into focus the rich and diverse stories and achievements of Blacks in American western history. The timeline begins with Esteban's 1528 arrival in the West and continues through the Civil Rights Movement.

At the end of Reconstruction in the South, discrimination and segregation caused African Americans to seek opportunities where there was less prejudice. In the 1800s, they moved by the thousands to the American West. Some went West as slaves, while free African American men joined the United States Army or became ranch hands, fur traders, cowboys, or miners.

Why quilts? Quilts and quilt making are important to American, and Black culture in particular. The art form was historically one of the few mediums accessible to marginalized groups to tell their own story, to provide warmth for their families, and to empower them with a voice through cloth. Using quilts to tell these stories accentuates the intersections of African Americans in the Western frontier while at once informing about the art form and its role in Black history. It is this often unknown and underappreciated shared reality that must be voiced if we are ever to truly value the unique contributions diverse groups make to the fabric of our nation.

The impressive quilts on view educate viewers with stories of individuals and events in African American history that may not have previously been familiar, and present new perspectives on those that are. It's a wonderful way to utilize a visual medium to captivate, inform, and often inspire.

This exhibition closes on 1/8/2023.

[pocketfulofelviss]

“Currie [Grant] did not mention Priscilla [Beaulieu] to Elvis during those first days and weeks, when he was setting the stage for his own seduction. He was aware that the rock-and-roll star was attracted to younger women. Earlier that year Elvis had become involved with a sixteen-year-old Brigitte Bardot look-alike from Frankfurt named Margit Bürgin, and he began dating a young German girl named Heli Priemel in August. Margit Bürgin had aborted Elvis’s child a few months before, unknown to Elvis — an experience that nearly traumatized Bürgin, who was a virgin when they met. Although Elvis was interested in younger women, Currie was not certain he would like Priscilla, ‘because she wasn’t passionate, and I wasn’t sure that E.P. would go for someone like that.’ He also had misgivings because of her age; sixteen was one thing, fourteen was quite another. And he still had designs on Priscilla himself.” (Finstad, 1997: 66) * #elvispresley #presley #theking #graceland #elvis #smile #love #idol #music #iconic #vintage #style #classy #vintagefashion #kingofmusic #rockandroll #sideburns #blessedsoul #rip #elvisthepelvis #memphis #tupelo #soldier #elvislegacy #epe https://www.instagram.com/p/CqLxfu4LSi4/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[shinecrystalmoon]

Zoe Suzumiya

VITAL STATISTICS

Age : 23

Race : Human

Gender : Female

Birthday : 11 August 1997

Height : 167 cm (5'6")

PROFESSIONAL STATUS

Affiliation : First Shibuya High School (formerly)

                Japanese Imperial Demon Army

                Gracefield Entertainment

                Shadow Empire

Section : Moon Demon Company

              Brooklyn Squad

             Crystalis

             Shadow Secret

Occupation : Student (formerly)

                 Soldier

                  Idol (Lead Vocalist)

                 Agent

Actor

Rank : 2nd Lieutenant Colonel

CURSED GEAR

Series : Unknown

Demon : Lyra

PERSONAL STATUS

Status : Alive

PERSONALITY

Beautiful, Kind, Imaginative, Adventurous, Athletic, Multitasker, Bold

In fights : Destructive

• • • ✿ • • •