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canmom · 2 years

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Animation Night 133: Disney, Dreamworks and the Emperors

Hey everyone, happy Thursday! It’s Animation Night. Come, have a seat~

We’ll get to you, Iron Giant. Hold on.

Earlier this week, I got fixated on writing a post attempting to figure out my answer on the question of why the big American animation studios abruptly turned away from traditional animation in the early 2000s - a subject previously visited, if briefly on Animation Night 31 and Animation Night 49. A string of high-profile 2D and 2D-in-3D failures, such as Treasure Planet, set against a string of 3DCG successes by Pixar, Dreamworks and increasingly other studios may have been the justification for executives claiming audiences no longer want to see 2D animation - but were they really the reason? Did the higher-ups deliberately sabotage 2D with (for example) scheduling decisions in order to make cheaper, non-unionised 3D films?

I’m grateful that people seemed to like my post there, but I actually don’t think my argument is quite satisfactory. I argued CG films by the same studios weren’t cheaper to make by and large (and also aren’t entirely non-union), but I only pulled up a handful of data points to make that claim. A more thorough investigation is due.

But in the meantime, it’s Animation Night. When I made that post, I was critical of the artistic decisions made in the post-Prince of Egypt films of Dreamworks, such as Spirit and Sinbad, which we watched back on Animation Night 43. I speculatively extended that to The Road to El Dorado, which I haven’t seen, and was promptly challenged by fans of that movie to give it a fairer shake. Sorry guys!

Let’s put that right. Tonight we’re going to be taking another look into that era. You’ll get to see this gif...

...and this one...

...in their original context.

But this is Animation Night, so we’re gonna be putting some Context down.

The first decade or so of Dreamworks was defined by sour grapes. To summarise briefly, Jeffrey Katzenberg left Disney after a bitter falling out with Michael Eisner over succession following the death of Frank Wells. Instead of promoting Katzenberg to Wells’s position of President, Eisner took over Wells’s duties himself, in part at the behest of Walt’s nephew Roy E. Disney. A furious Katzenberg, who was already not loved by many animators for his heavy-handed meddling in the direction of films, departed and founded a new company with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. (He’d also start a lawsuit with Disney, eventually settled for hundreds of millions of dollars. It was bloody!)

Thus began the years where Dreamworks seemed to be trying very hard to show up Disney and Pixar - although Katzenberg always denied this and insisted the similarities were coincidental. This was primarily true on the CG side, with movies like Antz targeting A Bug’s Life (much to the upset of Pixar’s John Lasseter) and Shark Tale targeting Finding Nemo.

But the year 2000 also saw a battle of traditionally animated films on the subject of the Maya and Inca, both with the conceit of someone assuming the position of Emperor. Disney released The Emperor’s New Groove, while Dreamworks released The Road to El Dorado. Whether these films were intentionally similar is not entirely clear, but Disney certainly thought Katzenberg was copying them, and both studios ordered their animators to race to get their movie out first. (In the end, Dreamworks won by some margin, releasing in March.)

Since these two movies deal with at least superficially similar subject matter, coming from the same era and animation tradition, it’s interesting to contrast them. Disney’s character designs are highly graphical and stylised, pushing into more angular shapes and generally very broad, exaggerated movements. To an extent its characters share some DNA with Mignola’s designs for Atlantis: The Lost Empire. The backgrounds are just as stylised, the stagings more flat and theatrical.

Dreamworks, meanwhile, takes the same semi-realism approach as all its other designs in this period; its cinematography is a little more towards the live action end of the scale with more close-ups and a stronger sense of space, the proportions of its characters a bit more grounded.

Beyond the setting, the major similarity between these movies is that both were conceived initially as a dramatic story, and retooled into a comedy during production.

In the case of Groove, the story goes that Lion King director Roger Allers was called into the office of Thomas Schumacher, who proposed making a film about either the Maya, the Inca or the Aztecs. Allers liked this idea, and set about drafting a film that would be called Kingdom of the Sun, drawing on 1894 novel The Prisoner of Zenda. An outline of this film is available (ty wikipedia)...

Kingdom of the Sun was to have been a tale of a greedy, selfish emperor (voiced by David Spade) who finds a peasant (voiced by Owen Wilson) who looks just like him; the emperor swaps places with the peasant to escape his boring life and have fun, much as in author Mark Twain's archetypal novel The Prince and the Pauper. However, the villainous witch Yzma has plans to summon Supay (the evil god of death), and destroy the sun so that she may become young and beautiful forever (the sun gives her wrinkles, so she surmises that living in a world of darkness would prevent her from aging). Discovering the switch between the prince and the peasant, Yzma turns the real emperor into a llama and threatens to reveal the pauper's identity unless he obeys her.

During his time as the emperor and doing Yzma's orders, the pauper falls in love with the emperor's soon to be fiancée Nina who thinks he is the emperor that has changed his ways. Meanwhile, the emperor-llama learns humility in his new form and even comes to love a female llama-herder named Mata (voiced by Laura Prepon).[12] Together, the girl and the llama set out to undo the witch's plans. The book Reel Views 2 says the film would have been a "romantic comedy musical in the 'traditional' Disney style".[13]

However, after Pocahantas and Notre Dame failed to make the stonks go up enough, Disney got cold feet about another movie with such dramatic scope. First, they called in Mark Dindal of Cats Don’t Dance to co-direct; then, worrying about making the summer 2000 release, Disney producers Thomas Schumacher and Peter Schneider ordered that the animation team would split in two and fight to the death each produce its own proposal to fix the film. Dindal proposed making it a straight-up farce; Schumacher and Schneider liked this and Allers quit, rather heartbroken at having spent four years of his life on the project.

Thus, starting in September 1998, with about a quarter of the film already animated, the project was extensively retooled on pain of cancellation. The basic premise (evil witch, emperor gets turned into llama) was kept, but the tone changed, and the animation was to be made simpler. A number of people left, notably animator Andreas Deja supervising Yzma, who went to work on Lilo & Stitch. You can read this grisly details here. The whole affair was documented by Trudie Styler as a condition of her husband Sting providing music, which is probably why we know quite so much about it. Sting actually also intervened in the story, demanding a rewrite of a planned ending where the emperor Kuzco, restored to humanity, bulldozes a rainforest to build a theme park (idek).

The movie that resulted from this tortured production process is basically a long string of rapid-fire visual jokes in the manner of a much older cartoon; it didn’t make a lot of money, but nevertheless gained something of a cult following. Which is also something that can be said of Road...

The story with Road is not quite so messy but still pretty messy. While Disney steered well clear of having any Europeans involved, Katzenberg decided to set a film during the Spanish conquest of the Americas, contemporary with the invasion of Hernán Cortés. Cortés, exploiting the tensions created by Aztec imperial rule over the many other peoples like the Totonacs and Nahuas, pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy which resulted in the Spanish and their new allies sacking the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán, thus installing the Spanish as the new imperial rulers... who unfortunately turned out to be even worse than the last guys. In place of the Aztecs’ system of tributary provinces and spectacle of human sacrifice, the Spanish brought in hundreds of years of genocide, epidemic disease, brutal slavery under the encomienda system and indoctrination to Catholicism, which would in the end constitute one of the largest episodes of mass death in human history.

Somewhat fraught, you might say. However, it doesn’t really seem like anyone did say.

The impetus for this movie came from above: Katzenberg summoned two of his screenwriters and said (this is definitely a direct and real quote) “here is a book about the Maya and the Conquistadors, write me a movie about this kthx”. “How about,” said Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, “a spin on one of those Road to... movies from the 40s, a buddy comedy with a guy following a map to a mysterious city of gold?”

“Great!” said Katzenberg. “Sounds like another grand, dramatic animated film like Prince of Egypt! That’s the kind of movie I like.”

“What if it’s a kind of white saviour thing where our guy, who accidentally becomes Emperor, goes on to save the Maya residents of a fictional city from Cortés? And we’ll make it horny, we’ll have a Maya princess love interest who doesn’t wear a lot?”

“Mm, sounds good.”

“OK, cool. Yo, Will Finn and David Silverman - direct it! Elton John, get us some of that Lion King score magic, eh?”

Time passes. The Prince of Egypt is well underway, with all of Dreamworks’s best animators, such as James Baxter, drawing it.

“Actually,” says Katzenberg all of a sudden, “I’ve changed my mind. We need a comedy to follow that. Movie’s on hold. Rewrite it to be funnier. And that’s too horny, let’s keep it PG-13.”

“Oh.” say Finn and Silverman. They leave. Finn writes to Katzenberg to try and smooth things over, but Katzenberg brushes him off. “You don’t quit Jeffrey.” said one unnamed source. “If you do, he closes the door behind you.” Instead, the film goes to some guys called Eric “Bibo” Bergeron (no idea where the nickname comes from) and Don Paul.

Katzenberg’s micromanagement seems to be the throughline for a lot of this. At one point, he was so overbearing that James Baxter had to intervene:

In one meeting, character animator James Baxter, a normally shy and bashful Brit, stood up to his boss in front of the other artists and told him to back off.

“You don’t know what you’re doing.” Baxter said. “You’re too involved. You’re losing the respect of the artists.”

Katzenberg, who respected Baxter, had seemed to listen. For a few weeks, at least, he kept a greater distance from the production. But soon, he was back to his old habits.

The other notable development in this movie is the increased use of painted CG sets, similar to the tech Disney would use on Treasure Planet. A contemporary Animation World Network article talks about it in detail, describing how the film’s backgrounds were completed on computers by the new generation of ‘tradigital’ artists - so for the first time you couldn’t hold a painting in your hands to review it. As well as a shortcut to complex staging in 3D space, the new technique allowed economical reuse of background elements in different shots. Further digital tricks could be used to add small amounts of animation to background characters without increasing the drawing count. The character animation pushed for naturalism and subtlety to suit the ‘buddy comedy’ tone. And judging by the tone of that article, Dreamworks had high hopes for the reception of this movie.

But on release, the movie was met with... a pretty lukewarm response. Mainstream critics were dismissive of its animation and found its characters unconvincing. Indigenous organisations were especially unhappy; Olin Tetzcatlipoca of the Mexica Movement, appalled, compared it to making an upbeat film about a guard in a Nazi concentration camp that doesn’t mention the Holocaust. Audiences, for the most part, paid it little regard. So, like Groove, it dropped out of history, only to be rediscovered decades later and gain a small cult following who declared it a hidden gem. (A large part of the reason likely being that the main pair is eminently shippable.) A couple of gifs were extracted as memes, as seen above.

What do I think? Haha, well, I haven’t watched it yet. But this is going to be an interesting review to treat after we have.

Now, I’ve covered Disney and Dreamworks, but there was another player in the 1999-2000 period who’s relevant to the story. That’s Warner Bros., and director Brad Bird, who would in the future go to direct The Incredibles and Ratatouille at Pixar; his 1999 movie The Iron Giant is as I recall a good film, and interesting as one of the very few animated films to address a cold war setting and the terror of living under nukes. (We watched another, When the Wind Blows, on Animation Night 26). That’s a story worth telling, but with an eye on the time, I think it’s going to have to be told another night.

So, if you will join me, tonight we’ll be watching Groove and Road. Are they indeed forgotten gems that did not deserve their dismissal? Are they just shallow comedy? Big racist messes? Let’s go and find out.

Animation Night 133 will be going live shortly at twitch.tv/canmom, and we’ll be screening movies in about half an hour (22:20 UK time roughly) - hope to see you there!

#animation night

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lingthusiasm · 4 years

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Transcript Episode 49: How translators approach a text

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 49: How translators approach a text. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 49 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the relationship of the translator and the text. But first, we’re heading into Lingthusiasm anniversary month! This is our fourth anniversary of doing Lingthusiasm, and we’re really excited that we’re still doing this four years later.

Lauren: We love a bit of reflection and nostalgia. The month of November is always an opportunity to be grateful that we have another year of Lingthusiasm. We have a whole 12 great main episodes. We have 12 more bonus episodes. As with every year, if you want to share a link to your favourite episode, November is an especially nice time to do it.

Gretchen: There are still people in this world who don’t know that they could be listening to a fun podcast about linguistics that makes them feel like they’re at a linguistics party instead of doing the dishes. You could help people find them. Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth. Every year we’ve done this in November, we see a big spike in people listening to the show and finding the show. If you wanna share on social media, we are very happy to thank you if you tag us in things.

Lauren: If you want to share off social media, please accept our deepest gratitude non-publicly for sharing shows as well.

Gretchen: Or, if you share Lingthusiasm privately and you still wanna be thanked, feel free to tell us about it on social media. We will still give you a little heart thank you comment. Yes, thank you already for all of the support that you’ve given the show over the years.

Lauren: If you like things additional to podcasts, because we are coming up to the holiday season, it’s also a good time to think about some Lingthusiasm merch or a copy of Because Internet. It’s a pretty great book. I like it. It’s available in paperback now. These things make great gifts.

Gretchen: We now also have annual memberships on Patreon. That could make a great gift to gift somebody to listen to more Lingthusiasm episodes as well as access to the Discord for an online linguistics community.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was about honorifics as a way of being polite to someone either through the title you choose or a variety of linguistic strategies.

Gretchen: You get access to the honorifics bonus as well as 43 other bonus episodes and new bonus episodes every month by going to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: So, Lauren, I’m gonna talk to you about Beowulf.

Lauren: I know this because you have been messaging me for weeks about how we have to talk about Beowulf.

Gretchen: There’s a new translation of Beowulf. I’m really excited. This made me want to build an entire episode around the translator’s relationship to the text because this new translation of Beowulf does a really cool job of it, and I wanna talk about it.

Lauren: I don’t think you’ve been this excited about a translated text since Emily Wilson translated The Odyssey. I’m pretty sure that’s what motivated our 18th episode on word translation.

Gretchen: You are not wrong about this. I think there’s a similar excitement that I have which is old texts – texts that are a thousand-plus years old that have been translated so many different times by so many different people – it feels like it’s hard for someone to do something new with a translation of them. And yet, here people are doing that, which is exciting to me. This is the new translation of Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley. She’s done some really cool things with translating Beowulf as a feminist text. It’s a text that uses very modern style language in this thousand-year-old epic poem of Old English literature.

Lauren: I feel like when it comes to translating, before you even translate one single word, there’s all these decisions that a translator has to make. In Episode 18, we looked at translation, but we looked at word-to-word translation. And that’s definitely one part of a translator’s job, but they have so many more decisions to make. It is such an impressive job, and it’s why it’s as much an art form as it is a technical skill to translate something well. So, what are some of the big decisions that Headley made before even starting to translate Beowulf?

Gretchen: One of the things about Beowulf is, as an oral poem, it has this intricate rhyme scheme. The Old English rhyme scheme is based on half lines. Each line has two halves and there needs to be an alliterative bit in one half that is repeated in the second half.

Lauren: So, Old English is way more interested in alliteration compared to our modern English obsession with rhyming. That’s one of the stylistic features you find in Old English.

Gretchen: It’s all about the beginning of the words rather than the ends. Trying to figure out, okay, how much am I gonna use alliteration? How much am I gonna try to represent – because we can do alliteration in modern English – how much am I gonna try to represent the existing rhyme scheme? Where am I gonna try to put it in actual rhymes like you would do in modern English – if you’re writing a poem, you might rhyme it? What am I gonna do with the metre? She’s produced this really oral text that uses a certain amount of modern slang as well in ways that are really effective. One example is there’s a dragon in Beowulf, and the dragon at one point is described as “Putting the world on blast.”

Lauren: Nice.

Gretchen: To some extent, this is modern slang, but it’s also a very literal thing that a dragon can do. It’s not using modern slang for gratuitous – like, there’s no “lols” or “omgs” in this text. It’s not like here’s this facile text-speak version of Beowulf. It’s what are the bits here that actually work with the metre and the rhyme scheme but also not shying away from using a modern idiom where a modern idiom really works.

Lauren: It’s interesting to put this in contrast to the other most famous version of Beowulf in translation that I know of which is Seamus Heaney’s from somewhere in the middle of the 20th Century where I feel like he tried to capture the mythical grandeur of Old English and chose very stoic, solid sounding Old English words. I don’t think he would’ve had the dragon “putting the world on blast.”

Gretchen: Well, I don’t think he would’ve – I think it came out in 1999, this translation. In some ways his translation is fairly vernacular, but he tries to do that in a different sense. Can I read you the first bit of the Headley translation and the Heaney translation?

Lauren: Yeah. This is super fun.

Gretchen: Okay. A big thing about Beowulf translations is the first word which in Old English is “Hwaet.” That has gotten repurposed as a meme, which we’re not gonna get into much detail about. Some people translate that as like, “Lo!” or “Hark!” or “Listen!” or something like this. Heaney translates that as “So,” which has already got a certain level of vernacularity to it. His first three lines go, “So, the Spear-Danes in days gone by and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.” This is very stately and like, “Here’s this thing you’re gonna do.” If you compare that with the first three lines of the Headley translation, the new one, she translates this “Hwaet” as “Bro.”

Lauren: Hm, that’s a very different tone.

Gretchen: It’s a very modern tone. I mean, you could pick a whole bunch of very modern things like “Yo” or “Hey all,” but specifically the reason she picks “Bro” is because she wants to highlight the bro culture-ness of this entire story. You can see that in the next couple lines which is, “Bro, tell me we still know how to speak of kings. In the old days, everyone knew what men were – brave, bold, glory bound. Only stories now, but all sound the Spear-Dane song, hoarded for hungry times.” It just leaps off the page in a way that really excites me.

Lauren: Yeah, no “princes” there.

Gretchen: Right. “Kings who ruled had courage and greatness” – “The men were bold.”

Lauren: The thing I always love about Beowulf is that it’s a millennium-old oral poem that happened to be written down, and a millennium ago people were like, “Let me tell you about the olden days.” [Laughter]

Gretchen: Right, it still takes place in this semi-mythic space, and it uses a certain stylised language that we even think was stylised at the time. You’re always picking between some kind of stylisation. There’s no neutral choice that exists. All of the choices are recreations at some level.

Lauren: I mean, it is kind of weird to think you’re translating from English into English, but it just shows how much the language has moved on because reading Beowulf if you don’t know Old English is an incredibly uncomfortable attempt to just guess some words that have retained some familiarity. I always find it interesting that you have to translate. And then because English went through enough changes by Shakespeare, we kind of put up with all of the features of Shakespeare that aren’t immediately obvious to us.

Gretchen: Right. But Beowulf is really this alien text. Like, “Hwaet. We Gardena” – and “Gardena” is “Spear-Danes,” but we don’t have “Spear-Danes,” and “Gardena” is not obviously related to those. There’s this great miniseries from The History of English Podcast that does a very in-depth line-by-line reading of Beowulf which I enjoyed a while back.

Lauren: My one semantic anecdote from that series is “Gar-Danes” as in “Spear-Danes” – garlic is the “spear-leek.”

Gretchen: Yes, it is!

Lauren: Because it’s like a little spear.

Gretchen: It’s like a little spear-leek. I love that anecdote. It’s interesting to be reading Beowulf at the same time that my book club is actually reading The Tale of Genji.

Lauren: Ah, from like a similar – Genji’s also a millennium old, yeah?

Gretchen: Yeah! In some sense it’s like Beowulf and Genji are kind of contemporaries.

Lauren: But they’re very much not contemporaries. Beowulf is about warrior bro culture in the Old English setting, whereas Genji is a Japanese court drama.

Gretchen: I don’t think they would’ve gotten along. I think they would’ve just found each other completely incomprehensible. Genji’s also one of those classic texts that’s been translated a whole bunch of different times in a whole bunch of different ways. For one thing, you’re translating from a much older version of Japanese. There are modern Japanese translations of The Tale of Genji as well. And then you’re also translating into a different cultural context. But the cultural context for Beowulf is also very weird. Like, I don’t do going and fighting monsters under lakes any more than I do writing haikus about the moon. In fact, I’m probably more likely to write a haiku about the moon than I am to go fight a monster under a lake if we wanna talk about relatability.

Lauren: Everything I know about Genji is because one of my colleagues in the Languages Department at La Trobe is a Genji studies scholar. It’s one of those pieces of work that is so big and so canonical that it has its own literary studies tradition associated with it. I also really love my colleague because the other part of her expertise is cosplay studies. I think it’s such a great combination of Japanese cultural experience there – Genji and cosplay.

Gretchen: I mean, what more do you want? The neat thing about reading Tale of Genji at the moment is because I’m reading it as part of a book club through Argo Bookshop – which is a bookstore that did the book launch party for Because Internet and I really like them – they’re having this Tale of Genji book club, and we’ve been reading it throughout the year a few chapters at a time because it’s over 1,000 pages. It’s huge. So, we’ve been reading it section by section, and different members of the book club have picked different translations into English of the same work.

Lauren: Ah, cool! Are there radical differences between the translations? Or do they all try and go for a literal approach?

Gretchen: They’re really different. One of the big things with Genji is at the time in 11th Century Japan it was considered very rude in the court to refer to people by their actual names. None of the characters in the original Tale of Genji manuscript have names, except for maybe Genji. So, you can imagine reading a thousand-page book where none of the characters have names is a bit of a feat of the imagination.

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: Different translations – and a lot of them have conventional names that literary scholars have used to talk about the characters. For example, Lady Fujitsubo lives in the Fujitsubo, which is the western pavilion, and so she gets called in the tradition “Fujitsubo” because that’s where she lives, and this kind of stuff. Or Murasaki gets called that after a flower, I think, the character. In some translations, they just use these conventional use names as if they’re the actual names of the characters. In some translations, they just use descriptions like the original text did, and they don’t really refer to characters by even pretend names or use names.

Lauren: So, one of them is trying to strive for cultural authenticity, and the other one is trying to just help the poor confused reader a little bit more, and that’s choices that each translator has decided to make.

Gretchen: Exactly. You also have other types of decisions like, “Are you going to try to” – because it’s a court drama, you have all these court positions. Are you going try to map those positions onto a western court so that people understand what a chancellor is? Or are you going to try to use those as a more direct translation of what the specific terms were at the time? That’s just different decisions that different translations can use.

Lauren: When you meet as a book club, is everyone following along, or is there a lot of clarifying across translations? Such an interesting little exercise.

Gretchen: Well, the nice thing is, is the division into different chapters is very constant, so we can be like, “Okay, we’re reading Chapters 6 to 10 now. We’re gonna talk about what happens in those.” But sometimes you do pull something up, and you’re like, “Okay, so this bit where this thing was said, do we think Genji is kinda misogynistic here?” And somebody will say, “Well, in my translation, it doesn’t actually seem like he’s misogynistic.” And here’s what’s going on in this particular translation versus that particular translation. And how much of it is the translator bringing their own preconceived notions of how people relate to each other? Because some of these translations are from the 1920s or something. People may have had different politics there. And how much of that is in the original text which was composed by a woman who we don’t know that much about? But it’s the first modern novel. It’s an interesting like, “How much are you going to try to westernise this book for a western audience?” Which some of the older translations do a bit more with the westernisation adaptation because people in the west hadn’t heard of Genji very much before. You do all this adaptation for your English-speaking readers. Whereas, more recent translators, people tend to have a higher degree of expectations of fidelity when it comes to a more modern translation. Sometimes they try to do that. And, you know, how many footnotes do you have? How much do you try to explain additionally? How much do you try to just make the text stand on its own as a story?

Lauren: So many choices to make as a translator. I’m eternally grateful to people who do this and make it appear so effortless while doing so much work bringing all of this context together.

Gretchen: It’s really neat. I’m not gonna read this 1,000-page book five different times in five different translations, but being able to experience portions of those translations vicariously through other people talking about, “Oh, here’s what happened in this one, here’s what happened in this one,” it does let you do this interesting comparative textual study.

Lauren: I’ve been thinking about translation in practice a lot lately because having worked with P. M. Freestone on their Shadowscent books, “The Darkets Bloom” and “Crown of Smoke,” these books have gone into translation in a whole bunch of languages, mostly European languages to date – Spanish, German, French, Russian, and Polish. I’m very excited about the upcoming Hungarian translation which will the first outside of the Indo-European language. But these translations involve a couple of things that are really interesting in that, in these books, I worked on creating the Aramteskan language, and for this language to work across different languages, sometimes it gets technically transliterated, or you need to add a different type of plural. For example, Russian has a different alphabet to English and so you need to fit this language into the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.

Gretchen: You’re not trying to pretend that Aramteskan is always written with the Latin alphabet. Even when the book itself is in Russian, you’re like, we’re gonna transliterate it into Cyrillic?

Lauren: No, translators have very much done what they think is most appropriate. I have a habit of buying these translations now and checking out what they’ve done because they’re not just translating from English into another language, they also have to translate this completely fictional language and this fictional world into that language as well. It’s one thing to maybe study in-depth Old English warrior culture or Japanese court culture and decide what to bring across, but with a fantasy world, there’s all kinds of choices you have to make as a translator as well.

Gretchen: Yeah, like what are you gonna do with the magic system? Or if you’ve invented all of these words for different scents or something, then they have to figure out some sort of equivalent of inventing those words for the other language.

Lauren: There’s a lot of scent vocabulary even in the English that P. M. Freestone has written in, so really taxing that part of the translator’s repertoire. One thing that’s been particularly interesting and that there’s been some discussion on how to manage is that in this world, both in the historical part of the world and the contemporary part of the world, the culture and the grammar allow for gender neutral third person like the English modern use of “they,” which Kirby Conrod gave a great interview about how that works in contemporary English. In fact, I did a little historical evolution of the pronoun system that fits with the story of the world where originally there was no gender distinction in the pronoun system, which fits with the old religious system of the world. And the religious system evolved younger gods that are all gendered, and the pronoun system evolved genders at the same time while still having that scope for gender neutral. Without spoiling too much, but a character that pops up in Book One and is much more a part of Book Two is gender fluid within the world. That works for current English because we have gender neutral singular they, but there are some languages like Czech or like Russian that the book’s being translated into where there isn’t that flexibility in the linguistic system. So, decisions have to be made about how that is negotiated in the translation.

Gretchen: Do you know what they did?

Lauren: I don’t know what they did for Russian yet, but I believe the solution in Czech is at various times this character is overtly identified using masculine and at other times using feminine – being much more flexible about the duality of their relationship with gender.

Gretchen: This reminds me of a thing that I heard Ada Palmer talk about at a conference panel with her book “Too Like the Lightning” and the sequels, which are set in this far future of English – well, far future and they’re written in English – in which singular they is used for everybody except when you’re writing in this faux-archaic style with “thous” and “thees” and “hes” and “shes.” It’s very marked at that point. Ada Palmer was talking about how this was translated into French where in modern English the progressive thing that people do is like, “Oh, we can use singular they. That’s very progressive.” In modern French, the progressive thing that people do is they make feminine versions of all of the professions.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: You have feminine versions of “professor” or “doctor” or these kinds of things to try and make the gender more visible. And so erase the gender in the French version wouldn’t have the same effect – where you’d end up using the default masculine or something in the French version – it wouldn’t have the same effect as using singular they all the time in the English version. There are modern French pronouns like “iel” that have been coined to solve this problem of using a gender neutral third person pronoun, but it wouldn’t work to use them in this particular case because the style is supposed to be faux-archaic. What the translator ended up doing was digging out this French pronoun “on,” which in the modern form “on” is used like “we” or like “one does this.” It’s related to like, “One does this.” There’s an older usage of “on” which is like a non-specific third person pronoun as well that – I speak French, but I didn’t know about this archaic form. And the translator went and looked for what other historic pronoun things could I do and ended up doing with “on” thing, which is a really interesting adaptation.

Lauren: The thing I find interesting is if you were – 50 years ago, you didn’t have the grammatical resources in English to use singular they for a specific person. It’s something that’s really only emerged in the last couple of decades. I think the translator has felt frustrated to not have �� you know, you sometimes feel like you’ve got this road block because you don’t have resources in one language that you have in another and you have to innovate. I did have a colleague in Italian studies tell me that they read a whole novel once where the gender of one of the characters was deliberately written around and avoided in a way that was an incredibly artful, thoughtful translation. It is possible that you could maybe do this with this character in the Shadowscent books, but it would be such –

Gretchen: But you couldn’t do it with the whole world in the Terra Ignota books because all of the characters would have to have that.

Lauren: Yeah. And you could do that amount of heavy lifting at the cost of some other things, but when you’re doing an efficient translation for a commercial novel, you don’t have the resources to really max out your art and strategy in that way. It’s interesting that, you know, translation is a really resource-intensive activity even to just do a good translation, let alone an incredibly strategic and thoughtful translation.

Gretchen: Even translating one word, like that word at the beginning of Beowulf, involves thinking about, “Okay, what kind of relationship do I want this word to have to the rest of the text? What am I trying to set up here in relationship to the whole text? Where do I see this attention-getting word as going?” Like, what the text as a whole is doing, which is this interesting question. I should say, speaking of translation news, this is very hot off the presses, but I have received news that there are gonna be translations of Because Internet into Persian, Chinese, and Japanese. So, all – well, Persian is an Indo-European language, but it has a different writing system, and then two non-Indo-European languages. I don’t know anything else about the details yet.

Lauren: This is news that I didn’t even know. This is very exciting.

Gretchen: It’s very recent, yes. It’s not – I dunno. I will have official links when they exist. They won’t exist for, I dunno, probably a couple years. I dunno how long it’ll take them to do. I know nothing.

Gretchen: The surreal thing about translation means that you will see you work and not be able to read it. There’s something so amazing and magical about that, that words you have created are finding new audiences – you know, there’s a lot of trust in the translator in those contexts.

Gretchen: Yeah, and I don’t know if I’m gonna get to have any say in who they get to translate it and how much they know about the internet or things like that.

Lauren: Translating non-fiction is an entirely different process because you’re not translating an internal narrative world as much as you are potentially translating something that explains how this world that we live in right now exists, or how a set of historical realities existed. That also takes deftness and skill.

Gretchen: And you’re potentially trying to translate technical vocabulary between one language or another, which isn’t necessarily the same as, “Okay, we need to keep the characters’ names consistent. It’s like, “We need to use this word that has a technical meaning in its technical sense.” Speaking of non-fiction translation, I dunno if you’ve been following in translation news relatively recently, there’s been a lot of things going on with the Scots language Wikipedia.

Lauren: Yes, I did read about this. So, Scots language is a language in the same family as English. It has a lot of similarities with English but is considered its own “variety,” using that very deliberate linguist term where you don’t commit to just how much it’s a dialect or its mutual intelligibility with other varieties that its related to. And it has its own Wikipedia.

Gretchen: Scots is kind of like, as an English speaker, I’ve always been kind of jealous of people who speak Dutch or German or something because they can kind of understand each other a bit. Or Spanish and Portuguese and Italian because they can kind of approximate understanding each other to some extent even if they haven’t formally learned the languages. I’ve always been like, “Why doesn’t English have some closer neighbours?” But I hadn’t been thinking about Scots when I was thinking that. Scots is probably English’s closest neighbour but is still a distinct language and, especially, there are grammatical differences and there are a lot of political reasons as well why people consider it its own language. However, [laughs] the Scots language Wikipedia, which has all of these articles written in Scots, had apparently been being edited for the last seven years by an American teenager who didn’t know any Scots and was just looking up the English articles in a Scots-English dictionary word-by-word and just picking the first word of the translation and subbing that in for the Scots word.

Lauren: This has been such a difficult story to read because everyone throughout this process has acted in the best faith. This teenager wasn’t doing this for any reason other than a passion for sharing knowledge on Wikipedia and a passion for seeing the Scots Wikipedia grow but with a really uncritical approach to translation. You can see where translation really does require this understanding of vocabulary choice and style choice and how it can all go really, really wrong.

Gretchen: Yeah, it’s really painful because this person started when they were, like, 12, and we have all believed very foolish things about the world when we were 12. It’s just many of us didn’t write thousands of Wikipedia articles in a language that is just really not the way anybody who actually speaks this language actually writes because it’s cobbled together badly from a dictionary. It’s this very painful, “Oh, no! You thought you were helping.” And yet Wikipedia is used as the basis of a lot of machine translation, and language detection, various natural language processing tools, and so this has been potentially sabotaging the efforts to try to create other machine tools in Scots because they’ve all been in this weird dictionary-a-fied version of English.

Lauren: It’s been really heartening to see the Scots language community and the Scottish Wikipedia community come together to figure out a strategy for how to approach cleaning house – I guess it’s the biggest spring clean ever, right – how to approach this, like, thousands and thousands of articles with this very strange approach to translation.

Gretchen: It illuminates one of the issues with smaller language Wikipedias in general which is that they may only have a few active editors because to be a Wikipedia editor is to be a volunteer. It takes a long time to translate things or to write articles. If you’re a language like English, you can have tens of thousands of editors. But if you’re a language like Scots which has many fewer speakers, you may only have a dozen active editors of which maybe one of them is a well-meaning but very clueless American teenager.

Lauren: We’ve both done lots of Wikipedia editing. We have run LingWiki events to improve linguistics content on Wikipedia. It’s challenging enough to write these articles in one language that I am proficient in. I’m always in awe of people who choose to translate and support content in their second or third languages because it is a non-trivial task to translate really complicated information in a way that is really clear.

Gretchen: Translation is a technical task that is one of those things that looks at all of the different levels of language where you have some things at the individual word, or even sound, or if you’re trying to translate poetry and you wanna make it beautiful in a very aesthetic sense with the physical properties of language, all the way up to words and sentences and structure and these discourse-y particles like “Hwaet” at the beginning where you’re trying to picture a whole framing device for the structure of an entire tone of a narrative. Or if you’re trying to pick, “Okay, how are we going to treat technical vocabulary that maybe has been borrowed from English?” because its scientific vocabulary that was invented from English, how are you gonna treat that when it gets borrowed into Scots? Trying to figure out how to make these technical decisions is non-trivial. It’s this very interesting train wreck. It can go spectacularly right when you have this very clever decision for a dragon to put the world on blast, and it can also go spectacularly wrong when you just say, “Okay, I’m gonna look through a dictionary and then pick the first word I encounter.”

Lauren: One of the great things about appreciating a good translation is that language never takes a break. Culture continues to change, and we move further away from the era of Beowulf. We move into new cultural settings and new cultural expectations. It means that there is space for new translations that bring new approaches, or try something different, or aim for really capturing something about the language of the era it was created in, or set an old story in a radically new setting. Even when you find a really satisfying translation, you know there’s still possibilities for finding other interesting ways to engage with the text.

Gretchen: I think that’s a thing that’s exciting about both the translations of these thousand-year-old texts, whether Beowulf or Tale of Genji, where they go through lots of different authors who put their own spin on the translation. And also thinking of Wikipedia as a place for translation where you have multiple authors working together on the same shared text, and a bunch of different people – like Scots Wikipedia has been having these Wikipedia edit-a-thons to try to clean the place up. You have a whole bunch of contributors that are finding out about this need because of this story and coming in and working on the text together and contributing to the shared text. In many ways, even though each of these editions of the translations are published as their own book for book-length ones, it’s this very intimate relationship that you can have with a text when you’re trying to render it in a different language or in a different textual interpretation.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes and you wish there were more? You can access to 44 bonus episodes right now to listen to at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patron also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and other rewards as well as helping to keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include pangrams, honorifics, and linguistics with kids. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay, too. We really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life, especially as it’s the anniversary month.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#language #linguistics #lingthusiasm #episode 49 #transcripts #translation #translations #beowulf #tale of genji #maria dahvana headley #shadowscent #p m freestone #wikipedia #scots #japanese #old english #scots wikipedia

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amysgiantbees · 3 years

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I need to yell about the Witcher 3 or I’ll explode and I’ve already accidently deleted this once.

The Witcher 3 is enormously sexist. I hate on principle anything that has hard and fast rules according to sex, especially in fictional settings, considering that sex is a spectrum and a social construct to an extent. But Witcher’s only being men makes even less sense since the reason given why is that women are weaker. Which again, is awful and incorrect.

Moreover, all the druids I’ve seen are men, all the Witchers are men, sorcerers can be anyone. Men literally can be anything in the Witcher. Whereas not only are women’s options severely limited but they must deal with societal sexism along with that.

Furthermore, the Witcher is SO white. Not only does it make the character design very repetitive and dull but it’s difficult to distinguish between NPCs sometimes. As well as the obvious racism of wanting to explore fictional racism with elves and dwarves but balking at being anti-racist in the game’s design.

I could also deal without the fat jokes. It really shows that if these white men creating this don’t find historical accuracy edgy or titillating – like including rape and gore – they ignore it. Because from the time periods they were borrowing from there would be less makeup especially in war times, people – including women – would be much hairier, and plus size people would be seen as conventionally attractive. Being plus size meant that you were of a higher class and had the funds to overindulge and not work, and the rich have the time to shape and indulge in the trends. So, they are envied and emulated and seen as more attractive like they are now. Also, there were more people of colour in Europe – the place inspiring this setting – than the Witcher itself has. So, it’s confusing that the modern representation of something is less diverse than the historical setting.

The writers being uninterested in anything that does not relate to them is shown in Ciri’s relationships in the game. Ciri can be practically naked surrounded by other near naked women but her only option for initiating any romance is with a man. She is bisexual but it does seem like the writers would rather ogle than give even representation. Not that her concrete stating that she prefers women isn’t representation. But is confusing when there are two siblings that you can only kiss the male one.

The lack of they/them pronouns is awkward in the dialogue, making it very stilted and grating. As well as actively taking away suspense. I never believed for a second that Uma might be Ciri. Giralt could talk about it all he wanted to, but he kept referring to Uma as HE. So, it was obvious from the beginning that he was the elven man she’d been travelling with. Making the twist instantly ineffective.

Side note, I despise that woman all wear heals constantly. It just looks so bizarre. I can deal with some stylisation, or slightly less than practical travel wear. But stilettos in a swamp? There’s no way a sane person would. It just doesn’t work at all and actively brings me out of the narrative every time there’s a close-up of them.

Also, it is a real cop out that the writers won’t allow their “big strong manly protagonist” wear high drag, just Yen’s pants when the boys are having a night together. If he’s so masculine a dress shouldn’t change that.

The romances are embarrassing. Why does Triss shoot herself in the foot and “friend zone” herself by calling Ciri her little sister? You are interested in Geralt, so even if you don’t want a mother like relationship with Ciri a sisterly one is not particularly appropriate. Do you want Geralt to see you like a child? Considering how immature you can be – which I’ll get to – you’d think you’d try not to make him see you in a paternal, platonic, or just patronising way. It’s confusing why she pretends to be drunk at the party. For one it is very desperate and cringy. Secondly it is very inconsistent with the character that was just confidently taking charge of this mission. Thirdly, you’d think she’d want to show she’d change from lying to him previously *cough* from the inane plot contrivance so the previous game could happen *cough* by being completely honest with him now.

Yennifer on the other hand seems too often come across as more sexual fantasy than fleshed out character. Yennifer’s character is also inconstant. I’m wondering if these men have ever spoken to a woman before. She is motherly, protective, determined, no-nonsense, confident in her convictions and knows her own worth. She’s flawed too, scoffs at people’s cultural and religious practices. Which I wish she grew more from; she could have shown faith in Vesimere from the beginning when it came to his ritual with Uma to show she regrets the garden and interrupting the wake and is trying to be better. Or maybe seeing the usefulness of what Vesimere did could have led to a tender conversation with Geralt about how this has made her see that maybe she should have done some things differently, found a different place to cast the spell, spilt some blood for the goddess. A flawed character is a well-made character but here is where she seems more object than person. When she gets unnaturally angry at Geralt for not wanting sex. Like how dare you do not want to play with the toy that we created. To compare it to another RPG game Dragon Age has its faults but at least the player is always given the option, and never punished for not wanting sex in a romance. Otherwise, I quite like Triss, she kind of necessarily pulls Geralt’s head out her ass but sometimes she is a bit too mean, nut usually with context it’s understandable, I think. Also the unicorn is just gross, like not to yuck anyone’s yum, but it’s nasty.

Also like if the general insensitivity and ignorance written into the game wasn’t there and there was more than two queer characters as far as I’ve seen, I would think that Elihal‘s portrayal could be nuanced in how gender and sexuality do not dictate gender expression. But considering the game as a whole their character feels very “look at this weirdo” “no homo”. Cowards.

The ableism is also just abhorrent. They would likely argue that the ableism featured is historically accurate - which I’m not confident that’s true - but then don’t have any representation of visible disabilities or just a variety of disabilities that would be historically accurate.

Also it’s just disappointing that you don’t get hang out with Triss and Kira at Kaer Morhen during the Uma quest.

#myanalysis #witcher #thewitcher #the witcher #the witcher 3 #witcher games #antiwitcher

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my-darling-boy · 5 years

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hello! i really want to learn more about ww1, i saw 1917 and it sparked something in me and ww1 specifically seems so complex and interesting, but it is has a lotttt of information, do u have any advice for any specific things to read/learn about first? or should i just dive in head first and learn about random stuff?

Good question! Also, I’m REALLY happy 1917 is bringing in a lot of new people wanting to learn more about WWI!

The good news is I find WWI is a subject that naturally allows you to branch out your knowledge no matter where you start. My best tip for learning more about the history: start out with ANY area that interests you, find a fact about it, and see where it takes you! I guarantee you’ll start out just wanting to know a little more about food served in the trenches and by the end of the week, you’ll be chest deep in a million other things you got caught up in learning!

For example, one of the first things that got me interested in WWI was a memoir (which I HIGHLY recommend) by Vera Brittain: Testament of Youth. From there, I researched her brother, Captain Edward Brittain and stumbled upon the story of his death and his homosexuality. It led me to Geoffrey Thurlow, a friend he showed clear evidence of having been in love with, and then the changes in male affection during the 1900s. It led me to learn of the “Edwardian Period” and delve into the social, political, and aesthetic aspects of the era. I started watching WWI films, reading academic articles, buying books, and one piece of information led to the next!

If 1917 is what got you into this, that’s a good sign! Cos I bet you were just as hurt as I was seeing depictions of that tragedy and were moved by that heartbreak! But while you’re learning about uniforms and trench foot and so on, I think a good chunk of time should also be dedicated to understanding why it’s simultaneously important to be critical of the war, and understand more about why people were very critical of it at the time, and the lasting impact it had on soldiers all the way up to young people today because it’s a HUGE theme throughout the conflict. I do a much more eloquent job explaining it in an ask someone sent me about my interest in studying, but like I said, VERY important to understand the extent of its effects and how what happened catalysed the modern lust for violence, and why a lot of mainstream remembrance efforts today end up exploiting this tragedy for nationalist-like agendas

I will say, even though it’s not filled with as many Insufferable White Boys as the ones found lurking in WWII forums, it’s war, so you still get your fair share of nationalist, white supremacist, imperialist, pro-war, sexist/misogynist pricks, so please do research with discretion and try to avoid these people (i.e. don’t even look at the comment sections on some websites) and watch out for those boasting about how “honourable” it is for boys to have joined up and died for their country at 15 and that there is something “glorious” to be had in war (because is the biggest lie men have invented for themselves and perpetuate the bs well into the 21st century unfortunately)

Some classic things I recommend reading/watching because they got me started on bits of my own research over time and one of them might be of some interest to you:

Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain (Book)

This true memoir details how the war affected a young British university student and how the tragedies she witnessed led her to become a VAD nurse, feminist, and pacifist. If you are a more visual learner, it was made into a beautifully shot 2014 film (obviously with some inaccuracies and omitted details) and a more in depth BBC miniseries available for free on YouTube. You may also enjoy the books “Letters From a Lost Generation”, “Because You Died”, and “Vera Brittain and the First World War” which give even more information about the Brittains and the war written by the family’s historian

The Christmas Truce commercial everyone still cries over (video)

It’s a couple minutes long, perfectly sums up what draws me to keep studying the war and my love for learning about the unique changes in human connection during the war

All Quiet in the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque (Book)

Another classic example of anti-war literature a lot of people start out by reading from a German perspective. You can also watch the 1930 film adaptation of the book if you would like a visual (even if it has American actors)

They Shall Not Grow Old (Film)

AMAZING first hand accounts and original newly remastered footage from the First World War. It’s arguably neautral in its stance on various factors on the war, but it does a tremendous job showing what life was like at the front and giving voices to the soldiers that lived through it to share their stories.

Oh What a Lovely War! (Film)

Another solid (and entertaining) example of media showing high criticism for the war. This film was revolutionary for its time after roughly 50 years of societal silence about the consequences and negative impacts of WWI. It is incredibly condescending and an absolute anti-war gem

Great War Tommy: the British Soldier 1914-18 (Book)

If you’re a visual learner like me and want information about the kit of a British soldier and drill among other kit care details with LOTS of photos, this a GREAT book

British Uniforms and Equipment of the First World War (Book)

Like the above but has a VERY extensive library of photos for uniforms and equipment, and even shows niche patches and what some uniforms look like inside-out! It’s available for download through MLRS Books online

Valiant Hearts (Game)

From the French perspective. Very heartbreaking game about a French soldier produced in a very unique art style and has a wonderful soundtrack. Great if you like causal, story rich games

11:11 Memories Retold (Game)

This very artistic, stylised game tells the story of a Canadian photographer hired to take photos during the war as well as a German soldier looking for his son at the front. Again, superb soundtrack, and excellent if you love causal, story rich games

Shepard’s War, by James Campbell (Book)

A lovely compilation of original artwork and biographical details about E. H. Shepard during his time as an officer in WWI. If you don’t know, Shepard is the illustrator for Winnie the Pooh! Very intriguing to see his depictions of WWI soldiers as someone who was responsible for a childhood classic

Journey’s End, by R. C. Sherriff (Play)

This play tells the story of a trio of British officers on the frontline and how the effects of shellshock has greatly impacted one of the main characters. It was also made into a film in 2018 staring Asa Butterfield, Sam Claflin, and Paul Bettany

Not About Heroes, by Stephen MacDonald (Play)

A play which tells about the gay friendship between wartime poets and officers Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen

Blackadder: Blackadder Goes Forth (Show)

You might have grown up watching reruns of this show already, but in case you haven’t, it’s the fourth series of the BBC historical comedy show Blackadder and is about as condescending as Oh What a Lovely War, but much less Heavy, aside from the last episode that is. I’ve learned it’s kind of a staple in references made by some reenactment groups :P

YouTube also has TONS of WWI documentaries from every subject under the sun, ranging anywhere from 2 minutes to 2 hours. Obviously it will be a little harder to tell if the information given is without bias, misinformation, or has questionable undertones, but it’s usually a good way to teach yourself how to always be critical of any information you take in, and also a low-maitence way to keep learning. I find it’s nice to keep a balance between informative non-fiction and historical fiction when doing WWI research to keep variation in my study and also to test my ability to tell apart inaccuracies, or just to take a break from the crushing reality of it all!

In conclusion, the answer is jump right in! You’ll learn the ins and outs of WWI research as you go along! The more you learn, the more you’ll get the hang of it!

Happy researching!

#asks #wwi #long post

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romansrace · 4 years

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Roman’s Season 13 Meet the Queens - First Impression & Placing Predictions

Hi everyone! Great to be back for a new season so soon! My review and prediction for each queen, in order of appearance on Meet the Queens, just behind the jump:

DENALI

Gorgeous look, creative, nice mug. Energy giving me a bit Aja, a bit Phi Phi O'Hara. Energetic and positive-to-neutral seeming. My prediction: 7th. Not one of the weakest queens right away, but might get unlucky on several challenges.

ELLIOTT WITH 2 TS

Energy similar to Blair St Clair. Her look is somewhat dramatic, especially if she's known as a dancer. Might be charming or might be argumentative, hard to tell. I'm charmed by her, but she might be divisive.

My prediction: 10th, following several lipsyncs. Early challenges unlikely to play in her wheelhouse unless we get an early Rusical.

GOTTMIK

The strongest look so far in my opinion. She (pronouns?) will have the storyline as a trans queen to go far, unless Ru or Michelle haven't moved with the times as much as we hope they have. Besides her gender storyline, she seems a very stylised and fun queen. She's giving me a little of Adore Delano and Lemon from CDR1. She's cinched well in this promo look which is also incredibly creative, not to mention her metal (?) wig.

My prediction: 3rd/4th

JOEY JAY

Another top look, I love her punk image. Looks a little like Pink (the singer). The impression of being more masc in drag is a fun spin and might play as a story for her. Not wearing a wig guarantees she'll come to blows with Michelle and Ru. Perhaps she'll change during the show.

I feel she may clash with the judges, because her personality seems abrasive and like she won't scare easily, which they tend not to like e.g. Acid Betty, Thorgy. I like her a lot, but I feel she might not be long for it. My prediction: 8th

KAHMORA HALL

Right away she seems extremely likeable. She will likely get on with the judges and be a fan favourite. Jackie Cox jumps out as a personality comparison, or Jujubee. Her look and mug are strong and polished, with an edge of being somewhat more creative. The combination of kindness, low self-confidence, and somewhat shadiness is very well-rounded personality-wise for tv. I think unless things go dreadfully wrong, Ru should really like her which should help her go far. My prediction: 5th

KANDY MUSE

Straight away, really funny. This season's meme queen or Vanjie. She's likely to create a lot of soundbites throughout the season. A queen very ready for tv. Mug is pretty good, a little unusual with what she's doing with the eyes and colour scheme. I feel like she might struggle in sewing challenges. At the same time, I feel like she probably won't be the worst at a lot of challenges, which will see her far enough to keep going. My prediction: 6th

LALA RI

Charming, but probably one of the weaker queens we've seen so far. Going for the soundbites like Joslyn Fox type of the season. Her look is nice and mug polished, but not one of the more dramatic looks served for this MTQ. Ability to do choreo means she might be able to save herself if she falls early into the B2. I wonder if she might do ok in acting challenges too though because her personality is quite likeable. Or she might go to pieces. My tentative prediction: 9th, going out in a lipsync to a top competitor.

OLIVIA LUX

Charming also. Jersey will tie her to Michelle Visage. Says that she can do a bit of everything, but her energy is very much giving me Brita Filter. I feel like if she does worse than she expects she will, she might crumble. Her look is fairly polished, but she admits to being a baby queen. I'm not super convinced by some of the claims she makes in this interview. My prediction: 12th

ROSÉ

Seems quite funny and charming. Will pink be her theme? Like some other queens here, she is a jack of all trades and should be strong, unless something throws her off. The fact she has old references should play well with Ru. Her mug and look are quite natural. I don't love her promo gown, but I think that's a style note rather than a quality note. She seems intelligent, too. A nerves/anxiety storyline might be on the cards for her. Seems like a finalist. The fact that she's political will also play really well for her. My prediction: Top 2

SYMONE

One of the most creative looks we've seen here, with that Medusa-esque wig. Her accessories and jewels are good. Claims to like fashion but also to show a lot of skin, this might be a getout clause. She also likes old references and black heroes, which should play decently well with Ru. Seems very self-assured. I believe her. She does give me Jaida energy to an extent, and she seems like she'll be a strategic player. Hopefully a finalist. My prediction: 3rd/4th

TAMISHA IMAN

The second half of the mother-daughter pair with LaLa Ri. There's no way these two aren't cast in order to B2 against each other at some point. Tamisha's style is good, if a little old-fashioned perhaps. Sewing skills should get her through the first week or the first design challenge, but she may be held to a higher standard because of her experience. An unsuitable lipsync song will probably be the end of her. My prediction: 11th.

TINA BURNER

Extremely charming, a comedy queen, and seems like precisely the type they've been aiming to capture with the disqualified queen last year. Energy-wise, very similar to that queen, minus the criminal elements. Also she has elements of Bianca Del Rio and Ginger Minj, but more respectful. Also some elements of Katya to her. Her mug and wig are great, very 60s with pop art elements. Hard to tell how big she is, but I think she's cinched. Should get on with the judges, and be saved from lipsyncs. My prediction: Top 2.

UTICA QUEEN

Her Meet the Queens image is right away a little one-note. I like her look. She seems very divisive and like she's trying to be a meme queen. Queens she reminds me of include Miss Fame, Jade Jolie and Dusty Ray Bottoms. From this video, I'm not sure she's quite ready for Drag Race, although she has potential. I can't think from what she said of what challenges she might do particularly well or badly at. I don't predict she'll make it to Snatch Game. My prediction: 13th - first out, unless there's a twist where they suspend lipsync for your life.

FINAL PREDICTED RANKING OF ALL QUEENS IN ORDER:

TOP 2: Tina Burner and Rosé 3rd/4th: Symone and Gottmik 5th: Kahmora Hall 6th: Kandy Muse 7th: Denali 8th: Joey Jay 9th: LaLa Ri 10th: Elliott With 2 Ts 11th: Tamisha Iman 12th: Olivia Lux 13th: Utica Queen

#romansrace #rpdr13 #rupaul's drag race #rupauls drag race #rupauls drag race season 13 #drag race season 13 #denali #kahmora hall #tina burner #rose #elliott #mik #drag race review

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Red Seas Under Red Skies

by Wardog

Friday, 01 February 2008

Wardog praises with faint damnation~

I was nosing about Scott Lynch's LJ (which is endearingly titled The Dork Lord, on His Dork Throne) not so long ago and I came across this:

I was not a fan of the Wheel of Time books, probably because I came to them in my twenties with my tastes already fairly developed. I was never able to get past the opening of the second book, and those of you who've known me for ages I'm sure absorbed my criticism and invective years ago. I once wrote at excruciating length upon the weaknesses of the books as I perceived them, and while I thought it was extremely clever and somehow necessary at the time, the years since have drastically mellowed my taste for mocking the work of other authors who aren't huge assholes in person or pushing a distasteful agenda with their work. About the best I can say for my mosquito bites is that I sincerely hope Jordan himself never had them called to his attention. Something tells me he would have given them the eye roll they deserved.

And the sheer decency of it has sort of shamed me to such an extent (especially since I am a non-achiever who hangs about on the internet criticising other people's work) that I can hardly bring myself to review Red Seas Under Red Skies, especially since my attempt to write about The Lies of Locke Lamora degenerated into a (semi-harmless) mock-fest of Scott Lynch's hair. By the way the important word in that sentence was "hardly." With this mind and all due humility, here are some thoughts on Red Thingies Over/Under Red Other Thingies, which I shall hereafter refer to as RSURS for the sake of my sanity. It's the second book in the Gentleman Bastard sequence which will, I understand, eventually form a septet. I have to say, this idea distresses me. Not only has Harry Potter soured me on the number seven for life but, given the fact the fantasy genre generally can't cope with trilogies, the idea of a septet seems utterly ludicrous to me. I mean, what do you have to say that takes seven books? Seriously?

For the moment, however, Scott Lynch seems to have something to say. Ultimately there's no point in reading RSURS if you haven't read The Lies of Locke Lamora not because it doesn't almost stand alone but because familiarity with the background, the setting and the characters deepens the experience of reading. To give it due credit: RSURS is reasonably satisfying on its own terms. You can feel the slow gathering of plot upon the horizon like distant clouds (and fear the coming storm) and there are some massive danglers just left hanging in a deliberately taunting and irritating fashion but, hey, thems the breaks with this kind of thing. And, as in Lies, the mysterious Sabetha, the apparent love of Locke's life, is alluded to but remains absent: for fuck's sake, Lynch, stop it. You know she's just going to be a total let down after a build up like this.

The problems evident in Lies are evident in RSURS, only slightly moreso because you don't have the novelty factor of being a first book to distract you from them. If you didn't like Locke the first time round, you won't like him here because he's exactly the same and still, some might argue, something of a Mary Sue or the male equivalent thereof. Although I don't personally object to the love affair Scott Lynch is tenderly enacting with his (anti)hero, I do struggle somewhat with the character. As I think I said in my review of Lies, he's absolutely the nicest bastard you could ever hope to meet: he never harms or kills anybody who doesn't thoroughly deserve it, his supposedly long-dead conscience miraculously reappears whenever he's confronted by any sort of cruelty or injustice and his unswerving and self-sacrificing loyalty to his friends is a virtue of such magnitude that it eclipses everything remotely unsympathetic about him. It shouldn't, but that's the way fiction works: if your character cares about the same people as the reader, it doesn't really matter how that character behaves, they're always going to garner a degree of support and approval.

I wouldn't mind this so much if I didn't have the feeling that Locke is supposed to be a shady character for a dark world. Perhaps I have the wrong end of the stick and Locke was never meant to be anything but a big bleeding heart beneath a thin veneer of survivalist criminality but I don't think so. I think the problem with Locke Lamora is that he's neither enough of one thing nor its opposite: he's neither selfish enough to be a convincing anti-hero nor virtuous enough to be a convincing hero. I know part of his shtick is his shifting sense of self and I'm not averse to complicated, contradictory characters but I find Locke incoherent rather than complex. I'm genuinely uncertain as to what Lynch is trying to do with the character or what we're meant to think. I'm not saying he doesn't do terrible things - he mutilates someone (who, admittedly, deserves it) in the first book - but everything he does that's vile and shocking is excusable whereas everything he does that's compassionate is extraordinary. For example, in RSURS, he and Jean, hanging out a decadent casino called the Sinspire, witness an entertainment in which a young nobleman, unable to pay his debts, has to survive in cage of stiletto wasps. Needless to say he doesn't and Locke secretly makes a blessing over the young man's forgotten corpse:

"Crooked Warden," Locke muttered under his breath, speaking quickly, "a glass poured on the ground for a stranger without friends. Lord of gallants and fools, ease this man's passage to the Lady of the Long Silence. This was a hell of a way to die. Do this for me and I'll try not to ask for anything for a while. I really do mean that this time."

There is no reason for this scene to be in the book (not that it isn't cool) - there are plenty examples of the upper classes being cruel and bloodthirsty to make the point and if the stiletto wasps are at all relevant beyond providing atmosphere they're certainly not to this book. In fact, its only purpose is to remind us that Locke Lamora is great and to show him, thief and conman that he is, being humane in the face of the world's inhumanity.

Unlike some of the reviews I've read, I've never had a problem with the snappy, modern dialogue and the very modern obscenity. In fact, I genuinely relish it. Unfortunately, it was during RSURS that I realised something that had passed me by in the first book: it's the only kind of dialogue Lynch can write. Everyone sounds the same. Pirates, noblemen, thieves, priests Locke, Jean: they're interchangeable. Witty but interchangeable.

"And now, my dear professional pessimist," said Locke... "my worry merchant, my tireless font of doubt and derision ... what do you have to say to that? "Oh very little to be sure... it's so hard to think, overawed as I am with the sublime genius of your plan." "That bears some resemblance to sarcasm." "Gods, forefend," said Jean. "You wound me! Your inexpressible criminal virtues have triumphed again, as inevitably as the tides comes and go. I cast myself at your feet and beg for absolution. Yours is the genius that nourishes the heart of the world." "And now you're-" "If only there was a leper handy," interrupted Jean, "so you could lay your hands on him and magically heal him-" "Oh you're just farting out of your mouth because you're jealous."

And so on. And here we have Jean talking to his ladylove:

"Have you really been practicing on barrels Jerome?" "Barrels. Yes. They never laugh, they never ridicule you and they offer no distractions." "Distractions?" "Barrels don't have breasts." "Ah. So what have you been telling these barrels?" "This bottle of brandy," said Jean, "is still too full for me to begin embarrassing myself like that." "Pretend I'm a barrel then." "Barrels don't have br-" "So I've heard. Find the nerve, Valora." "You want me to pretend that you're a barrel, so I can tell you what I was telling barrels back when I was pretending they were you." "Precisely." "Well ... you have ... you have such hoops as I have never seen in any cask on any ship, such shiny and well-fit hoops-" "Jerome-" "And your staves! Your staves ... so well planned, so tightly fit. You are as fine a cask as I ever seen, you marvellous little barrel. To say nothing of your bung-."

See what I mean?

I think in my review of Lies I commented on the deftness and subtlety of the world building - well, in RSURS, the action has moved from a city made of elderglass to a city consisting of islands made of elderglass. Astonishing. And sadly the delicacy of touch seems to have been replaced by the typical fantasy fiction obsession with geographic detail. It's nowhere near Perdido Street Stationbut, as much as I enjoy Lynch's world, there's a bit too much of this sort of thing:

Tal Verrar, the Rose of the Gods, at the westernmost edge of what the Therin people call the civilised world. If you could stand in thin air a thousand yards above Tal Verrar's tallest towers, or float in lazy circles there like the nations of gulls that infest the city's crevices and rooftops, you would see how its vast, dark islands have given this place its ancient nickname. They whirl outward from the city's heart, a series of crescents steadily increasing in size, like the stylised petals of a rose in an artist's mosaic.

And so on for two or more pages at a time. A bit like this review really.

Also it has to be said, the plot makes no sense whatsoever. It attempts to follow the embedded narrative format of the first book but it feels strained: Lynch occasionally plays with chronology, explaining how events came about after they occur, and offers a few reminiscences but it's noticeably a device now, rather than the most natural vehicle to tell the story. And, like the first book, it begins with Locke and Jean mid-heist only to drag them - reluctant and swearing as ever - into much bigger events, allowing the plot to twist, turn, double back on itself and eventually come full circle in a strangely satisfying manner. Except this time, it turns out that the Archon of Tal Verrar wants them to become ... wait for it ... pirates. Yes. Pirates. Two conmen from the streets of Camorr. Pirates. Now, I know that pirates are just inherently cool and you can't go wrong with them but still, come on. What's next? Locke Lamora and some ninjas? Locke Lamora and zombies? I don't know whether to respect the sheer brass bollocks ludicrousness of it or complain bitterly because it has to be the most spurious excuse for a plot I've ever encountered. And the fact that even main characters complain about the stupidity doesn't actually counteract that stupidity:

"Send us out to sea to find an excuse for you, that's what you said," said Locke. "Send us out to sea. Has your brain swelled against the inside of skull? How the screaming fucking hell do you expect the two of us to raise a bloody pirate armada in a place we've never been and convince it to come merrily die at the hands of the navy that bent it over the table and fucked it in the arse last time."

This is Lynch's latest technique, by the way, one I think he might have borrowed from JK Rowling. He seems have developed a tendency to address the inevitable plot holes of his novels by having his characters draw attention to it. To be honest,

fridge logic

doesn't bother me - I don't care how Buffy the Vampire slayer pays the mortgage on her dead mother's house or how Sydney Bristow circles the globe in half an episode - but attempting to pass it off as anything other than what it is offends me. Having the Archon blackmail Locke and Jean into mustering a pirate armada for political reasons is little more than a blatant excuse for the author to have them messing about with pirates, which is in itself fair enough. However, having Locke and Jean constantly bitching about the insanity of the plan even as they enact it only serves to induce bouts of fridge logic before you're even anywhere near the fridge. It also leads to odd little moments like this:

"Why not?" [said Jean] "Why not? We carry your precious misery with us like a holy fucking relic. Don't talk about Sabetha Belacoros. Don't talk about the plays. Don't talk about Jasmer or Espara or any of the schemes we ran. I lived with her for nine years, same as you, and I've pretended she doesn't fucking exist to avoid upsetting you. Well I'm not you. I'm not content to live like an oath-bond monk. I have a life outside your gods-damned shadow."

Err...actually Jean, you're a sidekick. Haven't you noticed? You actually do not have a life outside Locke Lamora's gods-damned shadow. The more Lynch tries to demonstrate to the reader that Jean is a person in his own right the less convincing it becomes. All it does is illustrate the fact that whatever Jean does on his own account is completely meaningless because his only relevance is tied to his supporting role, a role to which he will always return. His short-lived relationship - although actually moderately engaging, while it lasts - is only further evidence of this. You can see its inevitably tragic conclusion approaching on the horizon like the sails of the good ship Obvious.

The other thing I'm feeling a little bit peeved is Lynch's reliance on a technique he seems to have ganked from Alias. Now, I'm not sure if it continues in the later seasons but the early episodes of Alias always end with a cliff-hanger. And at first I used to get tremendously caught up in them. Oh no, I'd cry, Sydney is hanging from a cliff with only her suspender belt between her and certain death. Oh no, Sydney's rival has locked her in the poison-gas filled vault. Oh no, Sydney is being held at gunpoint by the bad guys. And then I'd insist that we watched another episode to find out what was going to happen, only to be faintly disappointed when the desperate, deadly situation resolved itself harmlessly in about two minutes of screen time. RSURS opens with Locke and Jean caught at crossbow-point on the docks and then, gasp, ever-faithful Jean turns on Locke. The novel then spools backwards in time to show you how they got themselves into this mess and, yes, it's arresting except that it's basically just like Alias, a cliff-hanger critical on the surface but ultimately completely meaningless and wrapped up quicker than a streaker at a tennis match. A couple of similar situations happen over the course of the book and, despite the satisfactory resolution of the plot, there's one left right at the end. I suspect I'd be more interested/frustrated by this Tense and Terrible State Of Affairs if the experience of the rest of the novel hadn't led me to the conviction that it's merely there for affect.

Okay, so I've just written four pages of bitching about RSURS but the fact remains that, despite its flaws, despite everything in it that doesn't quite work for me, I still heartily enjoyed it and very nearly loved it. Pirates, for God's sake, pirates! It's not quite as taut as the first book but once Locke and Jean hit the high seas the pace really picks up and the book becomes wonderful fun, sweeping you along on sheer exuberance and panache. And, damn it all, that's good enough for me. Roll on book three.Themes:

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~Comments (

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Arthur B

at 01:09 on 2008-02-02It strikes me that the Gentleman Bastard series embodies a problem I have with lots of fantasy series, namely that one book is really enough. I've felt absolutely no urge to go and read RSURS, and most of the things you point out in the review cement that; sure, it seems to be more of the same, and that's well and good - at least it's not a serious decline. On the other hand, one

Lies of Locke Lamora

is enough for me - having read one book, I don't feel as though anything the other books say can really add anything. (I'm also utterly unconvinced that there's enough juice in the Gentleman Bastards concepts to fill 7 books. I mean, for goodness' sake, he's only on the second book in the series and already he's resorted to pirates.)

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empink

at 02:49 on 2008-02-02@ ArthurB: Forsooth, he *will* go to ninjas next.

You know, I had more faith in this guy. I thought he'd at least 'fess up about Sabetha whatshername, or tie the book back to the first one, or do something other than send Jean and Locke to cavort with pirates for no good reason. It made for fantastic cavorting and rather dull and simplistic reading, though-- I won't be buying any more sequels in hardback, or holding on to them out of guilt either.

Oh, and Kyra, the DIALOGUE. Everyone does sound the same, it's so boring. No one is allowed to be stupid, or say frightening things without twisting themselves into witty shapes and cursing fit to kill themselves. It was all right in the first book, but in RSURS, it starts to look like lack of imagination on Lynch's part.

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Arthur B

at 12:04 on 2008-02-02Yeah, I can think of several points in the first book where I had to start reading a conversation again from the beginning because I lost track of who was who. It's this really weird blind spot in Lynch's writing; he can, when he tries, differentiate between characters in terms of disposition, personality, and so forth, and you can tell that by looking at their actions. (To pick the most obvious example, Jean is far more inclined to charge headlong into a fight like a raging bull than Locke is.) But he's chronically incapable of differentiating them when they're speaking.

I can only assume that he finds dialogue difficult (and to be fair, dialogue

difficult), and is trying to compensate by finding a style of dialogue he's quite good at and applying it to everyone.

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Wardog

at 14:23 on 2008-02-04I'm glad the dialogue thing isn't only me ... it's the main problem I have with the series to be honest, despite all my trivial bitching above. After a while, it gets really wearing and the characters all start blurring into each other because I find that it's language rather than behaviour that distinguishes people in books - heh, she says, massively generalising.

I think I must be less bothered by "more of the same" than Arthur is - I genuinely enjoyed both books and I'll happily read more (although I've never splashed out a hardback of either, so the cost of my good will is significantly cheaper than Empink's!) as long as they stay on this kind of level (or get better!). I do find them a nice antidote to ponderous, serious fantasy. I genuinely dig the exuberance and the irreverence.

Also I've been poking about Scott Lynch's personal sites and he seems like a pretty decent, charmingly humble guy...

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Cheriola

at 16:16 on 2014-07-26You know, oddly most of the things you mention didn't bother me at all. Except the utter pointlessness of the opening cliffhanger.

The only thing I did have a problem with is the way Jean shames Locke out of his depression, and Locke keeps apologising for "letting Jean down" in those few weeks for literally the next two years. I mean, in this book, it still reads like he's just mourning/recuperating a little too self-indulgently and maybe like he has a really short bout of alcoholism - but since the next book starts pretty much the same (except Locke has even more good reason to be depressed), and Jean then actually makes a reference to some kind of mental disorder (more something like Freud's innate death wish than depression, but still), it becomes problematic in hindsight. Especially since, either intentionally or not, Locke pretty much reads like a textbook case for bipolar disorder (spending most of each book in a manic phase), if you read all 3 books right after another. So for largely-neurotypical Jean to go "If I can handle our losses, why can't you?" and being sucessful at shaming/angering Locke out of suicidal depressive phases, that's rather problematic in my eyes. I know it fits with the setting that nobody has a clue about modern psychology and how Locke's mood issues are a disease, not willful misbehaviour, but Lynch should find a way to make at least narratively clear that Jean isn't right to do this. Besides, that kind of shaming would just make things worse with a real depressive person.

By the way, I'm fairly sure Locke is supposed to be a straight up trickster hero. Like Robin Hood, or the characters of the show "Leverage". He's not just a crook, he's also a priest and he really does believe in his duty to the dead and that holy mission for class revenge that Father Chains put them all on. (Even if this was retconned into this book and not in the first.) If anything he gets ever kinder from book to book. I think the third one literally points out that Camorr culture is particularly brutal, macho and homophobic compared to all the other city states, and much of Locke's initial darkness is part of his culture (like for example an extreme belief in having to take personal, blood-feud style vengeance) and that this is supposed to be a character flaw. But as he spends time in other cultures, he grows out of some of it. For example, in the first book, he calls the villain homophobic slurs several times. After encountering the queer-positive pirates in the second novel and that little discussion with "I'll try anything once - or 5 or 6 times" guy, he never does that again. And by book 3, when encountering a random pair of gay lovers making out in a garden and being tempted to go through their discarded clothing for their wallets, he stops his kleptomaniac impulse by reminding himself that doing malice to happy lovers would be bad karma.

Also, the losses of his friends, the brush with alcoholism and several with death have seemed to have made him a lot more sympathetic with other people's failings and tragedies. I actually really liked this character development. Yeah, he starts out as a bit of a cock-sure, obnoxious ass, but he does grow up and mellow out over the years, as one should expect.

Heh, but one character actually goes into a rant in the 3rd book about how Father Chains ruined them all for life as hardened, greed-motivated criminals by saddling them with a conscience. So I guess Lynch sees your problem.

By the way, can you really call a character a Mary Sue if literally none of his grand plans for cons ever work out, sometimes because of his own sheer stupidity (e.g. forgetting the cats), sometimes because his mark is just plain cleverer than him (e.g. the paintings), and the author takes an almost perverse delight in beating the crap out of him on a regular basis?

And, as in Lies, the mysterious Sabetha, the apparent love of Locke's life, is alluded to but remains absent: for fuck's sake, Lynch, stop it. You know she's just going to be a total let down after a build up like this.

I thought so, too, and got annoyed at the on-the-pedestal-putting. But now that I've read book 3, which features Sabetha both at about age 30 and when they were both teenagers: She's not. She's really, truly not. In fact, I was genuinely amazed at Sabetha - she's the best feminist (NOT straw-feminist!) character I've ever seen a male author write. And even if half of her discussions with Locke function mainly to introduce the male part of the audience to concepts like male entitlement to female sexuality, Nice Guy behaviour, Shroedinger's Rapist, victim blaming, the general frustration inherent in being an ambitious, highly talented woman in a patriarchal society and the frustration of being in love a with patriarchally socialised guy (who messes up occasionally even if he tries very, very hard not to, and who can't help the unfair male privilege that said society gives him), and that what feminists most want in a man is the ability to listen and learn - even if she's a bit of a mouthpiece in that regard: It's for a good and noble cause, and the author's heart is in the right place. And besides, there still is a clever, head-strong, angry, conflicted, and of course snarky character behind all the Issues. Her characterisation and reasons for leaving are thoroughly believeable, and also function as an Author's Saving Throw by actually pointing out in-text that the worldbuilding in the first book was problematic. Locke and Sabetha are still in love when they meet again, and they are surprisingly mature about their falling out and their attempts to fix it (if not in their professional rivalry...)

And Locke's adoring pedestal-putting, claiming her to be the love of his life, and his whole fixation on her are just that, quite literally - and the text seems aware that it is creepy, and the only thing that saves it is the fact that Locke is absolutely respectful of Sabetha's wishes and never, ever would force so much as a kiss on her. (I found the retconned-in reason for the fixation a bit sad, though: Until book 3, Locke could be read as demisexual for only ever being romantically/sexually attracted to one person. Then it's retconned as having creepy magical reasons that I don't want to spoil.)

The only thing about Sabetha I found a little... amusing, was that teenage Locke was almost too understanding and willing to accept anything feminism-related that she says and to change accordingly. Like I bet the author wishes he was at the age of 16, now that he finally gets it. Still, again, if it serves as a positive role model for male teenage readers, I'm fine with that kind of Mary-Sue-ism. Maybe it's a little preachy, especially since Lynch tries to cover so many topics, but I was just smiling through the whole thing. We do need more books like this.

The con plot of book 3 is a bit meh (basically it's a satire about 'democratic' elections, where Sabetha and Locke are press-ganged into controlling the campaign of one rivaling but politically indistinguishable party each, with all methods allowed short of murder, all ostensibly just for the entertainment of the people who really control the power in this 'republic' - their lives are being threatened to keep them in line, but it just doesn't have the personal stakes and sense of danger that the previous books had), and the teenage flashback is largely about the gang having to stage an annoyingly faux-Shakespearean play while conning a noble into paying for the production. So the relationship between Locke and Sabetha and the object lesson in how to make feminism 101 easily digestible in a fantasy novel, really are the main draws of the book. The meta plot for the series gets going right at the end, though. Which to me felt a bit like jumping the shark, but YMMV.

But I really do recommend the 3rd book, even if the plot is a little weak. Just for the sheer surrealness of reading a male author who manages to get practically everything right with regards to feminism. I mean, I've just read Elizabeth Bear's "Carnival" thinking she must have been the one to teach Lynch - but even she had like two dozen points in that ecofeminist polemic that made me headdesk.

(That book also needs a Ferret review, by the way. It's not thoroughly bad, as such, but the social philosophising made me uncomfortable and I wasn't always sure if I was supposed to be, and the worldbuilding has huge holes at least from my biologist/ecologist point of view. Still, queer protagonists are rare and deserve a mention.)

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Robinson L

at 20:15 on 2016-12-21

Cheriola: You know, oddly most of the things you mention didn't bother me at all. Except the utter pointlessness of the opening cliffhanger.

That pretty much sums up my feelings about the book, too. I guess I just think of this series as running on Rule of Cool and nothing else. Locke and Jean become pirates? Sure, why not? Doesn’t make sense? Who cares? And of course they’re going to complain about how ridiculous the Archon’s plan for them is, but that’s part of the fun.

Dialogue’s all the same? Ehn, so what? It’s all fun. And like you, I relish the modern snappiness/obscenity.

I mean, I don’t blame Wardog or Empink or anyone else who is bothered by this stuff, but just for myself, it seemed fine.

Wardog: I genuinely dig the exuberance and the irreverence.

That’s me, all the way (well, more like ~90% …)

I think the series is of two minds about whether Locke is actually supposed to be kind of an awful person or a stand up guy who happens to be a criminal—but as explained in my comment to the

Lies

review, I’ve chosen not to engage with those aspects and treat the whole thing as a rollicking adventure yarn. I will, however, once again point out a couple instances from this book of Character We’re Supposed to Root For Acts Like a Shitheel and Is In No Way Critiqued For It By the Text presently.

Re: description

And sadly the delicacy of touch seems to have been replaced by the typical fantasy fiction obsession with geographic detail.

Okay, here we come to a criticism I wholeheartedly agree with. Ye GODS but the description got tedious at times. It got tedious on

audiobook

; I shudder to think of trying to slog through it in text format.

I didn’t so much resent the book ending on a cliffhanger – although by the time I got to it, <Republic of Thieveslt/i> was already out, so I knew I’d be reading the next installment in a few months. Mostly, though, I was just relieved the cliffhanger revolved around Locke’s survival rather than Jean’s, because there’s a chance, however slight, of the series killing off Locke’s sidekick before the final book, whereas there’s absolutely none with Locke. So I appreciate the book making it absolutely clear that it’s not really a question of

the poisoned character will survive, but

how

His [Jean’s] short-lived relationship - although actually moderately engaging, while it lasts - is only further evidence of this. You can see its inevitably tragic conclusion approaching on the horizon like the sails of the good ship Obvious.

I think you undersell the extent to which the tragic conclusion was telegraphed beforehand. We’re talking

a MegaBrooks at the very least

. And I don’t think it would be humanly possible for the way it played out to have been any more cliché. Not to mention the whole fridging angle. Easily the lowest point of the series so far for me.

I thought RSURS handled the aftermath of said inevitable tragic conclusion a heck of a lot less annoyingly than most other books with similar big deaths I’ve encountered, though (lookin’ at you,

Harry Potter

). Jean is, of course, grief-stricken, and the book portrays the depth of his unhappiness while mostly avoiding an Epic Angst Sequence (seriously, there are few things in fiction less engaging than characters sitting around moping), and even sets up some genuinely touching moments, such as in the immediate aftermath of Ezri’s death, when Locke talks Jean down by threatening to throw himself at Jean, forcing the latter to beat the crap out of him (Locke), “and then you’ll feel terrible.”

Yes, pretending Jean is anything more than Locke’s sidekick is on par with “suddenly, Harry realized Dumbledore had actually been a fully-fleshed, three-dimensional character the entire time.” (Book 3 confirms this, when, after Locke is all patched up, Jean slips happily back into his role as Locke’s Number 2 without a hint of lingering grief over Ezri’s death, even as he’s helping out his best buddy romance Sabetha.) However, I thought the conflict between Locke and Jean set off by this outburst of Jean’s you quote in the article was actually pretty decent in terms of a “tensions between the series’ Main Pairing” subplot, which are usually of the eye-bleedingly terrible variety.

And what’s this guff about “moderately engaging?” I found it one of the two most engrossing parts of the story, along with some of Locke and Jean’s interactions. Jean and Ezri are adorable in every single scene they’re together: they bond over martial arts (with Jean being impressed that tiny Ezri actually managed to take him down at first), and their mutual affection for the Gentleman Bastardverse’s Shakespeare analogue. And then there’s the celebration scene where the two of them officially get together, soon after Jean has had his argument with Locke. And he’s keeping his distance from Ezri and it seems like at first he’s heeding Locke’s “you need to stay away from her, bro” bullshit, but it turns out, no, he’s craning away because he’s near-blind and he’s trying to see her properly and it’s incredibly cute you guys, like seriously.

Another thing I really like about the Jean / Ezri relationship is that the presentation feels balanced. I instantly get why Ezri is attracted to Jean as much as why Jean is attracted to Ezri, and in that scene during the celebration where, of course, Jean is being all shy and awkward, there’s a part where we suddenly see Ezri being shy and awkward as well. I’ve read a lot of similar romance arcs—especially those told from the male perspective—where the viewpoint character is vulnerable and complex while their love interest is all strong and confident and basically put on a pedestal.

I actually found it more engaging than Locke’s relationship with Sabetha in

Republic of Thieves

. While I agree with Cheriola that Sabetha is a great character, we don’t get much sense of her interior life, and the only times she displays vulnerability are when it directly relates to Locke. Also, it takes a long time into the story for her to tell Locke and the reader why she’s attracted to him, and I don’t feel the text really

shows

her being attracted the way RSRUS does with Ezri.

RSURS opens with Locke and Jean caught at crossbow-point on the docks and then, gasp, ever-faithful Jean turns on Locke. The novel then spools backwards in time to show you how they got themselves into this mess and, yes, it's arresting except that it's basically just like Alias, a cliff-hanger critical on the surface but ultimately completely meaningless and wrapped up quicker than a streaker at a tennis match.

Oh my god, that was the worst; maybe even worse than Ezri’s death.

I detest flash-forward openings as a general rule. I feel like there

may

have been one or two I’ve encountered which actually worked okay, but if so I can’t remember them now. Those possible examples aside, at best, flash-forward openings contribute f***-all of substance to the story, and at worst they undermine immersion by distracting the reader from the current action with questions which aren’t going to be answered for another 200-400 pages.

To be fair, some flash-forward openings, while still crap, sometimes do something clever with the reader’s expectations (I remember one where a guy wakes up and wonders what the heck is going on, and when we get to that part of the book in turns out the original guy died, and this is a clone, so that waking up sequence is technically his birth). RSURS is not one of those stories, though. The sequence takes on no new significance or added meaning for having read the rest of the book up to that point.

But wait, it gets

better

! Jean turning on Locke is in itself not terribly surprising: they are master con artists, after all. The linchpin (no pun intended) of the tension to this scene is that Jean fails to give the hand signals which mean “this is a scam, play along,” leaving Locke, and the readers, to wonder if this is a real betrayal, after all. Then, after Jean has dispatched the two assassins he says: “Oh, yeah, didn’t you see me giving the hand signal which means ‘this is a scam, play along’?” and Locke is all like, “Gosh, man, I must’ve missed it.” And that’s an end to it. Are you f**king kidding me?

Granted, this sort of stuff happens all the time in real life, but narratively speaking, it’s the worst kind of cheap trick for creating false tension. It

might

have been forgivable if there were some long-term consequences to the whole business. Locke and Jean have both been dosed with a slow-acting poison at this point in the story, and I thought maybe Locke’s failure to notice the hand signal was an early warning sign that the poison is beginning to effect his perception. But

. Or maybe Jean really was considering turning on Locke for some reason or other and then had a change of heart, and made up the part about the hand signal. No sign of that, either.

Look, I’m glad Jean doesn’t actually betray Locke, because as story turns go, that would have been at least as irritating as Ezri’s death, probably worse. But first you hit me with this bullshit flash-forward, then you double down on the bullshit by revealing the whole thing was just a trifling misunderstanding with no effing consequences whatsoever? What a waste of time.

… So yeah, on balance, I was not well pleased or amused by this sequence, especially as our hook into the main story.

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Robinson L

at 20:30 on 2016-12-21And now it’s time for another installment of Robinson Dissects the Ethics of the

Gentleman Bastard

Books. This week’s episode: Captain Zamira Drakasha Edition.

So yeah, Zamira is all kinds of awesome, but like with the other main characters, it’s best to turn one’s critical thinking off when thinking about her actions, or it becomes very hard to think of her as any kind of hero.

Case in point: she takes Locke, Jean, and the rest of their sorry crew onto her ship as probationary pirates. You do good, you play by the rules, you become full crew members; you step out of line, you die. All pretty standard stuff, except it turns out when she says she will kill you for breaking the rules, she means it.

One of the guys who originally signed on with Locke and Jean now despises the two of them intensely and is kind of an asshole in general, so the reader is primed to dislike him. He’s getting picked on by some of Zamira’s crew members, and finally he gets pushed too far and grabs a weapon to defend himself with. But laying hands on a weapon is against Zamira’s rules, so she has him executed on the spot. For the kind of mistake that anybody could make. And the reader is supposed to be okay with this because the guy was made to be unlikable. It could just as easily have been someone like Jean or Locke making a similar mistake, prompting Zamira to execute them, and the reader to hate her, in turn. We’re not invited to judge her character based on her actions, but on how we feel about the characters she acts against.

Later, there’s the time when we first see Zamira’s

Poison Orchid

attack a merchant ship, which involves pretending to be in peril themselves. As the pirates are preparing to board the ship, one of Zamira’s lieutenants tells the new recruits “if any of you are feeling moral qualms about attacking these merchants, just remember that they thought we were in distress, and only came to help us when we signaled we were willing to give them unconditional salvage rights.” Which, if you stop to think about it, is a

really

clever rationalization to psych people up to potentially commit an atrocity. I mean, if that were the point of the sequence—which it isn’t—I would’ve said it was brilliant. For all they know, the captain of the merchant ship was just a huge asshole, and literally everyone else aboard was clamoring to help the

Poison Orchid

right from the beginning.

It also seemed like, in the three way struggle between the Archon, Stragos; the proprietor of the big gambling den, Requin; and the members of the Priori; Stragos winds up being the Designated Villain of the book, not because his actions are worse than those of Requin or the Priori (we’ve already established they can be equally vicious), but because it happens to be Stragos’ actions which got Jean’s girlfriend killed. He gets punished, whereas Requin and the Priori members get happy endings, only because Stragos hurt someone the reader is supposed to care about.

Locke and Jean are quick to forgive the Priori member who was sending assassins after them because the Bondsmages told him the two Gentleman Bastards were going to cause him trouble. Which, okay, the assassins all failed, and all got killed, but by the logic of this story they were probably all Bad Men who deserved what they got, so no harm, no foul, right? Except, no, there

was

harm. One of the attempts to kill Locke and Jean was a really convoluted scheme to give them free drinks which were laced with poison. And the thing about convoluted schemes is that they’re full of holes, as in this one where Locke and Jean weren’t interested in the drink in question, and passed theirs on to the dockworker at the next table, who proceeded to die in their stead. No one in the story ever gets any kind of comeuppance for this murder, ‘cause I guess we’re not supposed to care about red shirts.

So basically, what I’m trying to say here is that the ethics of this series are all kinds of messed up if you look closely.

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Robinson L

at 00:00 on 2016-12-22

Cheriola: book 3, when encountering a random pair of gay lovers making out in a garden and being tempted to go through their discarded clothing for their wallets, he stops his kleptomaniac impulse by reminding himself that doing malice to happy lovers would be bad karma.

That was cute. Another very minor point I appreciated from that book was in a scene where Locke has to hold Sabetha as part of this play they’re performing and the narrator (speaking broadly from Locke’s perspective) talks about what it’s like for someone to hold another person whom they’re attracted to. It would have been

easy to gender the subject of attraction in that sentence as female, or to say something like “a person of the opposite sex whom they’re attracted to.” But no, it’s a general statement, and so the book sticks with generalities, not making stereotypes about the genders or orientations involved. Again, a minor point, but one I’ve seen even a lot of nominally well-intentioned works fail at, so I was mildly impressed.

I was genuinely amazed at Sabetha - she's the best feminist (NOT straw-feminist!) character I've ever seen a male author write.

I think it was this part which finally clinched it for me to read the series. As a male author myself, I can’t help but take it as a challenge.

As mentioned earlier, though, I feel like we didn’t get much sense of Sabetha’s internal life, except as it relates to Locke, and she has to tell Locke (and the reader) what particularly attracts her to Locke, rather than the book showing us.

It probably was implausible to have 16-year-old Locke be so receptive to Sabetha’s Feminism 101 lectures, but for me it was preferable to the second hand embarrassment of having Locke throw out insipid, MRA-apologist arguments for Sabetha to shoot down.

Since I’m not seeing a

Republic of Thieves

review on the horizon, I suppose I might as well give my thoughts on the book in general. Overall, I liked it, and Sabetha is a fine addition to the series’ cast.

I also kind of dug the way the main caper of the book was not a high stakes life or death game of taking on some brutal, affluent, entitled snot or other, but rather fixing an upcoming election. It shows you can have all the same drama and intrigue without putting countless lives on the line, which comes as a nice change of pace. (Granted, it turns out there are countless lives on the line in the Bondsmagi’s larger game, but that only comes up after the whole thing is over, so in my view it still counts.)

My political sensibilities being what they are, I particularly liked the election angle to the plot because the book depicts it as 1) an aristocratic exercise with no pretense of populist input (only a small fraction of the city’s residents have the franchise), and 2) a complete farce in any case, because who gets elected has f**k all to do with who’s better leadership material or has the best policies – the book dispenses with such preposterous fig leaves and dives straight into the real heart of electoral politics: naked corruption, double dealing, and general chicanery. There’s also the implication that who gets elected is ultimately trivial in terms of how Karthain is actually run, because the real ruling elite (in this case, the Bondsmagi), make damn sure that in practice, it gets run exactly the way they believe produces the greatest benefit for the city’s inhabitants. (The book seems to suggest that what they think is best for Karthain really is, which is where its views and mine diverge, but other than that, I’m completely on board with the book’s representation.)

Locke’s backstory seemed … really out of place. Given how magic has always taken such a tertiary role in the books up to that point, I didn’t expect it to play such a huge part in Locke’s past. This felt like the backstory to a character in a very different type of story, honestly. But other than that it’s just kind of, “whatever.”

#Ferretbrain #Wardog #Red Seas Under Red Skies #Scott Lynch #The Lies of Locke Lamora

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myfriendpokey · 6 years

Text

receipt king

What's the difference between a paid game and a free one? In my opinion, one of them costs money, although various qualifications could be made. But maybe what's important is not the fact of purchase but the moment of purchase - that singular, legally recognised and binding moment where you hit the buy button or put the coin into the slot. Since after all the ways in which you really engage with, or even claim, a videogame can be spread out, blurry, diffuse.

Maybe it sits on your hard drive for a year before you play it, or in a notepad file full of steam keys, maybe you played it on and off in sessions too split up and individually indistinguished to solidify into a single instance. You can "own" both a paid gameand a free one but it's hard to feel your relationship to the former is not somehow more solid - maybe because it's founded on that moment of exchange, and not just the more transitory moments of lived experience. Experience comes and goes but purchases can be logged, tracked, indexed.

Maybe all the people who keep buying reissues of Chrono Trigger for every platform it comes out on are just laying a more 'real', economic foundation to support the expanded dream-Chrono Trigger that exists in their heads… Holding on to the receipts!

***

For a videogame to be sold is for it to exist in a network of exchange relations with, say, chairs, fruit, labour... And the implication is that these things can be compared but also that the comparisons can be quantified. A game is cheaper than a cup of coffee - or four times more expensive than a new movie, and both of these give us a picture of how it fits into the spaces of our life.

It also lets them take on a sort of objecthood-by-proxy, as another in the catalogue of commodities, which is increasingly important as the actual ontological status of a videogame gets ever more uncertain. Are you buying a program, an installer for a program, a temporary access pass for a program stored online, a program which runs using a server which remains in the company's control, a set of new assets, are you unlocking a set of existing assets which shipped with the game and were just stuck behind a paywall?

Emilie Reed has written about videogames in a museum context - with the expectation there that they get reframed as "singular objects", to fit the needs of an institution which has historically trafficked in singular objects. Maybe we can also think about this movement for objecthood in the context of the market - and that, since for at least forty years videogames have been a market artform, this movement was reflected on the aesthetic level as well. When people talk about a videogame as a "world", as a closed, alien space of object relations to be examined and explored at will, are they talking about the bare digital structures of the Game or about the mysterious opacity of the Object? Perhaps the unknowable heart of the commodity is the true "bonus room", ha ha ha 8p

***

(I remember when Mountain was something of a critical talking point, and at the time I maybe crassly wondered if it was the production values - since there were plenty of glorious trainwrecks games making basically the same nonsequitor joke but it somehow only merited attention coming from a paid game with stylised graphics and lotsa assets… Now I wonder if it was specifically the saleability of Mountain which generated that fascinated reaction, as the dismissal of not-games wrestled with the deference thought due to the commodity. Which makes all those posts about the zen qualities of staring at it seem much funnier in retrospect.)

***

Anyway.

The free game / paid game thing is something that interests me because it's basically something I grind up against all the time, when I'm making things, and slowly need to come up with the vocabulary to deal with. The dream is always to "just make things" - you'd work on what takes your fancy and then figure out at the end whether it worked as a saleable product or not, which environment to release it to. But the problem is that even speculating something could be a paid game is enough to drastically change how you view it. What works in a free game absolutely does not in a commercial game, and vice versa.

I don't think anybody at all would have played Magic Wand if it came out for free, for example - that game could get away with being tonally muted and laid back because it took place within the bubble of objecthood that comes with being sold, and those qualities are experienced much differently in a free game.

A free game is one with no immediate comparison points - it could end after 5 minutes, after 50, it could demand your time and energy to no return... it lacks the "guarantee" of a pricetag, the guarantee of existing in some stable relationship with other objects. A commercial game could be the barest early-access WIP, or just some printed screenshots in an envelope. But the fact that it was sold at all grants it some of the enclosed legibility of the object, while free games conversely exist in the world of pure experience, which I think Hegel memorably described as a bloody head flying at you through the dark. Dreams, hallucinations, memory, etc.

***

So maybe we can think of commercial status as part of what Michael Brough calls the "grain" of a work, part of that network of processes and feedback which we either glide with or grind against while producing a thing. To make a free game paid is to change how it's read. The gaps which your attention span could easily skip over in a free title become unbearable contained within a fixed, sealed object. You begin to draw the contours and to fill in the gaps... The game becomes more ornate, detailed, denser within this narrowed scope, with a kind of symbolist langour and inertia seeping into the whole thing - the inertia of the product.

It may be hard to make a videogame into a narrative but to be sure it's harder to turn a product into one, a product which necessarily has something circular and static within the very foundation. The presumed audience for a product is like the little dude in the middle of the panopticon - everything is arranged panoramically for their benefit, necessitating a certain vagueness of temporal relationship, while a free game is arranged for the less predictable, less reliable, eye of the attention span as it moves through an unknown space. I like making both types of games and don't mean to imply one is either more mature or more subversive than the other, whatever those terms mean in this junk-ass consumer format. But it's not quite a matter of pure preference, either.

***

Archiving games can be notoriously difficult and I imagine this goes double for free ones - it's one thing to document, say, the NES library which at least has some kind of fixed scope for inclusion, trade magazines to consult, physical copies to track down... and even then there's always the frontier of, yknow, bootleg Dendy cartridges, nobody knowing when Mario came out, stuff like that. At least in principle it can be boiled down to a finite list of titles and release years. Who wants to deal with the messier and more nebulous task of recovering all the RPG Maker projects that briefly got hosted on Rapidshare in 2007? And even then, would it make sense to organize these games by a similar neat list of release dates?

Commercial games can afford the pretense that they "happened" at a singular point in time and that this singular point takes priority over the broader mulch timeline in which they were stumbled across, played, looked at, made fun of. It's not that you can't make a similar claim for the release point for freeware - it's just that it might mean a different thing, and I think it can be valuable trying to think of those games as something other than "commercial games that happen to cost $0". If to be released for free is to engage with a fundamentally different context and set of assumptions - to deal with and work around a kind of vanishing experiential quality, rather than the fixed objecthood of the product - then it's hard to work out how to talk about and memorialise that without converting it into its opposite.

I've always wanted to write about more freeware games but how do you do it? Pick out a handful to talk about and avoid as much as possible the question of dealing with the endless churn? Elevate a few to ambassador standing? To pick a random RPG maker game and say "Crystal Masters 2 came out in 2008" can be to imply, like, a launch party, or some immediate impact, or that anybody at all paid attention or cared - which in turn can distort the actual expectations of how these things would be recieved that to some extent affected their aesthetics and structure. It’s still better than nothing, and I’m being pedantic – but it's hard not to think about it when at times it feels like the only way this stuff can be written about and preserved is as a set of attenuated best-ofs, by either becoming a product or by being treated as one.

I think if most of my games have been commercial lately it's less a question of expecting to get money from them and more because that sometimes feels like the only way they'll still have some kind of trail left in 10 years. I always liked the idea of making time capsules and just hiding them away in a rabbithole somewhere for people to find. Right now it feels like the types of videogame spaces I'm most comfortable in - the kind least hung up on ideas of importance - are archival ones, digging through the debris of the past, curious about what they'll find. In reaction I guess to what feels personally like increasingly calcified, unliveable contemporary or franchise-oriented spaces of culture it can feel freeing to think about the other ones, of things instantly forgotten or which barely existed at all. Blind albino cave salamanders - - 64!!

(images: castlevanias ii and bloodlines)

#caves #games #gamechat

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titmasjack · 6 years

Photo

Character Lift Task Preparation

In preparation for this week's Stop-Motion animation task, we were asked to write up and design a 6 frame storyboard that clearly showcases the keyframes and movements that I wanted to convey when having a character ‘Lift a Box’. Working in a storyboard structure, as a visual learner, this allows me to get a better visual understanding of how I want to approach this task considering how I can best showcase my variety of ideas, by creating a variety of iterations in my designs, changing different aspects of the character, the box in which they lift and the use of camera angles and movement to portray the action within the scene.

Alongside the opportunity to write notes amongst each frame, this gives me the chance to go into further detail on how I can approach each action discussing the timing and spacing between every keyframe and pose. Distinguishing how I aim to convey exaggerated and realistic movement through every iteration.

To keep the task simple, we were told to keep the action within a single shot, without using angles or changing the camera view, this would give the best sense of clarity to how we portray the action within the scene. With it being up to me, I want to experiment and explore what angles would be best to portray the action of the shot.

Although a profile shot will probably be best, I think it would be fun to experiment and go beyond the expectations of the brief by trying to gage a sense of depth to the character. Being a 3Dimensional model, it would seem lacklustre for me to only portray one side of the character and lose the lifelike quality from working with a physical puppet. Leading me to want to explore more diverse angles that would showcase all sides and the proportionality of the puppet for me to explore.

Storyboard Iterations

Taking the time to fill in 3 separate storyboards, I wanted to get the most out of my time by coming up with an array of ideas. Although they’re based around the same action, I was surprised by the amount of diversity I could create by stylising and basing my actions around different influences. Having my character portray, young, old, strong and weak characteristics, it led to a range of ideas that showed how ‘character’ could be shown through a simple action like ‘Lifting a Box’. Not the only variable at play, within my experiments I had the opportunity to play with the weight of the box, making it seem like a more excessive and harder task to lift of the ground as well as having my character lift it with ease.

I believe it would be easier to animate the character lifting a heavy box, due to the acts of anticipation and easing in and out each motion. I feel that exaggerating the actions of my character would be a lot easier than achieving a more fluid realism to the action of lifting a box. In the hopes of pushing myself out of my comfort zone, I want to try and achieve a degree of realism by animating a light weighted box, leaving less room for struggle from the characters lift. This would mean that I have to animate the key motions without the unnecessary exaggeration whilst conveying a realistic sense of weight and fluidity to each portion of the animation.

Like our previous week's animation task, I hope that I get the opportunity to animate a series of iterations giving me the chance to experiment with the characteristics of my puppets as well as the timing of my sequences, playing with shooting on both 1′s and 2′s to get a better understanding on how I can make my animations more lifelike and realistic.

Reference Footage

Going beyond what Helen asked in preparation for this weeks task, I decided to go ahead and create a series of reference footage that I could use alongside my animation, as a tool to guide and support my ideas as I animate. As I change to physically try to explore character beforehand, using reference footage allows me to identify and bring my ideas to life in a short manner of time. Conveying the range of ideas I have and how I could approach them from an animation standpoint.

To diversify my resources, I asked a couple of people to also to perform this action, to see how different body shapes, sizes and heights would interact with the action itself. This allowed me to see how different body shapes not only approach the task but how differing circumstances can alter the persons approach to picking up the box. Whilst I believe that most people will be animating a more common setting of casually picking up a box. I set out to challenge the idea of referencing bodybuilders and weightlifters who use specific form and techniques to lift heavier and more dangerous weights.

Having this footage on hand, I got to see the stark contrast between casually picking something up versus picking up something for a purpose. A sense of drive and will can truly be seen throughout the struggle of the person body, as their limbs and posture is much more rigid in comparison of someone lifting something more significantly heavy.

If I can compare anything between my original storyboard expectations and my live-action reference footage, is that although in some instances my reference footage includes anticipation, its nowhere near then exaggerated extent that I originally believed. And to convey a true sense of realism, I need to be able to subtly convey these struggles through smaller and believable actions.

Reflection

Taking the time to set out my intentions for the upcoming animation task has allowed me to consider aspects of my animation I wouldn’t have thought of if I had dove straight into task itself. I believe that taking this task one step further through exploring reference footage will set me up with a solid foundation that will give me a better understanding of how I can convey the weight shift of the character, whilst providing a sense of strength and casualness to their actions.

I hope that I have the opportunity throughout the week to not only respond to the brief but develop on my ideas further by taking the time to create and develop some individual iterations in my own time.

To summarise;

Using the ‘Storyboard’ sheet provided I have plotted out a series of character approaches to ‘Lifting a Box’.

I have contrasted the ideas of exaggeration versus realism, discussing how I can use iterations to explore both concepts.

Gathered a series of live-action reference footage that explores lifting a box in a variety of contexts.

Showcase how I can apply reference footage to best suit my needs of timing and spacing in my experiments later this week.

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mokkoriness · 8 years

Text

ViSULOG February “MEMENTO” Interview Part 2

Part 1 Here

So, please tell us things about from when A9 were a new band. You started out as アリス九號., then you became Alice Nine and now you're A9, so your band name has changed three times.

Show: Yes. Together with the concept of "Japanese meets Western", we stylised our name as “アリス九號.”. We started appearing on TV and front covers of magazines more, and we didn't like the fact that the way we stylised our name gave off the feeling of being a minor group. So we discussed it with management at the time, and when we welcomed our 5th year anniversary we changed it to the English stylisation of "Alice Nine".

What was the reaction when you changed the name?

Show: We had been told by experts in the field "Isn't the previous stylisation better since it has impact?", but it's just the stylisation that had changed; the pronunciation hasn't changed. However, when we became “A9” from “Alice Nine”, the pronunciation also changed.

Hiroto: People thought we were a different band entirely.

There are people who think A9, Alice Nine and アリス九號. are all different bands.

Show: That's right. The people interested in us know they are all the same band, but I suppose the people who aren't interested in us don't know.

When you formed アリス九號. and first came out in the Visual Kei scene, what kind of position did you have in the scene?

Saga: Good-looking guys!

He answered straight away (laughs). Did you form a band of good-looking people?

Saga: No. It's not like we were only looking for good-looking guys.

Show: Personality is important.

Saga: We were told at the time "It's a miracle all these nice-looking faces came together", but we didn't do it on purpose. It's not like I thought of myself as "good-looking".

Nao: I also never thought of myself as good-looking. But since everyone around us kept saying it, I thought "Huh? So I'm a good-looking guy".

All: (Explosive Laughter)

Huh?! Did that many people call you a “good-looking band”?

Saga: They called us "the SMAP of Visual Kei".

(laughs) Really?

Hiroto: They did (laughs). The people around us always said "Be the SMAP of the Visual Kei world".

Tora: That brings back memories (laughs)

Show: But I could only ever think of them as them ridiculing us. Even if we were told "You guys are a good-looking band", I thought "You're making fun of us, aren't you?"

Tora: That's not it. It's just that we were relatively fast in realising the importance of design and re-touching. It was a time where people didn't do it that much.

So you even set yourselves apart in that respect.

Show: Yeah. We certainly did start doing that stuff relatively early (laughs)

Tora: Really early.

Show: But now it's become the norm.

Saga: If it's a five person band, there would be about one or two cool people. In our generation. That's why when I first saw our band photos that had been edited, I was like "Huh?! How is everyone looking so good?!"

So it turned out so nice that even you yourselves were surprised.

Show: That's why re-touching is important.

And since you all looked so good, some people got jealous and said things like "Those guys are just pretty faces"?

Saga: Yeah. A lot of people said that.

Tora: Well, it was true.

Dahahaha (laughs)

Tora: But the reason why we were told that is our aura when we stood on stage lost to the aura we gave off in those edited photos.

Saga: We should have been more aware of that back then. If we were more aware of the fact that we were good-looking we definitely would have been more popular.

Nao: Fuhahahaha (laughs)

Show: What left the biggest impression on me at the time were words said to us by someone who wasn't our fan: "Even though these guys can't do a thing, what is with their "We're the winners here" aura?"

Tora + Nao: Gyahahahaha (laughs)

Show: I just remembered that we were told that even though what we were doing was rubbish, only our aura and "We're the winners" feeling we gave off was amazing (laughs)

I suppose the impression that アリス九號. and Alice Nine would give off to non-fans were about your appearance.

Show: Yeah. At that time, we were either the band that wore school uniforms in 「Shunkashuuto」 or the band that appeared on a music show called 『HEY！HEY！HEY！』 with Downtown for the song 「TSUBASA.」 where Nao got a roundhouse kick from Hama-chan1. It was either one of those two images that a large majority of non-fans had of us.

Hiroto: That really was the case eight or nine times out of ten. But our seniors and people close to us would often say to us "アリス九號./Alice Nine actually also play some old-school rock and progressive rock". They never really said this or that about our faces. It would be nice if people could start talking about our music instead.

Show: They say it takes ten to twenty years for peoples' first impressions of you to change, so we've still got a way to go.

Tora: I mean Dragon Ash still has this hip-hop image. Even now.

Show: Even though they've stopped rapping.

Meaning the same goes for アリス九號./Alice Nine's image.

Show: I guess there are a lot of people who just look at our faces and think that we're completely devoid of substance and stop there.

So rather than your music, you presented your faces to people instead?

Tora: Not presented, but "were able to present". Assertively. I think that was our style back then. I mean, even though we hadn't finished any songs we took new photos first. We couldn't even talk about musical direction or anything.

So you took on the words 「You guys are just pretty faces」 and even though you didn't have any songs, you kept on presenting new, cool visuals.

Tora: Right. At the time, there weren't any people to put visuals as the top priority. Although after that there were people who started to imitate us. That's why I think we're an example of succeeding (though putting visuals as a top priority)

And ever since then you've been putting visuals as the top priority?

Show: When we got signed to a major label, we gradually stopped doing it that way. Because you start learning about how to make music. At the time, we were also told by our company to make songs with more grown-ups. We were quite resistant to that, and that's when Saga brought in the song 「JEWELS」 and we were able to make the company understand that "We are going to do the songs that we make ourselves". I think things started changing from there.

You shifted from having the top priority as visuals to music.

Show: That's right. And from then Saga started thinking about the basics of music. We've been putting visuals a top priority for about nine years, and I think that the point at which people started to acknowledge that we weren't just a bunch of pretty faces but a band that plays music was last year at 「PARTY ZOO〜Ken Entwines Naughty stars」(L’Arc〜en〜Ciel's Ken's live event). When we played at that event with our latest musical style with the rock band style which we thought was cool, Ken told us "No! You look basic! I didn't call you here for that. Don't you have any white suits?" (laughs). Ken had said to us "Put out your “Good guy aura” more to the point it makes us choke", and Tatsuro (MUCC) told us "You need to use your "good-looking guy" part 100% more! Even though I hate those kinds of bands".

Tora: We were like "Oh, really?"

Nao: It seems like I'm still a good-looking guy (laughs)

Show: Being told that, we became more aware of our colour. To a certain extent, MUCC has shown us an example of that. MUCC is overwhelmingly MUCC. They're a band that does exactly what people, including the fans, want from MUCC. They don't "spoil" themselves at all and say that next they're going to make the music they're into lately. And if we look at ourselves in the same way, I think that the things people want from A9 were the things that Ken had said, so we've accepted that. But we really don't think of ourselves as good-looking. Ah, except for Nao (laughs)

Nao: Hahahahahaha (smiles)

Show: But we've accepted this. After that 「PARTY ZOO」, we've played at events in all-white costumes (laughs). 「PARTY ZOO」 had the effect of making us stop spoiling ourselves, like "We're in this mode right now so that's why we're doing it like this", and letting us do the things that we should be doing. I think that the results of that can be seen in our latest single.

So please tell us about your latest song 「MEMENTO」. How did this song come about?

Saga: It's a song that was made being influenced by our 12th year anniversary live last year and all the live events we've appeared at up until now. The advice we got from Ken and Tatsuro at 「PARTY ZOO」. The us that third parties see us as, the things we want to do, the things that our fans or fans of the scene want from us; they are all different. That's why we thought to put all of that in this song. But what it comes down to is what we want to do. I thought that if it didn't have the things we wanted to express, it wouldn't catch on, so while taking into account the advice, we properly express the things we want to express. I really thought about that balance.

Was it the uplifting chorus you made taking into account the advice you received?

Saga: I suppose so, if we were to talk about specific parts. I think that you wouldn't imagine a song with that kind of intro to have this kind of chorus. I think that perhaps our distinctive feature is that we can do that sort of thing.

Was the second bridge always supposed to be like that?

Saga: Yeah. That is kind of like my bad habit, I just want to make the song go in that direction. I am trying to treasure those parts too. Because that also makes up a part of our "unique characteristics".

I think another part that you couldn't imagine just from hearing the intro is the piano part before the solo.

Saga: For this song, I asked nishi-ken to do the arrangement. I didn't say anything at all like "Put a piano part there" but it seems like nishi-ken had the image of a piano at that part. At first there were a lot more notes but we cut down on some.

I felt that the uniqueness of the song is also that it quickly develops and the melodies keep changing.

Saga: Personally, I think it's important that you don't bore the listener. So taking that into consideration, I did think that it would be better to have a fast-changing development. And with all of that, while using things that are also popular in this scene, we gave of this "rock feeling" that even fans not into this kind of music could listen to.

What about the other members?

Hiroto: I think it's turned out to be a song that reflects the motivation we received from the live events. Personally, it's been a while since I used down-tuning for a song. Hearing the completed song for myself, rather than it being intense it has energy, but I thought that we made a song with an awesome uplifting feeling when the five of us play it together on stage, so I think it's great that this is the song being released as a single, as we haven't released a single in a really long time.

Tora: The lead song on our previous release 『LIGHT AND DARKNESS』 was a danceable track but this time the song is intense. I'm the kind of person to go with the flow of the other members, but this kind of song is easier to groove along to. But it really is the kind of song Saga would make. Even if Saga makes an intense song, as expected, it's also really melodious. I think there has to be a reason why it's like that.

Nao: The start makes me nervous. Because it's a song that starts off with the drums. And because if I mess up the beginning there's going to be trouble. It's a song that make you that nervous. It's also got a fast tempo.

And the title has the meaning of "memento", right?

Show: That's right. For us, there was a moment where the future of the band was in danger. But even though we've been doing this for more than 12 years, I don't really feel that we've done all we could, or that we've left an impression behind. That's why we want to leave something behind in this scene. That is expressed as the lyrics of a hand reaching out to the light.

So those intentions are in the lyrics.

Show: Yes. Although there are a lot of ambiguous expressions, that is the main point of the lyrics. During lives, it appears as if the audience is reflecting the light of the venue, so the feeling of reaching out to that light is linked to the uplifting feeling of the chorus.

I hear that Tora was involved in the editing for this MV. What did you pay attention to when editing the footage?

Tora: I looked for the members good-looking “nice faces”.

Based on your own tastes.

Tora: Yeah. I used all the parts where I thought that the members probably wanted me to use. Hiroto shines during the performance parts, so rather than the acting parts, I mainly used his performance parts. The way he moves during the parts he wants you to use is usually the same for all takes, so you just know. But there was also some conflicting moments. There were times when Nao or someone wants you to use his shot but you can't due to the flow of the MV. Those are difficult to deal with. But I have few shots in this MV. I put in my own cuts when I thought I had to. It's quite hard for you yourself to put in your own shots (bitter smile). That's why the main part of the MV is the performance part.

So what is the concept for the visuals in 「MEMENTO」?

Show: Up until now, I've sort of being like the artistic director, but this time I asked a designer to do this for us, for the first time in a while. It had been a while since I met a person that made me think "This person is amazing!", so I left it all up to them. They're a person who does designs by combining mode fashion and 3D, so that's why the artwork has turned out that way too. Even though it's really fashionable it has an eccentric atmosphere to it and that's really interesting. So that's why even though it's a single, the booklet is oddly quite detailed, so do please take a look.

After the release of this single, you'll also be releasing your album 『IDEAL』 in April and prepare for your nationwide tour 「IDEAL HORIZON」. For A9 lives, the lights that the fans wear on their arms are also a part of the performance. From when did you start using those?

Show: Ever since we were アリス九號., we thought about other ways to enjoy the live apart from the moves, head banging and reverse stage diving. We're the pioneers in the Visual Kei scene when it comes to using those lights.

Really?

Show: Aren't we?

Hiroto: In the past, the use of these lights were only limited to idol culture, so when we, a band started using them we were hated by the fans.

Show: We were bashed quite a lot.

Hiroto: But we started using them from around the time we made our 1st album.

Show: At that time, there weren’t any bands that were using those lights, but once we started using it other bands caught on too.

The “A jump” in 「RAINBOWS」 is also something that only this band does. Whose idea was that?

Show: That was from a live in Niigata or something.

Hiroto: We were talking about the X-jump2.

Show: During the MC.

Hiroto: And since we're A for Alice Nine.

Show: We do the A jump.

Hiroto: Did we start doing it there too?

Saga: At first we were joking around and did the X-jump. If I remember correctly. But the fans were like "Since it's Alice Nine shouldn't it be an A jump?". That's when it became the A jump.

I see. Finally, please give a message to the readers about the tour.

Saga: I think there are a lot of people who first saw our photo or read our interview from ViSULOG. If you come to our live, there will definitely be good-looking male fans since people always call us a good-looking band. So maybe you can meet new people there.

Show: That's your message?! (laughs)

Saga: No, I'm sure it's much better than going to “group dates”.

And on top of that, you have this good-looking band standing on stage.

Saga: We're not scary and we talk a lot, and we also have a comedian in our band (laughs). And we're the kind of band that at an event the other day, we were told that there wasn't enough time so when we had to choose between playing another song or talking more, we chose to talk more (laughs). We're a band with that kind of sense of humour.

Watching your live really gets the point across that though A9 is a good-looking band, they don't put on airs.

Saga: I think you can enjoy that "SMAP" feeling we have.

Nao: Since it's April, it's a new school year. Why don't you get a change of pace and come to our lives and get a good start to the year? Also, to those who haven't come to see us live yet, why don't you start a new relationship with us?

Tora: I think we're a really approachable band. Even though distance-wise we're far from the audience, we are also close to them. There are also cool parts in our live shows, so I hope you watch our lives with an open mind.

Hiroto: We're definitely a band that never gets told that we're boring, even by people who don't know us or people who came along with their friends. I think something will catch your attention. So I want people to come see us on tour and not hesitate to invite their friends along.

Show: We're actually a good band. I think that we will definitely be able to make all those involved in our band happy. It's okay to read opinions online, but if you actually come to our live show, we will make you happy. Do come see us. 1 Hama-chan is one half of the comedic duo "Downtown".

2 A jump that X-Japan fans do, by crossing their arms to form an "X" shape

#alice nine #A9 #alice nine translation #translation #MEMENTO #visulog #A9 Translation

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straykatfish · 5 years

Text

Demonstration of technical and visual skills – materials, techniques, observational skills, visual awareness, design and compositional skills.

I found four paintings by different artists using different styles and made sketches of these in soft pastels, the originals being oils, acrylics, and woodblock print. I translated these, adhering to a differentiating extent to the key approaches used by the four artists: stylised and linear (Hokusai’s The Great Wave [~1829]), blended (Turner’s Fishermen upon a Lee shore in Squally Weather [1802] ), naïve and almost abstract (Klee’s Golden Fish [1925]), and gesturally expressive (Hambling’s Bold Breaking waves series [~2012]). I began then to consider texts that might be relevant to each one and to look at typographic art, some of which I’d seen in a gallery in Brighton earlier. I was drawn back, though, to a poem I’d read by Marianne Moore called The Steeple jack (~1930) in which she writes, “Durer would have found a reason for living in a town like this … with eight stranded whales to look at.” I could not reconcile this with the art work I had chosen and nor could I see how I could use text in the very sophisticated way I had observed, a graphic rather than a drawing/painterly skill set.

As a result, I found myself deviating from my original plan and went on to work on sketches applying the different styles to reference photographs driven by sea scenes and whales. These I eventually amalgamated into one A1 image in which the four styles were represented in different areas. Finally, after a number of iterations at A1 size and some experiments at A2 portrait format, I developed the submission piece (A1 landscape) as a coherent whole but with small details that, for me, acknowledge the less foregrounded styles. As part of the process of composing the eventual image, I used the Fibonacci spiral to find the ‘golden ratio’ focal point then, using cut-outs from elements of earlier large scale sketches that I had printed out, found the placements and spaces I wanted.

The submission in its final form comprises images based on photographs of an exemplar of a huge wave in the north Atlantic, and whales surfacing to feed. The whole owes its expressiveness to Hambling’s energetic style, blended areas of foam to Turner, and some details in both the sweep of the wave and the foam to Klee and Hokusai. The large expanse of black gesso is unadulterated beyond a detail of dark red wash and is, for me, a triumph of leaving things alone instead of filling them up. Gesso is both textured and reflective so its surface changes depending on lighting and angle of view. For me, this seems to indicate that it is not a neglected unfinished space but one with its own dark movement and content.

Quality of outcome – content, application of knowledge, presentation of work in a coherent manner, discernment, conceptualisation of thoughts, communication of ideas.

This task permitted the use of any medium on any support of any size and I think it’s telling that, despite developing a fondness for soft pastels, I chose acrylics which would permit the large scale (A1) gestural marks I felt at least parts of the eventual piece merited. I wanted the height of the wave to be emphatic and the several iterations of the piece, including two I portrait orientation, were often about the position and relative size of the whales such that they would emphasise the scale by complementing each other. People know how big whales are and so if these were recognisable as such, the size of the wave is inescapable.

I have shown the evolution of the final piece in my contemporaneous blog posts where each image and associated discussion appears as a developmental stream, moving from the initial direct copying through the application of the individual styles to reference images and then to the eventual amalgamation of elements and blurring of styles. This was unplanned but grew, I believe, out of experimentation and productive extension of the principles of homage and progression.

Demonstration of creativity – imagination, experimentation, invention, development of a personal voice.

I really valued the copying process and I want to do more as it made me zoom in mentally to the techniques of the individual artists and what made them different. But I was also anxious not to attempt replication, not just because I lack the skills but because I am not those artists and developing my own voice is important. Amalgamation led to some backgrounding of the styles drawn from Hokusai and Klee as these did not sit well with the other two which I found could merge along their edges and in pockets within each other. In essence though, the piece travels right to left from Hambling-esque to Turner-esque with dots of reference to Klee and Hokusai within that broad area.

There are parts I like more than others; the leading edge of the wave for instance, and the turbulence around the whales. I have cropped these and put them in a folder accessed by my Echo Show devices which is a method I use to distance myself from a piece of work and see it as nearly as possible the way someone else might, and they still please me. I am less sure of some of the other parts, including the expanse of sea/sky on the left although I think that serves to balance the energy of the rest.

An intriguing observation is that I felt very present in this image; cold and small in the freezing environment I was trying to make. Is that the voice I’m trying to find? Being there in the image as I am when I write? Perhaps it’s an essential, and hopefully I will develop in time the skills and techniques to begin to do that justice.

Context reflection – research critical thinking (as evidenced in learning log).

I am not sure what to say here beyond the shock of finding copying the styles of four different artists using different media, different supports, and most likely a different dominant hand something I could do sufficiently well to feel I had accomplished something important in learning how art works. This was a revelation and I intend to do more of what I’m seeing as ‘copies+’ – someone else’s design, my interpretation or slant. I am beginning to understand a little of the debate about representation and what second order art work might be via the materials for UVC (2016) which I dropped as a qualifying course but still have available to read. But I’m not sure what term might apply to the use of an original representation re-presented in a different style.

My research I would define as exploration of different media – inks, soft pastels, acrylics, pen and brush, and devices to scratch at a surface to allow layers beneath to show or to give ink a channel into which to accumulate. I also went back to my original idea of four small pieces in different styles, illustrating a stanza from The Steeplejack, and made a series of drawings in inks and pastels on a piece of A3 watercolour paper, incorporating the text itself. Researching typographic art, I saw how sophisticated and graphics-driven it appeared to be, the lettering inventive and tailored but very precise so as to be clearly the vehicle for the image. What I produced is a essentially a prototype, an idea that requires its own process to develop for which I am not at all equipped.

Hokusai, K. The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1829-1833). The Met Museum

Turner, J.M.W. Fishermen on a Lee-shore in Squally Weather, (c 1802) Southampton City gallery.

Klee, P. The Golden Fish [also The Gold Fish] (1925). Paulklee.net

Hambling, M. image selected from the series Bold Breaking Waves (c 2012). My Modern Met.

Moore, M. (1932) The Steeple Jack. The Poetry Foundation.

All sites last accessed 18/01/2020.

Typographic art

https://mymodernmet.com/what-is-typography-definition/ This was the first set of examples of typography art I found and the quality is such that I realised I would be unable to produce anything remotely satisfying. Site accessed 17/01/2020.

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/heart58/typographic-artwork/ This is an annotated Pinterest collection with a wide variety of types, styles, and artists. Site accessed 17/01/2020.

Discussion of representation, resemblance, nesting, meta painting, and auto/allographics attributed to Michael Belcham, author of Understanding Visual Culture course materials, OCA 2016 pp 72-75

Blog posts

Part 5 – personal project preparatory work, digital seas

Part 5: personal project – introduction

Part 5: task remit, artist statement, supporting images – first thoughts

Part 5 – personal project, sketches and ideas #1

Part 5 – personal project; sketches ideas #2

Part 5: Personal project – expanding on sketches #3

NB I may edit this post prior to submission, but will not do so subsequently.

Part 5 self evaluation Demonstration of technical and visual skills - materials, techniques, observational skills, visual awareness, design and compositional skills.

#Part 5 #self evaluation

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howtosocializelove-blog · 5 years

Text

Corrective Relations: Bad Trip

An interview for the etc. gallery

Could you please introduce the video displayed at your exhibition at the etc. gallery?

I perceive the video showcased at the etc. gallery as an attempt to transfer a complex emotion, which accompanies a particular formative event. The title of the video is Bad Trip and the work is very atmospheric, even though – to some extent – it can also be perceived as narrative. There are different moods and environments, symbols and signs, premonitions and dreams that alternate in the video. I work a lot with the dynamics of cut and sound. Possibly, this video is the most surreal piece I have created so far. It was preceded by a work titled Corrective Relations: First Meeting (2018), which was inspired by a first therapy session with a psychologist, when one does not really know yet what his or her problem is. In Bad Trip, his or her unconsciousness strives to reveal the problem. First Meeting was based on a type of therapy, for which psychedelic drugs are used. This therapy is currently being developed for instance at the National Institute of Mental Health, where they work with the macrodosing of psilocybin carried out by the therapist (sitter), who guides the patient through the altered state of consciousness. It has had some achievement in the field of depression. It has been discovered that a depressed person tends to think in circles, which can be interrupted by psilocybin and other psychoactive drugs, because they can create new neurone connections in the brain. Corrective Relations: First Meeting was primarily inspired by these impulses and by the 1960s psychedelic culture. My intention was to evoke the sensations at the beginning of the psychedelic trip and the related ego dissolution. Therefore, Bad Trip is a sequel of the First Meeting, another part from a series. It is about falling into a trance which was induced by deep meditation. During this trance, unpleasant revelations from our unconscious come to the fore.

You spent several months in Indonesia. Did your stay influence the work Corrective Relations: Bad Trip?

It certainly did, even though I had already thought about the concept of the 'bad trip' even before I knew where I was going to do my internship. The previous video First Meeting ends with a transition from a state of ease to unease, from day to night, from a conformist zone to non-conformist – which is something that can happen even when you are travelling or staying abroad for a longer period of time. Hence, I would have made Bad Trip regardless of the location; I did not intend to shoot it in some particular place. That is why I cannot really say that the work clearly reflects my stay in Indonesia. Rather, the stay has confronted me with many questions. The environment is certainly present in the film but I was myself curious to see in what way will the locality influence it. It is also important to mention that I understand Bad Trip as a metaphor, a challenging process with a possibly positive result. However, by doing so, I certainly do not intend to say that my stay in Indonesia was a 'bad trip'.

So you knew you wanted to work with a certain therapeutic format but it was not tightened to any local tradition, is that right?

From the start I knew I wanted to make a 'darker' video as a counterpoint to the previous one. At the same time, I was aware that I had to be very cautious and sensitive when it comes to the use of footage shot in Indonesia. I understand it as an experiment because it was the first time I worked with imagery from a different culture. As a part of my residency at the INI Project, which precedes my exhibition at the etc. gallery, I would like to organise a tie-dye workshop during which we can discuss texts related to the topic of cultural appropriation – and not just from the field of theory but also fiction. I think that the issue of cultural appropriation is still unresolved for the local art scene – if it has ever even been discussed, which is why I find it important to discuss how or even whether it is possible to work with imagery from different cultures. It is apparent that my video was shot elsewhere, which is why I want to reflect on how this ‘otherness’ and my position might be interpreted.

Does your work comment on the phenomena, when people from the West travel to the East expecting to live through a transformative experience?

I am not sure, whether my work literally comments on this phenomenon. I perceive it as a particular symptom and am interested in its possible causes. In her essay Imaginary Orient, Linda Nochlin states that in the work of classical academic painters such as Gérôme or Delacroix (at that time it was called the ‘Near East’), the conception of the so-called Orient represented a way of juxtaposing a European rationality being yielded to corporeality, emotionality and animosity – those were the features associated with the faraway Orient. The representation of the Orient was supposed to depict a period that we, the more developed European civilisation, have already overcome. At the same, it also represented a fantasy realm of escape from that developed, structured, fully rationalised world. I was contemplating on how Indonesia nowadays functions as a land of fantasies – we have a certain preformed idea, which is then confronted with the lived reality and we either confirm our stereotypical ideas or overcome them. In this respect, I think encountering the 'other' is an important process. The problem is that such encounters are still very one-sided. It is usually white, financially secure Europeans, who need to figure out who they are. I do not really judge that, usually they do reach some kind of ‘enlightenment’. I am just more interested in what is behind all this. What causes the desire to encounter this kind of experience? The video presented at the etc. gallery balances between what is reality, a dream and my idea of the country – I am trying to critically confront my own experience.

Does your role in the video Bad Trip represent something more general? When you arrive to the country, do you represent a category with a certain history and connotations, such as the category of a white woman?

I intended to stylise myself as the ‘white European girl’, who needs to find her true self and was told by her friend that the Vipassana meditation method is great. The core of this technique is a ten-days long meditation in isolation. The third day of meditation is usually followed by a state, during which things from the unconsciousness begin to occur and one can objectively observe them. The first part of the video depicts me as that white girl, who hesitates, whether she should go through the Vipassana meditation and she is little afraid because it might not be a pleasant experience. That is why there is an interview with Dewi Filiana (Fili) at the start of the film. She and her husband Joshe are the owners of the accommodation Filistay in Yogykarta, where I lived during my stay in Java. Over the course of our conversation, Fili partly calms me down but toward the end kind of laughs at me, because all I actually want from her is an affirmation that everything turns out well. She tells me: “You made some decision and it is your issue, do not make me involved”, by which she means something like: “I wish I had your problems”. In the video, Fili might appear as an archetype of the mother-carer, but I was mostly drawing on the way she talked to me. In reality, Fili is a mother of five and she takes care of the family, household and people, who are accommodated at their place, which was also my case. The dialogue is fictional but based on our real conversations.

The moment the main protagonist of the film makes her decision and enrols in the Vipassana course, an approximately 20-minutes long lesson of Yoga Nidra begins. Yoga Nidra is a form of sleep meditation, during which one experiences an altered state of consciousness. In the last section of the film, the main protagonist attains the trance, which she no longer controls and has to go through it. In this moment, things from her personal and social unconsciousness start occurring to her, which also entails her role as a contemporary colonizer – someone, who comes to the foreign country to take something – be it mineral or spiritual resources or some kind of authenticity. I find it funny that this search for our true selves usually ends with the realisation that he or she stands for different values than those imposed by the system or surrounding environment. So maybe a mass meditation, an LSD or ayahuasca trip might help us to overcome capitalism – not as a solution but rather as a tool for realising the state of affairs. Steve Jobs also liked meditation. Being aware does not by necessity lead to change; for that to happen action or activity is required.

You mentioned you want to relay to the viewer a certain comprehensive experience through the exhibition. What is this experience based on?

I always draw on my personal experiences, but personal means social to me in the sense that my experiences are in certain respects a part of more general tendencies in society. So, I am interested in whether someone can identify with my experiences or feel close to them, whether it is only my feeling or also an experience of other people – whether it might be some form of a social pressure. I would appreciate it if a person that sees my video thought: “Yep, I know this…”.

Do you consider video to be the right means of sharing this experience?

I believe so, because I come from a generation that has a plenty of emotions related to a particular type of moving image. For instance, the subject of my video Love Manifesto (2017) was the existence of certain typical scenes that we automatically recognise as romantic. It is particular compositions, shots and gestures, such as when two people hold hands. These images are not intrinsically mine, I have seen them somewhere, I know them somehow and associate romance with them. It is actually some form of collective memory. But at the same time, I am aware that images like these constitute the reality we live in, which is why I want to work with them in a critical way. In comparison to performance, which I also pursue, video represents a more permanent and direct format that allows me to determine the focus of the viewer. For me, personally, video functions as an archive or a record of my thoughts.

When making a film, you often use your own archive of audiovisual materials, which you process based on a distinctive dramaturgy. In your last video, this dramaturgy guides viewers through individual phases of the formative experience. What should this bring them?

If the viewer withstands it – the video presented at the etc. gallery lasts one hour – I would be glad if he or she underwent some exceptional experience. My intention was that the video itself should be the formative event. Its effect might differ for every person, as well as the formative event itself. It should cause something, but what this something is, depends on the particular person. It is also likely that it doesn’t cause anything, right?

Is it important for you to consider the possible strategies of engaging viewers’ bodies to make their experience sensually complex? How does it influence the way you work with the gallery space?

I like when art exaggerates and when one always enters a different space. From my point of view, spectacular installations disrupt the habituated norms we have when thinking about spaces. If a gallery space is transformed in an inordinate way, I perceive it with a certain distance and understand it as another possible form of reality. In this respect, I was influenced by the gothic conception of a cathedral – the way they worked with space, colours and light. A visit to a gothic church was designed as a holistic experience. I like to enter a space that immediately captures me or carries me somewhere else, be it a gallery space or a Christian church with rich decoration. More generally, I am interested in the possibilities of altered or parallel reality.

Are there any artists working with immersive installations whose work you find interesting?

I conjure up for instance the Berlin Biennale in 2016, part of which was the installation of Cécile B. Evans titled What the Heart Wants, or the exhibition Welt ohne Aussen in Gropius Bau in 2018, which was devoted to immersive artistic installations since the 1960s. At this exhibition, it was the video Nightlife by Cyprien Gaillard I found the most interesting.

Do you think that the creation of an immersive and unusual environment, different from our everyday experience of utilitarian spaces, might encourage thinking about new modes of functioning?

I think it might. I remember for instance the installation of Lucio Fontana at the exhibition Welt ohne Aussen in Gropius Bau, which was composed of a pure white environment with rounded corners, where people could really feel as if they had wandered into a completely different place. The whole exhibition gave me a really lively impression and after I left it, I felt very joyful and enthusiastic about doing anything. It worked well in contrast to the Berlin Biennale happening at the time, which was rather moderate, intellectual and critical. I feel like these two approaches perfectly complement each other.

Are these two approaches not symptomatic of the difference between exhibitions, which reckon with the physical presence of visitors and their bodies, and exhibitions that force visitors to adopt an intellectual distance and a critical stance. Which approach do you usually adopt?

The presence of the visitor is important both for my videos and performances. When I am working on something, I ask myself whether I would enjoy watching it or not. I also think how I could make the visitor’s experience more pleasant and provide them with some comfort. I do not want to submit to the demand to make short videos, which is often raised because of the visitors’ attention span at group exhibitions. The solo exhibition at the etc. gallery is a good opportunity to try working with a longer format.

Why is the topic of altered states of consciousness so pertinent in your recent works? Do you consider it to be a possible way of observing with a distance the conditions of the world we live in?

The series on this topic started with Love Manifesto, which I literally intended as a kind of declaration in the spirit of the modernist manifesto. The following videos, including Corrective Relations, are a search for means based on which this manifesto could be lived up to through the dissolution of the ego or altered states of consciousness – through a transformation of the perception of reality. I think ideologies work in a similar way. Ideology to me consists of a set of schemes and codes, based on which we read the reality we live in. I understand altered states of consciousness, attained through drugs, meditation or dance (which should be the subject of my next work), as other possible forms of being. So, I do perceive them as a way of thinking the future.

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