#whedonesque

[vaguely-concerned]

as I am replaying origins -- a game which, to be clear, I love very VERY much -- I can't help but feel that people do don the rose coloured glasses on it a bit specifically when it comes to the range of dialogue options you're actually given to work with at any given time (something I've seen my fair share of silent vs. voiced protagonist discourse about over the years *smokes tired cigarette in survivor of a decade of DA tumblr*). like... there are a couple of situations where you're given a decent range of responses, but the vast majority of the time you have about three dialogue options, and often they're presented sort of like 'polite/bland/unprovoked near-cartoonish levels of assholery'. arranged like, y'know:

I am [BLANK]. It's an honor to make your acquaintance.

You can call me [BLANK].

How dare you speak to me. Fuck you and your family back five generations. I'm going to rob your mother's grave before your eyes.

(sometimes if you're real lucky you get the secret extra 'Something else/I'm bald/but I'm a dwarf!' option)

I'm not at all saying it's worse in that aspect than the other games (Dalish Inquisitor 'Who's Mythal' just entered the chat), but I do think it's worth considering that this might be a bit of a franchise original sin that has been present since the beginning, as indeed it is in most rpgs because making rpgs is real hard, and you notice it more with the dialogue wheel format than when the responses and questions you can ask are all laid out in a list together

[90stvqueen]

"Giles, I'm 16 years old. I don't wanna die." I've watched this show like five times but this scene still makes me weep

[afterthefeast]

the thing is i think steven moffat is. to be totally honest. an absolutely brilliant writer and the themes he explores are ones i personally find more compelling (the doctor as a fairytale figure & the show as overt fantasy, notably). but his gender politics makes me want to screeeeeeeam

[ink-asunder]

The way Dragon Age kneecaps the possibility for sentimentality will always make me furious tbh

[ustalav]

actually sometimes the problem with getting into zevran voice for me is that I have to sort through the bits of his dialogue that are just… soooo 2009 LMAO

I want to be in character but I also want to reject “we are so ridiculously awesome” 😔

[bloomfish]

your man's dialogue is whedonesque

[thefrogknight]

Madam web was bad but I dont think it was as bad as everyone was saying it

[quasi-normalcy]

I mean, don't get me wrong: Netflix is just as shit as Disney, as corporations go; but there's just something about Wish--seemingly so safe and soulless and focus-grouped with its generic, Rapunzel-faced, Disney Princess(TM) heroine and its paint-by-numbers plot and its Whedonesque, hang-a-lampshade-on-it humour, and its bland, inoffensive, Lin Manuel Miranda-pastiche musical numbers--losing a nomination to fucking Nimona, which is about as anarchic as mainstream entertainment media can be, featuring a protagonist who is about as far from being a Disney Princess as anyone can be, and which we all saw evolving organically in real time from someone's sketch on Tumblr. One of them feels like extruded film product; the other one feels like art.

[dynared]

There’s something to be said about an era where media wants to be as Whedonesque and inauthentic as possible that the internet sniffs out inauthenticity and attacks like rabid bloodhounds.

[fallingtowers]

so i'm watching dollhouse currently, and watching a non-buffyverse whedon joint has got me thinking about the phenomenon of whedonspeak. it's fascinating to me, because there have been plenty of moments in dollhouse where a character has said something patently whedonesque and i've been like :/ ahh yeah i see why people can't stand this style of writing. but on btvs, where the dialogue is generally a lot more heightened than on dollhouse, it really doesn't bother me at all (outside of a handful of really egregious examples).

the big reason for this, i think, and the one i always bring up when i'm defending the dialogue on btvs, is that on btvs it always felt like a tool of characterization. at first blush it may seem like e.g. buffy and willow have very similar voices, but the truth is it's all stylized, but in different ways. and btvs is so good at characterization (a lot better, i would argue, than dollhouse) that by the end of the show you know the characters' voices so well that you can clock it instantly when a line isn't 100% in character. it helps, i think, that btvs is patient zero for this kind of dialogue -- it became an established style of the show, but it wasn't yet an established style of writing in general (note that before it was known as whedonspeak, it used to be called "buffyspeak"). it works well because it's tailored to the tonal sensibilities of btvs, whereas if you just slap it onto any old story it's bound to feel incongruous and grating.

(also, as a sidenote, by and large, btvs knew exactly when to drop the banter. that's another thing -- these days whedonspeak as a concept is so bound up in people's minds [and with good reason!] with that particular brand of annoying mcu-ass ironic storytelling that has to mock itself at every turn for fear of coming across as self-serious. but btvs is a very heartfelt work of art! it [not always, but often] takes the emotions of its characters seriously! when buffy comes home and finds her mom dead on the couch, she doesn't go "well that just happened." you hit a certain threshold of dramatic weight and the whedonspeak falls away.)

there's another reason it's become so pervasive, though, i think, and it's one i kind of sympathize with. it's got to do with the demands of television as a medium. i think modern tv and film is the form of storytelling that has the biggest gulf between Showing and Telling. like, in a novel or a comic or whatever, you can just use narration to shed light on a character's thoughts or plans or whatever, but on screen you don't have that luxury, and these days voiceovers and flashbacks and stuff are generally regarded as being kind of graceless. so you've got Showing, which always runs the risk of being too vague and confusing, and you've got Telling -- and dialogue is really your only method of Telling -- which comes with a whole host of potential pitfalls. it might feel too on-the-nose, or too stiff and contrived. or it might commit the cardinal sin of 21st century entertainment: being Boring.

that's the thing, right. screenwriters are always trying to figure out how to do good exposition. one instance of dialogue i found grating on dollhouse is a scene where echo is dreaming, and the audience needs to be told she understands she's dreaming. so what do you do? in writing, you'd just describe her moment of realization, but on tv you can't do that. so instead, they have echo go, "oookay... i think we can all agree this isn't real." which like, if we view it as an attempt to content with the limitations of the medium, it makes sense! she's alone, so she has no reason to say "this is a dream," so we solve that problem by having her make a little joke to herself. but in practice, it just kind of falls flat.

in conclusion, the art of writing dialogue is one thing and the art of writing exposition is another, and neither is at all easy, and in screenwriting specifically they often dovetail in a particularly torturous way. we're still gonna be trying to figure this out when the sun burns out probably. i certainly don't have an answer. i do have a piece of advice though: watch buffy the vampire slayer. it's really good, and the dialogue is only a little annoying

[timemachineyeah]

Just imagining going back in time to 2012 me and being like “in ten years Whedonesque will have disavowed Joss Whedon and Mugglenet will have disavowed Jo Rowling” like imagine fucking up that bad. That’s not being canceled - you don’t lose your core fans by being canceled - that’s being so fucking repulsive that even those with the most to lose can no longer defend you. Fucking imagine the next edition of The We Love You Specifically Times there’s a front page editor’s letter that’s like “We don’t even like you. We kinda regret making this paper.”

[thedurvin]

Just watched “Cherry 2000” and LOVED it, a post-apocalyptic schlock adventure that admits it’s a ridiculous genre but with no obnoxious comic relief characters or even any Whedonesque snark, just a weird weird world that they all have to do their best with. A yuppie in the ruling class of a crumbling post-apocalyptic city accidentally kills his sex-bot and hires a tracker to help him find the Robot Graveyard in the wastelands to get a replacement but then the tracker is a fiery attractive lady and you can guess the rest, BUT the aesthetic is amazing—very Terry Gilliam-ish except the female characters get personalities and the ending makes sense.

In town he goes to a singles club but all hookups are marketed through your sex demo reels and your lawyers negotiate the terms of your hookup. (The sex lawyer is an early role by Lawrence Fishburne, FYI)

The warlord of the wastelands is a golf-loving Jack LaLanne type based out of an old motel and all his minions wear Hawaiian shirts and zinc oxide on their noses. All the ominous wasteland graffiti are his inspirational sayings, usually “be yourself and wear sunscreen”, and his wife is this bimbo housewife that happily makes sandwiches for the death mission and then once he dies gleefully takes his place as lord of the wastes

Really forms the bridge between the worlds of, say, Robocop and Demolition Man on the one hand and Mad Max and Tank Girl on the other. This is what’s happening on the West Coast while Judge Dredd is on the East. Escape From New York and/or LA could be in the same setting.

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 8/8/2023

theoretically seeing two apartments this afternoon so i am taking the date as good luck

listening

the asteroids galaxy tour's the sun ain’t shinin no more. this was apparently a very famous iPod commercial song? wasn't paying attention to general popular culture when the original iPods were coming out. i would attempt to classify this as somewhere between the doors and smash mouth. spotify.

bitches by tove lo (feat charli xcx, icona pop, elliphant, ALMA). is this a good song? eh. is it fun to scream-sing while navigating through packs of lifted pickups whose hoods are higher than the roof of my moderately-sized hatchback? yes. spotify

how'd i find these? really leaning hard on spotify autogenerated dance playlists these days.

-

reading

normal pair of books to read at the same time

diana biller's hotel of secrets was an odd one. you CANNOT take away from this section "oh tumblr user girlfriendsofthegalaxy hates consent" okay? i don't piss on the poor either. i had to really think about if i thought the sex scenes were jarringly modern and concluded no, they simply challenged my preconceptions of what a single mid-thirties woman in late 1800s vienna might get up to in a time when the best available methods of birth control were french letters. however, the lengthy discussion around consent and boundaries read as somewhat performative and out of place? or like a slightly different tone? than the rest of the actual sex scenes.

in many ways the romance was the b-plot to the hotel's inner workings and the international intrigue, which was fun. i enjoyed the a-plot enough to put a hold on biller's next romance, about a young american window in gilded age nyc. we'll see how that all shakes out!

i did not enjoy and did not finish chris miller's hefty pop history book on the history of microchip production and manufacture. got about a third of the way through. i think i most disliked his approach-- the technical style is very polished, one sentence flows into the next quite well, although we have very different opinions about the meaning of "intuitive" -- but we sit in very different seats watching the american political thunderdome. the way he presents his ideas is a bit jarring, bc it is an almost full-throated and uncritical endorsement of america's cold war diplomatic policies. i think many people would agree with me when i say those policies were not very good.

both of these have been on my holds list for months and i could not tell you the inciting incidents that made me place a hold.

-

watching

in my best friend's endless search for Things to Have on in the Background That Are Semi Child Friendly (or THBTASCF), i have viewed National Treasure (2004, dir. Turteltaub), Rush Hour (1998, dir. Ratner) and Rush Hour 2 (2001, dir. Ratner).

i cannot say i truly enjoyed any of these choices or that they have aged particularly well. national treasure has such an ominous looming of the whedonesque Well That Happened!!! that continues to infect movies.

also rewatched The Mummy (1999, dir. Sommers) bc i wanted a screenshot of the subtitles [YEEHAWING, GUNSHOTS] which is my Texas Adventure(TM) tag, but the subtitles on my pirate movie platform of choice are not that sophisticated. you'll simply have to take my word for it bc my dvd box set is still in storage.

-

playing

mainlining g/enshin impact. did not realize a whole nother goddamn country is being released next week. their every-six-weeks major content update schedule is batshit insane and i do not want to really think about the level of crunch happening over there.

the regions we have so far are legally-not-switzerland, not-china, not-japan, not-india, and we are going to not-france next. it has a real jules verne/twenty thousand leagues under the sea/steampunk vibe about it. look at this whimsical little deep-sea diver boy!

i have not enjoyed this past region (sumeru, legally-not-india) as much as the others. this may be due to the hiccup of seasonal depression i am experiencing. it may be bc this is the most Contiguous Landmass segment of the map and it's less segmented into individual regions than the other countries. it may be bc i have not spent quite as much time running around here as i have liyue (legally-not-china) which does feel genuinely comforting to run around. it may be bc the last time i played this game i still worked in the games industry and i still have residual brain weirdness about playing games.

i do appreciate their dedication to Big Fuckoff Trees tho.

-

making

fallow weeks. things are simply not percolating in time for yeehawgust, due to the agonies, and that's fine, i'm telling myself through gritted teeth.

[ustalav]

sometimes people just like see dao entirely through rose colored glasses. someone said it had whedonesque moments (like even the writers said they drew inspo from buffy) and now people are arguing

Like I’m so sorry but this is the game that has a dwarf npc actually saying “epic fail”

[the-seelie-court-official]

favorite thing to do when someone says some weird out-of-pocket shit in my replies is to open their blog in another tab, delete the reply, and block them

good luck spreading your weird debbie-downer vibes when you can't hijack my better posts with your stupid little not-even-funny whedonesque quips, douchecanoe

[floggingink]

these TV guide are going to kill me I know it. can you tell us about vampire slayer pls 🙏

ohohoho I like this one...Hawkins is the Hellmouth, the Hideout is the Bronze, and Chrissy is the Slayer

Eddie's a grimy, grungy, demobat-scarred vamp working for Vecna (ie. the Master) in the vein as it were of Spike. Due to the laws of super-nature and his personality Eddie grosses Chrissy out but also holds an undeniable allure, kind of like you might still find the mangled corpse of a motorcycle accident victim hot if his dying words were like "Show me your tits"

Due to the convoluted lore of the only weapon that could kill him or the Slayer, Vecna needs Eddie to determine whether Jason, the Slayer's jock-prep bf, truly loves her...

At some point due to plot Chrissy needs something from Eddie and the only thing he says he'll trade her for is for her to let him suck some of her blood. (He is by now fatally in love with her but can reveal nothing.) And she's like no you're vile. And he's like then sayonara sweet cheeks, etc., until it is determined she'll let him eat her out bc she's on her period. She ties him to the headboard and rides his face in her cheerleader uniform. Soon she's on her back and he's going to such town on her as has never been performed

A Whedonesque ending, eventually...

Here's a bit of him being like haha no I'm cool after he eats her blood out of her pussy:

Beneath the mirror in which he didn’t appear the sink was the shape of a seashell and pale pink. On either side of the tap was a cup holding her toothbrush and a soap pump scented with warm vanilla sugar. He sat crossed-legged on the fluffy blue rug at its base, splayed his shaking fingers, and licked straight up his palm. The blood was dry and tacky. He had to drag his tongue up the same path four or five times until it made a track. Then the same stripe to the left of the first and then to the right and then ninety degrees sideways the same pattern against the grain. He put his thumb in his mouth and sucked it clean, then his index finger. He had to curl his tongue hard around his fingertips to get the blood out of his cuticles. To get it out of the webbing between his four fingers he had to rub it off with his other thumb and then had to suck it off that one. He lapped it off the back of his hand like a horrifying mimicry of a tomcat and sucked it off the notch of bone at his wrist. When it was all gone some microscopic film of it was still there, he could smell it, so he got up on his knees, vibrating, and batted for the little thing to pull to stop up the drain, then put his hand under a stream of warm water and rinsed it off. He turned off the faucet and rubbed his face clean from the basin until it no longer felt shrink-wrapped with blood then with his hands on the edge of the sink he bent at a jagged angle and drank the water. When the pool was gone he refilled it, rubbed the edges of the porcelain until the faint stain was gone and drank that, and when that was gone he craned his head into the depths and licked the sink. Beneath the warm wash of water and dregs of toothpaste mint and sugar soap and rusted metal stopper were atoms of it still: her blood her blood her blood.