#when you’ve been doomed by the narrative since your conception

[docidoci]

PoR JP/EN script differences overview: (Part 3) ch #10 - ch #11

→ Main Index — Begin reading here ←

Chapter 10.

1) Ranulf explains the use of "human", so a note on that. As a curseword, "Human" = ニンゲン (ningen), it is phonetically the same as the normal "human" but written in kana to stand out. However, "sub-human" is originally "Half-beast" = 半獣 (hanju). That explains why Ike initially doesn't consider it an offensive term, which is fairly impossible in the translation.

2) Narrative introduction again implies that Crimea is still having a dependent position to Begnion, while the localisation adds a lot of words to say that they are currently independent.

JP: The support of the suzerain Begnion was absolutely essential for the rebirth of the Kingdom of Crimea, which had been born as a domain of the Empire.

3) Meeting Volke. Where the original is reasonable, the localisation confuses measures of time to a great effect.

EN!Volke: Stop into any tavern along your way. Tell the barkeep you've need of a fireman. You'll see me within an hour.

JP!Volke: Any tavern in a little town will do. Just tell the owner, 'I need a fireman'. I'll be there within a week.

Volke himself indeed comes off as abrupt and rude to the point where even Soren calls him rude.

4) Kieran is mostly the same person. He is slightly less wordy, like for instance he isn't describing torture to Brom, but his attitude is accurate.

Chapter 11.

A lot of subtle foreshadowing is going on here… or should have been going on.

1) A little worldbuilding note. It's not super important, but we are introduced to the concept of Kingdom of Crimea being non-monolithic and the possibility of internal conflict, even if it's not happening until RD.

EN!Soren: Perhaps this is due to the temperament of its rulers, but the country hasn't seen serious warfare for centuries.

JP!Soren: Perhaps it is because of the gentle temperament of the royal family that there are few conflicts between territories, and there have been no major — country-wide — wars for hundreds of years.

2) Talking about Soren right after he gives the famous "no sympathy" speech (which is translated very well).

EN!Titania: Soren's a very empathetic young man. The emotions of this place may have proven to be too much for him.

EN!Ranulf: Ignoring impending doom because you cannot prevent it... Fatalism is by nature a disheartening beast. Well, for all those born with nothing, there are those born with everything. Perhaps those who never notice the difference are the ones we should envy.

Some really weird choices here that seem to fit badly with the rest of the script. What is actually happening?

First, Titania has the role of implying Soren's non-beorc perceptiveness.

JP!Titania: …Senerio is a sensitive kid, so he can't stand this kind of atmosphere, right?

After that, Ranulf, in fact, continues talking about him being Branded. When you know that the Branded are considered "born without a blessing", everything he says becomes clear.

JP!Ranulf: Sometimes, even if we know something we pretend not to know, because we can't do anything about it…… I wonder if those who were born without a blessing are envious that those who were born blessed live their lives without realising it?

Ike: What's that supposed to mean?

Ranulf: Oh, I was talking to myself. Pay me no mind.

And now it becomes natural that Ranulf doesn't want to explain anything to Ike, since he sort of "pretends not to know" as well.

3) Brom ☆

Small, but strange choices erase the foreshadowing that he is a dad to Meg and give him parents instead.

EN!Brom: We never had much money, so my parents gathered some stones from our farm back home and put them in this leather pouch. It's not much to look at, but it means a lot to me. Every day, I take them out and talk to them like they're my family.

"How is everyone?" "I'm out here doing the best I can." "Don't worry. I'll be home soon."

JP!Brom: We're poor, so I have a worn-out pouch full of pebbles that each of us picked up... That's all. But for me, it's very important. I take it out and talk to them every day.

"How is everyone?" "Dad is doing his best here." "I'm gonna make it back alive."

4) Ranulf talking about Nasir.

EN!Ranulf: You'll be met there by a man with a dusky pallor.

JP!Ranulf: There's a dark-skinned man called Nasir waiting for you with a boat.

The unfortunate word choice makes him say that Nasir is sickly greyish in complexion instead of merely dark-skinned. Again, it's not super important, but really baffling…

~~TBC~~

[thrillingdetectivetales]

Author Interview

I was tagged by the lovely @ianandmickeygallavich1​ 

(Throwing a read more in here because this bitch got LONG!)

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

I have 136 works across 45 fandoms, just to give you an idea of what a shameless fandom hopping multishipper I actually am.

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

My total WC is 676,938.

3. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

By a Thread, By a String, By a Rope The Magnificent Seven (2016), WIP, Kudos: 987

Matinee Suits, 5125 words, Kudos: 947

Careful Application of External Pressure Grimm, WIP, Kudos: 876

This Night Ain’t for the Holy Man The Magnificent Seven (2016), 5578 words, Kudos: 875

Catch It Like a Butterfly Leverage, 1497 words, Kudos: 658

4. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I try really hard to respond to every comment, but sometimes they pile up and the anxiety of seeing the number gets to me and I just mark them all read and start over with a clean slate. So, apologies if I skipped you. I promise it was nothing personal, just me trying to practice some fumbling self-care.

5. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Probably Curtain Call, which is a Roy Harper-centric DCU fic exploring his feelings in the aftermath of the 2015 Red Hood/Arsenal run.

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Pretty much all my fic have happy endings, so I’m not sure which one is the happiest. I feel like that’s a subjective question, haha.

7. Do you write crossovers? If so, what is the craziest one you’ve written?

I do write crossovers! I love crossovers and crack fic premises and wild “okay but just go with me here” scenarios, haha. They’re the most fun to figure out, imo. The craziest one I’ve ever written is probably the Shameless-meets-Ducktales crossover I did for Tumblr Jukebox a little while back, though the one I picked up as a pinch hit for the Crossworks Fandom Exchange just last month, crossing over Brooklyn Nine-Nine with Dragon Age: Inquisition is definitely a contender for that spot.

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

I received a couple of snide comments on a Matt/Foggy Daredevil fic I did under a different name back when I was in college, but that’s about it.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

I do! I don’t think I’m particularly bad at it, though I do find it very difficult. I’m not sure what the “what kind” question is asking, exactly, but I actually do a smut writing challenge called Monday, Slutty Monday that includes a list of kinks I’m willing to write. You can give it a gander here, if you’re curious.

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

No, though I have had someone ask if they could use the concept of the lover’s noose from By a Thread, By a String, By a Rope for their original works. I said no, largely because it’s a concept I intend to use in my own original works, though I welcome transformative, not-for-profit works to remix or reimagine or play in any of my sandboxes.

11. Have you ever had a fic translated?

I have! I was lucky enough to have Doomed to Play, a Magnificent Seven werewolf/vampire AU, translated into Russian several years back!

12. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

I have not! I am extremely interested, though, as I’m a huge fan of old-school, forum-style roleplaying and I really, really love collaborating on projects, so if you’re interested, please feel free to reach out to me and ask! I can’t promise anything, because I’m lucky enough to live a very full and busy life, but who knows!

13. What’s your all-time favorite ship?

I am not really sure that I have an all-time favorite ship. I have a few oldies but goodies that I revisit pretty regularly, including Harry/Draco, which was baby’s first ship, and Fraser/Kowalski of Due South fame, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a true OTP.

14. What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

God, so many of them, haha. I’m terrible about finishing WIPs because I have a very short attention span, but I’m not fully willing to write any of them off because I do periodically poke at the GDocs for a lot of them, even if they haven’t been updated in years. The only one I truly don’t foresee finishing is So Let Us Not Be Lonesome, which is a Magnificent Seven ghost/medium AU, and the only reason I don’t foresee finishing it is because I hope to one day revisit it as an original work.

15. What are your writing strengths?

I’m pretty routinely cheered in comments for writing true-to-character dialogue, really lush sensory descriptions, and tempting food descriptions, so I’ll go with those.

16. What are your writing weaknesses?

I tend to overwrite and I really fucking love adverbs, haha. I was a big reader of doorstopper fantasy in my youth, which tend to be really, really purple in their prose, so I lean in that direction. I have a lot of betas whose opinions I trust tell me I go too purple quite often, but I love my descriptive language so I’m not sure it’s a weakness I’ll ever overcome. Let’s call it a stylistic choice, for now, haha.

17. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I do it all the time, and I really enjoy it in other folks’ fic, so long as the dialogue is something that a non-speaker can still understand from context. I think I probably wasn’t great with that when I first started writing Spanish-speaking characters into my fic, but I like to think I’ve gotten a better handle on it since then.

18. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

I think it was honestly Ronin Warriors, an anime that used be on Cartoon Network’s Toonami block way back in the day. I had a lengthy and involved Mary Sue self-insert fic that got be like, a few hundred pages long, though it never saw the light of day.

19. What’s a fandom/ship you haven’t written for yet but want to?

The two currently at the top of my list are Ted Lasso and 9-1-1, though I can hardly watch a piece of media these days without seeing something in it I want to explore that the creators didn’t have the time or inclination to explore, or that didn’t fit their narrative.

20. What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

Oh, this is so hard! I honestly don’t know. I don’t tend to go back and re-read my own fic too terribly often, so I’m really not sure, but I will say that one of the ones I think is underrated is The Lady and the Knife, which is a Luther/BBC Sherlock fic that came about because I got tired of Sherlock stans claiming his behavior should be forgiven because he was a high-functioning sociopath and thought it would be fun to see what happened if he ever crossed paths with someone who was actually a high-functioning sociopath and not just a dick. (Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the early BBC Sherlock and some of the fic is chefkissingfingers.gif, I just really hate it when people require their characters to be morally upright at all times. Let them be villains! Let them be dicks! Don’t apologize for finding that interesting!)

I am tagging @thesummoningdark, @blahblahblahclintnickiscanon, @townhulls, @ksansart @rubinecorvus @persipneiwrites @irolltwenties and anyone else who feels like participating! I have a lot of mutuals who write fic and I’m really bad at remembering everyone’s various handles, so please, if you want to participate but I didn’t tag you, go ahead and do it and @ my ass anyway!

Luh ya bbs.

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #497

Top Ten PC Games No One Talks About Anymore

Blimey, Quake is rather good, isn’t it? Have you heard about it? I really hope so, because it’s only twenty-five years old. I mean, Jesus. What’s up with that? Quake is meant to be the future. It’s full of true-3D polygonal texture-mapping and real-time dynamic light-sourcing. Fancy it being a quarter of a century old. That’s ridiculous. “Old” is for things like, I dunno, Space Invaders or The Godfather or I Wanna Hold Your Hand. Stuff that our parents heard about before we were born. It’s not – it’s absolutely not – used to describe something that people bought 3D accelerator cards for. It’s not used to describe a game that popularised online gaming.

But old it is, getting silver anniversary cards and everything. No longer the angry, hungry young tiger, devouring its ancestors and growling at upstart rivals like Duke Nukem 3D – sure, you’ve got non-linear levels, interactive scenery, and toilet humour, but we’ve got grenades that bounce with real physics – Quake is now an aged beast of the forest, resplendent, battle-scarred, weary with gravitas. Quake is the game that shaped the now, but it does not represent the future anymore. In fact, arguably its greatest rival – Unreal – is the game with the lasting, living legacy, its progeny building the next generation of gaming with one of the most popular and impressive engines around, the framework underpinning everything from Gears to Jedi to Fortnite. Quake blew us all away, but arguably it ceded the conflict, secure in its status as one of the most important and influential games of all time. Quake II got plaudits for actually having a proper story and an engrossing single-player campaign (and coloured lighting!), and its immediate descendants such as Half-Life changed the nature of what FPS games could do, but in a funny way it feels like Quake has long since retired. A sleeping titan. It got old.

So it’s great that they rereleased it on modern systems! The version of Quake released last month is basically the game I remember, but tarted up a little around the edges, with texture filtering and dynamic shadows and other stuff that I couldn’t manage on my Pentium 75 back in the day. It plays great – it’s slick as anything, and you go tearing round the levels like a Ferrari with a nail gun, blasting dudes and ducking back around a corner before you get hit with a pineapple in the face. It’s the first game I’ve played in a long, long time that evokes the feel of classic PC first-person shooters of that era – which, y’know, kinda makes sense as it is a first-person shooter of that era. But that style of fast-paced run-and-gun, circle-strafing gameplay has gone out of fashion now, with FPS games usually favouring slow, methodical, tactical combat, or larger-scale open-world warfare usually involving vehicles. Whether it’s a straight-up no-frills blaster like Quake, or a game that takes you on more of a linear, narrative journey, like Quake II, or even just a multiplayer-focused arena shooter, like Quake III Arena, it does feel like a dying artform, like a style of gameplay that could do with a resurgence (and, to be fair, there are games on the horizon that look like they’re harking back to the era, so that’s cool).

But it’s not just first-person shooters like Quake that I feel have slipped from gaming’s shared consciousness. Maybe it’s my age (it’s definitely my age) but there seems to be quite a lot of games that were a big deal twenty or so years ago that are utterly forgotten now, whereas some – Doom, Duke Nukem, Command & Conquer, Age of Empires – are often namechecked or rebooted (even before the full-on 2016 reboot, Doom must have been one of the most re-released games of the last thirty years). But there are lots of others where sometimes I feel like I’m the only one that remembers it. And that’s where this list comes in: inspired by the excellent re-release of the Quake franchise, here are some other great PC games of that general era that I feel still need shouting about, even if I’m the only one doing the shouting. Maybe they don’t all need a full-on remaster or whatever, but it’d still be nice if they got a bit of modern gaming love.

No One Lives Forever (2000): coming at a time when most FPS games were still Doom-style blasters with little in the way of real plot, NOLF was different: stylish and funny, genuinely well-written (as in the dialogue), with interesting objective-based missions and a cool female protagonist. It skirted similar ground to Bond and the then-white-hot Austin Powers franchise. Two games were made and then, as far as I’m aware, it evaporated into a mess of tangled rights, hence no sequels or remakes. A shame, because it was great.

MDK (1997): the next game from the people who made the multimedia phenomenon that was Earthworm Jim, MDK was a really cool slice of sci-fi style, all sleek level design and intriguing features. It had a supremely bonkers plot which bled through into a game with a sense of humour, but mostly it was the run-and-gun gameplay and innovative use of a scoped weapon – possibly (don’t quote me on this) the first sniper rifle in a videogame. An even wackier sequel followed, but despite its cult status, that was it.

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Klingon Honor Guard (1998): it’s probably fair to say that Star Trek has not had as many great videogames as Star Wars, perhaps because Trek’s historically straightlaced earnestness just didn’t translate as well as bashing someone up the chops with a laser sword. Honor Guard shook things up by casting you as a Klingon, showering levels with pink blood and going Full Worf. It was the first game to licence the Unreal engine, and had a cool level where you walked along the outside of a ship like in First Contact. Also: shout out to the Voyager game, Elite Force (2000), which was another really good FPS set in the world of Trek, with intriguing gameplay wrinkles as you fought the Borg. It also let you wander round the titular starship between levels. Trek deserves more quality action games like these.

Earth 2150 (2000): the nineties on PC really saw RTS games come down to those who liked Command & Conquer or those who liked Warcraft, but as the decade drew to a close other titles chased the wargame crown (including Total Annihilation, which would have made this list, except I feel like the Supreme Commander franchise is a sequel in all but name). 2150 was notable for its Starcraft-like mix of three factions with contrasting play styles, and its use of 3D graphics and the ability to design and build weapons of war that could lay waste to armies and bases with spectacular results. I think the genre has ossified into something more hardcore, and this was probably an inflex point where idiots like me could still get a handle on things.

Midtown Madness (1999): Microsoft has a history of building up great racing franchises and then abandoning them, but their “Madness” line of games in the late nineties/early noughties was terrific and much-missed. Back when tooling round actual 3D cities was still new and exciting, this was a no-holds-barred arcade racer, with some gorgeous shiny chrome effects on the cars, and very nippy handling. It was great fun smashing up VW Beetles and the like. It was surpassed, I guess, by Project Gotham on the Xbox, and sadly the whole franchise was then forgotten, despite the ascendent Forza franchise mostly shunning city driving.

Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines (1998): part tactical war game, part puzzler, Commandos was famous for its gorgeously intricate graphics and its difficulty – I mean, it was way too hard for me. But its beautiful top-down design and its slow, methodical gameplay was compelling, as you evaded Nazis and solved missions with a team of unique units with special skills. Sequels followed, and western spin-off Desperados, but there’s not been a true follow-up for quite some time, despite promises; and few games have echoed its style or look.

The Pandora Directive (1996): okay, so really this is just a placeholder for an entire subgenre of game that appears to have been forgotten: interactive movies. I know, there are flirtations with this from time to time; and many of these games featured obtuse puzzles and relatively little gameplay strung between FMV scenes. Pandora was great though; a first-person 3D game with loads of old-school adventure aspects, as well as FMV, it was a noir-tinged detective story but set in the future. The Tex Murphy series (of which this was the fourth instalment) has had sequels – the most recent one was sadly cancelled only this year – but many other games of a similar ilk, such as Phantasmagoria and even Wing Commander – have fallen by the wayside. With in-engine graphics now allowing the fluidity and expression of cinematic renders of old, shooting movie inserts doesn’t seem like it’s worthwhile; but I still always loved a point-and-click game that featured digitised actors milling about. Toonstruck, anyone?

Marathon (1994): before Halo there was… Marathon! Back when I used to lug my Pentium round my mate’s house so we could play different games on different machines side-by-side, he’d bang on about this Mac-first series of games, like Doom but better, with an intricate plot and complex levels. And y’know what? He was actually onto something. There’s a style and an earnestness to the Marathon franchise, along with many concepts that would be refined in Halo years later. With Bungie now seemingly committed to Destiny, and Halo in Microsoft’s hands, I’m not sure what could possibly become of this, their forgotten FPS forebear, especially as it shares so much DNA with its offspring.  

Outlaws (1997): LucasArts are famous for two things, really: their Star Wars games and their adventures. But they made loads of other stuff too – including this intriguing Western shoot-em-up. Back when Western games were rarer than Western movies (which were rare at the time), this quirky and difficult cowboy-em-up saw you rounding up outlaws in typical oater locations such as saloons, trains, and mines. It had great music and a really intriguing set of weapons, including (don’t quote me on this) the first sniper rifle in a game. Sadly Outlaws’ success could be described as “cult” and it never got a proper sequel. and, weirdly, despite the success of Red Dead Redemption, we’ve never had a bit Western-themed FPS again. Which is really odd.

Soldier of Fortune (2000): I pondered whether to include this one, as if I’m honest I’m not sure I want this licence brought back. But I can’t deny the game was a huge deal and has seemingly been forgotten. A relatively gritty and realistic combat game with a huge variety of excellent real-world weaponry, its big hook was its incredibly detailed damage modelling, that could see you blowing limbs off enemies, or splitting open heads, or disembowelling them. Whilst its OTT violence made headlines, the granularity of its systems meant you could be more tactical, shooting weapons out of hands. But really its biggest controversy should be its association with a big old gun magazine.

There are many, many other games that nearly made the list - I almost had a Top Ten of just FPS games, for instance. Little Big Adventure was here, till a sequel was announced the other day. Hexen and Heretic I think still have a place in FPS history. Toonstruck, although without a sequel, was only really a cult hit at the time, and I feel the people who’d love it already know about it. I do tend to overthink these things, y’know.

So maybe not all of these could make a comeback, but all the same I don’t think they should be forgotten, and it does make we wonder what games will fall by the wayside twenty or more years from now. That game about the big green space marine dude in a mask – what was that called again…?

[dyinginlava]

I posted 15,691 times in 2021

773 posts created (5%)

14918 posts reblogged (95%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 19.3 posts.

I added 3,516 tags in 2021

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Longest Tag: 139 characters

#‘now referring to @dreamsclock’s essay on c!dreams intentions if we assume his interpretation is correct that leads to a very interesting—‘

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

Wait I just realised the best way for Wilbur Lore to fit into canon and also be very funny.

Wilbur ‘raised by an immortal’ Soot just cannot tell what other people’s ages are. Oh that guy is... tall? That’s an adult right? But no wrinkly bits, that’s gotta be early 20s right?

And then no one ever corrected him.

551 notes • Posted 2021-03-24 22:01:39 GMT

#4

You know what, I’m just going to say this because I’m still annoyed at it even after so long.

I hate Tommy killing Dream twice at the disc confrontation.

Now I know this is because I’m someone who puts a lot more value in the concept of honour than a lot of others, but killing someone who’s surrendered (which Dream had, he’d dropped his things) just isn’t... it’s not something you do. If someone has surrendered, you’ve won, it’s over. Anything more is just unnecessary cruelty.

This becomes more clear when you look at Tommy’s first two deaths to Dream: the first was during a war, a war that he signed up to be in with full knowledge he might end up killing or being killed. That’s an honourable death! The duel is honourable! It’s fair.

Dream’s deaths to Tommy? Those aren’t fair, those aren’t honourable. They’re just cruel.

580 notes • Posted 2021-03-13 20:03:53 GMT

#3

C!Quackity as a character is really interesting in a storytelling sense, because he’s basically always been doomed to fail by the narrative.

He couldn’t win going against Wilbur in the election because Wilbur was a protagonist, he couldn’t become President even though he got the most votes in the coalition because Schlatt was the antagonist, he couldn’t win against Dream with Mexican L’Manberg/El Rapids because Dream had to be defeated by Tommy (since they were each other’s protagonist and antagonist), and he couldn’t beat Technoblade because he’s the protagonist of his own story.

With the knowledge he’s going to be having some serious lore soon, I’m very curious about where his character will go from here. We’ve already seen villains who embrace that title in Wilbur and Dream, will he do the same in an effort to just win for once? Or will he try and become a protagonist instead?

622 notes • Posted 2021-02-19 15:47:54 GMT

#2

Fanon Enderboo: Mind controlled/manipulated, would murder Michael, doesn’t express emotion, extremely suggestible

Canon Enderboo: mainly concerned with getting rich and causing chaos, vandalises posters and blows stuff up for fun, always checks up on Michael, extremely persuasive

1140 notes • Posted 2021-04-26 09:42:44 GMT

#1

I think not enough people are really talking about the fact Wilbur said he didn’t want to be brought back to life. Plot-wise I don’t think it would make much sense for him not to come back to life at this point but... yeah you guys definitely aren’t getting the heartfelt reunion vibes you’re hoping for out of the resurrection

1583 notes • Posted 2021-02-25 10:34:46 GMT

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[rockthistowninsideout]

Never Too Late For A Leap Of Faith

Part 2

Part 1 here

Five times Taichi only feels the presence of Digimons and one time he actually meets them (again).

Words: 1401 Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Tags: 5+1 Pairings: Taichi Yagami/OC, Sorato, Jyoumi

Inspired by this youtube video talking about how the end of Kizuna fits into the narrative of the Epilogue in 02, posted by TheDigiKnow. It’s in my opinion a thorough and yet personal analysis.

   The last time Taichi had been this nervous was before his final exam in his studies. He stood before a sleek black door on one of the highest floors in a governmental skyscraper in Tokyo’s heart, Roppongi. Behind the door sat a panel of the Japanese government, wanting to hear his expertise. He wondered if Koushirou was already in there. After another deep breath, telling himself to just screw it, it wouldn’t be any better if he stood here for another minute or two, he knocked.

   “Ah, Yagami-shi.” The prime minister bowed to him, as did everyone else, when he entered.

   Taichi did his best to compose himself and not get all flustered by the honour of the prime minister knowing his name.

   “Hello Taichi-san”, someone said at the other end of the table and Taichi noticed to his relief that it was Koushirou already standing beside a holographic screen.

   Taichi bowed to everyone around, then proceeded towards Koushirou. He put his briefcase onto a desk and extracted his notes. He looked at them but then he realized he wouldn’t need them. Nodding to Koushirou, he said, after a few welcoming words “The public has known Digimons mostly as, at best, a nuisance and at worst as a life-threatening force. But we know that Digimons also have a different side. They are caring, loving, and loyal companions who want nothing but the best for humans.

   Notice how I said ‘who’? Rationally looked upon, they might be only comprised of data, just like a music or a text file. But they are much more. Imagine the agony you might feel when a CD with your favourite song breaks or a very important text file gets deleted. Now exponentiate that to the grief you feel when losing a loved one, maybe even finitely. This is how we felt when we had to let our Digimon partners go all those years ago because the nature of human-Digimon bond was a doomed one, it was only temporary. Something we lose when we grow up because Digimons make the most sense when you are a child.

   And as an adult, you lose sight of what is important in life. You think you have cracked the meaning of life, working hard and getting married – and while I don’t want to disparage marriage or family, not at all – we treat it like it’s some kind of competition. That way, though, carefreeness, our sense of fun, and the lightness of just being and living get lost. But when you have children of your own, you start seeing the world again through the eyes of a child, and slowly that lightness returns.

   To make a long story short, we as humans are better off having a good connection to Digimons instead of condemning them as monsters. They preserve our childlike side and add to our social value. This is not about being chosen for a great task, like Izumi-kun and I had been, but about living peacefully together with a species that is much like us humans: Every Digimon is an individual with a fully-rounded personality.

   We are here to propose diplomatic relations to the Digital World with the long-term plan of finding a Digimon partner for every human, if they wish to have one. Izumi-kun will now introduce you to his network of DigiDestined that he’s been running for nearly fifteen years now and that shows that not only peaceful connections between humans and Digimons are possible, but also between humans themselves.”

   If Taichi had thought the anxiousness he had while standing in front of that office door had been bad, well, he’d blatantly been wrong. He had to suppress the urge to vomit while he watched Koushirou typing furiously on a holographic keyboard. It didn’t make any sense to him, though. As long as he knew Koushirou, there had been the steady rhythm of his fingers flying over the keys, a soft hammering, the sound of knowledge and curiosity. But now it was only silence, as if someone had muted reality.

   With a final enthusiastic hit, a picture appeared on the floating screen floating that was painfully familiar. A crystal blue lake, nearly perfectly circular, glittered in the sunshine, surrounded by a dense wood. In the middle of the lake was an island with the most peculiar yet reassuring sight around: a gleaming tram wagon, empty but for a few odd creatures looking like they’d been sitting there for eternity.

   Taichi looked down when he felt someone take his hand.

   “Let’s go together”, Koushirou said smilingly.

   On the other side, he felt another person’s presence. Yamato hadn’t taken his hand but his upper arm was brushing Taichi’s. Taichi inhaled deeply, then nodded. It was time.

***

   “Taichi-san?”, a hardly-surprised, childish voice asked.

     Taichi took a deep breath but he didn’t turn yet. It was too good to be true, it was what he had dreamt of since their disappearance after the Eosmon incident but he was wiser as to put too much hope into this voice. After all, it could be a hallucination his wishful mind had made him think.

   “Taichi-san, do you not want to say hello to me?”, the voice asked again. Someone tugged at his hand.

  Finally he looked down. A tug at the hand could hardly be imaginary, could it?   Many teeth greeted him, then the mouth closed and he looked into Agumon’s blinking blue eyes. “Taichi-san, you’ve finally come back to me!”, Agumon exclaimed and held out his arms.

   Taichi laughed while he cried, crouching down before his Digimon partner. “Yeah, it took me a while, a lot of things have happened.” He embraced Agumon. “Are the others with you? Because we’ve all been waiting so long. Biyomon and Gomamon and Palmon and Gabumon and Tentomon and Patamon and Gatomon. They’re all here.” Agumon stepped away and made a sweeping gesture. The Digimons came forward, their gazes flickering between Taichi and the group of people standing a little distance behind him.

   “Yes, we’ve all come back. And we want you to meet some special persons.” Taichi wiped away the tears with the back of his hand, then got up and beckoned the rest towards him with a wave.

   “Oh, Sora-san”, Biyomon exclaimed and excitedly fluttered forward, straight into Sora’s arms.

   Yamato and Gabumon looked at each other amicably; they’ve never been much for words but understood each other perfectly nonetheless.

   “Jou-senpai, I hope you’ve been eating well and not studying too hard while I was away”, Gomamon greeted his partner after he’d waddled over towards him.

   “Kouhirou-han, still carrying your tablet with you? I’m glad you haven’t changed a bit.” Tentomon buzzed excitedly around Koushirou’s head.

   Mimi and Palmon were running towards each other, screaming with joy, but actual words were not decipherable.

   “Takeru-kun, Takeru-kun, why haven’t you come earlier? I was so bored without!” Patamon flapped towards Takeru, then settled comfortably onto his head after Takeru had taken off his sailor’s cap.

   A solemn but smiling Gatomon stood before Hikari, paw extended. “I’ve been keeping this”, he said.

   Hikari took the whistle gently, a flood of memories rushing through her mind, then she blew it mightily.

   As if they had agreed on that as a sign, the remaining people shuffled forward, most were visibly nervous.

   “Kana-chan! Oh, Kana-chan, it’s been so long!” somebody suddenly yelled from the edge of the forest. A red birdlike Digimon, with a green beak and yellow coat pattern on his belly, waddled as fast as he could towards Taichi’s wife who’d been leading Hotaro to the Digimons.

   Now she dropped to her knees, crying “Oh Muchomon” in delight and embracing her Digimon once he had reached her.

   The remaining spouses, who had not been DigiDestineds, watched a little warily. They had heard the stories, hair-raising at times and most certainly not what children should have to endure, so they were familiar with the concept of Digimons. But meeting them now in the wild, so to speak, in their natural habitat, was something they still had to get accustomed to.

   Until Gatomon turned to Hikari’s daughter and introduced himself. Then he added “We welcome you to the Digital World, hoping that you will find a home here just like it is ours.”

   Meaning the same, but phrasing it differently, Agumon exclaimed “I’m hungry, let’s have a picnic!”

   Which earned him laughter from everyone. The ice was broken.

[ardenttheories]

I covered the first point in the original post here. 

Dave’s voice often starts off within the narrative. For some reason, almost all of his iconic phrases start as something that’s read in the narrative text - moreso than any other character. It’s almost always word-for-word, which we never see elsewhere in a similar manner. 

So Dave’s influenced by narrative voices a lot more than any other character. The fact that he also speaks AR’s words shows that he is affected by it; in the same situation, John talks to WV as if a haze has come over his mind. Dave, on the other hand, repeats AR’s text - which is directed to him, and not a command, the same way WV asks John for a can opener. 

So something weird definitely happens there. Something that doesn’t quite add up when you really think about it. He’s affected by narrative voices but still stunned by them; when it’s purely narrative, he doesn’t even seem to recognise what’s going on, but when it’s influenced (by AR, or by Dirk), he seems to be much more aware that something weird is happening, yet doesn’t link it to anything in particular. In both AR and Dirk’s narratives, he assumes he’s just having weird thoughts and odd actions - even though, in AR’s case, he’s literally been told that Exiles are a thing. 

He’s so used to the narrative that he doesn’t subconsciously recognise that AR’s text isn’t meant to be spoken out loud. 

As for why Dave might be able to recognise yet not be wholly aware of the narrative:

I think there’s definitely some merit to the idea that Dave’s more confusingly affected by Exiles because of their position within the narrative. They, in all technicality, are at the End of their journeys - and symbolise the End of the universe that had originally been to full of life. 

But I would suggest in this case, isn’t he being exploited by AR more than he is exploiting AR? He still seems, in this situation, so ignorant to what’s going on, even though - once again - he’s been actively told that his Exile is communicating with him. He’s aware but unaware in the dumbest way. 

It definitely might be that he can subconsciously use it again later, but I’m not wholly sure. I can’t think of a point where he uses this information again. The Exiles don’t become exactly relevant at any point after the first few acts, except for WV and PM, who Dave doesn’t interact with a whole lot. And it’s not like he gets into the whole idea of the command consoles, either? 

You also mentioned in another post something about Dead Daves - the concept that maybe, I assume, some of the narrative is provided by Daves that have already done these things? Which would make a lot of sense. Daves exploiting the narrative to talk to this past Dave and ensure he stays on track with the Alpha Timeline - the same way that Aradia becomes the voice of the dead that whispers to herself and guides her throughout the timeline. My only issue with that would be that we don’t actually see that in canon, I think. 

Unless we say that when Dave repeats his iconic lines - such as the apple juice one - it’s just another Dave remembering he said that and ensuring past-Dave says it? 

Going onto the concept of Time within the narrative:

I went into that here, but I’ll go over it again in brief. 

Time isn’t the narrative. It is heavily related to the timeline, the past and the future, but it is entirely in-universe. Characters that host the Time aspect don’t go into it the same way a Light player does - with the concept of the plot and of this storyline they have to follow. I believe at one point when talking to Rose, Dave even calls this concept bullshit as it just makes them seem like characters in a story (which they are, which shows that Dave doesn’t recongise the narrative as a real, physical thing). 

Within the narrative, Time represents the End of the story. Space is the Beginning, Life is the Rising Action, Doom is the Falling Action, and Time is the Conclusion. 

This is why, as I explain in the linked post, Caliborn can take control of the narrative - at the end of the story, to create a timeline that prematurely concludes Homestuck. 

I know exactly what part of the comic you’re also referencing when it comes to Caliborn being aware of the narrative, and having remembered it, I want to point something out:

Caliborn isn’t aware that it’s the narrative, either. The narrator goes back and forth with him on it, and he ultimately ignores it. It goes something like this. 

“You don't have time for fancy poetry. It's almost as useless as having your thoughts dictated to you, assuming you were even aware of that happening, which you definitely aren't. Cherubs aren't prone to that kind of self awareness. No way, absolutely not. Yes, you believe that thought. The one you had just now, by your own volition, and now it's true reality. See? Yes, you agree totally with that thought you had.

You stew in your own quasi-lucid hostility as you think this very thought. The one right here, that feels like it's being dictated to you, you think. You think it feels that way, so you guess it's true. But we previously agreed that you were the sole author of your own thoughts, didn't we? That's the thought you should be thinking, and more importantly, believing in as hard as you can, thus slightly reducing its stubborn fakeness attribute. You then think the word, HUH? That doesn't sound like a thought you would have, you think to yourself thoughtfully. What the fuck? But seriously, you've got to stop this. If you keep thinking thoughts like this, you'll probably start going crazy.”

He seems to notice something. The narrative asks what he’s looking at, which leads to this whole internal conversation.

Caliborn is in a similar boat to Dave, but maybe a bit more aware? He almost attains awareness, but can’t place what it is. The concept that his thoughts aren’t his, but must be his, but then ultimately are disregarded once the narrator forces him to move on from the concept entirely - it’s definitely a very similar thing to Dave. Almost identical, except for the fact that, once again, it’s entirely internal. 

Even Caliborn doesn’t have that moment of speaking out the narrative. He’s aware that there are thoughts that aren’t his, but he doesn’t seem to go to the point where he speaks things out and then questions why he says them. His physical conversations are entirely his own. 

And then his only ability to talk directly to Hussie comes from the command console. Everything that comes after this is because he’s taken control of the device that writes the Ending.

That’s the bit that makes this unique to Dave, I think. Caliborn might have minor narrative awareness in this one scene, but it’s directly before he finds a device that draws him into the narrative. Questionably, we could say that being within reach of this device allows him to hear Hussie’s voice more clearly - especially since we don’t see this happening with either Aradia or Damara (albeit we don’t see much of the latter at all). 

It’s once he gets his hands on the device that he actively argues with Hussie’s development of his character, after all. 

I think, instead of metaphysical, I should have made the distinction between in-universe and out-of-universe.

Time, while it can be influenced by or influence the narrative, is focused solely in the concept of the in-universe. What Caliborn does is essentially change the timeline for his own benefit, and crafts his own story - not through his own powers, but through the powers of an external device. It’s not like he uses this to create a novel that’ll take him out of the core of Homestuck and make him more than just a character - he uses it exclusively to affect the timeline they’re already in. 

Out-of-universe means anything that goes beyond the actual Homestuck universe. So, Dirk talking directly to us, being aware that we’re an audience that’s outside of the realm of his reality - that’s out-of-universe. That’s interacting with our world rather than solely influencing what happens to the timeline. 

Even when Caliborn is the author, he’s still... vulnerable. He’s still wholly connected to the timeline, to being punched in the face by John, to things taking him by surprise. He’s still not the author - the real world Andrew Hussie - and the person he talks to in the narrative isn’t real-world Andrew. 

There’s definite merit to the theory, but there’s also other factors to explain why Caliborn might be able to affect the narrative and be aware of it - the same way there’s reasons why Heart and Light and Space can influence the narrative without it being an actual part of the Aspect itself. 

Basically, I wouldn’t say “the narrative” is a part of Time as the Aspect description itself, but I would say “Time players can affect or be affected by the narrative when in relation to their Aspect”. 

As for the scene with Aradia, no. The section I think you’re referring to is the one wherein Calliope explains how the narrative works and what it is - essentially telling Aradia that it exists. 

On page 40 of Candy:

JADE: to establish an extremely short narrative for certain illustrative purposes.

JADE: i’m going to repeat your story to you, and i want you to listen carefully.

JADE: a martyr died and said fuck.

ARADIA: ok i listened

ARADIA: thats definitely the short story i just said

JADE: yes.

JADE: now i’m going to repeat the story, but change the way i say it very slightly.

JADE: listen again carefully.

ARADIA: ...

JADE: a martyr died and said fuck.

ARADIA: hmm

ARADIA: yes that was a little different

ARADIA: im not sure that i could describe how though it was pretty subtle

And a bit further down:

JADE: a martyr died and said fuck.

JADE: his final howl of profanity reverberated through the ages.

JADE: it inspired his devotees during the darkest times of a brutal regime.

JADE: his lessons were guarded, kept secret, espoused in the shadows of tyranny.

JADE: a vision of peace would inspire those who’d never conceived of it.

JADE: and though his death was gruesome, it opened the world to a feeling of hope.

JADE: this hope echoed through the ages.

JADE: it gave his disciples the strength to persist as they perished in droves.

JADE: it was the only light to shine on a dark planet for millions of sweeps.

JADE: and if you are one so devoted to his teachings, who sees truth in his words,

JADE: it may be said with great authority that you are wrong.

JADE: you are foolish to believe his lies. his martyrdom is false, his sacrifice hollow.

JADE: repent for your adherence to this illusion now, and perhaps leniency will be your reward.

ARADIA: 0_0

ARADIA: what just happened there

JADE: i brought to your attention that the story you were listening to had a speaker with a specific identity.

JADE: and where there is an identity, there can also be an agenda.

So it’s our Space player, the one that’s actively influencing the narrative, explaining it to our Time player - thereby showing that Aradia had no prior knowledge of the narrative. So it can’t be a wholly Time-related thing to have a connection to the narrative, otherwise Aradia wouldn’t have been surprised in this section.

As I said; Time’s effects with the narrative seem wholly more in-universe. They don’t seem to be aware of the wider narrative as a whole, so much as they’re influencing the timeline - the series of events - itself.

It’s the difference between going back in time to stop yourself from eating some cereal, and writing into the story that you ate an apple instead. One is a physical action; the other is a metaphysical edit.  

This is why I think Dave must be influenced by something other than his Aspect. I get the idea that, maybe, his ability to hear the narrative (but his struggle to recognise what it is) isn’t meant to be something he’s aware of - the same way Caliborn isn’t meant to be aware of it until he’s in the presence of the narrative control panel. It’s also why he struggles with meta concepts as actual fact - such as the Exiles, the idea of “becoming someone”, the fact that his E-bubbles have a much more metaphysical effect than he recongises or even intended.

Additionally, as a posited question more than set fact: Is the character of Hussie dead by the time narrator-Hussie talks to Caliborn within the narrative, as I showed above? Because that could very easily explain why he can hear him; if Hussie is Dead, then that falls naturally within the realm of Time, and as the Lord of Time (albeit a Failed one), Caliborn could hear him better.  

[b0x]

i hate that post that's like “we would've gotten a better trilogy if they'd just let rian johnson write all three films than playing hot potato with jj” like i get the point it's trying to make but you're forgetting that rj was fighting tooth and nail for the tlj r*ylo narrative since day 1 so you do realise we would've just gotten the same trilogy as we got now.......

further Thoughts on the trilogy as a whole and a few troc spoilers under the cut

also you KNOW that even if jj COULD have had a hand in saving it... there’s no saving a screenplay written by the guy who did the justice league films

No Comment. No Thoughts. Head Empty. everything post tfa was doomed from the start

have you SEEN the screenwriters for tfa? THAT’S why that one was so good, THAT’S why tfa succeeded as an excellent reboot of a long-dormant franchise. kasdan and arndt and jj should've been on for ALL THREE, and if they couldn’t, then a hiatus was the way to fucking go. rian never should have Touched it, never should have even Looked in its direction.

tfa had the essence of sw BECAUSE the essence of sw wrote it! tlj and tros isn’t sw!!!! 

they rly just tried to make Anakin..... 2! with kylo... but somehow... even Worse. you can’t make an anakin story Without showing kylo’s motives and morals - oh, except, you Did show his motives and morals, and they were in no way redeeming whatsoever! anakin had a whole ARC of complexity that allows for endless discussion on morality and justifiability that led him to earn his redemption. all kylo had was a blood tie to han and leia, which!!!! if anything!!!!!! made his motives and morals WORSE, knowing that he had the most IDEAL most loving and perfect upbringing and he still chose the dark side. that makes any love received from han or leia or luka or even fucking rey completely insignificant because we ALREADY KNOW what it means to him. all of this shit was so worthless!!!!!!!! fuck!

and i have a lot to say about rian johnson because i Cannot for the life of me believe the guy behind BRICK (2005) was taken on for tlj, WHILE TFA WASN’T EVEN FINISHED YET. i really didn’t think this had to be said but that is just NOT how you make a Trilogy. that is how you make Three Separate Films and guess what! that is exactly what we got! and it honestly saddens me to think that the guy behind the beautiful 6 minute music video ‘oh baby’ by lcd sound system, inspired by some of his greatest work in looper (and even brick!), would then take the absolute worst of his worst and apply that to a star wars franchise that desperately needed his best. and there’s something hilarious about that too, that you have this huge sandbox FULL of belief-suspending ridiculousness and STILL somehow make it fail? make it atrocious? that takes skill. it’s like that one post that was like “you have to ACTUALLY put EFFORT into making something this bad” like it’s no longer silly mistakes or lacklustre energy, this was ACTIVE sabotage.

the fact rian Had the Understanding of the core concepts of star wars right in his hands, but somehow completely missed the entire point of them? if you look at the films he screened to his story group during the development of tlj... this handful of culturally and historically significant war films that just seem like he screened for aesthetic and reference purposes only instead of actually exploring and analysing the importance and criticism of the exonerating war propaganda and racist source materials and using these films to inspire the actual groundwork of some of the root themes of current climates and today’s culture in a sw universe... i bet big bucks on the fact that twelve o clock high was only screened to inspire the air battle on crait (red salt planet) and because of ‘VIII Bomber Command’ because ha ha hee hee tlj is episode VIII and hoo hoo hoo *you’ve been gnomed.mp4* 

the general rule is this: when reading ANY report on tlj and tros and something like “the characters came first” is mentioned, just exit out the window, it’s already a botched article/thinkpiece.

i’m also thinking a lot about how arndt translated his first draft for tfa into a script for eight months and said he needed 18 more, which disney and jj said no to, so he left, and IMMEDIATELY after jj kept saying how relieved he was that the release date was delayed and gave him more time that he also needed. like.. you had your lesson then and there. did they learn from it? *disney forcing rian to write tlj at the same time as tfa was still being made* No!

i am ALSO thinking about how they had considered fincher, brad bird, jon favreau, del toro, even getting development suggestions by spielberg.......... and rian johnson is who they called up for tlj.... my head is... empty.

just give the fucking thing to taika waititi he understands the nuances of the socio-political climates of sw’s narratives built around a guise of a fun sci-fi fantasy adventure-drama. he understands. that’s literally the very definition of his style of writing and directing. Makes You Think Why The Mandalorian Is A Hit.... they already gave him 2 mandalorian episodes just give him the whole franchise i cant take it anymore. 

AND NOW THEY’RE GIVING RIAN JOHNSON A WHOLE NEW TRILOGY? RIAN? RIAN JOHNSON? THEY’RE GIVING HIM A WHOLE NEW TRILOGY AFTER WHAT HAPPENED... HERE. SURE.. OKAY . ALRIGHT. IT’S HONESTLY MIND-BLOWING. THE THOUGHT PROCESS THAT GOES INTO CONSECUTIVE DECISIONS SUCH AS THIS. like i would LOVE to see footage of the board meeting for this. no sarcasm i am GENUINELY curious to hear what was said to greenlight this. i have GOT to know what post tros board meetings about this will be like. 

anyway! op of that post! i will be thinking about you when the new rj trilogy drops!

what’s worse about this whole trilogy is that.. they Had it. they had it in the bag with tfa. they HAD the original idea they HAD the power to make a sw trilogy set to current climates JUST LIKE THE PREVIOUS TRILOGIES DID, cos that’s what sw is all about! what it was ALWAYS about! a space opera reflective of current times and climates. but disney turned it into a Keeping Up With The Skywalkers reality tv show that’s nothing more than a sci-fi fantasy light show and vfx flex to keep the brand alive, and personally, i think that’s ultimately one of the reasons it’s so hated and why it failed (of course rampant misogyny/sexism, racism, homophobia under the guise of geek culture within the sw community and in the production itself is a whole other discussion and is another humongous part of why it’s hated and why it failed)

and it’s why hamill had every right to criticise tlj the way he did with rotj, why boyega and isaac and ridley had Every right to their commentary on their distaste of the second and third instalments. how the only reason they’d rescind what they said was due to their contracts. how their silence was necessary to squeeze every last dollar out of consumers because god forbid a potential boycott due to their own star’s “controversial” (Correct) judgements and disapprovals

they really had it in the bag..

a female protagonist who could be a chosen one regardless of her blood and family ties, a protagonist that reflected the importance and validity of found family, and the idea that Anyone can be a “Skywalker”, a symbol of hope and a fighter for justice and goodness and love in the world, especially in the darkest of times... a young woman being just as powerful, as Chosen, as essential as Luke and Anakin were... a narrative that couldve been commentary on the necessity of women needing to do double the work, make double the effort, to earn the same spot of her counterparts. and with the second and third instalments, especially NOW, with the growth and vocalisation of the MeToo movement, the narrative of strength to speak out against abusers, to fight back and to thrive, a symbol of justice, to teach that men such as kylo who refuse consequence, who actively and soberly choose violence and manipulation for the strengthening of the self, who will ignore and deny all opportunities to better the self, to know their guilt, to make up for their actions, are the ones who are irredeemable. that people like him are not owed any time or understanding or belief in, when that belief perpetuates the violent and oppressive nature they are indefinitely attracted to and make themselves defined by.

a black hero raised by violence and refusing to be defined by it and unlocking the force within as a symbol of that strength within over encompassing goodness, to have a hero that breaks that harmful narrative stereotype that black characters have had for decades and still continue to do so, to have a voice and a hero that fights with love and kindness, that is able to find family and support in a place beyond what he believes he is allowed to have, the significance of a hero being deemed a “traitor”, a term that holds weight in the shame of seeking your own independence and identity, versus the cathartic empowerment of thriving in the independence you make for yourself in the end. a black hero that defeats his oppressors, oppressors that belong to a policing fascist regime, a faction that has always from the very beginning been a depiction of nazis, of authoritarian nationalism. 

a canonical gay latino man freedom fighter, being the best in his career as a literal symbol of hope for the resistance, a literal symbol of the climates for lgbt folk in regards to resisting those same fascist nazi regimes, resisting laws against lgbt existence, lgbt employability, lgbt success. a man who grew into a legacy of heroism, surrounded by it, something that could have been powerful poignant commentary on the necessity to sacrifice lives so others like his didn’t have to, the very narrative to fight for a world that the innocents and the ones he loves could have peace in, could have a future in, could Exist in. poe fights in the skies because he knew damn well the effect of believing in someone that is human, like you, instead of a force that is bigger than anything you could ever know or believe in. poe brings humanity and realism to an otherwise fanatical universe of magic and religion and chaos of endless war that means nothing, that is based on nothing. poe is commentary on fighting a fight that you have no choice but to fight, that you are forced to fight from birth just for the very act of Existing. his humanity and realism is a significant grounding necessity for our two protagonist heroes and it is appalling that he’d just be discarded the way he was, shallowly played off as sideline comic relief, much like lgbt narratives and characters are expressed in pretty much ANY media today, so it comes as no surprise. 

the three most vital narratives that should have been told in this trilogy but no of course not (disney voice) gimme my Fackin MANEY. it’s the silence of marginalised voices cleverly disguised under hollow face-value representation.

honestly, even rey being blood-related to palpatine as his granddaughter was such a strong and perfect set-up for The Narrative That Could’ve Been TM, but instead they had palpatine make it a whole weird pseudo-marriage thing that was just so. backwards and unbelievably shocking that it was in a 2019 era star wars film.

wow marriage story and the rise of skywalker really is the same movie huh

yes we wanted a grey jedi protagonist hero that gets tempted by the dark side but this was the absolute worst way that could’ve been explored. like if they were just gonna recycle old characters and old storylines and make them worse they could’ve at least looked at darth maul or asajj ventress and the nightsisters

and NO WONDER oscar looked so DEFEATED every time finnpoe was mentioned cos he fought for that shit tooth and nail and they? ? ? they gave him a funny ha ha hee hee hoo hoo straight flirt scene? ? with like his ex or something, where they imply they get back together? COMPLETELY destroying the ENTIRE narrative of his character that was so lovingly built and developed in the Official Canon Comic Series About Him ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

NO WORDS. there are NO WORDS. head EMPTY. no not even empty there's NO HEAD at all i am BEHEADED

finn had NOTHING in this film. Nothing. how are you gonna make him a joint-protag with rey and give him Nothing? 

anyone with brain cells knows that what finn truly was trying to tell rey the entire film was that he was force sensitive, i will take this to my grave, and that should’ve built up to this grand reveal where they empower each other and take down palpatine and kylo as one, as the joint-protagonists they were Literally Fucking Written And Built Up To Be. they gave EVERY antagonist to REY. what was the POINT. rey had her significant clash with kylo across two films, hell, even in this one (before the Final one), tros was the penultimate film about her family, her bloodline, so her significant final battle should have been with palpatine a la rotj. the person who DESERVED to clash with and take down kylo once and for all was FINN, even a TODDLER would understand WHY. 

but considering everything, i would take the thing finn was trying to tell her the entire film being that he loves her ANY DAY if it meant whatever the fuck we got instead Never Happened.

finn got made general and not only was it a blink-and-you-miss bit but it adds NOTHING, yes it’s something to celebrate and of Course he deserves it, but it holds zero significance to him as a character. like i mentioned earlier, when han was made general, that never defined him. he was still han solo and it took a Dozen other significant scenarios and twists to make him a significant and vital memorable character. han solo isn’t known for “being a general”. he’s known for being han fucking solo, a critical puzzle piece in the taking down of the empire, a scamp-turned-deeply-loyal friend and lover, a man who not only got his own personal storyline concluded to the level it deserved to be (the repercussions of his bounty hunter life, the importance of the falcon, his relationships with lando, luke, and leia, his triumph over his captors even when it was luke and leia who freed him). 

side note, this was maybe the one thing that tfa screwed up, the entire point and development of the original trilogy, it sort of felt a bit moot with how they put a “twist” on han, leia and luke’s relationship, especially when it came to kylo. but i think there are some forgivable aspects to it for the sake of the new trio, and that’s why those executive decisions kind of Worked! this is, of course, for another discussion bc this is about the new trilogy.

leia IS known for being a general because part of her entire storyline revolves around it and the significance of it!!! which is why finn being made general just feels so... i don’t know! just completely disrespectful, to both him as a character, and to generals who are defined by this position (such as, hello!!!!! poe!!! poe fucking dameron!!!! a man raised by the resistance!!! a man who’s entire life and prior legacy was entirely dedicated to the resistance!!!! him being made general MEANT something). it’s like rubbing salt in the wound of the fact that finn has been discarded as the protagonist he was meant to be, the story, development and conclusion he never got, just to slap general on him and call it a day and then write about his actual development in a novel that 3/4ths of the ppl who watch the films will never read. 

and that's just the core story stuff!!! do NOT get me started on the general lore proposed in this shit. i’m talking about the force ghost nonsense and the convenience of some of the timing choices (rewriting the way death works in sw, claiming that rey “didn’t really die/wasn’t really dead” since she didn’t fade which in itself completely destroys the entire plot they were going for with the resurrection scene, the timing of the fades themselves bullshitted for “dramatic cinematic purposes”), the entire palpatine storyline, the bullshit with snoke and the lack of explanation, all these one-off characters that have the lore capacity of an overwatch character when instead they could have developed the ones that already existed and had the opportunity to be fleshed out and CARED about

the FACT that HUX (hux!!!!!!!!!) had a more interesting storyline in all three films with a total screentime of maybe 10 minutes than these one-offs whose only purpose is to stroke the cock of sw nostalgia seekers and lore aficionados. to make these characters so inaccessible that to fully appreciate them, fans have to dive into hundreds of different novels and comics and games and whatnot. like if you make it so that the Only way someone can experience a character’s full essence is by reading their wiki page then you’ve failed in creating them, in writing them, in including them, in using them, in whatever them. you’ve just failed as a creator.

and the ONLY reason hux got a reaction (a barebones reaction but a reaction nonetheless) out of me was because they essentially just turned him into phasma 2 which is SO telling of the climate of this trilogy.

it’s a recycled trilogy. that’s all it is. it’s a recycled series of films where tfa’s originality was completely entirely scrapped and ignored because rian wanted to write his personal fanfiction more than he wanted to continue the story he was given, and did everything he could to insert that whenever he could, and kennedy, of course, let him, because she realised giving herself indulging content other than fifty shades and radfem articles that she could jerk off to was more important than telling a critical story where its wonder and valuable, influential morals could’ve stayed in this generation’s minds for years to come.

if you want to watch tros just watch the prequel trilogy instead you'll get the same story except actually good.

[a-bit-too-much-of-a-zelda-fan]

Linked Universe Fanfiction ch. 9: Can We Get Back to Adventuring, Please?

Stop! You’ve Violated the Law!

So, you’ve stumbled upon this original post for my Linked Universe fanfiction. That’s okay, it happens to everyone. As of March 2021, I’ve uploaded the entirety of this fanfic to my Archive of Our Own page. Along with finally giving the story a name--Oops! All Links: A Linked Universe Story--I made substantial edits to some of the chapters. These range from minor stylistic revisions to fixing a gaping plot hole that kinda completely broke the character conflict in the earlier chapters. I also renamed and renumbered (but not reordered) the chapters. Specifically, this is now Chapter 11: Can We Get Back to Adventuring, Please?

The AO3 iterations of these chapters are the definitive versions. So, if you would like to read this fanfiction, please do so on AO3, right here. With this embedded link. Hehe. Geddit? Link?

Note: My screen name on AO3 is FrancisDuFresne. Yes, that is me. I am not plagiarizing myself.

Anyway, for posterity’s sake, the rest of the original post is below the cut.

The Links continue their journey to the next village and now face a dense, dark forest. By the way, have you ever wondered what the Links think of the Timeline? Thus continues my fan narrative of the @linkeduniverse AU. Word count: 1275

“Just a few more minutes, boys!” Wind exclaimed. “We’ll be out of these hills and into the… oh, shoot.”

Legend smirked. “You forgot about the possible swarms of monsters?”

“… Yeah.”

The Links had been walking a shade above three hours since returning to reality. The fire was far from gone from their minds, but they were glad to be rid of this place. They had to admit it was beautiful, though. The noontime sun shone on rolling hills, wind blowing the tall, swaying grass. A few clouds had crept up on the edges of the horizon but showed no sign of raining on their proverbial parade.

As far as Time was concerned, things were back to normal. His companions hadn’t brought up the masks, and they acted no differently towards him than before today. Time suspected they may still have questions but didn’t want to dampen their good mood by asking them. That was fine. They could discuss it more tonight when they were comfortable and safe in an inn.

Wild chuckled. “Relax, Wind. We don’t know for sure if there are any monsters. The woods are just so thick that I can’t get a good reading of it.”

“After yesterday,” Legend began, “I’m not shocked there are limitations to that Slate of yours.”

Wild was about to shoot back a retort when Sky butted in, “Drop it. We got out of there safely.”

“Thanks to you, Sky.” Hyrule said.

“You can thank Fi,” he replied, patting the Master Sword’s hilt above his right shoulder. “She was the one that guided us.”

“She is quite the sword,” Time added. Secretly, he hated the Master Sword. He saw it as a curse, one of the many factors that led to his childhood suffering. However, it was a blessing to the other six of them that wielded it. He felt it best not to sully their opinion of it.

“Fi helped me too, once,” Wild said.

Sky looked at the back of Wild’s head; the latter had the map and was leading the group. He thought Fi had only ever spoken to him. He wasn’t offended, per se, more shocked than anything. “Really?”

“I was mortally wounded when Calamity Ganon struck my Hyrule a century ago. Zelda thought I was doomed, but the Master Sword glowed and sort of sang to her. That let her know I could still be saved. I suppose I owe Fi my life.”

“Huh,” Sky replied. He drew the sword. Its silver blade reflected the sun brighter than the others’ swords, save for the Four Sword. He smiled. “Heh, I wouldn’t expect any less of her.”

Given he himself had forged the Master Sword, Sky gathered that his adventure somehow took place before any of the others’. It still confused him how they all could coexist. By reciting the legends and history they knew, they figured out a somewhat cohesive, yet confounding, chain of events.

Sky forged the Master Sword and Hyrule had yet to be established. He was clearly first. Time witnessed the split of the Triforce, so he must be next. Based on the historical texts in Hyrule Castle, Twilight seemed to live centuries after Time. Over their time together, Twilight began to see eerie similarities between Time and the ghostly Hero’s Shade who mentored him. He preferred to ignore them for his own sanity’s sake.

It all got muddier after that. Time had suspected Zelda sending him back in time had somehow disrupted the flow of time. Lo and behold, Wind seemed to also live centuries after Time, but Hyrule had been flooded. His legends told of a Hero of Time that disappeared when he was needed. Time wondered whether Wind lived in the world that Zelda sent him away from.

Even more disturbing was Legend’s story. In his world, Ganon was sealed away by the seven sages, but not a hero. In this alternate reality, could Time have perished in his fight against Ganon? Hyrule had heard vague legends of a legendary sword, but never figured it was the Master Sword until he met his other selves. Strangely, Warrior and Wild somehow seemed to hail from a melding of everyone else’s worlds.

Four was the most peculiar case. Neither the Triforce nor the Master Sword seemed to exist in his world. Instead, there were the Picori bestowing the Light Force upon the Hylians. The concept of it all utterly confused the Links. After trying to piece it together, they never mentioned it again.

Sky was snapped out of his thoughts of multiple timelines and realities when Warrior said suddenly, “Well, it’s about time.”

They had reached the top of a hill and were faced with a tall, dense forest. The heroes couldn’t see the village beyond, but figured the treetops were obscuring it. Wild frowned. He thought they would be able to see it based on map’s elevation readings. He hooked the Sheikah Slate back on his belt.

He withdrew his paraglider from his pouch, gripped one handle with his left hand, and knelt on the ground. In a flash, ghostly flames appeared around Wild. He jumped. An updraft carried him a hundred feet in the air, a hazy image of a Rito soaring up with him. His paraglider holding him aloft, he got a better view of their surroundings.

Satisfied, Wild returned to the ground. Despite seeing him use this ability several times before, the others were still awed by the sight. The concept of fallen warriors imparting this and three other powers upon him was foreign. Time’s experience with his masks was similar, but Wild’s seemed much more wholesome in nature.

“Don’t worry, I can see the tops of buildings way down there,” Wild confirmed. “Five or so hours in there and we’ll be through.”

“Wait, wait,” Warrior said. “Let’s think this through. We do not want another ambush on our hands.”

Wind groaned. He found Warrior’s obsessions with plans and tactics annoying. Time shot him a look. Wind saw it and stood at attention.

Warrior continued, “Legend, arrow count.”

Thinking back to last night, he remembered that he had counted the arrows before going to bed. That seemed so long ago. “Uh… oh, right. Forty-two.”

“Hm… four each. Wild, you’re our best archer, you need more. Volunteers?”

Sky shrugged. “Aye. I’m better with a sword anyway.”

“Seconded,” Time said.

“Third…ed?” Wind flubbed.

A chuckle spread across the group. Fighting back more laughter, Warrior composed himself. “Okay, Wild, take sixteen. Make them count.”

Wild nodded.

“Legend, Twilight, Four, Hyrule. Take four each. I’ll take five.”

Legend pulled their stash of arrows out of his pouch and divvied them up. Warrior came up last and took the remaining five. They fit their ammunition in their quivers. “Right, next order of business,” Warrior continued. “Twi, transform and take point. We need your senses. Wild, I want you behind him with two arrows nocked. Fire at Twi’s mark. Sky, cover them. Everyone else, fall in behind them. I’ll take up the rear. Keep your eyes on the shadows. It looks pretty dark in there, so everyone grab a lantern. We’re low on oil, so let’s try to get out of there ASAP.”

The others nodded. This seemed easy enough. At least, if they didn’t encounter anything nefarious. They knew they probably would, but they could handle it. Warrior turned to Twilight and nodded. The latter took on his beastly form and took the lead. Wild drew his bow and nocked two arrows. The others unsheathed their swords and raised their newly lit lanterns. With a last look at the clear blue sky, the heroes entered the dark forest.

[snowwritesall]

Writing update #2 Anathema + new WIP!

Hi folks, hope y'all have been doing well and staying healthy - I've had a pretty trying week and my financial situation is gonna be tight at best for the next few months but I'm still trying to maintain a positive outlook. With that being said, I'm gonna give you guys some updates and excerpts on my current WIP, Anathema, and a new novel that I started the other day (yes I'm well aware I have way too many wips but I'm dumb and listen to no one's advice :)

Anyway, that being said, onto the updates!

Anathema is my surreal sci fi novel that I came up with last year and has spent many months under development. A brief summary on the novel for you!

The tea on my novel: 

I absolutely love the concept of my novel - keeping in mind that there is a lot of the plot hidden because I don’t want to spoil the entire book - however, there are a lot of things that need work. Seraph - my main character - still feels a little flimsy and underdeveloped - as well as my side characters, who have had limited interactions with Seraph throughout the novel as far - mainly due to the reason that I’ve been focusing on narrative rather than characters. The next thing that I’m finding is a problem is that there’s barely any dialogue between what character interaction I do have. I’ve been focusing a lot on the vibe and feeling of my book - I really want to create an eerie, almost alien feel, without being fully horroresque - think Coraline x Limbo. 

The things that I do like about my novel: 

- I really love the literary devices that I’ve come up with to help give the story that eerie vibe I want. 

a) Really weird rhetorical questions

b) interjections of two unknown characters that comment on Seraph and his friends when they’re together

c) POV of animals and inanimate objects 

Here are some examples of both: 

a)  Really weird rhetorical questions

The wind seems strangely muted to Seraph, as if moving through a half-awake dream, or sinking in murky water that chills the bones.

Why does the water hurt? This is only one of the questions hurtling through his mind, but there are many more barrelling inside his head; a turbulent chamber of thoughts and unspoken quandaries that crescendo in the night hour. He is curious. And that - that, is what will save him.  

ai)

The beetles crawl up the blackened bark, wings glistening from between the cracks. They make soft, chittering noises as they climb aimlessly up the branch. Their path is strangely linear, their wings a malachite soaked fluorescent in the bitter, fuse sharp breeze. If they were to travel down the length of Seraph's spine; their strange, crackled wings fluttering against his ashen, ghostly skin; they would calm him as they walked up the shallow curve of his spine and nestled in his hair, a dim saucer of moonlight that they would bathe in.

Is the moon ever lonely?

b)   Interjections of two unknown characters that comment on Seraph and his friends when they’re together

“What was it like?”

His voice shakes as he asks, still staring at his hands. Wilbur is teething his lip, his jaw hardening like clay left in the sun.

  “Were there others? Are we the only ones left?”

Are we the only ones left?

They both look scared, don’t they?

     No. Not scared. Doomed.

Why are they doomed?

      Because they were never meant to be here.

Wilbur continues to stare out at the forest, and after a moment takes a few steps forward, shoveling his feet into the soil; the wind rifling through his clothes. He looks like a scarecrow made of marble, distant, ghostly - not real.

  Were any of them real?

c) POV’s of animals 

Seraph had stroked the snake gently, the scales cold and undulating under his fingers, the snake mothers eyes dark and pupils, her nose nudging the wings of the fledglings.

“Don’t eat your babies, mother snake. They love you. Don’t leave them.”

I have found my new children. My own children were buried in a sandstorm, and I milked my venom from my teeth on the carcass of a deer. There was no one to sing them to sleep as they died. I will listen to this strange boy. I will take care of my children.

I will not leave them.

ci) 

The forest is very cold for us. Even we, with our wings like a shield and a fur coat, even we feel the wind. The bark splinters are like earthquakes under our feet, even though there have been no earthquakes for centuries. We remember. We remember when the earth shook and trembled, and when we would seek shelter amongst the splintering trees and scuttle for cover under broken fern leaves. He comes to see us. The boy with curious eyes that glint like the rock in the sky, his hands are as pale as the eggs the birds lay. He brushes his fingers across our coats, and we shiver; with a strange fear and an even stranger contentment. We are not alone.

 He is not alone. 

Here are some excerpts from the novel that I really like: 

- POV of the boy that drowned in the lake. Seraph remembers this when he looks at the jars of butterflies that he keeps on his windowsill. The clear, glossy surface reminds him of how the lake looked when he watched some of the village men pull the boy’s body out of the lake. 

- Seraph is remembering the first time that one of the children stuck their head in the guillotine in the schoolyard. He remembers thinking how odd it was that they would have something so dangerous where children could find it. Maybe they wanted them to use it. 

Seraph is watching his school teacher polish the guillotine blade through the cover of pine trees. One of his friends, Beluah, creeps up behind him and startles him. They both watch the teacher and talk. 

More commentary of Seraph and Beluah watching the teacher together: 

Okay, that’s all on this novel for now, onto the new WIP! 

Basically, this idea arose from two things - I felt like I was constantly writing in the same sort of style - ie, cold rivers, frost, rain, foggy forests - and I was majorly inspired by Fairytales for Wilde Girls by Alysse Near. This woman has an absolutely INCREDIBLE writing style - I would compare it to the bright and shiny treasures that magpies collect, and her plot and characters are amazing; so a big part of why I’m writing this is because of her. 

The characters appeared really easily to me, and after only a few minutes, I already could feel them writhing around alive inside my mind. But, before I tell you about the characters, a summary of the novel for you! 

When three dead girls show up at school with flowers where their eyes should be and birds living in their chests, Ariel isn’t sure what to think. She’s never really been sure what to think, since her mother sells beads and homemade jewelry for a living and her sister is a snake. Well, two snakes, really. Her parents keep strange things in the closet, like elephants with jellyfish swimming in their stomachs and siamese twins with leopard skins in the attic. And then there’s that strange girl that lives in the mirror.

When three dead girls demand to be brought back to life, you start to panic a little when you realise the closest things you’ve made come alive are the ragdolls in your toy chest.

It gets even worse when they tell you you only have a month or they’ll take you back to the underworld with them. Then you really begin to freak out. And begin to have a mental break down in the middle of class which involves involuntary tap dancing (Except the tap dancing is actually crying. Ariel doesn’t own tap dancing shoes. Not even doll tap dancing shoes.)

It doesn’t help when your best friends are literally ragdolls. She actually has a few real friends. I promise.

Now onto my babies/kids/characters! 

Ariel Hakens: 

has a big giant ball of curly red hair that she likes to dye a new colour every week. She likes glitter but also loves black. Big boots and shiny raincoats are a thing. She love to collec. She loves to garden, but her methods are...unorthodox, shall we say. Loves Edgar Allen Poe, and recites it to herself on the way to school. Does she ditch a lot? Maybe. Who knows. Can apparently see the dead and do weird stuff nobody should be able to. Favourite animals are mice and rats. Is fascinated with the legend of the pied piper. Is like a beaver in the fact that she chews pencils. They’re basically like a midnight snack for her. Favourite foods are peanut butter and cherry tarts.

(yes I am fully aware this is Leigh-Anne Pinnock from Little Mix, but this is what she looks like in my head) 

Gwendolyn Spires: 

She is as extra as the name sounds. She dreams of participating in an illegal dance competition in an abandoned subway tunnel. Her mother is the principal of a ballet boarding school, and highly disapproves of her daughter's skateboarding fetish. Her father is completely on board with it, and also her addiction to gumballs and love for all things haunted. Yes, those spell books are completely real. The amount of salt rocks she keeps in her bag would put a shaman to shame. African American. 

Indie Brooks:

 She’s basically a giant nerd, but covered with tattoos. And piercings. She actually needs those glasses, and she refuses to put in contacts for fear that the government will be able to read her mind. She has a conspiracy theory Youtube Channel, but her theories are really??weird??

Think: we are all giant animals living in a zoo for aliens

Does she have evidence: Yes. Is it sketchy evidence? Also yes.

May or may not have broken into area 51.

Native American/Latina.

Callum Prikhill:

pervy, but not in a sexual way. Will he sell you exam answers in exchange for candy? Possibly. Ironically wears caps. Unironically wears light up shoes. Likes sci-fi movies from the early 70’s. Skinny dipped and LOVED it. Is a theater boy. If he were an animal he would be a lizard. His mother is a low-end movie producer and his father is an accountant. Often stays at his nan’s place a lot because she has a hidden bunker under the house and he very much down for that. Because the acoustics are amazing.

The first time Ariel saw the three dead girls sway through the doors of Helkbud Senior Preparatory School, she was whistling Sissyneck while flipping through her collection of rained on vinyls that she’d chanced to pick up from the thrift store, her tanned dewy legs slick with snow and hail as she pushed hot pink cat eye sunglasses up her freckled nose.

They looked like nesting dolls all jumbled up in a lolly bag, corpse candy sucked dry of their colour and watermelon blush that should have twisted their cheeks into marionette smiles.

The girl in the middle wore poppy red heels that spun and shone like a disco ball at a teenage party where the parents were gone for the weekend and everyone was drinking punch mixed with vodka in cheap, crinkly red cups; and was the shortest of the three; yellow daisies and white crocuses growing out of her eye sockets, petals drinking salty tears out of a chipped watering can that dangled over her head.

Hope you enjoyed hearing about my WIPs, and I’ll keep updating about them as I continue to work on them :)

That’s all for now, folks! 

- Bella. 

[roseisread]

My Year in Movies: Favorite Non-2018 Feature Films (Part 1)

I watched a LOT of movies this year. At last count, I had logged 229 features and 126 shorts; and that doesn’t count rewatches--only movies that were new to me.

I set a few challenges for myself as well this year. The first one was to watch at least one non-English language/US release per week--this exposed me to so much world cinema and some really amazing filmmakers. Anyone who avoids foreign films because “I don’t like subtitles” is really missing out, and I found myself craving these narratives from voices I don’t ordinarily get exposed to in my everyday life. 

Other personal challenges: Watching as many horror movies as possible in October (with horror defined pretty loosely so I could include entries from silent era and onward, as well as some comedy cult classics that have horror/thriller elements); participating in Noirvember (in addition to attending Noir City in Chicago); crossing off some major blindspots from my list (such as Bicycle Thieves, The Producers, Lethal Weapon, A Few Good Men, Grease, Home Alone 2, Brazil, and Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom); and trying to watch movies and short films from every decade that motion pictures have existed.

In 2019, I hope to do similar personal challenges with a focus on movies made by women, LGBTQ+, and people of color, in addition to filling in the gaps of my classical/canonical movie knowledge. 

OK, so that’s enough preamble. Let’s get to the list! For this list, I’m excluding movies that were released in 2018--that’s coming but this is for movies released before that. 

50. Linda Linda Linda (2005, directed by Nobuhiro Yamashita, country of origin: Japan)

High school girls recruit the Korean exchange student (Doona Bae, of Cloud Atlas and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) to join their rock band a few days before the school talent show. This is just a feel good film, recommended if you enjoyed the likes of Sing Street, We Are The Best!, and The Runaways. Unfortunately, it’s out of print in physical form; but last I checked someone had uploaded it to YouTube so you might want to get on that before it’s removed. You can watch the trailer here.

49. The Blue Dahlia (1946, directed by George Marshall, country of origin: US)

This film noir stars Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd, and like any good noir, it deals with dark subjects including murder, blackmail, political corruption, and PTSD. It’s been on my watchlist for a long time, and thanks to Noir City Chicago, I got to see it on the big screen at the Music Box Theatre. For small screen viewing, you can catch up with it via rental on Vudu, Amazon, iTunes... the usual suspects. 

48. Siren of the Tropics (1927, directed by Mario Nalpas and Henri Etievant, country of origin: France)

My dearly departed Filmstruck had a spotlight on the films of Josephine Baker, and this was among them. I fell in love instantly with the lively, beautiful Baker, here playing a woman named Papitou who deals with some super scummy dudes but manages to be herself in the face of all that nonsense. Silent films can sometimes be tougher to engage with for modern audiences, but this one flies by and contains some unexpectedly racy sequences for the time. Its racial politics don’t meet today’s cultural standards, but considering Baker’s parents were former slaves and their daughter went on to become the first woman of color to star in a major motion picture, this is still a landmark film worthy of our consideration. She broke down many barriers and contributed a great deal to both the entertainment world and the Civil Rights movement, and this serves as a nice entry point into her career. It’s available on DVD through Kino Lorber, and hopefully one day soon it’ll pop up on another streaming service that carries on the Filmstruck legacy.

47. I Don’t Feel At Home in This World Anymore (2017, directed by Macon Blair, country of origin: US)

Here’s a film that goes to some unexpected places. I had no idea what to expect from Macon Blair, who frequently appears in the movies of Jeremy Saulnier; but in his debut feature for Netflix, he pulled out all the stops. Hilarious, violent, and intense, with memorable performances from stars Melanie Lynskey and Elijah Wood, this is a movie about getting in over your head and just going for it anyway. I don’t want to tell you about the plot because it’s best discovered through watching--just go to your nearest device and add it to your Netflix queue. 

46. Song of the Sea (2014, directed by Tomm Moore, country of origin: Ireland)

Absolutely gorgeous animation from the team that previously brought us The Secret of Kells, and a touching story that combines family and mythology. I adored this one. Watch it on Netflix or rent on the usual streaming sources--for a preview, click here. 

45. Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942, directed by Michael Curtiz, country of origin: US)

I always watch Independence Day on the Fourth of July; but in 2018, I decided to mix it up and cross this patriotic musical off the watchlist. I’d seen James Cagney’s gangster movies like White Heat and The Public Enemy, but seeing him sing and dance was a whole new joyous discovery. This movie is entertaining, funny, touching, and full of iconic sequences that other films would go on to borrow from. I absolutely loved it. Pretty sure I saw this on Filmstruck originally, but since that’s no longer possible you should be able to find it at your local public library or you can rent it for a couple bucks on Amazon, YouTube, iTunes, and the like. 

44. The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950, directed by Felix Feist, country of origin: US)

This tightly wound noir thriller pits brother against brother against the backdrop of 1950s San Francisco. Lee Cobb plays an aging bachelor and an accomplished police detective who falls for the wrong dame. His younger brother, played by John Dall (Gun Crazy, Rope), has just joined the police force and idolizes his older brother. Trouble strikes when the dame murders her no good husband and needs help from Cobb to cover it up. Naturally, Dall gets assigned to the case and as he begins to piece together the clues, he doesn’t like where they’re leading him. The climactic sequence is one of my favorite endings to a noir film, and I’ve seen a lot of them. Watch it for free if you have Amazon Prime; otherwise, there are a few versions uploaded to YouTube of varying quality or you could wait for it to pop up on TCM. 

43. Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003, directed by Thom Andersen, country of origin: US)

This documentary edits together clips from movies of every era that were filmed or set in Los Angeles, and explains through voiceover narration the significance of each location and the history of the motion pictures in LA. That’s it--very simple concept but also fascinating. I split this up over a couple nights because it’s pretty long, but if you’re a film fan or a Los Angeles native, this is well worth your time. The voiceover is kind of hilariously flat in its delivery--kind of a Steven Wright sound actually--but that sort of adds to the charm for me. Get a taste by watching the trailer, and then you can rent it on YouTube for $1.99.

42. A Simple Plan (1998, directed by Sam Raimi, country of origin: US)

It’s been almost two years since we lost Bill Paxton; I don’t know about you but I don’t think any other actor can really fill those shoes. This year I caught up with three films that showcased his talent: A Simple Plan, One False Move, and Frailty. He plays very different characters in each one but in many ways they all start off with a similar premise: Ordinary guy dreams of becoming more. What that “more” is for each character is what sets each film and performance apart, but Paxton provided a great canvas to paint these unique characters onto. He inhabited the ordinary man better than just about anyone. 

In this film, which I watched during Noirvember, Paxton plays Hank, a college-educated guy working a blue collar job in a small town, trying to make a better life for himself and his family. He’d like to get away from those small town roots, but his socially awkward brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) relies on him. Unfortunately, Jacob is often accompanied by the hard-drinking loose canon Lou (Brent Briscoe). When the unlikely trio discover a crashed plane in the woods containing a suitcase full of cash, they each have ideas for how to handle the situation. Of course things escalate from there, and the way the movie explores human nature and family ties set this story apart. Available for online rental on the usual platforms.

41. The Iron Giant (1999, directed by Brad Bird, country of origin: US)

Given my obsession with Vin Diesel in the early 2000s, it’s pretty shocking I never saw this movie til now--sure, he and his glorious muscles don’t appear on screen, but he does provide the voice of the title character after all. When the Iron Giant made a controversial cameo in this year’s film adaptation of Ready Player One, I decided it was time I saw the source material for myself. 

This gorgeously animated fable unfolds during the Cold War era, and features an ET-inspired story arc of a young boy befriending an unlikely being that the government is looking for. If you’ve never seen it, this is definitely a must-watch. Currently available on Netflix, but rentable on other platforms too.

40. The Unsuspected (1947, directed by Michael Curtiz, country of origin: US)

I adore Claude Rains, star of this film and supporting actor in Curtiz’s more famous work, Casablanca. Here, he plays the host and narrator of a popular radio show that revolves around tales of murder--basically the Law and Order: SVU of its day. We learn early on that he sometimes draws inspiration for his broadcasts from real life criminals. When people in his own life start dropping dead, the plot thickens and he finds himself at the center of the action. A very suspenseful and well-plotted film noir, which is available from the Warner Archive collection on DVD. I got to see it at Noir City Chicago, and loved every second of it. 

That’s all for this entry--stay tuned for part two of this list, posting soon! 

[nautilusopus]

Serious non-troll: What if you like the cop-outs and the scrambled bullshit plots and the nonsense towers of half-constructed ideas? I agree that for example Nomura is a goddamn crazy person but I find his convulsions fascinating and want to see more of them.

i mean, you’re entirely within your rights to do that. it’s just frustrating that there’s visibly no effort put into any of it, and he’s just writing for the sake of what makes the trailer look good, and that’s been 100% to the detriment of the story ever since he’s started doing it

i’m not even inherently opposed to ridiculous convoluted bullshit. i’m one of those pretentious fuckheads that unironically likes End of Evangelion and thinks it made perfect sense, obviously, duh, with all its absolute nonsense of adam and lilith and rei being a god-analogue from absorbing both the white and black seeds and allowing shinji to dictate the ultimate outcome of third impact in the culmination of a couple of really fucking long and extremely obtuse character arcs. i mean, hell, i’m 38 chapters into a fic that is running off nothing but weird high-concept ideas of how reality and parallel universes work and abstract metaphor andsleep deprivation. in any other circumstances, i’m fine with convoluted batshit nonsense.

i think the best way to explain the heart of the issue is to look at what happened to the matrix trilogy. or actually wait this is tumblr, everyone’s in high school and would’ve been foetuses or something when Revolutions came out. homestuck, then. we’ll look at homestuck. 

okay so homestuck. remember when that was as big as it was? initially, the big stumbling block was the slow pace of act 1 where john just kind of fucks around throwing glass at clown dolls for a while and if you weren’t into that kind of humour that was where the comic immediately lost you, but what ultimately got the ball rolling was [S] WV: Ascend. the general metric back then was if you weren’t hooked by that one, you wouldn’t like homestuck at all, and for many people that was the point of no return. the reason WV: Ascend was as big of a deal as it was is that we’ve been seeing a bunch of disconnected nonsense happening all over the place, and this is the first time we see our first major time loop actually closed, with the promise of a few more being set up. all that supposed joke nonsense we’d been watching the whole time? it actually mattered, surprise! from there, the narrative spends a lot of time introducing a lot of new concepts – we have captchaloguing and paradox slime, and time travel, and doomed timelines, and exiles and future versions of planets from a parallel universe the metanarrative being perpetuated by the author being diagetic and fuck knows what other things i’m forgetting about. and then, to throw you for a loop twelve whole other characters show up on top of that. so then the narrative needs to spend time establishing who these people are and what their relevance to the story is – which it does, by having them be active participants in the first arc as things go on. this ultimately culminates in [S] Cascade, where we see all these different concepts eventually tie into one another because they were deliberately set up to, and it’s at that point that you figure, well shit we’ve hit a point where all the time travel stuff has finally come to a head. and with it, you’d expect it to also bring all the character stuff to a head too, but instead hussie has an entire extra act to go so we can’t have that resolve yet. 

so in the meantime, here are 20-ish whole other characters doing some other things. but we don’t have time to establish what’s effectively the silmarillion by now, so we have to speed past it, meaning we aren’t given a chance to care about these new people. but we can’t have a chance to care about them either, because we still have to tie all this into 5 whole previous acts that are meant to feed into this. at this point, homestuck is visibly collapsing under its own weight. character arcs are forced to fart around in circles because the status quo can’t change because we still need to make it to endgame with these character dynamics more or less intact. but that’s boring to read so we’ll do this entire “what if” thing and then retcon it all out of existence, and then have the fact that you can retcon things suddenly become vital to the resolution of the coming in place of anything we’ve already established previously – not the time travel, not the parallel universe with the trolls, not even the whole thing with the Scratch leading to the alpha kids being here in the first place – when the mechanic was only introduced in the first place to sloppily patch a story together that had long since devolved into infodumps that served to paint hussie further and further into a corner as he was forced to define his lore to get the plot to keep moving forward despite the fact that the narrative wasn’t focusing properly on the people that could make that happen anymore because the story had since switched focus from those people almost entirely. 

and in the meantime the damn thing got eaten up by filler, and suddenly characters from that filler are showing up like they were totally relevant to the main story the whole time even though literally nothing they did in their own subplot had any direct bearing on the story at large, unlike the initial 12 trolls. why yes, Alternate Universe Calliope was a completely necessary addition to the story! didn’t you see our important sidestory thing where they do Stuff, and then her showing up in the climax to resolve some other things that are sorta disconnected from the main plot anyway?

not to mention the shipping. nothing ruins a story faster than throwing in a love triangle or eight, and then immediately invalidating all the character growth that happened on top of that anyway by having it literally never happen. not that it would’ve mattered anyway, because remember, we never actually got to have any of this really developed to begin with. 

by the time we hit end of act 6, there’s been so many new concepts haphazardly stapled onto the story and so many threads brought up and discarded entirely when we already established back with [S] Cascade that the story works best when they actually do this and it is doable, that it stops being merely complicated and off the wall, and starts being spread too thin, incomprehensible, and ultimately no longer part of a whole narrative deliberately comprised of interlocking storylines. shit’s just kinda happening at you, and rather than getting to see parts of a text interacting as a result of them coming from somewhere for the express purpose of then going to somewhere, you’re just being asked to accept that, yup, that’s a thing that’s going on right now. neato. sure is some stuff happening and whatnot. and in the end, for all that posturing, it didn’t even do anything. in pre-cascade homestuck that wouldn’t have even been a full flash. a bunch of nonsense happens, and then They Fightan Good, and then it’s over and there’s not a single time paradox or meta-interaction to be found. none of the stuff they built up to over all these years mattered, and neither did any of the stuff they just threw in, either. 

i’m sure you see what i’m getting at with this. 

(also he treats the women in his stories like shit and quite frankly i’m sick of it and even more sick that people keep giving him a pass for it because it’s practically reached parody levels at this point , so there’s that)

i have no problem with convoluted twisty bullshit in and of itself. but it has to accomplish something aside from just existing, and nomura doesn’t do that. by his own admission, kingdom hearts wasn’t planned, and it shows really badly. characters and entire story mechanics and plot lines are introduced solely for the sake of introducing them. they don’t go anywhere or build to anything, because they can’t, because fuck we have to stall for kh3 shhhh just keep adding more soras and hopefully no one will notice. i think the last time any of this actually mattered was kh2, and even that had a lot of the issues i’ve mentioned here. as a result of all of this, the character arcs suffer a lot, and you’re left with nothing but a big ball of plot twists that goes nowhere, and a bunch of characters that only somewhat have anything to do with any of it. 

i don’t feel like it’s overly nitpicky to find this kinda gross and seriously insulting of the audience’s intelligence. it’s just lazy time-stalling. i get that people sometimes really don’t care about stuff like narrative and character development and are just here to see riku punching mike wazowski in the teeth or whatever, but i think it’s disingenuous to pretend that these aren’t nonetheless important parts of a game’s construction – especially a studio that used to openly pride itself on selling games with a focus on story. 

and the genuinely frustrating part is, no one cares. people are gushing all over everything square puts out because it’s square, so they know they don’t have to put effort into their stories. i’m well aware i’m in the minority for saying that these games are bad. but i also thought we were done with treating, “it’s just a video game, bro! why do you care so much about the story having quality as a narrative? this isn’t an english class!” as a valid rebuttal. 

maybe i should’ve used the matrix trilogy instead. most people hate movies 2 and 3 for the weird “YOU’VE ALREADY MADE THE CHOICE/EVERYTHING THAT HAS A BEGINNING HAS AN END NEO” shit and the bonkers christ-allegory ending. i hate it because neo is about as interesting as the rock that cracked goofy’s skull open.

[youngerdaniel]

A WAFFLE OF GENRE: ADVENTURES IN REWRITES - PART FOUR

Not just a trade magazine, Variety is the spice of life... And waffles. It’s not just theme or character that help you determine what stays in and what stays out of a rewrite. Genre is your other King Kahuna. For me, once I figure out exactly what it is I’m trying to say, the next question is usually “How do I say it?” This is often followed by, “What’s for breakfast?” But since we know the answer to that is waffles and doom-scrolling, “How do I say it?” will be today’s focus.

Blake Snyder — the king of simple wisdom about story that writers like to balk at for his quote-unquote prescriptive nature — paints the scene in Save the Cat! by having you imagine opening up the paper and reading the loglines. What kind of movie do you feel like watching tonight?

At the risk of losing my younger audience who thinks newspaper is just what artisanal salad bowls come wrapped in so they’re #authentic, let’s leap back to this century and update the scenario:

You’ve just ordered your favorite vegan short ribs on Uber Eats and you’re plopping down on the couch with our old pal Netflix. Maybe you just watch the top 20, but if you have any sense of adventure at all, you’re already trying to narrow down your choices. Remember that handy genre drop-down?

Y'know... this old friend.

Just like the categories on Uber Eats, genre helps an audience know if your movie is for them or not. Without having to jump in blind, it gives you a sense of what you’re ordering — a curry is spicy, ice cream is sweet, Japadog sounds crazy but is unbelievably delicious... A funny, a scary, a twisty thing, a brainy independent thing, et cetera.

Once again, lots of writers will balk at anything that forces them to pin down what they’re story is about. They’ll feel like it paints them into a corner, like it keeps them from letting their creative freak flag fly, like it oversimplifies the stunningly original and intellectually riveting expression of the human condition into a two-toned bitmap. They’ll see it as rules — because there are some. The same way you’d be pissed if your Wagyu Beef Taeriyamo from Japadog order arrives and there's a fruitcake instead of a Japanese-American frankenweenie in the bag, an audience feels ripped off if they think they’re going into one thing and get another.

“But wait!” I can almost hear some first year film school students whining, “I’ve been to a ton of movies that I thought would be one way and wound up totally flipping the premise halfway through. Who is this guy? Has he even seen Parasite? I’m writing my own thing.”

Go ahead. I’m not rewriting your script, and I have seen Parasite… And while indeed, things are absolutely not as they appear, you know going into Parasite that you’re in for surprises. It’s not billed as a family drama. It’s a thriller. Yes, it is — it’s right on Google. Look it up.

Or in our case, "Film school kid, hates boxes, makes things that are literally inside of a rectangle."

The book of Ecclesiastes has a big section that tells you there are times for some things, and times when those things are over. So there is absolutely a time to let your creative impulse run amok; and a time to get your narrative in control. Rewrites are that season.

The hot thing nowadays is to do something called an “elevated” version of a genre — that is, exec-speak for imbuing classical models of story with something that provides social commentary, makes an observation about not only our nature but our proclivity to a given type of narrative itself. I don’t think anybody actually knows how to elevate a genre, but I would take a wild guess that the mechanics are the same as with any good story…

Have something to say, not just a situation to present.

You get the picture. So why am I picking at genre next? Well, when we loop back to The Librarian, it’s got a potentially too-big scope. If any character can jump out a book, as the concept suggests, it stands to reason this script can run through movements of multiple genres in the course of its runtime. That’s an interesting notion, but again, it lacks focus. Without focus, you’ve got sweet looking car with no engine block. Yada yada, Youngo goes on about conflict and theme and premise until the cows come home… Remember, I’m still writing these things more for me than for you. Maybe the discomfort you feel can give you perspective on that script you’re writing more for you than an audience.

When I first wrote the Librarian back in 2021, I had pictured it as a sort of Ghibli-esque adventure story. It’s got your typical conventions of “newbie recruited into secret organization, struggles to the learn the ropes, and ultimately the student surpasses the master” but it plods along, exploring different potential characters and subplots in the way that only a first draft is allowed to. It’s a big, everything-in-the-pantry soup, and as a result, it sorta has too much flavor to taste anything. But as I did my margin notes and ruminated on what the central, compelling element of the thing really was, it became clear to me that it’s a mystery.

See, buried under the A-plot, in which Rory and her mentor (the titular Librarian) cleaning up a spill of characters in their town, and ultimately preventing Hazel the Wicked Witch of the West from destroying reality in her quest to become real, there was a mystery. Because one of the “Rules of the World” I established was that Hazel is able to boost her ability to stay in reality by sapping the imagination out of the town’s children. Real, classic Evil Villain™ stuff, but it does the trick and it raises the stakes… And when it comes to my villains, I’m always looking horrible things they do for a reason. If Hazel doesn’t kidnap children and sap their imagination, she has to go back into the book and accept her status as a fictional character. So something about this feels like it sells.

Direct quote from me talking to my second draft.

You may remember how I’m also always hunting for things that stay with me. Well, the image of a bunch of missing persons notices posted on a library cork board is one of those images. It’s nothing revolutionary, to be sure, but it’s sticky. When the time came to start concocting a rewrite plan, I knew this was going to be the element that needed to come to the surface; it connects the personal stakes of the protagonist and antagonist to larger stakes of the story world they inhabit. It’s got a sense of darkness that feels reminiscent of old fairy tales, it’s got a feeling of urgency that’ll give the kids in the audience a thrill and also give their parents nightmares. All that tension and intrigue has the potential to build to a totally satisfying conclusion when I free them — if I do my job right, anyway.

Knowing this, it’s pretty clear that while it’s a big fantasy adventure in concept, in its mechanics, this story is a mystery. And now that I’ve cracked that particular question, I’ve got some expectations on my hands.

Tune in next time for Genre’s oddball cousin: the wacky and wonderful world of tropes.

[margridarnauds]

Top five characters from literature (and why, if you're feeling chatty)

I tend to forget about literally everything I’ve ever read when I’m in a position to talk about it, so I’m going to do my best. 

(1) Bres mac Elatha - Cath Maige Tuired, Cath Maige Tuired Conga, and a load of other assorted medieval Irish myths. 

My boy. My son.

There’s a lot I could say about him, and a lot of it I wasn’t able to fit into my 45 page Capstone. Sometimes, in my (fairly short) life, I’ve been lucky enough to come across something that happened to be exactly what I needed at the time and, for my 14-15 year old self, that happened to be an obscure Irish deity who ends up choking on bog water. As you will. 

I didn’t start out liking him; it’s very, very easy to accept a simple version of the text where he’s just a moustache twirling tyrant, and even though it’s not an interpretation I AGREE with, seeing as it’s…boring, as a concept to me, it’s just as valid as anything, given these texts were meant to be interpreted and reinterpreted and transmitted and then rewritten from the ground up to suit the times. Cath Maige Tuired Bres is actually an anomaly; before that, he seems to have been an esteemed member of the Tuatha dé. 

Which, I suppose, is part of why I like him. There’s an ambiguity about him, a crossing of lines. Even in CMT where he’s at his most villainous, he’s fairly unique, having many of the traits of a hero and, I would argue, he is as much the protagonist of the text as Lugh is. He has the heroic birth with a missing father, the strange childhood, the trial by combat, etc. And yet, in the world of CMT, with the context of the Viking invasions, he just doesn’t have a chance. He’s a fundamentally doomed character from the beginning, with his own actions damning him in the end. 

His very existence in the tribe, the son born out of the most “proper” form of medieval Irish wedlock (seeing as there were nine, I hesitate to apply the term “bastard” to Bres, but the circumstances were NOT the ideal) to an unbetrothed noblewoman of the Tuatha (THE FUCKING SOVEREIGNTY OF IRELAND) and the king of a neighboring tribe, really warps the social structure, and it’s something he kind of carries throughout his life. He isn’t like Cú Chulainn, who is probably the one character who comes closest to him as far as his place in the tribe; he’s not content to serve the maternal side of his family as a champion, doing as he’s commanded. He wants power, and, when he’s removed from power, he takes desperate measures to take it back and, in the process, loses everything.

And, really, that essential liminality extends into his relationship with gender and power structures. While he’s supposed to represent order, as the king, he has no taste for the nobility; he makes them work (!!!!), he doesn’t give a bard due hospitality, he doesn’t give the warriors ale and meat. You get this image of him as this kind of distant, isolated figure in the tribe; not particularly JOYLESS, per se, at least in my interpretation of him (given we don’t see him happy all that often, the interpretation is open), but one who takes joy in things very, very different from the rest of the tribe, or at least from the men. Instead, his closest relationships in the tribe are to the women, who are the ones who elect him. His mother is his most constant ally, being willing to travel with him to see his father, even if it means leaving her own tribe to do it, and she’s the one he goes to IMMEDIATELY for help. And, when his mother addresses her father, it’s notable that SHE’S the one who takes control of the narrative, not Bres. Bres only confirms it when his father asks him. I wouldn’t say that he’s a feminine-coded character, specifically, though I think there are elements of that, but he definitely does not fit the expectations of how a medieval Irish nobleman is to behave with his own sex and with the opposite sex. At the risk of going full-on Pretentious Academic here, it reminds me of what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen wrote in his Seven Monster Theses, where he wrote, “By revealing that difference is arbitrary and potentially free-floating, mutable rather than essential, the monster threatens to destroy not just individual members of a society, but the very cultural apparatus through which individuality is constituted and allowed.” 

And, in other texts, I think there’s decent enough subtext to do a queer reading of Bres. Like, in Cath Maige Tuired Conga, which is a sort of prequel to CMT, Bres appears as the champion of the Tuatha dé, a completely normal part of the tribe, and he meets with Sreng mac Sengann, the Fir Bolg champion, and their meeting is…interesting to me, in how intimate it is, as far as two men from opposing sides sent to essentially size up the enemy. There’s a certain…familiarity with one another. They know that if their tribes go to battle, it’s going to be a bloodbath, and there’s really no personal dislike for one another. They even ask each other where they spent the night! (Which, it’s a common enough phrase that I’m not going to tie it to The Wooing of Emer, but…) And then, at the end of their meeting, they each give each other one of their sharp, pointy weapons to bring back to the tribe as a show of what the other tribe can do, and the text says, “They parted in peace after making a compact of friendship with each other.” It’s just…a very unusual scene, in terms of champions meeting up with one another, and it’s one that I think I could spend a lot more time with if I was given the opportunity. And curiously enough, they keep the vow of friendship! Throughout the rest of the fight, you see everyone being paired off against their equal, but Bres and Sreng never go head to head even when Sreng takes the arm off of Bres’ king. Instead, Bres goes for Sreng’s king. 

Personally, for me, he only really clicked when I was going over CMT again and I was looking over the scene where Bres meets his father for the first time and he says, “Do you have any advice for me?” and I was like…fuck. This is the first time he’s ever met his father, and the first words that his father’s ever said to him are essentially, “Why aren’t you leading your own people? What have you done wrong?” which is doubly painful when you realize that his father was one of the Fomorian lords who were raiding Ireland earlier. At the risk of going personal here, at the time when I read those lines and had them hit me, I was in the process of divorcing myself from my own father, who, like Bres, I had had a distant relationship with, as he lived across the country and was happier with the idea of having a picture on a mantelplace than a daughter who wanted something as inconvenient as his attention. Reading that, and thinking about my own situation, I was like, “Yeah, I get you” and, from then on, I really read him and the text in a wildly different light, especially when I started to think about the repercussions of, say, Bres having the growth of a 14 year old at the age of 7. Like, if you take this text realistically (which…you can or you can’t, because these texts are over the top by their nature), he never had a childhood. He was just moving from one stage of growth to another, with the tribe probably being all too eager to put a spear in his hand because Well, he has the growth for it now and That’s Just What a Man Does. Which is something that I ALSO understood, deeply, and is something that I wish more adaptations of CMT would take into account besides just forcing Bres into the role of “Entitled Brat.” 

Also, if my dissertation up there wasn’t enough: According to some genealogies, he’s The Morrigan’s nephew, given that both Eriu, Bres’ mother, and she are both listed as daughters of Ernmas. Like, if you don’t love him for the batshit insane, Extra antics he finds himself in (like the time the Dagda, his half-brother/father-in-law decides to distract the husband of the woman he’s banging by sending him on a mission to Bres), you’ve got to love him for his batshit insane, extra, goth family. 

(2) The Countess - Makt Myrkanna (AKA Weird Ass Swedish Dracula.)

This will hopefully be briefer than my little essay up there, mainly because there’s really not all that much information on her in text and it’s been awhile since I read her scenes (and even then, a lot of that was me rereading it so that I could write the Countess/Lucy smutfic that I am probably never, ever going to let see the light of day. Which. Vampire smutfic. Light of day.) 

BUT…why I like her. Makt Myrkanna is a very, very different work than the original Dracula, extending the scenes in the castle while condensing the rest of the novel to a truly dizzying extent, to the point where we have no idea whether Arthur Holmwood’s actually…alive by the end of the book given that the last time he was mentioned, he was stalking Lucy’s grave given that he thought she’d been buried alive. RIP Artie. To me, though, it really, really shows in the figure of the Countess, who is very different from the three women Jonathan meets in the original novel. There, even though there is a lot of subtext about what their relationship to the Count is, some of which might not have been printable in a Victorian novel (at least not one to be sold to the public), the brides really only have the two key scenes: Once when they tempt Jonathan and Dracula intervenes, and then again when they try to get Mina to join them and then Van Helsing goes down and stakes them. They’re probably one of the most memorable parts of the novel and certainly a BIG influence on the portrayal of vampire women in fiction, but they’re not…there all that often. 

The Countess, however, is a far more formidable figure. She does not seem nearly as pleased in her current position, seeming to be held in place by Dracula, who it’s heavily, heavily implied might have been her husband (?), though he also shows just as much disdain for the man’s actions towards her in life that it’s kind of hard to tell one way or another. (Like a lot of things in Makt Myrkanna, it’s toyed with and then never picked up again.) No matter what, he definitely wants to bang her and probably has on multiple occasions, given that he describes her, uh, attributes to Thomas while showing him his collection of dirty paintings. (Yes, Dracula has a porn collection in this one.) For the Countess’ part, there seems to be a certain…fear that the Count inspires in her, or at least a sense of caution with her quickly ushering Thomas Harker (inexplicably, Jonathan becomes Thomas in this translation) away. Obviously, she’s on Team Dracula in the end, she very much wants to eat humans, and she’s not a Broken Bird, but you do get the sense that she has some sort of agenda of her own and that, perhaps, there’s a sort of power struggle being waged in Castle Dracula that Thomas is more or less oblivious to (he’s a bit busy dodging human sacrifices). 

She also represents far more of a temptation than the original brides, who Jonathan…is interested in, with the reference to “almost wanting them to kiss me” (or something; I don’t have Dracula on hand and, if I spend too long searching, I know I’ll never get this done), but it’s still not…..in depth. Like, Jonathan loves and is faithful to Mina, even though he’s ashamed when he shows her his diaries because of that line. Thomas Harker, his counterpart here, though, reacts…very differently, trying to keep his calm but, “The moment she turned towards me and locked her incomparable eyes with mine, it felt as though an electric current surged throughout my body. I grabbed a nearby chair and held onto its backrest. She looked steadily into my eyes, and it didn’t even occur to me that I should have greeted her, or that my behavior was doltish. But evidently neither did she see a need for salutations. It felt as though we had already known each other for a long time and therefore didn’t need to explain ourselves.” There’s this hypnotic effect that she has on him, and unlike her three counterparts, she is perfectly willing to wait and talk with him for long periods of time.             

Also, unlike her other counterparts, we get her backstory detailed to us, with her being described as being just as ruthless and cunning as the Count even as a child, with her being described as, holding, “the hearts of men at [her] fingertips, playing with them as a child plays with grapes before sucking out the liquid.” And in her lifetime, she was powerful, with Dracula saying she, “Held the destinies of whole nations in her hands, though few suspected it. Heads of state, kings, and emperors, lay at her feet–or in her arms.” Ultimately, her only downfall was when her husband ended up locking her and her lover in the bedroom together so she could sex him to death. Literally. He jumps out a window. And then her husband had a funeral service performed but, given she’s walking around the castle, we can presume it didn’t stick.                                                                                                                                

(3) Asriel/Mrs. Coulter - His Dark Materials

I’m including both of them because it’s not necessarily the two of them I like as individuals; it’s their dynamic. I mean, I do very much like them as individuals, they are each favs in their own right, but their dynamic is essential to that as well. They both complement and bounce off of each other very well, having this kind of spark where, even though they absolutely despise each other for most of the trilogy, they are really the only two who match each other. They’re both incredibly magnetic; like, in his first scene at Jordan College, I was pretty blown away by Asriel’s presentation, in his confidence, his ruthlessness, his intelligence, his pride and his ambition, all of which are also mirrored in Mrs Coulter. They simply happen to have landed on separate sides, with Asriel trying to essentially tear down everything that Coulter stands for and Coulter seizing control in the Church because it’s the only thing she really has as far as options, since she lacks the privileges Asriel has as a man. 

They both do horrible things in the pursuit of their goals, including killing children, with Coulter being essentially the embodiment of Stranger Danger, and they both harm Lyra both physically and mentally. Still, when they let their guard down, on the FEW occasions they let their guard down, it is shown that they have some amount of love for Lyra, but they fundamentally don’t know how to be parents when all their lives have been spent in the pursuit of power and knowledge and all the ways those two intertwine. 

I’m not sure how much I fully believe in Mrs Coulter’s swerve to motherhood, whether it was the best writing decision, whether it leans into the overall weakening of female characters in the last book or so, with Lyra being another notable victim, but I do think there’s a tragedy in there, as far as her trying but failing. And there is something in the classic femme fatale, generally seen as sexual but cold and unmaternal, dangerous in her embracing of sexuality sans procreation and motherhood (and monogamy!) being allowed to HAVE those kind of feelings and to have a complicated dynamic with the father of her child who she still has obviously holds some feelings for. And for Asriel’s part, he WAS ready to sacrifice Lyra, but he was also HORRIFIED by it, and in the end, he does repeatedly show that he cares, I just think that ultimately he let his own lofty goals get in the way of that until it was almost too late. 

I really think that the best showcasing of them as characters tends to be with them together, such as in the third book when she steals the Intention Craft. She comes in there a prisoner, Asriel doesn’t WANT her there because he knows she’ll pull something, but she’s able to trap him in his own words by playing his commanders like a fiddle, and then she takes advantage over his desire to show off his new toy to get her an in, with Asriel then letting her go with one of his spies in the craft with her, knowing fully well what she’s going to do next and then going back to his improved prototype for more scheming. Like, they’re always trying to one up the other; it’s essentially a form of foreplay for them (as much so as you can get in a kid’s series about killing God), and I can only imagine what they were like when they were actually in a relationship, because they must have been terrifying and yet, for whatever reason, they both fell in love with each other to embark on a forbidden affair with each other, when she was married to a highly powerful man, risking everything. 

So, I’m going to be curious to see what the new BBC series ends up doing with them, both as individuals and as a pair. 

(4) Morgan le Fay - Like, a hundred different Arthurian adaptations 

I’ll be honest: Morgan le Fay in The Magic Treehouse was one of my first crushes. I was always strangely drawn to books with her in them, looking at the pictures for a while. 

These days, I have broadened my Arthurian knowledge significantly, though not nearly as much as I’d like to, but she’s still my eternal favorite. (Literally any book or film that tries me to root for Arthur over Morgan is going to fail miserably.) She is the embodiment of the Other in a woman, being otherwordly in her name and in her powers, but, like Bres and any other character from a long tradition, she is ambiguous in her presentation. Sometimes, she loves her brother and truly wants to expose the love affair between Lancelot and Guinevere to save his honor. Sometimes, she wants to create destruction for destruction’s sake. Sometimes, she reconciles with her brother and gives up the fight, sometimes she only relents when she sees his dead body there. She is always powerful, but the way that power is applied and, at times, not applied is part of what makes her fascinating and why, I believe, she is still subject to so much study after all these years. 

 The backstory as far as her mother and Uther gives her VERY strong motivation for why she would be less than pleased with Arthur, though I tend to favor the story of her expulsion from Camelot for having an affair with a kinsman of Guinevere’s for the delicious, delicious irony involved. 

 She is more of a schemer than her sister Morgause who, despite the oddness of her family, tends to be a loving mother (who just…happens to take a lover many, many years her junior and pays the consequences) in works that don’t take off from sexist Victorian bullshit. (I have many, many feelings over the portrayal of Morgause, and they’re very complicated so I won’t vomit them out.) Like, she successfully steals the sheath of Excalibur, and came very, very close to killing both Arthur AND her husband with the whole Accolon thing. 

Also, she literally has a dude come into Camelot dressed in green so she could terrify Guinevere AT CHRISTMAS and then continues to troll her nephew for a year (and a day!) Like, name a greater icon. 

(5) Shiloh - Saving Shiloh

 A Very Good Boi. Doesn’t die at the end, unlike SOME literary dogs that I could mention whose authors thought that kids needed the slow, creeping inevitability of death forced into them. A+ pupper. 

[brand-it]

Digital Marketing for Beginners: The Ultimate Guide (2021)

Digital marketing is what drives e-commerce sales. So what’s the point of that? Can you do it and succeed? In this beginner’s guide to digital marketing, I will break it down into smaller sections to make it easier to understand.

Digital marketing is not new; it’s been around for a while. Radio’s first public transmission happened in 1896 when the radio began broadcasting. That’s the whole point of internet marketing. However, this advertising approach is distinct from typical marketing in that it uses wireless signals.

Digital marketing has a lot of misunderstandings associated with it. A simple way to illustrate this concept is to note that, for example, some people believe that online and digital marketing are identical, which is incorrect. In the context of online marketing, internet access is just required, whereas conveying digital signals is also required in the context of digital marketing.

In other words, digital marketing encompasses various media, including billboards, radio, and televisions. Have you discovered this by chance? Don’t worry; you’re not alone. Believe it or not, there are still some more misconceptions out there. It sounds reasonable. Let’s get started!

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing has been around since the invention of the radio. Using digital signals to communicate with clients, visitors, or readers is a method of marketing known as communication by digital signals. Digital marketing has grown a lot over the years, particularly in the past few years.

The word “digital” describes several methods of delivering marketing communications such as electronic devices, including television, radio, search engines, websites, social media, and more.

It demonstrates the range of channels available in modern-day digital marketing. Suddenly, every day a new app, website, or digital solution appears. According to Think with Google, 48% of customers use search engines to begin their inquiries.

All marketing channels are not equal. When it comes to digital marketing, you have many marketing options, including email, social media, and PPC. Let’s learn about your company’s investment rationale for digital marketing.

Why Digital Marketing?

In business, more sales, leads, and profits are always required. To succeed, it will have to experiment with new marketing techniques. Digital marketing is at least ten years old. Until now, there were just a limited number of channels. However, people’s attitudes have shifted. Companies have also adjusted in response.

Google and social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram create more income than any traditional media agency; they provide more monetary revenue than traditional media agencies. Why? They’re exposed to more people. That is why internet marketing is critical. There are a few things you must know.

Your Clients or Readers are Online.

Today, around 4.66 billion individuals are using the internet. That represents over 60% of the whole global population. It is rapidly expanding in number. With the current year ending, you’ll see approximately 319 million new users. So think about the ability to promote your idea to the people in your life.

Affordability and ROI of Digital Marketing

More than ever, digital marketing is all about online marketing. However, while online ads are much more economical than those aired on television, they still carry a much higher cost. For example, it might cost $120,000 to air a 30-second commercial on a national television channel.

When it comes to making new material and then spreading it around on social media, the cost may be reasonably low. And, of course, you’re well aware of it. Starting your digital marketing efforts is quick and easy with digital marketing. As well as increasing profitability, digital marketing investments have the advantage of growing profitability over investments in traditional marketing.

Your competition has already Implemented it.

Businesses from McDonald’s to Gucci are all promoting using digital channels. So regardless of your sector or niche, your competitors are already doing it. So that’s a strong argument in favor of your success in digital marketing.

How do you deconstruct the problem? First, discover the most prominent digital marketing categories. Then, let’s give it a go!

Breakdown of Digital Marketing: 9 Major Types

The only way to become a successful digital marketer is to learn how to break it down into steps. I’ll take care of it. Digital marketing may be broken down into 9 distinct types:

Content marketing

Search engine optimization

Search engine marketing

Pay-per-click advertising

Social media marketing

Email marketing

Mobile marketing

TV & radio marketing

Electronic billboards

As you can see, digital marketing is a broad topic; this one can’t concentrate on one part of it. Instead, you can find your items and services via a variety of ways and channels.

The Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing for Beginners in 2021

Since you’re in the marketing industry, you should focus on a particular sector in digital marketing rather than using digital marketing as a whole. Do you understand this? Let’s begin.

1. Content Marketing

Content marketing is the only kind of marketing that will exist forever and the only type of marketing ever existed. Today, the variety of content marketing efforts includes email marketing, social media marketing, and electronic billboards, but all begin with the concept of content marketing.

Without unique content, every marketing campaign is doomed to fail.

While it’s true that many content marketing initiatives include a blog, video, or tweet, these elements are only a tiny part of a larger content marketing strategy. All about the content: a printed flyer is still a good source of information even if it doesn’t benefit from the power of content. Powerful because it is an excellent storyteller. We all enjoy narratives. Isn’t that correct?

I love Quora because of the amazing content created by its users. When your audience is present, your message is conveyed.

Affiliate marketing is a type of content marketing in which you market the material to earn affiliate commissions. Books, podcasts, movies, white papers, emails, and many more are part of content marketing strategies.

Each approach has its way of going about things, but they all follow the same core creative process.

These are the actions you should take:

Make sure your goals are in line with your mission.

A unique selling point is anything that differentiates your company from competitors.

You need to know your audience and be aware of its regular patterns.

Consider who your target audience is and the type of information they are most likely to find helpful.

Plan by creating a content calendar that you can update often.

And for those of you who care, here’s a helpful hint, To measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing, use URL shortening tools.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Now that you’ve recognized the value of content, it’s time to optimize it for search engines such as Google. This digital marketing strategy attracts organic traffic because of it. While traditional forms of marketing tend to be inconsistent, digital marketing is more consistent than anything else.

SEO is all about applying the best search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to rank most in search engines like Google or Bing. The material must meet business objectives by ranking for a particular keyword or query. SEO is not quick. It will take some time before you can appreciate the payoff, but it is well worth the wait.

These are the actions you should take:

It would be best if you understand what your target audience is searching for.

Use keyword research to find the most effective keywords, and then choose the ones that best describe your content.

Identify keywords for your audience, and produce valuable content for them based on those keywords.

It is crucial to always keep in touch with your visitors or consumers with great, thought-provoking content.

Push to increase the number of authority links or mentions of your business asset to its place in the overall strategy.

Long-term SEO is continuous. It does not follow rigid guidelines and is not a one-time technique. Diversify your portfolio and anticipate your profits to increase little by little.

3. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

As with SEO, search engine marketing (SEM) is most similar to search engine optimization (SEO) because both seek to target search engines. There are many distinctions between SEO and SEM, but some can be surprising. For example, the practice of making money through paid advertising is referred to as search engine marketing.

SEM aims to get as much visibility as possible in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). When you purchase a search ad, you’re paying the search engine to place an advertisement for a particular keyword. So, for instance, if someone types into the search engine, your page will rise above organic results in the results list.

These are the actions you should take:

Start by conducting keyword research.

Calculate the total cost of all relevant keywords.

Limit your selection to terms that have the highest return on investment.

Create content that your audience loves and use adverts to bring in revenue

You may improve the click-through rate by using A/B ad copy.

Choose places relevant to your business.

Analyze the performance as a whole and plan accordingly to increase the ROI.

Before finding a specific phrase or term to target, test many keywords in the search engines to find the one that yields the most profitable results. Pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine marketing (SEM) are both forms of paid advertising using search engines.

4. Social Media Marketing

You did indeed guess correctly. You use social media marketing to market your business, such as on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. Everybody in the world must use social media in their business these days. Why? Because everyone uses social media. Customers, Visitors. Everyone.

Go for the social network that will best help you meet your business goals. This is an example of an organization focusing on B2B, and LinkedIn is one of its outlets. And if you enjoy fashion, then you should check out Pinterest or Instagram.

For each individual, it depends. Planning will help you avoid social media miscalculations.

These are the actions you should take:

Know your audience and their needs.

People only care about the type of stuff they adore.

To recognize and identify your competition.

Do something different to engage your audience.

Initiate a social media audit and make changes as a result.

5. Email Marketing

In 1978, the first email was sent to prospective customers, resulting in $13 million in revenue. Momentum continues to build. With email marketing, you can expect to receive a return on investment (ROI) of $42 for every dollar you spend. Email marketing is one of my favorites since you have the opportunity to make personal connections with people. Before it’s too late, build an established relationship with your subscribers.

Take the customer-centric approach to sharpen the power of email marketing. It is about your clients and readers, not about you and your business. If you are new to email marketing, use them as your starting points.

The first step to finding customers for your brand is finding new prospects. And email is just one of several marketing channels, not the only one.

These are the actions you should take:

Determine who your target audience is and why they should care.

Give your customers a reason to sign up (offer an ebook or some other lead magnet).

The goal is to develop an attention-grabbing opt-in form.

Select an email campaign type that is more likely to generate the results you want.

Decide on an email marketing service to help you accomplish your goals.

Another vital point to keep in mind is that your text should remain consistent with your overall voice or brand image. A solid call to action (CTA) is required to increase site visitors who convert into subscribers. Make sure that an opt-in box appears at the proper time so that you can send a message. Personalize your message regularly.

6. Mobile Marketing

Digital marketing encompasses all of the different forms of mobile marketing that I’ve addressed here. Our entire lives are on our phones, thanks to social media and email. To serve customers on their mobile phones, you must optimize your content.

There are a few things you can do:

Always monitor your content’s sizing to stay on top of your competition.

Also, think about the phone when you’re streaming on the go.

Redesign your websites to provide mobile-friendly advertisements.

For a high open-rate, make sure to optimize your newsletter, too, not simply the video content or blog.

Measure the effectiveness of your mobile marketing campaign.

7. TV & Radio Marketing

It is possible that you may not be here for this, I understand. But I suppose I should also add television and radio advertising since it’s a kind of digital marketing. For another thing, the radio may also be used to describe podcasts, and TV may describe internet videos. Nevertheless, in this section, I will focus on radio and TV.

Today, everyone is online, but you may use TV and radio solely to target specific demographics precisely. To catch your audience’s attention, you can also use TV commercials while your audience is watching their streaming TV. What would you like to do?

There are things you can do:

Know your audience and their needs.

To ensure your ads will capture the audience’s attention, be sure your audience will be looking at your ads.

Change the adverts on your TV and radio based on where your audience lives.

Hire the finest and on a budget.

Customize your TV and radio advertisements with streaming service providers for more personalized adverts.

8. Electronic Billboards & Other Digitized Marketing

In addition to digital marketing, electronic billboards are kinds of digital marketing. It is impossible to dispute that your eyeballs become an electrical billboard of eye appeal when you are on the road. The exciting things you may do to enhance earnings depend on your audience.

These are the actions you should take:

Know your audience and their needs.

The method for luring in the creative set is to craft the creatives.

Use the power of colors to your advantage.

Invent powerful catchphrases.

When choosing a location, be sure only to select the most acceptable potential option.

That’s all there is. I’ve put in my best effort to give you value and understanding to help you as a newbie in digital marketing. Even if the guide was lengthy, read on to see what happens next.

TL; DR — Digital Marketing for Beginners in 2021

In this beginner’s guide to digital marketing, you can see that it is not just for internet marketing. But let’s be honest: Not even the wealthiest can win them all. So when planning this type of content, I don’t encourage it unless your audience dictates it.

This means that despite this, let’s have a look at the many things digital marketing can help you do:

Make material that will go viral and then come up with a content marketing strategy.

It is essential to focus on search engine optimization and marketing, too.

Third, you must be adept at finding and implementing new social media methods (as discussed above).

Mobile phones are great to include in any marketing campaign, so have them.

It is recommended that you use TV and radio commercials and electronic billboards based on your target population.

Every form of digital marketing has one thing in common: the audience. As said in the ‘Things You Need to Do’ section, I maintain an understanding of your target. Why? To advertise yourself or your business ideas, make sure that you sell what you have to offer.

[doomedandstoned]

THAL Pave Way For The Heathen Invasion

~By Billy Goate~

I knew there was something special about this band when I first picked up their trail a few years back and listening to their debut album confirms this. It's especially effective listening in the dead cold of night, I've noticed. You've picked up on a badass stripe of stoner metal known as THAL. The Columbus duo of John "Vince Green" Walker (vox, guitar, bass) and Kevin Hartnell (drums, guitars, synth) proves yet again that the Ohio heavy underground is a definite force of reckoning. THAL's new album is called 'Reach for the Dragon's Eye' (2018), the band's second full-length following 2016's Glitter   (which I remember playing a track from back then on The Doomed & Stoned Podcast).

The new record has THAL continuing to kick major, major behind, but with a renewed sense of purpose and resolve. It's as if Down and Kyuss had met for a handshake and bumped into Acid Bath on the way to the head shop as I listen to a song like, "Under Earth." Others, like "Her Gods Demand War," give us a groovy Goatsnake beat fueled by some genuine Midwestern metal steam. You'll delight in the vocal collaboration with Sophie Steff at this point in the record, a musician I know little about but suspect we'll be hearing more from in the future.

You came here for hard-driving, riff-driven southern-fueled American stoner-doom, though, right? "Thoughtform" scratches that itch and then some, putting it in good company with bands like Pale Divine. There's a purity and simple forthrightness to the music-making here (see: "Soulshank") that pulls in a lot of what I love about Jerry Cantrell's Boggy Depot . The vocals jockey between clean and Neil Fallon dirty. All eight tracks have kept me company on the drive to and from work and I suspect you'll be riding them just as hard.

THAL's Reach For The Dragon's Eye drops Friday, February 16th in digital and CD formats via Argonauta Records. You can hear the record right here, right now on our bitchin' lil blog!

Give ear...

Interviewing THAL's Vince Green

What inspired you guys to start THAL?

I actually never touched a guitar until I was in my 20’s. I was into producing and recording hip-hop back in the 90’s. As I started getting older and maturing, my tastes started to change and I was feeling very limited by the hip-hop genre. Around that time my friend in college introduced me to Clutch and I was immediately hooked. THAT is the kind of music I wanted to make. So I started learning the guitar by playing an acoustic along to Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters records; learning basic chords and such. I also began to digest as much heavy music as I could. Obviously Sabbath was at the top of the list and I also got into Hendrix, Buffalo, Sir Lord Baltimore, Pentagram, The Obsessed, Kyuss and literally hundreds of others -- I have a very large record collection.

Finally, after getting to the point that I felt competent enough to record. I started making heavy music under the THAL name. It was just my solo thing for a few years. I played all the instruments and wrote/sang all of the lyrics. After I met David Jones -- my guitar partner in wytCHord-- and he introduced me to Kevin Hartnell, who came onboard as our drummer. Making the first wytCHord album with those guys was some of the most fun I’ve ever had creating music. In the meantime, I kept writing THAL songs on the side and decided to see if Kevin would have interest in drumming on my next record. He said yes and not only drummed, but provided quite a bit of additional instrumentation including two songs on the album, "Thoughtform" and "Death of the Sun," that are completely his instrumentals. I’m hoping Kevin would like to continue making music as THAL with me and that we can continue to evolve the band.

I know THAL is an acronym, but I thought I’d let you explain its meaning to the readers and tell us exactly how you came up with this for the name of your band.

THAL stands for The Heathens Are Loose. It was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek representation of modern society. Rock & roll is “music for heathens,” right? So I wear the title proudly. I also wanted something that when you broke it down into an acronym sounded primitive and heavy. THAL. As an interesting side note, I recently found out that Thal, Austria is the birthplace of Arnold Schwarzenegger whom I admired greatly as a bodybuilder. Totally unplanned.

You’re no new kids on the block – you’ve been making music for 4 or 5 years, right? Has the band evolved musically, stylistically, thematically from your earliest singles to your last record, ‘Glitter’ (2016), and the new album, ‘Reach For The Dragon’s Eye’ (2018)?

I posted the first THAL song up on YouTube in 2013. Listening to that, I think the biggest thing that has changed is the quality of the recordings. As I’ve added to my arsenal of tools and had more practice, the sound quality gets better each time. Also, I was not as confident vocally in 2013 and was still trying to find my voice. In 2016 Sam Durango of the mighty Rage of Samedi released Glitter on his Voodoo Chamber Records label in Germany. That was a great experience and was the first time a larger group of people were exposed to what I was doing and it was very well received. At this point, I am relatively comfortable with my range and do my best to work within that. I am far from the world’s best singer, so taking more chances with harmony and phrasing has “improved” things, at least in my mind. Ha! Thematically, I think my earlier stuff was more occult based and over time I am reflecting more on the struggles of modern life; although still from an esoteric viewpoint.

I’m really excited about debuting the new album. Can you take some time to walk us through each of the songs and tell us a little something about each? Could be the song’s history and development or meaning.

Absolutely! We are excited and honored that you are debuting the album, so thank you! Keep in mind that I think a song can mean something different to each person, so my intentions when I wrote the song may not match up to the meaning when you hear it and that is 100% okay.

"Rebreather": This is actually the last song we recorded. I was sent a piece of poetry by a friend named Randy Blood. That poem ended up being the words in the chorus and I built the narrative around it. It’s about us as a society being thrown into the deep end of the pool with all the snakes and trying to breathe for as long as we can. The title is homage to an amazing band from Ohio.

"Under Earth": I had written the riffs on this one for another vocalist that I thought I might work with at some point. That ended up not happening and it became the first THAL song that Kevin and I collaborated on. He sent it back to me with drums and a working title of “Under Earth”. Those words conjured images in my mind and it almost wrote itself. Each generation buries meaningful truths before it until we have a false representation of the way some things are meant to be.

"Her Gods Demand War": Ever since I came across Sophie Steff’s Sound Cloud, I wanted to collaborate with her. She has a crystal clear voice that conveys a lot of emotion. I sent her the instrumental along with the title and told her to write what came to her. She recorded that as the chorus and sent it back to me -- all the way from France! It was gorgeous. I wrote my parts around her choruses and added some harmony as well. In addition to the drums, Kevin added the beautiful guitar harmonies. One of my favorite songs on the record.

"ThoughtForm": Kevin sent me an instrumental he had been working on and it felt like Christmas morning to receive this track. Of course I was going to add vocals to it! This song has more groove than any other song on the album and is more about a personal struggle with the world kicking you when you’re down.

"Soulshank": I wrote this song not long after I was out of the hospital. I had just been through a surgery; hence the lyrics “Stick the knife into my soul and twist.” It’s an imagining of someone dying and returning to take the world back from the pieces of garbage that are running it now.

"Death of the Sun": This is the other track where all instruments are played by Kevin. It’s as “soulful” as I’m going to get when I sing. Haha! The concept was Kevin’s about the world ending and the words son/sun being used interchangeably at times. Basically, when the end comes we are all going to be in it together. The time for judging each other is done and whatever is going to happen is going to happen.

"Punish": I don’t normally call people out specifically when I write my music. I prefer to be more metaphorical. But in this case, I will gladly say it is about three pieces of shit (Shawn Whaley, Brandy Shaver and Gary Bubis) that tied a little girl to their truck and dragged her in addition to other abuses. Her mother was also complicit! The story horrified me and broke my heart. This song is basically my hope for their complete and utter destruction.

"Reach For The Dragon’s Eye": The “Dragon’s Eye” is an esoteric representation of knowledge and light, both spiritually and physically. You can assign whatever deity you want -- or no deity at all. Maybe the Dragon is your inner strength. Either way, the Dragon is meant to be a positive although sometimes we must go through a lot of negative to get there. That is what the album is about…ascending against the forces of negativity.

What message are you hoping to get across, if any, through THAL’s sophomore LP?

In the fall of 2016, I was in the hospital for a time and was in pretty bad shape. I had a lot of time to lay there and reflect. With that came internal realizations and “proof” to me of the things that are important in life. At that time, the US election season was in full force with many negative things happening in the United States and the world at large. It’s a helpless feeling seeing the country being manipulated and turning on each other. The only outlet I really have is writing songs, so those thoughts and feelings got tangled up into the lyrics.

How’d you get hooked up with Gero at Argonauta Records?

My good buddy Aaron Wall of the killer band Red Beard Wall is an Argonauta Records artist. I had contacted him for advice on what my next steps should be regarding signing with a label and distribution in general. He was very encouraging and recommended sending the album -- it had already been recorded and mastered at this point -- to Gero, the lead man at Argonauta to see what he thought. About a week later, he reached out and said he would like to sign THAL and put the album out on his label. Gero has been very good to work with. Since he is involved as a musician himself, he knows what it is like on both sides. He is relatively hands off and is all about the artist keeping control of their own music. I still handle my own Bandcamp and he gives advice on when to do certain things, etc. Not to mention, his stable of artists is amazing and Argonauta is the fastest rising label in the underground. It was really a no-brainer for me. It is an honor to be part of the family!

Tell us a bit about the recording, production, and mastering process – who did you work with to lay down tracks, how long did it take, and what instruments, pedals, and amps did you find most helpful in this process?

In terms of who I worked with, the whole thing is DIY. I recorded all guitars, bass and vocal parts in my home studio. Kevin tracked his drums and synths from his home studio (we live about two hours apart). Typically a song will start with a guitar riff idea. I’ll usually program some scratch drums to flesh out the arrangement and record bass parts as well. I’ll do a pre-mix of those tracks so that they sound generally “right” and then send the files to Kevin. He will track drums and additional parts on top. He will then do a more final mix of the whole instrumental and send those files back over to me. I then have the instrumental to write and record vocals over. I will do a final tweak to the mix, make sure the vocals are sitting correctly and then I will master the mix in my studio. I use a combination of rack gear and a software called Ozone for mastering. Everything is tracked in Cubase.

My go-to guitars are Les Pauls. I have a 2013 Gibson Tobacco Burst, a '77 Ibanez Custom and an Epiphone Les Paul Custom Silverburst that I am in the process of modifying. The low end comes from a black Squier Classic 70’s Precision Bass run directly into the board through an Ampeg DI box. An Orange OR50 stack and a 70’s Sunn Concert Lead are my workhorse amps, although I recently acquired a 100 watt Marshall DSL head and 4x12 cab that I am falling in love with. As far as pedals go, I use mostly Black Arts Toneworks for my dirt (Pharaoh Fuzz, Black Forest, Oath, Boneshaker), a Jimi Hendrix Crybaby Wah, and a Carbon Copy delay, EHX Small Stone and Small Clone for phaser/chorus effects. Kevin’s drum kit is a Tama with Zildjian and Paiste cymbals, and Vic Firth drum sticks. He uses a Korg Triton for keyboard parts.

What is in THAL’s crystal ball for 2018 and beyond?

I will always make music as THAL. It started out as a solo thing for me to get my musical ideas out and has now grown to include an outstanding drummer/multi-instrumentalist. I like how things are developing organically at their own pace. It is possible that we continue to add members such as a bassist and a second guitarist. Possibly some regional shows? The most satisfying part for me is the songwriting and recording process. It is truly a release. Reach For The Dragon’s Eye comes out on February 16th. After that, we may take a short break but we’ve already thrown a couple of new ideas back and forth. It wouldn’t surprise me if we released another album or EP by the end of this year. Otherwise, 2019 for sure. We want to thank our beautiful families and friends including everyone that has shown us support by purchasing an album, writing a review, or leaving us encouraging messages. Thank you Doomed & Stoned for highlighting what we are doing and for spreading the word about great music for as long as you have. Getting respect from those that appreciate music is the best part of the whole thing!

Follow The Band.

Get Their Music.

[mattsagervo]

Interview: Tal M. Klein, Author of 'The Punch Escrow'

The Punch Escrow has been a huge critical and commercial success, author Tal M. Klein's debut novel has garnered praise from everyone from NPR to Felicia Day, and with good reason. Set in the year 2147, Escrow combines a compelling story and cast of characters with masterful world-building - transporting the reader to an all-too believable future, constructed from a mix of imaginative fiction, and speculative extensions of real-world science and sociological trends. 

It has garnered many favorable comparisons to Ready Player One, which does it a bit of a disservice, since it's a work of breathtaking originality. The only similarities I note are that it successfully integrates, and updates, some beloved science fiction ideas, and that it has been fast tracked to the big screen; a film adaptation is already in development at Lionsgate.

I had the opportunity to interview Klein about the book's origins and influences, what to expect from him in the future, and how he masterfully constructed the world of 2147 - from science, to music and more. 

Matt Sager: Like a lot of great science fiction, The Punch Escrow has several themes, and is clearly about a lot more than a future of human replication and teleportation. How would you describe the book's plot and overall themes - or more bluntly, "what is your book about?"   Tal M. Klein: I like to say it’s a hard sci-fi technothriller with a love story at its core. Joel Byram, an everyday guy in 2147 New York is duplicated en route to Costa Rica as a result of a teleportation mishap, the company that runs teleportation wants to “fix the bug” by killing one of the duplicates, religious zealots want to use his circumstance as propaganda, and his wife is kidnapped by a rogue scientist. Now Joel is fighting to save his life and in his wife in a world that has two of him. The core elements of the story are rooted in identity: Are we who society says we are? Or who we think we are? Or who those who we love believe us to be?  

MS: You’ve attained huge success with The Punch Escrow - you’ve attained massive critical and commercial success, the book has been optioned by Lions Gate, and as of this writing it’s number 1 on Amazon’s Hard Science Fiction charts. Did you envision this level of attention and success for your debut novel?  TMK: I set out to tell the best version of my story. That was my criteria for a “job well done.” I’m thrilled people are digging it. The credit for its success is equally shared by my wife, my editorial team of Robert Kroese, Matt Harry, and Adam Gomolin, and Howie Sanders at United Talent Agency.  

MS: I’ve been told that the concept for the book came about over an argument over the plausibility of Star Trek transporters - can you elaborate on how that led to a book about teleportation and cloning? TMK: What you’ve been told is true! Back in 2012, I was complaining to a co-worker about J.J. Abrams’ over the top use of lens flare in the Star Trek reboot, when suddenly, our CEO interrupted our conversation by shouting “It’s bullshit!” It turned out he wasn’t talking about the lens flare, but Star Trek’s transporters. He was an expert in quantum physics and went on to explain that nobody in the right mind would ever step into a transporter if they knew how it worked. It was then that I realized that there wasn’t a good origin story for the commercialization of teleportation. The fact is, I initially set out the write The Punch Escrow as a textbook from the future, with scribbles in the margins by a smartass named Joel Byram. That was the first draft. By the time the final draft was done, Joel’s story became the focus on the book, and the “textbook” was relegated to liner notes, explaining the world Joel lived in.  

MS: I’m very aware that you're not a fan of J.J. Abrams' lens flare. Cinematography aside, are you a fan of the new Star Trek franchise? Other than the transporter argument, has it had any influence on your writing? TMK: Hah, well, discounting for his penchant for lens flare, I’m a huge J.J. Abrams fan, the first movie of the Trek reboot was great. I didn’t really care for the second or third. MS:  J.J. Abrams aside, I know that you’re a huge fan of Star Trek - which is your favorite franchise, and how has it influenced you as a writer? TMK: I’d qualify that by saying I love Star Trek, but I’m not a Trekkie. I say that because I learned my lesson at San Diego Comic Con. If you tell a Trekkie that you’re a Trekkie, they expect you to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the entire Trek cannon, which I do not possess. So, yes, I am a Star Trek fan. My favorite franchise was DS9, but my favorite season of all time was TNG Season 6. MS: Which other science fiction television shows, films, books and writers would you cite as your biggest influences?   TMK: Larry Niven, Scott Meyer, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and, because The Martian undeniably catalyzed me to write my book, Andy Weir. As for television shows, I think it’s fair to credit modern detective shows like Psych and Monk for helping me wrap my mind around Rube Goldberg plot devices. Most influential was my favorite show of all time, the X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen. I think they really nailed the technogeek persona. Influential movies run the gamut from The Princess Bride to Donnie Darko and everything in between, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention District 9, Looper, and Gattaca. MS: The Punch Escrow strikes me as a book that's in equal parts hopeful and fearful for the future. There are themes of utopian technology corrupted by corporate interference. How much of that - the good and the ill - do you see unfolding in the present? Is your fictional vision of 2147 similar to your actual view of the future? TMK: To borrow a phrase from The Jester, There's an unequal amount of good and bad in most things. The trick is to figure out the ratio and act accordingly. I don’t think future is dystopian or utopian, it’s just us progressing along our evolutionary path. MS: Music plays a major role in the book. I understand that we have a music industry background in common. What was your career in music like, and how did it contribute to the Joel's soundtrack, and the new genre of redistro? TMK: I never think of anything I do artistically as a “career” — music and writing are my hobbies. I’m very serious about my hobbies, but I pursue them for the sake of pure joy rather than income. MS: One of the most original ideas in The Punch Escrow is the brilliant, if gross, race of genetically engineered mosquitoes. What was your inspiration for these bugs that eat lighting and crap thunder, so to speak? TMK: Everyone loves the mosquitoes! The near-scandal is that I cut the mosquitoes in the third draft of the book because I learned about bacteria that eat methane and excreted oxygen, but my beta readers freaked out on me, so I put the skeeters back. The reason the mosquitoes are there is because I wanted to solve for air pollution but in a very messy, human way. Humans tend to to opt for quick fixes and shortcuts, I think it’s because we are a breed largely driven by the pursuit of instant gratification. MS: Hard science fiction like The Punch Escrow seems to grow more relevant by the day as AI and robots are, to varying degrees, infiltrating the workforce and performing tasks that were once the sole domain of humans. Do you see this as a growing issue, and if so, need it be a threat? Is AI really capable of supplanting people, and is that really what corporations as a whole want?  TMK: Will apps and robots take the place of people? Absolutely. But if we look at what happened in the Industrial Age, people were prophesizing similar doom and gloom scenarios, and that’s not how the future turned out. There will be plenty of human jobs after AI, it’s just that those jobs will be different than many of the jobs we have today. MS: How did you come up with the idea of a machine language - that is, a language by machines, for machines, cars talking to one another, etc? How surprised were you when Facebook had to shut down it’s AI because it had created a secret language for itself? TMK: If you’ve ever played with AI, it makes sense that two pieces of semi-intelligent code might form a more optimal method of communicating than our cumbersome language. I was a bit taken aback by what happened at Facebook, yes. But it wasn’t shocking. I also understand why they pulled the chord, but I kind of wish they hadn’t.   MS: What do you think machines are saying about us, and if AI continues to advance, do you think that they are going to develop an opinion of us? Do you think it will be favorable, and/or within our ability to influence?    TMK: Code will likely always be subservient to its programmer. As such, I think we need to add ethics to the list of engineering core competencies. If engineers exclusively focus on successful code execution without regard for anthropological outcomes in the age of AI, we may very well end up with evil robots.   MS: Are there sequels in the works? What’s next for the Punch Escrow universe, and for you as a writer? TMK: I’m contractually obligated to deliver two more books that take place in the world of The Punch Escrow. One of them will likely be a sequel of sorts in that we’ll get into matters unresolved in The Punch Escrow, but the other is shaping up to be a standalone novel with a narrative that is ancillary to that of The Punch Escrow. But who knows, both are at the very early formative stages.