#which for reference is a show just made for pure humor with no messages it wanted to convey

[sepialunaris]

Jsjshshs like I don't like to say this... but people are crazy. Saying "screenwriter should be fired/have a worse life for making ROTT ending I don't like, everyone should've not died" like that's... toxic behaviour. And even funnier when the proposed ending they approve of is narratively worse and basically the All Hail King Julien ending.

[xiu21chen99]

hxh headcanon/imagine.

again... still about hisoillu but about their engagement instead of illu's influenced fashion choice.

also this is more of... idk it gave reason why they chose to marry instead of uh other ways i guess??

i've seen so many fanarts where illu would break the news to the zoldycks or how killu would react to having hisoka as his brother in law- like srsly it's meme worthy at this point- and lotsa ones that showed how hisoka proposed as a joke or smtg but... I've been overthinking abt it these past few days sO i present to you how i think "the big question aka the proposal" happened... (manga spoilers??)

it's after hisoka resurrected himself obviously, and def after he killed kortopi and shalnark (so he knew there was gonna be empty slots in the spiders' lineup)

i imagine illu went back to the zoldyck estate after the whole fiasco and only heard of hisoka's "death" from rumors while he was on a mission

and then when he was idk maybe contemplating on whether or not he should visit the body(?) to pay respects or something, he gets a text message from the devil himself

their text went like this probably:

hisoka: hey~ where are you right now?♠️ (and no u can't tell me hisoka doesn't text w card suits u just can't-)

illumi: who are you and how did you get the phone you are currently using?

hisoka: ooh~ illu~ i feel betrayed, did you delete my number?♣️

illumi: hisoka is dead

hisoka: *image attached*

illumi: oh

illumi: hello hisoka, how are you still alive?

hisoka: you sound disappointed~♦️

illumi: i kind of am...

hisoka: rude, just tell me where you are♥️

...and that's how they met up?? ngl i think illu has a know-it-all syndrome where he just has to,,, k n o w everything

he's curious so he agrees to the meetup ofc

he's also surprised when he sees hisoka is in good shape when they meet (idk at a bar in an unknown city?)

they drink whiskey on the rocks because... you know...

hisoka explains how he survived and his next plan of action (which is terminate the spiders)

illumi makes a mental note of nen after death bc he's heard and seen it all before but... not to this extent,

this is gonna be,,, bland but i think this is the logic behind why hisoka chose to get married/engaged instead of just paying up front (reference to the ten dons' commission to get chrollo killed and chrollo's commission to get the ten dons killed)--

anyways here's how their conversation goes:

i: "why did you want to talk in person?"

h: "oh y'know, for old times sake."

i: "...right"

hisoka laughs, "okay so maybe i want to ask you for a favor..?"

confused, illumi asks, "why could you not have just texted if you wanted me to kill someone for you?"

h: "no, no- wait, actually, you're not too far off."

i: ~mOrE cOnfUsiOn~ "huh?"

h: "how do contracts for assassination work in your... family business?"

i: "half the promised pay before, the remaining half afterwards. should the target be eliminated by a third party, the assigned zoldyck still gets the pay and should the employer die, then the contract is terminated and the zoldyck will report back immediately."

h: "and has anyone made a contract to have themselves terminated?"

i: "i beg your pardon?"

h: "what complications will arise should your employer's target be... themselves?"

i: "i believe... i have never encountered such circumstance before. the people who hire us are those who have enough money and resource to have their enemies killed quickly. no one's tried to test the zoldyck assassination prowess."

h: "so... how will that work?"

i: "are you implying this is the reason why you have contacted me today?"

h: "yes~ ♥️" (how he said a heart emoji out loud is up to you, reader)

i: "it will be a pointless paradox. logically, the zoldyck will only get the employment bill. and i, myself, do not find pleasure in going for the kill like you lest i get my reward, so you will not get a contract out of me, hisoka."

h: "is there no leeway?"

i: "a zoldyck stands up to their word. so no."

h: "even for a friend?~ ♦️"

i: "we are not friends, hisoka-"

hisoka raises his glass of whiskey along with his eyebrow.

i: "oh..."

h: "didn't you tell dear killua that a zoldyck didn't need friends?"

i: "you... are an associate, someone reliable in the killing world. it's different."

h: "hypocrite"

i: "i ask you for favors and you make me return them. it is not like we spend our time together leisurely like killu with that island boy..."

hisoka clinks their matching glasses of whiskey even though his is already empty, a shit-eating grin on his lips.

i: "you suggested we meet here."

h: "this isn't the first time we went out to drink, right illu?"

i: "regardless!! i will not kill you just for half the money. i do not like wasting efforts on fruitless missions."

h: "as i said, is there no exception, to make sure you get my money if you were to succeed in killing me?"

i: "are you doubting my skill, hisoka?"

h: "that's not the point right now~ ♠️"

i: "wait, why do you want me to get all of your money?"

h: "haven't we just gotten over this subject? because you're my friend, of course."

i: "i... we are not friends, hisoka."

hisoka claps, "that's it! illumi!! ♣️"

i: "eh?"

h: "marry me! that way in our prenup I'll make sure you get all of my money, and even without a prenup you'll still get it since you'll be my only relative! that solves it!"

i: "hisoka, are you sure death did not took a toll on your brain? you did say you used Bungee Gum only on your heart and lungs..."

h: "i'm being serious, illumi!! and doesn't this solve your earlier conflict? we don't have to be friends, we'll be husbands!"

i: "do not use that tactic with me, you manipulative bastard. stop joking."

h: "this is purely beneficial for you, honestly i don't get why you just won't accept it."

i: "then humor me this first, why now?"

h: "dear illu, i've been to literal hell and back. i think it's time to leave my mark in case i fail to escape death again."

i: "was it that bad?"

h: "you'll love it there, illu~ ♥️"

h: "on a more serious note, though, i do plan to marry you. out of everyone i've encountered, you're the most eligible candidate. you're powerful, fully capable and extremely pretty to boot! you're the ideal husband!"

(blushing obviously, illumi downs the remaining whiskey in his glass) i: "death has changed you, hisoka."

h: "so?"

i: "fine."

h: "excellent!"

and in one fell swoop, illumi has a pin against the curve of hisoka's jugular, wrist held tightly by hisoka- a card matching against his own neck.

"not yet, dear husband." hisoka whispered into his ear, "we have to manage the papers first. and i've a request before you do."

they let each other go at the same time, not even breathing an unnecessary breath in the other's personal space (well, they're nearly pressed thigh to thigh anyways, what's the point of personal space anymore-)

"a condition rather than a request, really."

"what?" hisoka orders them refills, and downs his when it arrives.

"join the ryodan first."

glass already pressed on thin lips, illumi's confused hum resonates softly into the concave utensil. "why?"

"so things can get more interesting. i assume you know of the dark continent expedition that's soon to take place?"

"father has advised i take part on it, since kalluto told me the ryodan plans to rob some cliches who'll join the expedition- to look after him. you want me to join them?"

"yes, and i plan to board as well, don't fret."

illumi's eyes turn to slits, "how should i know you would be there? i can't take your word when you might just disappear when we've all boarded."

hisoka grins, wide then wider, "you should know by now illu, i plan to avenge my wounded pride. that damned chrollo didn't even fight me properly."

tilting his head, illumi stared at the man beside him, "is that not contradictory? i thought you did not mind your opponent using whatever means necessary to win?"

"magicians use tricks and misdirection to awe the audience," hisoka says almost thoughtlessly, "chrollo's a narcissistic hypnotist who used the audience as a damned shield because he knew he couldn't handle me face-to-face."

he groans, tinged in regret. "i shouldn't have picked heaven's arena, if i'd chosen a more discreet location then maybe the damage won't be this bad."

"damage?" illumi rests his chin on his palm, facing his husband.

hisoka swipes a hand over his face, and the glamour comes off. the picture he sent illumi now present in front of him. he was missing a nose, his left hand didn't have any finger left and dried blood chipped on his white skin. "oh."

with another swipe, everything's made correct again. hisoka was grinning again. he downs the remaining alcohol and leaves jenny bills under the emptied glass.

"come, lovely husband. we're to elope and legalize our union!"

illumi follows suit after downing his own glass, "i think there might be another loop hole, if you were to join the family. zoldycks do not kill family."

"so if i were to wed you, here and now, you'd think me more of a family than alluka?"

"alluka is not family."

"are those your words, illumi? or silva's?"

"i..."

"wow, you're really just as fucked up as i am."

"where do you plan to take me? i've just said i cannot kill family."

hisoka chuckles, "then you're the one to take my name, of course."

"preposterous!"

"who the hell still uses that word?"

"i am and will always be a zoldyck-"

"exactly. it's just legal papers, if you kill me then you'll just be a widow and even get your name back! see how everything'll work out in the end?"

"hisoka-"

"are you doubting your skill of assassination, my dearest husband?"

"... i better get the most expensive ring in this damned city."

"that's the spirit! now let's go get married!"

"wait, hisoka. what is your last name?"

later that night, when they leave a chapel, something gold glimmers on hisoka's bungee gum/texture surprise ring finger. a matching one around illumi's finger.

unlike hisoka, though, illumi had an extra red glimmer right under that gold, in the dead center of a silver band of intricately designed pattern. hisoka had foregone the traditional diamond in favor of a 16 carat ruby engagement ring, such a curious choice but illumi accepted it all the same...

(much later on, hisoka took both rings as collateral and reminded illumi that he would get them back even if he died bc it was in their damn prenup- and bc it was technically bought under illumis name and that's how hisoka assured illu that he'd be on that black whale,,, bc he had the rings and planned to give them back to him there)

"I thought a red gemstone was better suited for the rather bloody and murderous ending that our relationship will inevitably come to, wouldn't you agree?"

-Hisoka Morow whenever someone mentions his preference of proposal ring...

"I disagree with most of his ideals, our relationship has always had a fragile foundation, and I knew from the start that we'd eventually end up killing each other."

-Illumi Morow, nee Zoldyck when asked about his thoughts on his husband...

[sharkselfies]

The Minds Behind The Terror Podcast Transcript - Episode 4

Our journey comes to an end with the transcript for episode 4 of The Minds Behind The Terror Podcast, where Dave Kajganich, Soo Hugh, Dan Simmons, and Adam Nagaitis discuss the last two episodes of the series. Once again, Adam steals the show with his revelations about Mr. Hickey, but we also hear about everyone’s favorite death scenes, the fight to let Mr. Blanky say fuck, the many changes the writers made to the ending that differed from the novel, and the importance of trusting your audience’s intelligence.

The Minds Behind The Terror Podcast - Episode 4

[The Terror opening theme music]

Dave Kajganich: Welcome to the fourth and final installment of The Minds Behind AMC’s The Terror as we discuss our final two episodes of the show! I’m Dave Kajganich, creator and co-showrunner of the series, here with the honorable Dan Simmons, creator of the novel The Terror on which the series is based. Also with us is Soo Hugh, executive producer and co-showrunner of the show, and Adam Nagaitis, who plays a man who plays a man called Cornelius Hickey. Welcome back!

Adam Nagaitis: Hi!

Dan Simmons: Hi Dave. 

DK: So we launch into our final episodes. Now we are in an episode where the show begins to bend time. We cover a lot of ground in episode nine, a lot of distance, we say goodbye to quite a lot of characters, and we start to really bend the tone and the shape of the narrative towards the kind of horrible collision that’s coming between Crozier and Hickey and our Tuunbaq.

Soo Hugh: So in nine we say goodbye to so many of our characters. I mean Dave and I cried so--

[laughter]

SH: The amount of tears that he and I shed editing this show, especially with nine and ten. For you guys, Adam and Dan, which were the deaths--well, what did you think of the deaths?

DS: What’s your favorite death? 

[laughter]

SH: Yeah, what was your favorite death? 

AN: My favorite was probably, the one that really moved me was Fitzjames, it’s such a fantastic story, his character’s so interesting, that transition, discovering, you know, admitting who you are, and the firework at the Tuunbaq being his feat of courage, and then to end up, to embrace death, and to do it in such a beautiful way. And then the line of “there will be poems” that Mr. Bridgens says. 

[show audio]

[sad, eerie music]

Bridgens (through tears): It was an honor serving you, sir. You’re a good man. There will be poems.

AN: It’s a beautiful death, it’s probably the best you can ask for, in that situation, you’re with a friend. Yeah, it’s quite sad. Of course you gotta love Blanky’s death as well, that’s, I’m cheating, now, yeah, but Blanky’s death is the greatest line to go out on, surely.

[show audio]

[Tuunbaq growling, shales crunching underfoot]

Blanky: What in the name of god took you so fuckin’ long? 

[Tuunbaq snorts, Blanky laughs maniacally] 

DK: We weren’t entirely sure whether AMC was going to permit us to use that word, a curse word, because on AMC you’re not meant to. Luckily for us, there are a number of AMC shows that have a precedent of using that word and we argued successfully that, you know, could you ask for a better show, a better scene than a Victorian disaster show to use the F-word, and they finally allowed us to use it, and we’re really grateful.

SH: I think just visually Bridgens’ death was so beautiful, and that pull out. And what was interesting was in our research found, we discovered, there was a corpse they discovered who had rolled over and was found sleeping on a set of papers, and in the show Bridgens takes Peglar’s diary when he chooses to die out there in the cold alone comforted with his memories, we see him roll over, and so that’s just our nod to history. Now it turns out we don't know whether or not it was actually Peglar’s diary, it could have been Armitage’s--

DK: No, I think we know it’s Peglar’s journal, but we don’t know whether the man lying on top of it was Armitage or Bridgens.

SH: Then there’s Goodsir’s death. Oh my God, Goodsir! I can’t believe Hickey! Adam! Goodsir!

AN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. He had it comin’!  

[laughter]

AN: I forgot that death, I forgot all of those deaths, actually, what a--so beautifully acted. I mean, unbelievable. It was perfect. The pure clean images of the coral, and the shell, oh I loved it, and the end, I think it’s an orchid, I just loved it, I absolutely--it’s something that I don’t like talking about, that death, it’s really horrible. 

[show audio]

[the rising music from the scene of Goodsir’s death]

DS: They were all very moving in their own way, saying goodbye to each of the characters, surprisingly powerful, you know, some of ‘em were not major characters, but everything connected for me watching your version. When--earlier, when Fitzjames is out with Crozier alone, and Fitzjames sort of acknowledges that he’s a fake, that he’s just been faking this heroism, you know, the admiralty thought they sent a hero, they sent Fitzjames, he was the man of the moment, but he hadn’t done that much, so he had the courage to say that, and Crozier immediately had the compassion to point out, “No, you’re here, now, and you’re doing fine,” that’s not the dialect but that’s the essence of his message. So all through these scenes with the different characters, I found compassion again. [It] was the way Crozier touched men who were close to the end, the tone of his voice, you know, it wasn’t mawkish, he wouldn’t like being at all sentimental, but it was so supportive. It was like Goodsir helping the poor boy at the beginning of the show, telling him how death could be good, how you see light, you cross over. The kid died in terror; some of these people did. But most of ‘em, they’re like--Fitzjames, when he’s, you know, when he finally has to be carried in the sledge, and he has a sense of humor at the end, he can laugh at himself, somewhat, ‘cause he tells Crozier that that the bullet that went through his arm into his chest, that area is now so gangrene--er, rotten, you know, the bullet is finally going to kill him. Haha. 

[polite awkward laughter]

DK: Well you pointed out a line from the first episode, where Fitzjames is talking to Franklin and he says, “Sometimes I think you love your men more than God loves them,” and Franklin's response is “For all your sakes, let’s hope you’re wrong,” and we brought that line back in a different way in episode nine, which is where the survivors of the Terror Camp attack are about to leave, and they know Hickey’s out there somewhere, and Fitzjames’s impulse is to hide or destroy all of their extra supplies so that Hickey’s group can’t benefit from them, and Crozier has the opposite instinct, which is because he knows some people in Hickey’s group probably made that decision because they were afraid that the alternative was worse to stay with Crozier and so many people, that he wants to offer them the resources in case they can use them and in case they wanna make a different decision in the days ahead.

[show audio] 

Fitzjames: And the supplies we cannot carry? If Hickey’s band are waiting us out to loot the camp?

Crozier: Some of the men with them made their choice out of fear, I’ll not take away any chance they have to survive. We may meet them yet again, and if we do, I want them to make a different choice. Leave our supplies in a tidy pile, as an offering. I want the men with Hickey to know that’s how we meant it. 

[shales crunching underfoot]

Fitzjames: More than God loves them...

DK: Lines like that are a real test, I mean, you struggle with them in the editing room. Did we earn that line? Is it important that an audience remembers that as an index point that line has now been sort of superficially applied to one man, but more sincerely applied to another man, and, you know, that goes back to sort of a close reading of the book, Dan, just sort of scouring through your dialogue trying to figure out how does a master, if I can refer to you that way, approach this idea of a relationship with an audience? And we learned an enormous amount from your book about restraint and indirection, and credit, giving the audience credit. And I will say this, the series is different enough from your novel that I would encourage everyone who has seen the television show but not read your book to seek it out, because they will have just as rewarding--even more so, possibly!--a time of learning about this history through the lens of horror than they did watching the show. So I think they complement one another. I hope they do, and I hope people will seek out both. 

DS: That’s kind of you, Dave. My wife keeps track of the tie-in version of the book, and it’s selling very well, so some people are gonna get that. 

SH: There is this fantastic scene that is in your book, that we had neither money nor time to shoot, but it’s where they discover leads, and they take the boats out going around, and they realize they’re just going around in a circle. We didn’t have the time to shoot that and we re-jiggered our narrative so that the leads ended up being a ploy on one of Hickey’s secret mutineers. Nine is a very quiet episode, and in some ways when you, in television shows--did you miss a set piece, in nine? Did anyone miss having a bigger narrative punch?

DS: Well, I'll answer, then let Adam answer, but for me, who had that boat scene and really liked it a lot, I didn’t miss my stuff too much, because what happened was when the young man, a boy actually, who’s secretly under Hickey’s control tells Crozier and the others he sees open water, and they rush to the rocky beach to see it, and of course that was a lie and a ploy to get them there so Hickey can seize them, but my heart just flew, that, “Open water! Ohh boy!” You know? How would men have felt if they’d heard that, in reality, what was their reaction? ‘Cause the open water could conceivably be their savior, they could get other places, not just cross over and start marching through middle Canada, but they could go anywhere on open water, and to see it all locked in with ice was just stunning to me, it was such a disappointment. So no, I don’t miss my part of it very much.

AN: I never thought of it as something that suggests a quiet narrative like you described it, Soo, to me it sort of links--I see nine and ten as one episode, really. It’s this slow build, the creation of that relationship that these two--the antithesis between these two camps, and between the tactics employed... I just think that the way you guys wrote it and put it together is flawless, I just think it’s so beautifully weighted, between, you know, the deaths that to me they don’t seem to just sort of monotonously pile up, they’re all just so beautifully handled and acted. And the whole time you have this tension building, slowly, slowly, that, you know, that it’s gonna come to a head. I didn’t feel when I watched it that it ever lacked punch. It had such clarity and such patience that made it really beautiful.

DS: And I don’t know if we can say the C-word on podcasts… cannibalism? 

[laughter]

DK: Yes, that one we can. 

SH: Yes.

DS: Oh, ok. You know there was a--if Hickey hadn’t already divided the troop into his people, the anointed, and then Crozier’s group, it would have happened anyway because of the cannibalism. And when you think about it, think of that rugby team or soccer team or whatever that crashed in the Andes. They went back into society. They were cannibals, they admitted it, they got a book deal. And so, presumably, even in England, these people would have been forgiven, or they would have kept it secret like some do. So cannibalism, what it did in this show, I think, divides the people. I didn’t see, until he was forced to imbibe in cannibalism, I didn't see Crozier even considering it. And so that fascinates me, just how far people will go to survive. 

[show audio]

[tense music, tent canvas flapping in the wind]

EC: I’ll give you some advice. Don’t indulge your morals over your practicals. Not now. Don’t you also wanna live? 

SH: Dave, we talked a lot about this, is when you’re in that moment, you’re not Dave Kajganich and I’m not Soo Hugh, in that moment, choosing whether or not we decide to eat someone. Something else will take over, whether it is the Goodsir in us or whether it is the Hickey in us, in that moment. I think that’s why when we shot that scene, you know, after Gibson is cut up, Adam, remember when we shot the reaction shots from each one of you eating your first bite of human flesh meat, and we took so much footage, we shot so much. We shot, you know, closes, mediums, just because Dave and I, you know, at that point, we were very confident of how to shoot everything, that was probably the moment when we were like ugh.

DK: Well we wanted to know how little we could get away with, and what we found, of course, which is typical for the show, the performances were so terrific, that we didn’t need very much. And I remember on the mix stage, the first mix that they did of the show, of that episode, I mean, there was quite a lot of chewing.

[laughter]

And so when I said, no no no, let’s pull all of that out, and use the most minute changes in expression, because all of you at that table were so well in character, that even the slightest muscle movement on your face communicated everything we needed you to. And we were obviously very interested in not overplaying that scene, knowing that audiences had been waiting for it, wondering how, in what kind of taste we would show it, you know, how we would modulate it, and you know a rule throughout the show was to try to present everything with its most practical face, including this. And so, you know, hopefully when that lands for people it will be both satisfying in the sense that they will understand how these characters made that decision but it won’t feel that we have over-articulated it, somehow. 

DS: I’m not religious, but I’m obsessed with religion, and in your story, the way you structured it, you have, in a sense, we’ve already talked, or at least I have, about how Hickey seems to be evolving towards Messiahdom, I think he near the end he thinks he is the Messiah, but it’s Goodsir who provides The Last Supper. How much more powerful a story of Christ is there, than, you know, “Take, eat,” and it’s yourself? And it’s fascinating to me that the man who dedicated his life to helping people and curing people and being empathic at their ending, his last act is to kill as many of Hickey’s people as possible. And, you know, so there’s--that’s where the trial was, it wasn’t when Hickey was gonna be hanged, it was inside Dr. Goodsir when he decided that “These people need to end and I will do it.” 

SH: So should we talk about the big scene at the end--well, it’s not the end, it’s the Tuunbaq sequence in 1.10? 

DK: To set it up, Adam, you know, Hickey--we’ll keep calling him Hickey even though we’ve established he isn’t--you get an important piece of information in episode nine where Tozer, Sergeant Tozer, relays to you a piece of information that he hasn’t shared with anyone, that he watched Collins be killed and he watched Collins’s soul be pulled out of his body. And, you know, for Hickey, suddenly a lot of things make sense. What happened to Private Heather, who was alive for many episodes but no longer sort of present in his body, I mean you even have a scene where you poke his brain hoping to get some kind of reaction out of him, and you take that piece of information and you suddenly realize you’re not longer in a kind of survival story, you’re in kind of a spiritual story, you’re in kind of a mythological story, suddenly. Can you talk about how you decided to play that so it was sort of clear to an audience what that opportunity was? Because we did not devote a lot of dialogue to it, it was going to have to be something an audience felt as much as was described to them. 

AN: I can only describe the way that it--the process--the mind of it, that, you know, you see Hickey has a plan, up until that point, he’s started--the way that I thought about it was that, you know, once he starts to hear things, he starts to have this space of this area, creates this space in his mind and he understands the things that have come before him and his curiosity leads him to, you know--one element in him is still practically engaged in survival, and outmaneuvering the captain, and heading south, and coming up with a plan and, you know, a story as to what happened, but then there are other elements of, you know, consuming human flesh, that there might be an answer there, it might be an enlightening experience. And if it’s not in that, is it something else? And he finds the hill, and he understands when he sees that hill, that he hears something, and then he’s not quite clear on what it is, what’s drawing him, and what’s talking to him, and what he’s feeling, but he’s becoming one with this realm, and, you know, he starts to, once he discovers the supernatural element--not that he hasn’t already established that there is one, but the fact that it’s such a specific--he’s been developing his knowledge of the summoning song that Lady Silence sings to become a Shaman, you know, the rules of this particular realm, this empire. And he’s been gathering this information as we go along, all the way through the series he’s been taking pieces of information, and he pockets it and learns and keeps it for later.

[show audio]

[mysterious music]

Hickey: Tuunbaq… a spirit that dresses as an animal, and yet we shot it with a cannon and drew blood. How do you reconcile that?

Crozier: I can’t. There’s much about this voyage I can’t reconcile. 

Hickey: What mythology is this creature at the center of?

Crozier: About the creature I have no answers, Mr. Hickey. We were not meant to know of it. 

AN: And when he gets this key piece of the puzzle, that the Tuunbaq is taking souls, and that... there’s a hierarchy of what the Tuunbaq wants to eat. You know, a captain, and important people, he realizes that he really is the center of this universe. I suppose the way that I adjusted it was that everybody else became irrelevant. Completely irrelevant. I no longer needed to worry about manipulation, control, fear. Everything was gonna sing for me, everything was gonna work as if I had magic hands, and my voice just dictated what the universe would do.

[show audio]

[mysterious music continued]

Hickey: I didn’t have anywhere near an equal on this expedition. But you. I wanted to thank you for that. On the eve of what is quite an important day. 

AN: Every single conversation was an annoyance because it was getting in the way of me listening to the universe, this world, this empire, this realm that was now speaking to me. And I was talking to the Tuunbaq, you know, from this distance, and we had this dance going, and everything that happened was just getting in my way. It was all gonna work itself out because I’ve been chosen to ascend, to reach this ascension, to, you know, ride the Tuunbaq into my new empire, to take my new throne, and I was finally gonna be given the answers to these questions that I’d been asking.

[show audio]

[rushing wind, men singing weakly in the background, creaking]

Hickey (shouting): Bugger Nelson! Bugger Jesus! Bugger Joseph and Mary! Bugger the Archbishop of Canterbury! None ever wanted nothing from me! 

SH: When you offer the Tuunbaq the tongue, and there’s that pause, what’s gonna happen, and he bites your arm off instead, and that look on your face of just, you know, “You too have failed me.”

DS: Et tu?

[laughter] 

“Et tu, Tuunbaq?”

[laughter]

AN: “Et tu, Tuunbaq,” that’s a great T-shirt. But that scene, I drifted, but that scene in particular, is a slight difference to what his plan was, which was to climb the hill, sacrifice the men, sacrifice the tongue, and to become one with the Tuunbaq and to take my place on the throne in this new realm. And to find the answers and maybe, you know, climb through to a different realm, or who knows what. This empire was now my empire, which was the culmination of all of Hickey through his entire life has been leading to this point, and he’s quietened himself enough to hear it, and then suddenly he gets sick, because somebody poisons him. And so it’s a slightly different feeling, as he’s climbing the hill, and it’s a different--something else is happening inside him. He’s still perfectly capable of executing his plan, he gets carried away in that scene, and then by the time the Tuunbaq appears, he kind of focuses again, and becomes very excited. It’s a relationship with the Tuunbaq, it’s a dance, that everything is for him and the Tuunbaq. Everyone else is irrelevant. 

[show audio]

[Tuunbaq snuffling, boat chain clanking]

[the Tuunbaq roars, sound of chomping flesh, then the screeching sound of the soul being eaten]

SH: And what he gets so wrong about the Tuunbaq, and I think what a lot of the Western characters in our show get wrong about the Tuunbaq, is that the Tuunbaq is not a deity, the Tuunbaq doesn’t ask to be a god, right? All it is is just this arbiter of what is good or what is not good for the land, you know, there’s no sense of the Tuunbaq wanting to be the ultimate creative force here, and I think that’s where Hickey was wrong, right?

AN: I think he sees it as a supernatural creature, and again, because everything comes through him, and the universe revolves around him, that it’s a challenge for him, it’s a question for him, and he deals a lot in questions as opposed to answers, and what his position is in the universe, and by the time he meets this creature that eats souls--and the creature’s sick, and it’s because he hasn’t united with it yet! It’s because of me that it’s sick, it hasn’t, I haven’t been in contact with it, and we haven’t united ourselves and taken over this empire, and he doesn’t see it for what it is. SH: And when you guys see the Tuunbaq’s death in the very end of that sequence, how did you guys feel?

DS: Speaking for the novelist here, I was surprised; and then I got through the surprise and thought yeah. And then I immediately wondered how Lady Silence would have to pay for this death, ‘cause you’d already shown me that she’s in charge of protecting the Tuunbaq, so it was controlling it in some way, and she wasn’t really up to the task, so I liked that in going, when Crozier’s with the Inuit band, learning that she’s been punished and sent out by herself. But the Tuunbaq’s death itself just seemed right at that time. 

[show audio]

[Tuunbaq’s death scene--growling noises, boat chain clinking, Crozier struggling] 

AN: It was a horrible thing to watch, as a viewer, it was so sad, and it spoke to me of this sort of contemporary sort of--to me it was sort of a global warming issue, not to bring it ‘round, but it was sort of like, that’s it, they’ve killed it. 

SH: No, absolutely, yeah! 

AN: They’ve killed it, they’ve killed the Tuunbaq and we’re actually rejoicing at Crozier’s survival. But really, the man deserves death, with the creature that creates balance to this culture should be alive. And we have this upside down world that we are celebrating, which is so, you know, intelligent of you guys to create, and it’s difficult to take, but that creature is gone, and so balance is gone, and here we are. 

DK: The very specific and subtle thing that we put in the show that probably no will decode it ‘til they hear this podcast, but was important to us as a structural element, was Sir John dies, when he’s killed down the fire hole in episode three, he has some flashes of subjective kinds of hallucinations, I suppose, or visions, I don’t know what you would call them. But one of them is of open water, it’s just a vista of the future of the Arctic, that there are going to be these, you know, that there’s going to be a huge melt, and there’s going to be all this open water. And for the final shot we tried to match, as much as we could, the angle, so that all of that frozen water that Crozier is sitting on at that seal hole would maybe possibly evoke that memory, to speak to what you’re saying, Adam, which is that this whole thing is a kind of, from the Netsilik’s point of view, it’s a huge tragedy in which these Europeans are the terrors, in a way. And not to be too reductive about it, but, you know, we wanted the season to have that kind of change of polarity, which is one reason why we couldn’t quite use the sort of the ending of the book, as much as we loved it, Dan, it felt like a lot of things that would feel--that would pull the point of view of the season across that line too much and too late. We wanted to try to modulate it a little bit so that every episode felt like you were giving some room in your point of view for Lady Silence’s perspective, or the Inuit’s perspective, and that that change would sort of happen so slowly you might not even notice that it was happening at all, which is one reason why we made that decision. 

DS: You gave every character I saw room to have his or her own apotheosis, which is a big theme with you guys, I meant, the arcs end and people becoming someone else. Crozier grows into his leadership, I think, beautifully. Maybe he deserved punishment, but I found Crozier and his empathy, as Fitzjames is dying in the boat, it’s Crozier that touches him and lets him know, you know, through physical contact, that he’s not alone. And giving them room is unusual. I just find there’s so many unusual elements to what you three have created, that, I have to warn you, I think it deserves a lot of intelligent attention.

DK: Well I hope we can volley a lot of those right back to the book, Dan. Well we should take some time at the end to--given that after the sequence, this really becomes almost a kind of silent film to deliver the ending to Crozier’s arc--to really sing the praises of Jared Harris in this show, I mean, what he did with this role is remarkable. So, Dan, I would love to know what you thought of Jared Harris’s Francis Crozier? 

DS: After watching the ten episodes of him and all those, and watching what he did with it, I just wanted him to adopt me. 

[laughter]

SH: He would love that! 

DS: But it certainly--leading is the operative word, isn’t it? He just, he didn’t give 100 or 1000 percent, he gave more than that to the character. He became Crozier for me. I’m the one who had to dream up the man, and see what he looked like, and write about him for about 1100 pages, 700 finally in type, and so I had my Crozier, he was pretty solid. But now Jared Harris is Crozier. There’s no doubt in my mind.

DK: The ending of the season is quite different from the ending of the book, Dan, how did you feel watching the ending of the show, and, in all candor, do you feel that it was satisfying? Do you feel that it was at least a good companion piece for the ending of the book? 

DS: Well I’m glad I didn't video record my reaction the first time I saw the different ending, because speaking for two million readers I stood up and shouted, “What's wrong with my ending!”

[laughter]

“Is it chopped liver?” And I realized it would be. I realized that I don’t think you could have taken my ending and made it a sensible finale visually in the way it went. So I tracked--the whole episodes, the last two episodes, were enlightenment to me, because I’m just a viewer now, I’m watching something I didn’t create, these are not my ideas, so I sat back and enjoyed it, as horrible as they were. So when I watch your ending, the only thing I was bothered by was I’m sentimental. And the real Crozier, I believe, and certainly the fictional Crozier that we’ve all created, was so lonely, he was so alone in life, I think he was less alone than Crozier was, and, you know, rejected by Franklin’s niece several times from marriage, a life where he really felt rejection, probably more than Hickey did, and at the end I wanted him to be with someone. So as much as I liked your ending and I really thought it was proper and appropriate for the series, I woulda put a person next to him as he’s fishing out there in, you know, in his Inuit outfit at night waiting by a seal--he’s not fishing, he’s waiting by a seal breathing hole to kill it. So if I’d seen a glimpse of two of them, you wouldn’t even need to see their faces, you know, the sentimental side of me woulda been happy.

SH: But we leave that ambiguous in the ending, in terms of he’s not with Lady Silence, she, you know, had to pay the bill in some ways for the loss of the Tuunbaq and her destiny is to venture forth alone, and in some ways her storyline is the most tragic of all the characters in our show because, I mean, the price she paid is so harsh. But in terms of the last shot, which Dave and I just knew from pretty early on that was gonna be our last shot, and it felt right. We don’t know much about Crozier’s biography, you know? For all we know that child could be his, it may not. We actually didn’t want to fill in too much of the coloring book at that point. It’s up to the audience to describe whether or not that last shot is--it’s interesting ‘cause we had this big argument, lovely argument in the color suite, the grading suite, of how we grade that last shot. Whether we grade it bright and sunny to be optimistic, or we grade it with a lot of contrast and stamp down a lot of the light to make it seem that, you know, there’s a sense--a harshness, to this reality. And in some ways we split the middle, so the audience can decide whether or not the life Crozier has at the end is one of punishment, reckoning, or whether or not he will move on and have something different.

DK: And I think something in that final shot that certainly we couldn’t have planned, that tipped things in a warmer direction was the child that plays that boy in the shot, who’s meant to be sleeping against Crozier as he’s waiting at the seal hole, really fell asleep because he was wrapped up in fur, and Jared’s a very welcoming person, and he fell asleep. And in the middle of that shot he twitches in his sleep, like children do. And I think that if you catch that it’s quite undeniably a warm moment. You don’t know whether that’s Crozier’s son, whether that’s just a friend’s son, someone he’s taking care of, but you do get a sense that there is a community and that it’s a warm one, even though that life will be difficult and he will occupy no position of leadership in that world, he will be--you know, he’s missing a hand at that point, it’s going to be a rough rough road ahead of him, but we decided to sort of be as ambiguous as we could but for that child who twitches in his sleep, which we just loved that, that that’s a part of that final shot of the show.

DS: Now you’ve made me wanna go back watch that scene about ten times. I think you did at the ending essentially what you chose to do throughout the series, which is to trust in the intelligence and the sensibilities of the audience. So in that sense I like it a lot, but I admire it too. It just, I’m just sentimental, I just want Crozier finally to find somebody.

[show audio]

[”The Gates of Paradise” by Robert Fripp, which is the music from that aforementioned final scene of Crozier and the little boy asleep at the seal hole, plays] 

SH: And with episode ten, the story of the Franklin Expedition on AMC is completed. And Dave, you’ve been working on this project now for ten or twelve years, I’ve been on it for two and a half years, Adam you’ve been on this journey for a long time, Dan you’ve probably been--how long has it been for you?

DS: Oh, since about 1994!

SH: Yeah, wow. I mean, what is it about this story that means it’s hard to let go? Even now I feel like there’s a grieving process that I feel like I have.

DS: I know why it’s hard to let go. You created real people, you did something that is incredibly rare I think, for any media, movies, series, anything. They’re real people, and when they suffer the viewer suffers with them. When they try to fight back and survive, that’s the viewer’s impression, and we’re sorry to see each one of them go, including Hickey. So, I think there’s a success in what you set out to do. 

SH: We’re just so thrilled that, you know, you gave us the trust to do your book but also that you love it! We were so nervous that you would hate this adaptation!

[laughter]

DK: Well and now what’s amazing is we all get to sort of take a seat in the theater of real history playing out again, now that they’ve discovered the ships. You know, we’ve been told by Parks Canada and by people we’ve met who are actively on the archeological expeditions now, dives to the ships, that there is a chance that they will find a ship’s log, and that all of the questions that have come up and perplexed us and preoccupied us and fascinated us in the researching of both the writing of the novel and the creating of the television show, that those questions may have answers soon. And so now we are all now back in that position of being riveted by this actual history. And what a treat it will be to have a conversation in a year when we have learned hopefully much more about what actually happened on this expedition. 

[“The Gates of Paradise” begins playing again softly in the background]

DS: If I were on the expedition ship and found the log, the diaries, everything, I would hide them.

[laughter]

DK: Agreed.

AN: Yep, absolutely. 

DS: I mean we’ve all done a lot of work here, who cares about reality? 

[laughter]

DK: Well thank you, Adam, thank you Dan, for joining us, Soo and I have had a fantastic time having this extended conversation that hopefully is interesting to people who have watched and appreciated the show. So thank you for the opportunity to do it, it’s been fantastic to talk to you both, and onwards we go, into the future!

SH: Onwards ho!

DS: Onward.

AN: Onward. Thank you so much guys, it’s been a pleasure.

DK: Thank you, and thank you for everyone who’ve watched the show and thank you for everyone who’ve read the novel, and we can’t wait to hear your feedback!

[“The Gates of Paradise” fades out]

[mysterious-prophetess]

Review: Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarves

It’s finally out in my region so I was finally able to get my hands on it to watch without risking my computer.

Not that I would resort to such....less-than-legal means... <.<

Anyway, I’m glad I did buy it officially. It was every bit as cute as I thought it would be after I saw the new round of trailers and comments by others on tumblr. 

I’ll give my spoiler free thoughts now and go into more details under a read more.

So first, I have to compliment the animation. It is so beautiful. The characters all looked great and none of them looked uncanny at all. My favorite character design of the humans was Snow sans shoes, but Merlin in his normal form is a close second. It’s their eyes. 

My favorite non-human character design was the magic mirror. 

The magic effects were also nicely done.

The plot’s pacing was decent. There were times where it almost felt like they had built in commercial breaks for an eventual network airing from how some parts would cut to black and start a new scene. It wasn’t often and it didn’t really detract from the film. 

The characters were all consistent and Snow White/Red Shoes was down right relatable for me. Merlin and the other six Princes were fun and played off one another, though the trio of Pino Noki Kio almost felt like they didn’t need to be three characters since they never acted independent of one another. Whereas Jack, Hans, Arthur, and Merlin all had their own distinct personalities.

Even the Evil Queen had some good moments. 

Prince Average felt like an after thought.

The moral of the story, while done before and nearly to death, was given a fresh spin in this film. 

Over all this film is charming and the marketing team that screwed them over with the fat-shaming like ad campaign should never be hired by these guys ever again. There is no fat shaming in this film directed at Snow White/Red Shoes. 

The lesson is instead a good one. 

I heartily recommend people watch this movie. There are some semi-Shrek like elements on occasion (like out of place pop culture references) but overall the film has its own identity. 

Another nitpick aside from the weird commercial breaks that kept seeming to happen and that’s the over use of the movie’s main pop song. I liked it the first time but after a few other reuses it started to get a little stale. 

Otherwise I loved the music of the film. 

Snow White’s journey was one that I loved. She had one mission and one mission only: find her father. In fact her desire to be herself contradicted the shoes magic. She was perfectly happy as her normal self and not the magic enhanced version the shoes transformed her into. That’s a powerful message to send to girls who aren’t skinny or traditionally pretty. Though, Snow White is down right adorable as her true self.

I also liked that the perfectly pretty form wasn’t something Snow White necessarily liked but was willing to use to her advantage to help find her father. I also liked that it had drawbacks as Snow White in her normal state was actually a physically strong woman but as a dainty pretty girl all that strength she had and liked having was gone. Furthermore, the movie showed that Snow White was decently athletic as her real self, which was a refreshing take for a heavier character. Large doesn’t equal flabby, weak, or out-of-shape. 

Snow White’s struggles with taking off the magical shoes were reflective of the times where she got insecure about herself. Despite loving who she was, she did sometimes accept the pretty dainty form because of how much nicer people were. 

The Magic Mirror was surprised she could even take them off because it meant there was something she wanted more than being pretty. The first time, at Risky Rock in the Fearsome Seven’s house, it was her desire to be herself. In the alleyway, it was a desire to escape the goons. In the river it was her desire to save Merlin. Yet, whenever she wanted to take them off other times, things had happened to make her hesitate on giving up the conventionally pretty form that had made it so others would help her.

As someone who is not conventionally pretty and definitely not skinny, I really empathized with Snow White about this. 

On no occasion was Snow’s true self ever treated like a joke. There was the scene after she’d taken the shoes off where guards were harassing her where it almost looked like Merlin and Arthur would ignore her peril because she wasn’t her Red Shoes form, but Merlin came back and helped her.  He was even kind of nice to her. 

Never even when Merlin finds out about the shoes versus her real form does he call her ugly or make comments about her weight despite being still kind of fighting his own ego while learning the lesson at this point. 

Speaking of Merlin (and the others of the F7). 

Merlin being the main male protagonist does get the most screen time. Arthur get the second most. Then Hans and Jack, and then the Pinocchio Trio. 

At first their dynamics were all clashing and Arthur seemed like a bully and Merlin seemed like a very shallow impulsive jerk. Let’s be clear, all the guys are shallow. Even the trio who are more obsessed with their inventions half the movie. It’s what got them cursed by the fairy princess in the first place. Considering it was a fairy they pissed off, being turned into green dwarves when anyone (who isn’t a magical creature) looks at them was actually getting off mild. 

I was surprised that each Prince actually has to break their curses one at-a-time. It’s not a “break the curse for one and you save all” which was a new take on a collectively applied curse. Which was why they were every-dwarf-for-them-selves when it came to trying to woo “Red Shoes” and get a kiss from her. 

Merlin’s character journey was one that is usually reserved for the curse breaker in fairy tale movies where a curse indeed is in play. In that he was the one who had to learn to look past appearances. I love that Snow White calls him out on that at one point in the movie too. 

Merlin learning to let go of his obsession with looks (his own included) was what allowed him to see Snow White as the most beautiful woman in the world (in his eyes) which was what let her second kiss at the end break his curse. Because he saw her inner beauty which mattered more than any physical appearance she had.

The characters grew and them ending up together at the end felt natural and not forced because the time they spent together always felt like they had chemistry which is hard to pull off.

Moving on to other things: Regina, Magic Mirror, and Average. 

Honestly? Average felt like a real waste of time. It was through his lines we got the most Shrek-like throw-away references, it was he who had the least impact on the plot, and he who could have been written out of the flick almost all together. Yeah, Merlin recognizing his tree-i-fied form did hint at what Regina had done to others (and it was after he and his two not-the-Stabbington-brothers-goons became evil ents that I figured out King White was that wood bunny because it was large and cute and that was the White Family’s designs overall). 

Average was a throw away character. In many ways he wasn’t even mediocre let alone average. 

The worst thing about him is he can be easily written out of the movie. 

As the stepmother of Snow White, Regina is queen of the kingdom and all the scenes where soldiers go after Snow White and the F7 could have been her sending people to do her dirty work to spare her magic usage. 

Average’s two goombas? Hired thugs who’d never seen Snow White before. Take him out, shuffle a few things around, make a captain character be his replacement in the attack on Risky Rock scene, and nothing of value would be lost in his removal. Average is the film’s only major mistake. He was a dead end that could have been easily written around and the screen time would have been better spent on Snow White and the F7 or maybe fleshing out Regina a little more.

Magic Mirror and Regina both played well off one another. Patrick Warburton as any character will always be an excellent casting choice. 

Regina’s schemes made sense from a shallow perspective. 

I saw someone compare her to Mother Goethel from Tangeled  in a youtube comment on one of the trailers and kinda? 

They had the same sort of vanity-wanting to keep their youth and maintain their beauty-and their penchant for cloaks was the same but, Regina to me....was more like Mother Goethel and Triss Marigold from Witcher 3′s fusion. Her younger form reminded me WAY more of Triss than Goethel as did her gown. Plus, it’s canonic in the Witcher-verse that sorceresses use magic to keep young. Also, she’s not the first evil queen of a Snow White retelling to even be obsessed with youth to the point she goes to extreme lengths to maintain it. See Snow White and the Huntsman’s queen. 

Regina stands out as her own character despite sharing a name and role with Regina of Once Upon a Time. She’s ruthless, and able to manipulate others with either her words or illusionary magic (though it costs her like the witches from Stardust). She’s also absolutely cold. She just kind of falls flat compared to the Magic Mirror.

No offense to the voice actress or the writers, but up against Patrick Warburton’s Magic Mirror/tree character, Regina is a little less memorable to me. He has more sass and more pure threat to him than Regina does. Sure, she has magic that can turn people into strange tree monsters, but it’s the mirror that gives the F7 the most trouble throughout the movie, and they fought off something that looked to be a whole platoon of guards/soldiers armed with heavy artillery (canons). Granted, it was a close call that relied on their wits and other skills, but they still had less trouble with that fight than they did against Magic Mirror. 

Some More Things:

The humor was nearly overplayed but they managed to tow the line between going too far and just right.  Mostly this was seen with the F7 and their attempts to get Snow White to kiss them and break their spells, especially Arthur. 

They did give him more of a character beyond loud bully, which was that he had a sensitive side and a lot of pride (which was easily bruised). In fact, only he and Merlin felt like they had characterizations compared to the other five. Hans was obsessed with cooking and Jack with jewels and the trio with tech but that’s all they got beyond having their friends’ backs whenever it really mattered and being awesome badasses. Since these other five were mostly side characters, this is more of a nitpick than an actual problem since the film was setting up Arthur vs Merlin for Snow White’s affections. 

The fact that Snow White brushes all the attempts of flirting off so easily was very amusing to me and a nice way of showing how she was focused on finding her missing father throughout the whole film (despite the fact that she had already found him). Hilariously, in hindsight, she really had seen him in the woods. If she’d been herself, who knows if he’d have even attacked her.

Finally, I’ll end on what had seemed like an inconsistency but now I realize is a loophole because the fae have those in everything. The guys have to be alone or have the person they’re with close their eyes to be their true selves, except Merlin is still his true form even though he’s not alone with the Magic Mirror or the wood rabbit/King, or the three wood bears/children. 

Turns out, once I thought about it, the fairy’s curse was if “people looked at them” which meant, the ones doing the looking had to be people and the wood creatures-despite formerly being people-were considered to be people no longer. The Mirror was probably never a person, which mean he’d never counted as a part of “people” so he could look all he wanted (which was his thing as a mirror). It’s an interesting loophole. 

Long story short, I really enjoyed this film. It was very cute and it was done so dirty by its marketing three years ago. 

Good film. Good messages. Go watch it! It’s not like we’ve anything ELSE to do at the moment (and it’s not like there are any other worthwhile films coming out right now). Support this film, and this studio.

[upfrog]

So I finished reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

This isn’t so much a review, as an attempt to cement some of my thoughts, and to at least write something down, the better that I will not look back in a year and not be able to remember a thing of what I thought of HPMOR. But overall... that was quite a thing.

HPMOR is long. Longer (by word count, which isn’t a perfect method of judging this) than War and Peace, the normal benchmark for “really long books”. I don’t consider getting through it to be an accomplishment, in the sense of say, getting through Homestuck, though maybe that’s only because I have tried, and failed to do the latter several times. It may also be because the plot is, for all it’s time travel and scientific tangents, less complex than Homestuck. I do not expect it to stick in my mind the way the canonical books do. While I do not consider them to be high literature, the canonical Harry Potter books, in addition to being entirely an entirely decent story, had a certain... Depth, of sorts, to them. Some of this may come from the midi-chlorian effect; the workings of magic are never discussed greatly in the canonical books, but much of HPMOR Harry’s efforts are devoted to understanding magic from a scientific perspective. I think it is more likely that it is because HPMOR simply had a more limited scope.

HPMOR set out to be a puzzle, an encouragement of rational thought patterns, a demonstration of how they might be applied to great benefit. And it does this. While potential plot holes and inconsistencies exist, it does this fairly well on the whole. But there isn’t that much beneath it, at least not that I have seen. It’s a good enough story, and the way it chooses to fill in the unfinished coloring book of Rowling’s world creates a compellingly interesting universe, albeit not a pleasant one. It has some good humor at some parts (more on that later), many clever moments, and some moments that are, frankly, just plain awesome, though these often contribute to the monstrously overpowered being that Harry is. Both versions shared the core theme of (spoiler warning: the rest of this paragraph. If you’re interested, I’d really advise you to just read it so that you don’t have the dramatic tension reduced) Harry ultimately triumphing by virtue of who he is. Triumphing by being, as we would describe it, a better human being than his opponent. The difference is that in the canonical books, this is a much more theological process. By the final book, Rowling is pretty much bashing us over the head with a crucifix. I still maintain that, unless the hill you wish to die on is unmarried teen snogging, declaring Harry Potter as heresy for the simple fact that it includes magic is to foolishly ignore the veritable flood of Christian messaging the books contain. I thought I’d made a post about that, but apparently not, so I’ll divert myself to that briefly. 

Spoilers for the whole canonical Harry Potter main series in the following paragraph:

The entire story is based on an innocent child who was permitted to live because of the intensely real power and protection offered by the selfless sacrifice of another to protect said child. So there, straight off the bat, right in the premise. And then in the 7th book, Harry does the exact same thing, but more so, and pretty much pulls an Aslan, “dying” willingly to protect others, but not by this being truly killed. And it’s not like the Christian messaging in Narnia is obscure. And at the end of the first Harry Potter book, Dumbledore, the most “good guy” character that the series has to offer goes off explaining how “to the well organized mind, death is but the next great adventure”. Then, in no particular order, having not done anything like a read through specifically looking out for these: the primacy of the soul over the physical, the specifically soul-corrupting nature of evil and killing, the power of redemption and forgiveness, the ultimate triumph of good over evil, the concept of powers that, while attainable, will damage your soul forever, and the existence of life after death. Anyway, back to the main matter.

HPMOR lacks any semblance of this depth (not that this is the deepest thing in the world mind), at least that I have been able to detect, and this makes it a lesser story to me.

The first ten or so chapters of HPMOR were pretty great as comedy. Harry constantly befuddling the wizarding world, and being befuddled by it, makes for some great laughs. Later on it undergoes a pretty significant tone change, and I had a very hard time adjusting to it, and enjoying the latter portion (which makes up most of the fic) for what it is. I did ultimately reach that point, but it was jarring.

This fic has some pretty obscure references. Have any of y’all read “Negima!?”? The author of this fic has. ( or at least, he’s watched some of the show.) It also had an offhanded reference to Madoka Magica, which is less obscure, but I still appreciate it. 

HPMOR Harry just keeps on getting more and more powers. (potential spoilers ahead, less severe): It seems like every month he’s making some discovery of how to do something that the entire wizarding world “knows” is totally impossible. It makes a certain sense, in context, but it certainly does contribute to some Mary Sue-like feeling. But on the other hand, Harry routinely oversteps his cleverness, failing to think things through enough, missing obvious points that would have counter-indicated his action. And some of the consequences are rather severe, so I don’t knock too many points off for it. Harry is powerful, but he is also rather a child genius in this telling, and all things considered, most of his discoveries don’t seem too ridiculous. 

I earlier mentioned that the world HPMOR painted was rather interesting. It (mostly) doesn’t directly contradict the wizarding world as portrayed in the common, but it does color in many of the blanks, and this author paints in dark colors. Wizarding britain, as portrayed in HPMOR, would be considered barbaric to most of the people reading this. Or perhaps it would merely be considered “medieval”. It certainly has some things going for it. It is portrayed as a place with relatively little history of institutional sexism, or racism amongst wizards. Even the stodgiest pure bloods find it silly to discriminate based on skin color. Wizarding Britain sees little wrong with homosexuality, and it is entirely un-taboo. But things get worse from there.

It is implied, or at least, I took away the message from my last reading some years ago, that the Wizarding power structure in the canonical books is... incompetent. That the benchmark of being a “fully qualified” witch or wizard does not in fact entail very much true competency, and many of the more powerful figures are somewhat dumb. HPMOR confirms this, and brings it into the light, offering more examples of just how useless most wizards are in matters non-magical. Wizarding Britain is controlled by an incompetent government, which is primarily controlled by one or several “Noble and Most Ancient House(s)”. The extent of Lucius Malfoy’s influence is brought up often in the canonical books, and the same is true here. This is a world where (minor spoiler for something before chapter 10-ish) a young noble raping a girl, and yes, girl is the proper noun here, repeatedly, and getting away with it indefinitely, is an open secret. Where this young noble’s security is secured by: a) the victim and her families’ fear of his familial power, b) memory charms, and c) a court system where the interests of the Noble Houses are often a primary concern. 

Wizarding news is minimal, and it seems to primarily toe the ministry (which is to say, aristocratic) line, save for the Quibbler, which... on the whole, isn’t great news either. There is no particular concept of a fair trial at play in this world, especially if your crime was committed against a noble house. Less than three days investigation is considered enough to go from crime to a sentence of ten years in Azkaban. And then there’s Azkaban itself. For all it is a prominent feature in the books, and Dumbledore’s opposition to it is often mentioned, Azkaban doesn’t get much light shone on it in the canonical books. This is likely in part because it is such an incredibly, ridiculously cruel place that it becomes very difficult for many of us muggles to imagine it being an appropriate punishment for anyone. I won’t go into great detail, but there are very few crimes capable of causing enough pain that, even working from a perspective of vengeance, instead of justice or rehabilitation, it becomes very difficult to mathematically justify Azkaban. 

To clarify, by mathematically justify, I mean, what percent of the pain a criminal inflicts by his misdeed can fairly be unleashed upon the criminal as punishment. Is a beating a proper punishment for beating someone? What about two beatings? Or three? At what point does the severity of the punishment become so much greater than that of the crime that it stops being sensible? If you slapped me, would I, absent any concerns about self defense or ensuring my future safety, be justified in immediately shooting you? Or boiling you? Or beating you to death? The murders who are so successful that we stop calling them murders and start calling them statesmen might have a shot at a mathematically (if not necessarily ethically) justifiable cell in Azkaban. For everyone else, it’s pretty difficult. And in both versions of the story, wizarding justice is NOT perfect. Innocent people go to Azkaban, and are exposed to this as well. Azkaban is pretty terrible, and most of the wizarding world just sort of... accepts it.

Anyway, I probably have more to say, but I really need to wrap this up. This probably wasn’t very coherent, so sorry about that. 

[ohayohimawari]

The Genin Gaffe

Remember the Kakashi look-alike, Kumade Toriichi? Maybe you don’t, but I do, and he hasn’t been far from my imagination:

I discovered this unknown Konoha Dork last February and wrote a drabble about him titled, The Copy Ninja.

I decided it was time to continue the Kumade and Kakashi Saga with a new piece of pure crack fanfiction.

I offer no excuse nor apology for this ridiculous drabble. I've spent most of my life surrounded by boys in my immediate and extended family, so, it was inevitable that fart humor would make its way into my fanfiction.

Gen, Rated: G

Hiruzen Sarutobi assigned a mission to Kumade Toriichi erroneously, and he enlists Minato's help to cover his mistake before there are long-lasting consequences to Kakashi Hatake's reputation.

Read on AO3

The Genin Gaffe

“You have a mission for me, Lord Third?” Minato Namikaze raised his head to regard the leader of the Hidden Leaf from where he knelt in the Hokage’s office.

“Yes,” Hiruzen Sarutobi exhaled the word absentmindedly within a cloud of pipe smoke without looking up from the scroll he was reading.

Minato maintained his reverent position and waited patiently as Lord Third finished scanning the message. Hiruzen signaled his completion of the letter with a thoughtful hum before he rolled the scroll up again and set it aside on his desk. The slight creases around his eyes became more pronounced when he issued a small, but warm smile to Konoha’s Yellow Flash.

“Minato,” he said the jōnin’s name softly and slowly. “Do you know Kakashi Hatake?”

“I’ve heard of him, certainly,” Minato said as he stood up. “He’s the son of the White Fang, correct? Other shinobi in the village have called him a prodigy, having graduated to genin after only one year at Konoha’s Ninja Academy.”

“Hmm,” Lord Third confirmed Minato’s information with a nod. “Kakashi has displayed exceptional skill and intelligence for one so young. However, I’ve been unable to find a permanent place for him on a team, even though he was quite popular among his classmates.” Hiruzen tapped the ashes out of his pipe into a glass dish before setting it down.

Minato paused for a moment to consider his response. “I have also heard that Hatake is difficult to work with,” he admitted. “Kakashi’s rigid adherence to the Shinobi Rules and determination to successfully complete missions regardless of the cost to his teammates has prevented others from wanting to join up with him.” Minato’s bright blue eyes met Hiruzen’s fixed gaze. “I assumed his behavior was a result of the circumstances surrounding Sakumo’s death. I can imagine the passing of his father has cast a long shadow onto Kakashi’s life.”

“Yes,” Lord Third emphatically agreed. “And it’s only one of the many problems his son is left to resolve on his own.”

“Oh?” Minato’s curiosity and furrowed brow displayed his genuine concern for Kakashi.

The younger man’s reaction was precisely what Hiruzen had hoped for, and he lowered his voice to emphasize that his next words were to be held in the strictest confidence. “As I said, Kakashi was popular among his classmates. Another student, Kumade Toriichi, seems to have modeled himself after Kakashi; though he hasn’t been successful at emulating him.” Lord Third ran a hand down his tired face.

“Kumade?” Minato cast a quizzical look to his Hokage.

“Toriichi,” Hiruzen repeated. “He struggled at school, and because Kakashi excelled in nearly every way, Kumade began to mimic him; in appearance especially.”

Lord Third pinched the front of his official headgear between two fingers and brought the hat down to hide his expression. “It has led me to assign a mission to Kumade erroneously. I’m afraid this has made things even more difficult for Kakashi.”

Minato’s blue eyes widened in shock that Konoha’s leader had made such a mistake, but he was quick to wipe the evidence of his surprise from his face. “The two must bear a striking resemblance, Lord Third.”

“Indeed,” Hiruzen lifted his hat a little, revealing the embarrassed flush that remained on his cheeks. “But that’s not the worst of it. It seems that Kumade has digestive issues.”

“Why would that matter?” Minato puzzled.

“Flatulence compromises even the best shinobi, Minato. Kumade is about as stealthy as Maito’s son. However, whereas Gai will learn the necessary skills to hide himself completely, Toriichi’s condition will plague him throughout his shinobi career. He may never rank higher than chūnin because of it unless perhaps, he can learn to harness it to his advantage.” Hiruzen removed his Hokage’s headpiece and ran one hand through his thinning hair.

Minato silently reassessed his dream to become Hokage, when introduced to a challenge he’d never considered. Outwardly he asked, “What does this have to do with Kakashi?”

“Kumade took advantage of the opportunity that my mistake granted him. He wants to be just like Kakashi, so he pretended to be Kakashi instead of correcting me. His hair looked a little different, but I thought Kakashi had cut it because of the hot summer it’s been.” Hiruzen shook his head. “That doesn’t excuse my mistake and doesn’t change what followed.”

Minato waited in expectant silence as Lord Third cleared his throat and continued. “It was a surveillance mission. They were supposed to shadow a group of traveling merchants that had roused suspicion during their visit to Konoha. From the little intel the team gathered, these merchants may very well have been spies from Iwa.”

Hiruzen sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “I assigned Shikaku Nara to lead this team, and according to his report, they managed to follow the others for several hours undetected until Kumade literally blew their cover.”

Minato’s mouth fell open, and he attempted to recover as quickly as possible, asking the first serious question that came to mind. “Wh-what made Shikaku suggest they were Iwa nin?”

“The targets encased themselves within an air-tight mud dome, which is an impenetrable protective jutsu that Iwa nin are known to employ. It’s their toughest defense, so it must have been awful. Unfortunately, the mishap incapacitated Shikaku’s team as well, and by the time they recovered, the so-called merchants had escaped underground without a trace.” Hiruzen leaned forward, propping himself up by his elbows on his desk as a grim expression overtook his face.

“My mission then is to try to confirm the identity of the escaped targets?” Minato wasn’t distracted by the odd details of Shikaku’s failed mission and quickly cut to the seriousness of the situation.

“No, I have a different mission for you. One that will remain off the books, and which may test even your patience, Minato.”

Minato respected the secrecy of this upcoming mission and stood silent, waiting for the details of his assignment.

“Word of this episode has spread throughout the shinobi of this village, as one would expect of gossip,” Hiruzen began to explain the sensitive situation to the Yellow Flash. “As you know, Kakashi’s cold demeanor hasn’t endeared him to his comrades. I have received several scrolls from Konoha ninjas respectfully requesting never to be assigned to work with the, uh, Gassy Genin, as they now refer to him.” Lord Third lifted the scroll off of his desk and offered it to Minato.

Minato accepted the scroll and was astonished by what he read. He inhaled sharply, “Does Kakashi know about this?”

“Not yet. I sent him to Suna to deliver a message to the Kazekage. Partly to report the suspicions of Iwa and partly to get Kakashi out of Konoha for a bit. I hoped that this whole mess would be forgotten, but it’s only grown worse. I expect young Hatake to return tomorrow morning.” Hiruzen sighed and looked up at Minato again. “Kakashi has enough problems without the foolish mistake of an old man adding to them.”

“How can I help?” Minato returned the scroll to the Hokage’s desk.

“Team up with both Kakashi and Kumade tomorrow. Round up lost cats, help the elderly carry their groceries, or assist civilians with chores—whatever you can come up with to keep those two boys together and most importantly, seen together. It’ll be easier to explain the mistaken identity that way and hopefully clear the air.”

Minato couldn’t help himself from chuckling at Hiruzen’s choice of words, and Lord Third soon followed him. “Please do this for me Minato. You’ll be compensated out of my pocket for a B-rank mission, because this may be just as difficult. Kakashi detests Kumade, and after seeing how far Kumade will go to mimic Kakashi, I can’t say that I blame him.”

Minato offered a half smile and a nod as acceptance of his mission, before bowing then turning to exit the Hokage’s office.

“Oh, and Minato, if it’s this hot tomorrow, take the boys for ice cream. It might help us determine if Kumade is simply lactose intolerant, which is easy enough to remedy. And should he drop offense where he goes, that’ll be all the proof we need to show the others that they too have mistaken this copycat ninja for Kakashi.”

The End

[thesydneyfeminists]

Netflix’s “Sex Education” Review

The Netflix original show “Sex Education” was released less three weeks ago, but it’s already creating quite the stir on social media. And its popularity is not surprising. In the span of just 8 episodes, “Sex Education” packs a large and memorable punch. As one review states, “The show, starring Gillian Anderson (Jean Milburn), Asa Butterfield (Otis Milburn), Emma Mackey (Maeve Wiley) and others, tackles tough topics that are central to teens’ lives - homosexuality, body shaming and female solidarity - in very real, digestible scenarios” (click here for link). In its first season, “Sex Education” confronts a range of raw and relatable themes, while embracing the full awkwardness of sex and life in general. It’s a great show of its own accord, and one I would highly recommend to all feminists, especially younger ones. Unlike many shows, “Sex Education” doesn’t just throw around catchy buzzwords – it does a magnificent job of establishing and following through on its feminist messages.

At first glance, “Sex Education” is a just another show about teens having sex. One might be tempted to make parallels with Netflix’s “Big Mouth,” due to the somewhat raunchy nature of both shows. Others have drawn parallels to Netflix’s “The End of the F*cking World” (click here for link) because of their shared British humor. The setting is a quirky blend of British and American culture, which encompasses both 80s/90s nostalgia and modern references and technologies. In many ways, the series draws on a long heritage of teenage dramas and romcoms. However, as another review suggests, “that stereotype-laden summary fails to communicate how Sex Education brilliantly subverts the assumptions made through labels like jock, mean girl, dunce, weirdo, therapist, popular, loser, gay, lesbian, slut (or slag), and virgin” (Click here for link). Once you delve into the series, you realize “Sex Education” is much more than it appears. It is a formidable addition to any feminist’s to-watch list.

        For starters, the representation on “Sex Education” is expansive and not forced in the least. LGBTQIA+ relationships abound, people of color characters have some of the most compelling storylines in the show, and different class backgrounds are explored in depth. The heartthrob of the school is a young, black athlete with two moms battling anxiety. One of the main characters in the show lives alone in a trailer park, after her father and brother deserted her and her mother left due to addiction. Another main character, also black, is the most openly gay person at his school and loves to experiment with makeup and feminine dress. Of course, Netflix shouldn’t be lauded for FINALLY upping its representation game. It’s been a long time in the making. However, it is refreshing to see people from so many and varied backgrounds in one show, especially one that explores sex and sexuality as openly as “Sex Education.”

        Another big draw for any feminist viewers of “Sex Education” is the largely women-led writing team. For a show about sex, the inclusion of women writers is truly a breath of fresh air. On the topic of their writing team, Laurie Nunn, Australian-British writer/ playwright and creator of “Sex Education,” commented, “it’s a show with a very feminist heart and having a female-heavy writing team definitely helped bring certain issues to the forefront of storytelling” (click here for link). Although there is a lot of sex and nudity in the show, none of it comes off as inappropriate or pornographic. Instead, the show speaks about women’s and girl’s desires in a candid and unabashed way. A similar show could have been written by men, but it’s hard to believe it would have been done with half as much wit and sincerity surrounding the experiences of its female characters.

The show “Sex Education” also does a better job of educating people on sex than most high schools (mine included). The running joke throughout the show is that Otis, the main character and son of a sex therapist, is better at running sex ed than the teachers. Alongside heavier topics such as STIs and abortion, the show engages with genitals in a powerful and transformative manner. One episode focuses extensively on the shame many young women feel about their vaginas. Emma Mackey, who plays main character Maeve Wiley, states, “There are lots of young women who feel like they have an ugly vagina … I just find it so sad, and I really hope … this show will open conversations around topics like that” (click here for link). Even as an adult, the episode referenced in this quote reassured me that all vaginas are perfect just the way they are – a much needed message for all to hear.

        Many of the reviews for “Sex Education” focus on the amazing women creator, writers and characters on the show. They certainly deserve praise. However, I also want to bring attention to the ways in which the show treats its male characters. Even the one signature “tough guy” has a rich and deserving backstory, dealing with his traumatic relationship with his father. But there are also plenty of examples of wholesome relationships between boys and young men. In one of my favorite scenes of the show, Otis apologizes to his best friend Eric by asking him to dance during the “couple’s song” at their school dance. Seeing two young boys with no romantic interest in one another dance together in front of their entire school was a moment of pure joy for me. Feminism has always included in its goals the abolishment of toxic masculinity. So, any show that promotes healthy relationships between boys and young men scores an A+ with this feminist.

        The final reason I personally recommend “Sex Education” is because it is a quiet yet mighty feminist show. Plenty of corporations have profited from the most recent rise of feminism. It would be naïve to suggest Netflix didn’t cash in on this type of corporatized “wokeness.” Still, “Sex Education” does not reek of the same kind of desperate appeal towards mainstream feminism as some other Netflix shows. You can tell the producers and writers are not trying to drop just the right amount of activist lingo, without actually unbalancing the status quo. They are simply telling the stories of young people, with a thoughtful commitment to inclusivity. As one reviewer writes, “Each character's journey, whether a main plot or side story, is an amalgamation of quietly unexpected revelations. Sex Education … delivers a story about real people and the complex mess of contradictions that we are” (click here for link). And it does so with careful attention to many of feminism’s main goals.

By: Brittany L.

Image Sources

Otis, Maeve and Eric: https://www.hindustantimes.com/tv/sex-education-review-netflix-pops-2019-s-cherry-with-its-best-show-in-months/story-TmGKfmBEaQgOT7z3ZFLqxI.html

Eric and lesbian couple: https://www.pride.com/tv/2019/1/08/netflixs-sex-education-lets-teen-hormones-run-wild-even-gay-ones

Otis and Jean (mother): https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-reviews/sex-education-review-774591/

Otis and Eric: https://www.popsugar.com/entertainment/Funny-Memes-Tweets-About-Eric-Netflix-Sex-Education-45703556

 Disclaimer: The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of The Sydney Feminists Inc. Our Blogger and Tumblr serve as platforms for a diverse array of writers to put forth their ideas and explore topics. 

[everythingmusicandfilm]

Melodrama / One Year Anniversary

On the 16th of June 2017, the Lorde herself blessed us with the pure art that is Melodrama. I clearly remember being at a stressed time of my life, having just finished exams and this album was definitely an incredible reward. The album takes us on a fluorescent journey of being a 20 year old female on the edge of the universe. We follow Ella’s relationship, her heartbreak, her endless partying, the love hate relationship with loneliness and the struggles of being a writer. Melodrama is an album about being alone and nurturing the relationship with yourself, something that resonates with myself very deeply. This album may be have been snubbed by the grammys but there is no doubt that it is my album of the year.

“Green Light”

The first song on the album starts with a piano and honest vocals bringing us in. The song gives us an inside look into Ella’s heartbreak. The punchy euphoric pre chorus comes in and Ella’s powerful vocals yell out “I’m waiting for it, that green light, I want it”, as we are lead into the masterpiece. This song was the first single released from the album and it delivered a clear message that this album will be worth the four year wait. The song represents a drunk girl who is crying about her ex boyfriend as the music is joyous and makes you want to dance all night long but the lyrics are so intense (“Did it frighten you, how we kissed when we danced on the light up floor?”). But Ella also knows she will be strong and rebuild the next day (“Oh, I wish I could get my things and just let go, i’m waiting for it, that green light, I want it). “Green Light” is an electro acoustic masterpiece with joyous instrumentals and powerful lyrics (“Sometimes I wake up in a different bedroom, I whisper things, the city sings ‘em back to you”).

“Sober”

“Sober” is a perfect example of experiencing Ella’s synesthesia. The first note hits you hard as a strange vocal syncopation comes through. Ella’s clear voice then starts singing “Oh god i’m clean out of air”. The song expresses Ella’s fears of coming down from her high and going back to reality (“we pretend that we just don’t care but we care”). The sprawling brass horns and hypnotic vocals creates a chaotic song that portrays the feeling of being drunk. We start to hear the colours in the song and don’t want it to end as the booming slow synth takes us on a journey of being ‘drunk’ and fearing for the feeling to end (“Jack and Jill got fucked up and possessive when they get dark”). This song shows a side of pop music we haven’t heard before.

“Homemade Dynamite”

“Homemade Dynamite” reflects a chaotic, explosive house party. The ‘homemade dynamite’ referring to alcohol/drugs, things youth use to destroy themselves and forget about things. The song vocalises an explosion and even includes a top gun reference as it explores the power of friendship and having a reckless night together (“A couple rebel top gun pilots, flying with nowhere to be”). The song which potentially has the lightest lyrics on the whole album, simply illustrates friends being drunk and enjoying a song together. My favourite part of the song is the lyrics, “Might get your friend to drive, but he can hardly see. We’ll end up painted on the road, red and chrome, all the broken glass sparkling”. The almost gothic lyrics reflect the events of a mythical car crash Ella and her friends feel has happened although it could have actually happened if they had let that person drive. These lyrics add a humorous and reckless touch to the song. An important reflection of what it feels to be young and unaware of what to do with your new freedom.

“The Louvre”

“The Louvre” illustrates the passionate and the vulnerable sides of being in love. The dry guitar opening and the ambient atmosphere of the song pulls us into a sort of trance as we explore Ella’s experience of love (“Well, summer slipped us underneath her tongue, our days and nights are perfumed with obsession”). Ella’s voice in this song perfectly matches the lyrics she is singing (“I overthink your p-punctuation use, not my fault, just a thing that my mind do”). When Ella sings “Just move in close to me, closer, you’ll feel it coasting”, she places an emphasis on each C word. These little details in her singing greatly enhance the song. The song is about thinking you’re perfect for each other (“But we’re the greatest, they’ll hang us in the Louvre, down the back, but who cares, still the Louvre) but also about the vulnerability of telling someone how you feel about them (“Megaphone to my chest, broadcast the boom boom boom boom and make 'em all dance to it”). The chorus sounds like when we’re around someone we like, we’re nervous and excited and our heart beats fast and it feels as if everyone can hear it.

“Liability”

A moment of quiet is portrayed as we reach the “Liability” track, potentially my favourite song on the album. The sad slow cinematic piano accompanies the honest and raw lyrics. When a song strips down the number of instruments, the lyrics have a more powerful effect (“The truth is I am a toy that people enjoy, 'til all of the tricks don’t work anymore and then they are bored of me”). Ella in this song recognises her destructive personality and takes the blame for the breakup (“Says he made the big mistake of dancing in my storm”). The piano descends as the lyrics soar. Ella explores the loneliness of being a pop drama queen as she questions if she is too complicated to find love. These very personal and intense lyrics make us feel bad for the singer and want to comfort her in that taxi. Ella realises what she does for a living and that giving up her privacy means she will always be a tax on someone. However there is hope in the song that her relationship with herself (“the only love I haven’t screwed up”) won’t let her down. A reminder that you’re not too much for people, you’re magical and you are always going to have yourself so you have to nurture that relationship. The song is Ella’s suit of armour as she confronts the painful reality of what her job means for her relationships and the hopeful empowerment of being okay alone (“you’re all gonna watch me disappear into the sun”).

“Hard Feelings/Loveless”

This track is two songs put together and they are two songs that explore different stages of a breakup. The distorted beats, the electronic sounds, the layered vocals all come together to create “Hard Feelings”. This song is about admitting the breakup (“I care for myself the way I used to care about you”). The first verse expresses blue tones and is the ‘winter’ part of a breakup where as the second verse is an “endless summer afternoon”. Throughout the song Ella is slowly letting go of the fantasy of the relationship and softly sings as she asks her ex to be gentle. Then the drums and beat of “Loveless” comes in. Ella vents her angry feelings as she becomes bitter about the breakup. Ella wants her ex to feel as much pain as she does (“Bet you wanna rip my heart out, bet you wanna skip my calls now, well guess what? I like that”). Ella then explores a loveless generation as the world seems darker to her now since the breakup, it is a loveless world for her now. “Hard feelings” represents how Ella was coping with the heartbreak and “Loveless” is a chance for her to vent out her angry emotions one last time as she lets the pain take over.

“Sober II (Melodrama)”

“Sober II” is the part two to “Sober”. After the party is over and the lights are back on (“Lights are on and they’ve gone home but who am I?”). The strings at the beginning of this song creates an illusion of dreaming, before Ella’s voice punctures through and we are then back to reality. This first note is almost like opening a wound. The song is a sobering experience as it creates blue and violet tones and explores the depressing event of cleaning up alone in the morning after a party. The song addresses the ‘melodrama’ of trying to remember but simultaneously trying to forget (“and the terror and the horror and we wonder why we bother..all the glamour and the trauma and the fucking melodrama”). The song is a clear representation of melodrama.

“Writer In The Dark”

After “Loveless” and “Sober II” explore the pain of being angry and attempting to sober up after a breakup, “Writer in the dark” reaffirms her strength. Her powerful vocal range is shown as Ella explains that being a writer gives her a secret power to overcome things. She can tell the story of her damaged romance in her own terms. The song represents Ella and the album. How she has the talent to tell us what she is feeling, she can determine how her life is recounted, she shows that the writer gets the final word. Being a writer means she can immortalise aspects of her life. This song is a message to her partner as it says that he became a part of this process when they met whether he liked it or not (“Bet you rue the day you kissed a writer in the dark”). Ella doesn’t apologise for this as she has always been a writer, it is who she is and this song is a love letter to this part of her life.

“Supercut”

“Supercut” is an empowering beat that makes you want to dance all night long. It is a message to look back at the memories of a relationship to help you recover from the heartbreak. The pre verse beats and bass are very different to anything else we’ve heard. Ella is coming to terms that the relationship wasn’t a good idea as she realises that the ‘supercut’ version of their relationship is not the whole story (“and as I reach for you, there’s just a supercut”). He is no longer there in her life. Each time Ella explores a happy memory she reminds herself “it’s just a supercut”.  As the song slowly fades out it gives us time to look back and reflect. This song is a sonic representation of neon and fluorescent colours. “Supercut” reflects how Ella is maturing as she explores her happy memories of the relationship but recognises that that is only half the story and in the end the relationship was no good.

“Liability (Reprise)”

As the slow hum comes in, and the husky tones are layered, you know you’re about to go on a journey. We can visualise the lyrics in this song as it is an ocean of emotions. We experience nostalgia, comfort and pain. The simple lyrics from the original “Liability” are repeated almost as if we are slowly turning over our memories from the night before, after a party. It is a representation of a hangover. The song is about being alone and reflecting as the world continues to move around you. This song clearly visualises Ella sitting on her own as life continues to move in front of her. Ella questions if all relationships feel like this or if she can find something better (“maybe all this is the party, maybe we just do it violently”). “Liability Reprise” is the morning after a party where Ella is trying to come to terms with being alone again.

“Perfect Places”

“Perfect Places” is a joyful upbeat vibe that explores the madness of becoming an adult. The lyrics juxtapose the music, as being with a different person every night can be fun but also sad. The lyrics illustrate coming of age, and all the political changes happening in this chaotic world as Ella tries to escape the madness. She suggests though that it’s okay because we’re in it together. “Perfect Places” is about trying to find yourself amidst the excitement and uncertainty of your late teenage years (“I’m nineteen and I’m on fire”). She was told when she was younger that becoming an adult is ‘perfect and wonderful’ however as she grows older she doesn’t understand what these perfect places are. The song was written in New York in the summer as Ella explains that the weather was terribly sticky and hot and every day something horrible would be on the news (“I hate the headlines and the weather”). She also talks about losing her heroes including Prince and Bowie (“all of our heroes fading”) as she continues to party so that she won’t be sitting at home with her thoughts. Ella illustrates how she continued to party every night in order to try and find these perfect places but has yet to find them. “Perfect Places” finishes off our journey of Melodrama as Ella questions whether she can find true happiness. The juxtaposition between the joyful beat and the depressing lyrics suggests that Ella is still on the fence about whether these perfect places actually exist.

Melodrama is a portrayal of a house party, the unfolding drama. It is a sensual journey about being a young woman in a chaotic world. It is a journey of a relationship and breakup and the reward comes with the embrace of the self. As Ella has often stated, this is not a breakup album, it’s an album about being alone. The unique vocals and illustrative music allows us to experience her synesthesia. Melodrama is an extraordinary album that expresses the pain and vulnerability of being a young woman on our own in this melodramatic world.

[neomacaught]

on blog playlist.

   I feel like I talk about them a lot, but I put a lot of time, thought, and energy into my blog playlists -- purely for my own enjoyment! I like them being there, I like listening to them. Music is important to me, and giving my kids “OfficialTM” music is just... fun. The overall feel and all lyrics of the song must be perfectly accurate to the character to be included. ( Therefore, there’s usually a lot of other music that’s on the cusp that’s denied entry, so to speak. )

   Neoma’s blog playlist, in particular, is not meant to be listened to as a chronological story, but is more arranged in tonality. However, it can sort of double as a chronology, and starts immediately after her family dies. Most of the playlist includes stringed instruments, a heavy bass, and a good beat. There is one fully instrumental piece. 

CROSSFIRE by Stephen “I hope you’ve got some beds around, ‘Cause you’re the only refuge now, For every mother, every child, every brother, that’s caught in the crossfire.” 

   Back when Neoma was a fully aesthetic sideblog, I came across this song. I immediately used this song as inspiration for the blog theme and title, and that’s carried over here! The words faintly discernible in my graphic on my hover are the lyrics to this song. In general, it captures her spirit because in many ways, Neoma, too, has been caught in the crossfire -- of the politics in Skyrim, of decisions other people in her tribe made and included her in. Honestly, this song actually began helping me iron out her character. So obviously it had to be included first. 

You Are a Memory by Message to Bears “I woke underneath the trees, for the first time.” 

   The mostly instrumental beginning to this song always hooked me. And all of the lyrics are fantastic. Neoma, living on an active volcano her entire life, woke underneath the trees for the first time? Thank you, perfect. Neoma, calling for the last time for Alteroth, her children? Mmmmm. Speaking of mmmm... 

Retrograde by James Blake “Suddenly I’m hit! Is this the darkness of the dawn? I know friends are gone I know friends won’t come So show me where you fit.” 

   I’ve always referred to this as the quintessential “alone” song. I’ve put it on other playlists, on other blogs. And since Neoma’s about as long as alone gets... it’s... perfect. No matter how many people she’s with, she’s still alone! Ha! Ha,

The Way by Zack Hempsey “This is not the right way.” 

   Another primarily instrumental song that tapers off into very apt lyrics. A lot of this song is focused on how other people are praising you for accolades that you feel like you don’t fully deserve / you didn’t even want in the first place and for choices you don’t feel like were the right ones, and doing the right thing even though others don’t understand why, which resonates... yikes... very deeply with Neoma. It has a lot of feeling out of place and confused with how everyone else sees this world and why everyone else does what they do vibes. 

Gold by Imagine Dragons “I’m dying to feel again Oh, anything at all But oh, I feel nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing!”

If we’re going in chronological order, this song would come after she’s amassed some wealth and prosperity in Skyrim. It’s more metaphorical than literal. Obviously, she doesn’t literally have a Midas touch, but she went from poverty and having a loving family to having everything materialistic she could ever want within her grasp but nothing she truly cared about. Y’know. Like Midas. It’s -- it’s another layer.  

Human by Rag’n’Bone Man “‘Cause I’m no prophet or messiah You should go lookin’ somewhere higher! I’m only human, after all I’m only human, after all Don’t put the blame on me Don’t put the blame on me I’m only human, I do what I can I’m just a man, I do what I can Don’t put the blame on me Don’t put your blame on me.”

   I could marry the bass player in this song. Anyway, uh! This song is one of two on here called Human, as humorous as it is because she’s... not a human. Anyway! It’s a very Neoma song because she spends a lot of time taking care of others and trying to protect them, and they often blame her for what goes on around around them anyway. They treat her like a god when she’s just... a woman. 

Spanish Sahara by Foals “Though I’ll find you in the sand, Wipe you clean with dirty hands So, goddamn this boiling space It’s the Spanish Sahara,  The place that you’d wanna,  Leave the horror here  Forget the horror here  Forget the horror here Leave it all down here.” 

   This song had to be added -- and, chronologically, would be her starting to remember the death of her family on the volcano, e.g. the lines I pulled -- because it’s the song I always equated to my Mabinogi verse. This song also happens to be the inspiration for multiple verse tags. It’s all about attempting to forget a horror of horrors that happened. 

Gerudo Desert from Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess’ Twilight Symphony album 

   Our only instrumental song, Gerudo Desert has a feel that reminds me a lot of Neoma’s home and upbringing intertwined with a reorchestration that feels very Skyrim to me. 

Uncle Mountain by The Fire Theft “Rhythm of mind, don’t wanna spend my time Being afraid of dying I really wanna do good Drown in a world of pity and sorrow  Been immersed within the light What was I looking to find?  Run along, to the sea I want love, if love wants me  I want God, if God wants me! Just can’t hold on To what I believe...”

   God, I’ve always loved this song so much. It’s so beautiful and so deeply meaningful. Chronologically, this is around where Neoma starts breaking and thinking back to her lost family, which is why the next few songs become more about her desperate need ( ha, ha ) for them to return. She’s done all this good and still hasn’t found anything good by doing any of it. She’s trying her best and still getting nothing in return. She just can’t hold on to what she believes. So... 

Need by Hana Pestle “Etch this into my brain for me Tell me how it’s supposed to be Where everything will go and how I’ll be without you by my side My hand searches for your hand  In a dark room  I can’t find you  Help me  Are you looking for me?” 

   ... She starts thinking about Alteroth and the girls again. She needs them back. She can’t find them in her prayers, can’t sense their spirits with her ancestors. They need to be there. Why aren’t they there? Why won’t they help her? Are they lost? Are they looking for her, like she’s looking for them? Tonally, this song marks the beginning of the rest of the songs -- a bit sadder, a bit bluer, until the very end. 

All the King’s Horses by Karmina “I knock the ice from my bones Try not to feel the cold Caught in the thought of that time, When everything was fine Everything was mine Everything was fine Everything was mine.”

   This was the second song I ever heard that made me go, Wow, Hi Neoma. Skyrim is freezing, and as she sits in the freezing cold, she’s thinking about the time when everything was hers -- when she had all of her family. And no matter how long she’s here, with these people, and how esteemed she is, no one can help her. Maybe she lives here, but is it really a home if she’s all alone? She starts finding her strength again. There is a reason she’s still standing, right? There has to be.

HUMAN by Krewella “The weight of the world is pulling me down (Where are you now? Where are you now?) Every breath feels like I’m gonna drown (Where are you now? Where are you now?) And I’m the only one left alone on this earth  (Alone on this Earth) Singing this song but can’t find the words  ’Cause I could use a hand sometimes Yeah, I could use a hand sometimes They say, ‘Pain is an illusion This is just a bruise and you are just confused’ But I am only human I could use a hand sometimes I am only human.”

   The second Human song on our list. She feels so alone, and it’s hard to breathe, and no one’s ever there for her... you know? She could use a hand sometimes. And maybe... she should start seeking them out again. 

Live Long Enough to Become the Hero by NateWantstoBattle “I’m down, but you know I’m not out I got another around round (Another round) Second wind and it’s picking me up right off the ground I’m coming back again -- can’t break me! I’m not giving up! I gotta prove them wrong Take your time, ‘cause I’m not taking mine, I gotta stand up strong!”

   Ah, there she is. That bitter defiance wakes her up. It hurts, and everything sucks, but she’s got to prove them wrong. She’s going to protect this world, even if everyone she cares about is gone. She can’t stop, even if she wants to. This hard rock infused with some violin action is perfect for Neoma. 

Unbreakable by Fireflight “God, I want to dream again, Take me where I’ve never been I wanna go there, this time I’m not scared Now I am unbreakable, It’s unmistakable No one can touch me Nothing can stop me!”

   And now she’s not just fighting because she feels like she has to -- she’s fighting because she can. She’s not scared. She’s back in control. She’s doing what’s right. Again hard rock and violin, fantastic. 

   And that’s a wrap! 

[wineanddinosaur]

Can You Build a Successful Bourbon Brand by Trolling the Taters?

The labels are colorful, cartoonish, comical, and a bit grotesque.

There’s Tater Bait, depicting a woman with a massive head of 1980s hair cascading over a visor.

Smash Bill shows a poor man’s Rambo, armed to the teeth with an M60 machine gun.

While Waxx Dippz displays a bald-pated man with a Van Dyke beard, seemingly staring into your soul.

Though you might not understand the joke, each of these (and six others labels) seem to be blatantly mocking the modern bourbon geek, that sometimes vile species of obsessive who covets Pappy, clears store shelves of formerly mid-tier stuff like Weller and Eagle Rare, and even adulterates bottles with silly stickers and post-purchase wax coatings, often with a total lack of awareness for their inherent absurdity.

“I deal with these people all the time. Sometimes their lack of a sense of humor is a little alarming,” says Matthew Colglazier, a longtime liquor merchandiser and marketer. “Taking a piss (out of them), that’s part of the fun, I think.”

Catch ’Em All

Colglazier has regularly found himself in the orbit of these whiskey collectors after more than a decade in the spirits industry in various capacities. The Indiana man has been buying single barrels for liquor stores for years and been making trips to nearby Midwest Grain Products (MGP), the massive, former Seagram’s distillery in Lawrenceburg for nearly a decade — well before most drinkers were aware that it was supplying upstart craft distilleries like WhistlePig, High West, and Smooth Ambler with much of the bourbon and rye they were bottling.

Scouring store shelves, looking at the thousands of non-distiller bottlers, as well as the countless craft distilleries that have emerged, all trying to get a piece of the perhaps $10 billion pie, Colglazier began to wonder how a new American whiskey brand could possibly set itself apart.

“When it comes to creating something new and different these days, that’s really a challenge,” says Colglazier.

Feeling confident in his industry acumen, however, Colglazier and some partners decided to branch out with their own brand in 2018. A family member had alerted him to Krogman’s, a whiskey and brandy distillery that had existed in Tell City, Ind., from 1863 until Prohibition, and then ran on fumes until the 1960s. Searching through trademark filings, Colglazier realized that no one owned it anymore. And, just like that, Krogman’s was his.

“We don’t own a distillery, we don’t own a license or anything,” says Colglazier. He sources all his “juice” and lets partners like Cardinal Spirits, a top craft distillery in Bloomington, do the bottling.

Early Krogman’s releases would include Krogman’s Bourbon and Krogman’s Rye, sourced from MGP and packaged at 90 proof in opaque black and red bottles depicting a drawing of the old distillery that no longer stands. It’s a typical way to launch a new brand, by evoking an esteemed history that isn’t necessarily your own and has nothing to do with the liquid in the bottle. These releases sold all right, but they certainly didn’t become a sensation among consumers. Colglazier knew he would have to start tackling his branding in a different way.

“How much innovation is there in the bourbon category today?” asks Colglazier. “I started to think: It doesn’t just have to be about the blocking and tackling of history.”

Around then, Perry Ford, MGP’s sales manager and an old industry connection, sent Colglazier an inventory list of the single barrels he currently had available. Looking over the menu, Colglazier noticed that all nine of MGP’s whiskey mash bills were available in single-barrel form, everything from four bourbons and three ryes to a corn whiskey and even a light whiskey. The MGP mash bills you’ll most often see in single barrel form these days are the ubiquitous 95 percent rye or the “high-rye” bourbon favored by Smooth Ambler and recent darling Smoke Wagon.

As a whiskey drinker himself, Colglazier wanted to try them all, but he needed a good excuse. His first thought: What if he created a unique single-barrel release for each and every mash bill, and then turned all nine into a set? Since the whiskeys were all 3 years old — a little youthful for your average bourbon enthusiast — he knew he’d have to make the labels novel, interesting, and highly collectable if he wanted to sell them.

That would start with what he called each release, naming them after the insider slang (so often intentionally misspelled) that had become popular on secondary market buy/sell sites, private Facebook groups, and message boards over the last decade.

“I tried to pinpoint relatively specific things that people would know,” Colglazier says.

Thus, there’s Tater Bait, a reference to neophyte collectors who do exceedingly embarrassing things in pursuit of rare bottles. Flipperzz refers to people who buy allocated bottles at retail costs only to immediately “flip” them for bloated, black-market rates. Dusty Hunterzzz is a nod to those who comb through off-the-beaten-path liquor stores for vintage bottles that have lingered on shelves for years gathering dust.

“Your civilian bourbon drinker would have no idea what these things meant and would just think, ‘Oh, that’s an interesting label,’” adds Colglazier.

He tapped local designer Aaron Scamihorn for the label art. Scamihorn specializes in a bold, vintage comic book style, perhaps more befitting the skate decks and even craft beer labels he also designs than the sort of staid, regal branding we typically see in the bourbon industry.

“When we first discussed this project it was the first time I’d heard the word ‘tater,’” recalls Scamihorn. His labels are inspired by the beat-up VHS box covers for campy, ’80s movies you would have seen stocked on the bottom shelf at Blockbuster (Buyy it Noww! was surely spawned from 1980s “Harlequin”). That era tracks with the late-30s/early-40s demographic of guys that Colglazier sees as most into bourbon collecting right now.

At the least, these are the dudes who already have a deep familiarity with the most online and underground parlance of the American whiskey world (Unicorn! Maxx Profitzz!) needed to get many of these jokes.

“Some were really on the nose, others were a stretch,” says Colglazier. “Some barely make sense.”

Of course, whiskey fans have long had the “gotta catch ’em all” mentality that, in many people’s eyes, has turned the industry into a game of liquid Pokemon, and Colglazier is well aware of that. But Krogman’s reminds me more of another set of trading cards: Garbage Pail Kids, the 1985 series of depraved and deformed characters meant to mock the then-frenzy surrounding Cabbage Patch Kids.

“It pokes fun, but honors [these people] at the same time,” says Colglazier. “It makes it recognizable to that consumer. It’s kind of a tightrope, and I’m not sure everybody understands.”

No BS!

The trickiest part of the tightrope, of course, is that the same people the labels are mocking are inherently the only people who might possibly desire having these crazy bottles in their collections.

“Looks like they are poking some fun at the bourbon world in general, but actually just bottling ALL 9 MGP recipes at cask strength with no BS!” wrote one man on Reddit. “Kind of better than all the other brands who make up a bunch of back stories. [sic]”

And that’s exactly Colglazier’s point. Yes, the Krogman’s labels may be satire, but the whiskey is no joke — it’s all non-chill filtered and bottled at cask strength, catnip for the whiskey cognoscenti who don’t really care about a brand’s nonsense “origin” story.

The set was first released starting in late summer 2020, mostly at big box liquor stores in Indiana, though Tater Bait made its way onto Seelbach’s, an online whiskey retailer that has plans to sell a complete set of nine in the future. There were three to four barrels each of most releases, so fewer than 1,000 bottles per SKU. (For the completists, bottlings made for the Kentucky market had variant labels meant to poke fun at all the Booker’s Bourbon releases like Country Ham.)

They sold for just $32 a bottle, a remarkably reasonable price in an era that has seen other sourced whiskeys cost many times as much. Smoke Wagon’s 8-year-old MGP single barrels, for instance, sell for upwards of $700 per bottle on the secondary market. That’s why another Redditor agreed that it was an “exploitable niche” to sell barrel-proof MGP so cheaply, calling the entire series a “slam dunk.” “The Whiskey Vault,” a popular YouTube channel, praised the series as well, loving its execution and transparency.

“Not subtle!” joked co-host Daniel Whittington.

A Collectible in the Making?

You could argue that Krogman’s is the most honest bourbon brand of this crazy era. It may seem like a troll — and, of course, it partially is — but it’s one of the few MGP-backed bottlers offering unique releases and not trying to dupe consumers and generate high demand based purely on hype. While other bourbon and rye brands pretend they exist in a vacuum, clueless to online discussions and tater-driven market forces, Krogman’s has a keen self-awareness of the hyper-obsessive culture it is being released into.

Colglazier isn’t sure where the series will go next, but a part of me feels that while leaning so heavily into the scene, he’s unwittingly created something that, in a few years, might end up being one of the biggest collectibles of the era. Krogman’s may be seen as an economically priced prank right now, but could it one day be the American version of Ichiro’s Malt Card Series released between 2005 and 2014 — of which a complete “deck” of the 54 bottles in the Japanese series sold for $1.52 million in late 2020?

Probably doubtful, as Ichiro’s came from the shuttered Hanyu distillery and Krogman’s is certainly not as well aged of stock. But sometimes it takes a few years for these ahead-of-their-time ideas to pick up steam. Even the Malt Card Series had initially been consumed by buyers, not squirreled away and collected.

“People really want to see themselves reflected back in the things they buy,” Colglazier says of his bourbon. “In many ways, what we buy, what we collect, these are validations of who we are. People have used lots of consumer goods to validate themselves. This is just taking it to the next level.”

The article Can You Build a Successful Bourbon Brand by Trolling the Taters? appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/krogmans-bourbon-trolling/

[isaiahrippinus]

Can You Build a Successful Bourbon Brand by Trolling the Taters?

The labels are colorful, cartoonish, comical, and a bit grotesque.

There’s Tater Bait, depicting a woman with a massive head of 1980s hair cascading over a visor.

Smash Bill shows a poor man’s Rambo, armed to the teeth with an M60 machine gun.

While Waxx Dippz displays a bald-pated man with a Van Dyke beard, seemingly staring into your soul.

Though you might not understand the joke, each of these (and six others labels) seem to be blatantly mocking the modern bourbon geek, that sometimes vile species of obsessive who covets Pappy, clears store shelves of formerly mid-tier stuff like Weller and Eagle Rare, and even adulterates bottles with silly stickers and post-purchase wax coatings, often with a total lack of awareness for their inherent absurdity.

“I deal with these people all the time. Sometimes their lack of a sense of humor is a little alarming,” says Matthew Colglazier, a longtime liquor merchandiser and marketer. “Taking a piss (out of them), that’s part of the fun, I think.”

Catch ’Em All

Colglazier has regularly found himself in the orbit of these whiskey collectors after more than a decade in the spirits industry in various capacities. The Indiana man has been buying single barrels for liquor stores for years and been making trips to nearby Midwest Grain Products (MGP), the massive, former Seagram’s distillery in Lawrenceburg for nearly a decade — well before most drinkers were aware that it was supplying upstart craft distilleries like WhistlePig, High West, and Smooth Ambler with much of the bourbon and rye they were bottling.

Scouring store shelves, looking at the thousands of non-distiller bottlers, as well as the countless craft distilleries that have emerged, all trying to get a piece of the perhaps $10 billion pie, Colglazier began to wonder how a new American whiskey brand could possibly set itself apart.

“When it comes to creating something new and different these days, that’s really a challenge,” says Colglazier.

Feeling confident in his industry acumen, however, Colglazier and some partners decided to branch out with their own brand in 2018. A family member had alerted him to Krogman’s, a whiskey and brandy distillery that had existed in Tell City, Ind., from 1863 until Prohibition, and then ran on fumes until the 1960s. Searching through trademark filings, Colglazier realized that no one owned it anymore. And, just like that, Krogman’s was his.

“We don’t own a distillery, we don’t own a license or anything,” says Colglazier. He sources all his “juice” and lets partners like Cardinal Spirits, a top craft distillery in Bloomington, do the bottling.

Early Krogman’s releases would include Krogman’s Bourbon and Krogman’s Rye, sourced from MGP and packaged at 90 proof in opaque black and red bottles depicting a drawing of the old distillery that no longer stands. It’s a typical way to launch a new brand, by evoking an esteemed history that isn’t necessarily your own and has nothing to do with the liquid in the bottle. These releases sold all right, but they certainly didn’t become a sensation among consumers. Colglazier knew he would have to start tackling his branding in a different way.

“How much innovation is there in the bourbon category today?” asks Colglazier. “I started to think: It doesn’t just have to be about the blocking and tackling of history.”

Around then, Perry Ford, MGP’s sales manager and an old industry connection, sent Colglazier an inventory list of the single barrels he currently had available. Looking over the menu, Colglazier noticed that all nine of MGP’s whiskey mash bills were available in single-barrel form, everything from four bourbons and three ryes to a corn whiskey and even a light whiskey. The MGP mash bills you’ll most often see in single barrel form these days are the ubiquitous 95 percent rye or the “high-rye” bourbon favored by Smooth Ambler and recent darling Smoke Wagon.

As a whiskey drinker himself, Colglazier wanted to try them all, but he needed a good excuse. His first thought: What if he created a unique single-barrel release for each and every mash bill, and then turned all nine into a set? Since the whiskeys were all 3 years old — a little youthful for your average bourbon enthusiast — he knew he’d have to make the labels novel, interesting, and highly collectable if he wanted to sell them.

That would start with what he called each release, naming them after the insider slang (so often intentionally misspelled) that had become popular on secondary market buy/sell sites, private Facebook groups, and message boards over the last decade.

“I tried to pinpoint relatively specific things that people would know,” Colglazier says.

Thus, there’s Tater Bait, a reference to neophyte collectors who do exceedingly embarrassing things in pursuit of rare bottles. Flipperzz refers to people who buy allocated bottles at retail costs only to immediately “flip” them for bloated, black-market rates. Dusty Hunterzzz is a nod to those who comb through off-the-beaten-path liquor stores for vintage bottles that have lingered on shelves for years gathering dust.

“Your civilian bourbon drinker would have no idea what these things meant and would just think, ‘Oh, that’s an interesting label,’” adds Colglazier.

He tapped local designer Aaron Scamihorn for the label art. Scamihorn specializes in a bold, vintage comic book style, perhaps more befitting the skate decks and even craft beer labels he also designs than the sort of staid, regal branding we typically see in the bourbon industry.

“When we first discussed this project it was the first time I’d heard the word ‘tater,’” recalls Scamihorn. His labels are inspired by the beat-up VHS box covers for campy, ’80s movies you would have seen stocked on the bottom shelf at Blockbuster (Buyy it Noww! was surely spawned from 1980s “Harlequin”). That era tracks with the late-30s/early-40s demographic of guys that Colglazier sees as most into bourbon collecting right now.

At the least, these are the dudes who already have a deep familiarity with the most online and underground parlance of the American whiskey world (Unicorn! Maxx Profitzz!) needed to get many of these jokes.

“Some were really on the nose, others were a stretch,” says Colglazier. “Some barely make sense.”

Of course, whiskey fans have long had the “gotta catch ’em all” mentality that, in many people’s eyes, has turned the industry into a game of liquid Pokemon, and Colglazier is well aware of that. But Krogman’s reminds me more of another set of trading cards: Garbage Pail Kids, the 1985 series of depraved and deformed characters meant to mock the then-frenzy surrounding Cabbage Patch Kids.

“It pokes fun, but honors [these people] at the same time,” says Colglazier. “It makes it recognizable to that consumer. It’s kind of a tightrope, and I’m not sure everybody understands.”

No BS!

The trickiest part of the tightrope, of course, is that the same people the labels are mocking are inherently the only people who might possibly desire having these crazy bottles in their collections.

“Looks like they are poking some fun at the bourbon world in general, but actually just bottling ALL 9 MGP recipes at cask strength with no BS!” wrote one man on Reddit. “Kind of better than all the other brands who make up a bunch of back stories. [sic]”

And that’s exactly Colglazier’s point. Yes, the Krogman’s labels may be satire, but the whiskey is no joke — it’s all non-chill filtered and bottled at cask strength, catnip for the whiskey cognoscenti who don’t really care about a brand’s nonsense “origin” story.

The set was first released starting in late summer 2020, mostly at big box liquor stores in Indiana, though Tater Bait made its way onto Seelbach’s, an online whiskey retailer that has plans to sell a complete set of nine in the future. There were three to four barrels each of most releases, so fewer than 1,000 bottles per SKU. (For the completists, bottlings made for the Kentucky market had variant labels meant to poke fun at all the Booker’s Bourbon releases like Country Ham.)

They sold for just $32 a bottle, a remarkably reasonable price in an era that has seen other sourced whiskeys cost many times as much. Smoke Wagon’s 8-year-old MGP single barrels, for instance, sell for upwards of $700 per bottle on the secondary market. That’s why another Redditor agreed that it was an “exploitable niche” to sell barrel-proof MGP so cheaply, calling the entire series a “slam dunk.” “The Whiskey Vault,” a popular YouTube channel, praised the series as well, loving its execution and transparency.

“Not subtle!” joked co-host Daniel Whittington.

A Collectible in the Making?

You could argue that Krogman’s is the most honest bourbon brand of this crazy era. It may seem like a troll — and, of course, it partially is — but it’s one of the few MGP-backed bottlers offering unique releases and not trying to dupe consumers and generate high demand based purely on hype. While other bourbon and rye brands pretend they exist in a vacuum, clueless to online discussions and tater-driven market forces, Krogman’s has a keen self-awareness of the hyper-obsessive culture it is being released into.

Colglazier isn’t sure where the series will go next, but a part of me feels that while leaning so heavily into the scene, he’s unwittingly created something that, in a few years, might end up being one of the biggest collectibles of the era. Krogman’s may be seen as an economically priced prank right now, but could it one day be the American version of Ichiro’s Malt Card Series released between 2005 and 2014 — of which a complete “deck” of the 54 bottles in the Japanese series sold for $1.52 million in late 2020?

Probably doubtful, as Ichiro’s came from the shuttered Hanyu distillery and Krogman’s is certainly not as well aged of stock. But sometimes it takes a few years for these ahead-of-their-time ideas to pick up steam. Even the Malt Card Series had initially been consumed by buyers, not squirreled away and collected.

“People really want to see themselves reflected back in the things they buy,” Colglazier says of his bourbon. “In many ways, what we buy, what we collect, these are validations of who we are. People have used lots of consumer goods to validate themselves. This is just taking it to the next level.”

The article Can You Build a Successful Bourbon Brand by Trolling the Taters? appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/krogmans-bourbon-trolling/ source https://vinology1.tumblr.com/post/656790305151057920

[eth-an]

Modern Love and Broken Promises: Romance in Edward Yang’s Cinema

Around halfway through the runtime of Edward Yang’s 2000 film Yi Yi, the audience is given a portrait of a pitiful man reaching one of his lowest points. A-Di, brother-in-law to the film’s protagonist NJ, is shown lying half-naked on a mattress in his ex-girlfriend’s apartment, portly and slothful, engrossed in a porno playing on the television at the foot of the bed. As Yun-Yun turns off the bedside lamp and the space goes dark, the scene recedes with nothing but the reflection of the TV’s glare on A-Di’s glasses and the moaning of porn stars reverberating around the room. A-Di attempts to ask his ex- for help with his money troubles; she ignores him, leaving him talking to himself. In Edward Yang’s oeuvre, characters are often left conversing with themselves, hearing the echoes of their own voices, constantly talking past the ghost of their partner rather than meeting them on an intimate common ground. As Franz Kafka wrote in a correspondence to his lover at the turn of the twentieth century: “writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts” (230). Edward Yang, a key player in Taiwan’s New Cinema at the end of the century, then could be said to extend Kafka’s formulation to match the new material technologies present in a globalizing city. While Kafka remarks on the letter and its inability to consummate a human connection, Yang replaces ink and notepads with more timely motifs: the TV screen, the fax machine, the tape recorder, the film studio, the business card. As A-Di lies with his limbs sprawled out, made agog by the material on the cassette tape, the television screen erodes the boundary between private intimacy and public spectacle. Critic James Tweedie has commented, “the television exists at the threshold between those two social spheres” (14), making the divide between the personal and public more porous than ever before. While giving the illusion of connecting A-Di to a richer outside world, we can see how the television only serves to further alienate him from Yun-Yun; from an active, embodied experience of his own sexuality; and from the conversation he halfheartedly prolongs. Yang’s films then are instructional in understanding how modern media technologies have turned the traditional triumphant romance narrative into an “intercourse with ghosts”—perpetually frustrated, mired with failure, and unconsummated. While this may seem like a cynical indictment of modern love, I hope to show through an analysis of Yang’s films Yi Yi and A Brighter Summer Day that Yang’s characteristic melancholia opens up new potentials for making meaning out of romance in an era of increasing fragmentation. As Fatty deftly comments before his murderous rampage at the end of Yi Yi, “we live three times as long since man invented movies” (1:51:18). Yang’s films live up to this charge, offering their audience three times the intricacy through their characters’ ultra-mediated relationships.

One of the most compelling romantic arcs in these two films is the rekindling of the long-lost flame between NJ and his first love, Sherry. Although NJ and Sherry are both married when they come across each other unexpectedly in the gaudy lobby of some Taipei hotel, circumstances give them a chance to temporarily forget their spouses and reconnect. However, their new intimacy is spurious. Rather than offering either of them closure from the thirty years since their last meeting, their connection is mediated through shadows and fleeting impressions. At first, their reconnection is facilitated by nothing more than the exchange of flimsy business cards. Sherry hands off one of her cards—a symbol of the professional success she has found since moving to America—to NJ, who does not reciprocate the gesture. This scene marks their relationship at its most obviously superficial, but as the story progresses and their interactions become more and more frequent, their reliance on flimsy forms of mediation persists. NJ misses several calls of Sherry’s, only to dial her number and pour his heart out on her answering machine. Technology, rather than making the world a globalized paradise, then offers NJ and Sherry little more than the ability to talk to strangers they used to know. Yang then problematizes the supposed forward march of global communication, showing how it causes NJ and Sherry to miss each other’s messages just as often as it lands on the mark. The context and location of their phone calls also plays a crucial role here. Walter Benjamin has commented on the “sanctuary” (171) of private living spaces in opposition to its “complement” (154) of the office workspace, but in Yang’s film this dichotomy is collapsed as well: Sherry and NJ are only afforded the opportunity to speak to each other in the context of a business trip, NJ always reaches out to Sherry through his office’s phones, and the details about meeting up with Sherry at a Japanese hotel are routed through NJ’s secretary. The office phone, just like the television screen, then refigures private intimacy as one more piece of a larger global loneliness.

Even once NJ and Sherry end up meeting each other in person, the damage has been done so that they are seemingly doomed to speak past each other. NJ meets Sherry along with Ota in the lobby of yet another hotel, and they briefly converse in English, a language which none of them grew up speaking. No matter how technically proficient they are in speaking this foreign language to each other, this adds yet another level of mediation to their conversation. Throughout the trip, NJ and Sherry go on walks together, each monologuing their discontents from their long-gone relationship to the air around them, as if the other was not even present to comment. “I wouldn’t know how to live on!” Sherry yells, to no reply (1:53:03). She later breaks into tears and screams at NJ in his hotel room, only to realize that she has missed the mark and that her yelling was out of turn, directed at a vision of their relationship that no longer exists, or perhaps never existed in the first place. In these scenes, Yang represents their lost young love not as a monument worth rebuilding, as might be the case in a more traditional romance film, but the crosshatching of faulty memories and miscommunications underwritten by modern technologies. In a 2000 interview conducted between Edward Yang and the magazine Cineaste, Yang comments that his stories try to deal with “the universality of being human” (Sklar 6). While it is difficult to pin down a specific meaning from such a broad and totalizing claim, surely the increasing “connectedness” of the world under globalization is one such universal feature of being human at the turn of the millennia. While many take this connectedness as an a priori feature of modern life, Yang remains critical of those media and communication practices that ambiguate meaning in our relationships. In a concrete way, the trains and planes that connect Taiwan, the U.S. and Japan—the modern transportation that brings Sherry and NJ physically closer together—only serves to ultimately push them further apart. Focusing again on the boundary between the personal and the outside world, Yang shows a shot of Sherry’s reflection in a train’s window: her face is contemptuous as NJ sleeps, unaware next to her.

In addition to those features of globalization like mass-communication and transportation, Yang builds in a reflexive critique of the proliferation of video as well. The porno that A-Di watches is likely a specific reference to the increasing production of Taiwanese porn films at the end of the 1980s, which made up over half the country’s video output at that time (Zhang 242). Likewise, Taiwanese news media makes up an important expository narrative device at the end of Yi Yi, when Ting-Ting learns of Fatty’s unfortunate demise by watching the television hanging in the police station. The seriousness of the situation is brought down into an almost humorous register by the TV program, which illustrates exaggerated CGI visuals of the way the crime may have occurred. While the viewer is able to experience some much-needed comic relief from this scene, a certain darkness underlies its motivation. Ting-Ting, who is as personally acquainted with the situation as anyone could be, learns of the attack the same way as the rest of the public. The boundary between personal and public is collapsed, and her formerly innocent crush on Fatty is plagued with the same failure the other relationships in the film suffer. If critic James Tweedie is to be taken literally in his claim that CGI animation is “staging in its purest and least encumbered form, without the limitations imposed by photography” (15-16), then the news media’s recreation of an animated murder is nothing less than pure spectacle, absent of substance. In terms of Ting-Ting’s own romantic arc, this form of media represents an emptying out of meaning from an incredibly impactful event: though her former lover is going to jail for life, she can (almost) safely feel that it is some distant event happening to another person, in another time. Fatty becomes just as much of a ghost by the end of the film as the lost romance between NJ and Sherry, and no trace of him remains save the hand-shaped blood stains on the front of their apartment complex.

While this emptying out of meaning is the most common effect of modern media technologies in Yang’s films, this does not necessarily make Yang a pessimist in the face of globalizing technology. Yang himself, who attended “the newest and hottest program” for engineering at the University of Florida in the 70s, could hardly be accused of rejecting the adoption of modern technology (Sklar 8). Instead, his films try to explore these technologies’ effects on human life and romantic relationships, rather than tackling their broader structural, societal causes. Yang himself claims that he attempts to portray the events of his films as “neutrally as possible” so that his audience can make any moral judgements for themselves (Sklar 6). This neutral exploration is perhaps best exhibited in his 1991 epic work A Brighter Summer Day, which masterfully portrays the young love and hate between two Taiwanese teens, named Xiao Si’r and Ming, in the dangerous Taipei streets of the early 1960s. Si’r and Ming’s initial introduction is made wholly possible by a chance encounter at a film studio, without which they would not have forged a bond of friendship. One day, as Ming and Si’r are wandering outside their school grounds to spy on the production of a film in the cavernous building next door, they are caught trespassing by the film director. The director, so taken with Ming’s beauty and fitness for the lead role, asks her to come by the next day for a camera test, so that she might take over the position from the previous actress. In many ways, this occurrence is the genesis of Si’r and Ming’s romantic relationship, which grows more fruitful as they pass each other in the halls of the night school.

In one of the film’s most beautiful scenes, the camera cuts to Ming’s face, covered in tears. Yang does not give this scene any prior context. The preceding scene features Ming in a hospital overhearing her caretaker haggle with the doctor about her mother’s medical expenses. As the camera cuts to Ming’s crying face, the viewer expects that she might be crying about her mother’s asthma attacks, or possibly about her boyfriend’s disappearance. Then, a disembodied voice simply asks: “Are you thinking about something sad? Can you tell me about it? Maybe you don’t know where to start” (1:07:58). Soon after these questions are posed to Ming, the camera broadens out, and Yang’s audience sees that Ming was crying during her camera test in the film studio. On the one hand, Ming’s performance could be cynically read as yet another of Yang’s demonstrations of the falsity of meaning in cinema. Although Yang’s audience is initially led to believe that Ming is crying due to some tragedy in her life, it soon becomes clear that she is simply acting. Like so many other instances in Yi Yi, the personal affective labor of Ming is then appropriated by a objectifying public medium, in this case the film camera. However, a more reparative reading of this scene offers a new understanding of how the boundary between personal and public can be recast in spite of modern media. Although the director’s assistant asks Ming to reveal her personal thoughts that cause her tears, she refrains from giving the audience insight into her most intimate thoughts and feelings. Ming’s obstinacy shows that there is still a final frontier of the personal that cannot be captured in written letters, animation, 35mm film, or phone calls. This boundary is preserved in this scene, and Ming refuses to become another ghost for the audience to empty out and recreate to their own liking.

This also becomes evident in Ming’s romantic relationship with Xiao Si’r. The sound stage of the film studio is also the literal stage for the beginning of their romance, and Yang shows how the stage can possess both of these meanings without compromising these characters’ intimacy. When the studio’s cameras are off and the lights are dimmed, Ming and Si’r share their fears and hopes. Ming calls Si’r “honorable” and says that it will get him in trouble (1:00:59). Ming does not leave Si’r with an overly picturesque view of herself, and willfully tells him about other men who flirt with her. In a world that could easily subsume Ming into empty spectacle, she remains an strong example of how intimate and open communication can continue to exist. Ming discovers a modern love that is able to work within both the public and the private without letting one destroy the other through their collapse. She is flexible in finding love not necessarily in a single monogamous heterosexual relationship, but variously works with and against the contingencies of her life in Taipei to maintain and consummate connection with others. When her lover Honey is tragically murdered, she finds generative dialogues with Si’r reconstituting to her self, and this allows her to find a stability in modern love where other characters fail.

Ming does not give herself over as a passive subject to modern love, chasing after Honey’s ghost (in this case, his ghost would be literal), but instead finds a way to move forward and make new meanings in life. In A Brighter Summer Day, Yang offers several other notable features of modern romance that employ a similar ethos, each making meaning in spite of the collapse between public and personal brought about by new media and globalization. The popularity of Elvis’s music among the Taipei gangsters in the film is one such example. Although the gangsters do not speak fluent English, and can only sing Elvis’s songs through phonetic transliterations, they still find deep personal meaning in this global phenom. Although it may seem campy to a contemporary viewer when a Taiwanese child with greased back hair and a white tee starts singing songs by the “King of Rock,” the teens in the movie take this mass-media sensation and make it re-signify in their own community. Even though the film’s title, “a brighter summer day” is a misheard lyric meant to be “a brighter sunny day,” this hardly seems to matter as it makes meaning for these characters personally. The divide between a public, globally recognized rock star, and the individual, personal (mis-)interpretation of that music is then shown to be a generative process that nevertheless allows for new bonds to be made and new relationships to be formed. In Yi Yi, while Ota and NJ sit together in a parked car, they commiserate with each other and agree that music has a unique ability to bond people across time and place. In A Brighter Summer Day, music is another valuable site for modern love to make meaning, as teen lovers lean against each other’s shoulders on the dance floor.

In both A Brighter Summer Day and Yi Yi, romance seems to be perpetually, invariably in the throes of failure. NJ and Sherry, Ming and Si’r, Ting-Ting and Fatty, even A-Di and Yun-Yun: these films offer no shortage of romances ending in spectacular violence or dissipating in dispassionate indifference. As such, it is hard to see how Edward Yang could ever be seen as a romantic filmmaker in the conventional generic sense, or an optimist when it comes to new, modern modes of connection. However, I argue that this unashamed willingness to deal with failure on its own terms is just one of Yang’s many virtues. As critic Jack Halberstam has said, “failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd” (187). In addition, “failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior” in modern society (3). Under the strictures of NJ’s soul-sucking office job, or the angry disciplinarians at Si’r’s night school, or even the covertly violent interrogation practices of the Taiwanese nationalist government, perhaps failure is a viable alternative that ought to be explored. Yang’s romances do not usually offer a happy ending, but their exploration of love does offer something else: an alternative to the rigid and confining norms of modern life that threaten to empty us out and turn us into ghosts.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing. Schocken Books, 1986.

Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011.

Kafka, Franz. Letters to Milena. Schocken Books, 2015.

Sklar, Robert, and Edward Yang. “The Engineer of Modern Perplexity: An Interview with Edward Yang.” Cinéaste, vol. 26, no. 1, 2000, pp. 6–8. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41689311.

Tweedie, James. “Edward Yang and Taiwan’s Age of Auteurs.” Oxford Handbooks Online, 2013, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199765607.013.0023.

Yang, Edward, director. A Brighter Summer Day. The Criterion Collection, 2016.

Yang, Edward, director. Yi Yi. The Criterion Collection, 1999.

Zhang, Yingjin. Chinese National Cinema. Routledge, 2010.

[ramajmedia]

Full House: 10 Things That Haven't Aged Well | ScreenRant

Airing from 1987 to 1995, Full House remains one of the most beloved sitcoms of all time, even over 30 years after it premiered. Chronicling the lives of the extended Tanner-Katsopolis-Gladstone family, and the crazy adventures they all get up to while living under one very, very crowded roof, the series is still beloved for its wholesome messaging and cheesy cutesy humor.

RELATED: 10 Quotes From Full House That Are Still Hilarious Today

With the likes of John Stamos, Bob Saget, and the Olsen twins bolstering its cast, the series went on to be a hit in its original run, but has ostensibly become even a bigger hit in the years of reruns and streaming. But as a result of being over 30 years old now, the series is full of storylines that never would have made it to air today. We look at 10 of them.

10 DJ inadvertently getting married at 13

Jesse's Greek background is one of the characteristics the show refers to most frequently for his character's arc. But when it comes to representing Greek culture as a whole, the few times the show does so are steeped in pretty stereotypical, outdated traits.

Take, for example, the season four episode "Greek Week." DJ quickly develops a mutual crush on visiting Greek boy, Sylvio, who asks DJ, all of 13 years old at the time, to go for a walk around the kitchen table with him. In this simplified, stereotypical scenario, DJ and Sylvio wind up married... as if that's how Greek marriages actually happen, and as if that's a healthy storyline to depict for a 13-year-old.

9 Dated gender dynamics

Being a product of the 1980s and 1990s sitcom world, it's unsurprising that Full House doesn't exactly have the best handle on complex gender relationships. But that doesn't make it any less disappointing. Various times throughout the series, the fact that the men in relationships have to be the ones "in charge" through macho stereotypes is frequently discussed.

Additionally, there are two episodes in the series,"Just One of the Guys" and "Girls Will Be Boys," that find both DJ and Michelle trying to act more like boys to be able to fit in. It's disheartening, even if the ultimate messages mean well.

8 Underage drinking storylines

It's no secret that teens face unbelievable amounts of pressure to grow up faster than they're supposed to. It's also no secret that Full House came about in the age of "Very Special Episodes," so it's a given that the series would tackle issues of peer pressure.

RELATED: Full House: 10 Uncle Jesse Quotes That Show Why He Was A Heartthrob

But the way the series does so is incredibly uncomfortable, after all these years. A late in the series episode finds Kimmy getting completely blackout drunk at a party and voicing her desire to drive herself home. And an early episode in the series' run finds DJ, just in middle school at the time, accosted by boys at a party who want her to drink.

7 Walter, also known as Duckface

Going along with the message of the Very Special Episode, Full House takes on the subject of bullying multiple times throughout its eight season run. But one of the instances most poorly thought out and truly mean-spirited comes in the case of poor little Walter, who is dubbed Duckface due to the way he purses his lips after speaking.

It's a truly hurtful episode, and it finds not only Stephanie engaging in bullying behavior, but also Jesse reflecting on being a bully during his own youth. No one comes out of the episode looking good, even if Walter winds up being integrated into Stephanie's friendship group afterwards.

6 Portrayal of women as predatory

Sitcoms inevitably introduce characters who are romantically interested in the main characters, to the main characters' horror, far more frequently than they don't. But Full House had a real, pervasive problem with the characters it introduced to fill these roles.

Almost all of them were older women, who could easily be demeaned as cougars, who expressed aggressive, sexualized interest in the main male characters. Mrs. Carruthers sexually harassed Joey for seasons on end, and Jesse found himself on the end of more than a few wandering eyes and hands, including while filming the IQ Man commercial.

5 The treatment of Kimmy Gibbler

Kimmy Gibbler might not have been the most likable character in the series... or the sharpest tool in the shed. But there's really no excuse for the way the show treated her character. Or for the way that the three grown men routinely bullied and embarrassed her whenever they could.

It's one thing for Stephanie and Kimmy to be odds at each other; little sisters and big sisters' best friends are a perfectly fairly matched duo. But to have three men in their 20s and 30s routinely make fun of a preteen and teenage girl is just mean-spirited, and definitely hasn't aged well.

4 Child endangerment storylines

Sitcoms clearly exist in a heightened reality to the one we live in. But that still doesn't make some of the storylines they take on any less offensive and dangerous. Take, for example, the purely ridiculous episode "Honey, I Broke The House."

RELATED: Fuller House: 5 Best Friendships (& 5 Worst)

In this episode, Stephanie somehow gets behind the wheel of Joey's car and backs her way through the Tanner family home's kitchen window. Stephanie could have been truly hurt in this process, and even if the moral of the episode winds up being that she's far more important and valuable than anything that could be fixed with money, it's still a dangerous situation to depict on television.

3 Offensive depictions of mental illness

Full House seemingly delights in making fun of quirky or stereotypically nerdy characters. But in the case of Danny Tanner, the jokes made at his expense travel into entirely harmful territory, particularly when it comes to his obsession with cleanliness and order.

Danny is clearly exhibiting signs of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) throughout the series, but his behavior is always used as a punchline, some of which are far more mean-spirited than others. Whether it involves him being called a neat freak or, in one cruel episode, "a psycho with a dust mop," Danny is never given the care or concern he deserves in this regard.

2 Stavros Katsopolis

Seasons after the previously discussed "Greek Week" fiasco, Full House's stereotyping of Greeks continues to show its age. After the tragic death of the beloved Papouli, the series introduces Jesse's cousin, Stavros, who seemingly embodies every possible stereotype imaginable.

Stavros is slimy, greasy, conniving, scheming, flirtatious, lazy, and thieving. John Stamos takes on the role in a dual performance, and from Stavros's hooked nose to his lecherous laugh, it's hard to imagine how this character even got off the drawing board.

1 DJ's one episode eating disorder

Full House, as a sitcom aimed at children and families alike, had to take on plenty of important issues as the result of being conversation material for families. But the hazards of the "Very Special Episode" format include the fact that the storylines tackled in one isolated episode are never issues that could receive so little focus in real life.

Take, for example, DJ's brief eating disorder. She stops eating, sustaining herself only on ice cubes, and nearly passes out while working out in the gym. But by the end of the episode, all is well and good again, and she's comfortable with herself. Eating disorders are far more serious than this episode depicts them to be, and the reductionist treatment is honestly quite offensive.

NEXT: Full House: 5 Best (& 5 Worst) Episodes

source https://screenrant.com/full-house-things-aged-badly-tv-show/

[warmdevs]

New Post has been published on https://warmdevs.com/the-four-dimensions-of-tone-of-voice.html

The Four Dimensions of Tone of Voice

If we envision our website as a tool that enables us to have a conversation with our users, it’s clear that a carefully considered tone of voice is critical.

In literature, the tone of voice refers to the author’s feelings towards the subject, as expressed through the writing itself. Writing for the web is obviously different from writing prose (or at least it should be, since web users read very little.) Still, every scrap of writing on a page (from body copy to button labels and other UX copywriting) contributes to the tone of voice we’re using to speak to our users.

Tone is more than just the words we choose. It’s the way in which we communicate our personality. Tone of voice is the way we tell our users how we feel about our message, and it will influence how they’ll feel about our message, too.

Despite the importance of tone, advice about it tends to be vague: “Be consistent. Be authentic. Be unique.”

So, we wondered, what are the broader qualities that make up a tone? Here we describe a framework of 4 dimensions that can be used to analyze or plan a site’s  tone of voice. Then we conducted qualitative usability testing and online surveys, measuring the impact of those tone qualities on users (full details and findings to come in an upcoming article).

The Four Dimensions of Tone of Voice

A quick Google search for “tone-of-voice words” will surface lists of hundreds of words used to describe literary tones. (Most of them come from websites for undergraduate English courses). You’ll quickly notice that most of those words have very specific meanings and connotations (e.g., “vexed” or “cynical”), and couldn’t be used to describe the tones of many (if any) websites. You’ll also notice that many of these lists are huge, some with hundreds of words.

We decided to design a manageable web-specific tool that content strategists could use to create simple tone profiles for a company’s online presence. Our goal was to identify several tone-of-voice dimensions that could be used to describe the tone of voice of any website.

We began with a long list of literary tone words. We then eliminated any words that wouldn’t be realistic content goals for normal websites (like “guilty”). That process produced a list of 37 website-specific tone words.

We then iteratively refined that list, by:

clustering any words that were similar (e.g., “upbeat” and “cheerful”)

removing words that had no obvious antonyms, so wouldn’t work as dimensions (e.g., “nostalgic”)

removing words too specific to be widely applied to a variety of websites and topics (e.g., “romantic”)

At the end of this process, we identified 4 primary tone-of-voice dimensions.

Funny vs. serious: Is the writer trying to be humorous? Or is the subject approached in a serious way? (Note that for our purposes, this dimension was only the attempt at humor. We didn’t evaluate if the writers successfully landed their jokes.)

Formal vs. casual: Is the writing formal? Informal? Casual?  (Note that casual and conversational are not necessarily synonymous, but they do often appear together.)

Respectful vs. irreverent: Does the writer approach the subject in a respectful way? Or does she take an irreverent approach? (In practice, most irreverent tones are irreverent about the subject matter, in an effort to set the brand apart from competitors. They are not usually intentionally irreverent or offensive to the reader.)

Enthusiastic vs. matter-of-fact: Does the writer seem to be enthusiastic about the subject? Is the organization excited about the service or product, or the information it conveys? Or is the writing dry and matter-of-fact?

Tones could fall at either extreme of each dimension, or somewhere in between. Each website’s tone of voice could be expressed as a point in the 4-dimensional space described by these dimensions.

One Message, Many Possible Tones

To see how these 4 dimensions of tone can be varied to create different effects, let’s consider a small piece of copy that almost every content team has to consider at some point — an error message.

At the core of every piece of writing is the message — the information we’re trying to communicate to our user. In this case, our message is, “An error has occurred.” Our tone will be how we communicate that message.

First, let’s try a serious, formal, respectful, and matter-of-fact error message.

“We apologize, but we are experiencing a problem.”

We’re not trying to make users laugh, or using any strong emotion in the message. It’s a fairly traditional, straightforward message.

Now, what if we tweak one of the 4 dimensions? Let’s make this same message a little more casual.

“We’re sorry, but we’re experiencing a problem on our end.”

The message is still serious, respectful, and matter-of-fact. But the message becomes more casual with a few small changes:

“We are” becomes “we’re”

“Apologize” becomes “sorry”

The addition of the expression “on our end”

Let’s add a little more enthusiasm to the message. In this case, “enthusiasm” means emotion more than excitement, since the subject is a negative one for both the site and the user.

“Oops! We’re sorry, but we’re experiencing a problem on our end.”

Now we’ve taken the error message’s tone to casual and enthusiastic. If we add an attempt at humor and a little irreverence, we’ll have taken the same message to a totally different tone of voice. (Remember, the irreverence here is the speaker’s attitude towards the subject, not necessarily towards the audience.)

“What did you do!? You broke it! (Just kidding. We’re experiencing a problem on our end.)”

Which of these versions of the same message would work best? For your organization, that will depend on:

Your brand personality. For example, if you work in a large traditional financial institution, an enthusiastic and irreverent error message might be out of character for your brand. The formal error message could work, but maybe you’ll opt for a casual message if you’ve decided that a personal, conversational feel would be best for your content.

Your users. Consider the characteristics and preferences of your users, but also their emotions and information needs for each piece of content. If your users are frustrated when they arrive to this error message, or they see it frequently, a humorous tone might be irritating. The best way to know which tones will work with your users is to test.

Users Notice Variations in Tone-of-Voice Dimensions

We wanted to make sure changes in the 4 tone-of-voice dimensions would be noticeable to our users, and not just theoretical concepts. In preparation for an upcoming study, we used these 4 dimensions to create paired tone-of-voice samples for made-up websites from 4 industries (2 samples per industry). Both of the samples within in each pair were nearly identical in everything from visual design to message. The only variable we varied was the tone of voice: the two samples in a pair corresponded to different combinations of tone-of-voice dimensions. For example, in the security industry, one sample was funny, casual, irreverent, and enthusiastic; and the other one was serious, neutral on the casual scale, respectful, and matter-of-fact.

In an online survey of 50 American respondents, we asked users to rate the friendliness and formality of each sample on 5-point Likert scales.

The average friendliness ratings for each of the tone of voice samples

The average formality ratings for each of the tone of voice samples

The differences within each pair were statistically significant at p < 0.05. The differences were also consistent with what we would expect, based on each tone profile. For example, the funny, casual insurance company sample was found to be friendlier but less formal than the serious insurance company sample.

The actual differences in the ratings were rather small, around 0.5–1 point on a 5-point scale. Our samples used realistic tones that we could reasonably expect to find in real sites. For all but the most extreme and exaggerated tones, you should expect to find similar effect sizes in your own tone variations. It would be rare for a writing style to collect scores at the outermost limits of our tone scales and still be effective for business purposes: you want to emphasize your chosen tonal qualities without making them dominate your writing to the extent that the content becomes excessive and stops communicating the underlying meaning in favor of pure style.

These findings confirmed our hypothesis that variations along the 4 tone dimensions would produce measurable differences in users’ impressions of the sites. As we’ll show in the following article of this series, these variations in impressions influence important factors, like desirability.

Applying the Four Dimensions

Use these dimensions to identify your tone-profile goals.

Decide what combination of dimensions makes sense best for your company and think about strategies to implement this tone of voice.  When you’re defining your tone for a whole site or a specific piece of content, start with these four high-level dimensions first. For example, first decide if a funny, casual tone will work for your brand and your users. Then you can refine your tone strategy by choosing more specific tone target words like “playful,” “quirky,” or “sarcastic.”

Use these dimensions to evaluate your tone.

Test with your users to determine whether the tone of any new piece does conform to the chosen profile. You can do this by:

Using product-reaction testing to see if your users choose tone words that correspond to your target tone profile. For example, let’s say you want your users to view your brand as funny but respectful. If users choose “humorous” to describe your content, you could consider that it matches your goal. However, if many of your users choose “snarky” to describe your content, you might interpret that as being slightly off your goal, since “snarky” humor feels irreverent.

Ask your users to rate your content on one or more of the tone dimensions, by asking them to complete a 3-point or 5-point Likert scale with each extreme of the tone dimension at opposite ends of the scale (for example, “funny” vs. “serious”).

Remember that you can always vary your tone to fit the situation.

Keep your personality consistent, but vary the tone to fit the user’s emotional state and the topic. (For example, a company’s financial report will need to sound different than the same company’s careers page targeted at university students.) You might decide on a casual tone for your site-wide content strategy, but vary the amount of humor in your copy across the site.

Tone is about more than just content.

The visual design and interaction design contribute strongly to the overall ‘feel’ of a website, as well as to the construction of the brand personality. All members of the digital product team need to think about how their piece fits within the whole.

Tone applies to all channels and touchpoints.

As our example with an error message shows, tone of voice applies to all touchpoints, not just to your homepage copy. Your tone of voice should be part of your omnichannel strategy and be used when creating writing and other communications for all channels, including email (whether promotional, informative, or transactional), physical products, and the in-store experience.

[briangroth27]

You’re a Wonder, Wonder Woman!

I was skeptical. I've never been a huge Wonder Woman fan; I didn't dislike the character, but she never really clicked with me. The recent DC films haven’t thrilled me either: I left Man of Steel without feeling hopeful or inspired; prerequisites for Superman stories. I didn't like Batman V Superman. Suicide Squad was fun, but a mess. Then the Wonder Woman trailers appeared and my interest was piqued. I wanted it to be good, but that was cautious optimism. Then reviews came out, the great word of mouth swept me up in the hype, and I couldn't wait to see it! Still, I’m sure my excitement didn’t compare to that of someone who'd grown up loving Wonder Woman and knew all about her; who’s inspired and empowered by her existence. Outside Lynda Carter's show, Justice League/Justice League Unlimited, and some animated movies, Wonder Woman’s had considerably fewer appearances than heroes like Batman and Spider-man, so I’d imagine this is a massive deal for her fans. With the unreasonable pressure of being the bar by which Hollywood will measure the bankability of not only female-led action and superhero films, but female stars and directors, this movie not only had to please the fans who’d waited so long, but it had to be a critically loved financial hit. Fortunately it’s all those things and more: Wonder Woman is outstanding! Go see this now!

Gal Gadot is fantastic, taking Diana (the best part of BvS) back to the past to show us who she is and how she came to be. Her Diana is charming, hopeful, new to Man's World but wise, empathetic but fully willing to silence those who'd hurt others, and aware of the great responsibility the Amazons have to the world, but still able to revel in her power. That last point is something we absolutely need to see more of in female superheroes: too often, the only women having fun with their abilities are the villains and "bad girls." It's great to see Diana grinning at her ability to do things like scale a wall with her bare hands; who wouldn't be overjoyed to accomplish these feats? We see a lot of sides to Diana as she goes from eager Wonder Tot (Lilly Aspell) to headstrong Wonder Girl (Emily Carey) to facing the horrors of Man's World during the First World War, and Gadot does it perfectly (the younger two actresses are great as well). Diana’s transition from thinking it’s cool to fight to witnessing the reality of war in trenches and gassed towns is extremely well-conveyed. Even so, Diana’s the inspirational, hopeful hero I’ve been wanting from the DCEU. Gadot also brings a wonderful sense of exuberant fascination with the perks of Man’s World, like the first baby she’s ever seen and her very first ice cream cone. Gadot, Chris Pine (Steve Trevor), and Lucy Davis (Etta Candy) have a great sense for screwball comedy as they play male and female social mores of the period for laughs, giving the characters a classic feel. Others have compared Gadot’s Diana to Christopher Reeve’s Superman and I’d say that’s dead-on: in much the same way Reeve brought Clark Kent and Superman to life, Gadot is Wonder Woman.

Gadot is backed up behind the camera by Patty Jenkins, who directs this beautifully. The action is clean and crisp; even periodic slow-motion fight highlights, which I'm generally not a fan of, are woven in nicely. Her pacing is great, taking time to breathe in each environment and to touch on each character without sacrificing the story’s momentum. Most importantly, Gadot is never exploited by the camera; if you want to see what a movie shot without the male gaze looks like, see this. Jenkins gets a great balance of humor and stakes from all of her actors and instills a Richard Donner Superman quality in Diana and Steve's relationship that feels timeless. I would've thought this and the period setting would feel at odds with the bombastic Zack Snyder-styled fights in the climax, but Jenkins blended the styles really well. The climax does look a little too CGI—it was noticeable but not enough to take me out of the movie—but it was still fantastic. There were two minor moments where the editing confused me for a second; not enough to create a plot hole, but more like the scene had been trimmed and I had to connect the dots about a minor sequence of events. Again, nothing egregious. There’s no reason Jenkins shouldn’t be getting offers to direct all the action movies now! I’d love to see her take on Man of Steel 2 (along with many more Wonder Woman sequels, of course!).

Chris Pine was charming and funny as secret agent Steve Trevor. I loved how constantly thrown by Diana he was and I'm glad he wasn't played or written as a cliché suave "ladies man" spy. He wasn’t made a fool by Diana either; the film knows how to make her great without making him incompetent. In fact, Pine and Gadot built one of the best-developed romances in comic book films with their fantastic chemistry. When they disagreed, it felt natural and relevant to the movie’s themes. Etta Candy was pure, undiluted fun and I'd love to see further adventures between her and Diana. Steve's mercenary friends brought some good texture and diversity to the film as well. My favorite was Sameer (Said Taghmaoui), who provided some great comic relief and truths about life plans. I also liked the Chief (Eugene Brave Rock), a Native American, especially when he drew a connection between the Germans and Americans for Diana, showing her all sides have evil in their past. Ewen Bremner’s Charlie, a sniper who can’t shoot, was interesting as a guy who wanted to be a hero but simply couldn’t. As author Zack Stenz pointed out on Twitter, all of these men (and Steve) kept fighting the good fight in the face of a world that had damaged them. I like that message a lot.

Connie Neilson's Hippolyta was a smart, idealistic queen of the Amazons and her idealism coming partially out of fear for her daughter's safety was an interesting, understandable twist. That's a cool facet to her role as wise ruler, and a testament to Neilson’s ability that she never came off as selfish for prizing Diana above everyone else. Robin Wright's Antiope was a pragmatic counterpoint to her queen: live in peace, but train (and train Diana) for war in case it happens. I enjoyed her training sessions with Diana and wish we’d seen more of how she and Hippolyta interacted outside of this issue. Ann Wolfe’s Artemis fell between Hippolyta and Antiope’s outlooks, backing up Diana’s assertion that they should hear Steve out, and I hope we see more of her in the sequel (in the comics, she too ventured to Man’s World and even took over as Wonder Woman; I wonder if she will at least visit her sister on screen). When war came to Themyscira's shores, the Amazons were awesome, effortlessly badass fighters! I’m sure their natural athleticism comes from the cool idea of using actual female athletes from all over the world to play the Amazons. I hope we get to see more of them in future installments!

Dr. Maru/Doctor Poison (Elena Anaya) was a great, creepy villain; another character I wish we'd seen more of. I didn't need to know why she was obsessed with poison or anything, but I wanted to know what other mayhem she could cause with her variety of chemicals. She felt like she was ripped directly from the early pulp comics and that was awesome! Danny Houston's villainous German General Ludendorf was as imposing as he needed to be to drive the film’s villainy. He and Maru get an incredible, unexpected moment of mustache-twirling glee involving an ineffective gas mask that I wish we'd see more of from onscreen villains.

World War 1 proved to be a great setting. It was refreshing to visit a time often overlooked in movies and superhero stories, usually in favor of World War II. That the war was compounded and exacerbated over previous treaties between nations isn't pointed out in the film, but I think that's an interesting indication of just how inhumane man can become over something as innocuous as an alliance. In hindsight, it also strengthens Ares’ theory. WW1's trench warfare also plays an important role, displayed in the instantly iconic "No Man's Land" sequence (which was insanely almost cut!). Someone online said it looked like she was fighting war itself, and that’s the most perfect expression of that sequence I can imagine. Diana rising out of the trenches and walking into battle to make her debut as Wonder Woman was astounding!

I loved the use of color in the movie, something I've not been a fan of in the washed-out Man of Steel and Batman V Superman. Themyscira was bright and vibrant, and those colors carry over to the dreary, smog-choked London and the haze-filled trenches via Diana's Wonder Woman armor. While her suit isn’t as bright as Lynda Carter’s was, it's as though she literally brings color and life into Man's World. The score was good and felt period-appropriate. I had a giant smile on my face whenever Diana's awesome theme from BvS came on; if that doesn't make you pump your fist and cheer for Diana, I don't know what music would. Well, maybe the Lynda Carter one; it's a shame they didn't at least reference that here. I wish they’d found a way for someone to say something like "all the world is waiting for you."

I hope Wonder Woman opens real-life doors for more female directors and convinces studios that women can headline action films. A $100+ million opening weekend and one of the smallest second-week drops in superhero movie history should shatter the lame excuse that female superheroes make bad leads, and the 52% female audiences should prove that superheroes aren’t just a guys’ hobby: they’re for everyone. Since the population of the country is roughly 51% female and 49% male, that audience stat would seem to indicate the film is resonating evenly across the board. I hope Captain Marvel (along with Batgirl, Gotham City Sirens, and Sony’s Silver Sable and Black Cat film) continue this trend, but just four DC/Marvel female-led movies in the next several years isn’t enough. Marvel Studios has no excuse not to finally give the already Box Office-proven Scarlett Johanssen a Black Widow movie. They should cast Gina Torres as She-Hulk and make the solo movies they apparently can’t with Hulk. Fox should capitalize on their female X-men. Can Sony still get Emma Stone to do an alternate universe Spider-Gwen?? It’s fitting Wonder Woman proved there’s an audience for female superheroes, given she was the first, but she shouldn’t be the last and it should’ve happened much sooner.

I’m not a skeptic anymore and this movie’s had me hunting down Wonder Woman comics for the past two weeks. For me, Wonder Woman is the best DC movie since Batman. That, Richard Donner’s Superman, and this are their best live-action films and WW is certainly one of the finest superhero films ever! I hope it meant as much to Diana’s fans and those she inspires. It’s absolutely worth seeing in theaters!

  Full Spoilers...

I was worried with the way the creators had described Diana as a "retired hero" preceding BvS that she'd end this movie victorious but hopeless. I was very happy that didn't happen and instead, she ended the flashbacks knowing that love is the way to save the world. This was the hope Man of Steel left me wanting and I'm glad Diana finally brought it to the DC films. I can't believe a Diana who's realized this was simply inactive for all those decades (there's no way she sat out World War II), so I have to assume she (with Etta as her handler?) has been a secret hero ever since. I'd love to see those stories!

Like Lois Lane for Superman, I liked that Steve showed Diana humanity's potential, even though he was also connected to our worst impulses via the American treatment of Native Americans. I wish we could get another period film to see more of Gadot and Pine together; his death was sad and I'm sorry he won't be in future sequels.

The movie isn’t explicit about it, but I read Steve’s arrival through the barrier to Themyscira as a direct result of Diana’s first experience with her godkiller potential. I think that energy blast weakened the barrier; otherwise, how could Steve be the first person to ever stumble onto the island? I like that Diana’s first taste of her true power literally opens a larger world for her, bringing her into contact with all the good and evil of Man’s World.

Though Antiope’s death is somewhat cliche in the “dead mentor” sense, I liked that Diana wasn’t driven to action simply because she’d lost someone. She always wanted to go help and Antiope’s death didn’t change or inspire that part of her. If anything, it was the first wake-up call to how serious battle actually was.

I thought it was a little random that Diana was unable to return to Paradise Island, though maybe Hippolyta's "If you go, you may never return" was supposed to mean "you might die." If that wasn't my misunderstanding, then Diana trying to reconnect with her people and possibly lead them into the world could be a cool premise for a sequel.

I really liked that Ares wasn't who he seemed to be, or even the second-most obvious option (I thought he was Dr. Poison for most of the movie). Making him an unassuming good guy (David Thewlis) was a great twist, foreshadowed in hindsight by Diana's admonishment of the generals who'd hide in their offices. Plus, as I saw pointed out elsewhere, he's totally right about the armistice leading to worse horrors in World War II. I think that's a neat corruption of the idea of peace, which is a nice counterpoint to the seeming contradiction of waging war to establish peace. I enjoyed Ares' belief that war brings out the "best" in man; that it's the truest expression of our nature. What a great counterpoint to Diana's belief in our inner goodness, and a perfect way to stage their final battle as an argument! I do wish he hadn’t worn his comic book armor; that’s what made the climax look a little too CGI.

I thought it was interesting that the movie essentially boiled the Greek pantheon down to analogues for the Christian God (Zeus) and Devil (Ares), right down to Ares giving humanity knowledge of evil rather than making them do anything. Diana's fatherless birth also makes her a Greek spin on Jesus (kudos for keeping the classic claymation origin!). I think it would've been better if Aphrodite had granted Diana life instead of Zeus to increase the girl power and to go along with the “love is the way to save the world” idea (Aphrodite also brought Diana to life in the original version of the story). Ultimately, however, this revision didn't bother me as anything more than a missed opportunity. As much texture from the pantheon was lost to backstory (unnecessarily; there's no reason they couldn't have just been locked out from this realm), it's a cool way to twist the afterlife of the DCEU. Will they follow the New 52 comics to introduce Darkseid and Co. as rising "New Gods" in Justice League?

I hope they continue to unpack Diana's mythological heritage in the sequel. The gods are unfortunately gone, but there are a ton of other beings out there. Let's see classic Wonder Woman villains like Circe, Cheetah, and even Giganta! Doctor Poison would be fun to bring back too. And of course, Diana’s got to get her invisible plane!

Whatever the sequel brings, I can’t wait to see it!

[daniel-foster-blog1]

So, recently I again started writing letters to @disneyxd. I decided to do this as often as I can. In one of the earlier posts, I published a list of topics that I would like to discuss. After a little reflection, I decided to share them with you. Each post from this heading will contain this image of Peepers. So, the first topic is:

1.      Stylistics – a space is an ideal platform for fascinating and creative ideas;

2.      Color palette;

3.      Amazing smooth animation;

4.      Some backgrounds are a true work of art;

5.      Creativity of character design. Often the design is not only a way to reveal the personal qualities of the character, but it is also a source of remarkable humor;

6.      Each new episode – a new planet. Seriously, how long does it take to create all these amazing worlds!

7.      The coolest spaceships!

8.      Wonderful songs created by Andy Bean;

9.      A lot of heavy metal (yes, I already talked about music, but …it's heavy metal!);

10.  The genius of some ideas, brilliant even for many sci-fi movies (a living planet, zero space and others);

11.  The original disclosure of the problem of the dichotomy of good and evil;

12.  An excellent and unusual message: “An enemy is just a friend you haven’t made yet”;

13.  Creators are not afraid to experiment. Such episodes as "The Breakfast", "The Eye on the Skull Ship" and "My Fair Hatey" are excellent proof of that;

14.  The references to other shows (such episodes as "The Cartoon", "The Robomechabotatron" and others);

15.  The best holiday Christmas special episode that I saw - "The Gift 2: The Giftening";

16.  One of the best episodes-musicals that I've seen – "My Fair Hatey";

17.  The elements of Looney Tunes (commander Peepers is proof of this fact);

18.  Creative humor, based both on dialogue and on the interaction of characters;

19.  Funny and original names of episodes (although, translators from English to Russian may will not agree with me);

20.  Careful attitude to old sci-fi movies and shows;

21.  References to Doctors Who: Wander, Skullship (really, I was always waiting for someone to say: “It is bigger on the inside”);

22.  The important life lessons: violence is not an option, an optimal model of parents' behavior in the child's upbringing, life is not always like a fairy tale and others;

23.  The theme of friendship (a very important topic these days) permeates all the series of the show;

24.  The courage of the creators to show things with ambiguous messages (the episodes "The Funk", "The Axe" and some others);

25.  The ability of the show to surprise the viewer by the ways in which the characters will go;

26.  The show shows situations from the standpoint of different worldviews, allowing us to look at the problem from different angles;

27.  Single storyline in season 2;

28.  Adult themes in the show (war, loss of loved ones, fight with obsession and others);

29.  The ability of creators to laugh even at themselves;

30.  Proficiency of the characters;

31.  The characters have their own musical themes;

32.  A variety of secondary characters and their important role in the story;

33.  The characters develop over time;

34.  The investigation of interactions between different characters;

35.  Wander – a great example for children, an atypical protagonist who fights against villains exclusively peaceful ways;

36.  Sylvia – a strong and self-confident character, a direct proof of the fact that it's never too late to correct the mistakes of the past;

37.  Lord Hater – a shocking reference to Skeletor, a direct proof of the fact that even the most stubborn rams are able to change;

38.  Commander Peepers – a wonderful, purposeful and internally strong character, a direct proof of the fact that the species affiliation does not solve everything… and also he is a reference to Marvin the Martian :)

39.  Lord Dominator - well, it's just pure evil. She fascinates with her passion for all the atrocities she does;

40.  Watchdogs – well, just the sweetest conquerors of the planets that we've seen;

41.  Watchdog named Andy. Well, maybe it's a little dishonest, but I was subdued by his self-giving and passion for the case, which he really likes. And I really want to see this character again;

42.  Characters teach us to cope with internal complexes (fear of being left alone, an attempt to forget the past, the need to be needed, and so on);

43.  Creative demonstration of emotions - as with the help of facial expressions as with the help of gestures, intonations and so on;

44.  Stunning voice acting of characters. Sometimes it is not clear – where is the character, and where is the person?

45.  Tom Kenny ... voices commander Peepers ... I have nothing more to say;

46.  The charge of energy and good mood for the whole day after watching the cartoon;

47.  The show helps people cope with depression during a difficult stage of their life path due to its sincerity and kindness;

48.  A huge source of inspiration for painters, beginners multipliers, composers and ... well, writers of fanfiction;

49.  The ending of the second season. The creators managed to make it very lampy and kind ... and, again, to everyone's surprise. It was a truly touching moment;

50.  The cartoon has gathered a huge number of like-minded people who have come together to save what they love.

Well, write in the comments why you love this wonderful cartoon, share your thoughts with others and let's just save woy!