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ammapreker · 4 years

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amity bell 21 / student & cheerleader / lily-rose depp

[ content warning for mentions of death, hazing ] i never want to grow up / semi-sweet cheerleader with better publicity than she actually deserves for the amount of hazing she’s been involved in / likes the thrum of power, but never one suited to the spotlight; instead, her pleasure arises from being the one bandaging them up / ignores her future so often she’s half-convinced it won’t ever come / still considers herself a virgin because she exclusively gets fucked in the a** / daughter of the town dentist whose pearly teeth are shown on every ad / “seven devil’s best smile” except there’s less kindness behind it than one might expect / after the loss of julia riley, she’s more vacant, nothing but a ghost haunting her old steps needs » the dare me request !!!!! / i DO have a family request written for them but essentially, if anyone’s character’s parents died in some tragic accident, amity’s mom has a tendency to one-up her fellow society frenemies to absurd degrees (baking a house full of baked goods for a bake sale, adopting a shit ton of puppies after someone wanted to donate to the local animal shelter) and that included adopting some girl with a tragic past when she and amity were in high school. also a younger sister please and thank you… / COUSINS would be amazing, especially from her mom’s side!! her mom grew up in the trailer park so any connections there could be fun!

daisy wilkes 19 / receptionist / face tbd

[ content warning for mentions of death ] the almost baby, spoiled rotten / sink your teeth in, she dares you, with a cheshire grin / never fails to push at the cages binding her / transformative, her personality of the moment dependent on those around her / for her father, she dons the guise of a doe-eyed innocent / for the girls in the death brigade, a girl willing to do anything to find the truth / alternatively inciting chaos or distracting from it with a cheeky joke / everything’s overrated except secrets and chocolate / haunted by her dead sisters’ ghosts / taking a “gap year” before college / dealing with her trauma, the rumors suggest, but “dealing with” is much too high a bar / using her position as receptionist at the sheriff’s station to help discover the identity of the angel of death / never thinks further than one step into the future / fancies herself impenetrable, pretending not to see her own darkness seeping through the cracks needs » the rest of the wilkes girls / the remaining members of the death brigade, inspired by now and then, who grew obsessive with a mystery in their youth and are now trying to find the angel of death following goldie’s murder / boys for her to flirt with but refuse to f*ck

lemon eisley 20 / volunteer & pageant girl / elle fanning

[ content warning for mentions of suicide ] a marionette tripping on her own strings, never realizing they’ve curled around her neck until it’s too late / she’s a pageant girl, a social butterfly, a beauty with brains enough to know she doesn’t need them for what she wants in life / which is destined (in her own opinion) to get by on her looks, perhaps become a trophy wife and life in the lap of luxury / is that really too much to ask? no / volunteers at the local historical society so she’s not considered a useless layabout, but mainly only welcomes guests and keeps everything looking orderly / determined to win the miss seven devils pageant even if it kills her (or someone else) / (it wouldn’t be the first time) / a prank gone horribly wrong led to one of her friends committing suicide in front of her eyes, but that’s what pills and ignoring trauma is for ! needs » the rest of olive’s amazing until dawn request (she’s the jess!!) / PLEASE give me pageant girls, all the pageant girls!!! especially the ones who’ve been competing against each other since they were kids and probably have been frenemies for so long / ALSO don’t make me write a request but . lemon needs two siblings ALSO named after the fruits their mother craved during pregnancy (i know it’s silly, but haven’t you ever wanted a character named apple???). while lemon and her siblings always thought their parents were disgustingly in love, their mother recently discovered their father’s affair with his secretary but, aside from their father sleeping on the couch and the fights the siblings have heard through locked doors, they aren’t addressing it at all, not even with the kids

mina whelan 24 / waitress / anya taylor-joy

[ content warning for mentions of parental abandonment, teenage pregnancy, death of a parent (stroke) ] a girl of two wishes; the first: to leave. the second: to never come back / one comes true, at the cost of a heart and a reputation; the second she’s forced to discard / grew up filing in line with two siblings who remain equally fatherless with a mother who’s lost her heart to love once, twice, thrice / she swears: i’ll never fall in love / she breaks it; bad luck / falls in love with a boy who’s destined for greatness and so she wrecks it before he can leave her / just after he leaves following graduation, she’s stuck with a pregnancy test in her hand and an immense desire to say fuck him / she has the baby as a fuck you rather than anything else, and mostly doesn’t regret it / hightails it out as soon as she’s earned a diploma, leaving her baby daughter lily with her mother as she tries to find herself / (spoiler alert: she’s still lost) / her mother’s stroke sends her back to seven devils to a family as willing to discard her as she once discarded them / perhaps wishes are only curses waiting to be met needs » two or three half-siblings PLEASE do not make me write this request… their fathers are all unknown (which made their mother the subject of plenty of gossip) so they should all be half-white, but half anything else!! currently also includes britt's girl billie (19)!! / former friends she hung around with in high school who probably were more like frenemies… they can have wine nights and pretend like they don’t spend the rest of the time talking about each other behind their back / i have a diner request coming soon to a theatre near you inspired by the pulp fiction diner (recent renovation that puts all the waitstaff in costumes of 50’s stars) so lmk if you’re interested!

owen wickham 23 / estate sales employee / face tbd

[ content warning for death of a parent (suicide), missing sister ] a cryptid in his own right / originates from that wickham family, you know the one / their sister went missing when they were kids and their father became the prime suspect / he committed suicide soon after, taking away their father and their answers / tends to be seen as: creepy, weird, potentially a vampire? / definitely not, but when him and one of his friends showed up to a towner halloween party with fake blood, the rumor got started / keeps to himself, mainly finds entertainment reading letters to whatever recently deceased persons estate the company he works for has gotten their hands on needs » the rest of his family (reach out to rachel if interested!!) / some fellow outcasts to pal around with

richard “dick” noble 29 / true crime podcaster / joe keery

[ content warning for mentions of death of a parent ] still that boy in that house, swallowed by memories of a life undone / buried himself so deep in his past that he can’t find his way out / grew up too fast [thanks to the trauma!] and then stopped growing entirely / craves the truth, but runs at the first sign of it / the worst elder brother except in a crisis, during which he’s still the worst but at least he shows up? / constantly dons a “polite grimace” unless he likes you [a rare occasion] / talks a lot about the Real World™ for someone who avoids the hell out of it / avoiding his own feelings about living in whitethorn (the site’s version of hill house) again by doing the podcast season on searching for the truth about what happened the night his mother died / a canvas of okay intentions resulting in misery needs » the remaining members of the noble family (inspired by the haunting of hill house) / co-producers of his true crime podcast ghastly / other potential mysteries dick and co. could have investigated on said podcast during seasons one and two (currently starting season four) / various past relationships that inevitably ended when dick would grow waaaay too obsessed with his current case

#crownsrp #m: development #PLEASE plot with them i will love you forever

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televinita · 4 years

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Every so often I think about the pet project at the back of my mind, of writing a memoir about my lifelong experiences with libraries. Not really with publication designs -- although I also can’t think of anyone who has published a reading memoir with this particular angle -- but just because it is a nice thing to remember. This is not really the platform to elaborate on it, but here is a snapshot of as many places as I remember off the top of my head:

Elementary school library, where we went as a class every third day, with the most fantastic librarian

Public library in the big city, where my dad would let me stock up on picture books sometimes to occupy myself on days he brought me in to work with him (his own 1-man business)

First visit to the local public library + getting my own card, age 6 (this would be my exclusive public library option for the next 5 or 6 years)

The middle school library I almost entirely missed out on because we no longer had designated Media Center Days, I couldn’t stay after school, and before school there was a homeroom in there and it was awkward walking past people watching you enter

The first time I visited a branch from the neighboring county -- a small, quiet library in a tiny town -- and got my card dual-registered. Being able to browse two different collections blew my mind.

(this one was demolished a year ago and rebuilt in an entirely new style. It’s now done but COVID-19 has kept it from opening)

My two glorious high school libraries, laden with decades-old books that would permanently shape the foundations of my love for older stories.

The second branch of my home county I ever visited, bordering a park, with multiple floor to ceiling windows (and window seats) overlooking it (5 years later they sold the building and built a bigger, louder, uglier one elsewhere, which is now my closest branch not that I am bitter) (on the bright side now they have one of the biggest year-round used book sale sections around)

My two university libraries, where I spent as much time as I could. One had an even more extensive collection of old juvenile literature than my high schools; the other had a basement level that was quiet and peaceful as a tomb, perfect for reading-homework concentration.

The Big Giant library, which after multiple remodels now boasts 2 stories, a thriving coffee shop, a used book section, and a massively sprawling open floor plan. Borderline too much, but it’s actually quiet upstairs where it’s just the adult fiction/nonfiction and I kind of like it, despite its in-your-face modernity

The little nook of a library in a community center, so small they don’t allow you to place holds on their items, whose main value is being a library in close proximity to a historic main street w/ a bunch of antique shops and a used bookstore, as well as a walking/bike path.

The truly magnificent Carnegie library in a historic town not too far away, still the most beautiful one I’ve ever been in. Also the only childhood public library of mine still standing without being completely remodeled or relocated (it has been added on to but the original part remains largely as it was built).

The historic downtown city library I explored upon being released early from jury duty

The 2 branches in the county where I (seasonally) work. One is quite basic and its best quality is being directly on my route; the other is technically in a community center, but an absolutely gorgeous community center with an indoor plant garden + waterfall where they charge hella $$$ for wedding receptions and professional photo shoots (and which you can enjoy for free as a visitor during business hours)

Pine City, MN, home (at the time) of Browser the Library Cat

So many other random libraries I have stopped by over the years to admire the architecture, scan the book collections of, and/or spend time relaxing in while gaining confidence in my independence and navigation skills as a first-time car owner.

#random notepad docs #if I have talked about this already then whoops #guess who else's library memories I would love to hear about?#if you guessed YOU then you are absolutely correct and I will see you back here tagging your post with #library memories #or my name

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hevrhardt · 4 years

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Tagged by: nobody, i stole this from an old blog Tagging: @imperialvestra @cursedcrest @unserkxmpf @edgecfdawn @falselord @santificate and everyone else!!

Name: linhardt von hevring Name meaning: linhardt — “lion-hearted” Age: 16 / 21 Gender: agender Species: human (⅛ sky dragon blood) Nationality: adrestian

What time do they usually get up in the morning? he rarely wakes early, though this is usually due to having worked late into the night rather than lazing about in bed. linhardt’s typically up by 10am if not disturbed earlier, though if he’s been researching without rest for several days, it’s more likely to be mid-afternoon before he rises—through sheer exhaustion.

What is their morning routine? after 10-15 minutes of wake-up lag, he’ll give his face a quick wash and dresses then tend to whatever mess he left the previous night. he rarely bothers making his bed, though, since he sees it as a waste of time. linhardt will then head to the dining hall for some tea and breakfast before tackling whatever the day holds for him.

How long does it take them to get ready in the morning? linhardt is not someone who wakes easily and it takes him some time to become alert enough to function properly. fortunately, his habits are able to take up any slack left by an absent mind and he’s usually dressed and ready to leave within 20 minutes or so of waking.

What time to do they usually go to bed? this varies greatly depending on his current research phase, but it’s rarely early. some nights he won’t sleep at all, but if his day has been a busy one and he’s not in the middle of important study (a rare occurrence), he may fall asleep around midnight.

Do they fall asleep easily? Do they stay asleep easily? linhardt’s quite infamous for being able to sleep just about anywhere, but it really depends on how active his mind is. he has a great deal of trouble shutting off his thoughts when he’s not truly tired and this has led to plenty of sleepless nights where he’s given up on the activity altogether. however, when he’s exhausted, he’ll rest at the drop of a hat. once linhardt’s asleep, he’ll usually stay that way unless undisturbed.

What position do they sleep in? this really depends on whether he’s having a full sleep in bed or simply napping. when napping, he’ll usually be on his back or slumped over a desk—whichever’s convenient at the time. when linhardt has a proper bed to sleep in, however, he’s normally curled on his side and often hugs a pillow.

What is their handwriting like?

(source)

Do they prefer typing things or writing things? even in modern day, linhardt prefers to write important things like notes by hand rather than use a computer. he prefers the more organic feel of it. he’ll use a computer regularly for other tasks and is an incredibly fast typer, but when it comes to his research, everything’s kept in notebooks.

What form of art (e.g. sculpture, embroidery, painting, etc) do they like? linhardt’s not much of one for art appreciation as he sees most pursuits as a waste of time. he does give some value to music, paintings and poetry, however, since they tend to capture some important details that simple records of the times tend to miss.

Are they an artist themselves? What kind of art do they do? while he doesn’t consider himself an artist by any means, he’s relatively accomplished at drawing and sketching realistic images. he uses this skill almost exclusively for his research.

What are some of their favorite books? even though he rarely indulges in fiction, linhardt has a little-known soft spot for fables and the like. his mother read these to him as a child and now that he’s grown, he finds historical and academic value in them.

What genres of movies do they like? modern-day linhardt doesn’t really enjoy movies that greatly. he’s usually only dragged to them by friends and doesn’t find them that interesting. the only somewhat-exception to this is science-fiction for the theoretical aspects.

What music genres do they enjoy? like with movies, he doesn’t have much of an interest in music. he finds it’s nothing more than a distraction to him.

Are they a musician themselves? not in the least. he considers it a waste of time and he has absolutely no talent in musical arts or singing.

What are some of their favorite pieces of clothing/outfits in their wardrobe? If not applicable, what do you think would be some of their favorite pieces of clothing/outfits? although he doesn’t consider himself to be materialistic, linhardt will admit that he has a certain preference for elegant clothes. he tends to lean towards high collars and waistcoats as well as loose-legged pants (though this is more for comfort than style). he doesn’t have any particular favorites and most of his wardrobe looks pretty similar.

How much are they willing to spend on clothes? since his clothes are rarely damaged, his actual spending on clothes isn’t all that great, but the individual pieces can be somewhat on the pricier side since linhardt wants comfort over anything else.

Do they wear makeup? What type do they wear? while he’s not strictly averse to wearing makeup, he doesn’t see the point in bothering with it himself—though, on very rare occasions, he has dabbled with lip paints and eye shadows.

What colors do you associate with them? deep emerald greens and sapphire blues, and hints of gold.

What natural elements (geographical features like mountains, animals, seasons, locations, plants, etc.) do you associate with them? pine trees meeting the ocean, moss, forest streams, ferns, sunlit clearings, warm autumn evenings.

#( ✒ ) words written in an usual book. / HEADCANON.

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legionofpotatoes · 5 years

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Okay then, since both of y’all are just delving in I’ll try to keep things (relatively) spoiler-free and stick to story sense and semiotics! Few caveats:

Have not had prior experience with Kojima’s body of work and if that’s a prerequisite in how I “should feel” about it then yike on a bike (just getting this out of the way based on what I’ve had talked at me)

My read excludes the entire context of moment-to-moment gameplay; I basically watched chronological story cutscenes stitched together with NPC interaction vignettes sprinkled in-between. 9 or so hours in total.

I did this because the gameplay does not interest me at all - and not in protest of chill social games (I adore both No Man’s Sky and thatgamecompany stuff, for example, and try to champion anything without Gun in it), but because the setting and length did not align with my expectations for something to invest so much time into. Still, I was super intrigued by the story, and, to a lesser extent, the plot.

also I have a hard time writing in condensed English, so this may run quite long. I’ll put the rest under a break. Second language, sorry!

I’m trying to think of a good way to start this. Like I said, the story, or what the thing was ABOUT, was infinitely more interesting to me than whatever wacko packaging Kojima thought up for the narrative. Which was a complicated, thought-out piece of fiction shattered into many disparate pieces and fed to us in a mystery-box-filmmaker kind of way, making us reverse-engineer what essentially was a rather simple interpersonal uhh. family tragedy, I guess.

But to its credit the lore is visibly built solely to support whatever thematic messaging Kojima would want to weave in there - something I can respect. Meaning it gets as wacky and as nonsensical as it needs to be in order to reflect the high-concept allegories at play, aaand then it does so to a fault. I adore works of fiction that don’t give a shit about “tone” - I hate that word more than anything in modern media - but effective symbolism in storytelling, IN MY OPINION, requires a deft hand, nuance, strong authorial position, and a good grasp of social context.

I want to like, go through these four points individually and nitpick my problems with the game in their lens, because I think they cover pretty much everything I feel like saying:

1. A deft hand - to me means to selectively dramatize correct themes and plot points as you go so that shit makes sense in the end. I felt this was incredibly lacking here. It was like a symphony going for hours without a crescendo. The absolute wrong bits of soulless exposition would be reiterated THRICE within a single cutscene while necessary context of, hell, character motives or even plot geography would be left vague. Intentionally vague, some would argue, but their later function would never arrive. Other times, what would visibly be conceived as wink-and-you’ll-miss-it foreshadowing could overstay its welcome to the point of inadvertently spoiling a later plot point. My girlfriend sniped the (arguably) most important reveal of the game, which is left for the tail end of the final epilogue (!), in the first hours of watching. The symbolics and allusions were just too plentiful where they should have been more subdued. I am DYING to provide examples here but I’m keeping it spoiler-free. Again, if this is a Kojima-ism, too bad; but it’s not a catastrophic failure of storytelling by any means. There are very few masters of this thing working today. But what can be easier to navigate, I think, is...

2. Nuance - this kinda goes hand-in-hand with the upper point but is a bit more important to me and applies to what SPECIFICALLY you decide to heighten in order to slap us across the face with your deeper meanings. Certain characters - not all of them - feel like caricatures. The silly names and overt metaphors (wearing a mask means hiding something! connected cities all have ‘knot’ in their name!) are honestly, genuinely FINE as long as their function isn’t betrayed, but the lean into metaphor worship can sometimes wade into SERIOUSLY shitty territory as contemporary implications are ignored altogether, and that ties into my fourth point, which I’ll address before looping back to the third; needless to say, approaching sensitive subjects with broad strokes is not exactly the way to go. But broad strokes is almost exclusively what this game does, forgetting to incorporate...

3. Social context - and I feel like avoiding examples here will be difficult lest I end up sounding like a dogmatic asshole; but there is a right thing and a wrong thing to do when co-opting IRL concepts to fit fictional messaging/storytelling. I feel that a character “curing” themselves of a phobia by experiencing emotional growth that vaguely corresponds to what the disorder could have symbolized is a wrong thing. And I don’t even want to get into all the wacky revisionism the lore ended up twisting into, which was mostly honestly entertaining (the ammonite will be a good hint to those who’ve played it), until it decided to, again, lean a bit too hard into painting today’s reality as a crisis of human connection and imply some questionable things about why, uh, asexual people exist, for example. Yes it makes some sense within the context of the lore and what’s happening in the plot, but it’s completely lacking in social know-how of the here and now. In other words: a Bad Look. To me, this type of wayward ignorance is a much more serious issue that can historically snowball any piece of writing into a witless disaster. I don’t know if it quite does it here, but it’s not really my place to say. Still, you can have wacky worldbuilding that has no sense of dramatic tension, nuance, or awareness towards the audience, and yet containing one last vital glue holding it all together, and that would be...

4. Strong authorial position - or intent I guess, to speak in literary terms - and I still have trouble pinpointing how and where this exists in this game. A bullshit stance you say, and I hear ya; cause this here is a video game very pronounced in its pro-human-connection messaging, painting the opposite outcome as an apocalyptic end to our species. And as I understand the gameplay is all about connections too - leaning into that theme so hard it even renders itself unapproachable to most capital-g Gamers. I honestly respect the balls of that. But really, as an author who headlined the creation of this thing, what was it really about? What were you trying to say?

And beyond “human connection is real important to beat apathy” I got nothing, and I think that’s because of points 1 and 2 failing in succession, and then point 3 souring the taste. It just had to be apparent the moment the curtain fell, is what I find. You just have to “get” it immediately, get what it was trying to say, but that will happen only if it’s been articulated incredibly well up to that point. Maybe the entire punch of that message REALLY depends on you spending dozens of hours ruminating on the crushing cost of loneliness as you haul cargo across countries on foot and connect people to your weird not-internet? If so, I’ve missed a vital piece of context, and with this being a videogame and all, it’s honestly a fair assumption. But otherwise.. it felt like a hell of a lot of twisting and turning and plot affectations that only led to more plot affectations and sometimes character growth (which had its own bag of issues from point 3) and not a hell of a lot to say about human connection beyond the fact that it is. good and useful. It felt like a repeated statement instead of being an argument. Does that make sense? I understand the story optics here are zoomed waay out and set on targeting the human condition as a whole, but like.. if you’re committing to a message, you have to stand by it.

Why is connection good? it’s a dumb question without a DOUBT but since the game has set out to answer it then it.. should? Did I miss the answer? I may have, I honestly can’t exclude the possibility. My lens was warped and my framework of consuming storytelling is a bit rigid in its requirements (the four points I mentioned), so maybe I’m just too grouchy and old to understand.

I just think Pacific Rim did it better and took about 7 hours less to do it! And yet, it, too, involved Guillermo Del Toro. Curious.

If you made it this far and are interested in my thoughts on the technical execution of it all as well, uhm, it’s pretty much spotless? Decima is utilized beautifully, the Hideo vanity squad of celebrities all do their very best with the often clunky dialogue, the music is great, the aesthetic and visual design is immediately arresting, and it certainly does an all-around great job at standing out from the rest of the flock. I fell in love with the BB a little bit. It is also a game that is incredibly horny for Mads Mikkelsen, which almost fully supplants the expected real estate for run-of-the-mill male gaze bullshit. It is. A change.

That’s all I got folks

#death stranding spoilers #reference

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prinzenhasserin · 6 years

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AU Exchange

Dear AUex creator!

I am very excited about most AUs, especially if they feature alternative explanations and use the canon dynamics to add something different, so if one of my tag combinations lead you towards an idea, I'd be pretty stoked to receive it, even if you don't use my prompts.

My AO3 name is Prinzenhasserin, and you can find some more of my exchange letters here.

In the grand scale of canon divergent AUs and setting change AUs I happen to love both! And if you want to combine the two, I'm also happy to receive them :D

If you want something more to base your ideas on, here's a non-exclusive list of things I like:

General likes:

loyalty

odd couples!

found family, dysfunctional families that nevertheless love each other

historical stories for same-sex pairings that aren't unhappy but that fit with the society of the time (so like, spinster ladies living together; bachelors-for-life)

cultural differences! age differences! height differences!

heists, rescue missions

character driven narratives

dragons, fairy tales, magical realism, urban fantasy

Space AUs

competent characters

people not realising they’re the most competent at their job/hobby

people failing their way to success

happy endings, earning your happy ending, open yet hopeful endings

cynical humour

mutual pining

everything is better in suits, corsetry, fancy dresses

Identity shenanigans (secret identities, mistaken identities)

Blatant Lies

Enemies becoming friends and/or lovers

outsider POV

epistolary, poetry, unusual narrative formats

orange/blue morality (that is, not entirely human morality); grey/grey morality

non-verbal expressions of affection

DNW:

breaking up requested pairings,

permanent death of the requested characters (if they come back from death, they shouldn’t come back wrong but they can be ghosts),

pregnancy as a main plot point

Legally Blonde

Fanfiction (Medium)

Elle Woods

Group: Vivian Kensington/Elle Woods

ALL: Starfleet Academy AU

ALL: Space Opera AU

ALL: Regency-Inspired Science Fiction AU

All: Space Privateers AU

ALL: Hyperspace test pilot AU

ALL: Character comes into an inheritance with strange conditions

ALL: Organized Crime

ALL: Marriage of Convenience AU

DNW: breaking up requested pairings, permanent death of the requested characters (if they come back from death, they shouldn’t come back wrong but they can be ghosts), pregnancy as a main plot point

STARFLEET ACADEMY

- so I really have wanted a Starfleet Academy AU for Legally Blonde for years now. There are a few really awesome picture sets here https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/cosmically-blonde, if you want the inspiration...

- otherwise: Elle Woods goes into Starfleet with her great SAT scores ("what, like it's haaard?") I can give or take the romantic subplot of the first movie (but I really ship her with Vivian Kensington, who can come from a family of starfleet captains, or engineers or whatever)

- I take even just a snippet of her application! or the way she gets accepted. or how her sorority sisters react to her wanting to go to Starfleet?

SPACE OPERA AU

- I'd love the entire plot translated into a space setting! Space law Harvard, why not. (I hope there's at least a few aliens, and space affirmative action, but I'd also take plenty of robots)

- really, go wild.

REGENCY-INSPIRED SCIFI

- does Elle have to go to space-Harvard to get back her boyfriend, and then it turns out she really wants to go to space-Harvard instead, and there's a comedy of errors because apparently it isn't explicitly forbidden for women to go but there's not really any space for her?

- also good: her parents not understanding why she needs to get her boyfriend back/to go to space-Harvard, but supporting her anyway

- Vivian Kensington who dreamed to go to space-Harvard feeling betrayed that someone like Elle got in on a whim; and then slowly realising how she was hiding her hard work behind a facade and slowly falling in love with her with added SPACE REGENCY, somehow, idk

SPACE PRIVATEERS

- the boyfriend dumps her to go space pirating like his parents always wanted for him, and Elle gets a commission of war just so that she can hunt him down, and then along the way decides she rather wants to stick with pirating (because it's more lucrative, and also she has fun doing it)

HYPERSPACE TEST PILOT

- Elle follows her boyfriend to hyperspace test pilot academy, only to find hyperspace test piloting much more interesting than him.

- if this involves tentacles in any way, or transformations into cyborgs to pilot hyperspace ships, I'm game

ORGANIZED CRIME

- Elle's parents belong to the mob, and Elle studies law to become a mob lawyer? i'd buy this if her enthusiasm for fairness was a front, but I'd also buy this if there's a corrupt government and the mob is the slightly better option-- or if the boyfriend was actually in the mob, and Elle joins to get him back, and takes over while she's there, that works too

- (I have no problem with either assassination or murder, but I'd rather not see the longterm consequences of drug addiction though if you want to mention it that's fine.)

MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE

- Elle or Vivian need a scholarship and/or a dorm room and the one they can get is only open for married couples, and Vivian/Elle agree and then they fall in love (or not)

- if you want to add more or different tropes, really, I'd love it

Character comes into INHERITANCE WITH STRANGE CONDITIONS

- yes please.

- Elle needs to marry before she can get her trustfund/access to her property? or exorcise the ghost, and she talks it into leaving instead?

- or maybe it's Vivian whose wacky aunt wants her to experience life to the fullest, and she needs to go on a roadtrip to Vegas with a friend, and Vivian only has Elle since she dumped Walther?

Ocean's 8

Fanfiction (Medium)

Debbie Ocean (Ocean's 8)

Group: Lou Miller/Debbie Ocean

ALL: Space Pirates AU

ALL: Regency-Inspired Science Fiction AU

ALL: Regency AU

ALL: Character comes into an inheritance with strange conditions

ALL: Marriage of Convenience AU

Oh god, don't remind me of these twos sexual tension! (Except please do.) I loved all the outfit changes, the sheer outrageous gumption of doing the heist like they did (but tbh, also the sheer outrageous way Debbie lived her entire life, so if you rather want to focus on that, that'd be great too)

I know I did not want you to break up requested pairings, but I don't mind if the Debbie/Lou thing is tumultuous and fucked-up? Like say, sleeping with whoever Richard Armitage played. I like them best at their grumpy movie-selves, but any other dynamic is great also.

I'd love to see how that translates into a different setting, like say space pirates, or a regency inspired AU, or a combination of both :D

SPACE PIRATES

- how does Debbie built her crew? how does the MET gala translate into a space setting--casino planet? rich tourist spot? a fundraising drive to fund the museum of culture in outer space?

- are any of the women aliens that Debbie hired with abilities that lend themselves well to subterfuge and theft?

- Debbie and Lou in a small space craft, sharing their bunk because they needed to fit in Daphne Kruger into their ship and there are no other bunks left?

REGENCY AU

- Debbie playing up her "I'm only a woman, what could I have done"-look, and robbing the entire aristocracy blind-- tbh, I'd love an appearance by her brother Danny if only to have someone appreciate her genius properly. (And so that she can tell him to stop stealing his marks, probably)

- what's her usual trick to get money fast? does she sell powdered mummy? fake glass as diamonds? does she have an empire of shell companies that lure in investors by promising stuff? selling islands that are either uninhabitable or don't exist?

- Debbie and Lou settling together with a house full of riches and a harem of young admirers after their biggest con?

REGENCY-INSPIRED SCI-FI

-YES! i don't know quite what I want from it-- the thumbing at class differences? the problems with authorities Debbie is going to have? a Debbie/Lou relationship that is really most blatant and very private at the same time?

- aliens! in corsets! and suits!

Character comes into INHERITANCE WITH STRANGE CONDITIONS

- Debbie gets an inheritance from Danny, but first she has to get back at someone/steal a diamond/bankrupt an enemy

- or! it leads to Debbie finding out about the curse put on her family, that their love-life will always lead to them getting caught, and before she can marry/move in with Lou, she has to take care of the curse

Crossover Fandom

Fanfiction (Medium)

Group: Buffy Summers (BTVS) & Anakin Skywalker (SW) & Ahsoka Tano (SW)

Group: Buffy Summers (BTVS)/Ahsoka Tano (SW)

Group: Cher Horowitz (Clueless)/Elle Woods (Legally Blonde)

Group: Jane Marple (Miss Marple) & Hercule Poirot (Poirot)

Group: Jyn Erso (Rogue One)/Amilyn Holdo (SWST)

ALL: Character makes an SO up and SO turns out to be real person

ALL: Character comes into an inheritance with strange conditions

All: Space Privateers AU

ALL: Space Florist AU

ALL: Time Travel

STAR WARS/BUFFY

Star Wars has slowly sucked me into its sphere again, and I just think pairing Ahsoka (and Anakin) with the Vampire Slayer who defeats Evil sounds like the most fun. I don't care if they meet because of Time or Dimension Travel, or whatever, or because Buffy manages to open a pocket dimension in Sunnydale-- though I would rather read space adventures than Anakin Skywalker in a coffeeshop, trying to fend off vampires.

Does Buffy make up an alien she has fallen in love with, and then Ahsoka stumbles out of the pocket dimension and is exactly how she described her, headtails and all?

Or maybe it's the other way around, and Ahsoka gets a talisman from her grandmother for a summon when she desperately needs help, and she uses it (when she leaves the Jedi Order? during a fight she almost looses?) Buffy comes out of it?

Or maybe, instead of making Ahsoka and Anakin join the Clone Army, the Senate gives them a letter of marque with which they travel through the galaxy, fucking up slavers, and finding Buffy who coincidentally is also fucking up slavers?

Or maybe an AU in which Anakin didn't become a jedi for whatever reasons and instead became a space privateer, hunting slavers, and he finds both Ahsoka and Buffy and they become a team?

Or perhaps Anakin starts a flower business with his mother, except they run into trouble with the flower smuggling business, and while he's being interrogated somewhere Buffy rescues him (because real flowers in space is where the money is at, obviously)

CHER HOROWITZ (CLUELESS)/ ELLE WOODS (LEGALLY BLONDE)

- Character comes into an inheritance with strange conditions: either one of them! they have to find a macguffin! they need to marry to get the deed to the property! they find out that their great-grandmother was an alien and need to do some quick intergalactic diplomacy!

- or! there's Cher and her father is really worried about her since she broke up with Josh, and so she makes up this awesome lawyer that only exists in her brain, except then she meets Elle...

- look, in my mind Space Florists are really in demand-- the 1% like to have extravagant things, you see, and importing real flowers from far off corners of the universe is probably the most extravagant thing ever. There's an entire smuggling industry around getting fresh flowers fast and fresh to where they need to go. If you want either one of them to own a flower business, that would be interesting! or, Cher is an environmentalist who tries to curtail the flower industry, and Elle is the lawyer helping her?

- Space Privateers!

Jane MARPLE & Hercule POIROT

I feel like they would not like each other at all. Or maybe they would, but they'd despair of each other's affectations, and would only barely be able to talk with each other before getting annoyed by the other. Or perhaps, they might even be acquaintances who met during their adventures, and were suspicious of the other's motives until they found out about their investigations-- of two different crimes that maybe turn out to have the same perpetrator?

- I'd love Jane as an immortal being, but I forgot to request something for that, but I'd also love her as a timetravelling hero who is quite happy to be seen as just a tottering old woman. Does Poirot notice her real self?

- Poirot gets notice of an inheritance from a woman who he never met, who thinks she has been murdered, and then he starts seeing her everywhere... (she could be a ghost? or it's part of the inheritance? or maybe she leaves a diary) This is against my DNW, but I'd like it anyway.

- space privateers

- space florists are the people the most crimes happen to in space; it is Known (I'd love an AU in which for some reason they have a space flower business together! or maybe there's a case a space florist is involved in, I'm really not fussy :D)

Miss Marple

Fanfiction (Medium)

Jane Marple (Christie)

ALL: Character comes into an inheritance with strange conditions

ALL: Character is slowly turning into an eldritch creature

ALL: Forbidden magic exists that can be used to raise the dead

ALL: Space Florist AU

ALL: Space AU

ALL: Organized Crime

ALL: One character is a dragon

INHERITANCE WITH STRANGE CONDITIONS

- Miss Marple inherits a dragon hoard, because what the dragon hoards is... unsolved crimes? small-town happenings? detectives? and the dragon feels like Miss Marple is the ideal recipient of that hoard

- Miss Marple's great-great-grandmother happened to be an eldritch creature, and sometimes it skips a few generations, but now that her grandmother vanished, Miss Marple has to deal with it instead

- Miss Marple inherits money, but she needs to solve a murder to get to it

SLOWLY TURNING INTO AN ELDRITCH CREATURE

- Miss Marple's great-great-grandmother happened to be an eldritch creature, and sometimes it skips a few generations, but now that her grandmother vanished, Miss Marple has to deal with it instead

- There's always been a Miss Marple at St. Mary Mead's. Sometimes, there needs to be a new one.

ORGANIZED CRIME

- Miss Marple knows who murdered all of the people because she's the one arranging all the hits and bringing her contesters into jail is a nice plus.

- or! Miss Marple is a fixer who is hired to bring light into the mob's many betrayals, and she does so because it reminds her of the cutthroat nature of her knitting circle and the mob boss asked nice and politely, not like the local inspector.

RAISE THE DEAD

- Miss Marple likes to chat with dead people, and that's how she knows so much about murders. Of course, since she's a nice old lady, and necromancy isn't exactly on the up-and-up, she doesn't mention that.

SPACE AU

- Miss Marple is from a small town in Coruscant, or wherever, and solves space crimes.

SPACE FLORIST

- So I do know that Miss Marple doesn't have a job, canonically. But it would be really funny if she had a flower business in space, and everyone always underestimated the trouble florist have. But there's many additional dangers to the flower trade in space: some people (aliens) like to send each other flowers from far off worlds they know are poisonous to breathe for that species, some people get high on flowers, and trading flowers involves some serious money (so there's a lot of smuggling of poisonous, maybe illegal flowers going on)

- either way, i'd love adventures involving space flower trade

Grace and Frankie

Fanfiction (Medium)

Group: Grace Hanson/Frankie Bergstein

ALL: Regency-Inspired Science Fiction AU

ALL: Space Florist AU

ALL: classical musicians AU

Grace and Frankie: Grace and Frankie marry each other

All: Character has a secret identity

ALL: Organized Crime

ALL: Character comes into an inheritance with strange conditions

REGENCY SCIFI

I am here for it, and if it involves my favourite old lesbian couple, then even better!

SPACE FLORIST AU

Grace and Frankie are obviously still living on a beach somewhere, but instead of investing in a dildo manufacturer, they invest in a local flower shop--maybe one with sex pollen to encourage the sex drive of older women?

CLASSICAL MUSICIANS AU

Grace and Frankie feel like they need to collaborate now that their husbands are collaborating, and their respective fields compliment each other well, so it would be ideal (since their husbands were their usual collaborators) but Frankie’s approach is so free-style, and Grace’s approach is so very technical and they need time to arrange themselves.

THEY MARRY EACH OTHER

I don’t care for when, only that they do. Would also read an AU, in which they married each other instead of their husbands :D

CHARACTER HAS A SECRET IDENTITY

- Grace is secretly a superhero? or perhaps a voice actress for romance novels that Frankie likes to read

- Frankie was the girl Grace slept with in college, but only one of them knows

- One of them is a mob boss

ORGANIZED CRIME

yes please.

INHERITANCE WITH STRANGE CONDITIONS

- Grace and Frankie have to marry to fulfil the conditions!

- Grace and Frankie have to fulfil a ridiculous request, and fall in love?

Naruto

Fanfiction (Medium)

Group: Dai-nana-han | Team 7 (Naruto)

Group: Yamanaka Ino/Haruno Sakuro

Group: Maito Gai | Might Guy/Hatake Kakashi

Group: Nara Shikamaru/Uzumaki Naruto

Group: Uchiha Sasuke/Uzumaki Naruto

ALL: Time Travel

Naruto: Uzushio wasn't destroyed

Naruto: Sasuke is possessed

Naruto: Sakura is a necromancer

ALL: Character's love interest is actually a tentacle monster

All: Space Privateers AU

ALL: Canon Character can see ghosts

ALL: Character comes into an inheritance with strange conditions

I really love these characters and I’d love anything about these freeforms. (And I hope to add more prompts tomorrow, but feel free to not use them!)

TIME TRAVEL

yes! time loops, groundhog scenarios, dimensional hopping, making the past work out differently, fix it fics -- I’m not so much a fan of dark endings, but Sasuke travelling back in time to, idk, murder Itachi, and failing, and becoming something resembling a human being with feelings would be great too.

UZUSHIO WASN’T DESTROYED

I’m still bitter we didn’t get a story line about the Uzumaki clan. Or like, the diaspora of the Uzushio people. Or like, anything about the village it had been, and why nobody remembers it.

SASUKE IS POSSESSED

look, it’d be cool? also, it’d explain a lot.

SAKURA IS A NECROMANCER

how will this change the way Team 7 operates? does Orochimaru want to kidnap the entirety of Team 7 (and does he succeed?)

CHARACTER’S LOVE INTEREST IS ACTUALLY A TENTACLE MONSTER

I don’t care who, but omg, yes please. (You can’t tell me that this doesn’t fit the wacky Naruto worldbuilding, come on, there’s ninja that fight with bubbles. and paper. and fucking Kisame with his shark dicks)

SPACE PRIVATEERS AU

Instead of ninja getting their permit from the daimyo, they’re pirates who get their permit from a shadowy government?

INHERITANCE WITH STRANGE CONDITIONS

yes please! does Ino have to prove herself in mind arts? does Sasuke get a ghost sword he can only use to restore people back to life, but only if he first manages to climb a mountain? does Naruto inherit a ton of money, but only if he travels to Uzushio?

CHARACTER CAN SEE GHOSTS

Sasuke is haunted by the people he killed. Naruto is haunted by a lot of red-heads who teach him pranks, and like to see him eat ramen. Kakashi sees the people who he killed, and they generally seem to prefer his dogs. Sakura’s ghosts teach her stuff she wouldn’t normally know. Or something else, maybe?

Harry Potter

Fanfiction (Medium)

Group: Regulus Black/Harry Potter

Group: Sirius Black & Harry Potter

Group: Nymphadora Tonks/OFC

Group: Nymphadora Tonks & Regulus Black & Harry Potter

Group: Remus Lupin/Sirius Black

HP: Regulus Black lives

HP: Tonks becomes Lord Black

HP: Sirius survived the battle in the Department of Mysteries

HP: Time Travel

HP: Harry is the Master of Death and thus immortal

HP: Sirius never goes to Azkaban

HP: Sirius is exonerated after POA

ALL: One character is a time traveler from a different era

ALL: Character comes into an inheritance with strange conditions

ALL: Marriage of Convenience AU

HP: Voldemort's end is early and anticlimactic

I love the magic, and I love cracky takes on this. I have read so many HP time travel AUs and tropey magical crack, but I cannot get enough of it, and there’s especially always a lack of my favourite characters, even though there’s so much fic already.

REGULUS BLACK LIVES

Basically, what it says. Does he time travel? Does Kreacher manage to go back to save him? Does he schlepp himself out of the cave and wakes up with a case of amnesia?

TONKS BECOMES LORD BLACK

So, I really think that this is an underused trope, because it would be so great-- the House of the “Always Pure”, gloomy Grimmauld Place with bubbly, pink-haired Tonks as its figurehead? Sign me up.

Perhaps she inherits because Sirius is in prison, and everyone else presumed dead, and her mother is the oldest? Or there’s a loophole for metamorphmagi to inherit? (Does she need to prove that she can morph a fully functional dick?)

Also great would be Tonks opening her house for Harry for the summer. Or tricky ministry politics by the Malfoys who want the Black House for themselves?

SIRIUS SURVIVES; SIRIUS NEVER GOES TO AZKABAN; SIRIUS IS EXONERATED

Pretty self-explanatory. Does he time-travel? Does he kidnap Umbridge and torture her explain that she’s overstepping her bounds? Does he make Crouch eat it? Does he rescue Harry from the Dursleys/boredom/Mrs Figg?

INHERITANCE WITH STRANGE CONDITIONS

Omg, really. This is the opportunity to go really wild. I hope there’s lots of magical circumstances, and perhaps vows or magical traditions. It’s kinda canon, too, with Dumbledore and his snitch, book, and deluminator, but I’d also appreciate a story in which they have to fulfil someone’s last will.

MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE AU

yes please! Tonks needs to prove that she intends to raise children, and finds a friend who needs a place to live so they can cheat the Black Inheritance Rituals, or something? I read this for contrived reasons, or for friends just living together, or for slowly developing romance, but all pairings I asked for are great for this!

Star Wars Sequel Trilogy

Fanfiction (Medium)

Group: Ahsoka Tano & Leia Organa & Luke Skywalker (SWST)

Group: Amilyn Holdo/Leia Organa/Jyn Erso (SWST)

Group: Ahsoka Tano & Luke Skywalker (SWST)

ALL: Space Pirates AU

SWST: Leia did become a Jedi and goes after the New Order herself

SW: Luke turns to the Dark Side and Leia has to learn her powers and bring him back

SW: Leia and Luke raised as Jedi

ALL: Robot Revolution

SWST: General Leia Organa time travels back to the Tantive IV at the start of ANH

ALL: Canon Character can see ghosts

I'm requesting all these things under the Sequel Trilogy, because I really like things set in the future, and I'd love to see the continuation of the OT-- if you want to set it during the ST that's great! But I'm also interested in the 30 years between OT and ST.

SPACE PIRATES

So, the new republic took time to built probably, and I can see every single of the requested characters taking the time out of their busy schedules to start (and finish) a war with any of the pirates blocking the trade routes (and trading slaves); possibly even without permission from the New Republic.

Or, if you want to recreate the Trilogy with a space pirate dynasty, instead of a Jedi dynasty, that would be grand too.

- ‘Canon Character can see ghosts’, ‘Leia becomes a Jedi and goes after the New Order herself’, and ‘Luke turns to the Dark Side and Leia has to learn her powers to bring him back’ are pretty self-explanatory, I feel? but to reiterate, I’d love all those groups, together or apart.

ROBOT REVOLUTION

I'm all for droid rights, and I feel like the droids are definitely under-utilised in their usefulness of bringing down the New Order. Or the New Republic. Or sneaking into ships and casino's to retrieve stuff.

- General Leia Organa time travels back to the Tantive IV at the start of ANH

Does General Leia try to resurrect the New Republic? Is her younger self aware of her? Does she steal a flotilla for herself and wage war on slavers/the order/politicians who blackballed her when she was younger? Maybe she sacrifices herself to take out the Death Star leaving her younger self more time to get the rebellion going?

LUKE AND LEIA RAISED AS JEDI

look, I'm not sure this request makes entirely sense within the sequel trilogy, but what would the far-reaching consequences be if Luke and Leia had been raised as Jedi? would they have had a relationship with their father's padawan? would Leia have noticed Snoke? would she have been tempted to go dark, or have gone dark, and what kind of impact would that have made on Luke? would he have felt as responsible as with her son, or would he have dragged her back the same as what he did with his father?

Star Wars Prequel Trilogy

Fanfiction (Medium)

Group: Anakin Skywalker | Darth Vader (SWPT)

group: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker (SWPT)

Group: Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker (SWPT)

ALL: Robot Revolution

ALL: Different First Meeting - Captured by Slavers

SWPT: Force Ghost Qui-Gon trying to influence events

SWPT: Qui-Gon survives the battle with Maul

ALL: Time Travel

ALL: Space Florist AU

All: Space Privateers AU

ALL: Hyperspace test pilot AU

SETTING AU

(Space Florist, Space Privateers, Hyperspace Test Pilot, Robot Revolution)

Any of these sound great, and I love any of those with or without them being set in the Star Wars universe (but they could conceivably all be set there too!)

TIME TRAVEL

I like spontaneous time travel, or closed loops, or dimensional hopping, or going back into the past!person, or force ghosts influencing the past, or groundhog-day scenarios

DIFFERENT MEETING CAPTURED BY SLAVERS

-Yes, please. This could also be combined with space florists, space privateers, hyperspace test pilots or robot revolution, depending on who was captured and who freed them, and where this happened. What if Padme gave Anakin a letter of marque? or the opportunity to go to space pilot academy? what if Anakin started the robot revolution by trying to rescue Padme (or Obi-Wan?) from slavers? what if Padme gave Anakin (and Shmi) a flower business to manage after she was rescued by Anakin?

or maybe Padme is the one to rescue Anakin? and sets him up with her family's flower business because he has no other skills?

FORCE GHOST QUI-GON INFLUENCING THINGS; QUI-GON SURVIVES

Dude, wouldn't it be great if a force entity could tell them who the Sith in the senate was? I always thought so, and I'd think Anakin would appreciate Qui-Gon's help with both Obi-Wan and Padme too. Or simply with not, you know, going dark-- or successfully freeing all the slaves, and the clones, and Shmi and while we're at it a robot revolution would be cool too (or just one of these things, I'm simply very greedy :P)

Qui-Gon actually teaching Anakin the way of the force (and possibly doing something about Shmi) would be great, too. Or simply seeing the change alive!Qui-Gon had on future!Anakin

Gentleman Bastards

Fanfiction (Medium)

Group: Locke Lamora/Jean Tannen

ALL: All Characters Genderswapped

ALL: Ocean's 8 AU

ALL: Ocean's Eleven-esque heist

It'd be so cool. Jeanne Tannen, the big-hulked butch who could break Locke Lamora in half? Yes please. You could also swap every single character in the entire series--I'd love to read it. Would also read it as an Ocean's 8 Fusion, or an Ocean's Eleven-esque heist, or like, simply chilling out after canon things happened.

(Sadly I forgot I could request art, because this would be very awesome to look at, but I'm equally ecstatic about having actual descriptions of Locke being a little shit but also a woman.)

#exchange letter

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Mycroft, Eudoria, Enola & Sherrinford: How FanFic Expands the Sherlock Holmes Family

https://ift.tt/2G8pKsV

Author Nancy Springer invented Sherlock’s secret sister. You might remember back in 2017 when Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes met his secret — and criminally insane — sister Eurus Holmes (Sian Brooke) in the 4th season of the BBC’s Sherlock, but Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown) came first. Springer’s Enola made her splash in the 2006 middle-grade book The Case of the Missing Marquess (upon which the new movie Enola Holmes is based) which makes her the reigning champ of secret Holmes siblings, at least in the 21st century. Are there other secret Holmes siblings? What about the Holmes parents? Did Sherlock or Mycroft have any children of their own?

Mostly, the answer to these questions cannot be found in the canonical 56 short stories and four novels written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Instead, the tapestry of the Holmes family tree has been woven over the years, almost exclusively by fans. Because Sherlock Holmes fandom is so much older than most other fandoms, it’s tough to find the line between amateur fanfic and professional pastiches.

Sherrinford Holmes, the Eldest Holmes Brother

So, when I say that fan theories about a secret third Holmes sibling began in 1962 with the publication of Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street by William S. Baring-Gould, I could be wrong. But, in terms of published mainstream pastiches and fanfic, it’s the easiest place to start. Because that’s where we get the notion that someone named Sherrinford Holmes lived out in the country, far away from London, and looked after the ancestral home of the Holmes family.

“Sherrinford” was one of the earliest names Conan Doyle considered for the character of Sherlock. Famous Holmes scholar Baring-Gould used this idea as the basis for there being a third Holmes sibling, the eldest of the three, and that he — Sherrinford Holmes — managed the family’s country estate. Some fan theories even suggested that after Holmes returned from the dead in “The Empty House,” that he wasn’t Sherlock at all, but instead, Sherrinford taking up the mantle. For Batman fans, this would be kind of like when Jean-Paul Valley became Batman after Bane broke Batman’s back, only in this scenario, Jean-Paul Valley would be Bruce Wayne’s secret older brother.

The notion of Sherrinford and the idea that Mycroft and Sherlock’s family origins are unclear in the Doyle stories created fertile ground for fans to casually assert random theories as pseudo-canon. Holmes fandom is not like Star Wars fandom or Batman fandom, and that’s because, for at least a century, a huge amount of the scholarship precedes from the premise that Holmes was real and that Doyle was merely Watson’s literary agent.

This is why, if you read the superb The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes by Leslie S. Klinger, you’ll start to slowly believe all of this is historical fact, when in fact, you’re reading well-woven fanfic that represents a “consensus” of what fans believe about the early life of Sherlock Holmes.

For example, according to these books, Sherlock’s father died in 1860 when Sherlock was just six years old. This book also tells us that Holmes’ father was named “Siger Holmes” and his wife, the Holmes mother, was named Violet Sherrinford. Enola Holmes gives the siblings’ mother the name Eudoria Holmes, which, arguably sounds better, since there are a ton of other Violets in the Sherlock Holmes canon. (There are a ton of Marys, too, at least one of which became Watson’s wife, but we don’t need to get into that, right now.)

Movies

Enola Holmes Review: Millie Bobby Brown’s Revolution Lacks Revelation

By Natalie Zutter

Movies

Enola Holmes: The Best Sherlock Holmes Easter Eggs

By Ryan Britt

Can Eudoria Holmes and Violet Holmes be the same character? Can Enola Holmes somehow coexist in the same universe in which Sherrinford Holmes is also a secret Holmes sibling? The answer is yes, but it requires even more layering to your own personal fan fiction narratives.

Arguably, the patient zero for a more contemporary psychological take on the Holmes family comes from Nicholas Meyer’s 1974 novel The Seven Per-Cent-Solution. The primary conceit of this novel is that Watson’s stories “The Final Problem,” and “The Empty House” (which featured Holmes’ death and return to life) were fabrications to create a cover story for what was really going on.

In Meyer’s version, Holmes was actually being cured of his cocaine addiction by Sigmund Freud during this time. The big denouement of the book is that Holmes suffered from severe trauma stemming from having witnessed his father (maybe Siger) murder his mother (maybe Violet) after having discovered that Violet was having an affair.

This novel brought a brutal dose of realism to the pantheon of Holmes pastiches but also suggested there was something horrible lurking at behind Holmes’ zeal to become a kind of vigilante. In a sense, Meyer gave Holmes an origin story much like Batman’s, but in this version, the hero sees one of his parents act horribly, in response to the other parent committing a lesser “crime.” Sherlock’s occasionally inconsistent sense of justice could be described as having stemmed from this.

Or not. Meyer has written three other Holmes novels since then, with another new one on the way next year. In 2019, after the publication of his newest Holmes book The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols, Meyer told me: “I’m sort of trying to have it both ways. If you want to stick with Arthur Conan Doyle’s version it still makes sense. And if you want to stick with me, it makes a kind of alternative sense.”

Mycroft Holmes

This notion of overlapping narratives is probably the easiest way for a casual (or serious) Holmes fan to sort out the competing truths. In Enola Holmes, brother Mycroft (Sam Claflin) isn’t much like the Mark Gatiss Mycroft we love in Sherlock, but neither Mycroft resembles the version crafted by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in his novels and comic book series focusing on Mycroft Holmes.

In 2017, talking about his graphic novel Mycroft Holmes and the Apocalypse Handbook, Abdul-Jabbar told me that creating a more “roguish” version of Mycroft allowed him to be more “adventurous with [his] approach.”

But, even within Abdul-Jabbar’s Mycroft stories, there are some tonal shifts. The Mycroft who appears in The Apocalypse Handbook is a subtly different man than the Mycroft from Jabbar’s prose novels; Mycroft Holmes and Mycroft and Sherlock. For Abdul-Jabbar, this hardly matters, because “More important [than continuity], though, the Holmes stories are about the triumph of reason and logic over superstition and mob mentality, which is the basis for modern civilization. That struggle between reason and group-think is the major social issue in our country. To me, logic is the key to saving humanity from its self-destructiveness.”

Spock Holmes?

A literal interpretation of the Holmes family tree might not be possible. Throughout the Doyle canon, Sherlock constantly berates Watson for embellishing the truth, which, of course, gestures at a deeper, hidden truth beneath all the stories. In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (directed and co-written by Nicholas Meyer) Spock mentions “an ancestor of mine,” before quoting Sherlock Holmes. Spock is half-human, so did he mean, on his mother’s side, that he was descended from Dolyle or Sherlock? In 2010, Meyer told me it was the latter, and that Irene Adler was probably Amanda Grayson’s great great great great great-grandmother.

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So, the Holmes family tree could extend far back into the early 1800s with a variety of different siblings with different names, and parents who did, or did not, love each other. And, that same family tree might push forward into the 23rd century with familiar characters connected to Holmes by their half-human green blood. The entire mystery of this family tree will never be solved. But, as the film Enola Holmes proves, that fact is just part of the fun.

Enola Holmes is streaming now on Netflix.

The post Mycroft, Eudoria, Enola & Sherrinford: How FanFic Expands the Sherlock Holmes Family appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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heartofaquamarine · 6 years

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Media Criticism: An Introduction.

As I think is clear if you search the “long post” tag on my blog, and if you see my regular smaller posts complaining about parts of fandom, I tend to approach media far more from a position of writing meta and critique rather than writing fanfiction or fanart. This is fairly common, I think, in the part of fandom outside of what we might call Capital-F Fandom. Reviews, meta, technical analysis and examining work in terms of a particular social, psychological or political framework all come under what we might call Criticism, (here used not to simply mean being critical, but how we think about and understand media), but all of these have very different aims and methodology. Just as it is worth understanding the goal, standards and methods of a type of fiction or a historical account, it is worth understanding what different types of criticism are trying to do, how they try to do it, and how it fits into the overall conversation about media. Criticism does not have to be critical, as odd as that sounds, and I think that the way we tend to blur the lines between types of criticism often blurs our discussions both of media and of our communities.

Why do Criticism? In my day to day work, I am actually a science based PhD student. We spend a lot of time discussing how to properly communicate our work to various audiences, both to our peers in the scientific community and to the general public who lack the specialist knowledge of our field. This is not a knock on the general public; I lack the specialist knowledge to understand the research of other students in my own office. Rather, it is an acknowledgement that different audiences have different needs, and will respond to the same piece of work in very different ways. However, while learning how to communicate your ideas is important, there’s an equally, if not more, important skill to learn; how to critically evaluate the information we absorb, how to read and listen to new information. I say potentially more important because of the ratio of how much information we read compared to how much we absorb. In an average day, unless you are sequestered entirely away from the world, you will hear more than you talk. No matter what form of art you focus on creating, you will certainly examine more work than you create, if only because during the course of creation you will naturally have to examine your own work. That is why I think being aware of both how we approach criticising things, and how we go about making good criticism, is important. Media is a product and a feedback into society, and is worth being examined carefully..

This also extends into real life conversations. In my university and field we often talk about the narrative of a piece of scientific work. Not in the sense that it is false, but rather in the sense that we use a similar methodology to story structure to create the piece. Terry Pratchett in the second Science of Discworld book called humanity “Pan Narrans”; the story-telling ape. Scientific papers, everyday conversation, politicians and business people making speeches and promises, and even how we get news at all are all, on some level, pieces of media we can critique for accuracy, for potential hidden meaning, for technical skill in crafting them and in their place within the wider social construct. All of these, of course, have their own individual quirks that need to be accounted for; one would not read a scientific journal paper in the same way as Harry Potter, but I think there are some underlying principles that apply to all forms of criticism. This essay is not intended to be a complete guide to how to do criticism well; it is merely the starting point. The majority of it will be taken up describing various kinds of common methods of criticism and their usage, as well as discussing criticism’s place in society and how we respond to criticism of both our own work and other’s.

Personally, when I am writing criticism, I tend to use a framework of four basic questions. Which one I focus on depends on the piece, but all four of them are worth exploring. 1.) What do I think the artist is trying to do? Essentially, this is an attempt to examine the intent behind the piece. This can include social and personal background on the artist, readings to explore the likely meaning that scenes are supposed to convey, ect.

2.) How well did they manage this? This is more focused on technical aspects; how good was the writing, how good were the actors, how well did they use the tools available to them.

3.) Do I think that this was a good aim? This varies from things like “no, I don’t think you should have made pro-nazi propaganda” to “I get what you’re doing with that subplot but it breaks drastically thematically from the rest of the piece. This is naturally more personal to the critic, and artists are free to ignore it, but that doesn’t mean it should be able to be said.

4.) What is in the work that they might not have intended? It is easy to create a work with implications you did not intend, and messages you didn’t expect the audience to come away with.

A brief taxonomy of Criticism.

The categories listed are not intended to be inherently mutually exclusive, but rather a set of broad classifications of types of Criticism I have seen. Critical works, particularly longer ones, often have parts of different types within them, but I think a lot of them has a main focus. These categories are more based on what the work is trying to do, rather than the methodology and standards of this type of work; not that those couldn’t be used (indeed, they will be mentioned as we go, and some particular methods of criticism will be mentioned on their own), but I think starting from the purpose of the criticism is a good place to start. I will be capitalising the specific terms I suggest as potential terms to make it clear that, say, when I talk about Reviews I am talking about a particular type of review, not the broad category of things generally called reviews.

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Technical Analysis

Technical analysis is one of the most fundamental types of criticism. It focuses on the skill of the artist at crafting their piece. How well did they handle their brush? How well did the writing in this scene flow? Obviously, there are as many different ways of making this criticism as there are types of media, so discussing particulars of these criticisms is difficult. This kind of analysis is likely the kind that artists encounter, create and seek out most, simply because it is the one that most matches up with the mental tools that artists use and master themselves.

In many ways, technical analysis is the most basic form of media criticism. Other forms of critical methodology build on the technical analysis to discuss other aspects of the media. I don’t mean this in a negative way; the fact that something is the basis that other things build on doesn’t make it less important.

Social Context

This category of criticism is less interested in the work itself, and more interested in how it reflects the worldview of the writer, the reader and the wider social world in which they live.

Sometimes this is as simple as explaining nuances of the social climate the work is written in that might not be obvious to outsiders; for example, as a kid growing up in the UK I caught the class aspects in Harry Potter, but completely missed a lot of the social commentary of the US in the Simpsons (in fact, my dad had to explain to me who Bush 1 and Clinton were so I could understand the Simpsons episode where Bush moves in across the street and becomes Homer’s enemy). On a deeper level, we can discuss the actions of certain characters, and also how the narrative responds to those actions.

The aspects that it reflects, notably, don’t have to be deliberately placed in the work by the writer. In fact, to be honest, it is often more interesting if they are not deliberate, particularly when they are spread across multiple works. If multiple works present the military in a wholly positive or negative manner, or present predatory sexual behaviours as amusing or desirable, then that is an indication of the underlying base assumptions about the military and sexual relationships. These base assumptions are almost certainly not actively on the writer’s mind while creating the work, but are still there. This also applies to setting details; the culture we live often colours our assumptions about how things and people work; just as an example, there’s a bit of a running gag about American Harry Potter fanfic authors treating Hogwarts like an American High School, with pep rallies and very particular social structures.

Cultural Feedback

The idea of cultural feedback examines how the media we consume affects us. Going beyond the idea of media simply reflecting reality, and now talking about how it changes people’s worldviews, their actions and through that, the reality we live in. This can be, in some cases, very obvious; the shift in how sharks were viewed after Jaws came out is fairly quantifiable, to the point that changes in government policy can be attributed back to the popular blockbuster. On a more personal level, media exposure to minority groups can be vital in helping to humanise those groups for people who have not encountered that group, and helping people explore and come to terms with aspects of their lives.

Other forms of criticism look at more subtle potential types of cultural feedback; the Frankfurt School was interested in examining how authority and society were portrayed in German media in the 30’s and how they may have influenced society in the run up to the rise of the Nazi’s to power. The idea of violent media affecting people and making them more violent, or sexist media perpetuating sexist attitudes in society certainly isn’t new, and some of this kind of criticism is obviously bad. I can see the words “Jack Thompson” forming on some of your lips already.

Examining the relationship between media and attitudes is difficult; it is an intersection of critical media theory, sociology and psychology, and empirical research is hard to carry out, particularly on how it affects people on longer timescales. There is some evidence to suggest that the way media affects people is less related to changing their actions, and more to do with changing their idea of normal, their understanding of the background social radiation that we live in. It isn’t that violent media makes you more violent, but rather that it can affect how you approach other people’s violence.

This kind of analysis is usually very focused; examining a very particular aspect of the media; the depiction of a certain action or group of characters, for example. By depiction, I don’t just mean how it presents them, but also their context within the narrative. Are the actions rewarded, punished or simply depicted? How much focus is the depiction given by the piece, and who’s perspective do we see the event from? Some of these aspects may be intended by the artist, while some be unintended implications, positive or negative. Note that all of this refers equally to positive, negative and ambivalent pieces of criticism. There is a tendency for fans of media to focus on using these methods of criticism to examine positive impacts while detractors focus on negative impacts. If art has power and meaning, there’s no reason for this power to have solely positive or negative results. While prioritising either is perfectly reasonable, good criticism should acknowledge both aspects, even if it doesn’t examine all implications of the media in detail. Acknowledging the failures of a piece you enjoy or the successes of a piece you dislike is important.

Reviews

By this I mean the kind of review you would see in a game or film magazine. The intent of Reviews is to inform the reader as to whether a piece of media, usually recently released, is worthwhile for people to watch/read/listen to/ect. They function primarily as kind of a customer protection service, to let people know what to expect in terms of quality, and to be honest are probably the kind of criticism we are most use to seeing, particularly as in a sense we are all Reviewers; if you recommend a new piece of media to friend and explain why, you are being a Reviewer. Formal Reviews tend to be very broad, but I might argue, usually quite shallow. This is not me insulting Reviewers, but rather it’s just a function of the commercial system that creates them; not only do Reviews usually have to be produced quickly to stay relevant to the product, but they have a rather unique target audience. While most works of criticism aim at an audience with at least a passing knowledge of a work (often with bits to get people who haven’t seen it up to speed, but once that’s done the criticism returns to assuming you already have the general geist and use small passages/clips to demonstrate particular aspects of the criticism), Reviews are targeted at people who don’t know about the work and want to know if it is right for them, often without spoilers, which inherently limits the amount of depth you can into.

A particular quirk of Reviews is the common use of scoring systems. These vary, but usually take the form of giving things a score between 0 or 1 to 5 or 10 (not that you need me to explain this to you, since you have probably already seen reviews that give “five out five stars” to things). Sometimes they granulate it a bit, giving the product separate scores for categories like “writing”, “music” and “gameplay”, as well as an overall score. These appear to give the Review some measure of objectivity, and provide a quick, easy to read summary of the Review. It’s worth remembering however that these scores are not objective, but rather we might call them quantitative measures of subjectivity. Ultimately the Review is only going to reflect the opinion of a single writer or set of writers, in the case of collaborative Reviews (more common in video format because it is easier to have people sit down and have a conversation than it is to jump between multiple perspectives in text). It is most useful to find Reviewers who generally agree with you on the particularly type of media you are interested in seeing, or who you know roughly where your opinions diverge. Furthermore, as I discuss later in the section on agendas in criticism, it is important to remember that your own priorities are not universal when evaluating the state of Reviews in the aggregate, and that just because the Reviews’ judging criteria agrees with yours does not make it neutral or agendaless. I know that paragraph may seem obvious, but since we are setting out definitions we just need to cover all the bases.

Review scores are often used to provide an average opinion of quality across a range of views, such as Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic or simply the scores on an Amazon or Google review of a product or location. While this is useful to provide an at-a-glance summary of, as with all such methods this convenience comes at the cost of some information. For example, two films might have 5/10 each, but when looking at the individual scores one is tightly packed, with most of the scores being 5/10, while the other has a clear split between people giving it 8/10 and 2/10 Reviews. The former is generally agreed to simply be a mediocre movie, the other is clearly polarising. Amazon and Google both show the range of opinions, but not all such systems do. Such review sites bring their own issues. The most obvious is what reviews are included in the system, which is generally solved by including all of them, preferably with some system in place to avoid spam (like Steam scores don’t have). Another problem that pops up occasionally is less to do with the combined review scores themselves and more to do with the way they are treated by producers of media, such as game publishers tying financial bonuses for the game developer to the metacritic score.

Reviews are incredibly important parts of criticism because they tend to be the ones most directly linked to how commercial media evolves and develops, both by direct Reviewer feedback and by their effect on audience buying power. They are tools that we use to direct our limited money, time and attention, and that is why I spent so long describing them; understand where a Review is coming from, what its priorities are (and we’ll get to that later when we discuss agendas in criticism) and how it relates to your opinions is kind of important, because, like I said, these are probably the kind of criticism we encounter most in our everyday lives, so in some ways it is even more important than other kinds of discussion that we get this correct.

Diegetic Discussion

This is probably either the most or the second most common kind of criticism carried out day to day. It is sometimes called Watsonian, in-universe or TV trope’s analysis. It is entirely based on discussing the characters and events of a story from an in-universe perspective. Usually a couple of assumptions are, knowingly or not, made; that said universe is internally consistent and that it lines up with our own universe in terms of physical laws and norms of human behaviour unless explicitly stated otherwise.

This kind of discussion can be really useful and interesting, allowing the work’s narrative to be explored in a far more in depth way. Extrapolating what we see in the work and applying it to the wider world create helps explore the themes, characterisation and issues the work, intentionally or not, raises. It also helps you nail down why a work does or does not work for you; many works rely on verisimilitude, and breaking that suspension of disbelief can damage the reception of a work. Finally, it can be used to attempt to predict later plots and character arcs of the work; if the current state of the work is X, then later on we might expect Y. That last factor often branches out into a more meta conversation about genre and expectations; we expect this arc to go in a particular way, based on what we have already seen.

Many examples of this kind of discussion can be found in message forums about shows, in shipping meta that attempts to show why a particular pairing is, can be or soon will be canon, and in discussions about whether character A or character B from different properties would win in a battle. It is also probably the most popular kind of literature study to teach in some schools, particularly those that rely heavily on automatically marked tests. It is, in many ways, a test of memorisation and knowledge, not actual analysis, and can be made into a true or false question rather than an essay style question. Unfortunately, in some cases this form of discussion becomes a bit of a “when all you have is a hammer…” situation. For one thing, treating the work like it is its own fully formed universe that just is fails to account for the role of the creator in the work. The ultimate answer to the question “why does something happen in this story” is simply “the creator put down that it happened”. The follow up question is then “well, why did the creator choose to do that?”. I sometimes call this the “Flamingo Argument”, after an incident in a roleplay where I justified the sentence “and then a flamingo jumps out of your pocket” so well the players literally applauded. The decisions, events and possible limitations of a fictional universe are defined by a real life agent, not their own laws.

Another problem with a lot of this kind of discussion is its incompleteness, which is to say it does not actually properly examine the internal world of the work. Extrapolating from one sentence and applying real world logic does not actually help when there’s a paragraph explaining how it differs from real life. This kind of emerges a lot in shipping metas, which often declare particular actions to only be done in romantic relationships then proceed to ignore, for example, instances where one member of the ship behaves that way to someone else. In some ways this is can apply to most kinds of criticism, I simply see it applied in these kinds of discussions a lot. A final problem is how this kind of analysis often demands completeness. By this, I mean that all revealed aspects of a universe are expected to tie into each other. Character’s cannot simply be unrelated, but must be webbed together; that dockhand in the prequel is the grandfather of one of the protagonists in the first story. In many ways this actually I think makes the world less large. Forcing everyone to be pulled into a clearly defined link pulls the world into the pragmatic reality that a story only has so much time to explore the world, and doesn’t let it expand itself through implication. In fact, much of this analysis has issue with implication and uncertainty; unreliable narrators are a constant bane to working out how this applies, but are a well worn literary staple at this point. I’m not saying don’t do this at all; but be aware of these traps, and don’t assume that diegetic explanations are the be all and end all of discussion about a work.

Aggregate Analysis

Aggregate analysis is not quite the same as review aggregates, discussed above. There, you are looking at lots of reviews of one thing. This kind of aggregate analysis is examining multiple pieces of media at once, usually looking at a common factor or theme. Given we are on the lay internet, the most obvious example of this type of criticism is Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes Vs. Women videos, both the more well known series focused on video games and This allows for trends in media to be examined, which can be useful for examining the social opinions that are being reflected by the work. It can also be useful for looking at particular creators and trends in their work; it’s very easy to come up with in-story reasons for a certain trope, but if it repeatedly appears in someone’s work, or the work of a particular group. then it is worth exploring. Additionally, examining work in the aggregate means that less focus is put on any particular given work in the analysis. This will be covered in a later post on critique etiquette, but when the creators are not in a particularly strong position, like most fanfiction writers, it can be good to be careful about how much criticism you are pouring on the creators and their work.

Another form of aggregate analysis was just mentioned above in the diegetic discussion section. Media can be discussed as to how they fit into particular genres and patterns, both how they use these patterns and how they subvert them. Romance stories can be expected to have a happy ending and slasher horror films use a particularly group of tropes so often that they now parody themselves, for instance. This is helpful because the human brain is very good at pattern recognition and seeing when a pattern is broken; holding to familiar plots and tropes fufils two major roles; it is often what people want in their media (there’s nothing wrong with just consuming something because you enjoy it, any more than there’s something wrong with consuming the same media critically) and breaking the pattern reinforces the point that you are making in the audience’s head. Like all methods of aggregation, this kind of analysis will result in some information being lost. Details about individual works get swept up and ignored, and some nuances will naturally be lost. Furthermore, the analysis is rarely systematic; that is, the selection of the sample from the overall population not actually be representative, meaning that it can imply a particular media trend is far larger than it actually is. This need not be a conscious attempt by the person doing the criticism to mislead, but simply that the sample size is biased in favour of what they have actually read. For this reason, establishing a selection criteria, such as looking at best selling books, works created in a particular year or from a particular author, is quite important. Generally, the larger the sample size, the more this issue is avoided but this expands the focus and resources (time, effort, money to obtain the works you are examining) needed to create the criticism. Obviously the more works you examine in the same length piece, the less details you can give to each piece.

Criticism as Comedy

*INSERT MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATRE 3000 THEME HERE*

Given that this piece is primarily focused on the internet, I would be remiss if I did not mention the thriving genre of comedy that uses criticism as a framework to build the jokes on (some people might prefer to think of it in an alternative form; criticism that uses comedy to enhance the experience of watching it). Riffing, sporking and some forms of let’s play all fall into this category. Commonly, this kind of criticism/comedy relies on a fairly straight forward structure; you go through the media in a linear fashion, inserting comments about it as you go; see most members of TGWTG, or the Mister Plinkett Star Wars videos. Quite often these pieces are presented as being from a character separate to the actual actor and writer; Lindsay Ellis, formerly the Nostalgia Chick, mentioned in a livestream about presenting yourself as a character online that she sometimes wrote herself opinions she didn’t actually hold for her character. These characters are often deliberately hyperbolic, cruel and in many ways pathetic, using the suffering of the character due to watching the media they are criticising as the source of comedy. The media chosen to be examined is also very often considered to be low quality, as it’s easier to write jokes for.

If I may be a bit negative myself here, the quality of the actual criticisms made in these comedies is often fairly low as well. Many of them focus on surface level issues, such as plot holes and immediately obvious aesthetic problems; bad drawings or cgi, while avoiding issues such as theme, editing technique or character growth. The worst ones openly misrepresent what they are criticising if they think it helps with the joke. This is both bad criticism and lazy comedy; the worst of both worlds. That being said, you can certainly have criticism that mixes comedy and insight well, and you can get very good comedy using criticism as the basis.

Agendas in Criticism

All criticism are made using some kind of underlying agenda. I know that’s an unpopular thing to say, but it’s true. Even the idea that art should be judged solely on technical merits without any kind of social analysis is an agenda. Any Reviewer will have an agenda dictating what part of the analysis they are focusing on to make their judgement. For example, many video game reviewers put importance on frame rates and other visual technical details in their reviews, which for a variety of reasons aren’t that helpful for me; while improved graphical quality might be nice, factors like frame rate don’t have that much of an effect on my enjoyment. Agenda is possibly a bad term to use, given the negative implications the word carries, but at this point I’ve been using criticism to mean all kinds of critical analysis of media, not simply negative analysis, so at this point I feel I might as well make a habit out of it. Perhaps a better term would be base assumptions, or goals; what aspect of the media is the criticism interested in exploring? As I’ve noted above, all of the types of criticism I’ve listed here have different aims, different agendas. These can certainly be criticised; if the intentions of an author are open to analysis I see no reason to shield creators of criticism from it, but even if you don’t feel a certain focus is useful to you, that’s no guarantee that it is not useful at all.

Art as Criticism

Originally this section was going to be much longer, since this is a rather large topic to cover, but ultimately I kind of felt that I was adding more words to an already long piece without much of a benefit; the subject of how traditional forms of art can be used as forms of critical discourse, on personal, social and artistic grounds is vast, too large to be given proper detail, but the overall gist can be summed up in two sentences. 1.) Art can certainly be used as an expression of critical discourse.

2.) Many artists lack the tools to make good critical discourse through their art. The second one I feel is probably rather controversial. I don’t mean this in a “artists are terrible” manner or anything like that, but simply that the toolkit needed to make good criticism and the toolkit needed to create good art are different techniques, and artists will have generally put more focus on learning the skills for their craft. People have limited time and opportunities to add skills to their personal toolkit; I have a lot of skills in mathematics, programming and physics (particularly climate dynamics), some lesser skills in communication, critical theory and story writing, but no skill in drawing or playing music. I’d like to gain these skills, but as noted above, I have other skills to learn. This is true for everyone, but the fact remains that the tools of the artist and the critic are different (as, for that matter, the tools required of a technical critic, a sociological critic and a reviewer are different from each other). Furthermore, the goals of the art as art, and the art as criticism, can be opposed to each other. While depiction is certainly not glorification or condonement, a lot of artistic techniques can result in the subject being portrayed more positively than intended; for example, good directing in a film is far more glamourizing than viewing the subject in real life. The camera is far more carefully controlled than our eye movements, and the director and editor can reshoot and recut the scene, unlike ourselves in real time. This is not insurmountable, but needs to be acknowledged.

Of course, the opposite is true; the tool kit of the artist can be used to massively enhance the skill of the commentary. I will hopefully do some more work on exploring how this can be done, but I will admit that my own toolkit needs some advancement on this subject. As I note near the end of this piece, the focus on my critical toolkit does very much tend towards the negative; I can diagnose the problem, but not necessarily provide a treatment. I can point to examples of media that does criticism well (Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, for example), media that succeeds in some areas but fails in other areas (Fight Club sets up it’s criticism of toxic masculinity incredibly well, but has difficulties sticking the landing by not allowing time for the audience to recontextualise the rest of the film after the revival at the end and…okay, I could do an entire piece on this, and many others have been written, so I’m going to stop now) and media that handles its criticism badly (A State of Fear by Michael Critchton), but this piece is more intended as an overview rather than discussing particular examples in detail.

Criticism as Art

If art can be criticism, then that raises the question of the reversal of that sentence; is criticism art? There’s a couple of ways of answering this question. One might be to start by defining art, and then seeing if criticism fits within in that definition. This...is rather famously difficult. Asking “what is Art” is almost a cliché, a line used by STEM folks like myself to mock artists, but attempts have been made. Quite possibly the most broad definition is the one given by Scott McCloud in his book “Understanding Comics”, that art is any human activity not directly related to survival or reproduction. This definition is broad enough to basically be useless; almost every human activity counts as art. On a personal level, I find the definition frustrating for the same reason an artist might be frustrated at a scientist declaring that the most important aspect of human existence fall under science; it gives art claim to every other field, ignoring their differences. I will be the first one to admit that both art and science can learn from each other, science gaining methods of communication and a great understanding of the way their work interacts with the world and art gaining improvements in technical methods and an increased understanding of the world for them to work into their art, but trying to make them subordinate to each other doesn’t really help.

I sometimes like to think of art more in the context of a “family”, in the sense of a group of things where it is far easier to confirm one particular thing is a member of the group than it is to actually define a group. Think of it like a blob of colour that fades out as it spreads. It’s difficult to define the boundaries of it without arbitrarily leaving things that, had you examined them singularly, should be in the group. So, is criticism art? Is it in the obvious bit of the blob?

I would argue yes. Criticism is, under any definition, a way of expressing opinions focused on another piece of art. It’s language is different from other types of art, in the same way a novel uses a different language to a painting, but it is fundamentally art. Any freedom of art, I think, must also include a freedom to criticise, but given I have just defined criticism as art, this applies to criticism itself. There are good and bad ways to do criticism, poor and useful ways to use the toolkit it provides us.

Critical Criticism.

For the most part, I have attempted to keep this piece descriptive, not prescriptive; describing the various methods and techniques of criticism, and, if not abstaining, then at least labelling the points where I am editorialising clearly. That being said, I believe that reading this may give you a fairly accurate reading of one aspect of my personality. I am the kind of person who tends to focus more on the negatives of a situation. Some have called me a pessimistic idealist; I acknowledge the good of a situation, but most of my focus is on how things can be improved. This is not an inherently bad thing; I need to keep aware of it, and avoid dishonestly ignoring good parts of what I am examining, but it is a useful skill to have. Knowing how to both create and receive negative criticism is important in basically any field, and art is no different. Likewise, there’s no reason why people with a more positive focus cannot coexist with me in the same social space. I am planning to create a post later on critical etiquette, both in terms of giving, receiving and coexisting with it, but for now I think it is enough to say that remember that art and criticism are both communication, and need to be treated like any other form.

Applying Critical Skills to Real Life

Throughout this piece, I’ve been trying to explain a couple of things. One, what different ways do we have to make criticism of media, the critical toolkit, to continue my preferred metaphor. Two, what at the limits of each of these tools, aka “don’t use a hammer to tighten a screw”. And three, why do we carry out criticism, or “what are we attempting to build or repair with our criticism”. So far I’ve discussed why I think it is good to critically examine media, from improving our ability to create other media, exploring the social situation that the media emerged from, examining how media feedbacks and modulates our own behaviour, and even to simply using it as a framework for jokes. The final question I want to tackle in this piece is whether these tools are more universally useful than they first appear. Can we apply this to real life, outside of fiction? This is, once again, kind of a large subject, but I believe the tools can be applied both directly and indirectly. Directly, a lot of the questions you need to think of when analysing fictional or fictionalised media also apply to non-fiction media, if not more so. Why is this piece of news being created? What does the focus of the news and encyclopaedias say about the society that created them, and how do they in turn effect us? Indirectly, we start to move from our toolkit to comparing it to toolkits in other areas. For example, the concept of base assumptions mentioned above a few times applies also to examining real life groups, and frankly many of us are unreliable narrators when considering ourselves, viewing our personalities and actions in either the best or the worst possible way, and this applies to how we approach others as well. I think one of the biggest benefits of media and stories is that it allows us to approach and discuss situations in a safe modelled environment, and this benefit applies to how we examine media as well. I hope that this piece has made you think a bit more about how you approach media, and helped you find out what your own priorities for media criticism are.

#Media Criticism #critical analysis #fandom #long post #very long post #please reblog #I spent ages on this #Earl don't look

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alexsfictionaddiction · 4 years

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'It is not enough to be the non-racist. We must be anti-racist.’

I don’t think I need to explain too much about what has prompted this post. There may be readers of it who will feel that my sudden creation of it is performative and that I don’t REALLY care all that much about what’s going on. That I’m simply jumping on a bandwagon and cashing in on some internet clout amidst the horrors of what is happening in the world. Hopefully my regular readers will know that I actively seek out Own Voices books and that I’m constantly reviewing them or recommending them on this very blog. Hopefully my regular readers will know that this post is very much in line with my inclusive, diverse ethos and that I am simply using my white platform to amplify those of the unheard.

It’s true that I’ve never written a recommendation post dedicated to one particular marginalised group. I think this is because I’ve always felt like these are not my areas to sway into. That these posts would be better written by bloggers who have direct experience with what these books talk about. Honestly, I’m shocked and incredibly upset with myself for having long harboured this mentality. Yes, these books will affect readers who can directly relate to the characters in a way that they couldn’t ever affect me but why on Earth should that mean that I can’t give them a platform in the first place?

Of course, I’ve always known about white privilege and I’ve always used it to take down racists both on and offline. In fact, the events of the past few days have caused arguments within my own all-white British family. There are currently protests happening in central London and Manchester but we are not allowed to use public transport at the moment and we don’t have any local demonstrations, meaning actively protesting just isn’t a feasible option for most Brits right now. It does feel like movements such as Black Lives Matter are ‘an American thing’, despite the huge amount of all types of racism in the UK.

I had never realised (or perhaps never wanted to realise) the amount of extremely questionable attitudes within my own family until very recently. I have had to explain white privilege to my parents, who have actually always been reasonably liberal in their political views, so I was astonished by exactly how much they didn’t know. There is an essence of ‘things aren’t anywhere near as bad as they used to be’ and ‘the police don’t arrest or kill innocent people’. It’s honestly only in the last few days that I’ve realised and therefore had to address the internal racism within my own family and therefore in my own origins and so I think that, as well as what is happening across the Atlantic, is what has really triggered this post. Despite considering myself an ally, I can do so much better than I have been and chances are, you can too.

Because it is a global pandemic. It’s not something that is only happening in the US, it’s happening here just without the guns. It’s happening in every country of the world and I (and my fellow white people) should not be leaving it up to the victims to sort it out. We have the power to boost their blatantly unheard voices and there is so much we can do, in order to do that.

Sign petitions, donate money and help in any way you can right here. Buy from Black-owned businesses, read all you can about the Black experience and above all, call out your friends and family on their racism. Of course, if you don’t want to take the advice of a white person like me, I’d recommend you check out these fantastic Black BookTubers and book bloggers:

LaRonda @ flyingpaperbacks

Madeline @ madelinewilsonojo

Jazmen @ lit-erally black

Nox @ noxthereader

Myonna @ myonna reads

I'mogén @ Peace&Cookies

Ben @ Benreadsbooks

Lauren @ The Novel Lush

Jo @ Jo The Great

Ella @ ella’s novellas

Keeana @ Reading in the Clouds

Francina @ Francina Simone

Lucie @ LucieReads

Jesse @ Bowties & Books

Joel @ fictionalfates

Ane @ Ane Adores

Olivia @ Olivia’s Catastrophe

Cecilia @ thatdisneychik

Taylor @ PageScreenTaylor

Tori @ Medusa Reads

Justin @ Ghost Reader

Seji @ The Artisan Geek

Mina @ Mina Reads

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list and I encourage you to please search for and support more wonderful Black bookworms and creators. They will give you more insightful reviews and recommendations than I would ever be able to, so please check them out and show them some love.

Here are 50 books by Black authors that deserve your attention. While I have read a good chunk of these, I will admit that I have not personally read all of them. This list was compiled following a deep scouring of the internet and reading countless reviews and synopses. I believe I’ve found some incredible hidden gems in here that you will love and pass on to those who need them. Each of them have a link to an online retail outlet that isn’t Amazon, so you can buy these books in quarantine without lining Bezos’ already over-filled pockets. Enjoy! -Love, Alex x

NON-FICTION

1. Stamped From The Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi. This history of racism in America seeks to completely rewrite the way we think of racism and encourages change in the every-day assumptive white ally.

2. Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Told in the form of a letter to his young son, Coates attempts to convey what it’s like to be black in America, using history, personal experience and the hope of liberation.

3. Redefining Realness by Janet Mock. An unapologetic powerful memoir from a trans mixed-race working class woman in America that will teach you how to be undeniably real.

4. Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge. Possibly the most widely-read non-fiction book on racism in the UK, Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book explores its links to class, white feminism and the black history we were never taught.

5. So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. Highly relevant to the current situation in the US, this book talks about police brutality, BLM and the N word, answering the questions that no one ever dares to ask.

CONTEMPORARY FICTION

6. An American Marriage by Tayari Jones. The winner of last year’s Women’s Prize, An American Marriage is the heartbreaking story of newlyweds torn apart by a wrongful rape conviction. Devastating, urgent storytelling.

7. Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams. Searingly relatable and timely, you will fall madly in love with Queenie. She is flawed, overlooked and underestimated. You will laugh, cry and scream as you spend a year inside her life as a British-Jamaican.

8. Get A Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert. When straight-laced nerd Chloe Brown almost dies, she vows to start living in the moment. Enter bad boy Red and you’ve got the perfect ingredients for a sweet, sexy rom-com.

9. Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. Joint winner of 2019′s Booker Prize and shortlister for 2020′s Women’s Prize, this is the combination of 12 very different Black-British characters that paints a very real picture of contemporary British life.

10. I Almost Forgot About You by Terry McMillan. When Georgia Young begins to feel dissatisfied with her seemingly perfect life, she decides to shake things up. It’s the perfect reminder that it’s never too late to make big changes and start living your best life.

11. Well-Read Black Girl by Glory Edim. Showcasing some of America’s best black female writers, this anthology explores the importance of finding yourself in books. Glory Edim is the founder of Well-Read Black Girl, an online book club exclusively for black women, which you can check out here.

12. The Girl With The Louding Voice by Abi Daré. At 14, Adunni is a wife and commodity within her tiny Nigerian village but she is determined to get her education and her voice. Original, powerful and unbelievably inspirational.

13. Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid. When Emira Tucker starts dating someone with a direct historical link to her boss, things get more than complicated. This is a very clever contemporary, driven by racial differences, that is completely unputdownable.

LITERARY FICTION

14. The Sellout by Paul Beatty. Winner of the Booker Prize 2016, The Sellout is a black comedy ringing with social satire about one man’s deceit having knock-on effects for an entire community. Controversial and weird but incredibly unique.

15. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Morrison’s debut novel focuses on our obsession with conventional beauty, fitting in and being accepted. Wonderfully written, it addresses race, gender and class in a truly captivating way.

16. Stay With Me by Ayòbámi Adébáyò. Amidst the social and political turmoil of 1980s Nigeria, Yejide's husband takes a second wife when she fails to fall pregnant. It is a heartbreaking portrait of grief, fractured families and motherhood.

17. Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. An epic road-trip novel with hints of supernatural and magical realism, this is the story of a young boy’s coming-of-age within a broken family told in a gorgeously lyrical style.

18. Half Of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Set during the Nigerian Civil War, three very different characters are entwined in a story about colonialism, class, race and love. You’ll want the tissues for this one!

19. Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi. This strange unique novel focuses on the split selves of Ada and their gradual rise to power within her. It’s one of the most unique mental health books I’ve ever come across and will resonate with anyone who has ever struggled with finding their own inner peace.

SCI-FI AND FANTASY

20. Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James. Dripping in African mythology, the first in the Dark Star trilogy gets off to a gripping start with plenty of unique characters, as hunter Tracker searches for a missing boy.

21. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler. When aspiring writer Dana is pulled from 1976 into 1815, she is assumed to be a slave. After saving a young man’s life, the mystery of their connection kicks off and takes them both on an incredible emotional journey. This is an amazing time travel story that is thoroughly unputdownable.

22. Rosewater by Tade Thompson. Rosewater is a town on the edges of a strange alien biodome which is rumoured to have healing powers but former criminal Kaaro knows the truth and is in no hurry to revisit it. Whilst making subtle digs at contemporary culture, Rosewater offers a fascinating view of the future.

23. Do You Dream Of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh. Ten astronauts leave a dying Earth to find another habitable planet. Set entirely aboard the ship, it’s a coming-of-age story that reaches beyond the sci-fi boundaries and focuses on human relationships and emotions. Brace yourself for tears!

24. Children Of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. Inspired by West African mythology, this magical adventure tells the story of Zélie on a quest to restore magic to the kingdom of Orisha. At the end of every chapter something happens that makes you want to keep reading, making it highly addictive.

25. The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor Lavalle. Hidden dark magic in the depths of New York is awakened when hustler Tom attracts its attention. With elements of classic horror and mysticism, this is one for lovers of weird speculative stories.

26. Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi. This touching story is a searing reminder of systemic racism and the violence that black Americans face at the hands of the law. When Kev finds himself in prison, it’s only the visits from his magically-gifted sister Ella that keeps him sane and gives him hope of revolution.

27. We Cast A Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin. Desperate to protect his son in a profoundly racist America, a man embarks on a mission to get his boy a ‘demelanization’ to make him white. It’s an original and edgy satire full of suspense and heart.

MIDDLE-GRADE

28. Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. This poetic memoir charts the story of Woodson’s own childhood, growing up as an African-American in 1960s and 1970s. These are truly beautiful poems that sing a young girl’s desire to be heard and to know who she is.

29. Ghost by Jason Reynolds. Ghost is a sprinter but it’s only when Coach sees his talent that he really starts to chase his dream but his dark past is hot on his heels. Full of Reynolds’ signature humour and heart, it’s highly relatable to almost any kid from around the age of 10.

30. The Jumbies by Tracey Baptiste. This creepy magical middle-grade adventure sees fearless Corinne on a dangerous mission to save her home from dark forces. Steeped in Caribbean folklore, The Jumbies is a fantastic gateway into eerie fantasy.

31. The Crossover by Kwame Alexander. Twins Josh and Jordan are basketball stars, following in their father’s footsteps but hardship tests their brotherly bonds. Merging basketball and rap, this verse novel gives us a stark reminder of what really matters.

32. Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes. Get set for a truly heartbreaking but horrendously timely story. Jerome was shot dead by police at the age of 12 and his ghost wanders the Earth in search of answers as to why he was killed. Not sure I need to say anymore as to why this is a highly important tearjerker.

33. Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo. When a plane crash brings two sisters on either side of the Atlantic together, family secrets unravel. Exploring sacrifice and identity, this verse novel is a stark reminder that most losses and tragedies are felt only by the families they directly affect.

34. Orangeboy by Patrice Lawrence. Marlon has promised his mum that he won’t follow the path of his gang leader brother but when a date leaves him a hunted man, he has some impossible choices to make. Laced with musicality, this pacy urban thriller puts you directly in the shoes of an ordinary boy caught up in very real danger.

35. The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta. Struggling with his identity as a mixed-race gay teen, it’s only when he starts university that Michael gains his wings through the power of drag. Tackling both racism and homophobia, The Black Flamingo teaches acceptance and self-love.

36. The Sun Is Also A Star by Nicola Yoon. Natasha and Daniel meet on the same day that Natasha’s family are about to be deported to Jamaica. Cue an epic quest for love to overthrow the authorities! It’s a sweet romance about fate and taking the future into your own hands.

37. Dear Martin by Nic Stone. When Ivy League-destined Justyce is arrested, he turns to the lessons of Martin Luther King to help figure things out but then shots are fired. Undeniably relevant to today’s America, Dear Martin confronts the blatant racism and injustice within the justice system.

38. On The Come Up by Angie Thomas. Aspiring rapper Bri is desperate to make it to help her family, despite all the odds being against her. Better known for her break-out debut hit The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas’ follow-up is an equally hard-hitting story of standing up and speaking out for what’s right.

HISTORICAL

39. The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Escaping an extremely violent and abusive past in the 1930s American South, Celie finds the strength to be her true wonderful self. The Color Purple is considered a staple of black literature and considered one of the most mind-opening books in existence.

40. Roots by Alex Haley. Tracing the story of his own ancestors, Alex Haley’s Roots is a highly educational documentation of African American history during the Slave Trade. Published in 1976, it made a massive impact on the world and Kunta’s story is just as urgent and vital today.

41. Freedom by Catherine Johnson. This historical middle-grade story follows Jamaican slave Nat as he makes his way to London, where he has heard that slavery doesn’t exist, which he soon finds to be false. Freedom is a moving, action-packed look at British slavery that is the perfect starting point for educating pre-teens.

42. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. This classic tale follows wrestler Okonkwo, who returns from exile to discover his village has been taken over by colonials. It’s a difficult read that captures powerlessness and pain in a short, impactful burst and will no doubt force white readers to look at their own behaviours.

43. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Exploring bigotry and racism across the US, our protagonist tries his best to play by the rules but continues to be knocked down. Despite being published in 1952, Ellison’s arguments are painfully relevant to today, indicating that not much has changed at all.

44. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Life as a slave in Georgia is hell for Cora but when new arrival Caesar tells her about the Underground Railroad, escape plans are hatched. Cora’s determination and courage are hugely inspirational and her experience, which mirrors that of many real slaves, should never be forgotten.

45. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. This epic story of two sisters’ very different experiences of 1800s Ghana sprawls across generations, clearly showing how history resonates and the ripples are felt long after the original event. A stunning captivating read.

THRILLERS

46. Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas. Highly selective, isolated academy Catherine House sees teenage runaway Ines join its ranks and a strange Gothic mystery unfurls. This subtly unsettling chilly novel is a brand new debut that I devoured earlier on this month and I’m sure you will too!

47. My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite. Korede is used to clearing up her younger sister Ayoola’s messes -and disposing of the bodies she leaves in her wake! There is a wonderfully dark tongue-in-cheek tone that makes this fast-paced thrilling celebration of sisterhood truly delightful.

48. They All Fall Down by Rachel Howzell Hall. Seven strangers find themselves in a mansion on an island with no contact with the outside world and no escape. With strong Agatha Christie vibes, it’s a highly entertaining mystery whose pages you’ll keep turning.

49. Devil In A Blue Dress by Walter Mosley. When a war veteran is pulled into a search for a mysterious woman, murder and lies are uncovered. Set in 1940s LA, Walter Mosley expertly weaves the natural fears of a Black man of the time into the smoky intrigue, making it extremely immersive.

50. Hollywood Homicide by Kellye Garrett. Broke former actress Dayna didn’t mean to solve a hit-and-run but the reward money would definitely come in handy. Once she starts digging, she becomes determined to find the killer. I love cosy mysteries with amateur detectives and this more than fits that bill.

#black lives matter #black authors #black books #anti-racism #social justice

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un-enfant-immature · 4 years

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If we could see alternate realities, would we want to take a look?

Well, here we are. After many weeks (and a somewhat inconsistent publishing schedule), we have arrived at the final story of Ted Chiang’s Exhalation collection, number nine of nine. It has been a fun journey reading each of these speculative science fiction stories, and I do think they have much to tell TechCrunch readers. Even if you missed some of the discussions, these stories are timeless: What’s Expected of Us was first published in 2005. So jump in now, or jump in later — they will be waiting for you when you are ready.

Today, we have a fantastic work on the meaning of the choices in our lives and what happens when we have more information about ourselves in alternative timelines. It’s a story that combines quantum entanglement with freedom of the will, connecting technology to the very core of what makes us human. We will talk about Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom, and then some concluding thoughts on the whole *Exhalation *collection for those who have walked with us every step of the way.

Some further quick notes:

Want to join the conversation? Feel free to email me your thoughts at [email protected] (we got a real email address!) or join some of the discussions on Reddit or Twitter (hashtag TCBookClub)

Follow these informal book club articles here: https://techcrunch.com/book-review/. That page also has a built-in RSS feed for posts exclusively in the Book Review category, which is very low volume.

Feel free to add your comments in our TechCrunch comments section below this post.

Reading Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom

This short story is a beautiful fusion of speculative science fiction and philosophy, punctuated with several plot turnabouts and rivulets of thrill.

The story centers around an invention called the prism, which is a quantum communications device. When triggered, a prism will cause a binary divergence in future timelines. In one timeline, the prism lights up its LED red, while in the other timeline it lights up blue. What’s critical is that the prisms in the now diverging timelines are connected together, and the device has a “pad” that allows for limited communications between the two timelines before the pad expires its capacity.

With the right prism, people can talk to themselves in other timelines to explore what might have happened if different decisions were made. For instance, someone could accept a marriage proposal if the prism’s LED turned red or reject it if the prism turned blue. Through the device, users can observe how their lives might have been lived — entailing all kinds of psychological consequences in the process.

It’s not surprising then that the plot partly revolves around a support group for people obsessed with prisms. One person, Jorge, struggles with the fact that he committed a violent act in this timeline, but then determines that he didn’t in any of the other timelines he was able to connect to. What does this say about his character? Does the fact he almost always doesn’t commit the violence show that he has a strong and stable character, who occasionally makes mistakes? Or does the evidence prove that there is a monster waiting beneath the surface, always just waiting for the right moment to strike?

Throughout the story, there is a latent question about how we use role models in our decisions. In our world, we can model ourselves off of celebrities or famous people, mentors and coaches, or even historical figures we’ve read about in biographies. Yet the prisms shrink this intrinsic distance — we can model ourselves after literally ourselves.

That opens up avenues for envy and jealousy. When our role models find success, we have the emotional distance to observe and reflect, and perhaps change our own actions in response. But when those models are ourselves, suddenly we can’t help but think that there must be something wrong with us if our counterparts in other timelines are doing well and we are not.

So we dwell on our choices, particularly on the major prophetic decisions that we feel our whole lives revolve around. Much like the prisms and the quantum split that happens inside the device, we ourselves have moments of binary decision-making. If we are angry, do we slash the tires of the car of the person who put us in that position? Do we pull the trigger on a gun?

In one case, Dana, a therapist and a facilitator of the prism support group, harmed her best friend Vinessa in high school during a field trip. When a teacher enters their hotel room on an inspection and sees rows of pills, Dana blames Vinessa, sending her life in a different direction:

It was as if, before that night, Vinessa had been balanced on a knife’s edge; she could have become either what society considered a good girl or a bad girl. Dana’s lie had pushed her off the edge, onto the side of being bad, and with that label the course of Vinessa’s life had taken a different direction.

Yet, Chiang is deeply skeptical of these binaries. We start to see glimmers of this as he explains the quantum dynamics behind the prisms, arguing that even a single atomic difference in different timelines can lead to massive changes in weather patterns and ultimately the macro events that build each of those worlds. This butterfly effect means that our decisions have far more chaotic consequences than we can anticipate. As the author explains, “Many worried that their choices were rendered meaningless because every action they took was counterbalanced by a branch in which they had made the opposite choice.”

Yet, much like the last story we read, this story doesn’t jump to nihilism. Quite the opposite, it argues that our decisions are really reflections of our character, and therefore our character constrains the probabilities of our actions in future timelines. Nat, our main narrator, asks during a support group session:

“But when I have a choice to do the right thing or the wrong thing, am I always choosing to do both in different branches? Why should I bother being nice to other people, if every time I’m also being a dick to them?”

The facilitator Dana responds with:

“But if you act compassionately in this branch, that’s still meaningful, because it has an effect on the branches that will split off in the future. The more often you make compassionate choices, the less likely it is that you’ll make selfish choices in the future, even in the branches where you’re having a bad day.”

While all future possibilities are always present, our innate character determines the gravity wells that most timelines fall into. Vinessa is angry at Dana for her lie, but as we later learn, she would have been angry in pretty much every scenario that Dana might have selected. No matter how she handled the situation, Vinessa would have gone through her downward spiral, leading to the story’s core message: “If the same thing happens in branches where you acted differently, they you aren’t the cause.”

We can’t control the past, and we certainly can’t control alternative timelines. But we can control our actions today, and those actions are going to accumulate to affect every single diverging timeline in the future. Yes, sometimes our other selves might have gotten luckier, or may have faced an unexpected tragedy. Yes, if we knew this we might experience envy, jealousy or horror. But ultimately, all the possibilities in the world are ultimately circumscribed by ourselves. We can only ever really do what we choose to do.

Some concluding thoughts on Exhalation

We’ve come to the end of Exhalation, and in light of the book’s symbol, we can take a breath now to take a look at all that Chiang has put together with these various stories.

To me, the most prominent message that resonates throughout the book is that contingency has no control over our own actions. In many of the stories in this set, Chiang places a new technological object, whether it’s a time-travel gate, digients and virtual worlds, or the prisms in this last story, and shows how humans react to their fresh capabilities.

One would think that these technologies would immediately change who we are or how we react. After all, if we can time travel, communicate through timelines, or completely change our perspective in virtual worlds, shouldn’t that radically change our identities? Wouldn’t we be entirely different people?

And yet, Chiang makes his point stridently clear: no. The characters inside each of us are hardly fixed of course, but they absolutely affect how we use — for good and evil — these new technologies. Humans are going to do what they are going to do, and they are going to do it with whatever tools they have available to them. That’s not to say that technologies shouldn’t be held accountable for the actions they afford their users. But ultimately, it’s a reminder that we each have control over our own actions, and we have the right to judge others for the actions they take when confronted with new options.

We are ultimately all connected, and that means that our actions don’t just affect ourselves, but all people everywhere through the air, through quantum mechanics, and through the physical laws of our world. Trust yourself, but also understand how we can control our actions for a better world. If that isn’t a message for startups and technology in 2020, I don’t know what is.

#TechCrunch

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miloswanders · 7 years

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When I was a kid -- say, between the ages of 4 and 10 -- my mother would spend her Saturday afternoons ironing in the living room. Since she has always found this particular task to be extraordinarily tedious, she would pick a movie out of her rather large collection of VHS cassettes and keep it as background entertainment while she went about her chores.

After a while, out of sheer curiosity, I would splay out on the sofa and watch whatever movie she had selected for the day, regardless of the rating. Since I was the one who, at 7 years old, had forced my mother to sit through Critters (carnivorous aliens terrorizing a rural American town... don’t even ask), she wasn’t too concerned about my young mind suffering any irreparable trauma at this point.

Which brings me to the following: I’ve been feeling nostalgic, as of late, and have to find new ways to procrastinate doing all the things that I should be doing right now; thus, I’ve decided to present you with a List of Films That Were Meaningful During My Childhood, in no particular order.

Enjoy!

The Fly (1986). Of course, the first one has to be a horror film, and a great classic at that! The ambitious scientist, the tragic love story, the terrifying metamorphosis... I’m pretty sure I couldn’t shut up about it for the next week or so.

Beetlejuice (1988). Another classic, which I am proud to say I personally selected from my mother’s collection. It’s been years since I last watched it, so I only remember bits and pieces of it, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t even remotely appropriate for a six-year-old. But! there were ghosts involved, and at the time that was the magic word to spark my interest.

In & Out (1997). This one was my introduction to LGBT media and themes. Being mostly satirical in its intent, it has to be taken with a grain of salt; but I’d laugh my head off every time we watched it, as my mother explained all the stereotypes they were making fun of. After the first viewing, I distinctly remember asking: “What does “lesbian” mean?”, and her answering: “Same as “gay”, but for women”. I thought it was a really cool word.

Mrs. Doubtfire (1993). This one... this one is special. I already knew Robin Williams from Jumanji, but, of all the roles he has played, this is the one that really stole my heart. My family was sort of falling apart when I first watched it, so it did a lot more than strike a chord -- it made me consider that maybe, just maybe, even if things were going to change drastically in my life, everything would work out all the same. A divorce didn’t have to be such a terrible ordeal, because there were a lot of different ways to remain committed to one another, and “family” didn’t mean the same thing to everyone. So, yeah... Thanks, Robin <3

American Beauty (1999). Picture this: it’s almost midnight, I’m bored out of my mind and should be going to sleep, but I’ve decided to stay up and see what’s on TV at this hour. I come across the first sequence of this film: girl speaking into the camera, creepy conversation with unseen interlocutor, then cut to the voiceover and the aerial view of the gloomy suburbs. My mother found me glued to the screen just as the “rose petals” scene was playing. She asked what I was watching, and I was like: “Uhm... American Beauty, I think it’s called”; she stared at the TV, verified her suspicion and went: “It’s late. I have the VHS, you can watch it tomorrow”. And I did. If anyone ever wonders how I got into the suburban-gothic genre, blame Kevin Spacey.

The Color Purple (1985). The film that introduced me to Whoopi Goldberg. I had never heard of her before, and I remember repeating her name over and over to make sure I was saying it correctly. I doubt I’d even bothered to ask, let alone memorize the name of any actor before, but with her it was love at first sight. A few months later, I found a radio programme where the host would read “literary classics”, one or two chapters per episode; sure enough, Alice Walker’s novel was on their list. I listened to the whole thing. And, as I did, I guess I thought a lot about the word “lesbian”.

The Miracle Worker (1962). The autobiography of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan. To this day, I cry at the end. Anne Bancroft was amazing. Also, possibly the first black-and-white movie I ever watched all the way through... and wanted to rewatch.

The Elephant Man (1980). David Lynch’s debut film; it completely changed how I thought of “monsters”. It was a milestone in my growth as both human being and horror fan, precisely because there was nothing “scary” about Joseph Merrick, at all. It filled me with a sadness the depth of which I still find difficult to convey. Also... Anne Bancroft. Again.

Divorzio all’italiana (1961). A film about infidelity, social hypocrisy and honor killings in Southern Italy. Not exactly kids material, but it’s not like anyone gave a damn. It’s the main reason why I laugh so hard and hysterically when people claim that misogyny concerns almost exclusively non-Western cultures. And by “laugh” I mean “scream into the void”.

The House of the Spirits (1993). Saw the movie before I read the book. Five minutes in and I was enraptured. It may or may not have been the source of my fascination with magical realism and historical novels in general. I was missing out on a great deal of context, in order to fully understand the more “political” parts of the story, but over the years I did learn a thing or two thanks to Clara, Blanca and Alba. And yes, Clara was played by Meryl Streep, but I did not care to learn the actress’ name back then.

Stephen King’s IT (1990). Since I’ve started the list with the horror genre, why not have another one? The TV film that exacerbated my fear of clowns to near-pathological levels. It (both the film and the character) scared me so much that I could never bring myself to re-watch it. Instead, by the time I reached the 9th grade I’d gathered the courage to read the novel. “IT” and “Stand by Me” were my gateway into Stephen King’s fictional universe, although the former was branded so deeply into my subconscious that the mere mention of that damned clown used to give me chills. Surprisingly, I have recently convinced myself to watch short clips from the film, only to discover that I now like Pennywise as a character. I mean, that’s still Tim Curry beneath the makeup!

The Exorcist (1973). Another classic. 9-year-old me was obsessed! I honestly don’t know how many times I re-watched it, but I can assure you they amounted to A LOT. I also tried to convince a dear friend of mine to watch it with me, once, but she freaked out halfway through, leaving me rather disappointed.

So, there you have them: the highlights of my youth.

And yes, before you ask, I did also watch cartoons like a normal kid.

#films #cinema #personal #horror fiction #magical realism #film recs

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starwarshyperdrive · 7 years

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My Star Wars

This is editorial and highly subjective. I apologise in advance. The thing that annoys me the most is also the thing I love the most. The fact that there is not one Star Wars fandom, there are several. Star Wars is for everyone. All ages, all ethnicities and all walks of life. And I love that. At the same time there is a lot of room for things that I don’t love. Don’t get me wrong. Just because despite trying my best I just couldn't get into The Clone Wars (I still prefer the 2003 Star Wars: Clone Wars series) I don’t think that it’s inferior. I acknowledge it. I acknowledge Ashoka, but I just don’t get excited about it the same way I get excited about other stuff. That doesn’t mean that ‘my Star Wars is better than your Star Wars’, it just makes it more interesting and at the same time challenging. I see a lot of things contradicting my personal perception of what ‘the force’ is. Even seasoned fans with popular channels sometimes seem to have a completely different perception of what Star Wars is. And instead of thinking THEY ARE WRONG I started wondering where this is coming from. The fact that we all still love Star Wars just proves the universality of the mono myth as described by Joseph Campbell. You don’t have to understand why it speaks to you. It simply does. Does that mean you’ll have a hard time predicting the plot or understanding connections. Yes, no, maybe. After all - by now - it’s ‘just a story’ that’s being made up by other individuals. Not an universal truth. I came to the conclusion that every fan has it’s own unique Star Wars fandom, built out of a large pool of pick-and-chose parts. To understand mine, here is the kind of Star Wars fan I am and what I think about that subject.

I didn’t grow up on comic books. As a European suburban kid that always seemed uniquely American to me. I grew up influenced by the history of the land around me. Medieval castles, Roman ruins and pagan folktales. I was always very interested in history and movies. So thanks to - but not exclusively owing to - Indiana Jones my dream job as a child was archaeologist. So I chose Latin and Ancient Greek in school, further focusing on ancient myths of heroes going on journeys, seeking adventure and fighting evil. Jumping a few years ahead, I started to get interested in eastern philosophy. Everything always just brought me back to Star Wars or was in some way related or seemed very familiar in that way.

If I’m interested in something I always want to go to the core, to the source, so the natural development for me was to study Kendo. The way of the sword. Ironically one of the first things the Sensei told us ‘this is not Star Wars’, this is not ‘sword ballet’ Just one of the reasons why it pains me to see beautifully choreographed sword fights in movies (did someone say prequels?). Reality is fast, reality is quick and painful. The better you are the less movement there is. I fought with 80+ year old 8th Dan Japanese Sensei who didn’t seem to move at all. They won easily and it looked like they’d just stand there. Reminded me a lot of Darth Vader in A New Hope actually or SPOILER ALERT the way Obi Wan dealt with Maul in Rebels. Luke is still a learner in Empire Strikes Back and Vader is toying with him. Those fights seem authentic to me. Same goes for the way Kylo Ren fights in The Force Awakens. Someone who is too sure of himself and puts too much power into his fighting because he isn’t used to fighting someone even close to equal. Rey has the fluidity of someone with talent (and previous training). In a fight there are no unnecessary show-offy swirly moves. This would just give the opponent an opening. Granted, a lightsaber is a bit different. Whereas a sword, or saber has 1 or 2 sharp edges, a lightsaber is deadly no matter where it hits. But enough geeking out over Japanese swordsmanship.

As for the philosophy, I started meditating and again found a lot of similarities with the force as portrayed in Star Wars. Especially after or before a fight, we used to meditate. Before to focus. After to regulate the heart rate. Both in combination would what Qui Gon did, I have to assume. There are many stories about buddhist monks who managed to achieve things through meditation some consider to be unnatural. The Chinese and Japanese even have a word for it. Chi, or Ki - the life force. Clearly a major inspiration for George Lucas when he came up with the concept of the force.

In the west and especially in our modern ‘we have solved and explained everything through science, there is nothing we do not know’ mindset we sometimes fail to see or understand other perspectives. So when someone talks about how a force ghost can’t do this or that or be at a certain time or space based on our ‘wordly’ limitations I have to wonder why they assume that force ghosts are limited the same we are. You don’t have to study quantum mechanics to be able to grasp the concept of more ‘timeless’ existence. The way I see it - once you’re one with the force you can pop up wherever and whenever you want. Ironically the fact that the midichlorians prove that the force can itself create life it also opens the door for reincarnation. I feel like a lot of people have problems understanding this concept of the force, which limits their comprehension a lot. Then again. Who am I to judge. But I think the force has to make sense in a philosophical kind of way. Something that parallels the myths on our own planet, be it Native American or Tibetan. This is also why I think seeing Star Wars through a Comic Book filter is bound to fail. And it’s why speculations of people too much into comic books tend to be wrong. I don’t know it very well but people suddenly turning good guys after being bad and killing people and no-one bats an eye, seems a bit too WWE wrestling for me. Motifs such as redemption and fallen heroes are a primal aspect of story telling. Enkidu in the epic of Gilgamesh couldn't return to his previous state once he spent too much time in civilisation. He went too far. The reason why Star Wars is so appealing is in my opinion because it speaks to this very essence of human story telling and repeats themes we heard and told over and over again for thousands of years. That and the fact that it mixes ‘fictional’ elements with real life.

It always worked best when movie sets can be visited. We can identify with it. Avatars Pandora might be impressive and tantalising but at the same time, deep inside we know it is not real. Star Wars feels ‘more real’ even in it’s almost Freudian usage of the ‘slimy slug’ as gangster boss or someone named Greedo who’s claim to fame is trying to make a quick buck and even double crossing his boss to achieve that goal. There is no dead superhero who is suddenly someone else and then a giant human planet attacks. There are no superpowers. The force is something everyone can feel. To use another buddhist metapher. The mind is like a glass of dirty water, when you stir it it becomes cloudy. If you calm your mind, the dirt will settle and the water will be clear. In my understanding seeing clear water equals feeling the force.

Myths also serve as moral principles and teach us valuable lessons. Darth Vader was tricked into becoming a dark side apprentice. He had doubts. He was redeemable. Kylo Ren chose the dark side. He committed patricide. An element that can also be found in ancient myths from all around the world. An act that will always lead to the ultimate demise. Don’t go too far. Don’t cross the point of no return. Don’t turn around, Lot. or your wife will turn into a pillar of salt.

Don’t turn around, Orpheus…

People talk about Anakin killing younglings (off camera) and use it as an argument that Kylo could turn to the light. If you look at historical themes this seems to me very unlikely and too comic booky for Star Wars. Which brings me back to why I didn't like The Clone Wars. Even though George Lucas stated that Star Wars is for 12 year olds, there has always been an additional element to it. Lets call it added depth. This depth I’m missing in The Clone Wars. Ashoka speaks up to her master and no-one is really acting the way they are supposed to act if they were Jedi or in some sort of military structure. Sure it’s good fun, but he constant disobeying of orders seems a bit..shall I say unrealistic (I’m aware of the irony). At the same time, that absolutely works for Star Wars Rebels. Kanan is an insecure half-Jedi teaching a street brat hungry for knowledge. While I’m not entirely on board for everything (you almost lost me at space whales) I am definitely a Rebels fan. The introduction of Thrawn gave me goosebumps and was the best thing that ever happened outside of the movies. I’m a strong advocate for the reboot and I never liked the old EU. Too many weird stories. The reboot came at the right time and was necessary. I never really followed it, but I’m all in when it comes to the new canon. I try to read all the books and get all the tiny bits and pieces of lore they hide in them.

As for the games, I know a lot of people like them and even though I’m not a gamer, I played most of them. Actually I exclusively play Star Wars games. I had a lot of fun with Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy and hope they do something similar again at some point. I also liked the Force Unleashed series and for a bit of fun the old Battlefront games. I don’t have a TV or console, so I couldn’t try out the new ones and I have yet to be convinced that a new game is so good that it warrants a purchase of the aforementioned. Of course I also played some Knights of the Old Republic and the visuals of the Sith are simply awesome. Darth Malak and Darth Nihilus are great. But somehow it seemed too detached from the Star Wars I knew. A bit of The Phantom Menace times a hundred. How often would designs and looks repeat themselves over thousands of years. And if it’s just a kind of similar look, then it might as well be Hunger Games with a lightsaber. I know a lot of people hope for an Old Republic movie or TV series. I’m not one of them. And I also think it’s not as marketable. The gaming target audience is huge but it’s not something that can easily be sold to the general audience. To quote Snoke ‘we shall see’. Of course I would watch and love it, but if I could chose I’d have other priorities, such as boba Fett never taking off his helmet in a movie unless it’s for 10 seconds and they get Temuera Morrison. Because: consistency.

Now for the movies.. There are several generations of Star Wars fans out there. Some say their favourite movie is Attack of the Clones. Some say their favourite character is Ashoka. If that’s what they grew up with that’s understandable. Star Wars is about emotions and association. If you grew up getting a battle droid for X-mas that’s the natural consequence. To me it still feels like a Christian saying that the local priest is better than Jesus. I can’t help it. The original trilogy is holy. Nothing can ever touch it. No matter how good the movie is it will never surpass 40 years worth of memories and experiences associated with the movies. I have seen the OT hundreds of times and they still hold up. When I watch the movies every couple of months I’m usually like ‘I forgot how awesome they are’.

Which brings me to the prequels. Yes I know. blabla, but.. I never had an issue with the prequels. I have always been an apologist, even though there are parts that tested my love. I don’t mind Jar Jar as much as I mind farting space gnus, but the pod racing scene always seemed much too long. And it seems longer every time I watch it. Apart from that I still hold on to the argument that the opulence and use of colours was a genius way to portray the fall of the republic and visualise the change to a bleak and cold empire. Of course the battle droids are no substitute for stormtroopers, but over all I’m surprisingly OK with The Phantom Menace. I would’ve preferred an older version of Anakin, but like I said.. it’s OK. It had Qui Gon Jinn in it. That immediately makes every movie five times better. Now Attack of the Clones is a different story entirely. I remember having high hopes for that one. The promotion back then seemed nice enough and the scene with the imperial march is still one of the most gripping scenes from the prequel trilogy and some of the battle scenes are really good. I’m talking about the clones, not the Jedi just pretend someone shoots at you CGI disaster. But that’s that.. The movie lacks a real opponent and the position is weirdly split between Count Dooku and Jango Fett. It somehow didn’t work for me. They should've kept Darth Maul. There is also something in Star Wars I don’t really like. Every bad guy needs a new and different lightsaber. In the end it make somehow sense for Kylo Ren, but did we need a bent one for Dooku, 4 for General Grievous, a Tonfa style in Force Unleashed, an upside down one for Ashoka, a helicopter lightsaber for the inquisitors. I mean it starts getting ridiculous. What’s wrong with a good old standard lightsaber. Thank you, Rey! (if she gets a saberstaff I’m ok with that). I recently rewatched Revenge of the Sith. I always liked it but for me - after watching The Force Awakens and Rogue One - it just didn’t hold up. It’s not Haydens fault though and the visual storytelling again is on point. The clouds increasing on the horizon to symbolise the fall to the dark side. Impeccable. And while I didn’t like the design the phase 1 clone trooper design, the phase 2 armours looks bad ass. It’s the unnecessary and completely out of place slapstick comedy that’s bothering me. The R2D2 vs. Battledroids scene in the beginning is the stupidest part of all movies. I always have to cringe. The CGI is also off.

The Force Awakens on the other hand.. I’m not an impressionable person. Leaving the cinema I’m not like ‘WOOO THAT WAS AWESOME. BEST MOVIE EVER!!!’. I usually like to let it sink for a while and philosophise about what certain parts meant and such. I have seen it 14 times in the cinema. That should give you an indication whether or not I liked it. A guy told me ‘yeah.. I saw it 2 times, the first time I was like awesome, but the 2nd I didn’t like it at all. I give it 6 months and then it’s the next Phantom Menace’. Well it’s been 1 1/2 years and it’s still far from being the new Phantom Menace. Overall the movie feels just right for me. I think the argument that it’s a remake is plain stupid. Unless you make an entirely different movie and remove all that makes it Star Wars you will always have parallels. And if we stick to the mono myth theme it’s obvious that the new hero will have a similar journey. Yes, but… yes, but.. A weapon inside a planet might be round but it’s not a Death Star. If they’d contracted a new super star destroyer the experts on the internet would’ve said ‘it’s another shape but it’s just another death star. So there is no winning here. What I personally didn’t like was the fact that Han Solo wanted to put Cpt.Phasma in a trash compactor as if he’d be doing his ‘best of’ tour. Remember that, kid? You all like that, right? We were crazy back then. That seemed a bit lets say..pathetic.

At first the rathtars bothered me but I somehow got used to them. Weird ball shaped monsters with tentacles seem to be both retro and Star Wars appropriate. The low budget cosplay look of Kanjiklub bothered me more. They looked more like the uninspired product of a costume designer on a budget for a cheap Nickelodeon series. I always thought it would be awful if Kylo took off his mask, but they way they did it worked perfectly. Most of the ‘plot holes’ people talk about can easily fixed by either watching the movie closely, thinking or being patient. Why do we need everything laid out and explained? I like that The Force Awakens left some questions open. I also think the often discussed scene - that even Mark Hamill himself would’ve loved to do - of him catching the lightsaber at the end would've completely defeated the purpose. Fan sometimes seem like kids that want to eat sweets all day. Don't give them everything they want. They don't know what’s good for them. This plot would've been disastrous and much too tacky. ‘was someone Luke-ing for me?’ Star Wars is not an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

Speaking of what’s good for fans. Rogue One. Holy moly. Can Gareth Edwards please do every Star Wars movie now? (Unrelated: I’m a bit worried about Han Solo) When Star Wars episodic movies are for 12 year olds, then Rogue One is what happens if you look at the Star Wars universe through the eyes of an adult. Rogue One was intense. I’m lost for words. If it wasn’t for the sanctity of the OT Rogue One might as well be my favourite movie. We got introduced to new aspects of the force. Showing once more that the Jedi dogmatic approach that lead to their demise is just one way of interpretation the force, which reminded me of the buddhist saying ‘there are may ferries leading to the other shore’. There are mystics and pragmatists but in the end we’re all one in the force. Chirrut and Baze are two sides of the same coin. The one who loses faith and the other one who trusts the force. It doesn’t matter if they are gay. That’s quite frankly insulting and ignorant. The way I understood their bond was beyond puny worldly understanding. A spiritual bond. Brothers in the force. And I’m so glad they didn’t make a love story out of Jyn and Cassian. Out of the same reason. Not every bond has to be sexual. That’s a shallow assumption. I wouldn't have minded if someone would’ve survived, but that’s the way things go. A bold move and it breaks my heart every time I watch the movie. It puts so much weight on the sacrifice they made for the rebellion. Everything else would've been wrong. No matter how much I would’ve liked them to survive. At the end of the day we all want a happy ending.

Going forward..where do I think will the franchise go?

I’m just worried that at some point they will cast aside the traditional storytelling aspect in favour of a more comic book style popcorn cinema approach. I don’t think we’re there yet and I hope they are aware of what Star Wars is about and don’t try to jump on some train that is selling well at the moment. Kathleen Kennedy and the story group seem to be on top of it and seem to be very aware of that. Also luckily Star Wars is still No.1 but for the unlucky case that Guardians of the Galaxy or Avatar are more successful, if that ever happens, I fear movie executives do what movie executives always do and ruin everything by desperately trying to sell. Be it by doing a reboot with whoever is popular at the time. The next Jennifer Lawrence as young Leia or the next Zach Efron as Han Solo or by just copying the highest grossing movie. Marketing will make sure the general public will like it but what about us smart ass fans?

Predictions for The Last Jedi: Did/will Luke turn to the dark side? Of course not. Luke made his decision in Return of the Jedi. I can only assume that the reason why he became a hermit has something to do with the fact that sometimes doing nothing is the best option. Just like in the educational game September 12th. Everytime you shoot a terrorist, you create more of them in response until the entire game is populated by terrorists. Sometimes you have to cut your losses and not get involved to avoid even worse consequences. History is often repeating itself, so why wouldn’t Luke do the same thing they did to him? Hide a force sensitive relative in a remote place? There are several ways this could pan out, but it has been said repeatedly that Star Wars is about the Skywalker lineage. Kylo will never be redeemed, so it doesn’t really make sense to focus on him. There is only one person left. There seem to be a lot of people thinking she is a Kenobi. Which brings me back to the The Clone Wars. Obi Wan might have had feelings for someone, but Obi Wan abided the Jedi code. There is no way she is a Kenobi. Also from a storytelling point of view. The jump would be too big. The regular audience would be like ‘WHAT!?!’ and it would just be lazy storytelling. Yeah btw Obi Wan totally did it. And you are his granddaughter, because he hid his daughter well. We will also not have the time to explain who your father is, so just bear with us. NEVER GONNA HAPPEN. People seem to have a big problem grasping the Jedi concept of non-attachment which is a 100% Buddhist concept. It’s not about being living in celibacy. Anakin even says it. It’s about attachment, which leads to the fear of loss. Just take spies. They aren’t forbidden to marry. They have to accept that their family can be used against them which makes them vulnerable. Which is exactly the point, both physically and philosophically. So this attachment is what ultimately led to Anakin's downfall. Makes me wonder ‘have you understood NOTHING?’. Obi Wan might be able to see through the problems caused by the Jedi orders institutionalised dogma rules but he surely won’t make the same mistake as Anakin. Rey has to be a Skywalker. Even C3PO theoretically is. Family finds family in Star Wars. She might not even be Lukes daughter. There is a way to squeeze in a ‘Ben started acting strange so we hid his little sister from him’ explanation. He says ‘so it is you’. That can be everything or nothing. And Snoke. He will most likely be a nobody. A wizard of Oz. I expect him to be some slimy poser ex-politician, who is as much of an imposter as Kylo is. Someone once theorised that Kylo might kill him at some point, which would be a nice twist on the Darth Vader / Emperor relationship. A lot can happen in some 30 years and we don’t know half of it, so it will be interesting to see how they fill the gaps.

To return to The Last Jedi - there are rumours that indicate that (SPOILER ALERT) Benicio DelToro won’t be some super duper Baddie, but much rather a sleazy casino owner kind of guy. I’m really looking forward to seeing his performance. He will bring gravitas to whoever his character is. Even if he is just another Dexter Jettster.

At this point I have no clue what the plot will be. I have no clue how Carrie Fishers death will affect the plot. I kinda expected the legacy characters to die one by one, the same way Obi Wan, Yoda and Darth Vader did. Now Carrie Fishers family said that there won’t be a CGI Leia in Episode 9. Lets just say, if she died in The Last Jedi and that was the plan all along there’s no way they’d say ‘all good, we don't need reshoots’. Could all be a diversion. Leias death on screen would definitely give the movie an additional emotional momentum. Just look at what happened with Fast & Furious after Paul Walker died.

#star wars #star wars theories #star wars spoilers #star wars rumors #star wars fan #buddhist #philosophy #the last jedi #the force awakens #rey #snoke #the force #jedi #sith #Darth Vader #the dark side

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