If your pride requests are still open. Could I request Bi and Non-binary Kenshi or Johnny definitely whichever you'd prefer doing! I absolutely love your art by the way. And happy pride month to you. ♡

Why not both >:) (also thank you <3)

Thoughts on Voltron Season 7

SPOILERS, OBVIOUSLY! Things that annoyed/angered/saddened/frustrated me: *Kuron still being treated as though he was nothing more than some evil monster and convenient spare parts for Shiro. I am still nauseated by the whole thing. This poor precious baby boy deserved so much better. *Shiro’s hair -I mean come on, his fringe was pure white before but now it’s grey? What, did the whole process leach colour from the rest of his hair yet restore some to his fringe?! I will just assume it’s meant to be white but they felt this particular shade of white/grey worked best aesthetically with his outfits etc. *Too little Shiro for too many episodes. *Too much Keef. (Sorry, fandom has completely ruined this character for me, he’s not a bad character but I am repulsed by his mere name thanks to the toxicity in this fandom. I wish I could go back to the beginning of watching Voltron when he was just another decent character that I felt neither yay nor nay about, but it is what it is.) *That weird game show -if it was some magical space mage mumbo jumbo thingy that just transported their consciousness, why wasn’t Shiro there? And the whole ‘comedy family’ shtick with the Galra... I mean, it was a bit funny but... mostly weird tbh. The funniest parts were the commercials. *Way too little background/interaction with Shiro and Adam. *Also Adam’s design -like, why do you make an entirely new character that looks a lot like a mix of two other characters who are father and son (Matt and Sam)? You could have done literally anything to his design but you went safe and way too familiar? I mean holy moly did you see Kinkade? Fuck yeah what a gorgeous design, that is exactly what my hopeful heart pictured for Shiro’s boyfriend but nope. Give us generic floppy-hair glasses boy with a generic medium brown palette, it’s so fresh and new and interesting. Not. *Adam FUCKING DYING before Shiro even got back to Earth. You could have at least let the poor boy have a reunion with someone waiting for him on Earth before burying some more gays, but no. He must suffer. *Shiro getting like three seconds to mourn Adam. 

*Speaking of burying your gays... (not to mention a delightful dash of the ‘evil lesbians’ trope): Ezor and Zethrid. Yayy on their relationship, nay on them being presumably killed off (I mean killing 3 out of 4 queer characters while keeping the straight characters safe is not a good way to show how queer friendly your show is. And no the ‘we had to show how dark and dangerous war is’ excuse doesn’t work when the only characters you kill are the queer ones. There were plenty of characters back on Earth we’d have felt just as deeply about -or more even- considering we’ve heard about the other paladins’ families back on Earth but we’d never heard of Adam until now. Just imagine if Veronica had died -that would have been intensely emotional and really had gone to show all that you wanted about the dangers of war -especially as I don’t doubt for a second that Lance would have gotten an entire episode at least to mourn her while Shiro got like three seconds. Because Shiro is apparently not allowed to mourn). *And isn’t it funny how the most alien-looking Galra women are the evil ones, while the ‘good’ ones look more or less like lavender-skinned human women (and are also very pretty, petite and with slender, ‘sexy’ bodies.) Like, seriously... *Not to mention how creepy it is that Keef’s Galra mom and the other ‘good’ Galra woman (Acxa, who for whatever reason the show tried to force some out-of-the-blue yucky heteromance together with Keef) look disturbingly much alike (and they look to be the same age too more or less. So sick and tired of the ‘hot young-looking mom’ trope in media but especially animated shows. And especially when the kids end up banging girls looking to be more or less the same age as their mom). *Shiro not reacting when Ezor and Zethrid went for Pidge -he’s consistently been shown to be very protective and self-sacrificing, yet here he barely bats an eye. I get it was a scene framed to lift Lance, but it felt extremely ooc for Shiro to not at least try to help. *Ezor and Zethrid’s relationship being honestly way more explicitly stated than Shiro and Adam’s (which was the relationship hailed as the big lgbtq+ rep for this season). No, they definitely didn’t need to get back together for Shiro to still be considered lgbtq+ rep -you don’t need a partner to be lgbtq+! But when you wave a specific relationship around as a big banner of glorious lgbtq+ rep to come and then barely even hint at it in the show... well... not so much of a rep then, is it? *Not showing Shiro in that worldwide message of ‘these are our beloved brave heroes from Earth’. Like, this boy was kidnapped by aliens, spent a year being tortured, brainwashed, cloned, dismembered, pretty much violated in every concievable way, then immediately after escaping (with a shitload of PTSD in the baggage) he was sent back out into space and chosen to lead some war against seemingly impossible odds, a war that really wasn’t his war to fight, a war he still fought bravely and selflessly despite his physical and mental issues, a war he died in, but meh I guess he wasn’t worthy of mention. (And I don’t know why Keef wasn’t mentioned either, but maybe being half Galra makes you too much alien to be considered part of the world you were born and grew up in *heavy sarcasm*). *Shiro’s bond with the Black Lion and his role as the Black Paladin being pretty much erased/retconned -it’s like Keef gets to sit his ass comfortably down in the seat Shiro shed blood sweat and tears for and struggled so hard for, easily just gliding along on what Shiro has paved the road for but without acknowledging the huge role Shiro had in it all. Shiro was the one who brought out the wings for Keef in the end of the last season because Keef was unable to do it himself, because Keef had never bonded with her the way Shiro did -Shiro and the Black Lion found and saved each other in so many ways, and the Black Lion loved Shiro so much she saved his ‘essence’ inside herself, yet now we’re supposed to just accept that Shiro is old news and no longer worthy of being considered part of the ‘mighty Paladins of Voltron’. Myeah, did not like the feeling I got of this saturating this entire season. Keef can still be a big hero -or even your new main character- without grinding Shiro down into the dirt on the way. *That arm... it’s so big and clumsy-looking it makes him look weirdly lopsided. The comically large arm works for Sendak, considering his ‘evil sadist who loves crushing people with his alien prosthetic’ shtick, but for Shiro it just looks too big to be practical. If it was intentionally meant to imply that Allura just grabbed a prosthetic modelled after someone bigger than Shiro and remade it, and that’s why it’s so big on Shiro, that’s fine. But it feels impractical for anything other than fighting evil alien generals. *Shiro not getting to fulfil his arc as the abused victim and underdog by overcoming and defeating the evils pushing him down, but instead being forced to take the backset to a character forced into a leadership role for what seems like nothing more than a desperate clinging to nostalgia. It is mindboggling that everything Shiro has worked so incredibly hard for, everything he’s struggled and fought for is being taken from him and he’s supposed to be satisfied with a consolation prize. Yeah, Shiro going full Magical Girl Princess was amazing but he didn’t even get to deliver the final blow in any fight -not even his personal fight with Sendak- because apparently Shiro is not allowed any victories at all. *The whole sense of Shiro being punished for choosing his life’s dream over becoming the obedient house wife of his ex -he had only a short few years left to fulfil his dreams, and yet he’s painted as the bad guy for ‘abandoning’ his boyfriend (who was the one that left Shiro, actually). Yes, Adam had the right to choose to not want to separate for so long -during what was likely the last few years Shiro had enough mobility to do all the fun things couples dream of doing together- he had the right to say ‘I’m sorry but I can’t put my life on hold, and I wasn’t really prepared to go straight to caring for someone with a debilitating disease without a few more years of fun in between, I want to break up’. That still doesn’t make Shiro’s choice to follow his dreams any less valid than Adam’s choice to not wait for him. I bet Adam had an exciting bucket list waiting to start ticking off as a consolation when Shiro was denied the role of pilot for the Kerberos mission -I doubt he’d expected Shiro to actually be allowed to go and that probably seriously stumped him- but it’s incredibly cruel and selfish (and ableist) to expect a person to sacrifice their last few years of being able to fulfil their dreams just so their able-bodied partner can fulfil their small dreams and wishes of things they want to do for the last few of that person’s fully mobile years. And yet everything about Shiro’s arc paints a very very grim and ableist story of ‘you chose your own dreams over bending to your partner’s will, now let us show you what a horrible decision that was by torturing you relentlessly throughout the rest of this series without ever letting up. You will never be allowed happiness again because this is your punishment.’ I agree with other people that the way Shiro’s been treated throughout this series -constantly tormented without ever getting a single break or getting a real chance to fight and overcome his demons- seems way too much like torture porn. *The feeling that Shiro’s Magical Girl Moment was only there to blind us to the fact that him being probably the only one able to transform the Atlas means he’ll be conveniently grounded next season, forced to stay on Earth to ‘protect his home’ while the rest of them get to go off being the ‘amazing Defenders of the Universe’, leaving both Shiro and his legacy behind, unsung. I hope I’m wrong, but I get an overwhelming feeling that Shiro is being pushed into the background because they never intended for him to be the hero of the series but by the time they realised that’s exactly what they’d created with him it was too late to take it back, so now they’re trying their hardest to push him back into some mentor/backseat role in a sneaky enough way that they hope people won’t notice because they’ll be dazzled by the shine of his ‘new role’. ... Things that made me happy/excited/pleased: *The animation level. I mean holy mamacita Shiro is so beautiful he glows in like every single frame. *HUNK. Love this big gentle boy and love that he got to show more of who he is and what he has to give this season. *Seeing the families we’ve heard so much of. Seeing them reunited. Seeing flashbacks to happier times with the families. *Pidge finally getting her entire family back together. *The designs of all the alien/Earth tech. Gorgeous. *The design of some of the new characters <3 *So many new Galra characters with faces and personalities even if we only saw them for a few seconds. *All the ‘Earth preparing for alien invasion’ scenes/episodes. *Finally getting to know more about Iverson and who he is as a person. *Sam and Colleen. *Shiro being the new Princess of the new Castle ship. *Shiro fucking transcending being the Princess and transforming the entire Castle ship Atlas into a new Voltron type battle robot. *The Atlas being this beefy paladin type knight on top but t h i c c femme legs on tippy toes/high heels on the bottom. 10/10 what a beauty. *White Lion Shiro... I mean, I’m certainly not the only one thinking it, right? *Just Shiro. Wow. What a strong, beautiful, good person who cares about everybody else above himself. Someone give this poor traumatised boy hero a fucking vacation with the softest bed surrounded by therapy animals. Perfect cinnamonroll too pure for this world. *Shiro fighting Sendak hand-to-hand on top of a fucking space ship free-falling (read: CRASHING) to Earth instead of trying to escape I mean this boy *Keef fucking anime-slicing Sendak in twaine for daring to try to hurt the person he loves like a brother (bloodless and nice for the young’uns of course, but still). *Hunk carrying Shiro. *@ anyone claiming Lance ‘never gets screentime or development’ -fuck you. Look at this brave, strong boy who started out as a self-centered antagonistic jerk yet has grown into such a good and mature person. I may loathe the Lance I see portrayed in the fandom, but in the show he’s still such a good character. *Coran, Coran, the gorgeous man <3 *The mice and Kosmo the space wolf for MVP *Kaltenecker, most chill character in the entire universe. *Shiro’s prosthetic not being attached -at first I was like ‘noooo’, but then I realised... fuck yeah this is exactly what people in fandom need to stop erasing disabled characters. It is way too common for people in fandoms to claim that a person having any kind of high-tech or magical prosthetic that makes their disability less visible (For example Edward Elric from Fullmetal Alchemist) isn’t actually disabled at all ‘because it’s like they have normal limbs’. Having a prosthetic arm that has a big void between itself and the shoulder attachment makes it impossible to ignore the fact that Shiro is missing a whole arm. (And maybe, just maybe, people will finally stop with the shitty ‘he’s got a full sleeve of tattoos instead of a missing arm in this AU fanfic because erasing disabilities is super cool’ trope.) *The entire Shiro/Atlas transformation scene -ugh so beautiful <3 ... Phew, that got long! (=A=;;) I’ve probably forgotten a lot of things -but it’s been a few days since I watched it so it isn’t as fresh in my mind as I’d have liked, however I don’t have the time to rewatch it right now to refresh my memory so it’ll have to do. These are just my personal thoughts -things I found negative might be things someone else found positive, and things I found positive might be things someone else found negative. This isn’t meant to be a debate or attack -just a way for me to put my thoughts down and remember them for the future. And one last thing -please remember to be kind to each other -and don’t go attacking cast or crew -most of them have no real say in what happens on the show anyway, and harrassing and threatening castmembers to the point where they’re scared to even show up at cons is not the way to make the higher-ups listen to your complaints -however legitimate they might be. Now I guess we’ll just have to brace ourselves for season 8...

David’s Resolution - Day 4

Day 4 (January 4, 2019)

Pitch Black (2000)

“All you people are so scared of me. Most days, I take that as a compliment. But it ain’t me you got to worry about now.”

This one is admittedly a bit of a cheat, as I have actually seen this movie before. But it was a while since I last saw it, and I hadn’t seen all the Riddick movies in their entirety, so might as well put it here. And besides, it’s always interesting to see the humble beginnings of something that became much larger than people initially saw. In fact, in 2004, when the sequel The Chronicles of Riddick came out, this movie was re-released on home video as The Chronicles of Riddick: Pitch Black to remind audiences that this wasn’t the debut of one Richard B. Riddick.

The film itself is a fairly straightforward sci-fi/horror movie with a tried-and-true premise: a spaceship lands on an alien planet, where a dangerous predatory lifeform is out to kill everyone until only a handful of survivors make it out alive. It’s something we’ve seen quite a few times, especially in one of my favorite horror movies, Alien, and even Alien wasn’t unique in that approach: this setup stretches as far back as the 1950s with It! The Terror from Beyond Space (a movie that quite a few feel Alien was a remake of) and Forbidden Planet. So what makes Pitch Black unique, aside from Riddick?

The story isn’t one, although that’s not a bad thing. It’s a stock premise, like I said. A spaceship lands (crash-lands, actually) on a planet, this one barren and with three suns that keep it in constant daylight. It gives us some interesting visuals to look at and that help give the movie a distinct look. A lot of the first part of the movie uses either yellow or blue lighting, which helps create an unfamiliar atmosphere for the viewer. (Funny enough, this isn’t the only film USA Films released in 2000 that featured distinctive color grading; the other one I will get to later.) But it isn’t long before the survivors realize that the planet they’re on is about to have a long eclipse, and after that the film spends the rest of the time in chiaroscuro, which adds to the creepy atmosphere by making us feel like the aliens are out there, stalking them at every step, waiting for the moment to turn one of them into a meal.

And then there’s the characters. We’ll get to Riddick soon, promise, but there’s other people, you know. The survivors of the crash are a motley crew, including Radha Mitchell as Carolyn Fry, the only surviving crew member of the ship, who has some guilt over the casualties from the landing; a Muslim known as Imam, played by Keith David (known hero of this earth, protector of this realm, long may he reign); a settler played by Claudia Black (who sadly does not get a whole lot to do in this film; that’s okay, we still have Farscape and Stargate and Dragon Age), a kid named Jack, who looks up to Riddick and even shaves their head like his and wears goggles like him; an antiques dealer who also has a lot of booze; and Johns, the man who wants to bring Riddick in and who has an unsavory thing or two about him. (Also, for Power Rangers fans, one of Imam’s kids - the first one to die, in a fairly gruesome fashion - would later play the Red Ranger in Power Rangers Mystic Force. I don’t have anything to add to that, I just like pointing this stuff out.)

The character interactions aren’t bad and they do a decent job of setting them up so we feel some sympathy when they die in gruesome fashion. This is a horror movie with alien monsters, so people are gonna die. It isn’t a spoiler to say that only three people survive - Riddick, Imam, and Jack, whose gender is a twist in this movie but not anymore in the sequel - because those are established in The Chronicles of Riddick. My personal rule is that if a sequel follows on what was a twist in its predecessor, it’s not a twist anymore and can’t be treated like a twist anymore. So yeah, Jack’s a girl and everyone but those three die. That and the direct-to-video animated movie Dark Fury follows up directly after this movie. So if anyone starts getting angry that this has been spoiled, yeah.

On the note of characters, let’s talk about the “unrated director’s cut” home video release. I will say that the term is a bit misleading. Calling it an “unrated cut” suggests that this version of the film contains stuff that was cut to satisfy the MPAA and get the film whatever rating it got for its theatrical release (R-rated, in this case), and that said content will contain some combination of violence, gore, sex, and bad language that had to be removed so the MPAA would be happy. It is also called a “director’s cut”, a version of a film that better represents the director’s intended vision of the film. But “unrated”? ...Why? Why does it have to be unrated? The “unrated director’s cut” is about six and a half minutes longer than the theatrical cut, and all of the additional stuff is just character interactions that were cut not for MPAA rating reasons, but for pacing reasons since they slow the pace a little. The most interesting addition involves the character Johns, as it expands a bit on his character and makes him slightly more sympathetic. I say “slightly” cause he’s still an asshole.

And there’s the creatures as well. The creatures are pretty cool-looking. It’s like a mad scientist created a new being by splicing together elements of a hammerhead shark and a bat and a velociraptor, and then decided it needed claws like Baraka from Mortal Kombat. The creatures only go into dark areas as the light literally burns them, so an eclipse happening means that it’s madness out there unless one has light to keep themselves alive, something that gets harder and harder for our survivors as the film progresses. They’re blind so they use echolocation to see, which gives another unique visual by portraying their sight as a weird black-and-white mesh. It’s kinda weird in that “early 2000s special effects” sense, and yet it works.

And then, we have Richard B. Riddick. After all, this movie spawned a franchise centered around the beautiful bald SOB, so let’s talk about him. For myself and I think for many, this is the role that defines Vin Diesel’s career. He’d already had some success with a supporting role in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (fun fact: Spielberg wrote that role specifically for Diesel after seeing Diesel’s performance in his first feature film, Strays, which he also wrote and directed), and then the year before he voiced the titular Iron Giant in Brad Bird’s 1999 animated film, which of course has gone on to become a modern animated classic. (And I will watch that film for the resolution since I’ve only seen part of it.) And a year after this, Vin would star in The Fast and the Furious, which was a big box-office success and spawned a successful franchise that’s still going strong to this day.

Okay, now let’s talk about Riddick. Riddick is honestly the most fleshed-out and interesting character in the film, and it makes sense why Vin, writer/director David Twohy, and the higher-ups at Universal saw potential in telling more stories about the character. He’s described as evil on several occasions, not only by characters like Johns in this film or Aereon in The Chronicles of Riddick, but even the poster for the film has the tagline “Fight evil with evil”. Yet throughout the whole franchise, it’s hard to say that Riddick’s actually evil. He’s more Chaotic Neutral, really. He's more like an animal who does whatever he can to survive, but that doesn’t mean he’s a backstabbing shitheel who’ll betray you in a heartbeat. (True Neutrals, on the other hand...) He seems more amoral if anything; near the end of the movie, he seems intrigued by Fry’s willingness to die for the sake of saving everyone while he was willing to let them die so he could escape, which may begin something like a redemption in that he seems to better understand the value of protecting lives, or at least can understand the motivation of selflessness.

But throughout the franchise, he basically only kills in self-defense, never for pleasure or for the hell of it. Hell, most who say he’s evil are actually worse than him, like Johns, so who knows; he may just be someone with a bad rep. My view of him could be summarized in a modified quote from Deadpool: he’s a bad guy who just happens to fuck up worse guys. But even then, he’s not really that bad. Yes, he’s an escaped convict who’s managed to escape even the most secure triple-max security prisons, and he’s an admitted murderer, but bad? The worst thing he does in the franchise is near the end of this film, where, like I said, he basically abandons everyone so he can save himself. But even then, you could argue that it’s not so much being an asshole as it is that it’s unlikely they’ll all survive. But hey, he does come back to save them, so yaaaaaay.

Also, he has the ability to see in the dark because he got a guy in prison to do an operation on his eyes that give him enhanced night vision, but at the cost of being more sensitive to bright lights, which is why he wears welding goggles all the time. The sensitivity thing gets toned down a bit as the franchise goes on, and they later retcon his acquisition as a supernatural ability.

I do recommend this movie. As it is, it’s a solid sci-fi/horror movie that, even with its kinda wonky early-2000s CGI, has good atmosphere and a very compelling character in Riddick. Plus, hey, Vin Diesel is always a win.

...Actually, anyone else think CinemaWins should do the Riddick movies?

Next time: The closest we’ll probably ever get to a Warhammer 40,000 movie.