#and we all have a bizarre relationship with the source material | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ot3 · 1 year

Note

Ok, now after all that Phoenix dad asks, i can't help but share my own unnecessary opinion. I feel like the rapport between Beanix and Trucy is too good for him to be a shitty parent, but the game strongly implies he has alcohol problem. Like no matter how I squint at the source material Beanix is alcoholic. And it's really hard to imagine him being a great dad if he' s spending their meager funds on "grape juice". ( Although with his life at this period I would really wish that at least he did the parenting gig right)

oh man i have been getting a lot of asks on this subject over the past coupe days and mostly avoided answering them because i just sort of more or less said my piece on the matter and didn't want to keep dragging out the same points but this take. is a really insidious one imo. and i feel like you've unwittingly touched on The Elephant In The Room regarding this entire discussion.

I don't think you really meant any harm by this and i hesitate to ascribe any real-world politics to people based on how they interact with fiction, but it's really difficult to see people talk about addiction in fiction this way and imagine they would have more sympathy for real addicts.

Someone being an addict does not de facto make them a bad parent. Someone being poor does not de facto make them a bad parent. I would also argue that someone being too poor to fully provide for their children doesn't de facto make them a bad parent either, because poverty - especially child poverty - is a structural problem and not an individual one.

But I digress, that's not really relevant, because there's absolutely nothing in ace attorney 4 that suggests that the wright's financial problems are caused by phoenix's drinking! Nor is there anything that suggests his drinking has caused him to in any way mistreat Trucy. Anything we see that could be loosely interpreted as neglectful parenting, such as bringing Trucy to poker games or leaving for long stretches to work on the jurist system, can be linked to their financial situation. And you're immediately correlating between the financial stuff and the addiction. Not illogically, but what you have to remember is that alcoholism is often a symptom of poverty, rather than the other way around.

Addiction is obviously very bad even if its not at the point where it's causing your entire life to fall apart! But phoenix is clearly functional and competent during the events of aa4, so i think to act like struggling with addiction is in and of itself enough to negate all of the good parenting he does is just suuuper shitty.

There's really a lot of bizarre distaste for anything resembling Addiction and Poverty amongst ace attorney fans, I've seen really nasty sentiment from people wrt aa4 that, once you cut through what they're actually saying, boils down to 'implying phoenix could ever be an alcoholic made him a fundamentally less good/less likeable character' and man. i just think that really sucks.

especially considering the fact that shu takumi has been pretty open about the fact that 1. he writes phoenix with a lot of Himself in there and 2. he's had, to say the least, a somewhat involved relationship with alcohol. He talks about drinking through work extensively in a pretty cavalier way. I don't expect everyone to know these details but i think anyone who has ever laughed about how shu takumi wrote most of JFA drunk needs to stop and wonder why they think making phoenix an alcoholic crosses some sort of moral line. Along those lines, I also feel similarly uncomfortable when people try to insist non stop that 'its just grape juice, there's no way it was supposed to be implying anything, it's just a joke.' it just feels super disrespectful to try and ignore the narrative implications here coming from a creator who has struggled with alcohol because you think it somehow taints the wholesomeness of a character he based off of himself.

i would urge you and everyone else who has had similar thoughts to please just sort of take a moment and re-asses the opinions you have on this subject and see if you're not just voicing some pretty harmful kneejerk responses to seeing alcoholism depicted or alluded to in ways you're not really used to. Because this just is not the take in any way, shape, or form.

#ace attorney #didnt want to make it That Deep but this kind of stuff really does grate on me!#i have a lot of addiction in my family! ive lived on and off being pretty poor! this stuff doesn't suck all of the joy out of life!

301 notes · View notes

one-equaltemper · 3 months

Text

what is fanfiction (not according to you)

i think it's absolutely bizarre that there are people who think it's appropriate to tell writers that what they're posting isn't considered fanfiction because it's not up to their personal parameters.

well i'm here to tell you that no one cares about your personal parameters and fanfiction exists outside the bounds of your brain.

tl;dr: fanfiction borrows from a source material, but it doesn't have to borrow everything.

join me in yet another ramble below the cut

so basically if i define fanficiton for you, then that definition exists within the bounds of my own brain and therefore may not exist within the bounds of yours

which is actually my point.

so i think we can all agree, in the most basic terms, that fanfiction borrows from a source material.

that's fairly generic, i think. generic enough to include characters, places, worldbuilding, specific problems or conflicts, etc, without me actually saying it.

what is ooc?

in my personal opinion it's an oddly oxymoronic term used within fanfiction because the only thing that's really in character is the source material, but for some people it seems to be the basis in which they determine whether a fanfiction is good or bad based on their own personal idea of what the character should be like.

sigh. how tiring to denigrate something because it doesn't match your made up 'character' values.

(seriously, go read any post that talks about the specific draco or hermione or whoever that they like to read and if there are 100 responses you'll get 100 different definitions of that character)

what's the point, tali?

okay so my point is that au's are still fanfiction. just because something is set in an au, doesn't mean that the character values that the writer has picked out aren't there, that they haven't borrowed canon issues and characteristics to explore in a different world and setting.

it's still all fanfiction because it's borrowed something from the source material.

so yes. my story about an older draco (yes, i realize in canon they're the same age, but for the purposes of my story i have decided to make him older because it's my story and i can do that while still using his name and physical and emotional characteristics based on what i think!!!) and a younger hermione engaging in a dd/lg relationship in the muggle world, while draco is a doctor and hermione is a student, is fanfiction because...i have borrowed content from a source material.

are they going to defeat voldemort? no, he doesn't exist in my world.

is draco going to have issues with his overbearing parents? yes.

is hermione going to have to grapple with losing control? yes

was there an attempted murder on harry as a baby? no

which leads me to...you don't have to borrow all of the source material. borrowing even just a little bit still counts.

footnotes

i think it's super odd that some fandoms are so open to au's and focus mostly on au's while others, like hp, seem to have an issue with anything not set in the magical wizarding world.

i also would like to say that you are obviously free to disagree with me because such is life.

in conclusion

i will continue to write what i want, how i want to write it, under the parameters that exist in fanfiction borrows from a source material.

#i ramble #ignore me

21 notes · View notes

fanonical · 11 months

Note

Holy shit the terf is claiming Miles and Gwen can't be in a het relationship if Gwen is trans. That's so unbelievably transphobic

🤷‍♀️ i think they’re trying to say that all relationships with trans people in are queer, because trans people are queer? i sorta get where they’re coming from but they’re making sweeping statements about literally thousands if not millions of people who all have different ways of discerning their identities.

also they’re also saying that they want specifically representation for cisgender heterosexual interracial couples so they can see more multigenerational mixed race families, which i respect & share as a desire but… this is a sci-fi animated movie. they can cross to different universes, become lizard monsters, build brain-computer interfacing prosthetic tentacle arms — but a trans girl having biological kids with a cis guy is too far? also they just keep implying that Gwen being trans means she isn’t a real woman and wouldn’t count as representation towards interracial couples… i don’t know, they obviously have some really reactionary ideals they’re trying to fanfiction force into the source material whilst simultaneously saying we are doing that about the very apparent trans storyline that is actually in the film. bizarre

42 notes · View notes

utilitycaster · 1 year

Note

Has your work with the wiki informed how you interact with the fandom? Scrutinizing the source material so closely and all.

Oh definitely, and this is a great question.

I think, without getting too deep into weeds or bitterness, that my attitude towards aggressively non-canonical (or, frankly, anti-canonical) interpretations of ships or characters has shifted both because of my negative experiences with the Fandom wiki and because I effectively have to go over the happenings of each episode two or three times. Additionally, my deep dislike and distrust of conspiracy theories long pre-dates my work on wikis or even involvement with fandom, but now that I spend a decent amount of "fandom time" looking up citations, I have even less patience for it. There are so many wonderful sources beyond just the wiki! We have a transcript search! We have Dani's recaps! We have so many sourcebooks! We have a talkback/commentary show! Please, while I'd love for people to use and add to the wiki, at the very least, if you don't have time to watch or rewatch episodes in full, use these wonderful resources instead of relying on like, someone's personal silly little clip compilations to shape your understanding.

In terms of far more positive things, I think because wiki pages are changing, living documents, going back to them has given me a lot of insight that I might have forgotten. To give an example - just now, in summarizing the party's trip towards Yios, I ran across the fact that Imogen was asked if she wanted to give up her powers - if there were a cure, whether she'd take it - and she responded that while once she felt that way, she no longer does. I think Imogen's relationship with power is fascinating, and I think this puts her in contrast with Liliana in a new and interesting way that I'd love to explore further once we return to more direct conflict. This small moment says so much, but I'd forgotten it in the several months since it aired, and probably wouldn't have accessed again if I were not a wiki editor. I've also been doing a lot of work on editing out plagiarism, or fleshing out largely overlooked details, and it's a delight to get to revisit prior campaigns and see how everything fits together. I get both a very high level view of the world, and also get to zero in on tiny moments, like Veth shooting Caleb in the Vellum Steeple library, and I'm so grateful I get to relive that, and often my meta is informed by what I'm working on and what details I'm immersed in and the connections they spark.

Finally - while I'm obviously super opinionated here, on Tumblr, I think it's a really good and important exercise that I also spend time in a place where I need to consciously prioritize a neutral voice and give attention even to things I dislike. This is an entirely separate post so I won't derail myself but I think part of why I sometimes get extremely bizarre anons/responses is that I'm both someone who talks about CR on the whole, but also am open about my preferences (rather than running a blog that's highly focused on one character/ship nor being a true generalist blog that primarily reblogs art). Anyway, working on the wiki means that, for example, even if I'm really frustrated with an episode or a character or a relationship, I need to spend time and stop and ask myself what is actually happening, outside of my own feelings. I think this is a really good practice to have with fiction! I think you need to be able to do both and compartmentalize and switch between them; to say "what is the author/creator trying to say and how are they saying it and what is literally occurring" and also "how do I, an individual with my own unique perspective, feel about what's happening." Or at the very least, if you can't do this, you can still enjoy yourself, but you will always be preaching to the choir.

#answered #blorbologist #critical role wiki #cr tag #my philosophy is that you should lie down on the floor and let the narrative deep tissue massage you #and i think once you get that you will understand all my positions as a coherent viewpoint even if they're loud and obnoxious at times

34 notes · View notes

philtstone · 6 months

Text

20 Questions for Fic Writers

thank you so much to the lovely @tllgrrl for tagging me! without further ado ...

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

as of this one, 197! i have been on these fanfic streets for roughly ten years, it all tends to accumulate

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

1,056,672 ..... do with that what u will

3. What fandoms do you write for?

yall, this is a prolonged list. i dont think theres been a source material ive written for once that i dont randomly write for again every so often. i have 1-2 big phases per year, usually. just go look at my ao3 dashboard sdlkfjldskf

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

to the surprise of absolutely no one, all five are from the age old skywalker happy trash family au. thanks for being so consistent star wars fandom, ur all real ones <3 but also my writing has improved so much since then that occasionally the hingeless urge to go back and re-write every fic in that verse is real

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

i try my best to! every so often life gets in the way, but especially in the last few years, i really try to engage with comments as much as i can. ive also been lucky enough to write in pretty small fandoms for the last couple years (ironically, given ive been in my second m*rvel era) so replying to comments has been a lot more intimate and friendly anyway

6. What is a fic you've written with the angstiest ending?

i was going to say "i dont know" because for the most part -- and especially my more recent fics -- everything ends up pretty consistently bittersweet. then i remembered vintage phil: "we want to live by each other's happiness", or the b99 captain america au

7. What’s a fic you've written with the happiest ending?

i tend to very consistently write things with shades of happy and sad. that said, some of my favourite purely "happy ending" fics include:

"easy, easy (my man and me)"

"i found a dream"

"hark the bluebells"

"i believe in you and in our hearts"

8. Do you get hate on fics?

eh, not really. i dont generally write chapter fic with controversial enough plot points and the unresolved nature of updating chapters to generate true "hate". i have gotten some really bizarre comments where one has to wonder what was going through the commenter's head when typing it all out, but most of those are not things that stick.

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

not me feeling emotional abt my ao3 tenure .... 15 yr old me would have such a different answer ...

i write often and (i hope) as authentically as possible about lived-in romantic relationships, and as ive gotten older it has felt more and more organic to include scenes in and around sexual intimacy where appropriate. i dont think most people would classify that as "smut", though.

10. Do you write crossovers?

if i am writing an au, it is a true au, with the single and sole exception of the force sensitive claire au, which is, on a technicality, a crossover

it also is, on much less of a technicality, unfinished ...

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

not that i know of and i certainly hope not!

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

not to my memory

13. Have you ever co-written a fic?

the closest ive ever come to this was, actually, writing the b99 cap au with maya Back In The Day. our tumblr messages used to just be draft upon draft of scenes evolving in real time. but never formally. friends are an integral part of the fic writing process tho

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

the world should know i am an anne-gil truther. blueprint if there ever was one

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish, but doubt you ever will?

sadly, probably "happiness, like those palaces in fairy tales"; my beloved small time constance-centered parks-flavoured musketeers au .... my writing style has just changed so much since, and it was such a huge undertaking. i still have half of the unpublished anne/aramis flashback chapter saved in my google docs though.

16. What are your writing strengths.

ive been told im good at prose! and writing from childrens' pov, which i am fond of doing, though in a tragic turn of events i havent done much of it recently

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

as i see it, sometimes i dont know when less is needed for a fic to be more. often, this comes from a lack of clarity on my end re: what the fic is trying to be -- OR when im trying to write about something i dont really know. at the end of the day, though, this problem recurs because fanfic is supposed to be fun, so something being a bit too messy and a bit too long is not a huge deal to me. hopefully its also not a huge deal to my readers!

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic.

u can pry doing this from my cold dead hands. & are also always free to criticize my phrasing and translations, lol, except for that one time i made bucky barnes speak farsi, which is a language i actually know

19. First fandom you wrote for?

star trek aos, baybeeeee

20. Favorite fic you’ve written.

IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION. i love many of my children equally!

here are some all-timers from those fics which i have not mentioned yet:

hopeful./summertime

and there's a keepsake my mother gave me

then she'll be a true love of mine

just to hear the nightbird singin'

my daddy was a prominent frogman

thank u so much for the tag my friend! i had heaps of fun. tagging @firstelevens, @sesamestreep, @sennenrose and @flyinghome-againstthewind as well as anyone else interested!

#my writing #these are too many fandoms to tag lol

8 notes · View notes

animebw · 6 months

Text

Short Reflection: Pluto

Naoki Urasawa is fascinated with the darkness of childhood imagination.

Admittedly, I've only watched two anime based on his work so far- Madhouse's masterclass adaptation of Monster and now this- so I can't say how common a thread it is in his other stories. But even just from those two, his fixation on twisting childhood into something sinister and unsettling is undeniable. Nursery rhymes and half-remembered country folk songs repurposed as grim omens of doom, picture books foreshadowing real world nightmares, the innocence of his child characters and childlike imagery juxtaposed against a creeping darkness that seems born from the pits of hell itself... the mind of a kid is frequently the most terrifying place to be in Urasawa's work. Whether there's any greater meaning to it or if it's just something he things is cool, I don't know. But it certainly makes him the ideal artist for a story like Pluto. Who else but a guy like him could take one of Japan's most iconic mascots of childhood fun and use his world as the basis of a serious minded political/philosophical thriller that seeks to explore the nature of hatred itself?

Now, as someone who only knows Astro Boy by reputation and has never so much as seen a single episode of any show bearing his name, I can't comment on this story's relation to its source material. Luckily, I don't need to; Pluto is fully stand-alone and you don't need to know a scrap of Astro Boy lore to understand or appreciate it. Although I imagine it would make some of the goofier robot designs a little less immersion-breaking. I dunno, there's something inherently funny about seeing Urasawa's grounded, realistic style of character and world design, his thickly textured and non-exaggerated human faces with realistic proportions and naturalistic wear and tear, next to some of these robots looking like they were pulled straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon. It makes me wonder how certain American cartoons would look if given this treatment. Imagine if someone, like, re-imagined The Powerpuff Girls this way, and you had to see these realistic child versions of Blossom et al next to Mojo Jojo or whatever. Oh well, it would probably be better than that CW show they cancelled, at least.

But I'm getting off track. Pluto is a story about a futuristic sci-fi world where robotics have gotten advanced enough for robots and humans to life side-by-side as part of the same civilization. Every year, it seems, robots and humans are growing closer together, to the point where people are genuinely starting to wonder if there's still any meaningful difference between them. But the seeming peace is shattered by a mysterious attacker, an unknown, unseen killer targeting the seven strongest robots in the world and destroying them one by one. One of these robots, a Europol detective named Gesicht with a robot wife of his own, decides to dedicate himself to tracking this killer down. But as his journey takes him all over the world, meeting countless different robots and humans all with their own bit of commentary to offer on the relationship between man and machine, we slowly peel back the sins this world is built on, uncovering a darkness much greater than a single mysterious killer... and a hatred that may change the nature of robotkind as we know it.

It's a heady, thought-provoking affair, and despite my jokes earlier in the review, it's shockingly good at justifying its bizarre premise. The world feels real and lived-in, from its complex alt-history to its eerily familiar present. It feels like a world that would arise from robots growing increasingly close to humans, and it makes all its musings on the distinction between them genuinely compelling. What would anti-robot bigotry look like in such an accepting time? What things would come naturally to humans that might be impossible for robots, and vice-versa? How would the presence of highly advanced AI effect the political history of warfare and diplomacy? And, most unnervingly, what new atrocities could result from a world this advanced? It's a show that's deeply interested in what ultimately makes us human, and what it would take for an inhuman machine to be considered human as well. But it's also interested in what is already inhuman about us, and if there's anything we, in turn, can learn about our own humanity from a "species" still living just outside it. And while there's plenty of action throughout its run, it's not afraid to take its time on conversations and machinations to really let those ideas settle.

Of course, it's been many years since the manga this was based on was published, and those kinds of "Can a robot learn to feel?" questions have been pretty beaten to death in other media that's come out since then. These days, a story can come off as pretty corny trying to tackle such topis. And truth be told, Pluto can't help but make you roll your eyes with its attempt to explore these ideas a lot of the time. Some of that's due to the oversaturation I just mentioned, but some of that's down to Pluto itself being a very corny show, in ways I don't think it's really aware of. It tends to deliver its story in the most on-the-nose, telegraphed way imaginable.This cranky old musician doesn't think robots can understand art but watch as he learns how to feel again! This robot just wants to paint pictures of flowers but his inner nature as a brutal rage machine is dragging him down! People make promises to their family to see them again right before they're brutally killed! You can see every emotional beat coming miles away but it still expects you to be surprised when it finally arrives there. And considering that the tension of uncertainty is one of the most important parts of any good thriller, it kinda makes it hard to get invested at points.

Sadly, that isn't the only problem holding Pluto back from greatness. Aside from the corny delivery, a lot of plot points feel pretty contrived and stupid, the hand of the author shoving the pieces across the game board with little regard to making sure it feels natural. I also don't think structure this show as eight hour-long Netflix specials was good for the pacing; it means every episode meanders over countless subplots that don't always fit together smoothly and melt into a sludge of Things Happening with little connective tissue to justify putting them together. You can practically see the points where there would be episode breaks if they were a normal 24-minute length, but then they just keep going into what feels like an entirely new episode with no breathing room. So it ends up feeling like a 24 episode show Frankensteined together into a series of bloated triple-length episode booster packs, rather than a story carefully curated to take advantage of its extended episode runtime.

And yet, for all its faults, I found myself getting drawn back in over and over again. Say what you will about Urasawa, the man knows how to keep your eyes glued to the screen. And for all the shows and movies I've seen exploring what it takes for a robot to be human, Pluto's take is still unique and fascinating enough to be worth the watch. It's nowhere near the simple, offensive allegories of, say, Detroit Become Human, nor is it so intellectual that it robs the story of its humanity. It's a genuine attempt to contend with humanity in its entirety, light and darkness alike, and what we may need to sacrifice- or what we might gain- by bringing artificial intelligence over the threshold to join us. It also helps that it looks fantastic; aside from a few moments that just plain look ugly (Atom's first fight with the mysterious killer made my eyes hurt, I swear), the thick lines and fluid animation bring this world to life in stunning fashion. Even outside the impressive action scenes, Pluto is a show worth looking at. Sometimes, that sweet Netflix money hits just right.

Is Pluto a great anime? I'd argue no; it's got too many basic issues holding it back. In my opinion, Monster is a superior Urasawa offering, and I didn't even particularly love that show either. But masterpiece or no, Pluto is a work of remarkable ambition, and it demands your attention regardless of its faults. It's a thoughtful, potent, sometimes frustrating, often eye-rolling, but always compelling work of sci-fi reimagining, proof that even something as simple as a cartoon robot with rockets on its feet can be fertile ground for so much more. And I give Pluto a score of:

6.5/10

And now we wait to see if Netflix struck gold again with its upcoming Scott Pilgrim adaptation. See you next time!

#anime #tabw #the anime binge watcher #pluto anime #pluto #naoki urasawa #fall 2023 anime #fall 2023 sr

12 notes · View notes

theimpossiblescheme · 8 months

Note

👀🔥🌙📌

What’s your LEAST favorite song? Why?

"Growltiger's Last Stand"--we all know why. Fuck you, T.S. Eliot, and fuck you, ALW, for not having the good sense to leave it out.

Share one (1) hot take/opinion about the show/fandom/etc.

No more London-style replica designs--society has progressed beyond the need for London-style replica designs. More Broadway replicas or, better yet, Hamburg replicas, you absolute cowards.

Do you think Cats has a theme/message? If so, what is it?

I do think it has one, albeit not one that I think its creators were aiming for. The original poems have a distinct element of British classism to them, i.e. "these cats' jobs/roles in the household constitute their entire lives, and there is nothing else notable about them" (yes, that is partially me projecting based on what I know about T.S. Eliot as a person, but I'm not wrong, am I?), which you still do get some of in the musical. But by nature of almost all of the cats being onstage the entire show, we do get to see that these cats have more to their lives and relationships than just their human-designated jobs. And for all the "Hal, it's about cats" of it, there is quite a lot in the show about the importance of community and acceptance and cherishing our lives and loved ones while we still have them and how growing old is something that happens to all of us with the only difference being how we handle it and how others treat us. I wouldn't call it a message so much as a theme, but I'd say if there is a central one, it's (to paraphrase a certain poem) "sing, dance, and be merry for tomorrow we die."

What was Cats 2019’s biggest mistake, in your opinion? (OTHER than 'bad cgi’) If you don’t think it made any notable mistakes, what’s your favorite thing about it?

I think so many of its flaws can be laid at the feet of Tom Hooper as the director. The dude clearly does not know how to handle a show like Cats (he barely knew how to handle Les Miserables, and that's me being generous), and I'm still baffled that he wanted to inject more realism into it, like... my guy, it's about singing and dancing cats. Realism has left the building. Not only that, but the movie feels like it has a certain amount of contempt for its source material, like it's having a laugh alongside everyone who thinks Cats is weird and bad, which would have made for a mean-spirited and bizarre-in-a-bad-way watch even with a more competent director. I don't hate the Cats movie--I'm not overly fond of it, given all those reasons, but I think all the hyperbolic hate for it got really tiring really fast. If anything, I feel protective of it--if you're gonna criticize the movie, criticize it on its own merits, and don't drag Cats as a whole down with it.

#cats the musical #asked and answered #stpaulofsuburbia

6 notes · View notes

starblaster · 1 year

Note

Hello! I’m not too caught up on murderbot, a series I haven’t gotten into yet.

Could I have some context on the book compared to the fanbase? Thank you, I love your posts :]

all you really need to know is that there are pockets/circles of people in the fandom who have terminal fandom brainrot which causes them to justify the erasure of character traits, particularly in murderbot and perihelion, for the sake of writing fanfiction and creating other highly out-of-character fan content.

full disclosure, i myself am an autistic survivor of sexual, physical, and emotional trauma. so, yes, this is highly personal and i take it very personally.

and i also want to note that murderbot, in-text, is never explicitly stated to be the labels "asexual" or "aromantic" or "aplatonic" (nor "agender" either, and you could make the case that murderbot's identity is undeclared (1) (2) — another identity that receives hardly any representation, fiction or otherwise) but there is a lot of textual evidence that murderbot is viscerally sex and romance repulsed, as well as touch-averse and averse to most platonic affection, including the words like "relationship" and "friend" or "friendship", using the term "friend" incredibly sparingly, like i do as a post-trauma aplatonic person. we know these things as facts, presented in the text. so it is especially bizarre that people would insist that, for example, "actually since murderbot is asexual i as an arospec asexual get to decide that murderbot is actually sex-favorable and romance-favorable and i'm going to interpret its touch-aversion as a flaw and i'm going to write a fic where gurathin (of all people) fixes that." as if that isn't horrifying, and honestly indicative of a person's lack of understanding of other peoples' boundaries.

being sex-repulsed is not a flaw that needs to be fixed. being romance-repulsed is not a flaw that needs to be fixed. being touch-averse is not a flaw that needs to be fixed. being aplatonic is not a flaw that needs to be fixed. the murderbot diaries books have never implied that these things are 'flaws' in murderbot that 'need to be fixed' and, yet, time and time again you'll see fanfiction penned by murderbot fans in which they explicitly frame it this way, and they justify doing so by saying (among other things) that they are 'projecting' onto murderbot, that they themselves are aroace and they're fine with romance so they'll 'let murderbot have romantic interactions' with another character despite how utterly distressed it would be, and how much of a literal assault that would be to canon murderbot.

and gee, it's almost like murderbot shares a lot of traits with trauma survivors (you know, because it is one), like how survivors of sexual assault can be sex-repulsed and romance-repulsed... like, wow, it's almost as if its preferences are not simply because it is aroace or simply because it's autism-coded but because it is a fucking trauma survivor! like it's all of these things! picking and choosing which of these things to 'read' for ignores whole chunks of murderbot's character. remember what it told us in all systems red? "It’s wrong to think of a construct as half bot, half human. It makes it sound like the halves are discrete, like the bot half should want to obey orders and do its job and the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of here. As opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole confused entity"?

you cannot just say "fuck you" to canon all the time no matter what. it's an irresponsible way to examine a piece of media. the way this kind of attitude is fostered in fandom spaces is disturbing to me, primarily because it is downright disrespectful to the source material and what it represents.

i am issuing a content warning for commentary regarding sexual assault below the cut, it is pertinent to my comment above about murderbot and canon and sexual assault survival, but also contains the rest of my answer to this ask:

it would not be a stretch to think it might be possible that murderbot itself has endured sexual harassment or assault from humans. its internal commentary about sexbots, the purpose of sexbots/comfortunits, and talking about their functions in opposition to itself, combined with other comments about being asked to do things that do not meet its designation as a secunit (such as tidying/cleaning up after humans).

i will accept that this is conjecture and based on nothing entirely concrete, but i am interpreting this as a possibility from my own experiences as a sexual assault survivor (and speaking from the perspective of a sex worker who has encountered and been on the receiving end of this specific type of anger and frustration murderbot has for sexbots early on); the way that it comments aggressively about things related to sex and comfortunits imply how adamant it is for people to understand that it is not a comfortunit, it is not a sexbot, it is repulsed and triggered by sex, it is repulsed and triggered by romance. much like other references to its traumas, it does the survivor-typical thing and avoids mentioning names, avoids topics, avoids its triggers as much as it can, and insists upon its preferences repeatedly. it's not hiding these facts about itself away.

so when people overlook this, that fandom behavior comes off as negligent. it tells me that people have not been reading the source material very closely at all. it tells me that people are only willing to relate to murderbot insofar as they themselves can personally know what it has experienced.

except not everything you fucking read has to be about you. "relatability" does not a good protagonist make. unfortunately, that's just about all that people with fandom brainrot give a shit about. unless, god forbid, a trauma survivor reading these books also shares murderbot's strong repulsions to sex and romance and feels defensive. in which case the fandom-brain idiots go "well we all interpret murderbot in our own special ways".

it stops being interpretation when you're just erasing the character. i just wish people would accept that.

#murderbot tag #suit.txt

16 notes · View notes

goratrix-betrayed · 10 months

Note

I found your panel transcript about living as a fictive interesting especially because of how much it absolutely differed from my experience. Kinda wanted to ask about your relationship to your source material, it sounds like you might be a lot more interested in it than i am- I spent a lot of time absolutely resenting my source material (especially because it was/is wildly popular and a Large amount of fictives and fictionkind formed) I've made peace with that but still find it so weird and offputting to engage with the source material or other fictives from it (not that it's "no doubles" but more like it feels bizarre to see someone who i share a common origin with and yet we are almost nothing alike). It seems like you've found peace with it though and you've kept your name and relationship to the source. I ended up changing my name and cutting my hair (internally, i guess. bald ass body) and walked off into the sunset. I'm still a fictive, I know where my identity comes from, im still not a human being and yet the path just. branched off dramatically.

I must admit, I've heard of fictives who have separated wholly or partially from their source material, but I haven't managed to share many experiences, so I am glad to have received this ask. Diverse experiences are the bread and butter of this community, and it's always interesting to see someone so different from yourself.

Ha, yes, I would say that I have an interesting, but fairly close, relationship with my source material. See, I derive from Vampire: the Masquerade, a tabletop role-playing game--and my specific source is the home game that my system runs, which Tanix started years before my entry into the system. So in that way, I have some measure of control over my exact canon, and very little I protest to outside of the existence of exotrauma.

However, there is also a fully canon version of myself out there, following the notes and writings laid out by the company that made the tabletop game exactly, and I do have some significant issues with that, to the point of rage in a few instances. I have an old prompt response that I wrote back in October of 2021 detailing my relationship to canon at that time, as well as the differences between my source and canon. Not all of it is accurate at this point, and my feelings have evolved significantly in several areas, but it's a good starting point if you are curious to read it. (I am also a significantly less angry and abrasive person now; good grief I was working through some things when I wrote that.) Additionally, you can find the rest of my writings on my system's personal website if you want to peruse through them. Perhaps there is something of interest there.

I can't imagine having so many sourcemates and/or doubles to the point of being offput by them. It's a perfectly reasonable response, of course, but our experiences are so different in that regard. My only sourcemates that I know of are those in my system and the systems that play in the same game as us--meaning we all derive so perfectly from the same source that we are the versions of the "characters" we knew with few, if any, differences or discrepancies.

I hope my response is satisfying or at least interesting. Feel free to reach out again if you want to know anything else, on or off anon.

#the tower inbox #anonymous

2 notes · View notes

prisonerposting · 1 year

Text

look. look. i normally like. ok overwhelmingly yes i share the belief that fiction and reality are delicately intertwined and we act as conduits for shit we pick up from fictional sources and i believe that too few people have enough control over the way that affects them that it's probably better to minimize or eliminate it where possible. However. i s2g if you send me some shit about how an absolutely literally completely impossible age gap between a non-human sentient immortal youth and a human youth is wrongbad i will start fucking screaming and tearing my hair out 100%

like for one we have definitely passed the point where anyone needs to consider the implications of this. when a young kid goes "wow i wish i had a thousand year-old hot dogboy bf" i don't worry about the effects that will have on their life except on a Furries Are Out There level. they'll both grow out of it and realize the absolute nature of the limitations of human lifespan. i don't think anything dangerous has been normalized for them. i could make a genuine argument that witnessing discourse about that would have more negative effects than the media itself because when people talk about these things they do so by comparing it to real world issues that do materially exist. i am vastly more worried about the effect this exact post could have on any given unwitting youth than the source material.

the other thing which is more of a personal gripe is that if you apply real world logic about breadth of life experiences and common ground to fiction in which one participant is not ever going to die naturally, they simply cannot vibe with humans at all end of sentence end of thought. nobody fucking talks about this and it drives me crazy. if you are fully committed to the broader ideology of not presenting a power imbalance positively this is the logical endpoint. this tends to be the problem i have with these ships

anyway sorry that's my "don't attempt to engage with me about the bizarre relationship in the kiddie books just because i posted about it" post. if a teen character who looks and acts like a teen happens to have many hundreds of years of existence and tending souls under their belt idfc especially if the maximum investment i have in the ship itself is "it exists" and "oh lmao baby polycule for babies"

#for the record if somebody who looked and acted my age appeared before me and was very charming but had a few millenia on me #i'd be like nah man that's cool but i cannot relate to you and also you are probably a biohazard

2 notes · View notes

stewblog · 1 year

Text

The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)

If you’re not a little kid, how much you enjoy The Super Mario Bros. Movie will likely be in direct proportion to how much you love Nintendo’s marquee characters.

I’ve been a fan of Mario, Luigi and crew since I first laid eyes on a Nintendo Entertainment System back in 1987. As I grew up, Shigeru Miyamoto was my Walt Disney: A creative visionary capable of conjuring delightful characters and worlds that sparked my own imagination. That love has never faded.

There have been other attempts to translate Super Mario Bros. into forms beyond its 8-bit origin, but those efforts were either half-baked (The Super Mario Bros. Super Show) or too bizarre for their own good (the 1993 live-action movie.) This is the first time that Mario has made the leap beyond a video game into something that could unequivocally be described as “good.” No small feat, given that at its core Super Mario Bros. as a game concept is little more than “man jumps over/onto things.”

So how do you spin “man jumps, saves princess” into a tale worth 90 minutes of an audience’s time? You lean heavily into the iconic imagery of the source material and emphasize the familial nature of the title characters.

Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) are the eponymous Super Mario Bros. (though it never specifies if their last name is also Mario), a Brooklyn-based duo desperate to make their mark as newly minted self-employed plumbers. When their first paid gig is a disaster-and-a-half, the brothers attempt to save face by helping solve a plumbing crisis that erupts from below their NYC burrough. But before they can wrench victory from the jaws of defeat, they find themselves sucked into a pipe transporting them to a magical land. With Luigi now captured and the fiendish Bowser (Jack Black) intent on laying waste to the rest of the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario teams up with the headstrong Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) to find a way to rescue his brother and help save the day.

The movie wastes no time in setting things into motion. Directors Michael Horvath, Aaron Jelenic and Pierre Leduc fully grasp that you’re at a Mario movie to see Mario do and be surrounded by the things gamers have spent decades seeing in the games, and they cut right to the chase. And if there’s a lingering, substantive complaint I have with the Super Mario Bros. Movie, it’s that never stops moving at a breakneck pace. With the world and characters such direct translation of their game counterparts, it can be more than a bit overwhelming seeing this whirlwind of colorful chaos whiz by you with nary a spare moment to truly soak it all in, much less spend time truly getting to know any of the characters. Though that’s also a testament to the chemistry that Pratt and Day share and how relatively well the movie immediately establishes the relationship between Mario and Luigi that it really feels like a bummer that they don’t share more time together until the big finale.

Speaking of Pratt and Day, the entire voice cast has to be commended for their work here. The Internet has been awash with cringing and complaints about Pratt’s vocal work since even before we heard a peep from him in a trailer, but he ends up fitting quite nicely with how the character is written in the movie. He’s doing a slight approximation of a Brooklyn accent, but it works. We’ve typically only heard Mario’s video game avatar shout and whoop or otherwise speak in cartoonishly over-the-top catchphrases, a style that would in no way serve a 90 minute movie with conversations and expositions and Pratt makes it work.

The real stars, though, are Black and Taylor-Joy as Bowser and Peach. Jack Black is perhaps the most “no brainer” casting bit of the whole lot, and he delivers exactly the sort of performance you’d want and expect. Taylor-Joy, however, is the movie’s anchor. No longer relegated to merely being a damsel in distress, Peach is more than capable of taking care of herself (she mostly lets Mario come along to try and rescue Luigi) and Anya Taylor-Joy finds the perfect balance of “girlboss” energy and sunny disposition to present what will likely be to a new generation of kids what Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia was to me growing up.

The result is a movie that sounds great (composer Brian Tyler’s renditions of classic tunes from across the game series are superb), looks great and moves like a rocket. It’s unquestionably the best movie that Illumination has ever made. But it’s a cotton candy movie, as colorful and sweet as it is thin. And that’s fine. It’s a kids movie and a better one at that than almost anything not made by Pixar these days.

But for a longtime fan such as myself? As someone who learned to draw because he loved Mario and spent countless hours in the backyard and on the playground pretending to be Mario, seeing Miyamoto’s creations brought to such vibrant, lovingly rendered life was a joy enough in and of itself to be satisfied.

#mario #mario bros.#shigeru miyamoto #luigi #princess peach #bowser #chris pratt #charlie day #jack black #anya taylor joy #mario movie #nintendo

6 notes · View notes

silenthillmutual · 2 years

Note

What's the fic 👀

ugh. i'm not going to namedrop the fic on anon. but i can tell you some gripes i had with it that lead to me not liking it:

the characters mention the central twist of the game in conversation, which i think is a fascinating angle to take a fic in. unfortunately they just bring it up the once and it is literally never addressed again despite this fic including character death as a major aspect of it. and i would think that knowing that none of this is real and you're dolls in a sandbox would change how you view things like death.

the characters have anal sex without lube. okay, not all that strange for a fanfic, except that immediately after the sex scene one of them mentions having lube with them. so what was the fucking point of them having sex without lube? either don't bring up the lube or edit your sex scene so they use it. that's just fucking asinine.

not sure if this kickstarted the herb bride!daniil thing or not, but considering its age it probably contributed to its popularity and there are, you know, issues with taking a sacred indigenous role and plopping it onto the (racist) white dude love interest. not to mention that's not how the role of herb bride works in canon and several people just outright get this wrong in their fics.

speaking of things breaking canon: it breaks the extremely well-established and explicitly stated canon that the polyhedron does not work on adults. which, even if i'd liked the fic, would have completely ruined it for me. i don't expect everyone to have every detail of the game memorized and there are going to be times when people forget bits and pieces of canon or ignore them because they don't like them, but the happy ending hinged on something that is, like, central to daniil's route.

there's a recap chapter.

i didn't think the characterization was all that good. it was another one of those fics where artemy just seems to kind of exist to be daniil's love interest, despite the story predominantly being (from what i can remember, and granted it has been about a year since i read it) from his perspective. this is a problem with a lot of fic, people are just sort of fascinated with daniil and seem to decide to use artemy as a lens through which to view him. but i've read fic more recently which is a, much more up front about doing this and b, still gives artemy his own characterization through which he interacts with daniil (and others). but there's a point in this fic where artemy is getting ready to destroy the entire town just to keep daniil alive. which is just such a disservice to his character, imo, especially if you're not even going to bring up the fact that artemy's ending was about saving the town. and i didn't really feel a connection or relationship between the two that the author clearly wanted us to feel.

there's also a weird thing toward the end of the fic where artemy hatemarries a character for no apparent reason and has a kid with her and he hates this kid but also this kid reminds him of daniil? it's just. bizarre.

my problem overall with this fic isn't necessarily that it's not good. i wasn't nearly as impressed with it as everyone else seems to be. some of the prose here and there was nice, but overall it was just kind of mediocre. my problem is that people treat this fic like the notre dame of the fanbase, giving it a level of reverence it doesn't deserve. and then this adoration of this fic bleeds into how people treat both source material and fanon. which is why i am just begging people to read better fanfic. like we have obt and alaiw and more recently this fic are all much better than what i just described. like i'm not going to say i 100% agree with everything every author of every fic i rec writes, but they're just. much more enjoyable imo.

anyway rant over lol. this message will self-destruct in the morning<3

#harker.txt

4 notes · View notes

nerdwriting · 3 years

Text

The Creative Directors Behind Fate: The Winx Saga Must Not Be K-Pop Fans

Also, they have a pretty wrong idea of the role fashion should play in a show.

There are a few words that will stand out across most reviews of Netflix's Fate: The Winx Saga - drab, boring, flop, flat, unimaginative. Critics and audiences consensus is that the show is not only a mediocre-at-best story, but also an atrocious (and ultimately confusing) choice of adaptation of the color pop and fairy magic cartoon it’s based on, 2004 italian cartoon Winx Club.

Fate has plenty of it's own issues - white washing and erasing characters, cringey dialogue, outdated melodrama, etc. But where it truly, unequivocally fails is as an adaptation. Fate misses everything that was magical and lovable about the original series, in all levels, from bizarre writing choices, - such as never actually developing any sense of friendship between the characters, who are based on a cartoon about…..a group…….of friends -, but it's especially and immediately felt in the art direction and costume design.

Winx Club is set on a fantastical world, Magix, where each of our main characters hail from a different planet, à la Sailor Moon. Alfea, the fairy school they attend, is the most common background: a pastel colored, futuristic high tech-meets-fantasy, art nouveau inspired castle. Alfea sets the tone for the whole visual of the cartoon: bright, colorful, futuristic meets vintage, leaning into the technological positivism of the Y2K style, uniting it with magic, DnD worthy monsters and, of course, fairy wings. Often featured are also the Red Fountain school, where the Specialists train, and especially Cloud Tower, the goth and gothic inspired witch school Alfea has an OxBridge rivalry with (How cool would that be in a live action? I guess we’ll never know…).

On Fate, Alfea is the only school we ever see, and it’s another beige boarding school in not-Britain, somehow set in a magical world where everyone has the exact same technology and even social media that we have on Earth in 2021, no transformations and, most egregiously, no fairy wings.

This lack of visual creativity is pervasive throughout the whole show, and its most heartbreaking iteration is in the characters' wardrobe. The styling has the barest bones of a color scheme, - such as 'Bloom has to only dress in red since fire, duh',- the clothes are ill fitting, bland, dark and very dated. These are supposed to be teenagers who enjoy fashion, and yet they look like varying types of soccer moms from 2010.

The series seems to operate on an old and tired vision that women and girls can’t have depth and have adventures and fight monsters while also caring about fashion, a vision that the original show played a big, big role in challenging in the early 2000's. Fashion and costume design sets as much of the tone of a visual medium as the script does; through clothes we can gauge characters’ backgrounds, passions, and personality.

Winx Club has some of the best examples of this in the cartoon sphere - Bloom’s comfortable and bright style, Stella’s glitzy and bold, Musa’s edgy and cool, Aisha’s sporty and fun, Techna’s neon and tech gear inspired, Flora’s earthy and romantic, they all work as extensions of each character and serve a narrative purpose. And that’s not even mentioning how insulting it feels that in their quest to make Winx “edgier, darker” and fit for an older audience, the creators of Fate somehow decided that was in opposition to caring about style and fashion. Most “girly” shows, including the Winx Club are just as much adventure action shows as the ones geared towards boys, and it’s emphasis in fashion, friendship and color does not detract from that. The original run of the cartoon deals with war, violence, grief, abusive relationships and even genocide; leaning into those plotlines would not require Fate to erase any integral parts of what made Winx so beloved, and the fact that they did shows that the Netflix team completely missed the point of fashion in the original show, and really, the point of fashion and costume design in the world building of any show.

That, however, is not a mistake K-Pop makes very often; (This might seem like a bit of wild swerve in topic, but stay with me here). Unlike it's western counterpart, the Korean pop scene never lost the emphasis on music videos and how the visual medium can complete and potentialize music and performance; the K-Pop culture is very album and concept oriented in a way that has been all but lost in many other pop circuits, and the music video, styling and set design of a ‘comeback era’ is a key point of excitement among fans.

As such, music videos that follow storylines, connected universes, boundary pushing concepts and visual effects are the norm, rather than the exception, and a list could be made of works that are beautiful examples of what a live action Winx adaptation could look like. In fact, and very smoothly, here is a small list of exactly that!

A Small List of K-Pop Music Videos That Are Better Winx Club Live Actions Than Fate: The Winx Saga

3. Red Velvet - Psycho

If it was a darker and more somber look that Fate wanted, there was a way to make it actually appealing. While it still feels a liiitle too grown up and elegant for Winx, (maybe this author is biased, as a full proponent for the Y2K fun) Psycho makes a very compelling argument for a witchy, mysterious, fairy tale-esque show that could look scrumptious and definitely not boring, or even a gorgeous example of what the witches in Cloud Tower could look like. Black and white, dark green, pastel blue and pops of jewel tones make Psycho's color palette. To add interest to the understated colors, the styling is heavy on textures; We see plenty of stonework, intricate embroidery, tassels, lace on lace on lace, feathers, bows, opera gloves and lots of glitter. All of that is offset by bold, dark makeup, leather accents and eerie cinematography. Needle & Thread, Marchesa Notte and Self Portrait lend their hyper feminine and intricately detailed tulle gowns, juxtaposed with the creepiness of the lyrics and the dark backgrounds; their deep berry and green fairy tale looks are built with pieces from Zara to Nina Ricci to Dolce & Gabbana to Alexander McQueen.

Red Velvet’s more edgy styling for 2018's Bad Boy would also not feel out of place on the Trix.

2. IZ*ONE - Fiesta

IZ*ONE kicked off 2020 with sweet and fun Fiesta. The MV features rooms with mismatched décor that go from retro to space opera, rocky faux landscapes that feel other worldly, and visual effects that would look perfect on the back of a transformation sequence. Mirroring the set design, the girls wear various outfits by sustainable up and coming brand Chopova Lowena. Their signature skirts made with discarded and repurposed fabrics give a cool and interesting twist on a schoolgirl look that would look very sweet for a band of school fairies that occasionally go off to save the world. Also, wouldn't those bedazzled headphones look great on Musa's fairy outfit?

1. Aespa - Black Mamba and Next Level

Aespa is what fans call a monster rookie. With only three music videos under their belt, they still have some of the most visually interesting work in the industry right now. Their concept is very tied in with high tech, featuring even AI avatars of each member, packaged in a glitzy, fantastical and futuristic aesthetic, candy pop meets cyberpunk. I think I’ve exhausted ways to say that is exactly what a perfect Winx adaptation should feature.

Their debut smash hit, 2020’s Black Mamba is truly a perfect moodboard for live action Winx. Wearing a sequined and colorful mix and match of Dollskill, Gucci, Didu and Balenciaga to a backdrop that features some alien fairy forest realness, a pyschedelic fever dream, rooms straight out of a Y2K catalog or donning lime green and black techwear inside a metro fighting the "black mamba", Aespa look through and through the part of fashion loving fairies who save the world together, while looking fierce, stylish and, most importantly, interesting.

The styling and the sets jump seamlessly from more casual colorful fits with blouses, shirts and baggy pants to barren, darkly lit backgrounds and fringe-and-glitter heavy pieces necessary to fight giant snakes, in a way so fitting to transformation outfits for magical girls we could cry.

In their third MV, 2021's Next Level, the cyber in their concept is taken up a notch (get it. because Next Level-), set to a futuristic urbanscape intersped with a planet made of crystals and the ocasional alien fauna popping up again. We get treated to Monse, The 2nd Skin Co., Johanna Ortiz and The Attico styled to fairy princess standards, sporty sky racers and a white and sequined group styling that is top ten fairy busy saving the world uniform material, or maybe even a specialist worthy getup.

This particular look from Ningning is so Techna that it almost feels as if it's mocking Netflix.

And doesn’t this Karina trapped inside the "black mamba" in Alexander McQueen feel like a perfect Dark Bloom moment?

These are only a few examples of interesting and creative designs that are in line with what a live action Winx Club should have given us. There are so many more I could list, even among other TV Shows, like Sex Education and even polemic dark Euphoria, that know how to have fun with style and design without losing the depth of their stories. In the end, it's hard to justify why Fate creators even wanted to make an adaptation that didn't even try to capture the heart of its source material, and all we can do is watch one more "Restyling Fate: The Winx Saga" video on Youtube whilst mildly dreading season 2.

#winx #winx club #fate the winx saga #fate: the winx saga #tv #tv/movies #cartoons #k-pop #kpop #red velvet #aespa #iz*one #fashion #costume design #art direction

186 notes · View notes

nanso · 2 years

Note

I am a bit underwhelmed...

When s1 came out, people couldn't stop raving about how the changes from the book made the show better

Now for s2, people can't stop complaining about how they could have made so many things better than book

I know TVWLM is a superior book, but they had so much source material and they left out the best parts! I still enjoyed s2 because of Kate and Anthony and their chemistry! And the Violet and Anthony scenes were so heart warming and satisfying especially after their conflict in s1. But other than that, I wasn't very impressed and will simply rewatch Kathony scenes only.

I will say, on my first watch of S2 as a whole, I also was a bit underwhelmed but that had nothing to do with Kate/Anthony or Simone Ashley and Jonathan Bailey's performances (tbh, lesser actors would have doomed this season given the writing). The pacing and editing just were too all over the place, as was the writing. And the tone is just super uneven - someone wanted Pride and Prejudice and someone else wanted The Age of Innocence. It was a bit jarring and I say that as a supreme lover of ANGST.

I hadn't read TDAI before watching S1 and when I read it after, I definitely saw how the show version of Daphne/Simon was better - but that had more to do with the portrayals by PD and RJP. The dynamics of that fictional relationship are not something I can ever really be into, however - book or show.

Re: S2 and the changes - to me, the changes here were WAY more drastic than S1 and TDAI. I do understand why they felt like they had to change it. The obstacle in the book is not a tangible one - here they used Edwina as the actual obstacle (even though their stubbornness to their own feelings also was part of it but that's not as tangible of course).

I'm okay with the way they changed things from the book mostly - I kind of embraced the MESS of it all honestly, lol. But I really think that the subplots intervened with/diluted the main love story; there was not NEAR ENOUGH Kathony; and they HIGHLY underdeveloped Kate's character - like, I don't even know how you can argue that they didn't do this.

And that last one really hit hard for me because had they done this effectively (and it really wouldn't have taken much, tbh), it would have deepened her and Anthony's connection for the viewer. Like - it's honestly bizarre to me that they said the reason they had fewer sex scenes this season...was that it wasn't really part of Kate and Anthony's relationship. But LITERALLY we really only see them connect together over their physical desire. We, as the viewer, know that they are similar - but we never see them make that connection together early on. We only see that happen later on.

All that said, I loved watching Simone and Jonathan as Kate and Anthony and they sold it, underdeveloped writing and all. So THANK THE CASTING DIRECTOR for them.

#asks #anon #bridgerton #bridgerton season 2 #kate sharma #anthony bridgerton #kathony

24 notes · View notes

jamlavender · 3 years

Text

Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss: Mrs Coulter, misogyny and the His Dark Materials TV show

The show went hard on misogyny as a vital part of Mrs Coulter’s backstory, and I want to talk about how they did it, and why, and how it might have been done better. This is quite long (when is anything I write not, let’s be real) so it’s under the cut. Read on for thoughts on women, power and fictional villainy.

As a quick disclaimer, though: I’ve enjoyed the show a lot! I’m so glad they made it! Ruth Wilson is mesmerising as Mrs Coulter! There’s so much to appreciate about the show overall, including many aspects of Mrs Coulter’s portrayal. But the HDM team have also made gender politics and misogyny very explicit themes of the show – particularly season two, particularly season two, episode five – and I think it’s fair to critique that.

Let’s be clear: Mrs Coulter is a villain. She murders kids by tearing out their souls. She kills and tortures friends and foes alike without a second thought. She abuses her daughter. She upholds and advances a totalitarian regime. She’s a Bad Person, as confirmed by God himself with the unforgettable line: “You are a cesspit of moral filth.” She’s fucking terrible, but, in life as in art, many of us are fascinated by how such awful people are made. What drives someone to commit atrocities? I am keen to see such questions examined in fiction, because I don’t think exploring a character necessarily means excusing their actions, and because it’s interesting (I mean, of course I find her fascinating, I’ve written a novel’s worth of fic about her). However, after a few snarky comments (“What sort of woman raised Father Graves, do you think?”) and some subtler commentary on sexuality, gender and power (her unsettling MacPhail with the key in the bra in S1E2), S2E5 drew a weird line between sexism in Mrs Coulter’s professional and academic life and her vast and senseless institutionalised child murder, and the longer I’ve sat with that the more I’m like: what the fuck?

Look, Mrs Coulter doesn’t tear apart children to search for sin inside them and poison Boreal and break a witch’s fingers because she’s experienced sexism in the workplace and in her education. That’s… a very odd thing to imply. We have to remember that there are lots of women in Lyra’s world, all of whom will also have experienced sexism, misogyny and other forms of marginalisation (many in more expansive and pernicious ways than Mrs Coulter, who’s a woman, yes, but also white, wealthy, highly educated and very thin and beautiful), and none of them are running arctic torture stations. She will have experienced misogyny, absolutely, and that will have affected her in various ways that inform how she approaches her work, but to imply that being denied a doctorate is the reason she became a sadistic killer is frankly bizarre. Here are a few of the lines from that episode with my commentary:

“Do you know who I could have been in this world?” What does this mean? If she’d been roughly the same person in our world, the answer is: Margaret Thatcher, which is probably a step down for Marisa, all things considered, because the Magisterium is far more autocratic than any recent Tory government and would be a much easier institutional environment in which to enact her cruelty. What we’re supposed to think, clearly, is that she’d have been a different person: a scientist and a mother, and she’s had this realisation because she saw a woman with a baby and a laptop and had a three-minute conversation with Mary. This doesn’t make sense. We live in our world! It’s less repressive than Lyra’s world but it’s hardly a gender utopia. If Mrs Coulter had chosen the scientist-and-mother life (which, as I’ll revisit later, she could have done in her world but chose not to because of her megalomaniac tendencies), she’d still have been affected by misogyny here too. Our world is not kind to young mothers, nor young women embroiled in scandals, nor is the world teeming with female physicists. It might be a little better, sure, but it’s hardly as if those gendered challenges would have been solved.

“What do you mean she runs a department?” This is just the show forgetting its own canon. Marisa, you ran a massive government organisation (the GOB), including a huge murder science research initiative in the Arctic. That’s a much bigger undertaking and much more impressive than running a university department in our world. Pull yourself together.

“But because I was a woman, I was denied a doctorate by the Magisterium.” This is the show flagrantly ignoring the source material to make a clumsy political point. In the books, there are women with doctorates (notably Hannah Relf, also a major player in the new Book of Dust trilogy) and at least one women’s college full of female scholars. Now, would that women’s college likely be underfunded and disrespected compared to the men’s colleges? Almost certainly. But saying that is different than saying “I couldn’t get my doctorate!” when women in Lyra’s world can. The show knew what point they wanted to make, and were willing to ignore canon to do so, which is frustrating. Also, given that there are female academics and scientists in Lyra’s world, and that Mrs Coulter is a member of St Sophia’s college, it’s clear that she could have lived that life if she so desired. But she didn’t want that, because being a scientist and academic at St Sophia’s imbues her with no real power, and that’s what she craves.

I’m not opposed, in theory, to exploring Mrs Coulter and misogyny in more depth, but I think doing so through an examination of the sexual politics of her life would have made a lot more narrative sense and been much more powerful. It’s better evidenced in the text – her using her sexuality to manipulate people and taking lovers for political sway is entirely canon, as is her backstory where genuine love and lust blew up her life – and it links much more closely with the most shocking of her villainy, which involves cutting out children’s dæmons to stop them developing “troublesome thoughts and feelings,” referencing sexual and romantic desire (and what Lyra and Will do to save Dust is clearly a big ‘fuck you’ to those aims). She even says this to MacPhail in TAS, “If you thought for one moment that I would release my daughter into the care - the care! - of a body of men with a feverish obsession with sexuality, men with dirty fingernails, reeking of ancient sweat, men whose furtive imaginations would crawl over her body like cockroaches - if you thought I would expose my child to that, my Lord President, you are more stupid than you take me for.” Don’t get me wrong, she’d have been a villain regardless, but I do believe that there’s a much stronger link between her sexual and romantic experiences and her murder work than between professional and academic stifling and child murder. It would have been a lot more interesting and a lot less tenuous.

However, the show is trying to be family-friendly, and digging into why this terrible, cruel woman might want to cut the ability for desire and love (and other non-sexual adult feelings, I’m sure) out of people could get dark. We know that the show doesn’t want to go there, because they’ve actively toned down her weaponising her sexuality: in the books, she has an established sexual relationship with Boreal, whereas the show made it seem like she’s been stringing him along all this time, and made it about potentially ‘sharing a life’ together rather than fucking, which was clearly the arrangement in the books. Also, I think Ruth Wilson said she and Ariyon Bakare filmed a “steamy scene” together, and given that only a single chaste kiss between them aired it must have been cut. I think they deliberately minimised the sexual elements of the text, particularly regarding Mrs Coulter (the mountain scene with Asriel, which I did still love, was also a lot less horny than in the book) and replaced that with another gender issue, that of professional sexism, as if the two are interchangeable, which they are not. This is a shame, both for Mrs Coulter’s character and also for the story as a whole, because the characters’ relationships with sex and desire are an important part of the books! (If this minimised sexuality approach means that they don’t use the TAS scene where Asriel threatens to gag her and she tries to goad him into doing it, I’ll scream). Overall, I think they missed the mark here, which is a shame because I also think it could have been done well, if they’d been bolder and darker and more thoughtful.

Why might this happen? Why might the show take this approach? Why might it be latched onto by viewers? Personally, I think the conversations we have about women and power are very simplistic, which leaves us in a tight spot when we see women seizing power for themselves (even in fiction) and weaponising that against others, not just other women but people of all genders, because we struggle to move past ‘women have overall been denied power, so them taking it ‘back’ is good,’ even if that immediately becomes a hot mess of white, corporate feminism and results in the ongoing oppression of many people. I think we are so hungry for representations of powerful women that we – producers and viewers alike – struggle to see them as bad, because it’s uncomfortable to be so intoxicated by Mrs Coulter effortlessly dominating the men around her, subverting systems designed to marginalise her for her own benefit, and generally being aggressive and intelligent and ruthless, and then realise that you are entranced by someone who is, objectively, a terrible, terrible person. It can be hard to realise that if you channelled the energy of someone who mesmerises you, you’d be the villain. So instead of sitting with that (more on this below), a lot of legwork goes into reworking her villainy into, somehow, a just act, a result of oppression, as her taking back power that has been denied to her, rather than grappling with the fact that for anyone to desire power in such a merciless way, even if they have to overcome marginalisation to get it, is really, really dangerous.

The joy, of course, is that Mrs Coulter is not real! She’s not real! Adoring fictional characters does not mean condoning their (imaginary) decisions, nor do stories exist for each person in them to fit neatly into a good or bad box so you know who you’re allowed to love. Furthermore, fiction can be a fabulous tool for exploring and interrogating the parts of yourself that, if left to bloom unexamined, might perpetuate beliefs or behaviour that cause harm to others. Mrs Coulter doesn’t need to be a feminist or taking down the patriarchy or a righteous powerful woman to illuminate things about gender, power and feminism for those reading and watching. In fact, it’s important that we explore what happens when women (most commonly white, wealthy women, as she is) continue to perpetuate brutal systems under the guise of sticking it to ‘men,’ because it happens all the time in the real world, and it’s a serious issue. Finding characters like Mrs Coulter so cool and compelling doesn’t make you a bad person, but it might tell you something about yourself – not that you want to be a villain or kill kids or whatever, but something about how you relate to your gender or women or men or power – and that knowledge can be useful! We all have better and worse impulses, and finding art that helps us make sense of ourselves, both the good and bad parts, is a gift that we should relish.

Anyway, tl;dr, Mrs Coulter doesn’t need to be sympathetic or understandable or redeemable to be brilliant – but you wouldn’t know that from how she’s been portrayed in the new adaptation.

#his dark materials #marisa coulter #my analysis #this might be controversial idk #more thoughts that no one asked for #hdm meta

211 notes · View notes