i do not fully understand Why elsa knudsen is like There in the narrative in peckinpah's Ride the High Country.

she doesn't do a lot to underline peckinpah's most beloved themes, she's mostly there to get assaulted many times, i think her naivety and black-and-white sense of morality could have been collapsed into. what's this fucker's name. heck longtree. the young jaded one, without really affecting the plot very much. judd and elsa aren't even a great parallel to the more vicious pair of westrum and longtree.

the whole inciting incident, the "am i gonna double cross my old best friend in order to steal (checks notes) the $11k in gold we're transporting down a big mountain instead of the $250k i thought was here at this mine" more than fills the "honor and ideals compromised by circumstance, the difficulty of doing right in an unjust world" themes peckinpah likes so much. the "will they help this girl get out from under the thumb of her abusive father in order to marry some guy who's also abusive and then help her get out of that also" b-plot seems to be there to fill time. which like. fine. i get you need a ninety minute movie and not an episode of television but think of a better b-plot. there was a whole ass carnival you didn't do shit with.

was it a competently made, well shot film? sure. did i enjoy the four separate assault scenes? no! why are those there at all! it's not like an equal amount of time is given to "wow the west sure sucks for guys too" bc mccrea's character is just like. poor and a little creaky and is not smothering under a life forced on him like elsa. i think getting shot four times over the course of his career is bad but on a different level of bad than being sexually assaulted four times in the course of three days and if THAT was the parallel peckinpah was trying to draw it's not a very good one

i acknowledge this movie is trying to draw Some parallels but i don't think it executes them well OR in a way i think is interesting. again, why is elsa here at all

On Narrators

You know what, fuck it.

I've seen a lot of references to Trigun Stampede having an unreliable narrator, and unfortunately it's activated my media analyst trap card. While there's always a degree of interpretation to these things, there is a difference between interpretation and declaring a banana skin to be orange zest. It makes a difference, especially if you're trying to bake a cake.

That isn't at all what Trigun Stampede is doing. Among other things, it doesn't have a narrator.

Narration, loosely defined, is text (or spoken lines etc) that directly addresses an assumed audience, which may or may not be the actual audience (it depends on the needs of the story). Think voice-overs, think Kuzco in The Emperor's New Groove, think the text panels in a comic or manga that list time and location, or describe the situation. The song of humanity continues to be sung is narration. A narrator is the character who performs narration; sometimes from with the story, sometimes from a position adjacent to it.

Honestly one of the most interesting things about Stampede, in my opinion, is that it makes a point of having neither.

There's no framing device, no presenter, no announcer, no chorus, no soliloquy, not even an internal monologue. There's no direct line to the writers, giving away their intentions. Indeed, the imposition of any text at all is almost entirely absent, save some pointed timing on the title cards, and no character's voice is objective. Zazie or Roberto, who come the closest, can definitely still be wrong - Roberto says Vash is "not long for this world" when Vash is longer for the world than almost anyone else; the man he says would kill with a smile was in fact coerced into becoming a killer. Zazie knows much and is always truthful, but isn't all-knowing, nor operating with complete understanding. And on the other end of the scale you have characters like Dr. Conrad or Knives, where the easiest way to tell they're mistaken or lying is if their mouths are moving. (Outside of brain fuckery. Then you're on your own.) Then there's Vash, who doesn't lie, necessarily, so much as he doesn't volunteer the truth, and tends to dodge giving answers when asked outright.

Now, an unreliable narrator is metafictional, taking advantage of the narrator being a character, and therefore capable of having an agenda.

What makes them unreliable is that they exert motivated influence over what we see - even accidental influence like distorted recollection or misconception. But before declaring such influence is occurring, we need a solid reason to doubt. You don't dismiss an account as unreliable just because it doesn't line up with your own expectations or desires - not without something like a clear contradiction, perhaps, or some conspicuous omission. *

We simply have no reason to believe what we see in Trigun Stampede is anything other than the truth (inasmuch as it's obviously fictional of course). We see some events from multiple viewpoints - here is what Vash experienced, here is what Knives saw, here is what other characters are doing - and what one character sees isn't different from what any other character sees when the perspectives swap. It's just from different distances and angles. The same words are said, the same events play out, and the same reactions are demonstrated by the characters, according to their established values and motivations.

The narrative itself is unadorned and unchanged by their viewpoints. Whether a character is being truthful is simply a judgement you're given to make as the events that occur and their actions reveal more about them.

The term for this isn't narration; it's focalisation, and it's hardly some avant-garde artistic statement. It's intrinsic to telling even the most simple story.

For instance, the way Knives evolves from his initial presentation. His introduction as an adult is as a wrathful would-be god and a merciless killer before his more nuanced motivations and origins are slowly revealed. It would have been different if he'd been introduced first, discovered Tesla and was then depicted destroying Jeneora Rock. He'd come across as more of a protagonist. Instead, because the central character is Vash, we see him first, the humanising struggles of Jeneora Rock's people and Vash's efforts to help them, his anguish when it's rendered moot, and all the ways he suffers as a result of Knives's actions. This is focalisation that makes Knives the antagonist, representing what Vash must overcome. A complex, compelling and perhaps tragic antagonist, but still - not the guy the story is about.

Oh, and that has nothing to do with their respective moral positions, good or evil. It's structural. A protagonist attempts to achieve while an antagonist obstructs, and both by nature will transgress.

Stampede isn't exactly free of ways to manipulate sympathy, and exerts strict control over the perspectives it presents. You could argue it misdirects, or lies by omission - but that's not the same as an unreliable narrator. A narrative is always going to impose some kind of order on events to produce a specific effect, and that does come with bias. But it's the nature of storytelling never to be entirely objective.

I'm not sure that I really have a point, honestly, except that Trigun Stampede is a show that's exceedingly careful to show the characters exactly as they are. It doesn't lie. Personally, I find that more interesting to contemplate than the alternative. We have everything we need to know why the characters do as they do. Certainly far more than some would rather have us know.

* There are two times I think something like this is happening. One is Wolfwood's flashbacks to the orphanage, which are coloured as memories of the softness the Eye ripped away from him. Hence the different art style, and the title of the episode they occur in: once upon a time. It's a fairy tale, more emotionally true than literal to highlight the harshness of his life since then by contrast. There's likely more to that story than Wolfwood is recalling at that moment.

The other, big surprise, is within the memory world. It has manipulative editing, clips taken out of context, video noise, ADR, everything. All you'd need to make it more obvious it can't be trusted is a disclaimer in the corner or inconsistent timestamps or something.

To all those reviews of Argylle saying it was so bad and claiming it must have AI in it (like ???)... Tell me you haven't watched a truly bad film without saying you haven't watched a truly bad film

Just say it wasn't your cup of tea and let everyone who likes fun action rom-coms enjoy them in peace pls and thank you

just discovered that all the wikipedia pages for the protein im studying absolutely suck ass. going on an editing crusade about it

ok listen. i know hbomberguy said he doesnt wanna become the type of youtube who spends their time doing drama videos or ruining ppl careers but like. if somebody doesnt start doing crazy detailed research on ryan hall, yall then i will

i was like 5 hours away from finishing the beverly hillbillies video and now its gone forever ;-;

what do you think of gretchen felker-martin’s work, if you’ve read it? I expected a lot from manhunt based on everything I heard about it but found it to be just fine

short answer: manhunt's prose sucked

long answer: i'm so over this little clique which has identified - by and large correctly - that what tends to sell in mainstream publishing scenes for genre lit is v meek, tepid writing with timid politics and didactic liberalism shaping its discourse, and used this fact to effectively carve out a marketing niche. the selling point of manhunt wasn't felker-martin's skill as a writer (to be perfectly honest: she does not have a lot of this); it was her consciously positioning herself amidst a discourse of "puritanism," liberalism, "censorship," "childishness"(!) etc in genre lit such that buying and adulating her book was a way to signal one's immediate "side" in the genre lit discourse wars. like ... that's a grift and a half, innit.

i do have some sympathy for this position! i know that gretchen is largely responding to the harassment of isabel fall, and i respect that. and i do, i guess, agree with her that the bulk of contemporary anglophone genre lit in mainstream spheres is having to measure up to a particular palatability such that eg. trans women's writing comes under heavy scrutiny & the sort of writing that fall was doing encounters precisely the backlash she got. i just - don't buy into her imagined solution of publishing a very graphic horror book about terfs with tor nightfire to own the libs.

the problem is that it's an incurious position. going to the capitalist hegemony and getting mad when there's liberalism in the literature is like going to the circus and getting mad that you saw clowns. there's no desire to move away from these circuits which reward easy stories & bury difficult ones; there's no desire to question why we hold these sites of production up as ultimately legitimating structures. there's a real sense that just getting the big names in publishing to publish the Right books is a significant accomplishment (and by extension, you as the participant who Agrees with gretchen on this matter must therefore Support Her Work).

i'll admit that i never actually finished manhunt - i didn't get very far in at all because the prose just drove me insane. so maybe i can't give a fair assessment of the book. but the problem i had reading it was that like, the prose was bad! more specifically, it was an incurious prose, reflecting what i identified above - an incurious approach to storytelling. it was an excessively didactic voice guiding me as a reader from discourse point to discourse point like she was worried i wouldn't get what she was going for if she didn't make it absolutely crystal clear in quotidian prose. this tends to make for the kind of story where i'll think about it for maybe 20 minutes and then be done with it forever, because you've already given me all the answers yourself. like. challenge me! stop patronising the reader! if i wanted this i would go read a medium article!

like, i like novels that construct discourse through literary technique such that they leave me with these various entry points & angles from which i can think about them & respond to them in a sophisticated manner. when a book comes barrelling into my living room and goes Hi, I Am About Discourse Points 1, 2, and 3, i am left with very little space in which to do that. i also just - and maybe this is boring of me, but - i like when prose is good! it's very like, well, congratulations on publishing a novel where you write jkr getting like burned alive in her castle or whatever it was but did you care about this story as anything more than a vehicle for Discourse? lol

(there's absolutely a place for quotidian + straightforward prose, fwiw, and i wouldn't appeal to Literary Technique as a measure of quality, but - like, it just wasn't a technically skilled book, and it wasn't a book which had much of a desire to be received as much more than a bit of grist for the discourse mill.)

also i find gretchen annoying on twitter but since twitter is the website for annoying people i guess i can't hold that against her

maybe it's a coincidence but it's a lil sketch that when i searched the ''intrusive thoughts'' tag (due to some curiosity from a post that crossed my dash) that this thing come up. @wip @changes I really don't like this kind of targeted communication, whether this kokobot is something that tumblr is cooking up internally or whether they're a third party getting the info from tumblr for this kind of targeted spam.

Wait hang on, I thought that you weren’t watching the show until the 27th? Did someone spoil it for you?

It’s fine, my dear. It’s okay. I’m still planning on watching it. My viewing of the show will be later down the road…

seeing ppl trying to cope with their faves dropping bad music is so funny

A Haunting in Venice Advanced Screening Reactions

An early screening of the movie was shown at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles, California, USA, September 7 2023, to largely positive reviews.

The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel's Blossom Room had a spooky setup, fun photo-op backdrop for selfies, masked Venetian gondoliers floating about, and the film's costumes on display!

Source (Photos): stacilaynewilson, dennis.tzeng, asadayaz, idkgravity, joerussotweets, izumihasegawa, zack.quin Instagram Stories

he complains about the "hysteria" and "mass compliance" of the pandemic so while i can't be CERTAIN he's one of the anti-mask anti-lockdown types, it also wouldn't surprise me given everything else i've learned about this man over the past however many pages

sigh

i am trying to read more nonfiction which is why i picked up this random memoir in the first place but i did not enjoy it very much

everybody's favorite doctor~

An old shitpost i made a long time ago. i never got around to post it here Quote from a friend

this video is wild. even if you don’t want to watch the entire thing, the conclusion is really good and really highlights some of the issues faced in game preservation and the failure to recognize contributions and properly credit artists that work on these games.

Ok Renfield RULED I will be posting about it so fair warning for spoilers probably I’ll try to tag them but ohhhhhh my god what a film. It’s cinema. It’s everything. It’s my personality.