#but like. she showed NO interest in ezra. ever. at all. during the whole series | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

motionlessonigiri · 6 months

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Hi Sabezra community.

Am I an English speaker? No. That's why I apologize in advance for the crimes against the English language that I'm going to commit next. But I still hope you can understand me. I'm not even sure anyone will see this.

It's been a while since I came here to find people who love the same things as me. Like a refuge from the outside world. I planned to post something only when I had something interesting to share with you all, like a video edit or fanart. Things so we could have fun together. The current circumstances didn't allow me to do anything for now, so I was just following things as a spectator.

Seeing all this ship war going on, made me feel like I wanted to get away from all social media, so I wouldn't see these things anymore. I also felt scared to express my love for this ship too. I'm scared to post this now.

Even my mother noticed that something was bothering me. She asked me several times what I had. I didn't want to tell her, because she's also a Star Wars fan and I don't want her to know everything that's going on. I want her to continue watching our favorite shows without thinking about negative things.

I want to get the hell away from it all, but for once, I would like to post this to all the Sabezra shippers who are receiving free hate. I think you guys need some love after suffering so much hate and I need to get out how I'm feeling. Because that's all I can do for now.

This whole time, I saw your fanart, I saw your video edits and I read many of the beautiful fanfics you wrote (I confess that I haven't read them all yet, it's due to lack of time, but I loved everything I read).

I see everyone putting so much love into what they do. And I can't ask you to continue, because I myself don't know if I'll ever be able to post anything in the future. But to be honest, I don't want you to stop. Am I being cowardly and selfish? Perhaps, but it's the truth.

But I'm here to remind you that not all Sabezra shippers are so active on social media, but we exist.

I've been a Star Wars fan for a few years and only watched Rebels during the pandemic. I started shipping Sabezra since then.

I was so happy that the Ahsoka series exists. And now I couldn't even watch Ahsoka or Rebels (I tend to rewatch the things I like many times). Because every time I try to watch it I'm reminded of this whole ship war that's going on.

So I decided to talk to a friend. He is also a Star Wars fan (and a fan of Rebels, which I recommended to him), but he doesn't follow things that happen on social media. We always talk about Star Wars, but we never talked about ships. But today I asked him what he thought of Ezra and Sabine.

He is my childhood friend and we practically grew up together, so I thought: "If he sees Sabine and Ezra as just friends/siblings, just like he and I are, maybe I'm seeing too much in the interactions between Sabine and Ezra and and I should just stop shipping them."

But to my surprise he also ships Sabezra. He said that you can see in the exchange of looks between them that there is something (In fact, my friend and I never look at each other the same way Sabine and Ezra look at each other). And he thinks Sabine is in love with Ezra.

The same case happens with my mother, who also loves Rebels and watches everything from SW since when she was young, but without following all the discussions that happen on the internet. When we watched Ahsoka, she said she thought Sabine liked Ezra since Rebels. She said this without me saying anything about shipping them. And when I asked her if she thought it was wrong to ship them, she said no and said she thinks they will be together someday. (I know, this may never happen, but hearing this from my mom warmed my little heart)

Even a friend of mine who isn't a fan, just watches casually, asked me if Sabine had a crush on Ezra.

Talking to these people from outside made me feel better, because this may not have been the intention of Dave and the others, but you can see that, based on common sense, no one can blame us for shipping them, it seems natural to many people. And not all Sabezra Shippers can be seen expressing this around.

I have nothing against anyone who ships wolfwren. But I won't lie and say I wasn't sad that the cast supported it so openly, while we are accepting crumbs. I confess that at first I felt betrayed. I haven't shipped Sabezra for as long as many of you, but I feel like I have. But thinking clearly, I understand them. Besides thinking that they can to ship whatever they want, just like us, I see it as a way for them to show support for the LGBT community. It is to be expected that they will do this. And it's okay.

Needless to say, I'm just posting this to express what I was feeling, I have no intention of hurting anyone. I am completely against any type of hate.

I don't regret watching Ahsoka, nor do I regret that the series existed. But I'm sorry to have seen so much fighting and hatred for something that was made to make us all happy. I wish I had followed everything in ignorance, as well as my friend and my mother. I think I'll start seeing things that way from now on.

I had a lot more to say, but I still don't know how to express them in words and this was turning into a mile long post. My first post and this was huge. I'm sorry for this. I needed to get these things out because I want to sleep and focus on the more important things I have to do.

And I want to be able to enjoy watching Ahsoka and Rebels again without feeling sick out remembering all the discussion surrounding it.

For now, I want you to know that I've been loving all the Sabezra content you've been posting. What I want to say is that I'm here and that I will continue to ship Sabezra until the end. Even if you don't see me interacting here.

Maybe later I'll regret posting this.

Maybe I'll delete it right away.

Maybe I'll never come around here again.

I don't know.

Too late. But everything is fine.

At least now you know I'm here.

I love you all.

#sabezra #ezrabine

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illuminatedquill · 1 year

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Sabine Wren: The Crossroads

I'm trying very hard not to hyper-fixate on a show that won't be airing for a few more months. But, damn, did this trailer awaken something in me.

I am, like most of you, super excited for this show; I'm excited for Ahsoka, excited for Thrawn (loved him since the OG Timothy Zahn trilogy all those years ago), excited for these new 'Dark Jedi' -

And, most importantly, excited for the return of Sabine Wren.

Actually, I'm the most excited for her and for what the actress, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, will bring to this older incarnation of the beloved Star Wars Rebels character.

Because this is not the Rebels Sabine Wren. This is someone new. And I am very interested in meeting this new Sabine.

Someone who is informed by the history of what happened in Rebels, yes, but who also experienced an entire Galactic Civil War and the repercussions of fighting said war while being so very, very young.

And she lost her family. Kanan, Ezra, and later on, the Purge of Mandalore. It's hard to say if the remaining Ghost Crew stayed together during the events of the OG Trilogy.

So many questions: what was she doing in the past ten or so years? How long has she been on Lothal? Did she ever return to Mandalore and try to save her family, her people? Did her family survive the Purge?

Someone pointed out that it's interesting that Sabine chose to stay on Lothal instead of returning to Mandalore - that she chose the homeplace of someone who was like an adopted sibling to her, rather than her own real flesh and blood home.

I suppose that speaks to the bond between her and Ezra. That she found more comfort returning to his home, rather than hers.

The official trailer released for the Ahsoka show is intriguing in what it shows of Sabine - and, most notably, how static she is. The Sabine Wren I remember from Rebels was dynamic, spunky, and a fighter.

This Sabine Wren is notably less so - we see shots of her basically living at Ezra's watchtower, garbed in his style of clothing, and just . . . waiting, it seems. Waiting for Ezra to come home.

(I'm aware that the extended Ahsoka trailer featured Sabine more in action, with her wielding Ezra's lightsaber against the female Dark Jedi, partaking in a speeder chase, and, later on, putting on her iconic armor. But, even then, I could argue that she's being reactive in most of those scenes as opposed to proactive.)

Rebels takes place shortly before the Galactic Civil War broke out in earnest. Sabine had just suffered two back to back intense personal losses - Kanan and then Ezra - and, despite the victory of dispatching Thrawn into the Unknown Regions for the foreseeable future, she still had a whole WAR to fight.

I can't imagine what it was like to do all that, while so young, and already having sacrificed and lost so much. Not having Ezra by her side throughout the entire war must have hurt unbearably - and the pain of his absence was probably magnified during the peacetime that emerged after the Victory at Endor. Because there wasn't a war to fight anymore, there was peace. Sabine didn't have that to distract her from his absence any longer.

And he wasn't there to enjoy seeing Lothal rise and prosper. Only she was.

Watching Sabine stare at the hologram of Ezra during the Ahsoka trailer hurt. Her expression is simultaneously haunted, sad, and . . . perhaps something more, that we'll hopefully see play out in the show. You know, immediately, that watching that hologram of Ezra is a daily ritual for her.

The actress for Sabine said that she's "wrestling with her demons" during the Ahsoka series. And if that one haunting scene of her staring at Ezra's hologram with a galaxy's worth of pain and longing in her eyes is anything to go by, then I am so ready for all the hurt and feels ready to be thrown our way.

There's a lot to be excited for in the Ahsoka show. But, for me, the success of such a grand epic that they're aiming for rides on how well they handle the Sabine x Ezra relationship. Because for Sabine, yes, the fight against a returned Thrawn is important.

But, there has to be personal stakes for our heroes. And having Ezra's fate intertwined so closely with Thrawn's was a master stroke on Filoni's part.

If Thrawn returns, then Ezra is back with him. And Sabine wants to find Ezra and bring him home. That's what she promised in the Rebels epilogue. I think that is what will matter the most to her.

Maybe that's how Ahsoka persuades her to get back in the fight - that finding Thrawn will mean finding Ezra. And if the Grand Admiral gets in her way . . . well, good luck to him (not really). It's obvious how much Sabine has missed Ezra - and, as we all know, Mandalorians don't take it kindly when someone harms their family.

#ezrabine #sebezra #star wars #star wars rebels #ahsoka #sabine wren #ezra bridger

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quipxotic · 3 years

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Some thoughts on The Bad Batch, “Finale, Part 1,″ and going into Part 2. Spoilers obviously.

The episode overall:

What a fantastic episode. Visually gorgeous, lots of juicy plot and character development. Just really good.

I’m glad the show touched a little on Omega’s feelings about coming back to Kamino and Hunter’s promise. It was also nice to see her show off her expert knowledge of the city, which was useful for moving the plot along but also made total sense. She’s lived there her whole life, of course she knows things about the city the rest of the clones don’t know.

I was also happy they confirmed what I’d suspected, that Omega is technically older than her older brothers. And the added detail that she was old enough to remember them being created and then taken away from her makes the first episode and her reactions to the Batch make so much more sense. It all just emphasizes how screwed up and inhumane the whole cloning program was.

I was also happy we got a little focus on Echo, having him step up a bit in Hunter’s absence to take point in the infiltration of the city and to look after Omega a little.

As much as I was hoping for a Mandalorian and Rebels style “let’s get the gang together for this rescue!” plot, I’m kind of glad that’s not what happened. Having the focus of the finale be the Batch, their history and relationships with each other and the Empire makes sense. It’s something you wouldn’t have time for if you had all those other characters in the mix as well, not in a less than thirty minutes episode.

I didn’t get attached to the prequels the way fans who grew up with them did, so the destruction of Tipoca City didn’t hit me as hard as a lot of folks. Still, what a stunning combination of imagery and musical score. The Kiners did a great job on this episode.

Crosshair:

This was the most interesting Crosshair has been to me ever. He was never my favorite during their Clone Wars episodes or in this series. His skills are cool, but he’s an asshole. Now assholes can be fun characters; Chopper is one of my favorite droids in all of Star Wars and he is both an asshole and has maybe one of the highest body-counts in the franchise (other than the Empire who...you know...blew up whole cities and planets). The thing about Chopper is he’s not an asshole to everyone all the time. From the beginning he loves and protects Hera and Sabine, he doesn’t always do what they tell him but they are his people always. He clearly cares about Kanan, and he grows to care about Zeb and Ezra. Despite being a droid and not speaking a language the audience can understand, he has an emotional range. Until this episode, Crosshair has had almost no emotional range. Being sarcastic to try to hurt others or get a reaction is not enough to make a compelling personality in itself. Staring forlornly at the middle-distance is not character development if that’s all you’ve got. This episode finally, FINALLY gave Crosshair some complexity, enough for me to actually be interested in what happens to him.

I like that they showed us how hurt and betrayed Crosshair feels because he thinks his brothers abandoned him (regardless of whether that’s actually what happened). How much he is clearly searching for a place to belong, somewhere he feels accepted and where his skills are valued. More than any of the rest of the Batch, Crosshair’s self-identity seems to be tied to what he was designed to do. It’s easy to imagine Hunter doing all kinds tedious, mundane jobs to care for and support his family, because to him that’s a valuable end in itself. Given his reaction to the work the Batch have been doing, I don’t think Crosshair would be willing to do the same. If he isn’t fulfilling his personal potential, then in his eyes he’s failing just like he thinks they’ve been failing. Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about his brothers and doesn’t genuinely want to be with them, he just needs a greater sense of belonging and purpose than that.

The tragedy is Crosshair is trying to find that sense of belonging and purpose in the Empire. We're privy to information he doesn’t have because we’ve seen what the Empire becomes, so we know that’s never going to work. The Empire and Rampart don’t care about him, he’s a tool to be used and thrown away. All the betrayals he feels his brothers are guilty of, the Empire will actually, intentionally do. The only way for this not to end badly for him is for him to walk away from the Empire and find a new path.

Even though he doesn’t know everything the audience does, Crosshair should be able to figure out for himself that what the Empire is doing is wrong just based on what he’s seen and done on its behalf. Other clones like Gregor and Howzer are able to see it and choose to either disobey or escape. If Crosshair’s chip was working in the beginning and he had the same experience Wrecker did of being forced to comply against his will, that should be plenty of evidence in itself that he can’t trust the Empire, but he’s so convinced that he’s special, better than the other clones, chosen. It’s an idea based in the Kaminoans’ warped view of what the clones are and what Clone Force 99 was meant to be, but it’s also fascist rhetoric the Empire will use in the future on more people than just Crosshair.

I liked that Crosshair had a more nuanced take on Omega than we’ve ever seen before from him. Although I think Hunter’s right that Omega belongs with them, Crosshair also has a point about her being in danger while she’s with them and that if Hunter really cares about her he should let her go. How much of that was manipulation vs what he truly believes is up for debate. I mean, if Hunter were to give her up to anyone it clearly shouldn’t be the Empire and I suspect Crosshair sees her more as a symptom of Hunter failing to live up to his potential, but still it was interesting.

Hopes and expectations for Part 2:

I was surprised Hunter was surprised Crosshair felt abandoned and I hope they follow up with that in part 2. Actually, I just want more conversations between he and Crosshair, but I’m afraid the escape from Kamino won’t leave room for it unless they give us a longer episode.

Was Crosshair’s chip removed? I suspect it was, it doesn’t make sense for them to give him this much character development only to take it all back by having the chip still be working. That said, I think we’re meant to be questioning it at this point and I’d like them to give us a definite answer to that and to when it was taken out if it was.

While they’re at it, could we get an explanation of what’s going on with the chip in the other clones? Is it weakening over time? Is it weaker in some clones and stronger in others? If the purpose of the chip is to force loyalty and control actions, why are so many clones seemingly able to disobey it? We probably won’t get any of that in the last episode, but maybe we will in season 2.

I’m still worried Hunter’s going to die. The fact he’s gotten more time and development than any of the other members of the Bad Batch would make sense if this were his only season. The way they’ve shown Echo’s connection with Omega and his stepping in the lead more makes me think they’re building to something there as well. I forget what after show or reaction I was watching...it may have been ForceCenter...but someone was saying one thing you learn in improv and comedy is to look for ways to make a situation worse in order to create more complications and generate opportunities for stories. One major way to make this situation worse would be to kill off Hunter and thereby remove both the Batch’s leader and Omega’s surrogate father figure.

I would love to know who Crosshair envisions leading his version of a reunited Imperial Bad Batch. I suspect he thinks he should, I just can’t imagine him being willing to give up being a Commander and falling back to whatever rank he had previously. Nor can I see him wanting Hunter to be promoted over him. Still, the answer to that might tell us more about who he is/what he values.

The series overall:

A lot is riding on this upcoming episode. All in all I’ve liked this series, but it’s no where near toppling Star Wars Rebels as my favorite Star Wars animated show. There’s just a lot of issues with it.

I won’t say the show has filler episodes because I don’t think Dave Filoni and Co. believe in filler episodes. Any episodes that don’t seem to advance the main plot are there for a purpose, either to develop a character or to introduce something (a place, a concept, a person, a bit of tech, etc.) that will reappear later in the story. It’s something he does in all of his shows, but this time I think the placement of some of these development episodes hurts the series by breaking the momentum. “Infested” is the biggest example of this; there’s nothing wrong with it as an episode, but coming right after “Rescue on Ryloth“ where Crosshair finally gets permission to hunt his brothers down, it can’t help but be a disappointment because it has nothing to do with the plot point they just introduced.

I’m starting to wonder if this series wouldn’t benefit from longer but fewer episodes. They’ve clearly got a lot of stuff they want to get into about the beginnings of the Empire and balancing that with developing the actual main characters...well, lets just say it’s been uneven this season.

The biggest issue, which the finale can’t fix no matter how good it is, is the whitewashing of the Bad Batch, Depa, and Kanan/Caleb. I just...this is such an unforced error on Filoni and Co.’s part, something so incredibly obvious and easily avoidable that it’s mind-boggling. I hope that’s something they spend a lot of time thinking about and fixing in season 2.

#quipxotic stuff #The Bad Batch #fan theories

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cross-d-a · 3 years

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fic tag game

aaahhh @vishcount thank you for tagging me!!! These are so fun and I adored reading about your fic journey~! ೖ(⑅σ̑ᴗσ̑)ೖ ❤

OH as a note!! For the ppl I tag at the end I don’t expect you to read all of this bc it’s A Lot!!! but I figured you might want to do this game yourself? haha :)

Name: cross-d-a shortened version of my first ever username. unfortunately stuck with it now haha but i’m fond of it :p wish it was cuter tho!!

Posting the rest of this under the cut so it doesn’t eat up people’s dashes!!

(｡•̀ᴗ-)✧

Fandoms:

oKAY YIKES there are....honestly too many too name. I’ve got a short and obsessive attention span so it’s either all or nothing with me usually. When I can stay in a fandom for a long period of time it’s a miracle. I’ll name the bigger ones that I’ve all written fic for! Even if I’ve never posted them haha

Right now I’m very firmly into Daomu Biji (dmbj). It feels like it’s both got a crap ton of content and yet barely anything at all haha. Maybe because the English fandom is so small. But at least there are a bunch of dramas and books!!! I really, really, really adore dmbj so much!! And a large part of that is the fandom!!! It's been a really cool and unique experience! Everyone in it is truly so kind and wonderful, and I’ve made some really incredible friends because of it (looking at you vish!! ❤). I’ve got a bunch of wips, but I’ve only posted two fics for dmbj!

Before this I was very into Guardian and mdzs. MDZS was my first foray into cdramas and Guardian’s Zhu Yilong really suckered me into watching more haha I also have fics for both these fandoms!

My very first fandoms were Fullmetal Alchemist, D. Gray-Man and Naruto. My very old ffnet account has fics for these and I’ve got a bunch of newer wips on my tablet. Then Star Trek, Twilight, BBC Merlin, Sherlock, Death Note, Harry Potter, How to Train Your Dragon, Battlestar Galactica, Avatar the Last Airbender and Marvel were a few of my main ones in high school. Plus a bunch of anime (like Fruits Basket! and Kuroshitsuji and Natsume Yuujinchou).

Then college hit and I renewed my childhood love of Tolkien (mainly lotr and the Hobbit), and Star Wars. I also found Teen Wolf! Then after college it was Stranger Things.

I find myself in a cycle of mild fondness and complete obsession with these fandoms haha I go back to Star Wars at least once a year!! Then I’m in the gffa hole for a few months. Marvel also reoccurs, depending on how interested I am in new content! Star Trek I always always always go back to. TOS is my comfort show and it will never fade from my heart ❤

But for now I’m stuck in cdrama hell and I love it

Tropes:

Time travel, found family, whump+hurt/comfort, fairytale-like elements, resurrective immortality (thanks to a “Nine Lives” Hobbit fic), CROSSOVERS

I’m a slut for all these things so they often worm their way into my plots haha

I also just- love weird premises. I think that’s the anime influencing me haha

Fic I spent most time on:

My series he leaves sand and stardust in my wake (main fic is hurricane on the edge of oblivion), I have...spent five years on now. I have done so much research for this fic it’s insane.

The premise is force ghost!Obi-Wan getting shunted back into his tiny 10 year old self. I incorporate a shit ton of legends and I try to stay as canon as possible. I basically want this au to feel like it’s 1000% plausible while still getting all my gay shit. It’s chock full of whump, redemption, found family, minor characters turning into major characters, and I’ve got slavery uprising on the mind, too. It’s just- everything I could ever want to explore in the Star Wars universe basically.

It’s my first big project. I started doodling and scribbling ideas in the margins of my notebook in my Scottish History class. I adore it so so so much. But, because of my hyperfixation and fleeting intense obsession with things it makes it- really difficult to consistently update. I leave it for months at a time and I am constantly guilt-ridden about it. Because it’s my baby and I have a lot of wonderful readers. I fear I’ll never be able to finish it. Especially since I’ve written so much and I’m still only in the beginning of it. ( ; A ; )

Also, I’ve spent so much time with Xanatos, Feemor and Bruck that they just feel like mine now. I can’t read any fics that involve them, it’s too strange. Which is a damn shame because I love them so much haha OH ALSO!! I think it’s the first really big fic to include those three?? So I’m very proud about that haha (I’ve had so many ppl comment about how they actually Give A Shit about these three and are Invested bc of me haha)

Favorite fic(s) you’ve written:

hurricane on the edge of oblivion (with nowhere to go) (Star Wars)

My long-term passion project. My love-letter to Star Wars, I suppose. Reading it now I feel like a lot of it is clunky or long-winded, but I think it really shows the foundation of my writing today :) Main characters are Obi-Wan, Xanatos Du Crion, Qui-Gon Jinn, Bruck Chun and Feemor. Eventually we’ll get to Maul, Savage, Feral, Shmi Skywalker, (more!) Ahsoka, Anakin and a shit ton of clones ❤

things we hunger for (Guardian)

My Ye Zun self-indulgent fic. It’s a time travel amnesia Weilanzun! Honestly has some of my fav writing I’ve ever done. It’s so soft and really indulges in the hurt/comfort. It gives Ye Zun the friends and family I think he deserves. Also, he gets to grow into a (mostly!) functional person and I adore him.

the beast that slumbers within your soul (mdzs)

Jiang Cheng centric fic!! I feel like all my favourite fics I’ve written are love letters haha. This is one def my love letter to Jiang Cheng. This fic possessed me for two whole days. I wrote 16k in almost one sitting. I went to sleep at 6 in the morning bc I couldn’t stop writing. And when I drifted off I kept thinking of new ideas so I’d whip out my phone and write down lines and notes. I- have never ever ever felt that way about anything. It was- insane. It felt insane. It was so amazing. I’m still riding the memory of that high.

Basically Jiang Cheng actually finds Baoshan Sanren and it turns out she’s a fox demon and Jiang Cheng is descended from wolves. It’s- okay I said the fic above this had my favourite writing?? That was a lie. This has my favourite writing I’ve ever done. It’s unfinished bc I am in dmbj hell but I am still excited about the next chapter which features Wei Wuxian’s pov!!

the whispers of spirits (dmbj)

My current passion project. In a way it kinda feels similar to hurricane? Bc multiple povs, incorporating different aspects of canon (we’ll get there!! I promise!), shit ton of research, etc. etc. I really really really love it for so many reasons. I’m basically taking all the things I was unsatisfied with in Reboot and Sha Hai and running with it. Found family and whump galore! It’s also a love letter to the women of dmbj who really deserve so so so much better.

Honourable mention to:

One Day (you’ll have given more of yourself than is meant to be taken) (Marvel)

This fic also kinda possessed me. I just- couldn’t get rid of the idea of a trans!Thor. And I mean a mtf Thor! It’s just? So many people look at Thor and go “that’s a Real Man.” Full stop. They never think there could be anything more, and it really really really bothered me. So I wrote out my feelings. I’m not trans. I don’t have that experience at all. I’ve had issues and confusion about my gender but nothing like this. I just wanted to do justice to this idea of Thor in my head. And I still feel a bit nervous having posted it. But I've gotten so many comments from people who really connected with what I’ve written? So I’m very very thankful I wrote it and it has a very special place in my heart. It’s a very cathartic fic.

Fic I spent least time on:

Probably we rise (Star Wars) and I think it shows haha. I wrote it in response to Dave Filoni posting a drawing of Ahsoka and Gandalf telling her “People thought I was dead, too, and look how that turned out...” So I incorporated Ahsoka (and Din and Grogu and Ezra!!!) into the ending of Rise of Skywalker, kinda explaining how I think they could all still be alive. :)

Longest fic:

hurricane is my longest fic (159k) but I’m kinda worried whispers will eclipse that.....

Shortest fic:

Of my posted ones it’s The Five Moments it Took Tony and Scott to Admit They Were Best Friends (and the first time they ever did), currently clocks at 1.6k. It’s unfinished tho so maybe that doesn’t count.... otherwise it’s we rise which is completed and 2k.

Most hits/kudos/comments/bookmarks:

hurricane overall has the most of all these. Though I don’t think hits counts as much bc it’s multi-chapter. If you discount multi-chapter stuff, most hits goes to my obikin smutfic Homecoming, bc people are horny af haha

Fic you want to rewrite/expand on:

If I had energy I’d like to rewrite the beginning of hurricane bc it feels so so wordy. I’d want to expand on One Day bc I really would like to write a whole series with trans!Thor. And like- I’d really like the focus to finish any of my WIPs.

Share a bit of a WIP: I really wanna share my Guardian/dmbj crossover that I started back in August. Bc I adore the idea of wu xie&shen wei&ye zun triplets! Plus time travel!!! I dunno if I’ll ever finish it tho ( ; A ; ) It just feels like a lot to deal with right now.

This scene takes place during the Mountain Awl arc. Guardian crew and desperado fam run across each other at the village! Wu Xie has recently found out that he’s adopted and he’s searching for answers in the area Sanshu originally found amnesiac!toddler!Wu Xie in :) Gonna pull two snippets bc I’m v excited and this might be the only time anyone else sees this fic haha:

“Oh?” Pangzi focuses on Yunlan now, lips twisting. “You think I’ve ‘got the wrong guy,’ huh?” He laughs, but it’s not a nice sound. “That’s rich! Are you that cocky or are you just stupid?”

Bristling, Yunlan drops his hands and scowls. “Excuse me?”

“Sir,” Shen Wei tries. “I think—”

Pangzi’s eyes snap back to Shen Wei, sharp and blazing. “How dare you fucking steal his face!”

What?

Automatically, Zhao Yunlan turns to Shen Wei, but the professor looks just as shell-shocked as Zhao Yunlan feels which- is seriously something. Since everything about Shen Wei is so carefully controlled, kept to the minimum. Except for those delightful little smiles that bloom across his lovely face, or the startled little bursts of laughter that fall from his lips. Or even when anger and frustration spark across his features, cracking his calm veneer open enough that he can see a glimmer of what lies beneath, the fire in those eyes. Zhao Yunlan delights in those moments, makes a game of making Shen Wei’s control slip.

He tells himself it’s nothing more than a game. Nothing more than trying to find out what makes Shen Wei tick.

Zhao Yunlan’s always been very bad at lying to himself. Or very good. Depending on who you’re asking.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Yunlan splutters.

But before anyone can say anything else, a very familiar voice calls:

“Pangzi? What’s wrong?”

Yunlan can feel Shen Wei stiffen, and Yunlan himself is pulled to that voice like a planet in orbit, like the inevitable plummet to the ground.

Another shadow wavers in the doorway before it steps out onto the dirt. Light illuminates shaggy hair, limning it gold, sharply casting everything else in shadow. But as the figure nears, the contrast softens until Yunlan can see the newcomer’s face properly and- and—

“Wu Xie!” Pangzi growls. “We’ve got ourselves an impostor!”

The man wearing Shen Wei’s face steps up to them, brows furrowed and mouth pulled down into a sharp frown. He glances between them, eyes landing on Shen Wei. His scowl deepens. He opens his mouth, but then—

“Wu Xie?” Shen Wei breathes, all trembly and lost and hopeless.

Heart in his throat, Yunlan turns to Shen Wei again. Turns and flinches at that stricken look upon Shen Wei’s pale pinched face.

“A-Xie?” Shen Wei chokes. “Didi?”

and

Pangzi snorts. “Professor?”

“I-it’s true!”

Startled Yunlan swings his attention over to Jiajia who clenches her backpack to her chest, face screwed up in admirable determination. “P-professor Shen took me and Xiao Quan on a field trip to investigate an archeological site around here!”

“Oh?” Wu Xie drawls all slow and amused. “Well, what a coincidence. We’re archeologists, too.”

“With guns?” Yunlan bites out.

Wu Xie raises a brow, grin full of teeth. “Well, you can never be too prepared.”

“Right,” Yunlan drawls right back. “Are you a professor, too, then? You come here with your students?”

Wu Xie outright grins. “You could say that, I suppose.”

Out of the corner of his eye, one of the men rolls his eyes. He’s the one with sharp features, glasses and looped earbuds. Does he think it’s appropriate to listen to music at a time like this? Yunlan admires the man’s gall.

aahhhh vish thanks so much again for tagging me!! This was so fun to relive my fic memories!! I’m gonna tag @alwaysaslutforshakespeare @jockvillagersonly @tehfanglyfish @lichelleme @undyingsunshine @humanlighthouse @thewindsofsong I’m curious about your guys’ writing and fandom journey!! As always, no pressure to actually complete this!! I just thought it was fun ❤

Wow if you read all of this I am very humbled and impressed, thank you!!

╰(*´︶`*)╯♡

#cross talks #my fic #fanfiction #uhhh what else do i tag this as i dunno #about me #cross posts #wip fic

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ncfan-1 · 3 years

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Because I feel like we’re being set up to encounter Sabine once more in The Mandalorian, some of my more discontented feelings regarding what happened to her in the epilogue of Rebels have been coming to the surface, because I just can’t be 100% okay with anything, can I?

But I really, really do not like what is implied to have happened with Sabine in the epilogue of Rebels. Over the years, I have become more cognizant of the problems I have with certain things in the back half of Season 4 of Rebels, but I think my problems with what happened with Sabine were there in the forefront of my mind from nearly the beginning, even if it was a while before I was willing to really engage with it.

Okay. The natural culmination of Sabine’s character arc over the course of Seasons 3 and 4 was for her to accept the mantle of leadership. We’re all in agreement about that, right? I remember having problems with her shirking that role on Mandalore back in the Season 4 premiere, but I had thought at the time that, from there, her arc would culminate in her accepting the mantle of leadership within the wider rebellion, rather than merely in the Mandalorian Resistance. After all, Sabine has had Hera as one of her most important role models since early adolescence, Hera who decided that it wasn’t enough merely to liberate her own homeworld, but that for liberty to last, she had to go out and free the whole galaxy. Sabine might more readily follow Hera’s example than, say, her mother’s, or Bo-Katan’s. It would have made sense for Sabine to transcend the need for just her own people’s liberation, would have made sense for her take everything she has learned since she was cast out of Mandalorian society as a child and dream bigger than just the dream of a liberated Mandalorian society.

And she really did seem on track for that culmination in the finale. There was a moment that I was sure was the culmination. You guys can probably think of what it is yourself, but it bears pointing out here. It was that moment after Sabine spotted Ezra sneaking off to carry out his own plane, that moment after she covered for him, that moment after the others realized that Ezra had gone off on his own. It was that moment when Sabine stopped Hera from trying to force Ezra to come back, that moment when Sabine took charge of the situation and formulated a plan of action for the team—and her leitmotif started playing.

This was the moment to me. I watched this play out, and I well and truly believed that Sabine had finally reached the culmination of her character arc. I believed that this was Sabine finally pushing past all of her doubts and insecurity. I believed that this was Sabine overcoming her feelings of unworthiness and taking up the mantle of a leader. I believed that this was Sabine accepting herself, accepting the fact that she was capable of being a leader, that she was a leader. And every part she played in the finale after that moment seemed to bear this out—it was Sabine acting as a leader without hesitation, without doubt, without second-guessing herself. She’d finally overcome that block.

And then, the epilogue. Then, Sabine’s voiceover talking about the parts everybody else played in the events to come—and behold, she is nowhere to be found in those recollections, and behold, the absolutely hideous implication that she completely abandoned the fight after the liberation of Lothal, and spent the rest of the war on the planet.

No, it’s never said outright, and that’s the one saving grace of it all. But it certainly is implied, isn’t it? It’s implied, and it’s such a monumental step backwards for her character, so out of left field, that the only way to make sense of it is to look at the man behind the curtain and think about it Doylistically, instead of Watsonianly.

It feels to me like Sabine was forced to abandon the culmination of her character arc in favor of shouldering the natural culmination of Ezra’s arc. Ezra’s arc would have had a natural conclusion in him remaining on Lothal to protect the planet from further reprisals and help it heal from the damage done to it, but it really hits differently when it’s a character whose arc was never heading in that direction before the last five minutes of the show. It’s not natural, is it?

Now, I don’t have as many problems with what happened with Ezra as I do with what happened with Sabine, and I honestly think that what happened with him works fairly well as an alternate culmination of his arc. But it doesn’t work with Sabine, does it? It does not work with Sabine to have her character arc mutilated this way, because what’s happened is that the implication that she abandoned the fight and stayed on Lothal makes her regress as a person as a character. I was originally going to say it regresses her to her early Season 1 self, but actually, it doesn’t, because even in early Season 1, Sabine was still willing to take the fight to the Empire, even if she was daunted by her doubts and all of her baggage. Where it regresses her to is her pre-series self, right after she and Ketsu escaped Mandalore, and Sabine is so utterly discouraged and heartbroken by her family and society’s rejection of her that she abandons the idea of fighting the Empire for a long time, and turns her heart away from the suffering of the galaxy at large.

It makes no sense, but then, forcing one character to take on the arc of another character rarely ever does.

Now, like I said, it is the strong implication that Sabine abandoned the fight after the liberation of Lothal. It is strongly implied, but never outright stated, and like I also said, that’s the one saving grace of all of this, that it’s never outright stated in the show itself. If The Mandalorian has her saying that oh, she actually was out doing stuff with the Rebellion during the war proper, it might go against the implication, but I’ll still accept it, because it would be so much easier to engage with a Sabine I actually recognize, rather than the stranger who was dropped on us in the epilogue.

I write all of this both to get it off of my chest, and as a long, long preamble explaining why I am writing this. I write it because I think that after meeting Bo-Katan, the next logical step for Din Djarin is for him to meet Sabine. He’s met someone who performs the Mandalorian identity differently from himself, and by the end of ‘The Heiress’, he seems to be on the way to accepting that there is more than one valid way to perform Mandalorian culture and identity. Sabine is the next logical step in the progression, the next step after Din coming to accept that there is more than one way to perform their culture: someone who has a deeply complicated relationship with her cultural identity as a Mandalorian, someone who has done harm to that culture while also deeply harmed by it, someone whose identity as a Mandalorian includes not only battle and loyalty to her family, but self-expression through artwork.

I think that self-expression through art, always so important to Sabine’s character, might be introduced here as well. Because Din’s unpainted armor has always been jarring to me, and I think that his ability to engage in self-expression might have been just a little stifled (or more than a little stifled) by his raising in the Watch, and the values the Watch inculcated in him. Sabine might well introduce him to the concept of painting his armor, whether in his clan colors (and if he doesn’t have any at present, there could well be a scene of him deciding what they are), or in colors and designs that he chooses, that are personally meaningful to him, without clan affiliation or loyalty to the Watch entering.

There is something else about Sabine that I think will be of interest in this show, especially since she is most likely to turn up in Ahsoka’s company. Sabine provides an interesting inverse to the Child’s present situation—where the Child is a Force-wielder sheltered and cared for by a Mandalorian, Sabine was, once upon a time, a Mandalorian child sheltered and cared for by a Jedi, a Mandalorian child who was in her adolescence brought up alongside a child who was a Jedi.

I don’t think that Din’s journey leads him ultimately to give up the child to the Jedi, because that would be a betrayal of the bond that has formed between them. I think that his journey leads to him finding the middle way, finding that place where Mandalorians and Jedi can coexist, held fast by bonds of care and loyalty and love. That Sabine has all of these bonds with Jedi—with Kanan and Ezra, and by the implication of the finale, with Ahsoka as well—may well be the thing that proves to Din that it can be done, that just because Mandalorians and Jedi have traditionally been enemies, does not mean that they must always be enemies.

Din has gone out into the galaxy as the man who has everything to learn about life and how his can be richer than it has been, who has everything to learn about how his own people can be more than just one thing. Both he and Sabine are alienated from their culture in their own ways, and I’m interested to see the way they might play off of each other, what they can learn from each other, and especially what Din is willing to learn from Sabine. I know it’s not a sure thing that Sabine will show up, but it feels right, and I’ll be interested to see what role she has to play in the show.

#The Mandalorian #Star Wars Rebels #Din Djarin #Sabine Wren #Meta

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cruisercrusher · 4 years

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i totally wanna hear what you have to say abt rebels!! personally im a big fan and ive never seen anyone specifically not like the show so im interested in ur thoughts !!

Ok please keep in mind I do not at all pretend to be unbiased because clone wars is my most favourite thing ever so every Star Wars thing ever gets compared to clone wars it’s like my thing

The core of why I’m not fond of rebels is because to me none of it felt impactful. I’ve actually watched I think 3 out of the 4 seasons, because my d*d made us all watch it as a “family” and imma be real with you chief. Years down the line I struggled to remember the main characters names. Almost none of it actually stuck with me in any meaningful way, someone will mention something that happened in an episode I did watch and I’ll be like damn i have no recollection???? But also like having gone back and taken a second and third look at the show I’ve gotten the impression that even within the show nothing has that much impact, maybe the last season is different idk but it feels very one note to me and at times shallow in the story telling. Nothing sticks, because the characters retain a degree of staticity throughout what I’ve seen, and Disney very clearly had a set formula laid out for how the episodes/arcs would go that left little room for the ballsy storytelling and character development we got from clone wars.

It’s a little disappointing because I think there were things in rebels that had a lot of potential, rebels as a whole had a lot of potential but Disney really put a stranglehold on Dave Filoni and the rest of the creative teams creative ability.

That being said, I really don’t like the animation either. Like, really don’t like it. I feel like it lacks depth and texture, and I don’t like a lot of the character designs, and the backgrounds are a little flat, and the way the characters move is weird to me. They’re just a tad too fluid and a touch too expressive that for me it reads as very uncanny valley, it actually took me out of it sometimes.

(Also the human skin tones all looked kinda off to me I was like I don’t think that’s the right undertone babes that’s too much yellow. Too much yellow babe)

As well as the fact that the animation stayed pretty much exactly the same throughout the series, and had none of the actual real innovation and groundbreaking animation that the clone wars had.

Going back to the story telling, and again, this is Disney’s fault, there were a lot of missed opportunities for them to go really hard. There were a lot of lessons in clone wars (like always question authority, and Capitalism Bad, and War is Futile, and sometimes the people who are supposed to be the good guys aren’t necessarily very good) that Disney is just straight up afraid of. Like clone wars really had a lot of more left leaning themes that is simply too much for the conservative, one percenter, trump supporting Disney executives and shareholders.

An example of this I feel would be when they introduced the clones. If I could have I would have done that arc very differently. And don’t get me wrong, I loved seeing grandpa Rex! But the way those episodes were executed felt a little. Dissatisfying? Maybe not quite disrespectful, but then again imo the story of the clones is THE MOST tragic one in all of Star Wars and those episodes had an element of levity to them that I don’t think fit. That arc could have been really deep and somber (and they could have done at least a little to acknowledge the rampant ptsd the clones must have, especially Wolffe who shot down his general and father figure against his will) yet the script didn’t really do those characters justice at all.

Also, I would have written Sabine’s character very differently. For one, I would have made her at least twenty, because with everything I know about it her it’s baffling that she’s supposedly only like sixteen. Makes zero sense. I don’t get it. Also I would make her a butch lesbian. Like a total mean dyke. We need more of those and I think Sabine could have mean dyke potential.

Now. The inquisitors. Dear lord. Again, could have been really cool, but tHOSE SPINNY LIGHTSABERS DRIVE ME INSANE HOW DO YOU FLY WITH THOSE IT SHDHJSJFJD FORGET THATS NOT HOW THE FORCE WORKS, THATS NOT HOW PHYSICS WORKS!!!!

Barbie life in the dream house had better animation because they were actually supposed to look plastic. Also, rebels yoda haunts my nightmares.

And I specifically don’t like Ahsoka’s character design either. I like her outfit but she looks less like Ahsoka to me and more like Ahsoka’s cousin. Her skull is a different shape. Why is it a different shape? Did she have jaw transplant surgery? Where is the consistency. We literally see an older version of Ahsoka during the mortis arc and she actually looks like herself (and looks really cool!) but Rebels Ahsoka looks nothing like that? I don’t understand. It makes my brain hurt to think about it

Alright, I’ve said a lot of negative things, so here’s a positive: I really appreciate Chopper. I just love chaotic astromech droids who feel nothing but unbridled bloodlust at all times. It is so funny. I appreciate him

And, bearing in mind I haven’t seen the whole episode (because I don’t want to) mostly just gift sets and clips, but the episode where Maul finally finds Obi-Wan on tatooine and they have their final duel?? Very cool concept, lots of potential, I just wish the lightsabers weren’t so SKINNY WHY ARE THEY SO SKINNYYYYYYY

I think that’s about everything? Barring the fact that for the longest damn time I thought none of the characters had fingernails because I mistook Ezra’s layered gloves for fingerless gloves and thought he didn’t have fingernails and that freaked me out? Yeah I think that’s about all my thoughts. I tried to have as little blantantly comparing to clone wars as I could because that’s not exactly fair, of course rebels was never going to be on the same level as clone wars. When it comes to well done cartoons I think it’s like. Way up at the top tier is Atla then clone wars in second place, and then literally everything else is wayyyy below it because that’s just how it is tbh. Anyways hope this satiated your curiosity!

#also i dont like jeb i think hes just annoying. like why is he here. literally what does he even DO what js his purpose other than to be #annoying. and ugly

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maryellencarter · 4 years

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Rebels thoughts part 2/?

* I keep thinking Vizago’s first name is Cilantro.

* So I have a sort of rant about the Force, which fits as well here as anywhere else. I *really* didn’t expect to get along with a Jedi character, okay, which is the other reason I’m probably not watching Clone Wars. See, my thing about the “will of the Force” is that I don’t think it exists. I think the Force binds the universe together, and if you are Force sensitive and meditate it will show you things, but I think every single piece of “it was meant to be such and such a way” is the relevant Jedi projecting their own interpretation on the events they see.

(I also don’t believe things in our universe have that kind of intentionality behind them. Shit happens. Sometimes it seems like the universe is mocking you. Sometimes it seems like it’s on your side. It’s all pareidolia. Which is a belief that makes my life harder, but that’s another post. I think.)

* Um. Where was I? Right. So I really didn’t expect to like Kanan. I think why I do like him is a combination of facts. One is that he doesn’t pretend to understand the Force; he was only a padawan during Order 66 and he knows little more than Ezra in some ways. Another is that, being voiced by Freddie Prinze Jr, he doesn’t really have a default “reverent” setting like most Jedi. XD So we have a Jedi who’s doing his best, but doesn’t act all-knowing with his dignity up his ass like most Jedi tend to do at times. Also, as noted, he is very much the mom friend. Which is distinct from being the friend who has the brain cell, but he’s competent at what he does and he tries hard to protect the others, which are both characteristics I am weak for.

* Hera usually has the brain cell. Not always. Unusually for an astromech, Chopper *never* has the brain cell. XD Ezra occasionally gets to hold the brain cell for a hot minute but it tends to slip through his fingers. Sabine thinks she has the brain cell a lot more often than she does.

* I suspect the first new-canon Thrawn novel will make a whole lot more sense to me if I reread it now that I know whomst the fuck Arihnda Pryce is and why I should be interested in Lothal.

* I was able to deal with loth-rats and loth-cats, started to roll my eyes at loth-wolves, and am really rather irritated with loth-bats. Seriously, I put more work into naming vegetables in a grocery store in “Dutybound” than this show puts into naming anything to do with Lothal. (Okay, Leia put in most of the work naming the vegetables, but still. If meilooruns were native to Lothal they’d be called loth-mangoes or something.)

* I did like Captain Rex. I may wind up watching Clone Wars at some point to borrow clones and parts of clone culture for Leverageverse. I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned, but in @camshaft22 ‘s and my Leverage AU, Wes (the Eliot character) is the first non-clone to become a clone commando, some time after Order 66 was prevented, which is where the AU branches from canon. He’s culturally a clone, and sometimes forgets he doesn’t have a clone face, which occasionally causes trouble for him. XD Anyway, so that’s my main thought on clones, and Rex is a suitably badass one, I like him.

(You knew I was somehow going to bring Wes into this conversation, right? ;P)

* Kanan destroying the Grand Inquisitor’s lightsaber wheel in the first season finale was sexy as fuck. Just saying.

* The Inquisitors being able to fly with their helicopter lightsaber blades was utterly ridiculous and made them ironically less scary.

* I do kinda see why people like Hondo Ohnaka. He’s very much a trickster’s trickster. He reminds me of somebody but I’m not sure who.

* The B-wing episode was pretty damn cute.

* There needs to be a LOT more Sabine/Ketsu. I swear to god, people, this is the single biggest problem with fandom is you can’t get femslash when it’s right the fuck there in front of you.

* (This is not actually the biggest problem with fandom but I have opinions.)

* “Legends of the Lasat” was a really neat episode. It reminded me of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode where Sisko builds an ancient Bajoran spaceship that flies on tachyon eddies, which made me squee loudly in the 24 hour computer lab the first time I watched it. Both of them hit me squarely in the Thor Heyerdahl / Tim Severin fanthingy -- I have a huge soft spot for that whole genre of using ancient techniques to recreate boats and follow ancient travel paths, and doing it in space only makes it cooler.

(No, I am not allowed to tangent off about Odysseus. Some other time.)

* Tarkin and Vader did *not* have the problem of the voice actors not sounding quite right. Whoever does the animated Tarkin’s voice is astonishingly good.

* Kanan being knighted in the Jedi Temple by the ghost of the Grand Inquisitor! That was such a damn good episode. I really like when the show actually leans on the thing where Jedi aren’t just about fighting, where peace and balance are important.

* Rant, continued: The prequel Jedi especially go on and on about bringing balance to the Force, but they don’t want balance, they want the light side to win. They don’t get it. They don’t consider what they’re actually saying, and that drives me crazier than anything else. Balance requires the existence of both light and dark, order and chaos in equal measure. Ethan has a tangential rant I don’t think we’ve ever actually done anywhere, about how modern culture is so very regimented that the only way to move toward balance is to be aggressively chaotic. That’s an argument we probably need to have in more depth at some point, because I like order and agree that I need to be better at chaos but I also very much want to stay within the confines of society and not be a semi-homeless jobbing magician, Ethan.

* Ahem. Where was I? Balance in the Force, right. I have thoughts about Kanan and the Bendu that are still processing. The Bendu really, really reminds me of Tom Bombadil, which... I can go into more depth in if anyone wants, but short version, I’ve never found Bombadil annoying or pointless, and I have an essay on what approximately makes me think this way, but there will be a lot of Elvish in it.

* I really love Chopper’s friend AP-5. He reminds me a whole hell of a lot of Squeaky. I think one of my very favorite moments in this whole series was the episode where it’s Zeb, Chopper, and AP-5 against the infiltrator droid, and Zeb and AP-5 are sniping at each other like Squeaky and Ton Phanan the whole time. :D

* “Twilight of the Apprentice” was one hell of a season finale. I wonder if they thought they weren’t getting renewed, or if that was a worry, because *damn*. Blinding Kanan, sending Ezra halfway to the Dark Side, blowing up Ahsoka, finishing off the Inquisitors... they certainly did close with a bang.

* Baby Wedge was cute but didn’t have much personality. That seems to be an ongoing problem with new canon’s Wedge, from what I hear. Still and all, rather have Wedge than no Wedge. I wish they’d have gone with more Wedge-and-Hobbie though -- poor Hobbie never gets any damn screen time. It’s a sad case when Starfighters of Adumar is still his best outing with two whole memorable moments. :P

* Saw Guerrera (sp?) makes me very uncomfortable. I know he’s supposed to, to show the way the “good” side can become extremists, but I was one slip of an Overton window from becoming him myself for a long time, and I don’t like being reminded. Nor having the writerly part of my brain noticing how I could write him more realistically.

#sw rebels #rebels spoilers #star wars rebels #star wars #not quite liveblogging

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parabellum-rpg-archive · 5 years

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Congratulations, Joss! You’ve been accepted to play Sofia Costello. Your request to change her FC to Ester Exposito has also been approved. Please make your page and send it in within 24 hours.

Admin note: I’m a big fan of the way you fleshed out Sofia. Choosing an applicant was near impossible for me, but all of the headcanons and mannerisms that you incorporated into your writing really screamed ‘Sofia’ to me. I can’t wait to see her on the dash! - Admin V

IC INFORMATION —

CHARACTER DESIRED

Sofia Costello

DESCRIBE THE CHARACTER IN YOUR OWN WORDS

The easiest way to find Sofia Costello in any room is to yell, “fuck Luca Costello” and see who comes out ready for a fight. Of course, then you’ll have to deal with her temper. She’s hardly the family spitfire, but when it comes to her twin, she’ll take on all comers. Raised from birth with a built-in best friend and tormenter (and tormentee, it really depended on the day), the twins were partners in crime, which perhaps suits them for their current life choices.

Sofia loves fiercely, and in an uncomplicated manner. She leaves the angst, pain, and doubt to her siblings and simply embraces everything and everyone she chooses to let into her inner circle. She’s a terrible poker player, wearing her heart on her sleeve, but she’d rather be known for passion than restraint. That being said, she isn’t sweet or naive or even remotely angelic. She’s a manic pixie nightmare, descending upon her family with loud exortations about how bad traffic is and how many lattes she’s already had, demanding hugs and kisses and perching on the edge of her father’s chair when she wants something from him. She lives by the unofficial 11th and 12th commandments: “don’t get caught” and “deny everything”.

While the tabloids always tried to paint her as a spoiled little rich girl and a wild partier, they missed the more important details. Like that she never got below an A in anything, was captain of her fancy school’s cheerleading squad, and got accepted to every school she applied to without even having to ask her father to make a donation. None of that mattered, of course, she and Luca had been caught out and about at any number of wild parties, so she was Princess Sofia to her classmates, and a trainwreck-to-be to the media. It turned out it was Luca who actually went down the rabbit hole, though Sofia went right along with him, prepared to follow him anywhere. Short of pushing Juliet down a flight of stairs (okay, it happened, but it was a very short flight and Juliet shouldn’t have been standing so close to the edge), Sofia could never find a way to dig Luca out of the hole he’d made for himself, so she did the next best thing: she stayed. She turned down every Ivy League school and went to the University of Chicago instead, majoring in history, which everyone said was a total waste of time. She emerged with a degree and no plans about what to do yet except maybe grad school, but the wedding has meant she’s had to shift all her goals. She can’t just convince Luca to move to Paris with her for four years while she gets a PhD or something, she has to stay to look out for him.

Sofia fell in love with fashion due to her obsession with her dead mother’s photographs. She rarely asks about her, and never knew the dead woman in the pictures, but Guinevere had a wicked sense of style, and Sofia picked up where her mother left off. Of course, Cassandra also has impeccable, if slightly more assertive tastes, and Sofia has moulded the two influences into her own aesethetic. She gained her history honors degree by writing about the history of corsetry during World War I, and would like to pursue an education in the history of fashion. She’s too short to be a model, and she has no interest in it anyway (and judges her sisters-in-law to-be for their career choices), but she always insists on attending fashion week and wearing a mixture of designer and vintage finds.

Seeing her brother break his heart over and over again with Juliet, Sofia has vowed to never fall in love, and instead keeps a string of boys that she briefly entertains before casting them aside, though she always makes it clear that she has no interest in a relationship. That being said, she has a variety of unrequited, and unspoken, crushes on the men that surround her family, like Benjamin, Mateo, and even Mason, who she remembers mostly as Juliet’s much nicer and very handsome older brother.

While she may be the youngest in her family, Sofia happily bosses all of them around, though it’s not always successful. She’s talked her way onto sets at Mia’s production company, into Leon’s club, and pretty much anywhere she wants to when it comes to Ezra, who everyone acknowledges is a soft touch. The only place she stays out of is her father’s business, since she has never had any interest in it, viewing it much the same way as her friends’ fathers, who commit acts of white collar crime on the stock market. She rarely judges her family for anything other than their sartorial choices or their sexual partners, which she happily comments on despite the rank impropriety.

The lowest point of her life so far has been the situation with Luca. While she’s normally almost preternaturally happy, her rage has done nothing to stop events from happening. It’s the first thing she’s ever really needed that hasn’t happened. It’s making her more and more frantic, and it’s gotten to the point where she’s willing to simply sabotage the wedding to stop it from happening, though she suspects there’s very little she could do to achieve that. She’s tried to talk Luca around, and has had to get multiple bus and train tickets refunded, though her plans have never really gone beyond “run away” and “protect Luca from the family bullshit”. Her brother and her breathe in sync if they fall asleep together, he seems to her as much a part of her as her arm or her eye, and she has felt like she was losing him for the past five years, never more so than now. While she hides it from him, she worries about what happens next.

WRITING SAMPLE

It was late, though the lights downtown meant it was never really dark. Sofia’s heels, so high that she didn’t so much walk as tip-toe, clicked along the pavement unevenly. That may have been because she was drunk. Well, tipsy at least. It wasn’t her fault. Bad news required the kind of support that only alcohol could provide. She’d had a mission tonight: get fucked up. Mission: accomplished. Of course, she hadn’t really figured out what to do after she’d completed the mission. It certainly didn’t make the whole “engagement” go away. Who the fuck were the Sinclairs anyway? She knew about them in the way that you knew about other rich people in Chicago who were also not necessarily on the right side of the law, and there were parts of town she wasn’t supposed to go to, not to mention that Paisley and Paityn Sinclair were always getting put up on magazine covers and billboards and other ridiculous nonsense. During the scary times she’d been told she had to go out with a bodyguard a few times, but that hardly counted. Her friend Anouk was the Turkish ambassador’s daughter, she had bodyguards all the time. So why, all of a sudden, did their families require some sort of bizarre merger that required Luca to marry one of the peppermint-stick girls whose family had clearly married their cousins a lot for their hair to be red?

“Fucking MEDIEVAL BULLSHIT!” She addressed a statue and informed it of her opinion. It didn’t answer back, but really, what was it going to do but agree with her anyway? Who still had arranged marriages? What was this, 16th century Italy? Was her father going to have her inspected to ensure she was still a virgin before marrying her off to a … her mind couldn’t come up with a decent enough comparison. “A fucking wool merchant!” She flung the remainder of the bottle that she vaguely remembered taking from the club. Or had it been a hotel bar? Or someone’s loft? It was more than a little blurry. She was going to do something about this. Something other than tell her dad to stop being an archaic tool of the patriarchy, which hadn’t really had any effect, and beg her mother to make her dad see sense, which also hadn’t worked. She’d even threatened to flunk out of school, go work as a porn star at Mia’s studio, develop an embarrassingly public coke habit, and possibly reveal all their secrets to Wikileaks (which she wouldn’t really have done, not that she knew anything anyway, but her dad still told her off for). She was running out of threats that she could reasonably pull off. Her education hadn’t really prepared her for this.

Without meaning to, her heels, which had been fashioned to look like hooves with cute furry boots up to the knee, and which came with an adorable horned head piece and mitts that had been sewn to match the boots, clippity clopped all the way to the nearest building, which just so happened to be Luca’s home, her breath coming in little white puffs from the cold. Her epic bar-crawl (had there been an art show in there as well? she felt like she may have bought an entire series of graphically nude and obscene sculptures and put it under her dad’s name) hadn’t been planned around ending up at his place, but it never really had to. Luca was her magnet, her compass point, the centre of her maze. She circled him but always found her way back, no matter how far she went.

Using her passkey, she trotted into the elevator, where a series of former frat-douches turned financiers stared at her with a mixture of interest and contempt. “Why are you dressed like a goat?” One of them, she didn’t care which, they all looked the same, had spoken. She wasn’t sure exactly how long ago, it had taken her mind a while to translate from douche into English. Giving him her most withering stare, which she’d copied from her mother whenever someone suggested she sit near the kitchen at a restaurant, she spat, “I’m a fucking faun, dumbass.” Clopping out of the elevator, she flipped the snorting party the finger.

Collapsing against Luca’s door, the hoof-heels failed her and she fell more than walked in. “Fuck me, what a stupid fucking place to put the floor.” Since getting up seemed like more work than she was capable of at the moment, she crawled from the entrance down through the apartment, complaining not particularly quietly about how Luca needed to get an open-design place for this exact reason, before finding his bedroom (it only took three tries). Dragging herself onto his bed, she noted that he was still passed out in it, but she’d known, even if she didn’t know how, that he’d be there somewhere. “Wake up, butthead, I can’t get my boots off.” He snorted and rolled over, still asleep. Giving up, Sofia tossed the mitts and the horned head piece aside and settled into bed next to him, curling up and pulling the covers over him so that he was tucked in better. Her own body had pinned the covers around him, so he looked like a boy-shaped burrito, but he was her boy-shaped burrito. “You’re not allowed to complain if I sleep in my boots, okay? Okay, good, we agree.” Patting his head, she lay there for a moment, studying him, trying to figure out what piece of him broke and why it hadn’t broken inside her. “Can’t you just take the piece from me?” Sniffling, she pressed her face into his pillow and left long mascara tracks on it, falling asleep like that, her hand tightly caught in her brother’s, as if she could hold him together in the places where he’d cracked.

#accepted

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breakingmllc · 3 years

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grissaecrim · 6 years

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My thoughts on The Last Jedi

Saw it a second time recently, and to put it briefly, I can say that it was an entertaining movie, albeit one with weird choices for storytelling cliches, and pacing, but a fun movie for me nonetheless.

I had seen how a lot of people are saying they felt the movie had misinterpreted the main characters, especially for Finn, Rey, Poe, Luke etc, and I can certainly see why, but I didn’t find these changes too bad once I began to think more of it. One thing that this movie’s theme was about, it’s about failure, how the characters tried to do the things they wanted to accomplish to only to fail or for things to get worse, and sure enough they perhaps overdid this part, but I think the last 20 minutes of the movie were absolute worth it.

Yeah I certainly did not liked the route they went with Rey’s character, and especially that whole thing with Kylo, I was cringing and feeling uncomfortable during those few moments, but at least I’m glad to see that she realized the mistake of thinking she could change him and shut him down, literally. Finn’s arc was weak, considering the casino part did dragged a little too much, but I think his rise for doing the right thing, defeating Phasma, even attempting to sacrifice himself for the good of the resistance was an quite a surprise to see. I liked Rose, while some say she was unessasry, I think it’s great to more normal characters that don’t have any special abilities to help out. Vice Admiral Holdo was a character that could had been better written, considering how she could had told Poe what her plan was from the beginning, but I see this to be a typical movie tropes of higher authorities not being transparent enough with their colleges in terms of what plans they had certainly something I had seen on other movies too. And who knows, she might still be alive after her spectacular light speed jump sacrifice.

The character DJ certainly felt like a magguffin, and him helping but then betraying the heroes was something I had seen before, I guess a lot of people are relieved to know that he is not Ezra Bridger as some had speculated since he does sort of look how he might look if he were still alive during this age.

Luke is the most talked about charcater, and the one most fans seem to dislike to see them changed, but I didn’t understood why the hate, and I think it’s interesting to see a Luke who became out of touch with the Force and his friends because of his failure and because he blames for creating Kylo Ren, and yeah the fact he thought of actually killing his nephew was extreme, but honestly it’s possible that something else big happened before that, maybe he found a Sith holocron that gave him possible outcomes and realized the corruption of Ben by Snoke was too deep, he was desperate, and certainly he was acting like a lot of masters are about their students on other series I had watched.

My favorite scene has got to be one with Yoda, it was delightful to see and now I’m shocked to see Force Ghosts apparently can have the power to summon lighting and physically touch living beings.

Luke and Kylo’s duel was great, Luke fought how I think a real Jedi would fight, defensively rather than offensively, and the revelation that he was projecting himself using the force all the way from Ach-to might as well be the most spectacular use of the force ever in all of the Star Wars that I had seen. I’m sad to see he died, but not too sad because he became one with the force in body and soul, so now he is immortal and I bet he is going to show up as a Force ghost to Rey in Ep 9.

Overall, I think this movie was on par with TFA, and I just hope and wish JJ Abrams best of Luck with finishing this trilogy, it’s going to be a long 2 years of wait.

#star wars #the last jedi #tlj spoilers

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thebestplltheories · 7 years

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Farewell, Pretty Little Liars.

Today is the day that we must finally say goodbye to Pretty Little Liars. With its never-ending theories and constant renewals, the PLL endgame always seemed like an intangible, abstract and theoretical concept that is just so far away, that it will simply never come. It feels so surreal to say that today is that day, which again, over the years, was never in sight. I thought watching Pretty Little Liars would just be some light, weekly, background entertainment. On June 8 2010, I did not truly know what crazy rollercoaster I had stumbled upon. Through numerous ups and downs, these past 7 years have certainly been unforgettable. If you told me seven years ago that a television show will have such a positive impact on my life, I would have laughed at you and called you dramatic. Tell me that today, and I’ll smile in appreciation at the positive influence and power a television show can bestow upon its viewers.

Not every show makes it to seven seasons, particularly mystery shows. Seven years is a long time. I started watching this show when I was 13, and I am now 19. (I realise I am probably very young in comparison to most other PLL fans!) Just to visually see this: Pretty Little Liars was with me while I was 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19. These are arguably some of the most important years of one’s life. As I grew, PLL grew too, in a literal sense, as we got a time jump where the characters matured, but also in figurative sense, since the stories gradually shifted from being high-school oriented to dark and twisted themed through a demented dollhouse and a psychologically straining board game. All while PLL was on the air, I graduated from primary school and high school, started university, got my driver’s license, my first job, credit card, car, gone overseas by myself, and made life-long friendships. Achieving all that never was easy, but it was made easier by PLL. If I ever struggled in my personal development, I always had PLL to fall back upon for psychological stability and security, aside from general entertainment. A part of me sees the end of PLL as if the training wheels are coming off my bike: for 7 years, I was learning how to become a young man, and now that I finally am one, I no longer need this safety rock that is PLL in order to continue developing.

This long, personal post is dedicated to me and my seven-year relationship with Pretty Little Liars.

How I started watching PLL

On June 8 2010, a new show called Pretty Little Liars aired. My sister had her friends over and they were all obsessing over this fresh new murder mystery with a hot cast. But it was socially unacceptable for me to watch this show, since I’m a boy. “Are you seriously watching Pretty Little Liars with us? Don’t boys play PlayStation when they’re bored?” My sister laughed in agreement at her friend’s comment to me. (To this day, I am even shamed for my love for Selena Gomez as a person and her music, because she is labelled as a female entertainer.) So I left my sister and her friends alone to watch their stigmatised “chick flick” that was PLL. Apparently it was wrong of me to take interest in this show. But I wasn’t going to let the irrational comments of a group of girls stop me from finding out how Alison DiLaurentis disappeared. And so little 13 year old me began watching the episodes online, in my room, every week, once my whole family had gone to bed. I was careful to put my headphones on a safe volume, because I didn’t want the sound to pulsate too loudly from them, and I always had my computer screen positioned so that it can’t be seen by anyone who unexpectedly walks into my room. Shoutout to my sister, for indirectly introducing me to Pretty Little Liars, but shame on you for making me feel less masculine just because I enjoyed the murder mystery of a show with female leads. I never shamed her for liking Harry Potter; a movie series with mostly male leads. As of June 8 2010, Pretty Little Liars was my secret.

Tumblr

In my secret weekly viewings of the show, I eventually reached the point where I was so personally immersed with the intricate mysteries of Rosewood, that I needed to hear other peoples’ thoughts to see if they aligned with those within my crazy mind. When I wasn’t doing my homework, I was studying who could be this omnipotent and omniscient stalker and potential murderer. What’s so wrong with a guy wanting to get to the bottom of such a juicy mystery? Apparently, everything was wrong with that. So around the season 3 Halloween episode, I decided to unload my brain on Tumblr; a place my sister could never put a face to the person behind the screen - she could never know her little brother is talking about the “chick flick” that is PLL.

During the first few months, I was lucky if my theories garnered the slightest bit of discussion and attention; I considered it to have been a very good week when I received two messages. Since Tumblr was the only way I could talk about my secret, I persisted with the near-silence my posts were getting because I knew those two messages per week are better than the zero people I can talk to outside of Tumblr. Never ever did I think my blog will blow up into what it is today with tens of thousands of followers and hundreds of messages per week, literally. I’m saving the thank you’s for the very end, because my gosh, that is the most important part of this entire post.

Being highly active on Tumblr during PLL’s lifespan definitely negatively affected my viewing experience of the series. Every single day, I was answering questions, reading theories sent in to me, reading theories posted by other blogs, reading Tweets from the writers/cast and watching interviews from the writers/cast. Everyday. While that was all fun in the moment, I’d be lying if I said that knowing absolutely everything about upcoming episodes and reveals made the show more fun to watch. I was always up to date on every single theory and all of the latest leaks, news, spoilers… whatever. Absolutely anything PLL related, you can bet I had read it. In fact, since I joined Tumblr, not one single event that has happened in the show has truly shocked me. I was here reading theories that Charles is a transgender CeCe. I was here reading theories that Toby is just being A to protect Spencer. I was here reading theories that Spencer gets shot, because we paused the promos at the right frames and could see it happening. Heck, I knew Ezra was only writing a book, I knew A is someone named Charles DiLaurentis and I even knew Mona is alive and being held captive in a dollhouse, ahead of their reveals in 420 and 525 respectively. Not only did scripts leak, but someone who worked on the subtitles of the show leaked the content of the reveals. Being on this site, of course I saw these leaks and spoilers even despite my serious attempts to avoid them. It’s impossible to avoid spoilers since you don’t know it’s a spoiler until, well, you’ve actually read the sentence. Since joining Tumblr, I can honestly say that nothing in PLL has shocked me, so I can conclude that Tumblr did ruin the fun in watching PLL.

Having a less fun viewing experience was a small price to pay for what I received in return for signing up for this wild ride that is Tumblr. Call me obsessed with PLL, and yeah I guess I am, but PLL is merely just the topic of conversation, in this world we created for ourselves. More than PLL itself, I am obsessed with this loving community of fans uniting from around the world, bound by a common passion which places us all as equals who share a sense of belonging and worthiness. This loving and fun community is emphasised and taken advantage of every single day - not just the days a new episode airs. Every. Single. Day. The warmth this community provides to my heart, alone, is enough to instantly override the fact that Tumblr stole the show’s entire shock-factor from me.

It feels very surreal to think that this show experience has finally reached its end - a lot of personal adjustment will need to now take place. In the society and culture I live in, your social status is defined by how many likes you have on your Facebook profile picture and how many likes you get on your weekly Instagram posts. When my posts aren’t up to everyone else’s standards, I find mental security and comfort in closing Facebook and Instagram, and opening the Tumblr app; a place where I do not have to prove my worthiness in society. Numerous times, my friends have been refreshing their Facebook profiles to see how many likes they got, meanwhile I’m refreshing my Tumblr dashboard to see one of your friendly commentaries. Again, this may seem overly obsessive with PLL, but I re-state: over the years, PLL is just the conversational topic. The simple existence of conversation, regardless of the topic, is enough to provide this mental stability I’m speaking of. On top of this inappropriate importance placed on social media in my culture, there have been other times where I have said no to dinner and a movie with friends and admittedly, family too, because I’m lazy and I would rather a date night with my bed and the Tumblr community. No longer will I have something fun to do on a Friday night, home alone. No longer will I have something to occupy me on the bus ride going home from uni. No longer will I have theories to think about during my study “breaks”, or something quick and easy to reward myself with after hours of studying. No longer will I wake up on Wednesday mornings (the Tuesday night equivalent here in Australia) full of energy. Now that this experience is over, I anticipate that my brain may start to feel empty. Sure I will miss the characters and the mysteries of Rosewood, but for me, this is the area that will require a lot of adjustment.

My final evaluation of PLL

As this is a post dear to my heart that I will keep forever, I want to include here my final evaluation of Pretty Little Liars, as a whole series.

Undoubtedly, the best season, in my opinion, is season 7. “But what about good old seasons 1 and 2, when PLL was at its prime?” Sure, seasons 1 and 2 were pretty good. We had just been introduced to fresh and exciting new characters and stories. Everything was amazing in seasons 1 and 2. The girls could be baking cookies whilst talking about good books they’ve read lately, and I would have loved it, because I’d be spending time with these new characters I just met. Retrospectively looking back on earlier seasons, I find that they are way too ‘bubblegum’ for my liking. Mona/A forced Hanna to stop her dad’s wedding, A gave Ella a ticket to the museum Ezria visited, A was hiding in the Spencer’s closet, A was spying on the girls visiting the therapist, A sends the girls on a scavenger hunt in the woods… sure, these stories did the job to reel me in back then, but if the show continued with these flowery, teenage-girl themes, I don’t believe I’d be here seven years later. Again, they were great for the time, but PLL did need to take a convoluted, complicated, psychologically twisted turn. What excites the 19 year old me, are the stories that season 7 is telling: the liars killing an imposter, the previous A being murdered, a dead body in the trunk, attempting to cover tracks for murder, seducing a cop, twins, the liars getting arrested, a liar betrays her best friends and wears the hoodie, a liar finds out her parents have been lying to her since literally day 1, a liar has been impregnated by the uber villain using another liar’s eggs, and ultimately, the uber villain being revealed. The stakes are heightened, and this is what I appreciate and enjoy watching, more so than a high-school Truth Up Night, a sleepover in the barn, or a liar steeling her sister’s boyfriends. No longer is the show about the Queen Bee of a group of high-school girls who went missing, followed by threatening text messages from an anonymous person. The show is far more mature now in season 7, and I appreciate that a lot. Again, earlier seasons did the tough job of attracting me to permanently reside in Rosewood, but such bubblegum stories would not have sustained me for the years to come. As each season went on, sure more fans began complaining at its progressively unrealistic and exaggerated nature, but I, on the other hand, sat here twiddling my fingers muttering “excellent”.

But have I just got it so damn wrong? If the general worldwide consensus is that PLL is no longer what it used to be, why am I more in love with season 7 than the earlier seasons? The answer is simple, yet easier said than done: I forget about what the writers have done wrong in the past, and I just enjoy the present. Here are the 6 areas that the writers have cumulatively pissed off the fans over the years: mysteries are dropped ridiculously fast (remember Melissa in Ali’s backyard saying “do it, just do it” to someone unknown?), red herrings are not properly explained once the truth is revealed (Melissa’s suitcase handle just so happened to break, when a similar object is what killed Charlotte?) the inconsistency in interviews/tweets (some actors say AD clues exist in season 1, yet Marlene says to ignore seasons 1 and 2), not making answers explicitly clear in the show and instead using interviews to confirm a theory the characters have (Garret being killed by Wilden was never said in the show), some answers don’t have a lot of logic behind them (why was Sara Harvey helping Charlotte?) and a significant imbalance between the romance and the mystery (did we really need to see Hanna dump Jordan because her favourite restaurant shut down, when Big A was killed two minutes ago?)

To summarise this point I’m trying to get across - I hear, and I agree, with the complaints PLL fans have. But never ever did I let “we still don’t know why Sara Harvey helped Charlotte” and “ugh I still can’t believe they killed Maya” disrupt my here-and-now viewing experience. THAT is why I’ve continued to love PLL more in 2017, than I did in 2010.

I’d like to conclude my evaluation on PLL by saying that I felt like I knew these characters on a personal level, to the point I could predict their future behaviour and responses. (Which is a good thing.) I’ve never ever felt this way about the characters of a TV show before. They felt like my friends, who grew up with me, and I’d catch up with them once a week by tuning in. Never have I ever seen a show where the off-screen chemistry is this visible on-screen. I also would like to commend the show for its portrayal of the LGBT community. When the show first started, I was a young, uneducated and immature 13 year old who thought that being straight was normal and being gay made you weird. I reflect back on this and am disgusted by the way I used to think. PLL was my only exposure to the LGBT community, and this show certainly standardised non-straight relationships for me, and was the absolute driving force to my acceptance of all people regardless of their identity and sexuality. To put this into perspective, I ended up ‘siding’ with PLL, rather than my own Catholic school which preached totally contradictory messages to PLL. Go figure: I chose the values of a TV show, than the values of my own school’s religion. While I may be one of the few to admit this on paper, I just know I can’t be the only one to have gone through something like this.

The show should be proud of everything it has achieved.

What’s next?

Let’s be real: PLL will get a reunion of sorts in the future. Shows this popular on social media and with a cast that call each other family, do not just die forever with the series finale. In 5, maybe 7 or 10 years, we will get a Netflix mini series, or even a movie. You can bet your ass I will be here for whatever reunion we get and I genuinely hope we can meet again, come that special time.

With tens of thousands of followers (thank you!!!) I could never have notifications turned on. My phone would have a panic attack. Now with the show ending, I’m expecting a major decline in Tumblr activity. So, I can safely enable notifications now. I promise you: any message I receive, or like, reblog, comment, whatever - from now on in, I will see it. I’m not going anywhere. I will be here forever, in the sense that I’m not deleting the Tumblr app. I may not be posting as frequently, but I’ll be here if there is something to post, or a notification to interact with.

As you may all know, I am obsessed with Riverdale. It is the new PLL. Amazing cast, insanely intriguing mystery. If you’ve never seen Riverdale - watch it. There have only been 13 episodes, concluding the first season, and season 2 is coming later this year. If you loved PLL, which I’m assuming you did if you’re on my blog, you’ll love Riverdale. Two months ago (!!!) I made a Riverdale-theories blog, and I have been waiting for today to officially announce @thebestriverdaletheories !

I am not sure yet if I want to use this blog. I feel like this Tumblr experience should be uniquely special to Pretty Little Liars. If everything is special, then nothing becomes special - I feel like if I start another blog for another show, then this PLL experience will be diminished. Unless, we join each other. If a significant portion of this PLL fandom ports over to Riverdale, then I’m willing to give this new blog a shot! If you go and follow me over there, just send me a message and say that you were a part of the PLL squad, so I know who to follow back! I’d love to see the community continue in this way, if possible. We’ll see how it goes! But I’ll be on thebestplltheories dissecting the finale for a bit, before I move over. Plus, this PLL blog is my main blog, with the Riverdale blog being a side blog. So, I guess this Riverdale blog will be a way for PLL to live on, as I’ll have to look at thebestplltheories every time I log in! So yeah - I’ll give it some time, and we’ll see if PLL fans are passionate about Riverdale!

Thank you

Before this post, no one knew the truth behind this nameless faceless blogger. I feel embarrassed, yet amazing, to finally be sharing with you all my personal and private story.

I cannot find the words to express my gratitude to each and every one of you reading this. Likes, reblogs and pressing that follow button, whilst always appreciated, amounted to nearly nothing in the grand scheme of things. What I appreciate the most, is your gift to me: your gift of a voice. You all gave me a voice in a community that my society labelled for “females only”. I mean, over the years, I received numerous messages with tags like you go girl and thanks girl! Which is fine - how could you possibly know I’m male!? But I highlight this just to emphasise that intuitively, it was always assumed that I am female and so I kept my gender a secret, in fear of being dismissed and not taken seriously in this fandom. All I wanted to do was to participate in PLL theories, and I really did think that my gender wouldn’t allow that. Eventually, I realised that that’s so not true anymore; my gender doesn’t matter! Which poses the question - why didnt I admit this earlier? I didnt want to be known as that blog that’s run by a guy. I wanted to be seen as normal. I knew I wouldn’t get rejected and dismissed, but I also didn’t want to stand out even in this slightest way.

So thank you, ultimately for giving me a voice that my sister and her friends, on June 8 2010, said I can’t have. Thank you for entertaining me every single day. No, not just days of new episodes. We all know this is a daily thing, not weekly. You guys are funny, brilliant, optimistic, honest, kind, energetic, intelligent, passionate, loyal and loving. (Each word there has been carefully selected. I’m not throwing around random positively connoted adjectives.) Thank you for being a spark of positivity in my life for all these years.

FOREVER IN MY HEART, PRETTY LITTLE LIARS

The only ‘show’ I have ever watched, and ever will watch, that is not “just a television show for entertainment purposes only”. The only show who’s set I have visited. That means something to me.

8 June 2010 - 27 June 2017

To summarise this experience in five carefully chosen words: unforgettable, irreplaceable, fun, special, passionate.

Til DeAth Do Us Part.

#PLL #Pretty Little Liars #Farewell PLL #Goodbye

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ambiguityisnoonesfriend · 6 years

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Chocolate Box 2018 Letter

Dear Cupid,

I am very easy to please. All my prompts and ideas are vague suggestions. As long as the relationships I request are the focus, I’m going to be thrilled with whatever you come up with.

The Silmarillion

Nienor/Turin:

I am deeply into the tragedy of these two doomed characters. I eat up the identity porn aspect and the places where things could have gone differently. What would have happened if Niënor's enchantment was never broken? What if it was broken after their child was born? How would they have dealt with what they did and didn't know if they didn't suicide out of their problems? I am not interested in AUs where they aren’t related. I am heavily interested in AUs where everything went very differently, either in a happily ever after where they never find out (I know, I know, no one gets a HEA in the Silm and I am okay with that), or one of their near-misses of finding each other earlier on didn’t miss, or even Turin didn’t fuck up one of the several times he fucked up, and everything went in a different direction.

Star Wars Prequel Trilogy

Depa & Mace, Depa & Mace & Obi-Wan:

I am ridiculously obsessed with Depa, and her interpersonal relationships with others. Mace was her Master and her best friend once upon a time, and it's implied heavily in the Kanan comic that Obi-Wan was also good friends with her. I'd love to see more about her younger days, maybe back when she was a Padawan to one of the greatest Jedi Masters of all time, or spending time with her fellow younglings, or both. As an art prompt, I would be ecstatic for something like Little Depa in her robes beside Adult Mace with or without goofy Little Obi-Wan.

I'd also be interested in seeing her as an adult, and how that transition went with Mace from teacher and student to friend and equal. I'm open to either Legends continuity or the new continuity, and I'd be fascinated to see a reimagining of the Shatterpoint plot or fallout in the new continuity. Not the whole novel, obviously, but maybe a scene of what went differently between them to make her ending what we got in this continuity instead of the old one.

I'm more interested in the friendship aspects of these three characters but I also don't mind if it gets mildly shippy.

Star Wars Sequel Trilogy

Rey/Kylo:

I went into TLJ expecting to get nothing for this pairing except maybe one dream sequence. I came out loving them even more. I love this pairing for all the potential. They are opposites. They are exactly the same. Each is incredibly jealous of the other. They keep being drawn together like two ends of a stretched spring, and the only question is if they’ll fuck, fight to the death, or both. My fondest hope is both. I love all variations of dubcon for these two, from The Force Made Them Do It and Sex Pollen, to Forced To Work Together For Reasons. I tend to believe Finn is the most important person in Rey's life, which could be wonderfully angsty for her as she can't figure out why she's linked to Kylo instead, or a situation where Kylo is forced to save Finn to make Rey happy. Force bond sex also very welcome!

Leia & Ben, Leia & Ben & Han: The pain and the angst and the love in this broken family is the gift that keeps on tearing my heart out and I love it. Ben didn't hate Han, so what caused the rift that led to everything between/among them even before he went away with Luke? What would the final fallout be between Leia and Kylo after TLJ?

Luke/Leia: I was ready for this ship to be sunk in the movie. I was not expecting to walk out shipping it even harder. I want all the angsty history post-ROTJ. Luke Denying his feelings. Leia denying hers. The times denying those feelings failed. I ship the trio, so Han can know, or he can be in the dark, or he can participate, or he can be completely absent. Emphasis on how they know it's a bad idea but they can't not love each other, whatever twisted form that love winds up taking. Were they also Force bonded, and did this turn into Force bond sex, which might be why Luke went oh hell no later?

Star Wars Rebels:

Let me begin with saying I am deeply into "Everybody lives and everything is fine and no one has to die I can't hear you" right now as the final ending for this series. For ships, I am super committed to Kanan/Hera or else no mention of ships at all for either. For background ships, I prefer Sabine/Ketsu and Zeb/Kallus, otherwise please no other ships. Rebels specific DNW: no character death, except for what was canon in ANH (Alderaan, Obi-Wan, etc)

Kanan/Hera, Kanan/Hera & Chopper, Hera & Chopper:

It's strongly implied that Chopper was Hera's only friend before Kanan came along. She would have met him when she was around eight to ten years old, and given the timing and the history with Cham, Chopper was likely her only support when her mother died. If this were an 80s movie, the pair of them would have a heartwarming relationship where he was her cuddly friend. Instead he's an astromech who swears all the time and she's a driven, closed-off radical intent on overthrowing the government. How did they grow together, and what happened when she brought aboard an alcoholic drifter who is suddenly competing with Chopper for her attention?

Kanan & Hera & Sabine & Ezra, Hera & Sabine, Kanan & Sabine:

I appreciate the complaints about found family tropes in fanfiction, and how it's frequently substituted with a severe lack of boundaries and unrealistic closeness. That said, this show went there first from the pilot. I love the semi-functional family unit where at any one point someone might act as parent, sibling, or military direct superior. I love how Hera and Kanan are very hands-on with Ezra and very hands-off with Sabine. I'd love to see more of them interacting on this level, especially now that there's so little time left for them to just be together. The show has given us plenty of Kanan & Ezra, so more of a focus on how Kanan and Hera have parented Sabine or the two kids together is preferred. Zeb and Chopper are more than welcome to come along.

Kanan & Depa:

They had less than a year together as master and student. What would have happened without Order 66? How would their relationship have grown? What would he say to her Force ghost considering the life he's lived here and the choices he's made? How would she react, and would those reactions surprise him or put him on the defensive?

Ezra/Leia, Ezra/Luke, Ezra/Luke/Leia:

I love the idea of Ezra and Luke meeting up after the original trilogy and finding someone who understands what it's like to be them. I love the idea of Leia and Ezra dating briefly during the early Rebellion days with an emphasis on bad dates or failsex. I love the concept of the younger Rebels post ANH all living on the same bases and dating one another.

Likes: toppy women and partners who are turned on by toppy women, humor, endings with hope intact, functional relationships, dysfunctional relationships, secret relationships that aren’t really a secret, canon divergence AUs such as what if they got there five minutes sooner, porn, fluff, friends with benefits, kidfic and pregnancy including mpreg and fpreg (do not like: pregnancy or kidfic with Rey and Kylo, do love: weird preg “because aliens”)

Specific porn likes: failsex including interrupted during or instead of sex, cunnilingus, both slash and het anal, light bondage, sex pollen, aliens make them do it, the Force or similar makes them do it, mental connections during sex, mental connections as a substitute for sex, using the Force during sex including light Force choking, Force ghost sex

Specific art likes: two or three panel simple line comics, playing card or tarot card type imagery, setting a scene, magic and metaphor

Do not want: noncon (as above, yes for dubcon and sex pollen), scat, watersports, omegaverse, unrequested ships except as mentioned, non-canon AUs such as coffeeshops, Poe, DJ, Holdo, Lux, Fëanor

#chocolate box 2017

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Justice League The Snyder Cut Trailer Breakdown and Analysis

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After years of drama, hundreds of hashtags, and a lot of discourse we finally got our first look at the Snyder Cut of Justice League. You might say “isn’t this just a director’s cut, what’s the big deal?” and honestly looking at this new trailer you might not be wrong. But for a lot of fans this moment has been a longtime coming and if you’re a big DC Comics head then there are some interesting deep-cut moments to dig into.

If you somehow haven’t watched it yet, you can check it out here…

So without further ado let’s dive in…

Darkseid

Uxas is here baby. As teased in Zack Snyder’s social media posts, Darkseid will play a huge part in the new cut of Justice League.

The opening of the trailer (which is set to a very on the nose song choice of “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen) shows a younger looking Darkseid wielding a large weapon and looking generally menacing.

Does that weapon look like a farm tool to you? If it does then this could hint that we’re going to be seeing the New 52 version of the character who was a cosmic farmhand that killed the gods in order to gain their power and create the planet of Apokolips. That sounds very Randian and rather up Zack Snyder’s alley.

There is also the other option which is that he’s holding a sledgehammer, to denote just how subtle Snyder’s messaging and symbolism will be in the new cut of Justice League.

Did you know Superman is basically Jesus? Well, you will in this four hour edit of the superhero team-up flick!

The Hall of Justice

Though we only get a glimpse of the terrible fate that the Justice League may have to face, we do get to see a demolished Hall of Justice–which is pretty funny as we never saw the Hall completed or even under construction–in the ruins of a city swarming with Parademons. We know that those are the minions of Apokolips and are usually controlled by Darkseid or whoever he gives his all powerful Boomstick to.

The only time we’ve ever seen them in the DCEU continuity is in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice during Bruce Wayne’s psychedelic dream sequence where he has a dark vision of the future where Darkseid has apparently terraformed the Earth which is under the control of a fascist-Injustice-style Superman.

It’s very likely that this is a vision of a potential future, much like Wayne’s vision in Batman v. Superman. And of course, Snyder made his disdain for “Saturday morning cartoons” known during a spat with a critic a few hours before this trailer was released. Since the Hall of Justice originated on the Super Friends animated series well…you do the math.

Aquaman

One of the best things about the theatrical cut of Justice League is the absolutely badass introduction of Arthur Curry as Aquaman. Though the character was soft-rebooted in James Wan’s spectacular solo-superhero movie we get a lot of shirtless Jason Momoa action here hinting at a bigger role in Snyder’s new cut. We don’t get much else with him though we do see him getting really wet in numerous water-soaked set pieces and who doesn’t want to see that in their lives?

But then there’s the question of who this is…

Is this Arthur in full and regal Atlantean armor before he had accepted his role as King in the Aquaman movie? Based on another shot in the movie that appears to show Arthur stumbling on a suit of armor and a trident, it’s possible.

Or is this more of the flashback sequence we saw in the theatrical cut of the film, which explored how DC heroes of earlier eras rose up to fight the hordes of Apokolips?

Batman

One of the key pieces of the arc of this movie (any cut) was always Bruce Wayne’s revelation that the world needed Superman, and needs heroes in general. This shot helps bookend Batman‘s line at the end of the trailer about the team being “united” against Steppenwolf and Apokolips.

Black Suit Superman

We all knew this was coming but we do get a brief momentary glance of Superman in the Fortress of Solitude wearing his Black suit. This isn’t technically new as a version of it apparently appeared on the Justice League deleted scenes but the fact that it’s here confirms we will actually get to see Superman in the Black suit in Zack Snyder’s Justice League rather than just walking past it in his icy den (the director had previously released a scene as well)

But there’s more at work with the Man of Steel that we’re still trying to figure out…

Supes appears to be wearing his traditional red and blue suit here, and we’re not sure exactly what’s happening. Could it be part of the sequence where the Man of Steel is resurrected after his battle with Doomsday in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice?

In any case, Supes is back in black in another shot which appears to be him taking on Steppenwolf during the film’s climax.

Cyborg

Zack Snyder has said that Ray Fisher’s Cyborg is “the heart of the movie” in his cut of Justice League, and the character is certainly a little more prominent here.

For one thing, we’re going to see Vic Stone’s origin story explored a little bit, as we see here is time as a college football star for Gotham University.

This quick shot COULD be of a vision Vic sees of the hordes from Apokolips coming to Earth.

In the established Justice League movie continuity, Cyborg’s father saves his son using the magic of the Motherbox. In case you aren’t aware what the alien technology is, the most important thing to know is that they’re a key part of DC’s Fourth World lore–where Darkseid hails from–and play a large part in all iterations of the DCEU’s Justice League.

In the comics they’re essentially superpowered supercomputers created by a scientist on Apokolips, in the movie universe they are mysterious threats which link the mythical worlds of both Atlantis and Themyscira as the powerful world’s tried to hide and destroy the boxes in the far past.

The new sequence doesn’t really build on any of that lore but it does show one of the boxes killing Cyborg’s father and turning him into Thanos-style dust. Another tragic moment for the young hero and one that will likely drive him to become a reluctant hero and defeat Darkseid.

There are a couple of interesting new scenes including one where see the hero desperately digging up a grave in a dark cemetery… whose grave is it, well that takes us to the next sequence.

Maybe it’s his father’s grave he’s trying to dig up. Or perhaps his mother’s. Oh god, what if it’s Martha’s…

The Flash

From what we understand, this shot happens right before the Iris West rescue above, as Barry vibrates through a shop window to stop the young reporter from getting run over by a car.

Barry’s in the speedforce. There’s not much more to say here but we didn’t get to see much of Barry being a speedster in the original cut of the movie and Miller’s version has been more of a cameo character than a true hero.

During the Snyder Cut panel, Snyder teased that Barry would play a larger role and hinted at the Cosmic Treadmill part of Flash canon that he has winked at before. Basically expect to see Barry causing some timey-wimey chaos in this cut.

Let’s stick with Flash stuff for a minute…

Iris West

Kiersey Clemons is a powerhouse and for this writer the most exciting moment of the film was seeing her appear in a brief moment that appeared to be the first meeting between her version of Iris West and Barry Allen (Ezra Miller).

Iris is a key part of The Flash lore and it was a massive disappointment to find out that she didn’t make it into the final cut of the original movie. Even though there is a lot of cynicism around this cut getting to see Clemons bring Iris to life as part of the wider DC world is actually pretty exciting.

Wonder Woman

Is Diana in Themyscira here? And is this spear an artifact of the flashback battle sequence we saw in the theatrical cut with the Amazons and DC heroes of old taking on Steppenwolf and company?

And no, the little girl she smiles at probably isn’t Donna Troy. We…think.

DeSaad

In a very exciting moment for DC fans the trailer revealed what seemed to be the first appearance of the deep-cut supervillain DeSaad. With his trademark hood and a suspiciously alien face we only get a momentary glimpse of the cosmic antagonist, but with his deep connections to Darkseid it makes sense that he’d appear.

The most interesting thing here is that DeSaad is a key part of the old school–Pre-Crisis–version of the character who was a royal on the planet of Apokolips who killed his whole family in his quest for power.

But as much as we’d love to see more of that dynamic Jack Kirby version of the character, he did play a small role in the New 52 relaunch during a plotpoint which focused on cloning Superman and Parademons. Both of those things are already established in the Snyder-verse–remember Doomsday? So if DeSaad is involved it probably doesn’t change the fact that this is a young Darkseid or Uxas.

We have more on Desaad here.

Steppenwolf

There’s a new and “improved” and definitely more menacing design for Darkseid herald/henchman/uncle Steppenwolf for this flick, too.

We wrote a little bit more about that new design here.

Uniting the Seven

Remember that poster for Justice League that said Unite the Seven and then nothing came of it? Well, maybe that was actually about the Aquaman movie’s seven kingdoms? Anyway it was once again hinted at here as Ben Affleck’s Batman says the word “united.”

Of course the big twist here would be if Green Lantern turned up making the Justice League seven heroes instead of six, that was a big rumor going into this movie but it never occurred. Who knows, maybe we will see a Green Lantern in this new four hour cut? If that happens my money is on John Stewart.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League hits HBO Max in 2021… allegedly.

The post Justice League The Snyder Cut Trailer Breakdown and Analysis appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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theconservativebrief · 5 years

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As a deeply jaded Harry Potter fan, I sometimes have to make a conscious effort to focus on the positives. So I think it’s worth noting that I didn’t have to try too hard to find some positives to focus on in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.

The second installment in the Harry Potter prequel series is now in theaters, and with it, author J.K. Rowling, who writes the screenplays, has introduced a host of serious wrinkles in her own established universe. The plot is confusing, disjointed, and seemingly devoted to setting up a convoluted storyline that will play out in future installments.

Watching the film feels a bit like being dropped into the middle of a very thick novel that’s full of words whose meanings you don’t know. And this holds true no matter your level of Harry Potter fandom; Rowling does a ton of worldbuilding on the fly, and expects viewers to roll with it and figure things out as they go. That’s difficult to do, and it makes The Grimes of Grindelwald hard to review, because it’s so obviously laying the foundation for some future film.

But even given all of that, there are things to like about it; and the things to like are, I think, pretty interesting things!

The Crimes of Grindelwald picks up where the first Fantastic Beasts film left off: with the dark wizard Grindelwald (the controversial Johnny Depp) sitting in jail after infiltrating the American magical congress. (Why he wanted to infiltrate it in the first place wasn’t ever fully explained, but it clearly involved being generically evil.)

In the opening moments of the new film, Grindelwald dramatically escapes prison, leaving Professor Dumbledore — an inexplicably de-camped Jude Law — to decide how to respond. Dumbledore, who was canonically in love with Grindelwald as a teen and may have once been in a relationship with him, is either unwilling or unable to fight him now, in adulthood, so he sends our hero Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) to battle Grindelwald in his stead. This involves finding the one person who can effectively fight him: Credence (Ezra Miller), who we encountered in the first Fantastic Beasts film as a frightened orphan, confused about his identity and unaware of his own tremendous magical abilities.

The Crimes of Grindelwald then follows Newt as he attempts to locate Credence in Paris. It also follows Grindelwald as he attempts to locate Credence, and as he launches what must be the most hastily assembled and disturbingly muffled political allegory ever thrown together by a writer capable of much greater nuance than this. The driving force of The Crimes of Grindelwald’s plot — though it’s difficult to refrain from putting sarcasm quotes around “plot” — is for Newt to find Credence before Grindelwald can, because the implication is that whoever gets to Credence first will have the best chance at deploying his magic as a weapon for their side. (More on what those sides are fighting for in a moment.)

Along the way, the movie gets sidetracked by a tangled web of subplots. Characters keep tossing around fragments of prophecies whose origins are never properly contextualized and whose predictions are never fully explained. There are baby-killings, cases of mistaken identity, mysterious characters with mysterious backgrounds, dramatic flashbacks, and several different moments that disrupt the established canonical timeline of the Harry Potter universe in ways that are sure to break the brains of Harry Potter fans across the internet. There’s even a giant Chinese fire-dragon cat-thing that needs to be dealt with. (It’s cute!)

But none of these subplots further the narrative beyond providing an occasional dramatic reveal that ultimately goes nowhere. Characters show up, deliver backstory and dramatic revelations, and then, more often than not, die. The effect is basically that watching the The Crimes of Grindelwald feels like staring at that spinning top from Inception for two hours straight before eventually realizing it’s never going to fall over, because it doesn’t have enough mass to upset its inertia. There’s just no story, no substance . And what little substance there is essentially forms dramatic exposition for the next Fantastic Beasts movie.

It’s especially unfortunate that this wheel-spinning for the sake of expository setup was one of the chief complaints of critics who reviewed the previous Fantastic Beasts film. But the previous film had so much more actual plot than this one that by comparison, The Crimes of Grindelwald feels extra-flimsy and empty. At least in the previous film, there was a set of clearly achievable objectives involving the rounding-up of a bunch of fantastic beasts!

But. But! Do we watch Harry Potter movies for the plot, or do we watch Harry Potter movies for the wizarding world? Because The Crimes of Grindelwald contributes beauty and a solid sense of setting and depth to the Harry Potter universe, and it deserves credit for that.

One of the things I continue to admire and love most about the Harry Potter film franchise in its latter-day installments is how director David Yates, who has helmed all of the movies since the fifth one in the main franchise, remains fully committed to J.K. Rowling’s vision, no matter how obscure it might get. And let’s be real, Fantastic Beasts is a totally new franchise arc that’s headed who-knows-where, and Rowling’s vision is deeply obscured in The Crimes of Grindelwald.

Yet Yates, with the trademark mix of sensitivity, detail, and emphasis on sumptuous worldbuilding that he’s deployed in each of the six Harry Potter films he’s directed so far, manages to make things work on his end. The Gilded Age wizarding world, Art Deco with a splash of steampunk, moves from vintage New York to London and Paris over the course of the film, and it looks as lovely and inviting as ever.

While the magical elements can feel a bit paint-by-numbers at times, it’s clear that Yates, Rowling, and longtime Harry Potter screenwriter-turned-producer Steve Kloves are still thinking deeply about how to keep the details of this world feeling unique and magical. And I think, for the most part, they do feel magical; that is, they feel like a world I enjoy spending time in, even when I’m exasperated by the lack of story.

It helps that Fantastic Beasts’ characters are, for the most part, characters I enjoy watching. It’s hard to overstate just how unique Redmayne’s Newt Scamander is within the annals of fictional heroes. Not only is he plainly and unremarkably neurodivergent, but he subverts typical onscreen representations of masculinity in refreshing and unexpected ways. Rowling seems to have written him by consciously sidestepping the tropes of toxic masculinity, and the result is that Newt, however overshadowed he is by plot dramatics, always feels like the answer to the questions she’s trying to ask about violence and propaganda and side-taking.

Unfortunately, those questions aren’t very well-posed. Grindelwald’s dark wizardry is a tangled mishmash of World War I-era fashion, militant Fascism disguised as leftist rhetoric, and concern-trolling about Nazis and World War II, designed to appeal to pureblood wizards of all races, including at least one character who’s coded Jewish. What Grindelwald’s actual politics are beyond wanting Muggle genocide is anyone’s guess, but given that this film is arriving during one of the most politically confusing and polarized eras in recent history, it’s mildly worrying that Grindelwald’s actual message is as vague and “insert-your-own-ideology” as possible.

And then there’s Grindelwald himself. The sheer number of characters in The Crimes of Grindelwald means we spend less time with Newt and his core group of friends than before, but we arguably spend the most time with Grindelwald. And though Johnny Depp’s performance is notably subdued (for Depp, at least), Grindelwald still feels like the series’ flamboyant gay villain (a stereotype that’s exacerbated further due to how toned-down and butch Dumbledore has become) — he’s always standing a little too close to his potential allies, always tacitly seducing them into joining him on the dark side, always being framed by the film as representing something irresistible and innately evil.

It’s weird and uncomfortable to watch, and I wish I felt like more of that weirdness and discomfort is because Grindelwald is a Nazi and not because he’s queer. (All of this potential association of Grindelwald’s evilness with his queerness is built into the narrative of the Harry Potter books, but given that so far, there are only two known queer characters in the entire wizarding universe, and given that one of them is an evil genocidal Aryan and the other one is in love with the evil genocidal Aryan, we can be forgiven for feeling a little queasy about how things are playing out.)

But commenting too critically on The Crimes of Grindelwald could, at this point, amount to unfair speculation. Rowling is clearly in the middle of juggling eight or nine plot points at once, as she loves to do, and it seems somewhat futile to do anything more than stand back and let her at it, until we finally have a coherent 10-hour film that we can judge as a whole. What we clearly don’t have in The Crimes of Grindelwald is a movie; instead, we have a heavily fragmented, not terribly coherent piece of something larger.

Whether that other, larger thing eventually coalesces into the sparkling magical story we came for, or whether it disapparates into oblivion, remains to be seen. But for Harry Potter fans who’ve put their trust in J.K. Rowling for all this time, the best thing I can say about The Crimes of Grindelwald is probably this: It won’t make you want to put your wand away any time soon.

Original Source -> Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald feels like a giant prologue for some other movie

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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creative-salem · 7 years

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Short And Steady Wins The Race at Salem Film Fest

Exploring the Short Film Blocks at the Salem Film Festival

By Chris Ricci

Each year, the Salem Film Festival celebrates the skill of documentary filmmakers with an incredible attention and appreciation towards their craft and the work they’ve done. Long-form documentaries are generally the mainstay of the festival, but no documentary film festival would be complete without a major focus on the more short-form approach. We are exposed to short documentaries on almost a daily basis thanks to things as simple as a news profile on a politician or an artist to something a bit more expansive like an episode of a documentary television show.

The effort behind a short documentary is quite impressive when you consider the extremely robust story that short film makers can condense in a half hour or less. Like every year, the Salem Film Festival showcased a wide range of short documentaries over the course of two separate blocks, but this year easily had some of the most impactful and well crafted stories yet. Over the course of each block, audiences were told stories about depression, government oppression, marijuana, a rockstar, video games, a carousel and so much more. Audiences also got a major treat in the form of director and subject attendance, resulting in two very excellent and very different question and answer segments.

The first block, showcased at Cinema Salem and sponsored by Deschamps Printing Co. featured some of the more introspective shorts of the two blocks, but also the most impactful. Dawn Dreyer and Andrea Love’s Fear told a complex story about depression through the eyes of a Chinese doctor who was a child during the Cultural Revolution by utilizing stop motion and animation sequences that brought a lightness to an otherwise heavy subject, while Frogman by Tyler Trumbo explored the life of a son whose father was a spy and how secrecy not only tore his family apart, but also made his relationship stronger with his father.

The incredibly timely NOT ONE STEP BACK brought viewers to North Carolina in December during the Moral Monday protests after a lame-duck governor defied voter rights by working to strip the newly elected governor of his power, while Adam Roffman’s more playful All The Presidents’ Heads introduced viewers to a man with a love for the country and his monolithic 20 foot busts of the first 43 presidents that he rescued and is keeping on his property. When it came to local stories, Mark Dugas’ Confessions of a Cannabis Consultant detailed the recent story of medical marijuana consultant Ezra Parzybok of Northampton and his passion for helping others being impacted by a government raid, while Johnny Physical Lives introduced viewers to a Tufts University student who used his passion for music and rock and roll in the face of terminal leukemia.

Confessions of a Cannabis Consultant

On hand during this block were directors Mark Dugas and Adam Roffman as well as co-producer of Johnny Physical Lives, Jeremy Wang-Iverson. For Mark, Confessions of a Cannabis Consultant was a welcome change directionally. “As far as shorts go, it was a really nice way for me to mix it up, because working in the long form is a completely different beast. I had to fight a lot of impulses with storytelling to whittle it down.” Jeremy added to this conversation by making it clear that director Josh Neuman “always knew it was going to be a short film in a way because of how Johnny’s life was cut short.” Incidentally, Johnny Physical Lives is exactly 22 minutes long, one minute for each year that Johnny lived. As for Adam, the short-form medium works perfectly for his other jobs. “I’ve been seeking out subjects that didn’t have enough story to fill a feature, but to fill a nice little short.” This being said, Adam would love to do a follow up on All The Presidents’ Heads, especially if Howard Hankins, the film’s main subject, got an opportunity to open the park of his dreams.

Johnny Physical Lives

Subject-wise, the decision to make their stories was almost as fascinating as the story itself. For Adam, his inspiration for his short came from his previous short Spearhunter which was, as he put it, another documentary about someone who collects various things. “Someone I know went to the park when it was open who had actually seen Spearhunter and the memory of the park came to them and they told me all about it, so I just followed that story to find out what happened to these gigantic heads.” For Jeremy, local ties lead to the creation of Johnny Physical Lives, and it was actually a perfect setting for the final festival screening of this film. “The great thing about being able to screen this here in Salem is that I got to meet Jonathan at Tufts University in 1998 when we were freshmen, shortly after he became sick. Our other producer also went to school at Emerson, so it was a very local collaboration.” Regarding how his documentary came together, Mark Dougas offered up a fascinating insight. “For me, my wife is Facebook friends with Ezra and had known him for a very long time, and she had been following his story. One day she just said ‘he’s going to court on Monday, and you should go film him’ so the first thing we ever filmed was him in court, and everything was reverse engineered.”

The second block, presented at and sponsored by The National Park Service of Salem was as fun as it was fascinating and had an incredible range of stories that kept the audience longing for more. Jonas Odell’s I Was A Winner started the block by introducing viewers to gaming addiction which, at first seemed to be tongue and cheek, but turned to be one of the more serious documentaries about addiction, loss, and overcoming I’ve ever seen. Black and white films were a major part of this block, including Jonathan Napolitano’s The Carousel took viewers on a trip to the Twilight Zone through the story of a carousel from writer Rod Serling’s childhood that not only impacted his work, but also his life as a whole. Jan Van Ijken’s experimental The Art of Flying utilized the black and white medium perfectly as it presented viewers to over ten minutes of well-shot and well timed visions of the “murmurations” of the common starling that had an incredible depth that only got more interesting as time went on.

I Was a Winner

Amy Nicholson’s Pickle proved to be the funniest short of the day by introducing viewers to an eccentric and wonderful husband and wife whose love for animals and experiences with death was as uproariously funny as it was heartwarming. Corinne May Botz’ fascinating Bedside Manner brought viewers into the little known world of of standardized patient simulations in medical school, and focused on the story of Dr. Alice Flaherty: a doctor, a patient, and a standardized patient actor that helps teach students to improve diagnoses and bedside manner. Throughout the film, the lines between reality and fiction were blurred in such a way that the end product proved to be one of the finest films of the series. The closing documentary during this block, The Leprechaun’s Wife by Alexandra Shiva, told the amazing story of Sondra Williams, a high-functioning autistic woman who was misdiagnosed and institutionalized at a young age who, years later, is a prestigious and sought-after public speaker and writer who is working tirelessly to teach the world about what autism really is.

Pickle

Viewers got a chance to speak to not only the director of Bedside Manner Corrine May Botz, but also the lead subject of the film Dr. Alice Flaherty. Viewers also got a chance to speak with the producer of The Leprechaun’s Wife Bari Pearlman. Many audience members asked about the structure of Bedside Manner and what was real and what wasn’t, and Corrine made it very clear that that meant this documentary accomplished it’s goal. “The goal was to make the viewer feel like a physician that needed to give a diagnosis, and to give the audience a sense of confusion and delirium to help highlight what these medical professionals have to sift through almost daily.” Dr. Flaherty added to this by explaining to the audience how the mental health field is a very different one to work in, especially from an educational standpoint. “There are many many doctors who have experienced or are living with mental health conditions in the field, and it really helped me out knowing that my doctors were not just doctors, but had first hand experience with depression and psychosis.”

The Leprechaun’s Wife

Bari Pearlman also told audiences the story about how her and Alexandra met Sondra Williams by explaining how they went about making the film. “[Alexandra] has a friend whose daughter is on the spectrum, and we wanted to tell the story, but we realized that we couldn’t do so, and that the story needed to be told by those on the spectrum itself, and not directly through us.” They both met Sondra at a conference where she was talking about working in the field of autism research as someone on the spectrum itself, and they were instantly taken by her. Once they found out she was from Ohio, they both traveled down there, and their experiences culminated in the Peabody Award winning HBO documentary they both made called How To Dance In Ohio, which showcased teens living with autism in the Ohio area. “We ended up making that film about teenagers coming of age and going to prom, and Sondra didn’t fit in the main story, but she was our impetus on the subject and the featured documentary itself, so we decided to give her her own film. And that’s what this is, and though it broke our hearts that her story was so different than the subjects in the feature film due to modern day understanding of autism, her passion and story needed to be told.”

Below, there is a review for each and every short documentary that was featured during the two blocks. Some of them have direct links so you can either stream the documentary directly, or you can purchase it directly from the filmmaker for a very small price that’ll help support these storytellers in their future endeavors.. Each and every documentary shown during the tenth anniversary of the Salem Film Festival reinforced the strengths that the festival has: diversity, incredible story telling, and introducing you to subject matter you might not have been familiar with from the get-go. Supporting these cinematic heroes is the least we can do, as they are the storytellers that prove that time constraints mean nothing when there’s an incredible story to be told.

BLOCK ONE

Fear by Dawn Dreyer and Andrea Love began the first block with the touching story of Dr. Zenglo Chen, a Chinese man who was a child suffering from depression during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The film, done almost entirely in stop motion animation sequences (with animated interludes) chronicles Dr. Chen’s experiences with “fear” and how it manifested itself during his life. Ranging from his family being taken away at a young age, to his nearly decade long daily battle with suicidal thoughts, “fear” means many things to him and shows up in many forms and, as Dr. Chen points out, one feels driven to eradicate it entirely from your life. However, the film’s overarching message is simple: It’s much easier and reckless to remove fear, but to live with it is the greatest accomplishment of all. Dr. Zenglo Chen’s journey to do is beautiful, funny, and true-to-life in a way that demands to be seen. The short film itself also serves as a segment to Dawn and Andrea’s feature-length film “Bipolar Girl Rules The World.”

NOT ONE STEP BACK by Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley followed the five days of Moral Monday protests in North Carolina after the unprecedented victory of Democrat Roy Cooper over the incumbent Governor Pat McCrory resulted in the North Carolinian GOP attempting to secretly pass measures to strip the power of Cooper while also nullifying the voting voices of the North Carolina voters. The documentary, shot in December of last year, follows the day-to-day in the middle of December as the voices of the protestors in the State House are silenced and over forty people were arrested for simply asking for government transparency. The film has a heavy focus on the NAACP leaders who stood as a strong voice during these protests, and the rapid-turnaround of this film shows the significance an event like this can have in such a short period of time.

All The Presidents’ Heads by Adam Roffman tells the story of the failed President’s Park in Williamsburg, Virginia that housed 20 foot high busts of the first 43 Presidents of the United States of America. After the recession hit, the park abruptly shut down and the fate of the monolithic busts was unknown. Enter the hero of our story, developer Howard Hankins, who moved all the busts in 2012 to his recycling field. There they stand in the weeds and underbrush of Croaker, Virginia, facing decay and rot, but the passion Mr. Hankins has for these busts is an incredible story in itself. His love for the Presidential office and his knowledge on the matter is funny, impressive, and downright fascinating, and his drive to eventually show the world these busts again is truly moving. Howard Hankins isn’t the hero I expected during the short blocks this year, but boy do I welcome him.

Johnny Physical Lives by Joshua Neuman tells the incredible true story of Boston rock-and-roll legend Johnny Physical and his band “The Physicals.” If you haven’t heard of this iconic band and frontman, Johnny Physical was a lady-killin’ rock god from the mean streets of NYC that commanded audiences all around the Tufts University campus with his incredible dance moves and his iconic tunes. But, off the stage, Johnny Neuman (the brother of the director of this amazing documentary) was a kid with a passion for the arts who was tragically struck by leukemia during his time at Tufts University. His love for his band and the rock-and-roll mysticism resulted in him and his brother agreeing to work on a film about the life of the artist Johnny Physical. The documentary weaves a first-person narrative by the director about his brother’s struggles and life before his treatment and and as the cancer progressed, and is inter-cut with animated sequences that highlight the life of his rock-god alter-ego. The film shows how Johnny experienced cancer not as a kid who was at Tufts University, but as a break-neck rock icon. The film brilliantly highlights the importance of the arts and what it truly means to be passionate, and honestly ranks up there with some of the tightest rock documentaries of all time. An honor that a rock icon like Johnny Physical truly deserves.

Confessions of a Cannabis Consultant by Mark Dugas tells the story of Ezra Parzybok, a medical marijuana consultant from Northampton, Massachusetts that works tirelessly to help patients out who want to explore the usages of medical marijuana, but don’t know how to do so. The documentary explores not only those that he helps and the techniques that he utilizes, but also the drug case he faced in 2015 after his home was raided by the National Guard and local authorities. The film shows his family life and the things and his passionate caring for individuals that wish to explore alternative means of medical help and paints him not as a man who committed a crime, but as a medical professional who wants nothing more than to help others. Despite the fact that recreational marijuana is now legal in Massachusetts, stories like those of Ezra Parzybok are important to read and understand.

Frogman by Tyler Trumbo is an absolutely fascinating story about a son who has spent his whole life trying to understand his father through the stories he told. Patrick Humphrey knew that his father was important, and idolized him deeply, but he never understood what he really did, mostly because he couldn’t really talk about it. You see, Patrick’s father was a covert navy operative during Vietnam, a “Frogman” if you will, and his forays into espionage and the stories he told could only be kept in the family itself. This forced his family and his son into a precarious situation: they needed to separate the truth and create a fiction that would help them survive as a family without risking secrets being let out. This separation of understanding impacted how Patrick raised his own kids; it’s difficult to live life being told how great your father is when you don’t know him, and it’s more difficult to expect that you will raise your own kids like how he raised you when you don’t know how he did it. The story told in Frogman is about the dissolving of a family because of the life of one man, but also of the strength and unity around him. It’s not a typical father/son dynamic, but the impact Patrick’s father had on his life is a significant story in itself.

Frogman

BLOCK TWO

I Was A Winner by Jonas Odell showcased three very different stories of suffering from addiction, the hardships it entails, and the eventual escape. However, the addiction highlighted in this film might seem a bit strange: the three individuals presented to us we’re addicted to video games. The film presents these individuals that suffered from video game addiction as their virtual avatars, and what starts as a seemingly silly story becomes a rather painful and biting example of the dangers surrounding this rather new and relatively unknown addiction. Highlighted are a man who spiraled into video games and alcoholism due to neglect from his family which resulted in a divorce and alienation from his children, a high-school kid who couldn’t really focus on work when his life in the game was so much more significant, and a woman who only interacted with her fiance in the video game, while neglecting one-another while they lived in the same house. The subject matter may seem silly at first, but I Was A Winner does a spectacular job bringing you into the world of video game addiction and showing you first hand how it can impact just about anyone.

The Art of Flying by Jan Van Ijken is a black and white experimental documentary about the “murmurations” of the common starling. The flight patterns of these birds have always baffled scientists, and are as perplexing as they are beautiful. The film’s aesthetic choice to remain black-and-white highlights this even more as the flocks of starlings swirling around the sky begin to look and sound like the waves of the ocean, or the clouds in the sky during a lightning storm. The open-ended nature of this film gives the observer many different ways to process these murmurations, and makes this one of the most individually interpretive documentaries this film festival has ever presented.

The Art of Flying

Bedside Manner by Corinne May Botz is a look into the world of standardized patient simulations in the world of medicine. Standardized patients are medical professional actors who have been trained to present a very specific set of symptoms to help those in medical school improve their means of diagnosis as well as the means of handling a patient dealing with very particular traumas. The central doctor in this film, Dr. Alice Flaherty, shows the viewer the fine line between “actor” and “patient” by explaining to the audience that her ability to understand and teach students is through the fact that she is also a patient herself. The lines between reality and fiction are blurred in an incredible way in this film, and asks the viewing audience to differentiate between doctor and patient in a way that I have never seen before. As Dr. Flaherty explains her personal life, the viewer struggles to grasp whether or not she’s being truthful, or if she’s being a standardized patient. Bedside Manner twists and turns reality for the viewer in an impressive way that highlights the point it’s making almost instantaneously, and forces you to pay close attention to the symptoms to figure out a cinematic cure and understanding the likes of which are truly remarkable.

Bedside Manner

Pickle by Amy Nicholson proves, if nothing else, that there can be some sort of humor in lieu of death and that, sometimes, death only serves as a small point in a significant life. The film chronicles the story of Tom and Debbie Nicholson who, over the course of their lives, have rescued an overwhelming amount of animals each ripe with their own unique story. Ranging from a fish that could only live because of a makeshift sponge suit, a paraplegic possum that needed a skateboard, chickens with heart problems, and cross-eyed cats, the Nicholson’s love for the animals they’ve helped and saved is painfully obvious, and their way of handling their deaths is even more remarkable. Intercut with hilarious animated interludes explaining the deaths of these animals, the story of Tom and Debby is an incredibly laugh-out-loud funny tribute to the animals we all love, the inevitability of death, and how we all can move on.

The Carousel by Jonathan Napolitano is, simply put, about a carousel from Binghamton, New York. The carousel located there has spun since 1925, and to many it might seem to be just a plain old carousel. However, for legendary writer Rod Serling, this particular carousel proved to be one of his first major steps into the Twilight Zone. The story being The Carousel ducks and dives between the mission to restore it with artwork related to the Twilight Zone, as well as the deeper implications behind it and what it truly meant to the man that served as one of the main reasons why science fiction is what it is today. In just under 14 minutes, viewers will learn the life story of Mr. Rod Serling and what something as simple as an old carousel can mean to a man and the rest of his life. For Rod, this carousel served as a portal to a past that he lost, and an inspiration for one of the most iconic episodes of his television show that was as surreal as it was autobiographical. The story of that juxtaposed with the artistic attempt to preserve it as such creates a short that has some of the most depth out of any film I’ve seen at this fest. The Carousel proves that the truth is stranger than fiction in a way that, ironically, fits perfectly in the Twilight Zone.

The Carousel

The Leprechaun’s Wife by Alexandra Shiva is the incredible story of Ohio native Sondra Williams. At a young age, Sondra was diagnosed as mentally retarded and institutionalized for many years of her life, when in actuality, she was on the autism spectrum. Sondra’s way of understanding the world is truly unique, and the life she has lived is remarkable to say the least. Sondra has been married for almost 30 years, has four children (who were also diagnosed with autism) and two grand children. Sondra’s clear way to articulate her experiences have made her a prestigious national speaker, a celebrated author, a counselor, and a powerful voice when it comes to the discussion surrounding the autism spectrum. Doing any sort-of in-depth or subjective analysis of this film would, frankly, be an injustice, and as opposed to me talking about it, seeing this film and letting Sondra Williams talk about it is only right. The life that she has lived and the stories presented in The Leprechaun’s Wife stand alone, and desperately need to be seen, understood, and talked about, as it serves as an incredibly perfect starting point on the conversation surrounding autism.

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