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greensaplinggrace · 3 years

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honestly THANK YOU for saying all that abt baghra bc i thought i was going crazy from not liking her??? bc i haven't read the books and only summaries of them on wiki and like. i dunno why ppl like her actually even in the show bc this guy, her son, is like "i wanna make the world better for us grisha" and she's just like "no." even tho he sees that she's MAKING HERSELF SICK from suppressing her powers! she's literally like in bed coughing in the flashback yet seem much healthier at the little palace. also like after everything, after her disapproval, after the fold, after centuries of waiting for the sun summoner.. he never abandons her. he makes sure she's cares for. he doesn't harm her. and i have to wonder if baghra has ever thanks him for that, for just not leaving her alone. like i dunno how im suppose ro believe aleks is a heartless villain when he still cares for his abusive mom like this. like has baghra even told her she loved him (honestly she reminds me of a classic emotionally unavailable asian parent but maybe that's just me). also im wondering if baghra ever told aleks that he had an aunt.. bc like.. now that u bring up her isolating him it's like hmmmm...

not at me being like alina... why do u trust the bitter old woman who literally beats u with a stick and verbally abuses u every chance she gets.. just bc she showed a bad painting... like.. pls use two braincells to see that who u figured out as his mother... is also using his protection..

like baghra could've upped and left with alina. but no. she stayed bc she knew she was safe under aleks's protection.

alsoim just impressed that after his first friend tried to drown him and harvest his bones... he didn't go into hiding???? he still wanted to make a safe heaven for grisha!!! HE STILL WANTED TO PROTECT GRISHA EVEN AFTER HIS GRISHA FRIEND TRIED TO KILL HIM FOR HIS FUCKEN BONES. like... this is the guy im suppose to believe is the villain???

honestly i feel like part of the reason why LB's plotlines seem so bad and disconnected (and sometimes outright racist but that's another rant) and why darkles is disproportionately more violent and villainous in the later books is bc she didn't expect the darkling to be so popular and wanted to stick with her guns of making him the villain. but also wanted the money from aleks's popularity. but like you can't have ur cake and eat it too.

Well thank you for sending this ask! It's very sweet and very passionate. I'm glad you liked my post! I didn't put as much thought into it as some of my others lol. I kind of just talked. But it was nice to be able to finally talk about some of the problems I have with both her character and the fandom/author's perception of her.

HERE is the post this is referring to, in case anyone's wondering.

👀👀 You've hit the nail on the head for so many things, here!

Baghra is extremely emotionally unavailable, basically to the point of neglect. She's also verbally and physically abusive, traits which I doubt were only reserved for her students and not her son. Baghra claims she would do anything to protect him, but I've known a lot of parents who have that mindset and yet still harm their children because they think it's "good for them".

Aleksander stays at Baghra's side for years, and even when they're opposing each other she's never too far away from him. Idk if you've read the books but he does eventually hurt her. And as much as I don't like Baghra, I think his actions were horrid. But I'm also honestly kind of surprised it took him so long lmao.

Yeah I mean, in terms of isolation, let's not forget that she never wanted to introduce him to his father, either. Baghra's sense of eternity clouds a lot of her judgments on relationships, which means she views most people as dust and therefore teaches her son to as well. The problem with that is that he's a growing child, and he needs those social and emotional attachments for healthy development.

I would bet quite a bit of money that Baghra has either never told him she loves him or she has told him so few times it's practically forgettable.

And everything becomes more complicated because so many of Baghra's actions are understandable because of her life and her history, but the impacts they have on the people around her, especially Aleksander, are permanently damaging. And the fact that that's never gone over in critical depth in the books or how it's glossed over in fandom is just very disconcerting. Like, acknowledging Baghra's failings doesn't mean we're excusing Aleksander's actions, it just means we're holding Baghra liable for her own. Which the fandom should be doing, considering she's the epitome of an abusive parental figure.

And Alina trusting Baghra over Aleksander is even more confusing! Especially in the show!! This is the woman who beat her and abused her and tortured her friends when they tiny little children (and who probably still does so now that they're adults). This is the woman who mocks you and harasses you and insults you on a regular basis. Why does Baghra revealing she's Aleksander's mother make Alina change her mind?! Like fuck, I'd just feel bad for Aleksander. No wonder he kept it a secret, I would too! And that painting is enough evidence?! Really?! A random painting shown to you by this abusive mentor that's been making your life hell. That's what you're going to betray your new lover over?

The friends trying to harvest his bones thing is a good point, too. I think Aleksander, especially show Aleksander, is incredibly idealistic. I think he cares too much for others - those he's deemed worth his care (a sentiment given to him by Baghra). Despite everything she's tried to teach him about hiding and abandoning others and never caring and never doing anything to help or reach out or connect with people, Aleksander still continues to do so. It's likely because he never got it from Baghra growing up, and so is desperate for those emotional needs to be fulfilled elsewhere.

His turning point, when Baghra tells him it was understandable that those kids tried to kill him because the world is such a hard place for them - that's crucial. And the reason it's possible as a motivating factor is because of that idealism and that desire to help and that desire to be everything his mother isn't. Baghra tells him this trauma he just experienced was because of the oppression of his people, and instead of following her lead and accepting that, going into hiding and abandoning everybody to their misery, he goes I can do something about that. I can make it so this never happens again. Which is usually how trauma like that combines with one's core personality traits at a young age, especially when there's none of the essential support systems in place to aid in recovery (ie, the role Baghra should have been filling but wasn't, because she decided to exacerbate the problem instead).

And yeah, one of my biggest problems with the ham-fisted "beating you over the head with a sledgehammer of evil deeds" look-how-bad-this-character-is! portrayal of the Darkling in the later books comes from the impression I get that Bardugo doesn't trust her readers. She's so desperate to have us hate this character and think him an irredeemable villain, not trusting any of her readers to engage critically with a morally gray character, that it feels quite a bit like condescending fucking bullshit. Which ew, I know how to engage with literature, thanks.

She really does seem to look down on a large part of her fandom, and imo, the infantilization of the female characters in her books seems to carry over to her impression of most of her female readers as well. Which is why the Darkling's character arc gets fucking destroyed. But he's still a good cash grab, of course, so she'll shake his dead corpse in front of the fandom for money every time she wants something from it.

Also! Another reason I think her plotlines feel disconnected (I'm sorry Bardugo I respect you as a person, but shit-) is because the writing in SaB is just bad. I mean, nevermind the absolutely nauseating implications of the way she portrays the Grisha as a persecuted group who's situation is never actually fully addressed as it should be, considering Grisha rights is what her main villain is fighting for (imo for a series called the Grishaverse, LB seems to be pretty anti Grisha), but her characters and story alone are just wrong for each other. They don't fit together.

And the ending is one of the main pieces of evidence in that regard! You can’t say the ending where Alina isn’t Grisha anymore is her “going back to where she started” when she’s always been Grisha. She just didn’t know she was Grisha because she denied that part of herself that she was born with.

Alina is reluctant to move forward or change, she struggles with adapting, and she’s very set on the things she’s grown attached to throughout her life. She also has some latent prejudices against the Grisha, and so denies the possibility of being Grisha for those reasons as well.

Alina’s lack of powers in the beginning of her life because she willfully doesn’t learn about them to avoid change versus her lack of powers at the end of the book when she’s accepted them and then they’re stripped away from her by outer forces are two entirely separate circumstances. You can’t make a parallel about lost powers and lack of Grisha status bringing her back to the start when she was always Grisha and she always had powers and she simply refused to come to terms with it because of personal reasons.

The first situation is an internal conflict that indicates a story about growth and a journey of self acceptance. Denying herself the opportunity to learn about her heritage and to find acceptance with a group of people like her because she’s tied to the past and because of the way she was raised is the setup for a narrative that tackles unlearning prejudice and learning how to connect with a part of her identity that was denied her and learning how to grow independent and self assured. It’s the setup for a different story entirely. The second situation is an external conflict that centers around the ‘corrupting influence of power’... for some reason.

In a world where Grisha do not have social, political, or economic power and they are hunted, centering your heroine’s journey of self acceptance and growth around an external conflict about... the corrupting influence of power (in a group of people that don’t actually have any power?!) just doesn’t work. It is literally impossible to connect the two stories Bardugo is trying to push in Shadow and Bone without seriously damaging the main character’s developmental arc.

The only way a narrative like this would work, claiming that she has gone back to where she started, is either a) if the Grisha weren’t actually a persecuted group and instead were apart of the upper class, or b) if the one bad connection between the two instances is acknowledged - that Alina denied a part of herself crucial to self acceptance and growing up, and that losing her powers at the end has also denied her. It is a tragedy, not a happy ending.

Alina suffered because she didn’t use her powers. She grew sick. It was bad for her. This was not a resistance to 'the corruption of power and the burden of greed', it was her suffering because she couldn’t fully accept herself.

Framing the ending as a return to the beginning can’t be done if you don’t address how bad the beginning was for your main character. You brought her back to a bad point in her life. You regressed her. This should be a low point in her arc. It should be a problem that’s solved so she can finish developing organically or it should be something that is acknowledged as a tragedy in it’s own right, for the future the world (the writing) denied her.

This is a ramble and it makes no sense and I’m really sorry, but my point is that Bardugo put the wrong characters in the wrong story. The character arc required for organic development doesn’t match the story and intended message at all. The narrative doesn’t fit the cast. She's got two clashing stories attempting to work in tandem and she ends up with both conflicting messages that fans still can’t comprehend in her writing and an ending that doesn’t suit her main character to such an impossible degree that it’s almost laughable.

So yeah, there's a few reasons why I think the story and the plot feels so bad and disconnected. I hope you don't mind me making this answer so long! 😅 I was not expecting to write this much.

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marysfoxmask · 4 years

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the secret garden (1949) - why it’s my favorite adaptation

hello @renee-mariposa! thank you so much for the ask! while i believe i have answered a question like this before, i don’t think i’ve elaborated as much as i’d like to. so allow me to wax poetic on my favorite adaptation, the secret garden (1949)!

intro

this adaptation really stands out, i think, because of the the era it was made in; i don’t think you could get an adaptation aimed towards kids that is such a sentimental, gothic-lite melodrama with these days, at least without aggressively telegraphing its more emotional moments a la pixar/disney; it’s amusingly blunt and straightforward in that regard, much like the children at its center. there’s not much syrupiness at all. the child actors (margaret o’brien as mary and dean stockwell as colin) are fast-talking as any actor of that era, but in my opinion, the film’s clearly scripted dialogue just makes all the kids seem amusingly precocious.

actors

margaret o’brien as mary is great. i love her stridency, her snobbishness. unlike other adaptations, which downplay mary’s contrariness to the point where her character arc comes across as too subtle by half, the movie upgrades it. not only is 1949 mary contrary, her sullenness has been replaced by a shrillness, snobbery, and the tendency to run to emotional extremes (not to mention a healthy helping of classism). she alienates herself from the other children on the ship to england purposefully, finding them inferior to herself, then attempts to physically fight another passenger when the child calls archibald a hunchback. while this characterization isn’t book-accurate (book mary is a mix of fiery and sullen that none of the films capture accurately imo), i prefer this characterization of her to the closed-off sullenness of the 1993 version or the palatably traumatized 2020 version. 1949 mary isn’t given an obvious freudian excuse for her issues; her parents are just as neglectful, but the film puts the onus on mary for being contrary, which is weirdly refreshing and more attuned to the novel’s perspective. (that isn’t to say that mary’s traumatic early childhood didn’t inform her character in any meaningful way, or that the adults around mary aren’t responsible for how she turned out--but imo the films tend to take an un-nuanced view of the situation in order to make her a more palatable, sympathetic character, which is vastly less interesting than a complicated, flawed one no matter if the character is a child or not). when mary’s character develops and she becomes sweeter, it’s much more impactful as a result of this earlier narrative choice.

brian roper, who was 20 at the time (crazy, right?), plays dickon, and he plays him with a sweet affability that’s hard not to enjoy. he’s a little mischievous, laughing at mary when she accidentally speaks yorkshire (i’ll talk about that in a bit), and has, in a nice touch that i’ve strangely only seen in in the 1994 straight-to-dvd animated film, just as much of a passionate interest in the secret garden as mary does. dickon isn’t treated as mystically as other adaptations, save for the tendency to disappear strangely quickly just when mary happens to turn around (which is a nice nod to his quasi-magical aspects without being distracting, and also adds to mary’s sense of displacement/confusion on the mysterious misselthwaite grounds). he also gets a surprising amount to do in this adaptation, which i love, as someone who strongly believes his character has been under-served in all the film adaptations thus far. in this film, he gets to even enter misselthwaite manor by climbing up ivy into colin’s room in the middle of a storm (albeit offscreen), which is just the kind of adventurous, dramatic touch i enjoy. he also gets probably more dialogue than any of the other dickons (whoo!), as he makes a couple minor declarations--nothing super ham-fisted and melodramatic, as i said the screenplay is rather straightforward and devoid of a lot of corniness you might expect from a children’s film made in the ‘40s, especially with this kind of source material--that are heartfelt without being cloying (one of the benefits of having an older actor playing this kind of role).

colin, played by dean stockwell, is a weaker element to me. he does a good job alternating between screaming (and this movie contains a lot of screaming) and being sweet when the movie calls for it, but i don’t think he was the best choice for colin. while i think it’s awful to criticize a teen actor (stockwell was 13 at the time) for being baby-faced, the fact that he looks significantly younger than o’brien (who was 12) means that his tantrums come off as less a result of arrested development than they should. while he speaks as stiltedly as 2020 colin (who i personally think was one of the best elements of that film), it’s unclear whether that’s the result of the ‘40s fashion of expressing dialogue or a characteristic choice (i’m guessing the former). he can’t help but pale compared to o’brien’s mary, though he is perfectly adequate. he just didn’t stand out for me.

i summed up my feelings of elsa lanchester as martha in my previous, brief review of the movie back in june: “the one major flaw, i think, is actually martha, played by elsa lanchester; her portrayal is odd, feels definitely tone-deaf. her constant shrieking laughter feels very forced and unconvincing. in her few scenes, she jars everything to a halt in terms of believability.” she was significantly older than brian roper, being in her ‘40s playing a character heavily implied to be in her mid-teens to early twenties, and as a result feels out of her depth. her establishing scene is probably the worst, although i’ve warmed to her other scenes as time’s gone by.

tone/atmosphere

in general, i think the ‘49 film does a wonderful job expressing the gothic implications of the original book, even emphasizing them by casting misselthwaite manor largely in shadow and having mary and mrs. medlock first arrive in a carriage pulled by black horses on a dark, stormy night. it makes the bright outdoor scenery seem that much more inviting in comparison. burnett’s robin is also replaced by a raven, who also takes on aspects of dickon’s crow soot, as he is friends with dickon and hops on his shoulder occasionally. while it divulges from burnett’s book, i think a raven makes a little more sense in this adaptation, which amps up the eeriness of the original story; it gives mary’s journey a little more of a fairytale aspect, i think, and is overall an understandable and palatable change.

plot

the big plot development that divulges from the novel is the presence of a subplot where, due to a misunderstanding of an axe and a tree in the titular garden, mary and dickon fall under the impression that archibald killed lilias. now, this is a pretty bizarre plot, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t take up much of the film; it’s charming in its strangeness, and fits well with the idea of innocent children struggling to understand the complicated adult world—which is itself a theme original to the story that i’m kind of a sucker for, in general. it also serves as a bonding point for dickon and mary, whose friendship largely feels passed over in film adaptations.

and, of course, there’s the big plot-breaking point near the end, where archibald goes to tell colin that he’s selling misselthwaite and going to move to europe with him. an obvious plot point that conflicts with this scene is that colin, in the book, has no relationship with his father. again, it’s an odd adaptational choice meant to amp up the stakes, but it doesn’t impede my enjoyment of the film as a whole. the presence of two doctors—one, a hapless neville craven figure named dr. griddlestone, and the other is obviously inspired from the book’s “doctor from london,” who insisted all colin needed was fresh air, food, and exercise—gives the film some psychological weight. despite the disappointing element of all of colin’s neuroses being blatantly the result of his father’s emotional ailments, which i think is a lazy way of reading the original novel’s portrayal of colin’s illness, i think the way this development was executed in the film was tolerable—and i’m a sucker for children’s films that don’t think anything of including long conversations between adults about psychological issues. like, you can’t help but respect a film like that!

the garden

something i also love about this adaptation is that the garden isn’t a huge part of it; it represents more of a place where mary and dickon and colin can foster ideas and grow rather than a place of orgasmic beauty. there’s not a surplus of lavish panning shots, really, like in the ‘93 film, and it lacks the magical realism of the 2020 film. the garden itself is more transparently a plot device, which i actually like—it gives more room for the children to center themselves.

individual scenes

and the pacing of the film is actually really nice, i think—probably the best out of all the films. i love the ‘93 film with all my heart, and it’s definitely gorgeous in its own right, but i think it gets a little sluggish; this film is paced beautifully. there’s no fat, really.

there’s a scene i really love that shows the passage of time from winter to spring in a super succinct, stupidly obvious way that nonetheless works because of the innocent sweetness of o’brien’s delivery. like, it’s very old-fashioned and sentimental, but gah, it gets me every time.

youtube

it’s time to talk about the scream scene!

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this film stole my heart the minute mary screamed wholeheartedly at colin that she hopes he dies. there’s a dark comedy to this whole scene; these two maladjusted, spoiled children trying to out-scream one another while tearing down curtains and knocking down tables full of food higgledy-piggledy?? you just can’t get better than that!

if you’re adapting the secret garden, i strongly feel you can’t soften the children’s meanness, their sharpness and ugliness. their tantrums must be harsh and grating and horrible! they have to really let loose! the rawness of the children’s emotional dysfunction contrasted against the buttoned-up stiffness of edwardian england is one of the fascinating aspects of the novel i love to think about, and you just can’t get that contrast if you don’t have the children be genuine terrors! i think this scene puts that nicely, more nicely than any of the other films, which pussyfoot around colin’s intense tantrum too much to be nearly as effective. i get giddy whenever this scene comes on; it’s brilliant.

there are so many little details from the book that i love: that the children speak yorkshire to one another, mary singing her ayah’s song to colin,

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dickon’s “i will cum bak” note (here written as “i will kum back”), the mention of dickon’s mother sending them bread to eat to make them strong. it’s all so nicely implemented, and reminds me of the joy of reading the book for the first time.

but the scene i love most is one entirely made up for the film. in it, mary tells colin about the garden, but wraps it up in fiction wherein it’s a sort of child’s eden, only accessible for children like themselves. that gets to the heart of why i love the book moreso than any other adaptation i can think of. it’s a children’s paradise where the innocent, inherent goodness of children reigns. it makes me tear up almost every time, despite the scene’s brevity.

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miscellaneous

there are some little details that i love about this film: the fact that mrs. sowerby is spotted in one scene where we see dickon at his home, feeding a lamb (and the implication that mary was so darn excited about finding the key to the garden that she ran all the way to the sowerbys’ cottage, five miles away from misselthwaite, to show dickon), mary’s clearly false story to colin about being surrounded by tigers and elephants in india, mary threatening to tear people’s gizzards out, mary telling dickon she hates him because he (gasp) dared to know about colin so she couldn’t reveal his existence to him...there’s a lot to enjoy about this film. it definitely isn’t the most accurate to the book, but it’s one of those films that i could watch over and over again.

aside from some superfluous subplots, it’s a lean adaptation that still captures all the essential elements of the book to at least to a degree. i can easily imagine some very indignant little girls in 1949 insisting that no, the raven was a robin in the book, and there was no implications of murder, either, but i love it in all its simplicity. i think you need a little old-fashioned sentiment to make a film adaptation of the secret garden successful.

#the secret garden #frances hodgson burnett #the secret garden 1949 #mary lennox #dickon sowerby #colin craven #margaret o'brien #dean stockwell #brian roper #elsa lanchester

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windona · 5 years

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Krypton v Smallville: A Study in Fate in Prequels

Many people have noticed that there’s been a lot of shows and movies set ‘before’ the main story or franchise. Some of these were always planned as part of the franchise (Star Wars), while for the most case Superhero prequels come about because someone thinks there’s a story there. And often they’re right; you can tell many an interesting story from side characters or backstories.

However, there’s also been a degree of prequel fatigue. Many think that it won’t be that exciting if you already know the ending, and that can happen if the idea isn’t executed properly. There’s also the way a prequel can ham fist and interesting idea to go into canon. Whatever the case, there’s always that looming sense of Fate in a prequel, and how it’s handled can either improve or drag down a show.

To explore this, I’ll talk about two Superman prequels: Smallville, which aired for ten years beginning in 2001, and Krypton, which just finished its first season this year. While there’s a bit of unfairness in comparing a finished long runner to a show that’s just beginning, they both have already established unique ways at handling the idea of ‘Fate’. (Warning, spoilers for both shows ahead)

In Smallville, we follow Clark. We know he’s going to be Superman one day, and the show has its fill of references. For a show about a character’s journey to become a hero, that makes sense. However, the show isn’t subtle and its story revolves around making Clark Superman. Characters who see the future know what Clark’s going to be. There are prophecies about Clark that are centuries old. Most glaringly, the show’s version of Jor-El’s AI is literally about forcing Clark to embrace his destiny, outright stating that as the goal. While a lot of conflict comes from the fact that Clark believes Jor-El wants him to conquer Earth and Jor-El’s behavior seems to support that initially, it still is a matter of enforcing Fate.

In contrast, Krypton is set with Seg, Clark’s biological grandfather. Krypton has been said to ‘not really be a prequel’ by those involved, and part of the reason for that is readily apparent in the first episode, when Adam time travels to the future and explicitly states he’s there to make sure Superman exists and time happens as it’s supposed to.

Both agents of fate do questionable things to achieve their goal of having Superman. The Jor-El AI brainwashes both an innocent uninvolved girl and Clark to further his goal. Later seasons, the AI keeps on giving Clark various trials, some of which are questionable at best, and is said to be responsible for Jonathan Kent’s heart condition that later kills him. In the end the narrative frames this as harsh but correct and worth it to produce a savior like Superman. The show also outright states that as a baby, Jor-El and Lara both planned on Clark being Earth’s savior. Clark had zero say as to whether or not he would be Superman, as his life was planned out for him.

Conversely, Adam Strange initially presents himself as a superhero here to prevent Brainiac from destroying Kandor and getting rid of Superman. Even if there is some doubts to his words and Adam isn’t instantly endearing to the rest of the cast, they trust him and work with him to save their city. However, the mid-season twist about General Zod being the time traveler and Brainiac taking Kandor being part of Kryptonian history changes that. It brings up the question if Krypton needs to be destroyed for there to be a Superman, and what choice is right. Seg and the other Kryptonians clearly choose to change fate and to try and save their world, while Adam continues his role as an agent of fate and tries to help Brainiac take Kandor at one point.

In Smallville, the AI is just belaboring what we already know and is essentially pulling the curtain back on a story. This is going to happen because we know it has to happen and the characters are at the will of the writers. There is no fighting or questioning it. On Krypton, some of the suspense comes from the fact we don’t know which option is right, and we can’t tell if there really will end up being a Superman. We fall in love with the characters, and see how that influences the future we think will happen, and wonder if these characters need to die for other beloved characters to be.

This also extends to non-El characters. On Smallville, Lex Luthor is introduced as a well meaning if flawed young man, trying to be a better person than his father. However, even before he goes evil we have prophecies and characters reminding us that he’s going to go evil. The audience isn’t allowed to wonder as early as season 1, and that both makes his fate more tragic but also makes him seem like a pawn of fate. If even when he was trying to be a better person he was doomed, then doesn’t that take away some of the hope that Superman stands for?

While due to the setting not many future comic characters appear, at the start of season 1 of Krypton we see the House of Zod. We know that a major enemy of Superman’s will come from them, and in fact he does appear in the second half of the season. But even with the drama, we wonder if Lyta and Seg will successfully defy society and become a couple. And when the General himself appears and tells Lyta what she will become, we wonder if saving Kandor will help prevent her from turning into her mother like she fears. Things are not written, so the audience feels the characters have a degree of agency.

Lastly, there’s the use of prophecy. Smallville is prophecy overloaded, with characters from Cassandra to Jordan telling Clark his fate, to outright written ones from the Traveler prophecy to the one of Naman and Sageth. A conspiracy forms around the Traveler prophecy, all connected to Clark and influencing his life and fate. This prophecy also influences the lives of characters, with the weight and knowledge of Clark’s future so heavy that apparently everyone knows it before Clark does. Again it serves as a reinforcement, and forces the audience and characters to say ‘yup, that’s the future’. It becomes redundant and trite, showing that no matter what again there was no free will in the matter. It cheapens Clark’s journey, and makes being Superman an obligation at times.

Krypton only has one prophecy: The one Adam gave, and a disappearing cape to prove it. Characters like Seg question it. Kem outright derides it when he’s searching for Ona. Few have reason to believe it or care, and for Seg it’s more an inspiration to fight Brainiac and go for that better future than something he feels chained to. Yes, he wants the House of El to flourish again and wants to have a grandson he can be proud of, but he doesn’t always have faith in it and is willing to throw away a vague future if it means saving his world and those he loves now. It’s not something that determines or confines their fate, but influences their choices.

#Smallville #Krypton #this meta is very rambly

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theinquisitivej · 5 years

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A Quartet of Reviews: Missing Link, Pet Semetary, Shazam!, and Hellboy (2019)

Missing Link

As the technical accomplishments and detailed beauty of Laika’s stop-motion films are part of the reason I’ve chosen to study stop-motion animation for my current academic research, you’ll forgive me if I approach their fifth film with some bias. Plus, box office numbers suggest that a lot more people really should be seeing these, so the more voices there are singing Laika’s praises the better, frankly.

Missing Link is notably ambitious in that it strives to deliver an action adventure in the vein of Around the World in 80 Days or The Mummy (the Brendan Fraser one, not the “DARK UNIVERSE” one- yes, that did happen, and it is hard to remember), with multiple thrilling and complex action sequences, all in stop-motion. Given the labour-intensive nature of stop-motion and the limitations you’d typically expect of a medium that’s executed through real models that have a weight and substance to them that makes them less flexibly fluid than cel or digital animation, stories with an emphasis on dynamic action aren’t what you’d typically expect when it comes to stop-motion. And yet Laika demonstrate their full commitment to making Missing Link an energetic blockbuster through impressive choreography and painstakingly realised action set-pieces. While the charming characters and light-hearted tone help you stay engaged with the narrative, you’ll be constantly taken back by the seamless merging of traditional methods and modern technology in the animation which makes you sit up and take notice as you wonder how they managed to put together each scene. The best use of digital effects are the times where you’re not entirely certain it’s even there, and Laika’s approach to this modern tool definitely fits in that category.

The film never quite reaches a point of emotional intensity that leaves me completely floored, as some of Laika’s previous films have managed to do. I didn’t walk away from the film remembering a moment where a character’s vulnerabilities are laid bare or a difficult but essential lesson is imparted in the most brutally earnest way. So, when compared against ParaNorman or Kubo and the Two Strings, Missing Link left less emotional impact on me. Having said that, the film still conveys numerous themes effectively through key story beats and striking visuals, with its central thesis being the importance of learning empathy towards others, and that you shouldn’t seek validation from close-minded proponents of outdated and toxic principles. As such, through a combination of entertaining characters with likable personality, an emphasis on globetrotting action, its refreshingly positive outlook, and tremendous animation on both the large and the small-scale across the board, Missing Link is a delightful adventure that you should make a point of seeing.

Final Ranking: Silver.

Boasting charm, an infectious sense of humour, and perhaps the best action I’ve seen in a stop-motion film, Missing Link absolutely meets the standard of quality that you’d expect from a Laika production.

Pet Semetary

As many other people discussing this film have noted, Pet Semetary is a Stephen King story that’s notable for being so bleak that even Stephen King felt it was too dark. He hesitated to submit it for publishing for three years, only submitting it when he needed to meet a deadline for a contract. In the subsequent years, King has been critical of the “nothing matters” mentality of the story. With that in mind, as well as the knowledge that several people I follow whose opinions on film I trust were not fond of it, I was prepared for the possibility that I wouldn't enjoy it, but nevertheless open to the film surprising me. After all, Stephen King is a consistently entertaining storyteller, and I’m always interested to see how people adapt his work. For a while, things seemed okay enough. Then it started to drag around the middle, and then it took a hard, fast, ugly turn, descending into the most distasteful experience I’ve had in a cinema this year.

As that summary indicates, the set-up is intriguing enough. A family move into a new home, and there are little signs that things aren’t quite right around here, as well as the telltale indications of a traumatic past that have left some of the characters with residual hang-ups that they will inevitably be forced to confront, and the tantalising promise of something unnatural on the horizon that will draw our protagonists in as they descend into horror. It’s competent ground laying work, and apart from the horrifying past of one of the character’s being uncomfortably demonising of the sick, and a lack of a distinctive visual style for the film to call its own, I didn’t have many serious issues with the first third or so.

Once you approach the middle portion of the film, things start to feel protracted. Even if you haven’t seen a trailer or heard the gist of this story and have a decent idea about the trajectory of its narrative, there comes a point where you start to know exactly where things are heading. Discussions of death and what may or may not come afterwards, repeated reminders of how dangerous and unexpected high-speed vehicles on the road outside their house can be, and allusions to some unknowable force that can make impossible things happen which the father of this family absolutely must not approach are all dots that anyone familiar with the phrase “monkey’s paw” can join together with little difficulty. Without an engaging dynamic between characters (a la IT), a self-aware bizarreness that results in humour, or a notable visual style, there’s little to keep you going as you wait for pieces to very, very slowly fall into place.

And the final act is just awful. It spits course language and nihilistic vitriol with little substance or point to its depictions of pain, misery, and spitefulness other than to wallow in this negativity with nothing else to say. Actors start to abandon any semblance of understated nuance in favour of ham-fisted bluntness, cursing out characters with an intensity that doesn’t feel earned as they clumsily fight against them in a way that lacks any sense of climactic satisfaction, and, because your investment in these characters rapidly drains with each new questionable decision and unlikable action, there’s no tension to these encounters either. There are numerous instances where the actors will do their best to deliver lines of dialogue that try to be shocking or wryly dark, but the material is so poorly thought out that it awkwardly misses the mark in both categories. It’s especially galling as the film spent so much time and effort on getting to this conclusion that it was trying to amp up as this big, horrifying finale that will shake you, when instead it’s just underwhelming and unpleasant without any purpose to itself. I was wishing for it to end, and yet when the credits began to roll, I couldn’t help but ask “wait, is that it?” It’s a limp ending with little meaning that leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

Final Ranking: Cardboard.

Pet Semetary’s first act offers some potential, but that’s all it is: potential. The middle act spends so long getting to where it needs to be and where the audience knows it’s going that, by the time it gets there, it spends what little time it has left on cruel, structureless nihilism without taking any ownership for the unpleasant material it lays down at your feet.

Shazam!

The DC movies are in a great place right now. I’ve yet to see James Wan’s Aquaman, but from the abundance of positive things I hear about it, as well as the profound impact Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman had on audiences, James Gunn and a whole lot of appealing casting choices being attached to the next Suicide Squad film, and the great feelings I have about the energy that the Birds of Prey teaser indicated, I’m very optimistic about the future of DC films. Now that Shazam! has released and proved to be a positively uplifting delight, my outlook on this series is cheerier than ever!

Hm? What about that Joaquin Phoenix Joker movie? Well... my feelings towards that are… complicated. I’ll save my thoughts on it for another time, but suffice to say, I think the film has the potential to be great, but I worry about the way it will be received, and that the worst crowd will embrace it and take the wrong lessons from it.

Anyway, for the here and now, Shazam is a refreshing blend of joyous levity and unexpected intensity. The film offers endearing comedy with teens and pre-teens acting like excited kids who enjoy doing dopey things but can still come across as insightful and having an emotional heart to them that makes you happy to spend time with them. But it’s never saccharine and, through a fleshed out script and a cast of sharp young actors and actresses, there’s a clear sense of authenticity which makes these adolescent characters seem grounded and well-observed. Something I appreciated is that, whenever the film goes into background details of the history of magic in this world, grandiose prophecies of mystical destinies, or the villain going into his sinister plans, it’s usually being talked about by grown adults who are taking themselves way too seriously. The best exemplar of this is Mark Strong who plays the villain, Dr. Sivana, with an intensity that deliberately comes across as hammy, and the young characters within the film pick up on this and play off him in a way that deflates his bluster and points out how ridiculous he’s being. As a result, the tone of Shazam! feels like it’s poking good-natured fun at prior DC projects and other big budget action blockbusters where stone faced adults spout clichéd speeches without any sense of self-awareness. It’s an approach that points out how some modes of behaviour that are often associated with maturity and being an adult are actually quite childish when you take a step back. As a superhero film that focuses on the experience of being the age where you’re young enough that you still enjoy being a kid, but old enough that you want to call adults out on their bullshit, Shazam! is impressively realised and fun as hell.

But for as light-hearted as it can be, Shazam! nevertheless surprises you with the occasional brutal sequence that catches you off guard with such rapidity that I found it relatively shocking. It’s not so detailed, gory, or explicit enough that I’d say it goes too far, but it’s worth bearing in mind before you show it to a particularly young and impressionable viewer. The benefit of these sequences is that the unexpected escalation accentuates how in over his head Billy is when he eventually comes across a situation that’s genuinely dangerous, as, despite his newfound powers, he is still a kid, and he really shouldn’t be facing this kind of thing. Indeed, the film demonstrates an impressive grasp of and dedication towards themes of maturity as Billy faces difficult truths about something he thought he wanted and realises he’s been looking in the wrong place for what he actually craves, as well as develops into a more responsible version of himself that opens up to being part of a group built on mutual trust. There’s a cleverly subtle visual indication of the progress Billy has made by the end of the film where he remembers to lower his head as he walks through a door while in his superpowered adult form. One of the first things Billy does when he first transforms is hit his head on a train door to show how unused he is to this new body. The simple act of Billy seeing the doorframe and lowering his head as he steps through without any hesitation near the end of the film signifies the control Billy has developed over himself and his own actions, making his journey of maturation resonate that much more with me. The impact of shocking dark turns and the firm, confident grasp the film has on its cohesive themes of maturation and finding your place in life elevates Shazam! from a fun time to an uplifting and refreshing story that I think people are going to really enjoy for a long while.

Final Ranking: Silver.

Energetic, full of character, and with a strongly executed theme of maturation, Shazam! is highly recommended. It is perhaps a little longer than it needs to be, which results in the latter parts of the middle section feeling a little drawn out. Having said that, the finale sends a jolt of electricity through you that makes you forget any objections you might have and remember all the positive qualities that make this film so likable.

Hellboy (2019)

Oof… why did I decide to end this collection of reviews on Hellboy (2019) and write this after three other sections? Sigh… okay, let’s get this over with.

It would be insincere of me to say I'm the most impassioned proponent of the Guillermo del Toro Hellboy films. I found them memorable and atmospheric, and you could certainly feel the characteristic flair from the many people that put their artistic touch on those films to create something unique that marked them out from other comicbook movies, which is especially impressive in the mid-2000s, pre Iron Man era. But after going through the slog that is Hellboy (2019), I think I’m more appreciative than ever of what del Toro and his team managed to achieve.

For a while, it seemed like this new R-rated version of Hellboy was angling for a more faithful adaptation of the original books by Mike Mignola, given the various interviews that were had about it over the years. Sadly, the final result feels like the result of too many outside influences dictating what the film should feature, culminating in a hodgepodge of a film which regurgitates character beats from the del Toro films, and rapidly stitches together a half-hearted attempt at a King Arthur narrative to fill in the requisite new material (this is your regular reminder to check out The Kid Who Would Be King, a much better modern reinterpretation of Arthurian lore). The presentation is dour, unenthusiastic, and lacks any atmosphere or personality, and that is something you could never accuse either the Mignola books or the del Toro films of lacking. In the whole film, there are only two sequences that stand out, namely the fight with the three giants and the rampage of the hell creatures in London. Even so, the former is a relatively meaningless sequence that contributes very little to the narrative and lifts right out of the film, while the latter is so sadistic and mean spirited that it made me genuinely uncomfortable. It falls flat as both an adaptation of a beloved fictional series that’s brimming with atmosphere, and as a piece of technical filmmaking as well.

On top of that, when the tone and general philosophy of the film does emerge out from under the rest of the film’s mediocrity, it reveals itself to be genuinely unpleasant. The film opens with narration that rushes through the backstory with Nimue and the Arthurian set-up and does so with foul-mouthed irreverence. There is a bit of humour to someone casually tossing in the odd bit of shitty language as they tell you about ancient history that should be discussed with pomp and circumstance but is instead being discussed with ill-fitting coarseness. However, there needs to be some personality to go along with it, otherwise it’s implied that the swearing is the character and all that’s there to it. In the case of this opening narration, Ian McShane emphasises each fucking swearword and it becomes clear that the dialogue is using this as a crutch in an effort to make the film seem like it has an identity as this edgy superhero movie that’s different because it swears. It’s a juvenile approach that is laughable when you consider how effortless Ryan Reynolds’ delivery in each Deadpool movie has been, which demonstrates how swearing can be used to accentuate genuinely funny jokes and characters, rather acting as the joke in and of itself.

And this isn’t even the most egregious part of the film either, it’s simply a bad first impression. The worst aspect of the film’s outlook is how virtually every character espouses the notion that you should stop complaining, stop letting things get to or affect you, and stop taking time to process things. This is especially saddening when Hellboy’s father, a character that was played with wonderful vulnerability and heart-aching humanity by the late great John Hurt, tells Hellboy to “grow some balls” and get on with things, making the emotional culmination of their time together on screen essentially boil down to ‘quit your bitching’. Characters in Hellboy (2019) show next to no empathy towards one another, and they continually reinforce the story’s outlook which, whether inadvertently or not, nevertheless encourages a state of being where you never have time to be open or vulnerable with the people around you. It’s profoundly disheartening to watch, and gives little to no thematic or visual sustenance to get you through a runtime that feels far too long.

Final Ranking: Manure.

David Harbour does an admirable job in the lead role and I was happy to at least have a protagonist in this film that captures the gruff sadness and down-to-earth affability of the character of Hellboy. But he’s drowning in limiting makeup and an even more stifling movie that has no visual flair and a boring, miserable narrative. The experience of watching this movie is draining and deflating, and I hope to never revisit it.

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mannatea · 6 years

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The latest chapter is bugging me and I was hoping to vent. I feel like the message of “war is bad, killing people is bad” is being handled in such a ham fisted way by isayama. I understand what he’s trying to do but it just feels so forced. For example Zootopia did an amazing job of taking a complex subject and making it clear enough for children to understand but weaving it into a good story too. SNK seems to be making that attempt for young adults, but it’s failing. Do you have any thoughts?

I always have thoughts! Sorry this took so long.

Zootopia has flaws! Glaring flaws! In fact, Zootopia has one of the same flaws that SnK has: the oppressed are feared because they used to have power over their oppressors. Right at the beginning of the film, they say: predators used to eat prey. So predators like Nick really did used to eat prey like Judy. This isn’t contestable, it isn’t arguable. It’s the backstory right there in the canon.

SnK has a little more wiggle room here, because our information comes from characters, not the narrative (or even an accepted historical perspective): we’re meant to believe that, more or less, the Eldians once had power over the rest of the world, and now, regardless of how they used that power and because of it, they are oppressed themselves.

What’s changed? Nothing, it’s just that the originally oppressed (Prey, Marley/rest-of-the-world) have gathered together the resources and means necessary to oppress, thus flipping the script.

And like, no matter how you look at it, the flipped script is both awful and understandable. This holds up better in SnK than it does in Zootopia, but SnK has been dragging on for years and Zootopia is a children’s movie that had a two hour block of time. So okay, in Zootopia, again, the predators ate the prey, but then they all developed Intelligence and stopped eating each other, but the predators didn’t develop blunt teeth or lack of claws, so the prey still feel like there’s something to be feared, there. In SnK, the Eldians can turn into mindless gigantic monsters that literally crush, stomp, kick, and eat everyone in their path, and to the average human being are invincible. Fear? Understandable. Oppressing them because they’re different? Awful, not to mention wrong…but not like…hard to understand.

Again, Zootopia ran into the SAME problem that SnK did with its comparisons. Both, brought into the real world to use with real world comparisons, would sound like this:

The Jewish people oppressed their German neighbors and the Germans retaliated and put them in Camps and killed them off by the thousands so that they wouldn’t have to fear being oppressed again themselves. This is, like, weird revenge for stuff that happened in the Bible, like when the Jews took the Canaan Land.

(HI IT’S ME, there’s some kind of essay comparison thing betweeen SnK and the walls of Jericho I’m sure.)

Black men and women were in a position of power over white men and women so the white men and women shackled them and dragged them across the ocean out of fear for their own lives, and like, let them live and stuff, but only as slaves (who were treated as less valuable than cattle). Oh, and I guess you can keep aspects of your culture but only the parts that aren’t scary to us. And also become Christian so you’re less terrifying!!

Women were once the oppressors of men. We’ve been put in our place.

Do you see how legitimately gross this is? The idea that an oppressed people did something to terrify other nations into doing the oppressing? There is always a reason for everything that happens, and by that I’m not quoting bullshit Christianity rhetoric that is intended to make your grandma feel better when Aunt Susie dies; I mean CAUSE AND EFFECT. It’s easy to stir up hatred, okay? It’s not hard. You see it now. “Those brown people are stealing our jobs!!!” We all know someone, or ten someones, or a hundred, who believe that shit–who believe that Hispanic men and women are illegally in the USA stealing “American” jobs. And for a much quieter, less overt version of this, we have the white vegans who get mad if you try and explain to them that their lifestyle is understandable up to the point where they’re fine with brown men and women working as slaves to produce their food all in the name of “lol protecting animals.” Racism and misogyny aren’t always overt, and in fact…usually are not. Nobody who has been oppressed deserved it; nobody who has been oppressed was once the big bad oppressor, either.

All right, so moving on.

Zootopia’s comparisons are more clearly across the board. Judy, a prey animal, becomes a cop, a predator position, and is deterred by her parents/friends/new coworkers for various reasons that are clearly an allusion to misogyny. It’s commenting on anti-women attitudes. “That’s a man’s job.” “I’m going to give you my shit work because you’re a woman.” “I’m going to give you unreasonable parameters to work within because it’s funny to do that to women working in a man’s field.” Oh, and my favorite: “You work here but we’re going to give you the job here that we reserve for women.” And it’s not just the obvious people either, like Judy’s supervisor or her direct coworkers. Clawhauser doesn’t exactly come to Judy’s defense even though he’s kind to her, and Nick mocks Judy openly multiple times.

But wait, there’s more: Nick as a little boy wanted to join the Junior Ranger Scouts! It’s a prey-only group, mostly, where you’re taught how to protect yourself (it seems to be the idea, since prey is generally less capable of this). But when Nick was finally able to enroll, he wasn’t welcome and was bullied instantly (in a manner meant to discourage him from ever coming back). The situation is generally black and white: predators bully prey, prey bully predators. We don’t see a lot of instances of like bullying like (even though it probably happens in certain circumstances).

Nick’s joining the scouts also brings up poverty, as Nick’s family seems to have been very poor and his mother had to scrape the money together just to buy the uniform (probably contributing to feelings of guilt and shame when it ended up being obvious to Nick later that he wasn’t welcome there). And also something-something single parent.

SnK jumped face-first into “like bullying like” but only because Isayama stacked the deck that way from the start (and had time to do it): Oppressed Eldians vs. Walldians is what I mean, here. So we see Eldians who hate Marleyans, Marleyans (and the rest of the world) who hate Eldians, and then we see Eldians hurting each other, too (because they’ve been brainwashed into doing so and/or to protect themselves). We even get half-Marleyan Reiner, who isn’t wanted by his Marleyan father, but that seems to be more out of fear of getting hung (and/or hatred of Reiner’s manipulative mother) than anything.

Those are just a couple of examples. Both Zootopia and SnK deal with a similar type of issue and try to comment on things like racism, but only Zootopia openly comments on misogyny and poverty (which are both things very clearly related when you’re talking about racism parallels), not to mention internalized racism (which is still racism but exists more quietly, even in good people like Judy).

Where Zootopia excelled isn’t the broken-down simplified version of racism. It’s the story. It’s engaging. It’s fun. SnK started out that way! But now, as a whole, it feels disjointed and incomplete. There are long lulls of SnK where I feel bored and the characters/events transpiring feel meaningless.

I’m definitely not going to say that Zootopia is an objectively a better piece of media than SnK, because it isn’t. As I said earlier, it has its issues. They fell into the same pitfall that SnK did with “the oppressed were once themselves oppressors.” And if you look really hard at it and squint a lot, there are things to critique that you probably hadn’t considered before: like Gazelle’s dancers being shirtless predator men

And we can’t really say it’s fair to compare a two hour simplified metaphor for racism/misogyny/“they’re different than I am” intended for an audience of about eight years old to a teen+ rated manga that has been going on for literal years and has been published monthly that entire time.

(Try updating a story once a month for years and see how good the whole thing ends up being. Get back to me with a laundry list of embarrassing mistakes you made and massive regrets. You’ll have them. Trust me.)

Zootopia pretty much did “racism and misogyny are bad” and succeeded. It was a fairly successful film that was way, way better than anyone expected it to be (considering we mostly knew it as “the furry movie” due to the trailers being wildly stupid), but again: 2 hours and aimed at children. You can’t really simplify racism and misogyny and poverty into a two hour film and you definitely can’t do it flawlessly. They get points for trying, though, and for creating a piece of media that I personally related to and enjoyed (particularly from the angle of a woman working in fields dominated by men).

SnK is doing a lot of…something. I think “racism is bad” is an intention but it’s very long and drawn out and plastered onto the backdrop of a war and brainwashing and, what, centuries of oppression? Shit’s convoluted as hell and there’s no room left to talk about misogyny and poverty, even though they’re part of the series in many ways, and even though IMO these things are impossible to fully separate from the topic of racism. Add to this the attempt to write a narrative commentary on war and grey morality with a fantasy/gore aspect and you’ve kind of accidentally ruined the intention of the racism message far more than Zootopia ever did. Zootopia’s kind of like, “so hey thousands of years ago predators and prey weren’t intelligent so in our pre-caveman days we were enemies but once we developed brains we were like WTF? and stopped doing that.” SnK’s like, “well so it wasn’t really that long ago BUT the eldians oppressed everyone and we’re scared of being killed by them so we keep them in internment camps lol.”

SnK could yet surprise us by telling us that anyone can turn into a titan, and IMO that’s the ONLY way to save the racism metaphor that the series seems to be going for. LITERALLY the only way. It won’t make it perfect, but it’ll save it from being a colossal failure. “They’re oppressed now because they used to oppress us” is disgusting and vile and honestly kind of scary; that’s not a thing and a wildly successful series like SnK putting that message out into the world is terrifying. “They’re oppressed because we’re greedy fucks who lied and covered it up with a reason” not only makes a LOT of sense (see: only Marley deals with Eldia, nobody else does, it’d be easy to lie about it), but it’s a clear real-world parallel.

Right now, though…SnK has basically failed to fully address “racism is bad”—at least in a satisfying and inoffensive way.

And then of course, as Anon said, we have the war to talk about. Greed is a huge part of this and not very discussed. (Greed being about monetary greed, power, land, resources, et cetera.) I don’t know if SnK is actively trying to say war is bad or not; the narrative seems to be painting Eren in a bad light, but if I were (general) you, I wouldn’t take that very seriously. Isayama is notorious at this point for manipulating the narrative to fit what he wants you to see/take away from things. Otherwise, his idea of a plot twist wouldn’t work. ;P

Anyway, the latest chapter’s “killing people is bad” thing would come across a lot better, in my opinion, if there wasn’t already so much going on. Zootopia could condense its subject easily due to its 2 hour block, smallish cast, and simplified world. 111 chapters into SnK and there’s just no way anything is capable of being simple anymore. Is 111 trying to talk about “war is bad and killing is bad” or is it talking about revenge or the folly of anger? The Count of Monte Cristo did revenge so well nobody else will ever top it (so it might be unfair to expect SnK to), and even a GBA Fire Emblem game did anger better in a few lines of text.

I’m always down for picking apart something large like SnK but it is my opinion that the series is just too big, the cast too large, and the story too convoluted and folded over on itself, to make anything satisfyingly simple. There just aren’t enough panels to let Mikasa talk about why she protected Gabi, or to get into Kaya’s head so that we understand how she felt right before she tried to stab Gabi, or even what Mr. and Mrs. Braus were thinking when they found out this little girl killed Sasha.

It has to be simplified for space and time constraints, just like Zootopia did, but on a scale Zootopia didn’t have to deal with–and probably wouldn’t hold up under, if I had to guess.

So that leaves us with Zootopia handling things nicely because it only had to hold up for two hours of non-critical thought/viewership with just a handful of characters (in possession of the added bonus of being planned and edited before publication), and SnK flailing around a bit in some areas, and badly in others, because it’s trying to hold up over 111 chapters of content and well over 100 characters while being written pretty much on the fly.

I mean, it sucks! But it makes sense. Themes are going to have to be ham-fisted if they’re going to fit into SnK. At this point the series doesn’t have the luxury of time to spread it out.

#snk #snk critical #zootopia #long post #cute anons #answered mail #snk meta

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cerastes · 7 years

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O-K so I finally got off Helltime, and now I have the Time to write something I’ve been meaning to: Doki Doki Literature Club prim and proper critique.

Now, you’ve seen me gush about the game, you’ve seen me recommend it to everyone I thought would enjoy it, you’ve seen me go through post-media depression after it, and it is precisely because I enjoyed it so much that I want to do a proper, serious post about it as a piece of media.

This post obviously contains massive spoilers for DDLC. Look away now if you have not read it yet and wish to experience it at full power.

NOW, what is Doki Doki Literature Club? It’s a Visual Novel, but not quite a Visual Novel, I’d say it’s more of a Visual Experience, kind of like a roller coaster. It sure is a read, a short read, but a read nonetheless, but you are not there just for the narrative: The gimmicks and the aesthetic are why you are here. Much like a roller coaster, you also don’t go through it too many times unless you really love it. Aside from the critique, I want to explain why I believe DDLC made amazing use of its medium and choice of narrative to do what it set out to do.

Now, you may say it’s a metanarrative with a heavy emphasis on glitches disguised as a cutesy dating sim, except, you don’t go into it expecting a cutesy dating sim, you go into it knowing something’s funky. The game is honest about it. It has a very serious, very thorough warning right on the get go, and it says to check a specific link to see more in detail. This not only makes it a fair warning, but it also doesn’t spoil anything to those that don’t want to see the warning/don’t need it. That’s a good touch. It’s never disguised, as much as it is stylized as a cutesy dating sim with something lurking within. This is important to note because it’s not a Surprise Genre Change or anything like that: What you get is what was intended for you to know from the get go.

DDLC was never intended as tight narrative, it was always intended to be an experience. It’s definitely not lacking as a narrative, but it’s not deep, either, and I’d say bare bones in some parts. DDLC did not discover the Wheel 2, that is, it’s not a revolutionary read, because it never intended to be a revolutionary read: It was always an experience from the get go. You are not there for the deep, intricate characters, you are there for what is done with the basic characters you get, and with the medium they are presented through. What does this mean? Let’s find out.

The base cast is a very simple selection of tropes we are all familiar with: Sayori, the childhood friend and catalyst as to why the story starts. Yuri, the sweet, loving and yet reclusive and hurt well mannered lady. Natsuki, archetypal tsundere who is very demure and caring past the spicy exterior. Monika, all around ace and role model, good at everything, model student. The characters are nothing new, which, coupled with the previous warning, does raise a few flags immediately: Works with such hard-coded characters and with Something Lurking Within Them tend to be deconstructions or ham fisted parodies that set out to mock these things. An experienced reader will already be on guard.

But, it never goes there.

A lot of things happen in DDLC, but it never once mocks the medium. It never once holds a sign that says “ONLY DUMB VIRGINS PLAY DATING SIMS”, or one that says “THESE BASIC CHARACTERS ARE DUMB AND ONLY FOR LONELY NERDS”. Think about it. It never does. If you thought it did, congrats, that’s your own bias against metanarratives playing you. The closest it gets is Monika saying “You play these kinds of games? Well, that’s weird, but I won’t judge you, haha”. At no point does DDLC actually mock the tropes it employs or the people that enjoy them, it simply uses them to do something unexpected in another way. I really respect this because it’s really easy to just be like “HEHE, THIS IS A PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR. DID YOU EXPECT CUTE DATING, YOU VIRGIN?”, I legit thought that was going to happen, but it didn’t, and I appreciate it, because I can do without cynicism in every single piece of media I consume, especially metanarratives I enjoy so much.

Now, if it’s not a cruel mockery of tropes and those who peruse them, what DOES DDLC do with its “generic trope” characters? It plays them in two ways, both of which I enjoyed: TOO straight, and then subversively.

What does “TOO straight” mean? In Act 1, towards the end of it, you hear Sayori explain her depression. She doesn’t say “I have depression”, she explains her depression in a scene with dialogue that cut a little too deep in the skin of a lot of readers, myself included. The way she explains it, as someone who works in mental health, and as someone who had depression, is shocking because it’s what actual depression feels like. Ask anyone who has or had it, Sayori’s dialogue cut deep and caused this wave of empathy towards her from a lot of people because she’s unexpectedly realistic in this regard compared to what you usually see in fiction. It is, in fact, a recurring theme with the characters, shown subtly with the meatiest narrative resource it uses: The poems.

A rundown, using information from poems and implications from the girls’ dialogue:

Sayori had suicidal depression. Most of her words in the poem minigame refer to sorrow or suicide.

Yuri’s depression is linked to her immense loneliness, and she copes by cutting.

Natsuki is the most adjusted, but she receives regular beatings from her father, and it is implied that she’s so short compared to the other girls due to malnutrition.

We’ll cover Monika later.

DDLC does not make a mockery of the genre, as much as it injects a lot of realism to it that is alien to the genre and characterization. All these causes of depression, sadly, are very common among teenagers. It’s truly uncomfortable because it hits home.

From Act 2 and on, the characters are played subversively: This is when Monika’s tinkering has begun robbing the game of its stability, and has begun amping the bad aspects of the girls purposefully. The narrative heft here is much lower than in the first part of the game, where the poems were subtle windows; instead, here we are on the other side of the window, and the poems from the first part make sense. No, the narrative heft is not the star here, from Act 2 and on, you are in the part where The Shit Has Gone Down, and you get to see the slow, slow devolution of these people, as they are aware of it. The files start going nuts, new documents appear in your game files, It’s All Gone To Shit, my dude.

A roller coaster is an apt metaphor for Doki Doki Literature Club: Act 1 is the ascent, where it’s all slow and nice and you are telling the person next to you that this can’t be that bad. Act 2 is when you get to the submit and then go down the super vertical rails of the roller coaster at 600 kilometers per hour, screaming in languages you didn’t even know you knew: That’s when the experience begins.

I need to put emphasis on the word experience. Salvato wasn’t making a meaty narrative with this game, and if you were expecting one, man, sorry, no, Salvato was making an experience, a roller coaster, something you go through, reach the end of, and say “FUCK YEAH”. Act 2 is the roller coaster’s descent.

All I want to say is that I am so very thankful to Salvato for making it an experience without any sort of arrogance. It’s rare for something this meta to not insult the medium it is using. It feels more like he just picked “Cutesy visual novel with this crazy glitchfest is what’s gotta go down” and went with it. That’s not to mention the amazing craft of the whole thing: Renpy is mostly a very basic Visual Novel engine that runs on Python, and easy and serviceable coding language. The shit he pulled in DDLC makes it clear he studied the engine in and out.

So with all this said and done, and my insistence on viewing this as an experience very clear, you might have noticed there’s someone we haven’t talked about.

Yup. That’s the topic we have left.

Just Monika.

Monika is the driving force behind the experience. Monika is the Big Meme. You see Monika where DDLC is mentioned. As of this writing, Monika has more followers in Twitter than Dan Salvato. But see, if you remove the wrapper from the candy, if you look beyond, what is behind Monika.

Not much.

And that’s wholly the point.

Monika is an NPC. Monika was never meant to be a love interest. Monika was the Bro Character that helps you get with the girls and cheers you on. You know who Monika was supposed to be?

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Tomoda. Monika was supposed to be this extremely friendly but otherwise hollow nobody in the narrative.

Unfortunately, Monika has grown aware of her status as a fictional character. Monika achieved independence from the narrative, and turned the narrative into an experience. But, see, you can’t just create something from where there was nothing. If you put aside Monika’s obsession for you, you truly are left with nothing. Because that’s all she had in the first place: She existed as the Tomoda that only lives to help you out with the other girls. The was nothing beyond her in the first place. What does this result in? One of the purest Yandere in the latest years, if not the purest. Beyond you, there is nothing in her. Sure, she likes piano, she loves debate, she likes poems, but... There’s nothing inside. There’s nothing in there. What happens when you suddenly thrust conscience, sentience upon something hollow that only has one operative command to “support Person”?

She’ll only have Person to think about, and nothing beyond it.

Monika is not supposed to be a dream wife, she’s a pitiable creature of bites and unrequited love, because it is impossible to love her the way she loves you: To her, you are everything, but to you, she’s the shitter that made all of this happen in this game you picked up to see what was going on. That is fully intended. For her, you are everything she ever thought about for as long as she’s had sentience. For you, she’s that one girl that wasn’t even in the poem minigame and that always mostly hung in the background.

If anything in this world ever made you think that the experience wanted you to feel anything for her except pity at how justifiably, tragically shallow she is, I have no clue what to tell you.

That’s what’s fascinating about Monika and why I love her character.

Because it’s just that.

It’s Just Monika.

There’s nothing inside. Deleting her is not like when you put a bullet through The Boss’ skull in MGS3, because holy shit, you have grown to understand the suffering and pain of The Boss. Deleting Monika is more akin to finding a grievously wounded dove that you tried your best to nurse back to health, but that is suffering too much and you have to put her out of her misery in order to do her the slightest and only favor you could to her in her short life. This is not interpretative, either: Whenever you close the game and reopen it, she tells you about her nightmares and how it feels like a brief yet eternal, intense, suffocating death: Even in her endgame situation, where supposedly everything is just as she wanted, she’s suffering so much.

The dove thinks you are its savior because you are the only one that tried to help it when both its wings broke. You have to kill the dove out of mercy because even in this state, it will only continue suffering. The dove also didn’t delete three other people.

It’s a pathetic mess.

It’s just Monika.

The other three characters, who you could say are overused tropes, are deeper characters than Monika already. It was always intended, and she never escaped this, even in sentience.

That’s all she ever was meant to be, as an NPC, and as someone who usurped being an NPC. She never could win.

I could adapt DDLC’s experience to the writing style of a Greek tragedy and you would be none the wiser. For Monika, it was always a King Midas situation.

So she’s the final triple horizontal twirls in a roller coaster.

The thing with metanarratives is that you have to be flexible when it comes to reading them. You can’t just throw a tantrum because it lacked something a narrative worth its salt should have; it’s not a narrative, it’s a metanarrative. Some metanarratives will follow more conventional rules, but they don’t have to. Don’t be a sheep for the status quo. This goes especially hard towards experienced readers. Think about Dadaism and its cultural context back in the day

So that’s that. DDLC doesn’t lack clarity of purpose, it’s purpose was always “a cool experience” first and foremost. It’s not that the plot “didn’t go anywhere”, the ‘plot’ went exactly where it had to: To the cool roller coaster triple twirls.

Of course, that is not to say that “ur dumb” if you think it’s a bad piece of media because it lacked those things or anything, I’m just saying “you were looking for fish at the beef steak menu”. Hell, you may even understand a lot of this and still think it could’ve done better with other things. That’s fair, all I am saying is that denouncing the experience for not being a narrative when it never tried to be one is like blaming the fish for not being beef steak. Sometimes you want a novel, sometimes you want a roller coaster. For me, personally, it’s how it played with its medium so wonderfully that made me fall deep in love with it, the files, the documents, the aesthetic... I went in for a roller coaster ride, and I got one.

If you are looking for a meaty, deep narrative with rich characterization and intricate plots, you are not looking for what DDLC has to offer.

If you are looking for a roller coaster, well, I have good news for you: Tickets are free, and I hope you enjoy the ride.

TL;DR: Not a powerful narrative, but a very powerful and fun experience.

#ddlc spoilers

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dialux · 7 years

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Are you able to explain Cleopatra Selene/Shimuka and your feels for them? and the possibilities? screwing over octavian sounds /amazing/

YES, I CAN, AND I LOVE YOU SO MUCH FOR ASKING.

Before I get started on this whole thing, I’m going to set up the premise, mostly because a lot of people don’t actually know who I’m talking about.

[Standard disclaimer: these people have been dead for millennia, and this means that a lot of dates have been fudged/guesstimated. Actual events/deaths are also shaky, which leaves us with this.]

Also, under a cut because this got long.

So, who were these two people?

Cleopatra Selene II was the only daughter of Cleopatra VII, last active ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt (before Rome took over), and Marc Antony. She married Juba II of Numidia and later became Queen of Mauritania.

Shimuka was the founder of the Satavahana dynasty- according to the Puranas, he was a servant to the then-ruler of the Kanva dynasty, but he overthrew the king, established his own rule, and went on to found a dynasty named, literally, “a hundred horses.”*

Now, we can start setting up the background:

Cleopatra had four children: one by Julius Caesar (Caesarion) and three by Marc Antony (twins, Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios; and another son, Ptolemy Philadelphius). Caesarion was her co-ruler.

Cleopatra Selene was born in 40 BCE.

In late 31 BCE, Cleopatra and Marc Antony lose the battle of Actium to Octavian. When it becomes clear that they cannot win against the might of Rome, Cleopatra sends Caesarion- her co-ruler- to India through Ethiopia.

In August of 30 BCE, Cleopatra and Marc Antony commit suicide.

The generals that Cleopatra sent with Caesarion betray him to Octavian; Caesarion never reaches India, and is killed.**

Cleopatra Selene and her two brothers are taken to Rome, clapped in chains, and forced to walk through the streets.

Between 26 and 20 BCE, her brothers die. The cause of death is unknown.

So what we know thus far is that Cleopatra Selene was ten years old when her parents died, ten years old when she was humiliated and forced to walk through the streets of Rome in chains. Sometime between ages fourteen and twenty, she saw the last of her family die.

The rest of her life, historically, goes roughly like this:

Octavian gives Cleopatra Selene a large dowry, and “ever after she was an ally of Rome.”

She marries Juba II of Numidia, and they settle in Mauritania.

Cleopatra Selene wields great influence over her husband, and under their leadership, Mauritania prospers.

She dies in early CE, in relative happiness.

We can now turn our attentions to Shimuka***:

Around 20-40 BCE, Shimuka overthrows the Kanva King and assumes the role of king.

The Puranas clearly state that he ruled for 23 years.

Shimuka also appears to be “a very shrewd politician”.

According to the same source, Shimuka married his son off to a maharathi’s (a very skilled warrior) daughter to get more support for overthrowing the Kanvas

Later in his reign, he went on to adopt/normalize Jainism

In the last years of his reign, Shimuka became a tyrant, and was deposed by his own brother.

(Here, I’m eliminating Satakarni- Shimuka’s son- from the narrative, because I like to imagine Shimuka as about 20-25 in this, and that means he can’t have a son of marriageable age. Just imagine that Satakarni is born a couple years later, to Cleopatra Selene.)

So, to sum up: Cleopatra Selene is a teenage girl who’s going to be given a huge-ass dowry, Shimuka is a newly-formed king who wants some form of legitimacy, and they live in ~roughly~ the same time period.

Is this not shipping material???

Now, okay, lbr, there need to be things exchanged for any such alliance to take place. Here comes the interesting part: the Satavahanas are sitting right on top of the Deccan Plateau, a place that is incredibly rich in minerals and crops.

They also have access to numerous ports.

Note that in the Geography of Strabo, Pliny the Elder asserts that “[he] learned that as many as one hundred and twenty vessels were sailing from Myos Hormos to India, whereas formerly, under the Ptolemies, only a very few ventured to undertake the voyage and to carry on traffic in Indian merchandise.” We can therefore assume that under Octavian’s rule, the Indo-Roman trade grew exponentially.

So let’s say that the Satavahanas were easier on tariffs than the Kanvas and eager for international trade. Let’s say that Shimuka realized that overthrowing a king and setting up your own rule is all well and good, but nobody really takes you seriously if you don’t get yourself some credibility. Let’s say that Shimuka wants gold, to finance an army that’s only growing in size, and he also wants legitimacy, to better-establish his dynasty.

Let’s say the Romans want better trade partners.

If, around 30 BCE, Shimuka overthrows the Kanvas and assumes kingship, this sets the stage for his eventual marriage. After negotiations and trade treaties- which can take years, not to mention that Octavian needs to legitimize his own rule first- Octavian’s persuaded to arrange an alliance between Rome and India, and what better way to do that than marriage?

Also, Octavian was a bastard. He deeply disliked both Cleopatra and Marc Antony. Though there is no evidence either way, it’s quite likely that he ordered the killing of Cleopatra Selene’s two brothers; he did order the death of Caesarion.**

The thought of sending Cleopatra’s only surviving child to the land where her heir was supposed to go but couldn’t… it’s deliciously ironic, and you can’t tell me that the man who decided to declare war on Cleopatra instead of Antony as a measure of revenge wouldn’t want that.

And now we get to the good stuff:

Cleopatra Selene, only living descendant of the Ptolemies, a dynasty that has been around for centuries, is asked to go to India, to marry a man who was, not less than a decade previous, a servant. She’s lost, in short order, her father, mother, and brothers, all within ten years. She’s alone.

And then she meets Shimuka, the man who overthrew his king in favor of his own kingdom, led by a revolution of servants- I mean, can you just imagine the debates on right and wrong these two would have, on monarchies and revolutions and military states and theocracies- because Shimuka follows Jainism, and Cleopatra Selene was born into a society where her mother was hailed as a goddess (Nea Isis).

In the beginning, of course, there are problems. Cleopatra Selene is haughty, dismissive, condescending; Shimuka is vulgar, violent, frightening. They don’t even speak the same language. But they have to find common ground, and Shimuka would likely be the one to take that step: Cleopatra Selene has the gold, after all, that’s financing his army, that he needs.

So they learn each other’s edges. Cleopatra Selene learns Prakrit, slowly, painstakingly; Shimuka finds her with a tutor and decides he’ll learn to read and write, too.

(Shimuka was a servant. He likely didn’t know how to read/write before this.)

(imo, in later years he asks her to do all the paperwork anyways, because she’s so much better at it. they’ve given each other that much trust, by then.)

They aren’t so different, these two; you see, Cleopatra Selene knows what it’s like to be nothing more than a glorified prisoner, because that’s what she was in Rome. Shimuka knows, intimately, what it feels like to be a servant.

Cleopatra Selene tells Shimuka how to defame his rivals and enemies without being ham-fisted about it, because she’s watched Rome reduce her mother (the woman who had the love of all of Egypt, who was called nea Isis, new Isis, who led armies and conquered kingdoms and loved, irrevocably) to the title of whore for eight years; Shimuka introduces Selene to Jainism, and she finds peace for the first time in her life.

He teaches her how to sing the old hymns, and, one day, she offers to sing some of the songs she remembers from Egypt. She tells him of the giant pyramids that were built ages ago; he shows her Jain monasteries, all pale-stone and delicate carvings. She talks about hippos, fat and lumbering and sharp-toothed, and Shimuka takes her to one of his favorite lakes to show her a peacock’s dance.

When Shimuka rages and starts to become a tyrant (note, there’s no evidence as to why he was considered a tyrant), Cleopatra Selene can guide him away from it. She’s her mother’s daughter; she knows how to manipulate. But she’s also her father’s: she loves, deeply, immediately, and knows no way to love other than with all her heart.

And now that Cleopatra Selene’s away from Octavian? She finally has the power to address the abuse she suffered under him. And if she’s smart- and she is, she’s just as brilliant and vivid and savvy as her mother ever was- then Cleopatra Selene would slowly, quietly, increase the trade benefits of other empires. Not by increasing taxes for Rome imports/exports; by lowering taxes for Chinese silks, or North Indian stones. She would foster a seething hatred of Rome via art. She would be very careful, and by the time the Guptas rise, there would be a lasting imprint of anti-Roman sentiment in South India.

It takes them both some time, this deposed Egyptian princess and this ambitious Indian warrior-king. It takes them some disagreements, some fears, some compromises- but Cleopatra Selene knows strategy and Shimuka is shrewd, and they meet, somehow, somewhere, in the middle.

It’s a love story in the making.

Notes:

*Satavahana: sata means hundred; vahana is properly translated as “that which carries,” and refers to pretty much any mount. There are other translations to this, but I’m going by the direct roots.

**There are other ideas of how Caesarion died, but in this text we’re going by Plutarch’s Selected Lives.

***Dates for Shimuka are even more controversial than dates for Cleopatra Selene. I have chosen to go with a version in which he lives during her lifetime, not three centuries before. However, I do acknowledge that there are schools of thought that disagree.

#history #Cleopatra Selene II #egyptian history #Shimuka #indian history #satavahana dynasty #this is very very very interesting to me #and honestly if i only convert one person to this ship i will be ecstatic #because i've been alone in this for nine years alright #nine years is a LONG time #but yeah if y'all have more questions about this LET ME KNOW #I LIKE THIS SHIT #my writing #the-sober-folly

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pixelsandpins · 7 years

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Ollie and Molly Post Mortem

Now that the last episode has aired, I wanted to share some thoughts from the production. Under the cut because it gets long. Contains spoilers.

The concept:

Interestingly, as a concept, Ollie and Molly as an idea began as a voice acting vehicle for myself. Olivia and Molly were the same characters (in that they were half-sisters who didn't know about each other), but Molly was quite a bit younger, a little girl. Initially they were going to be comedic shorts featuring just the two girls in a generally more comedic fashion. I was going to voice both of them.

Then, I thought, "well, maybe I'll throw in Olivia's fiance in after a couple of episodes" because there were some male voice actors I wanted to work with. I figured at least one of them would be on board.

I was a little bit stuck, though, on what exactly the story would be, so I just started writing clips of dialogue. I think the overall tone started shifting once I wrote what would be the first draft of the opening monologue. It came out just so much darker than I intended and a new story started developing.

Then I just went from there.

On the developing the characters:

Olivia-Olivia didn’t change much from her initial inception. She was always the sort of straight man to Molly, this girl who suddenly had a sister and didn’t know what to do about it. I think her arc was the one I planned out the least, and it just sort of unfolded.

Molly-I feel, looking back, that Molly got the shallowest overall arc. Conceptually, she began as a little girl as I said above, and it was in later iterations of the concept that I made her a teenager. She was a vampire from the very start, but there were other things that I wish I had talked about more with her. Something that only got hinted at was that she’s on the ace spectrum. I wish I had made a more overt nod to it if only to make the sudden engagement to Carter just a little more troublesome. I just couldn’t quite get there without it feeling ham-fisted, though. It’s something I’ll need to work on for future endeavors.

Ferris and David-Ferris came into my head fully formed. A slightly sassy half-elf that was fed up with the noble life felt like the perfect character to help act as a bridge between Olivia and Molly if they ever needed it. David came about in relation to him. I knew, from the start, that Ferris and David were going to know each other. It was meant to show the smallness of the non human and preternatural communites. At the time, David was a blank slate, no gender, no personality. That’s when I flipped a coin, and it was like “okay, he’s a dude, what now?” Then I had to figure out how they knew each other and the most effortless way to explain that relationship. Once I had the thought that they could just be a couple and cut out all the middle, I realized I had the perfect foil to Olivia and Nate’s relationship. Then it was easy from there to make this nice, very gentle vampire mentor.

Nate-I didn’t know, at the beginning, how active Nate would be in the progression of the final conflict. I knew I wanted him to be guilty by complacency, but I didn’t really start figuring out the scope of his involvement until I was writing his and Olivia’s scene in episode 3. In the first draft I realized that the best way to really amp up the conflict for Olivia was to make him an active conspirator in the engagement annulment. Knowing that, I went back and did passes earlier in the script to congenial him up a bit (but to also make him have little flashes of insecurity), so that the final turn would be that much worse.

Carter-Carter wasn’t initially going to actually show up, just be mentioned. As I was working out the last half of the series, though, I realized the opportunity to create more sympathy for some of the people caught up in this nonsense. Where Olivia was Nate’s counter, Carter could act as Molly’s, showing another corner in this rhombus of madness. He definitely could have used more development, but I think the flashes that we got were adequate.

Chuck Brunkus-CHUUUUCKKK! Chuck was specifically written for his actor. I needed a catalyst character that was just going to show up in episode 4 to give an introduction to the vampire super-structure. Dan was doing music for me but is also a VA, so I just knew I had the perfect guy to give me a nice, salt-of-the-earth performance. He was named by Liam (Ferris). I was looking at very gruff names like Hank, Chuck, and Bill. Liam just sort of came up with Brunkus while I was talking to him about what to name the character. Then Chuck Brunkus stuck. I love Chuck. He’s coming back in the future.

Lord Beryl and Serena-I conceived Beryl and Serena as the sort of anti-Father and Mother for better or worse. Serena didn’t keep Molly despite being the next best thing to her real mom, Beryl was the fatherly authority figure she actually respected. They were also meant to be more functional characters in that they’d provide information on Molly’s past and the bureaucracy of vampirism. I think they filled their roles well.

On writing:

Episode 1

This was the episode that had the most dramatic rewrites from draft to final episode. Obviously, this was because I was trying to find the pace of the story over all and get in character development. It was also my first shot at world building. I had to establish that it was semi-fantasy without exposition dumping, always tricky. I wrote the opening monologue, the dinner scene, and Ferris introduction in that order, and filled in the gaps between them. The sequence with the students talking behind Molly’s back is probably still my favorite in the whole series.

Episode 2

The “hey, guess what, there are vampires” episode. At first, I had no idea how I was going to play this. I really wanted to establish that we were dealing in a “vampires are normal” kind of thing, that in this world there weren’t some scary boogeyman, just humans with a weird genetic condition. I think David being as mild-mannered as he is, Olivia’s almost immediate acceptance, and Molly’s sort of vague apathy about the whole thing really helped with that. This was also a good time to set up Father and Mother as belligerent figures for later.

Episode 3

This was a tricky episode to write, and it ended up being the shortest for it. I didn’t really want to linger too long in Molly’s old life, but I really felt like I had to show the mental toll she was going through. This needed to be the turning point episode, where she started getting some closure to be able to sort of narratively move on into the last half of the series.

Episode 4

I was already in the process of casting when I actually started writing this one out (not just outlines), and that made it all the more fun to write. I sort of already knew who my Ferris and David would be and ended up writing to their voices more than in previous episodes (which I would later go back and adjust). It remains my favorite episode for how it came together and everyone’s performances. I really wanted to work in more Ferris and David growth, and having there be a vampire-based conflict allowed me to setup what would end up being the central conflict of episode 6. It’s one of the few times in writing where I was actually trying to do some foreshadowing. Most of the time stuff just kind of….happened.

Episode 5 & 6

Ah the finales. I probably rewrote these a dozen times trying to first, suss out the appropriate conflict and, second, find the right balance between ridiculous and serious. I wanted the audience to feel the pressure that the girls were feeling, but also be able to step back, see the whole picture, and realize how not that big a deal the problem really was in the grand scheme of things. I wanted the girls to be able to do that, too, to start opening up their worlds. The mention of Olivia traveling at the end was my way of showing how much bigger she had made her own world.

On Casting:

This was my first time casting for voice and let me tell ya...it was pretty fun, but also exhausting. I really have to thank the existence of the Let’s Dub Project for putting me in touch with so many great actors who I was able to pass the casting call along to. Funnily enough, Dijit, who played Father, didn’t even realize that I was the Ashe that was in LDP. He just auditioned for the heck of it. That made me feel really great, actually, that someone who I find really talented saw enough potential in my project to audition without knowing who I was.

Overall, I was astounded by the amount of talent that showed interest, which made casting the best hardest decision. I was so honored and humbled by all of it. I could probably go on for a bagillion pages about the actors.

What I’ve learned:

I didn’t have all the episodes written before opening casting. So when I had to add characters all of a sudden, I found myself having to reach out to a few extra actors. I was lucky in that they were available, but I know that’s not something I can always rely on.

Doing the full version of episode 1 with art was definitely a lesson in knowing when to scale back. When it was taking me months just to get it ready, I knew I was in trouble. Cutting out the art was a good move.

Good SFX, Foley, and audio mixing are underrated skills. If I hadn’t cut my teeth on comic dubs and smaller audio skits before heading into O and M, I would have been in a world of hurt. I honed that skill so much over the course of Ollie and Molly I can really feel the difference.

For future projects, I’m going to actually direct. I had initially planned to do directing via skype for this project, but the more people I brought on cast, the more I realized how hard that was going to be to organize. I went with a leap of faith, put direction in the script, then just....sent them off hoping for the best. I was lucky everything came back amazing, but I can’t trust that to happen again.

The month to month schedule saved me. There was slight variation when the episodes came out. There were some 4 week gaps and some 6 week gaps, but making sure an episode came out each month made this whole thing possible. It made me finish and not get distracted. And now! It’s DONE!

#long post #writing #how i write #ollie and molly

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theliterateape · 5 years

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Book Club Made Me Read It | The Changeling

By Kari Castor

I’m a member of a small, informal, friends, and friends-of-friends book club. We try to read one book every 5 five weeks or so. The rules are simple: Everyone gets an opportunity to pick a book for the book club to read. Each member must pick a book that they have not personally read before and each member is responsible for leading the discussion after we read their selection. Sometimes the books are good. Sometimes they are not. I review them here regardless of their quality.

I’m a bitch and don’t care about ruining the experience for you, so I’m going to include spoilers whenever I please. That’s your only warning. Proceed at your own risk.

The Changeling by Victor LaValle

Sigh. I wanted to like this one. I thought I was going to like this one. Hell, I did rather like the first 128 pages of this one, which makes it a real shame when the whole thing shits the bed in the final two-thirds.

Here’s the problem: Victor LaValle’s The Changeling is not a novel. It is at least three separate stories that are loosely stitched together into some vague semblance of a novel. It is an effective and frightening novella stretched into an increasingly disappointing novel. It is a bunch of ideas, about parenthood and family legacies and the dangers of the internet, with which the author would like to whack you about the head. It is a heavy-handed fairy tale that bemoans the heavy-handedness of fairy tales.

The first 128 pages are primarily the story of a relationship. Apollo Kagwa’s father left when he was a child, and he has felt the loss echo acutely across his life. Apollo meets, woos, and marries Emma Valentine, and they have a child. Apollo is deliriously happy to be a father, and he vows to be everything to his own son that he wishes his father could have been to him. Meanwhile, Emma slips increasingly into darkness and despair, refusing to call baby Brian by his name, refusing to care for him, insisting that he isn’t Brian at all. Apollo and Emma’s relationship grows antagonistic. Frustrated and angry at her inability to snap out of it, he pushes her away and devotes himself wholly to Brian. Emma’s presence in the story (which is told primarily from Apollo’s perspective) begins to feel more like that of a malevolent spirit than of a co-parent and partner. And then one day, Apollo wakes up chained with a bike lock to a steam pipe in their apartment and a kettle is whistling on the stove, and Brian is wailing in his bedroom. And Emma, Emma who has been insisting that the baby is wrong, takes a hammer to Apollo’s face and the kettle of boiling water to Brian’s room with the words, “It’s not a baby.”

And holy shit if this book had ended right there, I’d be writing a very different review right now. The vibrancy of their early relationship with each other, the slow creep of horror as things become more and more wrong in the Kagwa-Valentine household, the awful question of whether Emma might actually be right, the visceral brutality of the final scenes… It works. It’s good.

Unfortunately, the book doesn’t end there. Instead, it takes one of the dullest turns for the fantastical that I’ve ever encountered.

The narrative continues after a time skip: Baby Brian is dead and buried, and Emma is missing, a fugitive from the law. Apollo, a used-bookseller, sells a rare book to a weird nerd who says he hopes to win his wife back with an extravagant gift, and then the nerd tells Apollo that he knows Emma is alive, and that his internet friends helped track her down. Apollo thinks this is great news, because he wants to kill Emma himself for murdering their child, so he and the weird nerd go on an adventure together to a magical island on the East River inhabited by women and children. The women there all, like Emma, killed their babies on the basis of a belief that it wasn’t their baby. Apollo starts to believe this fake baby thing might hold some water after all, and then we find out that his weird nerd buddy is actually a bad guy and the evidence of his badness is that… he killed his baby. Yeah, I know, but you see, he killed his real baby and not his fake baby, and that makes all the difference. Anyway, then his mysterious bad guy friends show up to wreak havoc and everyone flees the island and none of it really matters.

The whole island episode is about one hundred pages long and could be lifted entirely out of the book with no real loss to the plot.

I should probably curb my impulse to continue summarizing the absolutely whack plot of this book, in large part because I’m afraid that the short version will make it sound much more interesting than it actually is, but the whole thing ends with Apollo finding Emma, who is a witch now, and they fuck and get back together without ever bothering to have a conversation about the fact that she hammered his fucking face in and maybe they should look for a couples counselor or something. Also, a troll has been trying to raise the real not-dead baby Brian, so Apollo and Emma kill the troll and get their baby back and also murder both the weird nerd who bought the rare book and the nerd’s dad, but not before the dad does a straight-up Bond-villain exposition dump to explain everything about how a troll emigrated to New York with a bunch of Norwegians in the 1820s and now his family is responsible for stealing real babies and replacing them with fake changeling babies, so the troll can try to raise the real babies (except it always fucks up and eats them instead).

The book… takes one of the dullest turns for the fantastical that I’ve ever encountered.

Meanwhile, there’s a B-plot about Apollo’s absent father, which eventually reveals that Apollo’s dad tried to kill him (in a fit of If I can’t have him, no one gets to.) as a toddler. Also, Emma’s mom tried to kill her and her sister as part of a murder-suicide. Basically this book is an exercise in How many subplots and backstories centered on the themes of ‘family secrets’ and ‘violence committed by parents in the name of their children’ can I cram into a single book? There is a distinct lack of subtlety at work in this book.

Much to-do is made about the dangers of posting things on Facebook (people will know things about you!), which mostly reads as though it is written by someone who has never actually used Facebook himself but asked his friend to tell him about it. The book twice uses the exact same metaphor about how dangerous it is: That putting stuff about your life on the internet is like inviting a vampire into your home — you’ve compromised your safety by making your private world accessible to the monsters. One of the villains (the aforementioned weird nerd) is an internet troll working in cahoots with an actual troll. I cannot roll my eyes hard enough to convey my exasperation with this.

There’s a bunch of miscellaneous shit that seems like it’s meant to be symbolic or important but just… isn’t. There’s a room that has four space heaters in it, which seems like it’s an important detail given how many times the extreme heat in the room is referenced, but it turns out the only reason there are four space heaters in that room is that the plot requires a way for Apollo and Emma set a house fire later, and four space heaters fits the bill nicely. Another example: The narration specifically remarks upon a headstone with the name Catherine Linton on it, at the cemetery where not-Brian is buried, but it doesn’t appear to mean anything... Did the author intend some symbolic significance there that he failed to convey? (At best, I can come up with some loose connection to the general “fucked up families” theme that runs rampant in The Changeling.) Is it supposed to be a fun little easter egg for the lit nerd who recognizes that name as a character from Wuthering Heights? Is it just “Look at how smart I am, I can drop in random literary references” masturbatory bullshit?

Honestly, an extraordinary amount of stuff happens in this book, and most of it is a mix of astonishingly boring and ham-fisted. It tries really hard to weave an epic modern fairy tale about parenthood, but there are too many abrupt left turns into entirely new plots and not enough cohesion and interweaving of threads throughout the whole tale. Classic fairy tales can do that sort of thing and still work in no small part because they’re short, but this is a 430-page book, which is actually just several ideas for different novellas loosely Frankensteined together, and all of them end up being less interesting collectively than any one of them might have been on its own.

MY RATING: 2/5 stars

POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT FOR: Writing a solid 128-page novella about a woman who might have serious postpartum depression or might actually have identified that her baby is a changeling and no one else can see it.

PLEASE NO MORE: Everything after page 128.

SHOUT-OUT TO: Victor LaValle's Destroyer, which is a comic book unrelated to The Changeling aside from the fact that it has the same author. But the full title of the comic book is legit Victor LaValle's Destroyer, which is just… awful. Why would you do that? Sorry Victor LaValle, but you’re nowhere near good enough or famous enough to justify putting your own name as a possessive in the title, and I don’t care if it’s your fault or the publisher’s fault, fuck everyone involved in that decision.

#books #book club #Book Club Made Me Read It #The Changeling #Victor LaValle #infanticide #masturbatory literary bullshit #trolls

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mrmichaelchadler · 5 years

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Short Films in Focus: The 2019 Oscar-Nominated Short Films

Once again, Pixar, kids in peril and refugees populate the Oscar-nominated Short Film landscape. And once again, Shorts TV will be bringing you the opportunity to view all fifteen films before the big show on February 24 (either streaming or in theaters).

This year’s batch feels mighty familiar with many of the usual kinds of selections, but there are some shorts within each category that nicely compliment one another. The documentary “Black Sheep” and the narrative “Skin” would work well together on the same thematic bill, as would the animated “Late Afternoon” and the live-action “Marguerite.” Nobody on the programming end plans that, of course. But many of the films here are worth being plucked from obscurity and discovered by a curious audience.

"Detainment" / ShortsTV

Live-Action Shorts

“Detainment” - On one hand, under normal circumstances, I’d be surprised if this didn’t win the prize (simple, English-speaking films tend to), with its harrowing true story and irresistible thriller elements. On the other hand, why drudge up such an unpleasant event if there is nothing to say about it other than pointing out the age of the two boys who committed an unthinkable crime? "Detainment" has courted quite a bit of controversy from the real-life parents who were never consulted for the film, along with many other Britons who feel the film has no business existing in the first place. Nevertheless, “Detainment” is hard to shrug off, especially given the two strong performances by the young leads, Ely Solan and Leon Hughes, as two boys being questioned in the disappearance of a toddler.

“Fauve” - Every year, it seems this category has to have at least one film with kids in peril. This year, we have four. The film follows two boys playing an innocent game in a salt mine until tragedy strikes. Unlike the watchable, but ham-fisted “Detainment,” “Fauve” has a subtler, more poetic approach to how tragedies occur between minors who have yet to grasp what nature can do and how unforgiving it can be. The performances here are equally strong and Jeremy Comte’s assured direction gives the viewer a true unsettling feeling at the end that might linger for some time.

“Marguerite” - Another French-Canadian entry (like “Fauve”), this film tells a gentle tale of an aging woman’s relationship with her nurse and how it brings back pangs of regret. While it may not be a big attention-grabber from the start, Marianne Farley’s “Marguerite” unfolds beautifully while giving the viewer a true feeling of how time slowly passes for this woman and just how long she’ll have to live with the choices she made in life (or the choices made for her). The ending is undeniably moving, achieving an arc that works perfectly for the short film format.

"Madre" / ShortsTV

“Madre” - This is technically another kids in peril film, but we never see the kid and the peril is left to our imaginations. A mother (Marta Mieto) receives a phone call from her six-year-old son who has been spending the weekend with his father in France--his father has disappeared and the boy is left with nothing but a cell phone with low battery life. This one-take wonder will keep viewers riveted and the believable interplay between Mieto and her mother (Blanca Apilánez), who is with her the whole time, adds to the tension. "Madre" is a mostly terrific little thriller that ends on a silly note with its unnecessarily flashy and distracting closing credits.

“Skin” - The kids in peril in Guy Nattiv’s film are the sons whose parents have different ways of teaching their kids a lesson, after a scuffle between a gun-toting neo-Nazi (Jonathan Tucker) and an innocent black man (Ashley Thomas) brings about a revenge that most can only dream of. Nattiv does a magnificent job of playing up the fact that the future of gun-toting Nazis will carry on into the unforeseeable future as long as small-minded lessons keep getting passed down to their kids. Will the child take away the right lesson from this tragedy? Hope comes in the form of his more mild-tempered mother (Danielle Macdonald from “Patti Cake$”), but even then we can’t be sure. This is my favorite of the five nominees, with “Marguerite” being a close second.

"Animal Behaviour" / ShortsTV

Animated Shorts

“Animal Behaviour” - Alison Snowden and David Fine’s short about an animal-based group therapy session has cute moments, but is hardly worth being put in the Top 5 Best Animated Short Films of the Year list, as this category would indicate. Some films just get lucky, I guess. It’s harmless and the animation gets the job done, which is not much to say. The movie loses its potential for a young audience once the animals start talking about their sex lives, which could cost it a win, since the award always goes to the most kid-friendly film.

“Bao” - Pixar’s entry [pictured at the top top], which played before "Incredibles 2," has grown on me with repeat viewings. Domee Shi’s film no doubt left many viewers thinking, “Well, that was nice, but ... huh?” “Bao” is better left unexplained. Enjoy it for what it is, a journey through the ups and downs of parenthood, no matter what the child turns out to be, culminating in an emotional climax that bears the Pixar trademark, one that is rarely duplicated.

“Late Afternoon” - Louise Bagnall’s lovely journey through a woman’s past snuck up on me. The seemingly unremarkable animation gives way to big, colorful, dreamlike sequences through childhood and adulthood memories experienced by Emily, now elderly and about to make another change in her life. This would have been nice to see on a big screen instead of the screener I had.

"One Small Step" / ShortsTV

“One Small Step” - Now here’s a film that does belong on the list of nominees, and is my personal favorite. There is a recurring theme this year of animated shorts that sum up a life’s worth of experiences in 10 minutes or less, but this one follows a woman who dreams of being an astronaut and her father who is always there for her. Maybe it takes a few easy routes to get there, but the emotional climax landed in a big way for me. I loved it.

“Weekends” - With the exception of “Animal Behaviour,” this year’s animated crop is rich with visual storytelling, and Trevor Jimenez’s film is a prime example of the art form’s true capabilities. A boy goes back and forth from his mother’s simple, penny-pinching household to his father’s bachelor pad where he has all the latest video games and gadgets. The fun eventually gives way to emptiness, but not with Jimenez’s film, which gets richer as it progresses. Along with having a moving and confounding conclusion, the film makes the best use of Dire Straits' hit song, “Money For Nothing.”

"Lifeboat" / ShortsTV

Documentary Shorts

“Lifeboat” - Much like last year’s short-doc winner “The White Helmets,” Sky Fitzgerald’s beautifully constructed documentary focuses on a non-profit organization that aids in providing a rescue for refugees. Here, the rescue takes place at sea as the German-based group Sea-Watch provides aid to Libyan citizens fleeing war, famine and torture in hopes of a better life. The central figure in the rescue, a good-hearted Englishman named Jon Castle, laments that not all will turn out well for these people once they reach the shore, but rescuing them is necessary for all humanity, for one day, they could be us and that all citizens “are our fellows.” Fitzgerald’s film is not so much about the urgency of the rescue, so much as it is a reminder of the different faces and expressions of the people being rescued and how each of these faces tell a different story. We have seen images of hundreds of refugees crammed onto a raft before. “Lifeboat” makes a point of humanizing each and every one of them. (Click here to watch "Lifeboat")

“Black Sheep” - Some may scoff at just how much of this film is just reenactment, but they would be foolish to let such technicalities spoil the richness of the story being told here. Subject Cornelius Walker tells the viewer a tale of how he survived moving to an English town where racism ran rampant and how he became the victim of it, how he survived it and how he came to terms with the violent streak that ran in him as much as the people he feared. Director Ed Perkins shoots the reenactments with a shaky-cam aesthetic that feels like puzzle pieces of a memory that has a hard time coming together, which fits with a moment in which Perkins asks Walker if he has regrets, a question that causes Walker to go speechless for the first time during the story. This is a complex and beautiful film about how to see an enemy in a different light by having the survival instinct to step into their shoes and come to terms with your own demons. (Click here to watch "Black Sheep")

"A Night at the Garden" / ShortsTV

“A Night At the Garden” - Filmmaker Marshall Curry seems to have broken precedent by making an Oscar-nominated doc-short that only runs just under eight minutes. It consists of found footage of a pro-white America rally that took place at Madison Square Garden in 1939. There, a speaker got up and drew rounds of applause as he deemed to media and the Jewish people as the enemy. A protester was violently dealt with and ushered out of the place, to the delight of all who attended. Sound familiar? That is basically the conceit of this piece, though Curry is smart not to draw direct parallels by spelling anything out. Its release in 2018 says enough. (Click here to watch "A Night at the Garden")

“End Game” - It’s hard not to be deeply affected by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s documentary about cancer patients and their families facing hard choices about how and where to spend a loved-one’s final days. The medical practitioners’ sole focus is to help the patients deal with the human element of dying, how to cope with the inevitable and make peace with it. “Hospice” is a dirty word for many and the film depicts one family determined to have their matriarch die in their home and not in a hospital. The lifeforce (so to speak) is a woman who has ovarian cancer, but has a deeply optimistic outlook on the hand she has been dealt. Epstein and Friedman’s film proves that a great film about death can also be a great film about life and “End Game” is that film. (Available on Netflix)

“Period. End of Sentence.” - This documentary examines the lack of education men and women receive (especially women) in a small town in India where the mention of menstruation draws blank stares from many citizens who have no concept of what it means. One woman wants to become a police officer “to avoid marriage,” so she teams up with a machinist who manufactures a superior tampon and then enlists the help of many women in her village to go door-to-door to try and sell them. Rayka Zehtabchi’s film is energetic, sometimes funny and very necessary in its cause to bring more education and awareness to parts of the world that still look at women’s biology with a medieval eye. This will be a likely favorite with voters, and for good reason. (Available on Netflix)

from All Content http://bit.ly/2UMty50

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