#it's random commentary on real world events in events where none of that is connected to the actual plot | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dotthings · 4 years

Text

Let’s talk about why Dean dancing with a lamp is subtext, but it’s subtext that supports textual arcs. Dean dancing with a lamp is not random. Meta on why Dean dancing with a lamp is part of the build of a textual arc for Dean, thematically, which also connects to his relationship with Cas. This symbolic moment being tacitly about Destiel will only feel like reaching if you ignore context, ignore canon, ignore long arcing, ignore textual material surrounding it. This isn’t just me talking about a ship, this is an important arc for Dean himself emotionally and the way canon’s working, Cas has become the star player in this specific emotional Dean arc about yearning.

Here are some canon quotes. I could just leave these here and not write another word of meta because the canon wrote it for me. But I’ve added some further commentary to spell out clearly what I’m getting at.

Dean in 8.14 “Trial and Error” by Andrew Dabb:

“You see a light at the end of this ugly-ass tunnel. I don't. But I tell you what I do know – it's that I'm gonna die with a gun in my hand. 'Cause that's what I have waiting for me – that's all I have waiting for me. I want you to get out. I want you to have a life – become a man of Letters, whatever. You, with a wife and kids and – and – and grandkids, living till you're fat and bald and chugging Viagra – that is my perfect ending, and it's the only one that I'm gonna get.”

Dean in 10.16 “Paint it Black” by Eugenie Ross-Lemming and Brad Buckner:

“You know, the life I live, the work I do…I pretty much just figured that that was all there was to me, you know? Tear around and jam the key in the ignition and haul ass until I ran out of gas. I guess I just thought sooner or later, I’d go out the same way that I live – pedal to the metal, and that would be it....Now, um… recent events, uh… make me think I might be closer to that than I really thought. And…I don’t know. I mean, you know, there’s – there’s things, there’s…people, feelings that I-I-I want to experience differently than I have before, or maybe even for the first time.”

Sam and Dean in 11.04 “Baby” by Robbie Thompson:

SAM: Really? You don't . . . Ever want something more? DEAN: I'm sorry, have you met us? We're batting a whopping zero in domestic life, man. Goose eggs. SAM: You don't ever think about something? Not marriage or whatever. But . . . Something? You know, with a hunter? Somebody who understands the life?

Sam and Dean in 13.23 “Let the Good Times Roll” by Andrew Dabb:

DEAN: But on a beach somewhere, you know? Can you imagine? You, me, Cas, toes in the sand, couple of them little umbrella drinks. Matching Hawaiian shirts, obviously. Some hula girls. SAM: You talking about retiring? You? DEAN: If I knew the world was safe? Hell, yeah. And you know why? 'Cause we freaking earned it, man.

Sam and Dean in 15.08 “Our Father, Who Aren’t in Heaven” by Eugenie Ross-Lemming and Brad Buckner:

DEAN: Look, man, I didn't want to say anything, okay, 'cause I was kind of in in a bad place, and, uh, yeah, I didn't want to jinx it or whatever, but, you know, I tried the family thing, right? SAM: Yeah, me too. And that's not for us. DEAN: No, not really. But I'm just saying if it was to work, Eileen, you know, she gets it. She gets us. She gets the life. She's hot. SAM: Dean. I mean, I'm not even- DEAN: Look, all I'm saying is you- you could do worse, okay? And she could certainly do better. Like, so much better. I'm happy for you, Sammy.

Dean and Garth in 15.10 “The Heroes’ Journey” written by Andrew Dabb:

DEAN: You know, I gotta say, aside from pincushion in there… this is pretty nice. GARTH: Yeah, better than I ever thought I'd get. I mean, hunting -- I figured I'd be dead before I'm 40. You know, go out young and pretty. But now I've got a great wife, great kids. I guess...sometimes things work out.

Dean in 15.10 “The Heroes’ Journey” by Andrew Dabb:

Dean, wistful, watching through the window as Garth and Bess dance: You know, I always thought I could be a good dancer if I wanted to be.

Ok, let those roll around in your brain for moment.

Now: CONTEXT. CONTEXT. CONTEXT.

There’s this long running arc about maybe Sam and Dean could each find a significant other, not white picket fence, but...something, with someone already in the life, who gets their life. There’s Dean’s move from despairing and believing the only ending he could have, the only ending any hunter could have, is dying with a gun in hand, to Dean’s enthusiasm for the concept of retirement, Dean’s wistfulness about finding a significant other, for what he thinks he can’t have, and he starts the cycle all over again, if he can’t have it, then he wants Sam to have it, so Dean encourages Sam with Eileen. Saileen, the Dean-blessed, Dean-approved Sam ship. Dean ships it. And that is how the canon is trending, complete with Sam and Eileen kissing goodbye and saying “this is real” and even God himself saying their feelings were real, “that was all you,” even if God manipulated events around them. Which is an overt mirror to Dean and Cas and Dean’s expressly stated doubts about what’s real and what isn’t, and Cas telling Dean “we are.”

Much the way Sam has been witness to Destiel, and has often pointed out Dean’s Cas feelings. Dean’s got a front row seat to Saileen and approves; Sam’s had a front row seat to Destiel and approves.

Let’s throw in Robert Berens’ work in The Trap here, since that’s relevant to this specific topic as well, because why did Sam and Dean in the potential future timeline where they’d killed Chuck give up and cave in to their vampire instincts? The world being overwhelmed with monsters...and losing Eileen and losing Cas. It’s right there in the dialogue. I’ll give you the quote and everything:

Sam and Dean in 15.09 “The Trap” by Robert Berens:

SAM: You want to quit? What's happened to you, Dean? Ever since -- DEAN: Ever since what? We lost pretty much everyone we've ever cared about? Ever since the Mark made Cas go crazy? Ever since I had to bury him in a Ma'lak box? Ever since then? Yeah. You know why? 'Cause the monsters -- they're everywhere. Everywhere! What we do -- it's not even Hunting anymore. It's whack-a-mole. We don't even save people. Every friend we've ever had is either dead, or they got wise and they packed it in. SAM: Jody's still fighting, and Bobby -- DEAN: Bobby has a death wish, and you know it. And Jody -- ever since what happened to Donna and the girls, she does, too. And after Eileen... so do you.

“Ever since” Dean had to bury Cas in a Ma’lak box. “After Eileen...so do you.”

So there’s this canonical long, long thread across multiple authors (and those weren’t even all the quotes, I’m sure people could dig up more) about Dean in particular yearning towards finding a significant other, some contentment, with someone who already is in the hunting life, who gets it, who understands.

An episode that flat out shows how losing their significant others is the final straw that rips out Sam and Dean’s last will to fight, and they lose themselves, and after they’re turned into vampires, they just...give into the darkness. Where Sam gives up their shot at destroying the big bad because losing everyone they love is too high a cost. Where losing Cas makes Dean lose hope, where losing Eileen sends Sam into a death wish mindset. Sam and Dean don’t just need each other. That’s not canon, it never has been.

And then right after that, along comes meta episode The Heroes’ Journey. Sorry if you don’t like The Heroes’ Journey, but it’s what the canon did, it’s textual, along with everything else I’ve pointed out here, and in among the crackish humor are some real emotional narrative points.

In The Heroes’ Journey, Dean gets to see Garth’s life. Garth found his significant other, Bess, and she’s another werewolf. Now, Garth’s life resembles the traditional white picket fence idea a lot more than what Team Free Will are headed for. Garth has a big house with a porch, and he’s a dentist. He’s also a werewolf and his wife is a werewolf and his kids are werewolves because Bess is a pureblood werewolf, Garth didn’t exactly leave the life, and he helps Sam and Dean on a case. But nothing’s been indicating to me that anyone in Team Free Will is headed for that kind of settling down, with a house, becoming a dentist. However, the canon has been practically shouting now, as we near final episodes of SPN, to make the point about a desirable outcome--some kind of stability, contentment, and a significant other. Dean gets a front row seat to seeing a hunter can have that. Garth’s a hunter who turned into a werewolf and he can have that.

When EP’s talk about how they aren’t headed for a white picket fence or driving off into the sunset or settling down, none of that rules out them finding...something...with someone, and some form of stability and contentment. Nope, I can’t really imagine them in the suburbs becoming dentists. But canon sure is putting up big neon arrows to...something. Think outside the box. This isn’t about the white picket fence.

And in The Heroes’ Journey, Dean, conked out on the good gas so Garth can fix his teeth, has a trippy dream where he dances with a lamp.

Rewatch the ep. Look at how the dance is choreographed not just the use of light, because that’s a clue too. The whole dance could have been Dean and Garth being dancing bros, but Garth fades off the stage, and Dean dances alone...until he grabs the standing lamp. In a season where Dean and Cas’s relationship is an A-plot, define it how you like, it’s A-plot. Their breakup and their reconciliation, which played like a marital breakup and reconciliation, are tied to major mytharc beats. In a season where a long-running textual theme about Dean’s developing hope for retirement and his wistfulness about “things...people...feelings...” is getting further play. Where Dean and Cas’s relationship continues to be one of the show’s most central ones.

Dean dances with a lamp. While his emotionally fraught, intense close relationship with Cas--A BEING MADE OF LIGHT--has a long-running arc and recently more and more textual level content spelling out the sublimated romantic interest in small words, while there’s an arc about Dean’s yearning for that stability, contentment, a significant other.

CONTEXT.

We don’t think Destiel’s “going canon” because Dean dances with a lamp, it’s that Dean dancing with a lamp is kinda loud serving as reflection of canon textual arcing. Sometimes subtext adds a layer. Sometimes subtext is directly tied to the surface layers, an echo, a highlighter.

I’ll just be over here, crying because Dean danced with a lamp.

#Dean Winchester #Castiel #Destiel #Destiel meta #spn meta #spn #supernatural #Saileen

815 notes · View notes

blackjack-15 · 4 years

Text

Silly Rabbit, Ecological Terrorism is For Kids! — Thoughts on: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek (ICE)

Previous Metas: SCK/SCK2, STFD, MHM, TRT, FIN, SSH, DOG, CAR, DDI, SHA, CUR, CLK, TRN, DAN, CRE

Hello and welcome to a Nancy Drew meta series! 30 metas, 30 Nancy Drew Games that I’m comfortable with doing meta about. Hot takes, cold takes, and just Takes will abound, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll all be longer than I mean them to be.

Each meta will have different distinct sections: an Introduction, an exploration of the Title, an explanation of the Mystery, a run-through of the Suspects. Then, I’ll tackle some of my favorite and least favorite things about the game, and finish it off with ideas on how to improve it. As ICE sends off the Jetsetting Games category and moves into the Odd Games category, there will be a section between The Intro and The Title called The Weird Stuff, where I’ll go into what storyline marks this game a bit Odd in the Nancy Drew series as a whole.

If any game requires an extra section or two, they’ll be listed in the paragraph above, along with links to previous metas.

These metas are not spoiler free, though I’ll list any games/media that they might spoil here: ICE; TRT; mention of FIN; mention of CUR; mention of TRN; mention of SEA.

This meta is under a read more because of its sheer length.

The Intro:

Ughhhhh. UGHHH.

The White Wolf of Icicle Creek has a lot of things that make it distinct in the Nancy Drew video game series — it sports the first new interface since SHA, it has the world’s most boring list of ‘enticing moments’ from the game on the back, its assets look like they were forcefully molded out of gummy bears, it randomly was released on Wii, it’s the best-known game among non-fans thanks to the Game Grumps — but it also stands out because not one of those things make it enjoyable to play or to watch without a heavy amount of MST3K-style commentary.

Also because it features the fandom’s least favorite puzzle of all time…but more on that later.

A point to get out of the way before we get into the game proper is that this game feels a lot like a cheap knock-off of Treasure in a Royal Tower. Like, a lot like a cheap knock-off. One of those animated films called “Bemo’s Lost in the Ocean” or “A Toy Tale” that come out around Disney/Pixar films to try to trick hapless grandmas into buying them.

Just lining it up, we have Nancy stuck in/around a lodge in winter, an edict from the owner of the lodge to figure out what’s up with repeated Incidents and possible sabotage while most guests have left, an academic around Nancy’s age, an Old Coot, an Olympian whose grandparent was important, chores (including food related chores) to do in order to progress in the story, a suspect you can only talk to face-to-face for part of the game…the list honestly goes on in both big and small ways.

While ICE isn’t the only one that tries to do this (since I’m not doing a SEA meta, I won’t get into the fact that SEA literally just remastered DDI’s characters and said ‘good enough’), it does feel particularly egregious because, for all its copying, there’s not enough in the game to distract from it even a bit.

ICE is a game searching for an identity and unable to find one, no matter how many plot points, chores, or games (horrible, unskippable games) they throw at the player. We have full on international espionage and ecological terrorism here (more on that in the next section), and it just…doesn’t matter, at the end of the day. It also takes place in Canada, but your only clue to that is that one of the characters says “eh” a lot, so that’s not great either.

If ICE is a new game to you (it can be a bear to install and even worse to complete, so I’m going to go off the assumption that not everyone will be familiar with it), you’ve probably only heard of the cooking chores, fox and geese, and that this is the game with the Return of Tony Balducci, previously of TRN fame. (Honestly, ICE had a big enough cast without its phone characters, but HER decided to shove three phone characters along with one partial phone character at us anyway.) And, to be honest, that’s pretty much all there is to the game.

Now I know this sounds harsh, but there is a possible explanation to the lack of content in this game. In my previous meta (link at the top of this post) I made a note that CRE’s production in all likelihood suffered because the company was focused on ICE’s new interface. I don’t think it’s a leap at all to say that ICE’s story and characters could also have suffered because of the same thing.

The biggest problem with ICE — besides the weird stuff we’ll get into below — is that it’s a shallow game. None of the characters have any real depth, the plot is a paper-thin copy of TRT, the puzzles are alternatingly impossible and extremely easy, and in an effort to add “depth”, we get…well, we get this next section.

The Weird Stuff:

With each of the Odd Games (ICE through RAN, Heaven help us all), there’s something that makes the game truly…well, odd. Odd for the Nancy Drew series, odd for the age range specified on the front of the box, and odd in general when you look at the rest of the plot.

In this game, it comes in the form of terrorism — or rather, two types of terrorism. Guadalupe is our first (and only, in this series) ecological terrorist, belonging to a fringe group called “Run and Go Free” and being perfectly fine with illegal acts (destruction of the fishing lodge, sabotage of personal property), even telling Nancy that she’s done worse in the name of Run and Go Free.

Nancy Drew Games are no stranger to hippie/naturalist types (see DOG, DDI, CAR, etc.) but Lupe is our first to be legitimately dangerous. Sure, she doesn’t end up being the ultimate Bad Guy, but she is A Bad Guy, and it really does seem very odd to me that after everything Lupe does (and insinuates that she’s done), that she gets away with barely a slap on the wrist in having to leave the lodge.

Lupe in no way fits in with the rest of the plot; there’s nothing to justify her being present in the game, she can appear about halfway through the game and then leaves to become a phone contact soon after, she’s not present enough to be an actual suspect — she has no place in the plot nor the game, and it really does just boggle the mind that a character is in it at all, especially with ICE having a greater than average number of suspects to begin with.

On the other hand, however, we have Yanni, an Eastern European Olympian spy/terrorist, sent by the Fredonian (a commonly used fake country) government to bomb around the lodge to find uranium under the cover of training for the next Olympics.

That is a whole lot of things for one character.

You’d think with the presence of Lupe that Yanni would fit right in, but he doesn’t make her — or himself — any less odd or out of place than he would have been alone. It’s a ‘suspicious Olympian’ character that we already got with Jacques, but he’s a million times worse, setting off friggin bombs to find a metal that his government wants for…well, the normal reason that governments want uranium.

So we can add in “reference to ongoing nuclear warfare” as another thing that makes this game Odd.

Yanni doesn’t fit the game or the plot, which is pretty bad considering he’s responsible for about half the plot in the first place. He also has that weird aside about his grandmother being eaten by wolves, as if HER wants the player to suspect him because of some twisted revenge against wolves plot (which would have been Very Weird) so that they can pull the rug out at the end and be like “see?? He’s a political terrorist looking for uranium for nuclear bombs for his country!!! Gotcha!!”.

Like, it’s not a Gotcha if it’s absolute lunacy. My land.

With that explanation out of the way, let’s get to something a little less Odd.

The Title:

I actually don’t have much to say here. The White Wolf of Icicle Creek is honestly a great name; it tells us the focal point of the game (the wolf), the location, (Icicle Creek), and even pretty much tells you the season that this game is happening in (white, icicle). It accomplishes a lot in a very short amount of words, and pertains accurately to the game we’re dealing with.

We’ll chalk that up in the “Win” category…especially since we’re going straight back into the “Lose” category with the next section.

The Mystery:

The mystery is a mess, full stop. There’s way too much going on for the amount of payoff (i.e. little to none), and the plot, thin at best, completely drops off at the 2/3rds mark when all the player has left to do is wait for random events to occur and keep putting off fox and geese.

Anyway.

We begin with strange, destructive incidents of sabotage happening at a renowned winter resort. Most of the guests have left, and there’s been some damage to parts of the resort. Asked for help by the owner of the resort who’s away on business, Nancy must pick up the slack left by staff who have quit, run food-related errands, and discover who might be behind these attacks before it’s too late.

Oh wait, that’s Treasure in a Royal Tower. Lemme start again.

We begin with strange, destructive incidents of sabotage happening at a renowned winter resort. Most of the guests have left, and there’s been some damage —

You get the picture.

The biggest difference pre-game is that after every incident, a white wolf is spotted, only to disappear before the police get there. People start connecting the wolf to the crimes, and go as far as blaming it for cases of food poisoning and slashed tires, as if the wolf is cooking food and using a knife with its paws.

Just as Nancy’s arriving on scene, the bunkhouse is blown up and she hears the wolf howling — so obviously there must be a connection there, and a wolf definitely isn’t just responding to a loud noise.

This part honestly feels a bit like the beginning of CUR, where the game tries to establish Scary Feelings and Ominous Threats and just comes off ham-fisted.

The back of the box features three ‘exciting’ things that Nancy gets to do in this game, which are as follows: cook lunch and dinner, ride a snowmobile and wear snow shoes, and do snowball fights and ice fishing. While it’s sad that those moderately exciting things are the best that the box can boast, it’s even sadder that they really are the best the game has to offer.

It’s easy to lose thread of the mystery nearly as soon as Nancy gets to the lodge, because she’s immediately bombarded with laundry that has to be done before a certain time, meals that have to be done within a certain hour or two, and a suspect (Lupe) that can just refuse to show up.

Oh, and the return of Tino Balducci.

Returning in a game where he doesn’t fit in and where no one wanted him in the first place, Tino’s there to “help” Nancy solve the mystery by giving her a questionnaire for her suspects to fill out that asks what planet they see themselves as, among other inanities.

Honestly, this whole section could be summed up as “Tino returns, among other inanities”.

Nancy, throughout all of this, somehow has time to do a bit of detective work, interviewing a cast of rather one-note suspects, figuring out that more than one person is responsible for the many accidents. Guadalupe’s sabotage is discovered and she’s sent home, Yanni is increasingly unavailable (which is hugely suspicious), snowball fights are more prevalent than necessary, and finally the villain is exposed, all culminating in a glitchy, nigh-impossible snowmobile chase.

Oh, and there’s a half-tamed wolf storyline that kinda pops up every now and again.

All in all, the mystery is a weak thread throughout the game — which is a problem, because it’s the only thread throughout the game — that’s easily overshadowed by the chores, games, and frankly awful visuals throughout the game.

Now, to those who contribute (in a way) to the non-entity that is ICE’s story:

The Suspects:

Ollie Randall is our resident grumpy caretaker and is Chantal’s right-hand man, along with being on the Avalanche Patrol and a firm believer in the bad luck that wolves bring. His wife can’t handle cold temperatures due to a nerve condition, so he’s also his daughter Freddie’s sole parent during the winter.

As a culprit in the game as it now is, Ollie would have been the only sensical option; fed up with the awful guests that come and cause havoc, he starts causing little easily-solved accidents to spook away the less hardy-type guests, but it keeps spiraling as it doesn’t keep out everyone but people like Bill Kessler. Frustrated by the treatment the lodge gets, he decides that if people don’t treat it nicely, they can’t have it at all…

Unfortunately, Ollie is limited to being Grumpy, and not a lot else.

Freddie Randall is Ollie’s daughter and the self-proclaimed Snow Princess due to her ability to stay out in the cold for hours in her snow fort, and to take repeated snowballs to the face courtesy of a teen detective.

Freddie is…I know I talked about how Yanni and Lupe don’t really fit into the game, but Freddie really doesn’t fit any version of this game. She’s there for a mini game, she doesn’t have a personality, you can’t skip her mini game, she’s voiced by Lani Minella…the list goes on and on. Her shining moment of glory is acting as a red herring by throwing a snowball through Lou’s window.

She’s pointless to talk about as a potential culprit, even though she would have been an interesting “culprit” in a case where all the incidents are actually Freddie accidentally causing trouble, but that probably would have been even less satisfying than how the game actually went, so we’ll just move along here.

Our cross-country skiing Olympian from the fictional Eastern European country of Fredonia, Yanni Volkstaia is both our only suspect wearing a onesie and our only suspect with a family member eaten by wolves.

I know, that’s already a high bar to top. Don’t worry, he’ll fall very, very far below it.

Yanni, as mentioned above, is our odd spy/terrorist villain who is disguising his being there for uranium by saying that it’s his Olympic competitors trying to throw off his training. Why an Olympian is training alone without any coaches or security…well, let’s just say that Yanni didn’t really think his cover story through.

Just because Yanni’s the obvious culprit doesn’t mean he fills the role well; Yanni is obvious, annoying, and his paper-thin cover is just annoying enough to be…well, annoying. He throws out that his grandmother was “killed and devoured” by wolves as if he wants Nancy to believe that that’s the reason he’s targeting the lodge but…it still points directly to him. It’s just not great all the way around.

Joining Yanni in terrorism is Guadalupe Comillo, activist from California and hard-to-find suspect. Lupe can, as mentioned above, literally just not appear for a bit, stalling out the game and making her even more annoying than she already is.

Lupe’s cover is that she’s a bird watcher, but she knows absolutely nothing about birds — like honestly nothing, even though she had time to make her cover story (not unlike Yanni).

She gets sent away by destruction of private property (Ollie’s gun – super dangerous to make a gun misaim out in the wild and she’s lucky he didn’t hit anything problematic [like another person] because of it) and good riddance, but appears as a phone friend to rather pointlessly exonerate herself and do pretty much nothing else but stop the game in its tracks until she lets it proceed.

As a culprit, Lupe would have been the other obvious choice, but she’s just not in the game enough, so she’s easy to ignore. Her cover is thin, but so is her motivation (!!! Save the wolf!!!), so she’s one of the most annoying non-entity suspects in this series.

Our second Californian in the cast is Lou Talbot, who is a college student, master of ‘earthitecture’ (inspired by Poppy Dada) and stealer of dinosaur bones for money. He also plays fox and geese with Bill in his spare time. He does a really good impression of the Guy in my MFA twitter as well, but that’s literally it.

No, really, that’s his entire character. I can’t even posit what he would be like as the culprit because that is LITERALLY all we’re given on him. End of bio. My gosh, what a waste of pixels.

Lou’s partner in fox and geese is Bill Kessler, who loves to fish and whose grandmother used to own the lodge before Chantal. While he feels that his grandmother Tilly was cheated out of the lodge, he has little desire to get it back, and really just wants to hide the fact that he’s been to the lodge before (an odd thing to hide, but whatever makes him feel better.)

Like Lou, apart from that, he really doesn’t have any character. He basically is a mix of TRT’s Jacques in his family connection to the lodge and SHA’s Dave in actual amount of motivation (i.e., 0 motivation) to do anything about it. He is, however, the person who makes Nancy play fox and geese, and for that alone, I hate him.

As a culprit, Bill’s played as a red herring for a solid 5 minutes of gameplay (though not very well — why would an avid fisherman blow up a fishing shack?), and then totally discounted the moment Nancy finds out his backstory. He’s really just there — like most of the cast, worryingly enough — to pad out the number of suspects and to give Nancy a taste of Hell through fox and geese.

The Favorite:

There are a few bright spots in this confused mess of a game, so let’s go through them.

My favorite moment in the game is when Nancy, after Yanni says the horrific line about his grandmother being killed and devoured by wolves, can ask “how”. As if that’s a sentence that needs a ‘how’. It’s a great moment of Nancy being absolutely tone deaf, and I giggle like a madman every time I think about it.

My favorite puzzle in the game is probably the cooking minigame, which I dislike in frequency and time requirement, but do love in actual practice. It’s fun to cook in every Nancy Drew game, and this one is no exception. I just wish it wasn’t regimented so heavily.

I love the atmosphere of the lodge; it’s beautifully animated (in fact one of my favorite locations in the ND games), big without being too big, and is never boring, even by the end of the game. The lodge is largely a character unto itself, and is quite successful as a wonderful location.

The Un-Favorite:

There’s a lot to unpack here, but we’ll keep it short because the fix section of this meta is gonna have me by the throat.

My least favorite moment in the game is the moment Tino comes into the game. As the game now stands, there’s no reason for him to be involved, and short a comment about him by the Hardy Boys, which would at least justify it a little, he’s purposeless. He’s worse than that, actually — he’s there to slow the game down, and that’s a cardinal sin.

My least favorite puzzle in the game is a tie between fox and geese (UGH) and the final snowmobile chase. My problems with fox and geese are obvious — they’re everyone’s problems with fox and geese: it’s a required puzzle, it’s hard to do, there’s no way to cheat through it, and it takes forever.

The final snowmobile chase is somehow even worse. It’s buggy, laggy, has nothing to do with the actual plot, has arbitrary win conditions — it’s the worst (or at least among the worst) that HER has to offer with final puzzles. If everything else about ICE was perfect, engaging, fun, and thought-provoking, this final puzzle would still put me off of playing it. It’s just that bad.

The storyline with Isis and that whole backstory isn’t treated well in game; it’s almost as if they came up with the title and then remembered at the last minute that there’s supposed to be an actual wolf. I would have loved more of a focus on that storyline; as it is, it barely counts as a blip on the game’s radar — which is a shame.

The Fix:

Gosh, how on earth will I fix The White Wolf of Icicle Creek? The answer is that I don’t feel like I can just apply a few quick fixes and be on my way; the only answer I could find is to approach this as if I was at the proposal meeting for this game — how would I outline the barebones scenario?

This section will be long, as I’m going to start just from the skeleton and build things in. What follows is my own imaginings of what my own personal ideas would be to create ICE, rather than to fix it from what the finished product was. As an important note, the side-plot with the wolf, as it was really neglected and bare-bones to begin with in the game, is mostly removed.

The first section I’ll work on is structure. Though it wasn’t done perfectly in FIN, I feel like the pacing of ICE could be vastly improved by putting a clock on the game by assigning designated days and tasks. Three days is still probably a good idea, as it lets us easily break the story into a 3-act structure and delineate certain tasks for certain days without overloading one day in particular. We’ll get more into what should happen in Days 1, 2, and 3 later in a general overview of how the plot would go.

The mechanism used to get Nancy there — Chantal being a friend of Carson’s — isn’t bad, but I’d change it up just slightly. Nancy’s not yet a “professional” detective, but we’re only 2 games from her being hired by a foreign country’s authorities, so she should be making her way up there. It stands to reason that Nancy would attract some attention from the business in CRE since the Hardy Boys would definitely mention Nancy in their de-briefing and Aikens is a big name, so let’s build on that from here. Chantal is still Carson’s friend, and she still wants to get these incidents solved while she’s away from the Lodge for legal matters — someone got injured at the lodge and is now suing.

Carson decides to officially hire Nancy — paperwork, legal documentation, etc. — as a “concerned third party” in Chantal’s problems, telling her that her job is to find out two things: find out what’s causing the incidents of sabotage, and give Carson enough evidence in favor of the lodge’s safety that he can prove reasonable doubt against the people accusing Chantal. Nancy will be there undercover as a family friend of Chantal’s, with only Ollie knowing that she’s there in an official capacity.

ICE has a cast that is both unwieldy and characterless, and I feel like the way to fix that is through combining characters. Starting out we have Ned, Chantal, Tino, the ex-maid, her boyfriend, Ollie, Freddie, Lupe, Yanni, Lou, and Bill — 10 characters that we deal with in the present, plus one other player (in the boyfriend/stalker guy). 11 in total. That is a huge, huge cast that we definitely need to pare down.

The first thing to do is to take out Tino Balducci. He slows down the plot, is completely unnecessary, and isn’t even entertaining. Since there’s no Hardy Boys to play off of him (and I would keep the Hardy Boys out of this game, even with my love for them), Tino needs to go the way of the dodo. And good riddance to him, honestly.

Freddie, an obvious subject to axe, should instead be aged up to around 20 and combined with the maid whose ex-boyfriend’s letter Nancy finds at the beginning of the game. Freddie would handle all the chores the first day except the cooking.

Instead of a nebulous, incident-causing ex-boyfriend, Freddie would have just started a relationship with Lou, keeping our cast tight and visible, rather than one-off characters with nothing else to give to the story.

By now we’re down to Carson, Ned, Chantal, Freddie, Ollie, Lupe, Yanni, Lou, and Bill. I think we can do a little better than that.

The next step I’d take is to remove Yanni entirely. Yes, I know it’s a big change to remove the canonical culprit, but bear with me. With Yanni and Lupe having so many similarities and together being guilty of 99% of the Crimes in this game, I’m pretty comfortable in combining them. I’d also make the minor change of having Lupe be an Indigenous Canadian rather than Hispanic and from California, since our game is set in Canada and there’s absolutely no reason for a large portion of our cast to be American.

With Yanni gone, Lupe (or whatever her new name would be, since the name ‘Lupe’, all nationality changes aside, in a game ostensibly about a wolf makes me want to kill myself) assumes a few of his personality quirks – most importantly, a family member with a past with wolves. It doesn’t really matter if it’s positive or negative, you just want the association there as a herring (red or otherwise).

That puts us down to 5 suspects to talk to and three phone friends for a total of 8 players in the present. Since Chantal is supposed to be busy, I’d remove the ability to talk to her entirely — anything that Chantal could offer can come through Carson as Nancy’s official “employer”, which brings us to a nice 7 players — an entirely manageable number.

So let’s begin.

The beginning of the game with Nancy at her desk always includes a case file, so this time the case file would say that Nancy, at the behest of her ‘client’, Carson Drew, is flying out to Alberta to investigate strange happenings at Chantal Moique’s lodge. Chantal is trying to settle with people who got hurt there and are trying to sue her, and Carson’s helping to advise her. Nancy’s mission is two-fold: figure out what’s causing the incidents at the lodge, and find evidence that Chantal can’t be held liable for the injuries incurred by the guests suing her.

Wolves are commonly seen around the area of the lodge — Northern Alberta has some of the highest population of wolves in North America — and there’s a rumor at the lodge that the spirits of the wolves that are hunted in the area every winter are causing some of the sabotage.

Chantal thinks the rumor is being spread by whoever is doing the actual sabotage to make her guests leave and force her out of business, so Carson tells Nancy to pay attention to the stories about the wolves — and one snow-white wolf in particular, who is often sighted very close to the lodge. Carson suspects that, if it exists, the white wolf is actually a trained dog (a white/white and silver Siberian Husky, for example) being used to whip up panic, but tells Nancy to keep an open mind.

As Nancy’s arriving at the Lodge, an explosion occurs in the distance, causing the rumbling of snow to start. Ollie, who’s picked up Nancy from her plane, says darkly that he’s been waiting for something like this to happen, and that this will probably cause a minor avalanche (his opinion as the head of Avalanche Patrol in the area), making it impossible to leave the lodge for a few days. He tells Nancy to head straight to bed once they get to the lodge, as she’s in for an exhausting time dealing with the “weirdos” still left at the lodge.

Nancy wakes up and Day One begins with Freddie freaking out outside Nancy’s door. After explaining that the regular chef (who was off for the last month visiting family) can’t get back to the lodge until tomorrow and that Freddie’s only manned the kitchen once or twice, Nancy says that she has experience cooking and offers to take the chef’s duties for the day.

Day One has Nancy meet all the suspects – Bill’s playing a game (I don’t care what it is as long as it’s something that involves writing things down) with anyone who passes by and talks about how out of all the lodges in Canada, this one’s his favorite; Lou hangs out near the bones (make him an archeology major or something related to but not exactly paleontology) and Definitely Doesn’t Know the Cute Girl Who Works at the Lodge, How Dare Nancy Assume; Not-Lupe is gone until 4pm when it starts getting dark because she loves spending time in nature, especially with the Super Special Wolf running around the place; and Ollie’s in the workshop fixing the things that have been sabotaged, worries about his daughter being away from her mother and about her ‘cavorting’ with a guest.

Nancy still preps lunch and the day goes on without a hitch other than Lou having an overheard argument with someone at around 6. Nancy cooks dinner, accidentally (due to smudged instructions from Freddie) sprinkling paprika in everyone’s food and setting off an allergic (mild to moderate anaphylaxis, helped by an epi pen) reaction + hives in Freddie, who they fly out via helicopter that night.

Ollie, feeling hostile towards Nancy, takes a look at the instructions/recipe that Nancy worked off of and says to her that the first page is Freddie’s handwriting, but the second page isn’t — someone did this on purpose. Nancy calls Carson, who says that the soonest he can get there is the day after next, and to keep herself safe above everything — he’ll check in with the hospital Freddie’s at since it’s also in Edmonton, where Carson and Chantal are. Carson warns Nancy that the guests were about to settle the lawsuit when the news about the explosion hit the news, and are now more determined than ever to sue for all Chantal’s worth.

Day 2 opens with the cook (who’s unseen and just exists in order to relieve Nancy of kitchen duty) arriving and a phone call from Carson asking for Chantal/Freddie if Nancy can grab the laundry bags from the guests’ rooms and that the spare key is in the register at the front (of course guarded by a puzzle — I’d even accept a mini fox and geese, as one of the big problems with that puzzle in the vanilla game is that it goes on way too long.

While snooping in the desk, Nancy finds evidence that Chantal might have been guilty of criminal neglect — a few things around the lodge are listed as “fixed” and totally safe when really they still need some maintenance — and wonders how she should tell Carson and if she should wait until she has more evidence. Before she goes out for the day, Not-Lupe mentions to Nancy “in confidence” that she overheard Lou fighting with Freddie before dinner, calling it a “lover’s quarrel”.

After lunch and talking with all the suspects again, Nancy goes to grab the laundry with the master key and snoops in everyone’s rooms, finding various clues and suspicious things: Bill’s journal detailing how Chantal is running the place into the ground and needs to be replaced, along with a few lodge magazines; Not-Lupe’s gloves with suspicious specks of things on them (Nancy takes a sample of it in a Kleenex or something); Lou’s heavy suitcase that has a case with imprints of bones in it; Ollie’s has maintenance books that also detail how to take things apart and maintenance notes that say he saw the wolf around but didn’t have his gun; Freddie’s only thing of interest is a little dinosaur pin on her dresser.

Nancy takes the opportunity to snoop in Chantal’s normal room and finds that the things that were listed in the documents in the front desk really were fixed; Ollie reported to Chantal that things that he fixed were un-fixed by the time he went back to them the next day — most of the time suffering damage as well, such as the sauna that injured the guests that are suing Chantal. Nancy calls her father with the news, and Carson says to save those documents so that he can come get them tomorrow, and to see if she can find any clues to who might have done it.

After dinner Nancy talks to Lou, who confesses that he and Freddie started dating a few days ago after meeting online last semester in a dinosaur enthusiast forum — hence his decision to come to the lodge, as Freddie said there were cool bones here. He was originally going to steal a few small ones and thought no one would notice if he replaced them with resin-cast replicas, but Freddie caught him and they had a fight which ended with Lou deciding not to steal, and Freddie saying that she could help him make replicas for him to take home and keep in his house.

Nancy asks why he’s telling her, and Lou says that Ollie seems to get along with Nancy well, and he’d like Nancy to calm Ollie down if Ollie discovers that he’s dating Freddie. Nancy asks Lou about the wolf, and Lou says that some of the stuff could be a wolf — he’s seen one around the lodge once or twice — but he hasn’t really been paying attention to anything except the bones and Freddie (who he’s looking forward to visiting once he can).

When talking with Bill, he offhandedly mentions that he used to be a handyman — the sink in his room started acting up, but he fixed it easily because he thinks that Ollie has enough to do without doing this easy fix. Bill says that this would never have happened when Chantal’s father was running the Lodge and accuses Chantal of preferring to spend long “business trips” in the city to actually paying attention to the Lodge — he says she should just live in the city and hire a manager with experience who actually cares. Nancy asks Bill about the wolf, and he says if anyone could be haunted by wolves, he’d believe it was Chantal.

Nancy, it should be noted, during her explorations around the lodge, sees a few pawprints and some chewed-on debris, but otherwise hasn’t seen the wolf in person. Just traces and tracks.

Not-Lupe and Ollie both dodge Nancy’s questions – Ollie’s busy as everything seems to be breaking at once, and snaps at Nancy that without Chantal around, he’s the only person keeping the lodge afloat, and he’d be better off without the stress of this job. When Nancy asks him about the wolf, Ollie says that the last thing they need is some idiot tourist being attacked by a wolf, and so he refuses to believe that there’s a wolf around the area.

Not-Lupe is at her normal place at the window (though there’s a chair there because no one stands all day), and when Nancy asks about the wolf, says that that’s why she’s there — she heard the rumor about the wolf and wanted to see it, but that her visit’s been very disappointing — just a junky lodge with incompetent staff and no wolves anywhere. Her hobby is visiting winter lodges, and this one just Isn’t up to snuff.

Nancy tries to pry deeper, but Not-Lupe shuts her down and goes to bed; Nancy investigates the living room as everyone leaves for bed and finds crinkled up under the couch a magazine cutout about the Premier Lodge Group, a company that owns winter lodges all over Canada and the United States, and their plans to build a group of lodges in Alberta as soon as a few “minor inconveniences” with location are solved.

The day ends with Carson calling; Nancy tells him about all the suspects (Carson confirms Lou’s story by having talked to Freddie), the magazine, Ollie wanting to quit, etc. Carson promises to do some research on Premier Lodge Group and tells Nancy to send him a picture of the stuff she found on Lupe’s gloves. Nancy does so, and that’s the end of Day 2.

Day 3 opens again with Carson’s phone call, informing Nancy that he’ll be there in the early evening — he’s having a contact of his look at the photo Nancy sent, but he’s pretty sure it won’t be good news.

Premier Lodge Group was investigated a few years ago for sabotage to their competitors but ultimately nothing came out of it, and Carson suspects that people were paid off to keep quiet about it. Carson says that he’s looked into Ollie (since Carson suspected him the most) and apparently Ollie always grouches about quitting when he’s stressed but has been there for 20 years and is as loyal as they come, so Nancy says she’ll focus on Not-Lupe and Bill — the two lodge-hoppers who seem dissatisfied with the lodge.

Both Not-Lupe and Bill are gone when Nancy gets downstairs, and Lou (who’s planning on leaving that night to go to Edmonton) says that they both got a sack lunch from the kitchen and left early in the morning to go explore outside. He tells Nancy she can borrow his snowshoes and says that they both headed out (independently) in the direction of Skookum Ridge.

When Nancy gets up to the Ridge, she spots the “wolf” — really a Siberian Husky, like Carson thought, who seems very well trained. When the dog comes up to Nancy, a gunshot ripples through the air and nearly hits the dog, who would have gone running off had Nancy not grabbed her collar and yelled not to shoot. Nancy sees Bill across the ridge and waves him over, explaining that it’s a dog, not a wolf. The dog (whose name is something way better than Isis — literally anything else would do) is suspicious of Bill at first, which convinces Nancy that it’s not Bill’s — the only suspect left is Not-Lupe.

When she tells Bill what she knows about Not-Lupe, Bill admits to having seen her before at a lodge that went out of business due to mysterious accidents, but thought it was a coincidence before digging deeper in the magazines he brought and finding Not-Lupe in the back of a small photo of Premier Lodge Administrative Staff — he was worried about keeping it safe and knowing that there would be no cleaning staff until at least the next day, crumpled it up and put it under the couch he normally sits by.

A happy, friendly dog in tow, Nancy and Bill head back to the lodge only to find Ollie and Lou standing outside looking worried. They tell Nancy that they both went outside because they heard a loud noise, only to find the door locked behind them — and every other door locked as well. After realizing that Not-Lupe wouldn’t open the doors for them, Ollie went to get an axe for the door, only to have a note appear on the door’s window that if they forced their way in, the whole Lodge would be burned to the ground in an instant.

Carson calls then, saying that he’s a few minutes away, but that his friend got back to him — Not-Lupe’s gloves were covered in residue from explosives. Bill takes Nancy’s phone and begins to fill Carson in on who they think Not-Lupe is working for and who she is. Nancy asks Lou and Ollie to hoist her up to her own window, which she keeps unlocked, and crawls in, creeping downstairs to the main room to try to find how Not-Lupe will burn the lodge and stop her.

Nancy confronts Not-Lupe, who confirms her identity as a saboteur for the Premier Lodge Group, saying that with the bad press around the lodge Chantal would have already had to sell — but she’s going to go one step further and cause an ‘incident’, blowing up the lodge with fuses hidden around its ground floor — Chantal’s father won’t spend the money to rebuild the lodge, and the only proof that is against her is the word of two American kids, an old man, and a lodge-hopper with a very incriminating diary that would be found soon enough. She tells Nancy that she can either try to catch her or try to save the lodge and runs out the back, intent on escaping as she pushes the button to arm the explosives.

Nancy yells out the window for them to catch Not-Lupe, who’s got to be headed out to the main road, tossing the cushion of the seat Lupe usually sat in so that her dog can catch her scent, then has the final timed puzzle be switching off each detonator (which would be in each of the places where the suspects usually were, with the exception of Ollie’s whose is in the front desk).

As soon as Nancy disarms them, Bill calls out to her that Carson just called — Lou and the dog tracked Lupe to the main road, and Bill called Carson to let him know. Carson’s car stops Not-Lupe (Carson brought a policeman on a hunch), and the day is saved. Premier Lodge is snagged in a major lawsuit by Chantal’s father and other lodge owners who have had the same thing happen to them, and Chantal hires Bill as co-manager to ensure there’s always someone there to manage the lodge and for his wealth of knowledge of what makes a good lodge and good experience for guests.

The game ends with Nancy writing her letter to Hannah (so that Hannah doesn’t worry about them), and with her dad’s praise for a job well done.

I realize that this is a monumental fix; it’s a brand-new game made out of the skeleton of the old one. I also realize that there are a million and one ways to re-write this game; this one takes the idea of sabotage, one of the most frequent inciting incidents in the Nancy Drew world, and just makes it a little bigger.

No terrorism required.

#nancy drew #clue crew #nancy drew games #white wolf of icicle creek #ICE #long post #video games #nancy drew meta

27 notes · View notes

orokinarchives · 5 years

Text

Discussion: Ticker

Occupation

Ticker sells secondhand wares – random tools and items that the Tenno can use to decorate their Orbiter. She shouts out advertisements for her shop if the Tenno is standing nearby, but she also hints to her real business: debt forgiveness.

Ticker collects Corpus debt dossiers and will sell them to any Tenno able to pay. By investing resources and credits, a Tenno can redeem a Solaris from their debt, freeing them from their servitude to the Corpus. In return, the Tenno receive the Solaris' debt-bonds, which are used as currency by some Fortuna merchants – allowing them to collectively repay the debt of the freed individual. Ticker stresses that the debt-trading operation is highly illegal and that the Corpus authorities will kill her (or, more likely, brain-shelve her) if she were ever exposed. This may explain why the other residents of Fortuna stay away from her shop and do not mention her.

After the Tenno has reached rank Old Mate with Solaris United and proven to Eudico that they are a true friend of Fortuna, the floor boss will reveal, among other things, that Ticker also smuggles families out of Fortuna (and perhaps also smuggles supplies into Fortuna – Eudico's wording is ambiguous). These are likely families that are targeted for full repo or brain-shelving due to severe delinquency on their debt. It is not known if Ticker takes the families off-world or simply to hidden sites on the Orb Vallis or elsewhere on Venus.

Personal

Ticker is flamboyant and self-confident, never hesitating to give out advice on how to live a fulfilling life. She speaks, like many other Solaris, as someone who has experienced too much pain in life, but she doesn't seem to dwell on it, instead emphasising personal growth in the wake of every tragedy. She is aware of the role she plays in alleviating, even slightly, the incredibly dehumanising system of debt-bondage the Corpus have instituted, and her outlook is a curious mixture of optimism and cynicism. Overall, Ticker demonstrates one of the more complex personalities among the Solaris.

Ticker's mother is dead, from an unstated cause. Her other family is not mentioned.

Ticker's debt-bond memory fragments portray a deep, long-lasting romance that was terminated when her significant other was brain-shelved. Although Ticker sold off almost her entire body to clear her partner's debt and buy a rig for him, he had apparently suffered damage from being shelved too long, both in functioning and memory, and Ticker was unable to resume the relationship. Although the story is deeply emotional for her, she does not seem bitter about either the romantic relationship or the loss of her original body, and will refer to both when talking with the Tenno.

Ticker seems to be good friends with Smokefinger and looks after him, as she mentions that she will often bring him food and remind him to eat when he gets engrossed in his work.

Ticker mentions The Business in passing, referencing his current occupation as an ecologist and wildlife expert, but it appears to be a segue to an unrelated thought on the importance of combating depressing and violent thoughts. Whether this is simply advice or a subtle commentary on The Business is unknown.

Ticker is sympathetic to Rude Zuud and her malfunctions, but in an interesting way. She mentions "all her invisible friends" – Chatter and perhaps other split personalities we have not yet seen – and then talks about a paranormal experience where Ticker's mother appeared to predict the time of her own death. This suggests an assumption that Chatter is a supernatural phenomenon, such as a spirit possessing or assisting Zuud. This is an odd assumption for Ticker to make, since we know objectively that Chatter and Rude Zuud's other issues originate from the Deck 12 incident and the loss of her sisters. There are multiple potential explanations – disassociation and hallucination due to the trauma of the event, residual copies or fragments of her sisters' consciousnesses due to the oneness of their minds and the abrupt nature of the disconnect, or even sensor and comms malfunctions as mentioned in her Corpus debt portfolio – and none of them necessitate a supernatural influence. It is possible that Ticker is not very close to Rude Zuud and is unaware (somehow) of the events in her past.

Interestingly, Ticker will sometimes mention the legend of Gara and the Sentient Eidolon, drawing inspiration from the battle.

Other

Every resident of Fortuna who the Tenno befriends will eventually open up and begin talking about the other Solaris, with a single exception in that none of them will talk about Ticker (Ticker will, of course, mention others, as noted above). In fact, the omission becomes conspicuous during Operation: Buried Debts. After the Exploiter Orb is killed and Rude Zuud gains closure, her mental trauma appears to be somewhat eased and she remembers her sisters, and the life they led in Deck 12 with the other Solaris. Eudico replies, "We've never forgotten. Me, Biz, Smokefinger… any of us." It's possible that Eudico was simply avoiding having to name every resident of Fortuna, but the fact is that she did name every resident we know, aside from Legs and the Ventkids (who were too young to have known Zuud before), Little Duck (who was possibly not present at Deck 12)… and Ticker. Coupled with the fact that she appears to be unfamiliar with the nature of Rude Zuud's trauma, it is a distinct possibility that Ticker was not present during the events of the Deck 12 crackdown. Since her accent points to her being a Fortuna native (unlike The Business), it is possible she was away at the time, working off her debt on a Corpus colony or ship elsewhere. Deck 12 holds such central importance in the histories all Fortuna residents that the fact that there are zero connections to Ticker is remarkable.

Another explanation, as noted earlier, is that the silence is a deliberate policy in place to protect Ticker from scrutiny, since she performs extremely dangerous work of great importance to the Solaris. Either way, a Tenno who never ventures into the upper level of Fortuna may never know she exists.

[Navigation: Hub → Discussion → Ticker]

#warframe #discussion #lore #ticker #solaris united #fortuna #orokin archives

32 notes · View notes

pilferingapples · 5 years

Text

Les Mis BBC: First Episode First Impression

Well, the actors are as excellent as I hoped they would be!

Cut for Spoilers or whatever term applies here

I really really really wanted to be wrong in all my misgivings about this series. I wanted to be blown out of the water by the whole thing, and have to make repentant posts about the error of my ways.

Alas, this is not a Repentant Post.

I liked some things! The set and scenery and props were all genuinely lovely. I enjoyed the animals everywhere? and the nigh-omnipresent beggars in Paris? Nicely done! And I really, genuinely, appreciate the constant background French; I know just enough to recognize it when I hear it and it does add something to the atmosphere of the piece.

The actors! What great performances! I want it clear that NOTHING I have to say in the way of character critique is down to them. Oyelowo is as good as I’d hoped he’d be, and that is saying a lot; Collins is doing a wonderful job with Fantine’s shyness and defiant hope; and the bit-part characters like Magloire and Nicolette are really standout.

I really appreciate the inclusion of the Pontmercy Family situation, and Gillenormand being placed in this first episode makes his social relevance more clear IMO; he feels less like random comic relief than he sometimes can. Really, the whole Pontmercy-Gillenormand family conflict is a standout in the episode; Gillenormand’s emotional manipulation of Tiny Marius and general domestic tyrannizing was very effectively shown (the scene with the toy soldiers!!!), and my heart was broken all over for Marius and for Georges. And Tholomyes is an amazingly perfect skeezeball; his PUA approach is clear and skin-crawling from the start.

*** Real quick Basic Plot Rundown: this episode covers roughly the era from Waterloo to Fantine being abandoned by Tholomyes. I say roughly because it weirdly changes the timeline of Fantine’s life to sync up more with Valjean’s;he gets released and goes through the silver theft with the Bishop when she’s getting dumped. The issue with that is of course that in the book Fantine is dumped in 1817 (the year 1817, when it was 1817); Cosette should just about be getting born around the year of Napoleon’s defeat and Valjean’s release, and now I guess she’s about a year old? This doesn’t necessarily have to be a big issue for chronology if the show’s just going to have Fantine and Cosette suffer for an extra two years (though: D:D:D:D: ) , and heaven knows Hugo is shifty on personal timelines, but...Les Mis *does* have certain unavoidable historical events it has to sync up with, so I’ll see how it plays out.

Besides Valjean’s last little while in prison and Fantine’s courtship and abandonment, this first episode covers the Georges-Gillenormand-Marius family situation, with Georges limping home from Waterloo only to be refused access to his son. The show cuts between the three ongoing stories so they all progress more or less in sync. We get far enough along to see Georges watching his son in church without Gillenormand knowing (thanks to Nicolette, who’s the only woman in the Gillenormand house so far), Fantine holding Cosette in their apartment and wondering what they’re going to do after Tholomyes leaves them, and Valjean curled up in the road after robbing Petit Gervais.

Okay, Actual Commentary time! Please assume a Personal Opinion disclaimer for things after this point:P

***

Several of the people I was watching with felt the constant cutting between scenes was jarring or hard to follow; I don’t know if that was the issue but I do think, overall, it just didn’t work as well as it might have. The individual scenes were very brief and the constant bouncing back and forth prevented them from building up any emotional momentum. I think..conceptually, I can see where it would be interesting to twine Valjean, Fantine, and Georges together, in many ways, but none of that thematic connection really came through either (Maybe most disappointingly to me, Valjean’s family is never mentioned, so the potential to connect all three of them as families torn apart by social inequality is lost). It really felt like just Three People Having a Bad Time in France. it really is hard to follow, because it starts to feel...kinda dull , just a collection of sad anecdotes for no purpose.

The dialogue doesn’t help. When the show leans heavily on Hugo’s writing (sadly, mostly with Tholomyes) , it’s fine, of course. But the original dialogue is clunky, pedantic, and weirdly flat throughout--and utterly lacking in nuance. It just aggressively clunks at points.

Valjean and Javert suffer the most for this. Javert basically states aloud his share of the Confrontation while lecturing a bound Valjean for ...reasons?? It’s never really clear. But hey, here you go, Valjean, have Javert’s entire backstory! ( I should say that Oyelowo almost sells it. He is incredible , and does a great job making Javert feel both his adamant self and humanly affected by the world around him. Just. some of this dialogue. Geez.) This is also one of those episodes with a weirdly more unpleasant Valjean; he doesn’t assault the Bishop, but he does much more consciously rob Petit Gervais, laughing as he scares the kid away and grinning as he first examines the coin. He also just...yells at people a lot? and argues with the Bishop and asserts his hatred of mankind very bluntly. I found it hard to believe this Valjean had any of the original’s internalized self-hatred or sense of being lower than a dog; he seems solidly outraged by his treatment, and confident of the injustice of it all. Which is definitely fair and all, but just...isn’t quite Valjean.

(Also, as I mentioned above, we don’t really get any of his pre-prison backstory; not an unusual adaptational move, but it sure doesn’t add anything to his motivation.) He seems both more casually violent and less emotionally deep than I’d expect a Valjean to be; I can’t believe , at least not yet, that he’s actually felt the Bishop’s forgiveness as a challenge in any way, even though the Gervais scene ends with him curled in the road--it just doesn’t feel connected.

Fantine does get more time--unfortunately, and unavoidably, much of that involves Felix:P . There’s also some brief conversation with Favourite about the general situation of grisettes. I think it’s a good addition, and puts in some useful context. (That said, I’m deeply uneasy about the attempt to portray Fantine and Favourite as actual friends-so much of Fantine’s story comes from her being really truly isolated. If she’d had real friends to help in the crunch, it would change things-- and if she thinks Favourite is a real friend and then Favourite fades on her, that’s even worse than canon and makes Favourite worse than in canon. Hence, Unease.)

Visually, there’s ..I won’t say nothing wrong, and certainly I can have fun for ages going over the details of this or that outfit or hairstyle (and I really do find the weird combos of Looks to be very distracting; if I knew less about the period it wouldn’t be,no doubt, but I do know a lot about How It Should Look and the fact that it doesn’t Quite sometimes makes it all feel like it’s happening in a generic Fantasy 19C) . But there’s no BIG thing wrong, it’s...fine?

It’s just ... it’s just fine. There’s no particular strong visual feel to it, nothing really striking-- unless you count the weird 60s-Acid-flashback-looking timeskip moment. It really does feel like LM 2012 in its more visually striking moments, and outside of that, it’s just very much a competently filmed period drama made in the last ten years--but that’s all. Without the specific characters, I don’t think there’s a single frame of it I’d recognize as being necessarily Les Mis and not any other random BBC Period Drama.

I guess this is really my problem with the characters and the story too-- it’s...Fine, it’s technically there , but too often there’s no sense of depth or specificity to it. Part of it’s the dialogue, part of it’s the weird pacing/ story jumps , part of it is because no one ever seems to be given a moment to respond-(Fantine crying for all of thirty seconds after being abandoned before the show decides we need her up and talking and dry-eyed was really actively jarring to me)--

There are a hundred little details I could go through but the overall effect for me was just a whole lot of Underwhelming. Yeah, there’s the Pee Scene and the (correct and fitting) visceral discomfort of Everything About Tholomyes (he ,at least, really is a Triumph of Skeeze). But the real problem so far is just that it feels like a visual outline of a story; it’s not pulling together into feeling like a lived world. It’s not taking my heart, even though, despite my surface grousing, I really want it to. It’s here, it’s fine, it’s Whatever; but all my really strong emotional reactions either Cringing or Cooing (over the very excellent babies). My heart didn’t break but the once, with Tiny Marius, and it really really should have been in pieces by the end of the episode.

I’m of course going to keep watching, as much of it as I can find a way to see; it’s Les Mis and I really am impressed with the actors. Maybe next episode, when the various stories start to come together a little, it’ll all feel more solid and more memorable. Right now, though, I’m sitting at a solid “ meh” about it.

#Les Mis BBC Talk #Les Mis BBC Spoilers #Long Post #Les Mis BBC Salt #this is not the Fun Outrage Post some people are probably wanting #it's an Actual Considered Reaction post #but Lighthearted Outrage shall no doubt be very present again soon:P

89 notes · View notes

marcusssanderson · 5 years

Text

60 Spiritual Quotes About Inner Peace and Love

Our latest collection of spiritual quotes that will help you develop a stronger connection to everything inside and outside of you.

We don’t always need to be inspired or motivated; sometimes we just need to slow down and reconnect…

During our quest for greater happiness, success and freedom many times we neglect our spiritual side. As human beings, it’s important for us to develop spiritually.

Below you’ll find our collection of inspirational, wise, and powerful spiritual quotes, spiritual sayings, and spiritual proverbs, collected from a variety of sources over the years.

These beautiful spiritual quotes will remind us how powerful it is to develop a stronger connection to everything inside and outside of us.

Spiritual Quotes About Inner Peace and Love

1.) The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it. ― Henri J.M. Nouwen

2.) You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul. – Swami Vivekananda

3.) The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty — it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God. ― Mother Teresa

4.) Step out of the circle of time and into the circle of love. –Rumi

5.) Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude. – Denis Waitley

6.) It took me forty years on earth To reach this sure conclusion: There is no Heaven but clarity, No Hell except confusion.

– Jan Struther

7.) We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

8.) Surrender is the most difficult thing in the world while you are doing it and the easiest when it is done. – Bhai Sahib

9.) If you want others to be happy, practise compassion. If you want to be happy, practise compassion. – The Dalai Lama

10.) It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we’re alive – to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are. – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Spiritual Quotes About Inner Peace

11.) Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life. – Ludwig van Beethoven

12.) Physical strength can never permanently withstand the impact of spiritual force. – Franklin D. Roosevelt

13.) One of the most spiritual things you can do is embrace your humanity. Connect with those around you today. Say, “I love you”, “I’m sorry”, “I appreciate you”, “I’m proud of you”…whatever you’re feeling. Send random texts, write a cute note, embrace your truth and share it…cause a smile today for someone else…and give plenty of hugs. ― Steve Maraboli

14.) My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind. ― Albert Einstein

15.) Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again. ― Joseph Campbell

16.) You and your purpose in life are the same thing. Your purpose is to be you. ― George Alexiou

17.) As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. … That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind. ― Anthony de Mello

18.) If you obsess over whether you are making the right decision, you are basically assuming that the universe will reward you for one thing and punish you for another.

The universe has no fixed agenda. Once you make any decision, it works around that decision. There is no right or wrong, only a series of possibilities that shift with each thought, feeling, and action that you experience.

If this sounds too mystical, refer again to the body. Every significant vital sign- body temperature, heart rate, oxygen consumption, hormone level, brain activity, and so on- alters the moment you decide to do anything… decisions are signals telling your body, mind, and environment to move in a certain direction.” ― Deepak Chopra

19.) I would rather feel compassion than know the meaning of it. –– St. Thomas Aquinas

20.) You are one thing only. You are a Divine Being. An all-powerful Creator. You are a Deity in jeans and a t-shirt, and within you dwells the infinite wisdom of the ages and the sacred creative force of All that is, will be and ever was. ― Anthon St. Maarten

21.) Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul. ― Walt Whitman

Spiritual quotes to awaken your inner self

22.) Take care of your inner, spiritual beauty. That will reflect in your face. – Dolores del Rio

23.) Maturity is the ability to think, speak and act your feelings within the bounds of dignity. The measure of your maturity is how spiritual you become during the midst of your frustrations. – Samuel Ullman

24.) Spirituality does two things for you. One, you are forced to become more selfless, two, you trust to providence. The opposite of a spiritual man is a materialist. If I was a materialist I would be making lots of money doing endorsements, doing cricket commentary. I have no interest in that. – Imran Khan

25.) Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life. – Eckhart Tolle

26.) You can’t have a physical transformation until you have a spiritual transformation. – Cory Booker

27.) Friendship has always belonged to the core of my spiritual journey. – Henri Nouwen

28.) Part of spiritual and emotional maturity is recognizing that it’s not like you’re going to try to fix yourself and become a different person. You remain the same person, but you become awakened. – Jack Kornfield

29.) I realized then that even though I was a tiny speck in an infinite cosmos, a blip on the timeline of eternity, I was not without purpose. – R.J. Anderson

30.) The spiritual life is not a life before, after, or beyond our everyday existence. No, the spiritual life can only be real when it is lived in the midst of the pains and joys of the here and now. – Henri Nouwen

31.) Soul is the central point of spiritual discipline. – Mahavira

Spiritual quotes to brighten your life

32.) “Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, man cannot live without a spiritual life.” – Buddha

33.) “God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas but for scars.“ – Elbert Hubbard

34.) “When you connect to the silence within you, that is when you can make sense of the disturbance going on around you.“ – Stephen Richards

35.) “We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.“ – Ray Bradbury

36.) “Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear and superstition. By the year 2050, when the conflict began, the world had fallen upon fearful, superstitious times.“ – Bernard Beckett

37.) “The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.“ – Daniel Defoe

38.) Big-heartedness is the most essential virtue on the spiritual journey. – Matthew Fox

39.) When a man is willing and eager, the Gods join in. – Aeschylus

40.) Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself. – Herman Hesse

Spiritual quotes to inspire and uplift

41.) Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from. – Elizabeth Kübler-Ross

42.) Be guided by Spirit and not driven by ego. – All1son

43.) If peace is our single aim in all we do, we will always know what to do because we will do whatever will protect and deepen our peace. – Gerald Jampolsky

44.) Looking deeply at life as it is in this very moment, the meditator dwells in stability and freedom. – Buddha

45.) We are not human beings trying to be spiritual. We are spiritual beings trying to be human. – Jacquelyn Small

46.) You are never alone or helpless. The force that guides the stars, guides you too. – Shrii Shirr Anandamurti

47.) Prayer is a friendly conversation with the One we know loves us. – St Teresa of Avila

48.) “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you really are.”- Carl Jung

49.) “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.”- Albert Einstein

50.) You can read books without ever stepping into a library; and practice spirituality without ever going to a temple. – ANTHONY DE MELLO

Other inspirational spiritual quotes

51.) “You are never alone. You are eternally connected with everyone.”- Amit Ray

52.) “The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware; joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”- Henry Miller

53.) On the spiritual path, all the dreck and misery is transformed, maybe not that same day, but still transformed into spiritual fuel or insight. – ANNE LAMOTT

54.) “Character can not be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”- Helen Keller

55.) “If you lose money you lose much, If you lose friends you lose more, If you lose faith you lose all.”- Eleanor Roosevelt

56.) It is in our wild nature that we best recover from our un-nature, our spirituality. – FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

57.) No individual can ultimately fail. The Divinity which descends into humanity is bound to re-gain its original state. – N. Sri Ram

58.) Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. – Kahlil Gibran

59.) Most importantly, the meaning of spirituality lays the seeds for our destiny and the path we must follow. – Dennis Banks

60.) It is the inner life that is to spark the change in consciousness that will permit us to advance. – Brother Wayne Teasdale

Spiritual teachings: Radhanath Swami at TEDxLondonBusinessSchool

youtube

Which are your favorite spiritual quotes?

Spiritual development doesn’t have to be hard or confusing. If we can just learn to break out of our shells and see the bigger picture, we will all have an easier time developing a stronger connection to everything inside and outside of us.

The pursuit of spiritual growth is a highly profitable undertaking. Hopefully, these spiritual quotes have inspired you to seek greater happiness.

Did you enjoy these quotes? Which are your favorite spiritual quotes. We would love to hear all about it in the comment section below. Take a second to Like, Comment and Share!

The post 60 Spiritual Quotes About Inner Peace and Love appeared first on Everyday Power.

0 notes

deadboxprime · 7 years

Text

The Bizarre World of “Emotional Labor”

http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a12063822/emotional-labor-gender-equality/

The recent Harper’s Bazaar article, “Women Aren’t Nags – They’re Just Fed Up” continues the feminist tradition of overgeneralization and demonizing men and in a new twist, joining the left’s redefinition of the world.

“Emotional labor,” as the article calls it, is just a rebranding of emotional energy, mental energy, personal energy, and other terms for the same thing. To give a basic and oversimplified explanation, everyone wakes up each day with a quantity of energy to live our lives. Depending on the events that you are faced with during your day, the amount of energy you have can increase or decrease. If you are repeatedly faced with the same draining chore – say like having to deal with a spouse who whines about how unfair life is – you can end up feeling drained, unappreciated and seeking escape. The twist that the article adds is the author’s struggle to deal with her own emotions regarding a detested chore.

Men, apparently, don’t understand this.

While it is true that there still exist relationships where women are responsible for working, child care, “housework” (which doesn’t include mowing the lawn, weeding, cleaning gutters, painting, landscaping or maintenance to the house itself, you egotistical man), men are more and more responsible for cooking, cleaning and child care. The fact that equality hasn’t yet reached the author’s relationship means, apparently, that all men continue to have a flaw that only women can see.

She goes on to criticize his attempts to give her what she asked for because he didn’t do it in the most unnecessarily labor-intensive way possible, so he could empathize with her self-induced misery. Everyone has their own process for getting things done. You can ask someone to do something for you or you can do it yourself, but expecting another person to adopt your process is unreasonable.

I have known women who have spent an entire afternoon walking through every store in the mall to save a few dollars on a white shirt. The man described in the article knew that spending an afternoon calling different places was unlikely to result in finding a bargain, and those that did offer a bargain would likely do a poor job.

The “gendered assumption” quoted in the article attributes a single motive to millions of individuals. It would be more accurate to say that men solve problems differently than women do, and leave it at that.

The author describes an event in which she struggles to put away a box:

“All you have to do is ask me to put it back,” he said, watching me struggle.

It was obvious that the box was in the way, that it needed to be put back. It would have been easy for him to just reach up and put it away, but instead he had stepped around it, willfully ignoring it for two days. It was up to me to tell him that he should put away something he got out in the first place.

“That’s the point,” I said, now in tears, “I don’t want to have to ask.”

There are clearly some things that most of us should be able to expect from one another. At the same time, if you ask a man to read your mind you only have yourself to blame if he gets it wrong. Why is it that some women are so intent that men need to communicate more about their feelings, while simultaneously refusing to communicate her needs and wants? Perhaps men should express how they feel about women expecting them to just know shit?

The author states that she wants a partner with “equal initiative.” Christ, how many times have I heard men make similar complaints about women?

“She damn near let all the oil run out of her car! Why can’t she at least learn enough to let me know that it needs attention? Why do I have to handle this alone?”

“No matter what I do it is never good enough for her. I work all week, come home to a second job taking care of the house and the car and spending time with the kids. Heaven forbid she catch me sitting down.”

All this complaining is not about “emotional labor” or “equal initiative.” This story is about a women who overfunctions in her family. It is a common occurrence in families in our modern, overburdened world. One person takes on more than his or her share of work and then resents the other, who is often oblivious to the whole thing. It is not always the woman who is overfunctioning. Sometimes, the person who is overfunctioning feels as if there is little choice, because if they stop their family will suffer for it. Nevertheless, there are ways reduce the burden. It usually requires a different kind of responsibility.

“Forcing him to see emotional labor for the work it is feels like a personal attack on his character,” because it is! Why are you afraid address the matter directly? “He would take it as me saying, “Look at everything I’m doing that you’re not. You’re a bad person for ignoring me and not pulling your weight,” because you are! Whether you speak the words or not, your tantrum makes everything his fault!

“If I were to point out random emotional labor duties I carry out—reminding him of his family’s birthdays, carrying in my head the entire school handbook and dietary guidelines for lunches, updating the calendar to include everyone’s schedules, asking his mother to babysit the kids when we go out, keeping track of what food and household items we are running low on, tidying everyone’s strewn about belongings, the unending hell that is laundry—“

Seriously? None of these things are life or death matters. There is no need to memorize the school handbook – that’s why there is a school handbook in the first place. Let him be responsible for his own family’s birthdays. Her real fear is that he won’t do it “right” and then she’ll feel responsible. In the end she’ll judge both him and herself.

Part of me has wondered if this entire article wasn’t just another Russian attempt to influence our elections by distracting us with frivolous controversy. In the end, though I suspect that one woman who has overfunctioned and blamed her husband has connected with a bunch other women who guilty of the same things. They have set high standards without sharing those standards with their partners, and insisted that men must do them the way she does. They have taken on tasks that no one asked them to take on, and refused to say no when overburdened. Paradoxically, what they really need to do is take more responsibility for their choices:

“...I haven't figured out another way to make him aware of all the emotional and mental energy I'm choosing to spend to keep the house running.” [Italics and bold mine]. Time to make some different choices.

©2017 Deadbox Prime. All opinions expressed on this blog are property of the author and may not be used or reproduced without permission. Limited permission is granted, retroactively, for reblogging or link posting for personal, not-for-profit use. Permission does not apply to material found at any page listed as a reference, nor should it be in any way misconstrued to give permission to use the work of another without citing it as such. Receive post notifications on Twitter, and between post commentary on Facebook. Comments welcome.

0 notes

its-just-like-the-movies · 7 years

Text

Logan (17, B)

Word on the hill is currently that the conclusion of the Avengers: Infinity Wars double feature will also be the final outing of Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, or so a random twitter person I follow who writes about movies has suggested. I can’t find any corroborating sources to this that aren’t a year old, so who knows, but haven’t rumors of retirement plagued that whole ensemble, Downey especially, for a little while now? Maybe they’ve all seen Logan and are praying to be sent off with anywhere near as good a final outing as Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart have, retiring their characters in a sad, violent film that offers both of them to stick the landing with indelible, tragic performances after so many years in PG-13 fare that’s seemed unsuited to the potential of the characters and their actors. I’ve basically enjoyed the X-Men films I’ve seen - fond but faded memories of the first two, faded memories entirely for the third and X-Men: First Class. I have seen The Wolverine, but not his first solo film, or any of the First Class sequels. Nor have I had any particular attachment to these actors in these roles, enjoying them without see them as worthwhile, or having the capacity to go anywhere near where Logan does with these characters. This also counts as a significant step up in my estimations of James Mangold: The Wolverine was frequently a messy film, and I barely believed we were ever in Japan. I’ve seen fragments of Walk the Line and Girl, Interrupted, both fine but not projects I’d be tempted to seek again if not for their recognition at the Oscars. But none of that changes the potent if not quite absolute success Logan represents for all of its participants, functioning equally well as the kind of one-shot that’d only ever see the light of day as an animated film or hollowed out for inspiration in other projects (like the original Bane arc for Dark Knight Rises), and a stunning showcase finale for character and actor alike.

For a little while, it’s hard to believe that there’s any greatness left in Logan himself, using his real name and abandoning the Wolverine moniker after a great calamity only hinted at that’s left Xavier dithering in a great metal dome with fellow mutant Caliban to look after him. We first find him drunkenly passed out in his limousine, waking to the vibrations and sounds of his ride getting tire-jacked. The confrontation with the carjackers goes horribly before it even starts, as Logan’s dazed, hungover journey to walk around the other side of his car is enough to show how weary he already is and has been for years. Trying to placate the men only gets him two barrels of lead in his chest, and the retaliation is messy, brutal, uncomfortable to watch and deeply satisfying as a feat of utilizing Logan’s claws. Logan is as violent as you’ve heard it is, both in general and for a comic book film series of this saturation. I don’t know if this is why I find it discomfiting, maybe it really is too much, but it’s a laudable choice that serves the film and feels like the first time that his adamantium claws are really being stretched to their best advantage. Never has he been so feral on someone who couldn’t inevitably repair themselves or dodge his most brutal swings in previous films. Here, we practically open with a man getting a bladed uppercut to the jaw, to someone else losing their arm in pieces, to irreparable violence inflicted by a man whose own healing powers have slowed down far past their original capabilities, even as they’re still going. Maybe a second viewing will give me a firmer opinion on the violence in Logan, but from where I’m standing it’s a specific and character-appropriate addition that feels as grotesque and horrible as the wrath of a man with knife hands probably should be. I’ll squirm in my seat, but I support it.

From here we are re-introduced to Charles Xavier and his deteriorating mind, as well as a semi-post-apocalyptic Western setting that the film totally earns. Again, I don’t think the film needed to explain the lack of X-Men in Logan the way it does, but it’s rich shading for Logan himself and Charles, even as he struggles throughout to remember what’s happened to the rest of the team. His attempts to grasping at those memories, knowing he’s done something but unclear about what it is he’s done, are poignant struggles for the character to handle, made all the more desperate in his least present moments early on as he prattles off advertising slogans or goes full Cassandra, shouting warnings to Logan about events and people doomed to fall on the deaf ears of a man who already considers him and mutantdom lost. Not long after we’re introduced to the rest of the film’s refreshingly small cast: Dafne Keen’s mute, somewhat menacing child; Stephen Merchant as the albino mutant tracker Caliban, now a caretaker for Charles; and Boyd Holbrook’s vaguely threatening non-presence as the film’s villain, who’s name I can’t remember anyways. Wikipedia says his name is Donald Pierce, which sounds plausible, Wikipedia also says Mangold was really taken by Boyd’s performance, which I can only agree with insofar as he didn’t try and furnish an oppressive personality to compensate for a lack of one in the script. His first encounter with Logan in the limousine is menacing, but fairly low-key, furnishing his character’s credential’s without acting like his role is anything more than a glorified functionary. Stephen Merchant’s Caliban is a weary, snippy presence that gets delightful chemistry with Hugh Jackman that gives his character proper dignity and sorrow in his abuse. Elizabeth Rodriguez is even better as Keen’s doomed protector trying to get the pair to Canada, fearing for their lives without doing overtime to tell us her last scene is her last. Even if her warning videos suggest she spent all her spare time editing tapes on an iMovie, it still lands despite the weirdness of its mere existence. The setting, not just in Texas but in the rest of the country as well fits snuggly in the film’s tone and genre, suggesting not a smaller world but an emptier one, sporadically introducing new characters in such a way that even their presence is precarious to the narrative. Maybe I’m giving the benefit of the doubt to a writer/director that struggles suggesting anyone outside our three heroes truly matters, but that uneasiness worked even as the seams showed.

But for the difficulty Mangold has in convincing us of a future for nearly all the characters, for better and worse, he capably reveals and implies the pasts that these people have lived, hoisting up the baggage that’s brought them to where they are now. The various troubled histories of Logan, Charles, and X-23 (renamed Laura) are all poignantly affecting and believable at all times as their backstories go even deeper than presumed, or as characters directly state what had been implied in their performances already. A special bullet’s very obvious purpose is stated out loud by a drugged man nearly ninety minutes after it had been first discussed, and the moment lands, getting past the awkwardness of everything set up to make this happen through sheer willpower of turning that subtext into text, the power of the performer, and what it means for that character. Xavier’s own attempts to discover what he’d done that broke his mind culminate into a moment of peace, no longer tormented in the abstract now that he knows what he’s done, making amends with himself and simply happy he even found out what happened on his own after so much time spent on the edge of madness. The shared histories between Lopez and Laura, Pierce and Caliban, Caliban and Xavier and Logan, all ring true, not just in emotion but in the years and toils that have forged these relationships.

The scope of their journey and the threat they face also feel more potently real than many a superhero film that feel as though they’re plucking a random villain from a spreadsheet and try to find a reason for them to want to blow up the world. It’s not as though these villains are particularly distinct, but their lower-tier status and low-key menace is simply what Logan wants, needs, and gets. Here, Holbrook’s Donald Pierce and Richard E. Grant’s backgrounded super scientist (apparently named Zander Rice. Zander. Rice) are merely the faces of a large, shadowy corporation hunting down Laura. Rice’s character carries important connections to Logan, Laura, and to Rodriguez’s Gabriela Lopez, in perhaps equal measure, but he’s mostly an evil face on the sidelines, engineering narrative events without directly taking part in them himself. In fact, the film has the good sense to make his “I will create a race of peoples” monologue mercifully short, allowing him to explain why he’s even in this film before he gets cut off explaining how humanity can control mutantkind or whatever the fuck he was yammering about as the final boss appears. The omniscience of the Transigence corporation is a real, viable threat made even more awful by their secret experiments, trying to grow mutant children and turn them into soldiers, only to turn around and start killing the kids once newer programs with stronger mutants and more unquestioning obedience advance beyond the capabilities of these rebellious, uncooperative children. Lopez’s rescue operation and escape to Canada through North Dakota have all the trappings and unreliability of a pipe dream, much Logan and Charles’ dream of buying a boat and living happily alone with each other, especially once Logan finds out the name of the hideout, Eden, is a reference to an X-Men comic.

The meta-commentary as Logan berates Laura for believing in these tales is obvious, but it rings with some truth and does double duty on a few variants of comic book media that’s a lot more interesting than James Marsden quipping about how implausible yellow-colored spandex would be as a costume for a group of atomic supermen about to stop Ian McKellen from accidentally eradicating humankind. Silver screen comic-book fare seems almost physically impossible to tread anywhere near the kind of stylization and storytelling that Golden-Age comic books are famous for, though it certainly seems to be thriving in animated features and all these CW shows. But nowadays most comic films have taken the grim stylization of an early X-Files episodes, all grim color palettes and poor lighting, but with “darker” and “mature”content that seems to rebel against the idea that these characters could ever be happy, and could only ever exist in the “real world” if they’re violent rejections of what those characters were often meant to stand for. Aside from whatever nasty implications these directors (Zack Snyder) are standing up for by making such nasty representations of source material they ostensibly love, and taking stock that maybe the second wave of X-Men films has pulled this off and I just haven’t seen it (I think Guardians of the Galaxy is close), I don’t think Logan’s overt violence and Western-style fall into the same sort of betrayal of character I’m accusing the DCEU of perpetrating (I also wouldn’t accuse The Dark Knight of this either). It’s unusual tone, full worldbuilding, and the confidence it’s executed with gives its melancholic setup far more credibility than the dour, murderous pessimism of Batman or Lex Luthor’s jittery bitchiness. Mangold’s realizations of the characters also honors them, taking liberties to suit the story that honors their histories without betraying the basics of the characters. Logan’s self-hatred and Xavier’s mental degradation are plausible interpretations that work within the established traits of the characters and their previous film appearances. They’re still Charles and Logan, but not the ones we’ve spent over a decade watching.

Are you as amazed as I am that I’ve gone so long without gushing over the three lead performances in this film? I know I am, not just because they’re so spectacular, but that what works about the film is easily creditable to how well these performers carry out everything that the script demands of them, filling in gaps and lending emotional sense to a flawed script. Newcomer Dafne Keen is probably the most convincingly angry Murder Child in a decade full of Elevens and Arya Starks traipsing around pop culture. Her stunt double deserves some joint credit as well, but Keen’s own physicality and rage are potent in her silent expressions and homicidal war screams. She’s more Wolverine than Logan ever was, Sarah Connor scaled three feet high, and it’s too her credit that the character never felt unbelievable or repulsive despite such a feral performance. I quibble that her language skills develop when and why they do, but she carries that character’s preternatural intelligence in a way that felt in the ballpark of Marlene Dietrich’s gypsy fortune teller in Touch of Evil. Maybe there’s too much bathos baked into the part of Xavier for Patrick Stewart to dodge them completely, but he earns the pity his character inspires while adding plenty of venom, patience, and uncomplicated kindness in his interactions with Logan and the outside world, evoking a richer history reminiscing about the first time he saw Shane than he ever did with Ian McKellen. Hugh Jackman carries the least tangible arc of the trio, having to present the character as an ornery, unmovable object whose plot-required changes of heart must appear spontaneous against all that foreshadowing and basic narrative obligations. Against these obligations, Jackman thrives, offering a full characterization that’s a bitter, sad, and savage as the film needs him to be without lending his fallen superhero any unearned sympathy, leaping the narrative and hurdles to make the whole film, but especially the final half hour feel so horrific and affecting even as the tragic inevitability of it flirts with the painful obviousness of the machinations needed to make it happen.

In the time it’s taken me to write this, I’ve read and listened to several more reviews of Logan, and it has knocked down my estimation of it a few pegs. There’s simply too many individual facets of the script worth quibbling over, adding up into a narrative mainly held together by the work that the director and especially the actors are doing to give the material real emotional weight. I’ll budge on the script, listen to any suggested rewrites, but I’ll give Logan credit for having the guts to approach this kind of material and tone at all. That last half hour ends with an unthinkable yet inevitable conclusion to our titular hero, and as Laura adjusts a single prop before running off into the woods, leaving us with a final shot that nearly made me cry, I couldn’t think of anything but the insane risk that must’ve come for Mangold to create this story, and tell it the way he did. It’s not a great script, but what Mangold filmed is surely the best realization of it he has in him, aided and abetted by three stunning performances to make the whole thing feel as sad and muscular as it deserves. Surely this will only help Hugh Jackman’s probable Oscar bid for The Greatest Showman, nevermind the spare critics’ groups that’ll recognize him for this instead (surely Stewart and Keen will get theirs, and recognizing the screenplay seems the best way to recognize Mangold). But after Prisoners it’s amazing to me that as good as Jackman is as a theater-groomed musical man (this gleamed from his award show hosting gigs, not Les Mis), I’m stunned that his most effective cinematic persona could be summarized as “Angry Murder Dad in Pulpy, Sad Genre Film”. That’s surely a limited type, and Jackman’s an actor whose filmography I need to get caught up with. But after such a glorious final outing in Logan, I’d be happy to see what else this man can do.

#my posts #my reviews #logan

0 notes