never getting over how. melancholy im here sounds

the chords in the chorus sound a little more triumphant at first but it kinda just sounds like a half victory. the pain of the journey is still there, even at the end of it all. but its alright. i will be with you. im here

C, J, R and S for the fandom ask game!!

C - A ship you have never liked and probably never will (be nice)

I attempted to like Cisco/Caitlin, but their platonic besties game was too good and I got too invested in their friendship to be comfortable shipping them. Which is a shame since there are a lot of good fics for that ship, I have no doubt. I just... have no interest in reading them.

Then there's more recently Chester/Allegra. Relationships with big age gaps have to do more to convince me there's chemistry there and since Allegra is 24 and Chester is a few months away from 32, they've got an approximately eight year gap. I've shipped bigger age gaps than that (Harrisco... and also ColdFlash) but those ships typically have so much chemistry on screen that it's difficult to unsee once I've noticed. But Chester and Allegra just don't have that. I mean, I am less drawn to canon ships in general since non-canon ships give more room to play by being divergent by default... but this really isn't that issue for me. They're just... bland.

But I do think that's a hallmark of the Flash's current cache of writers who apparently thought KillerBlaine was a good idea. Mark Blaine's only real impression on me is that he doesn't know how to keep his shirt on and he lacks the charisma, personality, and badass leitmotif of Zaveid (Tales of Zestiria/Berseria) needed to pull that off. ... this said be nice so I should probably stop here.

J - Name a fandom you didn’t care/think about until you saw it all over tumblr

Glee. I'm never going to be able to get into the show itself. I tried but i didn't care about high school based drama shows while in high school, so not even the music could make me enjoy the utter slog it was otherwise. But despite the drastic divide over whether Blaine is a good person or terrible and somewhat emotionally abusive boyfriend (which... he does canonically assault his boyfriend in a parking lot so you can imagine where I am on that divide), there's a lot of interesting fics (prose is so much more accessible to me than tv for high school and college type dramas) and fandom meta.

That said, since I'm never going to actually watch the show all the way through or even halfway through, I have no intention of ever contributing to the fandom beyond commenting, liking/kudos-ing, or reblogging. But there's fun to be had in fandom without necessarily having to enjoy the canon its built off of as long as people can be nice to each other... while also liberally blocking those who can't.

R - A pairing you ship that you don’t think anyone else ships

Well, Hartley/Roderick is certainly a pair so rare that I wrote the first fics about them on Ao3. But though they're canon, Roderick is basically a clean slate upon which any personality may be placed. So he's less interesting than basically any character on the show with a defined personality of their own beyond 'loyal minion'. Which is probably why I can only think of one other person, off the top of my head, who also writes for that ship. I think there's more than that now, but not by much. That was a definitely a ship where when I first wrote for it I was hoping that even if there didn't wind up being much interest for the ship itself, people who enjoyed my writing would consider reading the fics anyway.

It was definitely Hartley's devotion to Roderick that drew me to the ship in the first place. It's still what I like most about them.

S - Show us an example of your personal headcanon (prompts optional but encouraged)

So I've got two contradictory headcanons about E2 Oliver.

1.) E2 Oliver drowned in what was a tragic accident. We know that the E2 version of the Hood was Robert Queen thanks to a brief news clip seen on the Flash and, in the final season of the Arrow, Oliver was able to briefly take E2 Oliver's place by pretending to be him, rescued and returned home after all these years so that means E2 Oliver at the very least never made it home himself.

But since E2 Malcolm wasn't evil that means he never orchestrated the undertaking which means he would have no reason to put a bomb on the Queen family yacht. So in order for it to have been lost at sea, the ship must have run afoul an actual accident of some sort and sunk. Assuming E1 and E2 Robert Queen were similarly preferential to Oliver's survival over their own, then E2 Robert must not have managed to find Oliver in the aftermath of the ship's sinking or he might have killed himself to ensure Oliver had enough rations, similar to how E1 Robert killed himself and his bodyguard.

All of which tells me that odds are Oliver died and it was probably that grief which fueled Robert's time as the Arrow.

Admittedly, this is what everyone in E2 thinks happened, no doubt, but canon never actually confirms one way or another that E2 Oliver is 100% dead as a doornail dropped into the ocean, so I say it counts.

2.) While it doesn't change Robert's motivations or belief that Oliver's dead... Oliver did not drown when the yacht sunk. Instead he was rescued by a member of the League of Assassins and was given no real choice about joining. We don't know that E2 Sara was on that boat - or even exists? do we know if E2 Laurel has a sister named Sara? - but E2 Oliver has taken the slot that was E1 Sara's and become an assassin. Only he never tried to leave and remained an assassin up until the universe got red sky-ed to death.

I have no idea if I'll ever use these headcanons in anything, but they're there waiting should I ever need them.

VISAGE... VOICE... VITAPHONE

In Dimitri Kirsanoff's Menilmontant a destitute waif, betrayed and abandoned by the man who seduced her, sits on a park bench with her newborn infant. Beside her is an old man eating a sandwich. This wordless exchange is one of the greatest moments ever committed to film. Nadia Sibirskaia’s face reveals all of life’s cruel mysteries as she gazes upon a crust of bread.

The persistence of hope is the dark angel that underlies despair, and here it taunts her mercilessly. A whole series of fluctuations of expression and movement in reaction to anguish, physical pain involving hesitation, dignity, ravenous hunger, survival, self-contempt, modesty, boundless gratitude. All articulated with absolute clarity without hitting notes (without touching the keys). Chaplin could have played either the old man on the bench (his mustache is a sensory device!) or Nadia. And it would have been masterful and deeply affecting, but Nadia went beyond virtuosity and beyond naturalism.

She made it actual. And it was more than just a face. Sunlight travels across buildings at every second of the day; and the seasons change the incidence of light, too. Nothing stands still. Even déjà vu doesn’t attempt an exact rendition with the feel of a perfect replay.

***

Another face equates with pain—though a far more luxurious and decadent kind of pain, a visage summoning leftover ancient Roman excess or Florentine backstreets, the contortions of Art Nouveau with its flowers, prismatic walls and perennial themes of ripeness/rottenness, sadomasochism. While various directors have helped mold her naturally unsettling screen presence into nightmare visions, it’s Barbara Steele's vulnerability I tend to remember.

She is open and sensitive even as she materializes in the viewer’s mind as a kabuki demon one moment and a radioactive waxwork the next, a kind of alchemical transformation, an appeal to what Keats called negative capability—one’s ability to appreciate something without wholly understanding it; in fact, one’s ability to appreciate an object for its mystery.

“When did I ever deserve this dark mirror?” Barbara Steele asks me. “Clever you – I feel you’ve just twisted and wrung out an old bible to dry that’s been left somewhere outside lost in timeless years of…” She pauses. “…of rain.”

She made her Italian screen debut as a revenant.  And in so doing taught us all the eye is not a camera. It’s a projector.

Barbara Steele’s appearance in 1960’s Black Sunday is, even now, a shock of such febrile sexuality that it forces us to ask ourselves—why do we saddle her with diminishing monikers like “Scream Queen”? And, more fundamentally, why does her force of personality seem to trouble and vex every narrative she touches?

Of course, the answer is partly grounded in Steele’s unique physical equipment—and here I’ll risk repeating a clichéd word about those famous emerald eyes of hers: “Otherworldly.” As if sparked to life by silent-film magician Segundo de Chomón, the supreme master of hand-tinted illusionism. Peculiar even within the context of gothic tales on celluloid for the consumption of Mod audiences, flashing at us from well beyond their allotted time and place in history.

Barbara Steele is one of cinema’s true abominations—a light-repelling force that presents itself in an arrangement of shadows on the screen. No “luminary,”Steele is celluloid anti-matter; a slow burning black flame that devours every filament around it. Steele’s beauty is no accident of nature, even if she is, but in Black Sunday she gives a virtuoso performance by an artist in full command of her talent summoning and banishing it in equal measure in her dual role as mortal damsel in distress and undead predator released from her crypt. Filmmaking is the darkest and unholiest of arts (done right, that is), and for Mario Bava it becomes the invocation of beast and woman from the unconsecrated soil of nightmares. Steele remains the high priestess of the unlit and buried chambers of the imagination; the pure pleasure center of original sin and the murderous impulse buried just below the surface. She reminds us that existence itself is the highest form of betrayal and a continuing curse on us all.

Where Steele’s Italian films are concerned, we are watching silent movies of a sort. “The loss of voice for me has always been devastating…. It’s almost like some karmic debt…” Her sonic presence was eclipsed in a string of crudely, sadly dubbed horror vehicles, yes, including Black Sunday—no doubt aficionados of the great Mario Bava will object to my calling it a “vehicle.”  But whenever Steele appears, the storyline falls away. Anachronism rules. Not to mention the director’s exquisite sets, all keyed and subordinated to his ingénue’s stark loveliness (understood in black and white, molded by Italian cameramen into disquieting and sudden plasticity). Like a hot-blooded funerary sculpture made of alabaster, raven hair piled high, Steele’s already imposing height summons schizoid power, satanic sorcery—she’s Eros and Thanatos dynamically balanced. I’ve screened the film many times; and the famous opening sequence invariably leaves my otherwise jaded film students looking traumatized. (Just as a young Martin Scorsese was shattered by it once upon a time.) Barbara Steele’s defiant witch, spewing a final curse upon her mortal judges, pierces to the bone.

While Italian movies robbed Steele of her voice, they liberated her from what it had meant in Britain. Leading ladies in Brit films tended to be well brought-up young things, unless they were lusty and working-class like Diana Dors. Even at Hammer, where sexuality was unleashed regularly via bouts of vampirism, the erotically active roles usually went to continental lovelies (Polish immigrant Ingrid Pitt got her work permit based on Hammer’s claim that no native-born actress could exude such desire and desirability). Steele turns up all-too briefly in Basil Dearden’s Sapphire (1959) as an art school girl, the only kind of role that might allow for both intelligence and a certain liberated attitude. And Steele really was exactly that type. Her appearance is so arresting, you want the movie to simply abandon its plot and follow her into some fresh storyline: it wouldn’t really matter what.

In Italy, Steele suddenly became class-less and nation-less, devoid of associations beyond those conjured by the chiseled cheekbones and enormous eyes (convincingly replaced with poached eggs by Bava for a special effects shot). Her inescapable exoticism didn’t make sense in her native land, but that bone structure could suggest Latin, Slavic, or anything else. Omninational, omnisexual, but definitely carnivorous.

Generally remote with his actors, who were nothing more than compositional elements to him, Bava’s capricious move of selecting his female lead from a magazine photo-spread looks almost prescient in hindsight. Was it luck? Or, perhaps her now legendary eyes suggested a bizarre and beautiful leitmotif… to be destroyed, resurrected, and played endlessly on a register of emotions—extreme emotions, that is, tabooed delights.

Steele shares an anecdote about her director’s temperament and working methods on Black Sunday… “Everything was so meticulously planned that Bava rarely asked me for multiple takes. There was no sense of urgency or drama, which was rare for an Italian director…” I’m suddenly detecting deep ambivalence as she vacillates between little jabs at Bava (“He was a Jesuit priest on the set, somewhere far away”) and gratitude. “There was a tremendous feeling of respect, whereas in my earliest roles at Rank I always felt shoved around, practically negated by the pressure of production.

“Bava did go absolutely berserk once,” she goes on. “John Richardson, this gorgeous, sinewy creature, for some reason couldn’t carry me across the room. And I was like eleven pounds in those days. We had to do it over and over, twenty times or something, and whenever John stumbled or dropped me, the whole crew would be in hysterics. We were all howling with laughter, except for Bava – he went simply wild! Eventually, some poor grip had to get down on all fours, and I rode on his back in a chair with John pretending to carry me.”

If Black Sunday is a summation of spiritual and physical dread, it’s because Steele is everyone in this dream-bauble, everyone and everywhere, an all-consuming autumnal atmosphere. Which, of course, provides Mario Bava with something truly rare—a face and mien as unsettling as horror films always claim to be and almost never are. The devastation she leaves behind, her anarchic displacement, which has nothing to do with conventional notions of performance or “good acting,” is hard to describe. And here Bava earns his label of genius through compositional meaning—amid the groundswells of fog, lifeless trees and gloomy dungeons, Steele is an absence impossibly concretized in penumbras and voids. She is a force of nature never to be repeated.

Nightmare Castle (1965) starts off in Lady Chatterley mode as Steele cheats on her mad scientist husband (“At this rate you’ll wipe out every frog in the entire county,” is an opening line less pithy but more arresting than “Rosebud”) with the horny handyman. She’s soon murdered on an electrified bed, hubby preserving her heart for unexplained reasons while using her blood to rejuvenate his mistress. Then he marries her insipid blonde half sister (Steele again in a blonde wig) and tries to drive her mad. So we now have Gaslight merged with Poe and every revenge-from-the-grave story ever.

The identical twin half-sisters (?) bifurcate further: blonde Barbara goes schizoid, possessed it seems by her departed semi-sibling. Dark Barbara comes back as a very corporeal revenant, hair occluding one profile, like Phil Oakey of the Human League. Tossing the locks aside, she reveals… the horror!

Almost indescribable in terms of plot, character or dialogue, the film looks stunning, as chiaroscuro as Steele’s coal-black hair and snow-white skin. Apparently the product of monkey-typewriter improvisation, the story serves as a kind of post-modern dream-jumble of every Gothic narrative ever. You might get a story like this if you showed all of Steele’s horrors to a pissed-up grade-schooler and then asked them to describe the film they just saw. As a result, the movie really takes what Dario Argento likes to call the “non-Cartesian” qualities of Italian horror to the next dank, stone-buttressed level.

When I first met Barbara Steele about ten years ago, we somehow found ourselves sitting in front of a Brancusi sculpture here in New York City—I remember a filmmaker acquaintance joking afterwards: “Steele beats bronze!” Indeed, at 66 she was still stunningly beautiful, flirtatious, frighteningly aware of the power of her stare.

She was a painter in her youth, so it’s not surprising that, even as I visualize her in a voluptuous, cinematic world of castles and blighted landscapes, her own self-image is perennially absorbed by art—in the sense of André Malraux’s Museum Without Walls. She asks me to show her my paintings and when I dodge the subject out of shyness she offers:

A friend of mine just had a show of his art in a little cinema here – very small paintings, about 8 inches by 6 – and then they projected them onto one of their screens and they looked fantastic!  Size is everything!   Unless you were born in the Renaissance… then you were surrounded by silence and stone walls, shadows and glimmers of gold, and faces that are like spells they look so informed.

Steele speaks of her “old, suspicious Celtic soul,” her bitterness at having “flitted through movies par hazard,” and a newfound desire to make audio books (what colossal revenge!). It’s poetic really, this doppelganger, a ghost-like screen persona following her around. Whenever I think of the effect her movies have had on me, the following words by Charles Lamb leap to mind.

Gorgons and Hydras and Chimaeras – dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies – may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition – but they were there before. They are transcripts, types – the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to effect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body – or without the body, they would have been the same… That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual – that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy – are difficulties the solution of which may afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.

Even the wooliest metaphysics can be hard to separate from actual violence. Case in point: the night of September 22, 1796. Charles Lamb had his own brush with horror, when the future poet and author of children’s stories found himself removing a bloody knife from his sister’s hand. A spasm of matricidal rage that would land her in a mad house—and tending to prove, once again, the need for genres of terror and trepidation.  For a moment at least, Steele seems to agree, bowled over by the Lamb anecdote, literally screaming: “AND THAT NAME – LAMB – IT MAKES YOU THINK OF SUCH INNOCENT BRITISH LANDSCAPES!”  She’s a fairly solitary and introspective person on the one hand, capable of intense and unexpected eruptions of joy on the other, which may be why Italians have always embraced her—a shared gloomy zest for life, fatalism and pasta. There’s something intensely porous about her (as porous as film itself), which helps clarify her otherwise inscrutable tension with that shadow-self up on the screen, the one she so busily downgrades.

***

The thirties bustled with wise-cracking, fast-talking dames, probably not for any proto-feminist reason, but simply because the writers had a surplus of sassy talk to dispense onto the screen, and audiences liked looking at legs, so why not combine the two? Amid all the petite peroxide pretties, a few acerbic character actresses were allowed room, perhaps to make the cuties bloom all the more radiantly against them. Whatever the aesthetic logic, we can be grateful for it, since it gave us Ruth Donnelly and Winnie Lightner and Jean Dixon and a few other unforgettable shrews and wiseacres, adept as stage mothers, streetwise best pals of the leading lady, etc.

Aline MacMahon sort of fits into this category, but also destroys any category she sees with her laser vision. In Gold Diggers of 1933, she’s a Fanny Bryce type comedy showgirl, and in Heat Lightning (1934) she’s an ex-moll running a garage. In between, she played world-weary secretaries and put-upon mothers, taking any role and stealing the movie along with it. Rather than resist classification, she goes on the offensive, smashing down stereotypes and insisting on her own peculiar individuality.

Big and rangy in the body and hands, she had a strange, sculpted beauty, and was as luminous as Dietrich. Maybe more so: cameramen hit Marlene with brighter lights to make her shine out, whereas Aline was typically in the lead’s shadow. Her complexion is like the glass of milk in Suspicion in which Hitchcock planted a light bulb. That white. A sheet of paper passing before her face would appear as a dark eclipsing rectangle.

The law of photogenics insists that actresses hired to play the non-glamorous roles must be staggeringly lovely, but off-kilter and unconventional enough to fool the audience into thinking they’re seeing failed beauty. Aline’s unlikely photofit of attractive features resulted in a caricature of elegance and earthiness in precisely the wrong proportions, which makes her fascinating and alluring to watch.

The eyes are seriously big, saucers hooded by the heaviest lids since Karloff’s monster, resulting in long slits which strive to echo the even wider mouth, a perfectly straight line seemingly intent on decapitation. Like a horizon with lips. The chin cleft below catches the viewer by surprise. Were chin clefts on women more common then, or did studios screen in favor of them? The cheekbones have a graceful, yet powerful curve, so the face as a whole combines the qualities of an ice-cream baby and a crystal skull. All wrong, and alright with me.

Aline’s humor about her ill-assorted collection of perfect features was often played on in dialogue, so it’s pleasing when a role like the one in Heat Lightning admits that, for all her unlikeliness, she was indeed beautiful. More than a pretty face, too: her way with a snappy rejoinder distinguished her even in an era of exceptional wit and quicksilver delivery. And her essence, which radiated out whatever the role, was that of a philosophical, warm, smart, funny, sad woman: the essence of the age.

By Daniel Riccuito and David Cairns

5 Takeaways from Avengers: Endgame (WARNING: SPOILERS)

Here’s another one I didn’t really have a place to post, so it’s going up here. Hope you enjoy my Hot Takes™.

On Thursday I went down to my local cinema to watch Avengers: Endgame, the culmination of over a decade of continuous, intricate world-building and story-telling from the mind of Marvel Studios boss, Kevin Feige and co. This article is not a review of the movie. To be clear, I loved it and there are a million reasons why, but looking at it purely as a film doesn’t really make sense to me considering all of the factors that make Endgame more than just another Marvel movie.

Instead, here are five takeaways that I, as someone who has been seeing these films in the cinema since Iron Man released in 2008, have been sitting on since I walked out of the screening on Thursday night. WARNING: HEAVY SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

1.    Sam Wilson is the perfect successor to Steve Rogers. Fight me.

There are several major emotional themes that Endgame introduces throughout the film: parenthood, reconciliation, coping with one’s failures. But, as the film moves into its insanely climactic final battle sequence, a new theme starts to move to the front of the pack – a passing of the torch.

From Peter being the major emotional anchor of Tony Stark’s death scene to Captain Marvel mirroring Steve Rogers’ heroic yet futile act of holding Thanos’ hand open from Infinity War, and even to Hawkeye teaching his daughter to shoot a bow and arrow in the film’s emotionally fraught opening scene, there is a real sense that the most definitive way this film can wrap up the original team’s character arcs is by showing who is still there to take up their mantles.

I’ve seen a lot of angry takes complaining that Steve passed on the mantle of Captain America to Sam over Bucky. These takes… *clears throat*… are dead wrong. Bucky is just as out of time as Steve was, more so even, due to the amount of time he spent either in ice, or out of his mind. He’s also so unclear of his own identity that it makes no sense for him to adopt this mantle that is meant to be so clearly defined and inspiring, especially considering the amount of damage he’s done to the world. That same internal conflict is why Steve was so uncomfortable being Captain America for so long. The main argument, I guess, is that he has a closer relationship with Steve, but I would argue that this is an incorrect analysis of their relationship. One of the things clarified by the time travel sequence is how Steve’s relationship with Bucky wasn’t about friendship, or loneliness, but about one of the other themes of the film: failing to deal with one’s mistakes.

It makes so much more sense for Sam to take up the mantle because, arguably, he is Steve’s greatest achievement as Captain America. Steve’s deeds inspired Sam to act. His training made Sam, someone with no superpowers at all, a superhero and brought him to the highest echelons of the Avengers. He, like Steve, was a military volunteer, unlike Bucky who was drafted. And, like Steve, and perhaps most importantly, he doesn’t know how to exist without the next mission. Sam has been Captain America-in-waiting since his introduction in Winter Soldier.

2.    This film shouldn’t be nominated for best picture, but there are Oscar nominations that it does deserve

This last Oscar season was incredibly long, taxing and discursively toxic. One of the narratives in various online forums was a sense of discontent that Black Panther was nominated for best picture over Infinity War. Now, despite the fact that I thoroughly disagree with that feeling – Black Panther is one of the most narratively and thematically powerful superhero movies ever released and Infinity War has a thoroughly unpleasant message of abuse=love – there will, without a doubt be an Oscar narrative surrounding this landmark movie.

Let me set the record straight here: Endgame, whilst being an incredibly important moment in cinema, a hugely emotional watching experience, and a massive technical achievement, is not best picture material. Why? It doesn’t stand on its own. Without the background of the rest of the MCU propping it up, it couldn’t achieve nearly as much of the emotional impact that it did. For the same reason, I don’t think Return of the King should have been a best picture winner either. Sue me. The film also has some tonal issues that prevent it from landing all the emotional punches that a best picture nominee should have.

That being said, there are elements of Endgame that deserve recognition from the academy, and they are thus:

Robert Downey Jr.’s gut-wrenching performance as Tony Stark

Honestly, it does feel like Downey’s been playing this character in his sleep since Age of Ultron, but not here. This, for me, is his strongest performance put to film, and that’s all down to an awareness of how this character has changed since his debut in 2008. His meltdown scene after he is rescued at the start of the film is masterfully frightening and sad, made all the more so by his CGI-facilitated emaciated state.

Alan Silvestri’s genius score

Alan Silvestri is an incredible film composer; this much is clear. While I loved his score for Infinity War, which was full of clever little twists on previously existing material, and stunning uses of silence, I did feel a little let down that some of the better leitmotifs from previous films weren’t utilised at all, particularly Captain America’s theme, which Silvestri wrote for The First Avenger back in 2011.

As of now, I understand why he made the decision to leave that out. It wasn’t studio interference, demanding overly aggressive aesthetic consistency. It was a choice made to enhance Steve’s character development. We haven’t heard Steve’s theme since Winter Soldier, because he hasn’t really been Captain America since that film. The moment in Endgame that brought me closest to ugly crying in the cinema was when Tony handed Cap back his shield, and we finally heard that theme again. Silvestri has been paying attention in a major way, and probably deserves a writing credit for every movie in which Steve Rogers has appeared since 2011 because of it. Thanos’ theme is terrifying and beautiful too. Give. This. Man. All. The. Awards.

3.    Guardians of the Galaxy needs a soft reboot, Ragnarok style

I hate the Guardians. I hate all of them… well… except Gamora and Nebula, but the former was done dirty in Infinity War, and the latter pretty much finished her character arc in Endgame. All the other ones are either funny window dressing (Rocket, Groot, Mantis), or outright intolerable (Starlord, Drax). One thing that made me enjoy Endgame so much more than Infinity War, was that I didn’t have to watch the Guardians’ unbearable antics for the majority of the movie. It was a small reprieve from the dick jokes, backwards character development, unfunny temper tantrums and relentless stupidity.

The end of the film sets up the future involvement of Thor in the next Guardians movie. I hope to god that means they’ll bring Taika Waititi on board to help write the new movie with James Gunn. I’m glad Disney made the right decision to bring Gunn back after his premature dismissal, but after the catastrophe that was Guardians of the Galaxy, vol.2, and the negative impact the characters have had on Infinity War, I think someone with the creative instincts of Waititi needs to be brought on to help make these characters into people again. Thor joining the team is a chance to make that happen.

4.    Marvel did ScarJo dirty

Ugh. Every member of the original team got a proper ending, except ScarJo, who got fridged. I’m a huge Hawkeye stan, but Black Widow should not have been tossed off (literally!) in order to develop his character in the way they did. To make matters worse, she doesn’t even get a funeral! Just a little nod at the end from the guy who she died to save. After everything that happened with Gamora in Infinity War, I can’t believe the Russo brothers, who did so much to develop this character in Winter Soldier, were okay with giving Black Widow a death that was not only meaningless, but so similar to the woman they killed in the last movie.

Come on!!!

5.    Endgame wrapped up 10 years of movies so perfectly that I don’t have to care what they do next anymore

All that being said, it really doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Over the last few years, I’ve gotten increasingly frustrated with the MCU. With the exception of Black Panther and Ant-Man and the Wasp¸ every film in the series since Captain America: Civil War has been a bit of a let-down for me. I hated Guardians 2, I was left feeling a little empty after Ragnarok and Infinity War, and Spider-Man: Homecoming was the biggest disappointment in the entire series that came close to ruining the character for me.

What’s so special about Endgame, is that it so neatly and powerfully brings to a close the narrative arcs of (nearly) all of the characters I’ve cared about since the MCU’s beginning over a decade ago. It, surprisingly enough, is a legitimate jumping-off point. If I were so inclined, I could be content to never see a Marvel Studios film again because most of the threads I was invested in have been tied up.

It also seems unlikely that they’ll be building to a huge single-narrative conclusion for a long, long while. How could they? Endgame was a movie a decade in the making, and I suspect it’ll be another decade before they get to anything that could rival the emotional resonance of their latest achievement. What comes next will, undoubtedly, feel substantially different than what came before, and therefore, probably isn’t targeted at me or others in my position. If I fancy seeing a new Marvel film, I will, but I highly doubt that by skipping one I’m going to feel like I’m missing out in the same way I would have done if I’d missed any of the last 22 MCU movies.

The greatest gift Endgame has given me, is a way out of the vicious circle of Marvel movie discourse. I can rest now.

Intro to Music

Music and how its used in storytelling.

Vocabulary: 

- Theme/leitmotif= reoccurring melody or instrument that becomes associated with something

- Soundtrack = musical score behind a visual story

- Track = a singular song from the score

- Score = all of the music written for the story

- OST = Original SoundTrack

Stories mentioned with potential for spoiler: How to Train Your Dragon (1+2), Big Hero 6, Your Lie in April, Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Alright everyone buckle down. Even though this is just another intro, it’s about one of my passions so I’ve got a lot to say. People often forget about or even flat out ignore music in movies, but music contributes a lot more to movies than people care to think about.

Sure, maybe there’s that one occasion where you noticed a nice melody within a movie or show or videogame. But what about the whole soundtrack? Have you ever considered what it does in a story? How it contributes? Why is it there? How does it show different and often hidden aspects of the story? How does it affect our own view of the story?

To be clear here, I am not talking about the sung portions of musicals, nor will I be referencing the sung portion if I DO happen to talk about musicals soundtrack (nothing against musicals, but I do have a little beef with songs with lyrics in them because for some reason people only seem to think music is valid when they have lyrics, and so when I try to talk about soundtracks everyone immediately jumps to musicals because “Honestly, what other kind of movie music is worth listening to?”). No no, I’m talking about the full blown instrumental, orchestral Original SoundTrack (OST).

(Disclaimer: I do not dislike lyrical music, nor do I think people who like it have bad taste in music. There is genuinely good lyrical music, and I do enjoy listening and singing to them too. I just get frustrated because that seems to be the only kind of music that a lot of people care about, and will immediately dismiss orchestral and instrumental music as boring even though it’s not. Sure, some of the older sonatas and symphonies miiiiight be a… hmmm acquired taste. But to say that all instrumental music is boring is a straight up narrow-minded and ignorant view of what music is truly capable of. Jazz alone has many many songs that has no singers and is all instrumental for example)

With that out of the way, let me give how I view OSTs and their role in storytelling. Comparing a book to a movie, there’s a lot of information that’s cut out right? Literally all the narration. As such, movies are left with only visuals to convey their point. Or are they? What is usually in narration? Well, by using the right language, narration’s job is to convey atmosphere and ambiance. There’s a difference between “It was a dark and stormy night” and “The rain pitter-pattered lullingly against the window”. Both are about storms at night, but one is ominous, while the other suggests a relaxed and sleepy atmosphere. Narration is also responsible for the emotions. Sure, the characters are responsible to portraying emotions to some degree, but that only goes part of the way. It’s one thing to see a character’s emotion, and another to feel it yourself. That’s what music does in soundtracks. Music creates ambiance. It tells you what sort of place you’re at when you’re watching. Playing exciting music suggests a moment of high energy that will build up to something (either a plot point (or an introduction if it’s at the beginning)), or maybe the music is slow and somber which means someone is dealing with something emotionally. Or maybe the music is eerie which suggests that something bad is about to happen. Emotions as well. Sometimes characters are too busy doing something to portray their inner emotions, music’s job is to tell you what they’re feeling, and if done successfully, will make you feel that too. 

Now, I’m getting a little ahead of myself, let’s talk about one of the biggest musical icons in music history. I promise you, even if you don’t recognize his name, you absolutely recognize, know and even love his music (If you’re a music nerd like me, you probably already know who I’m going to be talking about). I’m talking about John Williams of course. For those who did a flat “Who?”, let me ask if you’ve heard the Star Wars theme? Superman theme? E.T. theme? Indiana Jones, Harry Potter, Jaws- the list is very long, impressive and recognizable. John Williams is the guy who created all that music. It’s important to note, that Harry Potter had a total of four composers, but movies 1-3 were all John Williams. So that iconic Hedwig’s theme is one hundred percent Williams (If you want to learn more about the music of Harry Potter, there is a very good catalogue/analysis (sort of)).

If you visit the page, you’ll notice that there’s a massive list recording each of the Leitmotifs/themes that Harry Potter has. Which is a perfect segway into my next subject of soundtrack and how music contributes to the story! Leitmotifs! Leitmotifs can also be called ‘Themes’ (which is what I’ll be calling it because it’s shorter and easier to write than leitmotif). Theme has lots of different meanings and definitions, for OSTs, it’s usually a set of notes, or a particular melody that can be heard in relationship to something else in a way that the audience associates said melody with the thing. Themes can be tied to anything: emotions, objects, a character, two characters together, an idea, a group, literally anything. Depending on what they’re tied with, they accomplish different things.

It’s important to note that Williams loves using leitmotifs way more than the average composer but even so, some composers don’t use themes at all (it’s a matter of personal preference and also director’s vision), which is a shame if you ask me because from what I’ve seen of my own observations, themes and leitmotifs are one of the most effective ways of playing with and manipulating audiences emotions effectively. By conditioning an audience to a theme, whenever they hear a theme, they will think of whatever it is that theme is associated with, even if the scene itself doesn’t have said representation in it. Imagine having a character with a theme die in the story, then when they die, their theme disappears until maybe later in the story when the main character thinks about them, and their theme is played. You can bet that this will cause crying.

Now because I am a huge music nerd, I could go on and on and on with examples (and honestly, I will cover more of these in another post), what they mean, how they’re used etc etc, so for the sake of not letting this post get out of hand (which, it already is going to be super long), I’ll show an example of how one particular leitmotif is used.

[leitmotif]

This is what I like to call the How to Train Your Dragon’s friendship theme. It’s played many different times throughout the movie. Note, this isn’t the only theme that plays when the two are onscreen together, the two explore many things together, but when it appears, it’s usually when the two are establishing some sort of meaningful relationship or interaction. For example:

[Hiccup’s POV Toothless’ POV]

The first time they meet and decide not to kill each other

[forbidden friendship]

The entire song called Forbidden Friendship is about them establishing trust and might as well be called “Variations on the friendship theme”.

[Playful]

Then they start getting playful with each other

[To the Rescue]

Then Toothless protects Hiccup for the first time

[Drowning]

Then there’s that time when Toothless fell in the water and Hiccup started drowning trying to save his friend, and his dad went down there and saved Hiccup, then had a moment of “Gee, this is my son’s friend” and saves toothless as well.

[hiccup is safe OST]

Then there’s that moment when it’s revealed that toothless saved Hiccup

[Helping Hiccup]

At the end of the movie, there’s that scene where Toothless is helping Hiccup walk. The friendship theme is absolutely EVERYWHERE! It’s one of the iconic How to Train Your Dragon themes! When people hear it, in the context of the movie, it’s almost immediately associated with their friendship. It’s just a fun, light hearted melody, that is both playful and gentle. So… Great! Now we can find all the moments in the movie when the filmmakers wanted us to be thinking about this friendship! Now what? Well, do you remember that scene in the second movie when Draggo turns Toothless against Hiccup and tries to kill him? Guess what plays there?

[Shattered Friendship]

Ouch. Talk about completely shattering a friendship. The theme is only played again after Hiccup manages to break Toothless out of the hypnosis and the two team up to take down Drago, and the theme is taken over by the new theme introduced in the second movie that is symbolic of their loyalty to one another.

I would dive more into this, but I do need to cover the OSTs that don’t use leitmotifs at all, and the hybrid OSTs before the day ends so! (Fret not friends! I intend on doing an intense analysis of How to Train Your Dragon’s music and themes in the future, so if this small taste of what that movie has to offer and my thoughts on it wasn’t enough, do not worry!) (also themes aren’t always melodies, sometimes characters are represented through a specific instrument)

So, as I said, I think that OSTs that use leitmotifs are usually stronger narratively, and have an extra/easier tool for manipulating our emotions. That isn’t to say however that OSTs without any themes at all are bad. There are many OSTs without themes, that have some of my favorite songs in them. Let’s look at another animated movie, Big Hero 6. Now, I haven’t listened to too many of Henry Jackman’s stuff, but from the few things I have listened to, I haven’t seen too many themes if any at all, but he knows how to write music to carry scenes. Case in point, the scene when Hiro rides Baymax for the first time, the scene where Hiro lets his grief get the better of him and transforms Baymax into a killer robot, and the scene when Baymax shows Hiro Tadashi recordings.

Personally, I think all OSTs should theoretically be able to carry a scene, but I can respect when OSTs are just there to accentuate the story, more than carry the scene, but I digress. In the scenes mentioned in Big Hero 6, with the exception of the last one, they’re all mostly scenes without dialogue. Which means, any emotion that creators want the audience to feel have to be portrayed visually, and musically. With the flying scene, the music’s job was to capture the thrill and the wonder of flying. With the killer robot scene (starts at 2:50), the music’s job was much more complex. The music’s job for that scene was many things: first and foremost, it had to encompass Hiro’s rage and his grief. It had to capture how truly broken he was, how far he had fallen. It had to capture Yokai’s fear at suddenly being the target of what was essentially this war machine. It had to capture the horror that Hiro’s friends felt when they saw this out of control robot trying to kill someone, and their fear when they realized they needed to stop him. Lastly, it needed to capture the possible torment Baymax might’ve felt had he emotions (being programmed to cure and being forced to kill). The score at this point absolutely hammers that all on the head. It’s absolutely devastating. As far as the third scene goes, I’ll cover that more when I do my analysis of Big Hero 6 and its representation of grief.

While I do think that OSTs that don’t have themes have a harder time making great standout music, that doesn’t mean that they can’t have them at all. But, this leads me to my next category on here, hybrid OSTs.

You can view these any way you like. T.V. shows have an interesting variant on hybrid OSTs, in that usually they don’t have OSTs for the entire season, rather they have a handful of tracks that they’ll reuse and recycle at different points in time in an episode. In this way, these tracks are played so repeatedly that they end up feeling like a leitmotif because they’ll usually be played in similar situations (e.g. “we’re now at school” “this is a fun time” “this is sad” etc). Sometimes, shows will have notable themes, other times they don’t, but even if they don’t, they still feel like themes. Just to go back to Henry Jackman real quick, the other works I’ve heard of him include Captain America: The Winter Soldier, in which he creates a singular leitmotif, but uses it in very powerful ways.

[scream]

The scream. There are many variations on it throughout the movie, and it’s almost always used to announce or suggest the presence of the titular Winter Soldier (for time’s sake, I do have another leitmotif I’d like to talk about now while we’re on hybrids, so I’ll be moving on from the scream, but do know that the scream is another music-themed post that I intend on doing in the future).

So let’s take a look at advantages and disadvantages of leitmotifs and no leitmotifs. On the one hand, themes can be used in very flexible and powerful ways to tell/move the story, and emotions, on the other hand, having too many themes can get confusing to keep track of. On the flip side, all of the storytelling advantages that themes have, OSTs without themes don’t have. They don’t have that character theme to pull up in a scene when they are being referenced for extra kicks and feels, but they don’t have the confusion that OSTs with too many themes have. Is there a way to solve this? Yes, this is what hybrids do. On the one hand, they don’t have a lot of themes. They mostly function like themeless OSTs do. But for the few themes they do employ them, because they are few and far between, they are instantly more recognizable and even hold more weight to them. Take the Winter Soldier’s theme for example. I would argue that that’s the only theme in that movie and yet its impact is incredible. The scream itself is chilling to hear, usually, it starts playing every time the Winter Soldier gets screen time. Then it starts playing when other characters start thinking about him. The second that scream is heard, you know that stuff is about to go down.

So now that I’ve introduced themes vs no themes, let’s dabble a little into how to “read” OSTs. This is also very large and extensive, so yeah, probably going to be a bigger post that goes further in depth about this later. A lot of it is cut and dry. Sounds sad? Probably something sad is happening or being felt. Sounds excited? Probably something energetic is happening. Sounds angry? Maybe it’s a fight. But of course, it goes a lot deeper than that if you hear tracks in the context of the other tracks. Also, it helps if you’re someone who also studies music (like me :D)

I have a friend who knows I love soundtracks, and she would frequently play OSTs of movies and shows I’ve never seen, and ask me what I thought was going on (she watches a lot of animé so the following story uses OST from an animé that I’ve never watched). One day, my friend pulls out this song:

[Song]

She asked me to tell her what I thought was going on. First things first: this song is playful, piano is often played in contemplative situations, and there is a call-response happening between the piano and the violin. To me it sounded like two characters who were supposed to become really close friends were meeting for the first time and getting to know each other. Also, given the dancing feel of the entire song, I would throw in two extra cents on the bet that the scene also had things swirling around these two in the wind (ya know, as animé does). Then, my friend pulled out this:

[Song 2]

I turned to her and asked her, “You gotta tell me, which of the two friends die?” Pianos are also used for somber and melancholic ambiance. The piano is being played gently and wistfully, and the violin partner is missing. The way it leans into certain chords and hesitates on others tells me a lot. Music is essentially another language, you need to listen to the pauses, to the way the notes are being played. The piano is gentle which signals a need for care, which implies affection. Hesitation implies fear of being hurt, in this case, remembering the absence of the other friend. Hesitation also had a hint of waiting for something, waiting for the violin to come in with their part. But they don’t. They can’t. They’re not there anymore. So the piano falls into the melody and the chord, trying to reclaim the song they were playing as a way of holding onto it even though it sounds a little emptier and incomplete. All of this points to grief, which of course points to a death. The pure tenderness of this version of the song sounds to me like someone trying to deal with a fresh loss. When you lose someone, all you want to do is to be with them again, but of course you can’t, so you settle for trying to reclaim their essence, and that’s exactly what this song is. Of course, without having heard the first song, I never would have been able to go so deep into this analysis.

But it goes further. While I was working on a personal project, I was using these two songs for my tracks because of the whole “loss” aspect that they have, and I discovered, they are the exact same song. The entire song is one giant leitmotif. For your listening ease and purposes, I’ve put edited some parts in which they play the same thing (Well, technically, they’re playing the same thing the whole time, but I only edited a few spots where they were compatible enough to play together, and/or for comparison).

[Comparison cuts]

The second song isn’t just trying to reclaim their friend’s essence, it’s trying to play their “friendship song” and being unable to for obvious reasons. Hearing them side by side and/or on top of each other, also shows stylistic differences that clearly exemplify what emotions you should be feeling. In the duet version, the violin leads up to the melody and shines right before entering. The solo piano version tries to imitate their lost friend, but they hesitate. They keep going because they must. Unlike the duet version where the violin flares excitedly before falling into the melody, the solo version hesitates, it seems for a moment like they aren’t going to play anymore. I can even imagine their lip or hand tremble with grief as the chord is held before they reluctantly go on.

Is your heart hurting even though you didn’t even see the story?

Oh look, my Intro to Music got way too long. What a surprise.

Who could have seen this coming?

Music is important, and carries a lot more weight in stories than people tend to realize. Whether it’s carrying the mood, or foreshadowing a future plot point, it’s going to be there to mess with you, your emotions and your perceptions of the story. Keep your ears open, and maybe you’ll notice the music in your favorite shows or movie more now. Maybe it’ll be fun to ask what it says about the story, and maybe, it’ll help you see something you’ve never noticed before.

Okay okay - work with me, the first time I thought ‘Genesis dancing’ I thought ‘ballroom, probably?’, because he’s got that sense of innate grace, elegance, and all... 

But you know what I realised? I realised I was wrong. 

Genesis’ chosen forms might be more ballroom and elegance, but-

Traditional country folk dances. Banora is an old-style country village. He’d have grown up with them.

Like... just imagine the seasonal harvest festival in Banora. Angeal and Genesis in their country best, being taught step here now, touch your partner’s fingers, turn around and clap.

Watch this - it’s not quite the right era here (this is Regency, with upper-middle class families, mostly) and if it is, it’s the wrong place and people, but... it’s the right sort of energy. The right style, and music. 

Actually, the part of the opening of Dirge of Cerberus where it shows the celebration in Kalm is perfect for showing what I mean.

And the thing is, like I was saying before - Genesis and Angeal would have danced these dances. Perhaps not when they were older, but when they were younger, definitely. 

Angeal would love the festivals, because there’d be plenty of food to go around for everyone (and people would hardly notice especially toward the end of the night if some went... missing) and Genesis would probably complain about the noise, and people pestering him to dance with them, and he can’t wait until he’s SOLDIER because he wouldn’t be tired by now if he was, and yet once you got him moving he’d be laughing and smiling.

I... really wish we’d been able to see more of canonical Banoran culture, but I have to believe that given it’s a country village with the wealthy landowner (Genesis’ parents) and orchards that become the town’s main export, and where there are poorer people and those who steal apples because they’re poor, I think it’d be inevitable that they’d have to put on their own entertainment. 

Just by looking in Genesis’ house and where Angeal’s mother was still living, there didn’t seem to be any TVs, probably not much radio signal out that far. Shinra propaganda might get through, but then, it’s a Shinra built town.

So you get people organising festivals at harvest and at other times of year, to break up the long months. You get people with space inviting others in so that they can put on a show - if you’ve got room for several tables in a room, there’s room to put tables aside and dance. Room to set up a stage and watch performers. Does anyone know how to play an instrument? Good, you’re up. Can anyone sing? You too.

Not just that, either. If they’re doing manual labour, you’d end up with working songs, and songs without words, and rhymes that make no sense to anyone who isn’t from Banora, because this is something that only happens in Banora. 

Imagine Zack walking in on Angeal and he’s humming what sounds like a nonsense rhyme. 

Or maybe Genesis is tapping out what he thinks is something completely meaningless, but it’s actually that one song from years back that he can’t get out of his head.

...Actually, you know what? They should have shown us some of Banora’s culture - they should have shown us a few flashbacks to before, when Genesis and Angeal were still living there. It would have hit home just what Genesis later does to the place, all the people who die, but it’d also foreshadow (or explain/call back to) all the mysteries surrounding the two of them, and the town itself.

Like. Imagine if Crisis Core had shown an opening FMV with no context right at the start, showing one of these festivals - we see a young redhead breaking away from people who by their actions are clearly supposed to be his parents, but look nothing like him, and who seem both overbearing and also unsure of how to be parents. We’d see who we’d later find out is the young Genesis running through the crowds to find the young Angeal, whose mother is watching over him as he hovers at the food tables, worried about him for some reason. 

The two young boys breaking away from the rest of the festivities, Genesis half dragging Angeal toward somewhere that we’d later find is the Banora Underground, while the camera pans away-

And then bam we’re with Zack. We think we know who this man is he’s talking to when he becomes visible, but we aren’t sure because we never learned anyone’s name before. 

So if we had that, the moment when we see Lazard flash up Genesis’ profile on the screen would hit that much harder - because you know who this is already. Even without any sort of further explanation, you know ‘this man grew up with the one who defected. ouch, this is gonna hurt.’

Later on, we’d still hear the dumbapples story from Angeal when Zack goes to Wutai, but this time we have more context; we’d already seen just what kind of place Angeal and Genesis lived in, and what poor meant to Angeal. There’d be a greater understanding than Zack, and perhaps that could be good, because it could drive in the idea that Zack wants to help people, but he’s on the outside, and he can’t always understand their problems. 

When we follow Zack to Banora, we’ll have seen these trees before, we’ll know where we are, we’ll be having a bad feeling about this. When we see the empty village when it’d been so full and lively before? That’d be an extra sense of foreboding, because this is not normal. Especially when Zack tries the houses and comes up with nothing other than monsters, and when he does find someone-

We’ve already seen Angeal’s mother once, when she was younger, and here she looks older, and tired. That worry we’d seen? Has worn lines into her face. Maybe there’s something from the FMV that’s an artefact of better times, and we can recognise it.

In this version, when Angeal’s mother says about Genesis that he was “Such a good boy”, we don’t think ‘oh, because that’s what they all say about kids who suddenly murder their entire home!’, we think, ‘yeah, he was, what happened to change that?’. A flashback to the FMV might happen, or something with his younger model turning into that sepia-tainted view of Genesis standing over the empty village.

When we see Genesis talk about his parents like he does, saying that they had ‘betrayed him from the very start’, we would know that there might have been something else going on. We might know from some sign dropped in the FMV that he’s not exactly lying, that they were watching him for Shinra. But... we might also know that Genesis is an unreliable narrator, and his parents may have cared for him somewhat more than he believed that they did - making the story more tragic, but also helping us know that there really are two sides to this story. We know that if Genesis believes this, then we know from how Cloud and so many others were used and thrown away by Shinra in the main game, he had every right to be furious. But we’d also know how bittersweet and awful it is, the truth that might in this version eventually come to light that they might have turned on Shinra for him (which is only shared to us through the Ultimania, but I see as canon).

How about Genesis going through the game and not just having LOVELESS (blasphemy, I know) but also all of those Banoran songs and rhymes and bits and snatches of music, and the only other person who can echo them is Angeal. Genesis might also say something - a Banoran rhyme - to Sephiroth, who doesn't know its meaning, and Genesis explaining drives home the entire subplot of Sephiroth does not feel as though he fits in anywhere, Sephiroth does not have a home, and also, Sephiroth no longer has his friends.

Make Banora one of the overarching themes of the game, like it essentially is, because when Zack’s on the run and is trying to find Genesis to get him to stop,  he remembers how Genesis doesn’t just carry a dumbapple around everywhere... there’s also those weird things he says every so often.

We follow Genesis back, and we know we’re getting near the end of the game, because this is the Banora Underground, this is where Genesis was leading Angeal all those years ago, and it’s going to feel like we’re closing the chapter of this story, ending this book, just like how Genesis gives his version of LOVELESS’ Fifth Act. Zack’s been walking through its pages, hardly even knowing what he’s doing, trying to fix things and trying to help and when Genesis looks into the face of his goddess, she lets him see her disappointment - because he isn’t the hero of this story. Zack is.

And when Angeal appears when Zack’s dying, well. I can see there being a specific leitmotif playing for just a moment, something people sing or say that makes them keep going, or to say that it’s going to be okay now, because you can take Banora off the map, but a place as influential as that ends up touching the people who’ve lived there, and who’ve been affected by it.

I dunno, I just think world building is cool and so is a bit more backstory, y’know?

Doom WADs’ Roulette (1996): Icarus: Alien Vanguard

Well folks, looks like TeamTNT decided to return and redeem themselves from their decision on commercializing TNT: Evilution with their second MegaWAD.

…

Am I repeating myself again?

#6: Icarus: Alien Vanguard

Main author(s): TeamTNT

Release date: March 21st, 1996

Version(s) played: ???

Levels: 32 (standard 30 + 2)

The story is pretty complicated so I’ll try to put it simply:

Icarus happens 12 years after the events of Doom II (even though it should technically be two years later, but let’s not change the subject), and focuses on the titular ship. It has been overrun by demons (or whatever the fucking shit was nearby) and you are tasked to sterilize the ship, the nearby planet, and some simulations from demons (and blow the ship up just in case).

Now, the design of Icarus is separated into three types of levels: The ship ones,

the planet ones,

and the simulation ones.

These styles are uneven. They are all, at least, good, but still uneven. The levels that happen on Icarus itself tend to be kind of bland due to being overloaded with grey tiles and plates but they tend to have interesting locations here and there.

I have a hard time deciding if the planet-themed levels or the simulation-themed ones look the best since the authors went somewhat all out with the simulation-themed levels but sometimes, the planet-themed levels show some of the best aesthetics, like Blessed are the Quick.

The new custom textures are good. I really liked the force field one.

The soundtrack is pretty damn good. Even though it was only two members of the original music team coming back (Jonathan El-Bizri, and Tom Mustaine), some of the tracks kept the level of quality of TNT: Evilution’s soundtrack. In terms of the favorites, I like Recapture(its last part uses a cover of The Demon’s Dead), Stomp, Heart of the Hive, MAP19’s track, and Face of Evil.

Now, here is something interesting about Icarus’ music… it has a leitmotif:

Yeah, this WAD has a recurring music bit that plays in different parts of other tracks. I don’t think I stumbled onto something like this in the other WADs I’ve played, at least, from what I can remember. Doesn’t matter! I fucking love it.

The only thing I didn’t like about the soundtrack is that how some tracks just stopped after they ended, and started again after a small beat. Like the music wasn’t programmed to loop smoothly. I don’t know if this is the fault of GZDoom, or the WAD itself, but it was annoying for me.

All I can say about the level structure is that is, at least, better than TNT: Evilution. Compared to that WAD, the maps feel less sluggish to go through and have less of annoying quirks (although it still has those 30 seconds locked doors -_-).

In terms of stuff I really like:

In Shuttlecraft, you blast off to space, and then in Shuttle Bay, you can see your ship docked in.

In The Haunting some of the enemies are ghosts (it happens when an Arch-Vile resurrects the crushed carcass of another enemy) that can only be harmed either by melee damage from the other enemies, or the splash damage from the Rocket Launcher. This level even shows at the beginning how to deal with them.

WarTemple probably took some inspiration from Wormhole, since the areas that have the blue and yellow key are basically the same. It’s just one of them is upside down. A simple concept that somehow makes this level amazing.

These are just some of the examples. Unfortunately, like in every WAD (probably), there are things that are annoying.

For instance, there are two cases in Donnybrook where you have to run like a madman through the temporarily open door to go further without any mistakes. Once with the switches in hallways connected with the yellow key room, the other time with the room behind the Plasma Gun (the latter one is much worse). And these doors are quite far away from the place that opens them.

Back in WarTemple, while it might be my favorite level, for some reason, in an upside-down location, the elevator that leads to the teleporter that leads back to the main building has this stupid red pillar that makes you just barely fit on it and constantly fall down trying to run to the teleporter. Also, the elevator is too tall to stay upwards.

In order to get the yellow key in The Haunting, you have to finish the shooting gallery by shooting all of the targets dead center, otherwise, you will have to start all over again.

The worst cases are in maps from 11 to 15. Would you like to have the blue key hidden behind one of the obligatory secrets in Feeding Frenzy? How about Waste Disposal, where you have to go through the teleporter behind the unmarked wall to get the red key? Twice?!

Asylum is just a confusing mess of a map. Fortress of Evil is the best of the bunch but it still has its shit moments.

But the worst of the worst award goes to Hydroponics. It’s overall fine level, but it has this bullshit at the beginning:

This is the case of a trap that likes to scream Oi! Fuck you!, where you end up in a situation where it is little to no chance to not get hurt from the sudden trap. And this case is one of the worst. Stay in place? Dead. Move in any direction? Still dead! It’s bad enough with these barrels alone but there also other enemies peppering you! With shotgunner nearby!! I died like over dozens of times trying to go past this bullshit, intentional way or not, and I only managed to do it (somehow) once, by blowing the frontal barrels and just run before the chain reaction gets me.

I’m against cheating, but my only, reasonable advice for this part of the level is to turn on god mode before going through the teleporter and turn it off after you deal with it. Let’s hope that it will be the only time it happens.

Changing the subject, the final map is standard Icon of Sin type of level but for some reason, it feels really dumb. You think that your target is that engine in middle, this whole nucleus thing.

Except not. What you have to do is to drop into the room, circle through the elevator, shoot the skull switch that appeared on the previous platform, and then pump your rockets through the target shield that moves up and down.

…

Why? Why it has to be so overly complicated?

Okay, enough of that. Let’s change the subject and ask: Is Icarus challenging?

Uhm… Not really. Most of the time it was easy. I don’t know if it was like that because of the WAD itself, or that I’m unconsciously getting better with Doom games/WADs.

The hardest parts were basically at the very beginning and ending, where the first map was hard only because I had to kill hitscanners with the Pistol for like the first half (fun incarnate -_-), and in the last map, I was scratched from the distance by Mancubus while trying to hit the target. There were of course occasional bullshit moments here and there but I believe nothing can top the very beginning of Hydroponics.

Some parts of me want to tell you about some bugs, even though there isn’t that much to talk about. I’ve encountered like some visual glitches and at least once there was a case of monsters not going through a certain line of terrain (the latter case happened somewhat in previous WADs; I just didn’t feel any need to talk about it). You might notice it only if you take a closer look at those things.

I can definitely say, without any doubt, that this WAD should replace TNT: Evilution as one of the two WADs in Final Doom. Icarus: Alien Vanguard, in spite of its problems, takes everything from the previous work of TeamTNT and makes it all better.

There is no doubt now that this WAD’s creators redeemed themselves. Unlike the last time, when they flew too close to John Romero’s flaming head, this time, they pulled through with little to no major problems. And for that, TeamTNT earns my respect.

This is the last megaWAD on the ’96 list, so from now on, it’s just the smaller stuff for the lack of better words.

See you next time.

Bye!

Pack the bong with fireworks, blow your face away

Generally speaking, my mind expands to fill all the drugs available. Ah, but not you ketamine, my wretched little red headed step child. You can go live with your mother, and  I don’t want to hear from you until the next court appointed visitation.

Unfortunately for me the same wasn’t true for the gram of amphetamine that was burning a hole in my pocket, then my nostril. And so of course I had try using it rectally, and man….. I was waaaaay too high. Like: compulsively jacking off for twelve hours / avoiding saying anything at mandatory zoom meetings while keeping my camera turned off / dodging colleague & co-worker / feeling like a fried egg in a “this is your brain on drugs” advertisement / scorchingly, motherfuckingly HIGH.

Jesus Christ, I knew boofing it avoided first-pass metabolism, I just didn’t think it would make such a big difference.

One interesting side effect of this was I went a full 14 hours without dosing any opium. In the ordinary course of things, while I wouldn’t be in the full pits of withdrawals after 14 hours, I would most definitely be feeling out of sorts. Instead, didn’t even fucking notice.

Figured “why look a meth horse in the mouth?” and used the opportunity to cut my dose for today by 25%. This is whole idea of the ketamine, so I can stop using opium as an anti-depressant. Cos I know the roller-coaster always twists the same way. Kicking ain’t that difficult. It’s what inevitably happens afterwards. the punch-in-the-guts of existential loneliness,  then, a quantum koan.

Student says to the Master: “Master, I feel absolutely unlovable at the very atomic core of my being. What can I do?”

Master says to Student: “All matter is an illusion. Consider, there are no atoms. In reality you are unlovable at the level of quantum foam, in reality, you are an indivisible,  unlovable one-ness with no beginning or end.... Now go and start making me my dinner you worthless sack of shit and for goddsake stop fucking moping for a minute.”  

Upon hearing this, suddenly the Student was / was not enlightened.

I have this dry wry internal voice telling me (like a crypt door creaking open):  “go ahead kid, admit it, nothing is ever going to change so you may as well go throw yourself over your balcony. Aw kid, whattsamatta? — are you scared of heights? Well then, in that case, as your lawyer I recommend that you order a gram of heroin on the dark web and then just down the whole lot. That’s right. Everything at once, at the same time, in one go. It’s easy: all you need to do is push the boat out from the pier a little bit— & from that point on, it’s smooth sailing”

He looks at me, grinning madly. I’m beginning to think it’s the only expression he knows how to make.

“No need to turn off the lights when you leave, kid. These are the kind of candles that will snuff out themselves”

Fuck off death breath, you plastic old carnival skeleton.. Not yet. NOT YET. You’re trying to cash out insurance policies for psychic real estate you simply don’t hold the deeds for. “Nice place you got here” — I can hear you chuckling as you light a cigarette, then hold up the still flaming match at eye height afterwards — “be a real shame if it all burned down, folks can get so careless”

I say: shut your goddamn mouth, skull features! Before I turn you into some kind of smoking accessory & start packing weed into your empty eye sockets. Before I donate you to some kind of charity for needy goth kids, or worse, slip you in a Halloween store sale, sometime after October.

Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of cards.

& you’re nothing but a pile of old bones. I’ve seen you at the cross roads when I went there to meet the Devil, came to do a little horse trading, and maybe swap myself a tall tale for some old soul or two; So I know that you know at least how to whistle to the one single note of your own leitmotif: , & hell, you may even know how to dance to it— especially when that old gallows wind from the West comes calling. 

You don’t like dancing. —I get it! You are lazy, and everything aches when you move.. But when that cold old wind comes calling, all groaning  and moaning like a dead man with insomnia seeing yet another unwelcome morning sunrise,   - a dead man who can’t seem to get any of the forty winks he feels that are owed to him, because he hasn’t slept for an entire century,  and so he groans with all the horrible weight of those endless years of bad debit & compound bitterness (you see: he was promised “a well earned rest”, it would be “like sleep” they said,  you’re going to get “a good long sleep, sweet sleep without dreams”, but now everything just feels a constant, crushing nightmare & however much he tosses and turns and rots in his coffin he still remains conscious, & sleep never seems to come). 

So when the wind runs up, coming at a full gallop with a groan rising in the back of its’ throat like a hurricane of pain, it’s hooves striking lightning,  the tongue of the storm cracking and crackling and attacking at random, like the snap of some terrible whip laying about itself with absolutely no regard for friend or foe or favourite, spitting out curses in ancient Enochian, the teeth of the ocean gurning and chewing on the lips of the shoreline -- this being no lovers kiss, not gentle at all but gleeful, with a kind of savage cannibalism, just straight up biting out whole bloody chunks of the cheeks of the beach and casually peeling open the hulls of great sailing ships like the shells of so many pistachos, when that very wind starts to shake your gibbet like a rattle and then begins to play xylophone with your rib bones

Dance! dance! dance me a pretty jig, oh my darling!

But I know this truth too: that old show tune you like to sing does not exactly ring melodious to living ear-drums. The song of Death is just so completely, utterly, monstrously monotonous.. Plainly, considered simply as a song to tap your toes to, it basically totally sucks. To those of us with ears to hear, Death sounds a lot like the village idiot, just mindlessly humming the same single, boring, utterly unremarkable note, over and over to Himself, in no particular time signature, forever to eternity. But the great tragedy of Death is that he honestly thinks he can sing real sweetly.  Utilising those far better acoustics that always seem to exist within the walls of our own heads, Death believes he sounds like the mythical siren, luring us out on to the ocean, only to dash ourselves onto the rocks in search of his irresistible music. But the truth is, we just want that fucking humming to stop, and we’re willing to risk a shipwreck to get it over with.

He also thinks that thing he does with his jaws is a smile.

You see: we are still things with skin, and so we haven’t forgotten yet that to smile & smile genuinely involves the involuntary movement of muscles, it also  invokes a certain twinkling in the corner of the eye, with a judicious pinch of pixie dust (this, despite being a completely imaginary ingredient,  is, none-the-less, entirely indispensable for proper operation).

A real smile is something you can’t fake. It mints it’s own certificate of authenticity, emits it’s own hologram,, and any attempt at counterfeit is immediately obvious.  Sadly, a fake is simply tasteless. A fake smile is not worth even the cheap vinyl skin it’s printed on. A fake smile belongs inside the pocket hell dimension of the “merely bad”, that mediocre & boring category of the not-even-kitsch, a generic garbage pile of cheap plastic crap far too dull to be commented on except in the aggregate. “Take this… and bury it.”

Compare and contrast. A real smile has the kind of articulation that requires REAL animation, rather than just animatronics. You cannot describe a smile as a series of steps to be followed. It’s instinctive, not instructive. It is Art without artifice . .   This is not the image of a fire,  but a real actual fire,  that is really here: burning in a cabin, with a real heat in it, that throws up sparks on occasion, it sends soot up the chimney that will definitely blacken your hands if you touch it. This is  kind of fire that you can come right in if you want and sleep next to and you’ll stay nice & warm & toasty… Here, let me open the door for you.  This is not  “"Ceci n'est pas une pipe” but a pipe you can really blow smoke rings out of, It’s a fact, not a facsimile.  

In comparison, the fixed, empty grin of the skeleton isn’t convincing anyone.

It certainly isn’t convincing me.

SO NOT YET. I swear to you I will NOT go down without a knife fight. Oh trust me, I will crochet my counter-argument in a fine stiletto needlepoint: I will pound my reply into your rib-cage like Martin-Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the false church door  

I REFUTE IT THUS:

I’ve got an okay feeling about this

A fan’s review of SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY.

(Spoilers ahoy, matey. Proceed with extreme caution. Running on extreme low sleep, so this will probably be updated over the next day or so.)

I’ve been pretty clear about the parameters for what I consider to be a good Star Wars film. My initial concern has been that they should at least be internally consistent, and consistent within (let alone respectful of) the established lore of the Star Wars universe. Beyond that, my mind also turns to whether or not it merely repeats what has come before or extends the universe in logical and interesting ways. Is there a need for this story to be told, or does it excessively rely on (or trivially extrapolate from) a known backstory? And finally, does it strike the right balance of humour and fan service while telling a decent story that stands on its own?

So, having been quite critical of Disney’s previous Star Wars releases on that basis, how does this latest instalment fare?

May the month of May be with you

There’s something right about Star Wars in May. Despite the attempts by all and sundry to turn a stupid dad joke into ‘Star Wars Day’ (May the Fourth - get it? No, Cinco de Quatro is much better), in fact the month of May has its own enduring significance for the franchise. Each of the original and prequel trilogy movies were released around the mid-May Memorial Day holiday. In the US, this means summer, when kids are on break and sitting in an air-conditioned cinema is preferable compared to just about anything else. For us on the other side of the world, it is on the cusp of winter, just as the weather really starts turning for the worse - the wind picks up, the chill sets in, and darkness falls before you know it.

It’s those memories of fighting to stay warm while making it to midnight on a dark, crisp winter’s night that have always accompanied first watching a new Star Wars film for me. For some entirely silly commercial reason, Disney has thus far eschewed the traditional May release window instead choosing  December for its premieres, which has never felt right to me - December is for Christmas movies and Lords of the Ring, not Star Wars. So if nothing else, there’s some small satisfaction for me in being able to enjoy a new Star Wars movie for the first time again in the cold of May - perhaps its karma, but it feels like that’s translated to my reaction to this second anthology film.

Why make a movie about Han Solo?

Here is a character who is infamous for his intrigue. Many so-called fans criticise George Lucas for adding context to Star Wars where they believed none was necessary - see the “Han shot first” controversy (the real objection being that Greedo shot at all - which changes nothing about Han himself)(1) - in which case, why sacrifice the ultimate lamb and give him an origin story? That being said, I am loath to be too critical of the raison d’être for the ‘Star Wars Story anthology’ films (this and ROGUE ONE) - they have to date been somewhat respectful of Canon, made some generous nods to what is now ‘Legends’, and taken some interesting new directions in filling the gaps in the existing story. We don’t necessarily need them (much like we don’t need the Saga to continue an already concluded story), but that doesn’t mean they don’t have anything interesting to add to the stories we already love. 

Back in the very early days of the Star Wars Expanded Universe (what would now be called ‘Legends’) there was a series of novellas by Brian Daley about a pre-Yavin Han Solo and his adventures with Chewbacca and (you guessed it) a couple of droids on the Millennium Falcon, as he tried to eke out a living as a white hat smuggler in the Empire-lite Corporate Sector.(2) They were some of the first EU books that I read, and simple though they were, I enjoyed them because they were episodic tales set in a different part of the world of Star Wars established by the films. They weren’t high stakes, and didn’t give Han Solo an origin or back story - they just gave a glimpse into some of the sort of swashbuckling adventures that we assumed the character we met in the Cantina Bar would have had.

This movie is nowhere near as light or insignificant as that - much like ROGUE ONE before it, it takes a throwaway line mentioned in the original film and turns it into a definitive origin story about how Han Solo became that guy who shot first.(3)

Now the story of a film that lost everything and the one director who had no choice but to bring it all together

From what little has been made public, this film has not had an easy gestation - even more so than ROGUE ONE, whose ending was completely changed (undoubtedly for the better). THE LEGO MOVIE directors were fired during the shoot due to “creative differences” with writer Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the brilliant EMPIRE (but also the lackluster AWAKENS). Apparently their take was too humorous and not the sarcastic selfishness that characterises Han Solo - which I guess is a good thing considering how ridiculous the obvious jokes in the Disney ‘Saga’ films have been. Their replacement is none other than early Lucas protege and all-round pretty damn talented Ron Howard of Imagine Entertainment (not Orange County Imagine), whose voice is embedded in many of our heads thanks to his shoddy narration of ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT.(4)

Ron Howard reliably makes good movies. He might not have the most stylistic flair, he may not be the most innovative or creative, he may not use the most challenging source material, but it would be difficult to suggest that any of the movies he’s made are anything less than solidly watchable - and most of them have been, in their own way, pretty great. He now runs a director’s masterclass, and you’d be hard pressed to find a better teacher from whom to learn the craft.

George Lucas had offered Howard the opportunity to direct previoud Star Wars films over the years, but as with Lucas’s other bestie Steven Spielberg, Howard didn’t want to take the reigns from his longtime friend. Now that Lucas has rather foolishly handed the keys over to the Walt Disney Company, that reluctance seems to have diminished. I’ve been disappointed with the direction Disney has been leading the franchise enough times to have serious doubts about this film, but the one thing that kept me optimistic about it was that it was ultimately left to Howard to deliver the final product.

That faith was well placed - this was the first Star Wars film in some time that I really enjoyed.

“You’re the good guy”

The fundamental premise of the film appears to manifest itself in this line of dialogue that Qi’ra casually throws away towards the climax. This information will spoil the payoff of A NEW HOPE, just like knowing who Darth Vader is spoils the reveal in EMPIRE. But it’s nevertheless true to the core of the character of the Han Solo that we know and love - despite being a selfish cad and a scoundrel, he is a softy underneath.

Given the context above about the importance of the tone of the film, it would appear that the decision made by Lucasfilm to bring in Howard was on the money (though really, the question is why he wasn’t there from the start). Moments of over the top humour have been toned down (at least from what I can recall of one of the early trailers showing Han being interviewed to join the Imperial Academy). That’s not to say there aren’t any funny moments, but for the most part they feel earned and not simply played for easy laughs (like *ahem* Poe/Hux).

There are some call-backs in the dialogue to the original films that might go a little too far (L3: “They don’t even serve our kind here”), but they are mostly effective when they subvert our expectations (“I hate you”/“I know” and “I’ve got a GOOD feeling about this”) which is nice when the film itself is a giant call-back. On the other hand, there were a couple of lines of dialogue that strayed towards uncharacteristically real-world expletives - especially Han’s use of the phrase “Bantha crap”, when we all know the correct terminology is “poodoo”.

Visually the film was just as much of a treat as any Star Wars movie, exploring some new frontiers with the Maelstrom / Maw surrounding Kessel, as well as the WWI-style trench warfare and snow train hijacking scenes. What I loved about each of these was that they created new unfamiliar environments with their own mechanics that drove the plot and the plight of the characters, as Star Wars does at its best. The Kessel Run - in particular the climax with the Millennium Falcon trying to escape both a hideous space monster and a black hole / gravity well at the same time - was both spectacular and incredibly intense to watch, despite the fact that you know that the chracters you’re invested in are going to survive (and that the Falcom reliably has trouble making the jump to lightspeed). From that perspective, it far exceeded anything in the last couple of ‘Saga’ films (two hour long chases of fuel attrition, anyone?).

The music was serviceable and on par with, if not a little better than, Michael Giacchino’s score for ROGUE ONE. It was used effectively and enjoyable, with impactful use of the well-known themes and leitmotifs. While I wouldn’t have called it as memorable as John Williams at his best (he was only partially involved), it was adequate if not decent - and unlike the ‘Saga’ films, it didn’t have to be any more than that.

Finally, the performances were for the most part quite good. Alden Ehrenreich faced the near impossible task of stepping into Harrison Ford’s shoes to recreate one of cinema’s most iconic characters, and he did it pretty well. Rather than attempt to mimick or channel Ford’s trademark smirk or swagger (let alone be forced to undergo make up or CGI as was done rather poorly in ROGUE ONE), he simply stayed true to the character and made it his own. Within a few minutes, I was on board and completely accepted him in the role, made all the easier by not constantly being reminded of how Harrison Ford would have played it. To each of their credit, Howard and Ehrenreich have created a perfectly believable young Han Solo that stands on his own two feet, not in the shadow of a legend.

Similarly, Don Glover (aka Childish Gambino) perfectly captured Lando Calrissian and at no point did I feel like I missed another legend in Billy Dee Williams (though I feel like Glover may have had some prosthetic teeth put in). Having to portray the dashing Lando in his prime provided Glover with the opportunity to bring greater depth to the character than Williams, who pretty much just played himself. Woody Harrelson and Thandie Newton were both solid as far as their roles allowed them to be - as was Joonas Suotamo, for the first time reprising his role as Chewbacca (despite the subtleties of the Wookiee costume, not for a moment did I doubt it was the same character created by Peter Mayhew). Paul Bettany chewed the scenery as the slimy crime boss Dryden Vos. Wherever there is Bettany, Jon Favreau can’t be far behind, giving a short but charming life to the personable alien pilot Rio (bonus point for giving the universe a little more needed diversity). Also bringing her vocal talents to the fore was Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who created one of the more sympathetic droid personalities in L3. Perhaps the only slightly disappointing performance came from the otherwise brilliant Emilia Clarke as Qi’ra, through no real fault of her own - despite playing a duplicitous badass, she wasn’t given much meaningful to do.

“Assume everyone will betray you and you will never be disappointed.”

The film is at its essence a heist movie, and a good one at that - it effectively uses the tropes of the genre, and though largely predictable it subverted them enough to keep me engaged the whole way through. The number of double crosses was just right enough to reflect that none of these characters were naive, but they all had their fundamental weaknesses.

I feel like Lawrence Kasdan and his son Jonathan did a pretty decent job with the script. Having said that, while the plot overall was thrilling, the story itself was a little disjointed. Other than Han’s relationship with Qi’ra, there was no real thread that wove all the way through and connected the somewhat disparate few escalating heists that resulted in Han’s independence and acquisition of the Falcon. Perhaps that’s enough, given most of the second and third acts focused largely on the famous Kessel Run and its consequences - most amusingly, how the Falcon goes from Lando’s souped up, sleek hot rod, into the bucket of bolts we’re introduced to in A NEW HOPE.

The side plots involving the competing crime syndicates and the mysterious motivations of the marauders weren’t particularly compelling until they each revealed their secrets towards the conclusion - but they did an effective job of believable world building, and setting up things that we already know will follow (like the Rebellion). However, the ‘droid rights’ concept inspired by the new character of L3 seemed a little underdeveloped and out of place.(5) It actually reminded me more of Hermione Granger’s Elf welfare from Harry Potter mixed with Korg’s ‘revolution’ from Thor Ragnarok, though I’d love to see the idea more fully explored within the Star Wars universe.

The film introduced the concept of ‘hyperfuel’ (also known as coaxium) as the primary MacGuffin for driving the plotting of the heists. This acted as a deus ex machina at several points with some interesting results in the execution of the Kessel Run itself (Where were the spice mines by the way? Was Disney afraid of being sued by the estate of Frank Herbert?). While fine in isolation to this movie, this did also feel a little bit on the nose given the central role fuel bizarrely played in the plot of the last ‘Saga’ film (not to mention the ongoing focus on Han’s lucky gold dice, which was overplayed in that film and introduced here as if they were far more significant to Han’s established identity than they actually are).

But there was one final touch to the plot that got the kind of ecstatic reaction out of me that I haven’t felt in years - it genuinely shocked and thrilled me, but more on that later.

“I’m putting together a crew? Are you in?”

A good heist requires the building of a good crew that brings a variety of talents to the table. To be frank, the actual Kessel Run heist in this film itself was somewhat anticlimactic. Other than the diversion created by L3 and the subsequent fire fight, the stakes involved in boosting the coaxium from Kessel were not particularly high. On the other hand, the escape and ensuing ‘Run’,(6) as well as the inevitable series of double-crosses and competing moral and selfish imperatives after pulling it off, were full of thrills and gave the characters an opportunity to really shine through - and this was nothing if not a character piece.

The Anti-Hero: The eponymous Han Solo. Well, this is his movie, you can hardly expect us not to start with Han - who is for the first time the sole protagonist of a film. As this is an origin story, he’s not going to be leader of this pack, but he’s hopefully going to show us why he will be when he meets the Skywalker family. Despite a stray reference to his father being a shipbuilder on Corellia, we never get Han’s true family name or any other indication of his lineage; he was dubbed ‘Solo’ by the Imperial recruiter quite literally for being on his own.(7) We meet him as a street kid with a conscience and a mouth - who’ll happily point out to a superior officer in his company that they are themselves the hostiles, not the natives of the planet they’re invading for the glory of the Empire. Much like his father-in-law before him, he starts off idealistic and a little bit twee in his oft-repeated desire to become the best pilot in the galaxy (the title actually held by said future father-in-law). Also like Anakin Skywalker in PHANTOM MENACE, we don’t actually get to see a lot of those skills before he slips into the role; Anakin at least was a Force-sensitive pod racing child (let alone the Chosen One), but other than the pretty nice speeder chase opening the movie its’s not until the Kessel Run itself that we actually see Solo’s exceptional skills. Han in this film is very much driven by the loss of Qi’ra right at the start, and his quest throughout is to first find her and then win her back. Having seen his cynicism while Luke is under Obi-Wan’s tutelage, it’s a nice change to see him as the earnest student trying to learn the game from his own mentor, the master con-thief Tobias Beckett. He slots easily into the role of rogue, deserter and mercenary, and through Beckett and his crew he also learns never to trust anyone but himself - with one notable exception. And the fact that exception exists, is also why underneath all that bravado, Han truly is still the good guy - when given a choice between a quick score or the greater good, he chooses the latter. Han may start off street smart but somewhat naive, but by the end he demonstrates empathy and a canny insight that lays the foundation for the scruffy looking nerf herder with a heart of gold that Luke meets in the Mos Eisley Cantina. At the very end of the film, we can see conclusively why Han had to shoot first.(8)

The Brawn: Chewbacca. The one notable exception to Han’s rule is his future trusty co-pilot, who we’ve never yet seen not by his side. Here we get to see how they meet for the first time and forge their lifelong partnership. While I was fully expecting Chewie to show up at some point, I must admit to being misdirected by the set up leading to his meet-fight with Han. Howard’s staging suggested that the ‘beast’ the stormtroopers were feeding Han to would be something like RETURN’s Rancor and the muddy fur that was our first glimpse of him also echoed EMPIRE’s Wampa. Hearing that familiar growl was both thrill and relief, as Chewie engaged Han in ferocious combat until we hear Han speak Wookiee for the first time in order to persuade Chewie that he can devise a way for them both to escape.(9) The two are literally bound together until Han tracks down Beckett - who immediately recognises that Chewie, not Han, is the prized recruit. Han learns of Chewie’s desire to reunite with and free his tribe / family, something he can and can’t relate to at the same time. Chewie appears initially skeptical of Han, but circumstance conspires to keep them together from one job to the next and along the way they continually pull each other out of the kind of pickles that would well establish the life debt he later owes to Han (but nothing specific is singled out here as the sole cause for it). At a critical moment, we see Chewie choose to stay with Han rather than return to join others of his own kind. This cements the fact that Chewie isn’t simply sidekick, but that Han and Chewie are in fact partners in crime. It’s also probably the most agency we’ve seen Chewie use throughout the saga - except perhaps for the moment that we’d all been waiting for (and had been teased at least once with Beckett), when he finally pulls someone’s arms out of their sockets. He’s also the first to throw cold water on Han when he starts bragging about making the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs - as Chewie points out, he was already rounding it down.

The Money: Lando Calrissian. When we first met him on Cloud City, Lando presented as a smooth-talking, responsible administrator with shades of a dark past. Lando is just as charming as he ever was, but in his younger days we can see more of the conniving, selfish operator he needed to be to survive as a renowned smuggler in the galactic underworld. However, as with Han, a glimmer of his true nature shines through his relationship with L3, his partner in crime (and possibly life). While Lando’s side of that relationship wasn’t that well explored at first (other than L3 suggesting that he may be what Futurama would call “robosexual”), and it’s not clear how sympathetic he was to her robot rights crusade, it is clear following L3’s death just how much she meant to him.(10) In return for an ever-diminishing cut,(11) Lando provides the getaway vehicle for the heist - his highly-polished and specially-modified freighter, the Millennium Falcon. The Falcon we see for the first time(12) is pristine and complete, including the escape pod completing its front that we’ve as yet not seen. Having cheated Han out of his first opportunity to take possession of the Falcon, we see the foundations of the mistrust underlying their chummy rivalry, and the guile that Han brings back to the table to finally win it fair and square. Given the considerable damage Han does to the ship through the maelstrom to turn it into our beloved hunk of junk, it’s somewhat ironic that in RETURN Lando promises Han to bring the Falcon back from the Battle of Endor “without a scratch”.

The Beauty and the Brains: L3-37 and Qi’ra. I feel terrible conflating these two, particularly between the two female members of the crew, but unfortunately that’s the sort of movie this was. Qi’ra may have conceived of part of the scheme, and been the mastermind who ultimately ended up on top, but she didn’t actually have a whole lot do other than drive the plot. It’s arguable that she may have used her emotional leverage over Han to ensure that she always had the upper hand throughout most of the film. Perhaps hers is a character that has scope to grow over the course of a greater story, but in this chapter alone she felt a little underdeveloped; you never got a sense of why Han was so besotted with her, to the extent that he would spend years trying to get her back - and her convenient reappearance at just the right time was a little contrived. But I find it more interesting to look at L3 as the one who used her appearance and/or emotions most effectively to create a robot rebellion diversion to allow the heist to proceed, despite the fact that it was literally her brains that ultimately enabled the getaway. Unlike the prissy C3PO and the sardonic K2SO from ROGUE ONE, L3 is the first protocol droid we’ve encountered that is idealistic and empathetic, and she tolerates no nonsense from her beloved Lando or the rest of the crew. While her demise was somewhat inevitable, she’s probably the most ‘human’ droid to date across all of the Star Wars movies. The other resonant feature of L3 is that she literally becomes part of the Falcon, and is as such retconned into the Saga itself as the ‘peculiar dialect’ that always seems to bring bad news to C3PO.

The Leader: Tobias Beckett (and his partner Val). Beckett also doesn’t have much to do beyond driving the plot and be a representation of the mercenary that Solo would become - his Fedora Man - without the redeeming qualities. When Val vainly sacrifices herself to try to help Beckett settle the score to end his indebtedness to the Crimson Dawn crime syndicate, he loses what little remaining connection and trust he had with others (at least, that’s what Beckett would have us believe). The challenge for Han will be not to do the same when Qi’ra walks away from him (or at least, not until he rescues a princess from a hidden fortress). Beckett is a ruthless mentor for the hungry young Han, but his commitment to making sure Han learns his lessons ends up being own weakness, resulting in his ultimate demise as Han catches him monologuing. Truly the student does become the master, with some regret but no hard feelings.(13)

The Competitor: Emphys Nest. Now this is an interesting character. Initially set up as a brutal marauder captain with a proto-Ren mask, it turns out that in fact she is the leader of a group of outcasts dispossessed by the Empire, who are not in the game for the money but for survival - and ultimately, rebellion. I found the the portrayal of the marauders and their motivation a little hard to follow at first, but ultimately far more believable and earned than the ‘resistance kids’ in the ‘Saga’. Also, I love the realism of the idea (reflected in the REBELS series) that there are disparate cells of resistance across the galaxy fighting their own wars against the Empire, who eventually coalesce into the organised Rebel Alliance. The fact that Warwick Davis’s PHANTOM MENACE cameo character Weazel returns as one of Nest’s lieutenants is icing on the cake.

The Heavy: Dryden Vos. I was fully expecting the boss of the Crimson Dawn crime syndicate to be a Hutt, so it was a surprise to see an apparently humanoid villain instead.(14) Vos appears recklessly tyrannical and limitless in his arrogance. It’s hard to believe that he’s effectively just a middle manager, though he alludes to that fact along the way, setting us up for…

The Big Bad: Holy poodoo. Darth F’ing Maul (sorry, simply ‘Maul’ now that he’s ceded the mantle of Sith to the little brat watching him from the fighter cockpit). I could not contain my glee when I saw his horned face reappear. Now this is probably going to be confusing for the casual viewer, because most would have assumed that Maul was dead after Obi-Wan bisected him in PHANTOM MENACE. But those who have had the benefit of watching CLONE WARS and REBELS know that Maul survived and has tangled with our heroes (and even his former master) a number of times, all the while plotting his comeback and revenge against his almost-murderer Kenobi. Along the way, Maul and his brother Savage Oppress took over the alliance of criminal syndicates known as the Shadow Collective (of which Crimson Dawn is one part) and took control of the planet Mandalore (in the process killing Kenobi’s beloved Satine - yes, just like in MOULIN ROUGE). We also have had the benefit of seeing his final rematch with Obi-Wan on Tatooine, possibly one of the most meaningful duels of the saga. So with context, given CLONE WARS and REBELS are technically Canon, it’s unsurprising in a way that Maul would be revealed as the ultimate villain of the piece. Nevertheless, the reveal of seeing this iconic and criminally-underutilised antagonist once again in live action was simply breathtaking. Maul was portrayed by original PHANTOM MENACE actor Ray Park, and voiced by Sam Witwer. I was somewhat disappointment that the amazing Peter Serafinowicz didn’t return to reprise Maul’s voice, but given the substantially greater amount of work Witwer has done for the character since in CLONE WARS and REBELS, it’s fair to say that Witwer is now to Maul as Hamill is to the Joker.

“You look good. A little rough around the edges, but good.”

The rather unsurprising conclusion to all that is that this film has managed to meet and perhaps surpass, the bar I’ve set for what makes a good and enjoyable Star Wars movie.

Simply by virtue of the fact that they aren’t recreating the figurative wheel, Disney seems to do a much better job with these Star Wars anthology movies than the ‘Saga’ they are unnecessarily trying to continue (but in fact are simply rebooting). I really hope they take advantage of the favorable ages of Ewan McGregor and Daniel Logan to tell the Obi Wan and Boba Fett stories that are dying to be told, let alone find a way to bottle a tiny bit of Don Glover brilliance before he becomes bigger than Yeezus and stops acting altogether.(15)

At this stage we know that there will be at least two ‘spin-off’ trilogies, by Rian Johnson (ugh) and the Game of Thrones showrunners (Qi’ra returns?). If each of those manage to continue to follow the trend set by SOLO, and to a lesser extent ROGUE ONE, rather than the tired tropes of the ‘Saga’, then my outlook is optimistic on the future of Star Wars on the silver screen for years to come.  

So for now: I’ll happily go see another Star War.

Notes:

(1) I’d add that despite sketching out a potential back story and cameo for an orphaned young Han Solo adopted by Chewbacca and present at the Battle of Kashyyyk in SITH, Lucas exercised restraint and omitted it from the shooting script. While not begrudging the creator his licence, it appears in hindsight that this was probably a wise move and certainly created an opportunity for this film.

(2) Actually, now that I read that back with decades of hindsight, I can totally relate!

(3) In this case, that line was Solo’s reference to the Falcon making the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs - long maligned as an incorrect reference given that parsecs are units of distance not time, though there have been some novel explanations of how that might still work that were Canon-ised by this film.

(4) Actual narration may be brilliant, please see a theralyst if doubt persists. Speaking of which, I wonder (did someone say WONDER?) which still life image he used as inspiration for this movie?

(5) I feel like the galactic resentment towards droids was signposted a little more effectively indirectly by the prequels, given the years of destruction caused by the Separatists’ droid armies.

(6) Lando set the bar at 20 parsecs, which is way higher than what Han eventually claims he achieved. It makes you wonder about the significance of the “less than” part of the claim. 

(7) It may as well have been “Corellian” or “Corleone”, for that matter.

(8) But let’s not blind ourselves to the fact that that says nothing about whether or not Greedo would have taken a shot too - Greedo already delivered his verbal coup de grace and allowed Han to get a response in before Han shot (back). Han’s mid-monologue blow to Beckett was more along the lines on Indiana Jones’s similar shot against the swordsman in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. As I said before, whether Greedo shot or not changes nothing about Han, who had already been preparing for the shot himself. 

(9) It’s a shame we didn't get an allusion to how Han picked up his stuttering Wookiee language skills or knowledge of their Imperial enslavement - particularly given the fact that the reason probably would have further demonstrated his empathy - hat tip to my friend Justin Scott for that one.

(10) I’ll be honest - as a COMMUNITY fan, it’s always a joy to watch Don Glover cry hysterically.

(11) He can’t seem to avoid deals that get worse all the time!

(12) Technically we did see the Falcon briefly in SITH, but let’s say that Lando has done a bit of a refurbishment since then.

(13) There hasn’t been such an effectively executed succession plan since the soon-to-be Darth Vader got ‘ahead’ of Darth Tyranus.

(14) It appears that the Hutts are being set up as the antagonists for a future Solo movie.

(15) I still vainly hold out hope for #SixSeasonsAndAMovie.

How to dress for your own wedding – the groom’s clothes in the five most popular styles

Do you browse wedding inspirations, see beautiful halls, stunning decorations, phenomenal-looking brides and … men as if stuck in photoshop, in sets that completely do not fit into the atmosphere of the event? The times and the weddings themselves have changed a lot, but still in 90% of cases the appearance of the groom leaves much to be desired. And it does not have to be this way, because modern fashion knows solutions that combine comfort, killer looks and matching the sublime of the occasion. If you are a future groom and you are interested in how to dress for your own wedding, I have good news for you – you’ve come to the right place

The guide published on Serene, presenting wedding guest outfits, has helped over five hundred thousand people so far. Continuing the topic of wedding and wedding inspiration, in today’s article we will present the groom’s outfit suggestions that will allow you to achieve a great effect tailored to the style of the event. We will consider five of the most popular wedding themes at the moment: classic, rustic, boho, vintage / country and glamor styles. I invite you

How to dress for your own wedding – introduction

In this article you will learn, among others:

•          what are the most popular conventions / styles / leitmotifs of weddings in 2019

•          what the groom’s outfit should look like in the following styles: classic, rustic,

boho, vintage / country and glamor

•          is a classic suit the only option available for a modern groom

•          how to match the groom’s outfit to the personality, leitmotif, as well as the rank and nature of the wedding ceremony and reception

•          where to buy things that will let the groom on this special day lethal

How to dress for your own wedding – “classic” style

Most internet dandies when they say “wedding” mean “navy blue suit with pin collar shirt, gray POW checked vest, tie / bow tie, white pocket square and black oxford.” Most of them cannot imagine any other set during their wedding and reception. What’s more, they can criticize giving it up as a deviation from the principles of classic male elegance carved in stone.

Interesting and actually quite funny is the fact that the set … was totally invented by fashion bloggers and has no support in the traditional rules of the wedding dress code!

Formal (read: ensuring the highest level of elegance) daywear is a jacket , i.e. a set consisting of a swallow jacket, a double-breasted, heavily cut vest and artificial trousers (made of striped wool and intended to be worn as part of such an outfit). At a time when the mythical principles of classic male elegance were emerging, no one would even dare to call a suit a formal garment. And what only to recommend it as an outfit suited to one of the most important days in the life of an elegant man.

The jacket as a formal daywear by David Beckham

So how did it happen that this painfully standard suit, though slightly tweaked with accessories, has plowed so much into the collective consciousness that some people are able to play Rattan whenever someone does not want to decide on this outfit?

He has undeniably one important feature that is attractive especially for people who wear a suit from a big bell – it’s very difficult to make a mistake in his case. It’s a bit of a jacket, but adapted to the requirements of modern times. Composed of commonly available elements and maintained in an ultra-safe palette of three base colors. You have to really make sure it doesn’t look at least correct.

The thing about safe choices is that most people will have no problem making them. As a result, by choosing this solution, we have a guarantee that during the wedding and reception we will be dressed almost in the same way as thousands of other brides. Of course, there is nothing objectively wrong with that, but it is worth being aware of it.

The easiest way to make this set more “yours” is to replace the basic accessories with more expressive ones (in color, texture or form) or to choose fewer standard shoes (such as flyers, i.e. the simpler version of oxfords or the recently popular monks).

How to dress for your own wedding – oral style

The rustic style is probably the most popular option if we want to give our event a slightly less standard setting, but we don’t want to overdo it with extravagance. Its popularity should come as no surprise – it is a very graceful, flexible and capacious convention, which allows for a very individual adaptation to the requirements of the young couple.

Briefly speaking, it is about giving the whole a rural character, but without losing the style typical of a wedding ceremony and reception. More than an idyllic, peaceful and cheerful village, it is one that is not afraid to interpret its heritage and go with the times. In a rustic style, nature perfectly blends with culture, often creating a very spectacular whole.

When it comes to stylistic inspiration, it is best to look at what creates a characteristic rural atmosphere – wood, grain, flowers, wood, white and beige canvases, aged metal, wood, glass and even more wood. The first thing that comes to mind in such a situation is a suit made of textured fabric in a palette of browns. Regardless of whether you choose chocolate brown, caramel shades, intense beige or sand color, it will certainly fit well in a rural-inspired setting. The second idea is cool gray, which will combine well with less natural elements of the decor. The third step is to choose a less obvious, more eye-catching color. It may be burgundy (this is my choice in the case of a wedding that will take place next year), emerald green, orange or an interesting shade of blue (except for cobalt, which for some logical reasons conquered men’s fashion a few years ago and, fortunately, is already letting go a bit). In the rustic style, all kinds of patterns that reduce the formality, such as a quite wide spectrum of grids, will also work.

When it comes to accessories, it is worth considering the same palette as mentioned above, and when it comes to fabrics, also do not overdo it with formalities (this means opting for silk grenadine or raw iron, shantung, light wool labor linen). In the case of shoes, we can hit either formally, choosing oxfords or flyers, or not at all, choosing monks, brogues or even derbies.

How to dress for your own wedding – b oho style

Wedding boho style – everyone talks about it, many people consider it, and then hardly anyone decides to use it in practice. This is a convention definitely for those who like to act so that they always get noticed. Or, those who put themselves completely in the hands of their future wives do not have a say on the theme of the wedding and are therefore required to dress appropriately. We have encouraging news for them – you are in the best place and in the best hands

Boho from bohemian, a lifestyle of artistic bohemia from the 19th century, characterized by a free approach to the rules and conventions that governed traditional society. Bohemia is freedom, like unrestrained expression and striving to be different from everyone else. No wonder that when deciding on a boho style ceremony, we can really afford a lot.

The key to the boho style is nonchalance. Nonchalance in approach, behavior and, of course, clothes. Most of the ceremonies in this convention take place in a natural setting (the house is poisoned by the lake, the vicinity of the forest, often the seaside). For this reason, when you enter “boho wedding men attire” in the search engine, you will see a plethora of non-suit sets. And while jeans and a shirt are one step too far, choosing a casual, coordinated set is the best option to maintain a smart-casual balance.

Beige with navy blue, brown with navy blue, brown with beige, gray with blue – such combinations will be perfect for dream catchers, a large number of wild flowers or the ever-present lanterns, candles and cotton balls.

However, if the suit option wins and the wedding takes place in the summer months, then it is worth choosing non-obvious light shades and light fabrics, such as linen or cotton. In turn, in the cool autumn-winter period, deep greens and shades of burgundy will look intriguing. As in the case of the rustic style, clear textures of uniformly colored materials as well as all kinds of gratings will find their way here. A suit can also show a bit more character, but you need to know where to look for such fewer standard options. Fortunately, more and more interesting options appear on the market with the departure from stiff elegance.

In this style, as probably in no other style, accessories are key. Such as straps, chains, a cheeky draped hat, or proudly displayed braces after getting rid of a jacket and throwing yourself into the whirl of dancing until dawn. The hairstyle should not necessarily be perfectly combed, and the styling should be buttoned up. After all, it’s about chic without being too stiff.

How to dress for your own wedding – vintage / country style

Tweed suit for the groom? In the case of a vintage / country wedding, definitely yes, because there is no better way to emphasize its unique setting.

It is also worth mentioning that we are not dealing here with a styling that requires complementing the styling with a hat, lasso and shoes with spurs. The country style refers to the unique character of the British countryside, with all its austerity and typically earthy color palette. Less formal, but still chic. Elegant but with a bit of extra-urban chill.

Courtesy: best banquet halls in Lahore

Truffaut Salutes to Books and What They Represent in Peculiar Sci-Fi

Produced in between of Le peau douce (1964) and La mariée était en noir (1967), Fahrenheit 451 (1966) marked French director François Truffaut’s brief departure into the international territory of non-French cinema. Not only was the film Truffaut’s first film in English but also his first in color. Running the risk further, the film meant a new opening for the production company of Universal, too, since it was their first European production. Given these risky factors at play, it might not be surprising that Fahrenheit 451 was not a success. It did not do particularly well in box office and it was a critical flop. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times wrote a hostile review, concluding that Fahrenheit 451 “is a dull picture -- dully fashioned and dully played -- which is rendered all the more sullen by the dazzling color in which it is photographed.” According to Crowther, Truffaut would be successful only if his intention was “to make literature seem dull and the whole hideous practice of book-burning seem no more shocking than putting a blow-torch to a pile of leaves.” [1] Whether one agrees with Crowther’s critique, emphasizing the failures in acting and the execution of the material, or not is besides the point, because the film could also be criticized for marking Truffaut’s artistic regression in terms of more formal aspects. Although Fahrenheit 451 might in this sense represent the wrong path of traditional film which Truffaut took and which Godard, for one, abandoned, and as such might justifiably be left in peace by some aficionados, it has garnered critical appreciation in later rediscovery. James Monaco has commended its visual style, though he has also felt that the film is unnecessarily dull [2]. Despite being Truffaut’s weakest film of the 60′s, it seems to me that Fahrenheit 451 is at the very least worthy of discussion and has many good elements to its merit which should not be overlooked. 

Based on the 1953 novel of the same name by Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 takes place in the not-so-distant future where firemen do not set out fires but burn books in order to prevent critical thinking. Oskar Werner plays the obedient fireman Montag who never reads the books he burns because they do not interest him in the slightest. As a result of his intellectual indifference, things seem to be going quite well for Montag. A promotion is coming his way and he has a beautiful wife, played by Julie Christie, who is fully content with her life which consists of watching semi-interactive plays on her futuristic flat TV screen. One day, however, an elementary school teacher, Clarisse, also played by Christie in a double role, enters Montag’s life, and she is able to spark a budding interest in Montag for the books he burns. After discovering Dickens, Montag turns into a reclusive bookworm who raises suspicion in his wife who eventually informs Montag to the officials. Becoming an enemy of the state, Montag leaves society with Clarisse as they join a remote tribe of “the book people”, an eccentric group each of whose members have memorized a book and thus have become that book. Their escape is a success, and a living library wanders in sad snowfall in the iconic ending of Truffaut’s film. 

Not your typical science fiction film, Fahrenheit 451 does not unfold in action-packed sequences and it does not have a lot of things going on for its nearly two hours of projection time. Telling of the film’s peculiarity even in the context of Truffaut’s oeuvre is that Truffaut kept a diary of the film’s production (something he did not do for his other films) which was later published by Cahiers du Cinéma. In the diary, Truffaut expresses both his likes and dislikes for the film in question, admitting that “I like the film quite well when I see it in pieces or three reels at a time, but it seems boring to me when I see it end to end.” [3] Prominent New Wave scholar James Monaco agrees, arguing that where Truffaut succeeds in creating a powerful visual aesthetics, he fails in captivating the audience with a dramatic narrative: 

Clear, fresh, and evocative, these images and sounds create a strong mood for the film, as does Herrmann’s music; but the mood can’t carry the full weight of the de-dramatized and de-politicized science fiction. [4]

Monaco’s complaint regarding the “de-politicized” nature of Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 refers to the popular sentiment that science fiction ought to be political. Whether this is the case or not is open for debate, but it seems nonetheless appropriate to take a look at the dystopian society Truffaut portrays in his film. After all, this is why so many people are drawn to science fiction, I believe, since it offers a narrative form to operate utopian contemplation through negation (that is, by portraying dystopian societies) -- from Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to Gilliam’s Brazil (1985). 

If Godard paid little attention to such aspects of the genre in Alphaville (1965) due to his ubiquitous fascination for the formal and meta-narrative elements of cinematic representation, Truffaut would pay even less attention due to his enduring emphasis on the people. Both Godard and Truffaut create their dystopian settings with few cinematic strokes, but Godard’s remains more abstract, whereas Truffaut’s feels (perhaps surprisingly) more real and concrete, even if parodist to an extent. Most diegetic information regarding the dystopian society in Fahrenheit 451 is provided in the background events and details in dialogue -- which, frankly, quite well fits with Truffaut’s overall emphasis. Based on the information, the spectator can deduce that the state of this dystopian world tries to alter history, to eradicate the citizens’ memory, and to manipulate them to believe what it wants them to believe. It is suggested that the state is covering up a war, and in the end we see the state’s successful manipulation of Montag’s TV death for the audience in front of their screens. The characters lack not only a collective memory for their shared history but also their private memories. Montag’s wife, for instance, does not remember when she and Montag first met. Given Truffaut’s intentions, his portrayal of the society is appropriately most interesting in its depiction of humanity. The people lack a connection. They don’t look at each other. They sit in train carts and wait for nothing. They sit in front of their televisions and are captivated by seemingly non-empty images.  They are imprisoned by the images which have taken over the life they no longer remember. They live in the society of the spectacle.

The way I see it, here lies the most intriguing aspect of Truffaut’s portrayal of the dystopian society; that is, the increasing power of the image. At first, it might seem odd to critique the power of the image and praise the power of the word by cinematic means, but it works because the spectator is frightened and caught by the very power of the image. This takes its point of departure from the very beginning since the opening credits of Fahrenheit 451 which are not shown in text but recited out loud (like the closing credits of Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, 1942).  Despite the striking filters of bright color and the quick zoom-ins characterizing the opening credits sequence, the lack of written text is not a mere exercise in 60′s cinematic coolness; rather the opening establishes the Leitmotif of the film, the absence of written text. No where in the film do we see written text (with the obvious exception of the banned books -- and the first time we do as Montag discovers literature is unforgettable). The state only uses numbers and images. Not only has speech overthrown writing but image has overthrown langue, the linguistic system at large. 

Depicting a society where images dominate our lives more than words, Truffaut (and undoubtedly Bradbury as well, though I have not read the novel) was definitely ahead of his time. Truffaut must have experienced the fact that more books were printed in his time than ever before, but perhaps he felt that those books weren’t really cared for, loved, and embraced. Nowadays, in the second decade of the 21st century, the theme feels even more urgent. Books are printed less and less, while old books are being thrown into dumpsters. People read less, and many of those who do seem to prefer listening to online audio books. Thus Truffaut’s attempt to give books their magic back, to make them resemble valuable living things, might even be appreciated more fully today in 2017 than in 1966. There lies deep melancholy in the powerful images where the wind turns the pages of the books before flames coerce the thin pages to curl up in agony. In the 60′s, Truffaut might have meant to salute to literature, but from today’s perspective, he is also saluting to the art of the printed word, to the physical texture of books. 

The reason behind Truffaut’s ode to books is the idea that books represent something, and that something is what Truffaut is saluting to. It is what is sometimes called inner life; yet this requires a specification because the books in Fahrenheit 451 certainly do not denote individual mental life but rather the collective inner life of mankind. Thus it might be better called Geist or the dimension of Lebenswelt which contains the impractical and disinterested (in the sense 18th century aestheticians used the term, the purity of aesthetic desire) aspects of consciousness: emotions, values, beauty, love, theoretical reason. It is important to emphasize the fact that theoretical reason belongs to this dimension as well because Truffaut is not elaborating a conventional emotion versus reason scenario -- unlike one might expect in a story like this -- but rather a narrative reflecting the eternal struggle between the practical and the impractical (the theoretical, the self-deliberate) the latter of which includes emotion and art as well as sciences and philosophy. It is this dimension, which might be better left unnamed, which Truffaut salutes to in his cinematic ode to books. 

Yet Truffaut’s call for the love of books went on deaf ears. Rather than romantic and passionate, Fahrenheit 451 was received as dull and desolate. Crowther writes that 

[N]othing could be more depressing than seeing people ambling through the woods of what looks to be a sort of adult literary camp, mechanically reciting ‘The Pickwick Papers’ and Plato’s ‘Dialogues,’ or seeing a dying man compelling his grandson to recite after him and commit to memory Robert Louis Stevenson’s unfinished ‘Weir of Herminston.’ What a dismal image we have here of the deathless eloquence of literature! [1]

While the ending might be depressing in the sense that it shows the desolate state which humanity is in, I think Crowther fails to appreciate the wider picture. The final images where the characters pass the camera in serene snowfall while reciting the books they have become is supposed to be melancholic. But its melancholy is romantic by nature. It further emphasizes the leading theme of books as organic and living; since the state tries to destroy them, the people try to save them by embodying them. After seeing books burn in agony, we see them live in another form. Truffaut was already establishing this theme in the scene, which ends with one of the highlights of the film, that is, the montage of the burning books at the secret library, where the old lady wants to die with the books. Yet she had not yet “become a book” which is why her death feels less tragic, but she wanted to die “like she lived,” meaning a life with books, the impractical dimension of emotion, art, and theoretical reason. The way I see it, the living books wandering in snowfall is not a depressing sight of idiotic learning by heart but rather a melancholic view of people trying to maintain that dimension in a world which does not see value in it and therefore tries to demolish it. 

The reasons behind the critics’ dismay probably concern the overall execution of the film, however. First of all, since the film was Truffaut’s first in English and he was anything but fluent in the language, the spoken dialogue in the film can have an unnatural stiffness to it. Second, Truffaut did not get along with Werner, and Christie seems to have been a last minute choice to play both the role of the wife and the schoolteacher -- roles which were not supposed to be played by one actor. Third, the film was Truffaut’s first and only science fiction film with whose stylistic and narrative execution he may not have been that familiar. 

Although the first point of criticism seems valid enough, I think the unwieldy delivery of the lines as well as the overall stiffness in the actors’ performances fits with the rest of the picture. If Fahrenheit 451 is really a film which tries to depict a dull-minded society whose inhabitants have lost touch with the Geist, the impractical dimension of Lebenswelt, it seems appropriate to emphasize their absent being. Even if this was not intentional but merely due to Truffaut’s inability to work properly in English, it works in the context of the film. 

Agreement on the second point of criticism seems almost unanimous; in other words, most people agree that Werner and Christie were bad choices for the roles. I will sustain from making argument for either position, but I think the fact that Christie plays a double role is worth discussing briefly. It seems to have been a last minute choice and as such it did not influence the original script. This, however, makes the choice to use the same actress for both roles seem irrational and unfounded only if one agrees with the idea that films can be reduced to the screenplay. If one holds a different position, it seems entirely plausible to argue that Truffaut’s film developed while filming and the use of Christie in a double role influenced it. 

It seems worth noting that I, as a spectator of the film, tend to forget this double role before I sit down to watch it (perhaps writing this down puts an end to that cycle). The same thing has happened with me in watching Luis Buñuel’s Cet obscur objet du désir (1977, That Obscure Object of Desire) where two actors play the same part. Regardless of whether one shares this experience or not, the use of the same performer for two roles seems thus to immediately emphasize and enhance their dualistic fellowship. The wife and the teacher, the obedient believer of the state and the passionate lover of books, are two sides of a coin. In the spirit of Cartesian dualism, one could go as far as claiming that the teacher represents the detached soul of the empty wife whose consciousness has been extracted due to the absence of books and the impractical. On the other hand, the dual presence of the same actress emphasizes the blurriness of individual boundaries in the dystopian society of the spectacle Truffaut portrays; it highlights the impression that the zombie-like people merge into an unidentifiable visual mass under the same, all-mighty image. 

To my mind, the third point of criticism is most interesting. It concerns the genre of science fiction and assumptions about what it should be like. Truffaut’s departure from the genre is evident to some by the lack of technological gadgets and supernatural elements both of which are apparently included in the Bradbury novel. Truffaut’s film is also more de-dramatized than most science fiction in the sense that it moves rather slowly and there is little tension between the ice cold characters. Moreover, it does not come across as political, unlike many of Bradbury’s novels as well as other dystopian narratives. Monaco seems to rely on basically these genre assumptions in his critique of the film: 

[T]he very nature of science fiction as a genre, as opposed to the drama of adultery or the revenge play, is just that it provides the novelist or filmmaker with a structure akin to parable and fable so that he can speak of grand themes convincingly. By muting that aspect of Fahrenheit 451 Truffaut made it almost impossible for the film to succeed with audiences. (...) When Fahrenheit 451 is compared with Jean-Luc Godard’s venture into science fiction, Alphaville, made a year previously, it becomes even more apparent that what is missing in Truffaut’s try at the genre is some sense of active resistance to the dismal, suffocating existence it postulates. Bradbury’s original novel, like Godard’s Alphaville, is deeply rooted in politics; Truffaut’s film ignores them. [5]

Monaco rests on the same argument when he agrees with Crowther that Truffaut fails to induce passion for books in the brief and weak ending where Clarisse and Montag “are still spaced-out, passive children of the TV-stoned generation they think they have escaped. They have advanced from narcissism to idolatry, no further” [6]. 

I think Monaco’s criticism relies a little too heavily on the presupposition that science fiction should be dramatic and political. Since Fahrenheit 451 is science fiction, but it is not dramatic and political, it fails this normative command and, according to Monaco, is therefore a bad film. Although this is a formally valid argument, I don’t think the normative premise is necessarily true. It would be the same thing to argue that war films should have dramatic war sequences, and because Jean Renoir’s La grande illusion (1937), which is a war film, does not, it is a bad film. For another example, I don’t think another French New Wave film, which also represents science fiction, is that dramatic or political either, which is Alain Resnais’ Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968). Its power stems from somewhere else. I think Monaco is essentially guilty of the same naivety as Crowther both of whom try to explain their disapproval of Fahrenheit 451 by referring to conventional notions of what narrative film should be. After all, Truffaut’s genre films of the 60′s from Tirez sur le pianiste (1960, Shoot the Pianist) onward were not about trying to make classic genre films but precisely about “exploding the genres,” as Monaco himself puts it in one of his apt chapter titles. In this sense, it seems a little silly to evaluate the film by comparing it to the traditional formulas of the genres.

The way I see it, a much better strategy in arguing against Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 would be to say that it does not go far enough into the direction of “exploding the genres,” stylizing its aesthetics, and utilizing de-dramatization in spite of trying to do that by challenging classical conventions of the genre. Although I tend to lean toward such an evaluation, as I feel that Fahrenheit 451 is among Truffaut’s lesser works of the 60′s, the development of the argument goes beyond the scope of this post. In order to suggest such an evaluation properly, however, it might be beneficial to take a brief look at Truffaut’s modern style in the film before concluding because that is, I believe, where the biggest merits of Fahrenheit 451 lie. 

Even if Fahrenheit 451 had a fairly classical structure in terms of narrative, Truffaut gives the film a taste that is totally unique and Truffautesque. The stark and dismal mise-en-scène, in perfect harmony with the intellectual state of the society, leaves a lasting impression with the bright, red firetrucks against the gray autumn environment, the black fascist uniforms of the firemen, the shocking 60′s decor, and, of course, the aforementioned stiff acting which emphasizes the characters’ absent presence in the sullen space. In the ascetic sound world, Bernard Herrmann’s classical and minimal score breathes an air of strangeness into a world it never seems to have known. 

In the spirit of 60′s nouvelle vague, Truffaut uses a lot of jump cuts to distort temporal organization but also more classical dissolves which are, however, modernized by occasional fade-outs laden with bright colors. One example of the peculiarity -- and the difficulty in grasping the film as a consistent whole -- of Truffaut’s style is the surprising change in the film’s aspect ratio when the image of 1.66:1 is briefly cut in half as the firemen investigate a playground. The purpose seems obvious: it guides the spectator’s gaze in a quasi-Hitchcockian fashion, taking away the freedom whose importance Bazin always emphasized with regards to observing the space. A more common way of doing this is the iris device which has echoes to the silent era, and Truffaut also uses the iris once in the film. Although these cinematic means are used ever so sparingly in Fahrenheit 451, they do suggest how Truffaut is constantly controlling our gaze just as the state is the illiterate minds of its people -- another great example without any particular device besides extreme close-ups is the scene where Montag discovers literature for the first time with Dickens as his guide. 

Like the juxtaposition of jump cuts with dissolves, Truffaut also uses both long and short takes. There is the single shot which covers the scene of Montag and Clarisse walking from the train to their homes next to each other, but some scenes are, conversely, executed as intense montages of close-ups when, for example, the fire station has an alert before the destruction of the secret library. The movement of the camera in both examples is slow and calm, but Truffaut’s camera is also wild and playful in zooming and panning rapidly. 

As these means are combined with not only a classical structure but also more classical means (such as establishing shots and shot-reverse shot sequences), Truffaut’s contradictory style gives Fahrenheit 451 a peculiar, disorienting tone. This tone might explain why some dislike the film so heavily, but also why we keep coming back to it. I would call the tone naivistic because it feels playful and simple. The juxtapositions are done for the sake of beauty -- for the impractical dimension. The naivistic tone also fits well with the childlike characters of the film from the obedient and illiterate citizens to the overly idealistic book people. This is, of course, not to look down at the film but to appreciate its fable-like quality. There is something wonderfully naive about the film’s aesthetics. The playful surprise of the cinematic means used thus articulates the integral theme of creativity which reaches from art and love to science and philosophy. 

Despite a tragic topic of intellectual apocalypse, this tone gives Fahrenheit 451 not only an optimistic but also a strangely lightweight mood. The original material would no doubt provide a framework for a big and melodramatic spectacle, but Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 feels as intimate as Truffaut’s closed chamber dramas of few characters and milieus. Truffaut is asking great questions, but those questions are presented in a circle formed by a handful of people. The sad snowfall of the end culminates this simplicity and further romanticizes Truffaut’s wonderfully naive universe which praises man’s will to preserve that which has no apparent usage. 

Notes:

[1] Crowther 1966.

[2] Monaco 1974/2004, p. 71. 

[3] Quoted in Monaco 1974/2004, p. 69. 

[4] Monaco 1974/2004, p. 71. 

[5] Ibid. p. 70. 

[6] Ibid. p. 71. 

References:

Crowther, Bosley. 1966. “'Fahrenheit 451' Makes Burning Issue Dull:Truffaut's First Film in English Opens Plaza Picture Presents Dual Julie Christie”. In New York Times, November 16th, 1966. 

Monaco, James. 1974/2004. The New Wave. 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Harbor. 

Homestuck Volume 10, One Year Later Retrospective!

Creata, by Seth “Beatfox” Peele: A very very good track to begin the last album. It just kind of embodies everything beautiful and epic about the finale of homestuck. Its beginning section is used in Collide, which brings you right into the first moments of the final battle and then, when you’re ready for the big hit and transition into Oppa Toby Style, the full version slams you with a full-out orchestra. Another thing I really really love about this one is its use of Song of Skaia. The original theme (Skies of Skaia) is used throughout the album, which I didn’t expect to be sure, but it works perfectly. We kind of forget about how important Skaia and universe creation is to the plot/lore of homestuck (which I think may have been one of the problems with Act 7 and our reactions to it but I won’t get into that).The lyrics are gorgeous too. Definitely check out the original Song of Skaia album by Mark Hadley and Tarien Ainuvë. I guess my only gripe is that the song is pretty obviously not a live orchestra or choir. That said, Beatfox did a damn good job with it. I would love love love to see a full orchestra/choir perform it.

Train, by George Buzinkai: The transition from Creata to Train may seem a bit jarring, but if Creata went straight into Of Gods and Witches we wouldn’t have time to relax. Train is just super fun, as are all of George’s songs. Speaking of, check out a bunch more songs like Train here! Also that track art tho. Not one of the strong tracks, but it doesn’t have to be with so many heavy-hitters.

Of Gods and Witches, by Tensei: Oh man, just. Goddamn. I just love this song so much. And what a beginning. The string part slams you full force and just when you think you’re getting comfortable with Jade's Pirates of the Caribbean Quest, Tensei’s classic guitar comes in. The swashbuckling nature of this one is a surprising choice for Jade, but every Jade song is a good Jade song and she definitely deserves such an awesome track. One gripe is that Doctor is referenced which has no connection to Jade but...whatevs I’m kind of weirdly obsessive about leitmotifs for whatever reason. I think Tensei said he did it to make the song 4:13. Worth it. This is one of my favorite strife-y tracks in the music canon for sure.

Beatup, by Clark Powell and Astro Kid: Beatdown is a song with a very interesting history in homestuck, not only because of its associations with Bro and his rooftop...ahem...training of Dave, but also because it was unfinished versions of Beatdown which caused the whole Bill Bolin thing. So Beatdown being featured so heavily on the album is a fun callback to the good ol’ days. And this is such a good version. That base. Makes you want to play it as party music or something. With the track art featuring both Dave and Dirk, I like to think of it as Dave’s reclamation of Beatdown, alongside his rooftop talk with Dirk and the reclamation of his identity since Bro’s death.

You Killed My Father (Prepare to Die), by Team Dogfight: Another one of my faves, though that doesn’t mean much because at least half this album are faves. This is pretty much number one on my list of songs I really want someone to do a full fan animation to, a la Rex Duodecim Angelus. Team Dogfight is amazing both as a group and as individual artists. Yishan Mai/Catboss (drums, mixing) has done tons of LOFAM music, including the Dance tribute songs (MeGaDanceVania, Dance-Stab-Dance, and Emissary of Dance) and so many others I can’t list them all. Listen to his solo stuff (especially Jar of Feelings), you won’t regret it. Will Ascenzo (orchestra, choir) has got to be one of my favorite musicians of all time. Her stuff is just...oh man. Check out Rust Apocalypse for more hs content, and also all of her original albums. DJ最テー (guitars) did Violet Prince and Iron Knight I believe, two tracks which have very much been growing on me lately. I just realized viaSatellite (bass) did Clockstopper (with infiniteKnife) which is my absolute favorite Dave song in the entire canon. David "Dirtiest" Dycus (synths, composition) and Ian White (trumpet) have also done tons of great LOFAM stuff. This song is just so fun and epic and cinematic. A+ yo.

Sound Judgement, by Malcolm Brown: First off, sick transition. Second, say what you want about the end of Terezi’s arc, but the fact that she got her own badass song on the final album says something about how amazing she is. Malcolm Brown is just the king of cinematic pieces, and this one is no exception. It does such a good job turning a pretty simple leitmotif (The Lemonsnout Turnabout/Terezi’s Theme) and making it super epic, which is a word I will keep using throughout this retrospective because I can’t think of another one. The main tune (hook?) of this one is also beautiful and emotional, both as the bells at the beginning and end and as the orchestra/guitar bit at the climax. Its use of Harlequin is obviously a reference to her fight with Gamzee pre-Game Over, though Harlequin is coincidentally also used in reference to John. So it fits both her pre- and post-Game Over arcs. 

Aggrievocation, by Mark Hadley: Considering how much it was used in Volume 5, I feel like we’ve forgotten about Aggrieve. Or maybe it was just me, whose intro to Rose’s music was almost all Chorale for Jaspers references. Aggrievocation was therefore another unexpected surprise, and damn I love it. It makes a nice little trilogy, too, with the original Aggrieve and Aggrievance from Vol.5. This would be my favorite badass Rose song if At the Price of Oblivion and Dance of Thorns didn’t exist

Stride, by Kalibration: I’m surprised neither official nor fan musicians have capitalized on the fact that Dave makes his own music in-canon. While we all know if he were from post-2009, he would deal exclusively in vaporwave, I like to think that Stride is the kind of thing he makes once he finally gets good. And considering the track art, I love the idea of him and Dirk making it together. This song exists in canon for all I’m concerned is what I’m saying. Also, this would make a great walk-around theme for either Dave or Dirk. This is the first of two great Moonsetter remixes on Vol.10, which is yet another happy surprise on this album. Moonsetter seems to have become a kind of hybrid Dirk/Meteor tune considering its original track art on Vol.9 and its use in Vriskagram. But we all know that Moonsetter is the official Gay theme now and I embrace that wholeheartedly. I...still have no idea where Showdown actually comes in though?

Skaian Overdrive*, by Thomas Ferkol: Ah, that good ol’ asterisk. Legend says that the music team video released in tandem with the album claimed Vol.10 included a track called Skaian Starstorm, which someone eventually realized was not the name of this track and was in fact an Astro Kid song from LOFAM 2. In correcting himself, Thomas (or whoever put it together, so probably RJ) placed the asterisk in the song title, which of course means that it is included as part of the title on the bandcamp page and on downloadeds. Who can say for sure if it was intentional or not, but I appreciate that we’ve all just accepted it as part of the title, either as a wink-wink or without knowing the backstory. Anyway, this is a great song for the Battlefield. I love Thomas’s metal stuff.

Freefall, by RJ Lake: It took me embarrassingly long to realize this was, in fact, a remix of RJ’s early version of Cascade (Beta). Cascade (Beta) itself has got to be one of my absolute favorites (which, again, doesn’t mean a whole lot) and this version is so much fun. It’s funky, epic, and I really really love those drop/clap bits. And it’s so great seeing a Cascade remix on the final hs album, harkening back to what was probably, for good or bad, homestuck’s apex.

Moonsweater, by David Ellis, Alto and Tenor Saxophone performed by Malik Refaat: My roommate is a jazz snob from New Orleans and he heard me playing this and came over to my side of the room to say it was really good and ask who it was by. Which, I think, is a major victory for homestuck music and a moment of pride for me. So apparently this is a great song even by jazz snob standards, which is sick as hell. Overall, just a fun bouncy song and another cool use of Moonsetter. And it’s nice to see the Midnight Crew featured on the album, whether they have anything to do with the song’s origins or not. Yeah the song is a bit long, but I can forgive it. Question though: is it sweater like sweat or sweater like the item of clothing? Plz advise. One is significantly weirder than the other and I assumed it was that one until recently. Another mystery which doesn’t need solving but heck if I’m not gonna try and solve it anyway, so nice work.

Castle, by George Buzinkai: Another fun, simple track from George. Again, check out his album of similar stuff I linked to above, and support George with your money and appreciation! The track art makes me think of this one as a song for the post-retcon Meteor Crew sneaking through Derse to save Jake and Roxy.

Skaian Happy Flight, by Seth “Beatfox” Peele: A fun remix of Skaian Ride, harkening back to the old days of Vol.5. A bit of a filler piece, but a fun one. Beatfox said he intended this one as a tribute to the music from the Never Ending Story. As such, notice the little Hussie riding Falcor in the background of the track art.

Voidlight, by Thomas Ferkol: Mmmm the more Calliope tracks the better. Thomas said this one was written as a tribute to Callie’s void bubble and her loneliness hiding in them which, yeah it works perfectly. I also like to think of this one as a theme for Alt-Calliope too, though, not only because I am starved of Alt-Callie Content, but also because those themes of loneliness Callie experiences in the void are mirrored really poignantly in Alt-Calliope’s characterization in-comic. A beautiful piece overall.

Beatdown DX, by Curt Blakeslee: As I mentioned earlier for Beatup, it’s neat seeing Beatdown come back full force on this album. Especially this one, which is a straight-up remaster of the original by its original creator. It’s awesome, especially considering that I don’t think he’s done anything else for the comic since the original Beatdowns from way back when. The original is purposefully harsh to reflect...yeah...but this one finally puts it to its full potential. The amazing track art (brought to you by the creator of Terepy herself) really drives the point home about what Beatdown represents for Dave’s character. I like to think of this one as how Bro sees the song/rooftop battles. Heroic, clean, fun, badass, classic video-game style. And we see from the art that what Bro is doing is none of those, and the original reflects Dave’s perspective on what was going on: harsh, dissonant, aggressive, violent. I do wish that this was included before Beatup on the album, since it represents the exact thing Dave reclaims with that version, as I mentioned earlier.

Solar Voyage, by Marcy Nabors: Oh man. This song. This song is such a great tribute to some of the most iconic songs in homestuck. Starts out with a pretty much one-to-one rendition of Ruins, then hits that sick-ass drop and flare beat, then that guitar. Oh man, that guitar. I wish I could make people feel the way that guitar makes me feel. And then to top it all off, another tribute to the iconic Explore. Three classics which work beautifully together. Also this one is a collaboration from pretty much everyone: Arrangement by Michael Guy Bowman, Marcy Nabors, Clark Powell, and Erik Scheele , Piano by Erik Scheele, Guitar by Tensei, Vocals by Paul Henderson and Marcy Nabors, Drums by Jamie Paige Stanley. The whole gang. And then that transition to.......

Feel (Alive), by Luke Benjamins and RJ Lake: This fucking song, I swear to god. It gets me so pumped. Every single time I listen to it I bounce along. I usually prefer songs with leitmotifs for added Emotions, but this has got to be one my top completely original pieces in the music canon. It goes so hard, it doesn’t even need a subject. The track art makes it a Meteor Crew (plus Jade) tribute, though, so I like to think of it playing as the Meteor is hurtling towards the Alpha session and their imminent doom, with everyone having lived three years of emotional turmoil and pubescence. Truly a masterpiece.

Breeze, by Erik Scheele: Yeah it’s a bit of a filler piece, but it’s a classy filler piece. I just imagine John chilling up in the clouds, free and relaxed. Maybe he packed a lunch for a little sky picnic. I don’t think it was written with John in mind but it’s called Breeze, so I dub it a John piece, so there. And then a tantalizing transition into...

Starfall, by Jeremy “Solatrus” Iamurri: I know we all thought of this one as just a little transition piece into Ascend originally, but after listening to it over the course of a year (!) I’ve grown to really love it. Solatrus has some amazing and unique stuff and out of everything he’s done, including solo albums, this is probably my favorite. I still can’t quite place exactly why I love it so much, there’s just...something about it that’s beautiful and ethereal and just really really cool. I like that the artist decided to go with a tribute to both Rose and the Reckoning for this piece, as it really works for both of them for similar reasons as above. It’s another one that transcends a subject, though, and I am a-okay with that. And then that transition into...

Ascend, by Tensei: No final album is complete without a big tribute to some of homestuck’s most classic tunes. I am such a sucker for those kind of songs and this one is just so much fun. That base drop though. That’s a good base drop. I can never help but laugh, however, at Tensei attempting to use it to make Johnradia canon which...a) is a boring ship b) the art doesn’t even suggest they’re romancey it just gives cool feelings about badass god tiers extending a hand to those who have Ascended and c) the song was, of course, used in the Credits and constitutes our current, but probably final let’s be serious Last Music in Homestuck, and the only ship we associate with it now is Rosemary getting Rosemarried which I think is a very poetic backfire for Tensei. But credit where credit is due, Tensei is still one of my favorite artists and he really delivers a super fun tribute to everything homestuck. 

Lilith in Starlight, by Malcolm Brown: Yeah, there isn’t really anything about this one that hasn’t been said a bunch of times. It’s so great having a full song dedicated to Rosemary. Including Blind Justice Investigation (I am not typing that out in Terezi’s quirk), Do You Remem8er Me, Black Rose/Green Sun, Sound Judgement, and others, it truly makes Malcolm Brown the musician king of gay homestuck ships. Yay Malcolm. But seriously, this is a beautiful piece. Gorgeous references to Rose’s and Kanaya’s themes (have I mentioned how much I love Black/Rose Green Sun? I really love Black Rose/Green Sun), and a fun, dancey rhythm which always makes me think of it as Rose and Kanaya’s wedding dance number. Imagine them spinning each other around as everyone claps and oohs and aahs. Good content.

Thanks for Playing, by Max Wright: Ya know, I never give this one the credit it deserves. This is a beautiful piece of music and combined with the track art, it really hammers in the emotions of the end of homestuck. There they all are, staring into the distance as the universe they’ve just created comes into being. Emotions. I really need to appreciate this song more.

Renewed Return, by Marcy Nabors: Man, who knew Warhammer of Zillyhoo could make me so emotional. This might be my current favorite on the album, though that changes monthly tbh. Especially since this is a real live orchestra and choir! I love that!!! It includes some great overlooked pieces like Calamity and Revered Return, too. Man I’m getting tired. But this is such a great song, and kind of the emotional climax of the album for me. Whether it has much to do with Jane or not, it’s just another great song for the end of homestuck and all the emotions that entails. And this has got to be one of my favorite renditions of Doctor. Rereading the lyrics, it really does seem like they were written for Jane and her resurrection powers actually. Resurrection is a theme throughout the comic in multiple forms, and paying tribute to that through Jane is so great, even regardless of her unacceptable lack of songs.

THIS Pumpkin, by Alexander Rosetti: And topping off the list of surprising returns of old songs, here we have a full-on orchestration of Pumpkin Cravings of all things. The original is such a fun little tune, and not one you would expect to work so well with an orchestra. Alexander Rosetti said the style was very much a tribute to Danny Elfman, which yeah I totally see (hear) that. It’s also great seeing a piece for Problem Sleuth on the last album for the media masterpiece it directly lead to. And finally...

Conclude, by Seth “Beatfox” Peele: It’s interesting that rather than go with a big epic finale, the album takes a softer route. It starts out as a more soothing Creata, then hits you (me) right in the emotional soft spot that is Showtime (Piano Refrain). The first track of the comic, featured in the last track of the last album. And then of course there’s no forgetting Homestuck Anthem. When not focusing on the piece, it can be a bit boring honestly. But when actually listening to it, it really is gorgeous. Kinda reminds me of John Williams’ Star Wars stuff actually, now that I think about it. An excellent finale of a finale of a finale.

There you have it, Vol.10 One Year and Several Hours Later. This took a really long time. Plz appreciate my hard work and the lack of sufficient sleep I am getting tonight.

I’m gonna ramble about Ganon(dorf) for a bit

Proceed if you’re interested (I wrote a lot)

Okay so I don’t even know how to start this, I’ll just go.

(note that I’ll mention the timeline in this, please dont think that I dont know that the timeline could be changed at any moment should nintendo feel ike it, I just like semi-going by currently established canon. Also please note that I got no problem with people who dont feel like following the timeline for any reason, to each their own.)

I kinda really like the fact that Ganondorf is said to be a reincarnation of Demise, because, idk, somehow the idea of powerful demons needing to reincarnate into human form for some reason, and then once they have this form and live that life they start having human feelings and emotions and start struggling with what they want to be and maybe end up becoming good guys, is just somethign I really enjoy.

(If that sounds weirdly specific, Great Demon King Piccolo from Dragonball is one character with that kinda arc that I love.)

And then of course, one of the most interesting things about Ganondorf, imo, is how in the three different timeline branches, you got one incarnation of Ganondorf who turns out very different in each branch.

Something I always like is to just kinda, look at the different “last words” Ganondorf has in each timeline branch, and what they really mean for each of them:

"The wind... it is... blowing."

“I am the Evil King, Ganon...”

“The history of light and shadow will be written in blood!”

(though this gets a bit muddled in the Downfall Timeline, as technically Ganon died in ALttP, but was revived in OoX,´, which I see as his true death for now, but then again we dunno if any Ganons after that where him revived or reborn so *shrug*)

But first we should talk about the guy that “grows up” to be these other three.

I mean, personally I think no matter how you look at it, OoT!Ganondorf did lots of bad stuff, and wasnt a good ruler to the Gerudo (I dont mind different interpretations at all though), but I do think his initial intentions were good like we hear him talk about in WW, but lets not get ahead of ourselves here.

OoT!Ganondorf doesn’t really end up helping the Gerudo once he actually takes over Hyrule (all the Gerudo are still over in the desert, cept for maybe Iron Knuckles) and its heavily implied all the Gerudo were brainwashed to some extent (The carpenters note that the Gerudo seem nicer, post-Twinrova’s defeat), and Nabooru, who was very respected among the Gerudo, was explicitly against Ganondorf, but then brainwashed into submission.

Like even if you think Twinrova did all that without him knowing, not noticing your parents brainwashing your people doesnt exactly make you a good leader.

Adding to that, if A Link to the Past’s backstory is to be believed (and the timeline is not said to split until Link falls in the final battle) then, Ganondorf entered the hiding place of the Triforce alongside fellow thieves of his, and ended up killing them all so he could have the Triforce for himself.

Buuut before you think I’m just gonna talk about how bad OoT!Ganondorf is, like, I still think he genuinely wanted to help his people (at first) and that everything WW!Ganondorf says does represent his true feelings, and that at some point, he just really wanted to do something good.

I think its interesting to think about why that presumably changed for a while, wether you think its the usual getting mad with power, getting to close to the “dark side” or whatever with all the dark magic going on, or being groomed into this role by Twinrova, or all of that, or something else entirely.

I mean, he definitely did some bad stuff before that too, but in the context of Ganondorf being a reincarnation of Demise, I wonder if it could be possible that either seeing Link and/or Zelda or laying eyes on the Triforce ended up having some effect on him, like awakening some part of Demise within him so to speak, contributing to him losing sight of his initial goals and getting more about power in general.

Notably post timeskip Ganondorf seems to use a lot more monsters/dmemons to do his bidding than before, but this could easily just be the difficulty spike for the player.

Idk if this sounds cheap to people somehow, but I remember a popular theory being that the Triforce of Power turned him evil so, its not that different imo.

Of course, in the final battle we see OoT!Ganondorf become Ganon, presumably for the very first time, but honestly? The transformation itself isn’t that important to me, as it just feels like a visual representation of the downfall Ganondorf had undergone already anyway.

And then, when he is defeated, he infamously curses Link, and ZELDA, and THE SAGES, vowing to kill their descendants once he breaks free from the seal and all...

...which leads into who is everyone’s favorite Ganondorf, and rightfully so, WW!Ganondorf.

Before going into the present day of WW, there is its backstory, which is very interesting to me, cause you just gotta think, how do we go from a guy like OoT!Ganon to WW!Ganon?

At some point after OoT but before WW, Ganondorf’s threat became reality, he broke out of the seal and tried taking over Hyrule once more.

But I cant help but wonder how it mustve felt for him. I picture him for years, decades, centuries maybe, sealed away, picturing his revenge, imagining how great it’ll feel to get free and eradicate the descendants of Link and Zelda, and finally making Hyrule his.

But when he was freed, he likely found a Hyrule that was different from how he remembered it. Notably, there would be no hero, nor descendants of his for him to exact revenge upon. And while we know that a princess seems to have had existed at the time, who knows if she was “a Zelda”, if you wanna call them that.

I just imagine it wouldve felt a lot less satisfying that he imagined, heck, probably wouldve felt more like he was robbed if his chance to take revenge.

And who knows what even happened to the Gerudo by that point? I know lack of them in Wind Waker doesnt mean they are extinct, but for all we know they couldve left hyrule altogether? (Like they seem to have done between OoT and TP, and mightve done post OoT in the Downfall timeline, if you dont think they went extinct)

Overall I could see what Ganondorf mightve pictured/wanted to be his most glorious moment, his long awaited return, mightve just ended up feeling kinda empty.

Not that I think he wouldve done a complete 180 already because of that, but I could see it leaving him in a bit of a shock.

Adding to that, now just as he is about to conquer Hyrule for real, the gods decide to destroy it, essentially. Or at least, thats how Ganondorf felt about the situation, given how he speaks of it in the game. Its like the gods are playing with him, everytime Hyrule is just within his graps, they take it from him.

The flood mustve felt especially terrible for him, cause the way he saw it, it mustve been something like the goddesses saying “we’d rather just end hyrule and kill all its people than have you be its ruler”. What a slap in the face, to put it lightly.

After that, getting sealed away again, and all the stuff I mentioned above, probably gave him time and opportunity to reflect upon his life so far, and the future too.

I dont think that in WW, Ganondorf was just “going through the motions”, and just trying to finish what he started because he had no choice at this point. I do think he still genuinely wanted to try and conquer Hyrule, its just that he has had some time to think about it, a bit more about why he wanted it, and about what he did wrong before, and regretting those mistakes.

Like for example, he really doesnt seem like he wants to harm Link and Zelda anymore, if he can help it. He could be hating them, still furious for what happened during OoT, but he doesnt seem to be.

One of these days I wanna talk about all the contrasts and parallels WW seems to draw to Zelda games that came before it, especially OoT, but for this bit I just wanna mention this one thing.

How in OoT you confront Ganondorf, who smugly plays his leitmotif on the organ, the sound of which growing louder the further you approach his chamber. His back pointed at the entrance which he knows the hero will emerge from. Zelda, encase in a crytal, hangs above him like a trophy, like the hero bait she is to him at this point.

And then in WW, his leitmotif plays in his final dungeon, but actually grow more quiet the closer you get to him. That already makes you feel like, while it invokes OoTs atmoosphere, it actually turns it on its head. And then, when you do cofront him, “Zelda” is instead peacefully sleeping in a bed, (presumably Ganondorfs bed?) with him calmly sitting by her side, watching over her. He doesn’t face Link directly as he enters, but isnt completely turned away from his either.

Of course this scene still has some creepy atmosphere to it, especially when he starts reading her mind, but maaaan, the contrast to OoT (and games that came before it) just GETS ME everytime I just think about it.

Ahhh, I could go on and on like, you all know this stuff, you all thought about him in this game so much, didnt you?

I really hope nintendo will choose to give another Ganondorf this kinda depth, and maybe even just play with the idea of Ganondorf taking on a different role than “final boss” in a Zelda title. I would love that.

Now, let’s turn the clock wayyy back to when Ganon fought Link, and talk about the timeline that occurs when Link is actually killed by him.

To me, this is kinda of the “original” timeline, for various reasons, but I don’t wanna distract from our main man here too long.

In this version of the events, Ganon manages to actually aquire the full Triforce in the final battle of OoT, and causes quite a bit of misery before the Sages finally manage to seal him away in this version, too. But because he is so powerful with the Triforce and all that, it ends up costing a lot more lives to finally get to that point.

Now from that point on, this Ganon seems to just kinda rule the Dark World, a twisted “evil” version of Hyrule of his own creation. And of course most notably, either because of this worlds properties, or his general state of being, this Ganon seemingly always stays in beast form from that point on.

Sadly this one doesnt talk too much (though he is very much capable of doing so), so we dont get much of a grasp on his character.

To me, ALttP!Ganon feels like somewhere in the middle when it comes to Ganons. Despite his bestial appearance, he doesnt seem as blind with power and rage as TP!Ganondorf, maybe cause he doesnt call himself a god or something. But he of course is nowhere near WW!Ganondorf in terms of reasons and having reflecting upon his past.

Either way, it is clear that he is not happy with just ruling his very own personal Hyrule, filled with damned people that have become monsters like him, as in ALttP he does attempt to break his seal and go back to the World of Light

This might just be out of greed, but you could also imagine he might simply be unhappy in this demonic world, or even scared? Given how we see that some inhabitants of this land lose their humanity to such an extent that they’re turning into things like trees, maybe even completely losing their sense of self?

One of the more curious things about ALttP!Ganon is his relationship to Agahnim. No one is entirely sure what they are to one another.

In some of the mangas, Agahnim is portrayed as a human who gets possessed or turned by Ganon in some shape or form, and this portrayal is popular from what I’ve seen.

But in the actual game, Agahnim is described as being Ganon’s alter-ego. The term used in the japanese version is “bunshin”, which can mean a lot of things, including alter-ego or even reincarnation, but in the context of the Zelda franchise, there is another part in the series where it is used. In Phantom Hourglass, Oshus is described as being the “bunshin” of the Ocean King. So, if we assume Agahnim works the same way, his consiusness would have to be exactly Ganon’s, right? Of course that doesn’t mean other interpretations can’t exist, I myself am not even sure what to think.

The usage of the word bunshin does imply that to some extent, Agahnim literally was a part, or offshot of Ganon. So froma  certain point of view, we could add his character to Ganons, if we wanted to.

Something that intrigues me though is that in the Downfall Timeline, we never see Ganon in human form again. Could this be related to Agahnim? Maybe not exactly literally but symbolIcally?

Did Ganon split the humanity he had left off of himself, because that was the only part of him that could exit the Dark World before the seal was lifted?

If so, did Agahnim dying have any effect on him? Or did whatever Agahnim was in the end just return to him?

So much to think about here, ahh.

Of cours, ALttP!Ganon then gets killed by Link in their battle. Not sealed away, just flat out killed.

Normally this would probably be the end, but of course OoX happened, in which Twinrova tried to revive him, but didnt quite succeed.

Ganon is revived as a seemingly mindless beast, only actualy talking in his final moments, which is the quote from earlier.

In the japanese version, this quote is written entirely in katakana, which can indicate that its pronounced weirdly somehow, in cases like this likely because he had a hard time forming the words at all.

He also refers to himself as a Demon King in japanese, but that term hadn’t caught on in the english versions of the games yet.

Okay so, as I kinda mentioned above, this Ganon’s story gets a bit muddled from this point on.

Sometime after ALttP, but before ALbW, ALbW’s backstory (which is not ALttP) occurs, during which a hero fights a Ganon, who is then sealed away by him, the princess and the sages, but we dont know if this Ganon is the same, just revived again, or an entirely new incarnation.

But you could argue that it hardly matters, cause he barely does anything in the game, essentially acting as a power boost for Yuga...

However, there is a theory that he might do more than that actually.

So, according to this theory, Yuga actually was completely loyal to Hilda, and its only by fusing with Ganon that he starts wanting to betray, due to Ganons influence. The theory is nice in the sense that it makes Yuga more of an opposite of Ganon than he seems if you take the game at face value, and gives Ganon more to do. Depending on your interpretation, Yuga might just be influenced by Ganon, or they literally fuse into a being that is just as much Ganon as it is Yuga.

But of course that is just a minor theory, and you dont have to like it, naturally.

After that we get HF and AoL!Ganon, who is said to be more of a mindless beast as this point, no trace left of the human he used to be.

A rather sad fate.

Again it is unclear if this is the same Ganon, revived yet again, or maybe (anotehr) reincarnation.

But if its the former, you can only assume that, even if you dont think Agahnim dying had any effect on Ganon, just forcing him to ressurect over and over instead of letting him reincarnate properly, must’ve done quite the number on Ganon.

Somehow thinking about this version of Ganon in particular makes me think about the cursed boars in Princess Mononoke, who where lost to their anger. Especially the moment when the Wolf faces the Old Boar, who we have seen slowly lose his self at this point, and she almost pitifully says “Can’t you even speak anymore?” to him.

It almost feels like Downfall Timeline!Ganon is cursed by fate, in a sense. Not really in-universe either, but out of universe too!

History is already written (the first two games are already out) and thus Ganon has to follow the path that is already set for him, become what he will be in the future (what he is in the first two games), a frightening monster that terrorizes this kingdom of Hyrule for the sake of power, with no humanity in him (him having been human wasnt part of his character at the time the first two games where released)

I wonder if the demons failing to get Links blood in 2 will mark the end of this Ganon? (I hope not)

It was kinda nice to see BotW seemingly do somewhat of a modern take on this kinda idea of Ganon, something that has become little more than destruction of Hyrule in pyhsical form. I could see people place BotW as post- AoL for that reason, even.

And well, rolling back time yet again, we go to the last way OoT!Ganondorf turned out, which is TP!Ganondorf...

....who, compared to the others, actually has a bit more of a complicated “set-up” that kickstarts his character.

When Link gets send back in time at the end of OoT, his Tiforce of Courage breaks apart into the pieces we find in WW, presumably because Link was literally removed from that reality as he possessed it?

Then upon his arrival in the new Child Timeline, Link immediately gets the Triforce of Courage of THAT timeline, presumably cause he is in a state of being where he is meant to have a Triforce Piece of Courage?

Well, regardless of what you believe to be the cause, this is what happens, and as a result, the other two Triforce pieces choose Zelda and Ganondorf to bear them and end up residing in them. Thats how the pieces ended up with the three without the Sacred Realm being entered in this version of the events.

Link ends up warning Zelda and the king of the events that will transpire in the future, and thus Ganondorf loses the trust of the king and is unable to set his plan from OoT into motion.

Its a bit vague, but sometime after that Ganondorf starts a direct attack towards Hyrule, but gets captured and put on trial.

And as you know, as he was about to be executed, the Triforce of Power activated and saved him from death.

Now I am not sure if this is true, but I think up until that point, Ganondorf didn’t even know he had it.

But wether he discovered he had it now, or the moment it fist came to him, one thing I am sure of, he mustve felt so great for it. Cause he has no idea that a time travelling Link caused this to happen, right? From his perspective, the power of the gods just came to him like that because he is that great! And then, he cant even die as a result of this? He is literally immortal? Well, he must be the dang chosen one, right?

No wonder he got all god complex in this one!

Something I´m kinda interested in is how this guy spend years, likely centuries, in the Twillight Realm, and if his form in there is any indication, not exactly in physical form either, I mean isnt it implied he HAD to mae use of Zant like that in order to be able to have a physical form like that?

Ultimately TP!Ganondorf just is a lot like OoT!Ganondorf if you think about it, just kinda taken to a more extreme. He is no longer just human, but has transcended humanity much further than OoT!Ganondorf has, and feels superior to everyone because of it.

He is absolute in his own eyes, he is a god, his eventual victory is certain, his battle with the hero just a formality at this point.

And he sticks to that mindset until the very end, even as he is stabbed and fatally wounded by Link. It only makes sense, he couldnt be stopped by this before, why would it stop him now?

Of course the events that follow are rather vague, and people argue about what it means to this day, but I think it ultimately boils down to Ganondorf biting of more than he can chew, overestimating his own power. Or rather, what he thinks is his own power, cause its not even his.

From the moment he was impaled by the sword of the sage, Ganondorf has been a dead man.

He has only been kept alive afterwards through the power of others, the gods, and Zant as well.

This power was not his, and thus it could just leave him just as quick as it came to him.

The imagine of Zant snapping his neck, to me, either just refers to the fact that with Zant dead, who acted as Ganondorf anchor of sorts, Ganondorf himself dies as well, or it refers to the fact that Ganondorf, who saw himself as a god and superior to everything, was ultimately just as much of a mortal and simple being than the very person who worshipped him as a deity the most.

Yes, you could call Zant the very person that made Ganondorf a god in the first place, in more ways than one, so without him, Ganondorf is a god no more. And he dies just like any mortal would.

Ultimately this Ganondorf story feels like a story of hubris.

Simple, but neat.

(Its interesting like, its almost like, TP!Ganondorf was a human who longed to be a god, and WW!Ganondorf was like a god who longed to be human?)

But, do not think it ends here...

We’ve looked at all the people that OoT!Ganondorf grew up to be, but that isn’t all the Ganons there is, the story of Ganon actually continues further down the Child Timeline.

Yes, this brings us to FSA!Ganon, or as I sometimes like to call him, Ganon II.

I understand that most probably never played this game, and I probably won’t blow your minds if I tell you Ganon doesn’t actually do much in this game but, I still like to think about him.

He’s actually a proper reincarnation of TP!Ganondorf, folowing the latter’s death at the end of TP.

From some dialouge in-game we know a little bit about his past. Like his past life, he was a boy born to the Gerudo people, and was named Ganondorf.

Interestingly, in this game, the Gerdudo dont actually say that every 100 years a male child is born, they that every 100 years a “special” child is born, and of course Ganondorf was that special child. They still mention the “only man” part, but it doesnt come up with the “every 100 years” line.

Notably it also doesnt seem that Ganondorf was supposed to be their king, and it doesnt seem like they ever treated him like a king, they only mention he was supposed to be the protector of the Gerudo people and the desert.

This is just speculation, but perhaps, after what happened to the first Ganondorf, the Gerudo people decided it wasnt a good idea to treat the sole male like a king just because.

The Gerudo in the game tell you that the older Ganndorf became, the more twisted and obsessed with power he became, and eventually he started breaking their laws, too.

When he entered the forbidden pyramid, the Gerudo basically considered him banished from their tribe, but also didnt think he would ever survive in there and presumed him to be dead.

The Gerudo in this game really only talk badly about Ganondorf, which probably makes sense if he really just did bad stuff to them, but its a very stark contrast to OoT where the Gerudo seemed to just let Ganondorf get away with everything, kinda.

Something I wonder about if maybe like, Ganondorf wasn’t exactly treated well by the Gerudo, out of fear of him turning out like the old Ganondorf, or if Ganondorf just turned bad all on his own. Or maybe a mixture of both?

What is sorta interesting is the story of how this one came to be Ganon, which is that within the pyramid, he found a certain Trident, which is implied to have caused him to “awake as Ganon”, so to speak, as he picked it up. This is the inscription found with the Trident:

“Seek...you...the world? Seek you...power? Does your...soul...despise peace and...thirst for... more? Does your soul...cry... for...destruction and... conquest? We...grant you...power to ...ruin...the world. The power of...darkness. Evil...spirit of magic trident. You are...the... King of Darkness.“

The trident feels like it has more out of universe meaning than in-universe (though I do headcanon it to be a reincarnated ghirahim somehow, because I can). The trident being a weapon that franchise-wise is heavily associated with Ganon, and notably Ganon only, as Ganondorf is never really seen wielding a literal trident.

This Ganondorf picks up the trident, and with it the legacy of the interpretations of Ganons that came in the games before this one, so to speak.

I´m sorry for this part being so unstructured, but interestingly, Ganondorf is this game is referred to as “ancient demon reborn”, or something like “instrument of evil reborn” in japanese, hinting that even at the time of the game’s release, this Ganon was probably intended to be the reincarnation of a previous evil, likely a previous Ganon, of course.

What I wonder about is how much this Ganon is aware of that, though. When he grew up, becoming more and more twisted, did he know? Did he know he was the reincarnation of a villain that had previously plagued Hyrule? Did he feel his hatred? Did he know whose it was, or did he consider it his own? Or was it simply his own?

And when he picked up the trident, and transformed into a demon beast, did he understand what this meant? What he was? Did he ever obtain any memories of his past self, even?

Something that hints that this /might/ be the case is Shadow Link.

Now Shadow Link is not actually created by the dark mirror from the evil part of Link’s heart as the english localization suggest. Instead its created from the evil part of Ganon’s heart, using the dark mirror. It is said that through the mirror,the hatred and evil of Ganondorf, throughout time, took on the shape of Link. Likely because the hero is a major subject of Ganondorf’s hatred.

The fact that this happened when FSA!Ganon used the mirror, despite himself never having met Link up until that point, hints that he might, at least subconsiously, harbor the memories of his past incarnations?

But really, as usual there is a lot open to interpretation.

I´m just so intrigued, like in this timeline there is a “second Ganon”, a Ganon that came “after”, someone who had to take on this cruel legacy.

And, with that we have now talked about all the Ganon(dorf)s that have existed in the franchise to this day, not counting stuff like BS Zelda and the CDI-Games.

If you stuck around until this point, thank you so much, you’re too kind!

But also thanks to everyone that just skimmed this or looked it over briefly, I hope this wall of text did something for you. 

(Sorry for any typos I... type too fast when I get excited about a topic.)

A PRAYER FOR MOTHER EARTH

MARCH 28, 2017

I originally penned these words as the Afterword for A MILLION FRAGILE BONES. Ultimately, my publisher Joan Leggitt and I took it out of the book because we didn't feel it was the right fit. However, in light of the Trump Administration's decision to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing climate change regulations, I feel strongly it is time to publish the piece.

Here it is in its entirety.

This abiding truth is as simple as it is profound: All living creatures are threads in a single tapestry of life. The loss of one species, the anguished deaths of 1,000 dolphins, the slow-oil-agony demise of 800,000 birds affects the entire planet, perhaps even the cosmos. As John Muir said, “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” We are enlarged, made better, by a healthy and vibrant Earth. We are not detached beings, divorced from our planet, only operating on the surface as if we’re bullet trains impelled by magnetic force, hovering above but never touching the tracks. We are of the Earth and of the sky. On this, our only home, we share DNA with every living organism. The worm and the butterfly. The gnat and the loon. The wolf and the crab. The whale and the ant. We are, individually and collectively, part of every molecule in our universe for every living creature is, at its essential self, stardust. One glance at the Periodic Table of Elements is a view into the building blocks that sustain and drive the complex lives of stars and every life form on our planet, including humans. Nitrogen or calcium, iron or carbon, chromium or nickel: these elements and more are created at the end of a star’s life when the energy producing nuclear reactions in the star’s heart cease, resulting in gravitational collapse. Perhaps this is the source of our origin story, the leitmotif of sacrifice: We are all sparkling moments of rebirth. But we are also astonishingly effective purveyors of death. We destroy a species, an ecosystem, a pod of dolphins caring for its young, a turtle completing her journey, a rare and mighty collective of whales that have a song like no one else in its genus, and we have effectively driven arrows into the very essence of our humanity. We have diminished our home, the thing that gives us joy, sustenance, life, an inkling of the holy. I have a friend whose hobby is deep-sea diving. She told me she stopped eating fish after she had several dynamic encounters with grouper. She claimed they are very curious, intelligent fish that often swim right up to her and seem to study her. She began making faces at them and the fish made faces back. She said she could no longer eat them because they are sentient beings, animals of intelligence with a range of emotions. Hers is not an act of anthropomorphism but of acute observation and interaction with her known world. If she’d never had those encounters, if she’d never paused long enough to notice what the fish were doing and to risk an interaction, she would have never been moved, changed. She would have continued to exist in an echo chamber of limited experiences. I have no idea how people harm animals, or clear-cut forests, or shear off mountaintops, or through greed-fueled negligence destroy rivers and oceans. In order for humans to slaughter sharks for shark fin soup (they cut off the shark’s dorsal, pectoral, and caudal fins, leaving the shark unable to swim, sentencing the animal to a prolonged, horrendous death), I believe they must enter a mindset similar to that of combatants: dehumanize your opponent. But in this case, since the opponent is a non-human animal, I suppose the process would more accurately be labeled de-recognizing. By de-recognizing another living being’s value, it’s easier to kill it. How else could one inflict such cruelty? And what madness causes men to think rhino tusk powder will make them more virile? Perhaps it is the same madness that prompts wealthy American men to travel to Africa and “trophy hunt” (a de-recognizing phrase—the animal is reduced to the status of object—for a killing ritual in which all the cards are stacked in favor of the man with the bait and gun). Somehow, cruelty inspires in these wealthy hunters, some of whom shoot the animals from the sniper-esque advantage of helicopters—a fetish-centered belief in the glory of their phalluses. They de-recognize the world in order to kill it, and for them killing translates into power, control, sex. I am no longer naïve. I understand death is integral, even necessary, to life . . . sparkling moments of rebirth. And that people create religions. And that people fear death. You must sacrifice that goat, that child, that man, that woman in order to appease the gods. Believe this man is the Son of God and you will never truly die. If you live by the Prophet’s rules, you will be given a harem of virgins in heaven (what, I wonder, do the women get?). These are all stories humankind has created in order to make peace with the inevitable black door of death. But they also prevent us from rationally dealing with the science of nature. Life begets death, death begets life. But nature offers balance in the life-death tango. A cyclone spawns off the coast of Africa and eventually makes its way to the American plains where it drops enough water to relieve drought and water crops. When humankind decides to play god, chaos ensues: global climate change, rising sea levels, acid rain, extinct species, cancer epidemics, marginalized nutritional values in our food, and an entire ocean and its inhabitants poisoned. We are living in a time where there is increasing awareness that natural disasters are also social disasters. In an essay titled, “There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster,” anthropologist and geographer Neil Smith writes in reference to Hurricane Katrina, “In every phase and aspect of a disaster–causes, vulnerability, preparedness, results and response, and reconstruction–the contours of disaster and the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus.” The same holds true for manmade disasters. The Gulf ecosystem and the people who depend on its health and abundance for their well-being were already stressed due to a panoply of human factors, the most pressing of which were agricultural pollutants, the megalopolis called Atlanta and their mushrooming drinking water supply needs, and the fact that everything runs downstream. As an Alligator Point neighbor once said to me, “Every time someone flushes a toilet in Atlanta, the Gulf dies a little.” Fertilizers and pesticides have affected the Gulf basin since their introduction post World War II. Indeed, one of the enduring legacies of a war that was technologically advanced for its era is the develop[L1]  and reliance on chemicals which, while killing pests, also destroy waterways and human health. In order to meet its ever-growing need for fresh drinking water, Atlanta relentlessly draws down the Flint, Chattahoochee, and Apalachicola watershed. This system, when working properly (read: not manipulated by humankind), creates the salinity balance necessary for thriving oyster beds. The proper flow of freshwater provides nutrients to the oysters without which they succumb to illness and predation. But Atlanta, because of its increasing population, has been manipulating the flow for years. As a result, when natural or manmade disasters hit the Gulf region, the oyster beds have an increasingly more difficult time bouncing back. This was the situation when the BP oil spill occurred. The oyster fields were already embattled. So, too, were the people who have for generations made their living off harvesting oysters. This is how a manmade disaster becomes a social disaster: Take away someone’s ability to make a living, especially when the livelihood is intractably tied to a cultural way of life, and everything falls apart—the individual and the community. During the hundreds of hours spent researching material for this book, I discovered a secret. It’s a secret that is beginning to slowly emerge from the shadows in large part because of the Internet. Now what was once a nearly impossible task becomes a matter of keystrokes. I have at my disposal studies, plans, reports, maps, and diagrams detailing vast fields of disposed weaponry piled in watery trash heaps in the Gulf of Mexico. After World War II, without making any ado about it, the military began using the Gulf as a garbage dump for all manner of ordnance. A 2015 article published by Texas A & M University asserts, “The ordinance includes land mines, ocean mines, torpedoes, aerial bombs and several types of chemical weapons . . . . The chemical weapons may have leaked over the decades and could pose a significant environmental problem. The military began dumping the unexploded bombs from 1946 to 1970, when the practice was banned.” And the U.S. Army sent three soldiers to my shack who were charged with digging up non-existent ordnance in my yard and all the while chemical weapons were and are, in all probability, leaking into the Gulf, mixing with petroleum and dispersant, and nothing is being done to address the situation. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Do we not understand that we get one chance to save this planet? And that saving our planet is the very definition of redemption? After experiencing the manmade destruction of my sacred place, I’ve come to understand there are people who apparently don’t possess an empathy gene and, as such, are capable of inflicting massive harm. But ignorance, apathy, and greed are just as dangerous and just as much in play. Glaciers are becoming their own rivers. Extreme weather is rampant. Species are disappearing at a rate that is up to 10,000 times greater than what would happen if humans did not exist. We are creating a period of extinction, what biologists call the sixth great extinction, and it is being primarily propelled by our addiction to fossil fuels. Gas is under three dollars a gallon, prompting a boom in truck sales. What’s next, the return of the dinosaur-sized, hydrocarbon spewing Hummer? The Florida legislature is on the precipice of opening up the entire state to fracking. This is more evidence we have elected people who are insane. Florida is essentially a thin crust of limestone veiling and protecting our lifeblood, the Florida Aquifer. The aquifer is the source of our drinking water and feeds our natural abundance. The aquifer is interconnected. You dump poisons in the north and they will circulate throughout the system. Fracking would bust through the limestone, contaminating the totality of the water table. In a First Amendment-wreaking edict, officials banned Florida Department of Environmental Protection employees from using the phrases “climate change” or “global warming.” Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, but the facts on the ground don’t change. I am reminded ever more of the Cree prophecy, “When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, you will realize you cannot eat money.” Prior to drilling underwater wells, energy companies conduct studies to pinpoint oil deposits below the ocean floor using sonic cannons. According to Time Magazine, the cannons “emit sound waves louder than a jet engine every ten seconds for weeks at a time.” Common sense and science tells us this is detrimental to marine life. We are stressing our environment—air, water, flora, fauna—to the breaking point. Sometimes I wonder if the rich and powerful won’t be sated until everything is gone: all the sweet water, all the animals, all the good air, all of us . . . you cannot eat money. According to the excellent 2014 documentary on the Gulf oil disaster, The Great Invisible, in the past decade 111 energy bills have been proposed in Congress and only five have become law. Those five contained subsidies for nuclear and fossil fuel energy sources. The 106 bills that did not survive all contained alternative energy provisions. Fact and metaphor: Fossil fuels are hydrocarbons formed from the remains of dead animals and plants that died millions of years ago. Their transformation from corpse to the earth’s hidden blood also took millions of years. Fossil fuels—dead animals and plants that underwent transmogrification—are not renewable. Nearly every aspect of our modern life is fueled with their blood, with the fragile bones of death. As far as I can tell, wind and solar power do not intersect with any blood, ancient or otherwise. And I suspect the same will hold true for marvelous energy sources not yet invented. Life fueled on the remains of a million (and far more) fragile bones is not only unsustainable, it’s killing us. Must we do everything in our power to embrace clean, renewable energy? Resoundingly, yes. What other choice do we have? Our fossil fuel addiction is a form of slow suicide. And with each tick of the clock, our demise speeds up. Tick, tick, tick: closer to the brink. Whoosh. We cannot risk trying to perform CPR on a cadaver. My poor mother tried. It didn’t work. It never does. In Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese,” she writes: You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Let us all, with infinite devotion, love this good earth. Let us understand with greater intimacy the meaning of “home.” Let us love with ever expanding intention and purpose, placing greater faith in nature and science. Let us view our planet and all its moving parts—stars, galaxies, winding rivers—with a shaman’s fierce gaze, a scientist’s deep knowledge, and a child’s open heart. Yes. Let us love enough and more than enough. Now. Today. Forever.

--Connie May Fowler

 Cozumel, Mexico

CIGARETTES AFTER SEX

Perhaps fittingly, the band Cigarettes After Sex was recommended to me by a woman I have been simultaneously naked with.

If she’s reading this, I want to assure her that she won’t be identified here (no need to drag her name through the mud; I figure anyone who’s been simultaneously naked with me has already suffered enough). Fortunately, she wasn’t naked when she suggested I should give Cigarettes After Sex a listen—if someone’s thinking about bands to recommend to you while you’re simultaneously naked with them, you’re clearly doing something wrong. Plus, had she been naked at the time, it’s highly unlikely I would have even registered her advocacy of Cigarettes After Sex—I very much enjoy seeing her naked, so contemplating any matters unrelated to her proximate nakedness is generally unfeasible under those circumstances. She told me to check out the band roughly an hour before any mutual nudity transpired, and I duly noted her endorsement because at that point I wasn’t even aware that mutual nudity was pending—if I had known that, I would have definitely been raptly musing on how super-awesome it was that we were both going to be naked in a hour instead of raptly musing on what this band she was telling me about called Cigarettes After Sex might sound like.

And maybe you’re now thinking, “dude, you had your arm around this girl on the couch in your apartment and she started talking to you about a band called Cigarettes After Sex… how could you not know simultaneous nakedness was imminent?” Which is, you know, a fair question. So I guess I should clarify that me and this woman have been friends for many years, but we’ve only taken our clothes off in the same locality on a handful of occasions—in other words, when we see each other, it isn’t necessarily a given that we’re going to see each other’s genitals at some point in the evening. It’s actually sort of ironic that this particular girl would be the one to tell me about Cigarettes After Sex, because I would very likely see her naked more frequently if I didn’t smoke cigarettes; she’s inherently grossed out by the habit, so whenever we hang out I have to be mindful that if I light up around her, the chances of any subsequent synchronized nudity taking place become greatly diminished.  

Anyway, since everyone who knows anything at all about me knows I love music, people are always recommending bands to me. Truthfully, I rarely actually investigate those bands. This is mostly because I’m always worried I’ll think their music is terrible and end up trapped in an awkward situation when the person inevitably asks for my feedback later, at which point I will either have to: a) lie, or b) inform them I think the band they told me is awesome sucks. Neither of those scenarios especially appeals to me, so I usually just play things safe and say, “I haven’t had a chance to check them out yet” a few times until the person forgets they ever recommended a band to me at all. It’s not a perfect solution, but I am not a perfect man (as anybody who has ever been simultaneously naked with me can readily attest to).

Despite my typical methodology, I decided maybe I should go ahead and listen to this specific recommendation, both because Cigarettes After Sex is a decisively superb name for a band, and because the suggestions of the girl who told me about them have been mostly on point in the past—for instance, she was the first person to play me the Metric song “Patriarch On A Vespa”, which was the song that made me realize Metric is fucking rad. Even though Radiohead is her absolute favorite band of all time and I think almost everything Radiohead has recorded in the last 17 years is ostentatious dogshit, generally she has excellent taste (despite her choosing to engage in contemporaneous nakedness with me on occasion).

So I did indeed make it a point to seek out Cigarettes After Sex. And, hey, as it turns out: Cigarettes After Sex is really, really, really good. Their music is totally sensual, too, so once I heard them I inevitably ended up reckoning they would have supplied a perfect soundtrack while me and the girl who mentioned them to me were in the process of becoming simultaneously naked that night (at the time, we were instead listening to a record by an outfit called Pity Sex, which—looking back—is probably not the band I would have chosen if had known we were soon to begin subtracting clothes from each other, regardless of their moniker being decidedly appropriate under the circumstances).

Rest assured, even if you’re not in the altogether with someone while you listen to Cigarettes After Sex, they still sound marvelous (I’m the only naked person in my apartment at the moment, and I’m enjoying their self-titled debut just fine). Most of their songs are virtually interchangeable—imagine Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” played at a half-speed on a broken turntable with Hope Sandoval from Mazzy Star handling the vocal duties and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what every track on Cigarettes After Sex sounds like. Notwithstanding, the band’s single-leitmotif approach doesn’t bother me too much because they do the one thing they do extremely well. And the voice driving these wistful canticles is unequivocally superb—so exquisitely feminine and amatory, in fact, that I was frankly amazed to learn the tunes were all written, produced, and performed by a singer named Greg Gonzalez, who ostensibly has a penis.

Though the lyrics are predominantly focused on various erotic entanglements, the downcast aura which permeates this slow-burning cycle seems to infer that sex inevitably leads to catastrophe (this is another thing that anybody who has ever been simultaneously naked with me can readily attest to). Gonzalez’s tales are raptly fixated on the grey shades in the pupils of starry-eyed lovers, reveling in the duskiest corners of carnal partnerships, where ardor has as much potential to cause pain as pleasure and sending roses and sending dick-picks are weighed as equally romantic gestures. His pensive poetry is infused with a compelling and refreshingly candid duality, vacillating between tenderness and vulgarity with an almost-schizophrenic abandon. It’s certainly jarring the first time you hear a phrase like “show me your tits” or “sucking cock” in songs this gorgeous, yet Gonzalez isn’t merely being crass—he’s just a songwriter honest enough to acknowledge that sometimes sweethearts make gentle velvety love and sometimes they fuck each other’s brains out. He peers his lens into the windows of bridal suites with perfumed silk sheets and filthy 20-buck-a-night motel rooms with paper-thin walls, and evidently feels equally at home in both. Though each track here qualifies as a beautiful love song, the overall dictum of Cigarettes After Sex seems to be that lust has a regal beauty of its own.

Don’t be misled, though. The somber ambiance that permeates the record suggests that the beating heart of this lush and alluring song-cycle is a fragmented one. The disc’s magnificent opener “K.” plays thing fairly straight, bursting with meditations about kissing until dawn and bodies blissfully intertwined in afterglow as they wait for sleep to come. But this candlelit exuberance only lasts about five minutes; the title of the next song—“Each Time You Fall In Love”—is also its first line, and the second line is, “it’s clearly not enough.” Even on a cut called “Sweet”—in which Gonzalez makes the truly awh-worthy declaration that when his girl sends him dirty videos, her smile and her eyes are the parts of her body he focuses on most—the sweetness culminates with him vowing, “I would gladly break my heart for you.”

It’s maybe a bit incongruous that music this melancholy will undoubtedly fuel countless make-out sessions—hell, at this very minute, there are probably multitudes of people getting undressed in tandem while Cigarettes After Sex softly plays on the stereo in the background (and good for them; they’re certainly having a better night than I am). But whether you’re fervidly caressing someone’s anatomy or simply sitting at your laptop drinking iced tea in your underwear at three in the morning, I’m here to tell you that Cigarettes After Sex is a wonderful record which I have absolutely nothing bad to say about. And now that I’ve acquainted myself with the band, I can categorically state that finding out about them was easily the second-best thing that happened to me the night I found out about them.

Which reminds me, it’s been quite a while since I’ve seen my friend who I sometimes experience concomitant nudity with. I should shoot her a text tomorrow and see if she feels like coming over to listen to records sometime soon.

Hey, I was only suggesting I should invite her over so she can recommend some more bands to me since I like this one so much… Why, what did you think I was talking about?

 July 16, 2018