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fireinmywoods · 4 years

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the heart of the matter (is Leonard McCoy)

Followers...friends. I come to you today, hat in hand, to ask for your support in a certain fandom matter, a trifling concern of little real consequence which nevertheless has been driving me absolutely cross-eyed bonkers for some years now.

Simply put: can we please all agree that Bones is the heart of the Enterprise???

In AOS, I mean. I’m not aware of any debate over this when it comes to TOS, where the roles of the triumvirate have always been explicit, though there are a few different ways to identify them:

Spock = logos = superego = head

Bones = pathos = id = heart

Kirk = ethos = ego = soul

So clear! So clean! So universally accepted by Trek fandom at large!

Oh, but things get murkier in AOS, and there are plenty of posts floating around which suggest that it’s Kirk, not McCoy, who serves as the heart in the Kelvin timeline. Even the writers of the first two AOS films have outright stated that their interpretation of the triumvirate had the original roles switched, with Kirk as the highly emotional one and McCoy as the arbiter between Kirk’s passion and Spock’s logic. It’s true that this technically counts as a Word of God pronouncement by the actual creators of 2/3 of the series thus far, which some would argue renders it canon. However, it’s equally true that those same creators also felt that Kirk was a fuckboi and that Benedict Cumberbatch wonderfully embodied their vision for Khan Noonien Singh, so honestly, who gives a hot hollerin’ fuck what those dingdongs think. This seems as justified a time as any to invoke Death of the Author, and in fact, it’s my firm belief that despite the writers’ intentions, Star Trek and Into Darkness both support the original triumvirate breakdown.

Under the cut you’ll find a long-winded and self-indulgent ~*~character analysis~*~ of the Kelvin-timeline incarnations of Jim Kirk and Leonard “Bones” McCoy, reviewing why Leonard is still unmistakably the heart, unpacking what the hell Jim’s deal is, and finally taking a look at some key examples from canon, because ya girl believes in showing her work.

Let’s get down to business.

[A quick warning, as this is starting to spread beyond my own followers: if you don’t like McKirk as a romantic pairing, you ain’t gonna like part IV, so I’d bow out before then or just take your leave now.]

i. Leonard

Independent of Jim’s characterization, it should be blindingly obvious that Leonard is the heart. He’s by far the most nakedly emotional of our seven core crew members, a trait we see writ large and small throughout the films. He’s reactive; he’s passionate; he’s humane. He cares, first and foremost.

Not about Starfleet, of course. Leonard doesn’t give a damn about playing the game or advancing his career, or even really about the Enterprise’s mission - he has no desire to explore strange new worlds, he’ll pass on seeking out new life and new civilizations, and he spends half his time trying to convince everyone else that boldly going where no man has gone before is a great way to die horribly. Fuck exploration, fuck space, and fuck the Federation while we’re at it. Leonard is perhaps the most improbable of the Enterprise’s senior officers for the simple reason that he seems to resent everything about the job.

Well. Almost everything.

See, what Leonard cares about is people. He cares about their lives, about their stories, about their hopes and dreams, about their suffering. That’s why he entered and has stayed in an extremely taxing caring profession, and it’s why he’s still on the Enterprise despite his incessant bitching about everything they do. He wouldn’t trust anyone else to take care of the crew he’s become so attached to, and he finds fulfillment in helping the people they encounter out there in the nightmare of space.

In every timeline, Leonard McCoy defines himself by what he can do for others: the pain he can ameliorate, the wounds he can heal, the diseases he can cure, the small amounts of good he can bring to a galaxy filled with so much absolute horseshit. Unlike most of his colleagues, he’s not motivated by curiosity or an adventurer’s spirit or a burning desire to make sense of the universe. (Fuck the universe, too, as a matter of fact.) Instead, he’s driven by the incredible depths of his compassion and empathy and concern for the people he serves alongside and those they meet along the way.

Sure sounds like the heart to me.

ii. Jim

I actually totally get why some people characterize Kelvin-timeline Jim as the heart. He’s quite literally a different man than the original timeline’s Kirk, and he definitely has more of the pathos qualities to him. Early on, he’s a total spitfire, fierce and hot-blooded, quick to anger and other sharp-edged emotions we’re not used to associating with James T. Kirk. Even as he grows into himself and leaves some of those traits behind, he remains spontaneous, passionate, protective, and self-sacrificing - easy enough to mistake for the heart if you squint.

But let’s not confuse having a heart for being the heart. Sure, Jim is more openly emotional and reactive than his TOS counterpart, but there’s still a marked difference between the way he and Leonard express and act on their emotions.

AOS Jim definitely has a lot of feelings - big ones - but at the end of the day, he’s not driven by his heart. He’s driven by his gut.

Whenever there’s trouble, Jim makes a beeline right for the center of it. He’s impulsive as hell, rarely pausing to think past his first instinct, because he just wants to be doing something, no matter the odds, no matter what it costs him. He explicitly calls himself out on this in ST:ID when arguing with Spock: “I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. I only know what I can do.” He doesn’t have the patience or the constitution to sit and debate all the options, either internally or with his crew. If there’s a path forward from where he is, even a bad one, Jim’s gonna take it.

[Sidebar: One could make the case that the roots of Jim’s instinct to act reach back to his childhood traumas - canonically ignored abuse and neglect on the one hand, and the Tarsus IV famine and massacre on the other - but that’s a whole post on its own and we ain’t got all day here.]

Jim can’t not act, and while that gets him into a lot of trouble, it also saves lives. Sulu probably appreciated that Jim’s gut drove him to leap off Nero’s drilling platform without a moment’s hesitation after a man he’d only just met. He may have been a real shithead about it, but Jim’s impassioned insistence on going after the Narada and not wasting time on the possibility of a better option was key to saving Pike and Earth itself. And I don’t know why Spock was so surprised that Jim intervened to save him on Nibiru, considering that the reason they were there in the first place was because Jim couldn’t sit back and watch the Nibirans die when there was something his crew could do to help them, even if it meant risking a violation of the Prime Directive.

Jim is a good man with a big heart, and he cares about people, absolutely. But he cares most of all about Doing The Right Thing - which in the heat of the moment often translates to Doing Something, Anything, Hold My Beer.

iii. heart vs. gut (i.e., time for some receipts)

I think one of the main reasons Leonard and Jim’s characterizations get confused is because they both tend to act on instinct, only lightly informed by higher reasoning. However, I’d argue that their motivations and the nature of those actions are super distinct, and those distinctions remain relatively consistent throughout all three films. (And y’all know I really mean this shit if I’m out here calling ST:ID consistent.)

Jim is a big picture guy, figuratively and often literally heaving himself full-body into the mix of whatever problem the crew has encountered for lack of any better alternative. That energy propels the plots of all three films: the chaotic path he carves through the events of Star Trek and ST:ID, and the slightly calmer but still undeniably bananas course he charts for himself and his crew in the second half of Beyond.

As the heart, Leonard operates on a more micro level. His concern invariably lies with the individual people caught up in those grand events Captain Chaos is busy dragging them all through. While Jim’s zooming around flipping plot switches, Leonard can always be counted on to bring it back to the personal.

We frequently see this juxtaposed right there on film. Think of that slow pan through medbay in the first movie after the Narada’s ambush and the destruction of Vulcan: while Jim is stewing over what to do about the Big Bad, Leonard has stepped into the CMO role without fuss or fanfare to care for the wounded crew and traumatized survivors.

Or jump ahead to Beyond: during Krall’s attack on the Enterprise, there’s a gorgeous cinematic shot of Jim sprinting down the corridor with two crew members to take on the invaders - and then we cut to Leonard moving slowly through those same ghastly red-lit corridors, searching for casualties in need of help, visibly affected by what his scanner is telling him about the downed crewman he tries to save.

Actually, Beyond as a whole does terrific justice to each of their roles. (Perhaps because it was not written by dingdongs.) The first act finds Jim flailing around for a sense of purpose and forward momentum - an understandable consequence of a gut-driven character having stalled out for too long - and he ultimately gets his mojo back by spending the rest of the film careening through one insane seat-of-his-pants ploy after another. Meanwhile, in the quieter moments between all the mayhem, Leonard serves as the empathetic sounding board for both Jim and Spock as they struggle with deep emotionally charged secrets and Big Life Questions, helping them untangle their feelings and reminding them of the emotional attachments which are ultimately key to their respective decisions to stay on the Enterprise.

More examples, you say? Don’t mind if I do!

Star Trek

GUT: Jim hurtles around the Narada, improvising almost every step of the way and paying the price for his and Spock’s scheme in bodily harm, and ultimately succeeds in rescuing Pike. HEART: Leonard calls out for Jim as he runs into the transporter room, overwhelmed with relief that he’s made it back, and takes Chris Pike’s weight literally and figuratively onto his own shoulders to begin healing him while Jim runs back off to the center of the action.

Star Trek: Into Darkness

GUT: Jim argues with Leonard, Spock, and Scotty in quick succession as he’s preparing to drag them all off to Qo’noS, immune to their attempts to reason with him because, unraveled as he is by grief and pain, he can only focus on his visceral drive to Do Something. HEART: Unlike the others, Leonard is upset not about the larger moral questions of whether it’s right to go after John Harrison or bring torpedoes aboard the ship, but about the fact that Jim himself is hurt and hurting and won’t accept help.

GUT: Jim makes a snap decision to sacrifice himself by hurling his body against the warp core to realign it and save his crew. HEART: Shellshocked by the emotional grenade of his best friend’s death, Leonard suddenly realizes, through the haze of his own numbness and upswelling grief, that he might still be able to do something for this lonely radiation-ravaged body he’s been brought and the life it represents.

Star Trek Beyond

GUT: At the tail end of an improvised plan to out-maneuver Kalara, Jim quite literally shoots first and asks questions later, igniting a fuel tank and setting off an explosive series of events which he and Chekov just barely escape. HEART: The next time we see Leonard, Spock is opening up to him about Ambassador Spock’s death and his own plan to leave Starfleet for New Vulcan - and while he’s empathetic toward Spock (I can’t imagine what that must feel like), Leonard’s thoughts go immediately to the emotional impact of Spock’s plan on the other people he’s closest with. (I can see how that would upset [Nyota]. / I can tell you, [Jim]’s not gonna like that.)

GUT: Jim frantically strains to reach the final switch in the life support hub, believing that he’s going to die either way since the vent has already opened, but spurred on by the knowledge that his ability to move that switch is the only thing standing between Yorktown and annihilation. HEART: Knowing exactly what’s at stake, with the fate of the station and millions of lives hanging in the balance, Leonard’s greatest concern is that Jim won’t make it out in time.

iv. never bet against the heart

Let’s wrap this up with a deep dive on one of the absolute best examples of Leonard as the heart: his decision to sneak Jim onto the Enterprise in the first movie.

As relentlessly as I drag him for the, you know, poisoning and kidnapping aspects of that whole deal, there’s no denying that it is a god-tier heart move. Is it logical? Absolutely not. Is it really the right thing to do for either himself or Jim, as far as he knows at the time? Nope. It’s 100% the wrong choice for his own job security, reputation, and relationships with his fellow crew, and it’s almost guaranteed to get Jim into even worse trouble. Leonard is a smart dude who must understand that this course of action will likely end up coming back on them both in a real bad way. For someone who argues loudly and often in defense of self-preservation, this is a shockingly bad idea.

But none of that matters, because Jim shakes his hand and tells him to be safe with that horrible empty-eyed smile, and it gets him right in the heart, one-two-three.

One: sympathy, worry, and affection for Jim - his best friend, his wild and troublesome stray, his only family.

Two: guilt over adding onto Jim’s pain, and the instinctive urge to fix whatever‘s hurting him.

Three: fear of heading out into the unknown by himself, the agonizing uncertainty of not knowing what’s coming, craving for the security and reassurance Jim’s presence would give him.

“Dammit,” Leonard says, as his heart wins out over his brain. He knows this is a garbage plan, and he doesn’t care. His heart chooses Jim. That’s all that matters.

So he goes back for Jim, and to his own surprise it turns out that this Very Bad Idea was actually a Very Good Idea because Jim’s impulsive instincts end up saving Earth, and Leonard’s not in the habit of fixing what ain’t broke so he figures he may as well keep on chasing Jim’s crazy ass around the galaxy for a while, through jungles and off cliffs and into the goddamn afterlife when need be, until finally one day Jim’s gut drives him right into Leonard’s arms and he suddenly realizes that this is what his heart was choosing all those years ago: Jim’s wide terrified eyes, Jim’s voice breaking over his name, Jim’s hand pressing hard against his chest, reaching out for what’s his.

But that’s another story.

#mckirk #otp: bedside manner #fic related #palimpsest verse #@animetrashmuffin is a gift #several people messaged me when i vague-tagged about this a while back #but you're the one who had to listen to me rant at great length about this while i was sick so CONGRATS PAL THIS MESS IS FOR YOU #mccoy #kirk #star trek #aos #long post

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jocazep · 4 years

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In the Whole Wide Train | Chapter 10

Author’s notes: Hi, remember me? Sorry about the six-month hiatus, but I’m back at it! And it gon’ get dark (even more so than before), so this is just me laying in the groundworks early... ENJOY~

Pairing: Curtis Everett x Reader (Jo, OFC), slight Edgar x Reader

Warnings: Major spoilers for SNOWPIERCER, dystopian society and its countless problems, mentions of forced abortions, language, violence, deaths, slow burn, eventual smut

Synopsis: Having grown up in the Front Sections of the Snowpiercer, you venture down the train when a rare opportunity presents itself, but the excursion quickly changes flavor when you arrive in the Tail Section.

Taglist: Now closed

Series Masterlist

Chapter 10 - Trading Secrets

Curtis couldn’t remember the last time he slept so well--it must have been before the train. There were no dreams, there were no nightmares, just deep, post-climax slumber as if the world around him has melted away--until the alarm blaring “oh-seven-hundred-hours” yanked him out.

He jumped up, but had to take a second before realizing where he was, as the rest of the revolters joined him, stirring awake and confused--the world outside was pitch dark.

“We’re traveling against time zones” Your voice sounded from behind--Curtis turned to see you walking up with a cup of hot water in hand, ”C’mon, need to make some arrangements before we push on.”

“Good morning to you, too.” He took your extended hand, stood up, and pulled you in for a quick kiss. You didn’t kiss back. “What’s the matter?”

“Oh nothing. Gilliam is looking for us is all.”

The truth of the matter is a little bit more complicated than that.

You woke up early. As a medical apprentice, you used to do that before you had important appointments, as it would clear your head and prepare for your day, but today you found no such effect.

Your eyes fixated on Curtis as he lay next to you, breathing in and out, but your head was a million miles away. What was last night? Was it just two people seeking solace in each other after the death of a mutual friend? Or was it the culmination of all those little touches and stolen glances and shared silences? Did it mean anything to him? More importantly, did it mean anything to you?

But then Mason entered your mind in stealth, slowly gnawing away in the back of your head, until you couldn’t focus on the inner debate between your commitment to your father vs. your--your what? Your responsibility? Your debt?--whatever it is you owe to the revolt.

So you push yourself up, and padded barefoot towards where Mason was being held captive.

“It’s about time.” Her unmistakable accent greeted you before your eyes could find her, “ah is that water?”

You didn’t respond, but dipped the mug in your hand lower so she could suck a mouthful of the liquid before you rescinded it.

“Any chance you can spare some food as well, my dear?”

“Not unless you want the fish they gutted before the fight.” You sat down next to Mason, and silence fell for a second.

“Well, I suppose we should make a de--”

“When did he send you to the tail section?”

“Excuse me?”

“I said how old were you when my father first sent you to the tail sections?”

“I must have been around...well, your age.“

“You don’t know how old I am.”

“You, Joanna Catherine Watt Wilford, are thirty-two years and some three odd months old.”

You stare at Mason in astonishment.

“I’ve seen your birth certificate. There was a time when Mr. Wilford thought about giving you to a foster family... After your mother passed away of course...” Mason took a pause, “But I thought you are here to warn me--”

“I am.” You kept your eyes straight ahead, “This is just my human interest story for the report.”

You tend to forget that for some people, there was a life before the train, since you had barely turned fifteen when your estranged father plucked you from the monotony of a privileged private school, into a monotony of the train.

But hey, at least you got to practice medicine and help people. Is that what I’m doing now?

“The report--that’s why I first went down there too, you know...He must see it as a rite of passage.” A smile threatens to break as Mason reminisced about her past.

“Was it..” You didn’t know how to phrase the question, but luckily Mason caught onto your train of thought.

“Oh dear, even more so. Mr. Wilford really turned it around. They were surviving on rats and vermin before the protein block assembly. When I first went down there... it’s as if all society had broken down. There was stories about this pregnant woman... And when they found out who I was, they chained me up and almost tore me to pieces. Imagine what they would do to you. ”

You had heard enough, “All right, here’s the deal. I keep you alive, you keep your mouth shut about me. Sound good?”

Mason nodded enthusiastically as you stood up to leave. “Just one more thing, what does Mr. Wilford want with Curtis?”

You did not look back, “Ask another wrong question, and my father will hear about it.”

Mason all but clasped her hands onto her mouth.

You were planning to sneak back and lay your head on Curtis’ chest, relive the little escape you two had before the day had to begin, but today luck just wasn’t on your side. As your turned the corner back into the makeshift dorm, soft crying and sniffling caught your attention.

It was Tanya. By the dim moonlight reflected from the snow, you could see her clutching a piece of paper and wiping tears from her face. By the time you realized it was the charcoal drawing of Timmy she was holding, it was too late to turn back.

Noticing the light shift, Tanya sat up and look at the person standing a few feet from her. You didn’t know what to do for a moment. You two haven’t been alone since you came clean about Timmy. In a letter no less, you coward.

“I didn’t mean to--”

Tanya lay back down and closed her eyes.

What was the rest of your sentence anyway? You asked yourself as you padded towards the infirmary section, sleep now the last thing on your mind. Didn’t mean to pry? Didn’t man to take Timmy? Didn’t mean to get so close to Curtis and the revolt?

You were pulled from the reverie by Yuna’s hand tugging your sleeve. Around you, the men were deep in discussion, figuring out how many people to station at each section.

Yuna slipped you a piece of paper torn from the small notebook you gifted her. On it she had drawn a picture of herself and Namgoong in the prison section, the many drawers colored dark and ominous. Yuna pointed to the drawers.

“It’s a little advanced for you but ok,” you took the pencil from her and spelled out the word prison, “Prison, it’s a place to hold people that have broken the law.”

Yuna didn’t seem to like that word. She wrestled the paper from you, pointed to the drawers again, and looked at you, waiting for a response.

“Jo?” You whipped your head back to the much less mystifying, but much more important meeting.

“Yes, I’m sorry.”

Curtis gave you an update, “Gilliam will stay behind, with 50 men stationed in the water section, then 15 men at each other section before our base,” Base is what you called the tail section now, “Grey will stay with Gilliam as well.”

“Nonsense, Grey will be much more useful to you than me.”

You shot a look at Gilliam as he chimed in, wondering if he really meant it.

“I think Grey should stay too. We are already a large pack as it is--”

“Don’t forget, Jo, we’re going ahead to take the engine,” Gilliam gave you a long look, “who knows what you will find there”.

Right. You bit your tongue and didn’t argue any further. Let’s never forget

“We were trying to decide what we should do about Mason.” Namgoong picked up the thread of discussion, “What do you think?”

“She’s injured, will only slow us down.” Grey’s voice was very quiet.

“I would rather keep her close than let her stay with the captured soldiers. Who knows what she’ll get them up to.”

“That’s fair, I can’t possibly keep an eye on her the whole time,” Gilliam agreed.

“Tanya’s doing a great job watching her.” *So that’s why she’s not in the meeting.*

“She didn’t want to come with us?”

“Of course she did, but--”

“I think Jo’s saying Tanya should go with you.”

The discussion wrapped up quickly after that, as dusk was threatening to break over the horizon. Your partners in crime stood up and went off--there were bags to pack, arrangements to make, and farewells to say.

You dragged your feet, hoping to spend a few minutes with Gilliam before setting off.

“Having doubts, dear?” Gilliam clicked by on his crutch.

“Before I first came down--”

“Perhaps it’s best you don’t tell me exactly what Wilford asked of you.” Sometimes you wish you had his ability to see right through everything.

“You don’t want to know?”

“I would be lying if I said I didn’t,” Gilliam chuckled, “But I’ve feigned ignorance too many times, even for someone my age. I’d like this occasion to be real.”

“Then...can I ask how much you know?”

“As far as I know, the revolt should have served its purpose after the water supply section.”

You nodded, “Do you ever ask yourself, why he always landed on culling?”

“It wasn’t just him, my dear.”

For the second time that day, you stared in astonishment.

“Perhaps you’re the only person with whom I can share this secret.” There were mini explosions happening in your head as Gilliam spoke, “No past revolt has gotten past the water section. Sometimes it was disorganization, sometimes it was survival instincts, sometimes just plain human greed. But every time, the necessary culling would take place, and the tail section would treasure its existence that was magnanimously gifted by Wilford.”

“Why did they settle?”

“The very first revolts that took place, was only six months into the train journey. Curtis was a little past seventeen, completely unaware, and Edgar, god rest his soul, was just a baby. The leader, he rallied enough people to fight. But every battle cost heavily on his side. Byt the time he got to the prison section, there were only a handful of adult men left. And Mason, who was also a surveyor at the time, managed to entice him with promises of a better life. He held out for a while, but eventually he chose the devil he knew.”

“Your point being?"

"My point being, there's only so much you can do at one given time. Learn to pick your battles."

---

You left Gilliam soon after, head still reeling from the secrets he confided, wondering if he ever regretted his past decisions.

“Hey...” Curtis snuck up on you, taking your hand. You jumped slightly, taken out of your trance. “Do you realize this will be the last time we’re alone for a while?”

“Yeah...?”

He pulled you into him, and caught your lips in a long kiss. You both stumble towards the steel walls of the train, eventually settling in a nook. Curtis dipped his tongue past your teeth, tangling with your tongue, one of his knee wedging between your legs, bringing back heated vignettes of last night. You wrapped your arms around his neck, your hips bucking against his thigh, your belly bumping up against his increasing hardness.

Curtis eventually lifts his lips from you, allowing you to breathe, while he latches onto the side of your neck. His hand roams up your belly, kneading your breasts, squeezing your side--

“Ow!”

“Shit, sorry,” Hard pause as he remembers your injury, “Is it getting better?”

“No, but I’ll live,” you answered, breathless, “when we get to the health section I’ll take a closer look.”

Curtis rest his head against yours, gulping for air, “This is your injury number three, huh?”

“Yeah, you are bad news for me.”

From the front of the section, someone called out, “Curtis, Jo, we’re doing the portrait!”

“You gonna be okay there?” You eyed his bulge.

“Yeah, just gimme a minute...”

The portrait took longer than you expected. While Painter took down your likeness in charcoal, Andrew was playing with the now captive Mason, asserting his newly-earned dominance over this once proud magistrate.

“I was hoping to talk about it earlier.” Curtis said out of the corner of his mouth as you all stood, eight half-frozen figures.

“I...enjoyed it?” You said, tongue in cheek, “Would recommend to a friend.”

“Funny,” Curtis couldn’t help the smile creeping onto his face, “But seriously...”

“I mean...” You looked up at him, “If we both survive when this is all over...”

You were joking but the words hit home for Curtis, as he remembered Edgar. Will you both come out of this alive? He had always considered himself as someone with nothing to lose, but now...

You turned away as you noticed Curtis staring into the distance. Gilliam was standing in the front of the crowd that would stay behind, looking at you with his signature elderly smile, and something else just behind the glasses, a mutual understanding that this is truly farewell.

You found yourself running his words again and again in your head.

“The leader asked for running water, and a stable food supply. Wilford agreed, but asked the leader to help him maintain the balance in the tail section whenever necessary. A few months later, the protein blocks started coming in, a washroom was unlocked, and my secret phone compartment was installed.”

Taglist: @torntaltos @emmalbg @ajosieface

#curtis everett #curtis everett fanfic #curtis everett x reader #curtis everett x you #Chris Evans #chris evans fanfic #chris evans x reader #chris evans x you #Snowpiercer #snowpiercer fanfic

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hawkland · 3 years

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Dear Fandom5k Author

My AO3 account (sidewinder)

Hello and thank you for writing for me! I’m excited to give this exchange a try for the first time and cannot wait to read what you can come up with for one of my requests. Please note I’d love any of them equally, no matter if I have more prompt ideas for one or the other. Some I seriously would love just about anything about since they are so rare, others I have more specific requests to scratch itches I haven’t seen written before (or that much.)

General Likes:

Soumates with a twist. I love soulmate/soulbond AUs, as long as it’s just not a shortcut to happily-ever, no-conflict fluff. I want there to be some difficulties or angst involved. For instance, I’d love seeing any fusion/inspired-by fics based off the concept of the AMC Soumates series - where there’s a newly-developed scientific test a person can choose to take to find their soulmate (if the other person out there has also taken the test). That way it’s a choice to find out or not. Would an already established couple want to take the test to find out if they’re really “meant” to be together or not? What if they find out other people are their “soulmates”? What about the possibility of platonic soulmates vs romantic? Discussions for the future if/when one partner dies before the other? I’d love to see these questions played out with one of my fave ships in either a happy or somewhat angsty/dark way.

Vacation/travel stories. Being unable to travel this past year+ thanks to covid-19 has me desperate to explore and live vicariously through my favorite characters! So I’d love a story involving travel to somewhere new (to them). It could be a romantic getaway/honeymoon trip to somewhere special - and I love it when an author “takes me” to a favorite city/place of their own. Or two friends just going on an escapade together, maybe one sensing the other needs some time away from a stressful situation or workplace.

Smutty likes: I love extended kissing scenes, frottage, light restraint play, sharing-one-bed-for-~reasons~-ooops-how-did-we-wake-up-cuddling, bathing/caretaking an injured partner-turns-erotic, desperate/reunion sex.

Canon-divergent AUs - I’m always good with fix-its, shifts in canon that only change one thing and see what happens next or instead.

Do Not Wants:

A/B/O dynamics, mating heats. (I do like Supernatural fics that explore Castiel and the angels having bird-like behaviors and instincts, however.)

animal abuse/death

anything related to pregnancy/childbirth/kidfic (except for Jack in SPN)

formalized BDSM relationships

scat/watersports

unrequested alternative-universe scenarios such as high school/mundane/genderswap/coffee shop/fantasy/etc. There are a few ships/groups where I would enjoy specific AUs, and those are outlined below.

Completely sad endings/permanent character death or injury that isn’t part of canon

Rape/non-con between requested characters. Dubious consent is fine in situations like magic spells/possession/fuck-or-die, however.

Supernatural

AU - Canon Divergence, Character Development, Established Relationship, Getting Together, Fix-it fic, Interpersonal Drama, Smut, Angst, Canon-Style Plot - Freeform, Hurt/Comfort, Mystery/Procedural, Slice of Life, Worldbuilding, Horror

In general for SPN, I love canon-divergence AUs at pretty much any point in time (especially as they kept having so many dumb reasons in canon to keep Dean & Cas apart just when one or the other seriously needed support or TLC!) I’m okay with post-series Heaven fics as well as canon fix-its/completely ignoring the finale, and I like exploring both human!Cas as endgame or Cas keeping/getting his full angelic grace back (which is a slight preference to me, as he repeatedly seemed to genuinely value/want to be an angel? But exploring all possibilities in fic is cool for me.)

I’m a sucker for Castiel Whump/hurt!Cas in general, so long as the author remembers Cas is a bad ass and not just a baby in a trenchcoat. If he’s going to suffer, I want him to suffer stoically until he just cannot keep up the facade any longer.

SPN-specific DNWs: mentions/implications of Wincest, past or present; extreme bashing/characterization of John and Mary Winchester, or Jimmy Nowak, as homophobic.

Group: Castiel/Dean Winchester Group: Castiel/Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester

Give me all the finale fix-it fics - no I’m still not over it, I’m still happy to read any new twist on how Cas got out of the Empty and got back together with Dean (and Sam). If Dean still dies early/ends up in Heaven, I’d like a story that explores what happens when one gets bored of peace-and-happiness-ever-after. (Yes, I’m a big fan of The Good Place and as such it makes me wonder if eternity with no conflict and everything you could ever want would just melt your brain and identity after a few millennia.) So what then?

I’m also stealing a Tumblr rant as a prompt I’d love to read, if you want to get into some good dirty smut:

ive had it up to here with fictional gays being like “i love you and if all i can ever have is that knowledge it’s enough for me” we need more “i have been struck down by horny insanity and i beg you to fuck me once. i’ve had three smirnoff ices and i’m gonna be crazy now. we can pretend it didn’t happen i don’t give a shit just gimme daddy’s blunt instrument” it’s more realistic [x]

Um so yeah. I’d love an au where, anywhere along the line when it’s been their/someone’s/the universe’s life on the life, Cas takes the initiative decides they’re gonna have crazy sex even if it’s just once before the end of the world/we die. But then, oops, we’ve survived, now we have to deal with it. ...Please?

For something different, maybe more romantic/fluffy, I’d really love a vacation/getaway story here, since they never really got anything like that of substance on the show. I want to see Cas take Dean somewhere beautiful and amazing in the world he’s never gotten to see before. Show him there’s more than just greasy diners and the landscape of America to enjoy and experience. If you want, they could stumble on a case/haunting/monster from another part of the world while they’re at it...but I just really want to see Dean having some mind-opening and expanding experiences beyond what’s he’s known and seen so far in life.

In specific with Cas/Dean + Sam, I love another tumblr idea I saw recently where Sam totally keeps bringing up the idea of “Sastiel” as a fun joke between him and Cas, and Cas plays along, and it drives Dean up the wall. Cas has to just keep re-assuring Dean that no, he doesn’t see Sam that way...but why does it bother Dean so much? A.k.a. Dean has to finally own up to the fact that it bothers him because he wants Cas to feel that way about him.

Castiel (Supernatural)

I just love Cas, period, end of story, he’s my One True Character of SPN. I love any stories that try to explore him more fully—be it his relationships in the past with other angels and being a BAMF commander/warrior of Heaven, or what specifically it is that keeps him so tied to the Winchesters. I love stories that feature his true-form in some fashion or try to dig into the alien/different nature of angels vs. humans.

Also, another Tumblr-musing-turned-prompt (I lost who posted it, sorry!) I'd love to see explored in a canon divergence fic focused on Cas. Specifically:

"I would have loved an arc for Cas (after he got his grace back) where he wanted to help people, like he was helped. Spending time in soup kitchens or healing people, and through that developing a sense of self purpose, leading to his grace replenishing unexpectedly. Sort of fulfilling the traditional angel role (as we know it nowadays) by replacing his faith in heaven/dean with faith in himself, to redefine himself as a protector of humanity instead of heaven's soldier."

Group: Castiel/Dean Winchester & Jimmy Novak Group: Castiel & Jimmy Novak

We know Cas carried a lot of guilt for what happened to Jimmy and his whole family. So I'm interested in a post-finale, canon-compliant (I guess?) fic where Cas tries to reconcile things with Jimmy in Heaven. Maybe Jimmy & Amelia were one of his first "projects" or test cases in trying to build a new and better Heaven with Jack? (And it's what he was so busy with while Dean was still alive.) Or, is it weird in Heaven with Cas and Jimmy looking so similar? Does Cas still fight doubts as to whether Dean really loves him, or just desires this body/form that isn’t his own?

Otherwise, I've been thinking about Endverse!Cas, who had lost his grace/powers as the angels have all left and abandoned humankind. What happened to/where is Jimmy in all of that? (If we go by the canon that Jimmy was not killed, nor went to Heaven, until the end of Season 5, when Lucifer blew up that vessel and Cas was resurrected by Chuck.) Are they now two "mortal men"/souls trapped sharing one body? Is that why Cas is so messed up/always seeking an escape through drugs and sex? (Besides of course Dean having changed so much.) This is one prompt where I don’t mind a very dark/not-so-happily-ever-after ending.

The Police

Angst, Character Development, Established Relationship, Getting Together, Humor, Interpersonal Drama,��Smut

Group: Sting/Stewart Copeland

Yeah I’ll always request these two together even though I know it’s a long shot to find anyone else as obsessed about them as I am. Really anything at all whatsoever would make me happy for this ship: Reunion Tour-era fic, early punk days before they grew successful, soulmate AUs...

I’d also love a spooky story where they’re on tour/on the road somewhere and end up in a haunted hotel. Or their tour bus/van breaks down in the middle of nowhere and they have to seek shelter in an abandoned house or farm or something...and supernatural weirdness ends up affecting them or bringing them together.

If you want to go the crack route: it wasn’t enough for Miles to take them all around the world to tour in “exotic” locations back in the day. He’s arranged for them now to go on the ultimate tour...of outer space and alien worlds.

Crossover Fandom

Action/Adventure, Character Development, Interpersonal Drama, Angst, Canon-Style Plot - Freeform, Hurt/Comfort, Mystery/Procedural

Group: Abe Morgan (Forever TV) & John Munch (L&O: SVU)

I’ve had a long running headcanon that these two could have been friends back in their respective 60s/early 70s hippie days. I’d love either a story set back then, “pre-canon”, or them running into each other in NYC later in life. Munch ending up in Abe’s antique shop, for instance, while on an investigation?

Group: Dean Winchester (Supernatural) & Ezekiel Stone (Brimstone) Group: Castiel (Supernatural) & Ezekiel Stone (Brimstone)

I’m fascinated by the idea of crossing over these two canons. Even if there’s some conflict in their approach to Hell/Lucifer/demons, there’s still a lot in common. Dean & Ezekiel having both put in their time in Hell and being demon hunters, for instance, and their complicated relationships with (fallen) angels. I’d love to see them bonding over their experiences (Maybe they even meet in Hell? Time DOES work differently there…) Maybe somehow after Ezekiel completed his mission for the Devil, he did get his second chance at “life on Earth”…but the devil’s trick is that it’s not HIS Earth, it’s in a different dimension (Supernatural’s). I’m also curious how Ezekiel might respond to Castiel as an angel–perhaps he mistakes Cas for a demon at first, with his powers, but then they realize they are in fact hunting the same demon? Cas is stuck in an alternative dimension and recognizes Ezekiel as a similar soul to Dean’s, and seeks out his help?

Basically I’d love some kind of casefic/demon hunt here, with the characters bonding over their shared/similar past traumas, taking care of each other when/if injured on a hunt, and/or perhaps helping them sort out their complicated feelings for another (ie, background Cas/Dean and/or Zeke/the Devil are TOTALLY welcome here, as I ship both of those ships.)

Law & Order: SVU

Group: John Munch/Odafin "Fin" Tutuola

Character Development, Established Relationship, Humor, Getting Together, Interpersonal Drama, Canon-Style Plot - Freeform, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Mystery/Procedural, Slice of Life, AU-Genre shift

Munch/Fin is one of my eternal OTPs so I’m always happy to see something new featuring them! I’m always good for procedural/case-fics. And this is one request where I’d love to read some AU-Genre or setting shift, reimagining the two in some other situations besides police work. I’ve always loved the idea of John hosting a conspiracy/weird news radio show or podcast, and Fin as someone completely skeptical but who gets wrapped up in one of John’s mysteries. Or John as the owner of a bar somewhere that Fin is one of his regulars, and over time their friendship develops/deepens into something more.

Supernatural RPF

Misha Collins/Jensen Ackles Established Relationship, Getting Together, Smut, Fluff, Slice of Life, Humor

It’s odd for me to be into an actor RPF fandom (I usually only fall for music/band-related ones), but what can I say...these two just make it almost impossible not to see the possibilities!

I was thinking I’d love something set post-Supernatural...their first time seeing each other again after a long time apart? (What with the show ending, covid, Misha’s surgery, etc etc.) Could be at a convention or maybe they get to go off on a getaway together somewhere private/romantic and it’s...kind of tense and maybe nervous/angsty at first? Like with doubts about whether they can/should go back to the way things were before.

Or: putting tin-hatty speculation about the “secret/real identity” of Alma Perpetua aside, I love their poetry and I’d love any “Cockles” fic using one of their poems as inspiration.

#fandom5k #dear author #exchange letter

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animatedminds · 4 years

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What If: Every Character In Dragonball FighterZ Had a Dramatic Finish? (Pt. 4 - Final)

Well, here we are at the end. For the last four days, this blog has been going over each of the characters in Dragonball FighterZ - the tragic, bereft ones without Dramatic Finish - and imagining what moments from their history would work best in Arcsys’ glorious animation style.

So far we’ve gone through near the whole franchise, with only a few characters left - and there’s no time like the present to give those few remaining characters their chance.

As before, this isn’t so much a request for all these characters to legitimately get Dramatic Finishes - Arc System Works’ animation is too intricate and time consuming for that to be a reality - as much as speculation of what might have been. Though only a few of the characters in the roster can have a Dramatic Finish, most of them can definitely carry one in my opinion, and at the very least it makes a great excuse to go back and watch a few classic Dragonball clips. It’s worth noting again, as well, that on this list we’re looking for appearances in Dramatic moments: not necessarily wins. Across the list there have been quite a few characters whose best, most cinematic options have been losses of theirs. If you want the whole list, no lines, no waiting, no need to go back, check out the SoundCloud cast of the whole thing - or if you prefer to sit back and read here’s Part 1, Part 2 and - of course - Part 3. But let’s get on with it. Last time we finished off Dragonball Super (with one exception), and UI Goku himself hit the stores... that is, without the Dramatic Finish we were expecting (that went to Blue Goku). What’s left here are the extras: additional characters, interesting ideas that don’t fit anywhere else, that sort of thing. But first, one thing needs to be settled with the last remaining Super character...

That, right. Goku (Ultra Instict) himself!

As you might have figured from what I just said - and the previous entry - the Dramatic Finish that came with the latest DLC turned out not to be an Ultra Instinct Goku Finish with Kefla, but was actually given to Goku Blue instead. This not only knocked Goku Blue off the list (just as well since - as I went through last time - the option I thought of for Goku Blue and the option I thought of for Hit were one and the same) and, naturally means we had to put Ultra Instinct Goku on in his stead.

This is a little tricky, as some of Goku’s best moments in the Tournament of Power have already been snapped up by the game. The Surfing Kamehameha moment with Kefla is of course the stand out, but there’s also already a Goku vs Jiren Dramatic Finish (with Base Goku). They’ve repeated themselves before - giving a Vs Freeza Dramatic Finish to both Super Saiyan and Base Goku (and I’ve already suggested what is effectively a third, albeit starting with Blue Vegeta), but it still makes this an odd thing to approach.

As seems typical, I ended up with two big ideas. You guys might not like this ruling so much, since the first is an overall very solid moment, and the second - my main idea - is a little unorthodox, but bear with me.

For the first idea, a picture perfect Dramatic Finish, I’d go with the moment Jiren attacks the stands, along with Goku’s enraged payback.

For those who haven’t seen the arc, the Tournament of Power is odd among Dragonball major storylines in that there isn’t really a “bad guy.” Everyone is fighting on equal terms in a universal storyline, for fear of having their universe erased if they lose (stakes which - spoilers - turns out to be semi-fake, or at least more than they think). Everyone in the tournament, moral or amoral, is neutral to one another... but that doesn’t mean they don’t have their hang-ups.

Jiren - the final boss - is a being who suffered hardship in his youth because he felt he wasn’t strong enough, and so dedicated his life to obtaining more power. Goku - anime protagonist that he is - claims that his power comes from his friends and Jiren, who couldn’t care less about friendship, doesn’t exactly like that, especially when Goku starts winning. So he throws a fit and tries to blow up Goku’s friends to prove a point. Goes without saying that Goku didn’t exactly like that either. This moment is very self contained, cinematic and strong, with quickly established stakes and an epic conclusion, which makes it a perfect Dramatic Finish - in fact, it might not have been a bad place to end the original arc itself. You would pretty much have to do it on the Galactic Arena stage - which is a FighterZ original - as the lack of a Tournament of Power stage means there’s no other place for Goku and Jiren to have a battle of the scale we’d need while also letting his friends be there in the firing line. But, that being the case, you would simply have it start - as all Dramatic Finishes do - with Jiren getting knocked back, he rants about how friendship is easily erased and shoots a blast as the stands, Goku deflects it, and goes to town: a fight ensues a la the Super Broly Dramatic Finish, with a couple extra dramatic shots, and ending with an uppercut and massive Kamehameha that takes Jiren out. End with a shot of Goku standing over Jiren, but on a much less cheerful note than the Base Goku one.

All in all, it’s a pretty great idea. One only has to look at the clip to see that. So what’s my other option, which I would prefer? Well... we’ve seen so many good Dramatic Finishes in the game, I kind of think the Dramatic Openings could use a little love, don’t you? I’ve already suggested a few, but mostly as side ideas. However, this one could serve as the most epic opening in the game, if done well. The moment where Goku goes Ultra Instinct for the very first time:

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Against Jiren again, of course.

The hypest moment of any transformation is always the moment the hero unlocks it. The point where they’re pushed to their limit and tap into that power they didn’t know they had. The God and Blue transformations were elaborate and offscreen, respectively, so this was really Super’s big transformation moment, and it was definitely hype.

Much earlier on, Goku tries to finish Jiren off with what he hopes is his ace in the hole - the Spirit Bomb. Jiren, having none of that, just flings it back... the resulting war ends with Goku losing: the blast slowly overtakes Goku before detonating in a truly spectacular way, and for a moment it looks like Goku is done.

That is, until he steps out of the transformation... changed.

It would definitely be the most elaborate Dramatic Opening - with the same amount of scene-work and modeling you would expect from a Dramatic Finish, but it would be worth it. The Dramatic scenes have in general become more and more spectacular over the years, but most of the Openings were early and so missed out on it. Still, the best thing about the Dramatic Openings is that they really get you energized for the fight to come - make you feel like it’s about to go down, and this scene would absolutely accomplish that. Not to mention, it would go perfectly alongside the Super Saiyan Goku and Super Saiyan 2 Gohan transformation openings as well.

But both options work pretty well, and either way it would be a great way to let the newest content in the franchise continue to shine. If Moro shows up later in this season, I’ll be surprised, but you can bet they’re will be some options off of that. But with Super now officially done, we move on to the truly extra candidates. Starting with...

Android #21

The villain of FighterZ’s story mode herself: a terrifying android who, thanks to a few infused traits from the Buu line, seeks to consume all life on Earth - while at odds with her own good side.

Since literally her only content ever is FighterZ’s story mode there’s not much to pull from, but luckily the choice for her is an absolute no-brainer. I’ve mentioned before that you could give her a decent Dramatic Finish with Android 16 - using any of his death scenes - but the best option is simply to take the end of the story mode, modify it and give it to us as a Finish of its own.

That’s right, we’re talking about the moment where Good #21 sacrifices herself to take Evil #21 out for good.

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And, on the unique side, it would make this the only Dramatic Finish to trigger off of a mirror match - which is something rather impossible for anyone else.

You would need Goku on your team, of course - in a climax reminiscent of Kid Buu’s death, the moment involves Goku charging a Spirit Bomb while #21 holds her evil self off. Once the bomb is ready, Goku lets it fly - but Evil #21 is just powerful enough that she can resist the explosion. All seems lost, until the good half, knowing that she still holds the malice within that could lead to her becoming like her other self one day, tackles her evil embodiment - resulting in both being eradicated in a blazing explosion.

It’s a simple moment, sans all the dialogue, and the would be very simple to adapt to a Dramatic Finish: arguably, you would barely have to alter anything that isn’t already there (well, besides making the models fully animate in the “in between” moments, which would probably take some doing). Granted, one would have to have played the story mode to know what’s going on, but it’s not as if Dramatic Finishes aren’t fairly lore heavy in the first place.

And with her settled, we move on to the next questionably canon character without a Dramatic Finish, and one that was pretty hard to think of one for...

Goku (Dragon Ball GT)

... I don’t want to say “why couldn’t this have just been Kid Goku?” I really don’t.

However, for the purposes of this list, him being GT Goku makes it almost impossible to think of a Dramatic Finish. There’s the rumors Omega Shenron is going to be appearing later on in the season, but so far those are only that: rumors.

Otherwise, Goku doesn’t really get much in the way of awesome fighting moments against the rest of the game roster. He fights against Gohan (and adult Goten, which for obvious reasons isn’t happening) when the latter was under Baby’s control, but that doesn’t really have a conclusive end - let alone a dramatic one. He fights Vegeta in the same way, but Baby Vegeta is very much a different character from any other Vegeta we’ve got, far past the point of finagling, so the reference wouldn’t work.

Thus, I’ve mostly been going with “why not just pretend GT Goku is Kid Goku” for this list and any future Dramatic Finish. It came up in the Tien section, if and when Roshi appears it’s my suggestion for him as well, and it works far easier than trying to shoehorn a GT scene into the game.

With that in mind, I’ve already noted a great option in the first part of this: the end of Tien and Goku’s first fight, on the Tenkaichi Budokai stage. It’s epic, it’s a classic moment, and it’s lots of fun. Honestly, it’s GT Goku’s best option for a Finish.

But to give a new idea, I’d love for them to do something small but sweet for GT / Kid Goku. Something that would be both a cool call back, and a neat fighting game classic moment as well.

I’m talking about Goku and Krillin’s fistbump:

This still takes some finagling - that’s Kid Krillin you see above you, who is a lot smaller than his adult version (though not by much, you’d think). And there’s also a moment like this in Super between adult Krillin and and what would be in Base Goku in FighterZ terms, which would probably work even better (if anything, they could make this opening between Krillin and Base Goku and have GT Goku stand in during the flashback) -

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- but if we’re talking about GT- sorry, “Kid Goku,” giving him this moment would work fairly well too. It’s another moment geared towards presenting a classic reference from the series’ oldest days, and gives us a sweet Dramatic Opening vs a tense and spectacular one.

It also doubles as a decent fighting game ref. Having characters who in lore are friends enter a fight with a simple fistbump or some other sign of respect is an enduring opening idea that’s most often seen in Street Fighter - which has often had Ryu and Ken begin fights this way.

This kind of small but sweet reference has somewhat gone out of style these days, along with a lot of the nuances you got with sprite-based fighters, but if it could be done more, I’d actually love to see it.

Here, for this case, you would simply have it happen on the Tenkaichi Budokai stage, and either have them walk onto the stage together and fistbump or - to save on animation costs - just begin with them doing it and jumping back to fight. For the full Base Goku version, doing that with a flashback of Kid Goku (a la GT Goku standing-in) doing the same, and then back to them as adults.

That and the Tien Finish are really the best GT Goku’s going to get unless something changes in the future, and both are pretty neat ideas, so that’s as far as we’re going to get with him.

And that’s the whole roster: with this list, now everyone has a Dramatic Finish. So I’ll end it instead with a truly extra suggestion: a Finish for a character who already has one, but which would be a very different kind of Finish that would still be pretty neat.

Kid Buu Destroys The World

I’ve already suggested something like this for Blue Vegeta’s Dramatic Finish - a finish in which the bad guy wins, and blows up the planet. It’s something that’s oddly cool to think about. Dragonball has many fantastic moments, including ones where the bad guys get ahead - King Piccolo blowing up Shenron, Nappa wiping out Goku’s friends, Cell crippling Vegeta and humiliating Trunks - but in the end, we mostly talk about the heroic ones.

So why not flip the script and just do one where everything goes to hell? Literally, for the evil people who happen to be on Earth.

Buu doing this is even more iconic than Freeza, imo, because while Freeza has been destroying planets for longer, it was always planets that weren’t our heroes’ own. He killed off Namek, but when he tried to come back to Earth and do it on the good guys’ home turf he got eviscerated - it wasn’t until a long time after that he was finally able to pull it off, and by then the heroes had a means of instantly undoing it. I still think Freeza vs Vegeta is a good choice for a potential Blue Vegeta Dramatic Finish, but if you’re approaching it from a “let’s make a Finish were it all goes horribly” standpoint, Buu is the standout moment.

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For this, Kid Buu wins against Super Saiyan Vegeta or Goku. After the customary knockback, Buu grins, and laughs, and creates a planet destroying ball of energy. Goku and Vegeta run, but can’t get away - for bonus points, you could have Gohan, Goten + Trunks, and Piccolo on the ground, just out of saving range as the two are forced to instant transmission away. Cut to a shot of the planet as a whole, just before it all goes up.

Then, in the empty nothing of space, Buu reconstitutes, and flies off for more destruction. The end.

It’s a very different feel from the rest of the Dramatic Finishes, I think, which is why I felt it deserved to be on here even though Buu already has one. It’s just a fun, extra idea of the kinds of interesting things they might decide to do with Dramatic Finishes in the future.

And that’s everyone!

Hope you all enjoyed sitting through my nerdy listing habit. This was a lot of fun, going through all these Dragonball moments, remembering this and that and finding the most epic things each of our favorite characters have done. This isn’t even touching the iceberg for most of the cast, but if they do someday decide to give more of the rosters Dramatic Openings, none of these would at all be a bad place to start.

But if you think I’ve got the wrong idea, let me know. If there’s some moments you think would be better, give ‘em a try! Keep playing FighterZ if you have it, and simply stay Sparking if you don’t. The sky’s the limit for Dragonball, maybe even farther, and sometimes I think we haven’t seen anything yet!

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have-theory-will-headcanon · 5 years

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“You Are Free” - The Kids of TDP

Warning: LONG POST AHEAD

I’ve seen some posts going around in the TDP fandom about how the children rulers of the human kingdoms, especially Aanya, are running their kingdom poorly, or will run their kingdom poorly in Ezran’s case. The biggest argument I’ve seen about this is addresses how Aanya handled Viren’s request to join him and the other rulers in combining her forces with his to fight the Xadians. Now, I get why her decision not to send soldiers into battle might strike a lot of people as a poor decision. Strategically speaking in a real war, it would be. But I think some people are forgetting that

A: TDP is primarily a kids’ show and that real war and the choices people would make during such times has no standing here, and

B: the point of the show is to illustrate to the primary audience (kids) how sometimes the right choice is not fighting, but listening, and understanding, because what you may have been taught about a place and its people may not be entirely true, or fair. (An especially important lesson for our youngsters given the current state of the world.)

We see during Viren’s proposal to the other kings and queens of the human kingdoms the backstory as to how Queen Sarai and Aanya’s parents, the Queens of Duren, gave their lives in order to ensure the survival of others. I’ve seen people going after Aanya’s decision to not fight as childish and selfish, but consider this: Yes, thousands of lives were saved by her parents crossing into Xadia and killing the Magma Titan. But how many thousands of lives would be lost if she sent soldiers to fight Xadians? Xadians who, probably, are just defending their territory? Let’s not forget that Xadians have a reason to defend the border and keep humans from crossing into their land. They’ve experienced the fear of realizing that all it takes is one dark mage to suck the life and magical force out of them, and that all they are to some humans is a power source. Imagine if the situation were reversed and you had Xadians trying to get across the border to steal the hearts and body parts of humans to perform spells? Wouldn’t you want to keep them out at all costs?

And I think that’s the point. Or at least one of the points of the show. There is a huge bias between Xadians and the human kingdoms. The human kingdoms, specifically the ones run by adults, portray residents of Xadia as monsters. Amaya even uses the word “monster” when referring to Rayla. Harrow is not completely without fault either in this aspect, given how readily he went along with Viren’s plan to cross the border into Xadia to seek the heart of the Magma Titan. Viren especially has instilled this belief into many people; his own children included. Xadians are bloodthirsty, heartless monsters, and are only good when used for dark magic. Neither side is innocent, not when it comes to the adults. Even Runaan, clearly an adult by Xadian standards, is shown as being limited by his prejudice and his conviction that there is no other way than the one he–as the experienced leader–has chosen. But the kids are a different story.

The children in TDP represent the dawn of a new era. An era where they have not yet been completely embittered towards Xadia. Aanya refuses to pursue war at the expense of yet more lives, because in spite of losing her parents to the Dragon King, she herself has not truly experienced any reason to loathe Xadians outright. Aanya is a child with the responsibilities of an adult, but she has the ability to see beyond what adults can or will.

Ezran and Callum have every reason to hate Xadians. Xadians essentially robbed the boys of their mother. In Ezran’s case this is especially hard because it happened before he ever really got to know her. Ezran also does everything to help the very creature that his people would insist on him believing is his greatest enemy, the son of the very being who killed his mother. But he protects Zym, encourages him, and helps him learn to fly. Ezran clearly sees the good in creatures that others instinctively recoil from (i.e. Claudia and the Banther incident) and does what he can to help and understand them.

Callum represents the truth that magic–Primal magic–CAN be done through hard work, understanding, and a willingness to be open minded to something you might not immediately understand. Claudia offers him the alternative of Dark Magic when he admits to wanting to be able to do it again, be he declines, stating that he wants to do “real” magic. Magic that doesn’t require the taking of a life, or inflicting harm on another living being in order to make it work. Let’s also not forget the words that Harrow says to Callum, both while he’s still alive, and in Callum’s fever dream:

“The great illusion of childhood is that adults have all the power and freedom, but the truth is the opposite, the child is freer than a king.”

“You are free. You are free from the past and the future.”

Harrow was limited by his own prejudice and his anger towards Xadia, both before and especially after his wife’s death. He made decisions that may not have been the best, but as he faces his imminent death it’s clear he’s starting to realize that, and wishes to do his best to ensure that his sons don’t follow his example and make the same mistakes.

The last instance I can think of for how children have a very different approach to Xadians and the entire human vs elf/dragon war, at least on the human side of things, is Ellis. Ellis is a child who, upon seeing Rayla and meeting Lujanne, smiles and offers help instead of instantly condemning them for being elves. Unlike the man with the Sunforge dagger Rayla briefly interacts with. The man clearly witnesses that Rayla has no intention of hurting him or stealing from him, but still gathers a mob to chase her and the boys out of town. Ellis, on the other hand, takes no time in accepting Rayla and Lujanne as friends. It’s clear that she has no issue with them. Why would she? Her only encounters with Xadians have been entirely positive ones.

Now to the Xadian side of things. At the moment, we only have two Xadian youngsters on the team, but I’d be surprised if it stays that way for very long.

Rayla shows that she is young enough to make mistakes but also willing to have the benefit of the doubt and be merciful and forgive. In the first few episodes, we see that’s not immediately the case, as she does her best to prove to Runaan–an adult she clearly loves and respects–that she can do what is expected of her as a Moonshadow assassin. She chases down Callum and Ezran, entirely intent on her mission, until she realizes that everything she thought to be true–everything that adults in Xadia had taught her to believe–was wrong. She doesn’t even hesitate to accept that things are different when sees the egg. Her only goal then is to get the egg safely to Xadia, because in the end that’s all that matters. It does take her a little while to open up to Ezran and Callum, but the important thing is that she does, and forms very clear attachments to both of them.

Then we have the Dragon Prince himself. Zym is a young dragon who has no reason to dislike humans because most of the humans he’s met have done their best to understand and help him. He is free from the bias of his people because he doesn’t even know who his people are yet. Even when he’s faced with humans who do wish to harm him (Claudia and Soren) we see that it doesn’t change his impression of Callum or Ezran. To him, there are good beings, and not so good beings. Human or Xadian makes no difference.

Now, stepping back from the kids, let’s take a look at one more adult who very clearly draws the line between good and bad, but not the way we might like.

From the word “go” Viren dismisses any and all children (even his own) as lesser. When Callum runs up to King Harrow right before the assassination attempt, Viren steps out of the room and tells him “You shouldn’t be here”, then proceeds to take his voice and call him an “impudent little mongrel”. When Viren is faced with Queen Aanya, he is clearly exasperated and asks several times when her escort will be joining them. When she gives her final answer to him at the end of his tale and plea, he rages “This is why we need an adult!” Before that, when he tells Soren he wishes for him to assassinate the Princes, he explains to Soren that Katolis cannot have a child king because he will make “weak decisions”. Viren continually tries throughout the series to express how children are the limited ones, but he is limited by his prejudice and self-importance as an adult.

And between the adults and the children, we have some interesting in-betweens. Prime example: Soren and Claudia. They’re older, but they’re not adults. They make poor decisions, but also redeem themselves with better decisions and trying to recognize their mistakes. They are the characters caught between whether to do the truly right thing, or whether to do what is expected and perceived as “the right thing” as nearly grown up individuals brought up on their fathers’ flawed teachings. I think Corvus could also technically fall into this category, given he originally went after Rayla on Amaya’s orders, but stopped when he realized he didn’t have quite the whole story.

But basically the point I’m trying to make is that this show is supposed to be about how kids can make a difference in a world where adults are so set in how things are or should be that they can’t or refuse to see how things could be. It’s about how children sometimes make better decisions because they’re not chained down by the responsibilities, or prejudices, of adults.

This will make for an interesting dynamic once Ezran takes the throne, because he is assuming an adult’s responsibility but still harbors the heart and mind of a child who sees nothing wrong with Xadia or its people–something Viren will probably use to his advantage, assuming he gets out of prison.

#The Dragon Prince #Headcanons #It's 2:30 AM and I should be in bed but nah...#I wrote this long ass thing instead.

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pinkletterday · 5 years

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In which Hussie says to hell with it and talks about all her slash WiPs even though she has no idea when they will be posted.

I love Olivarry and Coldflash. But my problem with reading those fics are that I miss Iris like a limb if she's not also part of Barry.

I felt the same way before I ever shipped Westallen, and I didn't even ship them for the longest time. Nor was I particularly interested in Iris as a character until sometime mid-way S3.

(It was when she burst into frightened tears in 3x9. Something in me immediately went PROTECC and it hasn't turned off since.)

I think it was more the sheer intensity of Barry's love for her that fascinated me. Not that a man fixating on a woman and obsessively pinning all his happiness on her is new or healthy phenomenon, but it was also deeper than that, character-wise. His love for her is so tied up in his self-definition, and the myriad ways their childhood bond helped mould their adult selves.

(And the fact that no matter how this love can change in nature, he will never be immune to appreciating her beauty and sexuality as a woman, which is so important to me as a slash fan and WoC. Seeing women be desexualized unless they're active romantic interests makes me want to scream. You can find people attractive af without wanting to bang them! It doesnt make you any less close! Not all close m/f relationships have to be sibling-like! Aargh!)

Regardless of how it came about, I need Iris to have that importance in Barry's life no matter who (else?) he's in love with. Which is why I started writing slash myself. It's a relief to me to know that she's there in every story I write, like a personal touchstone if nothing else. There you are my darling, you aren't forgotten.

Coldflash vs Olivarry polyam AU - Barry's love for Iris and the pain of her rejection is the springboard of the series. His struggle to reconcile with her over the years drives his character trajectory as much his love for Len and Oliver does. And there is so much she sees and evolves and goes through herself that the stupid boy cannot see until the very end, caught up in his own pain as he is.

The Assistant Verse - Barry and Iris are queerplatonic partners in a poly sexual relationship. Iris is the one who dolls up her boy in lipstick and booty shorts and sends him into Len's path in Paint It Red. Many years later, in Every Kind of Love, she descends wrathfully on Oliver from half a world away for doing her darling wrong, bringing her own broken heart for Barry to nurse.

This is one of the most wholesome Westallen relationships I have ever written, even though I'm pretty sure it will generate the least interest.

For The Good of the Realm - in the first draft Iris was Barry's first love and heartbreak pulled apart by politics, but in the second revision they're again queerplatonic partners and childhood best friends who call each other "soulmates". They had hoped to be married to each other and be kept safe from political matches. But then Barry becomes betrothed to High King Oliver and must be sent to Starling Court as the reluctant new Prince Consort, while Iris sets out on her mission to emancipate the tribes of the Middle Kingdom. They gift each other two halves of a magical "heartstone", a conduit of emotional resonance that connects two people across leagues of distance. In the fear, alienation and intrigue of the Starling Court, its Iris's love and safety that Barry holds onto, even while he falls in love with his husband.

Call Me By Your Name - Barry and Iris go to Greece in the summer before college, each hoping it will lead to a resolution to the magnetic push and pull they've been feeling for years. But when Barry meets and falls in love with Oliver and realizes he's gay, he is devastated at both breaking Iris's heart and not being in love with her. Because he really wants to be; she's always been his home and the future he's envisioned - to lose that terrifies him. It's a story about Barry and Oliver's sexual and romantic awakening, but also about how Barry and Iris manage to break down their own expectations of what it means to love one another forever and build something much truer and real.

A Stitch in Time is solidly Queenwestallen now. I was going to have Iris evolve into an undefined queerplatonic partner for Barry and Oliver but that ship is long gone.

For Love Or Money - Barry and Iris were childhood sweethearts and married young, Barry's tech startup and her career both took off. By their mid-twenties they should be the couple that has it all.

Except for Iris finally realizing she's ace and sex-repulsed. This is a terrible shock to both of them and not a small blow to Barry's self-esteem because she's the only woman he's ever been with. But they decide they're too in love to divorce and Iris tentatively suggests that Barry takes the opportunity to explore his interest in men, leading him to engage Oliver's services as an escort. Iris has to discover for herself what it means to be an asexual woman but Barry falling in love with Oliver is an issue they both have to deal with as a couple. Meanwhile Oliver has to reconcile the fact that not only is he falling for a client but one who is very much in love with his wife.

Mercury Rising - my Earth-13 Coldflash mob boss AU and oh is Iris ever there! This is my most delicious iteration of her - not as Barry's support but as his combatant, his antagonist and the eternal thorn in his side. Her unwitting role in Barry's betrayal that drives him to criminality, her bull-headed faith in the goodness of his character even in the face of his escalating violence, calling him to account every step of the way till he does the one thing she cannot forgive. The resulting single-minded determination to take her former best friend down without compromising her own moral code even as the undeniable magnetism between the two of them wreak havoc with their lives, and final realization that even after everything she can never give up on Barry Allen. Hate is truly just love with its back turned and what makes them tear each other to pieces even as it brings out their noblest and most human instincts.

Queen of Starling - On Earth 42, Beatrice Allen is adopted by Harrison Wells when her parents are murdered and taken away to Starling City - but even distance can't make her less in love with the best friend she left behind.

Here's the kicker of this story - Iris dies. Her death bisects Beatrice's story in two - the halycon days of her girlhood and the shattered trauma of the next fifteen years where she has to collect the pieces of herself out of her lover's grave to rebuild herself into the mother her children need, the superhero the world needs and to let herself love again.

The Awakening - Curse specialist Iris West and alchemist/ lore master Barry Allen are part of the Men of Letters team that go into a old cursed and haunted mansion to retrieve the Book Of The Dead, last known to have been in the hands of disgraced former Man of Letters and necromancer Eobard Thawne. The team is led by their chapter's chairman Harrison Wells, but the expedition is funded by eccentric millionaire and hunter Oliver Queen.

The blue-collar hunters and elitist Men of Letters don't trust Oliver, being seen as a mere hobbyist or thrill-seeker in the absence of any real tragedy or family legacy to put him on his path. But Iris distrusts him because she's the only one who can see his clear attraction to her best friend and childhood sweetheart Barry. Iris has spent her life as Barry's protector, himself being something of a pariah in the community due to his rumoured supernatural parentage and open empathy for the spirits and monsters they hunt. It's Iris that sees the way the house draws in both Barry and Oliver and the patterns of the hauntings that occur around them, she's the one who is as terrified for Barry's safety as Oliver as the house sucks them deeper into the tragedy of its past and she's the one that finally deduces how the malevolence of the house works and what it wants.

From Dusk Till Dawn - I think this is the story that has Iris in it the least. Eobard kidnaps Barry at age fifteen and subjects him to an experiment that backfires badly, leaving him dead and Barry with only a fraction of powers he was destined to have and no connection to the Speed Force. ARGUS immediately finds him and forces him to manufacture a rift with the Wests so they can claim him without suspicion, mould him into one of their operatives and train him to hunt the other metahumans Eobard created.

This is an Olivarry story where Barry rediscovers hope and love through his secret protection of Oliver. But its the memory of Iris's love and the happiness of their childhood that keeps him tethered to his humanity through the next eight years, it is her that he goes to the night before what he believes will be his final sacrifice ("You have always been the best part of me. Keep that part of me inside your heart and I can never die. Keep me and don't let me go, Iris"), it is her, after everything, that leads him home, and it is her that seeks out Oliver and asks him to help Barry heal.

This is not including my Coldwestallen fics The Scarlet Rose (Snow Queen/ Beauty and the Beast fusion) and The Adventures of Snart The Cat (Bastet turns Len into a cat and charges him with protecting Barry and Iris's unborn child).

So yes, I absolutely started writing slash because I missed Iris West. It's not just her though. None of the ladies are relegated to ship support. In the Polyam AU Lisa Snart specifically rips into Barry for ignoring her emotional needs as a friend while on the outs with Len, Oliver's fixation with Barry in Stitch in Time and resulting neglect of his friendship with Laurel has serious repercussions, Caitlin couldn't give less of a damn about Barry's romantic exploits in her incarnations as Killer Frost. Even in For The Good of the Realm where he's her foster brother and charge, Caitlin is more wrapped up in manoeuvring him away from court intrigue, legitimizing her own presence at his side and being a ball of identity issues. And I absolutely love my dark!Felicity AUs where she is outright antagonistic and disapproving of Barry's love interests and sometimes of Barry himself. In the Olivarry stories where she is supportive and sympathetic, Felicity and Oliver themselves still acknowledge their own romantic potential. Which means Barry and Oliver falling in love creates tension between the three of them, and the men have to learn how not to hurt her or take her support for granted while they figure themselves out.

The relationships between men and women in every flavour and intensity makes stories so much richer and deeper and three dimensional. I am done being conditioned as a woman to erase ourselves when we inhabit the bodies and stories of m|m men.

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15hont1c · 5 years

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Week 5: The End

Our reflective essay should:

Discuss set text and how your screenplay was inspired by it.

Draw specific links between screenplay + source text.

Show familiarity with relevant aspects of book (period, themes, genre, location, etc)

Discuss writing process and the creative decisions you made.

Reflect on your journey from first idea to finished script.

Use quotes/evidence from screenwriting texts to explain and support your decisions.

Refer to any other books, films, images, etc that influenced your writing process.

Discuss how film would be like?

Discuss animation style, aesthetics, material, color palette, lighting, soundtrack.

Think about intended audience for film.

The tone and style of the reflective essay should follow the appropriate academic tone with citations and bibliography. The reflective essay can also use first person as it is meant to be discussing and analysing our own experiences.

The Last Night - Strictures of Victorian Society

Utterson is annoyed at the servants who are “huddled together like a flock of sheep.”

Upkeep of the Victorian calm and self-contained attitude.

The housemaid breaks into “hysterical whimpering.” -> Mass Hysteria

“A rather wild tale.”

Utterson stands for the audience as he expresses the same doubt/questions the readers ask.

“This drug is wanted bitter bad, sir.”

Depiction of drug addictions.

Victorians can buy over-the-counter heroin; frequented to opium dens and even babies who were born drug-addicts.

Stevenson himself is also a drug addict who was reliant on hallucinogens.

Poole seeing the masked man who was much smaller than his ‘master.’

Referral as a symbol of something hidden/concealed (like door).

Description is evocative and deepens the mystery.

Upon breaking the door, there was no big reveal; no dramatic scene.

Instead, they found a mirror with their own reflection reflected instead, showing the “evil” duality of themselves.

The scene also utilises the uncanny -> we expect the extraordinary, but is actually overwhelmingly ordinary in the scene, even though things are not ‘quite right.’

There is a duality/juxtaposition in the description of the scene: The twitching corpse and a defaced book as opposed to the boiling kettle.

Prompts the idea of “To what extent did Utterson cause the death of Hyde/Jekyll.”

The final two chapters were written in first person narrative:

Dr Lanyon revealing the core of the mystery.

Jekyll telling the chronological story that happened over the course of the novella through his perspective.

First Letter (Lanyon):

Lanyon receives a strange message, begging to carry out a series of specific and peculiar requests.

Jekyll/Hyde begs Lanyon for help.

He goes to fetch a drawer containing powders and a test tube from his lab and goes to wait for the mystery man.

Hyde’s too desperate for the drugs, and gives him the option to leave to watch him ingest it.

Dr Lanyon is bound to secrecy - bound by the Hippocratic oath.

He is unable to reveal what he knows.

Even in a vulnerable state, Hyde presents himself as more superior than Lanyon.

The format of an ‘objective’ third person narrative + ‘subjective’ first person accounts was a trope of Victorian fiction, but was also similar to the medical literature of that period. Anne Stiles (2006) observes that the book’s structure reflects the medical case studies of that period, but also subverts them. Jekyll’s character is both the physician and patient in the story.

Jekyll’s observation states that “man is not truly one, but truly two.” This reflects a Victorian theory that ‘each brain hemisphere might house a separate personality or a separate soul.’ It can be imagined that when a Victorian reads this, they may become afraid of their inner “Hyde” taking over.

An example of this could be the case study of an injured French soldier called Sergeant F which was discussed in the medical Cornhill magazine. According to Stiles in her book Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century on page 43, Sergeant F developed “two distinct personalities upon a gunshot injury in the left brain hemisphere.” His first state is known as intelligent and kindly, while his second state displayed “animalistic and automatic qualities along with impaired sensory impressions.” He is also resilient to pain in this second state.

Even though Sergeant F was male and his condition was caused by an external factor (gunshot), the ‘multiplex personality’ was almost overwhelmingly a female condition. Felida X was an example of a female patient that was also discussed in the Cornhill magazine. Felida’s condition was natural occurring, exhibited hysteria and has another ‘peculiar secondary state of mind.’ She felt pain when transitioning between the two states. While she felt better in this second state, it had “unfortunate moral consequences,” such as when she got herself pregnant with a man whom she had no romantic interest in the first mind state. Her subconscious base instincts made her chase after the man and impregnated herself due to it.

Applying to Jekyll and Hyde, we can see that Hyde was wrestling against the approaches of hysteria. Hysteria is a centuries old illness that no one really understood at the time. It was usually diagnosed when no other cause could be found for its exaggerated symptoms. Examples include:

Salem Witch Trials

Occurred in 1692, over 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft.

20 people were hung upon accusations from mass hysteria.

Neighbours and friends turn against one another.

Started because a group of girls exhibited convulsions and weird spastic behaviour -> epilepsy.

Most of them were girls and women.

Anneliese Michel

A German woman who was supposedly ‘possessed’ by a demon after a complicated series of illnesses early in her life.

Suffered a seizure and diagnosed with psychosis of temporal lobe epilepsy.

Took a lot of medication, but her condition worsened (as well as her mental health.)

Began to hear voices and became intolerant to sacred Christian sacred places and objects.

Stiles (2006) theorised that the small, puny, right-brained Hyde has something of the Victorian femininity about him; emotionally unstable, physically chaotic and somehow ‘lesser’ than his male counterparts. In the novella, Poole describes Hyde as “weeping like a woman.”

The nocturnal setting, theme of monstrosity and embedded narratives (i.e fragments, manuscripts and letters.

Key Features of the Gothic

Wild landscapes vs imprisonment

Hyde was constantly ‘imprisoned’ by the duality in Jekyll’s personality.

Other characters were also imprisoned by the Victorian society’s rules.

The re-emergence of the past within the present (often represented by ghosts - the thing you thought was dead.)

Exploring the limits of what it is to be human.

Internal desires or forces outside our control.

Perverse, weird and dangerous kinds of sexuality - incest, abduction, violence.

The vulnerable of women in 19th century - the ‘triumph’ of young women over seemingly impossible force.

The Uncanny

Figures that are not quite ‘human’ (dolls, was works, automata)

May feature ‘evil’ doubles.

“Somebody who seems unfamiliar and strange in fact has an identity you already know.”

No one in the novella could really describe what Hyde looked like; an uncanny physical description.

We can harness the power of the uncanny to enhance the story in our writing.

Less is More

Planting the seeds and letting the readers’ imagination flow.

Stay Close

Use all senses when writing, stay close to the protagonist and allow the audience to feel their fear.

Make it personal

Use your own fears/phobias to make the scene more realistic.

Give the reader time to feel the fear

Place hints that something disturbing is going to happen.

Create a mood of tension/horror before it actually happens.

Provide something uncanny that is both familiar and unfamiliar.

Allow the sense of underlying unease to intensify over time.

E.g A radio turns on by itself, a child toy changes position.

The Birth of Urban Gothic Horror

Jekyll and Hyde is usually considered as the first ‘urban gothic’ novel. Gothic revivalists of the 19th century believe the threat is no longer an external force, but rather an evil that is curled inside the very heart of the respectable middle class person. This scared the readers at the time even more, as to some extent, the evil was inescapable. The progressive society with the advancement of the Industrial Revolution caused the dark progress of social and psychological effects. Moral decay was an obsession of the Victorians. By identifying and analysing that fear, they seek to control and contain it.

How to Write Dialogue

Unnatural is natural

Not real speech, but a representation of it.

Aim to capture the flavour of speech (without the boring stale bits)

“Natural speech is full of hesitation, repetitions, omissions... when we’re listening to it in real life, our brains filter this out and extract the essential parts (Pierre, 2011).

The S.A.D method

Dialogue is a function of character. Know the character well so their dialogue flows easily.

Status - Who was the upper hand?

Agenda: What is the purpose of the conversation?What do they hope to gain from it.

Desire: What do they want? (What is their ultimate goal/super objective.)

Inhabit their physical space

Listen to how differently different people talk.

Our physical bodies affect our voice. Spend time imagining yourself as the character.

E.g. Timid & trembling? Broad & bold?

Silence is gold

What people don’t say is just as important as what they do.

What are they avoiding to talk about?

Actions speak louder than words.

Explanation kills drama

Characters should talk to each other, not the audience.

“Good dialogue is a manifestation of behaviour, not an explanation” (Yorke, 2013, p150).

Dialogue is not just a Q & A

Good dialogue is surprising and unpredictable.

Promises excitement, but keeps us waiting for it.

Drip-feeds information but withholds answers.

Be ruthless

Dialogue should either move the story forward or reveal something about the character.

If it does not, take that out!

Always read the dialogue aloud.

Make sure the dialogue can actually be spoken/performed realistically.

Reference:

Stiles (2006) - https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KyFrjbezjSgC&pg=PA43&lpg=PA43&dq=sergeant+F+brain+study&source=bl&ots=XgsrEFdmxR&sig=ACfU3U0cTzmOzIkZPnboQKh4FeOQA41Zzg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiC5dm7t4LgAhVho3EKHTYRAJcQ6AEwA3oECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=sergeant%20F%20brain%20study&f=false

#story adaptation #year 2

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briangroth27 · 6 years

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Ready Player One Review

I went into Ready Player One with polarized preconceptions. Several friends loved the book so I was initially excited, but in the run-up to the film's release hate exploded online and I saw all manner of spoilers and scans of troubling chunks of the novel, which made me much more wary. I still liked the story’s idea so the trailers’ focus on nostalgia didn’t bother me, but I didn’t know what to expect going in. I was pleasantly surprised: it’s a fun roller coaster! There are several strong ideas at play, even if they aren't fleshed out as much as they could've been. It definitely seems like most of the book’s problematic stuff has been excised, making for a fast-moving, enjoyable film with a strong, important message.

Full Spoilers…

Tye Sheridan was solid as Wade Watts/Parzival, a generally good guy obsessed with OASIS’ virtual playground and the quest to win control of it. Sheridan was awkward and geeky enough to sell a classic nerd persona without being so overbearing or unlikable that it's unbelievable Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) would fall for him (or that we would root for him). An altercation in the real world with Wade’s aunt’s (Susan Lynch) boyfriend (Ralph Ineson) was a nice moment for Sheridan to show Watts’ vulnerability and fear, giving a glimpse of how differently he reacted to challenges outside the OASIS. I would’ve liked to see more opportunities for that in the script, particularly after Art3mis meets him for real. While I was glad Wade was toned way down from what I’ve heard he is in the novel, I think he’s written a bit too safely. He’s likable, but he’s so much an everyman that he lacks conflict. I don’t think genuinely good characters are boring, but challenging their beliefs is a way to make goodness interesting and this film doesn’t do a lot of that. That could’ve been easily remedied by playing up a few aspects of the movie version to give him a stronger arc. For example, Wade’s poor and wants to win the contest so he can live a life of luxury (winning comes with a huge payday). Why not use that selfish—if understandable, in a world consumed by severe economic decline no one cares about because they all escape to the OASIS—instinct to spark more conflict with Art3mis, who wants to better the world with her winnings? Why not have Wade argue that it’s easier to play in the OASIS than to endlessly fight and maybe really die for people who don’t care about the real world? Maybe even let the promise of relaxation, safety, and an end to financial worries tempt her a bit so her values are challenged as well. When she beats that temptation to carry on with her crusade, Wade could also realize there are more important things than his own comfort.

Also, Wade declares his love for Art3mis way faster than anyone could reasonably love someone, somewhat undercutting the “take chances with your heart” lesson he learns later, so I wish the script had given him time to find out what real love is. He could still be intimidated by the enormity of real love, necessitating that lesson when actual feelings are on the line. While I don’t think their love story is any shallower than in the average film, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been deepened. Lean into Wade’s instant “movie love” and have it mess up Art3mis’ quest by making his help a hindrance for a while. His eagerness to connect with her does destroy his real life, but the movie only comments on how foolish he is to reveal his real name, not that his infatuation is the cause. I also wish there was much more reaction to Wade’s family being murdered; it radicalizes him to Art3mis’ cause (making his aunt into yet another woman in a refrigerator, unfortunately) and Sheridan is good at conveying the loss for the few moments the film lets him live in it, but beyond that it felt like the loss got forgotten somewhere. Even when Wade and his friends intercept villain Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) as he’s exiting the OASIS and trap him in a simulation, Wade’s rage at his aunt’s death seems to be mostly an act, because he has a totally cool head as soon as he leaves Sorrento’s presence. Had the movie presented this as an example of how disconnected players had become from people in their real lives (even if they do make friends with people online), it would’ve been a strong, compelling rebuke of the OASIS. If that’s the intention, it needed a vocalized realization and a moment for Sheridan to explore it.

Olivia Cooke was awesome and driven as Samantha Cook/Art3mis, who—like others have pointed out—had a stronger plot and motivation than Wade did. Since her father died a debtor worked to death by the evil corporation IOI, she was out to prevent them from winning the contest and (in the book, so I’ve been told) wants to use her financial winnings to better the real world. I wish that end goal had been clearly articulated in the movie, because while I like the idea that the world is so bad that the only thing worth fighting for is an escape from it, the huge sum of money the players were competing for could make a real difference. Also, it might have been interesting for Art3mis to be out to shut down the game altogether. There's a literal "delete the OASIS" button—which I kinda wish was designed to look like the Ghostbusters’ Containment Unit—introduced at the end that's never referenced elsewhere, so why not tease it earlier as part of Art3mis' mission? Shutting down the game (and reimbursing everyone for their virtual loot) so that people would be forced to focus on bettering and living in the real world would’ve been a logical goal for her. That's where you could play up Wade's reverence for James Halliday (Mark Rylance) and his OASIS by making him argue for the importance of a game, leading to them compromising with the "close the OASIS on Tuesdays and Thursdays" idea at they implement in end.

Samantha immediately shutting down Wade shortening her real name to Sam after they met in the real world was a nice beat; it was a small moment, but it’s cool that she got to assert her chosen identity in the real world as well as online. I loved that she was weirded out by Wade saying he loved her so quickly and that she called him out on not really knowing her, instead only seeing the parts she wanted him to see. Those both felt like realistic reactions and smart commentary on internet (and real-life) interactions as informed by movies where all romance is a speedy fairy tale. I do wish they'd continued to subvert and expand on those ideas, however. They could've played up her insecurities about her real self beyond being embarrassed by a birthmark, which would've been a nice contrast to Wade's confidence in the OASIS vs. his considerably more fearful real-world persona. It also would've been nice if more than her birthmark had thrown Wade off. Props to him for not caring about her physical appearance, but that's a really low bar; why not include some personality traits he doesn't like? Different tastes in pop culture? Are there things about Wade or his interests she doesn’t like? At the very least, her rebellion could've fueled conflict between them and created much more drama than her apprehension about her birthmark did. Her drive could've been too much for him at first, since he just wanted a cozy life and she's putting her real self in danger. Now that I think about it, playing that up could’ve been a reference itself to Han and Leia in the original Star Wars. While conflict and challenges would’ve generated more sparks and, eventually, a stronger bond, both Sheridan and Cooke sold what they got and I liked them together. While I appreciated that they were drawn as more or less equally capable in the contest (and Samantha was definitely more capable in the real world), I didn’t need her to tell Wade she knew he'd win: it seemed less supportive and more like it undercut her own skills to nod at him being some kind of savior. She does get a lot to do in securing Wade’s access to the final challenge from behind enemy lines, though, which was cool and made winning a bit more of a team effort.

I liked Wade’s best friend Aech (Lena Waithe) a lot and the reveal that the male avatar was controlled by a woman was cool. It was also a nice touch that her mechanic skills weren’t received with shock once her friends knew who she was (and that she didn’t need to explain how she was such a good mechanic!). Waithe was good with what she got, but I wish they'd used her to explore the idea that the OASIS lets you be anyone and anything you want a bit more. Wade gets confidence, Samantha gets beauty and the power to strike back, and Sho (Philip Zao) gets respect beyond his years, but letting Helen articulate exactly what she gets out of the OASIS could’ve been a powerful moment and an argument for its positive aspects. I’m glad the movie at least nodded at her being a lesbian (by having her avatar enjoy making out with the Shining ghost (Gem Refoufi)) instead of ignoring that altogether, though that’s the perfect example of something that could’ve been expanded upon by giving her a moment to say the OASIS allowed her to acceptably live her truth. I wish we’d gotten to know Wade’s pals Sho and Daito (Win Morisaki) better as well. They could've at least had varied goals; rather than seeking control and fortune, maybe one of them could’ve just been down to complete the challenges like a trophy hunter in today’s video games. In general, I would've liked to see more of Wade's competitors before he brings everyone together at the climax. TJ Miller’s I-R0k is a great counterpart to Wade, given he comes off as a much more problematic nerd than Watts does, but he’s still essentially an IOI stooge rather than a player with his own agenda. Are there rebel Gunters Art3mis works with that do extreme things she doesn't approve of? There's only so much screen time, of course, but after the first leg of the Egg Hunt it felt like only the High Five and IOI were invested in the quest.

Mendelsohn was good as the evil businessman in charge of keeping IOI's profits up. That he wanted to monetize the OASIS by putting ads all over it and wanted to charge for its use made him a good avatar for both Hollywood leaning on nostalgia instead of creating new things and for the forces opposed to net neutrality, since this tech should be for everyone. The fact that he was greedier than outright mustache-twirling evil (until he started killing people) was a smart choice that kept him human. At the same time, that greed quickly led him down a "who cares" path: he has no concern about zeroing out everyone scrambling for the Easter Egg, which would bankrupt everyone against him (I hope Wade restored those players' coin counts!), and that was good character progression. I also liked his fake geek scene: being fed trivia to convince Wade they were the same (and his general exasperation with geek culture) was a good way to make him markedly different from every other character in the movie, particularly the younger generation. I also liked the change in his response to confronting Wade as an “inferior” geek and Wade as a competent rebel threat. I've seen it jokingly pointed out that a rich white guy like Sorrento just admitting he's a criminal and giving up at the end is the most unrealistic thing in the movie, but I think that's foreshadowed by Wade confronting him with the "gun." Nolan respects the gamers when they show the capability to end his life; as soon as they're willing to play by his rules, he takes them seriously and backs down almost immediately. Like Wade’s online courage and offline weakness, Nolan has an “avatar” of strength in the real world around people he believes are less than him.

Contrasting with Sorrento, I really liked that the IOI researchers (Turlough Convery, Joe Hurst, Eric Sigmundsson, James Dryden, Danielle Phillips, Rona Morrison, Khalil Madovi, Morris Minelli) were truly invested in the outcome of the game and (eventually) watching Wade win it. Their glee at the success of the hunt and the purity of the final challenge added a lot of texture to them. They may have sold out to IOI (or simply been forced into working with them because of debt or promises of riches), but they weren't just heartless drones. While I appreciated that depth, I was a little confused about the power IOI wields in general in this world. One of their divisions seemed to be a (virtual) privatized debtor’s prison and I would've liked to see what that was like when not engaged in the egg hunt (assuming it existed before Halliday's challenge). That seems ripe for the potential to program nightmares into prisoner’s minds when the only crime was falling behind on their debts. I've been told that in the book, IOI's Sixers are more like indentured servants and I could see that spin in the film (particularly through Samantha's dad), but some clarity on what their actual power level and place in society was would've been appreciated, because it certainly looked like Samantha had been arrested by them. It was also a little odd that IOI could blow up part of the Cleveland Stacks and no authorities cared or even showed up until the end, unless that's a comment on the classism of this society. Despite that lack of clarity, "the common people vs. a corporation with too much power" is a solid theme and the movie plays it well. I also appreciated that Sorrento’s real-world muscle was headed up by a woman, F’nale Zandor (Hannah John-Kamen). She could’ve easily been a guy and most movies would’ve gone that way, but making her a strong, dangerous woman who didn’t like Sorrento that much was a cool choice. It would’ve been nice for Samantha, Sho, and Daito to be able to defeat her instead of Wade (who was focused on the OASIS during their fight), though.

I liked Halliday and his quiet sadness in the wake of the important lesson about connections he'd learned too late. He seems much more likable and understandable than what I've heard about his book counterpart. I'm pretty quiet in real life, so I could definitely relate to his difficulty opening up to people. The fact that his quest to know his favorite pop culture is really a quest to appreciate the game and the world outside by connecting with real people (first Halliday, then people in your real life) was an awesome twist. Whether Halliday is really dead or not doesn't matter to me; either way, he is free of his creation and has found a successor who can do what he couldn’t. Halliday’s programmed self leaving with his childhood self was a perfect exit from the story for him. Simon Pegg gave a solid, unexpectedly subdued performance as Halliday's former friend Ogden Morrow that I liked a lot. He had a good bit of tragedy to him over falling out with Halliday and I liked how he figured into the OASIS world. Serving as the docent of the Halliday museum felt like a cool way to honor his friend and preserve his memory while potentially trying to figure out exactly what drove them apart. I’m glad that the fact that Halliday was in love with Og’s wife wasn’t played to make anyone look bad—rather, it was treated as just something that happened—and the real tragedy was that they fell apart over something Og probably would’ve forgiven Halliday for had they just talked about it instead of Halliday bottling it all up inside (another lost connection).

I liked the references in Halliday's virtual world—I love 80s/90s pop culture—but almost none of the cameos stunned me. They were more like set dressing selling the idea of a nostalgia playground and that’s all they needed to be. If they were the real characters instead of players using avatars, we'd lose focus on Wade, Samantha, etc. and their struggle. While we do get glimpses of interests beyond the 80s/90s—the Adam West Batmobile, King Kong, mentions of steampunk, and disco music (bizarrely referred to as "old school"...all of this is old nowadays, not to mention to teens in the 2040s)—as others have noted it would've been nice to see more diverse fandoms represented by the Gunters, even while they were engaged in cracking Halliday's 80s/90s-focused challenge. It would've brought more variety to the characters. As for the contest itself, I loved the race and The Shining test a lot. The race for the first key, through a twisting and turning New York, was a great adaptation of racing games that made me think of Split/Second. It also featured two of my favorite cameos in the movie, Rexy from Jurassic Park and King Kong, because those “were” those characters. The Shining challenge for the second key featured an excellent recreation of Stanley Kubrick's movie before morphing into pretty much exactly what I'd imagine a bombastic video game version of that film would be, which was cool. That adaptation being hated by Stephen King was also a nice tie to Halliday becoming disillusioned by what people were giving up to use his game. Jack Torrence’s fall and attempt to destroy his family also feels like a pretty perfect (if extreme) parallel to Halliday feeling he’d betrayed his best friend by secretly loving his wife and cutting him out of the company. The chaotic melee leading up to the final key was fine, but full of players I didn't know or care about so it fell flatter than it probably should have (one of the "real" characters thrown into that battle gets a great moment, though). On the other hand, the final challenge was a nice, quiet moment that fit the film's theme and Halliday's lesson. It felt right to bring it all down to one player connecting with the designer of one game. The actual final challenge was perfectly personal too, but they totally missed a chance to homage The Last Crusade by having Halliday’s wizard avatar say “You have chosen…wisely.”

I liked the ideas behind this world quite a bit. It’s definitely prescient to showcase a world in love with distractions and games to the point where they stop interacting with real people or doing something worthwhile with their lives (who among us hasn’t gotten distracted by Twitter or Facebook and put off doing something we should be doing?). They did a great job of showing how much people were wrapped up in their virtual lives, spending real money (even their mortgage money!) on virtual trinkets and upgrades. That real-world financial connection made the stakes high enough to carry the film for me. It's true Wade and the High Five are only fighting for a recreational toy (even if it has other applications like education) without having goals for their lives outside the OASIS, but in the dystopia they live in (and in our real world), people need a release and escape: our lives can't just be work/school, food, bathroom breaks, and sleep. That's why we go to movies and play games in the first place. It's why people shouldn't police what people on food stamps use them for; existence should be more than just existing. At the same time, remembering the OASIS is just a game, not the pinnacle of your existence, is a great message and the movie walks the line between these seemingly at-odds lessons very well. To that end, I wish they'd said the High Five were going to use their enormous winnings to make the real world somewhere people would want to explore too.

I'm interested to see if the novel expands on what you can do in the OASIS beyond playing. I did miss the first minute or two—I came in as Wade was introducing his treadmill/haptic suit—so perhaps some of these elements were referenced and I just missed it. I've heard kids go to school inside it and that's an interesting opportunity for students to be exposed to any facet of history/science/whatever in a tactile way through VR. I'd be interested to see how much work is done online in conjunction with OASIS applications, if any. Do people buy their food with OASIS coins? The more real-world things are wrapped up in the program, the more crucial it becomes to save it from a corporation that wants to eventually price people out of vital services. On a more personal level, seeing more people experimenting with how they present themselves to the world would've been great. If they can literally be anything or anyone, a lot of personal freedom is also at stake. Aech and Shao touch on this freedom, as does Art3mis with her idealized appearance, but I would've loved to see more, particularly with today's political battles over transgender rights. In terms of how people in this future interact with each other, I found it disheartening that even 30 years from now, in a world where everyone is constantly online playing in the OASIS, Wade still has trouble believing a girl—even the famous Art3mis!—could be an expert at trivia. This very modern problem doesn't come up much in the movie, but the Slappers Only line stood out to me. Wade and Samantha test each other on Goldeneye 64 knowledge, which is fine, but it's obvious by what she says that she'd know what Slappers Only is without Wade mansplaining it.

From the look of trailers, I never would've guessed Steven Spielberg directed this. However, he brought his trademark heart and humanity to the CGI elements and video game structure; even in unfamiliar trappings, it felt and acted like a Spielberg movie. Despite areas where the characters could've been fleshed out to create more conflict or explore the personal freedom of the OASIS, Spielberg's touch and the strength of his performers kept them likable and engaging. He also maintained a quick pace: this didn’t feel like a two and a half hour movie at all. I thought the CGI looked good, given this was supposed to be a video game with game graphics. Since it intentionally looked "off" from reality, it wasn't jarring to have anime-inspired avatars or constantly shifting geography. I liked that the score had touches of film scores from the 80s in it; those bits of nostalgia did get me. From the excerpts I've read online, most of the novel’s problematic elements were removed for the adaptation. Wade doesn't show any transphobia—Aech brings up the idea that Art3mis could be a guy and Wade denies it, but seems to accept that possibility anyway. They're worried Art3mis is a guy who’ll steal Wade’s coins, not that he’s a guy who wants to date him. There's no "masturbation manifesto,” no super-long lists of everything Wade has studied (partially because they can just show us all the references and partially because the movie has a more personal egg hunt). Wade's attempts to make Art3mis like him are also toned down or cut altogether, though I wouldn't have minded including one or two and subverting them to teach him that real love isn't like in a movie where grand gestures and "persistence"/stalking will get you everywhere. Unfortunately, it did seem like there was still a noticeable lack of content by female and minority artists, though. Thriller gets a shoutout, but only as a costume Wade considers wearing. As I’ve seen pointed out elsewhere, there was also a lack of 80s content that was geared toward girls. Why not have Jem and the Holograms playing the club Wade and Samantha go to or something? This section of the OASIS is curated to Halliday’s tastes, sure, but if we’re going all-in on the 80s and 90s, largely ignoring minority and female artists is a pretty huge oversight.

I don’t think my critiques here are about movie-ruining problems, just areas where a good, solid film could’ve been exceptional. Even if its characters could’ve been expanded to make more of an impact and statement, Ready Player One is definitely worth seeing! It's an exciting adventure with heart and a great, relevant message. I had a lot of fun and I recommend it!

Check out more of my reviews, opinions, and original short stories here!

#ready player one

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fuckyeahjamieandclaire · 6 years

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In fact, their yin and yang are a perfect metaphor for the two realities that we seemed to be caught between in 2017: love vs. hate, feminism vs. toxic masculinity, and hope vs. despair.

A Tale of Two Themes As such, Outlander‘s lowest points exist to magnify the upside of its high points. The show revolves around Claire and Jamie’s struggle to remain together despite the many plot contrivances working to tear them apart. The more fraught their separation is, the more satisfying their next reunion will be.

Protagonists vs. Agony-ists Outlander is built around two strong feminist protagonists. Claire (Caitriona Balfe) is a strong-willed, time-traveling doctor, wife, and mother who must navigate the social norms, politics, and life-or-death conflicts that span multiple continents and time periods. Jamie (Sam Heughan) is an alpha male renegade war hero as depicted through the female gaze of author Diana Gabaldon, who balances his macho instincts with honor, grace, and an increasingly open mind. Their supporting cast may be petty or myopic in their initial desires, but over time they often learn to adapt, evolve, and grow. As such, Outlander‘s plots revolve around characters taking actions that stretch their comfort zones, all in pursuit of shared successes (which are the secret ingredient to every crowd-pleasing blockbuster).

Plot Speeds, Fast and Slow Brace yourself, because things are about to get brisk. In Season 3 of Outlander, Claire — who left Jamie during the Jacobite uprising of the 1700s to raise their daughter in the relative safety of the 1940s — learns that Jamie may not have died during the ill-fated Battle of Culloden, so she travels back through time to reunite with Jamie 20 years after their last separation. She finds that former Scottish rebel Jamie has since become an enemy of the crown in his new role as a smuggler and a printer of seditious pamphlets meant to incite a new uprising against the British monarchy. They spend the latter half of the season searching the Atlantic for Jamie’s nephew, Young Ian, who was captured by a Portuguese slave ship and sold to a witch while trying to retrieve precious gems that would have been used to negotiate a divorce settlement with the woman Jamie married out of propriety after they all thought Claire had departed the 1700s forever. (And if that doesn’t sum up Outlander‘s Harlequin romance meets time-traveling soap opera vibe, nothing will.) The show’s cliffhangers move fast — maybe too fast, given how much narrative ground they have to cover — with Claire being separated from Jamie (again!) during a typhoid outbreak on a second ship, Jamie being hunted for murder, Claire nearly dying in the island jungles before being rescued by a rogue priest and his mother-in-law (it’s a long story), and Claire and Jamie being reunited just in time to save Young Ian from their fellow time-traveling frenemy, Geillis (the “witch”), who intends to travel back to the future and murder their daughter to fulfill a prophecy that will put a Scottish king on the throne. Whew. Hang on a second. Let me catch my breath because that was all one sentence.

Payoffs vs. Debts After rescuing Young Ian from Geillis, the Claire-and-Jamie entourage sails for home… but they’re shipwrecked by a massive storm and Claire nearly drowns before Jamie saves her, and they wash up on the shores of… Georgia? Yup: they arrive in the American colonies, where they can start new lives and Jamie will (presumably) no longer be hunted by British authorities. So while the leads on Outlander repeatedly defy death, exhibit valor, and are rewarded with a chance at a fulfilling new life together… the leads on The Walking Dead repeatedly fall prey to fear and loathing, exhibit moral confusion, and are punished for their attempt at delivering justice by having to literally flee underground into the sewers, and/or die. In other words, Outlander is 2017 Instagram and The Walking Dead is 2017 Twitter.

Conclusion? [...] there’s a limit to the amount of nihilism we’ll subject ourselves to before we start to seek out proof that all of our suffering will be worth it. And in that sense, Outlander may be best-positioned to capitalize on the kind of roll-up-your-sleeves, hardworking optimism that could swing 2018 back toward the bright side.

#outlander #outlander starz #claire fraser #jamie fraser #jamie x claire #the frasers #tv: s3 #best of 2017 #tv news #review #tv series #character: jamie fraser #character: claire beauchamp #otp: jamie x claire #queue

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asagimeta · 7 years

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Double-Face's search for a "perfect host body" feels very much like the DDS experiments in s5. I wonder if maybe we're gonna get some kinda tragic ending for a character, since he's seeking a supernatural host with "something more" than the usual shift (like Scott's True Alpha power, or Theo's chimera, or the Hale full shift) and he (and host) end up locked away on the Other Side.

You know Anon, it’s funny you should say that, because the meta pack has talked alot about sacrifices, specifically regarding two charectors: Scott and Peter, and your theory makes a hell of alot of sense…

Now, before we continue, it’s important to note that Scott and Peter aren’t the ONLY ones who need, thematically, to make a sacrifice, but they are the primary two, we’ll talk about the others later

First things first- the sacrifice you’re talking about is perfect because it’s a *TRUE* sacrifice, as in: There’s no “coming back” from it, this isn’t a situation where a person dies and comes back to life, or loses their powers and regains them, this also isn’t a situation where they get something out of the sacrifice that isn’t purely selfless (IE: If Jackson sacrificed his kanima powers and gained a full shift because of it, that sacrifice was not purely selfless, he never wanted his kanima powers anyway AND he got a reward) but this? There’s no reward for this, there’s no step up on the ladder, and there’s no “Oh I didn’t need that anyway” moment, it’s just sacrifice for the greater good, plain and simple

Now onto Scott and Peter and why they could both be perfect choices for this

Firstly, they both physically fit the bill, you said it yourself Anon, Anuk-Ite is looking for something *MORE*, not only harkening back to the Dread Doctors in season five, but also to THEO*, remember, Theo didn’t just want ANY pack- he wanted a DARK pack, he wanted SCOTT’S pack, because everyone in Scott’s pack was something *more*, he didn’t just have some betas and a couple of humans, he had the makings of something unique, to quote:

“I came for the werecoyote- the one who’s first instinct is to kill, I came for the banshee- the girl surrounded by death, I came for the dark kitsune, the beta with anger issues, I came for Void Stiles, that’s the pack I want”

Theo wanted a unique pack, a DARK pack, and we know that he’s not just talking about the species involved, werecoyotes don’t seem to be killers by nature, this is something Theo says but remember that Malia’s instincts are only as intense as they are because she lived in the wild during her formative years, we saw another werecoyote tonight- Edgar- who didn’t seem very violent, we can’t assume all werecoyotes are this way and even if we could, most packs don’t have any, coyotes- as stated by the beastiary- don’t like werewolves, and they CERTAINLY don’t like Alphas, so you’re hard-pressed to find one in a pack, banshees are also considerably rare if Jennifer and Arya’s reactions to Lydia are anything to go by, these are women who are DEEPLY involved in the supernatural and have been for most of their lives but they treat Lydia like a rare find, Theo then specifies he wants the DARK kitsune, not just any kitsune, and the beta “with anger issues”, not just any beta, but one who’s specially geared for violence, and, ofcourse, finally, VOID Stiles, not Stiles the human, VOID Stiles (seriously how does even know what that is??????? The thing possessing Stiles was called a nogitsune, Void Stiles was a term only used in private, so..??) Already we see that Scott’s pack has something *more* than most just in general, but back to my point

Scott is a True Alpha, a top of the line rare breed in the werewolf community, one that even most born wolves have only heard about in legend, and Peter is an odd case, he was a demon Alpha- wich in it’s self is not necessarily common- who died and was brought back to life via a convoluted banshee ritual, he also was taken by the Wild Hunt and escaped, he clearly has SOMETHING going on even if there isn’t a clever catch-all term for it, you also mentioned yourself that Theo is a chimera- a successfull one- but there’s something else special about Theo: He’s literally been to hell and back

*Theo is our third candidate, but we’ll talk about him later

SO why do Scott and Peter need to make sacrifices?

For Scott, it’s completing the hero’s journey, for Peter, it’s redemption

Scott has been stuck in stasis for a wile now because there are certain parts of his story that he refuses to allow to move forward, certain challenges he refuses to take and certain trials he refuses to face, and the more he refuses, the bigger his “debt” builds, think about it this way:

You have to get from Point A to Point B and along the way you have to eat a certain amount of candy, every few miles a peice is presented to you, now wile you CAN turn down the peice initially, you WILL have to eat it eventually before getting to Point B, if you keep denying peices along the way, then instead of eating one peice every five miles- wich is reasonable enough- you’ll get to the end with thirty peices waiting on you and you can’t advance until you eat all of them

Scott is facing something of the same problem, wile he does eat SOME of his peices when they’re initially presented, he’s saving alot of them for later, and those peices are building and building and building… and the bigger the pile of uneaten candy gets, the bigger his stomachache is going to get when he has to swallow down all of it at once

You can see even in recent episodes that there are still things that harkin back to Season One Scott, and NOT in the charming nostalgic way, let me give you a prime example-

In Magic Bullet when Derek tries to show Scott what hunters will do by telling him what happened to his family, what the Argents did, Scott replies with “Well then- they had a reason”, to put this at it’s most blatant: Scott is telling an innocent person that there MUST have been a reason his ENTIRE FAMILY deserved to be burned alive, for .. what? Being werewolves? Scott didn’t know the Hales, as evidenced by the fact that Stiles had to fill him in on everything regarding their family, what did he know about them besides the fact that they were werewolves and related to Derek? Pretty much nothing, so why else would he say something so crass? I get that he wanted to defend the Argents, but this kind of exceeds “defending the Argents” and goes straight into “Blaming the Hales”, Scott could have offered several different explanations- “Maybe it was an accident”, “Maybe they told someone else”, “Even if it was ONE Argent that doesn’t mean it’s ALL Argents”, but to imply Derek’s family MUST have done something to deserve being burned alive? Really? Now in “Pressure Test”, you have Scott ACTIVELY TRYING to throw two kids to the hunters- KNOWING they’ll be murdered- just because their eyes are blue, he seems determined not to see them as innocent people anymore the moment their eyes turn, even before they confessed to killing hunters (wich they didn’t actually do, by the way, they said they chased them down and tormented them) Mind you, Scott knows for a fact that not all blue-eyed wolves are vicious murderers, Derek and Malia both have blue eyes, and although his relationship with Derek is rocky at best, he’s downright DATING Malia now, either he believes his girlfreind is evil or he knows that eye color doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a cold-blooded murderer, but he’s ready to believe these kids *DESERVE* to be killed without even knowing WHY they have blue eyes… just like he was ready to believe the Hales deserved to be burned alive just for being werewolves

This is one small example of Scott circling the drain, but it nods to the much larger problem that he still has a type of internalized specism*, he’s always very quick to side with humans over werewolves even when the werewolves have done nothing wrong and the humans have (IE: Pressure Test) and is quicker to believe in evil supernatural people vs evil human people, he believes werewolfism needs to be suppressed, not controlled (there’s a difference, and the way Scott trained and taught Liam vs the way Derek trained and taught his betas is a good show of that difference, not that I think Derek’s teachings were all that grand, in fact, they were pretty cringey in their own rights, but the endgoals were VASTLY different, Derek wanted his betas to be able to defend themselves and work WITH their new power to do it, Scott wanted Liam to work AGAINST his power via control to the point of suppression and never taught him anything about self-defense, only control) Scott’s hero-journey has always been about finding harmony with himself as a werewolf and he still refuses to do that, he picks and chooses what parts he wants to take of being a hero and what parts he wants to take of being an Alpha, being a werewolf, being *other*, etc etc, and has refused to accept that these things are all fulltime and lifelong things, until he accepts all of that he’ll keep going in circles, collecting candy to stockpile until he reaches the end of his journey, and when he does reach that end, the sacrifice he’ll have to make (the candy he’s collected along the way) will be enormous…

Now let’s talk about Peter, who needs redemption, throughout the series Peter has toed the line between straight up villain and antihero, and before people start screaming, you have to look at how the charectors themselves treat him, particuarly in seasons three, four, and six, wile seasons one and two presented Peter as a Big Bad- end of story- you start seeing as of season three that the charectors are adjusting to him and reluctantly acceping his presence, when planning to break into the bank vault he’s sitting right there in the open and no one is trying to hurt him or even expressing anger at him, in fact, the only aggression he gets is a mild nip from Stiles and Stiles nips at everybody, he’s just an aggressive person that way, but there they are in 3A actively working with him, wich happens as well during Visionary with Cora and Stiles and again when Lydia and Allison seek his help, during none of these occassions did anyone act like they needed to kill Peter, just give him a swat on the head for being an irritation, that’s antihero interaction, not villain interaction, in season four Peter is back to plotting against Scott but before that he’s part of the deadpool and his interactions with Derek, again, show hero -> antihero interaction, not hero -> villain, even the sheriff lets Peter go along his merry way after killing The Mute, Derek takes pleasure in burning Peter but, again, that’s classic hero -> antihero banter, then in season six you have Peter actively helping the kids and you have more hero/anti-hero; Peter wants to use an innocent person as a guinia pig against Stiles’ wishes but ultimately it’s to HELP Stiles and himself, not just because he wants to see the kid die, later on we see the reluctance of Melissa helping Peter but she DOES help him- even if it’s just to use him- and wile Malia constantly gripes about having anything to do with Peter, she does seem sincere when she wakes him up and seemed sincerely concerned about him here and there, plus the very fact that Scott didn’t reach into his back pocket and dial Eichen to come pick him up when it was all over was probably telling to a degree

To be clear, I don’t like Peter, and I don’t forgive him for anything he’s done, but it doesn’t change the fact that there’s a very clear line between villain and anti-hero and Peter has been riding it like a mechanical bull since day one

But back on topic

Peter is still straddling that line both with fans and in the narrative as much of his anti-hero behavior has been fairly selfish/self-gratifying (he works with Stiles at the train station because he wants to get out of there, he’s hesitant to directly help Stiles just out of the goodness of his heart but the fact that he DOES is what has him sitting on the line of an anti-hero) and what few selfless things he DOES do (helping Stiles in 6A) are pretty small peas compared to the bad things he’s done (he gave the kids Roscoe’s keys but in the same breath encouraged them all to leave, regardless of what happened to Stiles after, this is a relatively tiny act of kindness and when you stack it against murdering his neice- just to compare to ONE- it really doesn’t hold up well as “Redemption”) The only way for Peter to get off the line between villain and anti-hero is to make a sacrifice worthy enough of pardoning some of his crimes, something selfless, something that shows that he DOES have compassion and a human soul and, preferrably, that he regrets the mistakes he made in the past, Crowly from Supernatural is the perfect example of what we’re talking about here, he straddles the villain/anti-hero line HARD series-long because even as of season 12 he was still plotting behind the Winchesters’ backs for his own selfish reasons, but then, you know, he killed himself to save them, wich was a big sacrifice that pretty much atoned for his behavior that season (throughout the series he’s had other moments of redeeming himself for crap he’s done but I’ll leave it others as to if he was really fully redeemed or not)

Scott and Peter both HAVE to make a big sacrifice for their narratives to work and to come full-circle, it’s just a matter of what that sacrifice is, the most common theories have been Peter’s death and Scott giving up his Alpha powers- or even his werewolf powers entirely**, but this could be a good way to avert either, though, if you want my honest opinion, I’d find it much more likely to be Peter’s sacrifice than Scott’s, I don’t think Teen Wolf will have a bleak ending (especially with the cast all being very excited and positive about it) and if Scott did, in fact, end that way, it would be an INCREDIBLY bleak way to end the show, Peter, however, isn’t, you know, the main charector, or even a hero, this would be a bittersweet moment and a great nod of redemption for him, it would give the show realistic depth and angst without going over the top and making the ending bleak and depressing

Now because I’ve talked so much about Theo- here’s the thing

This entire season is being played as Theo’s redemption arc, showing him living out of his car a few episodes ago was Teen Wolf’s way of punching you as hard in the feels as fast as they could to make you more primed to wanting to redeem him, it’s looking like they’re trying to turn Theo into more of a reluctant hero than a true anti-hero though, so in my opinion, his redemption moment will probably be alot smaller and not involve his own death, probably a really bad injuery that he sustains wile protecting Liam or saving Scott, maybe explaining his backstory or even apologizing to Scott would work, Theo is the world’s biggest dick but in comparison to Peter he hasn’t really done anything *THAT* bad, he’s tortured alot of people but only actually murdered one, who just popped back to life anyway, and in the realm of Teen Wolf that all seems like the sorta thing that can be washed away with a good chest wound and a sincere apology….. unfortunately…. but, I could always be wrong, this could be an interesting fit for Theo, my only problem is that it would be too close to what already happened to him- he was sent to hell, being locked in another dimension for eternity is too similar to that and would feel like a bland rehash instead of narrative genius

You mentioned Derek, but he’s pretty safe in my book, he completed his hero’s journey already and atoned for the wrongs he’s done, he EVOLVED, wich is the most textual nod to completing the journey I’ve ever heard of, he found peace within himself and has already made the big sacrifice he needed to acheive harmony and hero status by dieing in season four- and he came out of it evolved, not only did he spring back to life, but he brought a fancy new gift with him too, but this is where Derek and Scott are really different, Derek has spent the entire series eating his peices of candy as they come to him, if he made a mistake/took a step back, it was a small one and he paid for it pretty much right away, he didn’t keep looping around the same points and never learning from them, so when it came time for his big sacrifice, it wasn’t actually all that big, he didn’t have too much candy built up from other learning points in the series so he was able to swallow it without a problem, and he came out of it stronger- he DID make the sacrifice with death, he WAS prepared to die, and he had been slowly losing his powers and becoming human during season four, he had been preparing to die all along and making peace with it, even more of a reason for his evolution to have been well-deserved

I think our candidates, if this does in fact happen, are really just Scott and Peter, with my bets being placed 99% on Peter

*On the topic of internalized specism, Teen Wolf’s strongest allegory is that of sexuality, wich is probably why Jeff did the “There’s no homophobia in this universe” thing***, you see queer people who have internalized homophobia quite often, just like women can have internalized misogyny and POC can have internalized racism, belonging to an Other doesn’t exclude you from Othering, but I would say that internalized homophobia is probably one of the more common examples, I was just saying in the meta chat earlier that the confrontation in the bathroom between Edgar and Spider Dude reminded me of the stories I’ve always heard about and seen with homophobic and closeted queer people following someone they were just attacking into a bathroom/closet/motel room/whatever and essentially pulling the “I’m not gay, I just want to have sex” card, that’s an example of internalized homophobia- an extreme one, mind you, there are much more common smaller cases such as following standards of heteronormativity in queer relationships- Scott often displays internalized specism this way- on the less extreme end, again- he can say “I’m a werewolf and I accept that”, and he can kiss other werewolves and feel kinda ok about it, and he can preach that werewolves are just like everyone else, but at the end of the day if a human goes “Ow that werewolf hurt me” Scott is going to turn around and punish the werewolf without any proof because they’re a werewolf, do you see what I’m saying? (I hope you do, that was long winded)

**On the topic of losing his werewolf powers entirely, this goes back to the allegory, some people have thrown around the idea of Scott’s ultimate sacrifice being a full loss of his werewolf powers because he’s always wanted to be normal, he’s always complained so much about them and tried to ignore them and tried to pretend he was a normal human, he’s always seen them as a curse (except when they’re helping him with lacrosse) so it’d be, in some ways, a bittersweet poetry if he had to give up those powers to save everyone and became the only human in the group, being othered all over again but in a much different way (this, ofcourse, partly would depend on magic!Stiles being a thing because otherwise the impact wouldn’t be there because they’d BOTH be outsiders again just like season one and nothing woudl have changed) The problem I have with this is that it really tears apart the allegory, a gay kid can’t just release his gayness into the ether and then go about his life as a straight person, if Scott did the werewolf equivolant it would destroy the message

***On the topic of homophobia not existing in the world of Teen Wolf, we see no homophobia, true, but bisexuality is treated rather weirdly, the idea of being attracted to more than one gender seems to take people by surprise (Stiles and Liam specifically) and this is especially noticeable when Caitlyn and Stiles have their scene at the rave, Stiles seems surprised and confused by the idea of Caitlyn liking both girls and boys and doesn’t quite roll along with it as easily as he always does when someone mentions being gay, I still think we’re going to get a scene about bisxeuality between Jackson and Stiles with Stiles acting in surprise that Jackson is bi and Jackson rolling his eyes about it, bisexuality seems to just be extremely uncommon in the Teen Wolf world, there are allegories for that too but… it’s five A.M. and this has gone on long enough ;)

#Teen Wolf

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jccamus · 5 years

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The 11 Suggestions: An antique mirror on journalism’s craft and values - Poynter

The 11 Suggestions: An antique mirror on journalism’s craft and values - Poynter https://ift.tt/2lj3pi0

The cool thing about the Ten Commandments is that there were 10 of them. That means they could fit on two tablets. Handy if you have to carry them down a mountain.

I’ve argued that old codes of ethics were too negative. They lingered too long on what not to do instead of what professionals should do to fulfill their mission and purpose. The old codes were filled with flashing red lights: Don’t do this. Don’t do that.

I prefer green light ethics. “Love thy neighbor” — as exemplified in the parable of the Good Samaritan — does not require the reminder “Thou shalt not kill.”

RELATED: ‘Lead’ vs. ‘lede’: Roy Peter Clark has the definitive answer, at last

I recently discovered in an old journalism textbook a list of 11 suggestions to young journalists on how they might live upright, professional lives. The list amazed me. I could not recall any similar list where journalism values were expressed so well, so succinctly and with such enduring relevance.

The list appears as the last words in the book “Newspaper Writing and Editing,” written by Willard G. Bleyer, perhaps the outstanding journalism educator of his day, and published in 1913.

Here then, for all to share, are, not the Ten Commandments, but the Eleven Suggestions:

Remember that whatever you write is read by thousands.

Don’t forget that your story or headline helps to influence public opinion.

Realize that every mistake you make hurts someone.

Don’t embroider facts with fancy; “truth is stranger than fiction.”

Don’t try to make cleverness a substitute for truth.

Remember that faking is lying.

Refer all requests to “keep it out of the paper” to those higher in authority.

Stand firmly for what your conscience tells you is right.

Sacrifice your position, if need be, rather than your principles.

See the bright side of life: don’t be pessimistic or cynical.

Seek to know the truth and endeavor to make the truth prevail.

I took a photo of the list and published it on Twitter:

Not sure I have seen a better list of journalism standards and practices. More remarkable, it was published in 1913 by Willard Bleyer, the final words of his college textbook. He was chair at Wisconsin. This is where craft meets mission and purpose. 1913! pic.twitter.com/L3vBOwk9aX

— Roy Peter Clark (@RoyPeterClark) August 1, 2019

I was surprised and delighted at how many of my Twitter followers found this list interesting and valuable, and in some cases, prescient. That is, the Eleven Suggestions seemed relevant to the education and socialization of journalists more than a century after they were compiled.

There is much to be learned from this list, its maker and the crises of journalism that inspired its formulation. Before I get to what I have learned about Bleyer himself, I want to attend to my own reactions to the Eleven Suggestions, that is, why I find them extraordinary.

If you distill from the list its dominant themes, they reveal most of journalism’s key concerns:

Not writing and reporting to please yourself or advance your career, but with a keen sense of service to an audience.

An understanding that the audience turns to you for information that will enrich them as citizens in the process of self-government.

That accuracy is a practical virtue and that the failure to achieve it can have negative consequences.

Truth seeking and truth telling are at the heart of the discipline.

Your ultimate loyalty cannot be either to special interests or even to your employer. It must be to the public interest.

Cynicism corrodes the soul of the journalist and erodes the trust of the public in institutions that sustain civic life.

Who was this guy?

Willard G. Bleyer was born in 1873 into a newspaper family that became prominent in Milwaukee and the state of Wisconsin. His grandfather, his father and his uncles worked all aspects of the newspaper business, and it’s fair to say that young Willard grew up in the newsroom. It’s also fair to say that his scholarly instincts inspired him to explore the intellectual underpinnings of the family trade, especially one so closely associated with democracy and civic life.

He would earn a doctorate in English at the University of Wisconsin and became a pre-eminent academic in the emerging profession of journalism and mass communications, his theories always grounded in the habits and protocols of the publishing business. A clumsy and dull teacher — some high school students drove him out of that venue by playing tricks on him, such as stealing his galoshes — he was gifted in the art of newsroom gab and in debates about journalism practice and news judgment. Childless in his family life, he was known as “Daddy” to his Wisconsin students, who referred to themselves as his “children.”

His association with the University of Wisconsin and with the journalism practiced in that state would last until his death in 1935 at the age of 62. By then, Bleyer was the among the most revered champions of responsible journalism on the planet. Lawrence Murphy, a student of Bleyer’s at UW who became director of the journalism program at Illinois, eulogized that Daddy was “the greatest single influence in journalism that the world has known.”

As a teacher and scholar, Bleyer expressed the most altruistic notions about the role of journalism in a self-governing democracy. However, his efforts to elevate journalism met resistance on two fronts: newsroom hacks spit on any talk of “responsibility” coming from academia; and the pointy-heads in the university looked down on uppity reporters and editors who might venture to join their ranks.

Perhaps because Bleyer had the vantage point of an educator — rather than that of an influential owner such as Joseph Pulitzer or an author and public intellectual such as Walter Lippmann — his influence, while monumental in his time, is less enduring. (In that respect, perhaps Bleyer deserves a spot in the Hall of Fame next to Nelson Poynter.)

RELATED TRAINING: Writing with Voice and Structure with Lane DeGregory

A 1998 monograph on Bleyer’s life and influence, written by Carolyn Bronstein and Stephen Vaughn, make a point that feels even truer in 2019 than it did in the last years of the 20th century. In a foreshadowing of our current conversations, Bleyer saw the journalism of his day — especially the business of newspapering — as in an existential crisis. It was not just journalism that was at stake, it was the system of democracy itself.

The culprits of 1913 have a familiar ring to them: publishers who put profit above purpose; sensational stories that were a staple of the yellow press; competition for audience created by the advancing technologies of photography, newsreels, motion pictures and radio; an underpaid class of reporters and editors who were not up to the task of working in these disruptive environments; a political and business class antagonistic to even the best efforts of the working press.

Bleyer even worried about the muckrakers. Yes, it was crucial for journalists to shine a light on corruption, but not in such a lurid manner that it turns citizens into cynics, giving up all hope of achieving real reform. In his day, Bleyer was playing ball with a team of intellectuals, political figures and journalists who thought of themselves as part of a Progressive movement. He was a strong advocate, even in 1913, for women’s suffrage, for opening doors for women into the newsroom, for some forms of unionization of journalists, creating for them better working conditions and higher wages.

My New York friends might call him a mensch.

Here is a version of the Eleven Suggestions suitable for displaying on the newsroom or classroom bulletin board.

https://ift.tt/2llIDyB via Poynter September 24, 2019 at 11:54PM

#IFTTT #Feedly

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gobbochune · 7 years

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I literally have a stage management BFA and still know next to nothing about the Heathers musical. Enlighten me on why it is The Worst.

Disclaimer: I have not seen the play live, only shitty cam recordings on youtube and anamatics of the popular songs. If there is a level of nuance to the play that I missed in modern performances, feel free to correct me. The same could be said for the film, but I have had no exposure to the film so I am not including it in this rant.

Part 1. “This situation does not exist.”

So like, I get it. you wanna have your relatable portrayal of highschool and with the cliques and drama and the petty squabbles of the popular vs unpopular kids is often magnified by inexperience and raging hormones. Everyone remembers highschool as being more intense then it actually was, so often the melodrama in these sorts of stories is amped up to eleven.

The ‘Popular Clique’ characters are never going to act like any rational person would ever act. When you’re a boring loser in highschool you will instinctively find ways to put yourself above the people who you consider to be your ‘enemy’. You’re smarter then them, they’re all druggy sluts, you’re a good person etc.

But the reason why this trope works is because its often presented from the perspective of the teenager, but by the end of the narrative has widened to a more mature point of view. We learn that everyone has their own shit going on, their own insecurities n crap, and by the end of the narrative the characters have literally and figuratively ‘graduated’ from the naive idea that there are inherently good and bad people.

But Heathers is not about that.

The popular girls are actually satan. Listen to that song “Candy Store” and think to yourself “do these characters feel like actual people? can i imagine how or why the girls act like this?”

The reason why popular girls are more popular then you is usually because they’re better then you. They’re prettier, funnier, nicer, or altogether more charismatic, and it still boggles my mind that anyone in this school would care what these Heathers bitches think of them. I actually knew girls like the Heathers in highschool myself, and everyone mutually hated them and ragged on them behind their backs because of how vapid and annoying they were. They had power over the freshmen for maybe five minutes before their targets found their own friends to hang out with those bitches are left in the fucking dust.

And its not just a misconception of the main character, no she seems to be the only girl in her whole fucking school who is like “Um, maybe its????bad to be mean???” and the story treats her like she’s some fucking martyr for it. They even sing a song parodying the fact that a decent highschool narrative you’d expect Heather to be a human being with emotions, by having main girl make up a bunch of bullshit about “Pretty girls have feelings.” the whole thing seems to be a big fuck you to highscool narrative tropes but instead of going in a more realistic direction it just spirals into a petty unrelatable hell.

Part 2: “If this situation did exist, it wouldn’t be happening to this character.”

Does anyone else find it incredibly far fetched that for some reason whenever a bunch of beautiful teenagers pick on another equally beautiful teenager its usually just because they dont like the color of her hair? I wanna know when we as a society decided that the shorthand for evil beauty is blonde hair, not because I find the trope harmful but just because it feels lazy.

Why isn’t Veronica one of the popular kids? Because she’s a brunette. Why does everyone treat the Heathers like royalty? Because they’re blonde. Does being blonde somehow make you a terrible person? I guess so. Its just a mutually agreed thing at this point.

But again the reason why the blonde vs brown thing works in other highschool dramas is because the entire thing is based on the main character being petty, and in reality the brown haired girl is just as popular and surrounded by friends she just doesnt realize it because she’s too busy being jealous of some other bitch.

Veronica is not this. For some reason, a beautiful, intelligent, kind, and generally cool girl has no friends besides The Fat One and everyone treats her like garbage. The fact that she has to seek “protection” from the Heathers at lunch because she gets bullied just for existing would be hilarious if it wasnt so pretentious.

The play lets is know in no uncertain terms that Veronica is the only decent student at her school, and that none of the ostracization she feels is in her head. Its all real. They all hate her because she’s good and they’re bad, and there is zero tongue and cheek about it. The whole thing feels like a play within another piece of media. Like maybe theres a playwrite who is trying to depict her highschool experience, and its intentionally written to be as shallow and petty as her memories there.

And even that might be okay if she is portrayed as being just a huge fucking whimp who lets people walk all over her, but nooooo she’s a strong female character! She sings a whole song about how she’s not gonna put up with their shit or let it bother her anymore and says she’s gonna fight back before they ‘come after her’.

Is anyone going to tell her that murder isn’t usually a thing that bullies do?

Like seriously. Bullying is a huge problem that can seriously damage people from the inside out, but its usually not because of any physical damage. If she’s decided that she doesnt give a shit about the Heathers, then thats it. She’s already won. They can’t touch her anymore because if she doesnt care then they’ll inevitably grow bored and do something else. she even has her own friends to hang out with now so its not like she’s being threatened in that way either. But instead she makes a big deal about how she’s a ‘dead girl walking’ like she thinks she’s gonna be shanked in the locker room or something.

But then we get to JD.

Oh Jason Dean, you poor innocent soul. Unlike Veronica this kid is actually a victim of bullying and abuse, but its not from the so called ‘popular kids’, its from fucking Veronica herself.

Part 3. “Are we not going to talk about the fact Veronica raped a dude?”

Yeah. That shit happened. Here’s the official lyrics:

J.D.(spoken) Veronica? What’re you doing in my room?

VERONICA(spoken) Shhhh.Sorry, but I really had to wake you;See, I decided I must ride you till I break you.'Cause Heather says I got to go;You’re my last meal on death row.Shut your mouth and lose them tighty-whities!Come on!Tonight I’m yours,I’m a dead girl walking!Get on all fours,Kiss this dead girl walking!Let’s go, you know the drill;I’m hot and pissed and on the pill.Bow down to the will of a dead girl walking!

Like I know later on in the song he gives consent n’ shit but its more framed like he lets her because he’s intimidated more then anything else. And whats more from this point onward in the play Veronica pretty much becomes JD’s only emotional outlet.

As someone whose known a lot of guys in this situation I can tell you that often they will do things they don’t want to to impress the people who they think are their only ally in life. More then anything these kinds of kids just want someone on their side, and will be roped into whatever toxic shit they need to keep these people with them.

Veronica goes through this guilty arc thing where she blames herself for ‘creating’ him but ultimately realizes that he was always doomed to be this way because of his shitty situation.

How fucking evil is it to perpetuate this idea? Oh no, Veronica isnt a bad person, she was just trying to help this kid by wrapping him around her finger and making him kill the people she doesn’t like but really its his fault for having a shitty childhood.

The song “Meant to be Yours” is supposed to be a picture of how twisted and evil JD has become in following revenge, but in reality its nothing like that. It wasnt his revenge, he was doing it for her. Veronica very much did break into his life and rip him to pieces for no reason other then she wanted a lackey to help her get revenge on people who shouldn’t have even bothered her in the first place.

But no, he is ‘damaged’, and the only way to redeem him is to blow himself up so the girl who destroyed him wont have to accept any of the consequences for her actions.

How the hell does Veronica ‘make things better’ at the end? She slaps a bitch and plans a sleepover. She was already doing that in the beginning. Why did JD have to die? He didnt. He fucking didnt. And the worst thing is that no even cares that he’s gone.

Not even Veronica.

She treats him like some kind of tragic monster that had to be killed for the good of mankind and everyone just fucking accepts it.

So just a recap: Blonde people are evil, everyone will hate you for being a saint, its okay to rape teenage boys if you’ve properly gaslighted them first, and if you are ‘damaged, far too damaged’ it is your responsibility to kill yourself so your abuser can be popular like she always wanted.

What a great show. 10/10. hope it runs forever.

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literallyjcstrash · 7 years

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Regarding lyrics to JCS… (part 5 of many)

Hello again, gdelgiproducer here! I’m back with more lyrics from JCS, covering both the changes to the show over the years and also doing a little extended analysis. I wanna start this particular entry off by thanking literallyjcstrash for giving me a platform, especially when I’m using it to do what I very easily could have done at my own blog jcs-study, which is now basically on a respirator like many projects that I lose my initial enthusiasm for. (Honestly thinking of asking them to consider a merger where I port some of my posts from there over here. Not kidding.) They fired up my years-long but frequently comatose enthusiasm for the show and got me thinking about it again, which is always great – coming back to an old love with fresh perspective isn’t something one can do very often (outside of Hollywood movies), so I’m glad I can do it here.

Today, we glance at what I feel is one of the most important songs in JCS, which is mildly ironic considering it only appeared in the 1973 film version and has rarely appeared in stage versions of the show since (usually in Europe). I speak, of course, of “Then We Are Decided." Believe it or not, this song sharply divides fans of the show. A certain amount of people like it; a fairly equal amount of people don’t care for it at all. Even Tim Rice sort of slides past its existence when writing about the film in his autobiography, saying merely that ”… Andrew and I did expand one of the High Priests’ scenes in a futile bid to quash further anti-Semitism charges at the pass.“

It’s not like that didn’t need attention. For those who don’t know JCS very well, Caiaphas and Annas, the Jewish High Priests, come off as sort of the only one-note figures in the original album and stage versions. Their motivation is basically hand-waved and sounds like typical "baddie” bullshit, they sing the same musical themes throughout the show (they do; check literally every song the priests appear in, every single melodic motif they perform is tied in some way to “This Jesus Must Die”), and they smack of the old Christ-killer stereotype. How much of that is due to ingrained anti-Semitism in the story thanks to the original Gospel texts is up to the viewer (or listener) to decide. Tim and Andrew certainly didn’t set out to tell an anti-Semitic story, I totally buy it when they say that, but the conventions of musical theater unfortunately wind up placing the portrayal of the “villains” squarely in the old-fashioned, all-too-familiar “Passion Play” territory.

I mean, look at the treatment other characters get compared to Caiaphas and Annas. Everyone looks at JCS as “the piece which humanizes Jesus and Judas,” but it really doesn’t stop there. In reality, the piece offers the chance to any who might take it to humanize the story in its entirety. Pilate was a person, with conflicts and reservations; Mary was a person with desires, both emotional and sexual; Peter was a person, with regrets and hope. Tim Rice takes these cardboard cut-outs from the Bible and infuses them with psychological motivation, with flesh and blood, with life. He puts the stakes back in the story… except where Caiaphas and Annas are concerned.

(Okay, and Herod, but he only has, like, one song to establish himself in, and while he shouldn’t be played as broadly comic as he has been, in my opinion, he’s basically just comic relief to break some of the tension in Act Two – more about that when we get to him. Anyway, getting sidetracked…)

And that’s part of why I like “Then We Are Decided,” personally. It breaks up the monotony of the priests’ material a bit, and Caiaphas and Annas’ specific motivations are particularized in a way that they aren’t elsewhere in the show. Yes, for the purposes of the story they are (technically) the antagonist, but it is far more interesting to watch human beings struggle with a decision than it is to watch comic book villains verbalize what their purpose is. The audience should be frightened not by their appearance, costumes, characterization, or the pathos surrounding them; it should be the fact that they are able to come to the conclusion that this man (Jesus) is such a threat to their power, and that they prize their power so much, that they decide the only course of action is his death. This decision, and the zeal with which they pursue their goal, should be what is frightening, not the priests themselves. Caiaphas, Annas, and the other priests were real human beings, too; let them be three-dimensional figures!

(Now seems an important moment to note this: I find it most interesting that, at least in my estimation, Caiaphas and Annas seem to generate the most head-canon in the JCS Tumblr fandom of any secondary character in the show, and I think it’s partly because their motivations and background are among the least explored of anyone’s in the show – again, aside from Herod, and maybe Simon or Peter.)

Anyway, time to give you some motivations and background before we dive into the lyrics (which have never changed all that substantially, same as “What’s the Buzz,” but then I still love an excuse to talk about the show):

Caiaphas, as High Priest, was the chief religious authority in the land, with important responsibilities including controlling the Temple treasury, managing the Temple police and other personnel, performing religious rituals, and serving as president of the Sanhedrin (sort of the Jewish Supreme Court, which ruled on both religious [always] and civil [where Rome granted them jurisdiction] matters). Unlike other Temple priests, Caiaphas lived in Jerusalem’s Upper City, a wealthy section inhabited by the city’s powers-that-be.

The Bible suggests Caiaphas was closely advised by Annas, the older former High Priest, who served as a sort of high priest emeritus to his younger son-in-law. Yes, Caiaphas was married to Annas’ daughter, which incidentally is probably how Caiaphas got the gig. (That doesn’t mean you should stop writing slash fic; hell, adds a whole creepy new layer if you ask me.)

The priests had to toe a fine line between serving as the spiritual leaders of their people and cooperating with Roman authority. This left them respected for their positions, but despised by some for actions the priests had to take, or in some cases actions that they thought the priests took.

So, with that context, let us set the scene for “Then We Are Decided.” It’s after hours, or they wouldn’t be able to snag a minute alone to converse about this matter, between the faithful asking for prayers and blessings, fellow priests bothering them with office politics, the sacrifices, preparation for the upcoming Passover festival, whatever shit Rome is ladling into their tureen that day, etc. So this is the only moment available – and this is key – for Caiaphas to seek Annas’ advice on a most pressing matter: a Galilean rabble-rouser growing in popularity. Annas’ first instinct is to be hands-off, but Caiaphas feels the need for more direct action.

Why is that key? Well, for some reason, it feels like the 1973 film stages it the opposite way, with Annas pressing Caiaphas’ buttons to push him toward the decision (seriously, take a gander at some of Kurt Yaghjian’s facial expressions, especially on “He’s a craze” – dude would have killed it in a Seventies version of Bates Motel), but the lyrics strongly suggest that Caiaphas is trying to convince Annas to back up his position, not being pushed into a firmer stance by a weasel-voiced toady. With the added historical context above, it’s not hard to read “Decided” the way it was likely intended to be performed.

And now, the lyrics!

CAIAPHAS We’ve been sitting on the fence for far too long…

ANNAS Why let him upset us? Caiaphas – let him be All those imbeciles will see He really doesn’t matter

CAIAPHAS Jesus is important We’ve let him go his way before And while he starts a major war We theorize and chatter

ANNAS He’s just another Scripture-thumping hack from Galilee

CAIAPHAS The difference is they call him king – the difference frightens me What about the Romans When they see King Jesus crowned? Do you think they’ll stand around Cheering and applauding? What about our people If they see we’ve lost our nerve? Don’t you think that they deserve Something more rewarding?

ANNAS They’ve got what they want – they think so anyway If he’s what they want why take their toy away? He’s a craze

CAIAPHAS Put yourself in my place I can hardly stand aside Cannot let my hands be tied I am law and order What about our priesthood? Don’t you see that we could fall? If we are to last at all We cannot be divided

ANNAS Then say so to the council But don’t rely on subtlety Frighten them or they won’t see

CAIAPHAS Then we are decided?

ANNAS Then we are decided.

See how that works? Now to get to some more opinion on the song, and its place in the show!

There are two reasons “Then We Are Decided” is rarely included in the stage show. The first is that, at least in America, the copyright for the song belongs to the film studio, and it’s not part and parcel of the stage production, like later changes (including “Could We Start Again Please”) were. To use it in a stage production would need a separate negotiation/fee, and productions in the U.S. that have slipped the song into the show in the past without getting rights (such as a production in the Eighties by the Candlewood Playhouse) have been legally censured by the licensing agency.

(Part of me wonders if that’s going to change in the near future. Andrew Lloyd Webber recently started his own licensing agency in the U.S., The Musical Company, which has taken over the licensing for all of his shows and his song catalogue in the States. The thing I’ve noticed about productions in the States vs. Europe including “Then We Are Decided” is that it happens way more often in Europe than over here, and I’ve theorized that this may be the case because Webber’s Really Useful Group handles everything in-house overseas with regard to publishing of individual songs and licensing said songs, whereas in America the rights situation has always been more complicated, needing to go to Universal to beg for permission separately from the rights one would hire from an agency like R&H, which handled JCS until recently. Thanks to Webber’s new licensing set-up, “Then We Are Decided” and the rights to JCS are under the same roof in North America for the first time. It would certainly make getting the permissions easier since one only has to go to one shop. Time will tell if my theory is correct and it was just a matter of lining up all the ducks in the same row, metaphorically speaking. Again, tangent, sorry, moving on…)

The second, and less explored owing to its rarity, reason is that its position in the film simply does not work on stage. On film, one is able to cut away from “Strange Thing, Mystifying” (“they only need a small excuse / to put us all away”) and increase the tension by showing the authorities are already thinking of dealing with the problem (e.g., Judas’ foreboding is not unfounded). On stage, however, interrupting the scene that incorporates “What’s The Buzz,” “Strange Thing, Mystifying,” and “Everything’s Alright” with “Then We Are Decided” ruins the arc of the scene — an uninterrupted rising dramatic line of tension, if you will.

A few of the productions that have used it over the years have tried to solve this problem by slotting it in after “Everything’s Alright” instead of before it, sticking it right before “This Jesus Must Die.” On paper, it makes sense – Caiaphas trying to convince Annas to back his position before the big council meeting, and then both of them making the pitch to the council. But in execution, put so close together, it only belabors the point of “the priests feel they must deal harshly with Jesus, and here’s why”; you hear two songs right in a row discussing basically the same plot point, with one of them being only slightly more personal (or interesting, for that matter) than the other. That’s called, in any style of writing, “beating a dead horse." An audience may or may not be as intelligent as we challenge them to be, but no audience likes feeling like the creative team believes they’re stupid enough that they have to be bludgeoned to death with story.

A friend and fellow JCS fan (who now works in reality TV – as they say on The Flintstones, "It’s a living!”) once came up with a novel suggestion: use “Then We Are Decided” as a prologue before the Overture. Right at the top of the show, you’ve got the priests, you establish their problem, they make the fateful decision, and we go right into the show knowing this man’s days are numbered and wondering what that’s about, with some foreboding sounding rock music to boot. Done right, I think it would be an interesting touch.

I then discovered that great minds must think alike, because a friend named Greg alerted me to the fact that director Ken Gargaro has been doing it this way for roughly 25 years with Pittsburgh Musical Theatre’s annual production of JCS. Precedent established, I feel way more confident putting forward this proposal, and I’ve even come up with how to make the musical transition seamless: instead of repeating the guitar intro to “Decided” at the end after Annas’ last line (which comes with a nice little helping of “Poor old Judas…” from – I believe – brass and lower woodwinds dumped over it on the film soundtrack that isn’t there in the movie), you cut the instrumental coda and go right into the Overture, likely accompanied by a bit of staging for dramatic effect to signal the transition into the show proper.

Just picture it…

Anyway, enough reverie. Coming soon: “Everything’s Alright”!

#jesus christ superstar #jcs #my mind is clearer now #yes really changed #then we are decided #caiaphas #annas #gdelgiproducer #submission

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romancatholicreflections · 6 years

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21st January >> Sunday Homilies & Reflections for Roman Catholics on the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B.

Sunday Homily

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year B

Gospel reading: Mark 1:14-20

vs.14 After John had been arrested, Jesus went into Galilee. There he proclaimed the Good News from God.vs.15 “The time has come” he said “and the kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the Good News.”

vs.16 As he was walking along by the Sea of Galilee he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net in the lake – for they were fishermen.vs.17 And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you fisher of men.” vs.18 And at once they left their nets and followed him.vs.19 Going on a little further, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John; they too were in their boat, mending their nets. He called them at oncevs.20 and, leaving their father Zebedee in the boat with the men he employed, they went after him.

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We have four commentators available from whom you may wish to choose . Scroll down to the name of the commentator.

Michel DeVerteuil : A Trinidadian Holy Ghost Father, late director of the Centre of Biblical renewal . Thomas O’Loughlin: Professor of Historical Theology, University of Wales, Lampeter. Sean Goan: Studied scripture in Rome, Jerusalem and Chicago and teaches at Blackrock College and works with Le Chéile Donal Neary SJ: Editor of The Sacred Heart Messenger and National Director of The Apostlship of Prayer.

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Michel DeVerteuil Lectio Divina with the Sunday Gospels www.columba.ie

General Comments

On this Sunday, we begin the continuous reading of St Mark’s gospel, which will be interrupted during Lent and Easter but will eventually take us to the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem in November of this year.

The journey begins in Galilee, the northernmost province of Palestine. This is where Jesus lays the foundation for his work of salvation. You might like to stay with this context of the passage – the humble beginnings (even in relationship with the rest of Palestine, Galilee is on the periphery) of what was to become a mighty work which has still not been completed.

The passage is in two sections: – verses 14 – 15: this first section is a summary of the preaching of Jesus; – verses 16 – 20: the call of the first disciples. The first section is short, but every word is precious. Stay with the context of “after John had been arrested,” remembering the enormous impact that the Baptist had made on the whole country, and gauging from that the traumatic effect of his arrest. Yet, what seemed to be the end of a movement was the beginning of something new. Take “the kingdom of heaven” in a down-to-earth way, as an expression meaning the kind of society which would correspond to what God wants. “Is at hand” means that it is within our grasp.

This second section is a may seem artificial at a first reading, but it is the classical story of the moment of grace, sudden and yet totally natural in the sense that it seems to happen so easily, like a ripe fruit falls in our hand. The two calls are clearly meant to be similar – St Mark is telling us that this is how a call always works out.

Prayer Reflection

Lord, we thank you for the changes that have taken place in our world. They happened so suddenly and unexpectedly – yes it is always how moments of grace happen. Like when John the Baptist was arrested and it seemed that the movement of religious renewal in the country had been blocked, but that was the occasion for Jesus to go into Galilee and proclaim the Good News from God. So it was in those Eastern European countries and countries where violent regimes take control People just knew that a new era was at hand, they must change their ways of thinking and acting, and trust that something great and wonderful was in store for them, even if for a while there is suffering. Thank you, Lord.

“Some would consider our hopes utopian. It may be that these persons are not realistic enough, and that they have not perceived the dynamism of a world which desires to live more fraternally.” …Pope Paul VI, Populorum Progressio

Lord, the role of the Church is to preach the good news of God to the world, and the good news is that the Kingdom of Heaven is within our reach, if only we repent and believe that it is possible. Lord, we pray for all the preachers of the gospel, especially those who give homilies at Sunday services. Teach them not to be abstract in their preaching, but to proclaim the Good News of God as Jesus did – as new possibilities which are at hand. They must of course preach repentance – but not as an imposition from outside; rather, as good news within ourselves, good news which we can trust.

“To destroy human power nothing more is required than to be indifferent to its threats and to prefer other goods to those which it promises. Nothing less, however, is required also.” ...R.H. Tawney Lord, your Son Jesus knew how to break the power of evil. When John was arrested, he went into Galilee and preached the good news that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand.

Lord, in the modern world we are accustomed to calculate things before coming to decisions. We have feasibility studies, computer printouts and charts. Eventually we think that personal relationships can be planned too, like choosing a marriage partner or a friend, picking those we want to work with us on a project. But we cannot plan those decisions. These things work by a kind of instinct, like Jesus walking along the Sea of Galilee and seeing two fishermen casting a net in the lake and then saying to them, “Follow me” and they left their nets and followed him.

Lord, when we want to start some work, we like to start with the spectacular. Teach us the way of Jesus, that when the time for action comes we should go to the periphery of life and choose a few companions, letting the kingdom grow from there.

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Thomas O’Loughlin Liturgical Resources for the Year of Matthew www.columba.ie

Introduction to the Celebration During this coming year we are going to read our way through the gospel preached by St Mark. And today we hear about Jesus’s first actions in inaugurating the kingdom of God. He proclaimed the good news that we should repent and begin life afresh; and he gathered about him the first members of his new people. Here, now, today, we are gathering as that new people, gathering around him and listening to him in the Liturgy of the Word; and then with him we are going to offer thanks to our heavenly Father in the Liturgy of the Eucharist.

Homily Notes

1. There is a strange surprise in today’s gospel if we just look at it for a moment. Right at the start we hear Jesus’s great message: begin life afresh and believe in the good news that God loves us. This is exactly what we should expect: the story of a great prophet’s teaching should begin with his core message Then, immediately after that, we are not given any further explanation of this teaching., but we are told abour how he recuited his first followers. We have all heard this so often that we forget that this is really strange, but it is.

2. For most people today, whenever they hear talk about Jesus, their first reaction is to say that he is a great religious leader, a prophet, or a teacher who said many wise things about how people should lead their lives. This is nothing new: many at the time of Jesus looked on him in just this way — a figure to be compared with Moses or Elijah or one of the prophets. To many in the first years of Christianity as it spread around the ancient world, it seemed as if Jesus was simply a Jewish equivalent of a Greek philosopher: a wise man offering advice on how to live life well. Similarly today, many compare Jesus with the Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, or some well-respected wise leader.

3. The basic idea in all these comparisons is that what we are seeking a wise teaching by which to live our lives. Alas, for people on this quest, very little of the gospel can be considered such ‘teaching’: indeed, this year, when we read Mark’s gospel, we find that 37% is taken up with the account of the final days in Jerusalem. It is all about Jesus’s life and death, not about how we should live our lives.

4. Anyone who looks on Jesus as just a wise teacher will be very surprised that what they think is a book of his teachings, a gospel, moves from his message directly to the comparatively ephemeral matter of his organisational arrangements.

5. But the fact that this way of looking at Jesus is in the air around us must prompt us to remind ourselves about a few matters that are often so taken for granted that they are forgotten.

6. Jesus is our teacher, but he also the One sent by the Father to build up the new community. This is why Mark moves immediately from the core teaching to the call of the first members of this new people.

7. Jesus not only teaches us the way to the Father, he unites us to himself within the church in order to present us to the Father.

8. To follow Jesus is to not only listen and agree with his message, but to be willing to work with others he has called to build the kingdom.

9. Mark preached his gospel to help us know who we are as a people — those who have chosen to become one with Jesus in baptism; he did not imagine that he was writing down wise religious sayings.

10. For the people of the gospel, to hear the call of Jesus to start life afresh is also to hear the call to follow him as his community.

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Sean Goan Let the Reader Understand www.columba.ie

Gospel Notes

With this gospel we have the beginning of the proclamation of the good news in Mark. Jesus is portrayed as discerning that the time is right for people to respond to the preaching of the kingdom. The essence of his message is simple: it is time to repent and believe. Behind the word to repent there is a much stronger meaning than simply ‘Be sorry and start again.’ Rather Jesus is looking for conversion, a change of mindset and attitude that will leave us open to God and allow us to trust that the news really is good. The radical response of the two sets of brothers shows something of what is intended, they leave their nets and they follow. The road they are taking will bring them to places they never imagined and will show them that following Jesus is a constant challenge to put themselves entirely into God’s hands.

Reflection

Both readings today warn us about the dangers of being self-obsessed. The parable of Jonah speaks very clearly of the dangers involved in imagining that we are better than everyone else. Such an attitude blinds us both to the goodness in others and the graciousness of our God whose mercy reaches out to all.

Paul is trying to get across to groups, who are trying to outdo each other in terms of their Christian virtue, that they don’t have to go making radical changes to their lifestyle in order to be faithful to the gospel.

It is much more important that in the ordinary details of their daily life and relationships they are guided by the love of Christ.

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Donal Neary SJ Gospel Reflections www.messenger.ie/bookshop/

The Ordinary

There’s something very ordinary for a fisherman about washing nets. Daily work, done with some drudgery but knowing that it is essential for a good catch of fish which would feed the family at this time Jesus called his first apostles.

There is something sacred about the ordinary. About bathing a child, loving a spouse, daily employment, family time and all that goes to make up our days.

In the middle of all this God can surprise us and call us into his service. Our expectation is sometimes different – that we need long times of prayer to find God, or read about him, or do big things for him.just as the smallest things are done out of human love, God is found in the ordinary.

The old Irish spirituality had blessings for everything – for milking a cow, cleaning and dusting a room, visiting the sick and many more. there were prayers for meals, for a safe journey and a happy death. Our Irish spirituality found God as much in mountains and people as in the church, and often more so.

Maybe the disciples remember in difficult times the way they were called in their ordinary work, and found their ongoing call to follow the Lord in the ordinary of their lives for the rest of their lives.

Give me O Lord a love for the ordinary; remind me how ordinaryyou were for so much of your life. Amen.

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ironjohnred · 4 years

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Cycles

h/t @SKRedPill

One, you must be hungry to relish food. You can't do it while full. All human instincts run in cycles, regardless of what you believe about love and life. In love, separation creates the pull that brings union, and union soon creates a push towards separation for the next cycle. You forget about the cyclic nature of love somewhere and end up killing it. If you don't realize this, the next cycle of love might very well not involve you!

Two, you are a deeper problem -- forever needy, your instincts running without any sanity, and your unhappiness a deep rooted chronic suffering that'll never go away till you face the "unhappy me" that's never here and now. What "unhappy me" was really seeking, you can't pursue that one thing, because it's not there, but here. This is not the usual happiness that comes and goes in waves, this joy is freedom from slavery to happiness. You can't chase it, but only bring it into your life and express it. Only that can cure deep suffering

This started out as a comment as to a poster talking about why women don't ever seem happy even after they have the perfect life they've dreamt of and chased all their lives. They eventually initiate a cycle of withdrawal, using every trick in the book (all these are well known moves now), that left to itself will end the relationship. Sooner or later they just chase the next hot guy and often in the process wreck their own lives and the lives of others around them. Why doesn't happily ever after exist? How many times do we see that so and so is "Never happy?"

In the past, someone predicted that after machines take over all the jobs, we'll finally have time to relax and enjoy life and its pleasures. Well, think about being jobless for just one week, soon you'll be dealing with mass depression and suicide and unemployment and horror households. I am sure most women would totally lose all their attraction for their ambiton-less lazy men. Why do we dread the utopia?

Because everything in the physical universe runs in cycles.

There is a saying that wanting is better than having. Or that only a starving man knows the real taste of food. Or the sweetest water in the world is water in a desert. The best sleep comes after a hard day's work.

Your body can play tricks with your sense of perception, it will make you do fantastic things when its survival is under threat. If you're very hungry or thirsty, you'd swear that food and water themselves taste different, and like nothing they do on normal days. There was this guy (I think Joe Decker) who ran in the Badwater Marathon and got severely dehydrated due to salt. His team saved the day with a box of salt, and what when he got hold of it, he literally ate the salt right off the box. True story. I've seen very hot summers, and you just want to keep eating salty food.

And then once you have eaten too much, your body actually changes its sense of taste so you don't want to eat anymore. The same thing you devoured easily and effortlessly as a hungry guy might now actually feel terrible to keep eating. You might even get upset or irritated when someone forces you to eat more when you're full and just want to leave the table. Don't you see this with kids and even some grown ups all the time?

When loaded with adrenaline, you can exert yourself like pain doesn't exist. The next day though...

In old books on love, it is said that love burns stronger in separation than union. That's why you have all these stories of separated lovers pining for each other. Separation is a driving force, creating the pull between subject and object. Union quenches the thirst of separation, but eventually by corollary, union will create the push that again drives you to another round of separation, which then brings you back to enjoy the next union, and so on.

There could also be other things wrong - for one the women are always seeking the next adventure, the next high, the next moment and aren't satisfied being in this moment. As a result they are ever needy. Highs become an expectation, and the moment they do, one becomes unhappy.

No amount of anything in this moment that they can have now will satisfy them when they're always looking for the next moment and the next thrill.

The idea that you can have it all and then be satisfied forever is a myth we all tell ourselves to motivate our chase for the next big thing out there. In reality we are really just seeking drama of the chase and the finish line the whole time. The biggest myth you can tell yourself is that if the chase ends, you'll be happy ever after. Once separation ends, and the pain of seeking is gone, you'll be happy and stay together forever.

No way.

That feeling will last for a short time, then it will be time to get back to normal, recharge and start the next adventure. Any high of any kind will soon have to come down for a low or the baseline, any wave will have to pass on for the next wave to come in. Without the cycle of union and separation, love dies.

And that's also why in times of lockdown and home bound, not taking into account the impact on jobs, the financial stress and the economic crash, all the people who claimed they always wanted to spend more time at home sweet home with their families are getting restless and finding the other intolerable. I know, it's happening in my own extended family. In some cases, they even get abusive to each other in a matter of days. Domestic violence has indeed increased quite a bit in many places around the world during the lockdown. Just look at people who've finally retired from whatever they were doing, for a long time they can just be intolerable and forever upset and unhappy at home, like an addict with withdrawal symptoms, and they won't even know why or what to do about it.

So there are 2 solutions. One, after people have had their fill, create hunger again. Most of your base firmware instincts work only when there's a real need, not whenever you want it, and definitely they don't work the way you believe they should. Love isn't anything what people believe it should be logically - it is base firmware. This always works only in cycles, just like everything else in nature. That's why dread and separation matter and why push and pull or sex-comfort-sex works. You have to respect these facts about your instincts. Even breathing works only push and pull. Try and see what happens if you hold your breath with your lungs full or your lungs empty. You won't last very long at either end. You cannot be active 24 hours a day, nor can you sleep as long as you want. Sooner or later your body will demand sleep or force you to get your ass out of bed. Sex too is cyclic. Even muscle building totally needs you to nail the cycle of exercise vs recovery, or else it doesn't work.

Life leads to death, and death is ground for new life. If cycles are true for everything in existence, why do you think a base instinct like love is an exception to the rule?

Although you might think that union is forever, sooner or later, union is bound to create a pushing force again. As bad or as angry as it makes us feel, this is actually natural. No really, your anger only comes out of failing to realize that all emotional highs and lows are temporary and that love is not what you believed it would be. There will be a push that creates separation and dread again, and this is essential for the next round of attraction and union.

There is a reason why it is said, "Familiarity breeds contempt". Old proverbs, lots of experience talking.

So your best bet is to create these cycles yourself. Don't overfill the tank or don't let it drain all the way to empty. Treat love like a Lithium ion battery. Organize the cyclic nature of your own instincts, or else they'll do it in a very reckless indiscriminate way and you'll screw up the life you've created.

Most men allow themselves to go beta simply because they don't realize the cyclic nature of human needs and instincts. They think it's over once you're in a committed relationship. What they don't know is that it's over for just a brief while. Then love needs to start off a fresh cycle, or else sooner or later it will happen subconsciously. Women don't believe it either, but our bodies know better.

So the guy stops doing everything that made him attractive as a lover, he destroys the very cycle of push and pull, union and separation. There're no cycles of love in being a provider, just a routine and chores. He tries to empathize with her pain by trying to make her happy (rather than she empathizing with his abundance), not realizing that she can't shine by her own light, but by his, and that's what is lacking. He tries to do more of the filling her up with niceness and she gets sick of over-eating on what he thinks is love. Eventually she pushes herself away for good, to feel hungry for love again and jump into another cycle of push-pull that someone else gives.

Also, discipline is not natural to base instincts. In the past life was super hard enough on its own to enforce its own discipline, but we are just not used to easy good times where we have to consciously keep up the discipline. So in good times, people's minds and bodies just go awry. Just look at the obesity epidemic these days! Left to itself, love, just like any base pleasure instinct, will try to keep its cycle going in very disorganized and wild ways that can be destructive in modern times if left undisciplined.

That is one essential skill we learn here in RP and MRP, is creating a healthy cycle of separation and dread followed by sex and comfort. There are many of us who know first hand that if we don't maintain healthy cycle ourselves, it will try to go by its own devices nevertheless, and we might very well not be a part of the next cycle!!

EDIT : Every time your relationship changes from one stage to another on the hierarchy ladder, the old cycle of push-pull attraction changes or is broken. Marriage is the worst offender here, but it can apply to all levels. Before an LTR or marriage dating came with a natural push and pull cycle, but afterward you end up spending most of your time sharing space and time which can kill the old cycle. Without starting off a new intimacy cycle and getting into a new rhythm, attraction can very quickly plummet in the next stage of a relationship. A similar thing can happen in long running marriages after retirement. The work-home division itself created a cycle of its own that most people don't pay attention to and when it goes, it can come with a lot of issues.

That solution addresses the immediate problem - not allowing the cycle of love to flow naturally. Not creating enough dread and separation to bring the hunger and attraction back for the next round.

Two, and this is the bigger, deeper problem here - is that regardless of which situation you find yourself in, you're unhappy one way or the other. You chase love because you're unhappy and then you push it away because you're not happy having got everything you wanted. You're not at ease in any situation really. This problem is purely internal and you are doing this to yourself. It is this that has been referred to by some wise guys as the root of suffering. This is an illness. If it was a situational issue, changing the situation should have solved it. When you've made all the changes and you / she is still not happy, it's high time to recognize you have a deeper problem -- with yourself.

Satiation is like the mid point between need and abundance. Problem and Solution #1 can help you stay managing the cycle of need <-> satisfying said need. But Problem #2 is about the deeper issue of not knowing abundance of life, and always living in a needy dependent state.

Real needs run in cycles or they're a one time thing. When needs are met, they become satisfied. One time needs don't come back. Suffering however, is a bottomless pit of neediness, no matter how much you try to fill it, it just gets worse. It's like the social media news feed.

You try to solve this suffering through any number of means. You think if you just find that one ideal thing missing in your life, it could be love or money or power or that perfect car or job or woman -- that will be happily ever after, and you are very disappointed and angry when you find that the thing you sought wasn't anything like what you believed it was, and even more disappointed when it did not solve the root of your misery.

Ever observed that over time Valentine's Day has become "Expectations Day to be loved" rather than a "Day for love"? That's what happens when highs become an expectation rather than a gift. I joke with my cousins' husbands that they're just dreading Valentine's Day, and they laugh. What went wrong?

The solution needs a bit of spirituality -- stop resisting this moment. Need is always looking to the future for fulfillment. Your dysfunctional patterns with a proven history of failure are stuck in the memory of the past. Abundance however is only in this moment. Your mind is never here, it's always looking for the grass on the other side. That will help you achieve your goals and chase your dreams, but it will lock into a pattern of perpetual seeking if it becomes an addiction and you forget that life is only ever happening here and now. You will never find fulfillment you seek in the end, because abundance doesn't come from outside, it's actually generated from within.

Your addiction to pleasure is not a journey to happiness - it is a journey of misery trying to numb itself, unable to face the truth of itself or life. That's why those who fill their lives up with every pleasure the world can offer turn out to be the most broken and depressed, messed up individuals you can find. Binge on YT and netflix for hours together, and you wonder why you feel so depressed at the end of the day. If you look too far into the future for your salvation, you'll only see death, not life, because life is now. All those people around you who're pursuing the dream of happiness? Nah, they're really just running away from their own suffering.

The secret of lasting happiness is this - you will never find as long as you seek. Unhappy people seek happiness, and the more you try to seek it, the more you convince yourself that you are unhappy, and the unhappier you become. Lasting happiness doesn't exist until you are free from this incessant need to be happy, caused by the root of your own suffering. Pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. Of late your quest for happiness has become so bad, you can't even focus on a task for a few minutes because your brain's too addicted to dopamine. You must become free from the grip of happiness itself to find abundance and fulfillment.

Actually it can't even be called happiness, it is abundance beyond happiness, or freedom. Freedom from the whole pleasure-pain trap. Happiness is just a wave on the surface of the water comparison, it throws you up to a high, and then you crash back down to a low / baseline. That forever comes and goes, no point in getting upset over it and trying to hang on to a high - that is futile - don't resist its flow. Lasting abundance comes from the depth of the ocean, which is ever there regardless of what waves are doing on the surface. When you're ok with this fact, you start experiencing freedom to create the life you've wanted, because now you're no longer afraid of discomfort or growth, or the waves of life, or facing the truth. That's freedom.

That inner freedom / abundance is what deep down you really want, and it is that which frees you of your chronic inner neediness and suffering. Every other thing in this universe you can chase and pursue, but this one thing you can't pursue, because it's already here and now. The more you chase it, the more you'll lose it, and the more your life gets fucked up.

It took me 12 damned years of breaking my head over the happiness problem - whether I'll find happiness or not, or whether this will make me happy or not in the future, to why people were still unhappy despite having it all, to why I was becoming increasingly unhappier and depressed, to finally realize my mistake. A simple, but dreadful mistake -- my frame was a fucked up one. My idea of happiness was fundamentally fucked up.

You cannot really pursue true happiness or abundance. You can only express it and bring it into your life. The more you pursue it, the less you will find. Every other thing - goals, achievements, things, people - can be pursued in this universe, but this can't. Abundance can only be brought in. That's the secret.

If you ever in your life want to know the nature of abundant love, you'll have to stop trying to escape this moment. So long as the root of suffering exists, you'll keep sabotaging your life by any number of means. Your "unhappy me" wants to live just like everything else, and it will keep doing anything to fuck up its life so it can feel the pleasure of unfucking itself up. It's a disorder - where you want to make yourself sick because you are wondering if the medicine still works and because the process of getting well is more important than actually staying naturally healthy.

What that unhappy me doesn't realize (or doesn't want to face) is that it itself is the root cause of the problem that doesn't let it stay happy for long in any situation. Pretty much everything you do in this state is driven only by suffering. There's no abundance in the suffering condition. What you normally call as love is just the sweetest most acceptable form of psychopathy. Almost everything you do, every distracted moment, every unhappy thought, every dissatisfied emotion, every attempt at trying to escape the misery in this moment with drugs or alcohol or games or sex or suicide, all originates from a chronic malaise to escape the moment of experience (this moment) and then try to recapture your lost abundance chasing it elsewhere, but not where it really is - here.

This behavior is not unlike a black hole - no matter how much you throw at it, it doesn't seem to go away, but only get bigger. And it's not going to go away till you realize what you're really doing. You have to have the balls to face this, that it is indeed your fault and responsibility to face this and deal with this. If every thing is always a problem, then perhaps you are the problem.

Why does your unhappy self resist this moment so much? Because it knows the solution to suffering will finish the ego. So it will do anything to keep up the drama of being unhappy and then seeking the next solution, the next high, the next lover, the next big thing. Deep down, unhappy me, subconsciously knows that it is the problem, and when it becomes too unhappy it tries to take itself out by trying to kill itself in many ways on the outside - suicide, addictions, depression, violence, abusive relationships, you name it. But those are not solutions. The real solution is mindful awareness of unhappy me itself, knowing that it is there and observing it in this moment, catching it as it arises -- that will take the air out of it, deflate and dissolve it.

Well, so if women are never happy no matter what, maybe they should look inside for the answer... in the meantime, you better too. After all, regardless of whose fault it is, it's going to fall on your head, and only you are responsible for your life and salvation.

Ok, if you don't like the word spirituality, at least learn the word discipline. If love could be seen as food, virtually every other person you meet is either starving like a famine victim or has some kind of eating disorder, and has absolutely no consistency or discipline maintaining even their mealtimes, let alone their calorific balance. Healthy eating with a bit of discipline isn't as hard as it seems, in a matter of time your mind and body will get used to it as the benefits begin to show. The brain is very flexible and can indeed be trained consciously. You gotta to be fine both bulking and cutting if you want to stay lean and build muscle. And now you need a similar approach with love -- it's high time to go on a healthy love diet. At least do this much.

So putting both together, You'll have to train yourself to be ok both in the chase and the peace afterward. Regardless of weather you're chasing your dreams or just being content, if you can be at ease with yourself, then whatever happens, you can use it to your advantage rather than suffering every single thing that happens to you and making others suffer around you as well. You'll have to know when to play and when to stop and be happy in both. Most are usually one or the other. This is far more challenging than it looks - most people's biggest problem is that they will seldom acknowledge that much of their suffering today is what they're doing this to themselves. Very few people solve this, reconciling two seemingly opposing forces and getting them to dance together. You've got to fulfill your needy side but also allow your abundant side to flow in to your life.

You've gotta learn to be at ease in both - if you succeed, you're free. You can do whatever you want. The root of suffering is finished. Now what happens is driven not because you're always unhappy, but by awareness and abundance seeking to express its potential. You've become closer to a white hole now. Your needs are actually needs now - they're not a bottomless pit that can never be filled - there's a difference between the two. Your energy is abundant and infectious in a good way and inspires others too. The real reason for your suffering is that the abundant and capable life that is you has never found expression. You have been trying to fill a needy you up with pleasures to numb the pain, and it just made it worse, because at the end of the day, your life was suppressed and just became even unhappier.

An aware life will actually bring you a lot more abundance and life than the needy guy who operates from a point of origin of pain and suffering. That's the ultimate challenge you'll ever face in your life. Very few people ever reached this kind of mastery where they live this way.

You cannot remain "high" forever. And you shouldn't. In fact once you realize life goes in waves and cycles, it's actually best to run them optimally as they were meant to be. But you can always be present, and once you look closely at it, you'll see you're always present, it's only the mind that always wants an escape. Then the highs become gifts you are grateful for, not expectations that ultimately disappoint you, and the lows become moments to bring in abundance. Life goes from running entirely on reactive mode to a more proactive and responsible mode. You go from being victim to channeling your inner creator. That is freedom, freedom from the very need to escape to freedom.

The utopia of your bluepilled dreams does not exist. And that's actually a good thing to know. It sets you free.

So here's a powerful exercise for your mind and self. Identify a few things that give you that rush of happiness and dopamine, that always keep distracting you or making you addicted and deliberately avoid them for sometime. Don't resist the reality of being free of them. Just spend sometime away and witness all the garbage inside your mind rise to the surface. If this happens, sit down and be fully present and aware of the one who's mind is bothering them, you, the living life in you. Your mind will trouble you for a while, but then it will begin to settle down. It might feel like dying for a while, the burden of time that you were trying to kill might start to hurt you hard, but stay present - in times of suffering, your mind narrows down and naturally comes back to this moment as this is the only place where there's really no stress. But that's the whole point -- you have to come to ease with yourself. Then you may go back to doing those things -- but always remember to withdraw and withdraw completely - don't just do it half way, go all the way. Push and pull.

You might initially feel strangely empty not filling up that void inside yourself, or having a lot of time that you can't kill somehow, but don't do it. Soon you'll realize it isn't emptiness but freedom, like a load of compulsion lifted off your mind. That freedom contains way more possibilities for you to create your life as you should have. Once you start coming to ease being present, the dreaded burden of time will start coming down a lot - this is a sign that suffering or the unhappy me is losing its grip at last. The need to kill time by any means begins to vanish when you find the one timeless thing there is. Time is no longer stressful or restless - it is now an opportunity.

Sometime after knowing this, you may find a new original idea, a fresh inspiration, or you might just go back to your usual life, but that peace of being unburdened will now come into whatever you're doing.

This will strengthen your inner muscle of mindfulness to be present with whatever situation that presents itself, and stop resisting what is needed for your growth. You have to be at ease with the fact that everything is a wave and everything comes in cycles and everything comes and goes. When you're fully present here, you don't hang on or resist the facts of life. Remove the friction and life feels lubricated. In time you will find you can be inspired to do things you never imagined you could do. You will stop being "never happy", by being free of this incessant quest for happiness itself. Then you can just surf the waves of life. If a high comes, enjoy it. It it goes, you come back to normal, be grateful and be at peace. Nothing is forever, but you now accept it for what it is and realize it's indeed for the best. Inner peace and living presence will always be there no matter what you're surfing - that alone is ever.

The next step is important. Once you feel this, stay in it for a while, and then when you have to get going, actively bring some of that mindful presence / peace / abundance / awareness (whatever you call it) into your every activity. Bring this awareness in whenever unhappy me raises its head, when the voice in your head talks too loudly, when you're feeling both high and low. Your pain will soon start losing its grip. Soon even simple things will become surprisingly fulfilling once this incessant need to find happiness comes down. Bring it in, intensely.

It even changes the way you want and desire. The "If only I have that one thing, I'll be happily ever after" - the victim's script goes down. Now you will find yourselves desiring to do something or get something directly (a simple "I want this"), or you may find yourselves driven to address something needed, and above all, now you're willing to embrace pain and discomfort if need be. You own the consequences of your desires. You desire more like a great achiever and less like a needy guy.

What we've done in society is we've given ourselves too much freedom without the consciousness to handle so much freedom safely. Our biology simply can't keep up with our pace of evolution. We've made ourselves too comfy, too technologically advanced, eliminated outside suffering, kept nature far away (or so we think, Coronavirus has made us think again), but our instincts work like they're still in the wild, and unhappy me is big as ever. We've given children loaded guns. The way we are right now, we are way too needy still, and therefore we're compulsively and indiscriminately creating push pull cycles subconsciously without any thought for the consequences. Until we evolve consciously, and learn how to handle ourselves in the good times sensibly, we'll always be unhappy and make our lives a mess no matter what happens. It's time to bring in a better consciousness.

So to sum it up - life and love works in cycles. In love matters, separation creates the attractive pull that leads to union, but sooner or later union is going to create a new push, leading to another round of separation and the start of another cycle. If you are not alert, that next cycle might not even happen with you. Part of why that happens is due to the cyclic nature of our physical instincts and needs, but beyond that, the deeper reasons for perpetually "not happy" is due to a perpetual unease and unhappiness with this moment, that just guarantees you'll suffer in any scenario. The first one can be solved with a proper dose of dread and separation, the second one is a disease that runs deep and is never going to be solved from the outside. If you are not really happy in any situation, the problem is you alone. That will only go away when your unhappy me that forever struggles against this moment is gone.

What you call "abundance" I would call "acceptance". It seems like a more accurate label, since "acceptance" allows you to be at peace both in moments of striving-for-more and dissatisfaction-from-having-it-all, while still being able to participate in the game and not completely giving up - after all, even the most ardent monks cannot escape biology. And completely giving up because you've found "abundance" is giving into yet another utopia fantasy.

Yes acceptance is sort of like the first most important step. But the trick to that is honest acceptance, which means reconciling to the truth of life. Abundance comes a little further down the road once you've realized you already have the "deep" fulfilling happiness you seek and the happiness of pleasure comes and goes like waves. Once the expectation that you should be high all the time goes away after some struggle , you feel relieved even, and that's when you realize you were in fact driven by pain the whole time.

Once you are free of this even a couple of steps, you can give some room to bring in what you're really capable of adding. That is the point of abundance. Of course so long as you live you'll have needs, but you won't be in a bottomless pit of neediness now.

Every time your relationship changes from one stage to another on the hierarchy ladder, the old cycle of push-pull attraction changes or is broken. Marriage is the worst offender here, but it can apply to all levels. Before an LTR or marriage dating came with a natural push and pull cycle, but afterward you end up spending most of your time sharing space and time which can kill the old cycle. Without starting off a new intimacy cycle and getting into a new rhythm, attraction can very quickly plummet in the next stage of a relationship. A similar thing can happen in long running marriages after retirement. The work-home division itself created a cycle of its own that most people don't pay attention to and when it goes, it can come with a lot of issues.

When OP was talking about happiness being a wave I was immediately taken back to a quote my grandfather shared with me. I asked him what the meaning of life was. After a few months he sent me a voicemail. "Prepare for the flow of life and flow along with it." He's 91. I wish it would have clicked then but it definitely clicked now. Unhappy me has been the driver all along, I just wasn't expressing this idea correctly when I thought about it. I kept thinking it was somebody or someone else controlling me but it's always been me. Just the unhappy one.

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