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da-birb-writes-sometimes · 8 months

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How You Turn My World; Chapter 1

Your day started with chaos, and my dear, it looks like it will continue to be chaos. But only time will tell. The Underground holds many surprises in store for you.

Characters; Grim, Lilia Vanrouge, Deuce Spade, Ace Trappola

Content; Gender-neutral reader, cat shenanigans, building the plot

Content Warnings; Swearing, illusion to marijuana but there is none

Word Count; 4.6 K

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 |

Don't put my work into AI; I'll make sure you go to the Underground and don't return. Mwah mwah, kisses~

Ah, the joys of cat parenthood. Days spent cuddling your little bundle of furry joy. That’s what your friends preached. That having a feline roommate was easy and rewarding. That you would benefit by having a cute and fuzzy companion that didn’t demand much of anything. That you would love your little kitty friend like a child. Well, either your friends were liars with questionable senses of humour, or you drew the short stick when it came to choosing a furry companion. And there’s always the possibility of it being both, what with having Ace as a friend and all, but you just hoped it was just your shit luck and not that you had shit friends.

Seriously, though, what higher power did you manage to piss off to deserve the royal hobgoblin of a cat you have? He has shit and pissed in your plants on several occasions. Demolished every single curtain he laid eyes on like he had a personal vendetta against them. Stole your breakfast off your plate right as you were about to take a bite. Puked on your last pair of good white shoes, which still had stains on them because they wouldn’t come out. The cherry on top of it all though was that he insists on yowling and crying in the middle of the damn night for no good reason. Rudely awaking you from the dead of sleep because he demanded attention. With how loud he was, you were surprised that you hadn’t gotten a noise complaint from any of your neighbours… yet. But then again, you could hear the upstairs neighbours’ children screaming bloody murder every so often — what were their names, the Clovers? They were probably so used to it that they threw you a bone, or they didn’t want extra grey hairs from filing a complaint to the landlord. So maybe Grim wasn’t all that bad, but he was still a gremlin child.

“MROWWWWWW!!!!!” Ah, so tonight was no different then. Grim had decided that you needed to be woken up before even the birds started to sing, needed to be yanked out of the land of dreams. That whatever had caught the attention of his singular brain cell was more important than you recharging so you don’t accidentally say the wrong thing to your boss. Since last time you had slipped up and called him dad, even though no one in their right mind would leave him alone with a rutabaga unattended, and he went on a two-hour long monologue about how much of a kind and generous person he was for you to see him as a father figure. And your salary wasn’t high enough, nor would it ever be, to deal with his eccentric and maddening behaviour.

Maybe, just maybe, if you ignored him and stared at the ceiling long enough he would stop his caterwauling and go to sleep. “MROWWWW!!!!!” Apparently not.

Just one night, ONE NIGHT, of peace and quiet. PLEASE. But you knew that if you didn’t get up soon, he would get up on the bed and put his fluffy butt in your face… like he did last night and the night before that. Sighing, you begrudgingly got out of your cocoon of warm, fluffy, blankets, and hoped you would soon be back in them after dealing with Grim. Hopefully, he was just complaining about his food bowl not being as full as he would like it.

What was the time anyways? Three-thirty in the morning? Ugh, Grim! What did Ace say about it, ah, yes, “Primetime witching hour. Demons and all sorts of creepies” yada yada yada. But you didn’t pay any mind to him, as his annoying smug look would taunt you in your mind even though he was probably sound asleep, blissfully asleep. Something that you wanted to be doing, but woefully you were not.

Stepping out into the main living space, you shot the grey fuzzball the stink eye. “What the hell do you want? You absolute gremlin!” You hissed through gritted teeth, very much annoyed with your brat of a fur child and wanting nothing more than to crawl back to bed, hell, even the loveseat would suffice.

The offending feline just trilled at you in response, and his tail vibrated, happy that you had come out to see him. How is he so cute but so annoying? He rubbed against your legs before trotting off to one of his hidey holes, which also served as his nest of your stolen socks. He has a weird obsession with socks. But he popped back out, holding something in his mouth. Something small and fuzzy that didn’t look like any of his toys.

“Prowwww,” he dropped it at your feet as if saying that catching whatever it was, was the equivalent to paying his share of rent. Which, it was very much not.

You closed your eyes and pinched your brow. Please be one of his toys. PLEASE be one of his toys. You chanted to yourself in your mind and then opened your eyes. Unfortunately, it was not one of his toys. The small, fuzzy thing in question seemed to be a mouse or some other kind of rodent. It was too late (too early?) for this, and quite frankly you didn’t have the brain power to confirm whatever the hell it was. All you knew was that it looked like a mouse, therefore it was a mouse.

“Is this what you’ve been screaming about this whole time? A mouse,” you sighed. Shaking your head, you went to the bathroom, grabbing some paper towel so you could at least put it outside for something else to eat, or go back to nature in some other way. It was better than just being left to decompose in the communal garbage bin. When you came back out though, it was nowhere to be seen. Now, either Grim decided to eat it like a good kitty cat, or, with your luck, it was still alive and was now running amuck in your apartment.

Grim’s chattering was coming from the kitchen now, and he was up on top of the fridge. It was running amuck in your apartment, how lovely.

“Why, why, are you like this?! Get down from there!” You really didn’t have the energy for this.

Grim just blinked at you before his eyes dilated. He leapt down from his perch on the fridge and was pawing at a corner by the window. Looking down and you couldn’t make out anything on the floor. But you had the oh-so-brilliant idea to look up toward the ceiling. The ‘mouse’ was very much alive, and wasn’t a mouse at all, since it was flying around and banging itself against the corner.

“YOU CAUGHT A FUCKING BAT?!”

He had indeed caught a fucking bat. And bats were normally fine, when they were outside. Not when they’re flying around your apartment at three o’clock in the morning and your cat is losing his goddamn mind trying to catch it. So no, this was very much not fine.

The bat was about as pleased as you were with this whole situation and kept on flinging itself against the glass of the window, desperately trying to get back outside. How the hell did it get inside in the first place? That could be pondered on upon at a later time, as the first priority was getting it back outside.

“Don’t fly towards my head, bat. I’m just trying to get you back outside. You’re a nice bat, right? Nice bat, nice bat,” you whispered in a non-threatening tone. Could the flying mammal understand what you were saying? Mostly likely not. Hopefully it understood that you, unlike your cat, were trying to help and did not want some fresh bat as your late night snack tonight.

After what felt like forever fuddling with the window to open with a broom in hand, just in case the bat decided to dive bomb your head, you finally got the cursed thing open.

Grabbing Grim, who was still trying to catch the bat for a second time tonight, you got back to your bedroom and locked the door shut. You hoped that the bat would take the hint that it now had a path to freedom, but only time, and a bit of sleep, would tell. Slumping against the door frame, you sighed and looked over at Grim. He was playing with the door stop, the boing, boingg, boinggg sounds filling in the quiet. Whether it was to amuse himself, or to annoy you was a fifty-fifty bet.

Just as you were about to crawl back under the covers a string of anxiety connected in your head. Shit, did Grim get bit? DAMMIT GRIM! After leaving a somewhat desperate and tired call to your vet’s voicemail, alongside an apology for the late call (early call?), you peeked outside to see if the bat was still flying around. According to Google, the bat should be tested for rabies. You did not trust your no brain cell having fluff ball to know better than to get bit by a possibly rabid bat. But it was gone, so yet again, you were out of luck.

You had enough with today, even though it had just really begun. Pulling up the covers, you sighed in the dark warmth of your blanket cocoon. Grim was busying himself by trying to pounce on your feet, but you ignored him, falling back to sleep and hoping that the rest of your day wouldn’t bring any more shenanigans, migraines, or small flying mammals.

…

By some miracle, you managed to get Grim to the vet the very same day. Your boss agreed to let you work from home because he is ever so kind and generous… It did help that one of the other higher-ups nearly nagged off his ear upon hearing about the condition of your cat. Even through the phone you could hear it, and could only imagine the spectacle it must have been. Oh well, you had the day off and that is what mattered… but you would be lying if you said that you didn’t cough out a laugh just imagining the scene on the other side of the phone.

You were relieved, Grim on the other hand was not having it. To be fair, you did trick him into his crate with some tuna. He made his disdain known to all though by crying the entire way there. You almost felt bad for him, almost being the key word.

“You have no one to blame for this but yourself, ya know.” You huffed at him, feeling your shit sleep all too well. “Crying about it won’t help you any.”

Grim let out a pathetic little mew. His little, bright, blue eyes being the only visible part of him, which peered out miserably from the crate. Caving to the kitty manipulation, you poked your finger in as a peace offering. Grim booped his nose to your finger and then proceeded to nibble on it; such a vicious beast.

The vet visit went as well as you could hope it could, as Grim only tried to maim the vet a few times. Hey, it was an improvement from last time, as he had actually peed on them. So yes, trying to maim was vastly better than seeing your figurative child pee on the doctor. You’re pretty sure your vet didn’t go through years of schooling and thousands of dollars into debt just to get peed on by your unruly cat. But Grim was won over by the offering of that cat gogurt, his nose and stomach betraying him. Note to self, stock up on some of that stuff.

The rest of the visit went on without a hitch; he had some blood drawn, got his booster shot for rabies, and even managed to squeeze in a bonus nail trim. There was no evidence of any bite or puncture marks, so Grim by some miracle, did indeed have enough brain cells not to get bit.

“Grim will have to be watched for about forty-five days,” the vet hummed, checking Grim’s chart. “Since you don’t have any other animals it shouldn’t be too difficult to keep him in quarantine. If you see any symptoms be sure to bring him back, just in case.” They gave you a tired smile, and then turned that smile towards their cantankerous patient. “And thank you for deciding not to pee on me this time, Grim. I’m not so bad, see?”

Grim swatted at them, which was his answer to the vet’s question. In Grim’s book, the vet was that bad.

Ignoring his attitude, as you would whenever you came across a screaming toddler and exhausted parent while doing your grocery run, you turned back to your vet. “Thank you, and sorry for Grim. If it makes you feel any better, he’s just as much as a gremlin child at home as well.” At least today went better than last time.

The vet chuckled goodheartedly, “Don’t worry about it, I have more unruly patients than little Grim here.”

Damn, they have seen some shit, haven’t they? … Maybe I should, I don’t know, bring them a gift basket next time I’m in? Or maybe a gift card for a spa day or something??? You should really get them something for the amount of dry cleaning they probably needed to do.

With the visit over, and Grim having a clear bill of health, you shoved him back into his carrier with zero decorum, closing the door as fast as possible before he could escape and try to hide behind the counter like he did last time. I know your tricks, cat. Speaking of bills, the one that was waiting for you at the front desk was enough for you to point an icy glare at your unruly ward.

“You’re lucky that I love you, asshole.” And much like the vet you too got a swat as your thank you. Wonder if this is what the Clovers feel about their children? At least their kids didn’t wake them up in the middle of the night with a bat they caught… You shook your head, moving past those thoughts, and hauled your wailing cat back home.

…

...

By the time you got back to your place, it was just a little past noon. The rest of your day was wide open, and you didn’t really have anything else to do, since taking Grim to the vet was the most urgent of your tasks. Your place could benefit from some tidying, since your boss had recently been demanding more as of late and has been even less useful than he usually was… which was saying something. Seriously, how does he have his position? It was baffling. You swore you could hear his monologue playing on loop in your head whenever you thought of the man, which you tried to keep to a minimum for your own sanity… whatever little of it still remained that is.

Shaking your head to rid the annoying voice, you put on your favourite playlist and got to work. You took your time, putting away the dishes, vacuumed the main room, and even got rid of the dust on the high shelves. But your place was small, so it didn’t take very long for you to tidy up, and deep cleaning could wait for another day when you had enough energy to mentally and physically deal with that undertaking.

You knew that your email probably had a few messages, but it could wait. You weren’t on the clock and therefore didn’t have to check it. Only do the stuff you’re required to do when you get paid, it makes your downtime way more enjoyable.

But, you were bored. The cleaning helped with it, but with the majority of it done and the more intense stuff waiting for another day, you had nothing else to do. And while doom scrolling through social media may fill in the time, it too, was boring, predictable.

… There were two people though who were the exact opposite of boring and predictable. And yes, they did give you your fair share of migraines and questioning your life decisions more than you usually do, they were your best friends. And you were in need of having a movie night with them.

Opening up the group chat, you typed in a message.

| The Responsible One | You guys down for a movie night at my place tonight?

And almost immediately, Ace replied.

| Ginger, derogatory | depends | ya got fiid?

Deuce responded shortly after.

|The Responsible One | How does 6 sound?

| Mama’s Boi | 6 works for me

| The Responsible One | I took a screenshot of that btw love you Ace | Thanks Deuce for actually giving me an answer. | What FIID do you guys want?

| Ginger, derogatory | FUCK YOU | … but yeah 6 works 4 me | any is cool with me

| The Responsible One | Yes yes, fuck you too Ace | Bring your own snacks it is then | See you guys at 6!

That gave you about ninety minutes to hide your good snacks, since the last time, Ace had made himself too comfortable and ate all your fancy treats that you paid way too much for. But like they say, you deserve to ‘treat yoself’ … Ace still owed you for those snacks though. They were fucking expensive, prick.

…

Ninety minutes didn’t take very long, but you managed to hide some of the mess that you hadn’t tackled in your bedroom; it could stand to wait. And the first of your dork friends arrived right on time, count on Deuce trying to be punctual… even if he was panting like he had run a marathon to make it.

“You know,” you sighed, “you didn’t have to sprint here.” You grabbed a glass, filled it with some ice water, and handed it over to your flushed and heaving friend. Please don’t pass out on me. “It’s not a race.”

Deuce took the glass and downed it, still catching his breath. He lifted up the tote bag he was carrying, “Mom made brownies.” A series of coughs escaped him, but he gave you a bashful smile and showed off the multiple Tupperware containers filled to the brim with still warm chocolatey divineness. “Didn’t want them to get cold! Oh! She also made extra for you too!”

He is such a sweetheart… but he’s also pretty dense at times, still a sweetie though. You could have just warmed them back up in the microwave — yes, they weren’t the same as fresh from the oven, but still — you didn’t have the heart to tell Deuce that though. He looked so proud that he made it on time and that the brownies were still warm. What did you do to deserve Deuce as a friend?

“Also,” he fished around the tote bag, “I brought extra popcorn, since we ate all of yours last time.” And he pulled out an unopened bag of popcorn, the bashful smile turning bright.

Deuce took a step forward, but stopped and backpedalled, taking off his shoes. After he set them neatly by the door, he made his way to the kitchen, and set all of his assorted belongings on the meagre counter space. Once he unloaded the tasty cargo, he made his way over to your loveseat, which had seen better days, and sat down, getting comfortable.

He was looking at you, and there was a little crease in between his eyebrows. Deuce only wore that look when he was worried. “Are you feeling okay? You seem a bit… off.”

You gave him a tired smile, “Meh. Tired, stressed, not enough money. You know, the usual.” You noticed that his frown was only deepening, so you took a seat next to him and patted his shoulder. “Seriously, Deuce, I’m okay. Plus you got enough on your own plate without worrying about me. I’m going to be fine.”

Deuce pursed his lips, but let out a long sigh, accepting your answer without much fuss. You were capable of dealing with whatever it was, he knew that. You were one of the most capable, and stubborn, people that he knew. You would be fine in the end. “Whose turn is it to pick the movie this time?” He asked, stretching out, trying not to bump into you.

“Hmm, your turn actually,” you hummed. “But–”

Bzz! Bzzz! BZZZ! Someone was buzzing your door, repeatedly pushing at the button. Only one person you know did that. BZZZZZZZZ! And he wouldn’t let up until you answered the door.

Groaning, you got out of your spot and peaked through the peephole. On the other side was none other than Ace, who’s leg was bouncing and he kept on pushing your damn buzzer.

You only opened the door when he decided to lean on it, making him almost fall… almost. Maybe next time would be the day where you would see him eat dirt. “Happy you could join us on this lovely evening,” you drawl, doing a little bow.

Ace rolled his eyes at you, “Seriously? Feeling petty tonight I see.” He too took off his shoes, since the last time he wore them in and tracked in mud from outside, you made him clean it up. He learned his lesson that day, and really didn’t feel like cleaning your floor again.

You smiled at him, “Yeah, yeah I am~” You dropped the smile and went back to your comfy spot beside Deuce. “Also,” you turned around right as Ace was about to plunder your fridge. You glared at him, and he backed off, giving you a sheepish look. “Don’t even think about stealing my food, there’s popcorn and you have food at your home. Unless you want to start paying for my groceries, stick to what’s on the counter.”

Closing the fridge, Ace busied himself by making himself some popcorn, and sneaking a brownie or two in his mouth as he waited for the microwave to finish making his treat. While he was busy in the kitchen, you and Deuce were slowly going through the seemingly endless catalogue of movies.

“What are we even watching tonight? There’s no special occasion,” Ace mused, sitting on the counter, swinging his legs back and forth. “Action? Horror? Sci-fi? Perhaps,” he paused and made a kissy face, “romance?~”

You stared at him, until he dropped the kissy face. “Never do that again,” you deadpanned, turning back to the screen. “Found something?”

Deuce was hovering over a title, Labyrinth. “Can we watch this? Mom said it was one of her favourites when she was a kid.”

Ace plopped into the armchair, and started chowing down on his fresh popcorn. “Dude, your mom probs just had the hots for, uhhh, Jared? Or whatever his name is.”

You threw a pillow at him, but missed unfortunately, and Ace flipped you off. “First off, Ace, his name is Jareth not Jared. And yeah, we can watch it,” you said, stretching back and getting into prime comfortable blob position. Oh yeah, you weren’t getting back up.

Once Deuce got up and brought some snacks back in, you started the movie. And damn, these brownies are divine. You really needed to ask Ms. Spade for her recipe. The popcorn was decent, overall meh, but the brownies! THE BROWNIES!!!

You all settled down after being rationed your snacks, and you pressed play. Ace and Deuce both nearly choked on popcorn when Jareth appeared.

“WHY ARE HIS PANTS SO TIGHT?!” They both choked in unison.

You just rolled your eyes and ignored them, trying to focus on the movie. Other than you nearly having to do the Heimlich manoeuvre on the both of them, the movie continued without incident, until a certain gremlin decided to start crying right as Magic Dance began playing. Seriously Grim, must you choose the most inopportune time to act like Toby does in the movie? But that’s life with a cat.

You paused the movie and looked at Deuce. You were in prime comfortable blob mode, you weren’t getting up. Deuce patted you on the shoulder and went to go see what on Earth Grim was screaming about. Ace just continued to scarf back brownies, thank goodness you hid some away before he got here, or else you wouldn’t have any come tomorrow.

But Deuce came running back out of your room, since that was where Grim was. And you were about to question why he looked like he’d just seen a ghost when something blurred right past him; something small, fuzzy, and flying.

The damn bat is back?! Yeah, you definitely felt like you were cursed.

Now, you could either get up and deal with the bat, since Deuce was just trying to shoo it outside the window with a mop and Ace was screaming much like Grim was, or you could stay warm and comfy and hide under the blanket, pretending that this wasn’t your waking reality…

Option B was really tempting right now, to be honest. Sighing, you got up, massaged your temples to collect yourself, before arming yourself with a broom yet again. Grim has his rabies vaccine, you don’t, so you weren’t taking any chances.

“WHY IS THERE A BAT IN YOUR APARTMENT?!” Ace hissed, ducking as the bat swooped near him.

You opened the window right open, almost threatening to take it off its bearings, “Because the universe hates me, that’s why!” Was it dramatic? Yes. Did it contain a seed of truth? Yes. So that’s what you went with. Was it really an exaggeration though? In the past twenty-four hours it really felt like the universe was sending you a personal ‘Fuck You ♡ ' letter with a kiss mark on the envelope.

You and Deuce tried to work together as a team to coax the bat outside. Come on, the window is wide open. Come on bat, get your fuzzy ass out of my place.

All that was happening though, was some scene that belonged in a Three Stooges act. With Ace and Grim screeching — yes they counted as one collective unit — Deuce trying his best, but not getting anywhere, and you feeling like you were about to explode from the stress and noise. Even on an impromptu day off, you didn’t get a break, not really.

Getting whisked away by the Goblin King is looking real appealing right now. The bat swooped down close to you, and your instincts kicked in and you swung at it, making it crash land into your coffee table, right into the popcorn. And alongside the popcorn getting spilled everywhere, there was also a poof of green sparkles.

When the green sparkles subsided, there was a strange person with long black hair and red streaks, wearing something that looked straight out of a Ren Faire, and he was standing on your table. The strange man looked straight at you, and you looked back, blinking fast. Did Ms. Spade give us a different kind of brownie? Or is this actually happening?

He snapped his fingers, and you watched as he slowly disappeared into another poof of green sparkles. You were backing up, since hey there was a stranger in your place out of nowhere, but thanks to your shit luck, you tripped over your own feet, tumbling into them. And as the green poof subsided, both you, and the stranger, were nowhere to be seen. Leaving a very confused Ace, Deuce, and Grim to wonder what the hell happened to you.

And honestly? You were thinking the same. Where the FUCK am I?!

...

Tags; @busycloudy, @eynnwwyjth, @identity-theft-101, @ithseem, @krenenbaker, @ryker-writes, @twistwonderlanddevotee, @xxoomiii

~~~~~~~

Author's Note; And I'm finally showing this to the world, after months of collecting dust in my Google Docs. I have no idea how long this fic will go on for, and the length may be dictated by how much feedback and interaction this gets, so yeah. General rating for this is Teen but might change in the future; I won't tag people if that happens though, cuz, yeah.

If you enjoyed this story, and want to read more of my stuff while I slowly work on more installments to this fic, check out my masterlist! Please ignore any spelling mistakes, I write and die with no beta.

#twst #twst x gn reader #twst x reader #twisted wonderland #twisted wonderland x reader #twisted wonderland x gn reader #twst grim #lilia vanrouge #deuce spade #ace trappola #there will be more x reader stuff in future chapters #soooo #lilia vanrouge x reader #lilia vanrouge x gn reader #loosely inspired off of labyrinth and some other fae media; but very loosely #majority of this should be original with some tie ins from the movie #i wrote like 9 K in may for this idea and haven't touched it since; it took me like a week to rewrite this 4.6 K and i deleted some stuff #don't be precious; delete your art (from drawfee)#the length of this may be dictated from how much traction and interaction it gets #gilf enjoyers rejoice #twst labyrinth au #<- kinda but not really; we shall see #to clarrify; there is nothing in the brownies; the brownies are just run of the mill brownies #will be making a masterlist for this series; just so i don't break diasomnia's sooner than the others #there's also going to be a break in fic updates in october; but more on that later #btw everything grim did; my cats have done; the 'bat' was a mouse though and not lilia vanrouge from twisted wonderland #also labyrinth gave me nightmares as a child cuz i was terrified of puppets; and i had the same reaction as adeuce at his pants #first time posting a multi-chapter fic; let's see how this goes

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bobbyinthegarden · 1 year

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March & April Reading Wrap-Up

Just like my February Reading Wrap-Up, here’s March & April

Fiction

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Might be my favourite Jane Austen novel? Maybe? I love the relationship between the sisters, and I hard relate to Marianne in an “I’m in the photo and I don’t like it” kind of way.

The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter

This book is really weird. I think I liked it, but I’m still working through my thoughts on it. I saw somebody on Goodreads say that this book is a bit like a hybrid of Mad Max: Fury Road and The Handmaid’s Tale, and that is pretty accurate. It’s bizarre at times, I was trying to explain some of the plot to my partner who was extremely bewildered by it. Major trigger warning that there is a lot of sexual violence in this book, and it also features forced surgical transition as a major plot point, so, do with that what you will.

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

Did a whole review of this one

Silas Marner by George Eliot

Absolutely adored this book, I am now a full fledged George Eliot stan.

Axoim’s End by Lindsay Ellis

I don’t know if this will be a surprise or not, based on my blog, but I do actually like sci-fi. Not so surprising, considering my lifelong X-Files obsession, I like stories about aliens and weird conspiracies to cover them up, so this definitely appealed to me for that reason and this was pretty decent, I will be continuing the series when I have time.

The X-Files: Fight the Future by Elizabeth Hand, adapted from the screenplay by Chris Carter

I thought it would be fun to check out some of the X-Files novelisations. As with most TV shows that get novel tie-ins, some are adaptations of episodes and some are original stories, with X-Files, they seem to mostly be original stories, but this one is a novelisation of the first movie. It’s a very faithful re-telling, it doesn’t really add anything, but it doesn’t detract anything either, it’s a very straight re-telling of the movie. I like the movie (the first one anyway), so that was fine for me, and the books pretty short so it only took me two days to get through.

The X-Files: Cold Cases by Joe Harris and Chris Carter

Debated if I should include this in my wrap-up or not, since it’s an audiodrama, not a book, BUT I listened to it specifically for my 2023 Reading Challenge (the audiobook category). Full review incoming.

The Railway Children by E. Nesbit

Read this one for my reading challenge too, this time the children’s literature category. Despite really loving the movie when I was a kid, I’d never actually read the book, so it was nice to finally sit down and read it. Full review incoming.

Colonel Brandon In His Own Words by Shannon Winslow

I read this purely because I was curious to learn what self-published Jane Austen fanfiction is like, and I chose this one because I had read Sense and Sensibility so recently (for the unaware, this book is a re-telling of that one). It’s basically exactly what you expect. I saw somebody on Goodreads say that they liked this book better than Sense and Sensibility, which is definitely not an opinion that I share. The depictions of the Indian characters and the British Army in this book was quite questionable, in my opinion.

Non-fiction:

The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan

I read this book several years ago, when I was doing my BA at university, and it totally blew my mind. I have far too many thoughts about this book to express in one short paragraph, other than to say that it’s amazing that this book was written in the 1960s, Marhsall McLuhan was out there, writing about the internet 20 years before it was even invented.

First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung

Did a whole review of this one too

Poetry:

Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky

This one too

Zines/comics:

The Fisherman’s Wife by @grendel-menz

A re-telling of the tale of the fairytale with absolutely gorgeous art that truly took my breath away. [LINK]

Two Pounds of Flesh by @thequeenofbithynia

I’ve talked about other comics by this user in my February wrap-up. This one is a beautiful and complex tale about gender, blended with horror - it’s extremely cool. I love everything that Andreas makes, and am planning on buying his most recent comic as well when I can. [LINK]

#Bobby speaks #bookblr #books

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breakingarrows · 1 year

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Morbid Curiosity: Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway

When I first published a video with the title, "Morbid Curiosity" it was described as, "Morbid Curiosity will be a inconsistent series of visiting older titles I have always been drawn to despite no commercial or critical acclaim." The first, and only, video published underneath that title was GRIN's final gasping release Bionic Commando (2009), but the idea behind the series has remained on my mind long before and after that date. Edwin Evans-Thirwell in his review of Wanted: Dead, makes several mentions of the bygone era of "double-a" games,

...basically, games from the dawn of the broadband era, before Naughty Dog and Ubisoft forced every third-person rival to learn parkour and court comparison with HBO, before the ubiquity of Steam and the death of trade-ins, before every game had to involve a loot treadmill and a season pass. This was a time when mid-tier 3D action experiences in particular were free to be raw, brutish, unpolished, shamelessly smashed-together and, very often, an absolute bunch of arse, because there were fewer settled notions about what any videogame should do.

For Edwin this curiosity for games released around 2004 is something I have for games around the 2008 period. The "HD" generation whose titles were, a majority of the time, hitting 720p, 30fps. It was the generation that saw the "death" of the licensed movie tie-in game and of double-A retail releases. It was this generation I am most interested in with its releases of games such as Alice: Madness Returns, Wolfenstein (2009), WET, Afro Samurai, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Bionic Commando, Homefront, Singularity, Medal of Honor (2010), Dead to Rights Retribution, The Saboteur, and Frontlines: Fuels of War to name but a few that I own due to this curiosity.

Some of these games have received acknowledgement in our contemporary times, but others have been all but forgotten save for the few fans who will chime in whenever a new YouTube video covering it is released.

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway was the third mainline entry in a burgeoning franchise underneath Ubisoft and Gearbox that has been long abandoned despite this game's "To Be Continued" that graces the black screen upon completion (and despite Pitchford's claims of another entry being in development). With Hell's Highway I don't think we have a game deserving a critical reevaluation, but instead is a game that, "craves to be understood and acknowledged, if not celebrated."

Two components of Hell's Highway that were crafted by the developers and recognized by most reviewers that separate this game from others of its ilk are: 1.) "emotional" story/storytelling, Band of Brothers-like focus on individuals during wartime, and 2.) "tactical" squad controlling gameplay that de-emphasizes the player as an unstoppable individual. Despite appreciating specific aspects of both, neither truly stay true to its intent.

One of the major hurdles in finding its characters interactions and the internal conflict of our main character, Staff Sergeant Matt Baker, is that the voicework is standard VO work but the facial animations are lacking entirely. Frequently the voices and their emotion, ranging from voice-breaking grief to rageful yelling, is undercut by faces that are just not capable of displaying the proper range and nuance to match the emotion being performed in the audio. Stunted plotlines also undercut intended effects. A sniper is mentioned as having killed a fellow soldier in the past only to be encountered and executed in the following level. A new recruit kisses a Dutch woman and later that night has the obsessive need to run into the bombed out city to "save" her, only to lead to both of their death's. His earlier comforting of a dying priest mid-firefight has the appearance of setting up this compulsive need, but you don't get sufficient time to invest emotionally in him as a person leading to his insubordination and ultimate fate not hitting the emotional target aimed for. It also doesn't help that it took me quite some time, and some reading on prior entries, to begin to learn who was who among the many similar faces of the cast.

Baker's internal conflict revolves around guilt of the death of a Private Kevin Legett, who was responsible for the death of two squadmates and subsequently ordered by Baker to keep it a secret lest he be executed by fellow soldiers. Legett ultimately died during a previous engagement and Baker keeps his guilt, and the secret source of that guilt, bottled up within him for a majority of the game. Legett will frequently appear in flashes, pairs of glasses found will summon his image, and he even begins to appear to Baker, first as a corpse, and finally as a sort of Tyler Durden-esque projection, complete with a POV switch to another soldier watching Baker seemingly talking to himself in the distance. This haunting made sense up until the point of Baker's admission of the truth to his squad, as even after he opens up Legett's haunting continues. It may be commentary on Baker's guilt being carried forward, despite his honesty and throwing away the "cursed" silver pistol that served as an anchor point, but we will likely never know considering a follow up never happened.

Hell's Highway has a heavy emphasis on controlling squads of fellow soldiers to suppress and flank enemy squads. Your machine gun squad can lay down long stretches of suppressing fire, your bazooka squad can destroy MG nests and destructible cover, and your assault squad can throw a grenade when close enough. While this is presented as a cooperative campaign of soldiers rather than something like Call of Duty where your lone player character performs every key action and achieves more kills than every other soldier combined, Hell's Highway still devolves into your player character racking up the highest kill count out of the whole regiment. This is due to the allied AI never really achieving much without your direct intervention. Leave them behind cover to do their thing and they'll trade bullets with nary a casualty for either side all day. Flanking maneuvers frequently require you to be in the optimal position before rallying the chosen squad to take up a position alongside you, by which point you will have already gunned down the enemy.

A few missions even push you into solo excursions anyway, abandoning entirely the squad-based mechanics. Despite this, I still appreciated some key points of the gameplay, namely: you do not rack up hundreds of bullets and shrug them off via a regenerating health system. Instead, your screen becomes increasingly red the longer you remain exposed, thereby giving the enemy more of a chance to finally achieve a hit and your death. I also liked the inaccuracy of guns, relative to other shooters. Too frequently online gamers will cry out for "authentic" recreations but god forbid this be reflected in weapons not always hitting where you're aiming. While the first person aim-down-sights retains this pinpoint accuracy expectation, a majority of the time you will be engaged in cover, bringing the camera to third person perspective and your aiming reticule will need some time to get smaller as you take aim to try and hit your target.

These mechanics, though small, were enough when coupled with the simple yet unique squad system and setting of Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands to keep me interested and playing until the bitter end. Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway isn't some underappreciated masterpiece, but I don't think it has to be in order to be worth playing and appreciating for what it is.

#Brothers in Arms #Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway #Hell's Highway #Video Game Criticism #writing #criticism

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davidmann95 · 4 years

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Your power is mine: thoughts on Kingdom Hearts’ newest, oddest character

Finished Final Fantasy XV over the weekend. Mixed feelings to say the least, but it does give me an excuse to talk about Kingdom Hearts again, specifically this weirdo:

And how it feels like most of the people discussing Yozora and trying to figure out what his deal is are missing half the point. Yes, there’s the apparent connections to Sora and Riku, and there’s his meta association with Noctis and the entire real-life corporate backstory there intertwining with the in-game narrative to an unknown extent. But when he’s discussed as some kind of fusion of Sora and Riku, or a literal reincarnation of Noctis, or that Verum Rex might end up a real game, or something similarly straightforward in terms of “he’s going to be a very important central character going forward”, the ideas or at least the tone of how they’re presented seem to miss an absolutely critical component of how he was introduced to us, in a way that shapes not only him but by extension the entire future of the franchise and its thematic concerns:

We aren’t just supposed to be surprised he’s important because he’s real where we thought he wasn’t. We’re supposed to be surprised because he’s introduced to us as a self-evident gag character.

Not that we’re not supposed to take him seriously where it counts: it’s clear he has an important role going forward and is a force to be reckoned with. But no matter what deep, foreboding connections to the Keyblade and Master of Masters may lie within his backstory that may determine the fate of more universes than one, he will never not have had the hilariously inauspicious beginning of being a toy played by Rex the Dinosaur. He doesn’t even have the dignity of being introduced as a game on one of the plot-heavy original worlds! He’s a throwaway gimmick to spice up one of the filler Disney segments, literally a child’s plaything.

Even before we learn the context he’s being presented in...well, look at him. He’s like Riku, who’s cooler than Sora, and Noctis, a Final Fantasy character and therefore cooler than all this Disney stuff, but also he has a LASER SWORD and a CROSSBOW - that are clearly functioning as cool future tech instead of dopey magical powers - and his eyes are MYSTERIOUS MISMATCHING UNNATURAL COLORS and he fights GIANT ROBOTS with a dude in a fedora in a city straight out of the REAL WORLD to save a helpless lady/prize: truly, let no mistake be made, he is VERY, VERY SERIOUS INDEED, AND ALSO, RAD. TO THE MAX. He’s every attempt at reframing contemporary Final Fantasy as slick and modern and cool dialed up and up and up until the tone breaks, without the barest hint of self-awareness even as it advertises its action figure tie-ins. I don’t think that his little Keyblade pattern on his jacket being near-impossible to spot unless you’re looking for it is just to preserve the surprise, but also because the sight of the big keys with the Mickey Mouse logo on them would be anathema to his entire vibe, so important as it may be it must be squirreled away where it can’t make him look dumb. Heck, when Dylan Spouse announced on Twitter he was playing this major character in a childhood favorite franchise of his, surely knowing more than we do about Yozora, his description of the part was “I have lived out my edgy JRPG character fantasies...I even got to say ‘Sorry, but I don’t lose.’” We’re supposed to receive him off the bat as Square Enix, and more specifically Tetsuya Nomura, poking fun at themselves, going ‘yes, we suppose this is all getting to be a bit much, isn’t it?’

And then he enters the story for real.

Obviously he’s much more than a joke now, but the idea of him as something off, something that doesn’t fit in these games, endures. His episode isn’t just in a modern cityscape but skinned in the graphics of the grittier, more detailed style of the Pirates of the Caribbean world meant to evoke photorealism rather than the look of the rest of the game. He interferes with the gameplay in ways no other enemy does, stealing your items and weapons (we’ll get back to that). When he casts you into a void to be attacked by the mechs, it’s not a pure empty white but a mass of abstract polygonal space, evocative of the visuals of early game development. What details we do get of his backstory frame him as a counterpart to Sora on a parallel journey all his own, but the associations with his other source material in Noctis are considerably more...cutting. Credit to @kitsoa, whose own extensive musings on Kingdom Hearts’ increasingly overt metafictional concerns brought to my attention the obvious parallel: that Yozora being changed ‘beyond recognition’ with his heart replaced by another’s is a reasonable, albeit scathing description of Noctis’s revised character in the shift from the Nomura-helmed Final Fantasy Versus XIII to the largely overhauled Final Fantasy XV (and by the same token, the Nameless Star’s identity being stolen comes across as a shot at Versus XIII’s Stella Nox Fleuret being entirely replaced by Lady Lunafreya. Who, by sheer coincidence, would have been corrupted in planned but cancelled DLC into a monster of darkness).

While the comparisons to his source material are not only intentional but textually overt - his introduction as a real boy is literally scored to the FFXV theme music - so is the distancing from that material, given that if Nomura simply wanted to use Noctis the very premise of Kingdom Hearts as a series could have allowed him to use Noctis, and even change him to fit his original vision however he wished given the design and backstory changes to the other Final Fantasy characters involved. Yozora has a distinct role in which he’s still meant to represent that tone and aesthetic, and all signs point to that being because as that representation, he hardly seems an endorsement. He’s a parody, offered up in a demeaning context and tangled up narratively in real-life creative bitterness before being placed as an antagonist, however well-meaning (though keep in mind every secret boss of his kind before - other than Julius, I suppose - went on to become an endgame boss later on), in the player’s path. He may not be a villain, but all signs seem to indicate he’s a figure to be regarded as a contrast to the heroes.

And it’s in that role as a contrast that I have my own theories about what his deal ultimately is, thematically if not plotwise.

For those who saw this in the Kingdom Hearts tag and aren’t superhero fans, that’s Superdoomsday, introduced in Grant Morrison’s run on Action Comics about 8 years ago. One among many takes on an ‘evil Superman’ from a parallel universe, the twist with his world is that rather than a survivor of Krypton, he is literally the materialized concept of Superman - imagined by his reality’s Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen, who created a machine which could bring ideas to life - that when sold to a corporation was reimagined in service of wide public appeal into an all-powerful, uncompromisingly brutal monstrosity clad in armor somewhere between an iPhone, 90s Rob Liefeld battle gear, and Nazi regalia, who ultimately journeyed into the multiverse to stalk and kill other incarnations of Superman, seeing them as competition to his domination of the ‘market’. “The curse...of Superman...” murmurs the dying Kent of that world, “...he becomes anything you want...him...to be...our world...wanted that...”

Yozora is...probably not exactly a 1:1 to that. But as a counterpart to Sora, it absolutely seems as if the main factor by which he contrasts him is that he’s ostensibly the sleeker, edgier model, new-and-improved. He reworks Sora’s story arc and aesthetic into something theoretically cooler and more palatable, steals his power, ‘saves’ him by sealing him away to presumably fight in his stead and thereby take his place as the lead. He is the protagonist so many feel Kingdom Hearts has needed for years, the somber AMV-ready Secret Movie tone and aesthetic stepping into center stage at last rather than maintaining a sunshiney Disney-esque child hero lead to anchor the assorted conspiracies and horrors of much of the rest of the tale. The manner in which he is presented as to make metatextuality an in-universe concern (to call back to Grant Morrison again, his next work after Action Comics was Multiversity, where a major plot point was that the events of parallel universes were unwittingly documented in each others’ pop culture; in that case comic books, in here video games) for Kingdom Hearts to explore in the next main entry is I believe so as to ask what, in fact, Kingdom Hearts as a series should be; is it a Disney series with some incidental Final Fantasy stuff in it? A Final Fantasy spinoff with some Disney elements cluttering it up that should maybe be discarded as it grows up? Something all its own? Is it time for Kingdom Hearts to get Serious? Even if the Kingdom Hearts as imagined by a marketing executive vision of Verum Rex isn’t what’s next, what is, as things get darker and that vision is now part of the narrative whether for good or ill?

So yeah it looks like Kingdom Hearts IV is Kingdom Hearts vs. its own Gritty Realworld! Urban Fantasy AU fanfiction for the soul of the series, and I am extremely here for it.

#Yozora #Kingdom Hearts #Sora #Final Fantasy XV #Final Fantasy Versus XIII #Final Fantasy #Kingdom Hearts IV #Grant Morrison #Analysis #Opinion

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bog-o-bones · 4 years

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Kaiju Media Forecast 2020

The kaiju fandom has certainly seen a gigantic upswing in content since the last time I did one of these “year going forward” reviews. Let’s take a look at some of the major movies, events, merchandise and more that kaiju fans have to look forward to in the coming year!

Movies

Every year since at least 2013, the kaiju fandom has had one “tentpole” film event of the year, usually the most highly anticipated feature coming out that year that most media and merchandise hype will surround. This year’s choice is the latest (and possibly last?) of the Legendary MonsterVerse which just last year introduced us to the first American incarnations of Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah. Later this year, the King of the Monsters will once again take on the King of Skull Island in a rematch nearly 60 years in the making with Godzilla vs. Kong. The only snippet of footage we’ve seen is featured in the screenshot above and recently leaked toy fair displays have quite a lot in store for the big crossover event of the MonsterVerse. Godzilla vs. Kong drops November 20th.

According to your definition, the first kaiju film of 2020 launched two weeks ago with Underwater. The Kristen Stewart-helmed deep-sea monster movie isn’t really making the splash it was looking for box office-wise and most people who have seen it say that it’s okay at worst. Regardless, if you like big monsters and quasi-Cloverfield type films, you can give it a shot in theaters now or in a few months when it hits home media.

Godzilla’s sole big screen appearance won’t just be limited to the big crossover with Kong as a snow-covered cameo role will land him a spot in the new Shinkalion movie. From a clip posted on Yahoo Japan (refresh the page if it doesn’t work) Godzilla briefly faces Hatsune Miku piloting a giant train-based mecha (I tried pinching myself, believe me) at the very end. This role is likely going to be very short but nonetheless, it’s always satisfying to see Godzilla pop up in the most unexpected places.

Again, stretching the definition of “kaiju” here, but also apparently the Monster Hunter movie still exists and is coming out later this year in September? I don’t know much about the franchise, but I do know it’s probably going to be butchered with a Paul W.S. Anderson directed schlock fest. Who knows, maybe the monster scenes will make up for it?

As is tradition, the Ultraman franchise hits us once again with an annual theatrical movie based off the previous year’s show. Ultraman Taiga The Movie: New Generation Climax will be out in March and judging by the title, will feature a climactic event featuring the New Generation assortment of Ultraman heroes. I still have yet to see Taiga but hopefully this provides a fun conclusion to the show.

Famed director Hideaki Anno returns to the world of his most famous creation with Evangelion 3.0+1.0, the highly anticipated final installment in the Rebuild series to be released this June. I have not seen any of the Rebuild movies myself but this is sure to be a wild and crazy ride for Evangelion fans.

Finally, the oddball of the bunch. Kadokawa rises from it’s dusty grave with a brand new monster film focused on the unproduced predecessor to Gamera: Nezura 1964. Featuring giant rat monsters and a cast comprised of many Daiei/Kadokawa favorites, it’ll be interesting to see if this film can capitalize on the recent kaiju craze and be successful enough to possibly give our old turtle friend the revival he truly deserves. Nezura 1964 is due out in December in Japan.

Television

Not much on the television docket this year. It’s far too early to speculate about Tsuburaya’s next Ultra series, leaving us with little to discuss. Studio Trigger is supposedly making some kind of new series related to it’s Gridman show from last year (another item I have yet to see). Titled SSSS.DYNAZENON, nobody knows when it’s due out so for all I know this could be a rather outdated entry.

What we do know for sure is coming is something not particularly kaiju but still related via the tokusatsu connection is the continuation of Kamen Rider Zero-One, the first Rider series in Japan’s newly named Reiwa period. This isn’t really related to the year 2020 but honestly I’d rather have something in this TV section to talk about than just the Gridman sequel.

Merchandise

Last year was one of the greatest years in the history of the American Ultraman fandom with the officially sanctioned releases of Ultra Q, Ultraman, Ultraseven, Ultraman Orb and Ultraman Geed to Blu-Ray in the West for the very first time. In this new year, Mill Creek will continue to satiate the needs of Western Ultra fans with releases of previously unseen-on-western-disc series Return of Ultraman, Ultraman Ace, Ultraman X, and the Ultraman Orb Origin Saga. A schedule flyer released online also teases many other entries in the franchise making the continuous release of these beloved shows a treat to look forward to. You can pre-order the four releases discussed above on Amazon.

American toy company Playmates acquired the license for the Godzilla vs. Kong toyline last year and in early January, a few figures from their non-film focused toylines showed up at Walmarts across the country. They’re uh...well, let’s be honest: they’re not great. Leaked images of the Godzilla vs. Kong toyline were also shared around social media but I’ll avoid talking about them here for spoiler purposes. Let’s just say the line is looking mighty juicy for kaiju fans and it will be interesting to see if they’re promoted come New York Toy Fair.

Bandai’s Movie Monsters Series line will likely continue to issue newly reissued/remolded monsters in the Godzilla line (as well as produce new figures for Godzilla vs. Kong) but coming out in March is a sight for sore eyes: a brand new sculpt of the 1995 Gamera design for the 25th anniversary of Gamera: Guardian of the Universe. Hopefully a Super Gyaos is not far behind!

The S.H. MonsterArts line had a fairly predictable and underwhelming list of releases last year. Great figures for the most part, but obvious choices without much surprise. This being a movie year, I don’t expect much to change and we’ll likely see Godzilla vs. Kong figures soon enough. What is confirmed and releasing in May is their take on the Burning Godzilla design featured in Godzilla: King of the Monsters last year. Originally a Tamashii WebShop exclusive, it’s being released in America by Bluefin around June.

Media company SRS Cinema continues to throw unexpected independent kaiju films our way with releases of Deep Sea Monster Reigo and Deep Sea Monster Raiga last year on limited Blu-Ray and wide-release DVD. They’ll continue the assortment this year with Attack of the Giant Teacher and Raiga vs. Ohga. The films likely won’t be much to look at, but more independent kaiju films seeing a western release is never a bad thing. Here’s hoping Daikaiju Eiga G or Gehara see a release soon.

In an almost perfect repeat of Daiei and Toho’s box office bout sixty years ago, boutique label Arrow Video has reportedly secured the rights to the Gamera franchise and are planning a box set that could rival Criterion’s late 2019 release of the entire Showa Godzilla series. Arrow Video puts out sublime products and kaiju fans will likely want to keep their eyes peeled for this set, even if they’ve already secured Mill Creek’s rather dull bargain sets from years past.

While not on the docket for tie-ins to Godzilla vs. Kong (yet), NECA will likely be continuing to pump out new figures in their Classic Godzilla line. No brand new sculpts are known at the moment, but fans can look forward to a blue, poster-styled repaint of their KOTM Mothra figure and some reissues of their older molds in new box-styled, poster-featuring packaging. Some, like the 1985 Godzilla, might even feature newly molded details.

In rather shocking news, Media Blasters has seemingly propped one of its kaiju films up from the depths of licensing hell with an announcement of a Blu-Ray release of Gappa the Triphibian Monsters scheduled for a February release. The out-of-nowhere circumstances surrounding this release as well as a proclaimed inclusion of an “uncut” Japanese release (despite the International version containing more footage than the Japanese version) and Media Blasters rather spotty history regarding kaiju Blu-Rays should have folks taking this with a grain of salt until the actual discs are in collectors’ hands.

Events

As per usual, the kaiju fan’s Woodstock G-FEST will be continuing it’s annual celebration of all things giant monster from July 10-12 at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O’Hare in Rosemont, IL. No guest announcements at this time, but fans looking to go should register and book a hotel immediately as attendance will continue to spike and rooms in the convention’s hotel are already sold out.

As is tradition, the San Diego Comic Con will take place this summer a week after G-FEST is over and will likely bring with it new information on Godzilla vs. Kong and many other kaiju-related media. NECA will possibly show off new figures and we may even see some post-2020 information on the MonsterVerse.

Not necessarily guaranteed, but kaiju fans may also want to look out for this year’s New York ToyFair taking place in February. ToyFair has pretty much become the SDCC for toy collectors with many companies showing off their new products for the new year. Kaiju collectors will possibly get a glimpse at the Playmates Godzilla vs. Kong assortment as well as a few other possible surprise reveals from other companies like NECA or Diamond Select.

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2020 is looking to be a monstrous year for kaiju fans. Hopefully the fandom will enjoy everything to come from our favorite franchises.

Here’s to a happy 2020!

#kaiju #2020 #kaiju fandom #daikaiju #godzilla #godzilla vs kong #gamera #arrow gamera #ultraman #mill creek ultraman #bandai #sh monsterarts #neca #neca godzilla #g-fest

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killian-whump · 5 years

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“Gremlins scared me when I was real young ... cause I thought gremlins were gonna come out from under my bed.” - Colin in one of his interviews for the rite. CAN YOU IMAGINE WITTLE 3ish YEAR OLD COLIN (I’m assuming that cause he was around 3 when the movie came out) BEING SCARED ABOUT THE GREMLINS WHAT A CUTE WITTLE BABY! SO MUCH CUTENESS TO HANDLE

Okay, this is all true, and I love you for saying it, and I love him for saying it, and I love everything about actualbaby!Colin and his cuteness.

BUT LEMME TELL YOU SOMETHING.

Growing up in the 80s meant being traumatized regularly. Unlike today’s parents, parents in the 80s more or less let their children run rampant through the streets, picking them up occasionally and brushing them off to make sure they were still sorta functional, then setting them down and letting them run off again. Granted, kids in the 80s were a lot safer than kids in the 60s, who were given actual radioactive materials in their science lab playsets and had to hope they didn’t die from a mis-aimed lawn jart at the family picnic… but 80s kids were basically ALL traumatized by something at some point, be it flying across the family car every time someone slammed on the brakes or, you know, literal actual monsters and graphic violence being marketed as “good clean fun” for kids.

Which brings me back to Gremlins. Now, we’re all adults here (or close enough to it), so we all can pretty much see the humor and silliness of Gremlins. I mean, look at these goons:

This is one of my favorite GIFs, because it’s silly as shit. Look at their stupid faces. Look at the sunglasses and trench coat. Look at the popcorn and coke the one’s holding. Look at their delight. Look at the hint of further shenanigans occurring behind them (and everywhere else in the theater). Good times.

But what kind of ABSOLUTE MANIAC looks at these creatures and thinks, “These look like something children would love.”

Now, to be fair, many kids DID love the Gremlins. Some kids love monsters and creepy crawlies and scary shit. Fair enough. But Gremlins was marketed to kids and had all the usual merchandising tie-ins expected of kids’ films… so many parents thought, “This is a movie suitable for children in general” and brought their kids to this nightmare-inducer, regardless of whether said kid enjoyed monsters and scary things, or was a normal child who was about to be traumatized severely.

And we were all lulled in by this adorable little guy at the film’s start:

Cuteness and hijinx abound in the first portion of the film, and when the first two cardinal rules about the care and treatment of this little guy get ignored, the only repercussions are some adorable screaming… and then some more adorable little rambunctious furry guys:

So when the last of those cardinal rules gets ignored… I mean, no one expects it to get TOO out of hand, right? Right?

WRONG. You feed these fuckers after midnight and they turn into these horrifying things, straight out of the Aliens franchise, which is definitely NOT something kids should be watching, by the way.

Also, this seems like a good time to mention that there was never any clarification on the whole “after midnight” thing. Like, is it just the hour between 12am and 1am? Is it the entire time between midnight and dawn? Like, where is the cut-off? At what point CAN you feed these things? Technically, every single minute of the day is “after midnight” so where is the safe zone here? This seems like a more “adult” thought process, but I promise you that as a bonafide child of the 80s, this really actually did bother me a great deal at the time. Granted, not nearly as much as the disgusting pods made of slime and ectoskeletal materials did, but still enough to be a concern.

Anyway, after a short bit of the human characters being perplexed and curious about these absolutely disturbing pods in their attic and not a single one of them doing what obviously should be done at this point (hint: it involves a flame thrower and a good home owners insurance policy), these things emerge from the cocoons:

THAT IS FUCKING TERRIFYING. I am 41-years-old, and if I saw one of these things in real life, I would shit my pants and then quickly eat some more food so I’d have something to facilitate me shitting my pants again. What sane human being saw THIS face and thought, “This would be great for kids. Children would love this guy.”??? I’ll tell you who: Someone who had never actually witnessed a “child” before and likely didn’t know what the word even meant.

And notice, too, how the original trailer shows plenty of adorable little Gizmo, but doesn’t give even ONE clear shot of what the gremlins actually look like. All the better to traumatize an entire generation of young children with.

Because it’s not that Gremlins was a bad film, in fact, it’s a GREAT film. But it’s NOT something for kids. It’s not a Disney classic. It’s not Winnie-the-Pooh. It’s not Dora the Explorer. And yet…

Yes, you’re reading that right. The Electric Company, an 80s program aimed at children who were a bit too old for Sesame Street but still too young for anything that isn’t Sesame Street… apparently felt Gremlins was appropriate for its age group. And licensed products for the film included toys, clothing and linens for children of all ages. They marketed this thing to children, and it was literally a horror film. Not only did it have the Gremlins themselves in it, but it was full of scenes of violent and sadistic “hijinx” - including one scene where a cat gets blown up in a microwave.

So of course Colin was terrified by the film. The vast majority of children in the 80s were terrified by the film, then made to feel like they were “too sensitive” or a wuss because they were afraid of a children’s film. And adults and bratty older siblings felt entitled to tease and taunt the ones who were openly afraid, because everybody else likes it and everybody else isn’t scared. 80s style peer pressure and shitty marketing at their very best :P

#colin o'donoghue #gremlins #80s children #kw writes a thing #not whxmp #just childhood trauma #no biggie #anonymous #kw ask box

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twiddlebirdlet · 4 years

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https://www.wired.com/story/chris-evans-starting-point-politics/

Chris Evans Goes to Washington

The actor's new project, A Starting Point, aims to give all Americans the TL;DR on WTF is going on in politics. It's harder than punching Nazis on the big screen.

It’s a languid October afternoon in Los Angeles, sunny and clear.

Chris Evans, back home after a grueling production schedule, relaxes into his couch, feet propped up on the coffee table. Over the past year and a half, the actor has tried on one identity after another: the shaggy-haired Israeli spy, the clean-shaven playboy, and, in his Broadway debut, the Manhattan beat cop with a Burt Reynolds ’stache. Now, though, he just looks like Chris Evans—trim beard, monster biceps, angelic complexion. So it’s a surprise when he brings up the nightmares. “I sleep, like, an hour a night,” he says. “I’m in a panic.”

The panic began, as panics so often do these days, in Washington, DC. Early last February, Evans visited the capital to pitch lawmakers on a new civic engagement project. He arrived just hours before Donald Trump would deliver his second State of the Union address, in which he called on Congress to “bridge old divisions” and “reject the politics of revenge, resistance, and retribution.” (Earlier, at a private luncheon, Trump referred to Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s top Democrat, as a “nasty son of a bitch.”) Evans is no fan of the president, whom he has publicly called a “moron,” a “dunce,” and a “meatball.” But bridging divisions? Putting an end to the American body politic’s clammy night sweats? These were goals he could get behind.

Evans’ pitch went like this: He would build an online platform organized into tidy sections—immigration, health care, education, the economy—each with a series of questions of the kind most Americans can’t succinctly answer themselves. What, exactly, is a tariff? What’s the difference between Medicare and Medicaid? Evans would invite politicians to answer the questions in minute-long videos. He’d conduct the interviews himself, but always from behind the camera. The site would be a place to hear both sides of an issue, to get the TL;DR on WTF was happening in American politics. He called it A Starting Point—a name that sometimes rang with enthusiasm and sometimes sounded like an apology.

Evans doesn’t have much in the way of political capital, but he does have a reputation, perhaps unearned, for patriotism. Since 2011 he has appeared in no fewer than 10 Marvel movies as Captain America, the Nazi-slaying, homeland-defending superhero wrapped in bipartisan red, white, and blue. It’s hard to imagine a better time to cash in on the character’s symbolism. Partisan animosity is at an all-time high; a recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic found that 35 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of Democrats would oppose their child marrying someone from the other party. (In 1960, only 4 percent of respondents felt this way.) At the same time, there’s a real crisis of faith in the country’s leaders. According to the Pew Research Center, 81 percent of Americans believe that members of Congress behave unethically at least some of the time. In Pew’s estimation, that makes them even less trusted than journalists and tech CEOs.

If Evans got it right, he believed, this wouldn’t be some small-fry website. He’d be helping “create informed, responsible, and empathetic citizens.” He would “reduce partisanship and promote respectful discourse.” At the very least, he would “get more people involved” in politics. And if the site stank like a rotten tomato? If Evans became a national laughingstock? Well, that’s where the nightmares began.

It took a special serum and a flash broil in a Vita-Ray chamber to transform Steve Rogers, a sickly kid from Brooklyn, into Captain America. For Chris Evans, savior of American democracy, the origin story is rather less Marvelous.

One day a few years ago, around the time he was filming Avengers: Infinity War, Evans was watching the news. The on-air discussion turned to an unfamiliar acronym—it might have been NAFTA, he says, but he thinks it was DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era immigration policy that granted amnesty to people who had been brought into the United States illegally as children. The Trump administration had just announced plans to phase out DACA, leaving more than half a million young immigrants in the lurch. (The Supreme Court will likely rule this year on whether terminating the program was lawful.)

On the other side of the television, Evans squinted. Wait a minute, he thought. What did that acronym stand for again? And was it a good thing or a bad thing? “It was just something I didn’t understand,” he says.

Evans considers himself a politico. Now 38, he grew up in a civic-minded family, the kind that revels in shouting about the news over dinner. His uncle Michael Capuano served 10 terms in Congress as a Democrat from Massachusetts, beginning right around the time Evans graduated from high school and moved to New York to pursue acting. During the 2016 presidential election, Evans campaigned for Hillary Clinton. In 2017 he became an outspoken critic of Trump—even after he was advised to zip it, for risk of alienating moviegoers. Evans could be a truck driver, Capuano says, and he’d still be involved in politics.

But watching TV that day, Evans was totally lost. He Googled the acronym and tripped over all the warring headlines. Then he tried Wikipedia, but, well, the entry was thousands of words long. “It’s this never-ending thing, and you’re just like, who is going to read 12 pages on something?” Evans says. “I just wanted a basic understanding, a basic history, and a basic grasp on what the two parties think.” He decided to build the resource he wanted for himself.

Evans brought the idea to his close friend Mark Kassen, an actor and director he’d met working on the 2011 indie film Puncture. Kassen signed on and recruited a third partner, Joe Kiani, the founder and CEO of a medical technology company called Masimo. The three met for lobster rolls in Boston. What the country needed, they decided, was a kind of Schoolhouse Rock for adults—a simple, memorable way to learn the ins and outs of civic life. Evans suggested working with politicians directly. Kiani, who had made some friends on Capitol Hill over the years, thought they’d go for it. Each partner agreed to put up money to get the thing off the ground. (They wouldn’t say how much.) They spent some time Googling similar outlets and figuring out where they fit in, Kassen says.

They began by establishing a few rules. First, A Starting Point would give politicians free rein to answer questions as they pleased—no editing, no moderation, no interjections. Second, they would hire fact-checkers to make sure they weren’t promoting misinformation. Third, they would design a site that privileged diversity of opinion, where you could watch a dozen different people answering the same question in different ways. Here, though, imbibing the information would feel more like watching YouTube than skimming Wikipedia—more like entertainment than homework.

The trio mocked up a list of questions to bring to Capitol Hill, starting with the ones that most baffled them. (Is the electoral college still necessary?) They talked, admiringly, about the way presidential debate moderators manage to make their language sound neutral. (Should the questions refer to a “climate crisis” or a “climate situation,” “illegal immigrants” or “undocumented immigrants”?) Then Evans recorded a video on his couch in LA. “Hi, I’m Chris Evans,” he began. “If you’re watching this, I hope you’ll consider contributing to my new civics engagement project called A Starting Point.” He emailed the file to every senator and representative in Congress.

Only a few replied.

In hindsight, Evans realizes, the video “looked so cheap” and either got caught in spam filters or was consciously deleted by congressional staffers. “The majority of people, on both sides of the aisle, dismissed it,” Evans says. Many “thought it was a joke.” Yet there are few doors in American life that a square jaw can’t open, particularly when it belongs to a man with many millions of dollars and nearly as many swooning Twitter fans. Soon enough, a handful of politicians had agreed to meet with the group.

On the morning of his first visit to Capitol Hill, as he donned a slick gray windowpane suit and a black polka-dot tie and combed his perfect hair back from his perfect forehead, Evans felt a wave of doubt. “This isn’t my lane,” he recalls thinking as he walked through the maze of the Russell Senate Office Building. Here, people were making real change, affecting the lives of millions of Americans. “And shit,” Evans said to himself, “I didn’t even go to college.”

“This isn’t my lane,” Evans thought as he walked through the maze of the Russell Senate Office Building.

The trio’s first stop was the office of Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware. “Which one is the senator?” Evans asked.

Coons, having never watched any of the Avengers movies, didn’t know who Evans was, either. But in short order, he says, he was won over by the actor’s charm and “very slight but still noticeable” Boston accent. The thing that got Coons the most, though—the thing that would lead him to pass out pocket cards on the Senate floor to recruit others, especially Republicans, to take part in the project—was how refreshing it was to be asked simple questions: Why should we support the United Nations? Why does foreign aid matter? Coons saw real value in trying to explain these things, simply and plainly, to his constituents.

“Look, I’m not naive,” Coons says. He is the first to admit that one-minute videos won’t fix what’s wrong with American politics. “But it’s important for there to be attempts at civic education and outreach,” he adds. “And, you know, his fictional character fought for our nation in a time of great difficulty.”

Evans stiffens slightly when people mention Captain America. The superhero comparison is, admittedly, a little obvious. But again and again on Capitol Hill, the shtick proved useful: Sometimes it’s better to be Captain America than a Hollywood liberal elite who defends Roe v. Wade and wants to ban assault weapons. When Evans met Jim Risch, the Republican senator from Idaho joked about catching him up on NATO, “since he missed the 70 years after World War II.” When he met Representative Dan Crenshaw, a hard-line Texas Republican and former Navy SEAL who lost his right eye in Afghanistan, Crenshaw lifted up his eye patch to reveal a glass prosthetic painted to look like Captain America’s shield.

Eventually, Evans loosened up—at least he lost the tie. Since that first round of visits, he and Kassen have returned to Washington every six weeks or so, collecting more than 1,000 videos from more than 100 members of Congress, along with about half of the 2020 Democratic hopefuls. Evans has conducted every interview himself. Kassen, meanwhile, managed the acquisition of a video compression startup in Montreal. About a dozen of the company’s engineers are building a custom content management system for A Starting Point, which is slated to go live in February. They’re running bandwidth tests too—just in case, as Kassen worries, “everyone in Chris’ audience logs on that first day.”

“We have to do this now,” Evans says. “It’s out there. We have to finish this. Shit.”

Back in LA, Evans pulls up the site on his iPhone. He hesitates for a moment and covers the screen with his hand. It’s still a demo, he explains, in the same bashful tone he uses to tell me the guest bathroom is out of toilet paper.

On the homepage, there’s a clip of Evans explaining how to use the site and a carousel of “trending topics” (energy, charter schools, Hong Kong). You can enter your address to call up a list of your representatives and find their videos; you can also contact them directly through the site. The rest is organized by topic and question, with a matrix of one-minute videos for each—Democrats in the left-hand column, Republicans on the right.

Early on in the development of the site, Evans and Kassen fought over fact-checking. Kassen, arguing against, was concerned about the optics: Who were they to arbitrate truth? Evans insisted that A Starting Point would only seem objective if visitors knew the answers had been vetted somehow. Ultimately he prevailed, and they agreed to hire a third-party fact-checker. They have yet to put their thousand-plus videos through the wringer, so for now I’m seeing first drafts. If they’re found to contain falsehoods, Evans says, they won’t appear on the site at all.

Kassen showed me a sampling of some of this raw material. Under “What is DACA?” I found dozens of videos, offering dozens of different starting points.

One representative, a Republican whose district lies near the Mexican border, describes the program’s recipients as “1.2 million men and women who have only known the United States as their home.” They go to school, he explains; they serve in the military; they’ve all passed background checks.

Sometimes it’s better to be Captain America than a Hollywood liberal elite who defends Roe v. Wade and wants to ban assault weapons.

Another Republican representative says, “So, DACA is a result of a really bad immigration system … We’re seeing record numbers of families crossing the border because a kid equals a token for presence in the US. All right? We have all of these people come over, we can’t process them, they’re claiming asylum. I just heard from the secretary of Homeland Security this week, about nine in 10 don’t have valid claims of asylum. Meaning they’re not political—there’s no political persecution going on. OK?”

These two responses (from politicians on the same side of the aisle, no less) illustrate some of the quandaries that Evans, Kassen, and their fact-checkers are likely to encounter. The first representative, for instance, says there are 1.2 million DACA recipients, when in fact only 660,000 immigrants are currently enrolled in the program. The higher number is based on an estimate of those who could be eligible published by the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. The “nine in 10” statistic, meanwhile, is a loose interpretation of data from 2018, which shows that only about 16 percent of immigrants who filed a “credible fear” claim were granted asylum. But this does not mean, as the representative implies, that the other claims weren’t “valid”—merely that they weren’t successful. Nearly half of all asylum claims from this time were dismissed for undisclosed reasons. These are fairly hair-splitting examples, but even the basic, definitional questions are drenched in opinion. What is Citizens United? “Horrible decision,” says a Democratic senator in his video response.

Evans doesn’t want to spend time refereeing politicians. To him, A Starting Point should act more like a database than a platform—rhetoric that rhymes with that of Facebook and Twitter, which have mostly sidestepped responsibility for their content. He’s just hosting the videos, he says; it’s up to politicians to decide how they answer the questions. There’s no comment section and no algorithmically generated list of recommended videos. “You need to decide what you need to watch next,” Kassen says.

One of the assumptions underlying Evans’ project—and it’s a very big assumption—is that the force of his fame will be enough to attract people who otherwise would have zero interest in watching a carousel of videos from their elected officials. This, by all accounts, is most people: Only a third of Americans can name their representatives in Congress, and those who can aren’t binge-watching C-Span. “Celebrities bring an extraordinary ability to get attention,” says Lauren Wright, a political researcher at Princeton and author of Star Power: American Democracy in the Age of the Celebrity Candidate. But Evans, she says, is “not taking the route that a lot of celebrities have, which is: The solution to American politics is me.” It would be one thing if Evans were guiding you through the inner workings of Congress like a chiseled Virgil. But why would someone watch a senator dryly explain NAFTA when they could watch, say, a YouTube video of Chris Evans on Jimmy Kimmel?

Without its leading man in the frame, A Starting Point begins to look uncomfortably similar to the many other platforms that have sought to fight partisanship online. A site called AllSides labels news sources as left, center, or right and encourages readers to create a balanced media diet with a little from each. A browser plug-in called Read Across the Aisle (“A Fitbit for your filter bubble”) measures the amount of time you spend on left-leaning, right-leaning, or centrist websites. The Flip Side bills itself as a “one-stop shop for smart, concise summaries of political analysis from both conservative and liberal media.”

The underlying idea—that there would be a new birth of civic engagement if only we could wrest control of the information economy from the hands of self-serving ideologues and deliver the news to citizens unbiased and uncut—is an old one. In 1993, when the modern internet was just a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, Michael Crichton wrote in this magazine’s pages that he was sick and tired of the “polarized, junk-food journalism” propagated by traditional media outlets. (This was three years before Fox News and MSNBC came into being; he was talking about The New York Times.) What society needed, he argued, was something more like C-Span, something that encouraged people to draw their own conclusions.

But does any of it work? Not according to Wright. “We have many years of research on these questions, and the consensus among scholars is that the proliferation of media choices—including sites like Evans’—has not increased political knowledge or participation,” she says. “The problem isn’t the lack of information. It’s the lack of interest.” Jonathan Albright, director of the Digital Forensics Initiative at Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, agrees. “All of these fact-checking initiatives, all of this work that goes into trying to disambiguate issues or trying to reduce noise—people have no time,” he says. “Some people care about politics, but those are not the people you need to reach.”

Naturally, this sort of talk makes Evans a little nervous. But he takes refuge in what he sees as the core strengths of the concept. For one thing, he argues, snack-size videos are more accessible than text. Also, those other sites rely on a translator to interpret the issues, while A Starting Point goes straight to the source. It’s not for policy wonks. It’s for average Americans, centrists, extremists, swing voters—everyone!—who want to hear about policy straight from the horse’s mouth. (Never mind that most people hold horses in higher regard.)

Evans has all kinds of ideas for how to keep people coming back. He might add a section of the website where representatives can upload weekly videos for their constituents, or a place where policymakers from different parties can discuss bipartisan compromise. He talks about these ideas with an enthusiasm so pure and so believable that you almost forget he’s an actor. The whole point, he says, is giving Americans a cheap seat on the kinds of conversations that are happening on Capitol Hill. That’s a show that Evans is betting people actually want to see.

The worst thing that could happen isn’t that nobody watches the videos. That would suck, but Evans could deal with it. What gets him riled up most is thinking about what he might have failed to consider. What if the site ends up promoting some bizarre agenda that he never intended? What if people use the videos for some kind of twisted purpose? “One miscalculation,” he says, “and you may not get back on track.” (See: Facebook.)

Evans knows his idea to save democracy can come off a little Pollyannaish, and if it flops, it’ll be his reputation on the line. But he really, really believes in it. OK, so maybe it won’t save America, but it might piece together some of what’s been broken. A fresh start. A starting point.

“This does feel to me like everybody wins here. I don’t see how this becomes a problem,” he says, before a look of panic crosses his face, the anxiety setting in again.

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dgcatanisiri · 5 years

Text

Yes, it’s that time again.

Welcome to DG’s Listing of Wish These DLC Existed, where I theorize, speculate, and just kinda generally throw ideas at the wall about DLCs for games I love that never happened and never will happen, but damn, I’d like to see them anyway.

Because I have ideas, I can’t get them made as mods, I don’t have time to make them into fic, and they’re never going to happen anyway, so why not put them up in a public place? After all, they’re tie ins to games I have no control over anyway, so it’s not like I’ll ever make money off of them anyway.

A review of the format: There will be a name for the DLC, a brief synopsis, a reference to when this hypothetical DLC would become available/if and when it becomes unavailable, and then an expansion/write up of the ideas going in to them. Some ideas will have more expansion than others, because I’ve just plainly put more thought into them - in a lot of cases, I wrote them down just on the basis of ‘this idea seems pretty cool,’ and then gave them more context later on.

Feedback is welcome! Like an idea? Don’t like an idea? I welcome conversation and interaction on these ideas. Keep it civil, remember that these are just one person’s ideas, we can discuss them. Perhaps you’ll even help inspire a part two for these write ups! Because I do reserve the right to come up with more ideas in the future - these are the ideas that I’ve had to this point, but the whole reason this series exists is because I come up with new ideas for old stories.

Our installment today is the natural follow-up to our last installment. That was Knights of the Old Republic, this is Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords.

Housekeeping matters here are simple: We all know this game shipped in an unfinished state, and mods have been a major step in the way of getting to play this game the way it was intended. So we’re going to assume that the effects of the Restoration Mod are to be considered base game so far as this is concerned.

There would likely be other ways of cleaning up the game from this point, but that’s a bit beyond the scope of this series. We’re sticking to DLC proper.

The Forgotten Ones

The Jedi Civil War left many lost. But none were quite as lost as the children of the Jedi, the ones promised to the Order, yet left aimless with the Jedi’s disappearance. Several have found their way to the planet Bandomeer, where an Agricultural Corps outpost was established. These children are particularly vulnerable, not only to the dark side, but to those who would exploit their abilities...

(Available after leaving Telos)

The Disciple is just one of the many people who were hurt by the loss of the Jedi as an establishment. And while I certainly, absolutely, entirely, and wholly take issue with the fact that the Jedi are, in effect, taking children with a promise of them having a “grander destiny” to indoctrinate them in the Jedi’s way of life, a way of life that is easily viewed as child abuse... What happened to these children when the Jedi Order fell apart in the wake of the Jedi Civil War? Hell, based on the Disciple, what happened to them during and after the Mandalorian Wars?

This is a tie into one of the core themes of KOTOR 2, which is that on the ground level, no one cares who won the war, because they’ve lost. Whatever side you’re supporting, once your home has been burned to the ground, it doesn’t matter who wins. And the next generation are always the ones left with the pieces to reassemble.

With the Jedi gone, there are countless kids out there who were taken from their homes, and so have nowhere to go, and, like the Disciple, get none of the training that they were promised would come their whole lives. Given how powerful Jedi can be, this is potentially very dangerous.

Throw in the resentment that can easily come from a Jedi recruit who ended up being washed out... You get one of our antagonists for this. A student who had various issues preventing the Jedi from letting them be taken as a Padawan, grew up in the aftermath of the various wars, and now thinks “the Jedi are gone, the Sith are still out there... Don’t we have a responsibility to assemble what knowledge we can and protect the Republic?” Which is a noble goal.

But it’s easily twisted by those who’d take advantage of them to create their own force of soldiers, imposing their idea of “order” to the galaxy (think Goto with... well, I’d say “less noble motives,” but I can’t exactly say Goto operated out of the goodness of his processors...), not to mention their own failings – they weren’t selected for Jedi training for a reason, because they’re vulnerable to the temptation of the dark side, particularly on the ideas of noble intentions leading to questionable actions.

If KOTOR 2 is a deconstruction and reexamination of the Jedi Order as a whole, then a vital part of this has to be examining how they treat not just the children who come to them, who they proceed to effectively indoctrinate into their ways of thinking and beliefs, but also the children who don’t live up to their standards, to expound on why, if the Force is so valuable and rare a gift, these children are dumped because someone decides they’re not worth the effort.

Plus, imagine the companion conversations to be had here once they become Jedi – they managed to slip through the cracks and not be located “in time” for the Jedi training (or, in the case of the Disciple, chose to leave, or the Handmaiden, who wasn’t given the chance, despite her heritage). Not to mention the tearing a new one that Kreia could do about the fact that the Jedi act as a cult, brainwashing these children into their way of thinking, one that rebels against the critical thought of the Jedi themselves.

The Empty Temple

The Jedi Temple on Coruscant has been abandoned. As a symbol, it means much to the Jedi Order. As a beacon, it could bring the surviving Jedi out of their hiding places. The Exile and company journey to the former home of the Jedi to find an answer to the question: Where do the Jedi now dwell?

(Available after leaving Telos)

The Jedi Temple gets an appearance in the game as it is, and is there for all of five minutes, in the recording of the Exile’s trial. It’s this major location from the movies, but we don’t actually get to explore it. From a personal standpoint, I want to see more of it – the Room of a Thousand Fountains, the Jedi library and the busts of the Jedi Masters considered “lost” for having left the Order, the various spires and countless spaces that were completely unseen by us as an audience (except if you’ve played other video games that came after KOTOR 2, like the Force Unleashed, showing the temple in ruins, or the adaptation of Revenge of the Sith or the original Battlefront 2, which showed the actual assault on the temple by Darth Vader and the clone troopers – nothing of it in its heyday).

And, realistically, it’d be a place to go to find out what has become of the Jedi – where have they gone, are there any other Jedi Masters, those who weren’t on that recording, out there, or even just those Jedi who have turned off their lightsabers, who could rebuild the Order – whether or not the Exile is out to kill the Masters who exiled them or reunite them to fight the Sith, it’s easy to justify a belief that SOME FORM of the Jedi should be ensured to be kept alive. Just because the leadership need to be removed, the head lopped off, that doesn’t mean that the whole thing needs to die.

Honestly, this is one of the more “concept” level ideas on this list over something with serious substance in terms of being fleshed out – I don’t know what I want to happen here, beyond an exploration of the more day-to-day Jedi, considering that we usually only get the chance to see Jedi mid-adventure.

Maybe the idea here is more about understanding why the Jedi decided not to rebuild in the wake of the Jedi Civil War. Sure, the ostensible answer is that they were threatened by the Sith, but the Sith are always a threat for the Jedi. That’s no reason to switch off all the lightsabers and run away (I have issues with Yoda adopting this strategy – at least Obi-Wan had the excuse of acting as Luke’s guardian on Tatooine). So for me, I want a greater explanation to exist of WHY this was the solution so many Jedi saw, even before Katarr happened. They might be concerned about a repeat of that, but for them to just completely go silent in the five years between games, when the galaxy actually kinda depends on them...

I mean, this was the Jedi effectively leaving the whole galaxy in the lurch. The same crap they did in the Mandalorian Wars, now on such a scale that they withdrew entirely from the greater galaxy. The Jedi keep falling into this pattern of withdrawing at times they’re needed, and only excusing it with some BS about waiting for a sign from the Force. If, as Kreia says, the Jedi Order did this because they no longer had faith in the Jedi Masters... Why vanish entirely? Why are none stepping forward to act in their stead?

That feels like a mystery that the main plot of KOTOR 2 is a little too focused in on itself to spend time on – we’re busy with understanding the Exile’s story and their focus on the Jedi Masters who declared them to be exiled, rather than what the story of the Jedi metaphorically on the ground was. So that would be the focus here, getting this chance to explore things on a different scale.

Ashes

Katarr was where Jedi gathered and were consumed by Darth Nihilus. Katarr was Visas Marr’s homeworld. In order to find a way for the Exile to stand against her former master, Kreia tells the Exile to journey there, to discover more about their enemy, and to learn about just why the Jedi Council must face this damning hunger.

(Visas has joined)

The problem of Darth Nihilus in the game proper is that, because he has no voice that is understandable by the player, we never really get to comprehend him. All exposition regarding him, all explanation about who and what he is, comes from Visas, Kreia, and Colonel Tobin. Now, I understand the concept here – Nihilus is no longer a man, just a hunger, a hunger that Visas views as a god, with her arc revolving around him being brought to earth (hence her statement upon looking upon him, that he is “just a man”).

The problem is that the first two have their dialogue locked by approval gates, while the later can be missed on the Ravager. As he exists in the game itself, Nihilus is a lot of mystery – which is part of the character himself, as he is a god Visas must see brought down to earth, the man he once was is gone – and, unfortunately like much of the base game proper, no solutions or pay off.

So we journey to Katarr, to the site of the Jedi gathering that led to the deaths of so many Jedi. This also shows us the results of Nihilus consuming life – this is something of a vague and unexplored threat as it is, Katarr was created for this game, so its devastation means nothing. It’s also a Miraluka COLONY, not their homeworld, so it’s not even like this has caused the Miraluka as a species to become endangered. So Nihilus is a vague threat that really doesn’t feel like it has an impact on us as players.

So we walk upon the ashes of Katarr. We see the devastation he brought. We see the ruins of life so brutally snuffed out. We see the hollow shell he left behind. And we know the horrors he inflicted once and will again. This gives Nihilus a more tangible existence in the game itself, someone that exists in the player’s experience, and get a more full idea of what the threat that he poses actually is.

There does need to be more, of course, some goal, some hope from all this. How can life endure, right? So I’m thinking some major Sith creature, or a series of them – the dark side is trying to claim Katarr for its own in the aftermath of Nihilus consuming its life, and, in an effort to heal it, the Exile faces a gauntlet of creatures that formed by dark side powers and try to kill them. Even ties into the central concept of the base game, by showing a wound left by the Sith, and trying to heal it. Banish and slay the Sithspawn that crawl over the planet, and you leave room for something new to grow in its place, or allow them the strength to grow and take the planet as their own, snuffing out a light in the dark.

And Visas? I say that she needs to be a requirement for getting this particular story, since the Exile has no reason to suspect Katarr has any relevance without her appearance on the Ebon Hawk, but... Honestly, I think that she’d be unwilling to walk the ashes of her once home. That this pain is still too raw, too real for her at the time. But without Visas joining the crew, the Exile has no idea that Katarr has any connection to matters involving the Sith, so she must join in order to let the Exile know to travel to Katarr in the first place. And, indeed, I see her as feeling that the Exile needs to go to Katarr, needs to see it, needs to understand why she serves her master, why she fears for their safety, why she lost all hope when she heard him speak.

I also see this as an opportunity to clean up Visas’s characterization a little – let me just quote Scorchy’s Let’s Play of KOTOR 2: “I don’t really know what’s going on with Visas’ writing. 10% of the time she’s hopelessly naïve, as Kreia points out; another 10% of the time, she’s more worldly and Sith-ish. The other 80% of the time she’s mumbling something about Force echoes. Her confused characterization carries over to her influence gains as well; she and Atton are the only ones who get influence increases from both light side and dark side actions. Make up your mind, woman!” So having a story segment that offers her some highlights can help to clear the fog that surrounds her characterization. Plus more opportunities for Kelly Hu’s phenomenal performance is never a bad thing.

Planet of the Droids

M4-78 considered is a myth, a planet of only droids, hostile to all organic life. Yet a mystery signal lures the Ebon Hawk here, as the droids of the planet are coming to life. HK-47, T3-M4, and G0-T0 are called upon to defend the crew, before the droids of this world come to execute them for defiling their home.

(After Nar Shaddaa and gaining Goto as a companion, must have activated HK-47)

Was there really any doubt that this would make the listing of DLCs? The lost planet of KOTOR 2, and I already said back in KOTOR 1 that I wanted to include that game’s lost planet, which didn’t even have much in the way of remaining content. M4-78 has enough to get a rough idea of the plan involved here, but, considering that the core concepts were removed from the planet’s data and transplanted, it’s probably best to keep it from the realm of main plot, right?

Obviously, there are some details that seem like they’d still be able to fit – droid companions going out into the toxic atmosphere (since the planet looks industrialized, and was supposed to have this toxic haze, giving the impression of a planet with out of control industrialization that drove off all organic life), reactivating the planet and its droid intelligence, the basics. But the puzzles have to be replaced and as for Master Vash... Well, we’ll get to her later, so suffice to say, she’s not gonna be here.

I almost want to say I want to bring in elements of the HK factory into this. Working with the idea that most if not all of the Restoration Mod is to be considered “base game” here, I think I’ll leave the factory on Telos where it is, but perhaps feature an offshoot element here – perhaps this is where the HK-48 and 49 models have been relegated, dubbed equally “obsolete” as their progenitor among our crew, and show the ways that the programming went from “single target assassination” to “wanton slaughter.” I mean, the HK factory has nothing that includes that particular change in priorities, and in the span of three models, we went from Revan’s personal assassin to what could almost be dubbed droid supremacists. Big jump, is what I’m saying.

That would, in fact, give a clearer light/dark path – because reactivating the droid intelligence seems to be something of the endgame scenario, especially with being drawn in (like the synopsis says), it would be a question of what kind of intelligence is activated. Do we go with the peaceful droids who simply want to live alone – perhaps setting up some kind of defense network in orbit that would block their planet from recognition in navicomputers and such – or the malicious droids (like HK-48/49) who’d offer a pledge of working with the Exile (a dubious offer, most likely, but one they’d make) and be a potential threat to any future organics who entered their airspace.

I’m still debating this one in terms of its story, but that seems like a reasonable approach to take the pieces that remain of this quest that was cut out of the game entirely, and the only thing we have to show for it are unfinished maps and scattered dialogue, with the actual content shifted around. It obviously can’t be what it was planned to be, can’t house our Jedi Master and lead to the conclusion of the reuniting of the Jedi Council, but it can be adapted into something new.

Mandalorian Rage

Mandalore has called for the scattered clans to rebuild. Not all of his fellows, however, believe such a thing is possible, instead planning a suicide rush on the weakened Republic, one lacking a Revan to stop them, perhaps even to take the shattered remains of the Republic and rule with an iron fist, staging from the conquered world of Serroco. They weren’t counting on the Jedi Exile, however...

(Post-Dxun/Onderon)

Call this a reaction to the fact that Mandalore’s influence in the game is screwed up and you basically have to hack the game to get a lot of his dialogue because the influence gains just aren’t there. Obviously we could just add some more influence gains for him, but why go the simple route when this whole business is about adding story DLC ideas, not to mention the fact that the whole game is set in the aftermath of the Mandalorian Wars and utilize that?

The Mandalorians prize battle and combat. They can accept an honorable defeat, which was given to them – by Revan. By Jedi who turned to the Sith. I think it’d be pretty easy for there to be Mandalorians left unsatisfied by that, because they’d wanted to test themselves against Jedi and the Republic, then ended up facing what amounted to Jedi heretics, who then turned on the Republic. Maybe, they figure, those weren’t actually the Jedi, maybe they didn’t get a proper test.

I mean, this is all rationalization, and Mandalore would be sure to dismiss the rhetoric as such, but it’s still the reality that they have to deal with. If the Mandalorians are massing again, then he has a vested interest in doing something about it. If there’s a pretender, attempting to claim that they are the “true” Mandalore, he DEFINITELY needs to do something about it. It’s a threat to his authority. And if we want to keep a connection to the Exile, the leader of this group of Mandalorians can be someone who they personally clashed with during the war, someone with some kind of relationship variable with the Exile – were they a worthy adversary, a pain in the rear, someone that the Exile doesn’t even remember... I think there’s an interesting way to come at a character who can be responsive to how well we want to play the Exile remembering him.

I think actually that’s no less than three birds with one stone – more content/characterization for Mandalore, who is sadly lacking it in the game as is, exploration of the Exile by way of presenting an element of their past, AND a tie in with the themes of the game. Not to mention some exploration of the site of a battle of the Mandalorian Wars. Dxun offered some, but it was basically overrun by the jungle reclaiming things and the Mandalorians setting up shop. This would be set in the midst of a wound still festering.

I also see a place for Mira in this (I take Dxun after Nar Shaddaa, personally, so that’s got some influence here). Considering she was raised by Mandalorians, went from slave to a soldier, picking up their skills, I can see some exploration of her past here. Especially considering Kreia’s cryptic remark about her: “She was not born to be a predator, despite her true father.” This is something that doesn’t even come up until Kreia’s fortune telling at the end of the game. Let’s explore this some – is Canderous supposed to be her father? Another Mandalorian leader? Someone else? This is something worth exploring.

As for Canderous, Mandalore, whatever you call him, this is his chance to really get to shine as a character, considering that he decides to join the Exile’s crew, then pretty much just stands around until the endgame and the Mandalorians joining the fight at Citadel. Especially to explore who he is in the face of Revan’s departure, how they impacted him and how he has changed because of their involvement in his life. (Remember, in my KOTOR 1 DLCs, he’s a romance option – yes, you should expect that sort of thing to carry over here.)

Actually, throw in Bao-Dur into the mix, as well. He barely gets any sort of response to the Mandalorians in game as it is, despite how he blames himself for the horrors of Malachor V. I’m reminded of an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation, “The Wounded,” where recurring character Miles O’Brien faces a Cardassian, a species he fought against in a war prior to the series proper, and says “It’s not you I hate, Cardassian. I hate what I became because of you.” That sounds a lot like what Bao-Dur should be experiencing while travelling with a Mandalorian, but aside from a banter that may or may not trigger, this isn’t explored, not even with a dialogue option with him. Sometimes I almost get the feeling Bao-Dur was forgotten about halfway through. This would be an opportunity to put some more tangible interactions into his character arc.

If KOTOR 2 proper is about exploring the wake of the Mandalorian Wars, the aftermath of war, this seems like an opportunity to examine that head on.

The Path of the Exile

The Exile’s wanderings were far from the Republic’s heart. Yet in those wanderings may lie the answer to the new question – where now does Revan wander? The Exile leads the Lost Jedi on a journey into their past, their journeys through the Outer Rim worlds – in particular, one called Kerobas - far from civilization to create a path for the future!

(Available after Korriban)

Hey, I said I was curious about the Exile’s past, right?

Seriously, though. One of the things that comes across as important (to me at least) is that the Jedi Council could not truly enforce the Exile being exiled. The Disciple points this out, the Jedi have no real mechanisms in place to make sure that those they exile (a rare punishment in the first place) remain exiled. And the Exile wandered, apart from galactic civilization for ten years. Considering that, it seems like they not only followed that ruling, they didn’t just exile themselves from the Jedi but the galaxy as well.

I may have my issues with being a part of society, but I don’t know about spending ten years in self-imposed isolation. Apart from anyone, not even interacting with them through a screen (because we have to imagine that the Exile was not connected to the HoloNet or anything in that time). And, ultimately, what drove them to break this isolation and return to the Republic? After all, they were cut off from the Force at the time, so it’s not even like we can say “the Force moved them.”

In some ways, I suppose this could be an extended version of the Tomb of Ludo Kressh, where the Exile sees visions of their past, but I’m not sure about that – the visions there told of the Exile’s choice to go to war and a major conflict where they risked themselves, which are pretty key things about their decisions. Though there are still other things – how did they feel about the war itself, once in the thick of it, interactions with Bao-Dur in the past (because why would I pass up the chance to expand on this relationship that should mean more in the game proper?), see what led to the Mass Shadow Generator’s construction, why did the Exile return to face judgement when all others followed Revan to the Unknown Regions, get to explore why the Exile followed the exile, and what made them return.

Kerobas is a complete fabrication of my own, by the way. If the Exile was wandering the unknown corners of the galaxy, then I’m gonna give them their own place to do that in. I envision here a planet that was abandoned – perhaps it’s one of the war-torn places from the Mandalorian Wars that was never reclaimed in the aftermath, a place ceded by the victorious Republic and ignored by the defeated Mandalorians. A planet of ghosts, a planet where what surrounds the Exile is the empty voices of the dead.

Not that I think they’d have spent all their time here, but it would be a place that connected to the Exile, more than just some place they passed through randomly. Like we mere mortals without the Force often feel drawn to certain places, so this would be a place that the Exile felt drawn to.

Those lingering ghosts are also a way to have more flashbacks like the Korriban Tomb visions, where we get to have the Exile reexperience their past and speak their opinions then. Yeah, it’s running over the same gimmick and attitudes from there, but they were GOOD gimmicks and attitudes. Why not give them more time in the sun?

Broken

Darth Sion has revealed himself. Held together through sheer force of will, he is a powerful foe. Kreia knows him, as a teacher knows a student. To that end, she encourages the Exile to seek out his origins, taking them to the planet Eriadu. He may be able to restore himself in a fight against a blade, but the cruelest cut can come from the knowledge of his greatest source of pain – himself.

(Available after Korriban)

Hey, we gave Nihilus a focus in DLC, it’s only fair that Sion gets it too. And in this case, I see it as stripping away the mystique, something that, really, we could use thematically.

Sion’s a mystery, but he really shouldn’t be – that’s Nihilus’s purpose. Sion is the brute force, the guy who really should need no explanation, but, let’s be real, a guy who’s holding himself together through sheer force of will, there’s a lot to dig in to there. Especially because, if we examine the Sith Triumvirate as different reflections of the Exile themselves, some element of who he was before coming into play seems like it’d be important.

That’s why I picked Eriadu for where this takes place. Whether or not he once called this planet home, I feel like it could be a place of significance for him. This is an industrial planet, one its inhabitants have tried to make “the Coruscant of the Outer Rim.” I feel like that kinda ties into Sion’s characterization – to Kreia, he is the pale imitation of the one student who truly embodies her teachings, as really any planet in the Outer Rim would be considered in direct comparison to Coruscant.

But how did he and Kreia cross paths? Kreia has lived a long time, and Sion could easily have lived just as long. Was he her first student? Was he cut down for the first time during the war against Exar Kun? (This is apparently part of what little backstory he was given in the Campaign Guide for KOTOR.) How did the alliance between the “Sith Triumvirate” even come to be in the first place?

These questions linger through the game, and this would be some of the kinds of things that I’d see included here – not just his past before he became the Lord of Pain, but his history in the time since taking that “Darth” title. I mean, you’d think a guy surviving mortal wounds for years would at least have drawn some rumors – Sith are seldom subtle.

Perhaps in finding more about him, we learn about the Force technique he’s using to channel his pain into the power that keeps him alive – this is another one of those Force abilities that would probably be of some kind of use later, and it does sound a lot like the description of some of Vader’s later attempts to heal up his body, but Vader couldn’t hold it for more than a few seconds.

As for the end result of this, I feel like it would be more a matter of a verbal joust (Obsidian does love those, especially in this game – battlegrounds are as much a verbal minefield as a straight up brawl). Perhaps even one with Kreia herself – the Exile knows that Sion and Kreia share a history, so this is a confrontation between the two of them about the things she hides, the secrets she’s keeping. Because if she wants the Exile to be her prize pupil, they SHOULD have a point where they can stand against her teachings, argue with her in a true fashion.

I mean, that’s one of the problems in the base game, that Kreia, after all this time talking philosophy, ends up in just a straight up brawl at the finale, so let’s learn about Sion, about her former student, and see a confrontation between her and the Exile, one that, unlike normal, we might actually manage to win against her. Because it’s the same lesson she wants to teach to the Council – there is often some element of failure that the teacher must own when the student fails.

Yeah, okay, I’m moving off of Sion at this point, but you can’t really explore Sion’s past and character without exploring how Kreia plays in to that. And whatever sort of history they have will be important for the ultimate confrontation on Malachor – the Exile’s dialogue in their fight shows an understanding that I don’t know if I feel is fully earned in the game as is, isn’t fully justified where the Exile’s insight comes from. Let them learn about Sion, this to an extent expands on that.

Prophecy

They will be known as ‘the Lost Jedi,’ the ones who followed the Exile after the Jedi Civil War denied them their birthright as Jedi. Yet there are those strong in the Force who would sooner see them dead than to bring about a new path for the Jedi, and attempt to stop them before they can even make the attempt.

(Available after making two of your companions Jedi)

If there’s one thing that reviving the Jedi will do, it’s stir up the ideas that the Jedi failed and need to be stopped before they plunge the galaxy into war yet again. We see it plenty on Dantooine, and Atton brings it up himself, to the galaxy at large, the Jedi Civil War was just that, a civil war, a fight between two factions of Jedi, and they were caught in the middle.

More than that, you bring back the Jedi, you bring back the same Order who sat out the Mandalorian War. It’s not just about not wanting the Jedi to not go down a new path – for some people, this is going to be as much about not wanting the Jedi period. The Jedi have been blamed for the state of the galaxy, sometimes as a scapegoat, sometimes rightfully – if the Jedi are the ones who can face these threats, someone’s bound to think that the reason that the Jedi existing are the reason they happen.

To use Sera’s words about the Grey Wardens in Dragon Age Inquisition, they’re the good thing that means something bad’s about to happen.

And the Exile is collecting Jedi Potentials, training them, making them the Lost Jedi, the ones who rebuild the Order after the Exile’s departure. That should set off alarm bells.

What I’m picturing, in fact, is that the source of the threat here is from former Jedi themselves. Perhaps even people the Exile knew, people who stayed among the Jedi, through the Mandalorian War, only realizing that they didn’t approve of how things were going after Revan, after Vandar announced that Revan was the Prodigal Knight (or, alternatively, that the Jedi hadn’t actually slain the threat they’d unleashed on the galaxy... Yeah, there’s a reason I refuse to touch on the possibility of Revan or the other KOTOR 1 gang appearing in these DLCs for KOTOR 2 – I ain’t dealing with the headache of accounting for light side/dark side endings, and you can’t make me).

These Jedi have decided that the Jedi have had their time, and that, ultimately, what comes next in this galaxy should exist without them. The Sith Empire Revan and Malak built up has collapsed either way, so to the galaxy at large, the Jedi have vanished, the Sith are gone... These former Jedi have come to believe that this is the best state for the galaxy. Go back up and reread about The Empty Temple DLC. This is the counterpoint – that was “why did the Jedi still alive just shut off their lightsabers and walk away?” This is “why should anyone pick up a lightsaber again?”

Because what value is there in bringing back the Jedi? I mean, in-universe. Out of universe, there’s a massive market for “space wizard-ninjas with a big glowstick that hums.” But to the denizens of the galaxy far, far away, the simple fact is the Jedi are easily painted as a menace to the galaxy they claim to protect, with the ideological civil wars devastating the galaxy practically once a generation. If the Jedi try to come back, then eventually, the Sith will come back too.

I’m setting this on Ossus, a planet that has a lot of connection to Jedi history – it was featured pretty heavily in the various Tales of the Jedi comics (where we get Onderon and Freedon Nadd and Naga Sadow and Exar Kun and the like), and I figure this connection would make it a natural place for the Exile to take the newly minted Jedi of their crew to learn. Because we should also see the Exile acting as a teacher to the others that they’ve led down the path of the Jedi. It would also be why these former Jedi are here – if you’re going to recreate the Jedi, go somewhere with a strong connection.

Ultimately, it’s another story about the consequences of the wars that preceded the game – this is a question of how can we do and act as we did before now that everything has changed? How do we return to the status quo after it was upended, and why should we pretend we even can?

Shadows and Light

Rhen Var is the planet that fallen Jedi Ulic Qel-Droma retreated to after Exar Kun’s war on the Republic. It is a site of great reverence to the Jedi. If any Jedi have survived the Jedi Civil War, this is a place they would retreat to. But also drawn to this place are adherents of the dark side, looking to test themselves against Jedi, prove themselves to the Sith spirits that speak to them...

(Available after meeting two Jedi Masters)

Remember in my KOTOR 1 list, I said to stick a pin in Ulic Qel-Droma and how he lost his connection to the Force? Time to take that pin out, we’re here. Ulic Qel-Droma is someone I would think would have some resonance for the Exile, considering that he has such a mirror to their situation. Hell, I’d think that, with Ulic’s own redemption in the eyes of the Force (his body vanished upon death, like Obi-Wan and Yoda), it’d be something that would actively draw them in. Yet surprisingly, Ulic’s not mentioned except as flavor text, not as someone who went through something similar to the Exile’s experiences.

Nomi Sunrider, and her daughter Vima, have a connection here. Vima was even originally going to have Bastila’s role in the first game, but there were some copyright issues revolving around the Sunrider name that resulted in that changing. Since that’s not a concern for me, I’d like to see her play a significant role here, that she has gone to Rhen Var in the wake of all the things that have happened since Ulic’s death, attempting to re-center herself and reconnect after all the chaos, find guidance in the place that she started as a Jedi.

Since I brought up the Campaign Guide a while back, I should note that it says that the canon Exile trained under Vima for a time, which I’m willing to go along with here – not just as a canon tie, bridging some of the gap of the comics and the games, but also to see the butting of heads between two of the Exile’s teachers, in Vima and Kreia, and to also have the Exile play up some of the parallels to them and Revan, who the Disciple says returned to their “first teacher” to learn how to leave the Order – this is the Exile returning to their first teacher to learn how to rebuild the Order (broadly speaking, anyway – yes, yes, light side/dark side alignment, bladdy blah).

But, of course, if we’re addressing Ulic, let’s address that other bantha in the room – the Krath, the dark side cult that Ulic initially infiltrated and then joined. According to Wookieepedia, Chris Avellone didn’t include them in KOTOR 2 because “Krath” has a bad translation in French. Good reasoning, but it DOES make for a very big gap, considering they were associated with Freedon Nadd, whose tomb we loot, and the Onderon system, where we spend a good amount of time. And, since I’m not bound by the French language here, we’re bringing them back.

So the Krath show up here – maybe they still admire the dark sider that Ulic was, while considering the redeemed hero their villain, maybe they view him as a traitor to their cause. Either way, though, the remnants of the Krath have come to Rhen Var, and they’re emboldened by the absence of the Jedi, want to gain new prominence now. They aren’t Sith, they just follow the dark side, which means they’re not the capitol-E enemy that the Sith forces are – maybe there’s a way to forge an alliance with them, given the fact that the Sith will wipe out all life if they get the chance, surely they see the value in survival, right?

The Krath view the Exile as a potential ally – they may even see them as Ulic reborn, considering that they do have such a mirror. And that leads to the conflict – Vima, knowing the Krath from Ulic’s history, her mother’s enemies, doesn’t believe they’re worth allying with (a fact with Kreia can easily pounce on – Ulic redeemed himself in her eyes, yet she won’t offer those who follow the same doctrine he did that same chance?). Allying with the Krath would surely repel any Jedi who’d be drawn to the Exile’s banner. All things considered, they’re probably not the most reliable group to join forces with... But the Exile could use any port in the storm against the Sith. Alliance of convenience, a chance to draw them to the light... There’s some good reasons for the Exile to believe they deserve the opportunity.

I don’t know how this situation would resolve itself, though – this is all still a bit off the cuff. I can accept the idea that we wouldn’t be allowed to kill off Vima Sunrider, considering this is a previously established character of significance, so that’s off the table. But perhaps we could end up, based on our choices, driving a wedge so deeply between the Exile and Vima that Vima would refuse to be associated with any Jedi Order that the Exile would rebuild, which, while not necessarily the worst possible resolution in the greater scheme, it says that the Exile would be changing the Jedi into something that one of their biggest names refuses to associate with, so having serious optics solutions, and speaks to the motivations of the Exile – rebuild and reforge the Jedi into a stronger order, or shatter the Order to pieces so small it can never be restored.

Before the Fall

Jedi Master Lonna Vash managed to escape the Sith Academy on Korriban. Her survival has led her further into the Sith held worlds – following her trail leads the Exile and the Ebon Hawk to Ziost, a long dead world. Her path has the potential to lead even the strongest of Jedi into the dark side. To find this missing Jedi Master, the Exile and their crew must risk the fall...

(Available after Korriban)

I also said above that we’d get to Lonna Vash.

What a waste of a character she is in game as is. I mean, yeah, I get it, tied to a cut planet, crunch time meaning that they couldn’t restore her somewhere else... But still, what a waste. Especially when that cut dialogue seems to sound like she was an advocate for the Exile (even though on finding her body, the Exile can say she was quickest to reject them – maybe it’s just part of the abrupt cutting of her involvement in the game? *shrugs* I don’t know, but that’s not the take I’m gonna go with anyway, so we’ll just ignore that one line).

So instead of her body on Korriban, we get a clue that took her somewhere else. I pick Ziost because that’s another one of the various supposed Sith homeworlds over the years (let’s not even start on THAT continuity headache...), another Sith stronghold that would be a place that a Jedi Master would be drawn to in order to learn more about their enemy. Plus, considering its appearance in The Old Republic, I’d kinda like to see it as a planet and a place before the ultimate destructive cataclysm that rendered it a tomb.

And, of course, there’s Lonna Vash herself. Going to Korriban? That was taking the fight to the Sith. That was actively attempting to learn and understand her enemy. That was even a little pro-active. That deserves her to get more than an off-screen death and appearing as a corpse for five seconds. So she takes the next step, and goes exploring in the heart of Sith territory. Why? Because if the Sith are the problem, let’s go to the source.

Of course, the thing about this is, naturally, that the Sith haven’t been coming from the known spaces of the galaxy as it is, but hey, we make concessions to work within the plot we have, right?

No, Ziost has hints of these “true Sith” that Kreia will later speak of come the ending. Perhaps here we have the species better known as the pureblood Sith from TOR (I may not be acknowledging the events of TOR directly here, but I can still choose to pick from it if it satisfies what I’m looking for). I mean, according to Wookieepedia, this is their adopted homeworld at this point in time.

Which provides more of the plot for this – Master Vash has attempted to infiltrate the society of Sith, trying to find any information that will act to galvanize the Jedi – she learned the lessons of the Mandalorian Wars, and is acting. Because the ground is cracking under the feet of those who would call themselves Jedi, and the simple fact is at this point, she can surely see that there will be another war, and even without the appearance of Darth Nihlius, there’s plenty of reason to believe that the Jedi will be crippled by indecisiveness after all.

Of course, searching for her is going to end up drawing attention. It’s enough to get a local Sith Lord to sit up and pay attention. Go back to the Sleheyron DLC from the last post, pull back in that mechanic of needing to keep your head down and not be seen (which I explicitly compared to Nar Shaddaa and its mechanic of getting Visquis, and by extension Goto’s, attention), at least until the time is right, that the more use of the Force you use, the more attention you draw. Same as on Dantooine, where walking among the people with your lightsaber equipped is going to get you different and colder responses from them – the Exile and company walking around with lightsabers on the belts (well, given engine restrictions, in hand, but you know what I mean) is going to mark them as someone who the Sith Lords of Ziost will want to get to.

I view this culminating in having a chance to talk with Vash before the confrontation against the Sith leader on this planet, who I’m gonna just create here: Lord Metus (Latin for – according to web translation - fear, dread, terror, apprehension, fright, which I pulled out from a synonym for anxiety), who is, if Nihlius, Sion, and Traya represent hunger, pain, and betrayal respectively, a representation of anxiety, that fear of “what if” and “what might be.” Seems appropriate for a Sith Lord to face a Jedi Council member, a body paralyzed by the thought of what they would end up facing by fighting the Mandalorian Wars.

And I say a confrontation here, but we’d of course build this Metus up (I’m seeing Metus going either way on gender, and while I did use “Lord” above, I’m kinda leaning towards Metus being female at the moment, Sith tending to use Lord as gender-neutral, but I’m not married to it), have them be a constant presence – after all, what is anxiety if not a constant weight that follows you around? Metus’s presence would be felt throughout Ziost, and we’d be fully aware of them long before they make a genuine appearance.

But this leads to fighting Metus alongside Master Vash. It’s one thing to have Kavar or Vrook join the combat at the finales of Onderon and Dantooine respectively, but I mean that she’s playable in this section, as a companion level character – I mean, I see this as a higher level unlock, even beyond just the fact that I take Korriban near the end of the game (second to last, before the return to Onderon), and I don’t think that it’s reasonable to expect the Exile to go to any major Sith held world before even the prestige class unlocks. Like, this is definite “near-endgame” level stuff.

As for Vash’s fate... Obviously, she can’t remain a party member. Likewise, the mods that restore her on Dantooine have her mostly silent, considering that the conversation in the base game exists without her anyway. Other restoration mods of her content bump her off at the conclusion of her encounter with the Exile to maintain continuity with the base game. BUT... I have grown an aversion of killing off characters for the sake of convenience. Especially factoring in how she’s now the one member of the Council who has learned anything, is willing to approach things from a new perspective.

So I’m leaning towards having her decide that she will not rejoin the Council – the Jedi have failed, and perhaps it’s time for them to forge a new path, a new direction, one free of the burdens of the traditionalist views of the Council. While their wisdom is valuable, it has come at the expense of understanding how the galaxy has changed (what do you mean, reality subtext of millennials versus baby boomers, whyever would you think such a thing, don’t be silly, I mean we’re talking about a hypothetical DLC to a game from 2004, so that’s context that wouldn’t apply then, let’s move on). Maybe the Exile can opt to kill her, like they can the other Masters, but the light side (and, in my mind, resulting “canon” choice, for a given value, since we’re talking about a non-existent DLC for an RPG... Go with it) option is that she can go, and she wants to be a part of the new Jedi, not the old structure.

Schism

The Jedi are broken and scattered. While the Exile trained the Lost Jedi, there are many more out there, both the lost and the fallen. Now, the time comes to unite them under a single banner and be the Jedi Order once more, born from the ruins at Dantooine. But the path to that new future is not one that all will walk towards willingly...

(Post-Game)

This one is a tricky subject, mostly because I see this as something that would exist WITHOUT the Exile. The Exile has a choice at the end of the game – light side, they go in search of Revan (again, begone Revan novel and The Old Republic interpretation of events), dark side, they are seemingly rebuilding the Trayus Academy. But, like with the previous KOTOR DLC, where there the two post-game DLCs were with an assumed light sided Revan, we’re going to assume a light side ending for this game, both for the fact that the Jedi need to rebuild for this, and because this needs to focus on the way that the Jedi Order is rebuilt, and that puts us in the position of telling a post-game story without the player character.

So we are looking at a story built around the companions – Atton, Brianna, Mical, Mira, Visas, Bao-Dur – and what becomes of the Jedi after the end of the game. Because the whole idea of the game focused on the idea that the Jedi must grow, must change. Given all the philosophical screeds of the game, here’s another one: Life must adapt, or it will die.

And, in the wake of Kreia, no matter her ultimate goal, she DOES raise many actual valid points. She questions much of the Jedi as they have been, and many of her points are entirely true. As I said above, when the students repeatedly “fail” the lesson, is the problem the student for not learning the lesson, or the teachers for not imparting the right lessons. Mical brings this up in conversation, and it’s a question that the Jedi must now grapple with as the rebuilding actively begins.

Because KOTOR 2 is all about the aftermath of war. Here is where the Jedi begin rebuilding. But the problem is the fact that we must eventually get to the place where the Jedi are circa the prequels, four thousand years later, where the Jedi Council have fallen prey to the same problem as they have in the time of KOTOR, to an even worse degree, even. What brings about their ultimate doom is their stagnation, their indifference to the universe beyond the Jedi Temple.

Was this the ultimate end result of Kreia’s teachings? I somehow doubt it. The Jedi Order as it once was ends up being restored, the traditionalists win. And I don’t want this to be the fate of those from the KOTOR games.

So what I want to see here is the rebuilding of the order, and a resurgence of traditionalist thoughts – again, this is the debate that the game has not really engaged in, just allowed the platform of Chris Avellone’s calling bullshit on Star Wars philosophy, with no real room to argue against it. And here, we see that the Jedi, despite all of their efforts to resist their ultimate fate, are doomed to the same old cycle.

But, as we see in the game, Atris’s desire to rebuild the Jedi, an act that these characters are ready to do, would have been a radical change, and her change would make the Jedi into Sith. So where is the answer here, because too much change, the Jedi tip into darkness. But, not enough change, and we get the ultimate fate of the Star Wars universe, because the Jedi end up stagnating, being life that refuses to adapt.

Star Wars is, in effect, the repetitive epic, where the same lessons need to be taught to each new generation. But I want some spark of hope – that the students of the Exile ultimately decide to break away from the Jedi, form their own sect to study the Force. That the failing is not the teachings or the students, but the teachers, the teachers who will not listen. The Legends line says that there are many different sects of Force users, beyond the Jedi and the Sith, those who have broken off from the Jedi but still follow the light. And ultimately, this would be the fate of the Exile’s students.

This would not be a traditional style DLC, I suppose – there is no villain to face, no great combat to be had. Rather, this is a story, told through the player’s choices – do each of the Exile’s students roll over and abide by the Jedi Order’s old ways? I feel like even they would at least be tempted to give in, because there’s the possibility of them choosing to stay, not just because they’re giving in to the way things have been, but because they believe in the Jedi, believe that they can shape the Jedi into changing. But others cannot accept that the Jedi would turn them away – and maybe they’d turn away from the Force, as well.

Small note: Maybe this is where Vash reappears? Just a thought – I don’t know for sure, but having her return to the Jedi, perhaps ultimately becoming the first Master of the new sect... or perhaps showing the inherent flaw of allowing those with power in old systems take power in new and she is the leader of the traditionalist thoughts, believing the Jedi were only in need of minor changes, not a massive overhaul.

This isn’t a tale about physical fights. It’s about philosophical conflict. Maybe this isn’t what people generally play a Star Wars game for, but this is where KOTOR 2 shined, at least for me. And I want some content centered whole upon it.

Miscellaneous

Romance Content – Handmaiden/Disciple as full party member regardless of gender, Bisexual Atton, Bisexual Disciple, Bisexual Visas, Bisexual Handmaiden, Atton romance culmination, romance endings at Malachor – light side and dark side

Again, we have a few little touch ups that I can’t really fit in as their own separate DLCs. First of all is one I think we all agree should have been there from the beginning, the Handmaiden and the Disciple both joining the Exile’s crew, regardless of gender. There’s no real reason they should be gated. And, of course, all the romances (well, by the standards of KOTOR 2) are now bisexual. Because space has always been gay, you fools.

Listen to Kreia.

Also, Atton never really gets a romance culmination scene – Visas and Mical have mutually exclusive ones on the way back to Telos, and Brianna’s is after confronting Atris. Atton’s was basically from the confrontation with Sion that got cut, but I’d like for one beyond that. Ideally, there’d be a clearer way of deciding between which of the romances your Exile favors, and they’d each come for a culmination between the Exile. They’d also each get their own separate romance ending, where the Exile is able to greet them after Kreia’s defeat, dependent on how they end the game.

There are probably other little tweaks and adjustments I’d make, especially considering the unfinished state that KOTOR 2 originally shipped in, but that moves outside the scope of this series.

#dg rambles #dg's hypothetical dlc #knights of the old republic #kotor #kotor 2 #dg talks video games

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marta-bee · 5 years

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Endgame Thoughts

(Xposted from Pillowfort.)

Let's talk about Endgame. I've had the chance to see it twice now (yes, I know; the tickets are basically free). This is going to get specific, so: spoilers.

On a first viewing, I liked it a lot. I don't remember being particularly swept away by it emotionally, and it was rightly focused on the original six Avengers, in whom I was much less invested. Before this weekend, I don't think I'd seen anything before the original "Avengers" movie, and I never really got invested in the series until probably "Civil War."

So I arguably wasn't really the target audience. But it's undeniably a FUN movie. The tone felt like an Avengers movie again, the middle third is just a pitch-perfect sendoff to a lot of the old Avengers movies and does such a good job at characterization, it's funny and heroic and just so optimistic even as it's a realistic look at living through all that trauma. And the final third is just really well balanced as it incorporates all these disparate character groups into a rather epic final showdown and built off a really interesting plot sequence. Too long and hectic for my tastes, but then I never did much like prlonged battle sequences so again, I can accept it's just not for me.

My main criticisms were minor, more nigglings than anything. I hated all the fat jokes about Thor, which made sense when they were in New Asgard but beyond that it really descended into fat shaming. (I'm fat myself, so I'm pretty sensitive to that.) That, and some of my favorite characters just didn't get enough screen time, but that's not really a fair criticism. Mainly, I whooped and cheered with the audience, loved the humor, and generally had a great time.

Second viewing? I'm much more sanguine.

First, there's Bucky. I'll be upfront, I quite like Stucky - in fanworks. I saw ambiguity they could build on, but was never particularly sold on this being the direction the films were headed in. What *was* canon to me was that this was the loss of movie!Steve's life, the person he was most driven to reconnect with throughout the movies and probably the best friend of his life. Peggy Carter is much less the center of his development. She's dynamic and fun in "First Avenger," and a sign of all he's lost by going into the ice, but at the same time? She's very much a first love, someone who has a common struggle with him to be accepted and valued by the military she worked within, and the first woman who really paid much attention to. But she really is the first love. Beyond that, and outside the fact she was ripped away rather than letting the relationship mature and simmer naturally, I never understood why she would be his one and only. Certainly I don't get why Cap should be willing to abandon all his relationships he's forged over the decade he's lived since coming out of the ice.

Except for the obvious: the writers thought he needed a romantic happily-ever-after, and that meant there had to be a woman involved. And I'll be honest: this bothers me. A lot, and not least because it suggests a person isn't complete without the romantic.

But I wanted to talk about Bucky. The problem with letting Steve have his second chance with Peggy is he essentially abandons Bucky in the twentieth century and consigns him to the whole loneliness and sense of being out of his time that Steve struggled through. And there's no real acknowledgement of the depth of this friendship. It wouldn't take a lot, really. Maybe having Bucky stand with Cap at the funeral, or even having him walk over to that bench after Sam's and Steve's final scene together, a hint that they were mourning their lost years.

(Also there's the logistical issue: how does Bucky live through the twentieth century as the Winter Soldier but still be relatively young at the end of Endgame, but Cap go through roughly the same period of years [taking off his years unconscious under the ice, but adding back in most of those if he relived them with Peggy] and wind up so old?)

Anywho. Enough about Steve, Peggy, and Bucky. Let's talk about Natasha.

I really liked the whole scene at Vormir, with Natasha and Clint trying to sacrifice themselves to earn the stone. It's such a lovely turnabout on Thanos and Gamora, though for some reason I thought the person claiming the stone had to actively sacrifice the person he loved. (Perhaps that's Sherlock's TFP coloring my thinking.) And I honestly wouldn't have wanted Natasha to just stand back while Clint killed himself. Still, Clint really is the obvious choice to die here, isn't he? He's a mess, and something of a liability to his family after assuming the whole Ronin identity should they get the snap victims back; while Natasha, she's obviously fixated to an unhealthy degree, but she's much more competent and together than Clint is at this point.

The whole fact that it's a female character sacrificing herself and leaving the men to mourn bothers me, particularly as you had more or less the same thing happening with the Guardians and Gamora in IW. Actually it reminds me of that quote from the L word you see in a lot of memes around Tumblr: "It's not a fucking woman's job to be consumed and invaded and spat out so that some fucking man can evolve." And maybe that's not entirely fair, and maybe there are good story-external reasons why they needed Black Panther to die. For instance, if Scarlet Johanssen just didn't want to do commit to major roles in the franchise, or if she was too expensive for Marvel now. As far as deaths go, this was a pretty awesome one, and beautifully done. Still, it bothers me.

(Related issue: Black Widow would actually make a much more convincing next team leader/Captain America than Sam! I love Sam, honestly, but he doesn't actually have a lot to distinguish him from thousands of other brave, moral soldiers. He's not like Cap with his superhuman strength and speed from the serum. He doesn't even have Natasha's rather unique training, and he certainly doesn't have her history with the team. Plus we see Natasha excelling so much as a team leader and administrator. It's a real shame she didn't get to step into that role.)

I don't mean to bash the movie, which I guess I kind of have. It's a highly enjoyable spectacle (the time-heist is just so *fun* all around, and it has all the joyful canon callbacks and tie-ins of, say, the DS9 episode "Trials and Tribble-ations." (Seeing Quill sing badly! The Wanda-Thanos showdown! Peter Parker just being so Peter Parker-ish!) It does a phenomenal job, really, of balancing all these different character sets. And if you can enjoy it on that level without thinking too hard I think you'll have a raucous good time.

And yet; and yet. I'm afraid it really is my curse to think too much about these things, and this time it really shows.

#marvel #Avengers #spoilers #endgame

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violethowler · 5 years

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What the Kingdom Hearts Series Means to Me

Holding the physical copy of Kingdom Hearts III that I pre-ordered and paid extra to have delivered on release day is a surreal experience. It feels like a dream in all honesty. Kingdom Hearts III used to be a formless thing. A cryptid that fans hoped to catch a glimpse of but didn’t really believe existed. To put it into perspective, Kingdom Hearts II first released when I was in third grade, and I’m currently approaching my graduation from college. Six games have been released in the last decade and a half to expand on the series’ lore and set up the major pieces for the next “main” installment, but only now are we getting Kingdom Hearts III. This franchise has been with me through middle school, high school, and college. It’s a big freaking deal.

I had never been passionately into video games as a kid. My first game system was the Nintendo GameBoy Advance, and the only games I was interested in playing were movie tie-in games that adapted the plot of a specific movie. The Incredibles. The Polar Express. Ice Age: The Meltdown, Madagascar. The only other game I can remember that wasn’t an adaptation of an existing film was a weird 3D Pacman game, but I don’t remember ever playing it as fervently as I did those old movie games.

Even after receiving a PlayStation 2 for either my birthday or Christmas in 2006, the only games I would play that weren’t movie adaptations were the NickToons crossover games like Battle for Volcano Island or Attack of the Toybots. But I only played them because they featured my favorite TV character. I was never interested in the storyline. That would change one day in late-summer/early autumn 2007, when, after seeing an advertisement for it in my old Disney Adventures magazines, I rented a PlayStation title I’d never heard of called Kingdom Hearts II.

In the beginning, I didn’t pay attention to the story. I just skipped through the cutscenes and focused exclusively on the gameplay. But as I got to the more difficult portions of the game, I started to watch the cutscenes and pay attention to the story. And the more I did, the more I fell in love with it. Once I had fully digested the story of Kingdom Hearts II, I wanted more. I went back and played the original Kingdom Hearts, then I bought Chain of Memories for my GBA. I was hooked. I started buying and reading the manga adaptations of the games. I bought a couple of collectible figurines. I. Was. Obsessed.

I spent much of my computer time in those days scouring the internet for every scrap of information I could find on the next games in the franchise. Kingdom Hearts III wasn’t in the cards yet, so I focused my attention on the three titles that I vaguely recall being collectively referred to at the time as “the handheld trilogy”: 358/2 Days, Birth by Sleep, and Coded. I searched with a fine-tooth comb on websites dedicated to gaming news in general and Kingdom Hearts specifically, hoping to find out more about these next three games.

In many ways, Kingdom Hearts helped me take my first tentative steps into the wider community of fandom. My search for news on the next games in the series unearthed funny fan-made comic strips about my favorite characters. Even though Kingdom Hearts III was still a fantasy by that point, I found people using Photoshop, or whatever image-editing software was popular around 2008 or so, to create ideas for what the cover art would look like. I found detailed fan art of potential new outfits for all the major characters. I found theories and ideas and the ever-raging bonfire of speculation that grows larger with each new game released. I found fan-made music videos and fanfiction to sate my hunger for more content between games. I wasn’t as involved in fandom to the extent that I am today, but my experience with Kingdom Hearts helped me dip my toes in the water, so to speak, as I started to engage more with my favorite media beyond simply consuming it once and then going back to watch/play it again when I needed something to do.

And what makes this day so much sweeter is how much effort Disney is clearly putting into promoting this game. Almost a decade ago, and the most advertising any Kingdom Hearts title got outside of dedicated gaming magazines or events was maybe a single tv commercial per game. The only way to know a new game was coming otherwise was if you were actively following the development of each title before they even locked in when it would come out. In the last six months of waiting for Kingdom Hearts III, there’s been a concert tour, multiple commercials and advertisements on both TV and social media, and even ads playing before the previews at movie theaters. After years of trying to share my love for this series, only for a handful of people to have ever heard of it, it’s a tremendous thrill to see the games I love finally getting mainstream recognition.

It’s because of this series that I even consider myself a gamer in the first place. Before Kingdom Hearts, I just plowed through every game I had, treating each level as just another puzzle or challenge to complete. But Kingdom Hearts II exposed me to the possibility of video games as a medium for storytelling, and it was through my engagement with the Kingdom Hearts storyline that I found myself seeking out other games with their own compelling stories. Final Fantasy, The World Ends with You, Horizon: Zero Dawn… These are some of the many games with stories and worlds that have enthralled me as someone who loves to both experience stories and create them. And without Kingdom Hearts, I would probably never been enough of a gamer to know or care that they existed.

When I was younger, I was only interested in games if they were available on the systems I had. But Kingdom Hearts wasn’t limited to only one console. In the early years of the franchise, the series was spread across the GameBoy Advance, PlayStation 2, Nintendo DS, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and smartphones. So, whenever my research uncovered that the next title would be on a console I didn’t own, I would go out of my way to get it, either by putting it on my holiday wish list, or by saving up the money for it myself. And usually, I would buy these platforms years in advance of the Kingdom Hearts game I’d got it for came out, so I would search for interesting games to play on it while I waited. And unlike before, now I was actively looking for things to play.

When it was just my GameBoy, PlayStation, and a handful of movie/TV show tie-ins, I didn’t go out of my way to look for new games. I relied on advertisements in my trusty Disney Adventures magazine to tell me what games that were out that might interest me. Nowadays, I annually watch live coverage of E3, the entertainment expo where game developers show off the status of their current projects or unveil their next main title. And I keep my eyes out for every title that looks entertaining from both a gameplay and story perspective, whether I see ads in a magainze, footage at E3, a trailer on YouTube, or fanart online.

Before I realized that animation was what I wanted to do as a career, my first dream job was to be a game designer. And if your first guess as to why I wanted to pursue that career path isn’t Kingdom Hearts, then in the words of one of the franchise’s original villains, “You have come this far, and still, you understand nothing.” While I ultimately realized that animation was my true passion as an artist, it was Kingdom Hearts that set me on the idea of turning my art skills into a career. Without Kingdom Hearts, I might not have ended up where I am today.

Most of the fandom knows that Kingdom Hearts III isn’t the end of the road for the franchise. Even aside from its immense popularity, series director Tetsuya Nomura has spoken about the fact that the series will continue beyond III, but that this represents the conclusion of the current story arc that has been going on since the original Kingdom Hearts game back in 2002. It’s fitting that this arc of the series is ending the same year that I graduate from college. This series has seen me through multiple chapters of my life. Middle school. High School. College. And in May, I’ll be a college graduate looking for a job. Each time I moved from one stage of life to the next, it always felt like the end. But it never is. But life goes on. The story will go on, but this chapter of it is over.

You can imagine, then, why today is such a big deal. This series has been with me for more than half my life. These games, and other media I obsess over to a similar degree, mean so much to be precisely because the story and characters connect with me on such a deep emotional level. My opinion on storytelling in any medium is that the ones that put your emotions in a blender and take you from screaming in anguish to crying tears of joy in the span of a few hours or less are the ones that deserve to be remembered. The best stories should leave you wanting to know more, not just out of curiosity over what happens next, but also for the satisfaction of knowing that the characters you’ve grown to love will be alright.

Kingdom Hearts has consistently checked every single one of those boxes for me for as long as I’ve been playing it. Even the prequels and midquels that ended in tragedy and heartbreak still had a note of assurance that there was still hope. Even if the games that inevitably come out post-KHIII hypothetically don’t have the same emotional impact on me that the pre-III ones did, I will never be able to stop loving the series I grew up with. I’ve been invested in it for so long that it feels like it’s woven into my DNA. This series has grown over the last eleven years just as I have, and whatever the future holds for the franchise, good or bad, I will never regret the time I’ve spent with this incredible saga.

#long post #kh fandom #kingdom hearts 3 #personal anecdote

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fiothelemon · 5 years

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december 22, 2018 soyo oka 岡素世

The word “hidden” is used a lot in gaming. Hidden gems, hidden easter eggs, etc. But what about in video game soundtracks? One example is Soyo Oka, hiding under some classic 90’s Nintendo games is an underrated composer. But despite that you may recognize her work, as she is the composer for games such as Super Mario Kart, Pilotwings, and did the arrangement for Super Mario All Stars! On the second issue of FBoGCaTW, we’ll go over Soyo Oka!

history

Soyo Oka was born on April 9th, 1964 in Nishinomiya City, Japan. Soyo’s first experience with music was at a very early age, when she was 2 and toyed with her mom’s xylophone, and enjoyed playing the toy piano. It was at age 4 when she started playing classical piano, and during then, she had a neighbor who was a piano teacher. Soyo would occasionally go over there and play piano with the neighbor’s son. Due to her enthusiasm with the piano, the neighbor helped teach her.

While Soyo was still in elementary school, she had moved from Tokyo to Kansai because of his father’s job. When she moved there she saw classmates play the electone, and compose music, too. Soyo described that discovery as “By example” in an interview with SquareEnixMusic. This inspired her, and on one Christmas eve, she wrote a letter to Santa in search for an electone of her own. She kept it a secret to her parents, and thus she didn’t receive an electone on her bedside the following morning. But when she started getting a job, she finally worked for the instrument of her dreams. She played it non-stop for about a year and a half, and then got bored with it. It was when she was in middle school when she started creating and sharing, rather than playing.

When it was time to go to college, Soyo attended a music school and majored in composition. (It really shows, doesn't it?) Her first discovery of computer music was at college, too. It was a music making program developed by yamaha that she installed on her MSX. Along this, she also used her drum machine, and a bunch of empty cat food cans that produced some sound.

After graduation, she got a job at nintendo, where she worked there for 8 years from 1987 to 1995. She’s come a long way since then, producing music for plenty of games, and now usually makes music for commercials. To help show some of her work, here are some personal favorites of mine!

music showcase

Alright. First song. Y’all might know this. This is the Light Plane theme from pilotwings! It’s quite a popular track for Nintendo fans, as it’s appeared in games in the smash series.

“Light Plane”

This one may be Soyo’s most famous piece as a video game composer, and for a reason. Not just because it’s been featured in other games, but because the song itself is pretty damn catchy and pleasant (you’ll notice that with a lot of her work.) It’s the kind of song that you really get the feel of when you’re on a sandy beach, with a cold one in one hand and a game boy in the other. Or like in the game where it’s the opposite. Nevertheless, this song is a classic and is apart of one of my favorite SNES soundtracks. If you enjoyed this track, check out the smash bros remix of it.

“Vanilla Lake”

This one, along with Light Plane, is apart of some of my favorite SNES soundtracks. Super Mario Kart is home to many, upon many beautiful compositions such as this, and really proves the mini-MIDI-game console what it’s worth when it comes to music. Soyo Oka states that one of her inspirations in music making is Chopin. And some of the Super Mario Kart soundtrack bleeds that baroque/classical composition and some songs could fit as classical if you did some arranging (I mean that’s the point of arranging music, right?)

“In Game Theme - Ice Hockey”

This one is pretty fast paced, especially for NES music. And for a game like Ice Hockey, it needs that, really. A good soundtrack (including sound design) to any type of media, whether that’s movies, shows, or games, should tie in to what the original source is about, along with bringing something new to the table. This track is a good example of that, and it’s what help makes Soyo a good composer! Think about it. The last time you played a game like Resident Evil or Silent Hill, part of that ominous, creepy aesthetic is thanks to the sounds of the game. Replace those sounds with duck quacks. Pretty fucking funny, but the atmosphere of the game is ruined.

“VS Mode - Wario’s Woods”

This track does a great job of hyping you up, and this kind of music is what Soyo is also good at. Wario’s Woods was a late release for the NES, so you may not have heard of it. By the time the SNES was in the middle of of its heyday, developers already knew the ins and outs of the NES hardware, including Nintendo! This game’s ost is quite good both on a composition end of the stick and in terms of technological ability. The same could be said about our next track, except for the fact that it was released in the late 80’s.

“Monster Dance - Famicom Grand Prix II”

I’m especially impressed with this one, mostly because of that weird bass twang going on. It’s somewhat comparable to the SEGA Master System’s FM capabilities. Overall the original game looks and sounds great, and I give Soyo a round of applause for the score. This is definitely one of my favorite tracks of hers due to its high funk levels.

“Goodnight, See You Soon!”

Of course, we end all of these by showing off (what I think) the composer’s best work is. Like it's Mario Kart younger brother, SimCity’s soundtrack is beautiful and deserves all the love it can get. What I imagine going along well with this is a lullaby, or maybe something like a music box cover. Or maybe it’s been a long night at work, you just got home and you dress down to your pajamas. You may have some spreadsheets to fill, but who cares at this point? You cook some leftovers, sit down on the couch and watch TV until you fall asleep. It gives off this weirdly nostalgic feel that I just love so much! It’s so gentle, soft, easygoing, and everything in between.

sources (in order of appearance)

Please look through some of these yourself, these interviews/articles are all way more informative than this blog!

vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Soyo_Oka

squareenixmusic.com/features/interviews/soyooka.shtml

nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/Soyo_Oka

#soyooka #mario kart #pilotwings #nintendo #retrogaming #game music #snes

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not-poignant · 6 years

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1/2 Re: your last anti-anti post. It's weird for me because for so long I didn't even get why some stuff (like in your example, hs student/teacher) warranted the underage warning. In my country, the age of consent is 14. (I live in the EU; fyi) Nobody bats an eyelid here for 15-16 year olds hooking up. Doing so with a teacher **IRL** would raise questions, sure, but more so for the power imbalance and dynamic rather than one party's youth.

2/2 It’s strange and tbh uncomfortable for me how much hate gets thrown on these works and authors when it’s a rather normal part of life here. ¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ I guess Americanization does that to you. And that’s just the RL-aspect of it - the other huge point being fiction≠RL, but as you’ve mentioned people genuinely struggle understanding that. =/

I definitely think like, Americanisation and the imposition of American cultural rules onto other parts of the world that have different rules, is actually a part of the shitty attitudes towards underage fics in general that have sprung up out of the anti movement. (Because it’s never genuine pedophilia they’re crusading against but like, movies like Call Me By Your Name, *sighs loudly*)

(Under the Read More, I talk a bit about American cultural imperialism and some of the tie ins it has with anti culture, so like, idk, enter at your own risk I guess?)

While our age of consent is different, it’s definitely lower than that of the United States. And so a lot of these conversations I see about how like, how we should treat minors universally, only apply narrow-spectrum rules from a corner of the globe that - for all that it seems to rule the english-speaking internet - is not actually the only population that makes up the internet.

Back when I was at university, ‘Americanisation’ was called American Cultural Imperialism (like, how to explain the local cultural erosion that happens when countries acquire a lot of US products like media), which I actually love as a term, in terms of how much ACI asserts itself over the lived experiences of people in other countries and how often that shames the lived experiences of people in other countries. Or how we’re expected to change our rules and standards to fit theirs. I have been told I should be using Australian grammar on AO3 because it’s a site based in America (I wonder if those people go to all the fics where folks are writing in languages other than English and being equally dickish? God I hope not).

When it comes to age of consent, and age issues in general, I just feel like to have very hard and fast rules over it is - in part - to disrespect the governance and decisions other countries have made, and the citizens that live within those countries pretty happily tbh. I believe in nuance and I believe in graded scales, and talking to people from many different countries for over twenty years has taught me that y’know, a lot of the world lives very differently to me and they’re perfectly happy, and that my country isn’t the Right Way for all Australians, let alone for all people ever.

And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of the loudest voices and the most Fundamentalist voices are sometimes coming from a place where like, some of these people (not all, for sure, but definitely some) expect their cultural rules and views to apply all over the world in the same way. And it’s just not like that. Even something like age of consent is subjective enough to change from country to country, to change from year to year, decade to decade, state to state.

I’m not against fictional underage anyway. There are circumstances where I find it uncomfortable or where I wish it didn’t exist (in the same way that I wish that some super violent video games didn’t exist, but where I then go: ‘well, that’s something I don’t fully understand and that bothers me, but it hasn’t led to an increase in X crimes, so clearly something is happening there that I’m ignorant of’ rather than ‘this makes me uncomfortable, therefore, we must BURN IT WITH FIRE’). But in the majority of circumstances, I just don’t really care enough about it because I know it doesn’t - when well-tagged for - do damage in existing. It is, to me, no different than the explicit rape and murder in Game of Thrones or the dismembering and slow stalking of human beings in Dexter. It’s uncomfortable, it’s taboo, it can reflect problematic things in society we need to discuss (note: discuss, not: verbally tell people they should kill themselves for writing/reading it), and fictional spaces exist so this stuff can exist. Fiction wasn’t only invented for the tame shit. It was kind of never there for the tame shit. The tame shit takes up space there too, but honestly, fiction was invented for our taboo shit.

Anyone who has looked at original fairy tales, or folklore, can see pretty clearly that while stories of hope existed, it was actually the taboo shit that was the domain of our fiction. From almost all cultures (I’d say all cultures, but I haven’t researched all cultures, lol).

We wouldn’t have room for sunshiny fluffy stuff in the first place if we didn’t make fictional room for the dark stuff, the cautionary tales, the grim folklore that had bad endings, the fairy tales since the dawn of time that had underage, incest, rape, forced weddings and more. It is one of the backbones of the human psyche that will never be eliminated - many people need a place to safely explore that Id.

Anyway, I’m rambling now. But yeah, anon, I completely agree with you. Also *high fives* for living in a country with a different age of consent and then sometimes having moments where like ‘wait what? How is 17 underage? OH. Americans probably.’

#asks and answers #american cultural imperialism #anti anti #////#/////#american cultural imperialism is now an outdated term #and it's a very complicated and problematic term #but like #it's still a term that describes what happens #even american POC imposing the term 'POC #on people of different races in other countries #like POC was NOT an okay term in Australia #for a long time #and I think it's still not accepted in some places here #it's not a *universal term*#but people are expected to accept it blindly #or without discussion #because you know #America apparently gets to do that to other people???#so yeah like #there is a certain american experience #which is a privilege #that people in other parts of the world don't have in the same way #don't get me started on americans expecting you to translate C to F for them #when fahrenheit is so fucking rare

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weeklyhumorist · 6 years

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The Tremendous Space Force Planning Meeting

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On my supersonic rocket ship, Nobody has to be hip, Nobody needs to be out of sight, Nobody’s gonna travel second class, They’re be equality, and no suppression of minorities, We’ll take this planet, shake it round, And turn it upside down, My supersonic rocket ship~ The Kinks, “Supersonic Rocket Ship”

Meanwhile, in Donald Trump’s White House…

“There’s this movie. Big movie, huge box office, Independence Day. With the black guy that can talk like a white guy. That’s a real talent, I have to tell you, most of them can’t do that. The President in the movie, good looking guy, right out of Central Casting, looks a lot like me, gives this speech. Something like, ‘We won’t go softly into the space! We’ll have a great, terrific Independence Day!’ Something like that. I want to recreate that exact speech when we premiere the Space Force, Michael, can you handle that?”

President Donald J. Trump, sitting at a raised podium in the Presidential Ballroom at the Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C., has just asked summer tentpole film director Michael Bay a direct question.

“It needs smoke and wind machines, shit like that, you can do it, Michael?” Trump asks.

“No problem, Mr. President. Maybe we can add some explosions in the background. My team will get working on the storyboards right away,” Bay says, then goes back to his iPhone Googling if any young starlets he wants to cast have nude photos leaked on the Internet from The Fappening.

The gaudy ballroom in the hotel is filled to capacity. Gathered are representatives from the White House, the Pentagon, NASA, various Senators and representatives from Congress, as well as movie directors, producers, costume designers, prop makers, and special effects experts, Madison Avenue branding and marketing pros, Fox News personalities, science and astronomy experts, representatives from McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Nike, Gatorade and other large companies looking to score merchandising tie-ins, all of the adult Trump children minus Tiffany, and actor Gary Sinise who has signed on to be the Space Force’s official spokesperson.

Trump bellows, “We got Lieutenant Dan! The great Lieutenant Dan, folks! Lieutenant Dan is going to be presenting an hour special on the Space Force on all four networks soon. We already bought the time, really expensive. The tremendous Mark Burnett is producing it – we made a lot of money with The Apprentice, that I can tell you, a lot of money, the number one show for like twenty-three years, right, Mark? – and the Space Force, it’s going to be as great a success as The Apprentice, that I can tell you.”

Trying her best to not let the planning meeting to take a harsh turn and veer off into Trump-esque rambling tangents of gibberish and non-sequiturs is First Daughter Ivanka. Printed agenda in hand, Ivanka suggests, “Daddy, let’s talk about the ideas you have for the uniforms.” She knows Space Force uniforms is a big deal to her father. It’s about “branding.”

Binks. That Jar Jar is “hilarious” and “really smart humor.” The next twenty-five minutes consists of President Trump going into great detail about what the Space Force line of toys needs to be. Action figures, shuttles, rockets, even a home base control room. Of course, the showcase of the toys is a super fit Donald Trump action figure in a glittering stars and stripes Mylar jumpsuit. The little guy is surprisingly pulling off those knee-high boots.

Representatives from both the Kenner and Hasbro toy level have broken into a shoving match after a contentious bidding war to manufacture the toys. Trump loves this, smirking as he teases each company with a deal, then jacks up the price again. Kenner’s CFO just sucker-punched a Hasbro designer. I, your intrepid White House correspondent watching covertly from the back of the ballroom, has never seen Donald Trump look happier.

A NASA advisor has just made the mistake of using the phrase “malevolent or benevolent alien species.” The next 17 minutes are consumed by trying to explain the difference between malevolent and benevolent to President Trump. He still hasn’t grasped the concept, even when broken down to “good and bad.” “Regardless, the Space Force needs to fuck those aliens up,” he says.

I take a lap around the ballroom, listening to the muted conversations as much as I can. Some officials are even covering their mouths as they speak like a catcher talking to a struggling closing pitcher. The mood is disbelief, shock, and embarrassment.

In the men’s room, there’s chatter amongst the suits such as;

“What are we doing? This is nuts.”

“Is he crazy? This makes no sense. We don’t own space. And Eric isn’t right in the head. Is there, you know, a medical issue? I can’t say the word I’m thinking of out loud.”

And, “I’m going to make a silly amount of money here, but will I be able to live with myself?”

Back in the ballroom, Trump is getting cable news withdrawal and needs to wrap the planning meeting up. It’s been three hours since he knew what the talking hairdos are saying about him and he’s getting ornery.

He says, “Look, folks, I’m going to leave you to it, you should be here all night in this great hotel, the best in Washington. There’s a lot of really great things you can do, I’ve given all the ideas. Everything. And nobody has done what we’ve done, this administration, you all know that. It’s been record breaking. In every way. We need another record. Another branch of our great military, who love me a lot, the Space Force!”

With that directive, President Donald J. Trump leaves his hotel and takes the motorcade back to the White House. Thrilled to watch the news channels talk about the major meeting he just led, to laud him for his leadership and vision, Trump is furious as he watches leaked cell phone video of Neil deGrasse Tyson heckling him on a loop. The real salt in the wound, is the anchors laughing loudly at the physicist’s jokes.

Three cheeseburgers deep, a pajama-wearing Trump slumps, pouts, and in true Citizen Kane fashion, mutters, “SPACE FORCE…”

Illustration by Mikey B. Martinez

The Tremendous Space Force Planning Meeting was originally published on Weekly Humorist

#donald trump #GOP #hasbro #jar jar binks #kenner #michael Bay #nasa #space force #star wars #toys #Trump #white house

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weekendwarriorblog · 4 years

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The Weekend Warrior Home Edition May 22, 2020 – THE TRIP TO GREECE, MILITARY WIVES, INHERITANCE, THE LOVEBIRDS

I can’t believe I’m writing this, but the “Summer That Never Was” continues this weekend, which is…. Are you seated for this next part? Memorial Day weekend! Yeah, there will be none of the usual BBQs and block parties, but most of all, there will be none of the voracious moviegoing that signifies the pyrrhic start of the summer… that is, if you don’t count the normal first weekend of May or the actual start of summer later in June.

This was an even tougher week to write a column, because just as I was starting on it this weekend, one of my favorite filmmakers (and just a wonderful person), Lynn Shelton, died quite unexpectedly and tragically. It really shook me up, and I’m not quite sure how long it will take me for me to get unshaken. But I’m going to try to push on through the tragedy. Just bear with me, please, if this column doesn’t see the light of day until Thursday.

After a rather drab weekend with not too many new releases and fewer that I was very excited about, we’re getting a few semi-decent films that hopefully will find an audience at the drive-ins, including some newly reopened ones.

But first… SPAGHETTIMAN!!!!

I’m pretty excited to hear that the virtual Oxford Film Festival is doing a special one-day screening of the HeckssBender’s hilarious superhero comedy, which I saw at the festival way back in 2016, where it became a bit of a sensation. You can get tickets to watch the movie and attend a special commemorative QnA, moderated by yours truly, right here! As you can imagine, I’m a huge fan of this indie superhero movie set in L.A. where a slacker named Clark, played by Benjamin Crutcher (who I think will be a huge comedy star someday), ends up getting superpowers… um… to produce spaghetti. When his roommate and best friend Dale (Winston Carter) finds out, he prompts Clark to use his powers to fight crime, but Clark has a better idea… he can fight crime for MONEY! It’s a very funny and sometimes silly premise but man, I love what these guys did with that premise. If you’re a fan of Broken Lizard and other comedy collectives, you should use Spaghettiman as your entry into the wonderful and wacky world of HeckBender! (They made a second feature since then called Cop Chronicles: Loose Cannons: the Legend of the Haj-Mirage and they have a YouTube channel, if you want more laughs.)

Oxford also adds more things to its Virtual Cinema this weekend, including a block of “Black Lens Narrative Shorts,” the documentary Queen of Lapa and the third “Fest Forward” block, all of which you can order at Eventive (including a few that will end on Thursday).

Also, the second Film Festival Day will take place this Saturday through the Film Festival Alliance with a virtual screening of Angela Pinaglia’s documentary, Life in Synchro, which is all about synchronized ice skating. About 34 regional film festivals, including the Oxford Film Festival, are taking part in the program which takes place this Saturday, May 23, and you can learn more about it at the Film Festival Day site.

Now that we’ve gotten some of the festival news over with, let’s begin this week’s column with a trip to England… well, not quite. The movie I’ve been most excited about is Michael Winterbottom’s THE TRIP TO GREECE (IFC Films), the fourth (and sadly, final) movie in the series of mockumentaries, starring best frenemies Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, who have really turned these movies into quite an art and science.

As the title will attest, this time they’re in Greece, basically doing the same things they did in Italy and Spain, visiting restaurants, eating food, squabbling with each other while also trying to one-up each other with a choice of selection of impressions. There’s a lot of Bee Gees and John Travolta references, as well as the duo recreating scenes from movies like Marathon Man and Midnight Cowboy. When that’s not happening, Rob is teasing Steve for his roving eye for women, while Steve gets him back since he’s found more fame and success in his career.

These aren’t documentaries, though, and Winterbottom includes a few scripted scenes to tie things together. We even get an arty black and white dream sequence dealing with Steve’s dying father, and these all offer good opportunities for Coogan and Brydon to show off their dramatic acting chops, which is another topic of dissension.

What’s nice is that The Trip to Greece works well as a standalone film even if you haven’t seen the previous three films. If you have seen the previous “Trip” movies, you may already know what to expect. If you’re a fan, you’ll already know that spending time with these two hilarious guys is a perfectly fine alternative for being able to go on trips yourself.

The Full Monty director Peter Cattaneo’s new movie, MILITARY WIVES (Bleecker Street), is another movie I saw right before the NYC movie theater lockdown, when it was supposed to be released in mid-March. Bleecker Street has finally decided to give the movie a digital release, although maybe it’ll get into some of those newly-opened drive ins where it would play beautifully. As the title suggests, it takes place on a British military base where a group of wives, including Kristin Scott Thomas’ Kate, come together to form a recreational chorus to have fun and get their minds off their spouses at war. Kate is a type-A control freak, so she is immediately at odds with Sharon Horgan’s Lisa, who is more popular among the wives.

Going into this movie knowing that it’s based on a real story about wives who formed a singing group and knowing that this is directed by the guy behind The Full Monty may be all you need to know about what is generally a cutesie dramedy where a wide variety of group of women get together to support each other with all sorts of ups and downs. Listen, this isn’t exactly redefining the wheel other than this being a younger group of women than, say, Calendar Girls, but it’s in the same vein. This is basically a feel-good movie with a last act that gets a little corny, but it’s otherwise a wonderful story and Thomas leads a strong cast of women, joined by Greg Wise as her husband and Jason Flemyng as the officer in charge of the base.

This isn’t a terrible movie, and even though the last act starts to get corny as the women prepare for an Albert Hall performance, the film is otherwise a wonderful film full of emotions that only true curmudgeons would feel like their time was wasted by watching it. Bleecker Street will now release Military Wives on Hulu and digital just in time for Memorial Day weekend, which actually may have been more appropriate than its original March date.

The suspense thriller INHERITANCE (Vertical), directed by Vaughn Stein (Terminal) revolves around a wealthy and powerful Monroe family whose patriarch suddenly dies, leaving his daughter Lauren (Lily Collins) and wife (Connie Nielsen) with a shocking secret inheritance that could unravel their lives. I won’t say much about the secret, but it involves an almost unrecognizable Simon Pegg, spending much of his time in the dark with an American accent and giving a very different performance than we’ve seen from him.

I’m a big fan of Lily Collins as an actor, and I’m all for actors trying to stretch out a bit with their roles, but I’m not sure she was well-suited to play District Attorney Lauren Monroe, which may have worked better with an older actor. Although Collins is in her early ‘30s, she still looks very young, and because of that, it’s hard to believe her already being the D.A. (something which would generally take a dozen or more years as an attorney, one would expect). Pegg isn’t much better, and maybe because he too is trying something different from the norm. Since the majority of the movie is just the two actors, it involves as lot of over-emoting to creating dramatic fireworks that never fully arrive. Collins in particular tends to go over with every emotion in a performance that desperately needed to be scaled back. The rest of the cast is just okay with Nielsen having an even smaller part than Patrick Warburton -- an odd casting choice as Lauren’s father -- who dies as the film begins. Chace Crawford plays Lauren’s brother who is running for office, a subplot that add so little to the mix, except to try and create more tension.

I haven’t gotten around to seeing HBO’s Succession to know if there are any similarities in terms of its exploration of dark family secrets, but Inheritance is just not very good or interesting. The writing (by Matthew Kennedy) is weak, a bit like a bad television drama, in fact, and the severe miscasting just makes it harder for anyone to deliver on the material. Realizing this, Stein overpowers every scene with overdramatic score that makes it even harder to appreciate the actors’ efforts. In some ways, Inheritance reminded me of the recent Human Capital, which was generally a better film with a stronger story, but Stein’s inspiration clearly comes from all those ‘80s and ‘90s thrillers that try to keep the viewer on the edge of their seats. Like David Tennant’s Bad Samaritan a few years back, this one fails to get the viewer even remotely excited. (The movie was also valid proof of why I hate watching movies on my computer since most of the scenes are so dark, it’s hard to really get much out of it.) Inheritance has been playing on DirecTV since April 23, but it will be available On Demand and Digitally this Friday.

Paramount Players is the latest studio to go the VOD route with the found footage supernatural thriller, BODY CAM (Paramount Players), directed by Malik Vitthal (Netflix’s Imperial Dreams) and starring Mary J. Blige, Nat Wolff, Theo Rossi and more. It involves a routine traffic stop by police officers that leads to the grisly death of one of them, and the surviving officer (Mary J. Blige) realizing that the victim’s body cam footage may be able to show what really happened as she tries to understand the supernatural force behind a series of murders. Sadly, Paramount Players wouldn’t supply critics with early screeners to watch and review, so I may have to wait for one of my colleagues to shell out the bucks.

A movie I saw at least year’s Tribeca that will be available digitally this week is Sasie Sealy’s LUCKY GRANDMA (Good Deeds Entertainment), starring Tsai Chin as a recently-widowed and quite ornery 80-year-old Chinatown resident who goes to see a fortune teller who tells her she is going to have a very lucky day. Of course, she takes that as advice to go to Atlantic City where she wins big, but it’s her trip on the bus back where she gets lucky when a man with a bag full of cash dies. Grandma’s newfound bag of cash ends up attracting the attention of local gangsters, so to protect herself, she hires a rival gangster as her bodyguard. This is a really fun movie that I probably before I saw my #1 movie of 2019, The Farewell, and it’s only similar in that it involves a lovable Chinese grandma, and it mostly takes place in and around Chinatown in New York, but Sealy has a filmmaking style more in the vein of a Tarantino or even the Safdie Brothers where it really pushes the genre aspects of the story with the music choices, which are particularly fantastic. But really, it’s the amazing character created by Sealy with Tsai Chin that makes the movie so entertaining. I’m so glad that this is finally being released so more people can see it since it was such a popular but underseen movie at Tribeca last year.

Another film to look out for this weekend is Benjamin Ree’s documentary THE PAINTER AND THE THIEF (NEON), which won an award at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s the story of Czech artist Barbara Kysilkova, who has two paintings stolen by Karl-Bertil Nordland, but when she seeks out the thief, she ends up befriending him and asking him to sit for a portrait as a bond is formed between these unlikely people. It will also be available on Hulu, VOD, on various Virtual Cinema platforms AND at select drive-ins starting this Friday.

Also on digital this week is Philip (Boiling Point) Barantini’s action-thriller VILLAIN (Saban Films), starring Craig Fairbrass as ex-con Eddie Franks, who is trying to start a new life after leaving prison. He soon finds that impossible when he learns his brother owes a large amount of money to a dangerous drug lord, so Eddie has to return to that life of crime in order to help him.

FilmLinc’s Virtual series continues this week with a combination of new and repertory films, including Bruno Dumont’s Joan of Arc/Jeanne (KimStim), a sequel to Dumont’s 2017 musical, Jeanette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc. This one, which premiered as a selection in this year’s cut-short “Rendezvous with French Cinema,” stars ten-year-old Leplat Prudhomme, and it will get a one-week exclusive rental with 50% of its $10 rental to go to FilmLinc. Also this week, the venue’s Virtual series will include Raúl Ruiz’s 2010 film Mysteries of Lisbon, an HD premiere that includes new footage.

As mentioned last month, the docuseries, Time Warp: The Greatest Cult Films of All Time (Quiver Distribution), will continue this week with Volume 2: Horror and Sci-Fi, which is available right now on digital, On Demand, and while I haven’t watched this episode yet, if it’s even remotely as good as Vol. 1, this will be a must-see.

STREAMING AND CABLE

Paramount has another planned release going to streaming, and in this case, it’s Michael Showalter’s THE LOVEBIRDS, reuniting him with The Big Sick co-writer/star Kumail Nanjiani and pairing him with Issa Rae from HBO’s Insecure. Despite the title, the googly-eyed love between Nanjiani’s Jibran and Rae’s Leilani only lasts a few minutes before the film cuts forward after they’d been together for a few years, and things aren’t as copacetic. They are close to breaking up, but on a trip to their last party together, the couple’s car is hijacked by someone who claims to be a cop and is chasing a guy on a bicycle. When the carjacker kills said cyclist, Jibran and Leilani realize that they may not have been helping the good guy. They’re soon sent on a trip through an underground world of crime and conspiracy to clear their names since they feel as if they’re the primary suspects in the murder.

I actually was looking forward to The Lovebirds after seeing its first trailer at CinemaCon last year. I generally like Nanjiani and really wanted him to bounce back from last year’s Stuber, which was pretty disappointing. Teaming him Rae seems to have done the trick since they’re both funny in their own right, but then they have former “The State” and “Stella” member Showalter at the helm, and he’s proven with his growing filmography as a director that he’s good at mixing laughs and even going fully R-rated when necessary. While the trip the duo takes isn’t particularly enlightening or different from other “buddy action comedies” (other than bringing together their own comic sensibilities), it all leads up to quite an amusing Eyes Wide Shut parody before its semi-obvious climax and endings.

Sure, some of the funniest bits of The Lovebirds were in the trailer, and some moments are downright corny, because you generally can figure out where it’s going. I did prefer this more comedic take on the premise that was slightly similar to last year’s Queen and Slim, and the combination of Showalter, Nanjiani and Rae allows the movie to go to newer comedic territory than we’ve seen from any of them.

In other words, this is still far better than Stuber and a lot of the Adam Sandler comedies produced by Netflix, so the streaming network kind of lucked out by having the opportunity to stream this semi-decent comedy, which more people are likely to see on the streaming service than they would have in theaters.

Next week, more movies not in theaters!

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

#TheWeekendWarrior #Movies #Reviews #TheLovebirds #TheTripToGreece #Military Wives #Inheritance #Streaming #VOD #Digital

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