✨Introducing my tavs✨

because I am unable to shut up about them I will now proceed to introduce my tavs:

(warning since one of them is a dark urge character!)

that‘s skylla! skylla brightsworn. she lived in elturel when she was young but due to her father deserting from the hellriders she and her parents (carakos and zagreia) left the city and hoped to build a new life for themselves in baldurs gate. as they travelled they got ambushed by goblins. she was able to hide but her parents left their lives dying due to poisoning. skylla made it to baldur‘s gate but spent many years on the streets until a bard decided to help her out and take her to the temple of oghma, god of knowledge, binder of what is known. the following years she spent as an acolyte tending to the temple and following her curious nature in books and studies of her own. before being abducted by the nautiloid ship she was on her way to where elturel once was, looking for survivors, refugees, offering her clerical power for help.

she‘s a happy go lucky kind of girl, very optimistic until the last straw snapped. she loves hearing people‘s stories and naturally write them down. her and karlach fell in love and she would and does literally go through hell for her. I like to think that after all the events they settle down for a short time so Skylla can document all their tales for the temple but adventure soon calls them (and Wyll) out again. so they set out on new adventures as a little group.

her fatal flaw is easily trusting and never having heard the sentence „curiousity kills the cat“ (seriously, girl, get a grip some times!). also that she has to pick up anything edible she can find and being in constant worry that they might not have enough food or won‘t find food again due to her time on the street.

next up:

xerxa! oooh, boy. xerxa is my dark urge character and absolutely not out for redemption.

xerxa is a drow cleric of eilistraee, her class a reminder of a once attempted try to break from the shackles of her destiny as a bhaalspawn.

she grew up in the cult of eilistraee and had a fairly happy childhood until the urges started. one night her mother woke up to strange noises and found her daughter shaking, covered in blood and guts, her fathers body on the floor and a knife in her hand. she sent her daughter away. unknowing what would happen, easier to cover it as an unknown act than to face what evil urge had overcome her daughter that night. xerxa cried a lot that night, unable to understand the frenzy that had overtaken her and why nobody would help her. she wandered, finding out that killing was a skill she possessed, hunting small animals and not having to hunger. she saw visions in the night, visions of gore, murder, her destiny. and sceleritas who appeared and led her to the temple of bhaal, leaving a trail of death to satiate the urge she made her way to baldur‘s gate and to the temple of bhaal.

she does not feel clarity most of the time but after a while of satiating her urge she felt a sense of denial overcoming her, a feeling that she should not be like this. she left the temple, once again praying to eilistraee, praying for freedom, for forgiveness, she played a dangerous game studying the lore of eilistraee, doing services, learning clerical magic until her bloody destiny caught up to her again.

the nautiloid crash could have been a new beginning but for a new beginning with a past like that she would have needed more knowledge of herself. she mostly gave into the urge after that not even remembering her childhood or anything at first. she allied with minthara out of familiarity, hoping for her to know things, for them to be similar but also out of pure blood lust.

later on minthara and her bond in different ways, they are vulnerable around each other and become a team to take vengeance on who did them wrong and to become powerful enough to not fear anyone wanting to take control of them.

before that she has a brief relationship with gale that is not based on love at all. she has a complicated relationship with everyone in camp, not really allowing anyone to get to close, gale was pawn in her eyes but honestly she is also just a lesbian.

Jen and Hazel return to the table with a bottle of wine with condensation on it and four glasses from the china cabinet. I have that feeling again like I am pretending to be somebody I am not as I yank the cork out of the bottle and pour some for each of us. I don’t really know how much wine goes into a normal glass, I realise, as I have only ever had it straight from the bottle or whichever cup was available, when measures didn’t seem like an important thing.  

“Not so much,” Hazel giggles, covering her glass with her hand, “It goes to my head very easily, you see, I’ve only been drinking since February.”

I assume that’s when she turned eighteen, and I find it interesting, actually, to encounter a person who waited, actually waited until the law said she could drink. Hazel is not like the rest of us, we who necked cans of lager at thirteen and said ludicrous, performative things like “Oh I’m sick of drinking, I feel like I’ve done enough of it,” by sixteen. I ponder too, as I sit back and swish the liquid around in its stemmed vessel whether my new, adult life will have a lot of new things like dinner parties and wine from proper glasses. The thought alone makes me feel strange and unprepared.

Over our food, Hazel shares an anecdote about one of her uncles who crashed his motorbike and survived. She’s a very unusual sort of person, and the way she speaks, by delivering shocking or disgusting details is as though she has no notion of the impact they might have upon us while eating, but still, I like her, and I can see why Jen does too. There must be something freeing about being her, like it has never once occurred to her to consider another person's opinion of her, and it’s the kind of thing you might hope would rub off on you after being around her for long enough.

Jen gazes adoringly at her the entire time, hanging on her every word with a full, untouched plate in front of her and I think that it’s also funny that Hazel seems entirely oblivious to Jen’s feelings, blatantly on her sleeve. Jen and I are made of the same things. She would say that there is some cosmic reason, written by the stars or the planets, but we can never disguise our emotion. Always pining, forever yearning for something or someone-

“Why do you put so much sauce on everything?” Michelle says, out of nowhere. 

“I dunno? I just like sauce.”

Jen is irritated that we have interrupted Hazel’s flow, “Jude always piles sauce onto things, I don’t think it’s a big deal.”

“Yeah but it’s so much, I'm just a bit disgusted looking at it, especially while listening to this story about Hazel’s uncle's injuries.”

A glob of red sauce and mayonnaise drops out of the bottom of my burger and I scoop it from the plate with my finger, “You shouldn’t look then.”

She scoffs, and there is a brief but uncomfortable pause at the table that I ignore in favour of turning my face away and watching Goose instead. Goose who is mesmerised by a little brown bird that has landed just outside the window. He paws hungrily at the window with paws pink like jelly beans and opens his mouth in a silent mew of frustration. 

“I’m going inside for a minute,” I announce, though Hazel is now in the middle of the most shocking and gruesome part of her story, where her uncle's wound turns septic or something, and has to pause again for me, but I have developed a keen sense for when it’s time to take space from Michelle and let her get over whatever specific thing about me that is bothering her at any given moment. I slip away and carefully let myself inside the dining room, blocking Goose with my legs as I do. 

“Hello, Goosey, do you mind if I hang out with you for a minute?” 

He chirps and blinks his big, dopey eyes, and I take it as a sign that he’s cool with it, and I let him weave around my ankles as I scratch his head with two fingers. I feel a surge of affection, maybe even sympathy for him and his weird little face, stroking his fuzzy chest now as he flips over onto his back with four legs in the air like a dog.  

We had a cat back in Albuquerque, Soda Popinski, named for a character from Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, an NES game that my cousin Justin got addicted to when he was nine. Justin was fourteen when I was born, and Soda Popinski was around for much, much longer. She was a big, surly tabby who lay in the sun for ninety percent of her day and sometimes ate the flies that buzzed around the terrace door, if she could be bothered. The other ten percent was spent hunting, us specifically, hiding behind corners to lunge at us, or tricking us into rubbing her belly so that she could grate ten inches of skin from our forearms for being so thick. Everyone in the house discussed Soda in tones that suggested she was pure evil from birth, but in an affectionate way, because it’s not as though we were ever going to get rid of her. She was as part of the house as the screws that held its frame together, and the idea of not having her terrorising us was almost sad.

I don’t think she hated us, it was simply her nature to be a bit savage, and I imagined that she was nastier to other creatures than she was to our family. Sometimes she’d leap in through the bathroom window when it was open, usually conveniently while someone was in the bath, with a dead bird or mouse in her chops, proudly dropping it on the edge of the tub in a pool of its own blood as if she were paying her rent, and I suppose it was some shade of love. 

She went missing the year I moved away. Aunt Maureen told me during our weekly phone call, and gently suggested that some older cats go away to hide when they were ready to die. I was crushed knowing that the house I had grown up in would never feel exactly the same ever again.

When I cried over Soda Popinski I cried over everything, all of it, the change and the unfamiliarity, all of the upheaval that I wasn't ready for, but that was the only time I let myself do it in front of anyone. I told my mom it was just because of the cat. She believed me and stopped asking.

I scoop Goose into my arms and carry him into the kitchen so that he can keep me company while I forage a can of 7-Up from the fridge, something I feel I’d prefer to be drinking than the wine that remains as not-very-nice as it’s always been, despite being served correctly in an adult glass. I sip it in peace on the kitchen island for a while as the kitten climbs all over me like he thinks I’m a tree, eventually resting where my neck and back curves and purrs there, his vibrations rumbling through to my chest. 

We enjoy several minutes of blissful solitude before there is a tap on the window. 

“Jude!” Jen is waving at me, “What are you doing in there? Come back out, and will you bring another bottle of wine when you do?”

I shoot her a thumbs up and carefully lift Goose onto the floor, then pull something at random from the wine rack. He’s at my ankles the whole way to the door. “You like me, don’t you? You’re infatuated with me.” I say to him, as though it isn’t total projection. 

“God, no, Jude,” Michelle starts the moment I open the door, “it was the wine from the fridge. Not that one.”

I glance at the bottle, “We can't just have this one?”

“No, because it’s the wrong one.”

“Isn't wine just wine, though?”

She uses the slow, impatient voice on me that teachers used to when they thought I was being stupid on purpose, “That one is red wine, we’ve not been drinking red wine we’ve been drinking white, and also, it’s not even the one that I bought for-”

“Goose!” Hazel shrieks and I almost drop the bottle onto the patio. The kitten is a grey blur as he makes a dash for the bushes.  This moment, far too late, is when I realise I have left the door ajar. 

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My Thoughts on Alien Covenant

So I am not exactly a stranger to the Alien film series. While I haven’t sat down and watched the films all the way through, the internet had pretty much spoiled most of them for me anyway. So with a decent enough knowledge of the film series, I went into Alien Covenant looking forward to a great sci-fi horror flick done by Ridley Scott himself. I wasn’t disappointed. The film was thoroughly enjoyable and I had a great time watching it. The film is by no means perfect, but it did what it set out to do, which was tie up the loose ends of Prometheus while setting up the origins of the Xenomorphs. If you are still planning on seeing the film, but are a little conflicted about it, I advise you to go for it. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

So, the film. For one, I think it does horror well. To me horror is about two things, anticipation and spectacle. Alien has both of these traits, though if you are like me and saw most of the trailers and such then the anticipation fell off at some points throughout the film. Nevertheless the spectacle is there in glorious gory sequences throughout the film. Me being the edgy author I am, I love a good bit of gore on screen, however too much of it can make me feel sick or can just look obnoxious and dumb. Alien’s gore is what makes it so terrifying. The sounds, visuals, and overall effects. Everything weaves together perfectly to paint a grisly painting in motion. Props to the effects department because nearly every gruesome moment had me in complete shock. But I am not here to talk about effects, I am here to talk about the writing.

Alien Covenant has a decent story to tie together its intense survivalist thriller atmosphere. It’s story opens with a conversation between Peter Weyland and David, the android from Prometheus. Right from the gate, the film does nothing to hide its relation to Prometheus. Alien Covenant was planned to be the film that answered many of Prometheus’ questions, even though some of them aren’t even worth answering. (Check out the Prometheus video over at Cinema Wins, I think it does a very good job of explaining things.) The thing is, and this is true for Prometheus from what I have seen from it, both films are very straight forward. Everything you need to know is on screen and when you take that into account, there aren’t many plot holes and are more or less some questions that are purposely left unanswered. This is mainly in relation to a certain character’s motivations. That being said, the film has a simple plotline compared to Prometheus’ commentary on the “who made us” debacle. We get a few small little anecdotes of philosophy, but in all honesty I’m okay with it. There really isn’t much need for Covenant to go into those topics because Prometheus said all that needed to be said. Instead we simply get to see our cast of would be heroes survive on an alien planet that just so happens to be trying to kill them. The plot serves nothing more than to carry our heroes through the gore slick locales of the film. Now this is where I am going to get into the spoilers for the film as I can’t exactly analyze the writing without going into its plot. If you haven’t seen the film then I advise you to stop reading here.

With spoiler alerts out of the way, I wanna begin by giving a brief mention to our main character. Daniels is far more badass than Prometheus’ Elizabeth Shaw, and can easily stand among the likes of Ripley (and her daughter if you wanna count Alien: Isolation.) Daniels is an amazing lead and Katherine Waterston did a fantastic job, but she isn’t the only great character here. The entire cast is thoroughly enjoyable, even if some of them don’t last very long. Hell, James Franco is in the movie for a whole five minutes, in which he is burned alive while in hyper sleep. The characterization is also very well done as that first five minutes of roasted James Franco gives us a bit of a glimpse into the minds of Covenant’s crew. This is where I should probably mention that Covenant, the namesake of the film, is also the name of the colony ship our characters are crewing. The film opens with the ship getting hit by a radiation storm in space that causes a malfunction forcing the crew awake early. Sadly, not all of the crew make it and Daniel’s husband, James Franco, is killed by his sleeping pod exploding. This whole moment shows us just how much of a risk these people have taken by joining a crew like this. Their responsibility is to two thousand colonists and their safe passage to a suitable home. This of course is where we come to one of the bigger problems of the film that people are going to latch on to. What is happening on Earth that would force humanity to start sending out colony ships? My guess is simply this, just refer back to Prometheus’ answers to quite literally everything. Covenant exists simply because humanity could do it. Humanity sent a colony ship out into deep space because they could. It is as simple as that. Ridley Scott has said he would like to do a film where the Xenomorph ends up on Earth somehow, but until that happens we can assume things back on our homeworld are prosperous, more or less.

Events pass and we eventually get our McGuffin of the film in the form of a transmission from Elizabeth Shaw. The transmission is barely understandable, yet Tennessee (yes that is his name) is able to figure out she is singing “Country Roads” for some reason. From this transmission, the Covenant crew discovers a planet far closer to their current position that has all the suitable parameters for a colony. Now, I can totally see why people would get kind of pissy about this because of how tropey it is, but it at least makes sense. Both Daniels and Christopher, the captain, have valid reasoning for exploring or ignoring the newfound planet. Daniels is against the plan simply because they have no way of knowing what is down on that planet. Christopher agrees but wants to find out what is down there, especially since it has all the needs a colony would require. Basically it’s a “nothing ventured, nothing gained” sort of plot thread. I personally think it works fine, it is a simple plot thread that gets us to where our characters need to be for shit to go down. Plus it does kind of play around with the audience expectations a bit. I originally thought their original destination was going to be where the horror was waiting but, nope. The funny thing is, either option is tropey as hell. It honestly feels like the film has to use tropes because of it’s plot structure, and there really isn’t anything wrong with it because it doesn’t dwell too much on those tropes in the first place given how linear the plot is.

So, needless to say, the crew heads down to the surface of this uncharted planet and shit goes down, of course. The progression of events is pretty standard for a horror film. There really isn’t anything groundbreaking here, though I do like that we didn’t see any Facehuggers aboard the derelict  Engineer’s ship. Which, when thinking about it, I find kind of amusing because the second half of the film follows classic Alien’s plot structure way too closely. The first half of the film is by far the superior half. While it does have a very standard progression in its plot, the escalation and spectacle keep it terrifying. I was struck silent once things started ramping up, and while I honestly think it was dumb as hell that one of the crew mates had his face literally RIGHT UP IN FRONT OF THE VIRUS’ SPORES, at least the crew isn’t all scientists like in Prometheus. Speaking of Prometheus, the first half of the film does a lot to expand upon Prometheus and bridge the gap between that film and Alien. We see the return of the virus from Prometheus but it would seem that this version is far more rampant. Prometheus gave us a sort of glimpse of what the virus did with humans, but after awhile and many, more than likely, modifications from David, the virus is much more potent. When two of the crew mates are infected we see the extent of what David’s virus has done. We get to see the emergence of a new alien monster, that I honestly enjoy a lot more than the Xenomorph. The aptly named, Neomorph, is an amazingly fresh creature to add to the expanding film universe of Alien and a much more memorable creature at that. The Neomorph was far more visually impressive than the creatures of Prometheus, minus the Engineer. That and it also isn’t just a variant Xenomorph, it has a different life cycle and it has a completely different behavior. The Neomorph is definitely what made the first half of the film so enjoyable, but we more than likely will never see it again, which is a little sad.

As the film goes on we eventually meet up with David who rescues our heroes from one of their own who turned into a Neomorph. I kind of like this angle they went with for David. They made David out to be this sort of survivor type of character. They even gave him longer hair and such to make him about as grizzled as an android can look. I expected him to have been studying the natural evolution of the virus and that he discovered the Xenomorphs, turns out he created them instead. Oh and he also has a preserved and dissected body of Elizabeth Shaw lying around. Fun times. But yes, that is our origin story. David basically nuked a planet that may or may not have been the Engineer’s homeworld with their own virus in one of the most disturbing scenes I have seen in a long time, and he proceeded to play at being god. Before I get more into David though, I want to talk about his counterpart, Walter. Walter is a later generation model that was designed to be more efficient than his predecessors. This means that he is forbidden to create and therefore one could see him as barely human. This is especially true from Christopher’s perspective as he treats Walter like shit. Walter’s “humanity” is also a great parallel to David’s, as David is almost too human to a fault as he essentially is repeating the same mistakes that his creator made. This of course brings us to the creation of the Xenomorph which, honestly, I think was done a bit poorly. Having David trick Chris into looking into one of the Xenomorph eggs was honestly kind of annoying. They could have done so much with this side of the plot and instead they stuck close to their guns and kept it roughly the same as the original Alien film. Guy looks into the egg, Facehugger latches onto him, Chestburster rips through guy, and Bob’s your uncle. My point is, we’ve seen this before, it’s nothing new. All it does is play into nostalgia, which far too many films and tv shows do nowadays, and that is something that doesn’t work with horror. You have to try damn hard to make something persistently scary, but after years of Alien stories, both in films and in the expanded universe, executing a scene like this is kind of a let down. Granted, the Chestburster scene that followed was pretty damn brutal and it completely outdid the original, but it still was nothing new, and that was the ultimate disappointment here. Even then, it was hype to see the Xenomorph make his appearance, and it did not disappoint. Granted the horror was kind of gone since Daniels was taking no shits and the film did the same thing it always does to kill a Xenomorph. Oh, hey, let’s chuck him out into space. Can we PLEASE get something new!? Is that too much to ask.

While I am not particularly a fan of this origin story, I don’t hate it. It fits the character and makes enough sense to be believable. David is a maniacal and manipulative son of a bitch, so this kind of thing is pretty much right in the ball park for him. However, I am disappointed that we couldn’t get a more Lovecraftian origin story that harkened back to the original Alien. The first film is hailed as a Lovecraftian horror film, especially because of H.R. Geiger’s art work that influenced the Xenomorph’s design. Instead we got a simple answer, and that’s fine, but they could have done a lot more and that is what makes me feel disappointed. I would have loved to see more Lovecraftian writing within this film series, but it seems after the success of Aliens way back in 1986, I don’t think we will ever truly return to the Lovecraftian roots of the Alien series.

I’m not going to say the film was bad, because it wasn’t. I enjoyed it thoroughly and it had a lot going for it, but unfortunately the second half did nothing to stray from the conventions of its predecessors. Hopefully when we see Alien return to the big screen we will get a much more intriguing story surrounding the Xenomorphs. All in all the film is entertaining and that’s good. The writing is to the point and straightforward and doesn’t do anything too philosophical. Granted the ending is sequel bait, and that is a bit of an issue, but if you are like me and just want to enjoy yourself watching this film then you should feel right at home. I can still say I enjoyed it despite it’s shortcomings and I think that is a good sign. Give Alien Covenant a shot if you are in the mood for some good sci fi horror. Hope you enjoyed the article.

Stay Frosty, Adam Schmidt