the incredible expressions of someone who absolutely Did Not Think This Through

I know that the subtitles do not show it, but I played it again with headphones after suspecting, and Crosshair’s exact words at the terminal on Tantiss are, “They’re after O-”

HE WAS ABOUT TO SAY HER NAME.

don't think I'm not still deep in the episode 7 brainrot. because OH BOY AM I

(also one more extremely, obnoxiously self-referential thing, I'm -- I'm so sorry)

I am obsessed with Atem right now. It's been going on for a few months. There's a story here but I can't write for shit. I'll upload a lot more soon!

You ever think about how neither of them got to say goodbye?

BESTIES HOW ARE WE FEELING RIGHT NOW

@vinosscum introduced me to the first Mistborn book,

Not to be too dramatic but this has been me reading the teasers for Hoard and still having to wait 2.5 more months to see it

JACE CARRYING HIS BROTHER’S CLOTHES TO THE PYRE BC THEY NEVER FOUND HIS BODY IM GOING TO SOB

ARTEMYRA WAYCREST ⬩ high half-elf ⬩ warlock ⬩ noble

Given how much of the spotlight they've been putting on Crosshair, I'm worried he'll either be the batcher to die this season, or he'll be the only one left standing

That said though, who do YOU think is saying goodbye at the end of this season?

Reblog for a bigger sample size!!

page 1 | page 2 | page 3 | page 4 | page 5 | page 6 | page 7 | page 8 | page 9 | page 10 | page 11 | page 12 (you are here)

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ID:

Panel one shows Tenzō having turned away from Kakashi. There's tears running down his face again, but his posture hasn't gotten tight and defensive again. "Hah. That's a pretty big drawback," he says, half joking,

Panel two, Kakashi's arms enter the frame and grasp the edges of Tenzō's happuri. Tenzō, seemingly caught off guard, lets him do this, too surprised to even mind that Kakashi can see his tears. "On the bright side, you have a home," Kakashi counters, "people you trust,"

"and a shiftless, good-for-nothing Captain, who's too lazy to fill out the paperwork for hospital-dodging." Kakashi says in panel three. The image shows Kakashi smiling more convincingly, if a little apologetic, gripping Tenzō's happuri in his hand.

Panel four shows him holding Tenzō's happuri out with one hand, and Tenzō grabbing the metal sides of it with both of his own hands. "Anyway, I'm pretty sure you're not a liability or a threat to Konoha," Kakashi says.

In the final panel of the comic, Tenzō ducks his head, looking up with one tearful eye as Kakashi reaches out. Tenzō is still gripping his happuri in his hands, close to his chest. Kakashi's back is drenched in the yellow light of the hall.

"My couch is yours, if you want to stay the night," Kakashi is saying as he ruffles Tenzō's long, now-unbound hair.

/end ID

So I'm in the middle of this research project centered on Dario Argento's OPERA, for which I have required myself to watch as many screen adaptations of the Gaston Leroux novel The Phantom of the Opera as I can take. What I have determined so far is that the Phantom of the Opera is a story everyone wants to tell, but not very many people are sure of how to tell it. In fact, it's not that easy to say what it is about archetypally. You know, Wolfman stories are typically about "the beast in man" (with femininity positioned as some sort of cure for this personality split), Frankenstein stories are usually about human nature (i.e. an uncanny creature can have more humanity than vain and bigoted humans), Dracula-type vampire stories are most generally about the problems of being an outsider (queer, foreign, etc). But Phantom of the Opera is like...well, everyone likes the love story part of it, which is more or less modeled on Dracula, with a woman torn between seductive darkness and the safety of square society. But then there are all these other parts that seem to flummox people in the retelling.

I haven't read the Leroux novel YET but the first round of movies have been interesting, and also sort of perplexing. The iteration from 1925 holds up, largely due to Chaney's creation of the Phantom which remains a top tier monster. People don't often talk about the mask though! Which looks like a cross between Peter Lorre and the Devo Boogie Boy, it's disturbing and I like it.

This Phantom was born in the dungeons during a revolutionary bloodbath and is disfigured from birth, drawing on the antique idea that a mother's trauma is translated in the deformity of her children; also, compellingly, these dungeons lie fathoms beneath the opera house where the bourgeoisie are witlessly dancing on the graves of martyrs and criminals embodied in the Phantom. The ingenue Christine is an interesting figure who breaks up with her boyfriend at the beginning because she wants to give her whole self to her career; when the Phantom starts murmuring to her through the walls it's as if the spirit of opera itself has chosen her to be its avatar, which she seems to find totally rational. It's sort of cool, what other movie of this era has a likeable heroine choosing her potential for greatness over love? This is the element of the story that is the most interesting, but I'll expand on that in a minute.

The Chaney edition benefits a lot from keeping things simple. The 1943 version with Claude Raines has a little bit too much going on and the story doesn't get a lot of time to congeal between so many long opera sequences; this movie really takes the opera part of the title seriously! Actually they're the best thing about it, mostly because of Nelson Eddy who is extremely beautiful and a real opera singer, and who projects this blazing desire for Susanna Foster that is incredibly convincing. Like I'd normally say they have great chemistry, but I think it's just a lot of power radiating from him specifically.

Ahem.

Uh anyway. This movie picks up the reoccurring (but not universal) idea that the Phantom is a genteel and sophisticated composer who has just fallen on hard times, who goes mad when his latest concerto is stolen. He is disfigured while struggling with the plagiarist and installs himself under the opera house where he can haunt his former protege Christine, who is already torn between dreamy Nelson Eddy and her stuffy cop boyfriend. One of my favorite things here is that even though this film is extremely quaint and old fashioned, everybody hates cops; this Christine is less a self-determined careerist than someone who is under pressure from her artist friends who find it profoundly repulsive that she is dating a policeman. Meanwhile the Phantom is just way too gentle and sappy, which is extra disappointing because Claude Rains's Invisible Man is so fabulously chaotic and sadistic, it made me really aware of the Phantom that could have been. This one doesn't properly represent the high society vs. underworld dichotomy that Christine should be torn between. So what is this movie about? There's so many guys in it and a few different themes flapping in the breeze. Is it about love? Is it about self-actualizing through art? Is it about the cutthroat world of showbusiness? It doesn't have that much to say, ultimately, and it just seems really unmotivated. Also I don't like this mask, sue me.

The Hammer edition is even more disappointing, considering the studio's previous successes with Universal Monster remakes. Here Christine is torn between a suave opera producer, the lecherous composer who has plagiarized the Phantom, and yeah the Phantom. Too many guys, it confuses whatever the dynamic and themes are supposed to be. Michael Gough as the plagiarist is so much more evil and threatening than poor Herbert Lom's Phantom that it's hard to stay focused on the main point here. Curiously the Hammer version is rather unromantic, with the Phantom just slapping Christine around until she sings his tunes right; that is kind of refreshing in a way, although it also means that the film lacks tension, which contributes to its being surprisingly anticlimactic. The best guy in the movie is actually Thorley Walters whose character serves almost no narrative purpose at all, he just hulks around with this WTF? look on his face and it is kind of adorable. I guess I like the gross mask in this one, too.

But the Hammer version has one interesting strength, which is that Christine is singing the lead in a new opera about Joan of Arc. Just like Joan, Christine hears a disembodied voice prophesizing her ascent to power. The best thing about the Phantom lore is the idea that the woman has this latent power that can either be activated by the Phantom, or suppressed by her square boyfriend (the relationship being mutually exclusive with opera stardom in many iterations). She isn't just a love object to be possessed, she herself possesses of some kind of devastating energy that needs to be awakened and channeled--or contained and forgotten, if she decides to get married and stay home or something. This is pretty cool, and it is interestingly realized in Dario Argento's OPERA, in which (spoiler alert I guess) a killer stalks an opera singer with the aim of catalyzing her own latent psychopathy. This idea is at the center of my thesis and I'm looking forward to fleshing it out, although I'm kind of dreading all the other PHANTOMs that I have committed myself to watching. I really don't want to deal with Andrew LLoyd Webber at all, but after I get through at least the Joel Schumacher one of the those I'm going to reward myself with a rewatch of PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE which I'm going to guess right now is the best retelling of this story after the Chaney one. I'm counting on Paul Williams' music to be catchier than Webber's.

I'm whining about my own decisions, I know, but really the main hardship of this project is that now I keep getting the Vandals' punk theme song from PHANTOM OF THE MALL: ERIC'S REVENGE stuck in my head, and let me tell you that is very unwelcome. Here it is, if you've decided you're done being happy and sane:

I remember making a shitpost comparing Han Dong soo and Park Jun mo as protagonists just because how similiar I thought they were. But now that we're in the last week of Evilive, I can't believe how fucking right I was.

I will make a more cohesive post talking about all the parallels between the two, but what's more fascinating to me is how different, on the contrary, Do young and Gicheol are. Do young is a man fuelled by pure ambition, refusing to let his heart (if he even has one) dictate his course of action, ready to sacrifice anyone and anything to achieve his goals. Gicheol, on the other hand, is purely driven by his emotions and personal connections to people. In a way, he is a slave to them, he just can't help but love too much, care too much.

And yet, "greed" is a factor that bounds these two incredibly contrasting individuals. In Do young's case, the greed is for being the sole proprietor of the Shinnam Ferry Business, willing to trample Dong soo's ambitions for it if he has to. While for Gicheol, the greed is for still wanting a normal life with the woman (and man) he's loved when they both emotionally manipulated him for their own selfish gains.

Do young and Gicheol are both extremely violent people, willing to kill and maul people that threaten them. For Gicheol, it is more a defensive instinct in a "kill or be killed" situation and it is almost always when him and one of his loved ones are in danger. But Do young is a sadist predator who genuinely enjoys inflicting torture on people, both physical and mental. He kills for himself, and wouldn't get involved in shit unless it benefits him somehow.

and of course they've both got "partners" who are essentially a worse version of them. Gicheol openly admits how he could "see himself" in Junmo while Do young carefully crafted Dong soo's monstrous persona in his own image. They're not the two sides of the same coin but after a point, they ARE the same coin. And one coin cannot be two different things at the same time--so one has to go. That's how it always goes in these type of stories.

For both Dong soo and Junmo, Do young and Gicheol are both, the people who put them on a pedestal and the people who they'll have to get rid of to continue being on that pedestal. For Junmo, it was clear from the start--Gicheol's downfall was his mission, the only way to get that coveted promotion. For Dong soo it will be more complicated, but the signs are all there. If Do young can't give him what he wants anymore, he'll have to figure a way to get it himself, even if it's the cost of getting rid of Do young.

There's a heavy Jesus-Judas, "my savior who came to ruin my life", betrayal disguised as devotion symbolism going on throughout both shows. We've already seen how it all ends with the worst of evil, with Junmo on the top of the world, alone, with the corpses of the people he trampled over to get there lying at his feet.

I doubt it would be any different for Dong soo.

I posted this on twitter yesterday and forgot to do so here, but look!! it’s Them and I’m Love Them so there!!! (artwork by @britishmuffin bless)