#they’ve committed every horror movie no no up to this point | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

xjustakay · 7 months

Text

(10/3) prompt: zombie — 1,220 words (mild sexual content; scare maze shenanigans) @jegulus-microfic

James is honestly beginning to regret every decision that’s led him up to this moment. He knows why he let himself be talked into going to a scare park this year, but he’s having a hard time keeping it in mind the longer he’s there. The thing is, he usually doesn’t scare so easily. His boyfriend loves horror movies and supernatural type shows, they’ve watched plenty of them together.

When he’s living in a moment straight out of one, though? It’s a little different.

The Undead Outbreak walkthrough is fucking killer, he’ll give them that. He’d lost his friends a little ways in, going opposite directions in the maze. Stupidly, James is now left alone, no one to cling onto, bracing himself for whatever jumpscare comes out at him next. The strobe lights and fog machines make it hard to tell what’s a person and what’s a prop, but he’s doing his best.

Rounding a corner, James finds himself at a fork in the walkway. From what he can tell, one way is slightly better lit than the other —meaning that’s probably the better option, probably leads to somewhere he actually wants to be. Still, he hesitates a beat, squinting toward the darker passageway. He thinks he can make out what’s meant to be a door a ways down, blocked off with yellow caution tape that reads ‘do not open’ in bold letters, splattered with fake blood.

More than likely a dead end. There’s got to be a zombie lurking in the shadows down there, waiting for an unsuspecting victim to launch themselves at.

James turns to face the way he’d just come from, debating whether or not it’s wise to backtrack and find more of a crowd to follow. Just so he knows he’s potentially going the right way instead of either of these new ones. He’s not having an easy time figuring it out on his own. Safety in numbers, or whatever, even if none of this is real.

Before he can commit to a decision, however, there’s a hand clasping at the back of his sweatshirt, tugging. He’s not embarrassed to admit that he lets out a pathetically scared noise, trying to squirm away from the firm hold. The snarl of a zombie is uncomfortably close to his ear as he’s towed toward the blocked off door he noticed at the dead end’s walkway.

Logically, James recalls a reminder from earlier in the day that the scare actors aren’t supposed to touch the guests. Unfortunately, the logical part of his brain isn’t firing on all cylinders as he’s being dragged through a horror maze he can barely see clearly in.

He’s shoved back into the wall, a forearm barred across his chest to pin him there. It takes him a moment, maybe two, to adjust to the dimmer flashes of light in this area. Then he recognizes what’s happened; familiarity in the zombie’s dark curls and sharp jaw, even painted with false blood and rot, filmy contacts blocking out grey irises.

“Hi, baby.”

“Oh, fuck you,” James wheezes, thunking his head back against the wall.

Regulus laughs, snapping his teeth playfully at him. “Told you I’d find you.”

“Almost gave me a bloody heart attack, you dick.”

James tosses his boyfriend’s arm away from his chest, but makes a grab at the collar of Regulus’ tattered costume shirt instead. Before he can pull him in fully, he pauses, hazel eyes flickering over the gash at Regulus’ hairline, the couple zombie bites along his neck. James brushes his thumb along the edge of the prosthetic piece at the juncture of Regulus’ neck and shoulder, nose wrinkling faintly.

“These look so real,” He comments.

“Kind of the point,” Regulus chuckles. “I can give you one if you want.”

James snorts, eyes rolling good-naturedly now that his racing heart has started to slow back down. “Oh yeah?”

“Mhm.” Regulus leans forward to close the few inches between them, catching James’ lower lip between his teeth and pulling at it.

When it snaps back into place, James breathes in shallowly, mutters, “Baby, you’re at work.”

“I’m bored. Hardly anyone’s come down this way.” Regulus curls both hands at his hips, shifts to slot one leg between both of James’ thighs, pressing until James lets out a soft groan. Nosing along the line of his jaw, Regulus hums. “Best case even if they do, they’ll just think you work here, too, and that I’m eating you.”

“Interesting choice of words,” James exhales, half a laugh.

“That might be a little more obvious, I’m afraid,” Regulus mutters into the side of his neck. He kisses gently along the soft skin for a moment, James’ head lolling to the side to give him more room.

“Have to wait until we’re home, then.”

“Mm, can do this in the meantime, though.”

Without further preamble, he bites down, digs his teeth in in a way that toes the line between pain and pleasure. James gasps when Regulus sucks harshly at the bitten skin, inevitably leaving a mark behind. The grip at his hips tightens, guiding James to rock forward against the thigh pressed to the growing bulge in the front of his trousers. Regulus drags his lips an inch downward, sucks another mark into tan skin just below the first. James rolls his hips forward on instinct, digging his fingers in on either side of Regulus’ ribs.

“Reg—” James cuts off on a breathless moan when Regulus slips a hand into his back pocket, palming at his ass and pushing him forward still. “Baby, I’ve still got to walk out of here.”

“Plenty of time to walk off the hardon,” Regulus mumbles against his skin.

James hisses, hips jerking forward, when Regulus sinks his teeth in again, a third mark sucked in a straight line down the side of James’ neck. One of his hands lifts, sinking his fingers into familiar dark curls at the back of Regulus’ head and tugging slightly.

“Not my dick still being hard that I’m worried about,” James manages, moaning again after the fact.

Regulus hums lowly then licks a broad stripe up the trail of bruises he’s left behind, grazes his teeth at James’ earlobe. James shudders, taking in an equally shaking breath between parted lips.

“Straight down that way, two lefts, then a right,” Regulus murmurs in his ear.

James blinks dazedly up at the flash of strobe light above them. “What?”

Abruptly, Regulus cuts all contact with him, hands falling and a large step taken backward. He inclines his head the opposite direction from the current dead end when James frowns at him in question.

“The way out.”

James lets out a loud laugh, head shaking. “You’re actually the fucking worst, you know that?”

“Oh, I know, baby,” Regulus coos tauntingly, slick and reddened lips curled in a smirk.

The fake blood around his mouth is smeared even more than it already was, meaning there’s some mingling with the fresh bruises. James really might look like he was mauled by a zombie, actually. He shifts on unsteady legs, adjusting his current predicament in his trousers discreetly. Regulus’ lips twitch knowingly anyway.

James steps forward, catches Regulus’ chin between his thumb and forefinger. “I’ll see you at home.”

Regulus snaps his teeth playfully at him once again. “Can’t wait.”

#jegulus #jegulus microfic #things not to do in a scare maze #no matter how hot your scare actor bf is #we love it for them though #also i didn’t edit this so if it’s messy don’t look at me #kay’s writing #kay’s microfics

106 notes · View notes

biaswreckingfics · 3 years

Text

Demon! Jung Subin

Summary: Summoning a demon for revenge was clearly not the best idea.

Word Count: 1.3k

Warnings: language, implied death

This fic is part of my October event Thrills and Chills.

Stepping back to admire your handiwork, you study the pentagram you’ve hand-painted on the floor and wonder if you’re really about to go through with this. If what you’re doing is an entirely stupid idea, and if you should back out now while you still have the chance.

You’ve heard of people summoning demons before, of them getting everything they’ve desired. You’ve also heard about the stories where it blows up in their face, and the demon kills them. Were you willing to gamble your life to get revenge?

Your mind flashes back to the moment you walked into your boyfriend’s apartment and found him fucking your best friend. Your boyfriend of five years and your best friend since childhood committing one of the ultimate acts of betrayal. The blood had boiled in your veins, and you had wanted to kill them both on the spot.

Fuck yeah, you’re doing this. You have too much pride to let the two of them get away with hurting you like that, and if it costs you your life, then so be it. You’d rather be dead than have to come across either of those two ever again.

Crouching down to light the candles at each point of the pentagram, you grab the piece of paper you had printed out from some shady website and look down at the chant. The odds of this working were small, but you don’t care. You want revenge, and this is the only way you know how to get it without being thrown in prison.

Clearing your throat, you begin saying the chant. You follow the words and directions closely, repeating and doing what needs to be done. After nearly five minutes, you stop. How long are you supposed to do this for? How’re you supposed to know if anything even happens? A demon is just going to be standing in the pentagram like a movie?

Sighing, you let the directions fall to the floor. This is stupid. You’re stupid. You kneel on the floor and lean close to one of the candles to blow it out, but a rumble has you freezing. An earthquake? You didn’t get earthquakes in your area, but with the way the floor is rumbling… What else could it be?

You stand up to go look out the window and come face to face with a dark shape forming in the pentagram. Your eyes double in size, and a spike of fear zips through your heart. Holy. Shit. It’s working.

Slowly backing away from the symbol, you keep your eyes trained on the dark figure that is almost in a completely solid-state. You watch in awed horror as the black shadow forms into a dark, scaly creature. Its shape is humanoid. Its eyes are an intense obsidian that appear to be staring deep into your soul as it cocks its head to the side.

A growl so deep that it feels like it’s rumbling in your chest surrounds you. Then, suddenly, a multilayered voice that you’ve heard in nearly every paranormal movie or show you’ve ever seen reaches your ears.

“Did you summon me, human?”

Your eyes trail down its body, starting at its horned head, noticing its clawed hands, and then stopping at its matching feet. You gulp as a nervous fear sets in and steals any voice you have. The demon growls at your lack of answer before sniffing the air. A smile, if you can even call it that, grows on its face.

“Your fear is delicious.”

Taking a deep breath in an attempt to calm yourself, you say, “Yes, I summoned you.”

“And what would a stupid human like you want from a demon like me?” It taunts you.

“Revenge. I want revenge on two people,” you cautiously answer as your eyes rake its body.

The demon cocks its head with interest. After a moment, a shadow begins to ooze from its pores, shrouding it from your eyes. You wonder if the demon is leaving until the shadow retracts and in front of you now stands a young man.

You take in the new figure in surprise and hate yourself when you find him attractive. He’s a demon for Christ’s sake. Nothing about him is attractive. Not his narrowed eyes. Not his soft-looking lips. Nothing, you remind yourself.

A cocky smile grows on his face like he can hear everything you’re thinking, and your heart drops into your stomach. Can he?

“Who would you like revenge on?” His honey voice reaches your ears. “Lover? Family? Foe?”

Blinking a couple times, you look away from his somewhat accurate guesses. Curiously, you ask, “I’m guessing I’m not the only one?”

A musical laugh falls from the figure. “Humans are such fickle creatures. The need for instant gratification always weighs out intelligence. You all want things you can’t have, and the desperate ones are always idiotic enough to summon my kind to get it.”

You look at the ground in shame for a moment. You’re quite clearly in the last category, and the fact that the demon is the one pointing out you’re an idiot is a special kind of irony.

“My boyfriend and best friend.”

The demon’s eyebrows raise in interest. “Cheated, did they?”

Your eyes trail up to his as you confirm, and he shrugs his shoulders. “You’re not the first, and you won’t be the last.”

Letting out a shaky breath, you ask, “So, what will you do?”

“That depends on you. Are you willing to pay the price to get revenge?”

For some reason, it never dawned on you that you’d get this far. You never even considered what the demon would want in return.

“What’s the price, and what will you do?”

“I’ll make their lives a living hell. Make them think they’ve gone crazy and that someone is after them until they descend into absolute madness and lose their faculties.”

You consider if that’s what you want for them. You want them to pay for what they did – to suffer – but you stupidly never truly considered what you wanted to happen. You went into this entire thing half-cocked like an idiot. Just as the demon said.

“For your soul,” the demon finishes.

It feels like the breath is stolen from your lungs as your eyes wildly meet the demons. The price is your soul? To get revenge? No. No way. You’ll drag their names through social media before you sell your damn soul to a demon.

“No.”

He cocks a brow at you. “No?”

“The price is too high. I’m not selling you my soul.”

The demon’s eyes grow hard as he stares at you. It’s like you can almost see the fire burning behind the blackness.

“Are you telling me you’ve summoned me here only to refuse me?” He growls at you, causing fear to spike in your heart.

“I guess so.”

The demon lets out a small laugh before it turns into a louder one.

“You think you can deny me?” He demands as he steps out of the pentagram, completely walking over the protection circle you made. You gasp and quickly back away from him. “You think your stupid little protection stones are going to stop me? Child, you do not know who I am or what I can do, but tonight, you’ll experience it firsthand.”

It shifts back into its original, demonic form, and you back away as it advances on you, tripping over any and everything. Tears stream down your face as it nears, and you realize the horrible mistake you’ve made. Any attempts to scream are dashed because fear has paralyzed your vocal cords, and once you hit the wall behind you and are trapped between a counter and a chair, you know this is the end.

Its clawed hand grips your throat, cutting off your air supply as it leans in close to your face. “The price of summoning me is a soul, so you were never walking away from this. Only now, I won’t do a single thing to your boyfriend and friend. The only one here who will be punished is you.”

#subin fanfic #subin fic #subin scenarios #subin au #jung subin fic #jung subin scenario #jung subin au #demon subin #thrills and chills #victon fic #victon scenarios #victon au #victon fanfic #demon victon

80 notes · View notes

troutfishinginmusic · 3 years

Text

Guide: Lesser-known nu metal albums that hold up

Nu metal is a genre that’s easily derided. It was caricatured as over-the-top angst, baggy jeans and casual misogyny. It was one of the biggest genres when I was first discovering music.

There was plenty of bad music, but to say it was all bad would be inaccurate. It was extremely diverse compared to other metal scenes. It also put issues like child abuse to the forefront, showing survivors they were not alone. Nu metal took a genre that was showing signs of wear and reinvented it. While it soon became saturated by faceless bands (as every popularized genre eventually does), it was important.

As the genre regains popularity, there have been plenty of retrospective lists about bands like Slipknot, Deftones and Korn. There have even been lists detailing some of the lesser known bands. The podcast Roach Koach has done a great job reassessing the genre (It was the catalyst for me making this list). In no order, here are seven nu metal albums you might be less familiar with but are worth your time. These all roughly come from the genre’s original era of popularity. I’ve also put together a ranking of more established nu metal records at the end.

I love the first couple of Static-X albums, but Cannibal is truly a high-water mark. It’s catchy, concise and extremely heavy. While it has some more straight-ahead metal flourishes (guitar solos!?!), no one could mistake this for another band. And, if nothing else, Static-X is a definitive nu metal band. Cannibal seems to find Static-X revitalized after kicking out a problematic member. Vocalist Wayne Static (who died in 2014) knows exactly what he wants these songs to do. His barking delivery finds spaces in each of these spartan industrial rippers. It represents all the things I like about the genre.

Oracle represents somewhat of a break from the more straight-ahead nu metal sound of Spit, so it might not exactly fit on this list. But ultimately Kittie is forever tied to the genre (much like Deftones), even if they’ve branched out in other directions. Oracle doubles down on heaviness by incorporating death metal influences. Morgan Lander’s vocals kneecap a lot of her more melodically inclined nu peers. It also shows the band progressing, despite losing guitarist Fallon Bowman. When people dismiss the nu metal as an outlet for white male whining, though sometimes deserved, they overlook great albums like Oracle.

Apex Theory’s only album, Topsy-Turvy, is brimming with creativity. Much like System of a Down, which originally featured lead vocalist Ontronik Khachaturianon on drums, the band channels its Armenian heritage. Yet Apex Theory leans into something more melodic, mathy and possibly emo (in more of the At the Drive-In sense). Every aspect of this album feels so precise and thought out. Khachaturianon’s vocals can leap out like a barrage of stream of consciousness yet can just as easily smooth out. It might’ve been a bit too weird for radio but, in a world where SOAD broke, it certainly could’ve happened.

Apartment 26’s final album might be one of the strangest on this list. It’s apparent that it was made to be more “marketable.” Yet those touches make it even weirder. The production here is very polished, but this is still an album that incorporates swing jazz into metal through programmed horns. It’s that oddness, intentional or not, that benefits Music for the Massive. An added bonus is the great cover of “In Heaven” from David Lynch’s Eraserhead (the band’s name is a reference to the film). Apartment 26 easily surpasses its legacy as Geezer Butler’s son’s band on this album.

Taproot’s debut struck on something deeply vulnerable that the band has carried through on subsequent albums. What is often missing on those other albums, though, is the heaviness found on Gift. The band’s raw talent is on display here, recalling System of a Down’s debut. Like that album, influences peek through but the band sound fully formed and unique. Stephen Richards’ distinct vocals, while not for everyone, bend around every twist and turn of these knotty songs. The band moved away from the genre, but created some of its best work within it. Oh, and bonus points for instigating this.

Orgy’s goth-y, processed guitar crunch was often imitated (Deadsy, etc.) but has never exactly been replicated. Candyass in some ways seems like the obvious choice, but there are some awkward growing pains. And really Vapor Transmission is just as good and possibly better. The hooks are bigger, the band commits to the futuristic themes and vocalist Jay Gordon is at the top of his gender-bending industrial crooning game. Orgy remains notable in this era for poking holes in the genre’s inflated macho exterior at every turn. There’s something so transgressive about the way the band operated in nu metal.

New Killer America’s cover always caught my eye when I was a kid. Album art was and still is a big deal to me. I love how subtly gross this is. At the time it was more affecting than the over-the-top gore common on metal albums. It fits the music. Skrape wallows in heavy post-grunge sludge. As Ulrich Wild did on the Static-X albums, there’s a good balance struck between heaviness and accessibility. Skrape had a mysterious vibe that was missing from similar acts that had a tendency to over-share. Despite some awkward vocals/lyrics that come up, NKA is noteworthy.

Honorable Mention: Coal Chamber-Chamber Music, Powerman 5000-Tonight the Stars Revolt, Nothingface-Violence, Mushroomhead-XX, Sevendust-Animosity

Established Classics Ranking

1. Korn-Korn: This was the album that started the genre. Every element that other bands would copy is here. It also features some of the rawist emotion ever recorded (”Daddy”) and some great singles (”Blind,” “Clown”). Some of the lyrics are definitely dated, but there are few metal albums that are as influence and heavy (well, in terms of subject matter) as this.

2. Deftones-White Pony: This album defied every stereotype the genre had. It seamlessly incorporated trip-hop and post-rock influences without sacrificing any of the heaviness. This is the highpoint for a band that rarely has a misstep.

3. System of a Down-System of a Down: SOAD’s debut is heavy, political and completely left-field. It still sounds like nothing else. All of the band’s records are good to great, yet I love how the death metal influences poke out more on this one. That’s a personal preference I guess, I really could’ve picked any SOAD album.

4. Sepultura-Roots: This album is so unbelievably heavy. It’s such a bummer that Sepultura didn’t make a record with this lineup past this point. It’s political in a way a lot of nu metal wasn’t. It seamlessly incorporates the band’s Brazilin heritage. It up-ends any perception about the genre being light-weight.

5. Slipknot-Iowa: This is really the only album from this era that rivals Roots in terms of heaviness. The band draws from a different well than Sepultura, packing Iowa with horror movie imagery. Much of this was to no doubt channel vocalist Corey Taylor’s troubled childhood. There’s something so frantic and desperate captured on this album, which probably has to do with Ross Robinson producing it (he produced Korn’s debut, as well as a lot of other iconic records).

6. Incubus- S.C.I.E.N.C.E.: Few nu metal records are this legitimately fun. Every part of Incubus is bursting with stoned creativity here. It also channels its influences much better than its peers. Somehow metal riffs and bongos go together here. S.C.I.E.N.C.E. showed a more easygoing side of the genre that still retained all the heaviness.

7. Linkin Park- Meteora: Though Hybrid Theory has a lot of singles, I always preferred this one. I think the band forged a bit more of its identity here. It gets a bit heavier, yet retains all the pop smarts. Definitely worth revisiting if you’ve just re-listened to Hybrid Theory to celebrate its recent anniversary.

NOTE: Yeah, Limp Bizkit is not on this list. The band has some cool songs, but ultimately its albums are pretty scattered. Fred Durst is a lot for me to take. The rest of the band is amazingly talented, especially Wes Borland. If its exclusion is annoying to you, please make your own list.

undefined

youtube

#numetal #staticx #korn #kittie #sepultura #taproot #linkinpark #deftones #systemofadown #apartment26

33 notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 3 years

Text

The Horror Influences of Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan

https://ift.tt/2Zl6eQ9

This article contains spoilers for JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is beloved by shounen anime fans for its nonstop action, absurd and over-the-top showdowns, and creative Stands (physical manifestations of one’s true self). It’s a bombastic series that defies predictions. We’re still waiting for the fifth part of the manga, Stone Ocean, to be released as an anime adaptation, and the story is still ongoing. Strangely, there’s still no confirmation that a fifth season is even coming yet.

In the meantime, however, we got something of a holdover: Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan. An adaptation of a series of one-shot chapters from JoJo creator Hirohiko Araki, it bridges the gap between the fourth season, Diamond is Unbreakable, and the fifth season, Vento Aureo. But while it follows manga artist Kishibe Rohan and what he’s been up to between both seasons, it takes on a decidedly different slant than the vanilla anime. Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan takes more inspiration from episodic horror anthologies, like that of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. It is, by all counts, a horror series.

It’s a new direction for JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, though not completely unexpected. The thing is, JoJo has always been riddled with disturbing, horrific, and downright chilling moments. They’ve just been couched between action-packed showdowns and bombastic character design so that the terror creeps in without you even realizing it’s there. Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan approaches the genre in a much more straightforward manner, though, wearing its influences on its sleeve. Both series, including JoJo to a staggering degree, are inherently spine-tingling properties, even if they don’t seem so at first blush.

Creator Hirohiko Araki is a ravenous horror fan, after all, and makes no secret of his passion for the genre. In his book, Hirohiko Araki’s Bizarre Horror Movie Analysis, he cites some of his top 20 favorite films as Misery, Alien, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The work itself is divided into several parts, each exploring a different branch of chilling media, such as “Bizarre Murderers,” “Animal Horror,” or “Sci-Fi Horror.” It wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility to think that, despite Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan originally being meant to be unrelated to JoJo, Araki created it to satisfy his love for the macabre.

The episode “Mutsu-kabe Hill” follows a woman named Naoko Osato, who belongs to a well-to-do family. She’s living in a house that belongs to said family along with boyfriend Gunpei Kamafusa. But she can’t be with Gunpei, as she’s already betrothed to a man her father has chosen. Plus, Gunpei is a family gardener, a profession her father won’t abide. The two end up arguing, and Nao tries to pay off Gunpei to get him to leave, as she knows her father and fiancé are on their way to the home. But tensions escalate as the two become violent.

Nao pushes him into a set of golf clubs and Gunpei dies instantly. He’s bleeding, and while Nao struggles to figure out what to do with his body, her father and fiancé are approaching her home. No matter what she does, she can’t get Gunpei’s corpse to stop bleeding. In the end, she lives with this bizarre phenomenon, telling no one about her plight, and doting on Gunpei’s corpse, disposing of the blood he continues to generate for the rest of her life.

Several comparisons can be drawn from this episode to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” in which the narrator commits a murder, dismembers a body, and hides it beneath some floorboards. Despite having seemingly gotten away with the perfect crime, the narrator is driven insane by the sound of his victim’s heartbeat. He ends up confessing to the authorities as he believes they can hear it, too. It’s the story of an unreliable narrator whose sanity is slipping.

Though the narrator in that story ended up confessing to ease his suffering, Nao chose to live with the consequences of her crime, succumbing to a monster that lives off of people’s affection. The stories are quite similar in tone, though with very different outcomes.

In “At a Confessional,” Rohan recounts a story of how he met a man who confided in him while in an Italian confessional. The man spoke of a beggar to whom he refused food and instead forced to work until he died. The beggar returned as a ghost, swearing revenge on the man who wronged him, promising he’d return on the happiest day of the man’s life. Return he does, as the man has enjoyed riches beyond belief, a beautiful marriage, and the birth of a daughter.

The beggar appears in the form of an apparition in the man’s daughter’s tongue. He forces the man to toss pieces of popcorn his daughter was eating into the air and catch them with his mouth three times in a row in an absurd challenge. If the man succeeds, his life will be spared. If not, he’s beheaded instantly.

Anime For Beginners: Best Genres and Series to Watch

By Daniel Kurland

How to Watch Anime Online: The Best Legal Anime Streaming Options

By Daniel Kurland

This tale immediately recalls Stephen King’s Thinner, a similar story about a man who’s committed several wrongs, cursed the father of someone he’s murdered — this time, because he runs over a woman while driving and engaged in a sexual act with his wife. The curse finds the man, who is obese, becoming thinner and thinner at an uncontrollable rate.

Eventually, there are options available to the man, who pleads for a resolution. He’s informed by the same person who cursed him that he can eat a strawberry pie with his blood in it and die, or give it to someone else for him to be spared. It’s just as gruesome as forcing the rich victim in Kishibe Rohan to munch popcorn or die.

In JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, the scares seem to come directly from a series of inspirations for Araki instead of new stories based on the media he’s obviously consumed.

The first JoJo arc, Phantom Blood, sets the stage by introducing a swath of Gothic horror elements. It introduces the eventual vampiric rise of DIO in a Victorian society, which directly references classic novels like Dracula and Frankenstein. There’s even a serial killer named Jack the Ripper, who faces off against Jonathan and his allies, pulled straight out of history — a perpetrator of grisly murders who ends up transformed into a zombie. The undead are also a major component of Phantom Blood, likely due in part to Araki’s love for classic zombie cinema.

In the arc Stardust Crusaders, Jean-Paul Polnareff finds himself de-aged by a Stand user named Alessi. A young woman named Malèna nurses him back to health, up until Alessi uses his Stand, Sethan, unceremoniously de-ages her to that of a fetus outside of the womb. A few of Araki’s favorite horror movies of all time, including Basket Case, center on body horror, which doesn’t make this narrative decision surprising. But for those reaching that point in the story for the first time, it’s chilling in a way that even some of the most nightmarish films can’t even touch.

While the visual of a fetus itself isn’t as offensive as some gnarled, disfigured victim, its implications are disturbing, to say the least. A fetus outside of a mother’s womb will eventually succumb to a slow death, especially one of Malèna’s apparent age. That makes Polnareff’s eventual victory over Alessi and his Stand so bittersweet.

The entirety of the fourth arc, Diamond is Unbreakable, plays out like a classic slasher flick with the introduction of Yoshikage Kira, a man with a powerful obsession with hands to the point of fetishism. He murders women with “beautiful hands,” then keeps the hands as his “girlfriends.” It wouldn’t be a stretch to compare Kira to classic killers like Psycho‘s Norman Bates or The Silence of the Lambs’ Hannibal Lecter, as Kira is believable and charming when he isn’t committing grisly murders.

Most of JoJo’s Stands are horrific on their own, and even though their story arcs enhance their terrifying power, there’s a fair amount of fridge horror to be found in these beings. The Freddy Krueger-like Death 13 can kill you in a nightmarish dream world while you sleep. Metallica (yes, named after the heavy metal band) forces you to cough up razor blades or have scissors burst from your chest.

Another Stand, Green Day, can secrete a deadly mold that will rot and destroy the flesh of anything it touches in an instant. Lastly, Rohan Kishibe himself has a fairly disconcerting Stand: Heaven’s Door. It allows him to literally read someone like a book, then erase parts of their being, or add in what he pleases, like the ability to learn a new language as his pal Koichi asks in Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan.

It’s easy to see how Araki has masterfully melded horror into every space when it comes to both JoJo as well as Kishibe Rohan. With that in mind, it’s strange that the former has been relegated only to a series of one-shots when it shows so much potential as its own project, in which Araki gets to stretch his Rod Serling-esque legs or impart some very Argento-like stylings into his works. For now, we can appreciate what’s there — and continue finding parallels to additional well-loved classics in the genre.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan is available to stream on Netflix now.

The post The Horror Influences of Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3bOxa0C

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

8 notes · View notes

ghost-in-the-hella · 4 years

Note

51. “You make me feel alive.” with PriceMarsh.

My apologies for taking so long to finish this! For whatever reason, Kate POV seems to take me extra long to get my head around. Better late than never, I hope!

CW for implied cutting, implied suicidality, referenced canon drugging and sexual assault (the Vortex Club incident), and referenced homophobic and emotionally abusive parenting.

---

“I’m a bad influence on you,” Chloe says, and for a moment she’s so beautiful in the moonlight that Kate doesn’t catch the sadness in her voice.

“What?” Kate says when it registers. “No, you aren’t.”

Chloe stares at her unblinkingly, cigarette raised so that her face is wreathed with smoke, and gives her a look like she’s somehow proving her point simply by existing.

“You aren’t,” Kate repeats more firmly. “What, you think nobody’s ever smoked in front of me before? I do all kinds of community service. Plenty of people have smoked in front of me.”

“Okay, but did they smoke in front of you after sneaking you out of the dorms past curfew, and did they commit petty crimes before they lit up?”

Kate rolls her eyes and shakes her head softly. “I still say you’re not a bad influence on me. I didn’t vandalize anything.”

“Mm. You did let a persona non grata delinquent into the dorms and then sneak out with her so she could tag public property, though.”

“True, but…” Kate kicks her feet gently in the air as she thinks. The metal of Chloe’s truck bed is cold and hard beneath her thighs, but right now it’s more comfortable than her own dorm bed. She hasn’t felt safe sleeping there since she woke up on the floor after the Vortex Club party she can’t remember. The gross comments that keep popping up on her whiteboard don’t exactly make it feel like home, either. “I asked you. I don’t think you’re the bad influence there.”

Chloe mock-gasps. “Kate Beverly Marsh! Are you suggesting that you were a bad influence on me??”

“Maybe,” Kate teases, and this feels better. Chloe’s moods tend to turn on a dime, and Kate’s never quite sure how to handle them. They’ve only been hanging out for a couple of weeks, and although Kate’s learned to recognize Chloe’s sorrow she hasn’t learned how to comfort her. Chloe wears that hard, tough, punk persona so proudly; offering her a hug feels like it would be a transgression. But when Chloe’s joking around, Kate feels much less out of her depth. Most people don’t expect Kate to have a sense of humor - “good little church girl” that she is - but Chloe’s proven herself to be an exception. Chloe’s an exception to a lot of things. “I did ask you to help me break the rules.”

“Because you wouldn’t know how to break them on your own, goody-two-shoes,” Chloe teases with a chuckle.

“I’ll have you know I was a rule-breaker before I met you, thank you very much!”

Chloe flicks the ash from the end of her cigarette onto the damp, sandy asphalt of the beach parking lot. “Really,” she deadpans. “Kate Marsh, rule-breaker.”

“Yes.”

“Sure we’re talking about the same Kate Marsh?” She holds a hand over Kate’s head (mercifully, it’s not the one holding her still-smoldering cigarette). “‘Bout this tall? Literal human marshmallow? Goes to church every Sunday and volunteers at the soup kitchen?”

“Yes!” Kate laughs.

“Okay.” Chloe shifts her position abruptly, reclining with her shoulders propped against the wall of the truck bed and dangling one leg off the edge of the tailgate while the toes of her other dirty boot stop just shy of touching Kate’s thigh. Kate wishes she were as comfortable anywhere as Chloe seems to make herself everywhere. “There’s obviously a story here.” She gestures melodramatically with her cigarette, luminous red embers and pale blue smoke - almost the color of her eyes - against the colorless dark of the night sky. “So spill, Katydid. Illuminate me.”

In her head, Kate scrambles frantically to find something suitably rebellious to tell Chloe. She’s sure she must have done something interesting at some point in her life, but with Chloe’s eyes on her and the way that Chloe’s biting her lip as she waits she’s having a very hard time thinking about anything else. “I… Sometimes I stay up really late. All night, even.”

Chloe looks like she’s trying not to laugh. “That’s it? Kate, that’s… That’s not even breaking any rules! You’re eighteen; you can stay up as late as you want!”

“My parents are really strict about bedtimes,” Kate says a little defensively. “Right up until I moved into the dorms, they would do room checks every night to make sure my sisters and I had our lights out and were sound asleep.” A sneaky little smile tugs at her lips and she drops her voice into a conspiratorial tone. “But there was a creaky floorboard between their room and mine, so I would listen for it and then I’d pretend to be sleeping when they’d check on me. And once they were gone, I’d stay up reading or texting my friends or watching movies.” Kate can hear how boring this sounds, so she hurries to add, “Movies my parents wouldn’t let me watch. I would sneak them. Horror movies, violent stuff. Things like that.” Not only horror movies, Kate doesn’t add because she doesn’t want to tip her hand even though she knows - she knows - that Chloe likes girls, too; she hasn’t forgotten how Chloe used to look at Rachel Amber. But she suspects that Chloe never had to sneak around her mother to watch Imagine Me and You or Saving Face or - God forbid - But I’m a Cheerleader, and she’s not sure that Chloe would understand how incredibly criminal it had felt.

“Pfft! I’ve been doing that shit since I was a kid. With my old friend Max, even, and she was almost as much of a goody-two-shoes as you. Man, after we sneak-watched Jaws she wouldn’t so much as stick a toe in the bay for the rest of the summer. Total chicken.” She grins wickedly. “Nice try, though. And I’ll definitely have to remember about the horror movies. I’ve got some that’ll knock your socks off, guaranteed. So what else you got, Cup-Kate?”

Kate chews on her lower lip for a moment before blurting, “I cursed at my mother.”

Chloe actually laughs at that. “I did that this morning. And again this afternoon. I do that literally every day.”

“I called her a…” She balks. She knows that Chloe curses all the time, but somehow she just can’t make herself repeat the word even though it felt so good to say it and watch her mother’s face turn livid. “A bad name. She grounded me for a week.” Grounded is an understatement. But Chloe doesn’t need to know about Kate getting her mouth washed out with soap at the ripe age of seventeen. She doesn’t need to know that Kate’s mother took away her phone and computer as punishment and proceeded to read her most personal texts and emails before grilling her relentlessly about them until her father came home and put a stop to it. She definitely doesn’t need to know how much Kate cried and begged for forgiveness that week.

Something in Chloe’s face makes Kate feel like she knows it all anyway. “Sounds like she probably deserved whatever you called her.” Chloe nudges Kate’s thigh gently with her boot. “And hey, if you ever want someone to go call her names so vile you’ve never even dreamed of them, much less let them soil your lips, just lemme know. I’ll do it for free.”

Kate can’t hold in a giggle at Chloe’s offer. It shouldn’t be funny, she knows. But it is. She shouldn’t think Chloe’s offer is sweet, but she does.

Chloe smiles and stubs out her cigarette, which is by then burned down to the filter. She hauls herself back up into a sitting position, the toe of her boot still pressed lightly against Kate’s thigh. “Okay, so we’ve got cursing at your mother what I’m assuming is a whopping one time in your life despite the fact that she probably deserves it way more than that, and you staying up to watch horror movies past your bedtime. Not exactly sounding like a hardened criminal, there, Kate. Sounding more like a complete and utter cinnamon bun, if I’m honest.”

“I, um. I drink wine every week?” It’s a weak stab and Kate knows it, but it’s all she’s got left unless she wants to delve into much more personal territory that she’s in no way ready to talk about.

Chloe rolls her eyes. “Doesn’t count as breaking the rules if it’s literally part of church.” She wags a scolding finger. “That’s cheating.”

Kate seizes the opportunity with both hands, a victorious grin spreading across her face. “Which is breaking the rules! Ha, got you!”

Chloe scoffs. “Uh-huh. Very clever, Marsh. Still not disproving my cinnamon bun theory, though. You’re going to have to try harder to scandalize me.” There’s a lift to Chloe’s eyebrow that feels like a dare. Or maybe it only feels like a dare because Kate really, really wants it to be one.

Both of Chloe’s eyebrows shoot much higher when Kate answers her challenge by leaning in and kissing her.

Kate wants to do this forever. She wants to press harder, dig deeper. But she’s never kissed anybody before and she suspects she’d do it terribly if it were much more than a peck, and if this isn’t something Chloe actually wants then pressing would only make it worse. So she holds her lips against Chloe’s for a couple of incredible, terrifying seconds, and then she pulls away.

Chloe blinks slowly, looking dazed. Kate isn’t sure whether that’s a good sign or a bad one. “Okay, wow, that… Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“...Does that mean I can do it again?”

Chloe lets out a laugh, fragile and amazed. “Holy shit, Kate.”

Kate wants to kiss her again, but Chloe hasn’t answered her question. Her stomach twists suddenly. “Oh my God, I’m such an idiot; I’m so sorry.” She puts her palms on her flushed cheeks. They feel impossibly hot; she can’t even imagine how red they must look. “I should have asked first. I’m so sorry.”

“It… yeah, that was definitely breaking the rules. I’ll give you credit for that one.” Chloe laughs a little shakily. “Kate Marsh, rule-breaker.”

“I shouldn’t have done it; not like that. Oh, Lord, I’m no better than those… those creeps who--” Kate can feel the warm feeling kissing Chloe gave her slipping into a cold spiral that seizes her chest and pumps ice water through her veins.

“Don’t even.”

“I didn’t even ask, or warn you, or anything; I just--”

“Dude, chill. It’s fine. I liked it.”

“You’re probably still-- I shouldn’t’ve just--” Kate blinks as Chloe’s words sink in. “You liked it?”

Chloe nods. “Yeah, I mean… It took me off-guard, for sure. Asking first would’ve been better, no doubt, but it’s not like I haven’t been wanting you to kiss me for, like… a week, at least.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. It was nice.” Chloe rubs the back of her neck, frowning. Her face slips back into that space Kate hasn’t learned how to navigate, the one that shows she’s thinking too hard and feeling too much. “Uncharacteristic, though.”

Kate's heart sinks. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means… Hell, I don’t know. It means maybe I really am a bad influence on you. It means maybe my step-dick is right and I’m just a no good delinquent dragging you down with me.”

“Chloe Price, you are not a bad influence on me!” Kate touches her shoulder. Chloe won’t turn and look at her, so Kate touches her chin and turns her head until she has to meet her eyes. The look in Chloe’s eyes makes Kate’s heart hurt. “You’re the best possible influence on me.”

Chloe laughs again, but it’s a broken sound. Kate never wants to hear her laugh like that again. “Not fucking possible,” Chloe tells her. “You’re, like… the best person I’ve ever met. And I’m…” She waves a hand to gesture at the whole of herself.

“You’re a good person,” Kate insists. “You’ve lived through bad things, and they’ve hurt you. But you’re a good person.”

“I’m a high school dropout with no job and no prospects. I smoke, I drink, I do drugs, I swear, I spit on sidewalks, I--”

“You don’t judge me. Why should I judge you?”

“I’ve sold drugs,” Chloe plows on, “I’ve hurt people, I’ve started fights just because I was angry and I wanted to hurt someone…”

“I’m not saying that you’re perfect. I don’t expect you to be perfect. But you are a good person. And you’re a good…” Kate takes a steadying breath. “You’re a good friend. You don’t treat me like I’m some fragile little flower that’s been sheltered from the world, or like someone who needs to be sheltered from it. All my life, people have tried to control me.” Kate clasps her hands in her lap, fingers wrestling with each other anxiously. “My family, my neighbors, my church, my friends… They all expect me to act a certain way, to talk and think and feel and believe exactly the same way that they do, and they don’t care what I want. They don’t care what I think or feel or believe. But when I’m with you…” Kate feels something wet slip down her cheek and wipes at it absently. “Chloe, when I’m with you, I can be who I want to be. I can be me. I can break the rules I want to break and follow the rules I want to follow and you don’t judge me either way. You make me feel alive. You make me want to be alive.”

Kate’s fully crying now, so it takes her a minute to realize that Chloe’s crying, too.

“Shit,” Chloe says, and she’s half-laughing as she cries. “Shit, shit.” She mops at her face. “You, I… Fuck, I can’t even… Shit, Kate! You’re… you’re fucking perfect. Jesus.”

Kate wants to correct her: Chloe is the one who’s perfect. She’s a perfect mess with her tangled blue hair and the dark circles beneath her eyes, her chipped nail polish and chapped lips and bony elbows and scarred forearms. Her stained clothes, her dirty boots, her bra strap slipping down her shoulder, the stink of cigarettes hanging around her in a constant fug. Her mascara running with her tears, the way she’s smiling through them and looking at Kate like she’s some kind of miracle. She’s perfect, and Kate wants to kiss her again. She wants to press the knowledge of how perfect Chloe is into her flesh with her lips so that she believes it.

But they’re both still crying, and the moment just doesn’t feel right. So instead Kate asks a question she’s been wanting to ask since they met: “May I give you a hug?”

Chloe nods rapidly, and her smile brightens. “You’d fucking better.” She opens her arms, and she welcomes Kate home.

#prompt fic #prompt fill #this prompt was not so prompt #fanfic #my writing #ghost writes #prompt ghost #life is strange #pricemarsh #chloe price #kate marsh

21 notes · View notes

santiagoswagger · 4 years

Text

i've never fallen from quite this high

Amy's birthday falls one month into her very new relationship with Jake, and he promises her he has plans to blow her mind.

Set sometime after “The Funeral.”

In all the years Amy’s known Jake, she’s been witness to the downfall of most of his relationships, and she knows they all tend to follow a similar pattern.

He was disorganized and completely consumed by his work throughout most of them, perpetually forgetting to show up for dinners or drinks because a case always took precedence. He could be selfish, unfiltered with his words and competitive to a fault. Most of the women he dated never seemed to last very long, and if they did, Jake usually found a reason to end things. There were a few exceptions, just as there are with any rule, but Jake was nothing if not consistent. He was a lone wolf, even in his personal life.

But the Jake Peralta that Amy finds herself dating now might as well be a stranger.

In the month since they decided to screw being light and breezy, she’s observed several small changes in him that often have her questioning if he’s the same man who once took her on a date designed for maximum humiliation.

When they make plans, he immediately adds them to the calendar on his phone so he won’t forget. He shares his snacks with her at the movies, even if he rolls his eyes while passing her the popcorn bucket. He takes the time to compliment her whether she’s dressed up for a date night out or wearing her ratty sweats on the couch at home, and genuinely means it either way. He’s still overly competitive, but that only makes her like him more.

She catches herself staring at him from across their adjoined desks, in awe of the person he was and the person he’s becoming. She can’t believe she’s actually falling for her goofy, infuriating partner. It’s scary, just as any big change is for a control freak like Amy, but she’s starting to believe that anything worthwhile begins with a little fear.

Much to Amy’s chagrin, Jake catches her mid-stare and smirks.

“Amy, I know you think I look extremely handsome in my new flannel, but this is a workplace. What would the Captain say?” he asks smugly, keeping his voice quiet enough so their coworkers can’t overhear. It’s something they’ve both perfected over the last month.

She rolls her eyes but can’t stop a traitorous grin from materializing on her face.

“Jake, we both know you took that flannel from the lost and found last week. And I wasn’t doing anything,” she says unconvincingly, burying her head in the open file next to her keyboard. “I was thinking. About my case. Because I’m a detective.”

Jake leans back in his chair and crosses his arms behind his head. “Does this ‘thinking’ have anything to do with a major life event happening this weekend?”

Amy cocks her head to the side. “’Major life event?’ What are you talking about?”

Jake lets out a loud, triumphant laugh, startling Hitchcock and Scully from their afternoon naps a few feet away.

“Amy, please tell me you didn’t forget your own birthday. No, wait, please tell me you did so I can make fun of you.”

Her jaw drops in horror. Amy Santiago, queen of organization, forgot her own birthday. Work had been so crazy the last few weeks and nights spent analyzing her planner were few and far between now that she had someone to go home with after work so something was bound to fall through the cracks. But she would rather let Charles cook dinner for her than let Jake know that.

“Shut up,” she says indignantly. “Just because I don’t obsess over my birthday like some people doesn’t mean I forgot it.”

Jake leans forward with a softer smile than before. It’s fond, almost. “You did, but that’s okay. I’ve got a few things up my sleeve for Saturday.”

“You do?” she says, surprised.

“Mmm-hmm,” he nods, grinning. “Prepare to have your mind blown.”

She laughs. “Okay, I’ll hold you to it.”

As they pack up their desks to leave for the night, Amy allows herself to wonder what Jake could possibly have planned. It’s their first birthday or holiday as a couple, and it’s so early. Their relationship is still so new and exciting, but a birthday is a big commitment. They haven’t even discussed where they see things going or if there’s a future for them. She doesn’t want this birthday to be the thing that scares him away before the relationship really gets off the ground. She’s pretty sure it could be something great if they let it.

Amy wakes up Saturday morning to the smell of fresh coffee wafting into her bedroom. It’s a shock for two reasons: she’s fairly certain she ran out of coffee grounds earlier this week and she knew Jake was scheduled to work an overtime shift today. The rumpled sheets next to her confirm his absence, but they’re still slightly warm to the touch; he must have just brewed her a pot before stumbling out the door.

She takes the time to brush her hair and teeth, and wash and moisturize her face – she refuses to let her morning routine slip, even if it’s her birthday – before walking out into the kitchen. It’s where she finds a full pot of coffee, complete with a new bag of beans from her favorite neighborhood café. It’s annoyingly expensive hipster coffee, and she can’t believe Jake shelled out the cash for it.

She also finds a note written in Jake’s awful chicken scratch on some stationery he must have grabbed from her office. Lucky for him, Amy’s been forced to decipher a few hundred of his case files over the years and can read his appalling handwriting without a problem.

Ames,

Happy Birthday, weirdo! I’m sorry I have to work on the day of your birth but I promise to make it up to you later ;) See you at 5.

Jake

She smiles as she finishes reading before pouring herself a large cup of steaming coffee and taking a long sip. She sighs, and she’s fairly sure it’s not just the coffee warming her from the inside out.

Truthfully, a day to herself is the best birthday present she could have asked for. She spends the day fielding calls and texts from her family and Kylie while also managing to organize her binders alphabetically and catch up on her very full DVR.

But by the time 5 o’clock rolls around, Jake is nowhere to be found and Amy can’t help but be a little disheartened. He had been making much more of an effort to be punctual lately, especially once he discovered what that earned him from Amy, but she supposes he hasn’t completely let his old habits die. She does her best to shrug it off. He probably just got caught up finishing a case, she thinks.

By 5:30, Amy is concerned. By 6, she’s spiraling.

He’s never been this late to meet her before, and never this late without sending an emoji-filled apology text. She, more than most, knows things can get out of hand at the precinct within an instant, but a shadow of a doubt still manages to nestle its way into Amy’s brain as the minutes tick by without word from her boyfriend.

She pours herself a glass of wine and takes a huge gulp. She knows from past observations that a month is usually Jake’s tipping point in a relationship. It’s entirely possible that he’s starting to have second thoughts about turning their friendship into something more. The thought rips through her like lightning.

It’s then that her front door opens and an exhausted looking Jake practically stumbles into the living room carrying two stuffed takeaway bags. His hair is a mess and his flannel is even more rumpled than usual. Her previously racing thoughts are immediately quelled when she sees him.

“Ames, I’m so sorry but I couldn’t find the restaurant and then the order was wrong and then I had to go to a different place and it was a whole thing,” he says in a breathless jumble. She can barely make out individual words.

“Are you mad?” he asks as he catches his breath. He looks genuinely gutted at the mere possibility he’s disappointed her.

She puts her wine glass down on the coffee table and moves to wrap him up in a firm hug. She can feel the tension leave his body at her touch.

“No, I’m not mad,” she mumbles into his shoulder. “But I wish you had texted me so I knew you were alright.”

“Phone died,” he says sheepishly. She pulls away slightly and gently swats his arm.

“I thought I bought you a charger for your desk!”

“I may or may not have been playing Kwazy Cupcakes all day and it totally drained my battery,” he laughs. “The precinct was so boring today, Ames.”

She smirks. “Did you miss me, Peralta?”

“Pshh, no,” he says, eyes darting around the room.

“You did,” she says smugly and he rolls his eyes, visibly grinning. “Now, tell me about this food.”

She pulls away from him to rummage through the plastic bags he’d placed on her dining table when he came home. It smells unbelievably familiar.

“I, um,” he stutters. “Remember when you told me about your favorite birthday parties as a kid? When all of your extended family would come over and it was just a giant party with games and the best Cuban food?”

“Yeah, I do,” she says softly. It had been such a throwaway conversation, late night memories shared while cuddling on his couch in front of the TV after a long shift. She’s genuinely touched that it stayed with him.

“Well, I found a place in Park Slope that sells those cheesy guava pastries your mom used to make you every year on your birthday,” he says, rubbing his arm uncomfortably. “But they messed up the order and I had to drive around to a bunch of Cuban restaurants to find them. That’s why I was so late.”

Maybe it’s the nostalgic smell of the pasteles de queso y guayaba bringing back her childhood, or maybe it’s the look of pure vulnerability on Jake’s face, but Amy can feel the warmth from this morning’s coffee returning tenfold. A lump begins to grow in her throat and she swallows hard to tamp it down.

“I can’t believe you did this,” she says, astonished. “I haven’t had one of these in forever.”

He’s rubbing his arm again, a nervous tick. “I hope they’re right. The woman at the last place I tried didn’t speak English so it was a lot of charades and pointing.”

She laughs. “They’re definitely right. They smell just like I remember.”

She puts the bag down and walks quickly over to where he’s standing in her kitchen doorway. She kisses him delicately, bringing her hand up to cup his cheek, thumb sweeping his jaw as she pulls away. His eyes are half-mast but they’re shining brightly.

“Happy birthday, Amy,” he whispers, moving to gently grab her hand as it pulls away from his face.

She scrunches her nose and smiles. “Thank you. Now, are you ready to try some cheese and guava pastries?”

He wrinkles his nose. “Ugh, no, thank you,” he says vehemently, backing out of her embrace.

She walks closer. “Please? For my birthday? You did say you would make it up to me after working all day.”

He groans. “Fine. But this is the last time I do anything nice for you.”

She smiles. “Deal.”

#b99 #brooklyn nine nine #b99 fic #b99 fanfiction #peraltiago #this is what quarantine has done to me

159 notes · View notes

angorwhosebabyisthis · 3 years

Note

Multiples of 6 for the OC asks!

AYYYYYYYYYY THANK YOU

i think for this one i’ll answer each question with three ocs for comparison >:V

(under the cut because, predictably, It Got Long)

6. Do they smoke or do they hate smoking.

(origfic, unnamed superhero verse)

Neil: won’t touch cigarettes, but has been known to smoke a bowl every now and then when his anxiety gets the best of him. he doesn’t like doing it--he’s internalized some pretty negative shit about how it means he’s a trashy, weak-willed loser who can’t handle reality--but since meeting nads and then beth, he’s eased up a lot on the guilt and is able to relax more.

Nads: smokes cigarettes, but only if they’re stolen. she’s got an active lifestyle to say the least and she doesn’t want to risk fucking up her lungs, so that’s her compromise. my god does she love her weed though

Beth: smokes cigarettes to take the edge off her anxiety when she has to go outside during the day. she knows they’re worse for her than weed, but she’s wary enough of her liminal space powers without imagining what they might do if she got stoned.

12. What’s an outfit they’d despise wearing Vs one they’d love wearing? Draw it!

(Tales of Arcadia; i’m godawful at drawing clothes so i’ll just describe them as best i can ashdflkshdfkl)

Liyen: loves comfortable, understated, professional-looking masc clothes, usually in muted shades of gray, blue, or black. give them a fuzzy turtleneck sweater and black pants and they’re happy. meanwhile they’d be SUPER uncomfortable in loud, clashing colors or anything too femme.

Schommag: Does Not Like Clothes That Will Get in Her Way, also not a big fan of dressing femme with very few exceptions (the right Little Black Dress, for example). give her what she needs to get around the woods and stay out of her way. that said she does love showing off her muscles, so she wears a lot of tank tops and sports bras (and sometimes no top at all, if she can get away with it).

Oryalv: VERY femme, particularly business casual. this man loves his pantsuits. meanwhile his nightmare is middle-aged high school coach aesthetic. put him in a t-shirt and khakis and he’ll start pouring smoke like a teakettle

18. Have they ever committed a crime? How? Why? If not, then what’s their opinion on crime?

(origfic, unnamed VALENTINE DON’T DO THAT verse)

Valentine: has been made complicit in a lot of their family’s cutthroat-noble shadiness growing up, is otherwise a law-abiding sort up until they jump off the slippery slope and get the war crime ball rolling in earnest. Whoops

Edmund: has gotten into plenty of cutthroat-noble shadiness of his own volition, thank you very much. unlike valentine he’s a whole lot more inclined to go UHHH and pull up when it comes to war crimes

Marcel: LOVES war crimes. LOVES them. would marry them if he could. lucky for him he’s captain of the guard and has plenty of opportunities. will otherwise use the law as a bludgeon but i don’t think he’s too bothered about it for its own sake

24. Mcdonalds, subway, or KFC?

(Final Fantasy Tactics A2)

Nebilim: subway, grease is sensory hell and makes him sick and it’s the easiest place to avoid it. the number of variables per sandwich make him anxious, but if he has to pick one then fuck it, it’s worth not putting grease in his body.

Moovry: loves grease with all his somehow-still-functioning heart, would bring his own beer keg to KFC and refuse to leave til he’s finished his fourth bucket of chicken

York: MCDONALDS! MCDONALDS! MCDONALDS. gets the happy meal and then uses the toy to test their black magic minispells. we hardly knew ye, beyblade

30. Have they ever dreamed about another oc?

(Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, taxidermy/doll horror cw)

Faerna: has dreams about missing his mother sometimes. he hasn’t seen her in a long time, and for all he knows she thinks he’s dead, but he can’t bring himself to go back and look for her when he doesn’t know if she’ll approve of the life he’s chosen for himself. for all he talks himself up, not everyone’s happy to have a thief and a conman for a son.

SkekNev: has recurring dreams about the victims of their taxidermy coming back to life. less of a HOLY SHIT THE DOLLS ARE ALIVE nightmare for them, more of an anger/anxiety nightmare because stop that, stop having autonomy, i made you like this for a reason.

Aivne: dreams a lot about her little siblings. outright nightmares, semi-lucid rehearsals of danger scenarios, memories from before they lost their parents.

36. If they’re nonhuman, what’s their opinion on humans?

(origfic, faeverse)

Aislinng: vampire/incubus, more specifically A Dracula Lookin Motherfucker. depending on how much of a bastard he is in a given au, humans are usually somewhere between ‘fun to dazzle with my Supernatural Charms’ and ‘boring. where are the interesting people to torment’

Meadowsweet: rabbit faun. depending on which of the two wildly different versions of him we’re talking about, he either treats humans with the same goodwill as anyone else who might need his healing, or looks down on them and considers them fair game for whatever evil bastard he’s pining after this week.

Agaric: aislinng’s son with a forest spirit, so fuck if i know what to call him at this point. humans tend to find his brand of quiet, aloof awkwardness either offputting or endearing; either one is mortifying, and he’d mostly rather just keep to himself.

42. What’s their standpoint when it comes to washing hands?

(origfic, bumfuck nowhere cult)

Cristina: obsessed with cleanliness, washes her hands constantly, crissy please you live in the desert

Skinner: if my hands are clean i can’t wipe them on cristina’s robes now can i

Rosemary: who needs to wash hands when you’ve got tentacles ;)

48. If they were defeated fairly in battle, would they accept and move on or throw a fit?

(origfic, slasher movie slaughterhouse dimension)

Maggie: will stay down and let you think she’s beaten, until you take your eyes off her for a second too long. then she’ll go for your hamstring

Dee: will accept it and move on, but will also try to make you feel like winning wasn’t really important anyway. maggie loves her dearly but she is kind of infuriating to everyone else

Esau: is delighted when somebody beats him, because if they’ve gotten that far they’ve committed at least one horrific atrocity and will have to live with that forever (if not embrace it). the real treasure was the corruption and PTSD we found along the way. no wonder maggie kind of hate-connects with him, he reminds her of dee lmao

54. Have they ever lost anyone?

(misc origfic)

Gray: lost the person who summoned them, gave them form, and taught them how to speak. once she died, all they knew was that she’d stopped coming, and that their only friend--their only contact with the world outside the cave--was gone. they’re there alone for a long time before a hitchhiker stumbles across them, and now they’re clingy as fuck and terrified of being abandoned again.

Ashdown: lost her wife the spring before her story begins, which left her so depressed she didn’t bother flying south for the winter with everyone else. she does eventually find love again, after coming to terms with the fact that what she’s lost isn’t the only thing she can ever have.

Jake: lost his older brother as a kid, which might or might not be why some fuck haunting their own fursuit recruits him to help with their unfinished business.

[DYING WHEEZE]

thank you again for the questions!!! i have. so many ocs. SO many ocs, and it’s always fun to get a chance to trot a bunch of them out, especially with a good range of questions like these :D

#the golden ghost #tales of arcadia #dark crystal age of resistance #asks #tag memes #ocs #my ocs #toa tag #origfic tag #my origfic #final fantasy tag #smoking cw #weed cw #dolls cw #origfic group tag #because there's too many to tag all of them on this post asdhfslkdfhsdf

3 notes · View notes

technoturian · 3 years

Text

So after dipping my toe in the Pedro Pascal stan side of tumblr I decided to give his Netflix movies a try. Yesterday was Prospect which I *loved* and today was Triple Frontier which was... possibly the worst movie I’ve seen in the last couple of years.

Spoilers under the tag but honestly... Just don’t watch this movie. If you’re a fan of one of the cute men in it then just search the internet for gifs, I promise you you will get more out of that than you will out of this movie. Ranting below, you’ve been warned.

I have to commend the Pedro fans for their fanon version of his character in this film, as they pretty much were forced to invent him from whole cloth because basically none of that is in the text. And that’s because he doesn’t have a character. None of them have characters! None of them have arcs! The plot doesn’t even have an arc! The movie ended in the biggest shrug I’ve ever seen. They didn’t fail, they didn’t succeed, it was just kind of... well that happened.

Every time I thought, “Okay, I see where this narrative is going...” It just... didn’t. It didn’t go anywhere. The main thrust of the movie was done 30 minutes in and then the rest of the movie was them walking around killing people. Now, it could have been about that, about that they were killing civilians and growing increasingly more cruel and emotionless in their actions, but that was not reflected in the resolution. Nothing that happened in the movie was concluded in a way that made sense. It just was a collection of bad things that happened that then stopped eventually. What about the characters and their families who at the start of the film were stated would be hunted to the ends of the earth by ALL THE CARTELS!! (and other unspecified Bad Criminal People) and at the end just kind of shrug off the fact that they have no money to disappear with? Are Santiago’s fake passports supposed to fix that? Or maybe they deserve that because of the ~horrible things they did~ but then why such a light-hearted, optimistic-ish ending note where they all cheerfully say goodbye? What is the message here?

It was like two producers came together, one said he wanted to make an indie film that was a blunt drama on the horrors of war and dehumanization of the American soldier and a scathing, unflinching indictment of the military industrial complex, and the other one said he wanted to make a shoot-em-up heist movie with big budget actors and lots of explosive action and they were like...

...and mushed them together without any attempt to make a cohesive and narratively satisfying story. It fails at both of these aspects by committing to neither. I saw only the briefest hints of any kind of thematic thread that was so incompetently conveyed that it might as well have never existed. I can’t understand how this movie has such high approval from critics??? What did you like here, was it all of the monologues about how war takes and takes and doesn’t pay well enough? Because if you like that, there was a lot of that. It doesn’t actually go anywhere but it’s there and gee, it’s a thinker, huh, war is bad actually. Groundbreaking.

And this is not an indictment on the actors at all (except for Ben Affl*ck, he can choke). They were honestly working so hard, I could see that, and it made me angrier than if they’d phoned it in. I honestly cannot imagine how they got all of these big actors in this movie and gave them absolutely nothing to work with!

Every one of these characters save Santiago had the same ~arc~, “I don’t like what being a soldier did to me except I’m super loyal so I’m just going to do this one last job oh crap everything is terrible better turn on my murder training...” Which is like... Yeah that happens when you join the military, it’s awful, sure. “War is hell” and all that. But just pointing that out doesn’t make these successful, rounded characters or make this a good movie. I again applaud fans that found any value in these characters, it honestly feels like a case of “I like this actor so much that he deserves a lot better than this, let me invent an alternate reality where he actually had substance”. I can’t feel bad for them too much because I guess, I hope they had fun filming it on location and made a lot of that Netflix money?

As an exercise I tried to think of a single line in this movie that, if shifted from one character to another, would have changed... anything. If it would’ve effected their character at all. If it would’ve felt like it didn’t fit, like, “well HE wouldn’t say THAT”. I couldn’t think of one. They were all completely interchangeable. They all switch from being guilty about killing people to not really caring to straight up going murder-happy depending on the scene, excusing their actions and condemning them. ~Oho, but don’t you see, that’s the duality of the soldier, the hero and the villain~ shut up, it’s bad narrative if you can’t even figure out what a character’s motivations and baseline personality are.

Literally the only person I saw any slight arc from was Santiago, who basically got all of his plot threads neatly tied up by the halfway point and then was just a shell of regret like the other characters. From then on the only person with any sort of arc potential was Tom, because he was the first to get greedy and he was the one to shoot first and I thought “Okay cool, so he’s going to turn on them or something as the money dwindles because he’s going to put his family first and they’re really going to show how far they’ve fallen” and nope he’s dead, of course he’s dead, that’s the end of the only character that seemed like he MIGHT be going anywhere (not that I cared because Ben Affl*ck can choke). Even the romance arc didn’t go anywhere! It literally stops halfway through the movie just like everything else???? This movie feels like they lost the second half of the script days before filming and they were like, “Um, and, um, lots of... climbing the Andes, and, um, this Andes thing is going to be very long and so that’ll pad it out and, um??? War is bad, look what they make you do, look what they make you give etcetera etcetera? Then, uh, action driving scene, uh, yeah. There we go, finished.”

I honestly just can’t believe I sat through a movie with Ben Affl*ck, Charlie Hunn*m’s absolute travesty of an American accent, and 70s-80s dad rock music just because two hot Star Wars boys were in it. Maybe the real message of the movie is the hot boys we looked at along the way.

* And because it didn’t fit anywhere else, just a shoutout to this particular part: William’s character introduction being a recruitment speech that starts with “My PTSD is so bad I have violent blackouts” and somehow with a scene cut manages to circle back around to “So anyway kids stay in the Army it’s the best and you’re all patriots” is the most heinous thing that completely undermines A, his place as the moral center/voice of reason of the film and B, any anti-military message the movie might be vaguely attempting. I just keep remembering that compilation video of young, desperately sad military recruits saying “f*ck you” and “you lied” to their recruiter and thinking, “This guy has given this speech HUNDREDS of times??”

#Triple Frontier #Anti Triple Frontier #Anti Ben Affleck #Anti Charlie Hunnam #gif #Pedro Pascal

3 notes · View notes

sweetsmellosuccess · 3 years

Text

Sundance 2021: Day 4

Films: 4 Best Film of the Day(s): Mass

Mass: Predictably, Fran Kranz’ film opens with a shot of a church, but the title turns out to be a reverberating double entendre — both the religious service towards forgiveness; and a term commonly used in conjunction with a multiple-homicide shooting event. The church, Episcopal it turns out, is the agreed-to meeting place for two sets of grieving parents: Gail (Martha Plimpton) and Jay (Jason Isaacs), whose teen son Evan was killed some years before in a high-school massacre; and Linda (Ann Down) and Richard (Reed Birney), whose son, Haden, was the shooter, before killing himself in the school library. They have agreed to meet, long after the lawsuits and legal wrangling have been settled, to possibly provide answers and solace to one another. As can be expected, the atmosphere is fraught with tension — a setting Kranz, an actor making his directorial and writing debut, expertly mines before the couples arrive, with a kind but overenthusiastic church administrator (Breeda Wool), fretting about the details of the food arrangement — and the couples, wary, at first, of letting things get hostile, work diligently to avoid disagreement by staying mild (an arrangement of flowers Linda brings is speculated upon a great deal). Eventually, however, the four wounded parents get down to more brass tacks, Gail and Jay eschewing their therapist’s call for them to avoid “interrogation” questions, to get at the root of what they are after. In truth, as Kranz has the characters cannily come to understand, there are no details that shed new light, no explanations that help rectify what they’ve lost, only a grim understanding that, as parents, they are all subject to the laws of chaos and chance. Unsurprisingly, Kranz has an actorly sense of conflict and explication, but, despite the limited setting (this could easily have been an adapted play), he gives his actors plenty of room with which to work, and the quartet are more than up to the task. They are each terrific, and given opportunity to shine, but it’s Plimpton’s monologue near the end about her son that becomes the film's singular tour-de-force moment, a scene with so many hooks and edges, it sticks to you like velcro. Kranz is careful not to overstep his dramatic boundaries, difficult given the potentially melodramatic elements of the story, and allows his actors enough time to breathe so it avoids feeling polemic or preachy (an early scene with Gail and Jay in the car before they arrive is a scintillating bit of set-up, where words are spoken, but our attention, like that of the characters, is entirely elsewhere). No easy answers, thankfully, just brutal realizations that can’t be avoided.

A Glitch in the Matrix: By this time, documentary filmmaker Rodney Ascher has carved out a sort of niche for himself: As with Room 237, and The Nightmare, he has gathered up fringe thinkers displaying a sort of group psychosis in order to explore other ways of seeing, and interpreting, our world. His docs don’t come down on either side of a given conundrum — are any of the far-out, would-be explanations of The Shining in 237 the least bit sensible? Is it possible in The Nightmare for people experiencing the horror of sleep paralysis to share in the same horrific vision? — but he carefully doesn’t contradict any of his subjects either. His new film, an exploration of what’s known as “simulation theory,” concerns a pattern of thought described back in 1977 by the heavily adapted science fiction author Philip K. Dick during an appearance in France, suggesting, Matrix-style, that all that we think we see and know is actually an intricate virtual reality, brought to us by an unseen technological force. True to his form, Ascher interviews numerous applicants to the theory — many of whom portrayed by VR avatars in their own homes — including scholars, practitioners, and skeptics, and bolstering their arguments with an assortment of other media, from Minecraft, Philip K. Dick-based films, and crude computer animations, to video games, and youtube videos. The views are intentionally conflictive — one subject suggests the very idea of such conflict is the basis of the simulation — and anything but conclusive, but, of course, that’s the very point. Less unsettling than The Nightmare, one of the few true horror movies of the documentary genre I’ve ever seen, save for the account of Joshua Cooke, who pled guilty to killing his parents in cold blood after cementing his belief that the ideas portrayed in The Matrix were completely real. Listening to his step-by-step description, from prison, of his descent into madness, and where those impulses took him, is to drop into first-person shooter psychosis.

Coming Home in the Dark: Both Australia and New Zealand are blessed with spectacularly beautiful land that is filled with wide-open, terrifying vast spaces in which any amount of evil may lurk. In dark, violent films like Wolf Creek and Killing Ground, all that beauty and space is turned on its head by far more chaotic inclinations, rendering brutally effective, and stomach-churning sadism as a means of displaying the horrible duality of the land. Kiwi director James Ashcroft attempts to add to this cinematic legacy with this film, a murder-abduction sort of thriller, in which a family on a camping trip in the wilds, is brutalized by a pair of killers they come across. In a twist that at least one of the killers, Mandrake (Daniel Gillies) would have us believe is a coincidence, it turns out the patriarch of the family, Alan (Erik Thompson), used to teach at the abusive orphanage school in which both Mandrake, and his partner, Tubbs (Matthias Luafutu) suffered as children. It’s not a believable conceit, which Ashcroft seems to readily admit, but because it makes the connection, the film attempts to work as a kind of metaphor for the violence which we didn’t perpetrate, but also did nothing to stop. Mandrake as an avenging angel, foisting Alan’s lack of empathy back onto him in violent spades. It’s difficult to fault a film for not being transgressive and shocking enough, exactly, but despite the theatrics of the situation, and Mandrake’s coldly comic engaging of the couple in “regular conversation,” it doesn’t have the heart to be as effective and unsettling as it needs to be. It plays it too safe, which saves the audience from being plunged into the all-too-realistic terror of, say, Killing Ground, but also dilutes the stronger point it wants to make about systemic brutality.

The Blazing World: Related to the 17th Century Margaret Cavendish novel in basic concept, Carlson Young’s feature debut walks a wobbly line between linear narrative, and neo-gothic opera — only with a soundtrack instead of singing. The story concerns a young woman, Margaret (Carlson), who loses her twin sister to a drowning accident as a child, but has imagined ever since that her sister lives in some alternate vortex of reality, heralded by a grinning demon, Leonid (Udo Kier, of course). Coming back to her childhood home before her battling parents (Dermot Mulroney and Vinessa Shaw) move out altogether, Margaret meets some old friends, does some drugs, and finally enters the fantasia-like world that Leonid has been beckoning her to for most of her life in order to find her trapped sister. There, she must amass a series of keys, plucking them from demon versions of her parents, and confront her own guilt and pain in order to unlock her twin and set everyone free. It would be easy to say Young’s reach far exceeds her grasp, but the fact that she was willing to attempt such an audacious project says something about her artistic chops. And for every moment that hits wrong, there are several more that work in interesting ways. Her aforementioned use of music, and sound design invokes a kind of Kubrickian aesthetic, and her commitment to her vision is palpable. This likely won’t be the best film she ever makes, but it does portend to a filmmaker worth keeping an eye on, going forward.

Sundance goes mostly virtual for this year’s edition, sparing filmgoers the altitude, long waits, standing lines, and panicked eating binges — but also, these things and more that make the festival so damn endearing. In any event, Sundance via living room is still a hell of a lot better than no Sundance. A daily report.

#sweet smell of success #ssos #piers marchant #films #movies #sundance 2021 #Film festival #virtual #mass #the blazing world #a glitch in the matrix #coming home in the dark

3 notes · View notes

doomonfilm · 3 years

Text

Thoughts : Tusk (2014)

This one has been in the queue for quite a while. I’ve been a fan of Kevin Smith since the late 1990s, and it has been a pleasure to watch him grow as a screenwriter and filmmaker. His brand of humor has always stood out as unique, but the word I was hearing prior to finally seeing Tusk was that it was unlike most any film folks had seen.

Wallace Bryton (Justin Long) and Teddy Craft (Haley Joel Osmet) are the hosts of The Not-See Party, a popular podcast where the two discuss social media influencers and viral videos before Wallace travels to interview the subjects. Wallace travels to Canada to meet the Kill Bill Kid (Doug Banks), a young man who accidentally cut off one of his legs with a katana, but Wallace arrives just in time for the Kill Bill Kid’s funeral due to his choice to commit suicide. Stranded in Canada with no story, Wallace stumbles across a letter on a corkboard from Howard Howe (Michael Parks), an eccentric explorer searching for a lodger who promises endless personal tales of his adventures. Desperate for an interview, Wallace seeks out Howe, not realizing that he is walking into a trap more bizarre than anything his imagination is capable of creating.

While Tusk is certainly not Kevin Smith’s first foray into the world of high concept contemplation, this is his first true dive into a realm as specific as body horror. The high concept comes into play as he examines Wallace through the lens of bad life choices, and how these choices have ripple effects that can leave an individual isolated before they realize for far gone they’ve spun out. Wallace is presented to us as egotistical, boorish, opportunistic and unfaithful, but in one of the rare tender moments he shares with his girlfriend Ally, we are told that he did possess desirable and admirable qualities at one time. Based on his character choices, and his job as a host of The Not-See Party Podcast (a show name that creates a self-imposed hurdle), his turn into danger plays out in a perfect “boy who cried wolf” scenario.

Perhaps the most interesting and impressive aspect of the film is how Kevin Smith is able to serve as a bridge between the comedic stylings he made his name with and the high-level skills he has gleaned from two decades in the film industry. A mix of absurdist, intellectual and low-brow humor is a given with a Kevin Smith affair, and Tusk provides it in spades. Canada not only serves as the butt of a few jokes, but it manages to dish out a few zingers and quips full of Canadian personality. Several characters are given carte blanche to embody outrageous characters and go nuts in that skin, with Michael Parks specifically getting the chance to show a handful of these looks. The premise of the story is a randomly obtuse mix of Misery and The Human Centipede, and the periphery of the main narrative is peppered with mini-narratives that are proportionally ridiculous in their own right. What really stands out amongst all of this, however, is the high production value of the film, as Smith finds a middle balance between the big budget comedy look of Cop Out and the darker, edgier look of Red State.

Tusk continues a streak of stellar, rejuvenated writing that began with Clerks II (if you’re willing to ignore Cop Out’s poor performance and critical reception), with Smith finding new and unique ways to expand his voice and naturally gifted ability to tell stories. The production value on the Howard Howe home is stellar as well, with everything from the living quarters to the walrus dungeon providing a jarring tonal shift at each point of appearance. The walrus effects and costuming are bold, but the final result is one that creates an image that will forever be burned into the minds of viewers. The scoring is also strong, standing up to the high bar set with his previous film, the brilliant Red State. The expository insert shots that accompany the Michael Parks monologues are a nice touch.

Justin Long jumps off of the screen with his ridiculousness broadness, with everything from his hilarious mustache down to his outlandish behavior setting viewers up for a shared journey down a path of darkness that could not be further from that initial stance. Michael Parks plays equally ridiculous in his diabolicalness, with his madness and obsessiveness played so large that it nears the brink of insanity, and yet somehow, he finds a way to ground it all so that he plays sinister enough to incite fear. Haley Joel Osmet finally gets a chance to break out of what seemed to be an eternal typecast as he gets to bask in a humorous light. Genesis Rodriguez brings the emotion to the table, with her unconditional ability to share tenderness and be vulnerable making the main protagonist trio engaging. Johnny Depp completes the trinity of ridiculousness, with his measured and specific take on his Inspector Clouseau-like character adding a different shade to the spectrum of humor in the film. Appearances by Ralph Garman, Harley Morenstein, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, Harley Quinn Smith, Lily-Rose Depp, Doug Banks, Zak Knutson and Ashley Greene also stand out.

BONUS THOUGHTS : Yoga Hosers (2016)

As if Tusk weren’t weird enough as a standalone, Kevin Smith followed it up with a comedic horror for kids in the form of Yoga Hosers. Part lore expander and part “let’s throw a movie together with famous friends”, the film famously divided fans of Smith and the View Aswkewniverse, mostly due to the lead roles of the Colleens in the form of Lily-Rose Depp and Harley Quinn Smith (the daughters of Johnny Depp and Smith, respectively).

Colleen C. (Lily-Rose Depp) and Colleen M. (Harley Quinn Smith) are a pair of friends whose job at the Eh-2-Zed convenience store has brought them minor fame due to their involvement in the rescue of a “man turned to manatee”. One evening after sneaking in a practice for their band Glamthrax with drummer Ichabod (Adam Brody) while on the clock, the girls are invited to a Grade 12 party by seniors Hunter Calloway (Austin Butler) and Gordon Greenleaf (Tyler Posey). The girls accept, but on the night of the party, Colleen C.’s father Bob (Tony Hale) is invited to Niagara Falls by his girlfriend (and Eh-2-Zed manager) Tabitha (Natasha Lyonne), leaving the girls to cover the store and miss out on the party. In a last ditch effort to exert control, the girls invite the seniors to move the party to Eh-2-Zed, but the Colleens have no clue of what was in store for them.

If held up to the standards of other Kevin Smith films, it’s easy to pick this one apart, as the tone is much more juvenile than films like Mallrats or the Jay and Silent Bob films. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however, as it seems like this film was not meant to be taken seriously or held as high art… this film does, however, totally read as a gift to two daughters whose fathers believed in their desires to act, and due to their rare ability to facilitate those dreams, were given the chance to fulfill a wish. You can see both actresses progress and become more comfortable as the film progresses, with Harley Quinn Smith especially showcasing that intangible growth where an actor or actress can visualize their place within a frame while on the set. It’s also very fun to see a litany of familiar faces and famous friends pop in and out of the film.

Certain creature design choices and production design continuously serve as reminders of this film’s connection to the Tusk world, though the two films have very unique rhythms. Much of the writing and humor drives home how the film is meant to be perceived as a bit of a “human cartoon”, with literal references to cartoons and comics sprinkled throughout. Keen viewers will be able to spot the numerous references to nearly every other Kevin Smith film that are presented.

It’s safe to say that words and descriptions cannot do the film Tusk justice… this film is one that simply must be seen in order to be believed, and even then, it is still rather unbelievable. Yoga Hosers is fun in its own right, but you REALLY have to be a fan of not only Kevin Smith the filmmaker, but Kevin Smith the family man to truly enjoy it… it’s definitely the one folks will see simply out of a need to be a completionist. I may or may not be writing on Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, as I watched it on the same day, but I can say that I have not laughed that hard at a movie in a long time.

5 notes · View notes

larryfanficwriter98 · 4 years

Text

Chapter One

Harry was lonely, ever since his first album kicked off so successfully he had learned that people are assholes and liked to use people for fame. He has also learned he couldn't do casual hookups. He could never allow himself to go the whole way no matter who it was with or how drunk he tried to get himself just so he wasn't a 21-year-old virgin. He wanted to date. He wanted to be in love.

Which was how, after drinking an entire bottle of wine by himself in his hotel room, he found himself on Anonymous, a discreet dating app that matched people based on sexual orientation, commitment level, and interests. No pictures, no personal information except your name and age. He was debating on it, whether or not to do it, or to delete the app when he felt the sudden urge to just do it and get it over with.

He started with the first name box and typed Harold, moving on to the last name box he typed in Stones. He then filled out his other information such as his age, 21. The next step was his likes and dislikes which was pretty easy. Afterward, he made sure his sexual orientation was marked gay and made an age group he was comfortable with then made his profile public.

He went to his bio and after a bit of thinking just decided on a quick sentence to sum it up, Looking for someone to come home to after traveling. With that, he closed the app and put his phone on the charger then turned over and went to sleep knowing it could take up to 24-48 hours for the app to start matching you.

Louis walked into the townhouse he shared with Zayn, Liam, and Niall after dismissing the horrible date in his car. He knew he should have driven himself, but he and the guy had been talking for two weeks, so he figured it would be fine. It wasn't fine. Louis likes sex, he was always having sex back in uni, but recently he hasn't been happy with just a quickie. He was ready to start settling down and making plans about the future and was in it for the long haul now. Apparently no one else near his age was at that point. He was 23, 24 at the end of the year, two of his best friends were getting married to each other in eight months.

"How was the date Tommo?" Niall asked turning back to look at him from the sectional.

"He was in love."

"That fast?"

"I understand some people fall in love quickly and all, but I mean come on. We've been messaging each other for two weeks." Louis pushed himself off the door he had been leaning on and moved to sit on the sectional sofa, "what are you watching?"

"No idea." Louis snorted reaching for the bowl of popcorn Niall was munching on, grabbing a fistful of it and putting a piece into his mouth.

"You know I've been on the new app called Anonymous. Its actually pretty cool, you just give it your interests, likes and dislikes, hobbies, age, name, and commitment level. No pictures, no personal information. Just your personality and what you like. I've been talking to this girl on there and we actually click really well." Niall told him, Louis scrunched his face up

"That sounds risky."

"Nope. Everyone is verified. A matcher will contact you and ask you questions about yourself and make sure you are real and if a person has a verified check by their profile that means they've been checked over. After that, you start getting matched to five people and you can decide if you're into talking to them. If not just press decline and if you are press accept. You're only able to talk to three people at once so you have to be specific."

"Sounds like a lot of work."

"Says the guy who is on his fourth dating app." Louis paused as his thumb clicked on the dating apps folder on his phone showing he actually had six installed, "oh sixth dating app, my bad. Did you really download Grindr?"

"No." Louis said as he uninstalled said app without looking at Niall as he cracked up beside him. "I'm going to bed, have work in the morning. Night."

"Night Grindr boy." Louis sent his laughing mate a glare before hurrying up the stairs to his bedroom.

If he just happened to go to the app store and install Anonymous...well that was his business and Niall will never find out. Louis laid in bed going through the somewhat familiar steps by now. The only difference was that you had to list more than ten likes and dislikes and more than five hobbies you do or would like to do. Nothing like the other dating apps which was completely optional and mostly ignored. After his profile was completed he closed the app and went to sleep.

Three days later Louis was on his break when he got a notification from Anonymous that he was matched to five potential interests. He had hesitated but clicked on the app then click on the matches section reading the first match.

Name: Dan Stevens Age: 26

And that was when it went downhill, the guy was heavy metal punk and Louis was not into that do he declined it. The next three weren't that much better, but the last one for the day seemed alright.

Name: Joshua Wilder

Age: 22

His hobbies were a bit more athletic than Louis was okay with, but that could be compromised on. His commitment however was "something casual/nonexclusive" which Louis was definitely not okay with. However, he figured everything starts causal in a way so he accepted it getting a popup his next potential matches will be ready within 12-24 hours. He had to wait to see if Joshua would match with him before he could send a message so he locked his phone and finished his lunch.

Harry hasn't been having any good luck with the app, he had completed all of the requirements for verification but had declined nearly every match so far. He was too nervous to actually go through with it and the few he had accepted and accepted him when he told them he was demi-sexual and wouldn't be having sex anytime soon stopped talking to him and Harry got notified the match declined him. It was a week after the making of the profile, Harry was feeling stupid for doing it when he got notified of his daily matches. Sighing heavily he clicked on the notification and looked through them.

Name: David Brockman

DECLINED

Name: Franklin Bottons

DECLINED

Name: Stewart Wesley

DECLINED

Name: Kyler Jennsons

DECLINED

Name: Louis Tomlinson

Age: 23

Commitment Level: Committed/Looking For Someone To Marry

Hobbies: Skiing, Surfing, Writing, Reading, Singing, Playing Guitar, Playing Footie

Interests: Skiing, Surfing, Writing, Reading, Singing, Playing Guitar, Football, Traveling, Watching Movies, Musicals

Dislikes: Hiking, Cats, Cycling, Running, Yoga, Avocados, Cooking, Horror Films, The Vegan Craze, Trendy Shit

The last few things threw him off a bit, but Harry shrugged and accepted him. He was the only one that was lining up with his interests and if he turns out to be just another one around for a bed partner Harry would delete the app and pretend it never happened.

Louis got the notification that he had a new match while he was playing fifa with the lads. He ignored it in favor of scoring a goal then he grabbed his phone and opened the app.

Name: Harold Stones

Age: 21

Hobbies: Singing, Dancing, Baking, Cooking, Travelling, Reading

Interests: Singing, Dancing, Baking, Cooking, Travelling, Reading Swimming, Surfing, Skiing, Snowboarding, Canoeing, Musicals, Films, Photography, Writing, Playing Guitar, Volunteering

Dislikes: Horror Films, Spiders, Mountain Climbing, Skydiving, Archery, Paragliding, Mountain Bungee Jump, Volcano Boarding, Heights, Roller-coasters

Louis remembered why he accepted him, he had drunk a lot of beer one night and thought, "if this guy doesn't like volcano boarding that means he actually did it and he had to ask him why" and so he accepted him. The guy seemed like fun and they had a lot of similar interests so he messaged him.

Why volcano boarding?

Louis honestly wanted to know who in their right mind surfed a volcano slope. He locked his phone, tossed it to the side, and continued the game.

"Yellow card! Foul! You tripped me! Louis shouted looking between Zayn and the game.

"I admit to nothing." Zayn said as he scored a goal

"I saw it mate don't worry." Niall said as he stole the ball from Liam, "take that."

"That was low." Liam said, "I didn't even do anything."

"No, but your fiance did." Louis said

"HE SHOOTS HE SCORES!" Niall shouted as Louis scored the winning goal of the match

"Night lads." Louis grabbed his phone and headed upstairs to his room putting his phone on the charger before he took a shower for the night.

#larry fanfiction #larry stylinson #new story #work in progress

9 notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 3 years

Text

How Mortal Kombat Became the Best Selling Fighting Game Franchise Ever

https://ift.tt/3iOdD3F

WB Games recently confirmed that Mortal Kombat 11 has sold over 12 million copies worldwide so far. That means that the Mortal Kombat franchise has sold more than 73 million games to date, which, as some analysts have already pointed out, also means that it now appears to be the best-selling fighting game franchise ever.

For reference: Mortal Kombat – 73 million units Smash Bros. – 65.1 million units (March 31, 2021) Tekken – 51 million units (April 2021) Street Fighter – 46 million units (March 31, 2021) https://t.co/f0mhQLMzeM

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) July 26, 2021

While WB has confirmed the lifetime sales of the Mortal Kombat franchise to date, it should be noted that some of the other current sales figures for the other major fighting game franchises are either estimates or are based on reports that haven’t been updated quite as recently. Having said that, it certainly appears that Mortal Kombat is now the best-selling fighting game franchise ever, which is even more impressive when you consider that it was nowhere close to dethroning Super Smash Bros. for that honor prior to the release of Mortal Kombat X and Mortal Kombat 11.

So how did we get to this point? Well, the success of the Mortal Kombat franchise isn’t a sudden thing nor is it one of those sales records that somehow make us question the direction of the video game industry or the tastes of gamers. No, Mortal Kombat‘s success can instead be attributed to a series of factors that highlight just what an incredible job its various developers have done over the years and the unique place this series has in the industry, video game culture, and certainly in the hearts of fighting game fans everywhere.

The Enduring Novelty of Mortal Kombat’s Violence

Look, you probably don’t need a complete rundown of how the original Mortal Kombat‘s violence helped set it apart. At a time when violent video games were still a novelty, Mortal Kombat offered one of the most celebratory violent gaming experiences the world had ever seen up until that point. It triggered Congressional hearings, protests, lawsuits, and, most importantly for our current purposes, an incredibly successful fighting game franchise.

What doesn’t get talked about quite as much, though, is how Mortal Kombat‘s violence has remained something of a novelty even as the idea of violent video games becomes much more common. See, there was a specific era of video games in which developers were trying to use violence/extreme content to court controversy for their games (Rockstar’s excellent Manhunt is one of the better examples of that era). It was kind of like the torture porn era for major horror movies. We experienced it, the fad burned out, and many of us left a little more numb to the idea of extreme violence as a draw. More and more game studios dialed back on the idea of implementing such incredible levels of violence, not necessarily on moral grounds, but because it slowly became less of a hook/novelty.

Mortal Kombat is different. The franchise could go toe-to-toe with most of the most violent video games released over the last 30 years or so from a pure content perspective, but Mortal Kombat‘s violence has always been…fun. It’s less of a torture porn scenario where violence is meant to disturb and test you and more like an ’80s slasher where the violence is so cartoonish and over-the-top that it’s often hard to take it seriously. It’s all about having fun, which is still a novelty compared to toned-down violence, violence as biting (sometimes hard to process) social commentary, or violence that is trying too hard to be controversial.

Mortal Kombat Is One of the Most “Accessible” Fighting Game Franchises

Talking about “accessibility” in fighting games is always tough. It’s a topic that draws gatekeepers who look down on the very concept of accessibility in gaming as well as those who think they’re defending a game by arguing it’s not really that accessible from a mechanical standpoint.

When we talk about Mortal Kombat‘s accessibility, though, it’s only as a positive. In fact, it’s not just about the game’s mechanics. Yes, the original Mortal Kombat games were perhaps “simpler” than something like Street Fighter, but as the series grew, it certainly adopted more complicated gameplay systems that elevated it in the eyes of some genre purists. I’d argue that modern Mortal Kombat games boast better pick-up and play credentials than some of its genre competitors, but you’re obviously not going to convince anyone who believes that is an inherently bad thing that it’s actually a very impressive quality.

No, the real magic of Mortal Kombat‘s accessibility is how the franchise’s various developers and designers over the years have maintained this aura of approachability that the series boasts to this day even as it has become a much deeper fighting game series. As we noted above, Mortal Kombat feels more fun than intimidating in a way that even some of the best fighting game franchises can’t equal. As we’ll look at below, a lot of the ways the Mortal Kombat teams over the years have achieved and maintained that image can be attributed to the elements of their games that they’ve intelligently chosen to emphasize over their closest competitors.

Movies

Mortal Kombat Sequel: What Should Happen Next

By Gavin Jasper

Games

Mortal Kombat: 15 Most Powerful Characters

By Gavin Jasper

Mortal Kombat is More Satisfying to a Much Wider Audience

You could maybe label this idea under “accessibility,” but it’s actually a slightly different point that proves to be very important when you’re trying to comprehend the incredible staying power of the Mortal Kombat franchise after all these years. “Accessibility” is what can help get gamers in the door and form their first impressions. What matters from there is how those players feel once they start spending time with the game, and that’s where Mortal Kombat really pulls ahead of some other notable fighting game franchises.

See, whether you play on the easiest difficulty setting and enable one-button fatalities or choose to master every combo and character, Mortal Kombat is really all about performing over-the-top moves with over-the-top characters in over-the-top environments while enjoying a, you guessed it, over-the-top story. That’s the core of the Mortal Kombat experience, and it’s the big reason why you’d ever bother to play one of these games.

You can enjoy the “core” Mortal Kombat experience no matter how good you are at the game. More experienced players can enjoy an evolved form of that experience that grows as they do, but the fundamental appeal of this franchise doesn’t demand a certain level of commitment. Ironically enough, that’s often what inspires a wider audience to spend more time with it in the first place.

Mortal Kombat’s Story, Characters, and World Give it a Personality That Many Other Fighting Games Don’t Have

Again, there’s no point in arguing that Mortal Kombat features better characters, stories, and world-building than Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, Tekken, or any of the other greatest fighting game franchises. That’s obviously a subjective argument.

What’s a little easier to objectively argue is the idea that the Mortal Kombat team has chosen to emphasize those elements more than other fighting games traditionally have. Mortal Kombat initially distinguished itself from Street Fighter 2 by offering a more cinematic (and obviously violent) gaming experience, and while you can still debate about which of those games were better, that kind of experience simply reached an audience that included many who would have otherwise never paid attention to a fighting game.

Over the years, Mortal Kombat developers from various studios have stuck with what brought the franchise to the dance, so far as emphasizing those personality-based elements go. It hasn’t always been perfect, but the fairly recent decision to turn Mortal Kombat‘s campaigns into this kind of cinematic universe has only helped ensure that more people continue to follow this franchise if only to watch what happens next. The Mortal Kombat franchise slowly forced other fighters to follow in its footsteps, and it honestly still does those “cinematic” elements better, or as good, as anyone else.

Mortal Kombat Constantly Reinvents Itself

Look, the Mortal Kombat franchise is far from perfect. In fact, I think you’ll find that other fighting game franchises may just be better on an installment by installment basis. There have certainly been Mortal Kombat games that have been cleanly outsold by their competitors over the years.

Yet, that strangely makes Mortal Kombat‘s success all the more impressive. When Mortal Kombat 4 made people question whether or not the novelty of the series had passed, the Mortal Kombat team decided to drastically change their design philosophy with the release of the surprising (and successful) Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance. That approach was still commercially viable by the time that Mortal Kombat: Armageddon was released, but in response to criticisms that things were starting to get a bit stale, NetherRealm Studios boldly decided to blow everything up again with 2011’s brilliant Mortal Kombat reboot.

There are few other franchises in all of gaming that have been this consistently committed to keeping things fresh even at times when “more of the same” would have been enough for many. You can point to a lot of factors that have contributed to Mortal Kombat‘s incredible success over the years, but let’s not forget that at the heart of it all are some really good games.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The post How Mortal Kombat Became the Best Selling Fighting Game Franchise Ever appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3BHYqK6

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

3 notes · View notes

gunnerpalace · 4 years

Note

Can I ask your opinion on Fade to Black? I just rewatched it and my Ichiruki heart is just overflowing with feels! But anyways I love your analysis and opinions on all things Bleach.

I am that rare IR who does not actually like Fade to Black very much. I can see what it was trying to do, and I appreciate the idea in concept (and some little moments here and there) but I am not at all a fan of how it was actually put together and executed. I guess I’ll do this as a pros and cons list:

PROS:

I don’t like Mayuri but I sort of like how he was handled in this movie. Him keeping a physical backup of his brain is a cool sci-fi idea for dealing with advancing the plot later.

Dark Rukia’s design is fairly cool. Especially in the little promo book that came with the movie, which you sometimes see screenshots of floating around.

The degree of attachment Ichigo shows toward Rukia is endearing.

The scene where Kisuke asks what Rukia is to Ichigo is cute and pretty spot-on.

Kisuke showing up in his old captain’s uniform for seemingly no reason other than to tweak Yamamoto’s nose is pretty funny. Him and Yoruichi basically alluding to the Soul Society arc is also kind of cute.

Ichigo using some special technique that’s unique to him in order to find Rukia (because it ain’t reiraku) is great.

The fight scene between Ichigo and Dark Rukia, and how Ichigo solves it and saves her, is well done and engaging.

Their little hug scene that’s gif’d on here a lot is sweet.

The ending where they have this discussion about how maybe this isn’t the first time they’ve met feels a little underplayed (they’re real far apart and stoic for people discussing such mushy things) but it’s still nice.

CONS:

I’m really tired of arcs about rescuing Rukia and reducing her to a damsel in distress, because she’s better than that. The Soul Society arc was the first time, and it was set up well and worked just fine—it’s classic. Fade to Black’s reasons are contrived (more on that later) and derivative. Then Hell Verse did it again and it was just stupid by that point. There should’ve been a rescue Ichigo movie instead, and the Xcution arc doesn’t really count since that’s presented as a horror story mostly from his perspective.

Rukia’s has had a hard life as a character and has been dumped on consistently, so I view adding yet more misery and pain onto her as gratuitous and frankly kind of insulting in general.

While Dark Rukia’s design is cool, it’s not really Rukia at all. It is very clear she’s an unwilling participant. It kinda looks like her, but it’s all Homura and Shizuku, they’re just forcing her along into it. And you know what? That’s basically rape, even if it’s not sexual rape. It’s still a total loss of consent and bodily autonomy. I’m pretty not cool with a plot that boils down to Rukia being raped.

I just hate the visual design of the kids. I can’t explain why beyond saying they just look out of place in the setting. Homura in particular looks like she walked off the set of Yu-Gi-Oh.

The backstory with the two kids frankly doesn’t make much sense. She meets Renji when she’s seemingly somewhere around the age of Karin or Yuzu (like 8-12) and they and their friends are together for ten years. At the end of that, she enters the Academy. In the flashbacks with these kids, she looks indistinguishable from how she does in the present? When exactly was this supposed to be happening?

The entire plot of Soul Society not knowing who Rukia is is stupid. Soul Society is a bureaucracy. From what we are shown, the majority of what they do every single day is paperwork. Just like Japan still to this day loves forms in triplicate, Soul Society fucking loves paperwork. And they love records and archives. And all Byakuya can do is find one lone book that references Rukia? There would be literally hundreds and hundreds and thousands of documents referencing her, or signed by her. The most casual search would indicate she was real.

Kon is annoying as hell in this movie. Like, he’s usually annoying, but not as much as he is here. It’s distracting and grating.

Ichigo is a continual disappointment in this movie. There are so many things that I will give them their own entries denoted by letters below:

A. People say he remembers Rukia when everyone else forgets. He doesn’t. Only Kon remembers Rukia. Kon jogs Ichigo’s memory. Ichigo does admittedly remember fully and quickly, which puts him ahead of everyone else, but he still forgets to begin with. That’s stupid.

B. Ichigo is extremely wishy-washy in this movie. He requires a speech from Kon, can’t or won’t beat Shuhei of all people even with his mask on, and loses to Toushirou. It’s pathetic. I get it, he’s a sad puppy without Rukia. It’s still pathetic to watch. The only time in the manga canon where his confidence wavers when it comes to trying to get to Rukia is during the Soul Society arc, when he wants to stay and wait for Ganju so they can settle their quarrel, and you can read that as being unique because it turns out they’re cousins and Ichigo may know something is unique, even if he doesn’t know it. This shit of him becoming discouraged and sad when trying to get to her is out-of-character.

C. This is an extension of (B), but like. Okay, when Orikasa Fumiko is voicing Rukia, and she screams in agony or despair, it chills me to the bone. I cannot explain to you how much I don’t like hearing it. It makes me anxious and makes me angry. She did it on the Senzaikyu when Gin broke her resolve to face death, and she does it in this movie when the Hollow fusion starts. And all Ichigo can do… is stand there uselessly going “Rukia…” like it’s nothing unusual. If he had been on the Senzaikyu bridge when Gin had done what he’d done, and he’d heard Rukia scream like that, he’d have fucking murdered Gin right then and there in cold blood. And here he faces the equivalent and does nothing. That’s not my boy. That’s not Ichigo.

D. When Rukia is crying over the deaths of Homura and Shizuku, Ichigo just stands there uselessly beside Renji and Byakuya and does nothing to console her. Renji and Byakuya at least have an excuse because they still don’t remember her. What’s Ichigo’s? Again, not him. Go to her you moron. At least grasp her shoulder. Not the Ichigo I know.

The fight scene with the goo monster is dumb as hell. Yamamoto should be able to solo it. He activated Ryuujin Jakka and… completely disappears from the fight. He just straight up vanishes. Because you can tell they realized he should be able to solo it and that would deprive them of everyone else getting a fight too. So he just instant transmissions out of the entire movie. And we get contrived shit like the monster being faster than Yoruichi and Soi-Fon so that Kisuke can heroically save Yoruichi (because him doing it in the Yammy fight wasn’t enough already). It’s just contrived, gratuitous, and pointless.

While the IchiRuki moments are very cute (if a little overly restrained, in my opinion) I feel like the rest of the movie that is set up to make them happen is a hot mess. Things happen because they need to for the plot to work, not because it makes sense or is in character for them to happen. I can’t stand movies that are made that way for any franchise, and seeing characters I care about deeply behave in such ways really just kinda pisses me off. The story beats are derivative and generally inferior versions of things we’ve already seen.

Movie Ichigo is generally out-of-character as fuck (and not just in this movie!) in a way that reminds me of like, Jean-Luc Picard in the Star Trek: The Next Generation movies (wherein he acts basically nothing like he does on the TV show). And Movie Rukia seems generally reduced to a background character.

I said recently that Rukia and Doomguy would be friends, and you know what? I would watch that movie instead of Fade to Black or Hell Verse, to be honest. Let’s do an outline.

Ichigo is kidnapped by some denizen of Hell (Kokutou and Shuren and company, I guess? they can still be anime pretty boys even if they’re damned souls, maybe they have terrible demonic forms or something) to be used as a reiatsu battery or some shit for evil purposes. (Breaking out of Hell to overrun the other worlds?) Ichigo’s energy running wild causes some kind of temporal and dimensional vortex which draws in the Doomguy. He finds himself in the upper levels of Bleach’s Hell and does what he does, methodically murdering his way about.

Rukia is sent to investigate Ichigo’s disappearance and eventually figures out Ichigo is in Hell, and so goes to save him (against orders, with the help of Kisuke and maybe the others). There she encounters Doomguy, and is at first horrified, but she notices the rabbit’s foot he keeps on him. She decides to help him, and they’re left alone for a minute, assessing each other.

Despite their initial lack of a shared language (maybe his helmet can translate Japanese?), she communicates to him (with Chappy drawings!) that she has to go deeper into Hell to save Ichigo. Given their shared love of bunnies, Doomguy is down with that. She rides on his back as she did with Ichigo, working some of his spare guns as they go. (Imagine Rukia cocking a shotgun meaningfully tho…) Along the way Rukia freezes some dudes and Doomguy punches their heads off. The usual stuff. She tells him about Ichigo as they go, like she did to Hanataro. Doomguy says nothing because he’s Doomguy, but he seems to listen.

They eventually get to Ichigo and liberate him through the judicious application of firepower. His raging reiatsu causes a lot of damage to the surrounding environment. Doomguy takes advantage of the chaos to commit more murder, giving Ichigo and Rukia time to have a tender reunion moment. The three then team up to take on Kokutou, Shuren, and the other baddies, possibly over the course of several different battles. (Probably like a third or so of the movie is this, and maybe the others show up to pair off and get some screen time. Doesn’t really matter.)

Eventually Shuren and the other chumps die and Kokutou becomes the big bad. Ichigo and Rukia do a big tag-team bankai attack to kill him after Doomguy provides them with an opening with a BFG9000 shot (as he is mostly doing add-clear).

Victorious, the three escape to the upper levels of Hell again, where they are met by reinforcements from Soul Society and explain that Doomguy is a friend. Eventually, Kisuke does some technobabble shizzlewizzle to send Doomguy back to the dimensions he more properly belongs to. Rukia gives him a parting gift of a drawing of him and Daisy in happier times. Ichigo gives him a fistbump and a CD player with some punk music, or a collection of edgy Shakespearean poetry or something.

Ichigo and Rukia share an epilogue to decompress and have some playful banter about how she’ll always be there for him just like he’s there for her.

Roll credits to At Doom’s Gate or BFG Division. Mid-credit sequence is Doomguy sitting on a massive demon corpse, making a detailed Chappy drawing of himself, Rukia, and Ichigo killing demons together as friends. End-credit sequence is Ichigo and Rukia playing an FPS game together on a console in pajamas or lounging clothes while laughing and bantering.

Like, yes, this idea is pretty stupid (although I am increasingly tempted to write it) and a frankly bizarre crossover. But you know what? It feels truer to the characters to me, and less contrived and dumb in setting up why what is happening is. It doesn’t really make the characters needlessly helpless or incompetent to generate those good moments of interaction.

And that is really my problem with Fade to Black: what it has to do to get the good moments outweighs them, for me. Maybe it’s because I just can’t turn my brain off and can’t stop doing critical analysis, but I always feel like the juice ain’t worth the squeeze. (And I kinda feel that way about all the animated movies. I was really surprised by how much I liked the Live Action: it nailed handling things perfectly.)

Other people like it, and that’s fine, but I don’t really intend to ever watch it again.

#Asks #rukia-kuchiki-divided #DoomBleach #god why did this stupid crossover even occur to me #i hate it #but i love it #but i HATE it

31 notes · View notes

wcstlcys · 4 years

Text

( IMOGEN POOTS. THIRTY. CIS-FEMALE. SHE/HER. ) in texas, FRANCINE WOLFF is more commonly known as FRANKIE. they’ve been living in stratford for THIRTY YEARS and currently a PARAMEDIC. some say they are AMORAL & MEEK but i’m more inclined to believe those that say they’re UNPREDICTABLE & BENEVOLENT. if you walk by their house, you can sometimes hear UNDER THE GRAVEYARD by OZZY OSBOURNE playing from their window. ( trembling hands , blood stained uniform , torn up medical books , chipped nail polish )

[ BLOOD, DRUGS, DRUG ABUSE & ADDICTION, OVERDOSE TRIGGER WARNINGS ]

basics.

* goes by frankie – will cry if you call her francine

* panromantic / pansexual

* has a fairly nasty pill habit

* horror movie fanatic

* has a fairly nasty pill habit

* frankie is one of the only members of her family who did not choose a career within the police department

* major family issues

* very obscure sense of morals, mostly just wants to help people even if that means breaking the law

about.

✘ frankie has spent her entire life in stratford, for no other reason that she does not know where else to go. generations of her family have grown up here and never left – so why should she ?? she feels as if she’s stuck and should simply remain.

✘ with her father and grandfather being both deputies within the sheriffs department, along with her siblings as well, frankie has always felt pressured by their reputation. especially with their very much outspoken hatred towards the gangs within town. perhaps it was her rebilious phase settling in, but she found herself drawn towards those groups. outlaws of any kind, really. anything that screamed the entire opposite of her family.

✘ frankie’s interest in medicine comes from an unusual source. she’s had a strange fascination with blood and violence from a young age. something about it simply just attracts her and she can’t particularly place a finger on it. in fact, the interest bothers her quite greatly at times. she tries her best to ignore it and tries to place it into a practical sense. which is why she chose to go into the field of EMS, she could fuel her obsession without anyone batting an eye, and at the same time she could help people.

✘ while frankie is a paramedic, she’s an incredibly corrupt one. a lot of her patients end up being criminals, a lot of the time in trouble with the law or hold the potential to be in some sort of trouble. she’s helped people escape custody at the hospital numerous times, failed to report things she should to the police, smuggle out medications and supplies from the hospital, and everything in between. she neither views her actions as right or wrong, she’s simply just helping out people when she can.

✘ a lot of her paramedic work also happens off duty, where she’s called into sketchy situations because people can’t go to the hospital in fear of being caught or questioned by the police. she can no longer keep track of the amount of times she’s had to stitch up someone in a poorly lit room with limited supplies at her disposable. but she does it every time, without question.

✘ [ DRUG TRIGGER WARNING ] while on the outside, frankie seems to handle her job just fine, more times than not she had to self-medicate in order to keep her nerves in check. she witnesses a lot of tragedy, death and grief in her lifetime and she has to keep her composure somehow. she refuses to believe she has an addiction, and for those who are aware of it she simply denies it all. her addiction has caused a near constant tremble in her hands, only disappearing when she’s hyper focused on her work. it’s a characteristic she tries to ignore, and shrugs her shoulders when pointed out.

✘ [ OVERDOSE TRIGGER WARNING ] unfortunately , after a particularly bad incident, frankie accidentally overdosed and landed herself in hospital for a short stint of time. her father, not wanting to have any shame or question directed towards his family, managed to keep the whole thing under wraps. a few people are aware of what happened, but for some reason of the other keep quiet about it. especially the person who found her [ yall im sorry but potential connection bye ] she took a brief break from her job whilst she was recovering, and for a lot of people her short disappearance is left unanswered. since the overdose she’s been sort of sober if you can even call it that. she’s been trying to keep things under control but ya gal ain’t so good at that.

✘ when she’s not doing EMS work, both on and off-duty, you’ll probably find her at a club or bar of some sort trying to wind down. it’s not so much about the drinking, she just likes to party and dance whenever she gets the chance. she’s pretty busy most of the time, and ends up taking a lot of night shifts, so partying isnt something she gets to do all the time. she can be quite shy sometimes so she needs a bit of a party setting in order to let loose and have some fun. is that troubling ?? maybe so, but she chooses to ignore it.

✘ horror movie fanatic. are we surprised ?? you’ll often find frankie locked up in her house, horror movies playing in the background. it keeps her sane and she would very much appreciate it if you don’t mention it. she finds it a little embarrassing sometimes. she’s very shy ALRIGHT.

✘ if you call her francine she might just cry. she hates it. only her family calls her that. if you’re special she MIGHT accept fran in a pinch but she always introduces herself as frankie. francine is reserved for family and legal documents alright.

wanted connections.:

✘ BLACKMAIL: [ OPEN ] someone who has gained the knowledge of her corrupted ways and is using it as a means to exploit her. whether it’s because they dislike her, they need information, or they are simply malicious and want to use it against her for their own needs and wishes. please for the love of god torture frankie goodbye

✘ FIRST LOVE / FIRST HEARTBREAK: [ OPEN ] because i am a hopeless romantic and also love angst, i demand some cute yet tragic love for frankie. am i lame and going to suggest it be a biker ?? maybe so, but i’m honestly down for civilians as well, whatever works out best !! i see this as someone she’s known for a good chunk of her life and the relationship may have been and off again and on again type of scenario. i also imagine they’re in the know of all her corrupt behavior within the EMS. idk man gimme angst so i can cRY

✘ EXES: [ OPEN ] even after her first heartbreak i imagine she’s dated around here and there. lots of opportunities for messy relationships with her busy work schedule and all the shady stuff she does on the sidelines.

✘ BEST FRIENDS / RIDE OR DIES: [ OPEN ] these would be the people she loves with her whole heart. she would do absolutely anything for them and literally commit crimes and risk her job for them. these could be childhood friends or simply friends she’s met along the way, even through her work ! especially her off-duty work

✘ FRIENDSHIPS: frankie needs friends ok pls she can be so sweet and loving and i just want her to drown everyone in platonic love and kisses

✘ HOOKUPS / FWBS: [ OPEN ] listen…ya gal has needs. she has a very busy schedule and doesnt have a lot of time to date. she needs to let off some steam alright ok cool

✘ PATIENTS / WORK RELATED [ OPEN ]: frankie opens up her services to a lot of people. sometimes she gets paid, other times she’s just owed a favour – but most of the time she simply just does it to help out. i imagine a lot of these connections would be affiliated with the gangs. she’s very much neutral to both sides and tries to help out whenever she can.

✘ WORK CONNECTIONS [ OPEN ]: police, fire department, hospital workers PLEASE come give frankie some love cus i imagine they’d interact a lot based off of their careers.

ok SO this is all i can think of right now but i am ofc open to a lot more connections and i REALLY wanna plot with all of yall and snatch up those connections.

#rideintro.#rideintro #yeeting these again bye #also i had to use that gif bc i love it

5 notes · View notes