#and make them sound shoehorned in and badly timed and its just all bad. how are you gonna fuck up the focal point
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when you forget how good memory of tears is
#crow.txt#to be fair i listened to don't look back first. whcih is definitely good. but removing the main guitar riff hurts it so bad.#original memory of tears is still unmatched. i was a fool for insisting i didnt like it for... a year or two?#cause i just never listened past the intro. L moment for me#CHILDISH KILLER TOO I WAS THINKING ABOUT IT THE OTHER DAY its genuinely a crime how fucked up they made the II#and black onslaught II. both of those were done so fucking wrong. if they had bothered to rerecord the vocals it could have been better#im so bent. how did you have preexisting vocal tracks and then not even construct the song around them right#and make them sound shoehorned in and badly timed and its just all bad. how are you gonna fuck up the focal point#that you already had. At The Start. i always forget exactly how bad it is until i hear it again. cause its straight up just. :/#how are you gonna make The Point Of The Song not fit anymore#at least they didnt fuck up the Main main riff of childish killer but also what am i saying yeah they did that is worse.
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TROS Reaction 12-20-19. AKA my 6 page long dissertation about why I really disliked TROS.
I didn’t think it would be this bad. I truly thought there would be some gleaming moments of redeemability, but no. It’s one...giant...shit-show. What a horrible blow to the end of not only the sequel trilogy and these characters but to everything that came before. It really takes skill to mess up this badly.
A little something nice though, was the guy I sat next to. Really nice (and cute too ^-^ ) and he offered me some of his candy (Buncha Crunch! My favorite!) before the film started and then throughout the film because he said, “Well this is consolation for having to sit next to me.” Aw I couldn’t have asked for a better seat partner, I didn’t even know him! And then when the film ended he knew I didn’t take it well and I cried and shook through many moments and he offered the rest of his candy and I said, “Thanks, I think I need it.” I asked him what he thought overall and he said, “C-3P0 was pretty funny.” I said, “Yeah I agree. I actually knew everything that happened before I saw it, and I thought it was a mess.” He chuckled and said, “Me too, but I didn’t want to say anything in case you liked it.” I said, “Oh, no, I didn’t really like it. But I gotta be honest, Ben Solo didn’t deserve to die. That’s just my opinion.” I think he was surprised by that but didn’t disagree. He just kinda nodded or something and then we said goodbye and he left with his buddies, who also seemed pretty unenthused by the whole movie. Hopefully I gave him something to think about with my comment, but he was really nice and I’m glad he sat next to me.
Pessimism aside for now, I’ll start by listing the things I liked. I gotta be honest, there’s not much here.
Reylo is canon! But, in my opinion, it was handled pretty badly. Ben’s death is only the start of the problems for it, but more on that later.
C-3P0 is funny I guess. Yes he is annoying sometimes like usual, but not more so than other times.
D-O is freaking adorable. Out of everything good I’ve listed I have no qualms with this one. His manner is cute, his speaking is very funny, and his actions are just precious.
Babu Frik is very cute too, just perfect! Lovely little puppet! Don’t know why he was shoehorned in at the end battle but whatever. We never saw him again.
Maz is a puppet now? Okay, cool. Wish that would’ve been the case since the beginning. You had the technology JJ.
The music is good, when it’s given its own time to shine and be noticed. I feel like I barely noticed it was there because sound effects just drowned it out. Really wasted, but still good nonetheless.
Leia’s death and how it affected Ben. Wow. This was the first moment I truly cried. This was handled very well by Adam Driver, and then Maz saying “Goodbye, Princess.” Ouch, that got me.
Ben talking to the memory of his father! This is something I did not know was in the movie and boy am I glad I wasn’t spoiled for it! THIS is where the really hard tears and sobbing came. I was literally shaking and shivering trying to keep it in so as not to disturb everyone else. This. Part. Was. Perfect. Ben looks at him like he wants to say “I love you,” and Han says out loud “I know.” *crazy screaming and crying* Out of all the things they got wrong for Ben in this film, THIS they got right!
Ben Solo is the Solo boy we always wanted. Running in with a t-shirt, gun slinging, blasting opponents without even looking. THIS is a true son of Solo! But of course they give him no lines except “Ow.” THAT was a bad idea.
And that’s it. Yes those are the only things I even remotely liked, but I have to be honest, each one of these has some kind of problem attached to it which sours the real enjoyment.
On to what I disliked. Strap in lads, this is going to be a long ride.
1. The pacing. OH. MY. GOSH. SLOW. THE. FUCK. DOWN. For fucks sake I couldn’t even process what the hell was happening before we were on to the next thing! This was the biggest problem with the movie, BY FAR. Yes I know the story is terrible, we’ll get to that, but the pacing just completely took me out of the movie. I couldn’t feel invested in anything because it was all in one ear and out the other like ten-fold!
And this is part of the issue I have with how Reylo was handled. It. Felt. So. Rushed. And. Unfinished. There weren’t enough scenes with them and the scenes we did get were so fast and then over with that it felt like no progress was being made at all! It felt, for lack of a better word, unearned. And I know, that’s not really the case since they’ve had plenty of build-up in the last 2 films, but there wasn’t enough time with them spent NOT fighting and hating each other and opposing each other. Yes, I know, Kylo kept trying to get Rey to take his hand, but it doesn’t feel genuine because even Kylo feels out of character, and Rey too, big time. Now this isn’t the actor’s faults, they did what they could with the shitty story they were given, so I put all this blame at JJ’s desk.
In any case the overall film pacing was too fast, too much, too soon, too many things onscreen, too many things happening at once, not enough character, not enough motivation, not enough letting scenes breathe and just play out naturally. Everything felt forced for the sake of the “plot.” Oh we gotta get this thing, and then that thing, to get this thing, so we can defeat these guys! LET. US. BREATHE.
2. The story. My gosh, they couldn’t have picked a worse storyline to follow. Everything truly felt like it was written by a fanboy who wanted to retcon everything in TLJ, even down to the dialogue. Everyone keeps saying to Rey “You’re a Palpatine.” But it sounds SO strange, like nobody says things like this. I get it, it’s a space fantasy, they talk weird mumbo jumbo but it just sounds like a fanboy ghost wrote this. Like we gotta have everyone know now she’s a Palpatine! You’re a Palpatine! You’re a Palpatine! Palpatine heir! All bow down to the Palpatine! Give me a break.
3. Yeah, let’s talk about Palps. The old raisin himself. You know, I never really liked ROTS, but Palps was always a great thing about it. He was sinister, diabolical, he had a plan and knew what to do with it. But this Palps. *le heavy sigh* What a waste this was. For one thing, the lightning effects that lights up his face is really annoying, even for someone who doesn’t get seizures, I can’t even imagine what it’s like for those who do, I’m so sorry. And like, he has this whole legion of Sith followers? The fuck? Where the hell were these guys before? I’m sure they existed BEFORE the last Sith Lord died, right?
I digress. I have a question though: why does he want Rey so much? Why didn’t he try to get his son to take over? Wouldn’t that have been easier? Also, WHO DID HE FUCK TO GET A SON?? HOW DID HIS SON GET AWAY FROM HIM?? WHY DID HIS SON APPARENTLY TURN TO THE LIGHT?? THERE’S TOO MANY QUESTIONS HERE AND NO GOOD EXPLANATIONS. AND NO DISNEY, I DON’T WANT A 10-PART COMIC ON THIS. GO FUCK YOURSELVES.
The only interesting thing about Palps in this film is that his face gets melted off like a Raiders of the Lost Ark knock-off. He better not be coming back. Ever again.
4. And hey, while we’re on the subject, let’s talk about Rey’s parents. So apparently they’re both good people. *le sigh* But what kind of good people leave their daughter alone on a harsh and unforgiving planet with a blubber guy? And don’t tell me they didn’t know he was an abusive asshole, they LIVED on Jakku, they HAD to have known him, ESPECIALLY if they truly were junk traders, they would have DEALT with him. Oh, and apparently the “I’ll come back for you sweetheart, I promise” line is changed up a bit and given to her father after all. No. Screw that. That line was meant for Ben, I don’t care how petty this sounds, this is terrible. So yeah, fuck Rey’s parents, I don’t care how “good” you try to make their intentions, they’re badly shoehorned in and they screw up anyway. Next.
5. Ben’s story and his fate. So yeah, obviously I hate that Ben died, but more than that I hate how his story was handled here. It was so rushed, it didn’t feel as natural as it should have. It needed time to BREATHE. A lot of time! And I feel like they really shafted Kylo/Ben’s story off to the side to give more time to the hereby named GoldenTrio. (You know who I mean...we’ll get to them.) It really seemed like JJ didn’t even care about Ben’s fate anymore, and just kind of put it in as an afterthought. His death scene? Not even given a fucking minute to process because WE GOT TO PARTAY. All in all, his whole story is so terribly sad that I don’t even know if I can watch TFA or TLJ anymore, knowing how it ends.
6. The GoldenTrio. Oh for fucks sake, JJ, you should have killed Poe off when you had the chance, because now the story is all about THEM. Boom! They’re literally front and center in the movie. I don’t even think Reylo gets as much screen time as them. I mean really, Ben’s death scene and Rey’s grieving gets 1.5 minutes, tops. GoldenTrio reunion and threesome hugging? 5 fucking minutes of nothing but them hugging. I’m not even exaggerating. (Okay maybe I am, but it’s given more focus and time to “breathe” than Ben Solo’s fucking death. I’m getting a headache remembering it.)
Hey, remember in ESB and ROTJ where the trio got split up and had their own story lines and own purposes to fulfill without each other hanging around (apart from Han and Leia because their story lines are interconnected)? Yeah, I miss that too.
Also, Rey keeps wandering off being “pulled” to something, and every...single...time, Finn is like “Rey, wait! Poe we gotta get her! rEy CoMe BaCk!!” This happens at least 5 times, pretty consecutively too. It gets old real fast. Boy do I miss the days of TLJ where people got to be away from each other to discover new things without interference.
Which leads me to another point: They tried to shove FinnRey in here while shitting on FinnRose quite literally. What. A. Slap. To. The. Face. This is horrible treatment, and I hope Kelly will never do another interview for Lucasfilm again. She doesn’t deserve this.
7. The Ending™. Wow. What a way to show that your characters haven’t progressed at all by showing them in the same environment that they started in. Let’s do an overview: Rey starts out alone on a desert planet and meets a droid that isn’t hers. Rey ends up alone on a desert planet with a droid that still isn’t hers. PROGRESSION 101!! *slaps forehead* I mean, don’t even get me started on the fact that Ben isn’t there with her and that literally one half of her soul is gone (how is she not in agony right now??), but then to add more salt to the wound she’s just like “oh yeah I must be the rightful successor to the Skywalker name, even tho I’m a Palps...makes sense to me!” Fuck off. You don’t deserve that title after hating Luke for not doing what you wanted him to do and for hating Ben for most of this movie too.
Can we also acknowledge that this is THE ABSOLUTE WORST POSSIBLE WAY TO END A 40 YEAR SAGA AND FAMILY LEGACY? So, Palps had a kid who had a kid. This kid is then deemed a-okay by the family that was affected most by Palps and they welcome her like the sunshine child she is, yet shun their own offspring for being damaged goods because he was being manipulated by said Palps. Okay, it’s official now, everyone’s an asshole...except Ben. He seemed to be the only one to understand his faults and right his wrongs and not be an idiot. Then the kid who was abused and manipulated is killed because “reasons” or “problematic” or whatever and the offspring of Palps lives while the family that Palps manipulated is ultimately gone forever because it’s last descendant wanted to save the offspring of Palps out of the goodness of his heart. Now the offspring of Palps doesn’t even give a flipping thank you and steals their name. wHaT a SaTiSfYiNg EnDiNg!!! Someone gag me.
8. Luke’s X-Wing being raised out of the water and it’s in perfect working condition. What. The. Fuck. I don’t know if you guys realize this, but this completely undermines Luke’s arc in TLJ. That X-Wing was sunk and dead to show that he had no desire to return to the outside world. He was staying on the island. For good. And he buried that thing in water to make sure he couldn’t use it ever again, but it was still visible to him to remind him of his conviction if ever he questioned it. But no. That thing is a-okay and ready to fly. No need for parts, there’s no rust or any sea salt corrosion, ready to go skipper! This was just added for easy call-backs to ESB but boy this had absolutely 0 weight to it. I literally yawned or looked at my watch around this part thinking “oh my gosh isn’t it over yet?” Pretty much sums up my entire experience.
9. Rose got shafted to appease the fanboys. This one needs no further explanation or analysis, it just sucks and has no real reason to exist.
10. Luke was barely in it and offered not that great advice. Poor Mark. His performance really peaked with TLJ and never went back up.
11. Rey is suddenly the Avatar now? You can now talk to all previous Jedi’s who existed? What buffoonery is this? Oh, but Ben doesn’t get a single. fucking. word. from Anakin, the man he looked up to. I’m so tired right now. What’s left?
12. The message changed from “it doesn’t matter if you’re a nobody, you’re a somebody to me” to “you’re a somebody with a bad bloodline, but that doesn’t define you (except when it totally does)”. That sort of message would be fine if it had been the message since TFA, but it wasn’t. The message since TFA was “I’m a nobody, but I can become a somebody regardless of my lineage or my childhood.” Why change the message in the 11th hour? To appease fanboys. Literally anything that makes no sense in this movie can be attributed to fanboys. There’s so much contradiction and hypocrisy in this film from both the narrative and the characters that it’s insulting.
13. Hux was utterly shafted too. What a waste of a well built up and conniving little bastard who in the end gets shot for shock value and laughs. It’s like what TLJ did but way worse because he’s actually killed. Hux as the spy? Just no.
14. Jannah was kind of wasted too, not enough screen time. I get her and Finn kind of bonding over being ex-stormtroopers, but it’s not really delved into. Also the whole “nature vs. machinery” thing kinda briefly shows up at the big battle and feels unearned too, because there was nothing before in this movie or others to suggest there was a war between the two.
15. Poe is treated more as the heir to Leia than Ben is. Poe gets to fly the falcon and gets to wreck it up (dishonoring who it belonged to before), gets to be by Leia’s deathbed, etc. Not earned at all.
16. The pointlessness of random cameos or thrown in references. Not a single person in my theater noticed John Williams as the bartender, nobody pointed out or said anything about any reference from previous movies, it was silent.
17. What the hell was even the point of the whole “Dark Rey” vision? Oh, she shows her scary pointy teeth ala Bilbo style. No thank you.
18. Why the hell does it feel like these characters aren’t the characters from TFA and TLJ? They feel so different and it’s noticeable.
19. Finn is Force sensitive. Literally tacked on like nobody wouldn’t notice. We noticed JJ. We notice everything.
20. Rey and Kylo/Ben fighting for way too much of the film and their interactions. Not enough caring or understanding, not enough longing looks, it feels like their romance was almost cut from the film entirely.
21. Oh yeah, Rey floating at the beginning? Looked stupid as hell. And the “Be with me” line? I thought maybe, just maybe, she meant Ben, but no. She’s trying to reach “her past selves” like the fucking Avatar and she’s even floating rocks around like Aang did. Ugh.
22. Anything else? Oh yeah, this movie sucks completely and wholly...FOR NOT GIVING ONE FUCKING LINE OF DIALOGUE TO BEN SOLO AFTER HE HAD BEEN REDEEMED. HOW HEARTLESS CAN YOU BE THAT YOU LET HIM DIE WITHOUT SAYING ONE FINAL THING?!?! DAMN J.J. YOU’RE STUPID.
And that’s it. Kudos if you read the whole thing. I ramble a lot.
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I saw that you anti-recced The Terror, and I’ve heard a lot of people talking about how good it is, so I was wondering if you’d elaborate more on why you don’t like it? I haven’t seen it and now I’m curious bc this is the first I’ve heard of someone disliking/hating it
I should be clear that my beef is with the novel! The series does a lot of work to deal with some of the novel’s weaker points, and it’s generally pretty successful at taking the fun interesting parts of the premise and scrapping everything else. The series still has flaws, but I would (and do!) definitely recommend it to people, which I wouldn’t really do with the novel.
The tl;dr version is that I found the book to be racist/sexist in ways that the supposed narrative purpose did not remotely warrant, and also just straight-up badly written. (If anyone on this internet is a valiant Simmons defender and this is their favorite novel, it’s ok to stop reading now, my feelings from here on down are unilaterally negative.)
It seems to be a pretty broadly well-liked novel in terms of its atmosphere -- it has some elements I enjoy, and scenes I think work pretty well, but from a literary pov, oof, not a book I ever want to reread. It wasn’t compelling enough as a horror novel or a historical disaster narrative to justify how long and just how grindingly... ugh it is. It’s fully possible to make unpleasant, stressed-out, flawed characters still interesting to spend time with, as a reader if not an actual person, and when your novel is almost a thousand pages long, an author needs to do that. Simmons just doesn’t.
Apart from more serious issues I have with the text, I’m annoyed by the way Simmons characterizes his Erebites and Terrors as Ohoho Unenlightened Victorians who all single-handedly and individually manifest the worst of Victorian imperialism and bigotry. (Except Fitzjames, who’s low-key Tiny Tim. And... Irving? Who is an absolute fuck machine.) There’s a lot of historical research about the individual Franklin expedition sailors that’s only become available since the publishing of Simmons’ novel in 2007, but Simmons just... does the straight-up worst with what he had at the time of writing, and as a result fucking none of his characters are interesting or likeable. He’s trying to write a big beefy 19th century novel but he doesn’t have the chops and I just could not give a fuck about anyone. Simmons does not miss a fucking chance to shoehorn in a stereotype (about Irish people! about women! about gay people! about Indigenous people!) and the result isssssss baddddd. The prose is bad! The pacing is bad! The way it handles its themes is bad! But above all, the experience of reading it is bad.
In terms of more serious, non-stylistic stuff, I think Simmons’ handling of his characters’ racism and sexism extends to a degree that becomes itself racist and sexist. This is a subjective one, but Simmons himself seems to be a marked right-wing asshole, so I’m not really inclined to cut him any slack. I don’t think depiction is the same thing as endorsement, but it just hits a point where it’s like “okay, Dan, is this for something, or are you just luxuriating in this?” It sounds like Drood and The Abominable are pretty similar in this department, but my desire to give them a try and find out
Simmons has a sexism problem in his own right, even independent from characters’ thoughts and attitudes -- I don’t think it would be impossible to write a character with a plot arc like book!Silna’s, or book!Sophia Cracroft’s, and have the end result still be on the whole a serious and enjoyable book with few but well-rounded women characters, but he does, uh. Not do that. At all. I don’t need a book about an all-dude expedition to be a feminist masterpiece but I do need it to actively suck less, and to take fewer detours for the sake of random sexist potshots at tangentially related historical women. I don’t have the background to really unpack the issues with his treatment of indigenous, First Nations, and Inuit characters but my instinct is that it’s also not great, with the same blurring of lines between enthusiastic POV treatment of period racist attitudes/blithely racist depictions with no excuse of a narrative filter to offset them.
Simmons’ treatment of gay characters/male-male sexuality is also at best chronologically shaky (he gives one character, designated good gay(tm) Bridgens, the most generic 19th Century Uranian mishmash backstory because he doesn’t apparently give a shit that his novel is set in 1845-1848 and not, like 1885) and at worst... actively bad (again, making its human antagonist Hickey a serial sexual predator who rapes boys and cognitively disabled men just because he’s very very evil and also gay. And also circumcised?) The show does a fair amount to remedy this and the above sexism, including massively revising Hickey’s character and plotline, but the book wears its bullshit on its sleeve and it’s just tiresome. So that’s, I guess, my beef with The Terror as a novel -- it’s racist, it’s sexist, and it’s fucking tiresome. Even if the series were as straight-up insufferable as the book, which thank God it isn’t, it’s only a single ten-episode series adapting that plotline; I listened to the novel in audiobook form and it’s nearly 30 hours long. I was ready to gnaw my own arm off.
There are well-written Neo-Victorian novels that use ye olde imperial bigotry to make a good point, and there are well-written horror novels that use polar isolation and maritime traditions to create atmosphere and dread (for the latter shout-out to Elizabeth Lowry’s Dark Water) but they all have to be well-written first and this novel is not.
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what more can you do?
WOO! this week’s episode was sad and weird and badly paced and startlingly, unevenly mature in true titans fashion. i loved it (with reservations)! let’s talk about it in excruciating detail:
SPOILERS ahead.
1. i can’t say that i’m awfully thrilled about the show following up on a character’s literal suicide attempt by... not addressing said suicide attempt at all. maybe it’s the awkward way an entire episode’s worth of flashback was shoehorned in between the end of 2.07--where dick literally talked jason off the ledge while in the throes of a psychotic break of his own--and the beginning of this one, but it’s honestly not just bad storytelling, but irresponsible storytelling.
1.5. in a general sense, tho, the tableau at the beginning of the episode is so egregiously unfair--so shockingly, plainly one-sided, with a slump shouldered dick facing the world, only kory on his side, that it’s quite apparent that it’s the lowest these heroes can go. and i do think their individual reactions to dick’s confession provide an interesting insight into their characters. hank and dawn have been operating alone for so long, each a reminder of their traumas and losses and very human frailty to the other, without even the resources that dick and the batman enjoy. it’s been them v the world for so goddamn long; is it any wonder that they were looking for the first excuse to bail out of there, to not Deal with the idea that what they were doing to deal with their traumas and guilt was clearly not working, and dick was--and has been always--so willing to be the scapegoat? hank punching dick was utterly unwarranted--but i can accept that as part of the unaddressed emotional outbursts arising out of years of accumulated head injuries from both college football and vigilantism. (this isn’t to excuse what he did but to contextualise it within hank’s history and personality.) their instinct when facing ugly truths is to retreat to what they think is familiar and what they need--except, as hank realises later in the episode, that’s exactly what’s fucking them up further.
rose is understandably upset at being lied to about her brother’s death and the titans being complicit in the same--but i’m curious that her reaction was to merely leave and not try and fight them. maybe after being defeated by dick while sparring and nearly being killed by rachel she was sensible enough to realise that she couldn’t take them on all at once? i don’t know--she’s curiously been a bit of a cipher this season. jason leaving with her made sense tho--unburdened of the weight of being the team’s scapegoat, understandably miffed at dick for keeping a secret that nearly cost him his life and left him with a great deal of trauma, just Angry at the world in general, he gravitates towards rose, the only other outsider/rebel who tried to reach out to him when everybody else shunned him or looked at him like an impostor. i think the decision was more impulsive than anything--they still look confused and uncertain in the taxi as they leave the tower behind. but--i don’t know. theirs is the storyline that i’m the most perplexed about. we just don’t have a lot of information about either of them, rose especially.
(a part of me still thinks she’s slade’s mole in the tower. but why would she leave if she is? to keep up appearances bc to react in any other way to the news of her brother’s death would be suspicious? maybe she left because her job is done and the titans were splitting up? maybe she was part of the long game to seduce jason over to slade’s side--seeking revenge for dick swaying jericho over to the titans’? am i going to stop asking myself questions in this post? am i ever going to write a review that’s not just stream-of-consciousness nonsense? only time will tell.)
DONNA. oh, donna. her decision to leave seems to me a logical continuation of her s2 arc that i’d talked about in a previous review--paranoid, insecure, retraumatised, and taking out her frustrations on jason and dick. it’s also very interesting to me that she complained to rachel about dick treating them like “soldiers” and only told them things that he deemed that they “need[ed] to know.” it was because of jillian and whatever mysterious business that themyscira was conducting in sf that she and garth and slade ever landed up in that airport at all; even worse, jillian deemed it was something that donna didn’t need to know until it was too late. donna lost so much in that fiasco--the man she loved, her friends, several members of her amazon family, and her sense of purpose, her belief in her strength and her destiny and her faith that other people trusted her as a warrior and as a leader. she’s projecting all that pain onto dick--who again, doesn’t deserve all this shit but takes it anyway because of his own issues.
1.8. and, like. as much as jericho’s death became the Traumatic Event that overshadowed almost everything else in dick’s life for the last five years and helps explain a lot of his hang-ups right from s1, it just doesn’t have the same significance for the others. don’t get me wrong--i’m sure hank, donna and dawn are devastated and guilty about the part that they had to play in manipulating jericho and his eventual death. but their issues with each other, with the titans tower and with their past run deeper and in different directions, and i think all of that came into play when they each decided to go their separate ways.
1.95. idek what the fuck is going on with rachel. i felt every ounce of dick’s heartbreak and devastation when she got up to leave with donna. for all that she saved dick in the first episode of this season, she still hasn’t reached the point where she’s willing to unburden her emotions and issues on him. it must be frustrating and sad for her to realise just how much dick didn’t trust her either. but there’s something else going on as well: maybe she’s realised she has no real control over her re-emerging powers, and, carrying on with the fatalistic attitude she had at the end of 2.05, she wants to spare the titans the chaos and darkness that she carries around with her. (she’s used to running away at this point, after all.) she goes with donna bc donna knows her the least: it would therefore be easy to fool her and escape.
2. more faddei! and kory backstory! \o/
it’s curious that they never once bring up trigon, because s1 gave the impression that she’d come to earth with a specific mission to seek his portal out and destroy it before he could, y’know, Fuck The Universe Up. faddei makes it sound like kory just went on this fun little sabbatical before taking up royal duties, which kiiinda undercuts a lot of what was cool about her s1 arc. i realise you aren’t entirely happy with your freshman season, titans, and s2 looks like it might be a soft reboot, but you don’t have to mutilate it like this!
but seriously. the stakes just got upped exponentially for kory, and it would be really interesting to see where she goes from here. apart from a promise to rachel, she doesn’t really owe the rest of the titans anything--not that i think she views relationships in such transactional terms, of course. on the other hand, abandoning her responsibilities on tamaran has led to its takeover by an unfit leader and the deaths of several of her family and friends. the choice shouldn’t be a choice at all. she should go back home. and yet--she waited too long, and the choice has been taken away from her. faddei is dead, both of their ships are destroyed, and she is stuck on earth, grieving and frustrated and furious. kory is usually very clear headed about exactly where she stands emotionally, but after such a big event, she must be feeling so much pain, guilt, sorrow, anger, even resentment. it’s so easy to look at kory’s level-headedness and open, empathetic personality and use her to prop up other characters, but i hope that this isn’t always the case, and that she’ll be allowed to really work through these emotions while somebody else looks out for her.
2.35. (the little snippets of faddei and kory just enjoying the shit out of the Little Things that humanity has to offer is just... it filled me with so much warmth. i wouldn’t mind an entire episode of them just chilling and exploring and annoying each other with badly-applied out-of-context pop culture references)
2.5. blackfire! i don’t know much about comics!blackfire beyond “she was starfire’s sister, Evil, and possibly sold her sister into slavery??? yikes” so i’m just going purely off what the show has revealed about her so far. it was honestly disconcerting to see so many references to her possible disability (?) and to see both that and the efforts to accommodate her spoken about in... i want to say mocking way? i don’t know. i just saw a murder mystery/thriller movie today where the serial killer was revealed to have been both disabled from birth and mentally ill, and maybe i’m just feeling extra sensitive to the truly disturbing and pervasive trope of having disabled characters be Evil--and tying their Evil to their disability.
2.8. anyhow, blackfire appears to have accumulated a fair bit of power in the time that kory’s been gone: not only can she remotely possess other tamaraneans but she can blow up their ships too. (and didn’t faddei say that she had goons on the ground, looking for starfire?)
2.9. it’s a Lot to deal with this late in the season. maybe kory will leave for tamaran to deal with blackfire once and for all at the end of the season. and if titans ends up cancelled, wouldn’t that be a bittersweet ending.
(wherein ‘bittersweet’ translates to ‘devastating’ ofc)
3. oh where do i even start with dick
his worst fears came true. after his confession, not only did his old friends up and leave, but so did rachel and jason, which he found more heartbreaking than anything else. utterly consumed by guilt and convinced more than ever before of his culpability, he actively seeks out ways to self-flagellate, first by going to adeline to apologise, then by banishing himself, then by making sure he is punished (tho i have my doubts on that last one; will elaborate a little later). after watching him have an extended psychotic break and dash into not one but two suicide missions, watching dick grayson do this to himself feels like watching an extended feature on human suffering. it’s not fun, or pretty, and i can feel it reaching its nadir so that dick can bounce back up again, but i hope it happens soon.
(dick’s natural tendency to internalise guilt and responsibility into a hard little diamond core at his centre and his long training with batman with all the emphasis on secrets and subterfuge with a healthy underpinning of paranoia ironically means that he does so much goddamn emotional labour for this team. he’s the glue that keeps them together, that gives them purpose. he’s trying so hard to do good by everybody that he isn’t really able to achieve it with any of them, which leads to another self-flagellating spiral and him determining to try harder and the cycle just keeps going on. only kory seems to have ever broken this cycle, because she’s never demanded anything of him, nor he of her. it’s really sad to think how bereft dick feels right now, and more than that, how it’s stopping him from being there for the people who really do need him and trust him, like gar and rachel.)
3.25. adeline makes a very good point about how merely apologising doesn’t mean you’re owed forgiveness, and that seeking it out after all these years is a self-serving exercise in itself. but i can see dick taking it hard, especially after discovering that she’s letting slade--the man who actually killed her son--recuperate at her home. (and let’s be clear: however good her intentions, she participated in lying to her child about the truth of what his father actually does. wow, jericho was really just fucked over by pretty much every one he loved, wasn’t he?)
but i am glad to see dick isn’t so far gone that he takes the blame for jericho’s death in front of slade. he’s very aware that slade has permanently broken the team and very aware of the threat slade poses if they ever try to get back together again, but he’s not going to completely surrender every last shred of his self-worth and dignity to this man, and that was refreshing to see.
3.5. so he banishes himself to the farthest place he can think of with nothing more than the shirt on his back and a single duffel bag. it’s so over-the-top yet so... dick grayson.
3.8. BUT WAIT! ~PLOT TWIST~
ok so here’s what’s happening, all right? strap in:
a) jericho is one hundred percent inside slade. i have no doubts about this. adeline knows this too. it’s why she was so even-keeled while talking to dick, why she confidently said that jericho loved dick, and why she said “they” might be willing to forgive him. i’m thinking when slade crawled back home, jericho took advantage of his father’s momentary weakness to tell what was happening to his mother.
b) jericho tried to communicate to dick. i saw something somewhere which said that slade had gestured something very specific in asl while conversing with dick? i’m willing to believe that was intentional.
c) when dick was turning to leave and slade called him one last time and gave his “banishment sentence” jericho likely jumped bodies from slade to dick
d) so why did dick get himself arrested at the airport?
- dick was going through, as others have speculated, a dissociative episode. given how he’s exhibited signs of mental illness throughout this season this isn’t that far out of the realm of possibility, but it’s a weak and redundant narrative bridge and wasn’t shot in a way that suggested that it was a mental break. so i’m ruling this out.
- jericho took over. maybe he felt that this was the only way he could force dick to stay in sf. maybe some of his father’s anger/resentment leeched into him and he wanted to dick to experience some actual punishment instead of scarpering again. maybe he was overwhelmed by dick’s own self-flagellating tendencies and chose the shortest route to maximum pain. maybe it’s a combination of all three.
- dick finally got his brain into gear and realised at the last minute that jericho had possessed slade and was trying to tell him something. why he then proceeded to get himself arrested instead of running out of the airport is a mystery.
personally, i’m leaning towards the ‘jericho possessed dick’ possibility.
4. gar is such a sweetheart and i am so glad that he took centrestage this episode, even though, like always, it was to support another character and ended up with him crying and begging for help from an unresponsive dick. *sighs*
4.5. much like dick himself, he’s trying to do good by everybody, only to end up badly misjudging a situation, and all alone.
5. oof. this has gone on for far too long and i am Tired. more thoughts to come later, because right now my brain is as disorganised as... as disorganised as a titans episode. hah! self-burn!!!
#titans#titans spoilers#dick grayson#koriand'r#garfield logan#hank hall#dawn granger#donna troy#rachel roth#slade wilson#meta#aaaah this is 2.6k+ words long I'M SORRY
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OMG, thank you so much for sending this! And thank you to the person who translated it! This story proves to me that Lea and Isa were just too gay for the mainstream Kingdom Hearts series. Seriously.
We thought we could save that girl. I don’t know why we felt that way.
The little story is very nice. It’s about as good as it can possibly be given the shitty source material that is KH3. I thought it was hilarious how Isa has pretty much nothing to say about Subject X. Oh yeah, she sounds so important to him here, doesn’t she? Isa sacrificed everything for her, lol. Maybe you just wanted to help her, Isa, because you had a good heart. Ever think of that?
But for real, what a crock of shit that whole idea is. Skuld was just shoehorned into their story because Axel and Saïx were too gay otherwise. That’s all it its. Just blatant homophobia, and I’m disappointed in Square and Disney for it. It’s okay to shiptease popular same-sex couples, but as soon as there’s an actual same-sex couple, they go out of their way to fuck it up like this. Pathetic.
Yes, I thought that I didn’t need you with me anymore.
So, yeah, Isa doesn’t give a shit about Skuld. They can’t even force him to seem like he cares. On the other hand, Isa sure had TONS to say about Lea in this story. I’m not surprised that there’s all this subtext hinting that Isa really loved Lea. That’s my favorite part about this story. It’s just so gay. Isa said his life had no meaning if Lea didn’t need him. Lea was his purpose.
“Kairi…? Oh, I expect she’s catching up with her friend from the darkness,” he said as if it were nothing of much concern.
“What’s that mean?!” Sora demanded.
“She doesn’t need you anymore.” Saïx smiled, but the expression didn’t reach his eyes.
It just makes me even more pissed off over how badly KH3 ruined Isa. There was so much wasted potential with the LeaIsa relationship. IMO, it’s still the most complicated and interesting relationship in the series. At least before KH3, anyway.
Ultimately, what is a heart?
What are friends?
Is there any meaning to making connections with your heart?
I’m not blaming the writer of this story or anything. They did the best they could with the cruddy source material. But I gotta be honest, this story still sounds like it’s written from Saïx’s point of view, not Isa’s. He just sounds so…robotic? If that makes sense. Like, he still doesn’t sound fully human here, if you ask me.
It was just that if he went back and reported that he couldn’t find anything, he would have to deal with those attempts at “personality”—the sneers, the snide remarks, the only trappings of human emotion that Saïx ever showed. Not that Saïx was even capable of annoyance or disappointment, of course, what with the lack of a heart and all.
Saïx was very, very cold and unfeeling. He couldn’t understand friendship or what it meant to have a heart.
In a way, Saïx put more effort than any of them into pretending he had a heart, Axel thought. And yet, he was more lacking than any of them.
He was the most Nobody-like organization member. There was a distinct lack of humanity with his personality. He didn’t even want to be that way. He desperately wanted a heart so he could feel like a normal human again. He was a tragic character. A victim. But…there was clearly something very, very wrong with him. He was NOT normal. And this never gets addressed. It really bothers me.
“I know I won’t forget you. Believe me, I try all the time,” Isa replied with a bit of humor in his tone.
“See? I’m immortal!”
“You’re obnoxious.”
I gotta say, I don’t like how Isa is now being written like Saïx, as if that was just his natural personality. In BBS, Isa actually seemed VERY sensitive. He simply seemed reticent with his feelings. He seemed like he had very strong affection for Lea, but was too shy to express this outwardly. So he teased Lea all the time.
Lea seemed to understand that Isa’s teasing was simply his way of showing affection, so he enjoyed their banter. A lot. Although Isa was shy, he still gave me the impression that he was a totally normal kid, like Lea. He had a good sense of humor and acted playful. He didn’t seem to be so…stiff or unable to understand emotions like he does in this story.
Talking to Roxas and Xion always brings back memories of my human life, back when I was a kid. It’s a weird sensation. I ought to be able to share all this with Saïx, but I just don’t feel like it anymore. It’s strange, but I’m content with just missing what’s gone. I’m not the one who changed. You did.
Lea was a normal human kid. Axel was a normal Nobody. Isa was a normal kid. Saïx was NOT a normal Nobody. So why would Isa be so different from Lea? IMO, there’s no good explanation for why Isa changed from a normal shy kid in BBS to what he became as a Nobody. This…unfeeling blob of a man. At least a backstory as a human test subject would make his personality understandable.
“Say something. Have you even thought that maybe I can’t erase Roxas?” Axel said, in a playful tone, and Saix finally looked up.
“It’ll be all right. ‘Cause I’m tough.” Axel puffed out his chest.
“How stupid,” said Saix, and for a moment he smiled.
It feels like KH3 had to sugarcoat Saïx a lot, in order to portray him more sympathetically. Saïx had a few moments where he showed genuine emotion and love for Axel (feelings that I don’t even think were his). He acted shy in this scene, for instance. He acted more Like Isa here. But generally, it was very, VERY hard to get anything out of him, no matter how hard Axel tried to connect with him.
After a while I became selfish, and turned into a foolish person.
I cannot say enough how much I loathe how KH3 handled Saïx. He was deprived of all the complexity and sympathy he could have had if he had been an abuse victim and human test subject. And at the same time, they also had to try and whitewash his character in order to redeem him. KH3 writes Saïx as just this normal guy who is a bit bad with expressing his feelings and as a result, acted selfish when he lost his heart. His personality as a Nobody was just an extension of his personality as a human.
Saïx: He won nothing and is nothing. He couldn’t stand the emptiness of being without a heart, and that led to his demise. He was foolish and weak.
But that’s just not true. Saïx wasn’t just a bit brusque. He was a monster. His moniker was “Demoniac Dancing in the Moon”. He was demonic. There’s no need to downplay this. He was not just this tsundere guy who just needed to apologize for being a bit douchey. He was savage and acted downright evil much of the time. Being bad with emotions doesn’t even begin to describe him. Nor does it explain why he acted the way he did, especially with Axel.
Saïx: All I did was find a place to send everyone who was getting in the way.
Axel: Well, it’s nice to know where I stand! Sheesh…
Saïx: Did you come back in one piece or didn’t you?
For instance, it’s never explained WHY Saïx pushed Axel away in the first place. In KH3, they’d have you believe that all the problems started when he became jealous of Axel’s closeness with Roxas and Xion. But that’s obviously not true. Saïx was messed up long before Axel got close to them. And the only reason Axel spent all his time with them was because Saïx had already changed and pushed him away constantly. There’s no explanation given for why Saïx acted so cold with Axel all the time. None.
In canon, Saïx’s personality just makes NO SENSE. Why did he abuse Axel if he felt like Axel gave his life meaning? It wasn’t just because he had no heart, because Axel didn’t have one, other. And if they both loved each other, they should have been able to grow hearts rather easily, anyways. So why did Saïx have such a black hole for a heart? In KH3, they’d have you believe that that’s just how he was. It was just his flawed personality and possibly him being upset that Axel wasn’t as obsessed with finding Subject X as he was. Not because his heart was swallowed by Xehanort’s after he was a human test subject.
Yes, I thought you didn’t need me anymore. If you didn’t need me, then I no longer held meaning. That’s why I sacrificed myself to that man.
He said he sacrificed himself to Xehanort because Axel didn’t need him anymore. But what I wanna know is, why he thought that! Axel never pushed Saïx away. Ever! He tried and tried and tried to get close to him. But Saïx always pushed Axel away. I hate how KH3 almost makes it seem like Saïx was justified to feel abandoned by Axel and hate him. I think that’s totally unfair to Axel. He did everything he could for Saïx. Axel almost killed Roxas and Xion for Saïx’s sake. And Saïx was never grateful to him or anything.
You’re ultimately still a crybaby, but you don’t need the marks anymore.
Saïx’s personality in KH3 just feels so random to me. In canon, there’s just no depth or substance to him as a character. He’s just this weird guy who is really bad with his emotions. I swear, there was so much more going on with him that was left on the cutting room floor. Like, why does he call Lea a crybaby? What is that all about? I have my theories, but still. Nothing about Axel and Saïx’s canon backstory made any sense. It pisses me off so much.
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Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 6.13
Be aware that this is not a blind playthrough! This will contain spoilers for the entire game, regardless of the part of the game I’m commenting on. A major focus of this commentary is to talk about all of the hints and foreshadowing of events that are going to happen and facts that are going to be revealed in the future of the story. It is emphatically not intended for someone experiencing the game for their first time.
…Okay, since this is the very last post of the main storyline, admittedly this spoiler warning has become completely moot at this point. But, you know. Tradition!
Last time as we got even closer to the end of trial 6, the audience literally murdered Keebo in the most pointlessly gratuitous death in the entire game, the narrative tried to insist this was necessary in order for Shuichi to both realise he needs to change their minds and actually be able to do so (but it wasn’t), Shuichi was adorably inspired by Kaito to make the impossible possible and Maki adorably agreed that a sidekick of Kaito’s could do that, I had A Lot Of Feelings, ones very personal to me (thanks to Kaito!), about Shuichi’s sentiment of how fiction can change the world… and then things abruptly mood-whiplashed into the worst Argument Armament both gameplay-wise and in terms of how it should have been literally actually impossible for Shuichi to change any of this asshole audience’s minds, even though things really could have been written such that it wasn’t if this audience had just been reacting to all this like actual human beings.
(…I did it! I found a reason to mention Kaito in every one of this chapter’s summary bits! Okay, admittedly I had to kind of shoehorn it a few times – though not remotely all of the times, mind you – but shush, Kaito deserves it, I have no regrets.)
Anyway, with the Argument Armament over and Shuichi having achieved the literal impossible, we’re about to go to the “vote”.
Monokuma: “Puhuhu… I think hopeful Keebo should vote for despairing Tsumugi, without a doubt!”
My god, Monokuma is so transparently just trying to keep things on script and pander to the Danganronpa buzzwords when it doesn’t even make any sense. When at any point during this trial has Tsumugi herself ever seemed to be in despair? And Keebo has hardly been advocating hope recently – Monokuma’s just desperately trying to make it sound like that’s totally still his character. Plus, he’s Monokuma! He’s supposed to be the poster bear for despair! He’s not supposed to want anyone to be voting against despair!
Monokuma: “Cuz that’s what the outside world wants to see!”
Since they’re in control of Keebo now, the outside world is already going to vote for what they want to see and shouldn’t have needed Monokuma to tell them what they supposedly want. Someone’s getting worried. (He really shouldn’t be, because what just happened should not have been possible, but.)
It’s pretty neat how it turns out that the real reason the game made you do the vote yourself the whole time is for the purpose of this bit in which you don’t vote. Though I guess technically they still didn’t need to do that and could just leave you to assume that Shuichi didn’t vote.
(If you do vote here, regardless of who for, there’s just a very brief game over in which Shuichi laments that he was a coward after all.)
Maki: “If she had cast one vote for Keebo then it would be a tie, but—”
Tsumugi: “Oh, there’s no need to worry about that. I didn’t vote either.”
Maki: “…What?”
Shuichi: “Just as I thought… You wanted hope to win.”
Of course she wanted hope to win, but then… why couldn’t she have just voted for herself, just in case Keebo’s body didn’t vote? I suppose this could be a sign that she actually does care about what the outside world wants and would be willing to accept it if they didn’t want the “hope” ending after all, rather than forcing it on them against their will anyway. But the rest of her behaviour a bit later when she realises they didn’t vote doesn’t really add up with that, so, eh?
Also it’s interesting how Maki seems particularly surprised to realise this. I guess she really was taken in by Tsumugi’s manipulative argument earlier that she’d want to be the lone survivor because she’s the big bad evil mastermind, and that Maki’s desire to not vote was all part of her plan.
(It’s okay, Maki! You were right to believe in your own feelings and stand with Shuichi after all!)
Tsumugi: “No matter who he voted for, the only one who survives is Keebo… So in other words, the winner is hope.”
I was going to question whether it’d really be the same even if the audience voted for “despair” to win, which should mean Keebo’d be executed after all and we’ll get the boring everybody-dies ending anyway. But actually he’d just be “punished”, aka being put into a new killing game, so no, that would end up the same as the “hope” ending in which he sacrificed himself to that fate, wouldn’t it.
Tsumugi: “He’ll be participating in the next killing game.”
Maki: “Hold it! Why are you punishing Keebo? If Keebo survives, then there’s no need for him to be sacrif—”
Maki, I appreciate your desire to try and protect your friend, but Keebo is already dead. She’ll just be “punishing” his empty shell.
…Actually, that’s a good question. What would she have done to put Keebo’s empty shell in a new killing game? Would he have gotten a new personality? Would it be the same as his old one with his memories erased, or a different character? Or would the audience have been in complete control of him like they are now? That would have been… disconcerting to his fellow students, to say the least.
Himiko: “Th-That’s not fair! Are you twisting the rules again?”
Tsumugi: “It’s fine, cuz this is all fiction. Maybe it’s a bit forced… but that’s fiction for you, right?”
Ha. Haha. There sure have been a few forced bits in this fiction here and there, both in terms of things Tsumugi did in-universe, and also in an out-universe sense.
Not that this is an excuse. Writers should be trying to make the best fictions they can, not writing off their mistakes and problems with “oh but it’s fiction so it doesn’t matter, right”, as if that’s an excuse to not even try in the first place. This is more of Tsumugi’s mindset of seeing fiction as enjoyable but ultimately meaningless because it’s “just” fiction.
Tsumugi: “And how about this for the next plotline? Hope has won but the lone survivor, Keebo, remains trapped… Now he’ll challenge the killing game anew. Will he be able to grasp true hope…? Yeah, an ending like that can work, right?”
My god, Tsumugi, you are a terrible writer and I hope you’re starting to realise this yourself. All of Keebo’s friends are dead and now he’s forced into a second killing game? That’s not hope winning! That’s the most despair ending if ever I saw one! And what the hell does “grasp true hope” even mean? She’s definitely not talking about “true hope” in the sense of the actual meaning of the word, so it’s clearly just a superlative to refer to an even more hopey kind of hope than the hope he already supposedly has. This “plotline” is so dumb, and at least this has got to be out-universely on purpose.
Maki: “What? This is the worst possible ending.”
Himiko: “But… this is bad. At this rate, our deaths will be meaningless!”
Shuichi: “…”
Shuichi is smiling, and he’s been silent for most of this, because he somehow has confidence in the literal impossibility he just pulled off when he really shouldn’t. I wish I could enjoy this final moment of Shuichi being a hero and living up to Kaito’s words as much as the narrative wants me to, but it just falls flat and I hate that it does that.
Shuichi: “Phew… I’m relieved.”
This is Shuichi after the voting results showed that the audience also didn’t vote. I’m glad he was at least a little nervous that he might not have been able to do this, because he should not have been able to do this.
Tsumugi: “Danganronpa is going to end? This killing game full of tense standoffs and backstabbings amongst friends…”
Oh, that’s what Danganronpa is to you and the audience? I thought it was meaningless yelling about hope being better than despair and people getting gratuitously killed because executions are fun or something.
Seeing the audience’s faces disappear from the trial background as they all switch off and stop watching is a satisfying moment all on its own. I just wish the buildup to it had been as good as it should have been to make it feel like this was actually happening for an organic, meaningful reason.
Shuichi: “You never appreciated us… And it looks like you didn’t appreciate the power of fiction!”
I still love hearing Shuichi talk about the power of fiction, even if his use of it here was so, so badly executed. If this audience had actually understood the power of fiction and appreciated these characters like a decent audience should, then things would never have needed to happen in this nonsensical way!
Shuichi: “No one wants to hear your sick, twisted stories anymore!”
This is veering a little bit into making it sound like even the existence of Danganronpa as a work of fiction in the out-universe has been bad simply because it involves people killing each other. But if it really is fiction and no real people are getting hurt, it’s still perfectly okay for stories to have bad things happen to their characters – that’s one of the things that makes stories compelling, after all.
Of course, since fiction can affect reality, people have to be mindful of the messages that their stories give off. But just because a story contains murder, that doesn’t mean the narrative condones it. The message of Danganronpa has never been “killing your classmates is totally okay if you don’t get caught”, nor has it been “being executed if you do get caught killing someone is totally deserved”, regardless of what this nonsensical audience may have seemed to think.
Himiko: “So what are we going to do now? Now that it’s over, there’s no need for any punishments.”
There really isn’t! Now that the outside world has already shown they don’t want the killing games any more, it’s already done. Shuichi and friends have no need to get themselves killed to try and give them a disappointing ending, or to try and make their point about how determined they are to end this.
Tsumugi: “No, it needs to end with a punishment… at the very least.”
Geez, Tsumugi! This is possibly the most sick and twisted decision she ever makes. With everything else, she at least believed she was delivering what her audience wanted. But this, she’s doing purely for her own satisfaction because she still wants there to be horrible executions, even though nobody else does any more.
Shuichi: “Now… if we… continue to live after this… the choice we made won’t really matter. The people will just want another killing game, so…”
No, they won’t! You already (somehow) changed everyone’s minds partly by showing that you would have been willing to die if necessary, but now that their minds have been changed, it isn’t necessary! They’re not all suddenly going to change their minds back just because you didn’t actually die!
This bit of writing does rather awkwardly reek of the out-universe writers desperately wanting to give themselves an excuse for one final execution scene so it can end with something of a bang. Out-universe writers, why are you behaving like Tsumugi.
Tsumugi: “I never expected an ending like that, so I don’t have a punishment ready…”
Don’t you? Not even for the possibility that the blackened wins and everyone else dies? I guess they really never do expect the blackened to ever win, do they. But even then, wouldn’t they have individual punishments ready for every character in case they become the blackened? They could just go through those one by one; that’s always what I imagined would happen in the eventuality that a blackened got away with it. I suppose doing it like that wouldn’t be exciting enough when she wants to kill them all at once for a grand finale. (Have I mentioned it’s fucked-up that she still wants to do this.)
Tsumugi: “I worked so hard to keep this going for 53 seasons and now it’s all over.”
No, you didn’t, what the hell, stop giving yourself way more credit than you deserve. Tsumugi is a teenager, or at least she’s young enough to pass as one. We saw from that one comment that there’d been three years between this season and season 52. Even if the usual gap is shorter than that, that’s still probably something like at least fifty years this franchise has been around. Tsumugi was born into a world that already loved Danganronpa, and she’d have only been working on it herself for the last few seasons at most.
(Plot twist: Tsumugi’s actually like eighty years old, but because she’s a literal fucking shapeshifter, she constantly assumes the appearance of a high school student as her “default” form. Yeah, no, somehow I don’t think that’s what we’re supposed to be getting from this.)
Tsumugi: “Well, that’s fine… If this is a world without killing games now… I don’t want to be a part of it.”
It seems, perhaps, that the main reason Tsumugi is insisting on a final execution is because she wants to basically commit suicide over there being no more killing-real-people-for-entertainment any more? Which is extremely fucked up in its own right, but even more so that she’s then selfishly insisting on dragging the other three into it when they have no reason to die any more.
Maki: “But now, it’s all over. We’re the last ones to suffer from the killing games…”
Yes! Whether you die or not, that’s still true, at least. That’s worth it.
Shuichi: “Come on, everyone! We should be proud! We were able to change the world in the end.”
You were! Somehow. I really wish it was easier to get behind this and be proud of Shuichi and friends for doing this. I really wish it had felt possible.
(The writers are the ones who didn’t make the impossible possible here and I am very disappointed in them.)
Tsumugi: “My plan was such a flawless copy, it even failed right at the end… So I should be able to hold my head up high as a cosplaycat criminal, right?”
Shuichi: “A ‘cosplaycat criminal’?”
Shuichi has some… odd deductions based on this statement in the epilogue, which we’ll get to soon enough. But just looking at it right here at face value, all it seems to be is that Tsumugi is trying to look on the bright side of her failure. She’s trying to tell herself that this is just like how Junko’s plan failed right at the end, so she can be happy because it’s like she really was cosplaying Junko and copying one of her favourite characters down to the letter. She calls herself a cosplaycat criminal, meaning she was copying a fictional crime!
I like how Tsumugi keeps trying to be happy about her Junko-ness during the execution by cosplaying her and copying Junko’s final grin… but she’s not Junko, and she’s not happy about this at all. Which is good, because she doesn’t deserve to be. Only Kaito gets to smile in death.
After even more destruction of the Academy, Keebo’s empty shell sees the rubble shifting, indicating that the other three are still alive under there. (Please imagine them huddling together with Maki using her body to shield Shuichi and Himiko as best she can. You know she would.) And the Keebo-shell just leaves them alone, because the outside world doesn’t want to kill them any more. Them not being visible means there’s plausible deniability that makes it look like he sure tried to kill them good and dead and totally didn’t know they were still alive at the end. Not that I’m entirely sure why he’d need to hide it, since right now, Keebo is the outside world, and they all want them to survive, so it shouldn’t need to be a secret. Maybe they’re just trying to give them some privacy and to let them live in relative secret when they escape. That would sure be far more empathy and decency than this audience ever seemed to have any capacity for, but then, Shuichi did a magic, so, whatever.
…Was this button that was in plain sight and easily accessible on Keebo’s stomach seriously his self-destruct button this whole time? Geez, can you imagine if someone had pressed it accidentally?
This execution music still has the usual “wa-wa-wa-wa, wa-wa-ooh” vocal part that they all have. Here, it plays as Keebo flies towards the wall to blow it open, and it’s in the usual lower key… but it shouldn’t be! This isn’t a killing blow, it’s a victory, again! This is allowed to be in the higher key just like it was for Kaito’s!
Based on the power Keebo’s laser gun displays, I’m still convinced that he could have just used the laser gun to blow a hole in the wall and didn’t need to straight-up self-destruct into it. The audience probably only made him do that because his body is a useless empty shell now anyway.
(Did Shuichi’s magic impossible miracle also make them feel bad for pointlessly murdering Keebo? It better have done. Maybe somewhere in the Team Danganronpa HQ there’s backups of his personality and he could possibly hypothetically be saved? Though he’d need a new body as well now.)
(…But then again, there’s backups of everyone’s personality if you use Flashback Lights, yet I can’t imagine Shuichi and co would be comfortable with creating what would awkwardly just be like copies of their dead friends.)
The credits listing the characters’ names are neat. They were all real people who contributed to this work of fiction, after all, right? …Though that idea sort of falls apart after it goes through the V3 cast and starts listing the DR1 and 2 characters, who were not real in this universe, and then characters like Kaito’s grandparents and such who had lines in certain flashbacks but were also not real.
I also like how the credits are being shown on the screen of a cinema, in which we can see people in the audience gradually getting up and leaving. Danganronpa’s over now! They’ll just go and find something else to watch.
It’s neat that it puts you back to what seems like the title screen before cutting to the epilogue. This isn’t a part of “Danganronpa V3” any more!
I’m glad the epilogue exists to show for certain that Shuichi, Maki and Himiko survived. It would have been incredibly frustrating if they’d just left us with some ambiguous moving rubble and nothing more than that. I’d have headcanoned the hell out of their survival anyway, but it’s nice to know for certain that they’re okay and that I’m not just desperately believing something that might not be the truth.
(That hole in the wall is very high up and I am not sure how they’re going to climb up there to get out of it. Awkward. Maybe it’s cracked enough that eventually the whole thing will shatter.)
Himiko: “To the outside world, huh? I wonder what kind of world it is.”
Maki: “A peaceful world with no fighting and no despair. That’s what Tsumugi said, right?”
It’s still a world where, until literally just now, the majority of the population was quite happy to watch real people kill each other for entertainment. That’s pretty fucked-up in its own right.
Really, though, the first thing the three of them should be doing before they even think about leaving is finding whichever rooms in the dormitory are still reasonably intact and getting some fucking sleep. They haven’t slept since before Kaito’s trial. (And Maki probably didn’t even get much sleep the night before that trial either.) Then they had the full day of that case and trial, including some very emotionally traumatic experiences, investigated through the whole night rather than sleep, then had this trial in the morning for several more hours, including yet more emotional trauma. They should be exhausted, both physically and mentally.
But the main thing about the epilogue is Shuichi’s odd theories about Tsumugi’s final words.
Shuichi: “She said ‘copy’… That means she must have been copying someone, right?”
…
Shuichi: “Perhaps Hope’s Peak Academy and the Remnants of Despair really exist. Maybe Tsumugi was just basing her performance on them.”
No? Tsumugi’s words were not any kind of indication of that at all? It is at least equally likely that she meant she was copying Junko’s fictional plan - more likely, in fact, since she called herself a cosplaycat, not a copycat, and she was always very insistent about not “cosplaying” real people, regardless of whether or not the cospox thing was bullshit.
Shuichi: “She might have been lying when she said ‘copy’. But if she were telling the truth, then… it would make sense that that was a lie.”
Himiko: “What do you mean, ‘that’?”
Shuichi: “What Tsumugi showed us… The way we were when… we first arrived.”
She doesn’t need to have been lying about the word “copy” for it to still mean that Hope’s Peak was fictional, what the hell, Shuichi. You can copy fictional things.
And by “what Tsumugi showed us”, Shuichi is talking not about the audition videos, but about the flashback of their pregame selves in the prologue being excited upon realising they were chosen. Which means that Tsumugi very explicitly did show them a video of that. Such a video cannot possibly have been faked. Tsumugi may have been a shapeshifter, but she was only one person. So that definitely happened, then! This is just even more proof that it was the truth!
Shuichi: “I still don’t believe it. I can’t believe that any of us would volunteer for this.”
Because those people weren’t you, Shuichi! And as soon as you realise that, it doesn’t matter what you would have done in their place because you’re different people! It’s kind of frustrating to me that after Shuichi was willingly accepting that he’s a “fictional character” back in the trial, that he was “created” out of Flashback Lights and fake backstory, he still apparently doesn’t get that this makes him a completely separate person from the moron who used to inhabit his body.
Shuichi: “Even if we were obsessed with this killing game, I still can’t believe we would participate in it. I just… I don’t believe it.”
Because you and your friends here are decent people who would never willingly choose to put yourselves through the terrible ordeal you’ve just been through. Of course you wouldn’t be able to or want to understand the viewpoint of these kinds of one-dimensional assholes from the outside world who apparently couldn’t even accept that people dying and suffering is bad until you magically yelled at them.
(And, like I’ve mentioned, it does seem that the people who chose to audition were specifically people who kind of hated their own lives and therefore wouldn’t mind dying if it meant they got to be in Danganronpa.)
Shuichi: “Ah, but… I don’t really have any logic behind that…”
Himiko: “One of Kaito’s hunches, huh?”
I would be annoyed that they’re attaching Kaito’s name to this obviously-flawed assumption… but to be fair I do think Kaito would also have trouble comprehending the idea that anyone would want to do this. This is a fair thing to want to believe, and I’m glad that at least Shuichi acknowledges that he has no proof at all for this part. (And I do like Himiko just bringing Kaito up like that. They’re going to be mentioning him and quoting his inspiring lines all the time in their new life outside and that makes me happy.)
This whole bit is my problem with the epilogue. I’m glad we have the epilogue itself to show that the three of them survived, but I hate the way it then tries to undermine everything we just spent the whole trial on by making flimsy, completely unconvincing arguments for how ooh maybe it isn’t true after all, look, ambiguity~! Despite their attempts to make it seem that way, it’s still not remotely ambiguous to me.
Even disregarding all evidence pointing or not pointing towards it, think about what it would mean if Hope’s Peak and all those characters really did exist in this world. If Tsumugi was lying about everything being fictional… why? What on earth would be the point of telling such a massively elaborate lie? There has to be some motivation to lie, especially when the lie is this huge. She’d have had to deliberately set up all of the of subtle clues that led to Shuichi figuring things out (yes, Tsumugi ultimately told them it was fiction in the end, but Shuichi had deduced himself most of the way there before she did so), and come up with all of the details about “Danganronpa” and its many many series that would all have been completely made up out of thin air. I literally cannot think of any conceivable reason why Tsumugi would have wanted to go so far to lie about this. She indisputably had some kind of audience she was trying to please, but why the hell would pretending that actual history was just a fictional franchise please any of them, if all that stuff really was actual history? And why would they have played along with that lie in their comments?
But aside from the fact that it being a lie simply wouldn’t make any sense, all of the evidence that I’ve discussed throughout this commentary overwhelmingly points towards the fiction thing being the truth of this story. Clues that point away from it are both far less frequent and generally a lot more ambiguous and unconvincing (which definitely includes this one here in the epilogue).
And ultimately, I really believe that the fiction thing being the truth is a better story.
See, the reveal of everything being “fictional” during the trial could be seen as having undermined the entire rest of the story by acting like none of it mattered. But that is not remotely the case. Shuichi goes on to reaffirm that even if their characters were created from Flashback Lights, everything that happened in this killing game still happened, and they still really suffered and died. The story up until this trial still mattered just as much as it ever did – the only thing that was truly revealed to not have mattered was the backstory about the Gofer Project, which was really never that important to the actual killing game in the first place.
But if we’re supposed to believe this claim in the epilogue that actually nothing was fictional at all and Tsumugi was just telling nothing but lies for the entire second half of the trial? Then that really does just mean that none of this trial we just had mattered. And if that’s the case, then why the hell did we even spend several hours on it only for it all to be literally completely meaningless? That is not how to write a story.
Clearly the out-universe writers knew, when they decided to make the final chapter and big reveal of their story be this whole fiction deal, that it would be divisive and controversial. But even then, they had the guts to go and do it anyway, having a whole trial confidently establishing that that’s what the story was about, plus many subtle hints of it throughout the rest of the story that you can pick up on a replay and that I’ve been talking about here. It’s a really interesting, unique premise for a story; I’m glad they went and did it! …And then in this epilogue, after all their conviction, they suddenly get cold feet and go “uhhh actually guys if you didn’t like that story we just told you then here’s a free pass to pretend it didn’t really happen after all, please don’t be mad at us”.
No! You told everyone that story even though you knew it might turn heads, you should be sticking to the fact that that really was the story! Stick to your convictions! Come on, you guys wrote Kaito, you should know what’s up!
That’s what this part of the epilogue reads as to me – not as any kind of remotely convincing indication that this actually is the truth of the story that the writers had in mind all along, but the writers suddenly being cowards right at the end, and it’s disappointing.
The other likely reason the writers threw this in at the last minute is in an effort to make their narrative point about how lies are ambiguous and sometimes you never know what the truth is. It’s that same point they made at the end of Kokichi’s storyline that was apparently half the reason his character was even here. But man, is this an incredibly half-assed last-ditch effort at this that doesn’t really work at all… and while I’m annoyed that they even tried it in the first place, I’m glad that it doesn’t work.
Shuichi’s final observation on Kokichi back in chapter 5 tried to make it seem like his whole character was completely ambiguous; ooh who knows whether he was even telling the truth about hating the killing game, or maybe he really was just full-on evil after all~? But… Kokichi really isn’t that much of an impenetrable mystery. You have to look for it, but if you do, the evidence overwhelmingly points to him being a coward with massive trust issues who did what he did for the sake of petty, selfish revenge, out of no particular evil but also no particular good. The only part of him that actually manages to be ambiguous, purely because there’s never any mention of it at all, is what happened in his past to make him this way. I complained about that part of his character being ambiguous, and I’m glad the rest of him isn’t, because then at least I can appreciate the character that’s here.
Related to this, there’s the plan in case 5, which was designed to seem as though it was completely ambiguous as to who the victim and the killer were. Except there was a very, very easy way to prove that for certain, by opening the Exisal and finding Kaito inside. And there was a less easy but still ultimately convincing way to be sure enough of it, by paying close attention to the way Exisal Kokichi had been acting to realise that actually it was very clearly Kaito in there. Things were not nearly as truly ambiguous as Kokichi had been trying to make them seem.
As for this entire story in general and the whole fiction aspect of it… well, there probably could have been a way to make it truly ambiguous such that it really is impossible to know for sure what the truth is – it would need a lot of rewriting, but I imagine it could hypothetically be done. But that wouldn’t be a good thing, to me, because I don’t think I’d be able to enjoy the story very much at all that way. If we couldn’t ever know for sure what the truth of the story was, it’d mean there’d be no actual truth of the story to grab hold of and enjoy. There’d just be a wobbly ambiguous blob on the surface that’s trying so hard to be multiple possible stories at once that it ultimately isn’t any story at all.
I love subtlety in stories – obviously, or I wouldn’t have done this whole ridiculously long commentary talking about all the subtle bits! But I only love subtlety when there’s actually something deliberate and meaningful that it points to once you take the time to look. And that’s what this story actually is: something with a concrete truth to it, even if some of the evidence pointing towards the truth is subtle and hidden and you have to look for it. It just… also has some extra twiddly bits that are desperately trying to make things seem ambiguous for the sake of making a narrative point about lies, but they really don’t truly throw the core of the story into question at all, because if they did then everything would fall apart.
The writers apparently want one of the messages of this story to be “sometimes things are just ambiguous and you’ll never be able to know what the truth is”. But… the message I’m actually ultimately getting from it, thinking about it here, is that despite how ambiguous things may seem on the surface, there is always a truth, and you can always find it if you look hard enough.
Shuichi: “If lies can change the world just as well as the truth can… Then lies… are just another way of telling the truth.”
Um, no? Having a tangible impact on the world does not stop something untrue from being untrue. Shuichi, why are you the one saying this? You’re supposed to have more sense than that. Apparently the writers are just trying to get him to to wax lyrical about their intended theme of this story even in ways that don’t make any sense for him.
Himiko: “I guess it’s not important whether it’s a truth or a lie. Just what it leads to…”
Shuichi: “Yeah. That’s what I believe.”
That’s a better way of putting this! Some lies or fictions can have a positive impact on people, sure, and maybe you can argue that that’s what really matters. But that doesn’t magically make them true.
(If it did, then, welp, I guess that means Kaito is real you guys, you heard it here first.)
They’re also still not properly distinguishing between deliberately-deceptive lies and wilfully-bought-into fiction, which I wish they had done. There is a meaningful difference between the two.
The training spot is still intact, despite everything! Obviously they’ll hardly be able to use it any more once they get out of here, but still. I am glad it is okay. And leaving it miraculously intact even seems pretty deliberate by the out-universe writers, because man is everything around it nothing but rubble. It is good that they understand how important the training spot is. There are precious memories of Kaito there.
Shuichi: (Was this lie able to change something? Was this lie able to change someone? If it was able to change even the smallest thing…)
Yes, Shuichi! It was! It really, really was.
---
[Chapter-end bonus ramble] [Commentary-end bonus ramble] [Bonus content posts]
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I’m sure you’ve heard by now they are doing a live action Lilo and Stitch. So lets skip past the middleman and get to all the ways they could potentially screw it up. If Hollywood’s obsession with remakes the last decade has shown, at least 3 of these will probably happen.
1.) they make lilo and her family american. american as possible. living in the northeast or far south so they have identifiable accents. blondes.
2.) they try to make stitch look more like a dog and give him a more quadruped body and more bulldog-like face. bonus points for fangs jutting out of his mouth.
3.) they make stitch more alien, which for hollywood means more like a cloverfield monster or like the mios from godzilla. long bug arms and legs
4.) pleakley and dr.jumba do not appear in the film at all
5.) the unique colorful spaceships from the cartoon are replaced with videogame-esque space helicopters for "realism". expect lots of blue lights and turbine sounds with lense flairs.
6.) stitch now has superpowers and fires beams or corrosive goop from a part of his body. possibly bum for “comedy”
7.) the other 625 experiments play a large part in the film, and have a giant fight scene with an astronomical budget
8.) any and all mentions of elvis are removed so disney doesnt have to pay royalties.
9.) child protection services (and Cobra Bubbles) are now the villains and not just frustrated people trying to do their jobs
10.) at least one shootout with alien guns vs real human guns
11.) an E.T. reference in the trailer or film. glowing finger. trail of candy. just take a guess.
12.) stitch talks in full sentences. unfitting hot young celebrity doing a bad impersonation necessary. like with the Chipmunks films.
13.) stitch is made smaller and fluffier like a Pomeranian or a gerbil or sugar glider so its easier to make toys of him
14.) movie takes place in big crowded city instead of countryside or coast so stitch can cause as much damage to cars, buildings, and other dogs as possible and get the most out of their cgi budget. gotta have lots of shrapnel flying around.
15.) movie isnt about stitch learning not to be an asshole. its about nani and lilo learning to live with the fact their pet is an asshole. stitch stays the same.
16.) at least 5-6 jokes of stitch doing "dog" things wrong. like he pees on a fire hydrant and it melts or explodes into flames. or he plays fetch and drags back a hobo’s leg. snare drum. canned laughter.
17.) one reference to ALIEN where a smaller mouth comes out of stitch's mouth
18.) cgi on stitch is jurassic world tier and he looks like crap in every scene. everyone hopes its unfinished cgi. then the movie is released and the truth dawns on us.
19.) lilo is an outcast for trivial reasons and not because she's actually got interests normally considered bizarre amongst children. she will be as bland as possible. for relatability.
20.) Stitch now wears a space-suit at all times. It produces gadgets that help him do things. Nobody finds it weird for him to wear. Bonus points if his suit talks as well in a famous comedian’s voice.
21.) Angel, from the animated series, added to films plot to give Stitch a love interest. if not Angel, a new girl monster will be invented.
22.) stitch is now a species and not a science experiment and theres almost none of him left so we can shoehorn in a badly written message about conservation or poaching into the film's story
23.) stitch now eats something SILLY!!!!! to make kids laugh. like other dogs poop or car tires or something. remember the hong kong phooey and chipmunks trailers? yeah.
24.) rather than have stitch be destructive and dangerous, because we want kids to look up to him because hollywood are stupid, instead he is valuable for some reason but has the ability to be invisible to hide from things
25.) sideplot about FBI trying to track down and capture stitch like men in black but devoid of humor. so like Men in Black 2 basically. (men in black 3 was great)
26.) popular american pop star (gaga, del ray, good charlotte, kendrick lamar) does a cover of a famous hawaiian song for the movie’s theme and trailer. it will be forgotten a week after the film premier.
27.) lilo is played by like a 12-16 year old girl instead of a very wee child. her problems will be angsty teenage problems. she will be a snobby jerk to her sister the whole film.
28.) lilo and nani will be portrayed as being fairly middle-class and not basically living in poverty with broken inherited crap from their deceased parents.
29.) lilo and nani's parents are still alive but are simply absent for some reason. alternatively, nani is now written to be lilo’s mother instead.
30.) stitch is now grey instead of blue for realism. animals dont have colors in real life, and they sure as hell wont when they are a cgi monster either.
31.) any and all references or allusions to hawaiian culture and life is removed from the film so that chinese audiences will be more likely to see it and not be turned off by seeing people that arent them, thus potentially killing off most of the film’s potential profits
32.) no actual elvis songs in the film. instead terrible covers by modern day dubstep / r+b / country artists are included instead. bonus points if lilo or stitch sing off key in one of the songs
33.) movie is barely about lilo and stitch. it is about lilo's new love interest, some new character nobody gives 2 craps about. it worked for Ghost Rider / Green Lantern, right?
34.) lilos obsession with photographing people on the island is changed to her photographing animals which is how she finds stitch in the first place
35.) alien council want stitch back. not because he's a criminal or dangerous but because he stole [insert macguffin] and gosh they need it back right away!!! bonus points if this leads to a chase scene on surf boards.
36.) alien council dont decide to forgive stitch and leave him on earth. they try to take him back by force and have to be defeated/blown up by either stitch/lilo/the army
37.) Ohana and what it means is never mentioned in the entire duration of the film.
38.) Stitch now makes generic monster sounds you hear in every movie. are you tired of hearing elephant honks slowed down by 600% yet? TOO BAD.
39.) Stitch is played by an actual dog and they superimpose cgi quills and an extra pair of legs onto it. when he talks his mouth will be CGI and look kinda crap. like those AIR BUD movies.
40.) they make stitch more humanoid and the movie is now a romance between him and lilo. everyone will feel really uncomfortable.
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Shadowhunters 3x18, The Beast Within -- Review
Now that I've got 3x17 over with...Let's get into 3x18, The Beast Within. And yet another episode where it's abundantly clear the writers wouldn't know subtlety if it drop kicked them in the face. This show has introduced fun concepts this season but as per usual, they feel the need to execute these concepts in the most boring way imaginable. It's also super weird to watch the premiere of a Halloween themed episode in the middle of April.
As always, I'm not a fan of Shadowhunters. I'm just watching this show to see what happens and I’m reviewing it because I feel obligated to. I don't think it's a good show, I actually think it's pretty trashy and it really only exists to be shipping fodder except minus the character and relationship development, there is none, so it basically fails even at that. But if you like Shadowhunters, that's perfectly fine. We like what we like. You just might not want to read this. Also spoilers for the books and movies.
I think I've actually hit maximum apathy for this show now. I normally blacklist shadowhunter posts while the new episode airs so I don't get spoiled when I watch the new episode the following day. But yesterday, I forgot to do that, I got spoiled and I didn't care. I saw plenty of gifs and discussions come across my dash and I didn't care. I'm truly saddened that I've at last hit this point. I always knew it would only be a matter of time before I would be brought to this point and it looks like I'm there now. But it's cool. We're on the final stretch until this show is finally done. So I really only have to suffer a little longer.
The Cure That Didn't Cure
Our "heroes" attempt to cure Clary of the mark using the Heavenly Fire but I guess the batch is too diluted for it to work. So it was really kind of a pointless scene that I don't even know why it exists other than to waste time. Oh and I guess to showcase Kat's screaming techniques which are pretty cringey. I hate it when she screams on this show. It never sounds like she's genuine. But you know, it's alright. Some people just aren't screamers. We can't all be Candace King (Caroline from TVD). Now, that girl can scream. I don't know how she does it but she's just really good at putting the emotion into her scream where you feel like you're feeling the same pain she is. The way she jerks her body, how she inflects her voice mid-scream, it's quite impressive. I certainly never enjoy watching my favorite character in TVD get tortured (and I think she was the most physically tortured character on the entire show) but I do applaud her ability to act out the torture. Oh, and Clary's lazer powers have come back. Thank God for that. I don't know if I could possibly survive without seeing another cringey scene of lazers flying out of Clary's hands again. Just why, show? Why? It's not necessarily. You've already depicted Clary as a fully functioning shadowhunter regardless if it was earned or not. Are the lazer powers really necessary?
But since it's Halloween, demons are running amok and everyone has to go out hunting and I'm just asking why they thought it would be a good idea to take Clary of all people to patrol? You know, the person who has shown they aren't always in control of their actions. They're going to take that person, give her deadly weapons and they didn't think it was going to go badly? But the fight eventually takes them to the sewer Clary makes the choice to join Jonathon instead of Jace so we're finally getting dark!Clary even though this is definitely not what I wanted. I don't want the show to use magic to make her dark, I want the show to acknowledge the darkness that was already there way before the mark. In fact, if they absolutely felt like they had to go this route, have the cure work but Clary still chooses to go with Jonathon because the mark helped bring out some of her more innate darkness and then deal with that for the final few episodes we're in. You know, do something to acknowledge that Clary isn't this precious little flower child. Allow her some character development. I also don't particularly understand why she chose to go with Jonathon. I get the mark was making her feel a little sympathetic but I don't understand how it lead to this?
The Continuation of the Malec Drama
It's not a Shadowhunters episode without Malec drama, am I right? Well, in return to giving Magnus his magic back, Asmodeus tells Alec to end his relationship with Magnus so it's basically every Malec fanfiction ever. Alec talks it over with both Jace and Izzy to varying degrees of success and he comes to the conclusion that he needs to break up with Magnus as he feels like this is going to save Magnus. And why wouldn't he think that? Magnus has been putting an awful lot on Alec regarding this whole situation so why wouldn't Alec feel this way? Alec breaks up with Magnus, telling Magnus that the past few days has made him feel like the spark that Alec loved about Magnus is gone. Magnus tries to stop him but ultimately, Alec walks away. And the break-up is alright, I guess, I just hate how "high school" writing it is. For me, a far more complex and interesting break-up would be Alec using the reasoning of that Magnus can't just lean on Alec for the rest of his life. He can't keep on pushing the drama onto Alec expecting Alec to fix it. Which has long been an issue I've had with the Malec relationship. That every time something goes wrong in in the relationship, Alec is the one who has to give way and fix it instead of both of them working together to fix it. Alec could tell Magnus he doesn't want to be in a relationship playing second fiddle to Magnus's identity crisis. He has to think about what will make him happy.
And can we talk about how terrible this line is, "You're not that selfish." This is Magnus basically implying that he likes that Alec selflessly makes allowances in the relationship instead of perhaps doing what he wants to do. And it also kind of reads like emotional manipulation. "I can't accept this break-up so I'm going to make you feel like a bad person so you won't break-up with me". So just, wow, Shadowhunters.
Becky
Believe it or not, there was something I did enjoy in this episode and that was Simon's sister Becky returning. She is so much fun, has so much energy, and with the innocence on how she approaches the shadow world, I kind of wish this actress played Clary. Kat's alright but I've never been too terribly impressed with her portrayal of Clary but the actress who plays Becky really brings energy in every scene she's in and I want her to be in more scenes. And what is it about this show and siblings who have more chemistry with each other than the love interests?
Though, I do think it's weird that shadowhunters who have literally grown up in the heart of NYC don't know mundane vampire culture, though. If you grew up in Idris, I can understand that but how have they lived in NYC, apparently they always patrol on Halloween and yet know nothing about how mundanes view vampires? It's just really hard to believe.
At Becky's request, Sizzy goes back into gear in all of its cringey glory. They literally made a pack two episodes ago to stay single and now this is being shoehorned in. Why? If they were going to do this. This pact should've been made a season ago. When you make a pact like this, it only works if the couple is a slow-burn and Sizzy definitely has not been that.
I Guess I Have to Talk About the Jordan Redemption
I don't hate that the show is giving Jordan a redemption arc but I do dislike how the show is going about it. It's definitely not deserved. Just because he saved Maia's life and joined an organization dedicated to helping people and that's enough to forgive Jordan for being a shitty person both before and after he became a werewolf? Come on.
I also hate the idea of Maia having to rebuild the pack. It does such a disservice to her character to make her own pack as opposed to taking control of her pack and showing that she's become strong enough to assert herself towards these individuals that previously looked down on her.
There's just so much going on in this episode that if the show was more subtle, it might've worked. But Subtlety and Shadowhunters have never gone hand-in-hand. I'll give this episode a B. I liked Becky and the structure of the episode wasn't bad. But other than the Becky parts, I thought this episode was pretty bland and most of what the episode did, I found to be pretty cringey and just generally trashy.
#shadowhunters#shadowhunters 3x18#shadowhunters 3.18#shadowhunters the beast within#the beast within
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DC MASTERPOST >3
It’s no secret the DC universe is something of a DCpointment. There’s no cohesion in sotrylines, films are released at odd and illogical times and I decided to rewatch and give proper reviews.
MAN OF STEEL 2013 7/10
This film is something of an outlier on the DCEU, because it is not terrible.
The strengths of this film are defiantly the first act, I feel it was a clear and concise way to create backstory without the stereotypes of following him through childhood into adulthood, they did a great job of creating krypton and establishing an antagonist with a clear motive. I liked the jump straight into adult with flashbacks when confronted with items from his past, it allowed us to understand his past without saturating his journey all at once. Arguably the first arc of this film is completed here with Clark/kal discovering who he is and why he is here. The second arc of General Zod trying to bring back his people is still very well done, providing us more relevant backstory and shows logical actions from both sides of the fight nearing the end of the film. The biggest weakness of the film in my opinion is that it is 20 minutes too long. When superman destroys Zods ship killing the artificial children of krypton, I feel this arc was complete, although the after fight solely fought between SM and Zod does show us the struggle superman goes through becoming the last kryptonite in exaistance, this does not outweigh the pointless mass destruction this causes, on top of a already destroyed city. In my cut this would be disregarded.
Final thoughts of the film; my favourite part was the shot of ‘ALERT’ that slowly turns to ‘Toner empty’, a good transition and piece of direction. I’m giving this film 7/10, in my classification would make it a good Netflix film, one I’d be happy to watch but not pay money to solely see. It was a hard choice to not make it a 6 however, I rank wonder women as a 7, and this is more than equally as good, the only things preventing me from giving it a higher rank is it’s rewatchability. Personally I rarely would due to its lack of joy and humour, and overall darkness, not just in plot but also in cinematography and colour grading.
BATMAN V SUPERMAN 2016 6/10
Batman v superman had all the the ingredients to be the summer blockbuster, but as predicted it followed every DC film and tanked.
Their are some aspects of this film that are genuinely good, giving it a 6, one of those things is the first act of the film where we are introduced to Batman, although I didn’t personally feel the need for another origin story, the way this scene is directed especially with the earl sequence is fantastic, adding depth and differing from older versions of the same story. The other good thing about this film is the Batman fight scene, it is so well articulated and choreographed, i struggle to see how it fits within the wider film which is strangely badly directed, edited and in-cohesive.
Continuing from this idea, I feel the dream sequences are one of the leading problems for the in-cohesion of the film, the issue with these sequences is, if they are not well done it stops the audience trusting more daring scenes, ultimately taking you out of the story. Next, I feel another reason this doesn’t live up to its hype is, again, DCs continuous frenzy of oversaturating it’s film with characters. Here I argue Wonder women is not needed in the end fight, the fight could just have easily gone on sitbout her, or, if they had released wonder women before this film so we felt more engrossed in the character it wouldn’t been fine. However her and all the other justice league promo clips, should not have been in the film in the context they were as they’re a corporate shoehorn, promoting further projects. The other character I feel is unneeded is ‘Doomsday’, he’s quickly thrown in at the end of the film, and honesty an antigunist shown to us at the end of the film will never give the depth and fear of a hero fight, as a villain shown throughout the movie.
To me, Batman V Superman is a movie. Not a film, crafted and worked on to create a narrative for the audience, but a summer movie to get the kids out the house. The idea of having two meta humans as important as Batman and superman battling each other should boggle the mind, as the first avengers did for me or civil war for a closer comparison. But the difference with the MCU spectaculars is, they earned their right to blow people’s minds, DC is playing catch up and trying to get praise and awe without the hard work.
SUICIDE SQUAD 2016 3/10
Wow. This review has been hard to create and will most likely feature ideas from other reviews via podcasts and YouTube due to the fact this movie boggled my head in the sheer awfullness that ensued.
As always, I begin with the strengths of the film. In this instance it’s slight. I loved the aesthetics of the branding for the film, the colours, the neon animations, I loved it all. The mini descriptions in the film were funny and added to the VeRy little personalities of the characters. It is important to point out this clearly wasn’t present in the first edits of the film, but due to good feedback of later trailers that were released they were added, which is why this element of humour is the only of its kind that lands in the film.
Next I normally look into the storyline and the character arcs of the film, arguably my second favourite aspect to look for in a film. In suicide squad there is none, and there aren’t any. That sounds harsh, but the reality is there is no cohesive storyline, it follows no one character individually and the film darts back and fourth between every character, no matter the timeframe. Dean Dobbs (from adventures with dean and Bertie’s podcast) best describes this as ‘like playing a video game where someone is skipping every cutscene’ and this is absolutly true, especially when looking at the relationship of the joker and Harley Quinn. This film is so badly edited, As jack Howard describes, this film contains no scenes, it is obvious the whole film was rehashed and re-edited after the release of BVS (which crashed at the box office) and the final trailer was released, which was very different from the first few as it showed humour and action, and it is evident they cut out almost everything apart from these things. I would best describe it as many GoPrandall videos I have scrapped as I tend to forget to film opening sequencers and filler clips to show the progression of the story told apart from the action, and this is exactly how I felt about the editing of this film, they did the best with what they got but it wasn’t enough.
Although there was a lack of character arcs, this film had an ABUNDANT amount of characters to fill its shoes. This film crams as many famous faces in as many characters
As it can, because for some reason DC refuses to create stand alone films due to the catch up to the MCU that’s going on. We’ll start with the joker, or more exactly the 10 minuets of joker we got. Many scenes with the joker were so heavily edited, and deleted, it is hard to judge Jared Letos performance, because he didn’t have chance to give one. But, as a side note the hand on the mouth laugh is one of the WORST cinema moments I’ve experienced only closely beaten by ‘were bad guys it’s what we do’. Yuck. But we’ll finally look at the ‘suicide squad’, although looking at them it’s hard to identify why they are in this squad. We’ll start with reason no one on the team seems to have a reason to be there, aprt from deadshot, who had his daughters arc to think about. All the others just seem to around and don’t want to die and get out of prison. VERY good motives DC, you’ve outdone yourself this time. Next we can look at the abilities of this so called ‘meta human’ squad and how under utilised they really are, which could show why this film failed so badly. Firstly deadshot- ‘never misses a bullet- amazing at trick shots.’ Who in the film performs close quarter headshots, the same as the Seal team next to him, and in the film performs 1 trick shot. 1. That was in establishing scene right at the beginning, but he isn’t the only victim, we can look at Boomerang, my favourite character by far, with one the coolest abilities, who throws a total of:5 boomerangs and catches: 2. Let’s be honest Harely is there as the jokers Love Interest and to keep him in the film. We can also look at el deablo, the man that can shoot fire but refuses until he’s bullied for a whole minute. The worlds worst archaeologist who starts the entire battle, after BREAKING AN ANTIQUE immediatly after finding it (bravo) who if wasn’t attempted to be weaponised, would’ve skipped this whole mess. Slipknot, a man who could climb any wall or anything, who immediatly dies after climbing a wall, but don’t worry because they don’t even want you to worry about this due to the fact they don’t even intro him before he magically appears on the squad, hoping the audience will react ‘oh he’s going to be important!!! What a mystery man!!’. This is almost as bad as Katana, who adds nothing the story apart from a short intro and when she cries to her dead husband, at which point I began to cut my toenails, something I gave more of a shit about.
But, it is obvious I’m a teenage marvel fanboy just shitting on DC,and I hate when people complain without offering another viewpoint, therefore, to fix this, I would dedicate this film to the viewpoint of deadshot, giving him the character arc of changing with the goal of seeing his daughter- eliminate the extra characters- slipknot/katana and either dedicate more time to the joker and harley sub plot or eliminate entirely, NOT BOTH. With this, better editing around these eliminated plot points could make a more coherent story with more empathetic story arcs. I have a full idea for a plot but this is too long as it is.
WONDER WOMEN 2017 7/10
Wonder women is a refreshing instalment into the DCEU, showing they seem to e learning, but are still falling behind on some of the most basic hurdles.
Firstly, as always we’ll start off with the strengths of his film, firstly it is vividly important to recognise that this is the first major Superhero film to be directed, and sustain a heavy female cast. It does so fantastically and leaves me more excited for the next instalment now knowing female directors and stars now have evidence for an accomplished superhero movie, which arguably has outdone the past 2 major films. With this we see a brilliantly refreshing opening act with a subtle and bright, vibrant origin story.
However, this film slowly returns to madness throughout the film when major plot holes appear, and the film making quality slowly deteriorates. Firstly, the iggest plot hole that has been so easily overlooked is the WW1 aspect. Given a World War Two film, having the Germans be the sole enemy is obvious and logical, however WW1 is not as simple as this and the use of Germans as the enemies is vaguely lazy. Also, as DC loves to do, it adds in extra characters and neglects to give them logical and coherent backstory and arcs. We only need to look at the ‘best marksman in the war’ who doesn’t fire a single shot, and continues not too all the way to the end of the film, showing no growth. The final plot hole is what draws it into the wider EU. The entirety of this film is showing Diana that the human race is bad and should be left alone, although when she defeats arias, this is meant to break this curse and peace seems to be restored. But, in BVS she claims to have stopped helping mankind because of their evils, neglecting Stalin, WW2 and the Vietnam war to name a few, but making a reappearance for- lex Luther. Wow.
Although in almost most of its entirety this was a pleasant watch, my personal issue stopped this at the third act when the final fight begins. To me the film returns to DCs favourite colour scheme of dark and clouded, and uses quite frankly some of the worst CGI I’ve seen recently, making me wonder why they didn’t at least try to incorporate real elements, such as Marvel, but this is still the best DC film after man of steel and I’m excited to see more female led and directed films come to screen.
JUSTICE LEAUGE 2016 5/10
This will be the shortest of the DC reviews, this is the film I’ve seen least of the lot and I feel I’ll need at least another viewing to get a full understanding. To premise this I fully understand Zack Snyder had personal issues leading him to leave and Joss take over, and this is in no way mocking him.
But I’ll dive in, maybe the fact I’m struggling to write this review tells me a lot about the movie. Wonder women was one of the only saving graces of this move, she was well understood and I feel her likeness as a character was well transferred from WW to JL. Contrary to this, I’m struggling to write about cyborg and flash, we were given next to no backstorys, although the flash’s was hinted at at least twice that I recall and what we were given were quite chaotic. Batman was a major letdown for me, coming down from BVS where he was a certified badass taking on superman, he turns into a wimp and hides for a majority of the film, quite evidently showing Ben affleck Clearly does not want to be there. I feel the overall plot of the film was almost underatsnvle, but had the taken the time to set up this storyline in previous films it would’ve been much better, this movie lacked the right to have all these characters on screen together. The characters had adequate screen time each, but contrary to its biggest rival ‘the avengers’ this really wasn’t that special, most of the characters had the same abilities, barring the flash, and the way the avengers films have shown all the characters working together simultaneously in cinematic mastery, you can see hints of Joss attempting this, but with a bad set up it’s an impossible task.
I conclude, not going into the issue with the CGi because I don’t have that much time.
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My Thoughts and Feelings About Mighty No. 9
It’s been a long time since I wrote a review for a game I’ve played. Well, I played Mighty No. 9 for a while now, and I finally finished it. And boy, was it…meh? I know tons of people consider it a disappointment and that the game is hated, but after taking time to think, it’s just average. It’s not the worst video game to ever exist, but it’s also not the best game. It’s far from it. Intended to be a spiritual successor to Mega Man, Mighty No. 9 was supposed to be a great game. I’ve done plenty of research about its development and what Comcept’s intentions were at the time. But so much went wrong! I still somewhat like the game, it wasn’t that boring, but I wasn’t oblivious to its flaws. Boy, there’s a lot of them.
Before I go on, I never played a Mega Man game my whole life, so I’m not that familiar with the franchise. However, I checked out a Mega Man X playthrough made by a YouTuber known as Capitalist out of curiosity. People stated that Mighty No. 9 ruined what makes Mega Man so great, and despite not knowing much about the series, I can see why. Everything that Mighty No. 9 has pales in comparison to what Mega Man has in store.
The story had a lot of potential. It takes place in the year 20XX on a futuristic Earth where humans and robots exist together. There’s even a Battle Colosseum for robots. The robots go haywire, and it’s up to Beck to stop them from destroying everything. Along the way, he saves the other eight Mighty Numbers. It all sounds cool, but the way it’s written had me bored. Not much happened, and whenever there were plot points, they seemed like they were shoehorned in and without explanation. Even a few plot points were revealed during conversations as you played through a couple of the levels. The one about William White being the one who created Trinity should have been like a flashback cutscene. Show, don’t tell, to explain how Trinity was a failure. The story was lifeless because there were multiple ideas that weren’t explored. Why the heck does William have issues with Dr. Blackwell? How were the Mighty Numbers and Call created? And some of the plot was just told, and they just felt awkward. At first, we didn’t know Will was at fault for the robot rampage. Heck we never knew he was Trinity’s creator.
Just like the story, the characters weren’t great. Aside from a few noticeable traits, they were bland. They didn’t have enough personality. The Mighty Numbers had one-note types of personalities, and they were annoying. And Call…she had no personality! I really hated Call because she had no personality. She was too emotionless for my taste. Yes, she’s a robot, but did she have to be so robotic, that she had no personality?? In the end, I didn’t care about anyone, not even Brandish. Not much occurred with the characters. They all lacked depth, and it’s sad because they all looked pretty cool.
The gameplay, although I didn’t mind it much, it wasn’t that great compared to Mega Man X. Beck can only shoot in one direction. Not that it’s a problem(?), I mean Mega Man X did the same thing, but the difference between the two games is X looks way more fun than Mighty No. 9 (Mega Man in general looks more fun to play). That I can admit. Also, X can slide and jump on walls. That could have made things so much easier with Beck! There was also supposed to be a tutorial kind of thing in the beginning. It turns out I didn't know a few of the things I can do until I was too late into the game. If I had known I could configure buttons to the abilities I get instead of having to scroll through them, it would have been less of a hassle. Another thing about the gameplay is the ReXelections, powers that Beck can utilize like Mega Man. They were…okay, I guess. Some of them weren’t my favorites. Pyrogen’s ability seemed lame despite its limited use it had when I played the game. The same applies to Cryosphere’s ice ability. Dynatron’s and Countershade’s abilities were used only once, and I never bothered to use them again. Battalion and Aviator had good abilities, and Seismic wasn’t useful to me until the final boss (more on that later…). The only ability I really liked was Brandish’s ability, yet even that power could have been better.
Basically, the abilities were underwhelming. For example, Pyrogen. It’s a fire ability. What can it do? You blow stuff up. Sadly, you have to time it real well to blow stuff up, and it’s hardly of any use (along with the rest of them). I tried using it against Cryo since fire beats ice, but that backfired on me so badly, it cost me a life. This, along with the other abilities, should have been different. Maybe Pyrogen’s fire powers could have involved shooting explosives. Maybe Cryo’s ice could have included a blizzard bazooka or something like that. Avi’s power was okay, but maybe instead of floating down, it could have worked like a helicopter, to fly you over deadly pits (and then hurl the thing helping you fly at enemies). Dynatron’s ability is self-explanatory: intense electric attacks! Battalion’s is fine on its own in my opinion, though I would add a lock-on feature. Seismic’s shield is good, but executing it was clumsy, so that would be something I would fix. Countershade’s sniper ability is also good, but again, a lock-on feature could have helped. Finally, Brandish’s ability is one I like the way it is, but I admit it could have been more awesome. If you were to wield it, waves would fly right at the enemies. See?? I managed to come up with ways that could have made the abilities better. Heck, there are a plethora of idea that could have worked in general. If the abilities you get aren’t fun or lack opportunities to use them, then what’s the point?
As for the levels, they were meh. They generally lacked excitement. Whenever you take damage, it’s sometimes not your fault. Insta-death can occur in some of the levels, and some of them were complete bullshit. A game can be difficult, but it shouldn’t be too difficult or else it’ll just be frustrating. It was also tedious and annoying to go through a lot of the levels without finding any health items. Mega Man X’s enemies left health items, which made the game a bit easier. Mighty No. 9 doesn’t do that. You rarely get health on some of the checkpoints, but they are rarely helpful if you’re so low on health.
Call only got one level, and it’s one of my least favorite levels ever! Her abilities are weak and limited compared to Beck, and she couldn’t AcXelerate into enemies, making gameplay so tedious. And in addition to her lack of a personality due to how painfully robotic she is, during gameplay she kept on saying what she was doing! “Jump!” “Holding.” “Barrier.” That was annoying, I wished she had a mute button. She’s cute in appearance, but everything else about her is just bad. Seriously, ONE level?!!
And Trinity…..*sigh* Her level is fine, but once you get to the boss, it all changes. Yes, the final boss should be difficult, I know! But battling Trinity was a major pain in the ass! Even though I chose the right ReXelections and selected the three buttons for them in order to choose them real-time (something I discovered real late), Trinity kept beating me. The battle was more frustrating than any other boss I’ve fought. It took me nearly two hours (from two different days) to beat that final stage and battle Trinity! You don’t even get taken to the second phase, which is bullshit. With all the other flaws the game had, the final boss was frustrating! Once I finally beat her, I wasn’t satisfied. I was just relieved I was done with the game, so I can finally move on to a more fun game that won’t make me feel like I might lose my mind. It wasn’t my fault! That boss was just annoying. Out of all the bosses, Trinity is the only one I despise! Avi’s battle wasn’t even that hard.
A game can be difficult, but if it’s too hard to the point that it will only make the game not fun, then that’s the problem. A few games that are known for being difficult are the “Devil May Cry” games. Those are difficult, but I would rather play those games than deal with Mighty No. 9’s final boss. Games are allowed to be challenging, and that’s why Devil May Cry is fun, but the difference between DMC and MN9 is that one is poorly executed and unfair. Yes, DMC can be unfair to some, but the thing is the games’ difficulty is connected to your skills. If you lose miserably in, say, “Dante Must Die” mode, that’s on you because your performance probably wasn’t great. All you have to do is improve. Higher difficulty levels are available once unlocked, and you can get the hang of things in the normal difficulty level. MN9’s difficulty, however, is hard. No matter what you do, you’ll struggle. Heck, it has three other difficulties! Hard, Hyper, and Maniac! But since the game is already difficult (and a pain) to play, it’s not worth it. You have to be a pro to tackle those difficulty levels. I’m not a pro, and I admit that without reluctance, so I won’t be doing those difficulty levels for myself. Playing it normally was already a pain (especially with Trinity!! Arrrgh!!). Therefore, Mighty No. 9’s difficulty was the result of poor design, meaning some of the hits (and deaths) you take are bullshit. So Mighty No. 9's difficulty was unfair and sometimes uneven. Countershade's level wasn't that difficult in my opinion. And has anyone realized that some (not all) of the advice it gives you before you enter a level hinted at the weakness?? Such as Dyna's ability being effective during Countershade's battle? But even the advice is useless because with the abilities being the way they are, they just weren't worth using at times. I did more damage using Beck's regular shooting abilities.
In conclusion, Mighty No. 9 gets a 5/10 from me. I can forgive some of the stuff. The music was good, the bosses were okay, and the designs for the characters were tasteful. So I'm showing just a hint of mercy despite the whole Trinity crap. But the gameplay wasn't super exciting, the final boss was frustrating as hell and no satisfaction can be received even after beating Trinity. The story was bland and it glossed over what could have been great storytelling if it wasn't poorly written, and the characters were boring and annoying (looking at you, Call!). Also, there's a boss rush!...I'm NEVER going for it because of Trinity. I can try to master the other bosses, but Trinity is one that I wish to never battle again (unless I want to torture myself out of boredom). I might try the challenges??? I'm not too sure. Despite the game's flaws, I oddly don't mind playing it. I like other games that are disliked by everyone. Last Rebellion and Shadow the Hedgehog are a few examples. Even Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy 7. People have different tastes, you know.
Still...what happened with this game?? Where did they money go??? Where????? Because $4 million dollars should have been enough to develop a fun and cool video game for Mega Man fans and newcomers. I also know that there were plans for a TV show and movie. If they had made better decisions throughout this whole process, Mighty No. 9 could have been great. I would have watched the TV show (or was it an anime?) and movie. Oh, and they had plans for a sequel...the post-credits scene was a sequel hook. But due to how the game turned out, I'm not sure if there will be a sequel, or a TV show/anime, or a movie, or anything. Then again, never say never. Bubsy came back with a new game after Bubsy 3D, and it took 21 years! Though the game wasn't that well-received. The point is if they do want to continue Mighty No. 9, please make better decisions. Reboot the game if you must (not that it's likely at this point), but don't do the same thing you did here. Mighty No. 9 has wasted potential, just like many other video games. Those certain games failed as a result of rushed development, bad decisions, and/or just plain laziness. Mighty No. 9 could have been great, and it's a shame that it didn't reach its full potential.
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Top of the Flops - Cursed (2005)
A brief introduction: I watch a lot of movies, and specifically, I watch a lot of terrible movies. On purpose. Perhaps it was growing up on Adam Sandler movies that did it, but I am naturally drawn to the mistakes of cinema. Making friends that are equally as obsessed with the annals of acrid cinema helped encourage my plight, as did the great podcast, How did this Get Made? I’ve learned to embrace my love of the hot garbage, yet all my terrible film watching tended to just fall into a well deep inside my brain where it’d remain, only to occasionally crawl back out and force me to admit: “Oh shit, I think i’ve seen that”. And so, with this feature, I will attempt to look these movies dead in the eye and say “.....alright then”. These films won’t necessarily be the traditional flop, but they will exist in one of three categories (or hopefully, all three): Financial Flop, Critical Flop, or Flop inside my own Heart. And we start with a movie that swipes at those three categories with a badly animated paw and succeeds at being all of them.
Budget: $38m
Gross: $29.6m
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 16%
When you think about something being cursed, sure, you might think of someone bitten by a Hollywood Werewolf. Or, you might think of a film that is produced by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the unsurpassed ineffectual tinkerers of Hollywood Movies. Cursed has a lot of curses, but it is hard to find one more damning than that of the Weinstein curse, which put this movie through years of production hell while they desperately attempted to lower the rating and stuff it full of stars so that people would actually go and see it. They failed wildly. Pandering is the bread and butter of Horror Cinema of the mid-2000s (let us not forget that Paris Hilton starred in the House of Wax remake that year) and boy does this film come off as a parent trying to access your love by accessing your CD collection (shit, ‘CD collection’? Sorry, this film has put me into 2005 mode, when I actually owned CDs by some of the bands in this soundtrack).
How pander-ific does it get? The film opens with a Bowling for Soup concert. Y’know, the guys who sang Girl all the Bad Guys Want? Yeah, them. Whether or not they were a voice of a generation, this film skews pretty young, and in case you were worried that they’re just aiming for the kids who ride skateboards, worry no more: the singer Mya is at the concert. Yes, the singer Mya. And the strangest thing is, the singer Mya doesn’t sing at all. Which is what, if anything, she was known for. It is entirely possible she showed up to the production, Wes Craven didn’t recognise her and instead cast her as “girl who flirts and therefore gets violently killed”. And later, the trifecta of “WHY ARE THEY THERE” musicians is complete when Lance Bass has a wordless cameo. Oh Bass, you truly were the Alfred Hitchcock of cameos! (Alfred Hitchcock was also the Alfred Hitchcock of cameos, as well as the Alfred Hitchcock of Alfred Hitchcocks).
Aside from Christina Ricci and Jesse Eisenberg leading the cast, (who no teen on earth cared about in 2005), the film’s attempt to celebrit-ise the cast list is, erm...weird? There’s Shannon Elizabeth (who was 5 years past being popular), Joshua Jackson (who was 10 years past being popular) and Scott Baio (who was literally never popular). As Bart once pointed out: “What’s a Chachi?”. And, if it had been released ten years later, the film could’ve had something on their hands with this cameo...
It’s odd that the film should be such a cynical Hollywood cheap-fest because writer Kevin Williamson (scribe of classics like Scream and...not classics like I Know What You Did Last Summer) is quite the meta lover, and is excitedly peppers the script with lots of digs at Hollywood. They’re not good digs: Jesse Eisenberg suggests that as the werewolf is from Hollywood, it might have breast implants, an image that’s so stupid, yet so viscerally disgusting, that I wish Eisenberg had never opened his bastard mouth to say it. Williamson is not much of a satirist outside of Scream, but you get the feeling he thinks he is. “I’m gonna make fun of dumb old Hollywood whilst making a film that is the most clear cut example of dumb old Hollywood. Haha! Take that, me!”.
The film has promise in its names: Wes Craven behind the camera and Rick Baker on makeup, but in reducing the film’s certificate, The Weinstein’s rid the movie of almost any of that great Baker body horror makeup, and any of that Craven intelligence. I can’t blame it all on them: the scariest thing about it is how horrifically directed it is: it looks like a TV Movie, and I genuinely would not surprised if Craven was napping through 80% of filming. And it’s an odd decision to rely so heavily on cheap looking CGI when Baker is around - it’s like they said “Great, we’ve got Rick Baker on board! Now, lets lock him in that cupboard over there for two years”. Because this film literally took over two years to make. A film taking a long time, a film having reshoots, and a film having rewrites, are three signs your film is in trouble. Cursed has all three of those. I mean, did it really sound promising when Men in Black 3′s rewrites were going so badly that they got Will Smith on board to help out? It damn well didn’t, and we ended up with a film with lines like “I will pimp-slap the shiznit out of you”. In 2012.
You can tell Cursed was filmed over gigantic periods of time, which would explain why nobody in the film appears to give a shit about anything that’s happening. Ricci, Eisenberg and Jackson seem so entirely bored and quite honestly, sleepy, that it’s baffling that Wes didn’t say ‘Hey can we try that once more but this time not shitty?’. Not that he cared too much - how do you direct a film from someone’s else’s script for nearly THREE years and still care? How do you maintain a solid and consistent directing style over three years? The answer is: you don’t.
I can not blame the bad performances. The script is so dire and laughable that caring about it requires energy which could be better spent on things such as making some lunch or clearing out your junk mail folders. I mean, what could Ricci possibly see in her character Ellie? She’s a talk show producer which never plays into her story, and after she and her brother are attacked by an LA Werewolf, what exciting changes in her occur? What emotional developments does she have to grapple with? Well for a starter, she wears a new shirt to work. It’s the most nondescript shirt imaginable, and yet it causes her co-worker to tell her she looks “Saucy”. Did I mention that this movie has no idea how people talk or act? She does so little else, except sniff the odd bit of blood, and worry that her brooding boyfriend, Joshua Jackson, isn’t happy with her. His story isn’t much better, the crux of his arc in the first half is “He loves to fuck so much, but can he learn to cut back on all the fucking?”. Oh, and he has a club to open, which is a bizarre Madame Tussauds of horror movie mannequins, but also Cher and Xena, and also a house of mirrors, and also a DJ. And Lance Bass attends the opening. It feels like the weirdest and laziest shoehorn of “Hey here’s some horror movie imagery so we can tie our movie to much better horror movies!”, and the twist is so predictable that I wrote in my notes “If Joshua Jackson doesn’t turn out to be a werewolf I will eat my own hands.”.
IF ONLY there was some framing to give me a hint! Darn it!
Meanwhile, Jesse Eisenberg plays Jimmy, who knows he is turning into a werewolf because he went on “internet search” and typed in the words “Werewolf L.A”. He doesn’t seem very bothered, though. As soon as they get home from their initial attack (during which Shannon Elizabeth is in a fiery car wreck and then dragged off to her death), he says, with casual indifference “Well. G’night”. After he saw a woman killed. And after they were attacked by a gigantic wolf. Nobody seems to care about anything that is happening, but why should they? Jimmy’s werewolf transformation is only marginally more exciting than Ellie’s, because he gets the Spiderman 3 style hair makeover (although this is spiky rather than floppy) and he can now suplex his bully.
Ellie’s transformation means she can catch a fly in her bare hand, y’know, just as werewolves are always doing. The film seems to forget that they’re actually supposed to be werewolves because they never actually turn into werewolves, and it never seems to affect their lives too badly. The traditional impetus for werewolves’ story arc is that they want to stop becoming a werewolves because they don’t want to kill people. That isn’t even hinted at with either Ellie or Jimmy - they never even try to kill anyone, they never fully transform, and the most dangerous Ellie gets is when she yells “Don’t start with me!” at a producer who doesn’t want Scott Baio to be bumped for Carrot Top. Seriously. A moment that is supposed to showcase Ellie’s newfound animal fury involves a conversation about Carrot Top and Scott Baio. For most of the film she doesn’t really believe she’s a werewolf, which gives us a contender for worst line of 2005: “Everybody’s cursed. It’s called life”. Her story is thoroughly underwritten, meanwhile you wish Jimmy’s story was not written at all.
Because he’s Jesse Eisenberg, he gets bullied by someone who throws homophobic slurs at him even though, as Jimmy repeatedly reminds us, he’s not gay. Poor straight kid! That must be tough, being straight! Some of these insults include “Your dog is gay too!”, and “You ass wimp wad”. But it’s okay, because it turns out the bully is gay! And not only that, but he turns up on Jimmy’s front porch and tries to kiss him, which leads to another of the worst/best lines of the film: “i’m not gay....i’m a werewolf”. The nonchalant way he just reveals that information is ridiculous, and is another demonstration of the way that nobody seems to care very much about anything in this movie. The film doesn’t seem to care very much about its set pieces either, one of which happens moments after the porch scene. The family dog for no apparent reason is a werewolf now, too! A vague, fuzzily CGI’d ball of brown that throws itself through windows!
“Ahh!! It’s an....onion bhaji?”
Meanwhile, Joshua Jackson’s secret kind of just falls out, as if Kevin Williamson was like “Oh RIGHT, there has to be an antagonist”. Joshua Jackson is a werewolf after all, and this draws the action towards the opening of his club, where Jimmy’s bully joins them for some reason, and proceeds to get knocked out instantly, a state in which he remains for the entire duration of the scene.
“My dying wish is that I one day star in a superhero show that is beloved for one season and then the most hated thing on TV for the second season”
The great TV writer John Swartzwelder was known for using “for some reason” in his scripts, which worked beautifully for a solid, absurd joke. But Cursed is a supposed horror film that takes “for some reason” and bases its entire third act on it. Why are they all here at this club? Why is Judy Greer turning into a werewolf now? And why, by any stretch of the imagination, did the writers think that, after having her looks insulted, it’d be a good idea to have the Greerwolf do this:
Yes, Judy Greer is the last-minute big bad wolf, but to what end? Where was all the build up to that? What is her motivation? And how much longer if there left of this film? She gives an expository dump about how much she hates women and thus wants to eat her, and it carries about as much weight as the fly that Ellie caught earlier (callbacks!). The big fight between Greerwolf and Jimmy & Ellie feels totally unearned, and they don’t even use any of their Werewolf abilities. I mean, sure, it’s a fun sight seeing Jesse Eisenberg charging at Greerwolf with a sword and shouting “yyAAAH YAAAAAAAH”, but the scene ends without Ellie and Jimmy doing anything impressive at all, and instead a bunch of cops just shooting her to death. It’s not very clever or satisfying. At least she got to crack a few lines before her time was up, including “Showtime. Isn’t that what they say?”. Uhh...yeah I guess? Good one? The film cannot seem to make up its mind on what any of the characters think or want, and so Joshua Jackson goes from good, to bad, to good and back to bad again, and not for one second does the disinterest on his face let up.
“I’m a fuckin wolf and uh, i’m gonna eat you now I guess. Or not. Wes!?”
The final set piece, which limps along after what feels like a 20 minute film (which is actually 100 minutes) occurs after 3 acts which involve zero emotional development, and zero cool werewolf moments. Surely now is the time for our protagonist, Ellie, to have both? Nah! Instead she slowly sort-of turns into a werewolf, by getting lumpy skin and big teeth. She never fully transforms (“It happens slowly at first” says Jackson, meaning “we don’t have the budget for a full transformation”) and doesn’t even get to overpower Joshua Jackson, which would’ve at least given her some agency and closure. That task is left to Jimmy who crawls around on the ceiling for a bit, (another classic werewolf attribute??) before eventually stopping Jackson with a shovel and a....cake serving knife. A cake serving knife that you see a lot of in the film, because apparently cake serving knives are really cool props to have as a sort of Chekhov’s Cake Server?
“Teenagers LOVE cake servers, right” - Kevin Williamson
Jimmy saves Ellie with the help of the cake server, and once Jackson is down, Ellie at the very least she gets to smash Jackson’s head off, and his body burns. Kitchen RUINED. She doesn’t even seem upset that she’s had to smash her supposed love’s head clean off his body. And mere moments after this, Jimmy’s crush comes to the door having found their were-dog, and conveniently knowing that a) it’s his dog and b) where he lives. They have a kiss and walk off, with his bully in attendance because apparently he doesn’t have a family of his own. They all got over that evening pretty fast. After tearing a werewolf’s head off and having your sister nearly killed, would you not want to hang out for a bit longer? Just have a bit of a night in? Instead, it’s a casual “Well that’s done then, bye!”. And there’s his arc. He’s made a friend, got a girlfriend, and saved his sister. And what was Ellie’s arc? She wears a new shirt, has her life nearly ended several times, has her house ruined, and then, as Jimmy fucks off with his mates, she closes the film with the line “I’m just gonna stay here and clean”. Seriously. That’s her resolution. That’s how she ends the film. Bloodied, miserable, alone, and cleaning up the gore in her kitchen. I can’t wait for Cursed 2 to see if she managed to successfully hoover up all that werewolf fur!!
It’s a real failure of a film in every regard. It does lean towards trying to be fun rather than trying to be scary, but couldn’t it have tried to be even a bit spooky? Could the jump scares have not been so endless and predictable. I mean, ten points for anyone who can guess where the jump scare is coming from in this scene:
Yes, a cuckoo clock is about as scary as it gets. I could tolerate the lack of care put into the story and the characters if the action and horror were there, but they really aren’t. There is nothing tense, well crafted or smart in the film. It’s baffling to think this is the guy who made Scream and A Nightmare on Elm Street, because this doesn’t just feel like it was directed by someone having an off day, it feels like it was directed by someone whose only experience is directing episodes of MTV’s Cribs. It doesn’t attempt to subvert, improve or even just successfully repeat the werewolf formula, instead it just throws random iconography from those movies at you with Dashboard Confessional songs playing loudly enough to distract you from this terrible film with an even more terrible soundtrack. Terrible, and yet I did have fun with it. It actually benefits from being flimsy and light as air, and as dreadful as it gets, I did appreciate it not taking itself too seriously. There are enough unintentionally funny and simply bizarre moments to make it an enjoyable watch, and it’s not the most hatable of films. It could almost have had a charm, if it wasn’t really, really, extremely bad.
Worth a hate watch?: Yes
Worst/best line: “I’m not gay....i’m a werewolf”
Worst film of 2005?: Son of the Mask, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, Doom, XXX 2, The Pacifier and Bewitched all came out in 2005, so no. Cursed might be a bad film from a bad year, but it is not the worst. Rob Schneider knows very well which film is the worst of 2005.
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Disenchantment: Season 1
Matt Groening is an Ideas Man. Life in Hell, The Simpsons, Futurama, it’s not often that a single creative becomes the voice of more than one generation. And yet, his TV shows, at the height of their respective successes, were not identifiable by Groening’s direct influence so much as they were their fantastic team of writers. At their apex, Groening’s greatest successes were far bigger than Groening himself, and while he was adept at dreaming up the conceit and the characters of the worlds he created, it was on the back of the efforts of a fantastic writing team that his shows flourished. So while Groening’s typically warped and cynical worldview held his comic strip in good stead, his short-form, frame-by-frame method of joke-telling lacks the subtlety and nuance that a good story-writer can use to build to a punchline, or to thread its characters into the weave of its plot rather than just having them stick their heads through a door and utter a joke because it’s been five minutes and the egg-timer sitting by his computer has gone off. In saying that, his contribution here is in co-operation with one of The Simpson’s most acclaimed writers - Josh Weinstein - so I don’t really know where to start in trying to figure out exactly what happened in the production of Disenchantment to start it off on such a bad footing.
Disenchantment is a ‘Netflix Original’ - a brand I can’t help but instinctively flinch at the mere mention of. To be fair to Netflix, not all its releases under that title are trash - some are even straight-up excellent - but there are literally hundreds of Netflix Originals released all over the world, and when you have the money and ambition that Netflix has (or had) there’s going to be an inevitable temptation to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. After all, Netflix is the bastion of those willing to settle for cheap thrills, rom coms, and anything that will drown out the deafening sound of existential dread reverberating around the inside of their skulls. Not the most discerning audience, is what I’m saying. And to be fair to Disenchantment, Groening’s writing only appears credited in the first episode (even though the symptoms of that writing appear throughout to various degrees throughout the series). But when you’ve only got ten episodes to make your mark, and your appeal is in part trading on the pedigree of a back-catalogue of seminal shows such as The Simpsons and Futurama, the bar you’ve got to leap is going to be higher than usual. Which is why it’s so baffling that the opening episodes of Disenchantment are just. so. bad.
Full disclosure - I barely got half way through the first episode before I gave up with a groan and a roll of the eyes and turned it off. I even called it ‘Disenchanted’ seven times in this review before I realised I was getting the title wrong. Perhaps I was projecting. The only reason I watched the rest of the series was so I could write this review in good faith. Characters bounce from scenario to scenario in a chaotic, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink fantasy world. The narrative almost invariably plays out in a ‘this happened, and then this happened, and then THIS happened’ format. Mediocre visual gags and one-liners are shoehorned into scenes with no care at to how relevant they are, or how they affect the pacing. Everything is overstated, lacking the finesse that the best episodes of The Simpsons or Futurama used to let their humour and emotion sneak up on the viewer and take them by surprise. It lacks the endearing characters, the contained and engaging storylines, and the genuine social commentary that both of its predecessors had. And on top of all this the animation is really, really cheap, meaning that my first impression was that it was as amateurish in its visuals as it was in its script.
Growing pains can be a passing thing. The first season of the American Office was mostly trash, as was that of Parks and Rec, as were the first few seasons of The Simpsons, and while the entry point into Disenchantment reeks like a teenager’s bedroom, with time and distance from the first episode it does open up in two something more engaging. But that doesn’t absolve it of its sins, as the budgetary and temporal constraints of the ‘Netflix Original’ title have clearly failed to let this series grow large enough to support the wide creative team it needs to even entertain thoughts of approaching its predecessor’s quality. Everything about Disenchantment feels impermanent compared to its predecessors - from the meandering and indefinable conceit, to the clutch of thinly-written characters, to the cheap, badly-written, throwaway jokes…it all feels like it wasn’t made to last beyond the initial ten episodes. It feels like a draft copy.
Which is a real shame, because Disenchantment is a vehicle for an excellent cadre of modern comedians and performers who simply haven’t got much to work with. Abbi Jacobson and Eric Andre both came from better, more ground-breaking shows to play far-less interesting characters. ‘He’s a demon, BUT HE’S KINDA CUTE!’; ‘she’s a princess, BUT SHE’S ALSO A ROUGH-AND-TUMBLE REBEL!’ The best a character can hope to be in this series is a thing that is also another thing, otherwise, they’re Kissy, the promiscuous elf. Or Weirdo, the sex pest elf. Or Shocko, the elf that expresses shock, and is legitimately the only joke I laughed at in the first episode by virtue of the fact that it was just so dumb. Below even that rung lay the characters that exist only as vessels for shitty end-of-scene one-liners, like the guy who walks through the door after the King has threatened to decapitate anyone who looks at his daughter, saying ‘oh boy, did I look at HER!’ Ugh.
And when the jokes aren’t content to simply be bad, they straight-up don’t make sense - a perfect example of this being when the princess’ betrothed accidentally impales his head on a sword.
Let’s break it down:
- A prince drops the ring during his wedding ceremony, and when bending to pick it up accidentally impales his head on a sword. The joke being that a character is suddenly killed in an unexpected way. This is mildly amusing.
- A member of the court declares him dead. To which the prince replies with the garbled mess of a line: 'Ah, I think I’m alive. No, wait, never mind.’ He then slumps down dead. Aside from not being as funny as the first joke, in showing the price to be alive it undoes the punchline of the first joke. ‘Prince has an accident and lives’ is not funny. ‘Prince has an accident, seems to live, but doesn’t’ is also not funny.
- Finally, after two increasingly poor gags that both rely on the prince’s death to even be considered jokes at all, the scene moves on for around a minute before the prince opines the fact that no-one is helping him. Not only does this YET AGAIN render the two previous jokes moot (’Visibly alive man turns out to be alive’), it just plain doesn’t make any sense. The joke was that he died. Twice. Why would anyone be expected to help him? Did they forget to take this out of the script? Or did they just forsake consistency and the internal logic of their show so they could cram as many shit gags in as possible?
In two minutes we have three crappy bits that are all essentially the same joke, each one simultaneously worse than the last AND retroactively rendering the jokes before it less funny. To be honest, I’m kind of impressed. It’s almost the perfect, literal, anti-comedy. And it’s the norm, rather than the exception, for the first few episodes at least. Any time the show starts to get any steam up and you allow yourself to be invested, some kind of desperate, tone-deaf non sequitur swings in and ruins your mood. The best jokes in the series are either less-painful versions of this, or the occasional rare gem that is both unexpected AND YET makes sense for the scene. When the king laments that he can’t possibly lose anything else, and then his crown slips off his head and plunges over the railing of his tower, THAT’S funny. In the moment, I laughed out loud. And it’s not even that spectacular a joke. But it’s sadly among the best that Disenchantment can offer.
I’ve got a real bone to pick with Netflix’s ‘Originals’. If you ever held hope that one day down the track the channel’s trashheap would be thinned out, or somehow transformed by the platform’s success, then one five-minute wade through the collection will convince you that this is a pipe-dream. It’s an endless sea of low-budget, thrown-together mediocrity that seriously suggests the person greenlighting these things needs to have their rubber stamp confiscated. Disenchantment grows on you, and by episode ten you might even find yourself a little bit invested. But big picture, the series is just another idea flung at a wall and failing to stick. The potential is there, I suppose, and I can only hope that the upwards momentum carries over to the newly-commissioned second season, but the low quality animation and poor execution just pulls the rug out from under it. Groening’s style is best suited to self-contained episodes that allow the writers to condense the humour; a ten-episode arc with a flimsy plot is not fertile ground for a style of show that needs time to find its feet and settle into the premise and the characters. And while it might amuse you if you hang around long enough, I don’t really feel like awarding points to a show for being kind of worth it eventually. Disenchantment simply doesn’t hold a candle to the best of Groening’s works.
5/10
#disenchantment#matt groening#animation#simpsons#futurama#luci#bean#televition#review#tv#netflix#streaming#on demand#cartoon#fantasy#elves#eric andre#abbi jacobson
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KYGO & ELLIE GOULDING - FIRST TIME
[4.22]
It's "European EDM DJs Featuring Other People" Friday! 10 points to whoever can come up with a snappier title.
Joshua Copperman: It's hard to hear Ellie warble about cigarettes after hearing the deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction of party music on Melodrama. It's even harder considering the great music that Ellie's capable of making. Ellie's too good of a singer to go through the motions with Kygo like this. "It Ain't Me" worked because of how it used its emotional-trop-pop trappings to its advantage, but this is weightless in a bad way. Those lines about debauchery sound like every writer involved is following a straight edge lifestyle. The melody, nostalgic references, and drum kits sound rejected from Memories... Do Not Open, even if the production is much better. "First Time" is just so hard to hear that it's difficult to pay attention for a full single listen -- normally I use comparisons to make a point about how it does or doesn't transcend the names dropped, but I'm pulling them up here because there's just not much that stands out otherwise, even the hyper-specific details sounding passé. Except for that "middle finger was a peace sign", which suggests that someone on the 6-person writing team (Ellie's not credited) watches Rick and Morty.
[4]
Alfred Soto: These memories recollected in tranquility have the logic of an addled mind. "We were sipping on emotions" isn't the first "huh?" moment. Ten dollars hasn't been a stack since Chester Arthur was president. No teen has ever confused a Honda with a Maybach. Musically "First Time" is unwieldy too. The main riff -- a pretty restatement of Toto's "Africa" -- evokes a pleasant haze, but Kygo adds the bloops and bleeps that are de rigeur in an EDM-drenched pop scene. If this be wisdom, give me madness.
[4]
Anthony Easton: The blankness comes from Kygo's affectless delivery; the flat, Lorde inspired electronics, that meanders but never quite commits to a beat...the worst of this was how badly written it is, a Frankenstein's monster of cliches, stopped from the very first line.
[2]
Crystal Leww: I hate to be dramatic, but Ellie Goulding singing 'ten dollars was a fat stack' seems mildly racist.
[5]
Will Adams: Kygo steps outside his box to create something that sounds like it could fit in with the dreamy pop of the overlooked Halcyon, but without the strength of Goulding's writing, it fails. Here, subtlety's drained in favor of metaphor dump and meaningless imagery ("the middle finger was our peace sign"). And that's not even getting to the chorus, whose string of "fat stack-Maybach" rhymes continues the awful trend of white artists shoehorning hip hop tropes where they do not belong (though it was at that point I became relieved that Goulding isn't a writer on this).
[4]
Alex Clifton: I wish that Kygo had picked someone other than Ellie Goulding for the vocals. It's not that she sounds bad--I'd actually say this is the strongest song she's been featured on since "I Need Your Love," and this is certainly miles better than anything on Delirium. But I don't buy the idea that Ellie ever had a time when "ten dollars was a fat stack"--she sounds too glossy for that. Nor do I ever get the sense from this song that this affair was a "wildfire" when the music is so laid-back. Kygo should have gone with Halsey. She'd oversing the whole thing, but there'd be some actual emotion in it.
[4]
Ryo Miyauchi: For all of its vanilla feel, the vastness of "Love Me Like You Do" suited post-EDM Ellie Goulding. So Kygo was on somewhat of a right direction tweaking his beach-side shtick to fit the tone of 50 Shades Darker. The songwriters didn't get the memo, though, leaving Goulding to draw history out of a collection of someone else's mementos. Or at least, she doesn't interact them like they're hers. With fake-deep memories like a drag of her first cigarette or Bon Iver's "Re: Stacks," can you blame her for not claiming that they are?
[5]
Thomas Inskeep: Con: I don't get what people hear in Goulding's voice, which always reads very empty to me. Con: The silly "remember when" lyrics, which seem to be directed towards those in their 20s; I'm 46, so that's not gonna work for me. Pro: That Kygo has severely dropped the BPMs on this and essentially made a pop single that just happens to have the same old EDM tricks in its chorus. But I'm happy that it's not only not uptempo, but it's not even really midtempo; this is basically an EDM ballad. And it stands out and works. Not exceptionally well, but enough.
[6]
Scott Mildenhall: Quite why Herefordshire's Ellie Goulding ever thought it a good idea to cement the carpet-scraping cringeworthiness of these lyrics with her voice might seem a mystery, but when considered with 2015's "On My Mind" it's clear she very much has form. Counting the clangers is a task in itself, such is the difficulty of listening to her utter the words "ten dollars was a fat stack" without an ounce of misplaced irony. Perhaps Selena Gomez did love The Libertines when she was 17, but this desperate grab for American currency is in no way legal tender.
[4]
[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]
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