disconcision:

twocubes:

disconcision:

twocubes:

i need to reread homestuck to check whether my initial reaction of “the story was really awful to aranea and she should have gotten a better deal” was reasonable…

i’d say that’s a definite yes, provided that we establish that the standard for comparison is vriska. i think the argument stands without this, but if we’re willing to give equal epistemic weigh to mind-aspect hypotheticals versus explicit timelines, consider the branch where vriska goes after bec noir, resulting in the certain deaths of terezi and karkat, and the probable deaths of everyone else. this is the same thing. the story tries to make game over a bigger deal (that this fails is a separate but highly-entangled story issue, see below), but it’s ultimately just another branching with only indirect impact on the alpha.

it’s weird that the story almost lampshades its mistreatment of aranea when meenah mentions after-the-fact that she’s rather not even run into aranea’s double ghost. this is imo doubly uncharacteristic on the part of meenah; both in that she would mean it, and that in she would say it if she did. i feel hussie dropped this as basically a brush-off for consistency’s sake, telegraphing that aranea is no longer even important enough to be mentioned again.

i guess a lot of this has to do with how sympathetic you find her. personally, i cut the betas lot of slack for dying young and being eternally confined to (what is debatably) a social-media hellscape. but the story didn’t try to sell the dismal fact of their circumstances as hard as it could have; another missed opportunity, as this much-maligned part of the story had a lot of potential as an odyssean katabasis.

even if you consider aranea’s background as less exculpatory than vriska’s, the fact is that her mistakes (unlike vriska’s) did not engender alpha casualties. the implied moral weighing of alpha- versus offshoot-casualties is unclear to me; we’re clearly supposed to read game over as worse than, say, the mass murdering of the beta ghosts, but at this point in the story death was devalued to mostly obviate the distinction.

more likely though the issue here is, as always, vriska. the way the story bent over backwards for her in act 6 is what makes aranea’s summary dismissal so eyebrow-raising. these are two awesome, utterly flawless awful kids with big damage which ultimately can’t excuse the awesome, utterly flawless awful shit they do. i almost feel like aranea’s role was as a kind of doppelganger scapegoat; an attempted emotional sleight-of-hand where she is symbolically punished not only for her own misdeeds, but for vriska’s as well, paving the way for the latter’s simultaneous forgiveness/resurrection. since death no longer serves this role in the narrative, the only real punishment is unpersoning. unfortunately this just makes aranea’s treatment sting more, because vriska was way, way better dead.

this seems reasonable; i will be honest that on the first read-through the thing that bothered me was maybe less sensible:

i really disliked how everyone hated her for providing exposition.

the story (in this specific aspect) was extremely meta-acknowledging. the fact that she was there to provide exposition and the fact that the way she did so was awkward (from a writing perspective) was essentially explicitly acknowledged by the narrative itself, and these were seen as reasonable reasons for people to dislike her

but like

in providing exposition, she was providing a crucial narrative service? the story couldn’t continue without her? hussie essentially stuck her with a shitty but necessary narrative job and denied her any comeuppance?

i guess that fits with the whole twisted-mirror-of-dancestor thingy (what with the whole hussie/vriska thing) but like

ultimately here she was excited about stuff that other people didn’t care about and the story and everyone contained in it conspired to hate her for it.

and that made me feel kind of shitty.

…at least that’s what i remember thinking at the time. i haven’t read that far in the story in many years…

relatable. let me extend my doppelganger scapegoat take: hussie (also) incarnated her as an avatar of his continued expository excesses, and then proceed to kick and eventually smite her down in an(other) act of misdirected self-flagellation.

(via disconcision)

“I’m the NBC peacock,“ he says. He then starts crooning “well well well wells” again. This will not be the last we hear of his "well well wells.”

Double survival is not the same as ordinary survival.  But this does not make it death.

sbnkalny:

grinserabe: Ok so after Eddie, two years later you put out the forest fire levels and water levels, and Even does the percentage mean

big-pepsi: fade to corn Confirmed.

garbage-empress: Welcome to corn confirmed.

grinserabe: FADE to corn Confirmed.

grinserabe: Welcome to corn Confirmed.

garbage-empress: Fade to corn confirmed.

terrychuu: Fade to corn Confirmed.

garbage-empress: Fade to corn confirmed.

garbage-empress: fade to corn confirmed.

garbage-empress: Fade TO corn confirmed.

grinserabe: fade to corn confirmed.

garbage-empress: fade to corn confirmed.

big-pepsi: Fade to corn confirmed.

grinserabe: Fade to corn Confirmed.

big-pepsi: Fade to corn confirmed.

grinserabe: fade to corn confirmed.

garbage-empress: Welcome to corn confirmed.

terrychuu: Fade to corn confirmed.

grinserabe: fade to corn confirmed.

grinserabe: Welcome to corn Confirmed.

big-pepsi: Fade to corn confirmed.

terrychuu: Welcome to corn confirmed.

grinserabe: Fade to corn confirmed.

garbage-empress: Fade to corn confirmed.

terrychuu: Fade to Corn Confirmed.

There had been a time when he felt that he ought not to call himself The Bulpington of Blup. Though it was only in his own mind that he called himself the Bulpington of Blup. He never called himself the Bulpington of Blup to any other human being. But to himself he did it continually. And the effects of doing it spread about in his brain.

meradorm:

tired: grimdark feudal period video games

wired: grimdark Heian period video games. You just wrote the meanest fucking poem about your lady-in-waiting, and

(via kbnet)

redantsunderneath:

nostalgebraist:

“Legion” is a good illustration of how much more there is to television than the writing.  I find it so fun and endearing that it’s easy to overlook – and occasionally jarring to remember – how I don’t really care what happens, or how little work the writers are doing to make me care about the key conflicts and relationships.

These things are easy to overlook because there’s such a wonderful goofy energy to virtually every individual shot, an energy that says this was fun to create.  You get the sense that everyone involved in the production – actors, set and visual designers, editors, episode directors – kept thinking “I want to do this cool thing, but will they let me?” and then thinking “well, on this show, yes.”  It’s the “oh my god, we’re making a movie!” energy you’d get with a video shot for a class project, except with real industry talent behind it.

It’s set in a version of the near future that looks like the 60s, so there are at least two different ways to get creative about how any given thing looks, and often both are employed at the same time.  The show isn’t a comedy, but it gleefully gives major roles to comic actors: Jemaine Clement is a hipster who’s been trapped in “the Astral Plane” since the swinging 60s, Aubrey Plaza is an avatar of villainous chaos, and the requisite wacky mad scientist is played by Bill Irwin, who’d I’d never heard of before, and who apparently “began as a vaudeville-style stage performer and has been noted for his contribution to the renaissance of American circus during the 1970s.”  The main character’s superpowers present inside his head like auditory hallucinations and dissociative states, and while this is written in a fairly cliched and unimaginative way, it’s a joy to watch on the level of editing, sound design, and acting.  And so on.

I see what you are saying, but Legion’s problem is that it never feels like a cohesive vision.  The individual scenes are imaginative and very watchable, but the whole thing never adds up in any way.  A good comparison point is Hannibal, another “trippy visuals über alles” show, but which has aethetic motifs and an overriding psycholoanalytic underpinning that makes it all hang together. Legion feels like a writers’ room trying to top themselves over and over to remember or make up their coolest dream, and they filmed that (in inventive and visually arresting ways) but did not take the effort to convert the “fanciful” moments into more universal ones, and integrate all the sequences in a way that achieves a subliminal shape.  I’ve watched it all because it is fun and pretty, but it is frustrating to go through that much material with no real story (not plot specifically, but any story) developing.  

Oh, yes, I agree.

It feels related to another problem, that the writers don’t seem to know what to do with the themes of mental illness and trauma.  At first (like, in the very first episode or two) these things are put front and center and depicted in a very real, harrowing way, using the trippy visuals and editing as a tool.

But mental illness quickly falls into the background, as everyone gets a comfortable handle on “what’s really going on” and the more standard comic book plotting takes over.  At this point the trippy stuff is still there, but it’s flying off in all directions – as if the only lasting residue of the early stuff is “this is a show about mental illness so it’s fine to do any trippy stuff you feel like doing.”  Which ends up being great as sort of a big artists’ showcase, but as you say has no coherence, and is pretty disappointing when you remember the thematic promise and emotional weight of the beginning.

I was thinking about this yesterday when – after writing the OP – I got to the parallel-universes episode in the second season, which takes us jarringly and suddenly back to the territory of the first episode, and shows us the frayed, on-the-edge early David who has long since dissolved (with insufficient justification) into a #relatably spacey but otherwise remarkably normal dude.  Then I press play on the next episode and we’re back to the status quo, David’s off in the dreamtime having dinner with the Shadow King, exchanging soap opera lines like “this is over, I’m not your friend anymore,” seeing things through keyholes which magically appear in the very same room, etc.  It was a startling reminder that, although the material of the former episode causally led to the style of the latter (in the development of the show), the two have now parted ways and lead uneasily separate lives.  Although I still haven’t finished the second season …

Looking at writer’s credits, I want to speculate about how Noah Hawley wants to foreground realistic mental illness and trauma and Nathaniel Halpern keeps pushing the show back toward comic book plotting, but I’m probably just seeing a pattern I want to be there.  (If not, then it’s a very close match for the Lynch / Frost tension on Twin Peaks, which I am convinced is a thing)

“Legion” is a good illustration of how much more there is to television than the writing.  I find it so fun and endearing that it’s easy to overlook – and occasionally jarring to remember – how I don’t really care what happens, or how little work the writers are doing to make me care about the key conflicts and relationships.

These things are easy to overlook because there’s such a wonderful goofy energy to virtually every individual shot, an energy that says this was fun to create.  You get the sense that everyone involved in the production – actors, set and visual designers, editors, episode directors – kept thinking “I want to do this cool thing, but will they let me?” and then thinking “well, on this show, yes.”  It’s the “oh my god, we’re making a movie!” energy you’d get with a video shot for a class project, except with real industry talent behind it.

It’s set in a version of the near future that looks like the 60s, so there are at least two different ways to get creative about how any given thing looks, and often both are employed at the same time.  The show isn’t a comedy, but it gleefully gives major roles to comic actors: Jemaine Clement is a hipster who’s been trapped in “the Astral Plane” since the swinging 60s, Aubrey Plaza is an avatar of villainous chaos, and the requisite wacky mad scientist is played by Bill Irwin, who’d I’d never heard of before, and who apparently “began as a vaudeville-style stage performer and has been noted for his contribution to the renaissance of American circus during the 1970s.”  The main character’s superpowers present inside his head like auditory hallucinations and dissociative states, and while this is written in a fairly cliched and unimaginative way, it’s a joy to watch on the level of editing, sound design, and acting.  And so on.