Category: Uncategorized

tagged by @heckofabecca

Go to your current work in progress and share the following:

  • The first line of the work.
  • The first line of your current chapter (or if it’s a one-shot, the first line of the tenth paragraph).
  • The last line you wrote.
  • A line for a chapter/part you haven’t written yet.

So current work is the mermaid story interlude from the original story slush pile:

First Line: “Boy, get up here!” 

First Line Current/Tenth Line Overall: Amabel started guffawing.

Urwin whispered the phrase ‘Pure Ones’, which scared Gislin, but then Amabel grabbed the young man’s hand and pulled his attention back to her. 

Last Line Written: “In battle the brothers were terrible foes, and Garabel no less a force. The war was not swift, nor clean, but by the end their enemies drowned.”

Not Written Yet:  “Why is Hirabel here?” I ask myself, only I am fool enough to say it aloud, and fool enough to say it loud enough for another to hear me. 

rose-of-the-bright-sea replied to your post:
[[MOR] rose-of-the-bright-sea replied to your…

It was an interesting rant! I’m a very superficial superhero movie fan, so it was cool seeing the perspective of someone who prefers DCEU over MCU. I might not be a fan of Snyder’s stylistic choices (not just his DC work), but I totally get why you might have similar visual problems with Marvel films.

It’s weird, because honestly It wasn’t until this year that I watched Watchmen, adn the only other Synder film I’ve seen all the way through is Legend of the Guardians, so I’m not a film devotee of his- but his visual style and more importantly that he treated the superhero movies earnestly and you can see the art history background, so yes, I love his DCEU films and how Jenkins and Ayer built upon that world. When there’s a really strong component of DCEU fans that are also huge Tolkien fans, the parallels of why that would be so are I think pretty obvious to me. Let’s just say when I found the hours of meta, I felt like I was back in the Silm fandom. And thus the MCU really feels like …oh, McKiernan’s fantasy series. Or to be honest- Piers Anthony’s Xanth series, with the repetitive fanservice continuity nods and humor focus, where the books were a fun and meaningless read but by book thirty it’s boring. Black Panther is the only recent MCU film that I walked out of it wanting to rewatch it- and strongly because it had the qualities of how it treated humor, the personality of the main male hero, the varied important female characters, that the plot focused on consequences of past actions and didn’t shy from issues – in other words, it felt more like a DCEU film than a MCU film. 

Like, while they aren’t prefect and we could talk about their problems, the Lord of the Ring trilogy in both visuals and characters and how it references back to source material even when changing things and the strong use of music is waaay more like the DCEU films than the MCU films. And as a SF/Fantasy fan, when a superhero film is more like that genre, I’m happier.

But there is a double standard that gets really frustrating, especially because there is the overbearing and omnipresent “There is only one right way to do these films” attitude, and you only need to look at twitter and tumblr and news sites (clickbait or not) to see it. 

rose-of-the-bright-sea replied to your post:
I forget how inane and common it is, but I tried…

*is guilty of complaining about DC’s color use* Sorry. Especially since it’s flooding the movie’s tags. You should get to enjoy that without the snide comments.

It’s just- SOOO F*CKING COMMON. Articles and podcasts about Star Trek, or other non-related fandoms or movies, let alone other DC properties have to bring that complaint or ones similar. I forget how common it is, that it’s the thing to do, and then I actually read anything entertainment-related online. And it’s exactly like the prequel bashing from the 2000s. I can’t follow anything Superman because god forbid there’s this version that isn’t some mythic nostalgia version from the late 70s movies or 90s comic that they say they want (and then contract themselves on what makes a good Superman).

I would listen to a podcast reviewing the John Byrne era Superman comics, and be baffled that the hosts were praising what the storytellers were doing – for almost the same damn things MoS was bashed for.

They’ve forever tainted the John Williams Superman theme for me, btw. I hate it.

But dare MoS exists, this one that was filmed specifically with the styling of a documentary, to lack artificially adjusting the skin-tones,

often the scenes are shot so that there is focus on one intense color (usually a red cape or the orange sunset of a dying Krypton, any time with the green kryptonite). Which is just not allowed to be the visual style for an action comedy – and the reviews for Teen Titans Go and Lego Batman made it clear that only satires are acceptable DC films anyway. Where were the people bitching about the color in the Deadpool movies? (Which, I laughed at them, but there’s a teenage frat boy’s humor, a snarkiness, that I completely understand why people wouldn’t like them for good reason. The spoofing of the genre that I also liked in the first GotG – but also the first GotG had moments of earnest heart whereas watching GotG2 was the most unfunny and non-enjoyable movie theater experience that I’ve ever had, even if the film was brightly saturated. Just, wow, I can’t remember paying for a ticket for a movie that I hated watching that much. Not even Ultron was that bad).

 I remember great lines from MCU films, but the only movie of the twenty that I will regularly think back and go “the images were beautiful and memorable to look at” is the first Thor. Okay, and the Thor movie is the only other one that I regularly remember the themes and musical motifs. I definitely have my tastes. Look, I’ve accepted that Thor is my Wonder Woman, the one that I’ll go “well the rest of the films aren’t good, but we can agree this one was good”. Well, except the general consensus nowadays is that only Ragnarok was good.

And I’m going to be petty and finally type my feelings on this: the Airport scene in Civil War (and most of that movie, c’mon people) is really ugly. Like, I can’t look at it without thinking of how godawful it looks. There’s only middle tones, and grayed, washed out ones at that, because they filmed digital and didn’t color grade, and it is a ugly gray movie, but hey, billion dollars profit and daylight scenes and constant quips and undercutting stakes with a wink and nod at the audience these are escapism films to snark with and therefore ‘more colorful’.

…sorry. it’s past midnight, I have no filter on the rant that simmers under my skin for months now (and I could point at Justice League and every single Whedon reshot scene where I could see the quality in both writing and cinematography dip – but the bloggers got the changes that they were demanding, including Elfman’s score, hooray), and I swear, if it wasn’t bashing BvS, it was complaints about how dare the Death of Superman movie rush to reestablish the Superman/Lois relationship. Like, wow, that was a mistake to go into that tag. Amazing, the Venn Diagram one could make between people who disliked Lois Lane and the DCEU films… 

Sorry, this is a rant properly aimed at the void.

I forget how inane and common it is, but I tried to browse posts about the recent animated Superman movie, and almost every other post includes a nasty dig at Man of Steel and BvS. Many of the complaints contradictory or infuriating, or just shoehorned in.

Sort of like the laughable bullshit that those films had no color (every time I see that in someone’s tags or replies, I want to pull up screenshots of the films, and then some of the awful colorgrading -or lack there of- in the MCU).

I know minority opinion here. But ugh, I stopped thinking or caring about one franchise about five movies back. And I am going to enjoy and still listen to analysis and care about the other, even if I’m going to have to stay in the little fandom echo chamber I’ve found.