Interview Breaks Bad??

So, I watched the trailer for the AMC series of Interview with the Vampire, and... I have words. Lots of words. All of them... varied.

Where I thought maybe Christopher, Anne's son, was responsible for raising the homosexual subtext to the level of actual text, I don't think he's included in this at all. The numerous rights wars and bidding skirmishes put it in the hands of AMC with Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul alum behind the entire production. Which is cool and all, as it's a totally different tone than these shows, but they've decided to do away with the negative aspects of the plantation period to slightly modernise it into the earlier 1900s. Which means: Louis is now a black man looking for some status and wealth, Lestat's very much his seducer and the one with all the money (and still white AF and very lionesque, perhaps even angelic), and Claudia's also black, however I don't know what her status is, I don't think she's entirely impoverished either. The three of them seem to be a pack of hunters rather than a strange (and ironically progressive) same-sex parent family.


Oh, and Daniel (the Interviewer) is now an older journalist familiar of Louis's who seems to be treating the interview with more incredulity and an air of interrogation rather than naive wonderment. Okay. Sure. He's still Daniel Molloy however, and has a younger version of himself.


I'm not detracting from Louis and Lestat's unique intimacy, and the romantic affection showed by all the vampires in the series. Marius and Armand were probably more graphically sexual, Louis and Armand had a certain attraction that was intimate and intellectual. Lestat and Gabrielle, his mother, have their own interactions that hint at a vague incestuousness marred by Gabrielle's want to explore the world alone.
But Louis and Lestat were complicated as fuck. And the thing is, vampires are basically impotent because Enkil is canonically without a dick, which renders his ancestors of sorts incapable. The sumptuousness of their relationship is really something to examine outside the penile-centric nature of sex. Absolutely, by all means have them make out and Eiffel Tower some women. Make them true companions in every sense of the word. They toned it down in the early 90s and yeah, that's absolutely annoying I get that, but they weren't completely shying away from the homoeroticism either. In a pre-Brokeback world, it was still there on screen, it was still capable of affecting audiences. I dug it. You can't accuse them of not giving us anything.

What this show does though, is effectively make this a kind of fan fiction the fans really wanted. You couldn't get Tom Cruise to make out with Brad Pitt, let's just make Jacob Anderson make out with Sam Reid, who does suit the appearance more of what we expect of Lestat. If it satiates that itch for the fans, go for it. I'm just not that interested in this story and I don't want the annoyance of nitpicking aspects because I'm a purist. All the remakes of my favourite books aren't good, while Rings of Power and the Whatever Dragon Show are satisfying the fans, that's fine, I'm not interested any more than I expect them to care about this. The Vampire Chronicles also has a rabid fanbase who deserve better. They understand that people won't sympathise with a white slave owner, even if Louis was benevolent, he was a slave owner. It explains his innumerable wealth that the somewhat broke Lestat is after, however it's not really part of Louis's character, either, it's a burden to him. I'll accept removing it invites a wider audience, though. Whether or not he needs to be white now, that's one thing, but he won't technically be Louis either, he seems less dour for one. The cast list has a brother and a sister and a mother, which is correct, they've not gone with the throwaway wife and child in the movie. From this, it seems more like he's bored with his life and drawn to the allure of wealth and sexuality he can't explore with anyone else. Lestat still seems like Lestat, only less overtly abusive and more cunning and manipulative. And even that isn't subtext, it's in the dialogue Louis was in an abusive entanglement with his maker and lover. What this appears to be is a more mutual arrangement where Louis is allowed to explore his forbidden wants and Lestat gains a companion for protection through the centuries. Plus the question of the elusive vampire population is still raised, and so likely to be Louis's quest in later episodes. There's a bunch of characters that are completely new, which seems so odd considering the Chronicles were being sold with a huge variety of characters AMC seem to not give a flying fuck about but hadn't been given proper, or any, onscreen interpretations. (Bert Newton's son as a pretty blonde Armand is no compensation for the blatant miscasting of Antonio Banderas in the 1994 adaptation).


Claudia still seems like hell in a pair of satin slippers, which is fine, however I highly doubt Louis relationship with her will be peppered with pedophilic undertones. That's another "woman's brain in a girl's body so it's all okay" scenario the internet has deemed morally reprehensible, so yeah, she'll be a bone of contention for other reasons. She was very much pulled between Lestat and Louis, I think it would be more interesting for her to maybe play them against each other more rather than become overtly violent and acting betrayed. She claws for her own agency but still needs a protector, so is Lestat bringing her into the fold to keep Louis from leaving, or is it another reason she's there? Her antics are what drive Louis and Lestat to endless arguments on how to raise her as a child vampire.

And now Anne's gone, I have no idea if she'd have approved. I thought she was working with Christopher and this was his brain child but I was completely wrong. Now it seems like an almost pointless adaptation, even if it's been critically accepted and praised. Shakespeare's been reimagined in multiple contexts and periods, so you can apply the same logic to Interview, with the author no longer metaphysically dead and now actually deceased, neither she or her estate can do anything. The audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, (which is gatekeeping their actual reviews), is lower but not significantly bad. But I don't see why you couldn't keep the same story and change Louis profession while still bringing it into a more enlightened age. I can't get away with complaining about that without sounding racist, I can accept a new version of Louis but what was entirely wrong with the original? Does this mean Lestat can't bemoan Louis's interminable whining through the centuries? The fact it got old made Lestat the hero of the Chronicles, I totally admit if we'd have had nothing but Louis for books on end, yes, it would've gotten fucking old. But it's not like he's the absolute worst either. I said I wouldn't mind a remake of the movie, this isn't what I had in mind.

There's absolutely no reason to completely change the Mayfair Witches because we haven't had any adaptations of that, and that's a lot to get through, The Witching Hour is an slog as it's a history lesson on the family. Their ties to the Vampire Chronicles was interesting except for the fact Rowan Mayfair seemed to be completely erased from the newer books. I wasn't even entirely happy with that being the conclusion of both series. I liked they were linked by the Talamasca without there being heavy overlap, and Mona Mayfair's kind of irritating so it sucks she gets to be a vampire. Lestat imposing on the family through an entirely new Mayfair descendant seems a tad ridiculous too, but it was a clear killing of two birds with one stone in Blood Canticle. All authors are allowed to say they're done with a series and return to it ten years later, it happens. It doesn't mean what we get is good, though.

I want to see a Mayfair Witch series and I like we haven't got anything to compare it to now. The incest is probably the one thing making it too difficult to adapt acceptably, even though people eat up adaptations of British royal family stories that were full of that nonsense in real life. Oh, and Game of Thrones made it "fine", right. It'll be like that.


So, the Mayfair Witches trailer dropped and it looks... fine. Trailer was cool, but using a cool song I like doesn't help as it amps me up for something that still might be crap. It looks kind of watered down but there are interesting aspects. Again I assumed a regular character was cast as a black guy but there's no indication it's actually Aaron Lightener just because they bring up the Talamasca, I'm okay with that but yeah Aaron's another old white dude. Whether they'll link this up with the Interview series at some point down the road, that I have to pay for access to AMC via Amazon I'll probably wind up giving Interview a try anyway. Of course the dance mom from Donnie Darko Beth Grant's playing a religious fanatic like she did in the Mist, she's Carlotta, obviously. It's all by the Breaking Bad peeps too. I don't know how their style will translate in this case.

What pissed me off is Witching Hour isn't available on Kindle and I really wanted to start re-reading it as I'm kinda bored with Firestarter. My copy is missing the cover and finding another copy is difficult, so unless the series generates enough interest in the book and they decide to actually release it is another matter. It would seem pretty stupid not to. It's fucking ridiculous the terrible porn she wrote got released and this and Lestat didn't. Supposedly she distanced herself from the vampire stuff but that obviously didn't last forever whether she left the church or felt compelled to bring Lestat back with a bunch of nonsense, it doesn't make sense to have two random books from the two biggest series completely unavailable on Kindle. Fuck, I'll take a bad optical scan like I did with Imagica over having nothing at all. I get I own this shit but I don't want to lug the book around and I like having stuff on my kindle, so my plan to read the Vampire Chronicles was shot to pieces when Lestat wasn't available. I don't know whether it's a rights issue I thought it all went back to the estate. The nutso thing is Lestat's an audiobook and not a Kindle. I'm sorry, I don't like audiobooks, I know people love them because reading sucks but I actually get horribly bored listening to them, particularly if the character voices the reader uses don't really fit my idea of what the character would sound like. And they're fucking expensive, and I don't want an audible subscription. It's where I delineate from everyone who just wants audiobooks thinking they're the easiest thing in the world to produce and sell and since it means they can feel less shitty about not having the patience to read. Isn't that kind of childish though? Wanting another adult to read you a bedtime story? Do you want them reading you my shit? No fucking thanks. It's the other reason I keep it a secret more from everyone, I honestly don't want these people associating me with this shit, I wish I'd been a ghost writer with a full NDA preventing me from even admitting it was me. It's the perfect crime. To me, I get something out into the world that isn't a total hot mess to look at, I don't have to commit to promotion or major editing and nobody has to know and bug me about reading it. The collaboration process might be annoying but honestly I'd just try to meet their expectations regardless. It'd be fitting everything around a deadline that would prove trickier.

Oh, fuck you Amazon you release Spanish versions of all the Chronicles but you can't fucking release an English version.

Update: I managed to see a reaction video of the second episode of Interview and there was a lot of muttering, muted and violent gesticulating and clapbacks involved from my end. Rather than have Louis persistently wrestle with losing his humanity, he picks and chooses when to be a monster and criticises Lestat for being messy and inhumane about killing, not for killing as a deed. Random tit shots. Malloy is a journalist, the acting from him is wooden and stoic, it's over dinner in a pretentiously designed room, (I'm assuming each episode is a night in this room). Louis openly drinks blood from a human in front of Daniel and lets the human walk off and collapse in the hallway like it's the funniest thing ever. Daniel acts like this is nothing, so there's no childlike wonderment. Despite them saying it's meant to avoid racist overtones, Louis calls Lestat out for inferring he's a slave. Apparently there's social commentary on priests being kiddy fiddlers and perfectly decent fodder for vampires, I won't deny people knew this about priests but I doubt they spoke of it openly, it would've been more taboo to mention it than to do the act itself What, is Lestat now going to take in abused orphans from a church? The dialogue is awful and isn't used appropriately. The acting is dreadful. Louis douses himself in milk from being caught in the sun after he's specifically told by Lestat not to run home. Instead of Louis's quiet astonishment from seeing through vampire eyes, there's a goofy scene where Louis's just tripping balls. Lestat just goes from deadpan to angry, he has no real charisma from what I could see, then he just makes gay comments. The subtext and text are there at the same time. I don't think the actual fans are happy with this overall. It looks frustratingly dreadful and silly, people are already comparing it to fan fiction and spoof movies. I won't touch it. But this doesn't bode well for the Mayfair Witch series in terms of acting at least. This is so bad.

Girls on film... Why I can't even with Lena Dunham

I had a copy of the pilot of Girls I got for free with another DVD set (I think it was whatever HBO show I bought at the time, I can't even remember). I had it on good authority it was great and worth the bother, and this was before streaming really took off so I could use the promo disc as it was intended. Maybe twenty minutes in, I gave up.

Opening on a scene where a white girl who's taken her parents' generosity for granted finds out they're cutting her off made me too uncomfortable and probably tapped into my own sense of teenage narcissism that spilled over into my early 20s. I don't really like cringe black comedy, it's why I don't think I could sit through Nathan for You or a lot of Curb. Reading over the pilot episode, I can kinda see how you're supposed to sympathise with Dunham's Hanna, things are shitty for her, but at that age, I couldn't even get an unpaid internship my parents thought would turn into a real job. I was happy to have the government give me money so I could feign financial independence from my parents (they still covered my insurance even after I had my own policy and a wage, I only removed their details when I worked for the actual company to get my now removed subsidy. Sadly, they didn't realise they'd under-insured me when I finally had another breakdown at 28 and I had to explain why when I was well again). 

 But my point is, even when I was down to my last 80c which covered the train ride into town to hand in my Centrelink form and get paid, I didn't call my parents for more money. I might've asked for more if I was desperate in uni but I kept it to a minimum, and usually felt bad if I spent it on anything other than rent, food or bills. During my first episode, I spent money on a dress and I remember my mother making a comment about it being "my money" in that way you know they really disapprove. I don't think she did like how I spent my money back then, but she wouldn't say, and I know she wasn't thrilled with covering my rent when I wanted to move out permanently and live in the city. Up until then, I came home from uni every year so I wasn't staying in residence over the summer, and we usually had to reapply, out of towners getting priority, so it meant I was approved for each year I attended. I have no idea what I'd have done had I not, I know my parents really wanted me to move back after my first hospitalisation and I'm sure they were looking into me finishing my studies at the sister campus in town, where my mother actually worked. I know she pulled strings to get me through my first year, I doubt they'd have let me take my exams down there had I asked myself. I know she really came through, however I also couldn't drop out at that point and take a year off despite desperately wanting to (looking back, this was my first instance of absolute burnout and not realising this made it harder to get over and avoid repeating). I appreciated she later said she didn't know how I got through it despite everything. I had to. I had a choice to really screw up and I chose to keep going instead, whether I hated it or not.

So, I don't really see how I'm supposed to find Hanna's character endearing, when the pilot ends with her, in a haze from opium tea, demanding her parents pay her 1100 a month and that they read her memoir she'll never publish. I know this was based on her personal experiences and you're meant to cringe with her but, no thanks. I understand there was supposed to be self-deprecation in this character portrayal but to me Dunham wasn't selling it in real life. She was becoming an industry darling who later had to apologise for assuming she knew what a black man was thinking. (Her getting together with Amy Schummer really became a bad marriage of egos at that point, and both of them were being exposed for their abundant flaws despite their previous popularity). 

I don't hold up these projects when they're female-centric as they tend to get bogged down in their own need for validation from critics as being important feminist pieces that seem to suggest they're exempt from objective criticism. I hated Wonder Woman and the 2016 Ghostbusters were just overshadowed by this so when it came time to really give opinions on the films themselves, any negative critique was labelled sexist. Brie Larson failed to be another champion for the cause when she said something valid in a very invalidating way, I heard a lot of condescension where others didn't. Sorry, honey, but you do sound like you hate white dudes. You sound passive aggressive and silly, that's what people were mad at. Somehow, you made Disney money off the back of "charity" so underprivileged girls could watch your movie. (I know it wasn't her but it was terrible when you really thought about what it meant in terms of valid "charity"). There's a myriad of better ways you can say we need more women reviewing movies. Most of the white dudes I watch on YouTube have actual time for female reviewers. They've been very respectful of them. If you want to say Red Letter Media are right wing commenters, you're a fucking idiot. Whether they were working with women previously or not, they're not the most problematic white guys online. I'm pretty confident I know which white dudes to throw under the bus by now, and it's not Rich Evans.

I veered off topic, my point was I didn't have a lot of time for watching Dunham beat herself up in the way I've consciously been doing my whole life. I've absolutely taken sole responsibility of dishing out any damage anyone had primed for me. If people did miss the point of Girls, maybe it wasn't as obvious, I don't know. Like I said, Dunham making herself so thoroughly unlikable, even to this very day where she's tweeting egotistical "LGBT ally saviour complex" nonsense for attention, how am I supposed to believe she's still not stuck in a sense of narcissism, as if she's  being sarcastic, I'm not seeing it, and I'm not that bad at reading sarcasm for someone who may or may not be on the spectrum. 

I'm going over a video essay that's from one of those verified content farms like WatchMojo that are usually a little too fair to certain shows. I also came across Dunham's article on Marilyn Monroe suggesting she's not unlike her, her mention of "childless" women annoying coming from a supposed feminist given women who have chosen not to have kids, like me, are childfree, childless denoting you're somehow a failure for failing to procreate. I understand she's gone through a lot of shit and tragedy but I can't see why she needs to keep popping up online saying contentious shit all the time. I also saw she was looking to make a Girls movie by 40, as of 2015, and she's now 37, so I'm questioning what interest there would be in a Girls movie, coming from someone who didn't think we'd ever be a Community movie, the fans wanted that and got it. Are there fans of Girls who want a movie? Well, the lack of a hashtag campaign would suggest otherwise. Rabid fanbases make shit happen, for good or bad. I haven't seen a groundswell for other movie adaptations of cult millennial shows.

I will admit my aversion to Girls was Dunham holding up a mirror to my own self-loathing, mid-twenties self. I still carry a lot of regret for how self-indulgent my episodes feel in retrospect, which is why I've distanced myself from involving people in this. I hate people in her age bracket are suffering from economic problems they didn't themselves create, what distances Dunham from that is her personal privilege and connections that gave her an in-road others perhaps didn't have. And her relative success now removes her from that economic burden. Which is fine, she's worked hard enough, I won't refute that, it's only made her less relatable. Maybe the idea of her having a memoir she felt worthy of publication rubs me up the wrong way when I didn't see myself as a self-indulgent writer, just an ignored one. Having said that, what she did publish in real life received a lot of backlash that wasn't worth the PR acrobatics she had to do back then to apologise. But yeah, joking you were a sexual predator towards a sibling would be considered triggering to anyone who did suffer sibling sexual abuse, whether your experience wasn't viewed the same way. (How many times do you want to apologise for what you've said in one lifetime? How are you not constantly exhausted and embarrassed?). I don't see why she continues to say what she says despite her success, unless it's a form of compulsive self-sabotage she hasn't addressed through therapy. I do know it is a nightmare navigating your 20s and 30s with a diagnosis nobody can agree on while being given far too much medication to cope with said illness when you're inside a medical model that dehumanises women for having mental illnesses in the first place. I wouldn't take that away from her.

Maybe it's because I didn't treat my 40s as being a terrifying phase and have been so desperate to get out of my 20s and 30s with the erroneous notion people would take me seriously by now. They don't. But I didn't have drug and alcohol addiction, endometriosis and the weight of expectation from the industry to be something I'm not. I sympathise with all that until Dunham reminds me she's sometimes incapable of checking herself before wrecking herself. Dreading your 40s seems to be the millennial curse left over from Gen X/Y fearing their 30s, where you're called a boomer at age 45 until someone reminds you how old the oldest millennials are now. I just fail at relating to them by simply being stuck between Gen X/Y and millennials and I was always writing to get away from myself and my surroundings. I wasn't bold enough for her honesty, which is admirable when it's not being completely and pointlessly offensive and glib.

As an addendum, she landed in similar BS as Ellen did over a shelter dog, and outed her sibling who's trans. It's still up for debate if the molestation allegations were true since she was protected by a society that probably comes to the defense of the wrong people, and the sibling didn't press charges. I don't know if I'd have been that forthcoming about any of it in the first place. Again, how much reward should one person get for being that blatantly and brutally honest? I'm waiting for her to say she's on the spectrum as that's a big known trait, saying things you find benign and it being taken as absolutely offensive. (Yes, when you're learning about a thing the thing paints your judgement of other things. I'm sorry).

Amazon has its own low bar for movies

If you've heard recently Amazon's become a viable distributor of bad independently made films, it's basically true. Having seen people react to some of these films, it's been killing me they've lowered the bar much like they did for books so they could flood Amazon Prime with absolutely shit content. Granted, Contrapoints failed to get her YouTube series approved, which is professionally made but sadly too full of gay content, it still suggests there is some gatekeeping. But if you have a shitty movie with mild Christian undertones, you may be in luck with Amazon. Provided you've uploaded a movie of reasonable quality in terms of visual/audio presentation, even if it has a terrible plot and appalling acting, it'll likely be approved for distribution. Sure, Amazon withholds the right to remove this (I'd say from poor views but it could be anything) at their discretion, but you can put your godawful God movie on there. Amazon's willingness to make money with publishing anyway possible couldn't stop at books. The only major difference is, most people's shitty books are never taken down unless there's a valid copyright strike, and given I barely had to prove my retention of rights, I'd say most of remained.

On top of that, I've been watching a show they salvaged from good old SyFy called The Magicians. It's been a pretty good show but they actually "stole" some of my ideas.

1. Girl throws positive pregnancy test in a rage over discovering unwanted child who will be destined to fulfill some prophecy.
2. Race of not so nice elementals (theirs were evil fairies and mine were indifferent sylphs but their demeanor was similar) conspire to take first born of human couple for own purposes without regard to human couple/child
3. Malevolent dryad character spurned by humans retaliates and laments being abused.
   

It's always bizarre to see someone else give a visual representation of an idea you wrote independent of the show. I don't plan on publishing the above, but it's always in my head if I did, I'd be the one accused of thievery. If I were more open, I'd say I'd written these and comment on the strange coincidence, all the while reminded of the collective unconsciousness of humanity and the fact there are no new idea.

Shut up before you make me cry... The Fisher King

I can't say why my 12 year old mind gravitated towards odd movies, I don't even remember the first time I saw the Fisher King, I think it was a thing that it didn't matter how old you were, if Robin Williams was in a movie, you got to watch it because we all knew he was a funny bastard. It was one of my parrot movies (I've recently learnt that I'm probably autistic and have a form of echolalia where you repeat heard phrases, only I'm rather good at accent mimicry). I don't think I cried at it at all until I was older. I sort of got the humor but didn't, I liked Amanda Plummer's character and probably identified with her. My mind was capable of comprehending cleverness  but I needed to grow up to really appreciate these movies. 

Something about the ending tears me up the way a good happy ending should. Gilliam's talent for putting us in the head of someone frenetic and appreciating the madness for what it is. He's quite underrated for how stylised and smart his films are, and he injected a whimsy into the tale that only someone like Williams could pull off, mainly for the fact it was easy to get him to do outlandish shit like jump around Central Park naked. I like Bridges' as Jack, how he adopts the madness and they balance each other out in the end, nobody needed curing, not in that sense. We're stuck in claustrophobic places off-kilter with Dutch angles. I think the hospital scene was a good precursor to 12 Monkeys. The dance in Grand Central Station is pure magic, I was very in love with mature yet fanciful romances at that age, Untamed Heart being my other go-to, that's also full of flaws a younger millennial wouldn't abide. (Do you romanticise someone sneaking into your house, or the fact they're a tad too childlike). I would put a trigger warning on this in terms of depiction of mental illness/degradation etc. It affected me more later, you can't rely on a 90's movie to give you the best representations of any affected group or minority, I'm sorry. This one isn't entirely offensive. (I realised the scene Anne is all over Jack despite him not being in the mood might bug people too).

The other William's movie I loved too much was Dead Poet's Society, another one that really kicks you in the gut in the end. I studied that at school, my English teacher actually berating the entire class for their shitty essays on it when we'd been studying it. (I think he ate his words when he realised he'd forgotten to assign a year long project we were supposed to do very close to the end of the year), I wish I'd kept my essay as apparently it was the only good one, a nearby student complaining that he'd just said they'd all fucked up so why did I get a good grade. He said because I deserved it. Duh. 

Everyone in the Fisher King is wonderful, it's fucking criminal Mercedes Rueh's career didn't take off after she won the Oscar. She's the perfect cheese to Plummer's chalk the way they bond over drinks and horror stories of their mothers. She's written so well and uniquely, she's really screwed over by Jack for all her patience and compassion she gives him only to have him basically abandon her once he's fine. Anne's prince falls into a coma like Parry. It's poetic for something that was advertised as more of a romantic comedy. It's a journey of one man finding his humanity, he has to finish Parry's quest or lose his own redemption.

I don't think Bridges and Williams could ever be replaced, in these roles or any others they've played. Younger kids won't get to experience how it was growing up with an actor like Robin Williams being such a respected household name despite him being a prolific coke addict, he was still the most human actor when we lost him, something special disappeared from the world, it also gave us in the mental illness community a swift reminder how close we skirt that edge without appreciating we could lose anyone at any moment. Williams having such a heartfelt sincerity in this film, you couldn't replicate it.

But movies kind of created my love language (or rather my only fucking language) it seemed to be the only way I could cope with running out of shit to say. So, if I ever quote the Simpsons around you, it's because I like you and I want to be your friend.

The safety of all things old...

I haven't let modern culture affect how I view older media, I'm stuck in that in between where I see problematic language for what it is but am too familiar with it to have a completely negative reaction. But what I find in watching any show that existed prior to 2001 is, it won't contain any mention of any piece of media I've grown to despise since that year.

Pretty much all media after 2001 has been either influenced or is a basis for reference for various intellectual properties I've just been so desperate to avoid hearing about. Even shows I really want to watch I have to put up with some throwaway line at the least, or parody at the worst. And the people I watched on YouTube were either reviewing the shit, or loving the shit, or loving the bad fanfiction related to the shit, or the fandoms of the stupid shit. I really wanted to enjoy this one girl's deepdives on toxic fandoms but she got grating, and she's another of a handful of people I watch who got stuck on the phrase "surffisive to say". I don't like to harp on about words that are not words, but if you're turning a misheard phrase such as "suffice it to say" into that, it's still not a real word. I know these kids type out their scripts so I don't know how their spell checkers never picked it up. I don't want to be a hater or a corrector, because it really crushes people to be corrected, I know dumb 40 year olds make those kinds of mistakes too, I'm the last person to judge. I still get annoyed. I also end up getting annoyed at these kids being into Wattpad fan fiction that's made me so sour about being an author that I can't get attention for any original work, even if the stories are getting dunked on and criticised either in its original form or in some adaptation, it's still getting attention and that only bolsters the people who write this shit to do more. All the people my university lecturers would have had thrown out for plagiarism and juvenile crap were the ones getting publishing deals, I stuck by my integrity and got stomped. I can't sit and have fun in that space with these YouTubers, I got to commiserate with one while we were both being screwed, but her platform rewarded her with the leg-up I could never get, so I had to leave her too.

My old DVDs and shows are the safest place for me, even if they're full of un-PC language, they're okay for me, and yes I recognise this 1000% as privilege. Even with politics, this is all before Trump and Hillary, hell it predates W. Bush robbing Gore, it predates 9/11. I can't praise this period since it makes me look nostalgic for a much shittier time, where people's feelings weren't protected at all, and I don't want to go back there, it just sucks that's the place I don't have to hear about current day stuff. I'm kinda into younger kids watching Degrassi, they're really good with humorous references and commentary, I get to watch their bug-eyed responses to language that isn't appropriate if they do go back to the older series. But, and I OOOP, the person I've never seen before who was doing a reaction video MENTIONS A THING I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT.

No YouTube channel is safe for me anymore. I've actually unsubbed from so many channels I have less to watch, so when we don't have an internet connection, I throw on a DVD series, and suddenly I'm not so interested in going back on YouTube. I think if I did this for maybe six months, if I limited all my media down to pre-2000s content basically for the rest of my life, I'll be fine. Fuck, if Billie Eilish can reboot 90s fashion, if the Gen Z crowd wants to resurrect pencil-thin brows and baggy shorts, fuck it, I'm here for it. I want a full length pencil skirt but I'm too hippy for those now. Harry Styles seems to have reached his Thom Yorke existentialist phase while hiding it behind 80s synth-pop parodies and I'm here for it, I listened to it repeatedly online months ago after it blew up on TikTok but didn't bother buying it until the other day. We've left too much of the past lying around for present-day kids to ignore it. My parents' music filtered into the songwriters I grew up with and since I didn't listen to pop princesses, I knew Leonard Cohen's shit via covers. Which is fine, I didn't expect teenagers to discover the Smashing Pumpkins and resonate with it too. They're better people than I am, I want them to have their things and love them, but I'm opting to run from it and go back to all the shit I loved before I left home.

The only major issue I have with 80s references in current day shows is, I'm starting to feel like the reference is the starting off point, and the whole scene/episode is written around it. It's not reached organically as you're fleshing out the story, you've gone "Wouldn't it be cool to have this reference at some point? However we get there is less important." It's why I find that shit so cringey and not cool and something worthy of genuine enjoyment. Stranger Things kinda wrecked the NeverEnding Story theme in that regard, now I guess Kate Bush is wrecked for some people. (True story, I still prefer the Placebo version, I like the original but I was never a Kate Bush fan, were I to say this elsewhere I'd be strung up). At what point to we stop using these references as a crutch and start making anything genuinely new? It's something that bothered me before the 2000s, reboots were so en-vogue even then, something stupid as Dr Doolittle with Eddie Murphy had me asking, okay so when do we get new movies? Star Wars was being re-released in cinemas, the everything old is new stuff was already a problem by the end of the 80s, I'm sounding like a giant hypocrite now. I wasn't that into it, I've never liked Star Wars. I've never really liked anything. One day we might get the Last Unicorn live-action remake, it's likely now but I won't hold my breath for that or the HBO Degrassi reboot, which might be dead due to that merger. Pretty soon, nothing will not be under Disney. I'm still waiting for my company to be absorbed by Amazon.

News Radio > Friends.

For all the un-PC shit Friends trotted out, its contemporary News Radio wasn't all that bad. Joe Rogan aside, (I like his character on News Radio so I limit my appreciation to purely that while I pretend he's not a meathead antivaxxer), I haven't really seen much that would be indefensible.

Lisa and Dave flying straight into a secret relationship instead of boring us with an interminable "will they/won't they" is more fun while we wait for the secret to be exposed, and Beth's inclusion on it is more fun. The "Spanish Fly" incident is a funny twist on workplace harassment probably wouldn't work in this current environment but I wouldn't say it's egregious. Dave looking better in Lisa's dress is a reference to Foley being considered relatively hot as a woman according to his Kids in the Hall cast, and it's true. I'm still laughing at the same shit that made me laugh 20 years ago. It's more a fine wine than a mouldy cheese that claims it's delicious when it's not. Friends had its moments but I can't see myself laughing at every scene in ever episode, aside from the early Chandler and Monica stuff, and some of Phoebe's antics, it would annoy me more to sit through the shrillness and whining. Joe and Matthew might've been relatively immature but they're not annoying, this was a clever as fuck show, and it wasn't entirely dependent on Phil Hartman carrying it, he was absolute gold, and yeah it can be reasonably argued his absence affected the rest of the show in a negative way, but the entire cast was solid and fun, Stephen Root is irreplaceable as Jimmy James, I can't mentally find a better actor for any of the roles, especially Beth. They were lovable, (yes, even Joe. Again, I choose to remember him as we knew him and not how we know him now). I don't know how else you could've pulled this entire thing off with anyone else. It's a smarter show than Friends or Suddenly Susan, or even Seinfeld. It's an unappreciated gem that deserves more credit and still holds up. Yeah, there's chauvinist bollocks in it on a 90s level, it's not stupendously sexist, at least there was equality in terms of who'd dish it out and none of the men are above justifiable criticism, the bullshit war between the sexes that was prevalent back then was at least a level playing field on this show.

Sandman...

I've failed at being a Gaiman fan for so many reasons. I have a weird attitude towards him for being glib about where his ideas come from while appreciating the fact as a creator, it's a terrible question to be asked. Because where else do your fucking ideas come from but your brain, logically. That being said, his contemporary Peter Beagle at least gave credit to a particular force coming in from the ether for him to speak to Molly Grue's anger over the Unicorn's failure to find her as a maiden. Being overcome by a character when you're in the grip of it, you sometimes speak a truth you didn't know was there until you gave it a voice. And I look at what I've done and wonder why I did it. Why that? Why those people? Nothing ever goes the way I plan so I don't plan, but I like giving up some control to it, too. So, the notion of a muse at work doesn't baffle me, I believe in nothing ethereal but that. Collectively, we draw on a certain thread of myths and legends, but why do these ideas come to some and not others, that's the weird part you have to appreciate. Of course someone who's never been "visited" is going to ask, "Where the fuck do you get these ideas?" I speak very little, so if I give you a story, it's a piece of what goes on in my head, and it usually surprises people.

My only question for Mr Gaiman is: Why is Sandman represented as a graphic novel and not a novel? I don't disagree with the decision, I'm curious now seeing it as a TV series what spurred it. He's done other shorts as graphic novels to good effect, like Snow, Glass, Apples (which you can attribute to Tori referencing it in Diamonds*), and it takes such a collaborative effort to make words into pictures. I've attempted it, more as an experiment to see what people could create from my words. The Sandman is an ambitious story that would probably be laborious if it weren't a graphic novel series, now I think of it. I'm bad at reading comics because the flow of text and dialogue sometimes confuses me, I didn't grow up with any series, I had a Care Bear magazine with a small comic in it, which I loved, but I never found out what happened in the next episode as it was the only one I had, and I even wished for the next edition but by then it was already out of date. That might've been what dissuaded me. I took longer to read books but I still got through bigger novels with multiple sequels, I read a lot less now. I decided to buy the Sandman books when I was working in the city and wanted stuff to read, while I was working further out, I'd buy books on my lunch break to just tide me over, and I had an iPod back then. I bought the Sandman books and of course my ever-ignorant team leader saw me reading one thinking comics are for kids, obviously. Which Sandman is not. Plus, it's a graphic novel, bitch. Not a comic. There is a relative distinction. And something about the Sandman in this format gives it a certain gravitas. It inspired more from me, I think I wrote more for reading it, but I never revisited it, and I wish I had before the series came out.

On the other hand, it's more fun to watch when I don't remember everything, so at least I can kind of have the joy of surprise with the scant understanding of the world and characters. Casting wise they've done so well, it's uncanny, it's something that deserves the best in terms of acting. It's also got scope for the characters to have a fluidity in representation and characterisation: Death is a black woman and less "manic pixie dream girl", but no less charming and wonderful. Lucifer is neither the suave nightclub owner in the other Netflix series, or the lanky, golden-haired Bowie tribute. You get Briene Tarth from Game of Thrones, who's imposing and beautiful while still embodying the playful but spiteful nature of Lucifer. (We also see Mazikeen, but I severely doubt we'll get the actual story of her mother, as the one in Lucifer was infinitely more tame).

And Desire is non-binary, Gaiman admitting their sister/brother would have been they/them had he created them now. What this achieved then was a perfect balance within the Endless of male and female characters, and this casting choice rectifies so much in terms of representation, the show has gone to good lengths to prove casting choices should ultimately be a meritocracy. I haven't heard complaints the way other adaptations have suffered because Gaiman fans knew he was already progressive and welcoming, many people were but lacked the language we have now. It hasn't had accusations of "wokeness" thrown at it because its audience was way ahead of everyone anyway. It does appeal to the strange and estranged more than a mainstream audience, which is where it makes the show inaccessible to those less knowledgeable. I keep waiting for the other Endless to appear, I thought I saw Delirium but she's absent, Destiny and Destruction are as well, it's pointless waiting for them because they play smaller parts in the story, which is filled with other tales. Each episode seems to follow a particular chapter while sticking to Dream's overall quest of sorts, which is plagued by his own disillusionment, but for the uninitiated, you're sort of left stranded unless you pay very close attention to the dialogue. Fans will spot Death whereas non-fans have to rely on some exposition. The episodes themselves are relatively slow in their pacing but still full of so much information that can be missed. I was more captivated by one episode while others were tedious and there wasn't any variation in pace at all, just the characters were more interesting. But because I also forgot how the story started I assumed the first episode was pieced together by unseen backstory. It's been 15 odd years since I read them. I only really remember the meandering we do on the way to the end, that certain stories were self-contained for the most part, which would make for a good series for everyone were they more familiar with the series as a whole. I don't really care if this is fine for people outside the fandom, but I can see how difficult it would be for someone with absolutely no knowledge to enjoy it. And I love Patton Oswalt, but his voice really does pull you out in ways his voice acting doesn't always do, I don't hate it but I don't agree with it. 

There's more to come I haven't watched, but it's the first show I've been genuinely excited for and want to follow through. I hate a lot of shit, Better Call Saul has one more episode, after that there's stuff on I'll watch but it's for the sake of having something on while we eat, and I can't stand looking for shows to watch over dinner. What streaming services do is give you too much choice, your brain goes numb, your food gets cold, and you just put whatever shit on for background noise. At least Sandman's been something to look forward to even if they let us binge it, I think they knew the episodes would be too slowly paced for most to endure in one sitting. Stranger Things having movie length episodes was excruciating and I had to keep turning them off, I was actively annoyed even if I liked it overall. I thought by now Netflix would have a handle on episode and series lengths but it's all over the place, it sucks.

I like the Sandman. I feel like I'm getting my money's worth for the most part.

Anyway, in a capsule I guess I can comment on the rest of the series, which is disjointed in relation to the beginning of the series, since it's basically the second book cut across multiple episodes. It wasn't enough for ten episodes of its own but in relation to the first part, it's kind of disconnected. The Corinthian is the obvious through line but we divert from him to focus on another bad guy for two episodes then they're not really part of it, while it's in line with the books, it feels disconnected on screen. Rose is sort of introduced in 24/7 but there wasn't much of a point to that once the Doll's House storyline starts. I didn't particularly like Jed, the superhero stuff was cringy, the emotion in some portions at the end was also cringy. Rose's exit from the Vortex conundrum makes sense and isn't a deus ex machina, but I think it would feel like one to an unfamiliar audience. Visually, it knocked it out of the park, everything looked good. There's something chaotic about the graphic novel in terms of style, I find some of it incredibly ugly but it's meant to be grotesque. Representing this on screen makes it look more spectacular and visually clearer.

I'm also waiting for the complaints about Desire being a queer-coded villain when they always were in the comic. But they were also dealt with relatively quickly. Maybe next season we get the other Endless and a return of those we've seen, Lucifer's gearing up to get revenge, Dream's about to face a lot, but I'm not excited for the next series at all. Which is kind of a bummer.

I genuinely hate watching anything where I see an idea of mine visually represented by coincidence: a character with diaphanous skin with swirling colours, another character turning into a burst of butterflies, Rose's character writes a book called Into the Night. I felt bad I lifted the Adam and Eve story because I thought it was a retelling of the original version but I think the Sandman one was more original. Same time, Death personified isn't a new concept either.

I hope it made real fans happy.

Terminator 2 is a near-perfect movie and we will never have another one. End of story.

My reviews have lately been about where my developing, prepubescent mind was around the early to mid 90s. Music and movies were affecting me more than anything, and I was weirdly overcome by the Terminator theme. In terms of action themes, it's not typical, it's basically a dirge, since Terminator isn't really your typical action film.

I'm not that familiar with the original. I liked it. But I love Terminator 2. It's one of the ones I watched when I was young but held up. I fucking cried at the end, y'all did, so you can't blame me. Also, I had a three week crush on Edward Furlong, (who really does look like a little kid the more I watch this. He's supposed to be ten but I only believe it now, I didn't then) so that didn't help. Acting-wise, he could've been as bad as Anakin in Phantom Menace but he's not dreadful.

I was easily moved by good movies and good scores. I wasn't allowed to watch it when I was nine, I think 12 was the age my brother saw anything above PG, as I said, I had to follow whatever path he'd been allowed. I'm not even into action films, but you can't call this a typical action film. Shit blows up but it's purposeful for the most part, people get shot but it's not entirely senseless. It grappled with the notion of fate and morality. It delved into the idea of becoming the thing you hate. It had an amazing female lead and decent characterisation. 98% of the special effects hold up and it didn't rely solely on CGI even if what it used was groundbreaking, it wasn't abusing that and made space for practical effects, which were a little obvious on rewatch but are better than a lot of 90s action films. It's well shot, it looks amazing remastered. Dare I say it, it's a thinking man's action film. Because Bond films are not. That's purely male fantasy.

I fucking hate James Cameron, I'll never watch any of the new Avatars. He can go piss up a flagpole, he's a total jerk. But he made an almost flawless film which can't go unrecognised. You have mild comedic relief, good set up and pay off. Arnold's basically at peak Terminator, I don't think he's ever been able to give the part the same humanity.

It also had the perfect ending. There was another scene of an older Sarah watching her grandchild play which was cut out, and I agree with. The black road at night is like the absolutely perfect ending for this. I should've ended there. Fuck the sequels. All of them. Throw them in the bin, they serve nothing to humanity. Maybe Salvation might be okay but I never bothered. Genesis was apparently a wet fart, Dark Fate might have shit worth bothering with, but I won't. I did bother with the Sarah Connor Chronicles, Shirley Manson as a fucking terminator is cool but we don't need it and it again becomes redundant later. I don't feel like Cameron really wanted to do more with this. Everything after 3 felt like a shameless cash in whether it was or it wasn't. I hope they're not about to rewrite history after the last attempt, it'll just suffer from sequelitis and retcons.

Leave the Terminator franchise alone.

Addendum 2023: I saw the original available to watch and decided I wanted to do a double-header, only the shitheads working on my concrete walkways decided to pick a public holiday to do their noisy-ass nonsense again (I thought they were done) so I couldn't start T2 until they were gone. The Terminator has a 100% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes and I don't agree. The acting's pretty awful, it really does depend on originality to carry it. Where I said the Sarah Connor Chronicles fails to be relevant comes from a line Kyle Reece says about nothing being able to go back, they're clever about not making him an expert about it, just a grunt, but the show suffered from the portal being more like an open door for rando characters to just show up. The other issue is, Arnold's too expressive as the Terminator. Really by the time Sarah's killing it, he's been replaced by the stop-motion chassis. I think since his English improved between movies, he understood what he was supposed to be going for and perfected it. The other men in the film are comic relief, I like the psychiatrist gets introduced then basically plays Sarah's real nemesis. It's a movie that didn't have to impress a lot of people, so when it did, we got a better sequel. According to RT, however, Arnold not being fun as a good guy and the plot being an unending chase sequence brought this down to 91%, but it still has a better audience score. Again, I get Furlong's acting isn't stellar but he is not the absolute worst as far as child actors go. (I can't tell you what made me crush on him at 12 but it rightfully didn't last long).

I don't know what the fuck y'all talking about Arnold's a million times more entertaining in this movie. STFU. He's like a big, dumb dog you don't want to see put down at the end of the movie.

Eyes Wide Shut

I was about to say I'm not a Kubrick fan until I realised he directed Clockwork Orange and Dr Strangelove, both of which I did like, not loved, but enjoyed mostly. The Moon Landing was pretty rad too. (J/K)

I hate the Shining, however. I absolutely couldn't stand the kid, Shelley Duvall is too overwrought not to be borderline comical, and while Nicholson basically carries the film, I still don't like him as an actor. Full Metal Jacket was fine but again I'm not into war movies, I wouldn't sit through it again because his movies are lengthy if you're not enjoying them. I don't think I'll see 2001, I've had that wrecked by references as well, I may attempt it.

He's an amazing visual storyteller, I wouldn't fault his technical abilities, and high def remasters really can bring out what was intended with his films. I just don't like the way he directs his actors in some cases. Eyes Wide Shut is one of those examples.

Now, you can look at this movie from many significant angles. It's Kubrick's last film, it's the vehicle that could have saved Nicole and Tom's marriage and finally disengage him from Scientology, it contained explicit moments between the pair that were blown way out of proportion compared to the rest of the film. Nicole couldn't defeat Scientology, sadly. I do feel sorry for her. Allegedly a sex therapist was involved to make their sex scene appear natural (it's not even that, they kiss naked in front of a mirror for half a minute and that's it, and soooo much hype was generated around that, we wanted an actual sex scene). A tabloid was sued over this, as it didn't happen. There was too much made of their pending separation for this to save everything. Scientology's absolutely to blame for this, like if he had some sense of critical thought and wasn't so easily led, I think he'd have been able to break their hold. Being on set seemed to be a way of keeping Tom absorbed and out of reach of the church but he doubled down later, whether he felt betrayed or the church's promises were too tempting.

But I don't get Nicole's performance in parts. She's very capable but she can't act drunk or stoned. When she's in a fit on the floor, it looks like first year actor's interpretation of a stoner during an improv performance. When she's drunk at the party, she's - well, see above. She has amazing moments when she's just being a bored housewife. I think she sucks at the other stuff. The scene she admits to wanting to leave the husband for a naval officer, which precipitates the whole mess, I really hate the way she stumbles around and casts aspersions, even when he's like, oh honey, of course other men want to fuck you you're amazing, I think she'd have been better off taking the fucking compliment. I feel like this is a story of mutual infidelity and how fucking pointless it is. It really feeds into an idea married couples don't fantasise of other people. 

Now, I don't know if the implications were set up that the doctor is a womaniser, he was about to go off with two models, he wasn't dissuading them at all. I'm assuming from how their relationship is set up from their boring apartment life to the lavish party where they're both seduced by other people, that he's already capable of cheating and has done. It's more obvious she's having fun flirting with someone, she's seen him, he's seen her. They can't write it off as a mutual transgression and admit their hypocrisy and move on, not until the end really. She has to prove in some obnoxious, overblown way, that women have fantasies about men, because he ignorantly assumes otherwise. Her execution is so ludicrously childish and pointless, but the point is she admits to wanting to leave him, so he finally gets jealous, just as she always wanted, and goes out with the intention of cheating, only to make a bunch of really stupid decisions. I feel like a certain maturity and sober discussion might've prevented all this, but then you wouldn't have a movie.

Yes, it's a movie about secrets and deception, maybe with a dash of class disparity. But that particular scene bothers the shit out of me. It's terrible. I don't think Tom's performance is bad, it's Nicole being too theatrical at the start. Oh, and her Australian accent really slips out later on, it's really there when she's upset. The scene where she's recounts her dreams is better acted, she carries this through until the final scene. I just can't believe she hasn't ever been stoned enough to know how to act that way. You see their humanity when they're exhausted and keeping up appearances for the daughter. What I think people wanted was a return to the chemistry they had in Days of Thunder, but it's really not there, just the gut-wrenching sensation it's all going wrong.

The only other thing that irks me is Tom playing doctor in such a stupid manner when he's dealing with the hooker passed out from a speedball. All he does is nudge and cajole her into opening her eyes, which she does. When we cut back to the bathroom, she has a blanket around her and she's feeling better. I don't know what else you should do, I understand he's there in lieu of cops/paramedics/causing a scene/covering up the host's transgressions. But at least in Almost Famous, we see the stomach pump, we see the ugliness. I have a feeling Tom didn't want to touch a naked lady. He tells the host to keep her there and get an escort home since the host was kinda hoping the good doctor would take out his trash, he tells her to give up the drugs and that's about it. She's integral to the story. So's Vinessa Shaw's character, who's great and sadly I've never seen her in anything outside Hocus Pocus. 

He's never bad in this but I think he could've done better. I have no idea what he was thinking during this performance and what it would mean for his marriage; superficially all I can assume is he loved her and thought the church was best for them, and she couldn't leave her family for him, why would you when they are literally attacking her and it seems to me Tom did little to defend her. (Attacking her father just because he was a mental health professional was so underhanded and sick). Tom's kinda all over the shop.

Speaking of shops, the costume shop scene is also ridiculous and I don't know if this is for comic relief or tension building, it is in the original story. Tom's also supposed to be the sexiest guy in the world and every woman/nubile child (the costume store owner's daughter)/obviously gay coded hotel receptionist wants to fuck him. He just obsesses over his wife fucking the basically mythological naval officer, who in reality could be absolutely anyone, including a gay guy. I think the story, which is an adaptation, has potential that's a bit wasted on this version in some parts. I think the draw card was having Nicole and Tom, and another couple, whether married or not, wouldn't have created the media stir that brought this to the mainstream. They were interested in a more Harrison Ford looking male lead, the culmination of Kubrick working with Tom and Nicole adds such a significant layer to the film. Other versions existed in Kubrick's mind given he'd had the rights since the 60s. Baldwin and Basinger were considered, she would be appropriate in terms of sex appeal. Jennifer Jason Lee and Harvey Keitel were filmed but had to leave for other projects, so it seems understandable Kubrick wanted Tom and Nicole to commit to this until its completion.

It's a clean and well-funded art house film that I don't think would've worked without Kubrick's eye in some places. However, his use of quick zoom ins for dramatic effect seems incredibly corny and dated by this point, the weight of the interrogation scene is diminished by the acting as well, everyone's using theatre voices. The sense of danger almost feels real, yet not completely. He's sweating bullets but I feel like someone needed to pull a knife or gun, the woman being taken away for "sacrifice" isn't quite ominous enough to me. Even the slowly executed ritual with the incense and Latin chanting was more mysterious than threatening.

It was hard then to put erotic thrillers out in large distribution without some controversy and blowback, However, the argument is it's not that at all, based on the fact it's missing the level of eroticism and "steaminess" needed for that category. So it's really a psychological thriller. The orgy scene is pretty sedate compared to scenes like in the Witcher and True Detective season 2. Basically, if you're doing more than the average film goer's conception of "erotic" then it's over the top, but it's not a sexy film. I think this disappointed that crowd as much as other mainstream films promising the same in their marketing. Oh, but you get a couple of guys slow dancing later, so progressive! More women are doing stuff with other women, of course. There were complaints about the women being more naked than the men, nudism should be an equal opportunity role, obviously, but most male directors aren't that keen on having a lot of peen on screen, and I'm sure there's a level of insecurity involved there. If you want that, go watch Game of Thrones. Hell, the new Queer as Folk had a split second of transpenis, if you're into that.

Also the ADR department had to work overtime with all the loud music and masks.  (Weirdly Cate Blanchet did the overdub for the speedball woman when she was in the mask, she said very little in the scenes you see her face, and I was more surprised Tom's character doesn't recognise her by her tits). That's reasonable but very noticeable. The interminable piano score for the second half of the film is very draining in terms of dragging out the tension, which is a Kubrickian thing, for sure. One thing I do despise is a drawn out denouement. The ending still feels very abrupt however, I can't even say what I was expecting, but Nicole and Tom in a toy store at Christmas deciding what to do about their failing marriage is kind of hilarious. Apparently Christmas is important in terms of symbolism (desire for toys is similar to a desire for sex) but seriously I think that's a little stretchy. There was a bit more to the final scene, which does tie everything together, but the tragedy of their separation in real life is playing out in Nicole's face so much at this point, and she nails it here, this is actually heartbreaking and real in the context of their failed marriage, something you'd not get from two actors not going through this.

The whole idea of the doctor getting in over his head is diminished if you consider this is some shallow threat to him, which is mentioned, the dead speedball woman is still dead, she's an expendable to the bad guys. We're supposed to identify with a guy who's realised he's crossed too many boundaries. The way he's gaslighted and left to question his experiences ties into the theme of the lines between dreams and reality being blurred.  But until this point, he hasn't done anything that redeemable for me to care what happens. If maybe he hadn't been acting like a womaniser from the beginning, if his wife was less sympathetic and perhaps actually cheated, and he's a broken man over it, okay, sure. You feel more sorry for the woman who sacrifices herself, which she only does in return for him treating her overdose. Man also shows up with a fuckin' taxi out the front, I'm sure that's not allowed. He chases this idea and gets a bunch of people in trouble and I can't say I feel sorry for the fuckin' idiot. If the implication is this is all completely real, the doctor doesn't seem so long suffering to have such a knee-jerk reaction to his wife fantasising of other men. He goes back to Vinessa Shaw's character again when he thinks his wife is just dreaming of other men. A dead body is what it takes for him to stop fucking with his life and fix his marriage.

I understand the themes involved, I'm not confused about anything, I don't know why other people were, shit it's not a film by Lynch but I'd watch his interpretation for sure. This movie's fine, it's interesting, I don't hate it but I wasn't largely impressed by it either.

 

 

Freaks and Geeks. Why not both?

Some reason my last watch of Freaks and Geeks wasn't a good one and I maybe got bored and quit watching the DVDs. Out of boredom I went back to it on streaming and I have to retract that it was boring, it really wasn't. Like it's shameful it wasn't given a shot. I also have to remind myself just because Paul Feig knocked it out of the park with this show, it doesn't make his rants on Twitter re: Ghostbusters and "hatin' on women" valid in anyway. People running to the defense of a bad movie on the basis of "you're picking on women" and for no other reason bothers the shit out of me. Please stop using gender as a defense against legitimate criticism. (See also: Wonder Woman, it was okay, it wasn't more amazing for what you bolstered it up for). Now I've seen the look Paul Feig gave Linda Cardellini during one episode I kinda wish someone had thrown that in his face recently. Yes, she was an adult (like 25 which is nuts considering she was meant to be 17) but her character wasn't and his character clearly was, so there's no argument. (There were a couple of "oh, you're super pretty" moments a lot of male writers give to female protagonists).

All that crap aside, Freaks and Geeks was a great show. It deserved better. I wanted to be Lindsey. Watching it I realised I was basically her. I was stuck in the middle of everybody, too smart but not smart enough grades-wise for my teachers to believe it or be put with the smart kids*, too nice but not nice enough to people who deserved better. I didn't fit. I went through the lengthy process of laying this out for a new psychologist and there wasn't a lot of opposition to what I said. I definitely got used by people who knew if they were nice to me they could exploit it, but I went through periods of being mean to the geeks as well, whoever was getting dogpiled on the most by everyone was a good scapegoat for the kids only slightly off the bottom rung. But I believed in the social ladder way too early. I hung out with the freaks who would've gotten me suspended, I hung out with the geeks who gave me shit for being a girl but were quite happy to flirt if they thought there was the slightest chance of getting in my pants. Lindsey's a lot like Veronica from Heathers by being forced to choose between two worlds but Lindsay won't unite them either. Lindsay's "Betty Finn" Millie doesn't get the short end of the stick, but Lindsay's brother Sam has to suffer some of her lack of consideration when she's inducted into the Freak Squad.

Going through the show even with all its great moments and great acting, which was mostly age appropriate but not entirely, the only one who looks completely misplaced is Jason Segel, however he was 19 and Linda Cardellini was 25, she was the one who looked age appropriate. Seth Rogan is pretty lackluster so he suits having a role with little to say but he got his shit together later, and you can see evidence of a guy who could be pretty great as an actor. (I hate his stoner laugh as much as everyone but I don't hate the guy, they give him a relatively mature topic to deal with and it's handled really well). It wasn't a crime to cast adults as teens, it was easier to cast boys since they could look a lot younger even as teens. Degrassi really was the only show that did it right. But I don't know where else the show would have gone after season 1. There are plenty of moments you can relate to on the cringe scale but it was also full of hilarious moments. It might have been repetitive eventually if they only focused on social stigma stuff and not teen issue stuff. That was the point, it really wasn't making any statements, it was just horribly relatable in an enjoyable way, and some moments were mortifying, like Degrassi could be. It did deserve better but what they would've done with a longer stint, I have no idea. I vaguely remember the episode one of the kids finds out his dad's a cheater, and I forgot the adults played more of a part in the show in terms of how they got involved with the kids, (including gaslighting and unfair assumptions) which gave it more of an adult feel, or it was appreciated more by adults as it was pitched at 20 somethings. The teachers were great characters which were fun to laugh at but still human, the coach isn't a total hard-ass and comes through for Bill and Sam. The guidance councellor isn't a total hippy. It did have some potential that could've really gone somewhere. Oh, and Tammy from Election has a part as Seth Rogan's love interest, so yay. (She's also the same age as me and so's Seth Rogan so them dating on the show is fine).

I realised how much it leaned on the Wonder Years (it basically was without the obligatory narration by the adult version of Fred Savage), but it was like a funnier, dirtier Wonder Years which was actually a lot more enjoyable and gritty.

*I beat the smart kids by opting to take English over English Lit,  everyone assumed I would because I was slightly better read and a good writer. I didn't expect to do well in English Lit and wanted to study movies and other mediums as well, I took the easiest way out for my entrance exam score. Turns out, English Lit that year was based on a bad curve, (sadly the curriculum council didn't report before 2001) as it was ranked by all the schools in the state. I had kids from that class come to my door asking for me to sign some petition the smart kids had to put forward because their total scores had been dragged down and it did screw with their results. Looking back, I could've been more sympathetic, but it probably wouldn't have fucked my score so badly since my entrance requirement was low, I know the other person it didn't affect and I don't blame them for telling those other kids to get stuffed. It must've made a difference to everyone's scores by a small but significant margin, which would've been fucking horrible. It's why as adults most of us say to kids now, don't base your whole identity and future on a fucking number. But yeah, I didn't think my decision would actually be that significant, it's another great example of how I went against expectations off my own instincts and it paid off. I couldn't have possibly brought the Lit grade up on my own, I got in the top 1 percentile in the end and I only got B's for the last two years of school for English. (Some reason I don't have the piece of paper with my actual score but it was like 77 and I only needed 67. It was a comfortable score). It was also something I was actually confident about, my mum decided to still say, "Oh, we'll see if you got in when you get your results". I don't remember her eating her words. I also got a High Distinction at the end of my first year of uni despite blowing out psychologically and having to defer. I told one of the nurses I hated in hospital when I saw her at the outpatient clinic, and she literally said: "That's not fair." So, me being a complete psychological mess means I should have also fucked up my entire year. I didn't. At least my mum later acknowledged she was amazed I got through it despite everything.

Anyway, here's proof I survived high school in terms of grades at least.

 

 

Netflix thinks they can make funny documentaries. They cannot.

I vaguely remember I wanted to watch "The Movies That Made Us" series but could not suffer though ten minutes because they'd utilised some kind of low-rent Patton Oswalt* impersonator to do the wackiest, most obnoxious narrations. Okay, it's not a dry doco series, I understand that. But with this series, they go overboard making it more "funny" than "interesting".

I was bored today, so I decided to watch the My Little Pony episode of "The Toys That Made Us", since people recommended it due to 80s toy histories being more fascinating from an adult perspective - we really didn't know the cartoons were ads. We didn't.

I don't know who gave me Blossom, my first pony, who I think was a reissue from the original model that fell forward all the time. People just kept buying me ponies. I stupidly didn't get a Flutter pony when I could, because I chose a stupid doll instead and instantly regretted it. The chances of the wings surviving all this long would've been slim, and I honestly now can't remember if it was a proper Flutter or one of the redesigns that built the wings into the body, which I did manage to find. I recently ordered a second Flutter that, long story short, ended up in the trash in Amsterdam because the seller's boyfriend mistook the returned package my arse of a postal service failed to deliver as rubbish. I got over it, it was too similar to the one I had, the one I stayed up until something like 3 am so I could make sure I wasn't outbid on eBay, because that really was a thing, there was no "buy now" option.**

Anyway, I digress once again. I watched the doco with less info than I had going in. And it was just a nightmare. The narration was so bad, I honestly almost muted the entire thing and put captions on instead. But it was also edited so badly, and jumped around repeating jokes and laughing at all the talking heads' contradictions, to the point it was so insanely disrespectful and humiliating to watch. Yeah, we get it, they all thing they're the pro-creators of the toy, yeah we get it, one of the ladies got all pissed she couldn't have a realistic pony and quit. There wasn't any need to mock these people, or the collectors, one of whom is the literal saviour of the entire franchise, Lauren Faust, who turned out to be an avid collector who sent designs of what she wanted the ponies to be like, because their "rump decorations" or whatever they cynically called them, inspired her to make way more interesting stories than I ever did. Hell, I considered my Applejack a boy and the dad of my Beddy Bye Baby with Blossom being the mother as they were my first three ponies. That's how fucking progressive I was. I decided to just make Applejack a boy, I guess because Jack was still a very masculine name to me. But yeah I was also lazy and just paired my babies up with their most similar looking adults I owned. (I do have a pretty bad-ass collection, including the rarer mail order Sparkle pony set). But I don't remember the stories I made, if I did. I took my Blossom outside and played with her in the dirt, she's trashed, and pale, I knew she was way more purple when I bought her. I have photographic evidence below, you'll see ratty Blossom's legs are better distributed to hold the head up, which isn't drooping.

I'm going to keep digressing. By the end when they revealed the letter Lauren sent demanding they immediately re-release the ponies she'd missed out on in exchange for her way cooler designs, all I wanted was a fucking doco about her. Shit, just give me half an hour of her and how Hasbro refused to let her make Celestia a queen because queens are "evil" and princesses are "good" by Disney logic. Like it was a way more interesting story how she came to be the creator of FIM. Don't laugh at the Bronies and just gloss over the toxic aspects of their community, how exclusionary they were to girl fans who, GREW UP WITH THE TOYS. Bronies love Friendship is Magic. They don't love My Little Ponies. There was a legacy they just glossed over in an "all jokes aside" way by the end, it was just funnier to laugh at the poor black guy who was assigned to designing more feminine play sets (while completely ignoring they had boy ponies and prince ponies), and let's just joke about him being the "First Bronie" and not, you know, the CREATOR OF SPIKE, who has a legacy of his own. Spike's the best. We love Spike, he's a purple baby dragon who can't fly. They had ponies transformed into dragons in the original episode. There was conflict there. Spike forever.

They discussed the original animation and crapped on about how men wrote the pilot Rescue at Midnight Castle, (which I had in my head was the actual movie, not a double episode VHS I rented with the Catrina/Bushwoolies episode) and how scary and reminiscent of a GI Joe episode it was, as that was the creators' background, you hired them. But I thought (and still think) it was pretty fucking cool. Instead of having an enchanted princess and an evil witch, you've got some asshole who wants to steal rainbows and make ponies in to kickass dragons for his awesome flying chariot, and a captured prince forced to kidnap ponies so they can suck the happy out of them and make them dragons. There was something substantial even for a toy commercial show, even if you had ponies shackled by the neck. Nobody could come up with stories at Hasbro, so a couple of people (sorry, MEN) gave you something and you couldn't force them to change it because it was a rush job. The point of the show dwindled, the generations were relative failures, then Friendship as Magic completely revitalised the franchise. I got sucked in so hard, even after I was like meh about the reboot. (my husband convinced me to watch). I searched for a non-pink Celestia, I wanted a cool Luna that was modeled on her character and not just a recoloured Mane Six (she was basically a more purple Twilight Sparkle with wings), I have a talking Nightmare Moon, that if you'd given me that at five, I would have loved you forever. My friend bought me a styling Rarity. I put up with Mane Six doubles that came with sets. I bought Equestria Girls, and a Pinkie Pie car because the hot pink and black style is fucking rad.

There were more than enough interesting facts they didn't have to repeat scenes as a joke, just talk about the fucking ponies, when you're interviewing multiple people with varying recollections of the same event, they are going to naturally contradict one another, you don't need to make a joke of that, or their lack of consistency by having "rules" that weren't adhered to: (Ponies were never ridden by people but then they created Megan and her sister, they never had saddles but sets came with saddles, which the Mane Six from G4 did have with little animals). It wasn't that funny to laugh at the grey and pink pony falling over all the time. According to the creator who wanted a horse IRL (like every girl did, and she's not wrong, I started a horse club at school and didn't own one then fell off a pony and never rode again) when market testing proved her naturally coloured ponies sucked compared to the rainbow ones, she made Snuzzle grey and that's all she managed to get away with. She also wasn't listened to until one of the other designer's wives said exactly what she'd been saying, and they listened to the wife and not the creator. Of course that was going to piss her off, you just summarised 50 years of mansplaining and disrespecting women in one second. Like you might as well have just said, "Oh, don't be bitter, toots. Give us a smile". I don't think half the people cared who "created it" none of them had a patent on it. Point is, Lauren Faust was the only genuinely humble one, and she's just a legend. I didn't even pay attention to them referring to her as a collector, otherwise I'd have recognised the name.

There's a reason the reissues sell well. I wish I'd been aware of the other anniversary sets because I'm buying the ponies I really wanted 30 years ago from the Rainbow series, because mine were sorta plain. It's shitty how belittling it was to see these passionate people be ridiculed by the creators of the show. Like they wanted to make a cool show about what impact these toys had on generations of kids, but they were mocking their own premise. They were marketed to girls like "dolls" and I maintain my collection is no different to any doll collection you can look at in a museum. They were designed to be collected, toy series survived if you had integrated sets. I wanted April o'Neil to ride on my Baby Firefly. I look at them and I realise how lucky I was then and am now to be able to have ponies around. My friend made custom ponies for me, including one for my pen name. Like, everyone I know who loves me knows I fricken' love ponies. I don't know what it is about my brain being so triggered by rainbow/pastel colours, I get distracted by them. Because they're pretty, and unique, even if the bodies are identical, the colours and "rump designs" or whatever, (which were hand drawn by another woman who resented the original designer of the first six released because she had to keep drawing proto-cutiemarks by hand, which Lauren realised was a beauty mark joke, which I missed. Also I assume that woman quit when the Twice as Fancy line was released if not before). But the fact something clever was incorporated, and that it was important to younger ponies that gaining their cutie mark was a rite of passage, that you put some fucking thought behind the most unique part of a everypony. (There was one original baby in the first series without a mark, but the newborns were already marked). Lauren really did make five of the Mane Six based on the G1s she'd placed so much personality onto as a kid, I wish I'd grown up with her, that she'd been my neighbour and we'd babysat each other's ponies and took them to each other's houses. I have vivid memories of going to a friend's house, (they had horses), and the only way I knew to go there was to climb a wood and wire fence. So I'd go with my box of ponies, put it on the biggest corner post and climb over. And that's how I played ponies as a kid. My best memories of when I got my favourite ones. I think if I looked at each one long enough I could tell you how I got it at the very least, or if I bought it with pocket money. I remember getting Hula Hula my Tropical, and my Happy Tabby set, that I wanted so badly. I remember picking out my Dream Beauty and my brother telling me to get the Pegasus one but I thought it was ugly. I distinctly remember convincing my mother to buy me Baby Rain Ribbon from the supermarket when we were grocery shopping. You just don't let that shit go. (To be fair, my G3 purchases were just so unremarkable I dug them out and couldn't actually fucking remember where one of them came from). But I have a spreadsheet and I can tell you how many I have, how many are broken down into Earth, Pegasus, Unicorn, Alicorn etc. I knew the ponies that didn't have wings or horns were Earth ponies when I was 8.

Ponies are fucking interesting. Fakies are a big part of the collector info. They could've bought up the international variations instead of laughing at Bronies. Lauren was worried people were going to see her show and laugh at it but reality was, bronies watched it and kinda liked it, because it was what a good 80s cartoon should've been like. Never mind they went on to sexualise the Cutie Crusaders with body pillows etc. Or that they just didn't give a shit about any other generation. Plus this was all before the whatever the fuck they're calling G5, which is just a joke hybrid of G2s and 4s. I did see some pretty looking G2s, of which I own none, because they were in that period (1997, I was 15) I wasn't buying toys. I still got some G3s in my 20s they're not the worst. They're just kinda meh. But looking back over the sister series which was like their answer to a young adult pony, I think they'd have gotten away with G2 releases being similar to these, but they fucked up.

Jenny Nicholson's Broniecon video got nominated for a Hugo Award. Her YouTube video was better researched, presented and edited than this fucking farce of a "documentary". And she didn't reduce to fucking Aftereffects and running gags which you think YouTubers love to do. She even has fame within the community, she's younger than me but has more respect for the older toys than any Bronie. She delved into the webrings, created parodies and collected with the best of us. She's a better restorer than me, I was proud I got the mould out of my baby seapony. I'm also catching up on Britney Broski and Sarah Schauer's take on Bronies, you get more honesty from YouTubers. Also, a more baby version of FIM came out a couple years ago, like they were trying to claw back the series from Bronies to reposition them to actual babies.

I won't watch another episode of this series, and it's sat on my watchlist since I signed up to Netflix ages ago. Just give me the facts. Make it as dry as a fucking David Attenborough documentary. Pay respect to your interviewees and don't edit them to look like a bunch of petty tools who didn't have valid responses to how they were treated in a male-dominated industry, or obsessive collectors who have immense pride in their collection, or were just befuddled white guys who got too much credit they didn't earn. I mean, I have enough for a couple of walls in a room at least, the fuckin dream would be to have a pony room. The woman who wanted a real horse still had her own collection, she still had an affection for them, clearly her resentment wasn't so profound she shunned the idea of being in this documentary. They don't make toys like this now, with painstaking care and consideration. There isn't really a lot of love involved. There are cartoons, but kids like Minecraft mostly. I don't really know if they have a toy series they love and play with, they like Bluey. Bluey's cool.

I'll watch any other YouTube video explaining the history of ponies. If this was Netflix's answer to a YouTube history video, it sucks. Channels like Quentin Reviews and Defunctland run rings around this bullshit and are probably more accurate. They might not personally interview anyone involved but they'll do the legwork and not just patch together some bullshit with visual gags.

*They should've gotten Patton Oswalt because he did a whole amazing bit about how it was okay his daughter wasn't like super into Star Wars, and just casually pretended he didn't care about My Little Pony before launching into the whole premise of FIM, the Mane Six and the Cutie Crusaders which was very sincere and triumphant. No, we had to get discount Patton and his "wackiness". 

** I just had a shocking realisation these ponies were released when I was between three and four, at the latest 1987, so I'm sure it was before I received Blossom at age 6 in 1988, which was a reissue of the droopy head nightmares pictured above. The Summer Wing range was out by the time I was the age I could've had one, and I distinctly remember the wing and body colour of one I saw a girl playing with at school was from a later range, not the Flutter range. So, realistically, me finding an original Flutter at that time wasn't actually possible, and I was thinking of the Windy Wings series. The eBay one was definitely from 1986, so I was four. Once a pony series was done, they didn't tend to re-release anything that didn't work unless they could improve on it. I feel like the Flutters haven't gotten a re-release because of the wing fragility, and Summer/Windy Wings was a response to wings breaking off/being lost as they were secured. Regardless, the wings were still easily scratched and damaged. They're going with the "classics" for the Anniversary releases knowing they were vastly popular and obviously the easiest to recreate without appendages. Doing research, I'm actually shocked how many ones I received in such a short time, I just feel like it took me so long to build my collection. I was super bummed the Club shut down by maybe 1991 which is a year before G1 finished. I was born in 82, MLP began 1981, so realistically I was only aware of ponies from the year I got one, which I'm almost 100% certain was 1988. I think if I'd owned one in 87, before I started school, I would've remembered and wanted to take her to pre-primary. The only other scenario I can imagine is there was a delay in release from the US and Australia, as apparently they were popping up in Europe a lot later. But I'm more sure if production had ceased by 87, they wouldn't have been exporting beyond that. My only other argument is when I saw photos of Flutters with wings, it didn’t match my memory of them, the translucent wings were unfamiliar compared the rainbow wings. I sort of just thought there was only one wing type with the flutter button. I sincerely don't think Ponies showed up in Australia at all until I was 6, but then again I don't have firm memories of store trips until I was that age. Someone saw a pony and went, girl + horse + rainbows = me. All my distinct pony memories happened after. I definitely got my Glitters in 1989. I thought time went fast back then, but it really didn't. They were running until 1995 globally,  but I feel like they were definitely not in our stores that late, I was in year 8 (13) by then. The Shout Factory, who released the DVDs, claim they didn't begin until 1983, but that was around the time the cartoon started, not the toy line. I am going to tragic lengths to prove my theory that I missed out on a Summer/Windy Wings pony and not a legit Flutter Pony. (I can tell the Klonopin has worn off because I am actually getting moderately obsessive about my memory and timeline of events that would've led to my supposition being correct. I pride myself on my vivid memory but whether this is absolute confirmation bias remains to be determined. It doesn't help there's a less accurate account of when releases hit my country as opposed to the US. Hooves indicate patent dates for the poses I believe, so my 25th set was released in 2007. The 35th Anniversary set released in 2018. Plus the mail order sets had to be ordered from the US. I remember wanting the pearl babies (see below) and was going to do an order but they weren't available for some reason, I don't even know how we discovered that, I think we put in the order and it was cancelled due to unavailability. According to one site these were released in 84, I don’t know if the flyer was just out of date by the time I got it but I don’t know how I had enough proof of purchase horseshoe tokens I had after the sparkles. As most packs came with further advertising, I wish I'd held on to more of them than I did. At least most of the info online is reasonably curated to be correct. Looking at when the activity club ran, I think we found out about via the packaging but this was out of the UK so my parents were paying a subscription service outside Australia as well. I was a spoiled brat in all honesty my original addiction was easily overindulged. Now I have my own money and I'm probably still struggling with constraint. The fact I even own an Activity Club baby is special, she's one of my precious ones. Even the ones I have less affection for I still can't dare to ever part with. You really would have to offer me a fuck of a lot and I would have to be fundamentally broke to take you up on any offer, personally. I know some of it's personal rather than monetary value, but sometimes that means more.)

Okay, I have to stop extending the above paragraph. Forums on the flutter wings stated they were easily breakable, and a lot of returns obviously went back to Hasbro. I'd imagine they wouldn't have continued, since replacement equates to lost income over time, and they were part of year 4 which died in 1987. I imagine I would've broken mine just as easily as everyone else, so owning one at the time meant immediate disappointment. To be fair, I had a very flimsy Sweet Secrets toy whose leg broke off because quality control back then was pretty lax, and your only recourse in Australia was to return it to the point of sale for a refund/replacement. I'm thinking original Flutters didn't release outside the US because of this design flaw, which with rigorous playtesting, would've broken, and one site said they weren't "made outside the US". It wasn't like they didn't do demo models, they did it to prove coloured ponies were better, if handling a product normally would cause it to break, why would you ship it? Quick buck production hasn't been proven to have long term benefits, but that's a product of the 80's. G1 in terms of creativity and variation in poses and concepts was probably the broadest. G4 seaponies are absolute abominations. If I know now whatever I wanted would have broken that easily, it's pointless lamenting over my failure to choose it when I had the choice. The ad looks familiar, and the toy clearly looks like it could deal with five year olds playing with it, like were they breaking on set and the children were admonished when it wasn't their fault? Like, how is it you have a perfect product to advertise you can't be bothered actually selling? Looking at remodeled wings and ponies, it's tempting to go with that on eBay but for some reason I'm failing to get into any account that will accept I'm not in the US. Some reason me owning something close to what I thought I missed out on will appease this sense of lacking, rather than me working on dealing with the sense of lacking. I don't tend to do deep dives for these things unless my brain is looking for an exit from whatever it doesn't want to contemplate. When I went hunting in 2005, the fact I even saw the one I have, I remember just being in love, and I could've used a Sprite bottle to make a reproduction but I made a flat, elongated wing out of plastic packaging and painted it with glitter nail polish, and because I suck with scissors, it looked pretty meh. I eventually found pretty butterfly wings and bought a set that looked really good, but recently the tab seemed super weak. Looking for replacements, I went through utter bullshit, in a pandemic, no less, to receive a sheet of uncut wings (I should've read the description, the seller basically couldn't be arsed cutting these out herself, even with the intricate details) and I wound up cutting mine without the tiny details because I didn't have a crafting knife. They look okay if you don't look at them that hard. I remember thinking, I don't like the bubbly wings, it's why I keep thinking the Windy/Summer Wings version was what I really wanted, my memory keeps being jogged that I was expecting this version when I tried to get one, I asked for one for Easter (dude, my parents got us little toys for Easter FFS, and my birthday isn't even a month after) and by then, they were gone. I can't seem to get even badly made replacements, so I've gone back to the butterfly wing supplier and just ordered a new pair. They really are very pretty, and they are for display purposes, which is what I am doing. Does my brain just want pretty wings? Do I want wings? The wings are the best things in Shining Nikki, I love when I get the wings, I obsessed over the fairy wings. I'm obsessed with wings, that's the problem. Why am I obsessed with wings? Should I address this? I can't even find this as an actual thing, you can certainly have a phobia, but an obsession? And it seems to be worse when I'm undermedicated? Is that it? And I just realised, it's not birds or butterflies I'm into. It's things that aren't meant to have wings having wings, like ponies and anime girls. That's the problem. I'm not even obsessed with how wings work, the anatomy of a wing, the aerodynamic concept of a wing. It's not about planes. Or angels, really, because traditional angels are their own thing and I don't collect angels or angel related material, and I don't believe they exist as most people think. It's just unnaturally shaded and shaped wings on horses and anime girls. This isn't a thing. Or it's autism. Yeah.