Cherry Bombastic Gender Elastic

Menzobarranzan

Unused Art for The Legend of Drizzt - Animated Short

rocky is both touched by the sentiment and disturbed by human medical practices

inspired by this grace quote:

Yeah, sure, serial killers deserve human rights too, but isn't there a more obvious demographic you're sliding right by? Isn't there a demographic of people so thoroughly erased by human rights discourse that their rights aren't even debated, it's just taken for granted that human rights don't apply to these people?

I take a poll: "how many of you would agree that 'everyone deserves the right to privacy' is a pretty uncontroversial statement?"

when 95% of them have put their hands up, I say "now, what if I clarify that 'everyone' includes children?"

"Long gaps are good" is a wild sentiment for the creators of a teen drama whose cast is now entirely Evan Hansens to express but also the common sense wisdom that shorter seasons = higher quality & higher demand is just. Off base for a lot of reasons

For one, let's consider, uh, almost every other show on Netflix but Stranger Things. All the ones that had unceremonious two-season cancellations bc they did decently enough the first go round, but it's a show that effectively existed for people for like one week and come two years later everyone's moved on. It's a model that only works for mega-hits! Versus the linear model, where even a fairly middling show can build demand for the season finale or season premiere.

(I'd wager they don't know how it is for non-blockbusters, given they're also seeing their child actors complain about how their knees hurt them nowadays & saying "taking ten years to make five seasons of a teen drama is great!")

From the article: “I get fatigued watching 20-episode seasons,” Matt Duffer said. “We didn’t grow up interested in any of that. We only watched movies. That’s the weird thing that we ended up in TV, because we had almost zero interest in television.” I guess it makes sense, if you ignore the part where he's an auteur in a medium he has no interest in. Nothing makes for better art than artists with contempt for their medium and an active desire to be working in another one instead!

A lot of shorter TV seasons can't maintain consistent quality. We have so many lumpy, glacially-paced streaming dramas we made up a Surf Dracula to represent them. At the most extreme example, Sherlock only had three episodes a season, and every year had at least one people regarded as weaker than the others.

For all that we talk about silly bad episodes and tonal changes, it's becoming a bit lost that with good shows, twenty-episode seasons were consistently good! If you put a bunch of writers in a room & tell them "come up with twenty-four weeks of stories for these characters", and they come up with ten great ones, eleven good ones, and three bad ones, that's a pretty good ratio - unlike now, where one bad episode in a ten episode season can sink the whole thing. There was no sense of "diminishing returns" to following a great show from year to year, unless a show not being able to keep up that level of quality forever counts.

"Yeah, it got rough after season five" is another way of saying "yeah, the writers kind of lost steam after one hundred & twenty weeks of mostly good-to-great storytelling". Seems like the returns were pretty dang good for a pretty dang long time before they started diminishing. A shorter model works best for some shows, just like how the twenty-episode season didn't work well for all shows, but instead of having a choice of the best option, everything must shift to thirteen ten eight episode seasons that happen years apart.

It's weird how many people work in mediums they don't like. Okay, maybe they want to work in movies and got pushed into TV. Sure, but taking a writing gig you don't really want is different from demanding to be seen as a major voice in television while going "you know, I didn't even own a TV".

Making TV "cinematic" once meant just increasing production values: paying more attention to visuals (not the staid grammar of the shot-reverse shot 4:3 close-ups, but something more dynamic), spending more on effects, being inspired by film but not beholden to it. The X-Files was widely praised for being "cinematic" in the 90s bc it drew inspiration from the likes of The Silence of the Lambs and paid attention to production values, but it was also trying to meld that with the beats of a episodic TV show. But what it now means is "this should be a movie, but we're making it ten hours long and split into undifferentiated chunks bc nobody wanted to make it as a movie"

People with contempt for their medium or genre are always the worst. The king of this is game designer David Cage, who seems to not have a single kind word for game design, but who is obsessed with being "cinematic", to the point that when he speculated about the future of game design, he just talked about cinematography, how they should have directors and cinematographers for video games, and said the future would be "an algorithm that will film based on [the styles of] Stanley Kubrick, or Orson Welles, or Coppola". His dream of the future of video games is to make it movies so comprehensively that we'll have AI cameras mimicking household name directors. Of course, the reason Cage doesn't make movies and instead makes ten hour long game-movies is that his brand of game would make for generic thrillers that would be mediocre-to-terrible films; the interactivity is the only thing that makes them at all interesting, since otherwise, it's not hard to see that someone whose highest aspiration for their work is "I want to be able to program in a camera that looks like Stanley Kubrick's camera" is not gonna stray from the derivative