theatre basement like the phantom or somethin

hi. do you like shows about how difficult it is wanting to succeed onstage? do you like comedy of the variety where the joke is really stupid you can't help but laugh anyway?

do you like characters whose relationships to each other can be described as not quite friend, not quite family, not quite lover, but in fact none other than Commitment to the Bit?

if you answered yes to any or all of these questions, i'd like to offer you my personal favourite drama for the past five years, aitsu ga kamite de shimote ga boku de (he's on stage left and on stage right it's me) (or if you check the few official english sources, two peas in a pod???)

the show follows a comedian, tokiura (aramaki yoshihiko), as he gets sent off to a theatre known for housing only the worst performers. there he meets shima (wada masanari), who asks to be his manzai partner after seeing him onstage only once. alongside the rest of the cast--shima's previous partner narimiya (sakiyama tsubasa) now working with hebiya (torigoe yuki), childhood friends wanno (hashimoto shohei) and inukai (tanaka ryousei) trying to break from their cutesy image, and genda (jinnai sho) in a temporary partnership with amano (umetsu mizuki)-- --this theatre kind of sucks. and everyone is bad at their job. but god if they aren't going to try to make it big anyways.

links and more miscellaneous yapping under the cut!

Two Guys Who Just Met, The Opposite Of Childhood Friends

you're stupid. i like that in a man

childhood friends (normal)

the thing where someone pretends to get close to a person as part of some secret mission but OH NO THEY GET ATTACHED FOR REAL

childhood friends (divorced)

this is me being biased but some of these guys are so easy to read as adhd and/or autism you have no idea how attacked i felt

the only women in it are also strange. i think they're worse in s2 but they also open their mouths and i'm like What

crumbling theatre with a ragtag group of misfits and outcasts, if you started following me from when i was into a3 and somehow stayed this entire time i am shaking this post at you specifically

TO REITERATE. NEITHER FRIEND NOR FAMILY NOR LOVER BUT SECRET OTHER THING THAT WHICH IS COMMITTED TO THE BIT (paraphrasing a line that is in the official webpage summary i'm not even joking)

YES i love it when adrian is way bigger than rocky uh here's my take on rocky and adrian

incorrect response: write the rest of the story to be as twisty, shocking and counter to expectations as possible, regardless of whether this is a logical or satisfying way for the plot to go

correct response:

(you’re not stupid. I posted this thinking it would amuse a handful of mutuals who all knew the context and that would be about it, so I didn’t think about providing any other explanation. I had no idea it would spread this far.)

I’ll start from the very beginning just to be thorough. so this is Alex Hirsch, creator and head writer of Gravity Falls, a show which had a big focus on mystery, conspiracies, codes and ciphers, etc. the whole plot is kicked off by one of the main characters finding a mysterious old journal in the woods, which detailed all kinds of weird and supernatural things, but then ended abruptly with the author saying they had to hide the journal because they were being watched. the central driving mystery of the show, therefore, was the question of who wrote the journal and what happened to them.

now, the thing about Gravity Falls is that, while it must be said that the writers weren’t always quite as sure of their plans as we tend to like to think they are, it is very much a fair play mystery, with legitimate clues to what was going on. but the writers were caught off guard by how quickly the show attracted a dedicated audience, including a lot of people outside the primary presumed demographic, who started solving the clues faster than expected. so some of the fans were able to correctly guess who the author was before it was revealed in the show, and the theory started spreading. this put the writers in something of a panic, because this was THE mystery that the whole story revolved around, with ¾ of the show building up to the dramatic reveal in the middle of season 2. they wanted it to be a mystery that could be figured out, sure, but they weren’t prepared for people to solve it so far in advance of when it was planned to be revealed, which would have really taken away from the big moment. they weren’t going to change the main story itself, but having been caught unaware by how much attention the fans were paying, they wanted to up the ante and make the mystery more complex to solve going forward–but first they needed to buy some time and throw the fandom off the scent for a little longer.

hence, Alex’s plan as described above. they whipped up a fake shot that appears to give away the identity of the author as being another character in the show, put it on a screen in the studio as if it was a real animation frame, took a picture of it, and ‘leaked’ it online. it was initially decided to be a hoax (albeit, I think, presumed to be a hoax originating from outside the production team), until Alex posted this tweet:

…before quickly deleting it (though not so quickly that it didn’t get seen, of course).

it worked well enough to distract most people for a while, and wasn’t revealed as a hoax until a year later, when an episode aired that definitively proved that the supposed screenshot could never have happened, at which point Alex owned up to the whole thing as seen in the tweet above. by then the episode with the real reveal wasn’t far off, and while people did still work it out ahead of time, it was more of an “OH MY GOD I KNEW IT!” moment than a “booooooring, we’ve known that for ages” moment, which of course was what the writers wanted all along.

personally I find this a fascinating approach to dealing with the problem of spoilers, because it doesn’t affect the story itself at all; if you watch Gravity Falls today–or if you were watching it when it aired without any significant contact with the fandom–you’d never know about it. ultimately, the problem the writers were facing wasn’t that some people might guess the answer to the mystery–they never wanted to make it completely impossible to predict–so much as it was that they hadn’t designed the story to stand up to so many people working on the puzzle together, which resulted in a sort of total output of puzzle-solving ability that far outstripped the capability of any one solo human being. so their solution is something that’s very much targeted toward delaying that group problem-solving, without actually affecting the experience of any individual person watching the show.

plus, it’s very in keeping with the overall tone of the show.

don’t:

change the ending

do:

marketing guy: hmmm yeah we need to make vodka soda branded as “gay water.” make sure the packaging looks like diaper packaging.

other marketing guy: maybe we should add funny little stickers, like–

The African American Smithsonian.

Project Hail Mary // Incorrect quotes 3/?

Bonus: