#books...subtitles...scripts.... anything really

Over the next 30 days i’ll be watching a movie everyday and giving a somewhat detailed overview of my feelings on it.

Starting with iron lung

Spoiler ahead be warned!

So you guys know how there's been a video recording of Don Juan in Soho floating around the internet? I found it a bit hard to follow, so I've decided to subtitle the recording based on the script book fro the play.

The video recording actually starts about 8ish minutes into the performance, so I've found an audio-exclusive recording of the first 8 minutes and given a transcript of what's happening.

I've only subtitled just over 10 minutes, but I've decided to make an unlisted Youtube video showing my progress in case anyone wants to see it as I go. I do plan to subtitle the whole thing, and I'll definitely upload it.

Also if anyone doesn't know - content warning for very very explicit descriptions of sex. I'm sure anyone who knows anything about the play will know that, but I'm saying just in case.

Dialogue starts at around 2 minutes! For some reason it has a really long intro

So you want to know about Chess. The first piece of advice I have to give you is:

Step 0: Are you sure?

Because trust me, it's a whole lot weirder than you think, even if you know that the story is, in fact, only very little about chess (the board game). But if you are sure, because you have a friend who, like me, can't stop talking about it, then, you're ready to begin with step one.

Content Warning: I’m going to talk about a kid’s cartoon from the late 1990s, but I’m also going to talk about a serial killer cannibal. From the kid’s cartoon. Yeah, from the late 1990s. Good? You good? Great.

Every time I start one of these articles I have to have a little conversation about myself about how the first word is going to be italicised. It’s usually the word ‘Transformers.’ You see there, not italics. That’s because I’m talking about the word. But if I’m talking about the first cartoon, which was called Transformers, that gets italicised, because that’s the title of a media piece. If I’m talking about the franchise over many shows, though, I just refer to that as Transformers. If I’m talking about a toy in specific, it’s a Transformer toy, and if I’m trying to emphasise these toys in a sentence, then they get to be Transformers. Two of the movies are called Transformers (one with the subtitle: The Movie), and one of them I will probably never bother talking about.

Artless formatting, really.

Point is, Transformers-no-italics-the-whole-franchise-here, is a sort of media platform. If all my time talking about the toys and characters of the franchise has given you anything, as a non-expert, I’d hope it gives you the clear impression that there is a lot of different stuff happening here, often by a variety of creators with a whole host of purposes. Sometimes a character is queer because of intentional coding or unintentional coding, sometimes a character is queer because of an animation or script mistake, and sometimes a character is queer as part of a deliberate choice (hi Rachel). This kind of thing serves as a useful range of explanations as to how things in any given Transformers story – comic books, videogames, movies or television program – is as much a genre of media. Within that genre, the author gets to do a lot as long as they hit their genre markers, which in the case of Transformers usually cooks down to ‘does it promote our brand to our market and make our cool toys look cooler?’

There has been room for a host of stories in the Transformers series, then. I’ve talked about some and I will talk about more, since I haven’t spoken about what’s probably the single best single episode of Transformers (see, italicised, that’s going to be about Generation 1’s TV show, probably not the movie). Today, I want to talk to you about one of the ongoing stories that was built into the best-so-far TV series, Beast Wars.

Now, I’ve glazed Beast Wars pretty hard for its Dinobot story. I still love it. The script of the story is still great, and the voice actors do a great job with what they have to work with. However, the animation is very ropy and it looks pretty bad in hindsight, even if it is one of my favourite stories about a desperate last stand from a character who shouldn’t have to be here but who can’t bring himself to do anything otherwise.

Also in Beast Wars, there’s the story of a cop on the edge hunting down the cannibalistic serial killer who escaped his grasp one time, and who wants to break that cop so they can die together.

This predates Hannibal by fifteen years.

First of all there’s our heroic cop on the edge. Depth Charge is a Peace Marshal (cop) and the last survivor of a massacre in territory under his control. A monster known as Protoform X did all the killing, left him alive, and went on its merry way, asterisk goes here. Depth Charge was supposedly a fun guy before, you know, all the trauma and now he spends his time – I say spends his time, this is all in the future and in the past, because time travel gets involved, but the important thing is that the default state of Depth Charge is a single-minded hyper-focused hunter who wants to capture Protoform X, at any cost, because the potential harm of Protoform X on the world is worse than anything else. Ostensibly, he is a Maximal and he helps out the Maximal cause, but he’ll drop an order in a heartbeat if it gets him closer to stopping Protoform X.

None of this stuff is in the character bio on the box. If you bought the Depth Charge toy, you would have no idea that the was like this. In fact, the box kinda describes him as a bit of a nerd, someone who would rather spend his time studying military strategies than doing them.

Next we have Protoform X. You won’t find a toy called Protoform X, but you can buy the toy Rampage. Rampage is one of those names with prestige, because it’s an obviously great name and it was in use since Generation 1, where it was part of the team of animal hunters called the Predacons. That is, animals that hunt, not like, a bunch of dentists with long rifles who deserve to be gored by buffalo.

Protoform X’s version of his story is that he is a monster created by the Autobots. He’s not a Predacon or a Decepticon; the Autobots knew about the immortal spark of Starscream (that’s why he shows up as a ghost all the time, and in every continuity they find a way to keep Starscream from dying), and they wanted one of their own. They made one of their own and all it cost was the subject’s ability to feel any reason to respond to moral frameworks of right or wrong.

Protoform X was by the letter of the text ‘criminally insane.’ What this seems to mean is that he was a robot soul that liked to eat people because he was told he shouldn’t eat people, and, as an immortal, he didn’t really see what use any particular rules or laws should apply to him. It makes sense, after all, it might be in the future that cannibalism becomes a totally cool thing and in that case, all this current now where you shouldn’t eat people who annoy you is just a passing fad.

Anyway, this guy with a very normal brain killed all of Depth Charge’s friends while breaking out, and then was recaptured and stuck in a time-stop prison cell to be dumped on some obscure barren world where he could do no harm. And then the Maximals had to go and crash-land on earth and jettison all the escape pods for ethical reasons, and oh no! It now seems Protoform X is gunna get dumped on earth to become a week’s character! And then, Protoform X gets captured by the Decepticons, who, through the use of a Torture Machine, convince Protoform X to work for them. They dub him Rampage, and thus the story begins.

Rampage is a weird character in hindsight. It’s very clear that he’s a cannibal and a murderer, in the context of a series that largely shies away from killing, as an action. Threat happens, but there’s few things so grisly. Rampage is a character who gets a lot of actual focus, and that includes episodes where he’s shown with his own goals and interests and even attempts to build a family and a community… which fail, because neither his allies nor his enemies know what he wants or are willing to respect it.

The way this story plays out is a lot of sequences where honestly, Rampage’s life could have been better, his moral framework could have been addressed, if he had a chance to interact with a ‘good’ person for any length of time. And there were people around him who could have helped. Silverbolt, for example, or Tigatron. But both of his interactions with those characters went badly because they, very sensibly, were being careful of dealing with the guy who killed and ate people.

Ah, the plight of monsters.

The end of the story, at least for Depth Charge and Rampage, was to end up at the bottom of the ocean, trying to thwart the escape of Megatron and his ship full of super war criminals. The greater order stopped mattering, the fight was about the fight, and in the end, when Depth Charge lost his cool and started hollering about wanting to hurt and kill Rampage, the cannibal couldn’t help but laugh.

When Depth Charge was holding a blade of pure magic-energy over Rampage’s heart?

Rampage stopped resisting, letting him kill him, and himself, in the ensuing explosion, and he laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

This was a show for kids!

Ohh thank you so much... Your blog would be so awesome 💪

As for resources, it's a biiiit hard to answer. I started learning japanese when I was 10 (& never touched it ever again until I was in my 20s lol) but back then I just grabbed a japanese learning book from the library. All I was able to memorize were very basic words & reading hiragana/katakana. A bit of kanji too but mostly the very simple ones that are used all the time

The rest I learned by watching anime & music I listened to, but only when it comes to learning some words, because Im very aware that people don't usually talk like cartoon characters or song lyrics

Even if it's only words, it was still very hard for me to take it at face value because there are inaccuracies even if the anime is trying to be realistic about it. An example I can think of is the Kansai dialect (specifically from Osaka) in Detective Conan. Fans from Osaka pointed out that some of the terms the characters use are very outdated & nobody really uses them nowadays maybe aside from old people, and the characters saying them are teenagers lol

If I want to listen to casual dialogue, I watch random videos on youtube about cooking or product reviews or just speaking about any topic that exists out there & I play them in the background with subtitles

And nowadays I just lurk on japanese twitter. I do this with most languages because I find it fun to see what other people are talking about & Im getting sick of seeing useless discourse in english or in french all the time, so I go look for more useless discourse in japanese. Sometimes I also speak to japanese people on there, but I always clarify that Im absolute ass at speaking it so that I don't embarrass myself. They're always nice about it so Im relieved. Sometimes they try speaking to me in french in return & I feel really bad about it because I don't want anyone to feel forced to speak french of all things

As for arabic, my parents forced me to go to saturday arabic classes in primary school. Tbh 99% of it was memorizing the quran & I hated it sooooo much. The only things I got from those classes were learning how to write & read the arabic script and getting a 2$ slice of pizza during lunch. Everything else didn't matter to me lol. I was also raised by parents who speak arabic all the time, so I learn from them too. My mother always speaks to me in arabic & I answer her in french. Same with my grandmother, but she doesn't know how to speak french, so my mother translates for her. I understand almost everything my mother says, but it's only the algerian dialect, so it's not very good if I want to understand everyone else lmao. Even if I know how to read & write, it doesn't mean anything if I don't understand a single word, so it's a bit useless... all Im good for is calligraphy art

The simultaneous lack of investment in the modern day portions by both the Developers, who understandably focused on the main part of the game, and the Players, who were given no reason to Start caring about the part of the game with the least consistent writing and the least to do, Created a feedback loop where low engagement meant low prioritization and vice versa. It came to the point where the Modern protagonists stopped getting Names and then straight up stopped appearing. Which is interesting considering the Art Book for the first game described Altaïr and Desmond as Dual Protagonists.

They put all that effort into setting it up and even interspersing it with the rest of the game. They needed to decide at the beginning whether they wanted to commit to it, not awkwardly spend the next decade whittling it out.

Here’s a list of ideas to increase the actual hub world vibes of the modern day sections.

Make leaving the Animus voluntary. Instead of scripted to certain events, it gives you a little pop up, maybe a dialogue prompt. Like, you could still get kicked for plot reasons, but having the ability to choose when to take your breaks and go see what’s up at home base would increase player agency, especially if there were changes that developed or stacked every time it was prompted. Have player curiosity drive that approach. Even if there are mandatory sections the ability to do them early and often, as near little breaks with maybe some missable or optional portions, or all at once, to get them over with, increases the sense that the Player is doing as much that affects the modern world as the ancient one.

There’s a lot of really beloved hub worlds that you don’t technically have to do anything in. The Modern Portions of Assassin’s Creed don’t have to be that way. And honestly, the fact that the part of the game that are set in stone, a sequence where the past can not be altered, is the one that feels more reactive to the player than the present day timeline is wild.

There is the ability to show the protagonist actually reacting to the missions, and have the other characters dialogue about it change if you’ve chained a couple missions together. Feel like they’re actively engaging both sides of the story

For real, the much smaller scope of the modern portions, both physical and character wise, should have allowed it to be incredibly reactive to the player’s progress through the game. You’ve made the environment and a small cast of characters already, make the clutter dynamic, give those guys a larger voice bank. Have them adhere to routines while the player is out of the Animus. Do Red Dead Redemption shit to this one environment. Make it realer than the Animus for better contrast and to make the Bleeding Effect more obvious and unsettling.

Set some dynamic effects on how much you Bleed and how many breaks you take. Maybe you could linger outside the Animus and the companions could start off nice and then after a certain period start getting pushy about putting you back in the Animus.

Whilst reading the book, it became clear that the notes I was making fell into three loose categories:

Things that were new information, or only disclosed in the book (but would still fit into the canon of the show).

Information that is confirmed in the book, or possibly explicitly stated (rather than being implicitly stated in the show). These and the new information points are in part 1 of the write up for this episode.

Things that are fundamentally different between the book and the show.

Not all of the notes fit neatly into one category or the other (there are shades of grey...). The first two of the categories will be presented within bullet lists, with a description. The last of the categories will be presented in a table. I'll make comments about anything I find particularly notable after each category.

N.B. I have made the comparisons between the book and the finished episodes that were released, NOT the Script Book. Some of the elements I have commented on can be found within the Script Book, but never made it to the finished episodes – I will point these out on their individual list/table entries.

Differing elements

I’m just going to start this section with a disclaimer – I’m 100% sure that I have not highlighted ALL of the fundamental differences between the book and the show. I read the book before I started doing the episode write-ups, and whilst I made plenty of notes in my copy, my attention to detail has become somewhat more honed in recent weeks. I really wasn’t up for reading the book again before I engaged in this write up, partly because I’m pretty keen to get stuck into the season 2 write-ups and finishing up the fanfics I have on mental hold. Also because of the information that has come to light since I read it last, the allegations made against one of the authors makes for some very uncomfortable reading in the book – the depiction of women in particular was difficult to swallow even before the allegations came to light. There are also some sections of the book that have racist, homophobic, and/or xenophobic undertones, and whilst it’s my belief that these were intended as a device to make a commentary of certain social issues in a satirical manner, I now find them simply a bit too vulgar to appreciate. With that (possibly overly sensitive) point made, let’s move on to looking at some of the book-to-screen differences in a bit more detail.

There are a couple of the points in the table that I’ve actually already touched upon in various episode and script-to-screen write-ups. Details below:

Crawly’s form (serpent vs. human) on the Garden of Eden wall.

The arrival of Crowley and Aziraphale to the Dowling house.

The resurrection of the dove from Aziraphale’s sleeve.

The second set of Horsemen.

Aziraphale’s quest for a body to inhabit.

The effect that keeping the Bentley going has on Crowley.

Chapter/episode subtitling.

Adam seeing a vision of Agnes in the sky.

Looks like I’ve done a load of the leg work for this section already! That said, there are a couple of things left to talk about that I haven’t discussed in the context of differences between source material and end product. The first of those, and it’s fairly minor, is the Bentley’s demise. In the book, the poor thing comes to a rest, slumps on its melted tyres and pretty much just expires in front of everybody present. It’s a very different end to the huge explosion we got in the finished episode.

I’m rather glad the Bentley gets an explosion for its “death”. It helps to convey how shocking, devastating, and irreparable the event is. The idea of it just sitting there alone, burned out with the flames slowly extinguishing, doesn’t feel like it does any justice to the mechanical wonder that has been an integral part of Crowley’s life for so long.

One point that I think is worth looking at a bit more is the difference between the representations sent from Heaven and Hell to talk to Adam about restarting Armageddon. In the book, it’s Metatron and Beelzebub. In the show, Gabriel take’s Metatron’s place. I can see the argument for both of these – ultimately both agencies would send the highest ranking “officer” that wasn’t the boss to try and resolve this situation, so the book’s version would be accurate. That said, Metatron and Beelzebub aren’t actually of equal standing in their respective agencies – Beelzebub is not the voice of Satan. So looking at it that way, Metatron would technically have more authority than her, respectively. And because of that, the show’s version also feels appropriate – I feel like Gabriel and Beelzebub are much closer to equals than she and Metatron would be. So which is better? Honestly I don’t know. I think probably the show version, but that’s more to do with the fact that we the audience are more associated with Gabriel and his personality than we are with Metatron. Also because season 2 – the tarmac is where it all began with Gabriel’s memories, so if he wasn’t there, how would that storyline have manifested?

Right, last up, and if you haven’t worked out which of the differences I’m about to comment on, let me make it painfully obvious for you.

vs.

Crowley’s response is VERY different in the book, isn’t it? And is a perfect demonstration of the fundamental difference between the book-version of our hero couple and the show-version. I will not bore you with my rambling, one-track minded thoughts about what the wall slam represents (if you want to read them, you can find them in the episode 2 write-up) but what I will say is that it’s obvious there’s no sub-textual sexual tension in the book version of this scene. I don’t think I need to tell you which version I prefer (it’s the wall slam, of course it’s the fucking wall slam, anybody who says otherwise is WRONG).

Closing thoughts

Well this was fun, even with the discovery that some parts of the original text are less than palatable (for me anyway). I have read done my fair share of consuming books and their movie/TV show counterparts, and I can honestly say that Good Omens season one is probably the closest adaptation I have ever come across. Even large chunks of the dialogue have been lifted from the book word-for-word. And I have to say, as an avid reader, I really appreciate that. Nothing irritates me more than a media adaption of a good book that bears little resemblance to the original text (looking at you The Shining, I hate Kubrick’s adaption of Stephen King’s brilliantly terrifying book with an absolute passion), so this has been a really refreshing experience. That said, there will always be differences between a piece of text and its visual adaptation – sometimes those differences are implemented for reasons of visual entertainment or flow, sometimes because the original text is perhaps not quite appropriate to the current day. What’s interesting about this adaptation is that the big change is the nature of the relationship between the two main characters: it’s clearly friendship in the book, and clearly love in the show. What makes this all the more interesting is that the tone and the underlying story doesn’t change, despite this pretty monumental shift and in fact I think having Crowley and Aziraphale harbouring more-than-friendly thoughts about one another makes the show more relevant to today’s audience – I will happily declare that this show would never have been as popular as it is if they were just friends, and I will die on this hill. In fact, I don’t think we’d ever have gotten a second season (or, hopefully, a third). Usually I detest this sort of fundamental change (the Pet Cemetery remake is a great example – the child that dies beneath the truck is supposed to be a boy, and a toddler at that. The producers probably thought it was too shocking for an audience to see, but THAT WAS ALWAYS THE POINT), but this one? Well, if 100K+ words (running total on this show so far) doesn’t tell you that I love it, nothing will.

As a New Yorker, I caught second-hand embarrassment watching the latest clip promoting Game of Thrones Ann [sic] Rice's Interview with a [sic] Vampire. 😭 But Jacob did his thing, as usual! 👏

Anyways, the clip itself was VERY interesting, from what I could tell with the audio + accents + French + lack of subtitles.

Sweet precious baby Louis, always the optimist in denial that things were getting better, not progressively worse. Louis of all people should know a thing or two about scar-tissue: some wounds only heal on the surface, but the trauma & PTSD can last forever.

I love how while Louis' waxing poetic about them "healing," Claudia's counting change (a la Bricktop 2.0--Louis "letting a woman count his money"); visibly holding back her frustration with their reality.

They had to pickpocket!? 😨 Louis! Don't stash Lestat's useless arse in a dump before making sure the alimony & child support checks get cleared! Like, I can understand them losing all their NOLA luggage while running from bombs & revenants in WWII Europe, but what happened to all Les' Parisian bank accounts!? You know how LOADED that guy is?! Louis, you really let your man take care of all the finances like that!? 💀

Jfc, Lou, The First Wives Club ain't teach you NOTHIN. 😒

Lemme calm down.

Now here's where the clip lost me; I couldn't understand a word he was saying in French--same, Claudia. 😅

But this bit right here really gets to the heart of the matter: "Truth and reconciliation;" them looking for the truth about vampiric origins & history (and the truth about Lestat's past).

Then we get this remark from Claudia:

I couldn't tell if this meant that A) Claudia was correcting Louis' French (Truth versus Trust, and her going "What?" cuz he got the translation wrong); or if B) Louis was correcting hers (her going "What?" cuz she still doesn't know any French). And if so, that got me wondering--Claudia lived with Loustat for 20+ years--how could she NOT know any French by then? 🤨

Like, I don't mean just through casual exposure/immersion; I mean cuz we learn in TVL that vampires are (preter)natural mimics. Lestat never learned how to play violin or even how to read or speak English. He picked it all up passively with the Dark Gift; a vampire who (barely) passed as human by mimicking them.

Which makes me NERVOUS for Claudia, if her powers are so dang low that she doesn't speak French by now. 😰

As for Louis, I had to laugh here; him calling French the "mother-tongue." Like, book!Louis was the same way about going to Paris--he wasn't born in America; he was a settler/colonist from France who got rich off of his Louisiana purchases in slave labor & plantations. Going to Paris really was going back to the motherland for him, and Louis was APPALLED when the Theatre mocked him for his French having an accent.

But French is clearly not AMC!Louis' native language (the DPDLs spoke English at home, NOT French--not even when Monsieur Bouillabaisse de Lioncourt came to dinner). And we also know from the OG pilot script that Louis knew (at least some) Haitian Creole, too, when he'd chat with Oncle Vervain Mayfair (GOD I wish they'd kept all that in!). French is more what bougie Creoles would speak to be cultured & educated & show off; not to converse with regularly.

If anything, French is more Louis & Claudia's father-tongue; from Lou's French White great-great grandfather; to the MIA Papa DPDL we never see; to Claudia's biological father "whose daddy gave her away to a mean old auntie" (and who left her for dead to die of PLAGUE in the books); to Absentee Father/Maker of the Year Lestat himself. What's more, French is the language of ANGER, VIOLENCE & verbal ABUSE in the de Lioncourt household/family/coven--Loustat only ever spoke it when arguing around/about Claudia.

So to have Louis talking in French to Claudia about mother-tongues is just hysterical, like boyyyyy if you don't stop--get Lestat's thumb out of your mouth for ONCE. 🤣