bluefall

i see people trying to hype them up too by showing off really impressive practical effects for the time, and sure, that's nice. but I unironically love seeing very obvious foam boulders bounce off people, and wooden swords clash, and bright flashes of light from "laser guns"... and it is so much better than 90% of shit today, and you know why?

key fucking difference: they inhabit it. everyone on screen is putting their entire soul into it. and I think people forget that tv is at its very essence theater, you tune in and suspend your disbelief, and you are always aware you are watching a story. if you go to a play and see someone stabbed with a very obvious fake knife, it doesn't fucking matter, does it?

because everyone's forgot that you're not there to see how good of a real-looking fake knife somebody can make, you're there to see people who can make you believe in the emotional truth of a story.

xena warrior princess is superior to every single marvel movie that has ever been made for the key fact that i can watch two actors struggling in "quicksand" which is very obviously just dirt that they were buried in up to their chests, but they are SCREAMING, wailing, crying: they are selling it and I am there for them ---

I know it's not popular to obsess over practicality in superhero comics (And BQM even included a little jab at fans like me complaining about her hair in her Batgirl solo THANKS BRYAN) (the Babscowl bothers me less than her current look though because at least the cowl keeps it out of her face)

But the fact the comics showed her actively worrying about her hair:

Then deciding to go with a ponytail sticking out to deal with this:

THEN cutting it short to deal with it:

Just made her feel really real to me. It was one of the things that made me connect to her so hard, that she felt like a real teenage girl even in the minor details like that. And the fact this was all implied, she never SAID that the ponytail was to deal with her hair under the mask, she never SAID the hair being short was to help with the mask, it was just something you noticed if you remember that Robin #25 panel and connected the dots.

It also SAYS something about Steph. The fact she cut her hair for the sake of being Spoiler shows how much more she prioritizes her life as a superhero over her civilian life, and how she took it even more seriously as time passed. It also gave the implication she likes to be comfortable, which you could see extend to her choice in a really practical costume.

Currently: Minji and Miyeong made out, Rumi freaked out, and everyone has run out of time to deal with the aftershocks—they’ve got wraiths to kill!

Celine has distributed protective bujeok, to all of them, meant to make it harder for wraiths to read or influence them, and give them something to amplify an exorcism through if needed. It won't keep them out, not by itself, she'd said, once again visibly annoyed that she isn't able to singlehandedly no-sell the most powerful shards of Gwi-Ma himself that Mira has ever seen, but it will give you an edge.

Mira rolls the little talisman around in her hand, and wonders.

"Minji, you want to do a little science?"

Minji turns to look at her from the passenger seat. "That's a very Zoey question."

"Zoey asks smart questions."

That earns a small smile. "True enough. What kind of science?"

"Wraiths can't read minds, exactly. But they can tell if you're afraid, or jealous, or angry or whatever. I'm wondering how different the listening ear is."

"You want to see if Celine's bujeok will block it? I'm game."

"Yeah, cool. Might be nice for you guys to not have to worry if I'm digging around in your heads, too, right."

"That would be nice," agrees Miyeong, but it's friendly, lighthearted. Probably more than it should be, about a Kang using sketchy occult magic, but… if Celine trusts Mira with this shit, and Miyeong trusts her, and Minji trusts her, and Rumi—

Fuck Rumi, anyway, but they can't all be wrong, right?

"Passive defense, then active defense?" suggests Minji.

Mira nods, and focuses, starting the slow, arcane murmur of it, wrapping the words of the spell around herself until it sinks into her, something almost like an audible click and the strangest feeling of weight settling just inside her right ear.

She looks up at Minji and it feels like the weight looks with her, as little sense as it makes, and she doesn't exactly hear but it's like hearing, a mild pervading sense of curiosity and—

"Are you listing medication interactions in your head right now?" asks Mira, baffled.

Minji shrugs. "It's an easy thing to think about on demand. Wanna try active defense now?"

"Sure?"

Miyeong laughs and Minji pulls the bujeok out from under her various layers of borrowed outerwear to wrap a hand around it, spinning up a quick, quiet defensive melody.

Mira points her attention back at her, again bringing the ear with her, and she almost thinks she can pick up something, a vague impression of numbers, maybe, but it's like there's a wall of white noise in the way.

"That worked. Or the ear didn't? Like, maybe if I were stronger, it wouldn't, I can tell there's something to hear, but I can't get to it."

"Nice," says Miyeong, and Mira's attention drifts over to her, unthinking, the ear comes with it, and she catches—

A starving deer may think a rhubarb patch a feast, but the leaves are no less deadly for her hunger.

Mira releases the spell, "Shit, sorry, I clipped you, Miyeong. Need to work on my aim, I guess."

Miyeong doesn't respond for a moment, but apparently it's long enough for her to decide to be gracious, because she just says, "Thank you for telling me," easy and kind.

"… you think that's your line in the prophecy, then?"

"Yeonggi used to call me that, sometimes," says Miyeong, and her voice is still kind but it's definitely not easy, anymore. "His little deer. I don't know what the rhubarb would be, though." Her voice twists, goes bright, laughing, "I'm a little spoiled for choice, really," and Mira doesn't need the listening ear to know the casual cheer is a lie.

Minji reaches a hand over the center console to give Miyeong's thigh a reassuring squeeze, but if she had any insight to offer, she doesn't get a chance; Celine's car is pulling to a halt in front of them.

Mira peers out the window, through the rain, at the four-story apartment complex, a dark shape in the storm. The lights of occupied apartments slipping out through curtained windows should feel warm, but somehow, looking at them, Mira can only see them as trapped, crushed things, fading signs of life being slowly swallowed up by the shadow around them.

"So this is it," says Miyeong, and from the way she says it, Mira thinks she must be seeing the same thing.

…Now is not the time to think of such a thing. Clearly, the summoner hadn’t yet begun their work.

She can feel it charging the air, though. The cords are being drawn, readied to rip open the fabric of the world.

“Shall I carry the chest, mudang-nim?” Rumi asks. She has not said anything of Celine’s shift into a perfectly neutral register for her—appropriate for someone she does not know, not yet—but Celine wonders if she is truly imagining the extra hint of melancholy.

“That would be very kind of you, Rumi-ssi,” Celine replies, and offers the umbrella back between the seats to Zoey. “I’m sure you saw how slippery it can get when wet.”

“Oh—right!” Zoey startles from her own head, breaking off the nervous tapping of her bujeok against her thigh. It’d be easier to keep her from getting too anxious about the upcoming conflict if she had a way to keep her hands busy, she’d said, and Celine hopes giving her this little task will help.

As Zoey circles the car with the umbrella, and Rumi starts getting the chest with most of the gear into place, Celine considers what’s left in the front seat with her, and then the pouring rain outside.

Oh, well. Her hair was already ruined.

She turns the car off, tucks the mess of amulets under her jacket, and makes for the front door as fast as dignity will allow.

Funny, but it’s almost easier, once they’re all dripping in the lobby.

She’s been in a million lobbies before, readying herself to go pull the thorn from a tiger spirit’s paw or convince a ghost to move on before it drove its living family mad from a doubled grief. She knows her role here, now. She’s more prepared than she has been… ever.

Rumi-nim is fighting beside her.

Celine slips off her jacket, and gestures for Rumi to open the chest, that she can retrieve at least part of her proper garb. Usually, she doesn’t bother to wear anything other than her own suits, but tonight, she wants all the weight of its symbols and ceremonies.

“Pretty colors,” Zoey says. Mira snorts. Rumi makes a face, like she isn’t certain if they’re being disrespectful or ignorant or just silly, and isn’t certain if she ought to correct them besides.

Celine…

Zoey follows Celine up the stairs, stopping at every floor to set wards and warnings and mystical tripwires. It's strange, how strange Celine doesn't look, decked out in her traditional garb with its vibrant reds and stark whites and shimmering golds, a million miles from the monochrome Western business casual she always wears but somehow still perfectly in-character. It's so… normal to her, like there's no line, no contradiction between the modern world of cell phones and car insurance and this ancient mythology of spirits and demons.

And prophecy. Can't forget prophecy.

"So, when you get told about the future," Zoey asks, as they finish locking a spell down around a fire door. "Is that, uh. Generally reliable?"

"Do you mean what I told you when we met?" Celine's expression is keen and knowing. "Or Kkachi-ssi's prophecies?"

"Um. Either? Both? Like, it sure seems like what you told me came true, keeping a bunch of demon shards from summoning an uber-demon into the world feels, you know, kind of important. Is it… is the future, like, set? Determinism was real all along?"

Celine makes a thoughtful hum. "Things act according to their nature. A tree will grow to a given height. If a rocky overhang bars its way, it will grow to the side instead. You can look at it now and know the path it will follow for twenty years to come. You can't guess the number of leaves it will have, or which bird will land on which branch."

"So… what Suspicion-ssi told us...."

"Moments, or choices, that our natures will inevitably lead us to, but how we respond is ours to decide. If we can understand and heed her message it will lead us to the better choice, with the better outcome. Which I recognize may sound unlikely, given the consequences of her intervention last night," and oh wow she's trying to lock it down but she's real annoyed, "but spirits have their own rules, and advice she offers in her capacity as Wisdom is reliable, regardless of what she does in her personal time."

Zoey smushes her (honestly not really sustainable) impulse to defend Suspicion-ssi, and focuses on the task at hand instead. "How do we take advice if we don't know what any of them mean? Except Mira's, I guess, but we don't even know which ones everyone else's are! Even if you and Rumi are right about yours, that still leaves me with healer, deer, or mugwort—"

"Mugwort," says Celine, as she tucks scribed paper up under a doorjamb.

"… you know what it means?"

"No. But it feels right that it's you." She opens a little satchel, holds it out to Zoey. There's a powdery herb inside, one she's been spending little pinches of as they go. The very plant in question, Zoey realizes, remembers from Celine's first few exorcism lessons at Miyeong's place.

Mugwort is as sacred as it chooses to be, Suspicion-ssi had said.

"Isn't mugwort always sacred?"

"Arguably yes, but one could distinguish between the way mudang use it, for purification— such as right now, weakening the negative influence the wraiths have left by wandering in and out of this place for weeks— and its mundane medicinal use, which requires no particular invocation of spiritual strength."

"Oh, right, uh, menstrual relief, sleep aid, and anxiolytic effects, right? Clinically ambiguous but popularly attested when used in tea or otherwise consumed orally."

Celine shoots her a glance, eyebrow lifting. "Impressive."

Zoey shrugs uncomfortably. "Random useless fact repository, at your service."

The corner of Celine's mouth tilts up. "Would the repository be so kind as to cleanse this stretch of stairwell?"

Zoey dips into the pouch and takes a little mugwort between her fingers, breathes in, focuses, and copies the short little couplet Celine's been singing as she does this. That little tingle of power tickles through her skin, there's a tiny spark of heat against the pad of her thumb as the powder burns itself up, like snuffing a candle wick, and the air smells cleaner, lighter in its wake.

"Much better," Celine says, tucking the little bag back in with the rest of her gear. And then, just like that, they're at the fourth floor, where their target is supposed to be. When they push the stairwell door open, Zoey smells ash and copper and rot, sudden and unnatural.

Neither of us would accept a plan of attack that we did not believe you would all walk away from.

The very first experience it has with the base crew is that they save it from people shooting at it, give it warm hugs, and kill the people trying to deatroy it. After that it attacks and impersonates an unknown (at the time) member of the crew. After that it gets surrounded by dogs who are angry but too scared to approach, then it changes, then it attacks the huskies, and only then does anyone in the base camp treat it with hostility.

The entire first act of the movie is devoted to establishing that they know each other with an Intimacy so deep they can anticipate one another's actions and attitudes. They have been in an isolated arctic base for months and months where they can barely leave the same building. They are in one another's personal space throughout the movie. It's a vital plot point that the Thing can immitate people down to memories and personality traits. It's a vital metaphorical point as well. It's so deeply and fundamentally superficial and factually incorrect to call them unfamiliar with each other that it implies total inattention to what is happening on screen.

The Thing is, at heart, not a movie about any singular decision or behavior creating a bad outcome. Baked into the 1982 movie is failure, death, entropy, inevitable loss. It's not a movie that's meant to have a right solution, or a right decision - but when someone comes at this very bleak story without a good grounding in horror, there's a kind of urge to treat it like a puzzle. If only they were closer. If only they communicated.

That's not meeting it where it's at, because it rests on a situation where none of those elements really exist. People acted the best they could in the circumstances with the tools and information they had - and it simply was not enough. Nearly everyone dies. Even with the ambiguous ending, whoever is human is going to die, because it's winter in Antarctica and he is hundreds of miles from anywhere with no shelter and no food and no transportation. That's the sort of horror it is, the idea that when faced with extinction humanity's best efforts won't succeed. Creating an interpretation where if we had "just" this or that is shying away from the bleakness. But at the same time, not facing up to the idea that some things really might not be solvable, that the worst can happen in spite of it all, is a necessary skill. Not one we need to indulge in constantly, but we should have that knowledge.

In brief, fandom seems to be predominantly comprised of people who only want to talk about what isn't in the media. There is a fandom for The Thing on tumble, and it's very much about ideas that come from the movie, but not about anything innthe actual film. The few times I've had the misfortune to enjoy media with a large fandom, I find almost exclusively shipping, fantasies about specific characters antithetical to the subject matter, and an almost oppositional distaste for any of the actual intended or unintended meaning in the media. None of those are a problem per se, because the world is a big place and it doesn't matter in the grand picture what people want to pretended about a book or movie or TV series. This is mostly a me problem, where I can be perfectly fine and ignore what comes across my dashboard, but this is also a me post, which means I can complain about the phenomenon.

Anyway, where I find it frustrating is the encroachment of fandom focus on what isn't in the media into my little wading pool of enjoying digging through the ideas that are in the media, when a "what if it was completely different" idea inspired by the media gains so much traction that it begins to be treated as a reflection of the text, sometimes even exiting its primary fandom, like The Thing, into general circulation. Which is how you get people discussing the "creature is misunderstood" not-present ideas of The Thing by fandoms, while effectively ignoring the vastly more significant elements of the film relating to the Reagan era 1980s, cold war paranoia, and so on. Once a fandom non-textual idea propagates far enough, it not only occludes the ideas inside the original media, in my experience it almost invariably excises anything that was challenging about it. For example, how rapidly fandom's latched onto the idea of Remmick in Sinners as a misunderstood tragic figure - rather than anything to do with what the film is saying about systemic racism. It feels like a companion behavior towards people whose take away from media like Breaking Bad, Fight Club, or Obsession is that the male protagonist is meant to be viewed in a positive light - because that is an easy and more comfortable option than for example treating any character who isn't a guy or isn't white or isn't straight as a vital, human person at the center of the film.

Hesitations Outside the Door / Margaret Atwood

All the episodes of Galavant are on the Internet Archive!

So most stories take place when Events are Happening, and this means that no matter what kind of job the characters have, they’re probably not too focused on them. Fanfics, on the other hand, often show the down time. Which means that the writer has to figure out what the hell these characters do in their jobs. Unless the characters have a job the author understands or knows well, the author is often at a loss for what to have the character doing.

So they sit them at a desk and give them paperwork. What is the paperwork for? Rarely specified. It is Paper Work for the characters Important Adult Job they have and they need to read or sign it or something. And there’s always a line about how Character Hates Paperwork. Doesn’t matter if Character is a Mafia Boss or a General or a Diplomat, here they are in an office trying to get out of Doing Paperwork.

There’s also a sense of, like, humor and mundanity that comes with it. Like the examples above, it always particularly stands out to me when a dangerous individual is griping about some paper they need to sign or something. The less you can picture Character doing paperwork, all the better to force it upon them. If Character is saddled with Paperwork, they’re usually now concerned about the physical damages their motley crew causes, because damage = More Paperwork.

Timesheets

Expense reports

Requisition requests

Budget justifications

Payroll

Performance evaluations

Incident reports

After action reviews / post-mortem analyses

Incident Action Plans

Contracts

Contract proposals / grant applications

even when the royalty look like they're just fucking off to have fun, they're doing Socially Mandated Fuck-Off and Have Fun Time

Invoices.

Intake sheets (information about new clients. The one for my firm is 13 pages and requires an hour long meeting. Then you have to do something with the info gathered)

Data entry for invoices and intake sheets.

Billing. (More involved than timesheets because you’re justifying to clients why you’re getting paid so much).

Form letters.

Taxes. Including 1099s for any contracted work.

Bank statements/accounting spreadsheets. Gotta track how expenses are trending.

Insurance documents.

General messages. Lots of office still use a paper system for missed calls and “important” stuff because it just works better than emails and chats for some people.

Cause there’s the invoice, and the follow up invoice and the we are about to have a problem follow-up invoice.

There’s the incident report and then the I swear I yelled at that worker about this don’t be mad at me if they do it again second warning documentation

The requisition form and the it has been six months now get me the fucking thing or you’re gonna hear from Cindy escalations form.

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.

That's me in the spotlight