“Many places I have been Many sorrows I have seen But I don’t regret nor will i forget All who took that road with me.” (The Last Goodbye, Billy Boyd).
“The Company of Thorin & the Fellowship od the Ring, after Rivendell”, watercolours and golden ink.
v for vendetta is a film with a female protagonist that criticises capitalism, condemns pedophilia, encourages the viewers to question their governments, has a central plot about how LGBT people are condemned in right wing societies (more than three LGBT characters are in it) and was directed by a trans woman and her brother.
why has this become a fuckboy classic
because they mistake V for the protagonist and Evey as simply the viewpoint character, wilfully ignore the part of the plot about LGBT discrimination, and concentrate on how cool V is with his mask and his government-rebelling plots.
What I find interesting is that – V is actually, imo, coded as trans, especially in the original graphic novel. Alan Moore claims that clues to identity of V ‘are all there’, which implies it might be a named character. If it was one, the only person matching would be Valerie, the woman whose journals V gives to Evey. Everything would match – Valerie was an actress, which would fit with both costume and tastes of V, and also why said letter was so important – and really, how the hell an occupant of a high-security concentration camp under constant observation had ability to write a letter, and also how a letter written on toiler paper would survive all these years, and burning down of Larkhill camp. (answer – by being written AFTER all these events).
Except, V appears to be male. Everyone is using male pronouns for him, in the movie he speaks in a masculine voice, and in the novel we do see a panel of his silhouette naked in Larkhill, and he definitely has a masculine physique.
But, if Valerie becoming V was metaphor for transition, that’d make sense.
That’s in addition to well, the fact that a lot of trans men begin their self-discovery as butch lesbians? It’d sure fit.
Why do I believe that theory? In addition to whole LGBT themes thing, and the letter thing, there’s one more reason. Well, I think this was skimmed by in the movie, but in the novel, we get a pretty solid clue. See, in the movie, exact nature of experiments performed on Larkhill inmates is kept rather dubious if I recall – we know they gave V abilities slightly above normal humans, but that’s it.
But in the novel, it’s more specific. So, what is the field of experiments that are being performed Larkhill concentration camp that they needed human specimen?
Hormone research.
V got strength to throw off chains of opression and fight back and yadda yadda, became a character who ticks off literally every single checkbox on definition of a superhero, including superpowers…
By literal fucking hormone therapy.
Administered to him, ironically, by the very oppressors.
From what I’ve read of Alan Moore’s stories, he doesn’t leave details up to a chance. Everything has a reason, and everything is interconnected with each other. And this, this doesn’t look like a bit of dark irony Alan Moore would pass up, since he loves that shit.
So, those are my reasons for this particular interpretation.
this is a really incredible
also I just wanted to add that both the directors are transgender woman, the Wachawowskis, and they also directed Matrix
Holy shot I did not pick up on this
I really don’t understand how anyone could not know V was Valerie. To me it’s as obvious as day. It’s actually somehow MORE obvious in the movie.
All of the blinds and curtains had been closed. Finn tried to turn on his living room light, and frowned when it didn’t work. He rocked the switch back and forth to no avail, squinting up at the ceiling.
Eyes started to glow in the far corner of the room.
He screeched and dropped his bag on the floor.
“… Bat… man…?” he asked finally. His answer was silence. “Are you… here about the show…? You’re here about the show. We’re — this is all above-the-board, legally speaking.”
Batman stood. At least, that was what Finn assumed happened. The eyes moved from eye level to significantly above that.
“Also legalities aside I think we’ve done a good job of being as respectful as we can within a satirical context,” he added hastily, backing toward the door. “And at this point it’s out of my hands so I couldn’t put a stop to production even if I wanted to. Which isn’t to say that you couldn’t find a way, because you’re Batman, it would just be really nice if you didn’t do that.”
“Convince me.”
It took him a minute to realize that Batman had spoken, to register that they were words in a specific order with a specific meaning. “… convince…? You want the elevator pitch?” Finn wasn’t getting a lot of useful feedback and he was trying really hard not to burst into fear tears and he didn’t understand how anyone could possibly jaywalk in Gotham.
He took a deep breath. “Right. The elevator pitch. I can do that, no problem, not a problem.” He clapped his hands together. “So it’s a show about, uh, Batman — it’s a show about you — not the real you, obviously, it’s — I’m just going to say ‘Batman’, I think you probably get that I mean Batman as an idea and not — anyway.” Finn cleared his throat, tried to swallow the lump in his way.
“The core of the idea is, uh, what if — what if Batman was just a guy. Some guy. No powers, none of, uh—” He flailed his arms into the darkness in an attempt to gesture at whichever part of it was Batman. “Just, you know, a guy. So our story is about, uh, he’s a guy named Johnny Butler — we wanted to name him Johann, you know, for Die Fledermaus, but that seemed a little on-the-nose so we went with Johnny — and he’s this blind guy, and he’s an inventor! He invents, uh, this thing, and it lets him echolocate and he can see all this stuff other people can’t see, and he makes this thing so he can fly, and, you know, other stuff. He lives in Gotham with all these crazy villains, so he decides he’s going to use his inventions to fight them! Because, uh. He can? And Robin is this child prodigy who can talk to birds, he’s sort of, he’s the Marty and Johnny is Doc, or like Penny to Inspector Gadget. That’s. That’s the basics, basically. Is that okay so far?”
“Johnny Butler.”
“Yeah! Yeah. It’s, uh, because of Johann? I already told you that. And how, you know, a batman was like a kind of valet, like a butler, so we were trying to do sort of a pun thing? There’s going to be a lot of puns. I mean, you probably saw the fake intro we made on YouTube? With the theme song? It’s all going to be like that, with the retro aesthetic and camp and the cheesy effects, we’re keeping all of that for the real show. I have this brother, my little brother, he’s really into Batman, uh, you, he collects articles and stuff, and he’s eight, and I wanted to make something that he could watch. So it’s going to be kind of a show for kids, like a funny show — not making fun of you! I can show you a script, if you want.”
“Show me.”
“Yes! Yes sir, absolutely, not a problem, sure.” He bent, and tried to dig through his bag in the dark. “I, uh — here, I think this is it.” He offered a thick stack of paper to the darkness, which took it.
“Rowsdower’s Revenge,” the shadow read.
“Wrong script!” Finn said, snatching the script back. “Sorry, sorry, ignore that, sorry. Here, this one, I think this is the one.” He handed off the other script. “I would turn on the light, but…”
Finn squinted, trying to make out a face in the dark. He would have thought that the light from those weird white eyes would have had more of an impact. But while there was definitely the pale lower half of a face, everything else was just a shape, darker than the rest of the room.
He could make out the sound of pages flipping. And another, different sound. A pen?
“Holy homicide, Batman.” It wasn’t quite a question.
“Yeah, it’s, uh, kind of like a catchphrase? Thing?”
“Batcomputer.”
“Yeah.”
“Bat-o-vision.”
“Y… yeah. It’s like — I mean, you have the batmobile and those batarangs — I don’t know if you actually call them that, but, uh. We thought, you know, wouldn’t it be funny if Batman just puts ‘bat’ in front of everything? As a joke.”
“Batman and Robin consult the giant lighted lucite map of Gotham City, parentheses, labeled.”
“Obviously you don’t actually go around putting labels on everything, it just, uh.” Trying to explain jokes to Batman was the most painful thing he had ever done in his entire life and he wanted to die.
“Johnny Butler is blind.”
“Right.”
“The actor isn’t blind.”
“He… is not.”
“Why.”
“He’s — casting is — that’s not really how we—”
“Fix it.”
“I. Okay.”
“King Tut.”
“We’re trying to get Rami Malek but he’s been pretty busy but I’ll make sure we get someone Egyptian because I can tell it’s important to you.”
“The theme song.”
“We can get a new one!”
“No.” Batman handed the script back, and Finn took it, hands shaking. “Robin likes it.”
“He does? The, the na-na-na-na-na—”
“Stop.”
Finn shut his mouth so fast his teeth clicked.
“I said Robin likes it.”
“Right.” He looked down at the script in his hands, or tried to. His eyes were adjusting, but still not enough. He brought the paper close to his face, squinting. Had Batman written notes on his script? It smelled like permanent marker. He could barely make out a few crossed out words. “You know, if Robin ever wanted to come by set after we start shooting, we could—”
The lights came on.
“Augh!” Finn shut his eyes, then blinked furiously. His apartment was empty and the window was open. He looked back down at the script, and flipped through it. The notes looked like they’d been left by a monk, taking a break from illuminating Bibles. They sat next to words crossed out and sometimes replaced, saying things like ‘mental illness is not a joke’ and ‘don’t use this word’ and ‘words with more plosives are inherently more humorous’. A note beside the description of Batman’s lair mentioned a carefully labeled ‘Historically Inaccurate But Well-Meaning Tyrannosaurus Rex’.
Finn hit the speed dial on his phone.
“Marco. Dude. You are not going to believe the notes I just got on this — okay, wait, first of all, we need to recast Batman. We need a blind guy. No, like a real blind guy. A tall one. Really tall. And Robin needs more screentime, we’ve got to curry favor with Robin. No, the real Robin. I have never been more serious. Making sure Robin likes this is going to be vital to not getting our asses kicked.”
“When I got my first cat, it changed me. There is something about holding a cat that makes your anger melt away. And if someone does something that upsets me—I have to remember my cat. I can’t keep my cat if I get into trouble.”
“I asked if Major Cabanaw had concerns for the safety of the cats. “Of course, we always want to ensure the safety of the cats, and the staff is great about keeping an eye out for them. But mostly, it’s the offenders keeping them safe. I have never once seen an offender kill his own cat. We screen them to be sure they have no history of animal abuse. But I’ll tell you this, there was a guy killed in here because he had spit soda pop onto someone else’s cat.””
Wow.
Cats now control the prisons. They now have an army.
This post went exactly where I expected. Well done.
I’m getting a lot of requests for the Macbeth story, which I’m sure I’ve told before but an old classic never dies.
Welp, might as well do something while I’m on the bus. Excuse any typos, typing on mobile is hard.
In news that will surprise no one, I was a drama school kid. I didn’t so much like to perform, but I did enjoy writing scripts and being the occasional narrator or background person.
In 5th year English class we were assigned a group project of retelling Shakespeare in six minutes or less. I rewrote the entire of Macbeth in a series of rhyming couplets, which by happy happenstance, synced up perfectly with Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” (”yooooou’re so vain, I betcha think this throne is bound to you, don’t you, don’t you”) which is what the group sung it as, while my favorite English teacher (the one who did the Lord of the Flies experiment with us) sat with his head in his hands, occasionally making noises like he was crying.
If I ever find those notes I’ll let you know, but that’s not what this story is about, but it is where it started. Cause I won an award for that hot garbage, and found myself propelled into the actual drama class in sixth year because of it and that’s when shit got weird.
First of all, everyone knows you don’t call it Macbeth around actual drama people, you call it The Scottish Play because of the well established curse. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scottish_Play)
Which is what we all being good Scottish superstitious kids did. We called it “The Scottish Play” and never spoke any lines unless we were rehearsing cause that’s just what you do. And when your school is built less than a mile away from an iron age fairy mound and was built on the site of what used to be an old laird’s house that mysteriously burned down in the late 1800s and was subsequently rumored to be haunted, ye dinnae fuck wi fate like that.
Unless of course, your name was Mister Hadley, and you were a) newly arrived from England and b) didn’t believe in superstition and c) took every opportunity possible to spit in the face of the gods and call it MACBETH like you had nothing left to lose.
And this is my stop so I’ll post more when I get home.
Okay home now, lets do this.
So Mister Hadley was a hip young thing, or at least he likely hoped he was. He would show up every day regardless of the weather wearing sandals under his dress trousers, and trying to hang out with us like we were his friends and not his students. He was, in hindsight, the exact type of smiling, friendly lech who thought Woody Allen was the pinnacle of genius and was likely writing a novel about a teacher who has a love affair with one of his students. And he hated superstition. Like, HATED. And he really hated that we kept correcting him whenever he called Macbeth, Macbeth while in the theater room. To the point where one day while standing on the stage, he got really exasperated and started yelling “MACBETH, MACBETH, MACBETH! There, see nothing bad happened! I mean, what could possibly go wrong?”
It’s subtle at first, like half the supporting cast coming down with mono the first month into rehearsals. Not an unusual thing of itself for a bunch of 17 year olds in close contact all the time.
But after that things get progressively weirder and wilder. And perhaps you might argue it was something of the Salem witch trials hysteria effect taking hold, and maybe it was. But let me tell you, it’s hard not to start having hysterics when one day in the middle of rehearsing her “out damn spot!” soliloquy, Lady MacB almost gets taken out by a falling stage light that plummets out of the darkness of the ceiling and smashes through the floor like an acme anvil falling through thin ice. It was so loud several teachers came running down to the auditorium cause they thought something had exploded, but all they found was Lady MacB standing frozen in the center of the stage covered in dust, starting at her upraised hand where she’d felt the falling metal whistle past her fingertips, and all of us staring at her realizing we’d almost watched out friend get crushed to death by falling stage apparatus. The school had to call in a second councilor after that.
And I mean, you’d think after that the school would think better of hosting this end of year play. You’d think. But after the room was inspected and repaired and the falling light deemed a freak accident we went right back to it. Persevering through random fire sprinkler mishaps that soaked the stage and scenery (not to mention the electrics), my friend Mark who was Lord MacB getting thrown against a window in a fight and falling out of it when it shattered. And several other small mishaps which by themselves wouldn’t have mattered, but when you compiled them all into one stressed out space, became completely overwhelming to the point where people left.
The cast began dropping like flies, their final grades be damned. Some others who needed to complete the class for their chosen elective the following year stuck around out of desperation. And then there were the ones like me, just there for the shit-show and to see who would be left standing at the end up. We all used to huddle together in the drama room on the 2nd floor after rehearsals, survivors of this mutual train wreck of a monument to our teacher’s ego, carrying salt in our pockets and throwing it over our left shoulders whenever we talked about the play even though we never said its name.
Mister Hadley
did though. All the time. Repeatedly. Even when we begged him not to.
Cause you see guys, this is Mister Hadley’s vision and nothing
small like 15 kids coming down with mono or having near death experiences is going to stop him. So I get
moved from helping to rewrite lines of this Modern adaptation which is
shaping up like Trainspotting meets Willy Wonka down a dark alleyway,
and I wind up on the raised podium off at the side wearing a black hat
and holding a broom. The irony of which was not lost on me or half my
friends, but hey, it’s supposed to be good luck to have a “real” witch
acting as one of the witches, maybe that’ll save us.
You might be thinking at this point, “buy Joy, what did your parents have to say about any of this, why was no one doing anything?”
Have you ever tried to tell your parents “our drama teacher cursed us all by saying Macbeth instead of The Scottish Play and now we’re all going to die”? I have. My mother said “no you’re not, dear” while my dad said “that’s nice, dear” and carried on reading his book. They genuinely did not believe us, and attributed it to “high spirits” and general shenanigans.
Until opening night that is, when the curtains lifted, and Lord MacB is standing there with his shredded arm in a sling, (there are pictures of this and I have been facebooking friends all night trying to get hold of them)
Lady MacB keeps looking up at the ceiling like she has a nervous tick, and everyone else is just plain god damn miserable and more than a little wild around the eyes.
But we get through it. Nothing else bad happens and no one nearly dies. Right until the very end, when
Mister Hadley
gets up on the stage to address our horrified looking parents to thank them for coming, says “ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming to tonight’s performance of Macb—” loses his footing, and promptly falls off the stage and breaks his leg.
And that’s the story of my schools first—and last—official performance of The Scottish Play.
ARE computers flammable? I feel like they’re probably not?
This depends entirely on how much uncooked rice you have shoved in the floppy drive.
…Ok I feel like there’s a story behind this.
There is, yes!
After I quit school, I worked briefly as a computer repair tech. Going to people’s houses or businesses, fixing their various bugs, etc. While I would rapidly decide that field was not for me because of the one businessman who needed multiple “cup holder” replacements (you know, you push that button and that plastic holder thing with the hole comes out … I think it is technically call the “Cup Depository Tray”? CD, right?), he is not the most memorable encounter. No, that goes to one of the nicest ladies I ever encountered on this job.
She called us out because her computer had stopped turning on, and wouldn’t even make a noise when she tried to push the button. One day it had just shut off while she was using it and stubbornly refused to come back on, and could we please see what we could do to fix it?
So I go out there expecting some wire had gotten loose and there was no power getting to the machine or something. It happens sometimes if a machine gets banged around enough, or if someone fiddles with it wrong or is careless putting it together, computers are finicky like that. But as soon as I get to the box itself, I know it isn’t that simple, because of the smell. I have smelled computers with dust all up in them, that isn’t uncommon, but this is just vile and, more importantly, entirely new.
I am now more curious than afraid, so I open it up and there is a mass of goopy off-white mush spilling all over everything, parts of it are burnt to circuits, there is almost nothing untouched by the mass. But by far the worst off is the A drive. That is the obvious source of the problem, and the thing has … not “exploded”, but more burst from the pressure of whatever this stuff was.
So I ask the woman if she had used the floppy drive recently and noticed any problems, and she says no, not until the whole machine stopped working. But I come to find out what she used it for.
Turns out this woman was a devout Shinto practitioner and believed that her computer (among other things) had a soul that needed to be respected an honored. Which, fair enough. But she chose to honor it by feeding it a grain of rice every time she had to wake it up and disturb its rest. For years this kindhearted woman had been putting a grain of rice into the A drive every time she turned it on or woke the thing up from sleep mode. And eventually that was enough pressure to break the drive and start spilling out onto the internal bits, where the heat melted it all and caused no end of problems.
After that it was a simple enough thing to explain that there are better ways to honor and take care of your computer’s needs, what with virus scans or defrags and the like, but that poor device was entirely lost.
I guess the moral of the story here is that you can try your best to be good and still wind up hurting people? Maybe? Or else it’s that even the most horrible out of context problem isn’t nearly as frustrating as one middle aged jerk who won’t freaking listen when you tell him that CD trays are not for your dang coffee cups!
The end~
ok but im so taken with the fact that she was feeding her computer to apologise for waking it up?? thats so sweet????
Barry and Lup have such an influence on how Kravitz handles bounties cause I just relistened to Crystal kingdom and Kravitz just snuck around trying to fuck over THB and it was like five episodes before he even talked to them and like eight episodes before he told them what his job was.
Hard cut to the san fran live show where they appear in a massive cloud of ravens, skeletal face and booming voice, declaring the will of the raven queen, with i imagine Barry and Lup posing like jessie and james behind him. Much faster and more to the point I’d say.
The Raven Queen: Kravitz it’s time for your quarterly review. In addition to pardoning three bounties, you’ve also been spending a lot of time, and I quote, “just generally fucking with people” instead of getting to the point and reaping them.
Kravitz: who are you quoting?
Lup, behind the Raven Queen: *waves*
The Raven Queen: from now on, the new policy is that you have to let people know who you are and why you’re killing them, and then get on with it
Lup, silently mouthing: it was supposed to be a compliment
The Raven Queen: however, as a compromise, I’ve given you the power to travel via a giant unkindness of ravens, to suitably intimidate necromancers while maintaining the “aesthetic”
Lup: *gives Kravitz a double thumbs up and a huge grin*
blackash26 