Have some miscellany

part of the fun of the original alien is the horror of the nostromo itself imo. it’s a cell of corporate greed ferrying narrowly-trained workers across barren space. it’s huge and yet claustrophobic, cockpits crammed with machinery giving way to yawning berths dripping chains and water. the supercomputer is named mother in a stroke of human anthropomorphization, but instead of providing comfort or protection, it’s only a courier between its creator and its wailing brood. ripley yells “mother! mother!” at a matronly-voiced computer that speaks calmly over her helplessness. the ship is full of endless details and patterns and unlabeled buttons and dials the audience can’t entirely make sense of; to do anything on the ship is a rigorous, technical process, and we must depend on the characters to know it. the internal mechanics of the ship are so alien that a literal alien can hide among the bits and bobs and not be noticed. it’s great.

I'd like to add the appearance of the craft for anyone that hasn't seen it

Look at that thing. We get used to sci-fi where the spaceships try to look aerodynamic and cool, and the Nostromo went in the exact opposite direction. It is an entire industrial refinery floating through the void, matching the interior of overly complex panels, cramped spaces and chimneys dripping with water, chains dangling and clinking in the factory shafts.

It's enormous. It gives the impression of being understaffed by its sheer size - it doesn't seem to fit that a crew of seven, only two of whom are engineers, can be responsible for this towering manufactory, an implicit reference to the corporate mishandling at the core of the story.

It takes the symbol of antihuman greed - the factory with its barely paid, unsupported, physically endangered workers - and slaps it directly into space. It tells you that Weyland-Yutani did not invent exploitation, but is part of a repeating cycle that never ended even once we commodified travelling to the stars.

Its labyrinthine layout, exposed piping, its ridiculous size, it all gives the alien a perfect place to hide and hunt the crew, as if the alien turns the very ship against its passengers, which Ripley then discovers was an intentional collaboration from the start. Even the vent shafts they believe they can corner the alien in have an unforseen advantage in the alien's favour.

The alien doesn't want them, their employer doesn't want them, even their very ship doesn't want them, and it's the only thing between them and the vacant hostility of space.

I think it'd be funny to have a character who keeps trying to break the fourth wall and failing

Dude's like "we can't do that, we don't have the budget this episode" but he's in a novel

Something stupid happens and he tries to stare directly into camera but he's fully looking the wrong way

Also when talking specifically about movies and TV "does the narrative respect women" and "does the camera respect women" are two different questions too.

Clone High style animated sitcom, except it's about those fuckers on the tarot cards. Strength still has the lion.

The nondescript background characters are clearly modeled on the minor suits.

There's a recurring gag involving an unnamed background character who's always carrying a bunch of swords whenever they appear getting bumped or jostled by whatever bullshit is going on in the A-plot and dropping all their swords, then being like "oh no, my swords!".

#the exact number of swords corresponds to a card which has some relevance with respect to the episode's plot for the attentive viewer (via @prokopetz)

The obligatory "the gang has beef with their eerily similar counterparts from a rival school" episode, except the rival crew are clearly based on the Crowley tarot instead of the main crew's Rider-Waite.

The tarot doesn't exist in-universe - the only cartomancy decks ever used or referenced in the show are Lenormand.

I feel like we're almost in an era of like, reverse queerbaiting. Used to be that you'd be tricked into watching a show because the story implied there'd be gay rep, but now they're using gay rep to trick you into thinking there'll be a story.

Hey, Tumblr. You like non-stereotypical depictions of autism? What about ✨ neurodivergent protagonists ✨ ? Yes? What about asexual neurodivergent protagonists that go on chapters-long rants about their special interests? You want gay characters that are important to the plot too? Then I've got the book for you! The author is gay!!! American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis, is

(via @manywinged)

Everyone is nostalgic and no one is sincere. Do you get the idea

Reboots made by people that don’t respect what they’re rebooting. Punching down before buzz feed listicles punch first. Isn’t it weird that the princess married the prince after just meeting him? Isn’t it cringe that magic exists? Irony poisoning of childhood classics. Well that just happened humour. Say something true and beautiful or I will start throwing rocks

Listen: If a movie written by AI is released, we don't go to see it. We don't spend our money. We stay home and make it flop. OK?

Even if it's part of a franchise you like. Especially if it's part of a franchise you like. You like that franchise? Probably because it had something worthwhile to say; probably because, at some point, it did something new or interesting. How do you think it will go when it just starts algorithmically lifting elements of its own back catalogue? Imagine The Rise of Skywalker on every screen forever. You stay home. You sit this one out until they can get an actual writer for it.

Needless to say, this goes for children's media too. I know that there's a philosophy that children are dumb and you can just plunk any old thing down in front of them, but you don't want a generation to grow up on that procedurally generated rubbish.

Softly filtered dead wife in movie montage but of the sandwich I had one time and can't stop thinking about

I feel like there's a necessary counterpoint to the "torment nexus" problem, namely that science fiction itself isn't free from the political and cultural biases of its creators or the capitalist incentive structure of media production. Like, every time there's an article about research into cloning extinct species, there are a bunch of comments to the effect that "There's an entire series of movies explaining why that's a bad idea." And that's true: there's an entire series of blockbuster monster movies (that very much make their money off of the spectacle of prehistoric monsters running amok), based on a thriller novel written by a reactionary, that hold that if you develop this technology, you will get the plot of a monster movie.

Like, the Cybermen were partially inspired by Kit Pedler getting squicked-out by the then-new technologies of pacemakers and organ transplantation. It's not a good argument.

The opposite of fanfic which frames a meticulous textual argument that two characters should fuck (and then has them fuck) is not porn-without-plot.

Porn-without-plot is in fact the centre point of the fucking spectrum.

The true opposite of fanfic which frames a meticulous textual argument that two characters should fuck (and then has them fuck) is fanfic which goes to enormous lengths to establish that it would be a terrible idea for two characters to fuck (and then has them fuck).

#the fact that all of these include the characters fucking implies that 'did they fuck' is a separate axis #the most interesting implication of this being that the graph would include 'fanfic which frames a meticulous textual argument for why they #should fuck but then they don't fuck' (via @slurpinator-supreme)

I mean, it's not without precedent.

no piece of teen media has ever accurately depicted the quiet psychological warfare of bullying. bullies on TV are always dumb brutes and not the evil geniuses of emotional manipulation that they are in real life. being given a wedgie and having your lunch money stolen is nothing in comparison to a classmate quietly creating a taboo against speaking to you that they intend to enforce against all the other kids. it’s nothing like continuous cutting comments from people you thought were being nice to you. that way that the work of one kid can make you feel like every person on earth silently hates you and that you are dirty, disgusting, worthless, creepy and useless. that you can have friends but many of them will not speak to you at school for fear of the social consequences on their end. how that damage lasts in any social setting for the rest of your life

you can’t even “tell a trusted adult” because you cannot begin to articulate the thousands of small transgressions you’ve experienced building to the horror of knowing your peers would like you dead. they don’t have to say it or hurt you physically. they have other ways of letting you know they’d prefer if you were worn fuel

Firefly is one of a very few shows I actually wouldn’t mind seeing a reboot of, if it was done with the right intentions by the right people. because the bones and aesthetic and premise of the show are incredible but I think maybe it was just kind of. created too early to actually fulfill the potential it had. like idk what if Firefly, but it was less weird about its female characters and half the cast was actually chinese. I just think that would be cool and interesting to see. and I want more space cowboys and frankly am not terribly picky as to how that happens and reboots are in. get all unknown actors to do it because I’m tired of looking at the same five people.

plus if it gets released on a streaming service we can even get the truly authentic Firefly experience of watching it be cancelled for no reason after season one.

“does it have to be queer”

yes, next question, unless the next question is “why”, in which case I am pulling the lever

Could it be more queer?

(To my personal assistant) Increase the sea salted wolverine’s budget

In principle, I can understand the appeal of depicting relationships between robots as a chaste thing that engages with romance in a purely intellectualised way without having to deal with any attendant biological untidiness.

In practice, if you’re going to show me robot romance, I want them to get weird about it.

“Oh, but it has to be a purely intellectual thing because nobody involved is interested in or capable of having sex” like, all I’m going to say is there’s more than one way to void a warranty.

Of course you would.

The most unrealistic thing about [media] is when [character] did [dumbfuck thing that you 100% would have done under the circumstances if you’re being completely honest].

Lord give me strength, the book I'm reading about the Hays Code is describing the "think of the children!" moral panic that led to the code, and it reads identical to essays I've read about the modern scouring of adult spaces from the internet.

History echoes itself and I am exhausted. Fucking hell.

I got to a section talking about the sheer amount of lost media that was directly "lost" (read: destroyed) because the censors culled it from the vaults or re-edited the originals to meet the Hays Code guidelines.

And now I need to stop reading and do something else for awhile, because it was only a week ago I was here on tumblr talking about how horrifyingly easy it is for streaming companies to censor their own media.

And of course all this started happening a few years after a devastating economic collapse, when the average American citizen was feeling more and more sympathetic to leftist politics, turning to mass-media entertainment to soothe the pain of capitalism. Conservatives insisted that communism was coming to destroy America through the silver screen.

So many people were turning to the arts that fundie Christians panicked, insisting that depravity in media was ruining the moral fortitude of the country and corrupting the children.

They began cracking down on sexual content, queer content, international media, anything that bad-mouthed authority and the cops and the government. They painted raunchy media as the cause of moral decline, and insisted that audiences couldn't be trusted not to imitate the bad behavior on their screens. Nothing too dark or too criminal could be shown on-screen, because what about the children? Think about the children!

History is a repeating cycle, and I am so, so tired.

The article talks about Hays censorship and then goes on to say

Because apparently we could not have gotten to romantic comedies without banning women in negligees seducing gangsters.

Y'know what evidence we have that that isn't how it works?

AO3 doesn't censor tacky porn.

AO3 has no shortage of insightful, plotty long fics. Of comedies. Of canon rewrites from a different POV that change the genre of the original. Of sweet fluffy romance stories. Of complex crossovers.

(...any of which might also be tacky porn, but there's plenty that aren't.)

Censorship doesn't spur creativity.

Pre-Hayes Code, there were movies in which women were only their for the sex appeal, for the raunchiness. There were a shitton of movies that had women swimming naked, or a whole line of women with only soapsuds singing merrily in the “shower,” or stuff like that, where it’s pretty transparent that the only reason those women are there is for men to look at them and be titilated.

You know what they also had? Businesswomen. Queer women who didn’t die. Interracial relationships. Complex women who didn’t fit into the Madonna/Whore duality. Women who had sex and weren’t punished for it by the narrative.

Censorship killed the sex scenes ... and it also killed 90% of the complex women characters. (And it killed 90% of the stories about people of color, and 90% of the stories about queer people, and 50% of the stories about class issues.)

They had romantic comedies before the Hayes Code! That didn’t change! What did change was everything else. And most of those things didn’t come back even after the Hayes Code had been gone for decades.

The thing about art--all art--is that it is based on and built off of art that has come before. All art contains tropes, motifs, techniques, and other things that come from other pieces of art. Nothing happens in a vacuum. What makes great art is how you take the things around you and use them in a skilled way. Sometimes you give it a perspective that makes it seem new, sometimes you don’t, but even things that look really new and different you can look at it and connect it with what came before and what was going on around it.

The Hayes Code lasted thirty years. That’s the length of an entire generation of writers. All of the tropes and story ideas and character types that the Hayes Code banned fell out of the screenwriter toolbox for an entire generation. And most of them never got picked up again afterwards. That’s why “bury your gays” is still a thing. Because the Hayes Code stranglehold forced writers to throw out so much for so long.