have a cream soda

[wontonsoupinthemorning-deactiva]

message to all bitches

please survive

[urbnite]

[neko-mancy]

just saw a "only one bed" fic with the major character death warning

[dontbreakthechain]

#i guess that's one way to solve that problem

[idabbleincrazy]

“This bed ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

[polteergeistt]

[sandy-days-and-sun-rays]

[romanceyourdemons]

it’s a pretty well-known phenomenon that you only get a couple seconds with your horror creature fully visible onscreen before it gets “chuckied,” a term coined by yours truly referring to the shift between the first and second acts of child’s play (1988) as the audience gets used to seeing the little chucky puppet moving around and consequently can no longer buy into the film’s serious slasher tone in the absence of the horror of the unknown. the tuunbaq in the terror and the dogomorph in alien 3 (1992) are also famous victims of chuckying—just like how lovecraftian horror usually falls flat on the screen, too much visibility and your scary, amorphous creature will become a very morphous puppet or cgi’d in picture. the easiest way to combat this is of course to keep the creature obscured for as much of the piece as possible; for instance, despite their oppressive presence throughout their respective works, the beast in over the garden wall is shown for less than six frames and the eponymous kaiju of cloverfield (2008) is never properly shown, allowing each to retain their mystery and danger. another route is to simply lean into the campiness of it, like the later child’s play franchise and alien resurrection (1997). in the case of the blob (1958) a mere satirical title sequence song is enough to completely transform a fairly standard creature feature into an enduring masterpiece of hokey fun. the third option to combat chuckying is for the horror creature to constantly transform—the thing (1982), the fly (1986), and aliens (1986) show their creatures in loving detail, but there is always something the audience hasn’t seen yet, something they don’t know to brace themselves for. it’s a fine line to walk, of course, but that’s the nature of the game when you want to turn the concept of the unknown into something knowable enough to bite you

[open-windows]

WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE BOOK SIGNING WHERE DANIEL MEETS GUY ANATOLE IS THE LITERAL DAY AFTER THE PARK BEHEADING DATE.

[indelicateink]

just another signing, fresh off posting incendiary lestat de lioncourt incest revenge porn, as you do

[dykesynthezoid]

Being that the writing is the most glaring and offensive issue with this season it’s logical that we’re focusing on it, but given how many aspects of the show have devolved I know it all has to go back to production. It’s one thing for individual writers to have racist bias, it’s another for that bias to completely overtake the writing in such a jarring way. At that point you have to start asking questions about the environment, and about groupthink.

It’s a production issue that no Black writers were hired or rehired or asked to stay on. It’s a production issue that there were only two women in the writer’s room this season. It’s a production issue that there seems to have been so much confusion about their timeline in terms of whether they’d be taking one or two seasons to adapt TVL. The downgrade in costuming and styling is a production issue. 20 songs for 7 episodes of television is a production issue.

So what the hell happened with production? I think there’s definite truth, at least in part, in people’s theories about the show looking for a wider audience, the impact of increasingly conservative cultural and political trends, a more pronounced interest in direct oversight by amc with the opportunity of having a white male lead and therefore greater perceived marketability, etc. That being said I do think it’s generally better not to assume intentional malice where run of the mill greed, carelessness and ignorance offer explanation. I say that only because that can be an easy gateway to conspiracy thinking.

It’s certainly easier to imagine there being one or two culprits behind these decisions, to place all the blame on the showrunner bc they’re the most visible target (not that I think Rolin is by any means innocent); but ofc the truth is always more complicated than that. We’re looking at the results of thousands of little decisions branching out and trickling down over two years, at every stage of the season’s creation.

Compared to everything that clearly went right in seasons one and two, it now kind of feels like observing Murphy’s Law in a way that’s far too up close and personal. And we only have the end result and a few interview tidbits here and there to work back from.

What’s clear is that the show’s production culture itself seems to have changed, the actual culture on set seems to have changed. It’s impossible that it didn’t when the problems this season are so pervasive. Which is disheartening for several reasons, but a big thing it illuminates is like. How delicate those kinds of spaces can be. How easily things can be disrupted, how group ideals and dynamics can be tainted by certain decisions from higher ups, how that sets the tone for every interaction to be had and every other decision to be made. A film set functions kind of like its own society. The ramifications of this change is therefore even more resonant on both a personal and political level, I think.

[seafarers-deactivated20131211]

Above Us by Katarina Stefanović

[wilwheaton]

[armandgoth]

to those who keep claiming that armand’s diabolically low screen time is justifiable, since he is not in any way the main protagonist: have you read the vampire lestat? armand plays an immensely important role in flashbacks to paris, where he is at his most desperate and unhinged self. it is a crime that they did not adapt the complexity of armand and lestat’s relationship, how armand begged for the other to love him (“what can i do to make you love me? what can i give? the knowledge of all i have witnessed, the secrets of our powers, the mystery of what i am?”), how lestat hovered between desire (finding him unspeakably beautiful) and fear (seeing how mad he was), how he saw that scared little boy in him (“in this broken child were centuries of evil and centuries of knowledge, and out of him there came no ignominious entreaty but merely the soft and bruised sense of what he was”) and how in depth he understood armand despite being utterly afraid of him. they did not show us the tower scene. no depth to armand. “love me. you have destroyed everything! but if you love me, it all can be restored in a few form”. armand shared with him his own story and the story of marius. later, as lestat met marius in person, they had a long conversation about armand and how marius perceived him as a bitter regret. where is the depth? where is that context? this is not about us getting all angry about not seeing assad’s pretty face, but he is one of the most important characters in the chronicles, a crucial part to tvl itself, and he has been completely erased from it. not even just erased, but also reduced: reduced to something laughed at and humiliated at every possibility, while being called, respectively: “a rag doll for sale”, “cruising the streets”, “tart”, “rotten”, “piece of mold”, “pussy”, “bottom twink sociopath”, and “boring to death”. hey so. uh. what the fuck?

[updownfragile]

Varda par Agnès (2019)

[lioncourtz]

Lover Boy Louis

THE VAMPIRE LESTAT 03.06 | "Montreal"

[the-breath-in-air]

I love how we get to see a version of Louis here that's like...oh okay, now I get why Lestat fell in love with him. There's real joy there. There's some swagger. There's real emotion amd connection and pleasure.

[rosefinchie]

how it all feels lately

[lestatdelioncuort]

Sam Reid as LESTAT DE LIONCOURT

THE VAMPIRE LESTAT | 3.07 "THE FAILURES"

[sugarmage]

[bellringermal]

[thyrell]

[fendalan]

Way too funny not to share

[ms-demeanor]

[optimisticrunawaygalaxy]

[thekaumidyking]

Trust Gru

[gruntsandpoetry]

Love of my life was him.

[play-now-my-lord]

sometimes I miss las vegas. It felt honest in way nowhere else I've lived has. Honest in the ways it hated you and tried to kill you. Honest in that everyone was on meth or running from meth. Honest in that tourists and locals viewed each other with open spite and tried to avoid each other at all costs. Honest in that if you just picked a direction and walked all day and laid down to sleep you'd never get back to civilization and would probably die of thirst. You don't get any of that in the pacific northwest

[play-now-my-lord]

Everyone who lives there wants to escape, but it mutilates you, learning to live there prepares you to live nowhere else on earth. It's a place where ambition goes to die. The casinos are all laid out to draw feet into their gravity, implosive forces on a tremendous scale. Twisting the orbits of daily life like an occult star. You walk into a convenience store, a laundromat, a pharmacy, and there's always someone there up front, by the slot machine, just gambling everything away. Usually smoking, often retired. They'll run out of money and just sit there for a while, not looking at anything. Every day feels like poison in the bloodstream, blackout curtains drawn against the oppressive light of the sun, wall AC caked with frost, dark all the time. Light is for outside. The lights outside are so bright you could walk onto the street with a book at midnight and keep on reading. Keeps killing birds, knocking them out of the sky. They used to detonate nuclear weapons under the earth, keeping their eye sharp for the end of days. They used to set them off above ground, too, and I imagine those people at the up-front slots, dead eyes catching distant reflections of hydrogen bombs, not even paying attention - pulling the arm, pressing the button, winning big, and going back to the busy work of losing everything