more dnd campaigns with overtly fantastic plots. full on fairy tale bullshit. like something out of mythology or a fable.
the party is tasked to retrieve the moon, which has been stolen from the sky. 87% chance the moon is also sentient.
a color that was locked away by the gods for being too beautiful/terrible/powerful is released again and a dragon of that color now threatens the land. also because it’s new it’s in fashion and everyone who can get their hands on it is wearing this color and it’s starting to give you a headache.
relieve the land of their drought by finding what happened to the rain and bringing it back.
Coraline is a masterfully made film, an amazing piece of art that i would never ever ever show to a child oh my god are you kidding me
Nothing wrong with a good dose of sheer terror at a young age
“It was a story, I learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. It’s the strangest book I’ve written”
This is a legit psychology phenomenon tho like there’s a stop motion version of Alice and Wonderland that adults find viscerally horrifying, but children think is nbd. It’s like in that ‘toy story’ period of development kids are all kind of high key convinced that their stuffed animals lead secret lives when they’re not looking and that they’re sleeping on top of a child-eating monster every night so they see a movie like Coraline and are just like “Ah, yes. A validation of my normal everyday worldview. Same thing happened to me last Tuesday night. I told mommy and she just smiled and nodded.”
Stephen King had this whole spiel i found really interesting about this phenomenon about how kids have like their own culture and their own literally a different way of viewing and interpreting the world with its own rules that’s like secret and removed from adult culture and that you just kinda forget ever existed as you grow up it’s apparently why he writes about kids so much
An open-ended puzzle often gives parents math anxiety while their kids just happily play with it, explore, and learn. I’ve seen it so many times in math circles. We warn folks about it.
Neil Gaiman also said that the difference in reactions stems from the fact in “Coraline” adults see a child in danger – while children see themselves facing danger and winning
i never saw so much push back from adults towards YA literature as when middle aged women started reading The Hunger Games. They were horrified that kids would be given such harsh stories, and I kept trying to point out the NECESSITY of confronting these hard issues in a safe fictional environment.
SAGAL: No. I mean, for example, your incredibly successful young adult novel “Coraline” is about a young girl in house in which there’s a hole in the wall that leads to a very mysterious and very evil world. So when you were a kid, is that what you imagined?
GAIMAN: When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn’t be a brick wall. So I’d sidle over to the door and I’d pull it open.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: And it was always a brick wall.
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: But it was one of those things that as I grew older, I carried it with me and I thought, I want to send somebody through that door. And when I came to write a story for my daughter Holly, at the time she was a 4 or 5-year-old girl. She’d come home from nursery. She’d seen me writing all day. So she’d come and climb on my lap and dictate stories to me. And it’d always be about small girls named Holly.
SAGAL: Right.
GAIMAN: Who would come home to normally find their mother had been kidnapped by a witch and replaced by evil people who wanted to kill her and she’d have to go off and escape. And I thought, great, what a fun kid.
It’s anxious adults who desperately want to “soften” stories. Kids prefer the real thing: with monsters, bloodthirsty ogres and evil murderous stepmothers; where the littlest brother always wins and all the villains are horrendously punished in the end. The world is threatening to the eyes of a child, so they need a fictional universe where the little people have a fair chance against the big and strong.
This isn’t specifically about stop motion but it is about how sad or scary parts of movies aren’t really all that bad- IE the 80′s movies, particularly Don Bluth’s films. (X- The Melancholy of Don Bluth, by Meg Shields )
How the children’s animation of the 80’s made room for sadness, and what that taught us.
There was a time when McDonalds used to give away VHS tapes with happy meals, and by some stroke of luck, one day my mom picked The Land Before Time. It
was the first film to etch itself onto me ‐ the way film tends to with
kids. I would recreate the plot with stuffed animals and parrot the
lines to whoever would listen; I pawed that VHS box until the cardboard
went soft.
A couple years ago, I saw that Land Before Time
was playing on t.v. and couldn’t remember the last time I’d watched it
all the way through. Within five minutes I was completely obliterated
and sobbing into a throw pillow. This is a shared experience for
children raised with Don Bluth: that as a kid, I could only clock a hazy sense that his films felt different
from Disney fare, but that the articulations of this difference, and
their ability to emotionally floor me, are something I’ve only become
aware of in retrospect.
There was a regime change in animation
during the 80’s. Quite literally in the form of Bluth’s official break
with Disney in ’79, but in a more elusive sense with the landscape of
what children’s animation during that decade felt like. For
whatever reason, be it Bluth’s departure or a diseased managerial ethos
in the wake of Walt’s passing, the 80’s were a mixed bag for Disney.
Don’t get me wrong, they’re amiable and charming films, but The Fox and the Hound and The Great Mouse Detective are not classics. And for all its ambition, The Black Cauldron cannot be redeemed on technical merit. Disney would eventually yank itself out of its slump in ’89 with The Little Mermaid ‐ but animation during the 80’s, along with the childhoods of a slew of millennials, were definitively shaped by Bluth.
That there is a dark tenor to Bluth’s work has been thoroughly, albeit perhaps vaguely, noted, often citing individual moments of terror (cc: Sharptooth, you dick). While I don’t doubt that frightening and disturbing scenes contribute to an overall sense of darkness in Bluth’s work, I’m unconvinced that they’re at the root of what distinguishes his darker tone. There is, I think, a holistic sadness to Bluth films; a pervasive, and fully integrated melancholy that permeates his earlier work.
These stories are full of crystalline moments of narrative sadness; specific story moments at which I inevitably mutter a “fuck you Don Bluth,” and try not to cry. There’s Littlefoot mistaking his own shadow for his dead mother; Fievel sobbing in the rain (a Bluth mainstay) convinced that his family has abandoned him; Mrs. Brisby shuddering helplessly after she and the Shrew temporarily disarm the plow. Other plot points are less tear-jerking so much as objectively miserable: the cruelty of the humans in The Secret of NIMH; An American Tail’s intelligent allegory for Russian Jewish pogroms and immigration; Carface getting Charlie B. Barkin drunk and murdering him at the pier.
You know — FOR KIDS!
Thematically, there is an ever-present air of death about Bluth’s work that is profoundly
sad. Bones litter certain set-pieces; illness and age are veritable
threats (shout out to Nicodemus’ gnarly skeleton hands); and characters
can and do bleed. Critically, Bluth films don’t gloss over
grief, they sit with it. From Littlefoot’s straight up depression
following the on-screen death of his mom, to Mrs. Brisby’s soft sorrow
at finding out the details of her husband’s death.
There is a space for
mourning in Bluth’s stories that feels extra-narrative, and
unpretentious. Critically, this is distinct from, say, wallowing.
Bluth’s films have a ridiculously productive attitude towards mourning,
most lucidly articulated through Land Before Time’s moral
mouthpiece Rooter: “you’ll always miss her, but she’ll always be with
you as long as you remember the things she taught you.” Disney
meanwhile, tends to treat death as a narrative flourish, or worse, a
footnote. And in comparison, even notable exceptions like Bambi and The Lion King seem immaturely timid to let palpable grief linger for longer than a scene, let alone throughout a film’s runtime.
Look at all the fun times they’re missing.
Musically, James Horner and Jerry Goldsmith’s impossibly beautiful scores are laced with a forlorn undercurrent. In particular, Horner’s tonal dissonance in The Land Before Time theme punches the Wagner-lover in me in the throat (admittedly, a good thing). Further to this, the first half of Goldsmith’s “Escape from N.I.M.H,” is reminiscently Tristan and Isolde-y. And while I’m here, I would also like to formally issue a “fuck you for making me cry in public” to American Tail’s “The Great Fire,” which when combined with visuals, is nothing short of devastating.
Speaking of visuals, backdrops of grim and vast indifference dot Bluth’s work; from the twisted Giger-esque caverns of the rats’ rosebush, to the urban rot of a thoroughly unglamorous New York and New Orleans. That these landscapes are in a state of decay is particularly dismal; there is a tangible barrenness, a lack of the warmth our characters are desperately hoping to find by their film’s end. These are depressed and morose spaces ‐ and that they are so seemingly unnavigable and foreboding makes them all the more compelling, and narratively resonant.
The way Bluth uses
color is also notable, with dark, earthy tones prevailing throughout
only to be blown out quite literally with the golden light
characteristic of Bluth’s hard-earned happy endings. Before Littlefoot
and friends reach The Great Valley, an event marked by gradually
illuminating god-rays, they must slug it out through the parched browns,
blues and pitch of their prehistoric hellscape. Like Charlie’s final
ascendance into heaven, Fievel must endure similarly muted shades until
he is finally (finally) reunited with his family and soaked in
glitter ‐ a level of Don Bluth conclusion-sparkles perhaps only rivaled
by the radiance of Mrs. Brisby’s amulet as she Jean Grey’s her homestead
to safety at the end of NIMH. Because Bluth leans into darker,
less saturated tones, these effervescent conclusions are all the more
impactful, which speaks in part to the methodology of Bluth’s
melancholy.
The plucky leads of Bluth’s early films are all
fighting for the same thing: family. From Mrs. Brisby’s persistence to
protect her children, to Charlie’s (eventually) selfless love for
Anne-Marie, these are characters in search of home. Invariably, each of
these characters gets their happy ending, but they have to go through
hell to get there, literally in Charlie’s case. In a recent interview,
critic Doug Walker asked Bluth if there was any truth to the rumor that
he thinks you can show children anything so long as there’s a happy
ending, to which Bluth replied:
“[If] you
don’t show the darkness, you don’t appreciate the light. If it weren’t
for December no one would appreciate May. It’s just important that you
see both sides of that. As far as a happy ending…when you walk out of
the theatre there’s [got to be] something that you have that you get to
take home. What did it teach me? Am I a better person for having
watched it?”
Melancholy isn’t just a narrative device
for Bluth, it’s a natural part of navigating life, of searching for
wholeness, and becoming a better person. Bluth acknowledges sadness in a
way that never diminishes or minimizes its existence; he invites
melancholy in, confesses its power, and lets it rest. Sadness is, for
Bluth, an essential characteristic of the world and living in it. That
is a wholly edifying message for kids, delivered in a vessel that is
both palatable and unpatronizing. For this reason, among innumerable
others, Bluth’s work has immense value as children’s entertainment…even
if it means crying into a throw pillow twenty years later.
So I just went with my buddy while he got a rib tattoo, and they hurt like a lot, so he’s over there grimacing and being a huge manbaby so I just reach over and grab his hand so he can squeeze it because I’m a good person who helps others
And he’s clinging to my hand like it’s a life preserver and I’m being me and talking about nonsense like Grimace from the McDonalds commercials and how R2D2 is always ready to throw hands, and whatever, and the artist keeps glancing over at me and I’m like do your tattoo bro I’ve got my buddy handled
But then I realize he’s like, looking over because he can’t tell if he’s seeing something or not, and I glance down and I see my rainbow scalemail bracelet, and how I’m talking to my buddy all fondly and I’m like stroking his arm like he’s a wounded animal, and right as it clicks in my head the tattoo artist asks in his most nonchalant voice possible, like intentionally bland, I’m just talking about the weather haha what do you mean voice:
“So, are you guys close?”
And my gay ass is over to the side internally screaming because yeah, I am gay, but like this is just me being a good bro and my buddy is COMPLETELY OBLVIOUS TO WHAT IS HAPPENING BECAUSE HE’S A GARBAGE STRAIGHT PERSON AND HE SAYS
“Yeah of course, that’s why I asked him to come”
SO NOW THE TATTOO ARTIST THINKS HE’S RIGHT AND HE HAS A GAY COUPLE GETTING A TATTOO AND MY BUDDY HAS NO IDEA AND I’M AWKWARDLY SITTING HERE LIKE SHOULD I STOP HOLDING HIS HAND??? SHOULD I CORRECT THIS TATTOO ARTIST??? SHOULD I LET MY BUDDY KNOW??? MY GAY ASS DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO HANDLE BEING INCORRECTLY ACCUSED OF BEING GAY, WHAT DO YOU DO
So that tattoo artist is like “Cool man, that’s great. Good for you.”
So then my buddy is like can I get some water, and the guy comes back with one bottle of water and my buddy takes a drink and then hands it to me, and I’m like obviously he has to lay down and needs me to hold his water so I just hold it in my hand, but turns out he was offering me water, so he turns to me and is like Colton, drink some water, and I take a drink and my garbage lizard brain is like “You’re drink sharing in front of the tattoo artist, now he KNOWS he’s right”
So we’re talking about tattoos with the artist and I mention that I’m getting a tattoo in September and my buddy is like “Yeah I’m gonna go and hold HIS hand for that one haha” and the tattoo artist FUCKING SAYS “I mean, I should hope so”
I MEAN, I SHOULD HOPE SO
I MEAN, I SHOULD HOPE SO
AND NO ONE ACTUALLY BROUGHT IT UP. I KNEW WHAT THE TATTOO ARTIST WAS THINKING BUT DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING TO CORRECT HIM. NOW WHEN MY BUDDY GOES BACK AND GETS HIS NEXT TATTOO IN THE FUTURE AND I’M NOT THERE HE’S GOING TO GO “OH WHERE’S YOUR BOYFRIEND”
had the sweetest moment this weekend with my 18-month-old baby cousin. my aunt and uncle were kicking a tennis ball back and forth and encouraging him to play. I was, as always, silently watching from my wheelchair (I’m not much for athletics anyway lol). he pointed at me while my aunt was holding him. she put him down and my uncle kicked the ball to him. instead of kicking it right back like earlier in the day, he picked up the ball and carried it to me, placing it down very emphatically in front of me. I was worried and anxious that he’d get frustrated when I didn’t kick the ball and become upset because I “refused” to kick it and he obviously wouldn’t understand why. I looked at him for a split second apologetically, expecting him to start fussing or cry when I wouldn’t do what I thought he was asking. but suddenly, he just got behind the ball so that he was in front of me and kicked the ball to my uncle on my behalf.
I teared up. he wasn’t demanding I kick the ball – he was putting it down dramatically to make sure I’d be watching and so I’d know he was helping me with my “turn.” at 18 months old, he not only noticed I was being excluded on his own, but actively brainstormed ways to include me with zero prompting from adults. It was the sweetest and most empathetic gesture towards me in months. I love him so much. my heart is melting.
bc one of our players had to miss tonight we’re playing a session as an ep of fantasy cutthroat kitchen (cutthroat dungeon)
hickory crit failed on her dish and served the judge an “eggs benedict” that was an unopened bag of english muffins smeared with butter on a plate with a raw egg and some slices of ham with a cup of milk dumped over the whole thing
so I’m thinking about supervillains (because when am I not) and that really is, like, the ultimate gig if you hate traditional work but live for the drama.
I’m not talking about your Lex Luthors or your Red Skulls or your Doctor Dooms here. not even your street level crime bosses like Kingpin or Penguin. they all have Goals and stuff and are usually down with actually hurting a lot of people to achieve them. I’m talking, like, much lower level villainy here.
I’m thinking of the peeps who just want to make some quick cash smashing up a bank or a jewelry store or some other cliched crime location. all you have to do is pick a gimmick, cobble together a costume, then show up and show off some flashy powers/tech enough to impress people. you don’t even need to hurt anybody, just spook them enough to get them out of your way while you take the cash. it’s essentially high stakes LARPing.
UNLESS, of course, you’re some unlucky fool who lives in a city with an Actual Superhero around, in which case the game suddenly becomes incredibly high risk/high reward.
the bad news is that the odds of your schemes being foiled dramatically increases, although that honestly won’t even be a problem if your local prison has sufficiently Arkham-esque security.
the good news is that you get an archenemy to flirt with!
small local supervillain resorts to desperately staging a romance with the local hero in order to boost their popularity on social media.
why do they need to boost their popularity? so glad you asked. I ABSOLUTELY think a villain with enough charisma/novelty appeal could get away with crowd funding. Kite Man has a patreon and people literally give him money to buy bigger and more elaborate kites just because he’s such a nice change from all the psychotic clowns and fear gas-spouting scarecrows and killer plants that the people of Gotham are used to. hell, most of his patrons are Gotham residents. (he thanks them by posting pictures of each elaborate new kite rig, with the caption HELL YEAH! it’s the only way he communicates and people eat it up.)
and you know what gets people interested/wanting to see more of you? tons of speculative tweets and fan art of you and your friendly local hero, who’s increasingly baffled by all of this.
but Makenzie, you’re asking, why would this hypothetical supervillain even need to crowdsource more money if she’s already out committing bank robberies and shit? SO GLAD YOU ASKED.
according to our friend google, the average bank robbery only nets are 4300 dollars. which sounds rad, but is barely going to be a dent if you’re, say, in student debt. add in your rent, car payment, any teammates and/or henchmen you have to split the profits with, the price of updating your costumes or tech, and general living costs, and I can very much believe a lot of lower tier villains are still strapped for cash.
so they’ve got to get these side hustles, crowdfunding, selling their own merch and stealing shit off of heroes during fights just to auction off to fans.
I just. really like broke villains who aren’t even particularly evil, just trying to make a buck.
anyway back to that fake romance shit cause I know y’all eat that up.
obviously heroes aren’t supposed to accept money, it’s all about the Goodness of Their Hearts, etc, but my duuuuude. there are plucky young college-aged heroes out there too and they are s t r u g g l i n g. and if people will donate to a villain’s campaign, they will ABSOLUTELY shell out for someone who once stopped a bus full of orphans from exploding.
what I’m saying is. completely and mutually staged hero/villain romance. there is not “gotcha!” moment when they fall in love for real. maybe one or both of them have partners. possibly they’re incompatible based on sexual orientation/gender. maybe they’re just genuinely not into each other. but goddamn if they’re not going to shamelessly keep their weird shipper fandom alive.
Update: he finally got the cat to the vet to see if she had a microchip
I was already on board with his sweet wholesome open-to-love-and-nurturing heart but I was fully unprepared for getting to that last tweet and seeing how off the hook HOT dude is
I one time did a campaign in DND where the entire party woke up in a trash heap, memories wiped, when a man in shining white armor approached them. He helped them up, healed them, and helped them escape what was essentially the dump and find their way into the sunlight. He told them of the tale of a wicked king of immense power who bargained for his abilities from a demon, hoping to save his kingdom, and succumbed to the evil after his wife died. The wife had a pearl necklace, and it was the man’s duty to find those pearls, because they held a magic in them that could defeat the king.
This particular NPC was startlingly overpowered at first, right a long the levels of 6 while everyone else was just starting out, and he helped them along in the most dire situations, healing, defeating, and even resurrecting for them. There would be periods where he would be gone, and the party would have to face a crypt full of mummies together, or dive into the deepest parts of the ocean and retrieve these milky white pearls that would give them the ability to help their friend and defeat the wicked king. Slowly, their memories came back to them, and that was a stark comfort for them, but the entire time, there seemed to be a piece missing.
After they retrieved 5 pearls (they broke the 6th one), they journied with the man to the wicked king’s castle, and fought their way through endless ranks of guards, undead, demons, and even a lich, until they made their way to the sacred bed chamber of the king, that they all remembered the story of from before they had awoken in that garbage pile. They opened the doors, only to find it empty, save the usual furniture, marred by scratches and the ancient scrawl of demons. The man in the white armor sighed and walked into the bedroom.
And his armor changed from white to pitch black, and the whole party remembered suddenly. That was the face of the wicked king, the face that smiled at them whenever he healed them, the face that looked stern as they suggested stupids things to find the pearls. Apparently, in lapses of the demon’s control, the king had found a way to set him self up for defeat, by bringing his wive’s pearls along with brave, powerful warriors. Every absence he felt was where he had to return to the demon’s control and become the wicked king again, but he was determined to fight himself, to rid his own evil from the world, to end this curse of immortality and see his loved one again.
I made the party fight the final boss, and they saw the eyes of a friend.
They all cried, and I am no longer allowed to DM for them.
i'll apple your turnover 