Looking Back at Wasted Potential

digging an old post out of drafts at the last second…

 

Rather than look forward to (this predated my doomerism policy)the apocalyptic corporate fascist world war three the orange ballsack is trying to start, let us look back upon the wasted potential in the recent Space Shooters films.  There were warning signs that J’brahms was too superficial and glossy to stick the landing.  I even clocked some of that stuff along the way, but chose to not dwell on it, hoping for a bright future.

Well, it’s time to dwell.  Or at least tarry for a moment.  What a wild ten years it’s been.

2009 Space Shooters, dir: J’Brahms.  This was less of a soft reboot and more of a chubby reboot of the series.  Turgid?  If this reboot lasts more than two hours, seek medical attention.  But it had an emotional through-line that was visceral, and big visuals that spoke to the giant scale of apocalyptic content in my dreams.  It felt legit.  Hokey, overblown, but legit.  I especially liked when they retconned Quinoa Djinn to play up his conflicted half-human heritage angle.  That part at the Fulcan Science Academy when he turned them down to join Space Fleet – badass.  The lens flare was a bad sign.  Maybe it was the poison at the heart of the whole proceedings.

2013 Space Shooters: Into Batchness, dir: J’Brahms.  This movie took a part originated by a rich corinthian adonis and gave it to a member of an underprivileged race – one of the cantina aliens from episode 4.  It was a radical move to appease us SJWs, and I don’t want to come off problematic here, but he just didn’t have the charisma to carry it off.  I swear it’s not because of his compound eyes!

2015 Space Shooters: The Fuck Actually, dir: J’Brahms.  This was an interesting one.  The first two movies in the stiff reboot were both squarely focused on the crew of the Starship Galactica – Captain Kenobi, Quinoa Djinn, Lieutenant Neytiri, and the rest.  This one introduced a whole new cast of characters, as if maybe he was trying to walk back from the heat generated by the casting choices in Into Batchness.

It also played up scientology and the cool powers it gives you, which was an interesting choice.  Dark scientologist Kyle Ron wants to give everybody body thetans or something.  Ray Palpable and Finn the Human form the heart of the movie – new friends on a big adventure.

It was a return to form – a strong emotional momentum and big apocalyptic visuals, tailor made for me.  The actors made all the difference, because the script was actually very flimsy.  They told the story with their faces and the guy at the lens helped make that happen.

The warning signs here: When Finn ended the film in a coma, it felt like an insurance policy that would allow them to write him out of the sequel if the racist backlash to the trailers proved dangerous at the box office.  I was extremely fucking leery of that.

Plus the lack of time spent with character development – even compared to the first one – was maybe a hint the director might be a soulless scumbag who was good at playing heartstrings with visuals due to experience directing hallmark commercials.

2016 Space Shooters: Tokyo Drift, dir: Justin Lin.  This one returned to the characters Space Shooters had started with so memorably, but something about the commercials put me off and I never got around to watching it.  Nobody I know suggested I’d missed anything.  It had Idris “Heimdall” Elba and motorcycles, which were a setup for the spinoff series “Hobbs and Shaw.”

2017 Space Shooters: TemporoMandibular Joint, dir: Jack Ryan.  Abbey recently pointed out that this movie caught a lot more flak from squalling fascist baby boys than the previous scientology-oriented entry in the series, and that it was a bit mysterious.  My own feeling is that they were already primed for revolt by their previous casting-based tantrums and something about the moment in US politics made it feel like go-time.  I seem to recall some billionaire rapist emboldening a lot of domestic terrorists at the moment.

Anyhoo, Jack Ryan turned in a weird but interesting movie.  I loved a lot of things about it.  But again it had a new character who had sparked controversy with nazi bitch boys landing in a security coma at the end of the film.  And I felt like the main characters – Ray Palpable and Finn the Human – were weirdly lacking in agency through almost the whole run time.  At least there were strong hints they could come to dominate the plot in the coming sequel / grand finale.  This was two questionable things that loomed as possible issues in the last movie, but could have been easily moved past.

2019 Space Shooters: Rule of Rose, dir: J’Brahms.  It didn’t happen.  They used the security coma to separate out our girl Rosie from the main cast and bury her in the background.  Finn’s character never developed beyond the first movie when he went to rescue Rey from the big laser death planet.  Ray just got shuffled through the expected paces and landed alone with no found family, just an orphan like at the beginning of her movies.

Her scientology powers were given a dramatically uninteresting excuse lifted from early fan theories.  A beloved villain from an earlier iteration of the franchise showed up with zero fanfare and couldn’t help but fail to elevate the proceedings.  I didn’t see it myself, but I have all of this on good authority.  I’m not even going to pirate it.  It’s just sad.

Live long and prosperity be with you, Space Shooter fans.  I’m sorry J’Brahms turned out to be another false messiah like Josh Weedlin before him.  It just doesn’t pay to like celebrities that much, but even for non-fanatical types, this was a sad one to watch playing out.  I feel you, kids.  I feel you.

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Superhero Violence

Sure is fun when superheroes punch.  Nobody gets brain damaged or killed by it.  Biff bam boom.  This is less true when you get into edgier edges of the genre, like martial arts films where the punching goes on for hours and eventually some people get killed.  But if Captain America is punching a guy?  Spiderman?  Batman?  They just fly away and bounce, knocked out.  Beddy-bye time.

This was my problem with R Batts, as much excitement as that revisit to batmannery generated.  The initial trailer showed him beating on a guy to the point where IRL he’d be looking like Emmett Till, emphasizing that by having the other dudes in the gang watch the violence in mute horror.

This comes up in my dreams.  Last night I dreamed I was Spiderman, and I had to beat these super-powered bad guys.  But when does a beating stop?  In comics and movies it stops with the KO.  In my dreams, much like in real life, a person isn’t necessarily going to lose consciousness before the point where they become crippled or die.  So I punch this guy until he’s at a disadvantage and he’s still tusslin’.  Then I push his head against the ground hoping he’ll black out.  Instead his superpower finds final expression when he phases through the ground all the way to hell.  I said, damn, tell me he didn’t die!  I don’t want to kill people!  But his girlfriend was like, no, he’s dead.

The dream followed him into hell then, where he woke up feeling refreshed, the damage of violence falling away.  But he was in hell, so more tussling ahead.

My husband never liked superheroes because he identified more with the kind of weirdos they fight against.  The late Wesley Willis was not consistent about this, but it did come up a lot in his poetry.  Fighting with superheroes, not thinking of yourself as the person they would save.  This was not my point of view growing up.  I could be a superhero in my imagination.  I’m starting to feel it tho.  The idea one can punch this fucked up world into making sense is absurd on its face.  The face you’re punching.

Now we have Watchmen, The Boys, Damage Control, etc., looking at the other side of superheroics, with varying degrees of success and varying degrees of horror content.  I’m not really into those either.  I’m just pointing out a thing, not making any case for a way to address it, or saying it needs to be changed.  In the vast realm of comics I haven’t read, there is almost certainly one that would make me say Yeah, that’s it, but I’m not enough of a comic fan to be all that curious about it.  Feel free to drop recs anyway, or just talk about related subjects.

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It’s a Gas

What did ’60s people mean by “it’s a gas”?  Something like “it blows my mind, it’s trippy, it’s exciting,” I think.  Wasn’t there.  Were they thinking of inhalants, huffing gas fumes?  Or laughing gas, at the dentist’s office?  Probably the latter.  Wait, no, maybe it was just about the fuel to make a hot rod go – mostly about the excitement.

Whatever the answer, life is a gas, and it blows my mind, and it’s trippy, and exciting.  Too much of the last one, unfortunately, but one can abide.  I think of the laughing gas.  I laugh under stress sometimes, like when I was a six year old shepherd in a school play and lost it completely, or when I annoyed my husband by weirding out at the hospital.

I remember when my homeboy was trying to go on a road trip, with me and my brother, and his car gave up the ghost at freeway speed.  We were slumping to a stop while a chu-chunk sound played to the tune of “when johnny comes marching home again.”  I started laughing.  I remember when we did manage to actually undertake that road trip, and a map put us on something one would barely consider a road, with giant chunks missing and boulders in the way, in the rain in the middle of the night.  The gas tank had a “remaining miles” display which was ticking down from two to one to zero super slowly as we struggled up a gradual incline that never seemed to end.  Inappropriate jokes, stifled laughs.

We finally crested that hill as dawn broke and the remaining miles jumped up to ten, gravity helping us out.  I hope we all crest this hill together, and in the meantime, I hope my coping mechanisms don’t get too annoying.

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Pitfalls of RP: A Fistful of Eastwoods

I actually wrote this ages ago, just finishing the last bit and posting it because I have nothing else at the moment, going bonkers working on everything.  So tired and wired and yarded out…  Anyway, classic flavor me.  Enjoy.

***

What happens when a tough cool guy that don’t take no guff meets another tough cool guy that don’t take no guff, and one of them gives the other one guff?  Something that is not cool, guy.  Something like the opposite of fun.

In real life, we often have to accept affronts to our dignity, minor and major, in order to avoid destructive conflicts.  So when we play RPGs – when we create a cool character to identify with – many people want their character to be a badass punk who takes no shit.  The problem is that an RPG is not a truly consequence-free environment.  Yes, you won’t necessarily die or end up unemployed or jailed if your character insults the wrong person.  But you can ruin everyone’s fun – including your own – and harm real life relationships.  RPGs are collaborative entertainment.  Your fun should not detract from that of others.

And this becomes much worse when more than one player is a hardcase.  Any disagreement can grind the game to a halt or destroy it altogether, if neither character is willing to back down or even disagree with civility.  It also serves no purpose dramatically.

When you see a character of this type in a movie, they get away with it because the Universe created by the writers is full of unreasonable people who can be put in their place verbally by the Eastwood type and his snappy comeback.  When two PCs draw swords or break up the adventuring party over a trivial matter, what does that mean, from a literary or dramatic standpoint?  Only one thing: both characters are assholes.

Neither of them can be the wisecracking guy who just keeps it real in a world of weak-willed phonies.  It was a questionable aspiration in the first place, dependent on all other PCs and NPCs to support the idea by diminishing themselves.  And once it’s put to the test, the illusion shatters.

Think about it.  Very rarely is there more than one Eastwood type per movie.  Recall times when it’s been attempted and how that went.  I haven’t seen The Expendables or its sequels.  But I can remember some cringe-worthy writing when this is the idea.  When the writer wants both of the show’s heroes to be unstoppable badasses, some plot contrivance must keep their rivalry forever unresolved.  Badass Cop One is arguing with Badass Cop Two, when their fight is interrupted by the Hardcase Police Chief, and so on.  The best way to keep this from going sour is to write both characters with a reasonable limit to their ego.

A variation on this is the snarker whose feelings are easily hurt by snark.  One of my best players had this problem to some extent in real life and imported it into (and even exaggerated it in) their characters.  I think they’re from a culture where everyone insults everyone else constantly, and they all imagine everyone’s cool with it, but inside of human heads, that culture has produced a jacked up pile of sad.  But my sample size is one, so maybe it’s just them.

The following list of traits are not necessarily bad traits in any given character, if you take off the “never” and “always” from them…  Eastwoods never take guff, always get the last word, never stop fighting, never submit, and are never afraid.  They always have someone to blame for any plot occurrence which was on any level humbling, and are aeternally spiteful about it.  They dish but they can’t take.

Anyway, this kind of shit is why I do not miss GameMastering.  I do not have to collaborate with bad writers to make my story happen.  Eastwoods, yer attitude bores the hell out of me.  It’s so played out.  Noli me tangere.

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Gotdam Aliens

Main post for day isn’t ready yet.  Lil dreampost for you instead.  What kind of recurring dreams do you have?  I have, over the years, occasionally dreamed of Aliens.  The most remarkable of those dreams had me as Sigourney Weaver in BA mode, doing gymnastics to get away from the mother alien.  But it got too exhausting and I gave up hope, letting her get me.  The mother alien gave me an abortion with a clear plastic tube and some kinda gizmos.  Good times.

Haven’t had an Aliens dream in a long long time, but I did the night before last.  I was in some kinda scifi scenario, on a space station maybe?, and a single alien caused so much ruckus the whole structure busted apart.  The survivors were left floating in spacesuits.  I found my cat Hecubus, who in this dream was still a shaggy kitten, floating in space – without any protection, exposed to the void!

Somehow he wasn’t dead or exploded, so we got him to some kind of space vet.  I ended up at a spaceport bumming around waiting for a flight.  I found out I was supposed to pilot the spaceship, but realized I’d forgotten my wig, so I went to see if I could by a bandana for my bald-ass domepiece.  This is the first time I’ve ever had a dream that directly related to gender expression issues from my waking life.  About how one would expect it to go.

I was late getting back to the spaceship and Lemmy Kilmister made fun of me.  He also complained there wasn’t enough time to finish cooking this roast suckling pig, so the only way to keep the meat from going to waste was to freeze it, which would keep it from cooking up as nice when it was thawed.  He was giving my vibes of a tall metal dude from my high school who had same last name as The Elephant Man.

I’m so tired but I can’t sleep.  Good daynight.

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The Bestiestiest

Big Spoilers Ahead.  If you thought you were going to read the Best Story in the World without spoilin’, read this not.

OK.  The post before this I was still trying to work out particulars on the Best Story in the World™ and came to a point where I had to chuck a not insignificant amount of work in the trash.  Maybe to be retrieved in future for a different occasion, but it won’t work for the best story in the world.  I needed something immediately and persistently more mysterious and uncanny.

I could dig through Grimm and try to come up with modern retellings of multiple stories, several of them, and pick the one that works the best for this requirement.  But we’re real close to the wire – this event begins March 1st!  So I’m gonna hafta freestyle more.  My husband is working on a story of his own, themed around the idea of a missing person, and sometimes we like to share a theme, so he suggested I do something with that.

I decided to re-use the setting I’d developed for the Henchpuss story – a big housing project with a strong presence of organized crime – so that someday the Henchpuss story could amuse people with connections to this one.  A child went missing in this area and police sometimes harass or shake people down using that as a pretext.  Nobody thinks it’s justified – but is it?

MCs will be a guy who lives in the building and a private citizen investigating the missing child.  I like the idea of the characters from Henchpuss never leaving the building until certain dramatic points in the story, and this one can be the same.  Guy who lives in the building as PoV character, has housing despite no job, because of a disability.

I think the MC sometimes sees the girl, sometimes sees a monkey, doesn’t know if the girl sightings were hallucinating about a monkey.  Maybe the monkey ends the story with some Murders in the Rue Morgue type of shit, wearing a pretty pink dress lol.  Boy I’m tired.  Lemme see…

You know what?  I’m gonna poke at Grimm for a set amount of time and see if I spot something that could have these ideas stretched over the top of it.

The White Snake:  A servant takes a lil bite of his king’s forbidden snake dish and gains Beastmaster™ powers.  He uses them to get a favor from the king and goes on an adventure where he uses those powers to get the love of a hot princess.  But I know what it means.  To walk along the lonely street of dreams.  HERE I GO AGAIN ON MY OWN.  GOIN’ DOWN THE ONLY ROAD I’VE EVER KNOWN!  LIKE A DRIFTER I WAS BORN TO WALK ALONE…

But seriously, this isn’t too bad.  Guy gains some wisdom he can use to his advantage – secret intel about the mysteries and criminal hijinks in the project.  He uses this to accomplish goal of resolving missing person mystery, and is rewarded with a hot prince.  Actually, totally workable!

The Girl Without Hands:  A lotta divine intervention in this one.  Devil wants a maiden fair and tricks her dad into cutting off her hands because reasons.  She goes out in the world and a king falls in love and gives her silver hands.  King has to travel and Devil messes with the postal service, yadda yadda, girl is out in the wilds.  Angels help again, King finds out about wacky misunderstanding and hunts down his baby boo, angels help him, and they meet up again and live happily ever after.  Also god does exactly the kind of faith healing in this story atheoskeptitypes always complain that he can’t do.

You can really tell the Grimm Bros actually did the work they said they were doing, and documented stories from across the land – not just writing their own and ascribing them to people from such-and-such place – because they often evince very different values or attitudes about men, women, religion, etc.  I don’t like the part of Europe this story came from, wherever it was, because the story is bad religious values – piety to the patriarchy taken to the point of egregious violence, being meek as hell to get impossible rewards from heaven.  Fuck that shit a lot.

But the love in it was easily the most moving.  And the girl was the main character!  Make of that what you will.  Also the main character was disabled, to a point, so relevant..?  Angels grew her hands back tho.  God cannot tolerate cybernetics.  But those kooky kids really loved each other.  I weep.  I cry, but angels deserve to DIIIIIIIE.

The Queen Bee:  Three princes gotta wake up three hot princesses from slumber with magical bullshit.  The youngest prince is nice to animals so they help him wake up the princesses.  All three get a princess but nice boy gets the hottest one.  Too many main characters.  Three brides for three brothers.  I don’t see it.

The Goose Girl:  One of the biggest flaws in Frankenstein is classism, and possibly also racism against the Irish, but very prominently the story has repeated instances of the only worthwhile people being upper class in origin.  If the character is a servant and good and fair, it’s because they descended from “finer stock” and only became a servant through misfortune.  This story has the same trope in spades.  Princess rides far away to marry a cool prince, but her wicked servant is jealous and bullies her into giving up her princessly raiment and treasure, and having to assume the role of servant.  A cool talking horse has to get killed and with his head nailed to a wall is still able to speak, giving the king a clue that the real princess is stuck tending geese.  So he takes what he perceives as the true princess and chucks her in an oven until she confesses the situation?  Get tortured, maiden fair.  The story ends with the nasty brutish lower class girl dragged around town in an iron maiden until dead.

Leaving aside the class angle, this is a changeling story.  Characters reversed their rightful roles but were ultimately given their correct rewards.  Is my disabled boy supposed to have a cooler thing going in life, gets it back?  No.  No, this doesn’t work.  Cool magic in the original story, if terrible values and unlikable characters.

The Golden Bird:  In a kingdom ruled by a greedy asshole with three incompetent ratbag sons, the king finds out about a cool bird he wants, and sends his sons to get it.  They fuck up monumentally, with two sons ending up at the gallows and one going on a misadventure with  cool magic fox.  The fox knows everything and has ungodly superpowers, but as a fox he has bad self-esteem, so he always has a human do shit for him.  He helps the least ratbag prince go on a magic adventure to get the cool bird, but prince’s incompetence repeatedly threatens to ruin the endeavor.  In the end, the least ratbag wins everything, and releases the magic fox from a curse, and they all live happily ever after.  Except the dead incompetent ratbags.

I like this one, aside from some amount of annoyance at how the least worst prince conducted himself.  There was some sorta clever stuff happening, it’s zany, it’s action-packed, and has more detail than some of these stories, which are a bit slight.  But I don’t even think it’s worth the effort to map this one onto the story I’ve come up with.

White Snake?  But I’ve made up my mind.  I ain’t wastin’ no more time.  ‘Cuz here I go again.  Here I go AGAAAIN.

Disabled boy can’t make ends meet because his disability benes keep getting cut off.  To get by he takes work for tha Projects Godfather.  He finds out something he was not meant to know, which helps him solve the case of the missing person, and get the sexy prince.

In the fairy tale, servant boy succumbs to curiosity and eats that white snake.  I feel like the symbolism here could be taken in a sophomoric direction.  Maybe he finds out about gay stuff going on in project?  And the Godfather is like, you’re one of us now.  This would be ironic, given what the Godfather gets up to in Henchpuss.  Maybe not.

What is the equivalent of the animal whisper network, in my version?  Secret tunnels in the apartments, maybe?  Secret chatroom?  Mobchat 2.0?  Little black book of mob activities?

He uses that resource to exonerate himself from a seeming wrongdoing, gets favor of boss.  He uses that favor to just permanently excuse himself from the job.  Then he gets involved with investigator boy, and uses his secret insight to help solve the missing person case.

He finds out about people having problems throughout the project and solves them, in exchange for unspecified future favors.  Three fish, the Ant King, and raven chicks.  He feeds the last ones his own horse.  “One good turn deserves another.”

To get the hot prince, he has to do dangerous tasks.  What risk is there in investigating the missing girl?  Original tasks were:  Get ring from bottom of sea (fish helped), Pick up a bunch of grains (ants helped), Get an apple from the tree of life (ravens got it).  Then he gives Prince some apple and they live happily ever after.

What dangerous thing could he be doing that involves helping people who can pay him back, resulting in mystery solved, and wuv, twue wuv?  Lurking on a bulletin board isn’t risky.  Is it?  Crawling around in secret passages that are used by mobsters would be.

I wanted the mob princess to be gay.  Maybe first thing he does is find out she is, because.. something.  She lost her cellphone and didn’t put a lock screen on it?  No…  In the secret passage he witnesses a girl pick her pocket.  He’s suspected of crime but is able to talk the guilty girl into giving up the thing she stole, in a way that doesn’t implicate her.  He lets Princess know he’s gay and she says she owes him – unspecified promise of future assistance number one.

The whole time police are harassing the tenants.  But somebody else becomes involved:  sexy investigator man.  How do I do this?  Somebody makes MC feel like little girl might be in the building, so he risks going into the tunnels.  While he’s in there he finds out about some people in tough situations and ends up helping them, for unspecified future assistance.

Three fish:  Somebody or group of somebodies that can help him with equivalent of the first task to win the sexy prince.  What is the first task?  Maybe… convince him that answer to girl’s disappearance does have to do with the building, so he’ll keep coming back?

Ant King:  Used legions to pick up grains as second task.  In Whitesnake this was when the princess wasn’t satisfied with first feat, seeing the servant as too lowly, and asked him to do a second impossible thing.  Mmm…  ugh drawing a blank here.

Baby ravens:  Get the apple from the tree of life.  The last task, allows happy-ever-after with love interest.  Solves the mystery?

Maybe I need to decide for myself what the resolution to the mystery would be, and to what extent the supernatural should be involved.  I like the idea of referencing Rue Morgue with a monkey in the mix.  What happened to missing girl?  What happened?  What would feel satisfying as an answer to the mystery?

What happened to Laura Palmer?  Too dark.  Should be dark.  I dunno.  I don’t think Frost or Lynch knew at beginning of series.  I ain’t goin’ out like that, as they say.  Gotta do somethin’ proper.  What do I want to say about anything, if anything?

I like people being compassionate and kind; I hate cruelty and greed.  My highest values.  Anything in that?  I’d like the mob boss to live through this one so he can be killed in Henchpuss.  If girl is missing because somebody did something evil, they draw the big ace, so it can’t be the mob boss.

Something terrible should be going on.  What does it have to do with the monkey?  Who did what to whom?  Who was the girl to them?  Competing theories could happen.  Girl was chasing the monkey or lured by the monkey to some horrible person.  Obvious thing would be rape and murder, which is dire as hell.  What other motives could a freak have to disappear a baby?

Spell components?  Sacrifice to the elder gods?  That could be a competing theory, whatever turned out to be true.  A false one could be that the sexy investigator did it so he could get something out of the victim’s family.  What would be a surreal abstraction of the idea of horrible stuff befalling a child?  I think monsters are the go-to.  She was gobbled up by a monster.  Another alternate theory.

What else could work as a metaphor for that?  Transformed into an object, as being murdered to satisfy a bastard’s perversion is the apotheosis of being objectified.  Transformed into an object and destroyed.  What kind of object?  What kind of destruction?  How would it be discovered and what would come of it?  How might it be turned back upon the killer?

The monkey is a murderer in Rue Morgue.  In Argento’s Phenomena a Rue-inspired monkey kills somebody near the end of the picture.  Maybe the monkey is the killer’s familiar, but rebels and kills the killer.  Killer transformed into something a monkey could kill.  Maybe a snake.

Fairy tail-ish but not surreal enough at the moment.  Ugggggh.  Through the darkness of future past the magician longs to see…  I remember that dream where the chicken lady said she used to shed like a bonfire.  Was girl turned into a chicken?  A lil fuzzy chick?  Does killer turn into a snake when he goes to eat chicks?

This isn’t feeling best ever.  I need the best everness.  Something iconic.  Something that grabs you by the short and curlies and slaps you around.  An indelible image.  What can it be?  Hellraiser had its puzzle box, its hell priest.  Maybe an iconic villain?  Yeah, like the ghosts in Kairo, like the mumblecore hypnodracula in Cure.  If he sees you, you just know that you are going to die.  Don’t let him even know you exist.  He walks like a burning pillar, like a lightning strike that refuses to fade.

Like Frank Booth’s weird friends in Blue Velvet.  I loved that scene.  That could be like… the suspects.  The Project Godfather’s friends.  The snake is in that crew.  Get invited to the party but don’t stay til the end.  I think that’ll be Princess’s contribution – at the mob party, she’ll keep MC from having to stay til the end and get taken up into the company.  The Unseelie Host.  The Bacchantes.

Part one of the book, MC eats the Whitesnake ON HIS OWN / discovers the hidden passages.  He opens up a door into his own apartment so he can come and go through them as he pleases.  Finds out about Princess getting girl-hustled and convinces Godfather to cut him loose – can’t take the fear of working for the mob.  Anxiety disorder?  I dunt know if I should be writing a mental condition far outside of my own.  Many people have kernels of disorders and with a smidge of research can write them effectively; gonna need to give that more thought.

Anyway, in background of this part, glimpses of girl and beginning of police harassment.  Maybe it culminates with, right around time of Princess saying she owes him, connecting the police activity with his memory of seeing a girl, wondering if it’s the same.  Also, should establish the mob suspect weirdos.

Part two of book, MC finds out bout sexydude investigations.  Has to protect him from running afoul of the mob, keep him around with hint girl might be in or near building.  Keeps trying to find out more about girl leading to favors owed.  But sexydude grows frustrated.  Somewhere in here should be more red herrings about the weirdos.

Part three of book, MC &/or sexydude go to big weirdo party and have to be saved by Princess.  MC ends up alone, having to save SexyDude and solve mystery.  This all get back to the need for some kind of interesting way to mystery, to menace, to horror.  Should people be dying?  Disappearing?  Might be necessary to establish stakes for the scariness.

I think back on Killer Bob putting that one character’s soul in a doorknob.  That kinda sucked.  I wanna be surreal but I don’t want that.  It’s killin’ me.  I guess the key thing is making any given piece of nonsense feel profound or emotionally significant, or have it speak to one of the mundane emotions one doesn’t normally experience in art, which thereby acquires a profundity it doesn’t normally possess.  sdijorsiejgijreojehow do they do itwfpijprijgpoirjgi

Leonora Carrington’s writing benefits from literally being dream scenarios, as do older surrealist films.  Maybe I can just think of the whole fucken endeavor as being a dream.  Start it with “last night i dreamt of manderley again” and then delete that when i’m done with the draft.  Maybe that’ll help jailbreak my mind.

Somewhere in the building a serpent moves, made of negative space, worming its way through lives and experiences, watching for vulnerability, or gliding by indifferent, until the day that it isn’t.  Ride the snake.  The ancient snake, baby.  The snake is long.  Seven miles. rjeoijgoijrigrefRip it up and start again.

How can I think when I’m burning the candle at both ends?  Every day is work of one kind or another all day long.  I take my breaks when I can but that ends up feeling like too much, like some responsibility is falling through the cracks.  Gotta go fast like hedged hogge.

Snake eats the chicks.  Snake eats the chicks.  How do you see them.  What do you see of them.  Through the walls.  What’s it all look like.  What does it look like.  What is a snake like?  A scary snake.  Regular snake ain’t great, but they’re just an animal.  What’s a human snake like.

Maybe everybody is an animal, that’s why becoming the Beastmaster is useful.  Animal associations for the whole cast.  When MC figures out what animal you are, he gets an advantage.  Maybe he sees a young Henchpuss and figures out the catness.  Maybe the ravens are the fuckup boyz from Henchpuss story, still children in this part of the timeline.  Teens anyway.

I walk forty-seven miles of barbed wire, got a cobra snake for a necktie, got a brand new house by the roadside, made out of rattlesnake hide.  Got a lil chimney there on the top, made from a human skull, Come on take a little walk with me honey and tell me who do you love?

What is the apple from the tree of life?  It’s the bomb that will bring us together.  It’s something that brings boys together at the end.  It’s a cure for poison?  When SexyDude gets snakebit?  Sounds good.

I think Angela Carter should be my guide.  I need to re-read some of the short stories from The Bloody Chamber.  Yeah, that’s good.  The downside is that those stories are explicitly fantasy, working in well-trod cultural archetypes that are a lil less accessible in a contemporary setting, without going “urban fantasy” – which is decidedly not my aim, whatever this all sounds like.

Alright let’s think, if I was going to take Carter and bend it Lynch of K. Kurosawa, how could that look?  Funny that I cannot help but think in pastiche.  A true child of the post-modern era, like all the fascists who benefited from helping the public view bigoted opinions as being valid truths, but coming from my own liberal schoolmarm / hollywood underdog story -programmed point of view.  I will say, in my defense, that I do this less on projects that are more specifically for following my own stars.  In this one, I’m trying to build to somebody else’s tastes, based on what I know he likes.

Way distracted, as usual.  Back to the point, Angela Carter but more contemporary and dream-like.  That doesn’t seem too inaccessible.  Y’know, it really still comes back to the issue, coming up on being a crisis, of not knowing how I want to depict the surreal elements of the story.

Snake mans.  The Godfather’s frank boothies.  A candy-colored clown they call the Sandman.  I think this godfather is black.  Maybe Dominican?  Just to avoid a ton of research he can be pretty amurricanized.  Villains of color can be cool, as long as that isn’t all the PoC in your story and they aren’t living down to stereotypes too badly.  I like the idea of him having grandiosity, bombast like the horror emcee characters in the Tales From the Hood movies, played by Clarence Williams and Keith David respectively.  Welcome to hell, motherfuckers!

His guys all run criminal enterprises in the project.  There are two stores in the building, let’s say the loan store and the bodega.  The loan store is a combination payday loan / loanshark operation and convenience store.  The bodega is the only place to eat something besides expired snack food stolen from the back of a semi in Chinatown.

I love naming criminals, but I’m overly tempted to call one Sheisty, like Sheisty Pete, Vincent Sheisty, John Forsythe Emanuel Sheistington the IVth.  I resist the urge.  Here are some ideas: Frederick Paz, Elvira Columbia, Don Commodore, The Disease, Salvage Sirloin, Crotchy Carolyn, Bobby Yomama, Sam Pham, Seeds Ballinger, Markethands, Gulliver Briscomb, Telly Felony, Lachrima Christy, Wretched Fitzgerald, Simone Kovacs, Zinnia Driver, Policy of Truth, Armando Ciniegas, Dario Jefferson, Rashida Mix, The Definition, Fuckbucket Gallego, Norris Lemonde, Yolanda Biggs, My Mormon Cousin, Snitchy Britches, Brittany the Witness, Cold Bicep, Salad Tongs, VHS, Hernan Bonanza, Tori Lameness, Felicia Fix, Jolene Roxbury, Sandra Impious, Nerdwad, Billy Blaster, The Hookup, Graham Torwulf, Laundromatic, Laura Suffolk, Dickvein Jackson, Sir Tossalot, Sizzle, Maryjane Datsun, Sotto Voce, Slim Delivery, Skinny Kimmy, Georgette Lewis, Mikki Maclemore, Fallon Frankenstein, Maddie Iberia, Dexter Slocum, Ivan Grigoriy, Vladi Hubcaps, Bumpin Booty, Seymour Panties, or Cristina Salmonella.  Drop more in the comments or tell me if this list has any faves.

On the other hand, Frank’s boothies may have worked better for lacking names.  I think only one of them had a name?  Maybe I just use the name for my own purposes and leave them mostly unsaid in the story.

This is all useful thought but isn’t getting over the crux of the problem.  I’m not sure what to litcherally do to evoke the kind of mystery and surreal horror my husband likes the most…  I broke down and went several rounds with an AI (deepseek) to try and boil down some lessons culled from the greats, and this is what it came up with:

“To create a Lynchian surrealism in writing, focus on immersing the reader through vivid, tactile descriptions that make the surreal feel tangible and immediate.  Let the surreal elements operate as symbols of a deeper truth, but resist explaining that truth, allowing them to function with their own internal logic.  Anchor these elements in the characters’ emotions—their fears, desires, and traumas—so the surreal feels like an extension of their inner worlds.  Finally, leave the metaphysics unresolved, presenting the surreal as glimpses of a larger, incomprehensible reality.  This approach makes the surreal feel more real by being vivid, symbolic, emotionally charged, and ultimately unknowable.”

I could ask it to make that more concise (I’d already asked it to make it more concise, but you can keep going with that stuff), but it’s important for me to understand and contemplate it.  I’m not giving you the whole back conversation, but suffice it to say, this wasn’t just me asking “hey whatcha think about david lynch” and pressing go.  I gradually ratcheted down what I was most bothered by, most trying to find a way past.  Basically, what do I literally do on the page to communicate surrealism, without it coming off trite, lightweight, like some fantasy.

First part – take advantage of medium to include sensations you wouldn’t have in a movie, just vividly felt, immersive writing.  Resist explanation – to do this I need to know what the truth is for myself before i present the illusion.  Focus on emotional realities, intense feelings people can have in the mundane world, as motive for their entry points into the surreal….   … . . .. . .    Yeah, I’ve had a similar thought before, but it was escaping me as I beat my brains against the keyboard.

Alright.  The reality is … The housing project is a spiritual puzzle box, a trap that lets supernatural forces feed on different aspects of human souls.  The supernatural parasites don’t understand themselves any more than they are understood by the hosts – operate like animals on instinct, despite powers of speech etc.  I could come up with classes of spirits like the angelic hosts.

first sphere:  seraphim cherubim thrones.  closest to the greater reality above the puzzle box.second choir:  dominions virtues powers.  enforce the will of higher powers or operate the functions of the box.third sphere:  principalities archangels angels.  i wonder why there’s a lower tier of archangels and the highest of angels are also called archangels.  that’s like there being local priests called cardinals, or infantry squad leaders called generals.  gotta dig up pseudodionysius and bust his chops.

Why is the box there?  Machines naturally emerge from the spirit world like crystals from chemistry like organisms evolving to fill vacant niches in biomes.  A giant stepped on the earth, and from its burning footprint emerged complexity.  A throne made the shape, cherubs buzz above the fire like flies, seraphs connect the giant to every footstep it has made.  Virtues became the machinery of the box, powers prevent anyone from escaping into the spirit world, and dominions interpret the will of the seraph to rule over lesser spirits.  Archangels go between dominions and angels, which are the main run of parasites, principalities rule over mortal institutions, clans, gangs, etc.

What does this have to do with animals?  I remember when I was researching demons for The Septagram I also researched angels.  As the goetian demons in the story were supposed to be fallen angels, and I’d noticed that the descriptions of some of those demons were quite close to the depictions of some angels, I assigned former angelic ranks to the demons that appeared in that novel.  All that’s to say, I know angels as classically depicted sometimes have animals aspects – six wings, three faces where one is a bull and one is an eagle, that kind of shit.

Maybe all humans are animals, like, in their souls.  Henchpuss is really a kind of cat man, the foolish boys are ravens, somebody else is fish, somebody else is the ant king.  I dunno.  Is this something that all people have before they even come into the box, or something that develops once you’re there?  Is the little girl actually becoming the monkey?

The angels are parasites.  Some would just exist invisibly causing problems for people, or have weird manifestations like stickers notifying people of debts owed or repossessions, drugs that replenish themselves just when you were most desperate, light fixtures in weird locations that burn your eyes.  The archangels and principalities would be more human-like – the Godfather, the owner of the loan store, the owner of the bodega.  Is Princess half angel?

So the snake is a snake is a snake.  Maybe he’s actually a dominion – seraphs have a serpentine aspect, their go-betweens could share this.  He makes human babies into their animal forms and gobbles them up.  But this should be the truth underlying some visual metaphor?  It obviously already is a visual metaphor.  Still I think I could work better with an idea of an underlying reality that will never be explained on the page.

I think this is perverse.  Usually authors will not do this kind of thinking in public, leaving a trail where nerds could track down the answers to all questions and leave people going – oh, this is unmagical as hell.  thanks, i hate it.

But fuck it, we ball…

What does it mean for a person to have an animal soul?  What does it mean for a person to have a soul?  The animals pretty much have to be metaphors for people’s souls, which might be glimpsed visually one way or another in the story, but are not true reality themselves.

This dominion angel snake just eats the souls of children for food.  Om nom.  Serving a seraph means he has more access to the world above than other members of his choir.  He’s aware of his insignificance and that of others.  Humans are nothing to him.  When he interacts at the weirdo party, he may be aloof to others present.  He should have the power to control all lesser angels with a word – the mob boss, the princess, the cockroaches in the hall.  He should have power over fire.

Bro collects souls like you do in Dark Souls – sits on em.  Do they ever digest?  Reduce to nothing?  He’s a snake full of eggs but they ain’t his babies; they’re victims having their dreams slowly digested.  God damn I’m tired.  Ugheuhfuhushdhdhgfghghghl.

I got a lot more thinking to do and not a lot of time to do it in; might come in the form of sketches, which i scan and upload later… I dunno.  Tomorrow, scene ideas.  David Lynch said if you have 70 scenes you have a movie.  We’ll see.

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The Bestiest

Big Spoilers Ahead.  If you thought you were going to read the Best Story in the World without spoilin’, read this not.

In the post before (the post before) this, I grabbed a Grimm Bros fairy tale at random, like the Wizard of Oz core of Wild at Heart, Alice in Wonderland-ish aspect of Blue Velvet, and tried to spin it into a contemporary tale.  I turned Puss in Boots into an LGBT crime story.  Now I wanna try to infuse it with all of the things my dude likes, from other posts.  Here I go…

Not yet.  I still don’t feel ready.  OK, a big recurring thing my dude likes is a sense of mystery, but what can be mysterious in this?  In original Puss, how a cat talks could be a mystery, but the story isn’t interested in it, so it isn’t, and in my story he isn’t a cat.  Maybe a combo of little magical elements can add up to that.  I know he generally doesn’t go in for what would be called “magical realism,” more just surrealism proper.  Ugh.

Surrealism is the challenge.  To me what’s great about Lynch is the surrealism, because it carries a sense of profundity.  Something that feels special in a very undefined way.  Maybe undefinable.  Most simply, can I make it feel like a dream?  I’m gonna skim my dreamposting.  Before I do that and before I forget, one element I just came up with and might use:  Boss has a vault with some unknown treasure in it, he sometimes goes in and comes out smoking.  Is it a weird drug stockpile, or a gate to hell?  Daughter is tempted by it at the end but resists and leaves the mystery unanswered, leaves with the boys.

Alright dreamposting…  A few surreal bits.  Main one I thought might work is the boy who accidentally names the antagonist in a video game after himself, and sees that reflected in adult life.  A lot of patchwork environments of grubby weirdness.  Some perv stuff.  Celebs I do not want to include.  Characters with deformities or disabilities.  Messed up animals.  Sense of obligation to menacing paternal figure, shades of The Freshman.

Still not feeling ready.  It occurs to me Puss is kind of a wizard, and he fights a wizard during the story.  Maybe the Wizard and Henchpuss can be actual wizards, Henchpuss being a wayward apprentice that comes to kill his mentor.  “Someday you’ll be killed by an apprentice junior.”  Later on has opportunity to teach some tricks to Princess or Boss and declines to.  What would wizardry be here?  Getting away with absurd things, like our original cat?  I dunno.  Henchpuss should at minimum have prior familiarity with or knowledge of Princess and various key figures in the Underworld.

Maybe the story within a story can feel magical.  Start with Boss as kid playing video game against himself, refer back to it in ways… keep intercutting flashbacks to that, or make him rediscover game as an adult?  So that’s three magic things.  Godfather’s vault, Henchpuss+Wizard being wizards, and Boss’s save game haunting him.

Maybe just plotting things out with more details will suggest to me what the magic should be.

Opens with Marlon Graf age nine playing video game.  Accidentally names enemy with his own name.  His character has the name of his mother.  He goes ahead and plays the game, being a practical kid and unbothered by foolishness.  Some indication of the ghettoness – he lives in the projects.

Marlon’s friends Jared Henke and Colin Gordon get tangled up with a mysterious sorceress.  There’s another kid there that they don’t see the face of.  Sorceress is named Majel Billy.  She gets them tempted on some turkish delights shit.

Grown Marlon gets dragged by Jared and Colin into doing a crime.  They go to a different part of the projects from the corner where they live, and break into a guy’s apartment.  It’s just to steal his supply of Thing X, but they end up killing him.  What about the assistant?  Something in circumstances causes them to split the goods.  Jared takes the treasure, Colin takes the money, and they leave Marlon with the gun – and the understanding he’s to kill the witness.

Marlon says I didn’t even want to do this.  What am I doing here?  Assistant introduces himself, David Coter.  I didn’t want to be a victim of violent crime either.  You know, if you trust me, I could make you very wealthy.  Just don’t get me killed and I’ll let you live.  Are you sure that’s all you want?

Later Marlon gives gun to Jared, saying “you’re gonna need this to watch your ass.”

David tracks Marlon to his home.  Are you sure that’s all you want?  Dude, get out of here!  I’m going to make you rich, because you saved my life.  If being rich is crimes, please don’t.  You won’t have to do a thing.  What can I say to make you go away?  Gimme those cool boots.

Jared comes by Marlon’s pissed, “Somebody got the loot!  The sorceress is going to be big mad.  Watch my six.  This was your fault.”  He goes charging down to a place where he gets ambushed and killed, while trying to roll David.  Echoes of death of David’s old boss.  David sees Marlon and gestures for him to stay out of sight.

The killer congratulates him and he takes him back to Godfather and Princess to keep his head low.  “Thanks for restoring Thing X to me.  You’ve been rewarded with your life, so this is fair.  But I haven’t given anything to your boss.”  “Let him operate in the project, and we’ll make sure you don’t get hit again.”  “Deal, but I simply must meet him.”  “You will.  He’s busy guy.”

David calls Marlon.  “I had to do that, you understand?  I’m so sorry you had to see it.” “Alright but are we goddamn done yet?”  “Please let me make it up to you.  I mean, I took your cool boots.  It isn’t fair.  We aren’t even.”  “Don’t kill my other friend.  No more killing.”  “OK.  Also let me make it up to you.  I got you into the Godfather’s graces so you have a pass for at least one fuckup.”

Comes by with a gift – game cart from a pawn shop.  It has his old save on it!  You mind if I stay and watch?  Bonding.  Colin comes around and David hides in the bathroom.  Bathroom flushes and Marlon says something wrong with toilet, goes to check and Colin startles him barging in, but no David.  Did he flush himself down the toilet?

Colin says “Jared got aced because that weasel got away.  I don’t blame you, not like you’d ever been in that position before, not a bad person…  But we gotta make sure we don’t get caught.  Let’s never go anywhere near there again.  Here, have some cash monies.”

..

NEIN.

This run at the particulars is sucking.  There are some potentially funny bits, it could be reworked to be a lot more interesting.  And the fundamental plot wasn’t bad, I am very likely to use this idea in the future!  But I am realizing this will be less about mystery and horror than about action and crime, which is not going to be the best story in the world for my guy!  And I can’t bend it far enough in that direction!

Last ditch desperate new attempt tomorrow.

–

No Politics?

I’m thinking I might wanna stop doing political posts for as long as I’m able.  But I’d be going against my remit as a FtBlogger to not do freethunk content, so I think… art with good principles.  Atheistical or progressive or whatever, but just narrative art, or autobio, or some visual art.  I don’t know.  It’s just that thinking about specific political issues is getting me way too mad, and I say regrettable things when I get too mad.

And more importantly, I get close to breaking my own doomerism policy, and upsetting people who are already having a bad time in life.  So it’s time for me to step back for a minute.  I will still probably post that dubious shit when I feel moved to do so, hoping that doesn’t happen.  Rest of the time, just stories and birdposting, etc.  Might also say some stuff about religion, if I can keep politics out of it.

One last political thing.  I had call to look at the final tallies of the popular vote.  That increased the numbers of both sides, over what it was when the race was called.  In the end, gross creep had gotten substantially more votes than before.  But if you think about things that would have reduced his numbers in 2020 – covid, wildfires, etc – it wasn’t necessarily that big of a difference.  Meanwhile, Harris had substantially narrowed the gap.  Dems were slow to get counted for whatever reason, but they only lost the popular vote by about 2 mil, when the margin when the race was called was more like 4 mil.

I just think that feels slightly less brutal than it did when the shit was raw.  Still totally fucking asinine clownshoes horseshit that so many USians thought the most transparent con man in human history was gonna get them a good deal in life.  And abject foolery that any leftist non-voters thought they could “send the dems a message” without strangling US leftism in its cradle.  A shame we all have to pay for their foolishness, but that’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.

Last time around the leopard-eaten faces were antivax covid victims.  What myriad shapes will their misery take now?  “Arab Americans for Peace” and other people who snubbed dems for Palestine come to mind.  If Harris had won, you could sit there feeling smug about how she was just as ineffectual and crappy as you thought.  Since she didn’t, you have to watch gleefully nazi fucks showering Israel with genocide money like they’re at a strip club, while also watching essential functions of the US government (and every human right) fucked to death.

Finding out how bad leopard people will feel, how many of them are going to suffer or die, it’s a cold comfort we’ll get to indulge in a lot, for a long time.  Meanwhile, keep fighting how you can, and take care of yourselves however you can, because that is part of the fight too.

–

Besteningeningening

Big Spoilers Ahead.  If you thought you were going to read the Best Story in the World without spoilin’, read this not.

By the time this post escapes my queue it will be just a few days before I get started on writing the Best Story in the World™ (for my husband).  As I’m composing this like ten days ago, I’m just going through my thoughts on the story in a public way, to get blog content out of the deal as well.  I hope by the time you read this I’ll be a lot closer to having this sorted out than I do as I’m writing it.

The latest scoop is that I should be able to take a fairy tale and heavily rewrite / modernize it.  Downside, one I know he likes a lot is The Seven Ravens, and I feel like if I use the most obvious one it’ll be less thrillening.  So lemme check on some other ones…

A lot of them don’t really have the pathos to turn into a really compelling story for adults.  They’re just “here’s some wacky shit that happened.”  The ones with real stakes are probably all taken…  Well, I’m going to change this a lot anyway.  What could I do to Puss in Boots to make it feel more like compelling narrative, where the ending is earned, instead of being doled out by a magic cat upon some lucky bum?

The boy who inherited the cat should have to suffer a lot more, so his fortune at the end feels like a magical transformation, reward for a bad time.  Taken abstractly, this then becomes a story where there are two characters – one a sad mess, one with cool skills who is always trying to help the other, and is rewarded at the end with that help becoming more permanent.

It starts with the boy saying he’ll kill the cat, and the cat says naw, let me help you out.  Which is weird.  But in terms of a modern scenario, I could see that playing out in a context of war, or organized crime.  Crime is less bitter for me to contemplate, so yeah, some kind of mafia thing?

Puss opens with a business dude bequeathing his possessions to three sons, maybe I have three partners in crime kill a rival and split his possessions.  One gets the business, one gets the money, and the last gets a henchman.  He’s like, what good is a henchman?  I should kill him before he has a chance to stab me in the back.  But Hench says I didn’t like my old boss anyway.  Gimme a chance and I’ll make you phat loot.  Hench asks for some cool boots and uses a zany scheme to make money off that, idk.

Henchpuss’s first scheme was to get catch elusive partridges for a king that loved partridges, and then to lie that his boss was an earl who had bagged them as a gift.  The king gave Henchpuss gold.  This reminds me of the Count of Monte Cristo, where somebody is going to use treasure to pretend to nobility they don’t have.  I think I can come up with modern mafia equivalents.

Henchpuss keeps partridging for the Godfather until he’s ensconced in his inner sanctum.  He overhears that the Godfather and his Princess are going to the lake, and tells his Boss to go bathe in the lake.  He steals his clothes and then cries to the Godfather that Boss’s finery got jacked by banditos and he’ll catch cold in the lake.  Godfather gives Boss finery he never previously possessed, and Boss gets cozy with Princess.  This scheme is a little more outlandish, but I think I can do it.

Literally the same day Henchpuss runs ahead to a fiefdom ruled by a magician, convinces the people in the fields to front like it belongs to Boss, and tricks the magician into making himself into a conveniently edible mouse.  Godfather Princess and Boss are still spazieren gehen and roll up on the fields where the people pretend it all belongs to the boss.  By the time they get to the magician’s castle, it’s no longer the magician’s, an Henchpuss says welcome home, Boss.

Boss and Princess get Godfather’s blessing to marry, Boss inherits the Godfather’s kingdom as well, and he makes Henchpuss into his Underboss.  The end.  This is the problem, as I said earlier.  The Boss’s only moment of suffering was getting Henchpuss instead of grander prizes, and his only virtuous deed, for which he was rewarded with a kingdom, was sparing Henchpuss’s life.  Doesn’t feel earned, not to a modern audience.

I think a natural sideplot, in turning this into a mob story, would be for the Boss’s other brothers from the beginning to recur as characters who mess him up, cause big trouble…  Y’know, Henchpuss is kinda reminding me of Yojimbo, in that he farms out his magical service rather than being a boss himself.  Altho unlike Yojimbo, he has loyalty.  Maybe I could lean slightly more Yojimbo in having him fake service to the other brothers, and betray them in the end to his chosen Boss.

For some reason as I’m running through this all, I find myself thinking of the two lessons of Haitian Creole I took in DuoLingo.  Imma mange some mango ak fwomaj…  Brains are the worst.

Problem is my dude specified he isn’t interested in crime stories, back in the previous post, and that’s where I’ve gone with all this thought.  Can this be tweaked?  I think the key thing is that my husband does not relate to greed as a motivation.  He wants things to make him happy, but does not want an amount of things that would require mobster loot, so mobsterism is unrelatable.  Could I replace the greed motivator?

What does my dude even want, aside from surcease of his various pains?  What’s a relatable goal?  It’s why he likes horror – the only goal is to survive, and this is relatable, I think, to living with chronic illness.  Hm…  Survival as the goal?  Is being gangster that dangerous here?  Is there any other motive he could find relatable?  Lemme think of his fave stories again…

Cure has a cop battling a guy that kills with hypnotism.  Gotta stop bad guy, because it is your responsibility.  Mulholland Drive has wannabe starlet falling in love with amnesiac girl, trying to have a career and love, while a very fucked up secret threatens to flip it all.  Hm… not very usable.  Perfect Blue has a wannabe starlet being stalked by murderous obsessive(s) that make her question herself and reality.  um…  Silent Hill 2 has a guy get a letter from his dead wife, and he goes to meet her in their special place, only to be confronted with his dark secret in surreal survival horror circumstances.  Motive: Investigate an impossible thing of great emotional significance…

My Mafia Puss in Boots is lacking supernatural mystery.  Maybe that can suggest a better motive for the action.  Contemporary setting, mobsters doing dirt, what magic can be happening?  Maybe the gangsterism is imaginary, like PvP in a video game, and there’s some question of what’s real vs. video gameness…  Been done a lot.  Kinda tired.

But a number of stories he likes involve that “through the looking glass” other world aspect.  The one where it’s most metaphorical is Blue Velvet, but that’s also one where it works very well.  Jeffrey’s innocence at the beginning of that story is not compatible with the mobster idea.  Or is it?  Maybe the Boss is just trying to fake it til he makes it, coerced by circumstances and sheisty other brothers into criminal world.

I’m kinda liking that, but I’m still in mobland.  The whole thing is taking shape in my head – kinda baroque, but ultimately can be boiled down to a simple story – just like he prefers.  But it’s in mobland, which is not his preferred milieu.

When I do gangster content in my stories, I prefer to keep it lo-fi, janky and skanky.  Like the furry scene in Centennial Hills.  That opens the door to eccentric freaks like you’d find in Blue Velvet, which feels magical even if the supernatural isn’t invoked.  You know, I may be pondering the mafioso because of my recent experience with JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.  I’m thinking, I like the idea of a mob princess in the vein of Trish Una.  Hm hm hm…

I can’t make this self-indulgent!  This MUST indulge my husband, above all!  Argghgghhgghhhghhg!

Well, it goes without saying then, that Henchpuss and Boss are going to be gay, and get together at the end of the story.  That’ll be big big husband points.  I might as well ride this Grimm Bros rocket to its natural conclusion, and switch gears at the last minute to something easier if I have no choice.

To that end, plot notions:

Henchpuss is a cool gay hustler in the criminal kingdom of Godfather.  Boss is a guy whose best friends are no-good scum that try to do a hot score by jacking Henchpuss’s boss.  What if they’re corrupt cops and Boss is just on a bad ride, like Training Day?  No, that makes Boss a cop, and I’d rather not have a protagonist cop again.

What if his best friends are undercover cops and he isn’t?  Lol.  Um… No…  OK.  No… Maybe… I can fold in the Wizard.  They should be in the Wizard’s crime family, which turns Henchpuss’s mousification of the Wizard into a betrayal of Boss’s original boss.  And maybe that crime family could be tha cops?  I feel like a crime story without cops is lacking…

But it isn’t supposed to be a crime story, not really.  Alright, so.  So let’s see.

The Wizard is a drug dealer who has done real well for himself in some limited market, like… a college campus?  Wait, I already did that in Mitosis.  Could this connect to the Mitosis Cinematic Universe?  Don’t be silly.  The Wizard is a Faginesque mystery man who has monkeyboys do crimes for him.  The brothers are monkeyboys turned onto a hot score – jack Henchpuss’s boss.  Boss didn’t know the only way to do that was to kill him.  Why wouldn’t they also kill Henchpuss?  They ask Boss to do it and he cheeses.

Henchpuss says buy me some boots and I’ll make you a bank full of money.  Boss says I’ll settle for not getting killed by rival gangs, but sure, have some boots.  Henchpuss scores some fat loot for Godfather and says it was Boss’s doing.  But mob bosses don’t usually love somebody doing crime without permission in their territory.  Let’s say.. Hm.. what can the partridges be?  What is Godfather like?

The obvious thing would be if the partridges are a vice.  Drugs, drink, weird porn, um… Guns?  Expensive watches?  Cars?  Is he on some Gone in 60 Seconds nonsense?  No, that’s cars, which my dude also finds boring.  What can Henchpuss get with nothing but boots, and impress a mob boss?  Lab-grown diamonds with fake pedigree as coming from more valuable blood mines?  Cool designer drugs?  Man…

Samurai swords?  Comic books?  Funko pops?  Used underwear?  Candy?  Expensive coffee?  Tobacco?  Fine art?  Maybe Henchcat’s starting boss was the guy who usually supplies the stuff to Godfather – but no, if he said Boss was supplying around the same time the usual supplier went dead or missing, Boss would be number one suspect.

Maybe it could be a switchback where instead of saying it was Boss, he says it was another brother.  Then when…  No, this doesn’t work either.  Unless… He says Boss stole it from other brother, and this is actually Henchcat getting revenge, while boosting his new Boss.

Mob Boss goes after other brother One.  This isn’t in Puss narrative originally.  What did come next?  Puss ensconced himself in King’s household while continuing to enrich his boss by selling this supply.  But that don’t work because Godfather would feel entitled to this supply.  Maybe Henchpuss just gives entire supply to Godfather and gets big brownie points.  He just asks permission to operate in town, promising not to hit any of Godfather’s enterprises, and it’s granted.

Henchcat overhears Princess lamenting Godfather expects her to marry so she can make male heir for family line, realizes she’s gay, and hatches scheme to have Boss do a lavender marriage to her, but doesn’t spring the deal yet.  Back at Brother Two’s place, B2’s manipulating Boss into helping him avoid mob wrath, but plans on making him take the fall for the score getting jacked, when the Wizard inquires.

Boss gets messed up and almost killed by the Wizard, Henchpuss gets Godfather to save him, and while in their graces he gets fresh finery.  Wizard disappears, killing brother Two to cover tracks.  Henchpuss discovers a clue, pretends to be Boss to get into the Wizard’s inner sanctum, and defeats him somehow.

Then he tells Boss to take credit for whacking the Wizard when Godfather asks, and Boss gets Made.  Henchpuss ends up having to do some difficult jail time but keeps advising Boss on lavender marriage scheme.  When he gets out, he gets with Boss romantically.

Godfather is biggest remaining threat to everybody’s happiness.  In Puss the King dies, bequeathing kingdom to cat owner.  How will he get taken out here?

It occurs to me that Boss is still a bozo letting Henchpuss do all the work.  What does he do to deserve it?  In this version, I think what he’s doing is being beautiful and romantically available to Henchpuss, who is the actual main character – if not the PoV character at the beginning of the story.

Godfather should pay for his misogyny and patriarchy.  Actually, let’s have this be the moment when Boss and Henchpuss get together.  Godfather finds out Princess is gay and is about to beat her or something, when Boss does his first brave thing and distracts Godfather – by kissing Henchpuss in front of him.  Godfather freaks out and goes to shoot them, leaving him open to Princess stabbing him in the back.

Boss is now Godfather and Henchpuss a consigliere.  Or are they?  I don’t get the impression they wanted to be criminals in the first place.  Maybe the gays all just take the money and run.

So there’s Puss in Boots as an LGBT crime story.  That’s pretty cool, but hardly what I was expecting.  But I suppose that means it would be unexpected to him as well, and therefore surprising or compelling.  Now to see if I can inject things from his “fave stuff” lists, reduce influence of “most hated stuff” list.

Aha!  Looking at older posts gave me some hot notions.  Commenter Ian King suggested a crumbling old gothic estate as a location, which doesn’t fit too well, but what about… a council estate?  What if the whole story including rival gangs is much more small potatoes / low rent, and the whole thing takes place in one housing project?  That fits me and my husband’s interest, as poor people, in more familiar environs – in avoiding glamorous depiction of wealth and power, of writing the world as we know it.

Then the name can just be the name of the project.

Getting Bullied

On the post Getting Terrorized, I talked about this a little, but not as much as I’d meant to.  Our country was taken over by your high school bully.  This is what has happened.  There are people who look at a bully and think, great, we need somebody like that to keep the dweebs in line, or to show the bitches they ain’t shit, or whatever.  Or just think, that guy creates a tough environment, which is what we need, so people can get hard or go home, burn the losers, allow the winners to reap the rewards of their righteous might.

What’s wild to me is that many victims of bullying share this mentality – become bullies themselves, or the enablers and fanboys of bullies.  If that wasn’t you, great.  I don’t get these fools.  I know a guy that did a lot of primary research on gamergate, and found a very informative chat log.  The one thing GGers had in common was feeling frustrated in their attraction to women.  There were actually cisgender lesbians in that chat, which may surprise you.  But more relevant to this discussion, whenever a stereotypical bully came into the chat and started calling people slurs and nerds, basically shoving them in lockers, they welcomed their new bully overlords.  Few had the spine to tell off somebody with bully swagger, even though it was an entirely online situation – jock muscles didn’t figure into it.

And so you see the incels / PUAs / MRAs and their juniors flocking to fascism.  Andrew Tate could literally call them shit, to their faces, and they’d accept it.  These are a non-zero amount of people who voted orange last november.  Bullied bully fans.

And then there are magats that are just bullies themselves.  Your high school bully never changed.  They just learned to hurt people in more socially acceptable ways.  A non-zero amount of them became murderers, the majority are just republican.  Which might as well be murderers, to be fair.  Cruelty is the point, hurting those they perceive as weak gets them off.

Of the quarterish of USians that voted bully, many of them are not bullies proper.  They’re para-bullies.  Second string bullies.  The people who didn’t bully you, but did laugh when you were bullied.  Thoughtless, social cowards, creeps.  But not active bullies themselves, unless their victim is extremely powerless against them – like infants, or small animals.  I’m guessing the average GOP wife abuses her children, or animals, or disabled people, in small ways whenever they can.  You know.  The kind of nurses you pray you won’t get when you’re laid up at the hospital.

Hey maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe those fucking shitheads are just outrageously foolish rubes.  Easily led sheep for the sacrifice.  What is it, conservatives.  Are you fools or fascists?  Ain’t no third option under your big nasty tent.

I meant to talk about the guys in office (or privileged to be in the criminal syndicate), not the voters.  I just get mad and lose focus.  Yeah.  Orange man bad.  Not even a man.  There is no agenda except brutality and brazen theft, and cruelty for you and I.  Cruelty specifically for anybody who thinks cruelty is bad.  The cry of the bully, when confronted with their moral superiors: “Ya think you’re better than me?”  Yes, I know I’m better than you.

Motherfucken jeffrey dahmer was arguably a better person than the current president.  Huge piece of shit, thought his orgasm was more important than the human lives that he stole.  But ya know, scale matters.  No question orange worm has a massively higher body count – including so very very many of his own followers!  And he’s such a soulless gasbag I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he’s killed people for sexual pleasure.  He’ll probably be bragging about getting away with it by the time midterms roll around, just to test how badly they’ve broken the political system by then.

Ahh… still still still, too mad.  Gotta cool it.  Gotta cool it.

Would anybody be terribly disappointed if I avoided political topics for a good long while here?

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