Caelicola

This fucking show is an exercise in frustration and disappointment, truly. I think I might actually be out, I'm so bored, and that pains me, because I still love (most of) the characters. But it goes nowhere, it never goes anywhere, it just slogs along without having the balls to make anything new happen. Build up something a whole season and then nothing, again, as usual, let's stretch it out for as looooooooooong as possible. And if something does happen, it's stupid as shit. That's a desert narrative landscape, and I'm tired of it. I'm not entertained anymore, the last three episodes haven't entertained me at all, six months of only being able to talk about who got smashed aren't going to entertain me at all, and I don't like to hate-watch stuff. So, if the goal was to keep the audience on the edge of their seat, well, I'm so much on the edge that I'm gonna up and leave. I'm probably still gonna read you guys' discussions, because I generally enjoyed all of you.

...I'm really, suuuuper dumb, and I've just realized that the finale airs on my birthday. Uuugh, what a nice birthday gift. Spoiler-wise, I can't bring myself to listen to the clip, just reading the description of crunching noises and "taking it like a champ" is enough to make me queasy. Ah, masochism, my long-time friend, it seems like we'll be spending my birthday together this year.

I'm so genuinely impressed by this cast that it has pushed me to write, seriously. I mean, even the bottom group, who absolutely deserved to be in the bottom, wasn't as bad as they could have been, and could have probably been safe in almost any other season. Just, so much talent and stage presence all around. I also noticed that the Bob-Thorgy "feud" had very very little meanness of spirit behind it; no doubt they were frustrated with each other, but more so in the confessionals, goaded by the producers, than in the actual footage, where they were all giggling together -and with Acid Betty! who can giggle!!- every other shot. There seems to be a lot of mutual respect and admiration going around, and that's lovely to see, on top of great talent. The only one I'm not feeling at all right now is Derrick, there doesn't seem to be much going on behind the Britney eyes. I'm ready to eat my words, though, I wasn't expecting much from Naomi, Chi Chi and Robbie either, and they all turned it out. I appreciated the athleticism of the lipsynch, but that's not my favorite kind of performance, especially not for a song like Call Me. I prefer facial and mouth contortions to body gyrations.

I looove Lennie James really really hard, but at this point any time Morgan speaks I just hear Charlie Brown's teacher trombone noises. Wah wah wah wah life wah wah wah precious wah wah. Write him some better material, please. If Daryl dies I'll...be pretty ok with it, actually. I'm saving my riots for Michonne and Glenn (and Rick, long shot as it is). Not that I want him to be dead. I just don't particularly need him to be alive. Since everything else was either stupid or boring, I'll just say that that Richonne scene was a masterclass in chemistry. Man, they do intimate really really well, I felt a bit voyeuristic. And Morgan, dude, guess what? Denise wouldn't have been in danger to begin with if you hadn't tied up a dude in the basement. Life lessons all around; don't tie up dudes in the basement, or they might kidnap your only doctor. But if you happen to have a dude tied up in the basement, don't kill him, he might save that doctor after he kidnapped her.

Argh, so the season 7 trailer wouldn't even have Sasha either?! Man, it is really gonna be 6 minutes of dark with flashes of Negan's face, whacking noises and Judith playing with solo cups if the cliffhanger thing is true, isn't it.

I'm the opposite, in that ON SCREEN I find scruffy, crazed and bloody men really hot -bearded Rick, deranged Shane, Daryl before the grime got to two inches thick- but IRL my biggest turn-on is kindness. So, any of those three hitting on me? Running away screaming, possibly filing restraining orders. Andy Lincoln, Jon Bernthal and Norman Reedus, who are by all accounts unfailingly kind? Yessss, please. Glenn/Steven Yeun is a different matter, he's kind on the show as well, and he only got hot to me around season 4, before that he was a baby. So, ogling through a screen? The wilder and bloodier, the sexier. Actually contemplating one of them hitting on me? Yeeesh, I'd be genuinely scared. The most physically gorgeous to me is still Corey Hawkins (Heath), when he isn't wearing the rattiest, fakest dreads in existence. And Seth Gilliam, when he's not peeing his pants or driving under the influence.

Off topic, but every time I see STD it takes me a minute to get to Spoil The Dead from it; I think Sexually Transmitted Disease, and think to myself "that's a harsh nickname to give someone just because you don't like their spoilers". That said, my fingers are crossed that most of what they've reported gets corrected.

Of course, this is all speculation and possibly worrying for nothing, but it is the spoilers and speculation thread, so I don't feel too bad about it. And maybe I'll be very surprised, and they'll do the whole thing in a way I will like, or love. This is just preemptively venting annoyances, so I'll hopefully be less annoyed if it does go down in a way I hate. But the fate of most of the cast is literally up in the air if we don't get a single clue about who gets it...is Michonne gonna die? (unless you go looking for filming spoilers), who knows. Is Glenn still alive? Who knows. Is Maggie dead? Maybe! Is Daryl still kicking? Beats me. Did they actually do it, and killed Rick/Carl? Might be! Did they majorly cop out and kill Abraham or Aaron? Oh, why not. It's not most of the cast at risk, but it is most of the cast in doubt, and none of them will have anything else to possibly talk about without spoiling the one hook they have for the new season. And it's gonna be talked about ad literal (at least for me) nauseam. My main problem is that I'm already bored of the speculation over who get Lucilled now, and I've been trying to actively avoid spoilers, I can't imagine I'll be any more entertained by it after a whole summer spent on it. It also compounds my problems with the pacing of the show, a whole half season of waiting for Negan and then he shows up and.....more waiting. It's like counting down to new year's day, only to find out your watch was actually two hours ahead and now you have to kill those two hours somehow (and you've already opened -and drank- the booze, because it was there and you thought it was midnight. Womp womp womp), and new year's day is actually something really bad that you fear will make you very sad. But I will stop, now, I just needed a good old fashioned ranting space.

The difference is, GOT didn't leave the fate of most of its cast up in the air. The big question is "is Jon Snow dead or alive?", not "who's gonna die? Tune in to find out!!", and they didn't leave unresolved the biggest -if not only- storyline they've been building for most of the season. It's a copout, after they had most of the cast hype all season long how dark and twisted and horrible and unexpected the finale is gonna be. Unexpected? Yeah, because people expected something to actually happen, and for the audience it won't until next season. Also, it's not a sustainable marketing strategy; GOT has a whole enormous cast that still has storylines to talk and speculate about, this would leave TWD with just two full characters and a handful of bit players still in play. The buzz will turn tiresome after seven months, and the audience will get bored of it, because it will be the only thing to talk about. I don't think it's disrespectful, I just think it's really bad writing, and a cheap, myopic way to get a watercooler moment that would have happened anyway. I'm completely ready to eat crow if it turns out differently. I hope I get to eat crow. I'm peckish. ETA: It's also much more sadistic, because there's people (raises hand) who don't really give a crap about the fate of Jon Snow, while almost everyone will have at least one favorite character in that line-up who they're gonna be really worried about for months on end.

I don't usually read spoilers, but I came across these against my better wishes (grrrr) and oh boy, if they're true, that's the most short-sighted move I've even seen, from a promotional point of view. That means that they won't be able to tease/promote/hype anything regarding Rick, Daryl, Michonne, Carl, Glenn OR Maggie, and that's like 80% of their main cast; the trailer for season 7 will have to be only Carol, Morgan, Sasha and Judith, with some Negan in complete isolation; the only hook for the next season will be who got the bat, and once that question is answered, there's literally only scraps left. It won't be just jumping the shark (again), and complete creative bankruptcy for which they'll rightly be raked over the coals by any critic, but also promotional suicide. I really really hope it won't play out like that, because that's a really shitty way to treat not only their fans, but their own cast and marketing department too. Just layer upon layer of bullshit, all the way down, and they'll have to stop pretending that the show is anything but the cheapest, most manipulative soap opera in apocalyptic setting. I hope this post will turn out to be completely pointless and premature, but I needed to vent. Sorry.

Oh, that breaks my little Italian heart. Rough.

As with a lot of things Gimple does, my issue when it comes to Carol is less how they did it than when. Maybe it's on me, because I personally found the first half of this season so hard to get through, so the first episodes feel like a lifetime ago. Maybe if I binge watch it all in a row when the season ends (whether I'll want to or not depends mainly on who bites it in the next episodes) the progression would feel more organic and gradual. As I see it right this moment, we had glimpses of her being definitely absolutely not ok, then she became very peripheral to the narrative; months later we get a whole episode in which she pretty much comes apart at the seams, and right after that she leaves, in an episode in which she is, once again, extremely peripheral. Now, I'm not advocating for more screen time for her, she already gets a lot more than many other characters. Just, maybe, distributed a little better over the course of the season. I like her development, heck, I love her development, I don't think it's weakness or ruining her character at all. I would have just found it a better story if it hadn't been told in starts and stops.

Fair enough, but if they're actually criticizing on a meta-textual level, that's way too glib an observation to have much critical weight, because at that point they'd have to consider a myriad things because they all contribute to the writing choices; like who the characters are, how they got to be injured, what they represent, and yeah, unfortunately, the role they play in the story and their respective importance in it. If you (that's an impersonal you, not YOU, POSTER ACW!!) want to critique a work going beyond the text, you have to consider every aspect of what motivates the choices beyond the text. I just think the article would have been more successful without bringing Carl's eyepatch into it, because it only muddies the waters and makes readers instictively react by going "of course he survived, it was a different kind of wound, are you even watching the show?!", and then dismiss any valid point the article makes. Edited because in my word vomit of pretension I managed to fuck up the grammar.

That's mixing levels of critique, though. Of course the writers decided to have Carl survive his wound and Denise die of hers, that's not in question. Of course there was the choice to have hers be much more damaging. But comparing in-universe the two wounds and acting like there's great inconsistency in how they affected different characters makes very little sense, because they're two very different wounds. It's like complaining that Hershel survived his walker bite only losing a leg, but Dale died of his. Very different bites, very different damage, the only point in common was that a walker did it. The first level of critique is meta-textual, and valid; but if you try to make it textual, that criticism loses validity, because it actually ignores the text it purports to examine.

Wasn't Bob a combat medic? So, five...that's how they defeat Negan, their mere presence kills all his trained medics, and all the Saviors die of infection after getting a hangnail or a papercut.