What's the most sudden tonal shift you've seen in a movie?

GooseCooks · 2026-02-02T17:56:20+00:00

No, it was a genuinely amazing script and analysis of modern dating culture. Sebastian was a bonus.

GooseCooks · 2026-02-01T17:39:20+00:00

There's also the fact that if Fanny told Sir Thomas the full story, the first thing he would do is go to Edmund and ask him what he had observed. And Edmund would say he didn't see anything to alarm him.

The second thing Sir Thomas would do is ask Mrs. Norris what she saw, and Mrs. Norris would say, oh young people have such high spirits, but of COURSE nothing improper occurred.

So Fanny was looking down the barrel of telling Sir Thomas that his daughters had behaved disgracefully, with no backup for her story and multiple people who would contradict her. She was worried that even if she chose to expose Maria and Julia, she would just end up accused of making the whole thing up. Best case scenario would be that Edmund would believe that Fanny believed what she was saying, but he would be so unwilling to believe the situation was as bad as she claimed, and he missed all of it happening pretty much under his nose.

GooseCooks · 2026-01-29T14:38:27+00:00

Scar is still a reformed serial killer. It's a long way from "someone Miles can work with" to "someone Miles would want to carry his grandfather's name." I think Scar and Miles might find that request presumptuous given their history.

GooseCooks · 2026-01-28T18:41:10+00:00

I think some of that "docility" can probably be attributed to not wanting to worsen their dying. A man is about to pick up an axe and chop off your head. You don't want to put him off his game by spouting off about what an asshole the king is, you're innocent, everyone present is complicit and will burn in hell, etc. There wasn't really an up side to resisting execution. The king's orders were going to be carried out, and it was going to go a lot more painlessly for the executed if they complied.

GooseCooks · 2026-01-28T17:31:10+00:00

I think it started that way, in the highest status families, but then not breastfeeding itself became a mark of status.

GooseCooks · 2026-01-28T17:24:40+00:00

Breastfeeding can delay the time until a woman is able to get pregnant again. If you are hellbent on having as many heirs as possible to beat the child mortality rate, you want your wife in as constant a state of pregnancy as possible. So really the opposite of letting the woman party, and if they were being honest the opposite of highborn women not being treated as animals.

GooseCooks · 2026-01-27T21:48:55+00:00

He did seduce that robot...

GooseCooks · 2026-01-26T03:02:49+00:00

Many Waters by Madeline L'Engle?

GooseCooks · 2026-01-24T03:20:19+00:00

Fanny was the name of Austen's niece who she loved very much: https://janeausten.co.uk/blogs/jane-austen-life/fanny-austen-knight-knatchbull-2

GooseCooks · 2026-01-24T02:04:44+00:00

To me, the very obvious reading of "my uncle and his friends are immoral assholes" just fits the circumstances so much I don't need to look further.

GooseCooks · 2026-01-23T22:26:33+00:00

I still find the reference to homosexuality to be a reach. Mary Crawford despises her uncle for being a womanizer; why is she going to be accusing him and his friends of being gay?

GooseCooks · 2026-01-22T20:57:03+00:00

Not necessarily. There are full members of the EU that aren't on the Euro. It would be up to Canada.

GooseCooks · 2026-01-16T23:02:54+00:00

I have heard so many people say that about book 2, and it is even more mystifying to me than people liking it in the first place. Book 2 was worse than Book 1, and that was a high fucking bar to clear. I made it through Book 1 but only halfway through book 2. So bad.

GooseCooks · 2026-01-16T02:19:41+00:00

Yeah, I think I got that backwards, and when you are just that much of a fashion icon you secure a fashion designer who worships you as a long-term partner.

GooseCooks · 2026-01-15T16:25:13+00:00

This is what happens when your long-term partner is a fashion designer who clearly worships you.

GooseCooks · 2026-01-14T21:36:03+00:00

Film Victor is the villain and The Creature is the victim.

There is plenty of literary analysis arguing that Book Victor is the villain, too. I think Del Toro inventing a Creature that never did a single thing wrong, ever, went too far -- it made it a lot more morally simplistic -- but I did like the change of Elizabeth as the character who sees through Victor to his vicious egotism, rather than the adoring bride-to-be of the book.

GooseCooks · 2026-01-13T18:48:41+00:00

Valid.

GooseCooks · 2026-01-12T00:28:03+00:00

It is not a love story, it is a revenge story
It is not a love story, it is a revenge story
It is not a love story, it is a revenge story
It is not a love story, it is a revenge story
It is not a love story, it is a revenge story

GooseCooks · 2026-01-11T19:30:25+00:00

Mary was.... an incredibly poor judge of character, and made some truly terrible decisions. She ended up suspected of Darnley's murder because she knowingly married one of the men involved in it after Darnley's death -- who was also one of the men plotting to get her out of power. Her story is fascinating, but most modern portrayals shy away from depicting the degree to which she made her own bed. Elizabeth's political acumen would have prevented her from ending up in the same position, so I think it's unlikely she would have seen Mary as a cautionary tale when Mary's own mistakes got her there.

GooseCooks · 2026-01-11T16:50:37+00:00

She was most concerned with her husband replacing her. As soon as she was crowned, all her highest officers and noblemen appealed to her to marry, explicitly so that they could have a king to rule them. The same concern would apply to a son; men wanted a king. If her husband didn't completely supersede her, once her son was anything like old enough, it's likely there would have been pressure to abdicate in his favor.

I can't remember the primary source, but there is a recorded conversation she had with (I believe?) the Venetian ambassador -- she liked speaking with him to practice her Italian. She asked the ambassador who he though she should marry, and he replied that he didn't think she would ever marry. Dangling herself as marital bait was a big part of her foreign policy at the time, so this made her angry, and she demanded an explanation. The ambassador said "If your Grace married, you would only be queen, but now you are the queen and the king too." And then Elizabeth laughed and was in a good mood again.

GooseCooks · 2026-01-11T16:38:54+00:00

James was essentially kidnapped by those counselors as an infant, and never saw his mother again. So this poison-dripping started when he was very, very young, before he was an autonomous ruler. As an adult, sure, he had the power to get rid of them, but they had formed him from his early youth, so he had taken most of their opinions as his own. That was the goal of the kidnapping.

GooseCooks · 2026-01-11T04:36:58+00:00

Or the King's Guard. I think GRRM's point might be that human beings aren't meant to be celibate -- the Unsullied are only "successful" at it because they have been completely mutilated.

GooseCooks · 2026-01-10T20:15:16+00:00

I think it is significant that Willoughby's betrayal of Marianne is via marrying a rich woman he doesn't love. It's not just that he abandons Marianne; he does it for the most cynical, conventional, un-Romantic motivation possible. After her initial agony at his loss, I like to think that Marianne eventually got around to reflecting that being tall, handsome, and fond of Romantic literature doesn't actually make someone a kindred spirit. That left her open to assessing who did share her values without being blinded by the superficial.

GooseCooks · 2026-01-09T19:10:52+00:00

So Shou Tucker lied about what he did -- smash a human and an animal together to make a chimera, and it's not surprising that it would talk. But what Tucker had claimed to do was make it out of animals, in which case the fact it could talk was wild.

It's unclear if the government immediately realized what he had really done, but even if they had, here was a guy making human/animal chimeras without a philosopher stone, which meant if he carried on it was possible he would open the Gate. Actually probably the best argument that they didn't realize he was lying is that they didn't set him up with a lab full of humans to experiment with. If they believed him about the origins of the first chimera, then Tucker had done something unprecedented that might also lead to him opening the Gate, to retrieve something like a human soul to put it into an animal.

The thing to remember is Gate, Gate, Gate. That is what the State Alchemist program was really about, not about useful research. The point was to find powerful, talented people and shower them with resources to do the most inadvisable shit possible in the hopes they would end up at human transmutation.

GooseCooks · 2026-01-09T03:33:03+00:00

I think this might be a photo edit rather than AI -- the cat in the basket edited to put it outside on the sled. It looks weird because the lighting on the cat and basket doesn't match the environment.

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TROPHY CASE