fifty frenchmen can't be wrong (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
some_stars) wrote2011-06-22 07:42 pm
some_stars) wrote2011-06-22 07:42 pm
(no subject)
I stopped my First Class rewatch last night due to sleepiness, now it continues!
1. So that awful awful Russian scene with Emma in underwear and then in bondage: continues to be awful! And every time I watch it it becomes more and more obvious just how STUPID it is. Because--they didn't, like, concoct a situation in which she'd take her clothes off. That would still be awful, but--they didn't even bother with a situation, because absolutely none of her actions make sense when you remember that she's a TELEPATH. I mean, seconds before she undresses for the Russian guy, we watch Charles convince a soldier that a truckful of people are invisible (and silent). When he enters the room with Emma, he tells the guy to go to sleep. AND YET, somehow, not only does Emma need to make the Russian official believe he's having sex with her in order for her to extract his thoughts--not only does she need to make him believe this in real time, instead of after the fact or just for a second--but she has to be in her underwear to do it. FOR SOME REASON. Oh, and the scene is practically designed to make you forget--or not realize--that she's actually there for a reason, and as she sits there on the couch she's presumably rummaging through the guy's brain. Presumably, because she obviously WASN'T, she wasn't doing anything so far as I could tell. There are lots of ways to show mindreading happening onscreen, most of them pretty cheesy but the movie was happy to use them for Charles. Emma just sat there with the camera looking at her. It just--there was no plot, there wasn't even the pretense of a plot or a sexist plot or--nothing! They didn't even bother to TRY.
2. SO THAT WAS HORRIBLE. Moving on. There are a lot of little touches I like in the acting, even if it kind of falls down on a lot of points. But like--when the "kids" (WHAT SHOULD I CALL THEM, dammit) in the room before Shaw attacks, and the CIA guys are outside the window laughing at them and Hank goes to close the curtain, that little salute he gives them is so--perfect. It adds so much to the moment and to his character, and it also reminds me that he may well know these guys in passing or at least have seen them around, because he's been at this place for--I don't know how long, but a lot longer than the others. And I'm assuming he lives there possibly? Since there was no indication otherwise, and once the recruiting starts they all seem to live there. But, yeah, so--that little wave, it shows that the moment is different for him than it is for Angel, the other direct target. He feels so used to it, not just in a beaten-down way (although there is also that) but--something. SOMETHING. It's there and I'm very happy about it. I, uh, possibly went through a few nights ago rewatching all of his scenes only, and taking notes on them, for a story I really want to write but is probably going to be 50% cannibalized for this Raven fic and 50% abandoned. But we'll see. I find him ridiculously interesting.
3. DARWIN YOU ARE THE BEST AND THE MOST BEAUTIFUL, ugh, this fucking movie. I read a really great long(ish, by current standards) Alex/Darwin today that made me FEEL THINGS. And it was really primarily about Alex, which I can understand because Darwin has time for like...two characteristics, at all. AMAZING ones, but still. So right now I'm just...MOVIE. FUCK YOU. I want to know about him! I want to know why and how he becomes this de facto emotional team leader and mom! I want A LOT OF THINGS.
4. man, can you imagine if that attack scene, with the comical-yet-horrifying festival of plummeting and stabbing, had been done with 75% less intrusive music? maybe even moments of NO music? it would have been so fucking scary and uncomfortable and awesome. And if they'd cut Shaw's big glamor shot moment of absorbing that--rocket launcher? IDEK. Or cut all of him before he strides up to the kids, even. So the whole thing could have been this claustrophobic panicky mess of interior shots of the kids' reactions and quick cuts to agents being killed, everyone running through the halls, bodies landing--ugghh, why am I not in charge of all movies??
5. Okay, so I can't tell if this is a (minor) continuity issue or if it just looks that way, because it looked like this in the theater both times, not just on the cam copies--first half of the satellite scene, Charles pointing the gun at Erik, the first two shots with Erik in them clearly show the gun about two inches away from his forehead. Then in the third shot where you can see him--fourth shot of the scene total--it looks like the barrel is pressed up against his skin. Then cut to the next shot and it's a little ways away again, then the next shot where Charles pulls it away it seems to start out pressed against Erik's forehead again. Both the ones where it looks like it's touching him are from the same camera position so I'm assuming the same continuous, split-up shot, so what it looks like to me is that whoever's in charge of continuity on-set was just taking a quick nap at that point. I'm not completely sure, because even in the theater the shots were lit and angled in such a way that I wasn't certain the gun was touching his face in those shots.
ANYWAY, this is not remotely interesting or meaningful, except that it does give the scene a slightly different feeling, for me, if Erik's asking Charles to shoot him literally point blank, because then I could believe that Erik believes, on some level, that there's a non-zero chance of him actually not being able to stop it in time (assuming he's not going to let himself just keep it from firing, which obviously he's not). So the subtext of "intense self-loathing and longing to self-annihilate" becomes stronger. But it's kind of a reach, I think, especially since the gun-touching-face shots (if they exist) are obviously the ones that are out of continuity and the two-inches-away shots are the ones we're supposed to register. --AND, okay, watching another two seconds I remember that Erik grabs Charles's hand and pushes the gun right up against his own forehead again. So I guess this is an even more pointless digression than I thought!
6. One reason I rewatch scenes so often, if not the whole thing--and I do this with all my TV/movie fandoms, I rewatch CONSTANTLY--is because I often need a corrective for the mental characterizations I develop from, apparently, cliches and whole cloth. Erik is getting the worst of it in this fandom--I keep having to delete words and whole sentences that are just totally wrong. Like--he reacts visibly (hilarious facial expressions, mostly) to things that are startling or strange! ALL THE TIME. And he talks about his feelings, at least some of them, pretty freely in the gun scene--saying he can't do something like move a submarine, "I need the situation, the anger." Which is not exactly touchy-feely, but like...I would NEVER sound that comfortable/casual talking to someone about how my abilities are powered by my deep, overwhelming, uncontrollable emotions. (Which they are! They're just far less interesting abilities.) So obviously with Charles at least, Erik has some measure of comfort discussing some feelings openly. Which is hard to remember. But important.
7. Until sometime yesterday, Charles's/the movie's assessment of Hank's issues as being "afraid of what he could be capable of" really did not scan for me, and it still mostly doesn't, but I hit on a way to run with it that I immediately fell in love with and wrote a scene around and hopefully can write the rest of the story that scene belongs in. And then maybe do it again in a story that's not primarily about Raven. WRITING SO HARD.
8. Another thing about Hank! I warned you guys that I'm mildly obsessed with him. It's just, he has FACETS. He's not just "timid, then douchebag." He has these moments of being--hmm. Like, when he's pushing Sean towards the window, Sean asking if the wings will work, and Hank makes this little "heh" noise and says "anything is possible..." as he continues to busily buckle/strap Sean into them. He's enjoying his experiment! He's delighted to have a test subject! He's completely unselfconscious, right in that moment. And then at the window, him and Charles giving Sean their very helpful instructions--they're both such SCIENTISTS. It's like a tiny, extremely vivid window onto all the time they must have spent being geeky delighted scientists together over those [x] months and in the future too.
Also that scene is beautiful because ERIK AND ALEX AND RAVEN, leaning out on the other side, having a FANTASTIC time watching Sean get shoved out a window. Their smiles, I can't even.
9. Okay and one more--what the hell are Hank's powers? Pre-furry, I mean--he has prehensile feet and seems to be able to jump higher than normal, then after being ~motivated~ he unlocks some superspeed (every time I watch that now, I can't not think Ability Unlocked: Speed!), and...I'm so confused. I'm almost sure we're not supposed to understand that scene as "Hank has superspeed!" and it's just lazy writing/directing, since he doesn't use it after turning furry--and obviously post-furry he has some degree of super-strength, and I'm sort of loosely assuming he also had that pre-furry but was psychologically unable to access it like he was with the speed? BUT HONESTLY, MOVIE, WTF. I feel so ridiculously comfortable making shit up for these fics because no one can possibly tell me different.
10. RAVEN. THIS SCENE WITH THE WEIGHTS. RAVEN RAVEN RAVEN. It just breaks my heart forever the way that all her anger and discontent, all her longing and hope and urge for something better, it all has to be channeled through Erik. I actually feel like a lot of this is legitimate--the patriarchy within the story as opposed to crafting the story from the outside. Not all, but a lot, and it's so SAD and frustrating and immediately recognizable. Also, one reason I've convinced myself that Erik tried to give a similar pep talk to Hank (and possibly Angel, earlier--the ones whose powers are visible on their bodies) is so that I feel less irritated and grossed out by him, Erik I mean. Because the scene where he sleeps with her, as a way of sealing her loyalty to his ideology, the "tiger" bullshit--so gross. It's a grossness that like other things about Raven's arc (and like Charles's treatment of ALL WOMEN EVER) I think is semi-legitimate, although I suspect the legitimacy is an accident, but I still don't LIKE it.
But RAVEN. Oh, I just. SO SAD. She has all that frustration and anger and potential, and in that scene Erik provides her with a hook to hang it on finally, but the farthest she can go with it, in the end, is to switch her allegiances from one male leader to another. And that is far, I'm not minimizing all the agency she does have and the choices she does make--but her options are so painfully limited. I have also already written this scene, I just need to build up the story on both sides of it. Where a couple days after the weightlifting scene, she's talking to Hank--their relationship in this fic is slightly AU in that they're together at this point--and she says something, some of the thoughts that she's been developing off of those two lines from Erik plus whatever politics she's absorbed from being young and intelligent in 1962 (although mostly in England apparently), and Hank's response is basically "...you sound like you should be at a sit-in, where did this come from?" And she's all, "idk, it was just something Erik said" and hates the way that makes her sound, like an impressionable puppet. And then...other stuff happens which I will not laboriously re-transcribe here.
11. The pushing-Sean-off-the-satellite scene continues to be BEAUTIFUL for all three people involved (I don't really think of Sean as a character so much as an annoying repeated camera glitch). Their faces! I NEED THE DVD, I need to see these expressions CLEARLY. I'm pretty sure Erik looks as excited/pleased as Charles and Hank when Sean starts flying. And something about his delivery on his two lines is just--especially the second, there's a surprising amount of intimacy in a line/situation like that. "You know you were thinking the same." (Which btw, I am in LOVE with that phrasing, it's so perfectly "100% fluent in English but learned it later in life after/while knowing several other languages.")
Also I don't know if I'm more delighted by the idea of Erik participating fully in training all the recruits and pulling shit like this all the time, or the idea of him mostly not getting too involved, at least not on the coaching/advice end of things--like he helps Charles teach by throwing metal at the kids or being a target or whatever--and then tagging along this time for whatever reason, whipping out his brilliant pedagogical technique, and never being allowed along again. (Okay, for like a day, after which Charles would decide that actually Erik was a great teacher--which he kind of is, in a comic book universe--and resume badgering him to help train the kids.)
12. I will never get over Hank groping the mannequin. NEVER getting over that.
13. I have so, so, so many thoughts and feelings about Charles's "between rage and serenity" advice. Except it's really just one thought which is that I am so INTENSELY FASCINATED with the idea of his anger. I mean, how would he have come up with that advice if it wasn't from his own experience? And also, feeling abandoned as a child, however it ends up being expressed (or not expressed), usually creates a LOT of rage. Deeply, deeply suppressed in Charles's case, at least by the time he reaches adulthood--there are traces of it in his childhood scene. And so--it has to exist, and it's SO repressed, and there are so many possibilities. Is he afraid of his own power, if he doesn't rigidly control all his negative feelings? He'd pretty much have to be. And of course there are endless issues that don't directly involve his powers, ways that damage could thread through his personality and his whole life, and I want ten million stories where something or someone (obv Erik or Raven are prime choices, but it could be someone else who's not necessarily that close to him) pulls on that thread until it comes loose and then: ALL THE FEELINGS. I think I would especially like a story where Erik did this more or less by accident, probably during telepathic sex. His reaction--to the anger and to Charles's reaction upon accidentally losing control--would be amazing.
OR MAYBE, Raven already knows, has run up against it a few times when they were young, before he learned to completely control all his strong feelings even around her. Maybe it was something they shared, a way they were drawn to each other, in those first years, and when Charles started to get really good at locking himself down it felt like he was pulling away from her, pulling away from *her* anger and pain. SO MANY OPTIONS.
14. Okay, I still think that Charles thanking Erik for that memory is evidence of a mega-creepy attitude, but his whole "feel your pain" bit is actually really affecting and sad in this scene. (The other instances of it are still BULLSHIT.) Obviously this is because I just spent five minutes thinking about his intense loneliness and feelings of abandonment, so I'm primed to be completely heartbroken watching his face as he proxy-feels not-his mother lovingly stroke not-his cheek. ...I actually have a vague story idea, in my privated DW/LJ entry where I keep barely-formed story ideas so I don't forget them, about--I'll just quote--"telepathic sex, and emotional overflow back and forth, and fantasies of maternal love--like pressing on a tight, deep knot that releases unexpectedly." So, you know...that. That's a thing. People being overwhelmed by nonsexual (or pre-sexual, more accurately) emotions during sex is some of my favorite emotional pornography material.
15. --and now we reach the part of the movie where everyone starts being AWFUL. Except Raven, she just starts being treated even more awfully by everyone. I have no coherent thoughts to share about that Hank/Raven serum scene, it is TOO SAD and TOO AWFUL. I mean, I have thoughts--I'm writing at least one, hopefully two stories about them--but they are not coherent or mostly in the form of language.
16. All right, so the Erik-sleeps-with-Raven scene is a hot mess in a variety of ways--"maybe in a few years," you douchebag, she's probably OLDER than you, at the very least she's in her mid-twenties to your thirty--but I LOVE how it echoes that recruitment scene in X2. "Your real name." And then it goes on to echo the end of this brilliant X2 fic, right down to the part where it doesn't seem to me like Erik, in this scene, is at any point genuinely sexually interested (I do think he really is interested in her otherwise, in a sometimes douchey but genuine way). He's sealing an alliance, offering an emotional lure.
(And oh god, this scene continues to be so UNBEARABLE the way Raven's every change and decision is refracted through, prompted by a man. Erik prefers the real Raven. I mean, speaking of the parallel with X2--that's a whole different way of phrasing the "prompting someone to embrace their mutant self" idea. But of course saying it to a woman requires some changes from saying it to a boy.)
17. CHARLES IS SUCH A DICK I CAN'T EVEN. I FUCKING CAN'T EVEN.
18. What is that look Erik gives Raven when she asks where Hank is? The camera holds on it for a couple seconds, through a cut, and it's not neutral at all, it's not just "huh, you're right, where is he?"--it seems distinctly directed at her--but I can't figure out what it IS saying.
aaaand I'm gonna leave the last 30 minutes for tomorrow, because I am entirely drained and also I want to leave time to do SOMETHING before passing out. Like writing! The point of all this! Perhaps!
1. So that awful awful Russian scene with Emma in underwear and then in bondage: continues to be awful! And every time I watch it it becomes more and more obvious just how STUPID it is. Because--they didn't, like, concoct a situation in which she'd take her clothes off. That would still be awful, but--they didn't even bother with a situation, because absolutely none of her actions make sense when you remember that she's a TELEPATH. I mean, seconds before she undresses for the Russian guy, we watch Charles convince a soldier that a truckful of people are invisible (and silent). When he enters the room with Emma, he tells the guy to go to sleep. AND YET, somehow, not only does Emma need to make the Russian official believe he's having sex with her in order for her to extract his thoughts--not only does she need to make him believe this in real time, instead of after the fact or just for a second--but she has to be in her underwear to do it. FOR SOME REASON. Oh, and the scene is practically designed to make you forget--or not realize--that she's actually there for a reason, and as she sits there on the couch she's presumably rummaging through the guy's brain. Presumably, because she obviously WASN'T, she wasn't doing anything so far as I could tell. There are lots of ways to show mindreading happening onscreen, most of them pretty cheesy but the movie was happy to use them for Charles. Emma just sat there with the camera looking at her. It just--there was no plot, there wasn't even the pretense of a plot or a sexist plot or--nothing! They didn't even bother to TRY.
2. SO THAT WAS HORRIBLE. Moving on. There are a lot of little touches I like in the acting, even if it kind of falls down on a lot of points. But like--when the "kids" (WHAT SHOULD I CALL THEM, dammit) in the room before Shaw attacks, and the CIA guys are outside the window laughing at them and Hank goes to close the curtain, that little salute he gives them is so--perfect. It adds so much to the moment and to his character, and it also reminds me that he may well know these guys in passing or at least have seen them around, because he's been at this place for--I don't know how long, but a lot longer than the others. And I'm assuming he lives there possibly? Since there was no indication otherwise, and once the recruiting starts they all seem to live there. But, yeah, so--that little wave, it shows that the moment is different for him than it is for Angel, the other direct target. He feels so used to it, not just in a beaten-down way (although there is also that) but--something. SOMETHING. It's there and I'm very happy about it. I, uh, possibly went through a few nights ago rewatching all of his scenes only, and taking notes on them, for a story I really want to write but is probably going to be 50% cannibalized for this Raven fic and 50% abandoned. But we'll see. I find him ridiculously interesting.
3. DARWIN YOU ARE THE BEST AND THE MOST BEAUTIFUL, ugh, this fucking movie. I read a really great long(ish, by current standards) Alex/Darwin today that made me FEEL THINGS. And it was really primarily about Alex, which I can understand because Darwin has time for like...two characteristics, at all. AMAZING ones, but still. So right now I'm just...MOVIE. FUCK YOU. I want to know about him! I want to know why and how he becomes this de facto emotional team leader and mom! I want A LOT OF THINGS.
4. man, can you imagine if that attack scene, with the comical-yet-horrifying festival of plummeting and stabbing, had been done with 75% less intrusive music? maybe even moments of NO music? it would have been so fucking scary and uncomfortable and awesome. And if they'd cut Shaw's big glamor shot moment of absorbing that--rocket launcher? IDEK. Or cut all of him before he strides up to the kids, even. So the whole thing could have been this claustrophobic panicky mess of interior shots of the kids' reactions and quick cuts to agents being killed, everyone running through the halls, bodies landing--ugghh, why am I not in charge of all movies??
5. Okay, so I can't tell if this is a (minor) continuity issue or if it just looks that way, because it looked like this in the theater both times, not just on the cam copies--first half of the satellite scene, Charles pointing the gun at Erik, the first two shots with Erik in them clearly show the gun about two inches away from his forehead. Then in the third shot where you can see him--fourth shot of the scene total--it looks like the barrel is pressed up against his skin. Then cut to the next shot and it's a little ways away again, then the next shot where Charles pulls it away it seems to start out pressed against Erik's forehead again. Both the ones where it looks like it's touching him are from the same camera position so I'm assuming the same continuous, split-up shot, so what it looks like to me is that whoever's in charge of continuity on-set was just taking a quick nap at that point. I'm not completely sure, because even in the theater the shots were lit and angled in such a way that I wasn't certain the gun was touching his face in those shots.
ANYWAY, this is not remotely interesting or meaningful, except that it does give the scene a slightly different feeling, for me, if Erik's asking Charles to shoot him literally point blank, because then I could believe that Erik believes, on some level, that there's a non-zero chance of him actually not being able to stop it in time (assuming he's not going to let himself just keep it from firing, which obviously he's not). So the subtext of "intense self-loathing and longing to self-annihilate" becomes stronger. But it's kind of a reach, I think, especially since the gun-touching-face shots (if they exist) are obviously the ones that are out of continuity and the two-inches-away shots are the ones we're supposed to register. --AND, okay, watching another two seconds I remember that Erik grabs Charles's hand and pushes the gun right up against his own forehead again. So I guess this is an even more pointless digression than I thought!
6. One reason I rewatch scenes so often, if not the whole thing--and I do this with all my TV/movie fandoms, I rewatch CONSTANTLY--is because I often need a corrective for the mental characterizations I develop from, apparently, cliches and whole cloth. Erik is getting the worst of it in this fandom--I keep having to delete words and whole sentences that are just totally wrong. Like--he reacts visibly (hilarious facial expressions, mostly) to things that are startling or strange! ALL THE TIME. And he talks about his feelings, at least some of them, pretty freely in the gun scene--saying he can't do something like move a submarine, "I need the situation, the anger." Which is not exactly touchy-feely, but like...I would NEVER sound that comfortable/casual talking to someone about how my abilities are powered by my deep, overwhelming, uncontrollable emotions. (Which they are! They're just far less interesting abilities.) So obviously with Charles at least, Erik has some measure of comfort discussing some feelings openly. Which is hard to remember. But important.
7. Until sometime yesterday, Charles's/the movie's assessment of Hank's issues as being "afraid of what he could be capable of" really did not scan for me, and it still mostly doesn't, but I hit on a way to run with it that I immediately fell in love with and wrote a scene around and hopefully can write the rest of the story that scene belongs in. And then maybe do it again in a story that's not primarily about Raven. WRITING SO HARD.
8. Another thing about Hank! I warned you guys that I'm mildly obsessed with him. It's just, he has FACETS. He's not just "timid, then douchebag." He has these moments of being--hmm. Like, when he's pushing Sean towards the window, Sean asking if the wings will work, and Hank makes this little "heh" noise and says "anything is possible..." as he continues to busily buckle/strap Sean into them. He's enjoying his experiment! He's delighted to have a test subject! He's completely unselfconscious, right in that moment. And then at the window, him and Charles giving Sean their very helpful instructions--they're both such SCIENTISTS. It's like a tiny, extremely vivid window onto all the time they must have spent being geeky delighted scientists together over those [x] months and in the future too.
Also that scene is beautiful because ERIK AND ALEX AND RAVEN, leaning out on the other side, having a FANTASTIC time watching Sean get shoved out a window. Their smiles, I can't even.
9. Okay and one more--what the hell are Hank's powers? Pre-furry, I mean--he has prehensile feet and seems to be able to jump higher than normal, then after being ~motivated~ he unlocks some superspeed (every time I watch that now, I can't not think Ability Unlocked: Speed!), and...I'm so confused. I'm almost sure we're not supposed to understand that scene as "Hank has superspeed!" and it's just lazy writing/directing, since he doesn't use it after turning furry--and obviously post-furry he has some degree of super-strength, and I'm sort of loosely assuming he also had that pre-furry but was psychologically unable to access it like he was with the speed? BUT HONESTLY, MOVIE, WTF. I feel so ridiculously comfortable making shit up for these fics because no one can possibly tell me different.
10. RAVEN. THIS SCENE WITH THE WEIGHTS. RAVEN RAVEN RAVEN. It just breaks my heart forever the way that all her anger and discontent, all her longing and hope and urge for something better, it all has to be channeled through Erik. I actually feel like a lot of this is legitimate--the patriarchy within the story as opposed to crafting the story from the outside. Not all, but a lot, and it's so SAD and frustrating and immediately recognizable. Also, one reason I've convinced myself that Erik tried to give a similar pep talk to Hank (and possibly Angel, earlier--the ones whose powers are visible on their bodies) is so that I feel less irritated and grossed out by him, Erik I mean. Because the scene where he sleeps with her, as a way of sealing her loyalty to his ideology, the "tiger" bullshit--so gross. It's a grossness that like other things about Raven's arc (and like Charles's treatment of ALL WOMEN EVER) I think is semi-legitimate, although I suspect the legitimacy is an accident, but I still don't LIKE it.
But RAVEN. Oh, I just. SO SAD. She has all that frustration and anger and potential, and in that scene Erik provides her with a hook to hang it on finally, but the farthest she can go with it, in the end, is to switch her allegiances from one male leader to another. And that is far, I'm not minimizing all the agency she does have and the choices she does make--but her options are so painfully limited. I have also already written this scene, I just need to build up the story on both sides of it. Where a couple days after the weightlifting scene, she's talking to Hank--their relationship in this fic is slightly AU in that they're together at this point--and she says something, some of the thoughts that she's been developing off of those two lines from Erik plus whatever politics she's absorbed from being young and intelligent in 1962 (although mostly in England apparently), and Hank's response is basically "...you sound like you should be at a sit-in, where did this come from?" And she's all, "idk, it was just something Erik said" and hates the way that makes her sound, like an impressionable puppet. And then...other stuff happens which I will not laboriously re-transcribe here.
11. The pushing-Sean-off-the-satellite scene continues to be BEAUTIFUL for all three people involved (I don't really think of Sean as a character so much as an annoying repeated camera glitch). Their faces! I NEED THE DVD, I need to see these expressions CLEARLY. I'm pretty sure Erik looks as excited/pleased as Charles and Hank when Sean starts flying. And something about his delivery on his two lines is just--especially the second, there's a surprising amount of intimacy in a line/situation like that. "You know you were thinking the same." (Which btw, I am in LOVE with that phrasing, it's so perfectly "100% fluent in English but learned it later in life after/while knowing several other languages.")
Also I don't know if I'm more delighted by the idea of Erik participating fully in training all the recruits and pulling shit like this all the time, or the idea of him mostly not getting too involved, at least not on the coaching/advice end of things--like he helps Charles teach by throwing metal at the kids or being a target or whatever--and then tagging along this time for whatever reason, whipping out his brilliant pedagogical technique, and never being allowed along again. (Okay, for like a day, after which Charles would decide that actually Erik was a great teacher--which he kind of is, in a comic book universe--and resume badgering him to help train the kids.)
12. I will never get over Hank groping the mannequin. NEVER getting over that.
13. I have so, so, so many thoughts and feelings about Charles's "between rage and serenity" advice. Except it's really just one thought which is that I am so INTENSELY FASCINATED with the idea of his anger. I mean, how would he have come up with that advice if it wasn't from his own experience? And also, feeling abandoned as a child, however it ends up being expressed (or not expressed), usually creates a LOT of rage. Deeply, deeply suppressed in Charles's case, at least by the time he reaches adulthood--there are traces of it in his childhood scene. And so--it has to exist, and it's SO repressed, and there are so many possibilities. Is he afraid of his own power, if he doesn't rigidly control all his negative feelings? He'd pretty much have to be. And of course there are endless issues that don't directly involve his powers, ways that damage could thread through his personality and his whole life, and I want ten million stories where something or someone (obv Erik or Raven are prime choices, but it could be someone else who's not necessarily that close to him) pulls on that thread until it comes loose and then: ALL THE FEELINGS. I think I would especially like a story where Erik did this more or less by accident, probably during telepathic sex. His reaction--to the anger and to Charles's reaction upon accidentally losing control--would be amazing.
OR MAYBE, Raven already knows, has run up against it a few times when they were young, before he learned to completely control all his strong feelings even around her. Maybe it was something they shared, a way they were drawn to each other, in those first years, and when Charles started to get really good at locking himself down it felt like he was pulling away from her, pulling away from *her* anger and pain. SO MANY OPTIONS.
14. Okay, I still think that Charles thanking Erik for that memory is evidence of a mega-creepy attitude, but his whole "feel your pain" bit is actually really affecting and sad in this scene. (The other instances of it are still BULLSHIT.) Obviously this is because I just spent five minutes thinking about his intense loneliness and feelings of abandonment, so I'm primed to be completely heartbroken watching his face as he proxy-feels not-his mother lovingly stroke not-his cheek. ...I actually have a vague story idea, in my privated DW/LJ entry where I keep barely-formed story ideas so I don't forget them, about--I'll just quote--"telepathic sex, and emotional overflow back and forth, and fantasies of maternal love--like pressing on a tight, deep knot that releases unexpectedly." So, you know...that. That's a thing. People being overwhelmed by nonsexual (or pre-sexual, more accurately) emotions during sex is some of my favorite emotional pornography material.
15. --and now we reach the part of the movie where everyone starts being AWFUL. Except Raven, she just starts being treated even more awfully by everyone. I have no coherent thoughts to share about that Hank/Raven serum scene, it is TOO SAD and TOO AWFUL. I mean, I have thoughts--I'm writing at least one, hopefully two stories about them--but they are not coherent or mostly in the form of language.
16. All right, so the Erik-sleeps-with-Raven scene is a hot mess in a variety of ways--"maybe in a few years," you douchebag, she's probably OLDER than you, at the very least she's in her mid-twenties to your thirty--but I LOVE how it echoes that recruitment scene in X2. "Your real name." And then it goes on to echo the end of this brilliant X2 fic, right down to the part where it doesn't seem to me like Erik, in this scene, is at any point genuinely sexually interested (I do think he really is interested in her otherwise, in a sometimes douchey but genuine way). He's sealing an alliance, offering an emotional lure.
(And oh god, this scene continues to be so UNBEARABLE the way Raven's every change and decision is refracted through, prompted by a man. Erik prefers the real Raven. I mean, speaking of the parallel with X2--that's a whole different way of phrasing the "prompting someone to embrace their mutant self" idea. But of course saying it to a woman requires some changes from saying it to a boy.)
17. CHARLES IS SUCH A DICK I CAN'T EVEN. I FUCKING CAN'T EVEN.
18. What is that look Erik gives Raven when she asks where Hank is? The camera holds on it for a couple seconds, through a cut, and it's not neutral at all, it's not just "huh, you're right, where is he?"--it seems distinctly directed at her--but I can't figure out what it IS saying.
aaaand I'm gonna leave the last 30 minutes for tomorrow, because I am entirely drained and also I want to leave time to do SOMETHING before passing out. Like writing! The point of all this! Perhaps!
no subject
My fanwank on Hank's powers: he has very, very strong legs and feet, and super-balance, but when he's got shoes on, he is kind of folding up his feet to make them a more "normal" shape. This means that while he is still stronger and has better balance than a regular person, his capabilities are seriously limited, like an athlete with their feet tied together.
no subject
This read on Hank's abilities makes as much sense as anything else to me. I shall adopt it until it becomes inconvenient. *g*