moonlightdeathwish:

Who’s the artist? (The signature looks something like “CedA.”)

I miss the carefree days ♡

croxovergoddess:

OUIJA CATS

I Just made a new design! It’s in my Teepublic!

@killstar

Plays oujia board to summon Jinghua, summons pissed off Jiang Cheng instead.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about movie franchises and how they can be awesome if done right or terrible if done wrong.  Today I want to expand on that theme and talk about some other trends that studios have been using to try to cash in.

The first trend is the reboot, which has a spotty track record.  There are some franchises that have been rebooted with much success and critical acclaim.  The ones that jump immediately to mind are The Dark Knight trilogy reboot of the Batman franchise and the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies.  Both of these reboots took well known and well traveled characters and storylines and breathed new life into them which led to commercial and critical success.  However, there are plenty of reboots that fail to achieve the success of their predecessors, both at the box office and from the critics.  

Things get even more insane when franchises get rebooted multiple times.   The Spiderman franchise  had some success with Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker and then the reboot did pretty well with Andrew Garfield.  Now there are rumors that Spiderman will be rebooted yet again with another new star.  James Bond has been re-cast so many times I’ve lost count and, other than the recent Daniel Craig movies, it hasn’t been a boost to the quality or success of the franchise.  Hollywood will try to squeeze blood out of a stone and every last dollar out of a potentially lucrative franchise.  

The second trend in Hollywood is the remake, which is slightly different than the reboot.  A remake is when a well-known film is copied as the framework for another film but many of the settings, characters, and plot points are changed or updated.  A recent example of this is the remake of the 1982 classic musical movie Annie, which was (quite unnecessarily) remade in 2014 with a new plot, new characters, and several new songs.  

Remakes can sometimes be great.  Ocean’s Eleven is a remake of a “rat pack” film from the 60’s and it’s one that I enjoy considerably.  The Coen Brothers remake of True Grit is another that I thought was well done and added a new dimension to the John Wayne starring original.  But the remakes that match or exceed the original films they are based on are rare, and too often they lose what made the original films so special and loved.

The last trend I’m going to talk about today, and the one that I really can’t stand, is the trend towards increasingly absurd adaptations.  It’s not uncommon for TV shows to be adapted to films, and sometimes with a lot of success.  Batman was a television show first.  21 Jump Street was a television show first.  There would have been no Serenity without the television show Firefly.  And of course the wonderful films of the Monty Python comedy troupe would not have been possible without the television success of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  There have been plenty of duds too, but it’s not the worst thing that Hollywood has done.

But the trend is spiraling downward recently with more and more absurd adaptations.  Disney turned a relatively popular theme park attraction into the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, which is sadly still continuing long past it’s expiration date.  Video games have been adapted into several films, none of which were as good or as popular as the games they were based on.  In recent years, sanity has been stretched to the point where board games like Battleship, Monopoly, Candy Land, and the Ouija Board have been adapted into films or are at some point in the development process.  I’m just waiting on movie studios to adapt crappy television commercials or cell phone games into movies.  It’s going to happen.

It’s hard to generalize and say that reboots, remakes, and adaptations are a good thing or a bad thing.  When done with care and craft they can be great to watch and successful financially.  However, as I said in part one of my thoughts on movie franchises, I think that the lack of creativity and over-reliance on proven commodities is one of the reasons that people aren’t going to the movies as often.  Plus there is more competition for our time and money with the increased quality of television and online entertainment.  Angela will have more thoughts on that in the next few days.

One of my friends commented that there seems to be a wealth of huge blockbuster franchises and an explosion of low budget independent films but the “middle class” movies are getting squeezed out.  I don’t have exact figures, but my initial reaction is that he’s on to something.  I know studio executives want to try to minimize risk and maximize profits by creating films that can be cross-marketed and have a wealth of merchandising opportunities, but the primary reason for making a movie should be because it’s a good movie.  When movie studios figure that out, maybe they will see the business grow.

My new big artwork! Ouija board

https://www.etsy.com/shop/VelvetMoonMoth

Credit: IG-@ pandorawitchshop

pictures do not belong to me.

,,

Magnus to Alec

Dear Alec,

Before anything else, I just want to mention once again that you are by far the handsomest man I have ever met, with the most beautiful blue eyes, and what I love most about you, among so, so many other features, is that you are a man of incalculable understanding, patience, and forgiveness.

Yes, this is our vacation. Yes, you and the kids are lounging on the soft white sands of St Barths, as is good and right. Yes, I have had to dash to London on urgent business involving Blackthorns. Yes, I have been receiving your many supportive texts, accompanied by your many photos in which you look angry while holding umbrella drinks.

No, I will not be back today. You must imagine me saying this with the heaviest of sighs and the most forlorn look. I need one more day. Blackthorn Hall is haunted—which I could have told anyone who had bothered to ask, I’ve never known a more obviously haunted place in my life—and none of the little Blackthorns (who I suppose are no longer quite as little as all that) have had to deal with this kind of ghostiness before.

So again, let me commend you for your forbearance in this time of trial. That is not sarcasm, just formal! I really mean it!

Love you, Alec. See you tomorrow night. The next morning at the absolute latest -

To the Greatest Man Who Has Ever Or Will Ever Live,

It will be tomorrow morning. I was meaning to depart tonight, but it is now very, very late, and I have had no small amount of wine, and these are not the conditions by which I would feel quite safe opening a Portal. It will not do me any good to return to St Barth if I show up on top of the Gustavia Lighthouse.

So since I cannot yet sleep, but must, let me quickly fill you in.

The Blackthorns are fixing up Blackthorn Hall—fancy that—and while I understand they are now properly adults, they are still young enough to use a hundred year old Ouija board they found hidden in the walls. Didn’t have a planchette? Not a problem, we will just make one out of scrap without reference to the wood or the ley-lines or any of the— Sorry. I couldn’t help it, it’s such the Shadowhunter stereotype. Leap before you look. In fact, just leap. Leap whenever and wherever.

As it turns out (spoiler alert!) the spirit of the house—at least the restless one—means no apparent harm and is just your standard everyday “ghost looking for its missing bauble to move on” situation, as you’ll see. But I was more alarmed for it being the house in Chiswick. Many generations of Lightwoods lived in it over many years, and there always seemed a dark shadow over the place. In the mid-19th it was the home of, I’m sorry to say, a very bad Lightwood, definitely one of the worst Lightwoods, and after that, well, its fall from grace was precipitous. I cannot say from what time period this ghost might date, but given its reaction to the name “Blackthorn”, I had my worries.

Anyway, by the time I got to the house, Julian and Emma had managed to cause the Ouija board to, you know, magically shatter into a dozen pieces. I magicked it back—note for future reference, easier to magically repair something that was magically broken in the first place rather than with, say, a hammer—and produced a makeshift but actually calibrated and warded planchette. And burned their planchette in a fire. Outside.

It was quick enough at that point to contact the presence in the house, who was indistinct, probably from being alone for the past hundred-odd years. Let me tell you, Alec love, I was worried then. I was worried that this ghost was someone I knew. Someone I cared about, once. It probably isn’t—most of them would have no reason to be ghosts at all, much less ghosts stuck here—but once the thought occurred to me, I couldn’t put it aside. I tried to ask but you know how ghosts are. “I do not now know you,” it said. Great. But did you know me when you were alive? Just “I do not now know you.”

Anyway the thing was peaceful enough. We finally got around to the topic of why he is a ghost—we got enough of a spoken voice to know the voice is male, at least. He spoke aloud, and firmly. I am bound here by a silver band, he said.

Whether this silver band is a ring, a bracelet, a handcuff, the concept of “the ties that bind,” or a group of robot musicians, I have no idea. But it’s normal enough for a ghost to be bound by an object and to be looking for the thing that binds them. I honestly didn’t get a negative vibe from the guy. I’m… let’s say ninety percent sure that it’s not the aforementioned Bad Lightwood, at least. I told Julian and Emma there was no harm in their keeping an eye out for a silver band during their cleanup of the house, but not to worry themselves sick over it. This felt like wise advice at the time, although we had all had quite a bit of wine at that point.

The wine was in fact drunk continually throughout the evening, as there are some salvageable bottles from the cellar—rather amazingly, although I don’t know, maybe Shadowhunters have wine preservation runes somewhere near the back of the Gray Book. And drinking red wine while talking to a ghost just seemed, I don’t know, the right pairing? But of course now I have a splitting headache from a combination of sulfites and light necromancy. I am going to put myself to long-overdue sleep, and then tomorrow at six in the morning your time please tell le garçon I would like waiting for me a café allongé, very hot and a sidecar, very cold. I will then entertain the children for the rest of the day while you, my love, my all, take a nap and join us whenever you please.

With all my love, all my kissin’, you don’t know what you been missin’,

M.

Julian to Magnus

Hi Magnus,

So I know you told me only to get in touch for a “real emergency,” and I think you might have already left for vacation. But we’ve got some ghost trouble here at Chiswick House and we could use a little advice. Just in writing! No need to interrupt your time away! Unless, um, you think it really is an emergency.

Chiswick House is in awful shape in general, so it’s hard to know what’s a real problem and what’s just a hundred years of neglect. Other than one small area nobody’s touched the place since, it seems, the time of Tatiana Blackthorn.

We have some garden gnomes here doing the structural repairs and the big stuff, masonry and framing and so on. I mean, they’re not actually garden gnomes, I think they’re brownies, but they have the big pointy hats and the beards and everything. They’ve been moving pretty slowly, but recently Kieran was here and he had a talk with the foreman (this guy named Round Tom who is not even all that round) and since then things have sped up a lot. And there is a lot less complaining about the work conditions, and a lot less disappearing for the day if the tea runs out for more than five minutes. On the other hand, they’ve started leaving little offerings around intended for “the Un-Seel Laird,” which I gather is Kieran. Not anything Kieran would want, I don’t think. A lot of acorns and pretty rocks, mostly? And the occasional portrait of Kieran in chalk, which let me tell you, it’s a good thing they’re competent at construction because their portraiture could use some work. We’ve been keeping all the stuff in a box for him just in case.

I’m rambling, sorry. It’s just us rattling around in this giant ruin and all we want is for someone to listen to our dull stories about home renovation. But what I actually want to tell you about is the ghost.

I’m sure there are dozens of random spirits going back centuries that have some kind of faint presence in the house—Round Tom hinted as much to me—but there’s definitely some specific one that is actively haunting the place. We’ve had some poltergeist-y stuff. Mostly harmless pranks: vases overturned, drinks spilled, music faintly playing in the distance but originating from nowhere, weird hot spots, weird cold spots, doors slamming, doors closing very slowly on their own. To clarify, I do NOT mean poltergeist as in the movie Dru made me watch. No one has been sucked into evil dimensions or levitated (yet!). Still, it seems like we ought to try to get out ahead of this, so Emma and I have been trying to communicate with the presence directly. Whoever it is, they haven’t responded to us speaking to them, and it’s starting to feel silly to constantly talk in a friendly voice to nobody, like we have an imaginary friend. All that happens is the next morning someone has stacked all the gnomes’ hats into a hat tower and we have to convince the gnomes it wasn’t us.

Lest you think we haven’t tried smarter things than just yelling “Here ghostie ghostie ghostie,” Tiberius sent us a device he’s been working on, like a Sensor for ghosts. I spent some time walking the halls and eventually found a spot along some random corridor where the Sensor went crazy. I busted the wall open with a sledgehammer—somehow I feel like you would approve, although the gnomes did not—and behind the plaster, wedged between two of the beams, was a Ouija board that must go back to at least Tatiana’s time, if not before. There was no planchette, so we made our own out of scrap wood and furniture tacks. Maybe there was something bad about using that instead of something that went with the Ouija board, I don’t know how it works, but in any event, we tried the board and it went really badly.

We tried to do things officially—Emma and I waited until midnight, we got dressed up nicely, and we went down into the cellar. (There are a bunch of rooms down there that are highly spooky and look like they’ve been used for ghost-ish business in the past.) We extinguished witchlights (no electricity down there any more than it’s anywhere else), lit lots of candles. Ghosts love candles, right? We had a bolt of black silk to sit on that Emma found in a trunk somewhere, and we sat on either side of the board and both put our hands on the planchette.

Us: HELLO

Nothing.

Us: WEMEANNOHARM

The candles guttered, but most of the windows in the room are smashed, so with the usual draft from outside I’m not sure we can count that as a response.

Us: WHATISYOURNAME

We heard a scratching sound coming from one of the walls, and we opened up that wall in great excitement, but it turned out to be a badger. Actually, it was a mother badgers and some badger cubs, which was very cute until the mother starting trying to kill us. So we had to interrupt and go get the gnomes to help us and they relocated the badger family to a glade of some kind. (They also issued us a bill for “badger decampment.”)

This was all very disappointing. Emma said that maybe it was rude to ask for the ghost’s name before introducing ourselves.

Emma: MYNAMEISEMMACARSTAIRS

Me: ANDMYNAMEISJULIANBLACKTHORN

Well,that got a reaction. As soon as I finished the last “N” the board leapt off the ground and twisted violently around. The planchette went flying and Emma went to go retrieve it from the other end of the room, but then when she came back the board went flying around in the air and, I am sorry to say, we chased it around for probably two full minutes without catching it. Eventually the ghost got bored, I guess, and the Ouija board stopped in midair and shattered into pieces, which fell to the ground. And all the candles went out. (There were sixteen pieces, if that means anything. Emma says no, I said we should mention it anyway just in case.)

So…any advice? Too much ghostly energy for an old Ouija board? Defective board in the first place? Does the ghost want to be left alone? (If so, why does it keep knocking things over?) Did we offend it? There hasn’t been anything like that since, but exploding Ouija board seemed sufficiently threatening that I wanted to get in touch. What do you think is our next step?

Again, I’m really sorry to bother you, but your help would mean a lot to me. I really want to make Blackthorn Hall a place that the Blackthorns can use again, a place that will feel like a second home for all of us. And it would be nice if people in London associated the Blackthorns with a grand manor house rather than an infamous wreck. Which is not going to happen if visitors wake up with their hair tied to the bedposts, or have their suitcases upended on the staircase. In payment, we promise you as much babysitting as you like, whenever you need. Although maybe once we’re no longer living in a collapsing death-trap.

Much obliged—

Julian