the decrease in costuming quality over the last 20 years has been soooo precipitous & nauseating. i’m not even talking abt marvel’s cg supersuits or anything this time, look at the fabric quality, structure, layering, character, and craftsmanship of older costumes in 102 dalmations (2000) vs cruella (2021)
ever after (1998) vs cinderella (2021)
lord of the rings (2001-2003) vs the rings of power (2022)
this trend should upset you not just because it looks cheap, but because it suggests a strong anti-art and anti-labor movement in film and tv making. don’t forget costumers are unionized
Ok, but what is happening here is not a degradation of skill. At all. The number of phenomenally talented and knowledgable Costumiers and maker working is astounding. The only thing more astounding is how little they are being properly utilised.
What is happening is a degradation of production schedules. Prep time is constantly being shrunk to the absolute bare minimum which limits design time, fitting time, r&d, sourcing (materials, hardware habdash, etc), making time (drafting, construction, embellishment, etc). Additionally budgets - despite the ridiculous sums of money being sunk - are becoming more shrunk, focused and scrutinised. That feeds back into the materials available (and a dependency on what IS available?, but also staffing levels - smaller workrooms, limited outsourcing etc etc. Schedules are not locked down at all. Ever. Even more so in these Covid times. Scripts aren’t locked down. Ever. Because productions never consider the wider logistics of outlying departments like costume, props etc.
Cast is increasingly last minute, w negotiations dragging out. This limits contact time for development and conception (actors must also be involved int he design process), fittings, etc. I did a job last year where - aside from our two leads - we had zero cast until the week we started shooting which meant we could only do extremely linited advance work plus we had a minuscule team despite being for a huge streaming platform with major stars. On another job we had three (3) days between a principle actor needing a visually iconic costume being cast and being ON CAMERA.
Additionally it is becoming increasingly common for actors to expect higher use of doubles - both stunt and picture doubles m. That means, simply, more costume as they all must have their own. Often in multiples. This with the commonality of stunts means that sometimes as much as 20+ repeats of element of a costume are needed, depending on necessity. That means fabrics are needed in huge quantities, and workrooms must effectively have factory productions. This paired with scheduling limitations above means more often than not we must use what we can get immediately. You know if you could have even a week to source something from, say, Italy, you can get something divine. But there just isn’t the time because you need 60m of specific fabric yesterday. There’s not time to get things made.
So the entire process is streamlined into what can be made in quantity and quickly. Everyone mourns what could be made if we only had the time, money and resources. Everyone know what we could be achieving, should be achieving and want to be achieving. But we just can’t because everything is about immediate, constantly shifting deadlines, high demands and logistics. It’s a nightmare, and we’re all very very tired. As with everything it’s all part of corporate greed. And I haven’t even gone into the twenty levels of executive meddling and the endless rounds of approvals (plus marketing and merchandising approvals etc etc etc it’s unending.)
I’ve been working in film costume for coming on 12 years (ugh), and it has gotten noticeably worse on all of these fronts in just the decade plus I’ve been around. Even in the last five years.
to be clear. i don’t expect any of grian’s potential lore connections w the watchers and the egg and all that to actually go anywhere. but i do think it is very very funny and legendary of him to capitalize on the viewers like this,,
Having friends on tumblr is really great. I often refer to you guys in real life as “my friend from england/australia/california/new york” and it makes people think I’m very well traveled when really I’ve just spent a lot of time on the Internet.
Iconic moments in history is Ciri being convinced that she doesn’t have any magical abilities and not understanding the tests she thinks she’s been failing all along and Yennefer finally revealing that she’s known Ciri is magical because they’ve been talking telepathically the whole time they’ve been together
I think we as queer people all know the “oh” moment where you realize you’re not straight/cis but no one talks about the “goddamnit not again” moment where you thought you completely figured out your gender/sexuality only for you then to discover another label and have to start the whole process over again
don’t read into this statement too much because it’s a vague theory of existence from my own perspective but it’s WILD how people can genuinely think autism is a modern thing that is “increasing” in response to some toxin or social contagion or some shit
My guy if autistic people were as “rare” as they supposedly were in the 70’s we wouldn’t be having this conversation. society as we know it wouldn’t exist. we would have barely developed tool use by now
It’s 200,000 BCE. You’re an early Homo sapiens living with your band in a tropical forest. You spot your brother next to a cluster of boulders, humming to himself in his throat, swaying aimlessly back and forth.
This isn’t unusual—whenever your band stops near a rockfall or boulder, he sits next to the rocks for hours, sometimes staring at bumps and ridges in the stone, sometimes banging rocks together—Clack-clack-clack. He has never shown any interest in foraging or hunting. If you hand him a rock to crush a nut or throw at a predator, he will stare fixedly at the texture of the stone until someone snaps him out of it.
When you reach him you notice something unusual—he has sorted the rocks. In one group of piles, there are paler, more irregular chunks of stone. In some other, smaller piles, there are smoother, darker bits of stone, fractured in clean, curving pieces. You pull him back to the rest of the group so he can eat and rest—he has been banging the rocks together all day, and he typically forgets everything else when he finds particularly interesting rocks. You pick up one of the darker pieces. Its edge is sharp, sharp enough to cut. You skim it along a thin green sapling and watch the bark peel off like fat.
You have used sharp rocks as tools in the past, even found rocks with such sharp edges; you wonder if there’s a way to find more. The next time your band moves its camp, you search the area for other rocks that look like the one you picked up, but find nothing.
You decide to follow your brother down a stony riverbank to the shore, watching him bang different rocks together and arrange them into rows and piles on the sand, humming happily. Some rocks seem to make him very excited and happy; he sets them aside in their own piles. Others are less significant, though he still deliberates about what piles to put them in.
You show him the shard you picked up earlier. He stares at it for a while and then, silently, searches the riverbed until he finds a dark chunk of stone. He presses it into your hand.
You point at a similar-looking rock. He looks angry and frustratedly kicks the water, then hands you another piece of dark stone, as if you should know better. This repeats for some time. But by the end of the evening, you are starting to notice that every rock is different, that many are beautiful, and that some are useful.
At another place, in another time, someone else is fascinated by snakes. She always closely examines snakes others in her band have killed, and can be seen observing them when they are alive.
Her family members notice that she can immediately distinguish a snake that is venomous from a similar snake that is safe, and she always, always sees snakes before anyone else does. Once, when they were about to make camp, she became upset and was inconsolable for hours, and no one realized why until one of the elders was nearly bitten by a deadly snake hiding in some fallen leaves. The group decides that she must have known there were snakes nearby, even without seeing one, and from then on, she surveys all potential campsites before anyone settles down.
Another person whose name we will never know loves the sounds of birds. All day long he echoes the birds’ songs as they walk through the forest, imitating the noises of whatever bird he heard last. Even a glimpse of a bird will set him imitating the bird’s song. Hunters in his group notice after a while that even the birds seem to be fooled by him, and practice bird calls until they are skilled enough to lure their quarry close.
Much later, someone feels more at home with the flighty goats her clan herds for meat than with other people. The goats flee from others, but they become so habituated to her that they respond to her calls, and regard her as one of their own. They let her treat their injuries and sicknesses, allowing members of the herd to recover from what would otherwise have killed them.
Yet another person somewhere else picks the wool of wild sheep off rocks and tree branches where it has been shed, rolling it in her hands until it sticks together. She loves the touch of the soft wool so much that she notices that enough wool, if it is worked enough, can be felted together into single pieces like hides, or twisted together into strong threads. She tracks the fluffiest sheep to their favorite scratching spots and soon the hunters won’t pursue the tracks that belong to her favorites, instead leaving them to produce fluffy lambs.
Our species is shaped by the contributions of people who paid a little more attention to the world than usual.
There is, of course, no way to find out how these developments actually happened.
But listen. I’ve been learning to identify plants and I don’t think some of this stuff was noticed by a person who stared at leaves a normal amount.
if you lived in prehistory and you were autistic, your special interest would be like, rocks. or the moon. or mushrooms. or one specific wild animal.
Like I HATE the idea that “every single neurodivergence was adaptive at some point NO exceptions” because obviously disability just exists sometimes. But it’s obvious to me that special interests would have served a really useful purpose in the early history of the human species, because…
…well, which makes more sense: that humans obtained all their knowledge of the natural world and of making and using technologies through basically a series of random accidents and observations, or that we had humans back then that were just really driven to pay attention to rocks, just like we have those humans now?
Like, stop asking “Did autistic people exist back then?” because there’s no reason to think they didn’t; start asking “What were autistic people doing back then?” and the answer is “serving as a walking treasure trove of hyper-detailed information about a very specific aspect of the natural world, probably”
Whenever you catch yourself wondering, “How the hell did people in prehistoric times figure this out?” remember that for any given thing, there is a human out there who is, for unknown reasons, compelled to think about and learn about that thing 24/7
The amount of effort ficwriter does in order to write a fic. “nah the story doesn’t need to be that accurate it’s just a fic I’m not getting any money out of it” and then as they keep writing and posting their browse history is something like “moon calendar in 1981”
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