and just like that, we have a perfectly good reason for a july thread

[sonatine]

the vikings spinoff world feel a lot like someone just pitched a bunch of half naked male violence with a dash of soap opera and a pinch of period set piece design and was like 'it will cost us N and we have advertisers lined up who guarantee us a 5% roi so punch it'.

[sonatine]

2025 update:

Foundation season 3

July 3

[sonatine]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bMCpnEi4k0

like, these effects look really fucking good.

[sonatine]

new lena dunham project on netflix

https://archive.ph/HNtK0#selection-1757.13-1757.25

i dont see any obvious red flags... its clearly not going to be girls 2.0 but it might have legs.

[sonatine]

sandman season to is like right around the corner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er18gmgqy2k


july 3

[gimmick]

Last season, because Gaiman got more SA accusations. I don't know if they're going anywhere court wise, but 9 women is just too much smoke. Doubt there is going to be projects in the future that have anything to do with Gaiman.

[sonatine]

SPOILERsssssoooooo this is just kind of a quick unload after watching the first of the season 2 eps.

i saw people accuse it of feeling like a bit of a larp of season 1 and i get that.

also forgive me for saying this but desire should have been recast. he doesnt look good and thats a problem because he looked fine in season 1. the decision to show a close up of his hands with no makeup on them was uh.. certainly something. maybe this is like, part of the plot? so far it doesnt fucking feel like it tho.

also death went from packing a nice ass to pudgy. cute still but its weird that death is like, thicc.

also everyone having their own vernacular used to be engaging and dynamic and now it feels disjointed and jarring.

but mostly what i find weird is the direction/photography. this show used to have these long, sophisticated, voluptuously indulgent shots and now everything is staged like a soap opera sorta.

one thing i really do like tho is the decision to show the second 6 eps on the 24th. i like having 2 weeks where i can just hollar at these eps whenever i want without being bombarded with spoilers, which was a very annoying problem with like squid game for example.

oh also they kinda redid how morpheus appears to nada and thats some bullshit because i liked the season 1 deal where he kinda looked like a masai warrior and now in season 2 he appeared to her first looking like the keyboard player of parliament funkadelic and thats unfortunate. anyway.

but yeah whatever, i gave season 1 like 9/10 and this feels like 7/10 and even if we drop to 6/10 its still light years better than most of its competition so you know, im not going anywhere with this.

[sonatine]

ep 2 was fun. gwendoline christie is such an absolute living wealth of talent.

[sonatine]

SPOILERok 2 more eps in. not happy that the whole hell thread got wrapped in like an hour. also they kinda spelled out that all of dream's woes are the product of some plot by desire like a few times over but somehow dream just moves past it every time someone attributes a motive to 'desire'?

season 1 had some weak points too so im not going to cry foul yet but im also sad because all the gwen scenes appear to be behind us and i dont know whats in front of us but so far its kind of a slog.

also i think we burned through 100% of the promo footage for season 2 already?

[sonatine]

ok i wonder if the ep 1 footage where everyone was kinda bloated was from a late reshoot or something? that might be it.

[sonatine]

SPOILERok well so much for pacing myself.

so like, look its not artless. but it also feels like the curse of the second season where everyone knows there wont be a third so theres no point in trying to develop a nice well rounded viewing experience.

like everything is just straight for the jugular, emotionally. and its not super fun. also there is so fucking much trans theme saturation and i hate to come off like kalam but its reallllly not what im here for.

whatever tho.

watched the teasers for the rest of the series and yeah its just all about desire's plot to jack up dream. and look im just going to have to say it; i bet she gets away with it because you literally cant have a trans character on a netflix series fuck up and pay the price. like dream gets clipped and now desire is burdened by her guilt oh noooo fuck outta here.

im glad it exists, im glad it happened. im grateful. but i wish we had the whole season drop at once and i wish they went a bit more easy on the emotional horrors.

[sonatine]

"Last season, because Gaiman got more SA accusations. I don't know if they're going anywhere court wise, but 9 women is just too much smoke. Doubt there is going to be projects in the future that have anything to do with Gaiman."


btw i have no idea if its true or not but the showrunners are swearing up and down that 2 seasons was always the plan.

[gimmick]

Somewhere around the second episode there was a solid hour when i wasn't getting bored. The random DEI stuff just comes across as box ticking and that's not useful for anyone.

There's all sorts of problems with the second season. It somehow became even more theatrical. Because reasons it's now more glaringly a bastardized version of late 80s and early 2020s at the same time. It doesn't work. Mostly you just need to choose one or the other. It would have been cheaper to lean into the original 80s aesthetics than try to yeet the whole thing to the 20s.

Oh well we got demons that look like Billy Idol and an old timey Rolls Royce mixed in with a pointless dead naming bit. Deaths house also never got past the 80s for no logical reason. If you insist that "now" is 2020s, just throw in a random Ipad, Peleton or whatever that sells the scene, instead of just recreating the comic from the 80s.

There is a fairly natural cutoff point in the original comics, but that was around the 2/5 of the whole run. If the show wanted to continue from that, they would have to deal with few of their casting choices. You could say that it was always going to be just 2 seasons, but had it got enough traction they would have kept milking it for 3+ more seasons and random spinoffs. I'm gonna venture a guess that they had plans for Death and/or Joan Constantine spinoffs.

[sonatine]

Somewhere around the second episode there was a solid hour when i wasn't getting bored. The random DEI stuff just comes across as box ticking and that's not useful for anyone.

There's all sorts of problems with the second season. It somehow became even more theatrical. Because reasons it's now more glaringly a bastardized version of late 80s and early 2020s at the same time. It doesn't work. Mostly you just need to choose one or the other. It would have been cheaper to lean into the original 80s aesthetics than try to yeet the whole thing to the 20s.

Oh well we got demons that look like Billy Idol and an old timey Rolls Royce mixed in with a pointless dead naming bit. Deaths house also never got past the 80s for no logical reason. If you insist that "now" is 2020s, just throw in a random Ipad, Peleton or whatever that sells the scene, instead of just recreating the comic from the 80s.

There is a fairly natural cutoff point in the original comics, but that was around the 2/5 of the whole run. If the show wanted to continue from that, they would have to deal with few of their casting choices. You could say that it was always going to be just 2 seasons, but had it got enough traction they would have kept milking it for 3+ more seasons and random spinoffs. I'm gonna venture a guess that they had plans for Death and/or Joan Constantine spinoffs.

yeah this resonates.

and as mentioned and at the risk of repeating myself, i think theres a lot of blame to go around. first off youre 100% right about the 'only 2 seasons were envisioned' narrative. they were willing to throw money at much less popular projects than this so i think that they are probably warping a less attractive narrative to suit everyones purposes here.

also i think whats most exhausting to me at this point is the whole 'games within games' plot arcs that go nowhere. or so far appear to go nowhere. and the ones that arent going nowhere are just really fucking dumb because you cant hit me over the head with hints while the star of the series just kinda spaces on them over and over again.

so we are entering this kinda friction field where either they wasted my time with senseless schemes that didnt actually go anywhere or they are wasting my time spoon feeding me the truth while a character im supposed to empathize with is oblivious and both of those are fairly unforgivable sins.

in 10 days we know for sure.

the idea of spinoffs is pretty infuriating btw. death has done nothing to deserve more of my attention and its unclear how we got from joan constantine's grave marker in greece to a future where shes foiling demonic plots etc etc. whatever. im probably missing some obvious explanation but my unwillingness to look it up says a lot here.

[sonatine]

ugh i gpt'd the johanna situation and ok i guess?

[gimmick]

Yea it started with swapping John's parts in 1st season with Joan and now the same actress plays every female Constantine (Johanna, Joanna etc.). The swap was done due to lack of rights, but it's safe to say they secured the rights for Joan.

Death had her own comic spinoff. Also lucifer, but they already did a shitty version of that.

Random noise from when Gaiman's name was +ev...

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv...er-1235235576/

..."Have you heard all the calls for a Johanna Constantine spinoff series?

I have, from Neil himself! One of the reasons that I wanted to do it was that the character felt so formed, and what was really thoughtful of Neil and Allan [Heinberg] is that they sent the script over to me, but they didn’t tell me who the character was."

It was a thing 2-3 years ago.