gay boys too 🔥😈

emily pope telling her to call herself Sheriff so that the agent would listen to her

sidetalkin’ into a third term

an OOP that rewrites your background so that you’re from Extraordinario, Texas 🤠

note that 峰迴路轉 (“a good turn of events”) is an existing idiom, but to localize the title Knives Out, they switched out the first character 峰 (“peak, summit”) for 鋒 (“pointed edge”)

right, like was this a glyph form corruption? a respelling on a character level?

i knew they were cooking when the 甫 radical showed up

did you ever have that moment where you first see a picture of a 鼎, and then you learn how the character is written, and it’s just a 🫢 moment of wow it looks just like the real thing? that’s how 簠 feels to me too

anyway, the costumes and the music were all quite excellent. they chose not to give Wukong a tail, but instead a Loki-ish helmet with two horns; this splendidly cascades into their artistic choices for the dances and choreographed fights. it’s lovely to see Guanyin floating across stage in her lotus

the precept is “power alone is not enough” and it acts as a through line for Sun Wukong orient himself even as he gets swept up in Heavenly Imperial Court politics. i think this is a bit simplistic, but it’s a very approachable way to show that Wukong misunderstands what he’s fighting for

as Solly noted, the opera tonally swings between serious introspection and deserving irreverence to match the breadth of the novel, yet it never has a big enough cast to create a more well-balanced emotional journey. instead the opera focuses on a precept taught by a mentor of Wukong

in terms of plot, it’s the early chapters of Journey to the West. many characters we know and love like Tripitaka don’t even show up because they’re introduced later in the plotline. i think this honed focus on the monkey king’s origins works quite well, but throws things out of balance

to be very clear, the translators did a splendid job. they faced the near impossible task of rendering new sentences in the style of 16th century vernacular, so they opted for “mandarin that sounds turn of the century” which is still quite intelligible

because you get “subtitles” for every line spoken and sung, if you’re familiar with the source material, it is painfully obvious which lines were taken from a chinese source and translated into english, and which ones were written in english first and translated back into chinese

it makes the bold artistic choice of using english to represent chinese, and keeping mandarin to perform buddhist chants, which are chanted in chinese today but were translated from sanskrit back then. thematically this works quite well, with supertitles in english and side titles in chinese

huge W 🎉

welcome to the transition, etc