thuvia ptarth

aycheb, Nobody Loves You
A vid like poetry. Noir Ellison, black and white, crisp, puts the clues together like a gumshoe does. But the slinky femme fatale he finds (naked, sleek, Brancusi sculpture in motion) is not about sex. All the surveillance footage here: watching watchers watching, Ellison watching Cromartie, Weaver watching Ellison watching Cromartie, photographers taking pictures of Weaver, images of Jesus in plaster and stained glass. The images blur: the reflections in glass, the images through tanks of water, the images on screen; the picture skipping like stuck tape, the gravestones running like film strips. Future and present and past colliding, merging, running into each other, movies displayed on the monitors and images showing through layers. Heaven's hardware problem spelled out in equations and blood.

Computer logic is predicated on Or, on definites, on black and white, on the individual squares of color that deceive the eye into seeing shades. But Weaver is And and One, liquid, changeable, water, invisible, reflecting back what is around her, showing the reflection of the eye, looking back.

cherryice, Unsteady Ground; hollywoodgrrl, Life in a Glass House; heyiya, Exit Music for a Witch
A troika of Merlin re-envisionings focused on Morgana, especially on her psychic visions/dreams and her ambiguous canonical/extracanonical position both inside and outside the charmed circle of power and intimacy.

In "Unsteady Ground," reflections in a shattered mirror and a spider crawling over a porcelain cheek signal the doomed mythic endeavor, the push-pull of all the characters as powerful and powerless, righteous and cruel, aggressor and victimized. History and foretold future identically disrupt the steadiness of the ground, the identification, the understanding: giving the keys to freedom to an unjustly imprisoned man kills him.

"Life in a Glass House" contrasts the gendered depictions of Merlin and Morgana, from the first close-up of the eyes: Closing in on Merlin's eyes shows what he sees, shows his power as active, shows him as powerful and full of agency; closing in on Morgana's eyes shows her victimized by her own power, made helpless by it, subject to it, able to use it only in her sleep. Her beauty, like her power, is made by femininity into a weapon and a curse, a shield against the power of others that will only take her so far; her own sympathies betray her. Her only hope is that some sympathetic power hears her wishes for revenge; her tragedy is that one does.

"Exit Music for a Witch" constructs a triumphant ending for the oppressed peoples of Camelot: magic users, witches, druids, blacksmiths' injured daughters. Sucks to be Merlin in this future, but that's what you get for siding with the patriarchy, dude. Brilliant and lovely and very clear storytelling.

obsessive24, Effigy (Merlin)
I have such conflicted feelings about this! It does such violence to Gwen's character to fit her into the position of the mythic Guinevere. Which may be the vid's point.

kiki_miserychic, So Say We All (It's All Part of a Bigger Plan) (Battlestar Galactica)
This reminds of what it was like when I first saw vids: overwhelming, exhausting, incomprehensible, moving but I cannot say what emotions it moves me to.

I like it a lot.

charmax, Unnatural Evolution (Battlestar Galactica/Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles/Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species)
This monkey's gone to Heaven.

This is so astonishing I just want to make big eyes and incoherent sounds and flailing hand gestures at you about it.

cherryice, Cemetery Side Road
Before 2x10, I wouldn't have thought I'd be interested in a Riley character piece; before 2x10, this piece wouldn't have made sense. This is what the inside of Riley's head must feel like.