My Spotify playlists are basically my soul
Also they are oddly specific
Baby Yoda is the blinking sip meme that 2020 deserves.
Closer....
Closer....
When Taylor swift wrote, “I sneak out to the garden to see you, We keep quiet ‘cause we’re dead if they knew,”
and “Baby, I know places we won’t be found,”
and “you should think about the consequence of you touching my hand in a darkened room”
and “Sometimes when I look into your eyes I pretend you’re mine all the damn time”
and “Seems like there’s always someone who disapproves, they’ll judge it like they know about me and you”
and “Your love is a secret I’m hoping, dreaming, dying to keep”
and “So we went on our way, too in love to think straight”
and “This love is ours, and it’s not theirs to speculate if it’s wrong”
and “ I would fall from grace just to touch your face”
and “I can hear them whisper as we pass by”
and “Our secret moments in a crowded room, they got no idea about me and you”
and “darling, you had turned my bed into a sacred oasis, people started talking, putting us through our paces”
and “The rest of the world was black and white but we were in screaming color”
and “I loved you in secret, first sight, yeah, we love without reason”
and “We could be a beautiful miracle, unbelievable, instead of just invisible"
and “Religion’s in your lips, even if it’s a false god, we’d still worship, we might just get away with it, the altar is my hips,”
and “Carve your name into my bedpost ‘Cause I don’t want you like a best friend”
and “I don’t wanna keep secrets just to keep you,”
and “They’re trying to tell me how to feel, this love is difficult but it’s real”
and “I loved you in spite of deep fears that the world would divide us”
and “Everyone thinks that they know us but they know nothing about all of this silence and patience, pining and anticipation, my hands are shaking from holding back from you”
and “Something gave you the nerve to touch my hand”
and “I’d kiss you as the lights went out, Swaying as the room burned down, I’d hold you as the water rushes in” and then, at the end of it all:
I wanna be defined by the things that I love
Not the things I hate
Not the things that I’m afraid of, I’m afraid of
Not the things that haunt me in the middle of the night
I, I just think that
You are what you love
The year ends THE DECADE
in a month ENDS IN A
MONTH
I’d go back to December, turn around and make it all right
what doesn’t kill me makes me want you more
One of the most important things you can teach your kids is when and how to say no to authority figures.
Love this painting by @florentinariri on Instagram ❤ ❤ ❤
IT GIRL ICONS: sabrina carpenter ( winter / christmas )
like this post & consider following @babydoili on twitter if you use xx
Jumanji and “Resets”
An actual big issue with Jumanji as a concept is the reset. Since the game messes with the space time continuum to revert away its consequences, technically the game never happened.
When Alan and Sarah won, they went back to 1969. Judy and Peter had no memory of anything. Brantford never went to shit because of the shoe factory closing and Alan’s dad didn’t waste away in depression trying to find his son. Alan’s dad lives longer, and Judy and Peter’s parents don’t die. Everything is different. In a way, Jumanji is just The Butterfly Effect without focusing on the actual butterfly effect. No one remembers lions in bedrooms and a hunter downtown because it literally didn’t happen. Only the people at the eye of the storm remember.
In the new movie, the players all revert to their own times. Alex goes home and presumably never actually “played” the video game. He grows up and has a life. He remembers, but that’s it. The kids go back to their time, and find Alex’s house and family in a better place. They’ve changed, but the world hasn’t. This works with the video game, I think, because there are no real consequences for the teens and they haven’t been missing for that long - an afternoon at most. They maybe got in trouble about their detention. Jumanji was able to spit Alex and the kids into their own times with their memories because the events would’ve happened the same way regardless. Alex donated the game to the school or lost it, which is how it ends up in the basement. It’s a bit odd that he didn’t destroy it, but it works. Jumanji really only happens for the players.
Where the reset becomes an issue is continuity. Since the game doesn’t happen and can evolve, the only constancies are within the game itself. The concept remains. There is a jungle. It takes people, literally or metaphorically. It tortures and tests them. It’s a game. When beaten, things go back to normal.
In the video game, we see the “Alan Parrish was here” written in the tree fort (which honestly makes me think the movie creators watched the cartoon) and that works. It’s a nice call back that also answers a question; the world of the board game and the world of the video game are the same, just evolved. Another tie is that the villain is a Van Pelt. That’s literally a Law of Jumanji: there must always be a Van Pelt.
Here’s the problem: since the game never happens, it can’t have a lore or any record outside of itself. No one but the players remember, and so there are no news headlines or death tolls. There’s no “Brantford teens have a tendency to disappear when they find spooky board games.” There can’t even be local lore, unless the players who remember decide to talk. As we saw with Sarah, that doesn’t go well. Magic board games don’t exist. Sure, I suppose they could publish fiction, but in the current Jumanji universe it wouldn’t be widespread. Maybe, maybe, their world has more whispers of dangerous board games. But we have those in real life, we have the movie Jumanji, and neither would convince me not to play some old board game.
The fact is, Jumanji barely leaves a trace. There is no way for the new kids to go “Oh, Jumanji? Isn’t that the game connected to that kid’s disappearance and all that chaos back in the 70’s? Or that other kid’s disappearance in the 90’s?” The thing in the 70’s never happened and Alex’s family didn’t go public with, “Our son is missing. He was last seen playing a video game called Jumanji.” What’s positively insidious about the game is that you don’t know what’s happening until it’s too late. There’s just no way anyone can know.
The only gray area is when a game is left unfinished. The pest control guy mentions the bats in the first movie because that did happen; the game hadn’t ended yet. Sarah tried to explain to the police that Alan Parrish got sucked into a board game and she was attacked by African bats, and so locals knew about crazy Sarah and about little Alan Parrish who mysteriously vanished and may have been murdered. It didn’t connect to the board game unless you believed Sarah. Even then, Sarah stopped talking about it, and so Judy and Peter couldn’t have found out that the board game they found was connected to some suspicious occurrences years before.
It’s the same with the new movie. Since Alex didn’t finish the game, his house is a wreck. His dad is crazy and haunted. There are stories of “that kid who vanished in the 90’s” and “freak house” but it doesn’t connect back to the game. In short, once the game is over and the only people who remember are the players? There are no warning signs until you start playing.
9 people know about Jumanji, based on movie canon. 2 of them were boys in the 1870’s, 2 of them were kids in the 1970’s, 1 of them was a teen in the 90’s, and 4 of them were teens in 2017. You want lore? Ask them. Even if they all talked, that’s a very small number of people with disconnected stories who won’t be believed - especially if they get rid of the game, as then they have no proof of it even existing. It’s pretty fucked up and very cunning, and I think it works. Without lore, you can have anyone play without being suspicious. You can have as big a franchise as you want with new actors, locations, and plots every single time. You just have to follow the Laws of Jumanji and the basic pattern: kid finds game, kid plays game, game plays kid, kid beats game, repeat.
The Van Pelts
I remember reading some comment that the new Jumanji’s Van Pelt is “10x scarier than the original Van Pelt” and idk it got me thinking.
On one hand, Russel Van Pelt does look more imposing than the original Van Pelt, who was often played for laughs and had a much lighter color scheme. Russel is also made of bugs, has one blind eye, and telepathically controls all of Jumanji’s creatures. I can definitely see where that comment was coming from.
However, when I think about it, I’m much more horrified of the original Van Pelt. The old Van Pelt, while lacking mystical abilities and looking a bit like an eccentric lion postman, had a goal and motive that is completely terrifying. He hunted players for the sake of hunting them. What he wants? You dead. That’s literally it. He’s simpler and yes, less imposing, but the singularity of that goal is scary. To Alan, this is even more horrifying because Van Pelt looks like Alan’s father. Imagine being hunted through a jungle for 26 years by someone who looks like your father.
Russel gives off a terrifying first impression, and only grows more horrifying as you see his abilities and ruthlessness, but he doesn’t really do anything. He runs a jungle biker gang, sure, but his motive is much less lethal. What he wants? The Eye of Jumanji. If you give it to him, you probably won’t die by his hand. Jumanji has plenty of other ways for you to die.
In the end, I guess it all depends on your point of view. I’d say that, while Russel is scarier at first glance, the original Van Pelt presents more of a deadly issue and is therefore more conceptually terrifying. I feel like you could talk something out with Russel, but the original Van Pelt would just shoot you.
In the board game Jumanji, losing a player is a catastrophe for the other players - as then the game can’t be finished - but isn’t it also counterproductive for the game itself?
(Speaking in terms of the first movie.) If the game can’t be played anymore, due to a player’s death, then it essentially can’t trap anyone else or let anything else out. It’s a huge flaw in the game’s workings - unless you can be brought back to life by a fellow player’s roll. This all makes me wonder if there’s a reset or if the game really is sentient, because something about its mechanics and its goals doesn’t line up.
In this same train of thought, Van Pelt is a very seriously bad roll. As a big game hunter, his sole goal is to hunt and kill a single player. Regardless of his accuracy and effectiveness in that goal, it’s bad. He isn’t some natural disaster that might kill someone, aimless and catastrophic; he’s focused, unlike many other aspects of the game.
The best roll that one can possibly get seems to be the one Judy rolled in the attic when Alan was trapped in quicksand: go back a turn. It doesn’t actually penalize the one who rolled it, doesn’t require the previous player to roll again (like you would think), and doesn’t make the person who rolled it roll again either. It literally just stops the previous roll’s event. It doesn’t double it or do anything nefarious and negative, like going back a turn means in many other board games. It’s such a blatantly useless and benign roll, I almost feel that Jumanji wouldn’t even offer it if not for vague plot necessity.
Jumanji Musings
I said before that I think way too much about the mechanics / goals of Jumanji, and that I’d probably have a series of posts about it. Here we go! I’ll try tagging all of my posts in this series w/ “jumanji musings” if anyone is following along, even though I’m probably yelling into the void.
There are a ton of questions about the game that go unanswered because they simply aren’t necessary to enjoy the concept, but here are some of mine and what answers (if any) I came up with.