v-ac:

“The most potent FX are Downey’s eyes — those big, expressive brown orbs that seem to be highlighted with natural mascara to make them pop. Downey uses his body like a dancer or an acrobat, but has there been any other actor since, maybe, Bette Davis whose eyelashes are so vital to his performance? Favreau seems to understand this: When Tony puts on his Iron Man mask, we spend as much time inside it, just looking into Downey’s eyes as they fill the screen, as we do watching him zoom through the atmosphere or stomp around on the earth’s surface. It’s the best special effect in the movie.“  — from Roger Ebert’s review of “Iron Man”

behemothblogging:

grimoire-of-geekery:

queenofchalices:

kingalchemy:

jhameia:

charminglyantiquated:

there’s dozens of stories about some kid from our world falling into a different, magical one,  being the chosen one or the close companion of the chosen one and saving the world, and then going home where they’re delighted to see their family again and have a new appreciation of their own life. but what about someone who didn’t miss it? what if you save the world and you’re given your medal and stripped of the magic you learned and put back in a world you never missed? and you’re furious.

maybe you gave up a few years of your life. you have callouses and muscles and a few scars and maybe a missing eye or something. you definitely have some blood on your hands. you might have PTSD you can’t talk to anyone about. and suddenly you’re fifteen again, in a body that’s too soft and too short and too complete. you’re always cold because there’s no magic burning in your veins anymore, and even as you grow up the feeling of not fitting doesn’t go away because when you look in the mirror at eighteen you look all wrong: this is not what you’re supposed to look like at eighteen. the sky clouds and you rub at the phantom ache of injuries this body never received. you wake up screaming sometimes remembering the sorcerer who burnt your hand to ashes, or the final battle you almost didn’t make it through, or the moment you felt the magic in you go out.

but here’s the thing: they took you and made you into a weapon that was determined enough and powerful enough to save a whole world. they can put you back where they found you but they can’t undo everything. and there’s this, too: the place between worlds clings to you. you can’t tease fire out of the air but you can feel the pull of the doorways all the time, although none of them so far go to your world.

but you try to make it work for a decade, anyway. you’re dutiful. but one night you leave work late and for the thousandth time you catch yourself searching the sky for firebirds. and you break. of the three portals within five hundred miles, one is a howling, frozen wasteland and one is a deep violet void, but one opens into a misty forest that you step into and don’t look back. it’s not your world, but if you keep going long enough, you’ll get there.

(and maybe much, much later, hundreds of worlds later, you climb through a window, or a door of woven branches int he middle a field, or push aside a curtain, and as you set foot on new land you feel the fire in your veins and sparks at your fingertips and finally, finally, you’re home)

Sadly the only story I can think of where it happens that the protag decides not to remain in the mundane home is Gaiman’s Neverwhere. 

This would be a great TV series though. Like Sliders, but better. 

Wow. These are my feelings all the time.

Chronicles of Narnia tho…

kingalchemy, I completely agree with you.

LITERALLY, I was just thinking this one and a half seconds ago before coming across this post!

Dashomancy is strong today.

Why do people never write this story? Oh wait, I know. It’s because fantasy stories are for kids, silly rabbit, and stories for kids have to have a Moral, and that Moral has to be one that makes squishy little kid brains value Mundanity over Magic, because that’s the only way they’ll be able to stick with soul-destroying corporate wage slavery until they’re 70.

Except it never actually works.

Embrace the magic. Embrace your birthright. Free your soul.