I missed the first 20 minutes of John Wick 2 the only time I had an opportunity to watch it and had no idea what it was supposed to be about, so I headcanoned that Keanu was at odds with Common for being unworthy of Queen Latifah in a different movie.[efn_note]Just Wright. (Also currently on Tubi if you doubt my analysis.) He did her wrong twice, exactly the same way, and she’s supposed to trust his sorry ass has changed in the final minute and live happily ever after with him? Nope. Let him have the star fucker he chose twice because she looked like he thought a star’s woman should. Twi-eye-eese. He squandered the second chance she generously gave him. The third should have been in the form of John Wick. And then she should have become John Wick’s personal physical therapist/assassin apprentice. Dammit, I’m going to have to write fanfic, aren’t I?[/efn_note]
Tubi (free-with-commercials streaming) has all three currently existing movies, so I was able to rectify my ignorance!
Alas, I preferred my Queen Latifah theory. I wish they’d rolled the only point of 2 into the first movie because 2 felt wasted—lots of action, scant new information, zero reason to care. Whereas 3 was so packed full of backstory, lore, relationships, and scenery, when I checked the clock because I couldn’t imagine how they’d be able to wrap anything up in a few minutes, I discovered I was only an hour into it and they had plenty of time left to make me crave a fourth.
So my recommendation (if you sometimes enjoy an absurd amount of stylized fictional violence) is to watch 1, pretend John killed someone from the Table inside the hotel with some help from Laurence Fishburne and earned a shunning befitting an assassin, and skip directly to 3. You’ll have all the information you need and save yourself nearly 2 hours.
In other news, my web host changed their in-WordPress interface, now I can’t manually clear the database, and I think it broke Jetpack, so that’s fun. Duolingo also screwed the pooch with an “update,” and my hope that my longest sustained effort to learn Spanish might go all the way is in its death spiral. It’s a little early in the season for so many unwanted gifts, but at least I’m unaffected by the ongoing social media fuckery. *bright side*
231 rough draft pages have become 360 revised pages. You can smell the ending from here!
This chunk had solid walls of page scribbles, but it was all fiddly sentence stuff and tweaking dialogue, not changes of substance (which prefer to take the form of brief, ominous margin notes on otherwise clean pages).
There are getting to be an awful lot of all-caps parentheticals asking for clarity regarding previous parts of the story or suggesting maybe something else would be better but would require an alteration of something that came before. I’ll tackle those on the next pass. I do love the evidence that things are connected and dependent on one another. It’s perversely satisfying to know a small change in one spot will make tons of work for me in a dozen other spots. If something’s just floating, unconnected to anything else, it’s almost certainly filler, and we don’t like that.
This is it for the resolution of the fantasy plot. All that’s left now is sticking a fork in the romance.