sam-the-zam2

[sam-the-zam2]

Garlic Bread Grilled Cheese (x)

[sam-the-zam2]

He's not really a captain, Rose.

[sam-the-zam2]

[sam-the-zam2]

Luffy takes a lot of Ls this saga, so it's best to treasure what few shit-eating grins we can get.

It's a nice touch that Oda doesn't cover his teeth with screentones like the rest of the image. It makes Luffy's smile pop all the more, and gives it a bit of an unnerving edge.

[sam-the-zam2]

I like how Oda handles his power scaling throughout this saga. It's a common shonen trope that every battle must be more difficult than the last, but once Luffy enters Gear 2nd he completely wipes the floor with the Marigold and Sandersonia. This carries over into Impel Down, as the first few floors are completely trivial before things start to go crazy, something I remember Oda actually being criticized for at the time.

Not only does this maintain Luffy as a credible (although not world-shaking) threat, it does amazing things for the pacing of these shorter arcs. In the grand scheme of things, Amazon Lily is an appetizer for the Marineford War; there's no reason to drag these skirmishes out longer than they need to be

[sam-the-zam2]

[sam-the-zam2]

JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT as ARTHUR INCEPTION│2010

[sam-the-zam2]

[sam-the-zam2]

Resisting tyranny takes a lot of forms.

[sam-the-zam2]

"... Beware my power... Green Lantern's light!"

[sam-the-zam2]

Who's your favorite The Power Fantasy character so far? Mine's probably Magus. (Though Masumi has enough notes of Amy to her that it triggers my Dubious Dallon senses).

Hands down it's Etienne Lux. Somebody on here summarized Lux as basically a more-strongly-executed version of everything Marvel has tried to do with Professor X for the past twenty odd years and yeah. Holy hell is he that.

[sam-the-zam2]

TOP GUN: MAVERICK (2022) dir. Joseph Kosinski

[sam-the-zam2]

The conversation with Clockblocker and Kid Win in 17.3 has definitely changed my perception of what wb is doing with the revived capes. The way I'd heard about them from stray posts, I got the impression that they were a reconstruction of flanderization in comics—the iconic parts of a hero becoming the whole of their character as they get picked up by writers less aquainted with them. That reading had strengthened for me from my initial presentation of Sarah Pelham as near affect-less; it seemed like the text was positioning her as less a person than an entity filling a suit and a powerset.

But with her reunion with the Dallon-Pelham clan, and Victoria's discussion of how Kid Win seems to have a constant discomfort he lacked in his initial "iteration," it almost seems like we're taking a more expansive look at how capes get written over the years as they get handed off to different writers. They're not just flattened versions of themselves with only a few barebones character traits and memories—they're full people, who only share a few character traits and memories with who they were before, but who have been fully fleshed out from that initial schematic.

The way Kid Win describes his old blurry memories, holding them at something of a distance with his current self—i'm reminded of how contemporary comics will sometimes have flashback sequences that suddenly veer away from their polished style to a heightened version of their original presentation. A modern Spider-Man comic will have Peter Parker flashing back to a memory of his high school days, and suddenly we'll switch to faux-Ditko four-color coloring and inks, all the characters getting frequent thought bubbles and speaking in an exaggerated Stan Lee-with-a-dash-of-Adam West register. Rocket Racoon will be morosely drinking at a space bar, and reminisce about times in half-world where he's talking like a kid's funny talking animal cartoon. The character is fleshed out—its the touchstones connecting them to previous iterations that are flattened and flanderized.

We're not looking at a deconstruction of flanderization, we're looking at a deconstruction of writers wanting to have their own take on a famous character.

[sam-the-zam2]

To get loosely taxonomical for a second, I think there are two loose strains of superhero deconstruction-

If superheroes were real- real in the sense of being an institution in the same way that any profession is an institution, what would that look like in practice, "superhero" being a sociological category, a thing you can be without getting laughed out of the room - how would it intersect with existing institutional power dynamics, how would it be informed by or reproduce the toxic dynamics that exist in comparable institutions? The who's paying for this strain.

If Superheroes actually had to live under the constraints of the genre as presented- all that meta bullshit, all those retcons and identity crisis's and crisis crossovers and clones and time travel and intergalactic turbowars and deaths and reanimations and carcinogen inhalation that gives you super strength and on and on and on- how would you not go buckfuck insane? The How do you live like this strain.

These intersect in many ways. Some works go heavier on one or the other, some try to do both. But it's a quick little taxonomy I've been sitting on.

[sam-the-zam2]

NOSFERATU (2024), dir. Robert Eggers

[sam-the-zam2]

[sam-the-zam2]