#I know the movie is about how fucked up our societal structure is but the gore got to me. i was fine with saw gore but not this apparently.

[evilkaeya]

love when i give a piece of media my 110% attention and still walk out confused

[elliwiny]

TLDR The Musical Chicago Taught Me About The Terrible Societal Pressure to Perform Gender Way Before I Really Understood What That Even Was

So it's Pride Month! And I've been listening to Chicago basically every day because it's exactly the length of my commute right now so I wanted to write about it.

I didn't grow up questioning my gender, and I guess my sexuality was 'I'll worry about that when I'm older' - until I got to my 20's and hit the 'oh shit, I haven't got the feelings I'm supposed to have, is something wrong with me?' phase of my existence.

Bringing it around to Chicago - I mean, look at her! It's Catherine Zeta Jones! Everybody is a little attracted to women, right? They're supposed to be hot! That's just how it is!

Hahahahaha.

But other than my hilariously delayed lesbianism I think Chicago stealthily gave me a primer on the fucked up ways our society enforces gender performance. Because you don't have to be trans to be in a situation where your life depends on giving 'em the ol' razzle dazzle.

The protagonist, Roxy Hart, is an asshole, a murderer, and kind of a ditz. Most of the criminals are right assholes, some are more sympathetic, and one is even 100% innocent! Aside from the innocent Hungarian, the thing the prisoners have in common is that they were boxed in, and were driven to violence after being pushed too far.

Whether 'too far' is justified is immaterial to the point. They became outlaws, and must perform womanhood to win over the court of public opinion and earn their 'not guilty' verdicts. And it's not just the kind of performance where you have to color inside the lines to not come off as weird, it's the kind where you dance and contort for the entertainment of the people who get to decide whether you get to live or die.

In Roxy's case this is kind of awesome. She's always wanted to be a star and with the power of hot-headed cold-blooded murder, she's stumbled ass-backwards into an unexpected avenue of fame and attention. She's determined to do this well, not for her survival (she doesn't appreciate the gravity of the situation, yet) but for a way to launch a career as a singer.

I mean what's Roxy's other choice? Go back to Amos? The guy who affectionately puts her on the same level as a housecat in his song? He's not the one who 'pushed' her, poor guy can't push anybody to do anything, but that's not even an option she entertains. I used to think he was one of the few good people in this movie/show, but it became pretty clear to me that devotion isn't the same thing as love.

Anyway, enter Billy Flynn, famous lawyer and expert ringmaster. In the song where he talks to the press, they do this cool thing where the reporters' initial questions don't follow the melody at first. As Billy crafts Roxy's story they quickly fall into the structure of the music, too. They draw the conclusions he wants them to, too. "Understandable! Comprehensable! Not a bit reprehensible, it's so defensible~"

Roxy's cover story is absurd, by the way, but it ingeniously plays to her type. She's a ditz but she's not naive, she has incredible natural instincts for the game she's playing. (Well, when it counts. She is resistant following the script, which sometimes gets her in trouble)

Roxy's innocent veneer plays contrast to the Hungarian, who becomes the first woman in the county to be hung for murder. She can't speak the language, literally, which locks her out of being able to play the game at all. In the framework of Roxy's imagination, we see the Hungarian's death as another performance... Because it is!

If you cannot perform, a narrative will be assigned to you and we will cheer for your pretty corpse. The metaphor could not be more clear. This is when shit gets real for Roxy, too.

Velma Kelly is also a good performer, who knows the game, but she has a disadvantage to Roxy. Her story just isn't as good. Nobody really believes she didn't do it, she's already so entrenched in the circus of jazz and liquor and sin that sentencing her is the least interesting outcome. I think that's why she gets away with shit like 'oh I blacked out I can't remember a thing' and getting her charges thrown out in exchange for her testifying against Roxy.

After all, she can't do it alone ;) if she didn't suck up her pride and embrace the pivot to playing the heel in Roxy's story, I bet she'd be hanging, too. Or at least, destitute.

They're both discarded by the public as soon as the verdict is passed and there's fresh blood to gawk at. The only way they survive as independent women cast outside the protections offered as stifled housewives is to embrace the world of Jazz, liquor, and sin... and most importantly, the narrative of the rivalry that they perform for those roaring ding-dong-daddies.

And it's not so bad, because that's what they both wanted, anyway.

[catgirlforeskin]

Actually, I want to talk about this more.

I think that people really overpay how bad politically "online" and 4chan and such are. Not because 4chan is good (it is very bigoted), but in my experience while imageboards are very loosely moderated*, and it allows them to spread some graphic shit, they are not interdimensional aliens. Sure, I didn't see photos of bestiality anywhere else, but I saw and see all the same prejudices in "normie" groups, in comments under movie torrents, in news media, I hear them on the streets and from my relatives. And it doesn't just happen, it's like the norm (not so much in official news, thank fuck, but mainstream TV is still guilty).

After Trump all imageboards into more or less interconnected system of fascist propaganda, sure, but the foundation wasn't that different, in my opinion. Society just sucks because of capitalism and due to the fact that most of pre-capitalist heritage is even worse.

Something similar is true for Reddit. It does suck, but also everyone uses it, even worldwide. The fact that it is like that is not because of redditors, but because this is the face of (mostly white American) middle class society.

This may sound too anti-communist of me, but I feel so angry when people say "actually bigotry is just a thing that online loners do, most people are actually nice". No! People are not nice, people are the ones who do all of this bigotry! It is not 4chan that makes people use racial slurs, it is not twitter that brainwashes women into being housewives, it is not Reddit that covers up rapists, it is not TikTok that makes people crave fascist dict6. It is your neighbors, your friends, you! And me, and all of us here. It's not "human nature", but it's our reality. Society is very flawed, and since society is not a deity but only a network of people, all of us are flawed, all of us are monsters even. Attributing every societal ill to "terminally online neckbeards" is just placing all of your crimes on convenient scapegoats.

This is not defense of 4channers or redditors, they suck, but it's so stupid to pretend that they are just not children of your society, not even that different from you

100% agree, yeah, I hate the tendency for people to project societal ills onto an Other so they don’t have to think about their own complicity in it. We see it in Stranger Danger and the creation of The Predator as opposed to the reality of most abuse coming from people you know and have structural power over you (parents, bosses, etc).

We see it all the time in the transmisogynist harassment campaigns on here, where we’ll see trans women get called “literal rapists” for doing cnc play with their girlfriends when we (at least used to) understand that Rape Culture is a thing and it’s omnipresent in society, or trans women promote “literal incest” for calling their girlfriends big sis or whatever when the most popular porn category everywhere for the last decade has been incest crap.

There’s easily a hundred other things I could list but the point is obvious, I mean shit it applies with the law too, there’s so many things that are part of the dominant culture and everyone has a hand in, but punishment is only inflicted on the subaltern

[terrence-silver]

Something something about how it sure is something that the only villain the narrative seems likely to treat as unredeemable at this point (terry) still remains the most queercoded. We got a reminder this season that kreese seems to have never gotten over that one girls death, so his hetero cred is established. But terry has no such woman to moon over, with kreese being the closest thing to that role.

(I guess also the Asian lady is kind of queercoded, because man does she not seem to give a fuck about men when every other woman is somehow tied down in a relationship.)

(I mean, Kim Da-Eun does give me vibes that she would like other ladies.) 👀

---

But, then again, Cobra Kai somehow ended up representing The Others, when in the original movies, it was quite the opposite. Cobra Kai was where more or less all the blonde, upper class, preppy boys of their respectively rich neighborhood learned under their very classically masculine Sensei who was an ex-military man (I think they had like one black student in the background somewhere, if memory serves). But, ultimately, they were the foil to the underdog who was Daniel who was a poor newcomer of Italian descent; if anything, TKK1 could've been taken, among others as a commentary on class and belonging, or rather, Daniel paving his way and excelling in a sport that was only honed by the well-off kids around him and besting him by learning from a master who was also an outsider like him.

This is a great message to have.

Now it is the faction of the childless, unamarried, friendless and loveless. Lacking legacy, as their only legacy is Cobra Kai. They are also conveniently the most suspiciously racially and culturally diverse of factions outside of being the most blatantly Queercoded and not fitting the mold of traditional societal structures as opposed to our ''proper'', ''right'' heroes who all have offspring, budding relationships, marriages, family businesses and whatnot and blossoming friendships and fit the Nuclear family structure --- or girlfriends and Johnny Lawrences they hallucinate, like in the case of John Kreese. To drop the fancy talk, I do find it weird and a tad bit strange how our band of very multiethnic villains consists of a bunch of single people without children out to take over the world headed by a Jewish billionaire.

This is a very weird angle they took. Don't know what to make of it.

[popwasabi]

“End of Evangelion” and the tempting nature of oblivion

(TW: Suicide, Self-harm, Pain, Depression, Mental Health, Death)

“End of Evangelion” is a perplexing movie to say the least.

Not that the original classic anime “Neon Genesis Evangelion” series ends on exactly the most conclusive note itself, but “End” takes everything that transpired in the series and literally destroys it.

The films ends with Earth experiencing the long foreshadowed Third Impact and all of the planet returning to the primordial “soup,” as fans call it, with its main protagonist Shinji Ikari and comrade Asuka Langley Soryu as the only remaining humans left. A pseudo, twisted rebeginning of Adam and Eve’s Genesis.

The film is fairly divisive among the fans to say the least. Some fans consider it a masterpiece for its nihilistic tone and mind-bending illustrations of body horror and others despised it for being too dark and confusing with no clear explanation of anything that happened in the film’s events. Hell, even the movie’s fans have a difficult time explaining what exactly happens in the narrative.

I was somewhat in the middle with it after I watched it the first time not super long ago. It was certainly abstract, and I like plenty of stories that don’t make it easy for me to understand. The animation is definitely the franchise’s best and I enjoyed the character moments between Shinji, Asuka, and Misato. But it was also, as stated before, dreadfully confusing and still to this day hard to makes heads or tails out of with its plot.

But, as with more than a few movies I have revisited this year, 2020 helped me contextualize one aspect I think the story is concretely trying to get across.

(We’ll save discussion of “Rebuild” for another day...)

At my lowest points not long ago, I had this frequent vision that would crawl across my mind.

I imagined being up in the clouds on a beautiful sunny day, but I wasn’t floating or flying. I was plummeting, falling like a bird without wings at a speed that would definitely kill me once I got to the ground. But I never imagined actually hitting the Earth like a meat-bagged, human sized asteroid. I only ever imagined the falling part. The wind reaching a terminal velocity and the air rushing past my body and you know what look I had on my face?

Happiness.

I was confused a bit by why I kept imagining this moribund fall into oblivion over and over again. I wasn’t suicidal, though I certainly have had thoughts of self-harm plenty of times before and general detachment from life. But why the fuck was I so happy? I’m about to die after all!

What I have come to realize in recent years, as I’ve developed a better understanding of my mental health and what makes me tick, it wasn’t that I wanted to die so much as I wanted the freedom that comes moments before it. The feeling of finally letting go and letting fate/gravity do the rest.

Years of my life failing at various aspects of societal expectations and career obligations from not being able to get the girls I wanted to date so badly, relationships ending poorly, not quite applying myself the way I should’ve in college, and working a plethora of unfulfilling jobs since graduation made me yearn for that release. Just that feeling of saying “fuck it all” and giving in to the void.

I wanted to stop feeling out of control. The way the world is structured often feels like you are on a wild, rapid river flowing in one very stark direction but you desperately want to go the other way. You keep fighting and fighting it and realize after a while you are just swimming in place, you tire out and either float where the river wants you to go or you drown. I wanted neither of those things, I just wanted control and unfortunately part of life is accepting that a very large percentage of it is beyond your power to alter.

2020 made this feeling starkly apparent once again as we were hit with a once in a lifetime global pandemic that has killed 2.21 million people and counting. As common people struggle to find ways to handle the loss of loved ones and the fallout from economic instability those tasked with protecting us have more or less ignored the cries of needy. Hell, they’re fucking miffed that we would even have the audacity to ask for $2000 of our own fucking tax dollars to put a band-aid on the situation. Combine this with an extremely volatile two-party system and late stage capitalism, we are about as out of control as ever in terms of how much we actually can course correct our destinies in a period like this.

It is why so many irony-pilled millennials and gen z-ers are posting dank memes about meteors colliding with the earth over the course of the year. We’ve lived through two recessions, two forever wars, and now a pandemic in our lifetimes while paying off our crippling debt with slave wages and yet boomers still wonder why we are near universally depressed as a generation.

(Seriously, everybody needs a fucking therapist right now...and also to dismantle the fucking system that’s making us depressed!)

This is what I feel is the real heart of “End of Evangelion.” The movie is a lot of things, obviously, but, after the events of this year and looking back on the more depressing parts of my life, I feel this film is about the tempting nature of oblivion. Giving up when things are clearly beyond your control so you can get that sweet but twisted, fleeting sense of freedom from it all.

Director Hideaki Anno didn’t feel too entirely different about the state of life when he made this series and certainly by the time he made “End” he was in a very dark place.

So, quick history lesson, “Neon Genesis Evangelion” debuted in 1994 and quickly became a classic among fans of anime and the giant mech vs monster genre. Critics loved it for its exploration of mental health and depression and of course plenty enjoyed the hell out of it for its giant monster/robot escapism as well. Fast forward to the conclusion of the series, critics and fans especially are far more polarized. I won’t try to explain exactly what happens in the ending and frankly I don’t think anyone can, but that confusion led to quite a bit of outcry by the fans.

Hideaki Anno, the series’ director, received tons of hate mail and death threats following the series conclusion. The fans hated how abstract it was, how it had an undecisive ending and chose to dive into the mind of Shinji instead of conclusively describing the events of the Third Impact with plenty going as far as to say he had “ruined” his own series for them. This made him unfortunately quite depressed himself over the ending he felt creatively fairly content with.

(I think it should be clear who Shinji is mostly likely a stand-in for in this anime...)

The fan reaction was toxic to say the least and all too familiar for many creatives who didn’t adequately satisfy the insatiable vapid needs of their fandom. Anno did not take this well to put it lightly. A man who was known as a delinquent in high school and expelled from the Osaka University of Arts much earlier in his life, and dealt plenty with his own bouts of depression, Anno had plenty of his own demons to sort out and quite clearly wanted to explore that mental state in “Neon Genesis Evangelion.”

I’ll be honest and say that I myself was not fond of the ending either when I watched it the first time as a freshman in college, and even went as far as to describe it as everything that was wrong with anime to friends in the years that followed for a while. I felt it was confusing and “fake deep,” existential for no reason other than because it just wanted to and people were “dumb” if they liked it.

When I rewatched it again as a much older adult when it came on Netflix last year, I found it much more fascinating and interesting. A sort of abstract introspective into the mind of a troubled teenager, who I had written off many years prior as a “whiny baby.” Though I wouldn’t say I completely understand it still, I get it much more now and I think it has a lot to say about depression and mental health.

Unfortunately, most fans did not have that reaction back then and as a result Anno made his true conclusion “End of Evangelion” as a response to that negativity.

(You’re welcome, nerds.)

As mentioned before, “End of Evangelion” is an extremely nihilistic film that seems to one up each dark moment as you traverse its spiraling narrative. It’s a film where things never get better. If you go into it blind expecting that big last minute heroic save the day moment, it’s always teased and never comes. Things just end very badly for everyone. Nobody gets a “happy ending.”

While the ending to the original series is strange for sure, it does end on a light note that can be interpreted in a number of different ways but ultimately positive. With the way fans reacted to it Anno decided to write a big “fuck you” to them by, in many ways, smashing his toys so no one could play with them again. He even went as far as to splice in the actual hate mail he received into the movie to quite clearly show to the audience, as their favorite characters met their grissly ends, that this was their fault.

(“Gee, I wonder what that was all about.” ~ a fan walking out of the theater back in 1997.)

In a way though, Anno created something strangely beautiful from that reaction. “End of Evangelion” is about giving up in some ways and accepting our inevitable doom. There are no easy answers, no workable solutions to achieve a happy ending because sometimes in life there isn’t one. Despite last ditch efforts by Misato, Shinji, and the crew of NERV the world still ends through the Third Impact. But tonally it’s not quite pessimistic; it’s actually positive, in a very twisted sense of course.

Set to the song “Komm Susser Tod” by ARIANNE, the film’s apocalypse can almost be described as a celebration. With people “popping” and turning into the primordial soup they all largely have smiles on their faces as they kind of get what they want whether it’s a desire to reunite with loved ones, to be with people they have crushes on, or happiness that they have sought for so long in the embrace of others. Everyone’s depressed! But now they are happy because it’s finally all over, they don’t have to give a shit anymore.

As the planet lights up like a Christmas tree, there are images of suicide and death that rapidly cross the screen in the form of the Angel’s final transformation but again, nobody is truly sad about it. They all have some kind of twisted smile or joy that they get from it. It’s a shocking film, if you’re not already prepared for what’s going to happen, and provocative to say the least.

(Can’t decide if I recommend watching this high or not...)

I had no idea what any of it meant at the time when I watched it several years ago (I watched it well after I had seen the original series), and to be fair there are many ways fans have interpreted what exactly took place in the film and have debated endlessly on its meaning for decades now. But at least in my interpretation, after everything we’ve been through this year, “End of Evangelion” to me is about the sweet release of not giving a fuck anymore.

Whether it’s about Anno feeling that way about his own life or the expectations of his fans or both, the film quite clearly doesn’t care about what people may or may not have wanted for Shinji and the NGE characters and is perfectly fine with the way it all comes “tumbling down.”

(He just wants to be with his boyfriend, guys.)

This past July 4th, city fireworks shows were prohibited in my area because they wanted to limit mass gatherings due to COVID but this didn’t stop people from buying plenty of their own to fire off. In what amounted to a collective “fuck you” to everything and 2020, beginning pretty much exactly at dusk people started firing off their at home lightshows like they were mortar gunners in World War I and did not let up until well past midnight. The entire Southern California night sky was lit up not to unlike the thousands of crosses that filled the screen during the Third Impact of “End of Evangelion” and though it could certainly be interpreted as a moment of people patriotically going “Yea, America!” that night, my head canon was much different. It felt like tens of thousands of people across the region just saying “Fuck it” into the night sky at everything; COVID, our horrendous government, police violence, pending World Wars, environmental disaster, and our collective impending doom from it all.

As these fireworks hit their zenith around 9pm I broke out my phone and started playing “Komm Susser Tod” from the movie and it felt perfect. Everyone just wanted to feel that freedom in the moment, that freedom of not giving a damn anymore. To be removed from expectations, from control, from hatred, from pain and it was kind of beautiful in a sick way.

And that’s what “End of Evangelion” feels like to me now; kind of beautiful in a sick way.

(Not saying the LA skyline looked like this exactly but it felt like it haha...)

There are still many ways to interpret Hideaki Anno’s cult classic, and it’s part of its charm but I think the take away fans should have is definitely not that suicide is ok but that we get it. We understand why people have those feelings and why it feels freeing to desire the void and oblivion. It’s a pity that the series most toxic fans didn’t get that clue through the original finale but Anno, not a person who likes  being shoved around, clearly created perhaps the most twistedly beautiful “fuck you” to that in anime history.

As we enter 2021 all I can say is it’s ok to feel like this, it’s ok to desire freedom from the relentless gloom and doom of the world and people’s prying expectations of what they think you “should” be. No one blames you. At the end of the day, we’re all just trying to survive the apocalypse we have zero control over, so the least we can do is be a bit nicer and considerate of one another. 

At least it’ll make the Third Impact more pleasant whenever it eventually comes...

Happy New Year, everyone! 

Congratulations on surviving 2020! Have fun in 2021...

[the-desolated-quill]

BBC’s The War Of The Worlds blog - Episode 3

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

You know, people often ask me why I get so angry when I’m reviewing BBC shows. I mean yes I give Disney and Marvel a hard time too, but they don’t get nearly as much bile and venom as I give the BBC. Well that’s because, unlike Disney and Marvel, BBC shows are funded by the British taxpayer through our TV licence fees. I’m effectively paying for them to make this crap. That’s what pisses me off more than anything.

Yes we mercifully come to the end of this... this. Episode 1 was a slow, plodding and utterly tedious affair that was about as exciting as an Amish bachelor party. Episode 2 was even worse thanks to its poor narrative structure, terrible characterisation and less than subtle allegories. Now Harness has come to hammer the final nail in the coffin with Episode 3. Is it bad?

...

You’re right, that’s a stupid question. A more apt question would be how bad is it. Very, very bad is the answer. Very, very bad indeed.

Lets start with the obvious problem. The non-linear narrative introduced in the previous episode. The stupid early reveal that the Martians ultimately lose and that Amy survives completely destroyed any and all tension and suspense thanks to Peter Harness desperately trying to outwit the audience instead of just telling a story. Now, bizarrely, he tries to reintroduce tension by having the characters umming and arghing about what killed the Martians off and whether this could help stop the Earth from terraforming. One teeny, tiny problem with this though. The audience already know! Even those that never read the original book know how it ended! And even if you didn’t, the episode drops enough hints like great fucking boulders. The prevalence of typhoid throughout the episode and its correlation with the Martians stumbling around like a drunken prom date isn’t exactly hard to miss. Harness’ writing is still as unsubtle as ever. But worse still, he completely undermines and misses the point of the ending to War Of The Worlds.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people (mostly Americans) criticise the end of the original book for being a deus ex machina. I mean the Martians get killed off by the common cold. How stupid, right? Except it’s not because those people (mostly Americans) are looking at it the wrong way. Your main takeaway shouldn’t be that the Martians were easily killed off by bacteria. Rather that we failed to stop them. The reason humanity prevails in the end is more down to luck than anything else. The narrator even attributes this to being an act of God. But here’s the thing. We didn’t stand a chance against the Martians. We didn’t beat them. They lost because they just happened to catch a cold. Now it’s not hard to imagine a society as scientifically advanced as their’s to be able to find some kind of cure or vaccine for it. And if and when they do, what then? We’d be fucked, wouldn’t we? Should the Martians ever return to finish what they started, the human race would be well and truly doomed. It’s not a deus ex machina. It’s a dire warning of what’s to come. A brief respite before the inevitable. That’s what makes the ending so effective.

The BBC series however completely misunderstands this, changing the story so that Ogilvy (an astronomer, don’t forget) somehow manages to weaponize typhoid in order to kill the red weed, which is presented as some kind of victory, when in reality it’s quite an insulting deviation from the source material. If only the Commonwealth could shake off the remnants of British colonialism as easily as these guys dealt with the red weed. Not to mention it just makes the Martians look really stupid. So they come to Earth, drink our blood, keel over and then... what, they just give up? Are they just waiting for humanity to die by itself? What happens when Mars HQ realises the red weed hasn’t worked? What then? Are they just going to shrug it off? It doesn’t make any sense.

Which brings us to the Martians themselves. The picture above comes from the Jeff Wayne musical version and is without a doubt the most accurate depiction of the Martians from the book. Most of the other adaptations have wildly different interpretations, which isn’t a problem in and of itself provided it works within the context of that particular narrative. However the reason I bring up the original design is so I can talk about what H.G. Wells intended when he came up with them. See, while the Martians are highly intelligent, they’re also presented as being quite vestigial. They’re sluggish thanks to Earth’s heavier gravity, rendered practically deaf thanks to Earth’s dense atmosphere and apparently have no organs with which to digest their food, hence their need to inject human blood directly into themselves for sustenance. The Martians represent what humanity could become as we become more and more reliant on technology. The Industrial Revolution brought about a lot of societal fears and concerns at the time, and the Martians are those fears manifested. Heartless creatures reduced to being simple brains, unable to properly interact with the world around them.

The BBC series goes a very different route. Instead of the giant brains, we instead get giant brown crabs, which, again, isn’t necessarily a problem provided it works in context. And that’s the problem. It doesn’t. The original Wells design told us what we needed to know about their biology, their motivations and their society. What do we learn about the BBC Martians? They’re big, generic monsters that look like rejects from Stranger Things. They don’t even inject blood into themselves. They feed off of us directly, leechlike. They’re more like animals. Not the vast, cold, unsympathetic intellects they were described to be. At no point do you buy that these creatures would be capable of building the Tripods or colonising the Earth. They just exist for some cheap jump scares and horror movie cliches.

What’s worse is that by changing the Martians’ design so drastically, any subtextual allegory gets chucked in the bin. The Martians from the book are meant to represent the British Empire at the height of its power. Merciless tyrants stomping all over the lives and cultures of the so called ‘lesser races,’ changing the environment to suit them rather than adapting to the existing environment. It’s Darwinism crossed with arrogance. And yet, ironically, the oppressors (the Martians) are technically inferior to the natives (the humans) as they are incapable of surviving without the aid of technology. The BBC series is unable to make this allegory, so Harness has to resort to straight up telling the audience the allegory. In by far the clunkiest scene in the entire series, we see George argue with his brother about how the Martians are no different from the Brits in their colonial ways. Not only does this break the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule and stands as a perfect example of bad storytelling, Harness doesn’t even bother to do anything with this other than just making the comparison. It’s been previously established that Amy was born and raised in India. You’d think she’d have something to say about all this, but nope. At the end, she wistfully describes India to her son in the most patronising and insulting way possible. It’s really quite disgusting. I mean H.G. Wells was quite patronising towards the Tasmanians in the book, but in his defence, he was a privileged white man from the 1800s. What’s Peter Harness’ excuse?! Ostensibly he pays lip service to the idea that the Martians are no different from the Brits, but he doesn’t want to really explore it or get us to actually think about it. Probably because it’s all a bit too complicated to get into, but if he’s not confident about exploring such topics, why the fuck is he adapting War Of The Worlds in the first bloody place?! Write something else!

In fact I think this is the root of all the problems with this adaptation. Harness clearly isn’t capable of exploring the complex themes of the source material, so instead he either introduces irrelevant social issues that aren’t nearly as complicated (women’s rights, empires are bad and so on) as a token show of progressiveness, or he goes as far as to uncomplicate themes and ideas to an almost offensive degree. In the book, the narrator is trapped in a church with a priest who is going through a major existential crisis and risks giving away their hiding spot to the Martians, who are busy terraforming the planet. So he resorts to knocking the priest unconscious and watching as the Martians drag his body away. In the BBC series, we see the old woman and the kid get killed off for no reason other than shock value and the characters have nothing to do with their demise, so they’re morally in the clear. The priest meanwhile doesn’t even appear in the scene, instead being relegated to the shitty flash forwards where his faith remains very much intact and even protests against the idea that it’s humanity’s illness that stopped the Martians rather than an act of God (brief side note, would Ogilvy really be this open about not believing in God? At the time of the book’s publication, the scene with the priest losing faith was considered extremely controversial, so this just seems utterly wrong). Plus there’s no tension in wondering what the Martians are doing and whether they’re going to find the characters. In fact there’s no tension whatsoever because we know the Martians have fallen ill and the characters are just hanging around, waiting for the fuckers to die. I cannot stress enough how atrociously awful the writing is in this show. We know the Martians are dying and the episode is about the characters waiting for them to die.

Jesus fucking Christ!

The Artilleryman from the previous episode was the same. In the book he was a deluded crackpot who willingly bought into imperialist dogma, believing that humanity could rebuild underground and eventually rise up and defeat the Martians. In the BBC series, he was a scared, innocent little waif being forced to fight in a war he wants no part of. It’s an incredibly shallow and uninteresting reinterpretation of the source material.

But the worst, the absolute worst, is what Harness does with George.

To be clear, no I’m not upset he gets killed off. I’ve made my views on him quite clear. He cheated on his wife because she was infertile and ran off to make whoopie with some redhead. The bastard deserves everything he gets, frankly. Plus I’ve had enough of Rafe Spall’s gormless acting to last a lifetime, thank you. What I am upset by is the way he gets killed off.

One of the most interesting parts of the original book is the fact that there are no heroes in War Of The Worlds. The Artilleryman is a young, impressionable, nationalist fool, the Priest descends into a pit of nihilistic despair, and the narrator survives only by his cowardice. He even goes as far as to attempt suicide, throwing himself in front of the unbeknownst to him dead Tripod because he cannot bear the idea of living in a world like this. It’s extremely dark and very cynical. The BBC series goes a very different route. We see George slowly become delirious as a result of the typhoid infection he got by drinking the poisoned cup of water in the previous episode (so all that stuff about the Martian terraforming was a load of bollocks) before, realising that he is becoming a burden to Amy, deciding to make the supreme sacrifice and facing the lone Martian alone while she makes a run for it. Not only does this open up a major plot hole - who the fuck was Amy expecting to arrive from the North if George is dead? They try to dismiss this as memory suppression, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t apply to losing a loved one to a fucking alien - it also completely stands at odds with the themes of the book. When facing annihilation at the hands of a higher power, the arrogant Brits, who previously lived a life of privilege on the backs of millions of subjugated, reveal themselves for who they truly are at their core. The BBC series says yeah, we were a bunch of racist tosspots with delusions of grandeur, but we weren’t all bad. The main takeaway I got from this despicable, badly written series was a three hour pity party about how all those selfish POCs don’t consider the feelings of white people and asking why can’t we all just get along.

Peter Harness’ bastardisation of War Of The Worlds is without a doubt one of the worst adaptations I’ve ever seen. In fact it’s quite possibly one of the worst TV shows I’ve ever seen, period. It’s not just the sheer disregard for the source material that upsets me. It’s also the absolute amateurish nature of the whole fucking thing. This series fails in some of the most basic ways. His writing is truly terrible, somehow getting steadily worse and worse with each episode. It’s not just upsetting to see someone get the fundamental elements of storytelling so spectacularly wrong, it honestly makes me sick to my fucking stomach. Peter Harness, please, for your own sake and my sanity, stop fucking writing. You’re clearly not good at it and I don’t want to see my money go to someone who obviously hasn’t the faintest fucking idea what they’re doing. Enough is enough.

So it would seem that Jeff Wayne’s musical version remains the best adaptation of War Of The Worlds. In fact can we just have a movie adaptation of that please?

[serendipitous-magic]

What give u the drive to write

I just wanna tell stories, man. Some people say that their brain thinks in numbers or pictures, my brain thinks in stories. They’re what I’m most passionate about and I want to spend my precious finite time on Earth doing what I love. 

Also I want to give people a real ~experience~ by writing them one. We’re all just toddlers at heart who want to touch everything and put rocks in our mouths to see what it’s like; human brains are wired to seek out experience. We’re explorers by nature, and we live in a world and society where our lives are shut up in these tight little schedules where we go around and around again and again, to work and back home or to school and to the grocery store, and everything has been carved into 90 degree angles and polished and sanitized (not because of the pandemic, I just mean in general). 

It can often seem like there’s so little left to explore in life. Want to just step out your door and see what’s out there? It’s probably cookie-cutter suburbs or city streets you’ve seen a thousand times before. Want to go walking in nature? You probably have to drive there first, and you’re restricted to designated “walking paths.” Want to jump off a rock into a pond? There are probably rules against that. Want to do literally anything? You have to pay for it. Honestly it’s bullshit. 

Now, I don’t think there’s no adventure left in the world. I happen to think the world is pretty amazing (society isn’t all that stellar sometimes, as we’ve seen this year). But it can so often seem like we’re in these sanitary little boxes staring at a screen all day. We can feel like goldfish in those awful too-small bowls.

When I tell stories, I want to give people an experience. I read once that the human brain, at a functional level, can’t tell the difference between fiction and reality. It all just becomes sensation and memory. Of course, at a conscious level we’re aware that movies and books (etc.) are stories, fiction, make-believe, and that real life is real. But our brains process that information the same way. If I can give people an experience that they’ll enjoy and remember, even if it’s ultimately just words on a screen/page, I’ll feel like I’ve done something good in the world.

I also happen to think that stories have an incredible amount of societal power. Like I said, the human brain doesn’t differentiate, on some levels. We have media full of sexism and racism and heteronormativity and god knows what else (I could make a list of words a mile long). So of course that’s doing a fuck ton of harm perpetuating those things in real life, because life imitates art as much as art imitates life. People are primates. Monkey see monkey do. How many times have you worn an outfit because you were inspired by something you saw in a movie or other media? How many times have you compared something in real life to a story? Probably, like, every single day of your life.

If storytellers portray stories with toxic relationships (which are portrayed as funny, good, normal, etc.), sexism, toxic masculinity, homophobia, classism, etc. etc. etc., that’s going to reinforce those things in society.

If storytellers portray stories that give people examples of healthy relationships, open discussion of mental illness, feminism, LGBT rep, challenging the structure of late-stage capitalism, etc. etc. etc., well, you do the math.

Ultimately (like in life and career) I want to be able to tell stories that not only are just fun for fun’s sake, because people love stories and I love stories and I love telling them, BUT I want to make stories that not only are good, but do good.

TL;DR: I like telling stories, it’s fun for me, I’m passionate about it, it’s all my brain thinks about 24/7 and also I think stories have a huge amount of power to do good or evil in society and if I have any tiny power to do good in this clusterfuck of a world I want to.

[classicintp]

That whole thing where cishet people think every person and every relationship is cishet? And if it's clearly not then the person was just odd, by no means gay or bi-sexual or trans, or the pair are just Best Friends™? That's classic projection, and everybody does it; you know everyone does it because of how often you have to hear the cishet white male babies whine about pandering when anything they were going to read, watch, or play dared to center around someone else.

It's probably one of the top (...idk, 3?) problems with humanity as species; we automagically believe everything must be made in, or made to become, our own image. For minorities this becomes a blessing after the fact of cishet white dudes rewriting history at every turn and aiming to dominate the world in their image, so please absolutely do not read into this as a fuss on LGBTQIA+ members, POC, and other minorites. Please keep projecting and pushing against the cishet white male norm. I'm a cishet white dude, I have no shame in being a cishet white dude, and my eyes get tired from rolling them at how often I have to hear fellow cishet white dudes bellyache over a woman-version of anything or a poc actor being cast in the movie for the white comic-book hero, as if they're being robbed.

I hypothesize that (and yes this is really dumb so buckle in)...... kind of like how we cross bred European honey bees with African lowland bees in attempt to breed passive bees that produced more honey, but instead created and subsequently let loose the hyperaggressive Killer Bee...... I am guessing evolution fucked up somewhere with white people in a similar manner. I'm not saying war and violence and land grabbing is a white-only thing, there are several monuments to and stories dictating absurd, grotesque violence that pre-dated the white man poking their guns where they didn't belong. But something about the inherent need to project our image onto our external environment must have been intensified exponentially at some point and we end up several thousands of years of white people genetically honing a motivation for everything to look and be like them.

Maybe.

Or maybe we are all the same on that front and events just happened for white people to become the aggressors before someone else did. Maybe in a different universe Pangaea is arranged where the appropriate resources are in a spot closer to the equator, and the first seed of inspiration to conquer spread amongst the natives of what is our North American continent, and American Indians are the majority (OBVIOUSLY NOT CALLED THAT. Or maybe they are by coincidence) and everyone has the exact same problems.

I don't fucking know.

What I do know is the biggest problem with fighting the particular ingrained societal structures all over the world that are modeled after the rich cishet religious male is that it all stemmed from a natural projection, and since that's the global foundation now anyone who fits just one part of that image is naturally going to want to fight back because of one of the other top problems with humanity: tribalism.

After agriculture was discovered/invented, technology has now progressed exponentially too fast for our brains to catch up, and so while physically we are raised to believe we must live in a house in a society with special social rules pushing us to get along with other societies and communities, our unconscious brains are still sitting in a cave spooked of every sudden noise, and warning or attacking any wandering neighbor afraid they might bring murder or disease to your little cave.

So now we have every culture and subculture trying to project the world in their image at the same time over the billion-watt projector of the rich cishet religious man, all the while fighting each other so our own images don't get flooded out, while the dude at the billion watt projector makes shadow puppets that antagonize everyone else the moment too many people start taking aim at the billion-watter.

And it works.

...

I.. uh.. don't have a conclusion. I guess. Maybe, um, understand that I'm just oversimplifying all of this because my brain is mush, and stay self-aware I guess. Be kind to each other? I'm going to bed.

[arcticdementor]

Ok, I'll do my best to try, because reading some of the galaxy brained takes about China and the Chinese government have cemented in my head the agonizing fact that most people prefer simple narratives and have little understanding of history, let alone an understanding of how history affects the present.

This will be long and requires some groundwork on explaining the modern Chinese mindset as a whole. Disclaimer: I am currently in Hong Kong, I hold British citizenship by birth and frequently do business with Chinese companies.

1) Big China and Collective Society.

This is something most people really don't grasp the scale of. To assign shared characteristics to fully one quarter of the human race would be broad enough to make those descriptors basically meaningless. Dividing sections of China along any non-geographical lines, economic lines, socio-political lines, this is all incredibly difficult. Despite a massively homogenous Han Chinese population, just looking at Chinese food culture would tell you just how freakishly diverse and different each section is. There are different dialects, accents, lifestyles all across China. When people say "China" it is often completely unhelpful when it comes to pinning down what they mean. For the sake of this discussion, we're assuming that we're talking about the type of Chinese person that the central government has taken pains to portray to the world. Which is, the middle class, consumerist, worldly and tech-savvy Han Chinese. Native of a Tier 1 city (e.g. Shanghai or Beijing).

Most Chinese people are aware of just how big the country is and how difficult a task it is keeping it all together, on a scale I've seen very few people outside of China appreciate. There is a real ethos of "tianxia", or the concept depicted in the Jet Li movie Hero (criticized for being state propaganda at the time, it was largely missed that most Chinese understand, if not support, this thesis). Chinese see themselves as sharing in a common destiny and collective group ethos. This can be traced back to Confucianism - a young person can have said to have "come of age" when they have fully adapted to and understood their role within a harmonious society. This both gives the common Chinese a shared purpose and skin in the game. They literally feel a stake in the collective power and status of their own country. This is not the flag-waving nationalism that the western nations consider passe, but a belief that China must hold together as a shared country and people.

…

Chinese pride is young, and very damaged. There is a sense of grievance and hurt pride that has never been resolved, and this is occasionally glimpsed in everything from their foreign policy to their mass market serialized literature. The reasons behind this can be traced back to a century of colonialism and rampant opportunism by the world powers during the 19th and 20th centuries. Chinese histories and memories are very long, and despite happening a few centuries ago this is very fresh in people's minds. An old joke about China's view of history has the Chinese waiting to see if the French Revolution is still a good idea. China has never forgotten that despite a massive population and huge amounts of territory it fell from being one of the world's oldest civilizations to becoming the "weak man of Asia", and their modern politics has mostly been about resolving this pride. There is a shared belief, or a hidden form of mass psychosis, that China has been denied its destiny as the foremost world power, either through treachery, the work of foreign powers, or other means. Even worse is the proof that the old rival Japan, a similarly impoverished nation, had managed to drag itself onto the stage of the world powers in the late 19th/early 20th century. This has caused some real complexes in the Chinese psyche.

Adding to this is the understanding of recent history. Coupled with historical understanding that ruling China is an incredibly difficult job and only people like the legendary Emperor Qin were able to unify the country in the first place, China collectively remembers the much more recent history of the Communist revolution, the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution, and more. The fact that China's current financial power and global status is largely a result of Deng Xiaoping's market reforms and liberalism is besides the point - the defining thing that most Chinese in the older generation take away is that revolution led to some truly fucking heinous shit and a death toll enacted on its population greater than any ever seen in the history of mankind, and as a result they have no taste for another revolution. The government stays in power largely because the older generation are aware of just how much death is involved with a changing of the guard. There is also no promise that whatever comes to replace the government will be in any way better than what came before it. Sure, the kuomintang government were corrupt as sin, but was that really preferable to having everyone starve because nobody knew how to farm land for years?

…

It is no surprise that the most radical nationalist pro-Chinese are the young students sent overseas to study in western universities. The Chinese attitude towards these western academies is not great; they attend for credentials and status, but these places of study have become cultural battlegrounds and ground zero for showing Chinese students that the Western societies and arguments are fractured and impotent. Students are given courses and humanities curriculum that demonize western civilization and its achievements, and emphasize the breaking down of existing power structures. Of course this would lead to nationalist students violently attacking pro-Hong Kong protesters and demonstrations, as both sides consider each other indoctrinated suckers (and one sees the other as trying to destroy the power structure of the country). An attack on China and Chinese identity is both a dangerous attack on national and societal cohesion and stinging Chinese pride. They have been handed something that can be easily interpreted as an attempt by foreign powers to fracture the unity of Chinese society, cause chaos in their country, and stop China from achieving its destiny of world #1 power and subjugator of other nations.

…

Many people have asked me why Chinese people put up with their government being totalitarian, so many human rights abuses, this and that. Social credit system, organ harvesting. No end of horrible things we hear about Chinese government. The corruption. The dark things the CCP has done to consolidate its power. Tiananmen.

Well, the unfortunate answer is that China, as a collectivized group, wants to fuck over people who looked down on them, even if it means causing itself grievous injuries in the process. It's painful to admit, but the regular Chinese is perfectly okay with the Uighur death camps, even if the government goes to some length to pretend they don't exist. After all, surely they must be doing something to destabilize and weaken Chinese society if the government is putting them in death camps. Don't you know Uighurs can be unpredictable, barbaric, and violent? And if Chinese society is destabilized and weak, the Chinese people won't achieve our common destiny of being the #1 world power.

Chinese people don't care that there is anti-Chinese sentiment internationally. In fact, it even helps. It plays into the narrative that people hate China now because China is strong.

Privately, Chinese people will celebrate the NBA and Blizzard backing down in fear, because they equate this with power and respect. It is perfectly natural for the NBA to apologize for offending the Chinese government, because this is a display of strength. How will you be able to tell that you are stronger than someone, if they are not underneath your boot heel?

…

China has gone from largely a nation of rice farmers to modern state with terrifying speed. They are now the world leader in 5G communications technology, technological integration into daily life, the world's biggest consumer market. By every single metric, logistics, travel, entertainment, living standards, Chinese life has gotten better. And they are completely aware of this. Twenty years. Thirty years?

…

So there is an unspoken pact between the government and the people. In exchange for getting rich, the people have willingly given up their freedoms. Because you can't eat freedom. Many of the social problems in China are rooted in this short-term manner of business thinking; tomorrow, there may be trouble. Maybe the country would be in trouble. I'll never see this customer or client again. Why bother maintaining anything? If I can get a benefit out of cheating, why wouldn't I do it?

Chinese, especially the older generation, understand existential failure on a level the western nations don't. They don't take anything for granted, including the attitude of the government (and this has in fact driven a lot of asset flow out of China into other nations). They remember the Cultural Revolution, the societal madness that took hold when roving gangs of diehard Communists went around lynching people who wore glasses or owned books. They understand that the possibility of that shit happening again, or coming for them, is non-zero. So the attitude is to use every trick in the book to make sure that they come out on top.

…

There is a recurring belief from Americans that most Chinese are brainwashed by their authoritarian government, and if they only understood democracy, knew about the atrocities of the CCP, or were exposed to the taste of an All-American cheeseburger, there would be a great awakening and China would truly "become free". While certain elements of brainwashing and information control are most certainly true, there is a certain level of arrogance in this method of thinking.

For one, this viewpoint has completely ignored the possibility that China already knows exactly how cheeseburgers taste, all about the atrocities of its own government, and about democracy.

…

China's political and social state project has openly stated its intent to utilize and take advantage of what worked before, while adapting it to fit their own situation. Throwing away what doesn't work, surgically excising elements they consider dangerous or don't like. 'Socialism with Chinese characteristics'. 'China Dream'. These are adapted policies, methods, and ideals, refocused through the lens of the Party. Yes, they are stealing. They are also adapting.

Any good propagandist will tell you that the ideological battle is the first battle that must be won, and on this note America has failed utterly at defending democracy and personal freedom. This is not by Chinese design; rather, a combination of factors including financial inequality, changing demographics, chaotic governance, political point-scoring and media clickbait have done their best to demonstrate that American government is both unstable and spectacularly inept, and no longer believes in the values set down in the Declaration of Independence. America has considered the argument for democracy so thoroughly won that it has forgotten to defend it, or even the value of it. Into this void steps the Chinese government.

…

It is impossible not to watch. The US is the world's only really global power, and the current measuring stick by which all global powers are compared against. China wants what the US has, but is going to attempt to do so without the mistakes the Americans have made. After all, American empire is ending, or so everyone says. The bars are equalizing. America was a leader in space travel, so China will become a leader in space travel. America was a leader in world culture and entertainment, so China will become a leader in world culture and entertainment. America has a strong military, so China will have a strong military.

…

To leave with one last note, in the online kerfluffle surrounding Hong Kong's current situation, Chinese netizens think it's fair play to "support 9-11" and advocate for California seceding from the United States, as payback for a mistaken belief that the fight in Hong Kong is over independence. When confronted with the fact that edgy teenagers in America have been making 9-11 jokes barely a week after the tragedy and a non-zero amount of non-Californians in the US would also prefer it if California sunk into the ocean, they are legitimately surprised. The idea that this kind of independence would be preferred by both parties is almost completely alien to the Chinese, who wonder and are surprised at the fact that Americans apparently wish their country to be weaker.

[redantsunderneath]

Us (2019) *Spoilers*

Us is the best movie I've seen since Mandy.  I shouldn't oversell it, but it's really rich and basically everything I like movies for.  I’m going to at least refer to major plot spoilers (usually without direct description) so stop reading if you want to stay clean.

Horror seems more direct and out of the box able to get at the concerns I like narrative art to deal with.  The genres kind of promote certain thematic preoccupations, and horror is so diencephalonic that it really is able to go psycho-chrono-geographically extreme (more unconscious, more primordial, more in the woods) with less dithering.  This movie is an example of why all my favorite movies loosely categorize horror (even cheap dumb horror movies seem to work a lot better subliminally than those of other genres).  

For people who don’t care about spoilers and want to follow along, the movie unfolds as follows: A black upper middle class family goes to their vacation house where no-one really wants to be - the daughter is in her phone, the son is withdrawn, the mom actively does not want to be there, and the dad is overcompensating.  They go to Santa Cruz beach where the mom, when she was a kid, saw a girl who looked just like her in a hall or mirrors below the carnival/boardwalk, the trauma stemming from which derives much of the movie’s impetus.  On the beach, they meet their friends, a white family who are the image of superficial aspirational American values.  

One night a full set of their doppelgängers show up in the driveway and a battle for survival begins.  This turns out to be broader with, at least regionally, alters (”the tethered”) showing up everywhere and killing their analogous surface people. The white family falls immediately, sand our guys have to face their alters too.  The family eventually triumphs, but not before the mom descends into the tunnels under the hall of mirrors and faces her alter who reveals a too literal plot and wins.  The family drives away and it is revealed that the mom was (THE SPOILER) the alter all along and what happens is the result of the “real surface mom” jealously yearning for participation in that kind of stuff we do that gives life meaning, including odd self delusions and empty displays... so, like culture in general.

What the movie is really about is how we have within us a shadow of our primal selves, an ancestral image of progenitors who were concerned with drives and survival, and we suppress this so that society can function and we can be free from the knowledge of existential risk. The "absent center" (a la Derrida) of the movie is the culture war in which we are prone to let this shadow (and its instinctual out-group hatred and violence) take more control. We have a complex relationship this repression that involves guilt (we have it better than they did, civilization is theft and genocide, how can I forget this) and tightly bound attraction/fear of giving into the deeper drives - we know it is valuable but we don't want to edge in too far.  

So civilization is an internal tension filled detente that is kind of a lie we tell ourselves, and that situation is slipping a little bit. Presented as the main perturbation is trauma - being forced to see the real of which this shadow is a part, whether the trauma is abuse, encountering too harsh truths as a child, day to day existence in western civilization, self inflicted trauma to confirm to norms, the loss of a way of life, epigenetic shock from slavery, or whatever else.  Being a “realist”, and societal “red pilling,” is depicted as extremely destabilizing and dangerous because the truths discovered when outed may annihilate everything we have been striving for (if that’s worth saving at all). 

Note, this is within the context of not absolute truth but competing ambiguities, or at least an ambivalent set of incommensurable ideas that are all true but are immanently inconsistent. Or, alternately phrased, culture has rejected confronting certain truths for so long that we should be afraid of how a bunch of people who are not nuanced and are not prepared for the knowledge will react, but we really need to understand the real to grapple with the inevitable dissonance (competing ideas of the good) when figuring out a way forward. This movie is not pedantic and is well aware this struggle should not be ignored but the pain of confronting the truth is that it threatens the good in a way that is fucking tough to resolve.

The semiotics of this movie must have taken forever to put together.  There is symbolism everywhere and most symbols have multiple meanings.The main reference points are the 1111, rabbits, and the direct references to other media, but it is drenched in nods to the Americana, slavery, status markers, black cultural touchstones, etc..  

The 1111 recurrence has many reflections, some harder to notice.  11:11 is in the ether as the “time that big shit goes down,” has numerological connections to the divine descending to earth, and has a direct function of representing the individuation/alienation of the family and the way things are “twinned.”  One good example of the way this ties together is, as they walk across the beach, their 4 shadows make the Black Flag symbol (there is recurrence of Black Flag T-shirts to remind us) which is a stylized single (1) flag, furled as to show a staggered arrangement of the 4 band members as individuals - unity in individuality, which the movie questions (also to play into themes of suburban rebellion and “authenticity”). The 1111/11:11 works a lot of ways: to suggest an eschaton of individuality, that there is a moment of great potential and danger, as judgement/revelation foreshadowing (via Jeremiah 11:11 "Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them."), the twinnings at different levels (we see the Black Flag t most clearly in the chest of one of a set of twins who have their own "twins" 11:11 - the other twin just has on a halter to maximally show off her "twins").

The rabbits are a psychological critique of the id in modernity (this movie is interesting about sex in its color-around-the-picture absence).  In deep psychological tunnels, they are caged and consumed subconsciously, red and bloody, as the current order/superego’s sacrifice to keep things quiet, and set free by the lysis in libidinal excess.  They also abut the slavery imagery as they are caged, utilized instrumentally, and are present not just in tunnels but in something that codes as an underground railroad.  But mostly I think Peele must be a David Lynch fan as Inland Empire informs this use. 

The Twin Peaks references were unexpected.  The first sequence is a descent from the carnival of fake activities that simulate real experience to the “deep place,” past the dweller on the threshold who gives us warning, into the woods with an owl (which isn’t what it seems), and into a veil of curtains through which are the deeper psychological truths where we interrogate inability to cope with trauma as a kind of existential problem - the whole situation as a manifestation of the sickness of the structures that give life meaning.  Also, the protagonist is trapped for a similar length of time, has a doppelgänger that is in a way the real protagonist revealed, and needs to face this part of themselves.

So, we’ll try to hit most of the wide ranging pop-culture references, but things really intertwine. Example: the red smocks evoke several things: 1. Michael Jackson, with glove, specifically Thriller (as on the tee), intentionally picking up on the gaslighting, the trauma, the ties to his own hidden nature, and the fraught nature of cultural affiliation (specifically black - Peele is the one doing the questioning) that perpetrates a cycle of behavior (we’ll get to code switching); 2. Chain gangs/prison uniforms - there are shackles in the movie and "tethered" is the word for the link between people and their alters - which, in the imagination, is just an echo of slavery;  and 3. Michael Myers... the white mask of one of the characters delineates this, but it reminds one of the other as an encounter with the real.  The glove looking like a low res infinity gauntlet will be left as an exercise for the reader.

The Jaws T-shirt fits with the water/boats stuff, evoking the polysemous subliminal other as a threat to out prosperity and illusions about ourselves. Just as in Jaws, the other is a really wide concept and can lend to a lot of different readings focusing on whatever you want to about the modern western world and what we fear/suppress.  All the MJ symbols and the mention of OJ alludes to the fraught identity of being trapped between worlds.  Black Flag and NWA recalls the shakiness of authenticity from opposite sides.  The consistent riffing on The Shinning evokes the sickness in the culture, the family, and the individual as inseparable and leveraged against our forgetting what has happened and who were were before. Hands Across America’s repeated direct referencing instantiates the desire for and society's readiness to provide the lie agreed upon, ambivalence about which is at the heart of the film.  Lost Boys is name checked by location and timing - literally they its filming is there in the flashback part - but also the spectacle hiding our savage natures which we are drawn to but need to control.  The home invasion scene is very A Clockwork Orange, with the eruption of violent life into the modern domestic space set to pointedly inappropriate music. There are tons of less specific movie references each evoking multiple films with similar shadowing - masks, scissors as weapon, the hall of mirrors, carnival as place of trial and trauma, underground as a place to resolve answers, incongruous music and violence,  etc. There is a shot with shelves of VHS tapes all of which have obvious resonances (CHUD, Goonies, the Man with Two Brains, Nightmare on Elm Street) except the Right Stuff which is pointedly there, perhaps as a reminder that man can and will transcend.

Tim Heidecker plays just the kind of character who you'd expect - a clueless smarm who goofily performs the rituals of commodified masculinity while not really seeming masculine at all. His transparency is why he was cast. He is part of a whole family critique of the superficiality of the American dream and how there is rot underneath.  Much of this critique is undercooked and a weak spot of the film as the family’s alters, besides Elizabeth Moss’s narcissism prompted ritual self mutilation, aren’t that worked in. Yeah, the father mimes dad stances, and the kids are interchangeable just like suburban identities (right, commuters?), but that’s it.  There is a lot of deeply implicit racism and distrust of the outsider in the families’ interactions that is much more subtle than “I would have voted for Obama for a third term.” How about “I knew you’d forget the flare gun” (but not the rope or life preservers) which has a lot running through it - ironic racial assumptions, a from the right critique of a political stance valuing safety and security over defense and accepting help, the "making fire” motif involved in beating back the shadow, and the plastic “real man” attitude.

The primary family is black and affluent, and have a connection to black culture that is depicted as at once not entirely real, aspirational, and a kind of cosmic separation.  But (mostly) the really deep connection to these things is "forgotten." Dad’s efforts to code switch when he has to summon something other than performative consumerism comes off as pathetic in the face of the power of the history of survival.  As dad listens and performs involvement of “heritage,” the son asks what “I Got 5 On It” means - dad deflects and the daughter answers “drugs.”  The correct answer is having a stake in the ($) dream whatever rules you have to break to get there.  This rubs (intentionally) uncomfortably against the Michael Jackson and OJ references (and the trapped in the closet pseudo reference) as cultural aspiration is about having to either forget a history of bad things (what the actual text of the things are speaking to) or leave behind the products of that thing (at which point where is your connection to your cultural past).  

The Fuck the Police joke works a bunch of different ways: 1. It’s a pun; 2. it’s an Alexa/Siri not working joke; 3. it brings the specter of technology contributing to faulty society into the space (as does the daughter’s phone); 4. it ironically contrasts with Good Vibrations; 5. it ironically contrasts with the action, the incarcerated kicking the shit out of suburbanites as class revenge; 6. the actual police literally still haven’t shown up after the 911 (is a joke) calls; 7. it expresses our ambivalence to societal strictures; 8. it is at odds with the environment, suggesting the absurdity of the middle class aping authenticity; 9. Ice Cube now makes a lot of fish out of water comedies of hood-coded man trying to fake middle class; 10. I could go on.

The weapons used by the heroes are all affluent symbols, often a costly reclaiming/supplanting/mastering of the primitive with the stuff of the modern - an expensive aluminum bat, a golf club, an outboard motor, and a geode mounted on a stand. The 3 family members win against both their shadows and that of their white counterparts by unifying his modern advances with the primitive impulses. The dad wins by understanding how machinery works and by mastering fire.  The daughter wins because cars > running. The son is really something because he is all about play and tricks and can't make fire, but is really about empathy (or maybe mirror neurons). His alter plays with fire, has burned himself badly, and is scared by technological magic.  So our son makes a spark, and learns to play with the other and thus control him to walk backwards into the alter's own fire.  He learns this trapped in a closet (the second R Kelly sub rosa reference this weekend after Shazam saying "I believe I can fly" before a messy edit) surrounded by board games including Monster Trap and Guess Who?

The twist really opens up what the movie is saying and is perfect Twilight Zone type "both chewy plot gotcha and thematic epiphany.” The twist basically says that the jolt of becoming aware of the real is traumatic and, if it is bad enough and you are susceptible, the state of wokenness requires you to fake it in order to fit into the life you desire but are alienated from, while the part of you that loves life (giving over to a spirit, art, believing in something "true" rather than factual) stays buried ready to erupt with negative effects.  This is a unique take on the subjectivity of trauma, that the bad unacceptable thing that is not supposed to happen that happened to you makes you feel like you are characterized primarily by that bad thing pretending to be the transcendent nature you repressed.  And yet, the movie ends with the Shining helicopter landscape shots of the car driving away, to Hands Across America being re-enacted, our primitive selves being inspired to attempt to recreate the lie of society as a life affirming spectacle.  This rhymes with the mom continuing to play mom as the performance is the reality, is who she really is.

I have left a lot on the table... the boat (that always pulls left) stuff as class critique, the voices the alters have, what each families’ possessions say (especially the wall art and architecture of the houses), the movements of the alters, the coding of the water settings, the idea of the “Carnival” of souls over abandoned tunnels and superficial (cheap and temporary) vs. deep (forgotten) culture, the scissors as a compound metaphor, the mirroring, 100 other media nods (e.g. Home Alone), the general quality of the music cues, the overdetermining alter names from the IMDB page, the Howard and thỏ shirts, the drunk dad, the excessive hinting at common types abuse (using film and real language) but not letting us have that as an organizing reality (as Nightmare on Elm Street does), and other stuff I’m not dredging up.

The movie is not prefect - 1. it commits the cardinal sin of 11th hour exposition to set the literal plot in concrete, which I didn't need and waters down the themes; 2. the white family (other than mom) deserves more specific behavior from their alters, and 3. there is only one real standout acting performance (Lupita Nyong'o, who I didn't "get" until this). But man, this is 1000 x better than Get Out - it's broader and more primal in its concerns with race falling out as just one critique among many.  

[scoutshonor56]

COP NATION

“Bad boys, bad boys, watcha gonna do…”

 As I’ve watched our country being torn apart these last three weeks, I’ve been tempted to voice an opinion, but I thought I would let things simmer and roil a while before setting my thoughts to words – see how events evolved.  What has become obvious is that what we have are two separate issues, albeit both intrinsically woven together, joined at the waist: Racism, and what America calls “law and order”; specifically, those who are tasked to uphold this social contract, the police. Those sworn to protect and serve.

 Well, like America’s fixation with guns, I have also written about race many times – so many times that I’ve given up writing about either years ago; there is simply nothing more to be said, nor has anything significantly changed. So instead, I’m going to put out there some observations and insights about law enforcement here in America.  I draw upon mainly two sources: Last Monday’s (June 8) John Oliver show, and a recent post in the social platform, Medium: Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop.

 A quick addendum about the Medium piece: some may question it’s validity and alleged source, as is wise today – there is a huge, digital quagmire of untruths and bullshit floating around the mass communications world, where anyone is free to write anything and instantly put it out there. I myself am a stickler for checking sources and facts before voicing an opinion.  That being said, I choose not to waste time digging and poking around on this one for the simple reason that it’s irrelevant; in my 64 years I’ve seen it all happen – a lot.  From the war protests and race riots of the 60’s, to the beating and drowning of Joe Campos Torres by the Houston police my first year down here (‘77), to the fatal shooting of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas during a “no knock” botched drug raid January 18th of last year - yes, just like the one that lead to the death of EMT worker, Breonna Taylor, of Kentucky, who was shot eight times, in her home, just last March 13.  

 Also, a lot of the material touched on in this ex-cop confession is mirrored in the Oliver show.  For instance, you might ask yourself, “Is there really such a thing as a ‘killologist’ who regularly trains our police force?”

 Why yes little Sarah, there is indeed, and you can see him on the Oliver show!

 I encourage you to read the post in Medium (it’s lengthy, but if anything, at least read the closing suggestions) and watch the Oliver show, and then ask yourself: Why does America far and away lead the civilized world in police use of firearms, death by firearms, and imprisonment of its citizens?  What are we, as a society, doing wrong or differently?

 How did a simple case of an Atlanta black man, Rayshard Brooks, inebriated and asleep at a Wendy’s drive thru, result in his shooting death just days ago?  By the way officer Rolfe, bravo sir, bravo!  Job well done – so how does it feel to take a human life, shooting him twice in the back for the offense of being drunk and resisting arrest?  Hey, here’s a crazy thought, a wild reimagining: Considering America is now a tinderbox just waiting for a spark over policing methods, how do you think this would have played out if you and your partner, after finding Mr. Brooks too inebriated to drive, said “You know anyone you could call to take you home?  You can park your car right over there, come pick it up in the morning…”  

 The days of dismissing these incidents as “a few bad apples” are long gone; thanks to today’s technology, everyday citizens (not to mention the ubiquitous security cameras that are everywhere) now have the power to record with a handheld phone; anywhere, anytime, and it has become increasingly obvious that no, the problem runs deeper - right to the core of police culture and training.  A culture that recently got Tulsa Police Department  Maj.  Travis Yates in hot water when during a recent podcast he said that systemic racism “just doesn’t exist”, and further suggested research shows the police are shooting African Americans “24% less than we probably ought to be.”

 Uhhhh -  wow…

 Maybe it’s time to look at this nationwide problem from a totally different perspective; maybe we continue to put Band-Aids and cosmetic patches on something that needs to be addressed before the bleeding even starts.  The cause, and not the symptoms.  

Yet, once again we assuredly will see some tepid policy changes, banning chokeholds, mandated race relations seminars, increased accountability and monitoring, policy reviews, blah, blah, blah – as we’ve seen it all before, for decades (Hey, remember Rodney King?), and in the end nothing changes.  If these methods were effective, why are these incidents only increasing in frequency? I join the many who have seen enough; who feel America needs to erase the board and start this equation over, or this bloody ugliness will continue, and only get worse.  For an expansion on this, read an excellent recent editorial written by Mariame Kaba, featured in the NY Times.

 Unfortunately, the Dems have come up with a reasonable start, but decided to call the initiative “Defunding the Police”.  Really?  That’s the best you can do?  Something that anyone could easily interpret as “let’s starve the cops financially!” Until what – they die on the vine?

 No.  But let’s take a look at what this financial restructuring really means, and start with the fact that the police force militia (which it has now become) is amply funded.  This is because every politician, be they a Democrat or Republican, loves running on a “law and order” platform – it’s an easy grab line.  Who doesn’t support law and order in our society?  And if it means the police want something from a military garage sale, like a Humvee, an assault vehicle, military grade ordinance and all kinds of fun urban warfare toys?  No problem!  

 Jeez, why does America accept this as necessary? Because our culture, out TV shows, our movies, are saturated with the fairytale myth of “they’re out there everywhere, the ‘bad guys’, and the only thing protecting the sheep from the wolves are the police!”  We glorify and promote the idea of our security and protection depends on a steely-eyed squad who are not afraid to use a gun; from the days of the old west, to organized crime during prohibition, to Nixon in 1971 making drug abuse “public enemy #1”, declaring war on the scourge of violent drug dealers that overtook our streets and enslaved our children!  

 Which, I might add, has proven a laughable failure by any and all standards, and has cost the U.S. over a TRILLION dollars since 1971, while glutting our jails to overflowing with non-violent offenders and ruining countless families.

 Watch a cop show (or movie) and see how long it takes before the guns come out to finalize justice, to provide closure and a happy ending. Justice ends with the scum bleeding out on the sidewalk.  “COPS”!? Are you fucking kidding me?  I didn’t even know it was still on the air – 31 years…  Oh, we feel so safe and secure in our homes as we watch the shirtless rabble led off in handcuffs to the squad car!  

Who watches a show filled with actual arrests for entertainment?  

 Meanwhile, let’s leave fantasy land and take a look at the real world: Did you know the vast majority of police action is what they call “reactive”?  Meaning responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, dealing with the homeless, domestic disputes, and other noncriminal, societal issues.  Most cops make one felony arrest a year – one.  And here lies the nut of the problem: armed police being called out mostly to deal with issues such as these.  

 Things that should, and could, be handled by trained professionals in these fields, not some cop who got 1,000 hours of training at the academy, little of it having to do with these issues.  And I say this in defense of the police, and this is what “defunding” really means.  They shouldn’t have to deal with these problems, and most are ill equipped to do so – they’re cops!  If all you have is a hammer (club and gun), and you were trained to be a carpenter, everything gets treated like a nail.  This is ridiculous that our police are expected to wear so many hats and are so over extended.  Free them up to deal with actual criminal issues.  If one of the other scenarios turns violent or threatening, then call the police.

 Why does America find this concept so alien – so non-applicable here in the USA?  What, are our citizens somehow different than in the rest of the world?

 Bottom line, these are problems that exist because of the anemic funding in areas such as education, housing, and our shameful, for profit healthcare system that leaves millions uninsured and one medical emergency away from bankruptcy.  The positively obscene gap of income inequality that grows ever larger.  The false promises of politicians.  America is increasingly angry and frustrated with a government that is structured to favor the rich.  So yes, let’s try diverting some of police funding and instead put it into social programs involved with education, housing, mental health, etc.  These areas and the lack of funding are the seed, and then the root of most of society’s ills today – and yes, that often grow into crime and violence.  Often these are people that we’ve let fall thru the cracks, who didn’t get the same chance, the same opportunities; and who need a little help.

 Pay the police a better wage, attract and demand a more educated and diverse pool of applicants, and free them up to do what they are ideally supposed to do – PROTECT AND SERVE THE COMMUNITY.  They shouldn’t be seen as our enemy, nor should we be theirs.

 “You have to dominate, if you don’t dominate you’re wasting your time – you’re going to look like a bunch of jerks…You have to put them in jail for ten years and you’ll never see this stuff again.”   

- Trump addressing governors during a video conference call, June 1

[nautilusopus]

I’m feeling angry today so here are all the entries of the Compilation listed from least terrible to “Nojima and Nomura are incompetent hacks and should be fired”.

8. The Case of Denzel OVA is the most bearable entry in the Compilation, because it does what a sequel is supposed to do: expand upon the lore of the established setting while showing us more about the characters in it. It's a shame, because I think this also might be the least acknowledged entry in it, apart from maybe Before Crisis, perhaps partially because it has no official English dub. In this case, we get to see Denzel finally fleshed out beyond "the littlest geostigma patient that Cloud needs to win the big game for!" He joins up with a group of salvagers, and we see everyone trying to piece the world back together following the complete collapse of the government, the economy, their primary energy source, and the deaths of millions, where they're immediately set upon by disease and societal tensions between what used to be the "upper class" and the slum dwellers that have always had it this way, more or less. 

What the fuck, this is what Advent Children should have been entirely. Except with Cloud and his friends, and not Denzel, because screw Denzel, I wanna see what Avalanche has been up to. (We never get to see what Avalanche has been up to, and we never will.)

That being said, even Case of Denzel didn't manage to not fuck up royally, and it has a giant huge plothole in the form of forgetting to account for an entire goddamn year because it forgot Advent Children was set two years after the OG and not one. Whoops.

7. Advent Children Complete, which I'm treating as a separate entry from Advent Children -- Advent Children is a fucking mess with a nonsensical plot and wonky character motivations that, word of god, were literally just there because they figured it's how the fans wanted to be pandered to the best and not because they thought the motivations would be good or interesting (nothing like a content creator that openly states he thinks his target audience are morons!). It's slightly lower on the list than Advent Children vanilla because A) it looks slightly less ugly due to the Bluray release, B) Denzel's and Marlene's child actors got too old and they had to find younger ones for the redub, and these newer actors are actually better and significantly less obnoxious, and C) it has My Chemical Romance doing the theme song. 

These are all very shallow reasons, admittedly. You'd think it'd be lower because the added scenes help fill in some plot holes, but they were badly added scenes that meshed very poorly with the story at large, and because of that they actually created about as many new plot holes as they filled in. Shite movie. 

6. Advent Children vanilla. This is a good place to discuss why they're both on the bottom of the list, since they're pretty much the same movie. Shitty plot, characters are a sad shadow of what they used to be, and they did some weird thing with Cloud where he unlearns everything from the original game for the sake of cheap conflict and the fans try and defend it like it's actually deep and coherent. Not to mention some more bad decisions: Renu and Rude are good guys now and friends with Cloud and Tifa despite murdering their friends along with everyone else in Sector 7, Marlene is no longer Barret's daughter because ewwww, black people, and Tseng and Rufus are retconned back to life for literally no damn reason at all (they contribute nothing to the movie. Nothing. They even waste the dramatic reveal with the sheet by having him say "yeah it's me Rufus but I'm gonna wear this sheet for no reason and rip it off dramatically revealing ME, RUFUS SHINRA"). As far as I'm concerned they both just died again right after this movie. 

Basically, Advent Children was bad and stupid, but it was pointless as well, which in this case works to its advantage: we relearn the exact same lessons but in a shittier, more juvenile way, wind up at the exact same point we started at by the movie's conclusion, and get confirmation that there were, in fact, zero fucking stakes. At least it didn't take a scalpel to the franchise lore at large, like everything else on this list. 

5. The Last Order OVA is basically Square Enix frantically trying to save face after they've realised that, "Oh shit, our complete inability to proofread the first drafts of the scrips we've been running with have resulted in every single bit of VII lore introduced in these things wildly contradicting one another!" Basically, Last Order is a very pretty fight scene with Zack in it animated by Madhouse that occasionally tries to have a plot. This is the entry that began the handwave of "oh, all the entries in the Compilation are different because they're all told from a difrerent point of view! It's up to you do decide what really happened!" Lazy, bad, the beginning of the end. It looked nice, but I can't even enjoy the fight scene in the reactor properly because Zack doesn't immediately get bodied like he should've, which wouldn't have been very much fun to watch but at least would've made more sense; as well as the weird bit where they tried to imply Cloud was always infected with Jenova and mako-enhanced from birth? Somehow?

Also, the "Last Order" in question seems to be Zack telling Cloud to run. Cloud, who is in a vegetative state, and even if he weren't, can't even walk. Sure, he'll get right on that.

4. Case of Novels. These things suck and are terrible and look like they were written by a third grader. That's not just a "lol these are terrible" jab, either. I mean they literally read like they were written by a child with a very basic grasp of how to put sentences together. All of them are structured like so:

Tifa was very sad, because Cloud wasn't talking to her. Tifa thought that maybe Cloud felt sad because his friends were dead. Then Tifa thought about her adventures with her friends from Avalanche, the friends that she was best friends with two years ago. Cloud and Tifa had lots of adventures with them, but they were sad by the end of it because Aeris died, and then Tifa thought that Cloud was probably thinking about that too. Tifa felt bad about that. 

They are bad to look at, just objectively, regardless of the content in them. Case of Barret's is by far the worst in that regard, to the point where I'm not entirely certain I didn't read a bootleg fake version of it, because there is no way Square Enix would charge actual money for a product that was meant to be released to the masses and presented as canon to Final Fantasy VII. Except that they did. (I can also believe it because it further works towards the goal of erasing Barret from the story entirely, more on this later.)

As far as the actual story content, I'd probably have to say Case of Lifestream White/Black are the worst, due to some weird nonsense where Aeris just hangs out in the Lifestream and watches people like it's a spectral break room, and Sephiroth grumbles and pines over Cloud like a jilted ex-boyfriend because Nojima forgot there was anything else to his character. These, like Advent Children, are pointless, but they’re pointless to the extent that it’s absurd they even exist -- there's apparently an entire third Shinra bastard running around out there, and he has zero bearing on anything ever, and never will again. What Shinra bastard? Who? Kadaj murdered a whole town offscreen or something, but I guess it wasn’t relevant, don’t know why we brought it up.

3. Before Crisis. Japan-exclusive mobile game where Square stops even bothering trying to hide their contempt for anyone not in the "marketable niche" (i.e: all the white male characters ages 16-27) and begins writing them out of the story. It's not enough that they take his goddamn daughter away from him on the basis that he's prospecting oil, which is fucking stupid in and of itself -- this is the story that decides Avalanche, the group Barret founded in response to Shinra murdering everyone in his hometown because they didn't want any competition in the form of coal, wasn't actually even Barret's. It was some other guy's, and grrrr he was a terrorist even more terroristier than OG Avalanche was because moral ambiguity is gonna go over our audience’s heads so let’s just make it nice and cleanly black and white for them. I've ranted about this before, but it's even worse that the fans seem to have no problem incorporating these changes into everything, because who gives a rat's ass about Barret, right? There was some dumb thing about Nanaki finding a girl catdog to have those babies he has in the epilogue, and the Ravens, but it's all just more of the same introducing samefaced teeny boppers that the fans love so much at the expense of everything else.

2. SPEAKING OF WHICH, Crisis Core, the king of samefaced teeny boppers consuming the franchise. I flipflop a lot on whether this one is the worst or not, but in addition to having the same problem as Before Crisis times fifty, I consider it as bad as it was because you could tell it could have been really good, and that's honestly heartbreaking. The first hour or so kicks things off with a really good start, introducing Zack as this cocksure jackass trying to make a name for himself, and his mentor Catchphrase Man. Then around the point where Banora gets firebombed it all sort of goes downhill, and you realise a lot of the credit you were giving it wasn't actually due. Zack being a gloryhound for Shinra and believing Soldier to be a bastion of good wasn't supposed to be a character flaw like it should've. Genesis almost singlehandedly ruins the entire thing by eating all the screentime in the word with his obnoxious motivations that made zero sense, and in a flashback we see he was always a fucking tool so there's no reason to feel sorry for him in the first place. He's actually secretly responsible for the iconic Nibelheim scene, of all fucking things (GENESIS DID NIBELHEIM would make a good bumper sticker). Tifa gets thirty seconds of screentime. Cloud doesn't fare much better, which is a seriously huge problem considering he's the goddamn protagonist of the entire franchise. He gets a single 49 second cutscene of them establishing "okay he's best friends with Zack" and then nothing else, ever, unless you want to count the three emails he sends him that you could tell were supposed to lead to more bonding cutscenes that were ultimately cut for more GENESIS, YOU LOVE HIM SO MUCH RIGHT GUYS??? Aeris fares even worse than Cloud and Tifa combined, being barely in it, and Square having decided that Zack actually made all her life decisions for her. That's right -- literally everything about her character? Zack did it. Fuck you. 

It's also this high up for what it represents, I suppose -- in the fanbase, you see a whole lot of "Well, Cloud lost Zack and Aeris so now he has no friends and nothing else to live for in this world because he didn't really care about anyone else besides them". It seems everyone forgot that not only was there more to Cloud’s character than "his friends are dead so he’s sad” and his friends being dead was only a small part of it, but that there were seven other people we spent about sixty hours establishing in no uncertain terms that they loved him unconditionally and that he felt the same way. Crisis Core is what finally got people to start disregarding the rest of the main fucking cast from the OG, and it was very, very deliberate. An old unwashed man in his late thirties jaded about his future in spaceflight, a catdog with daddy issues, a black man with a character arc revolving around fatherhood, a triple agent paper-pusher that had a furry phase right in the middle of his midlife crisis, two women that are both alive and have agency of their own, and hell, even a young man with severe psychological issues that had a very strong bond with all of these people even though most of them aren't young and attractive white people and realises he can count on them all for support, are not as marketable as the cast of Crisis Core. Square knows this. You can't wring any sex appeal out of "happy supportive environment" or "female characters", since most of the fanbase tends to be straight women in their late teens and early twenties. So, everyone in both those categories gets shafted. And, as mentioned, the fans seem all to happy to run with this, given the overwhelming amount of material that seems to disregard everyone else in Cloud's life that wasn't Zack (and sometimes Aeris gets acknowledged because all she's good for anymore is a corpse to motivate Cloud) as unimportant, and not really his friends. 

The fact that the entire game seems to undermine the original's tone very badly almost seems like a nitpick at this point next to very intentional racism and sexism and pandering, but I'm gonna bring that up too. The new version of Zack's death scene flies directly in the face with how they were handled in the original game, and is more in line with Cait Sith's than anything else's -- that death isn't heroic, or glorious, or profound. It's just sad and fucking hurts, and it's something that happens. They made that pretty clear the first time around when he just gets gunned down on a cliff in complete silence. You can practically hear the "so it goes" in the background. Naturally, this time around they gave him an entire speech about dreams an honour and then when he dies he goes to heaven (on a planet with no heaven) and he's successfully become a hero. Fucking bravo. Or the bit where, as has been pointed out, you have a wacky scene where Zack meets a young Yuffie, and she skips off amongst the corpses of her people that Zack himself just finished making in the name of glory and imperialism (not a character flaw, though! He’s a good guy!). There's an astounding lack of self-awareness in everything the game does. 

AND IT COULD HAVE BEEN SO GOOD, and that's why I still debate whether or not it belongs in the Worst spot or not. It could have been great to see a non 49-second version of the friendship that eventually motivated Zack to die for Cloud, but then they forgot to write it, because why write that when you could have these four cutscenes with Genesis? It would've been great to see Aeris and her relationship with running from Shinra that caused her to grow up street smart and how that caused Zack to maybe question Shinra's motivations, but them they forgot to write it because HEY LOOK HERE'S SOME MORE WING SYMBOLISM WITH ANGEAL DO YOU GET IT THERE'S ONLY ONE OF THEM AND HIS NAME IS SPELLED ALMOST LIKE ANGEL, I'M WORKING WITH GENESIS NOW HIS NAME MEANS BEGINNING LOL. It could have been great to see Tifa getting her start with Avalanche, but after her obligatory cameo in Nibelheim she's swallowed into the void again because they forgot she was ever anything besides Cloud's love interest, and fuck you we gotta show you this Genesis scene in Modeoheim. It could have been great to meet a younger Barret, and wonder how at odds he would've been with Zack, a man who's been drinking the Soldier kool-aid for years, but instead we got Genesis reciting poetry. It could have been great to see the workings of Soldier before it all went to shit, but instead we got fucking goddamn Genesis. Genesis Genesis Genesis. 90% of the screentime in this game that should've gone to developing Zack's character for one fucking second, let alone other things, just gets eaten up by Genesis. God I hate Genesis.

1. Dirge of Cerberus.

I'll try and keep this brief because I can go on about Dirge of Cerberus all fucking day if you let me. 

If Crisis Core is terrible because it had the shadows of great ideas that were terribly mishandled in the name of turning a profit, Dirge is sort of its opposite, in that at no point did anything even remotely resembling a good idea come anywhere near the building this was being written in during the entirety of its production. It's bad. Thoroughly bad. There are no redeeming qualities. It's ugly, it plays badly, 90% of it is cutscenes* and the remaining 10% is invisible walls, the plot is a fucking mess by anyone's standards whether you're familiar with the franchise or not, it is the reigning fucking king of tone issues, the design choices are the worst of what Nomura has to offer by a country mile, and the characters are the worst Square has ever made in the Final Fantasy series. 

Vincent is the protagonist, and since he just wants a nap and is too cool to care that means you don't really give a rat's ass about what's going on either, which you wouldn't have anyway, because Dirge's plot isn't so much rife with plot holes as it is a giant, gaping hole, where bits of plot occasionally drift by, mangled beyond recognition by the plane crash in 1976 that claimed their lives. Did you know there was an even more secreter army living under Midgar that somehow survived the entire city being demolished with cosmic hellfire, a pandemic with no cure, and a giant sword battle dropping more debris on them? Did you know Hojo actually didn't die, he invented the internet in 30 seconds in his death throes and then invented the technology to upload minds to computers, AKA created a fucking goddamn technological singularity, and then uploaded himself in a .zip file until he could blow up the world for shits and giggles completely unrelated to anything even remotely having to do with Jenova? Did you know Lucrecia wasn't actually a terrible person that willingly carried Hojo's child and injected it with science juice for the sake of their careers, but was actually a really nice lady and is really sorry you guys, and was just an unwilling womb for Sephiroth to be birthed from, and was pretty much the Madonna? Did you know that apparently the Actual Goddamn Apocalypse wasn't enough to convince the Planet it was dying, but someone stabbing a few thousand people was? Did you know Reeve decided to call the events of the main game the "Jenova Wars" because he doesn't actually know what a war is? Did you know mako actually makes you live forever instead of giving you brain damage and killing you? Did you know the Lifestream is pretty much the same thing as the internet? Did you know Vincent was a paedophile? Did you know someone decided Genesis still needed to be fucking alive? 

Oh yeah, and also there are such stellar characters such as Red the Red, Blue the Blue, White the Clean, Black the I-Have-A-Jockstrap-Taped-Over-My-Mouth-Because-Fuck-You-Why-Not, and Orange the Clear, who is physically 9 years old but mentally 19 so it's totally not paedophilia if we have a weird romance between her and Vincent (never mind that if we're going by that logic, you now have a 19 year-old dating a 61 year-old, which is... not a whole lot better.) 

And hey, remember that one scene where Shalua completely unnecessarily died by holding a door she could've easily ducked through, and then she pissed herself upon death, and the game took the time to show the piss puddle, and Yuffie was super upset about it despite the fact that they never interacted even once but the writers forgot about that, and then after all that shit she didn't even die in her own melodramatic death scene, and then she did die anyway at the end of the game and all you can think about is the piss and god Shalua is so fucking pointless and looks so fucking stupid. Look at this hot mess: 

She’s a scientist! Or something. 

Even by Final Fantasy standards these designs are fucking ridiculous.

There is nothing redeeming about this game. It's like a gift that keeps on giving -- every time I look back at it, I discover a new plothole that I didn't catch the first time before. It's easier to hate than Crisis Core, though, which just makes me sad. At least Dirge never had anything going for it in the first place. I paid two bucks for my copy and I still feel ripped off.

* Okay, that’s an exaggeration -- 50% of it is cutscenes. Four hours out of an eight hour game is cutscenes. Do you realise how fucking many cutscenes that is? It’s a lot. (And yet not one of them has any plot in them HEYOOOO)

[evilelitest2]

In answer to your follower question, I'd LOVE to see more Alt-Right Debunking. I personally would also be interested in you elaborating on "the hell that is high school" and how that messes people up, since from my observation, a lot of Alt-Righters, even ones who are adults in their 30s and older act like everyone in the world still thinks in terms of high school cliques and pecking orders. What say you?

That is as always a very good question, and yes it is very true, a lot of the Alt Right mentality is based upon a high school mentality, which makes sense honestly, a lot of the Alt Right are emotionally maladjusted men, and high school is where the seeds of that are set up.  I mean in most of the world, HIgh school is a land where we systematically traumatize our children for shits and giggle, and it sets the mental standard for a lot of people in terms of social interaction.  And high school is a really really hostile place, you are constantly beset by parental pressure, teacher pressure, administrative pressure, work pressure, sports/team pressure, the beginning of romantic pressure, potential college pressure, and of course pressure from your peers, who are the absolute worse.  All happening as you are going through an extremely awkward phase, suddenly experimenting with sexuality, potentially experimenting with drugs and alcohol (and if you aren’t, hearing a lot about other people doing so), getting a degree of independence from your parents, and suddenly finding yourself devolving preferences and tastes and learning to be a human beings.  and then to make matters worse in most of these countries the education system is based on fundamentally flawed assumptions, and in the Us it has this awful problem of no funding and designing the system to be as dehumanizing as possible.  So a lot of people come out feeling very tramatized and very scarred by the experience, and for young straight men, this pressure mostly comes out in a sense of helplessness.  Now obviously women, GSM people etc do get it worse in high school, i’m just talking about white straight men cause that is who makes up the base of the alt right.  FOr my demographic, the constant societal pressure is to be manly, to be sexually successful, and that if you behave in an appropriately macho way, you will no longer be insecure, awkward, uncomfortable, socially isolated, and cripplingly insecure.  At my high schools, there were basically two forms of Nazi kids, the people who were on the verge of dropping out and turned to Nazism as a form of ideological comfort, in a “Sure I failed at school, sports, nobody likes him and I am likely to spend the rest of my life in this piss ant town working menial labor, but damnit, I’m white and part of a group” sort of things.  The other Nazi kids (Though they didn’t openly call themselves Nazis” were primarily nerds who honestly bothered me more than any of the jocks at my school.  These people were somewhat smart, but they were unpopular and extremely insecure, and they basically assumed that because some people didn’t like them due to them being into nerdy things or dressing funny, that was true of all people who didn’t like them.  When in fact, a lot of people didn’t like them because…they were socially maladjusted assholes, who never fucking thought about other people when they talked.  All they bloody did was talk and never really let you speak, it was extremely frustrating.  also they were somewhat smarter than average, so they kept assuming they were the smartest person in the room at all times, but of course they were not and knowing more than the average moron doesn’t tell you much.  For example, I remember one of those chaps being all like “Well contrary to popular opinion, the Nazis had a lot of allies among the local population in Eastern Europe because to them they were fighting communism more than they were oppressing Jews”  Which is true and that isn’t exactly taught,  But then when I pointed out that A) A lot of the locals in Eastern Europe were more than happy to participate in the mass killing of jews themselves and B) The nazi cruelity to the slavic peoples was so great it actually lost them all of the support they gained C) The nazi disorganization and utterly incompetent leadership structure made any formation of a longer term Nazi Empire impossible and this guy was like “That isn’t true you are wrong”  And within a few mins I found out he wasn’t reading primary sources on this shit, but was getting this on message boards and games about the nazis.  BIt of a ramble, but my point is these people are losers in both instances, and society is telling them that if they can just act macho then they aren’t losers and if that the reason why they are losers is because they aren’t sleeping with enough girls/getting in enough fights. 

   And i think a lot of people get this hyper defensive socially withdrawn thing going on in high school and never leave it, which of course makes them even more maladjusted which makes Neo Nazism even more tempting.  Also if you are really insecure and constantly emotionally upset, then anything that is saying “hey your behavior is kinda not cool” or “hey the way you conceptualize women as nothing more than something to help you win is kinda fucked up” they take as the greatest attack upon themselves. 

   I find it really noticeable that Pick up artists don’t actually seem to like sex itself, they mostly seem to just want to be able to tell themselves “look, i’m a real man, I had sex with women” which more comes out of a lack of that in their earlier life.  

   Whats worse and at the exact same time high schoolers are in the midsts of this sense of mass dehumanization, pop culture makes teenage boys the center of pretty much everything, and speaking as a former teenage boy, the shit that is meddled to us is fucking awful, every time a movie or comic book showed up for me I was like “Wow, popular culture revolves around me and isn’t that a massive implied insult”  But all of it is anti intellectual, pro violence, and just encouraging the type of simplistic reductive self indulgent world view so many of these alt rightists gravitate towards, these people take being mentally shallow as a badge of honor.  Also they are all based on emotions and symbolism rather than reason or nuanced thinking, like 300.  

    This is to say nothing of the fact that you have the Dunning-Kreger effect

Which John Cleese explains nicely and is rampant in high schools

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF-5-5MMpGw

ANd I am sorry I didn’t answer this question sooner, I have been sick and since this is a very good question, I wanted to answer it in full

[gender-pages-blog]

CAMPAIGN:

1. 

I Want You To Fuck All The Women In Me The female heart carries courage in the chambers that pump blood into lifeless souls, for it has learnt to surreptitiously push itself through tsunamis that dismantled strategically established structures with a mere hair flip. It knows how to put make-up in crowded metros, when all the women wonder why she's so obsessed with the idea of putting up make-up, that she's doing it here in front of everyone, when she could have done it within the confines of her home. Or wait, eyebrows raised, with questions on their otherwise serene morning faces, "why do you need make-up when you're beautiful the way you're?" To the women going to office without wake-up, standing firm amidst unsettling remarks, "your eyes look patchy and droopy", "are you sick or didn't get enough sleep?"Her dark circles are easily ignored evidences,of all the nights she was up convincing her family, to let her go to another town for her undergraduate degree, and from the time she spent breastfeeding her hungry daughter in the middle of the night, or from ensuring that socks don't keep falling off the little feet of her son. To the women who spent 6 hours dressing up, fixing it, re-doing it, deciding it's all been done wrong, so staring over all again, imitating the women on the Internet, finding just a fraction of the perfection she was looking for. We know how years of societal ridicule telling you that you're shorter, darker, heavier, slimmer, taller, than other women or than what men would have liked, has reduced you to a zombie feeding off on other people's shallow validation, and how deprived you're of the goddess that sits in your chest singing victory songs to the gods in heaven, proclaiming how it learnt to fight, from the time when she was a ball of blood and flesh in her mother's womb, hearing carefully drawn strategies to strangle her before she can come into the world only to learn what the world will snatch from her, from the time when genital mutilation was the only way out to keep her from letting things in, from the time when marriage stumbled like an unprecedented warning call over her ears when the only thing she wanted to hear was, "well done, you're meant for great things!", but she forced herself to learn each word of the "Guide To A Happy Married Life", learning how to find happiness in her husband's happiness, and her so-called "conflict of duties" didn't permit her to utter a word to her parents, because daughters can be scarred and sacred and scared, but no matter what, they don't come back home once married because they were never yours to begin with, from the time when she could claim the streets and dance naked celebrating her glory, being unrestrained and beautiful and ugly and melodramatic without giving a fuck to any tag that tried to push itself down her throat slowly choking her and claiming everything she could have been, from the time when liking pink and hugs and romantic movies were blurred lines segregating the dumb whores from the intellectual bitches, from the time when Holi (the festival of colours) was an excuse of a festival for men to feed off her in socially approved ways, leaving marks of their convenient pride over the skin that she proudly wore, over the skin that just wanted to see the colours of life, they showed her the colours of their souls when she was just 7, from the time when they told her she would never be able to walk or dance because she is too fat to move like that and has flat feet that will stifle her aspirations to keep pace, from the time when being beautiful was a warning bell that would never stop ringing and being ugly was "desperation dressed subtle", from the time when standing up for yourself was being a feminazi-sick-hysterical-neurotic-abused-crazy woman, and being silent was ignorant-dumb-weak-powerless-submissive, from the time when glancing through books under bed covers were plans to destroy established civilisations and control systems meant to maintain exploitative structures, from the time when letting a man touch you wherever he wants however he wants defined how much you loved him by surrendering your body-mind-soul at his feet even though he refuses to let you stroke his hair when he "doesn't feel like it", from the time when biting my lip was sexual and uncovering my breasts could wreck havoc  over the most dead faces in the room, from the time when you divorced me and left me stranded in the middle of the road with your child in my womb and I still tried my best to ensure that our daughter could have a relationship with her father despite the abuse that became my everyday life, to the time when social media where I find the illusion of being able to say what I feel, is a careful traitor trading my messenger (a place to initiate communication) in the hands of men, who can't resist telling a woman they don't even know, how much they wanna be frandz with her, and fuck her under the streetlight in a car that stinks of their unfriendly odour, but they say that the hostile smell is of her unclean and hairy vagina, wait but try naming the patriarchal instruction manual that told you to equate a woman's genitals with roses and lemons and peach, so I can have that shit banned, from the time when travelling alone meant being a money bank deliberately putting itself on sale, to the time when a simple activity like travelling alone was enough to get me called "rebellious",when it was nothing more than a statement of my power, defying your suffocating nerve-cracking fear-installing soul-wrenching systems, from the time when leaving my hair open meant a rude declaration of my recklessness on an otherwise warm winter day, and how sitting with my legs spread wide grants you commodious certification to get right between them no matter how much I scream, from the time when sex meant your entire being reducing me to pieces with the blink of an eye, without taking the time to understand what my body wants and how it responds, when it meant letting hormones dictate the anxieties of my confused head and shivering soul, I think today is your day to fuck me, show me how you will fuck all the women in me, because I swear that though the women in me are tired, they will fuck the fuck out of your fragile ego rusting at their fingertips, if you take a close look at us,you will see how we are so tired our bones would've given up on us if we didn't have this perpetual sadness keeping them together,our wombs would have refused to nurture lives if we didn't push hard enough to expel out lives that could live by everything you wanted to kill,our blood would refuse to flow if you weren't following our unchaste moves with the vigilance of a midnight cop, look at us, my dear, we're about to change the world, the tables are turning, the lights are getting dim, keep your shoulders down, don't grin like that in front of me, stop your suggestive wink emojis, step down from that convenient biased system-granted CEO chair that your ass is so accustomed to, your time's up boy, your time's up my boy.

2.

Thing I learnt after being in an all girls college:

1) It could be extremely uncomfortable to sit with your legs close to each other, as the touching/rubbing of thighs causes sweat and irritation. And contrary to popular belief, women feel absolutely comfortable keeping their legs apart and airy, when they aren't being monitored by sperm-possessors under the gender-conforming systematic apparatus that sexualises vaginas, hence reinforcing the idea that the vagina should be carefully hidden at all times, as sitting with your legs open grants legitimate authority to the privileged sex to get right between them or puts the sex in their eyes. DAYUM GIRL SPREAD THEM LEGS WHENEVER YOU WANT HOWEVER YOU WANT 2) Women tend to love each other without any inherent impulse to harbour hate or jealously over how the other woman looks/what the other woman possesses. In-fact, when they're allowed to express themselves in a free setting (without being headed by men in lines and classrooms), they recognise their power to RESIST/MANIPULATE systems that strategically reproduce similar societies while subtly accommodating the idea of a progressive flux. 3) In an environment where you don't have the  consistent fear of being groped/harassed/raped shoved down your throat with every breath you take, women LEARN TO UNLEARN pre-conceived ideas of living in bodies, that are pre-determined crime spots, with socially approved criminals, who are just doing what nature has conveniently assigned them to do, and since women are the ones defying the law by resisting the order of nature, anything happening or the mere lack of it is caused either by the inability/ability of women to have caused otherwise. Reading, discussing, sharing (without the fear of threatening traditionally empowered groups), often enables women to work their way through contexts and scenarios while reclaiming their power to bargain with patriarchy and challenge discourses. 4) Timely acceptance of your sexual impulses is the key to recognition of manufactured consent. Only you own your the body you inhabit, and if anyone tries to alter your state of consciousness, refusing to take the time to understand how your body functions and what it really needs, you can show them the unapologetic exit gate from your phenomenal life. I think what I'm trying to say is that I didn't know how the fear of being physically weaker, the fear of being groped/raped/beaten, altered my mind and body so much on an everyday basis, until I stepped into a world where I was allowed to run free without anyone discussing the weird shape of my ass when it moves too fast, or without anyone commenting on my nipples being visible because I didn't wear a bra, or my dark lipstick shade being a subtle invitation to invade everything familiar. I slowly learnt to voice my opinion without a louder (ignorant) voice suppressing mine. I learnt to wear crop-tops without the fear of my waist-line being a mid-day party for hungry hands. I learnt everything by unlearning what FEAR, had almost gradually, with the abruptness and the consistency of a moving fan, injected into my craving nerves. And for the first time, the grass was greener on my side. For the first time, the grass on my side wasn't short"er" or weak"er" or less"er". For the first time, the grass on my side was all that there was, and I was told to run on it freely for as long as I wanted to, without the other side calling the act of running, sexual or rebellious or inappropriate. Of-course, my hair flew and my boobs shook, but it was all okay. For the first time, I was complete. I was whole. I was enough. For the first time, sentences began with, "if she does this/does that, then..." You'll probably tell me I shouldn't have gone to an all girls' college because it alienates the viewpoint of the other gender, and I would look at you with puppy eyes amused at the spontaneity of the moment, where you never realised how the OTHER viewpoint is all that has existed since the beginning of time.  When male viewpoint is all you've known all your life, a certain distance is needed to give you the permission (as it's said) to have your own. To let you have your own as an independent entity, without existing in relation to a fear-installing, soul-wrenching, gender-reinforcing, system. And unless you have your OWN, can you fully accept the OTHER?

Artist: Avnika Gupta Sociology Honours; Lady Shri Ram College For Women, Columnist; Berlin ArtParasites & Thought Catalog

The Redesigned, Renovated and Refurbished project is running a campaign on social media where we invite all of you to transgress, embrace and showcase your true gender performance by wearing whatever you would have/ already do, had their been no regulation and the different spaces you would occupy in those clothes. 

[popwasabi]

“Do the Right Thing” and “the language of the unheard”

Two things tend to happen following the death of unarmed African American at the hands of law enforcement in this country.

The first are protests that often lead to heightened demonstrations of anger, which lead to police decked out in riot gear to come in and put a stop to it while property and storefronts often burn around them. The second is a condemnation of all that but less so of the brutality that led to the riots but of the riots themselves.

In America, there is a modern philosophy of “civility” at any costs, that even when angry, even when rightfully enraged by the injustices that befall a group of people, you are STILL expected to “behave” and it is YOUR responsibility to stay calm and do the right thing.

“I’m sorry, I agree with you, but I just can’t support you because of the way you demonstrated that belief” are often the words that follow.

(Image unrelated)

I’m not saying you should ignore all toxic behavior or that you can’t take issue with a movement’s methods, I’ll leave that up to you to decide, but I used to stringently believe this myself. In the wake of the Ferguson riots in 2014 where a Missouri police officer shot and killed unarmed African American Michael Brown for the crime of allegedly *check notes* stealing a box of swishers, I found myself participating in the same tone policing as much of the wider country.

“Yeah, the police were wrong to kill Michael Brown like that but also the protesters have no right to destroy their own city. That’s wrong, they should do it peacefully!” I proudly proclaimed at the time.

(Image unrelated)

Six years later my feelings on this have taken a complete 180, partially because the circumstances of our times have become exponentially more volatile but it really began with finally understanding an ending to a movie I got around to seeing in 2009; Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing.”

Back in the “halcyon” days of 2009 I used to be a part of a small Myspace (yea, I know…) movie club group where we all shared various movie reviews amongst each other upon individual recommendations. One day one of these members recommended watching 1989’s “Do the Right Thing.” Up until that day I really didn’t know much about Spike Lee beyond him being a rabid Knicks fan and opinionated Clint Eastwood agitator but I gave it a watch and I liked it quite a bit.

(Shade you can hear.)

“Do the Right Thing” details a day in the life of Mookie, played by Spike himself, as he navigates his rough Brooklyn neighborhood. Throughout his day, he and his mostly black neighbors, friends, and acquaintances encounter various micro aggressions in the form of gentrifiers, white and Asian store owners who disrespect them despite being their primary customers, widespread income inequality, and of course the police who monitor their every step. The movie examines the intersection of race and how it all comes colliding together when circumstances are less than perfect specifically to those that exist in African American neighborhoods.

I enjoyed this aspect of the film, it felt real and authentic to me, even humorous at times, critiquing the very real issues black Americans face every day while also examining how other groups of people interact with them. 

Where I took issue with the film, at the time, was its aforementioned climax.

At the film’s end, tensions have boiled over as Radio Raheem, one of Mookie’s friends, is called the n-word by Sal, Mookie’s white pizza store owner boss, leading to a scuffle between the two of them. Police are then called, pulling Radio Raheem away, nevermind that it was Sal’s words that ignited the fight, and put him in a chokehold and well, you know this story already…

Finally, the anger that has been rising throughout the film ignites with a growing mob agitated at Sal and his sons who they see as the main instigators. Mookie stands rubbing his face for a few moments before picking up a trashcan and tossing it at the window of the pizzeria, simply yelling “Hate!” as it crashes through.

A riot of course ensues, as the largely African American neighborhood tear the store apart, looting it of all its material goods before it burns to the ground. The next day Mookie returns to the scene of the unrest to ask Sal directly for his paycheck who angrily tells him his stunt destroyed his business to which Mookie simply retorts “Radio Raheem is dead.” The two argue for a bit but somehow ends with the two quietly understanding each other before they go their separate ways.

For the longest time I couldn’t square exactly with the ending despite my enjoyment of the movie. I never outright condemned the entire film’s message, (some people within that group I spoke of did though…), but I did find myself saying I couldn’t condone how it ended. Afterall, what did Sal do to deserve that kind of backlash, why did his storefront deserve to be destroyed? It had “nothing” to do with Radio Raheem’s death, right?

Fast forward to today and well, my attitude has definitely changed.

At this point I’m not going to spend an entire paragraph describing our current events as you all should be smart enough to know by now what’s going on but an African American friend of mine summed up these past two weeks in the most concise way possible I feel; “the results of oppression, poverty, hopelessness, and frustration is destruction and violence.”

Throughout “Do the Right Thing” Spike Lee shows us a microcosm of the effects of societal neglect and institutionalized racism has on his community. He tells us exactly why Mookie did what he did and yet still largely white viewers, which included myself at one point, were confused by this. At a certain point a person, a group of people, an entire community can only take so much before they take actions into their own hands.

When our white dominated society tells African Americans it’s “inappropriate” to protest during the national anthem, that it’s inappropriate to “make everything about race,”, ask “What about black on black crime,” respond back “#BlueLivesMatter” or “#AlllivesMatter,” when largely white Americans, especially those in power, ignore and refuse to believe all evidence that says otherwise this is what happens. These are the results of the neglected, ignored, and unheard.

(Btw, Roger Goodell can fuck all the way off with his crocodile tears until he gives a formal apology to Colin Kaepernick on behalf of the league, AT MINIMUM.)

There is a rush to judgment when the looting and rioting starts following these tragedies around the country. Nevermind the fact that police are largely the aggressors in all these interactions and attack peaceful protesters who are “doing it the right way” anyways but the blame for the destruction is almost only squared on the rioters themselves.

Cries of “Martin Luther King would have never supported this” and “He would call for peace and #unity right now!” are typical when this happens. King was a far more nuanced and complicated man than the liberal hippie that both Republicans and Democrats liken him to be and when you invoke his name to condemn protesters before the cops who actually started this you, and I cannot emphasize this enough, ARE NOT HELPING.

(If you won’t listen to me, listen to his daughter, you assholes.)

People generally want to empathize with victims but for some reason only want the perfect victim in this country. A victim that is a Saint in real life, lays down, does all the right things, and still gets hurt for it because they are “doing it the right way.” Sometimes victims are imperfect, including people who have been murdered by cops and people who loot and riot, but they STILL deserve to be heard and most importantly they deserve JUSTICE.

Nevertheless, these people are villainized to their most extreme as people are disproportionately being harassed by the cops while it all happens. Again, I cannot emphasize this enough, when you spend more time talking about “good” vs “bad” protesters you are helping those who benefit from maintaining the status quo. They WANT you to make this about those “criminals” and “thugs” who would “destroy our communities.” Nevermind, that upping the militarization of our police force only INCREASES the chances of a protest turning violent anyways.

(Tell me who is this protecting? Who is this serving?)

By making this about the “bad protesters” they drive a wedge between you and the cause so that police brutality can be maintained, so that power structures are not changed, so that you can be “protected” from people who are actually fighting for your rights right now. When the media and politicians use this kind of language, they are giving cops free reign to justify all forms of heinous means of pacifying these demonstrations, including ones that are banned in war. They want you to miss the point, they want you to forget why this started, hell they want you to forget they looted your asses long before the “rioters” looted a multibillion dollar company’s store who has more than enough insurance to recoup their losses anyways.

Spike Lee is often asked about the ending to “Do the Right Thing,” a question I would’ve asked him myself even just a few years ago, and he’s quoted as saying “only white people ever ask me that question.”

MLK’s name is often invoked when shit hits the fan in these demonstrations and while I’ll admit that I don’t like seeing neighborhoods destroyed and certainly don’t like seeing small businesses torn down and looted it’s important that King wanted us to understand why they happen and to keep our eyes on the ball:

“A riot is the language of the unheard” is important in understanding “Do the Right Thing” and this current moment we are having in history. While I have been pleasantly surprised by the near unanimous support Black Lives Matter has had across the board by people I would never thought to become radicalized there are still pockets of people who make this about the “right way” to protest.

To quote Spike Lee even he says he is unsure if Mookie did the “right thing” or not in that situation but he also says, “I know who did the wrong thing.”

Some of you might be saying still that MLK would not have supported these riots and hell, that may be true but need I remind you, there’s a reason he's not here today to tell you himself.

I’ll leave you with the same two quotes Spike left his audience in 1989 from MLK and Malcom X. I want you to read them both thoroughly and see if you have done the right thing yourselves over these past two weeks.

I truly hope you have...

Love and respect, y’all.

[apostateangela]

Apron Strings Be Damned!

My mother’s birthday is the week before Mother’s Day.

A few days ago she turned 70 years old.

I remember how old she is because she tells me about the day of my birth nearly every year and begins the story with, “I was 22 years old when I became a mother.”

So I always just add 22 to my own age.

I began my motherhood story the same way. “I was 22 years old when my son was born.”

Are we fated or even doomed to repeat the actions of our parents?

There are many ‘coincidences’ with these kinds of things in my life.

It is unsettling to say the least.

I’ve had quite a lot of cause to reflect on motherhood lately. Leaving the Mormon church has cause quite a paradox in my life in regards to this piece of my identity. While much of my old identity was shattered after my husband left or disintegrated as I’ve left the church, motherhood is something that withstands any circumstances, because the life you created with your body still exists separate from you but still of you.

The causes for my reflection have to do with the conflicts I continue to have with my own mother, the difficulties my own children have with the new woman that is still their mother, the birthday of my estranged son, Mother’s Day itself, and the imminent arrival of my granddaughter.

Mormon’s believe that motherhood is of Divine origin and that it is the most important mission of a woman’s existence. She is created first, to be a mother. All things beyond that are secondary. I’ve already outlined this in my Family post (See my reference from The Family: A Proclamation to the World). Remember, the second commandment given to Eve in the Garden was to ‘multiply and replenish the earth’, or in other words, have babies.

And, as I have already described, I followed this directive. I had and raised four children. I took motherhood very seriously, educating myself in all that the church and other experts on parenting had to offer. I read many books, went to workshops, tried everything from Love and Logic, to the 5 Love Languages. I worked hard at being a good mother.

And all within the umbrella of the Church, its culture and teachings.

Therein lies the sorrow that I can never escape.

I feel like I forced these things, that I find so reprehensible now, on my own children.

And I cannot take that back.

You can say I was brainwashed, too entrenched in the culture to know any better,

but it doesn’t change the facts or the outcome.

I have apologized to my children who are out of the church and voiced some of my regret even to the ones who are still in the church.

But words, however well meant, ultimately cannot make up for years of misplaced actions.

But I’ll talk more about my children in a moment.

One of my most difficult challenges is and has always been with my own mother.

I love my mother.

She has also worked hard to be a good mother.

She is the epitome of the Mormon mother with all the homemaking and motherhood skills paired with a deep spiritual belief.

She has very little formal education. She has never understood a need for it.

She keeps herself closed off from the world: watches very little television, attends very few movies, does not read unless it is her scriptures or books written by LDS authors, is not on social media. The music she listens to is religious. The friends she has are within the social structure of the church. Her driving force is that of service and temple work, believing that if she is serving her family and others around her she is serving her God.

She is the martyr of all martyrs. She puts everyone else’s needs above hers.

I remember once her saying that she hadn’t bought herself a new dress in over 7 years.

She has the same hairstyle she had in the 70s when she was a young woman.

As I said she is the perfect picture of an obedient, subservient, modest, agreeable, righteous, pious woman. And ultimately this makes me very sad because she has lost anything resembling her authentic self beyond the Church and motherhood.

We are very different women.

And have always been so.

I have the rebellious, outspoken personality of my father.

Except, I am a woman and while my personality is more like my father’s I was taught and guided by my mother. She was the dominant example of womanhood and motherhood I’ve had to follow.

And I tried.

I really did.

Everyone wants their mother to love and be proud of them.

We have always been in conflict.

She has always believed I am too disagreeable, too rebellious, too unhappy.

She does not know what to do with me in general and resorts to passive aggressive guilt trips because she cannot ever discuss things with me directly. Add to this the fact that I am her only daughter and that she is so deeply entrenched in Mormonism, our relationship is strained at best. My mother lives in the fairytale land of religious idealism and has an impossible picture of what a perfect daughter should be.

It is not me.

The mold never fits.

I never fit.

I have been reminded of that fact all through my life. Never being quite good enough for her, or anyone for that matter.

And now, I’m so far away from fitting into that mold she can’t even see me for who I am in any context.

She hasn’t the vocabulary to describe who I am except that of a lost sinner, her eternally doomed child. And she earnestly tries to bring me back into the fold, shoving dogma and guilt down my throat, and in doing so creating an even greater distance between us.

My heartache and frustration bleed into the karma that is motherhood.

Remember your mother cursing you with “I hope one day you have a child just like you!”?

That idiom haunts me and has some truth to it at least in my mind.

My children are flabbergasted at who I even appear to be now. Of my four children two of them still have some presence in the church. Whether it is my oldest son and his deep conviction and devotion to the church, or my youngest daughter who ‘believes’ in it but pushes the boundaries a little like drinking coffee, these children still understand their lives under the rules and culture of the church. They see me as foolish and in a stage of sin, or even broken so much that I’ll never be the same. They both criticize and pity me. And ultimately, keep their distance. Much like I do my own mother. These two children, married and moved back to Mormonland. My son, in the 5 years since he has moved away has not once come to visit me. My daughter came to visit her best friend who was having a baby and stayed in town for 5 days, and reluctantly went to dinner with me once.

I haven’t heard from my second son in over 18 months.

I haven’t known where he is for over a year because he left the job he had and no one would tell me where he went or was working.

He doesn’t talk to any of us; not to his parents, siblings or grandparents.

His birthday was last week and came and went.

I don’t know how to cope with that.

I’ve never wanted my children to feel like they have to be in my life if they don’t want to.

But the depth of love I have for my son prevents me from coming out of that reality unscathed. The small bits of information I have make me worry-both about his welfare and my culpability. He may be in transition and even dealing with financial issues or mental illness.

Does he think I won’t accept who he is?

Am I the cause of his multiple anxiety issues?

I wish for nothing more than the chance to prove myself to him.

To be a better mother than I was then.

The amazing chat group I am in with other ex-mormons is full of struggling young people still trapped within the system; underneath the head of that system, their strict and oppressive unaccepting Mormon parents. They fight to survive until they can leave and be on their own.

My penance is to witness their pain at not being able to be themselves or be accepted by those who should love them knowing I did the same to my own children.

And while their story is in many ways my own, they are getting out before they can perpetuate the cycle onto their own future children.

I applaud their bravery and give what encouragement I can.

My oldest daughter is in my life, does her best to support me in who I am now. But I make her nervous and I know she believes I am reckless and strange in my more radical of views.

She is a heathen in many of the same ways that I am: we have tattoos, sex outside of marriage, drink coffee and alcohol, and don’t believe in organized religion.

But she is still very comfortable in other societal constructs that I am not anymore. Some of her own social anxiety is surely caused from the type A, aggressive, controlling mother I was.

She has truly forgiven me.

And I have the opportunity to prove myself to her.

She allows me that.

As survivors of the Mormon church, we support each other when our fucked up programing gets the best of us.

She will make a big deal of Mother’s Day for me, even though I hate the holiday completely.

In fact, we are on our second mother-daughter tattoo in honor of Mother’s day.

I hate Mother’s Day for the same reasons I hate Valentine’s Day. The idea that a singular day that has been commercialized to the hilt is in any way adequate to honor someone who sacrificed her body, her time, her wants and desires, and even a piece of her very identity for her children is ludicrous.

But my hatred for this day moves beyond that. It links again to the impossible perfection culture of the Mormon church. When the struggles of parenting are colored by the divine calling of motherhood and the need for perfection the result is yet another place to fail. And the failure here is beyond this earthly life, it is eternal. No wonder my mother agonizes about my departure from the church and into sin.

She has failed and I am lost eternally.

So is she.

The church doctrine says that if you do a good job teaching your children then they will stay in the church and act righteously. And if they don’t, they are cursed, and along with them the parents shall be held accountable.

From the Book of Mormon:

2 Nephi 4:5-6

5 But behold, my sons and my daughters, I cannot go down to my grave save I should leave a blessing upon you; for behold, I know that if ye are brought up in the way ye should go ye will not depart from it.

6 Wherefore, if ye are cursed, behold, I leave my blessing upon you, that the cursing may be taken from you and be answered upon the heads of your parents.

This belief is of course contradictory to the whole free will and repentance piece of the gospel, but oh well, contradiction and hypocrisy are the well worn paths of Mormonism and many other religions.

The point is, if I didn’t feel that it was my natural divine nature to be a mother and do the job perfectly, taking my greatest joy from the experience, I was not just a bad mother cursed for all eternity, I was a bad woman.

Mother’s Days were just the highest point of reminding me of all of this.

Mother’s Day Sunday services were full of such reminders, delivered within loudly quoted scripture and trite poetry and anecdotes--mostly by men who knew nothing of mothering.

They glorified the martyrdom of a mother and I always left church feeling not just of failure, but the overpowering guilt that my desire to have something only for myself left in me.

I was confusedly frustrated at the loss of everything that had been taken from me by being forced into the stay-at-home-mom role the church dictated.

I had left college to marry and have children.

I had no education or career.

I gave up hobbies and interests and all my time to their care.

I had no friends except those of my children’s friends mothers.

And I felt the loss of my self with despairing anger that would avalanche into guilt for not feeling the fulfillment I was supposed to feel in motherhood.

I will reiterate, I stand by my choice of motherhood. I believe I would have chosen to be a mother without the church’s influence.

What I am struggling with now, is choosing myself--even though my children are all grown and my job is, in effect, done.

The paradox is that I choose myself now--not only because as a single woman I have to, but also because I WANT to--and that fights with the mother I still am or think I should be.

I miss events in my children’s lives to go to music festivals.

I say ‘no’ to giving or spending money on them because it will cause me to sacrifice something I need or want.

I am selling all my children’s toys, books, and baby furniture.

I don’t attend family gatherings if it will cause me emotional or psychological pain.

I CHOOSE myself.

And I believe this is what I SHOULD be doing, even if the misplaced mormon motherhood guilt tells me otherwise.

I know I have to fight for myself, even against my own children and family if necessary.

This fight makes me feel like a non-mother.

It is as if the apron strings that tie me to my children are being cut.

Not to set them free,

but to set ME free.

The cut is brutal, not clean and swift at all.

But as with the severing of myself from the church, it seems a necessary act.

The final piece of this Motherhood Madness is the impending birth of my granddaughter.

She will be born tomorrow.

And from the moment I found out about her conception and then later gender, I have agonized for her and her Mormon future.

The idea that I have to watch my flesh and blood (granddaughter)

be subjugated in the same way I was,

by my flesh and blood (son) is horrific on a meta level.

I have tried to keep my distance; worrying over my imagined helplessness and eventual shunning if I try to intervene.

But it seems that the mother in me, the grandmother in me will not let it go.

For on the day my son sent me a 3D ultrasound photo of this little girl I have tied myself to her.

Not with apron strings but rather a feminine sutratma tying our astral sister bodies together across the hundreds of miles that separate us, a lifeline against what is to come.

For who will tell her there is another way, when she wonders, if I am not there?

Who will urge her parents to provide a choice?

Who will guide her to an education, prompting her to seek her own truth in all things including the never ending expanse of the Divine?

Who will give her a safe, mormon-free haven to come to when she needs reprieve?

Who will show her another way to be a woman, one free of restrictions?

Who, if not me?

It will be me.

I have learned that redemption is never possible.

We cannot change the consequences of our actions.

But action for change is possible.

And perhaps I will have a chance to save someone at least a little more time in their lives

than was given to me.

I will try for her.

And maybe in this grandmotherhood,

I can be the mother

I should have been.

-Angela