#and as an aside this all seems very tied to the technology of the era

[daydreamerdrew]

The Avengers (1963) #10

[lhostgil]

I do sometimes wonder...

How long will it take before people realise that Kurt’s development and story during the Krakoa era of X-Books is fairly heavy-handed with its references with regard to the Prometheus mythos and relevant themes by extension. In fact, the whole of the Krakoa era (in particular, the Destiny of X arc, more or less follows the overarching classical Greek literature themes of Fate vs Destiny, Foresight vs Forethought.)

Without going in depth--

Prometheus in classical literature and mythology is the Titan God of forethought and crafty counsel; a figure considered to be a culture hero, and trickster in Greek mythology. Known as a champion of mankind/humanity for becoming a traitor to his fellow god-kin by gifting the spark of fire (that is stated to be the fire of creative power--knowledge in the form of civilisation, technology, the human arts and sciences; aka “human ingenuity”) to humans so that they may defy fate and surpass the gods. Further to that, his story is tied to Pandora’s box (unleashing of sorrows + suffering upon the world) and the spirit of Hope (“Elpis”); in fact, to some degree, Prometheus is seen (by extension) to be an ‘evil god’ for that -- blamed as the individual who caused blind hopes to live in the hearts of man. 

Kurt’s name literally means: “Bold/wise counsel” (following the Germanic roots of the word), it also means “wolf” (following the Turkic roots of the word). I don’t think it needs to be further explained on Kurt being a champion of humanity; many events in the comics display that, and the Judgment Day event speaks for itself. But the most damning of all I feel--isn’t that the philosophy (not religion; there is a very marked difference that people seem to enjoy brushing aside) he came up with in comics is literally named “The Spark”.

It’s that his home in Krakoa; the forked towers, is named the Narthex. 

In myth, Prometheus stole the spark of fire belonging to the gods in a hollow fennel; an item that carries the name Narthex--a Classical Greek word that the English language borrowed, and gave a definition that obliterated its original meaning.

The original meaning of Narthex, “giant fennel” had further derived meanings such as: an object that functioned as a schoolmaster’s cane and/or a singlestick for military exercise, as well as a splint for a broken limb. The term was also used to mean a container for medicated balm/ointment; thus appearing in medical works.

Now all most people know of the word is that its a term for a part of church architecture.

[australiamarriage]

Find a Bride from Best Matrimony Website

Marriage is a holy institution which brings two strangers together in a pure and significant relationship that lasts a lifetime. This marital bond is strong and difficult to break, but it takes a lot of work and patience to keep it that way. As there are many obligations that must be met once a couple ties the knot, it is important to be on search for an eternal companion who is mature and responsible enough to take on such a commitment.

Online bride-searching has become increasingly common in recent years. Even though this development is directly attributable to technological progress, the practice of people marrying via the Internet takes a long time to mature. The greatest way to find wives from Sri Lanka is on an online Sri Lankan matrimony site.

The use of Dating Sites For Sri Lankans In Australia to list prospective Sri Lankan brides is widespread. Nobody has time to go bride-hunting these days due to their busy schedules and the hectic lifestyles most people lead. Numerous matrimony websites have emerged as a common response to this trend. When Finding A Sri Lankan Bride In Australia, several aspects of her life, including her age, relationship status, education, social class, faith, occupation, geography, and so on, are considered.

This is in sharp contrast to the old method of showing photos of available girls and then setting up individual dates with each of them. These days, users can customize every aspect of a site to their hearts’ content. As a bonus, you can view multiple potential brides’ portfolios simultaneously.

When Finding A Lankan Bride In Australia, attractiveness of a potential bride is an essential factor. The bride’s appearance and demeanor in public are very important to the groom and his family.

Since simply publishing your profile is not enough to attract serious suitors, another option for finding a spouse is to take the time to craft a compelling one. The true nature of the person’s character should be reflected in the description.

However, before any of that can happen, the authenticity of the site needs to be verified. Once its legality has been established, a wedding ceremony can proceed.

In the end, finding a suitable spouse is not quite as difficult as it may seem, so long as you stick to a few simple rules. One needs to be extremely specific about what it is they want. Having a clear head means you’ve already accomplished half of your goal; the other half is putting your plan into action.

What makes Matrimony Sites so Popular?

The ease, convenience, and appealing nature of matchmaking services are largely responsible for their widespread popularity among singles and their parents.

Modernity against Antiquity

The matchmaking sector is currently experiencing a meteoric surge, with annual growth rates of 48% being reported. It is intriguing to learn that traditional families were able to quickly throw aside all taboos and convictions in order to accept technology for marriage and societal well-being when the internet era began.

[passionate-reply]

Great Albums is back! This week, we’ll take a look at one of the greatest electronic albums of all time, Kraftwerk’s The Man-Machine, and try to avoid getting sued by Ralf Huetter! Full transcript for the video can be found below the break. Enjoy!

Growing up, my main genre of choice was 80s synth-pop, and while the deep influence of Kraftwerk is as significant there as it is everywhere else in electronic music, I was one of those people who initially saw them as somewhat "intimidating." Today, moreso than ever, Kraftwerk are held up as one of those more high-brow or cerebral groups with a philosophy that transcends mere pop or dance music, which makes them seem respectable, a kind of “model minority” in the world of music outside rock. While I don’t buy into the judgmental quality of that sort of praise, which damns so many of Kraftwerk’s greatest fans and imitators, I did get the sense, as a child, that these hoity-toity Germans, working with primitive equipment way back in the 1970s, might not be what I was looking for in a new favourite band. That was before I heard The Man-Machine.

While it’s certainly true that Kraftwerk were a highly experimental band in their own time, they’re one of those acts whose ideas have deeply permeated contemporary music, to the point where their actual work is extremely approachable and listenable to today’s ears. Of all the fairly early electronic acts, who started making this kind of music before it began to become mainstream in the late 70s, Kraftwerk are almost certainly the ones people nowadays listen to for pleasure the most, and that’s no accident. While their earlier albums like Trans-Europe Express took more overt inspiration from classical music, The Man-Machine was their first great foray into the arena of pop, which I think is key to why it resonates with people. For evidence of that, look no further than the biggest mainstream hit of Kraftwerk’s career, “The Model.”

I think it’s easy to see why “The Model'' became a hit single. Sure, it may not have the most traditional pop song structure, let alone instrumentation, but unlike a lot of what Kraftwerk had done before, it’s got a lot of lyrics and a real sense of narrative. Plus, that narrative we get is about a person and not a machine--a good-looking person, in whom the narrator is sexually interested. It’s the perfect pop material. Of course, I would be remiss to mention that “The Model” didn’t achieve all of its success until the single was re-released in many markets in 1981, and in those few years, the idea of “synth-pop” advanced significantly in the charts and popular consciousness. By the time “The Model” was a hit, Kraftwerk admirers were already taking over: look no further than Gary Numan’s "Cars” or OMD’s "Enola Gay,” two synth-pop classics that, it must be said, are still about vehicles!

That aside, though, not everything on The Man-Machine sounds like “The Model”--in fact, it’s surrounded by tracks that have much more in common with Kraftwerk’s earlier LPs. Literally surrounded, in the track listing. I think that adds to this album’s appeal as an ideal entry point into their catalogue: it has some things that sound familiar, while also preparing you for what else you’ll encounter if you choose to probe deeper into the band. The Man-Machine has the least homogeneous profile of any Kraftwerk album. While most of their other classic albums are highly cohesive “song cycles” that almost blend into one long song when you listen to them in full, The Man-Machine doesn’t really have those repeated melodies and motifs that tie its tracks together. While many people, especially fans of psychedelic and progressive rock, really like those cohesive albums, I think this change is a welcome one. It gives the individual tracks a bit more room to breathe and express distinctive identities, and makes the album feel a bit more pop, even if the material itself isn’t always all that poppy. *The Man-Machine* actually only has six individual tracks; they range in length from the three-minute pop stylings of “The Model” to the urban sprawl of “Neon Lights,” which luxuriates in an almost nine-minute runtime.

Given that the average track length is around six minutes, I’m almost tempted to think of The Man-Machine as six tiny Kraftwerk albums, or at least, musical ideas that could have been expanded into full LPs in another universe. “Neon Lights” and “Spacelab” feel dreamy and easy-going, with floating melodies that draw from the “cosmic music” scene, one of the many emergent styles that began as something uniquely German and spread throughout the world--in this case, becoming an important forerunner to ambient electronic music through acts like Tangerine Dream. Meanwhile, the hard, tick-tocking rhythms of “Metropolis” and the title track point to the newfound focus on rhythm and the so-called motorik beat that made the music of Neu! so compelling.

The Man-Machine can serve not only as an introduction to Kraftwerk, but also as a sort of crash course in this entire period of electronic music, showcasing some of the most distinctive and influential features of the German scene, as well as the shape of synth-pop to come. It’s a complex and busy historical moment with huge ramifications for almost all of subsequent electronic music, and The Man-Machine really creates a microcosm of that whole environment. There’s also the fact that each side of the record has one track from each of my three broad groups, like an expertly-designed sushi platter or charcuterie board for us to sample from, and they both follow the same formula: a pop appetizer, a cosmic *entree,* and motorik for dessert.

*The Man-Machine* also has what is almost certainly the most iconic cover of any of Kraftwerk’s LPs. This is how lots of us still picture them in our minds, and it’s inspired tons of parodies and riffs over the years. I think all of that acclaim is deserved! Emil Schult’s graphic design for the album was heavily inspired by avant-garde Soviet artists of the 10s and 20s, chiefly El Lissitzky. These visual artists used their art to express their hope for a new world, defined by the promise of technology, and their literally revolutionary philosophy--so what could be a better match for Kraftwerk’s electronic revolution in music? Lissitzky used bright, primary colours, straight lines, and geometric shapes to convey the “built environment” of modern cities and man-made architecture, and you’ve got all the same sentiment on display here. The use of strong diagonals really draws the eye and lends this image a lot of continued visual interest. It’s also worth noting the extent to which Kraftwerk’s aesthetics inspired later electronic acts almost as powerfully as their sound. When you picture an electronic band, and get a mental image of stiff and stone-faced musicians behind synthesisers wearing shirts and ties, you can certainly thank Kraftwerk for that, as well.

I also love the title of The Man-Machine! The relationship between people and technology is one of, if not the, most central themes in Kraftwerk’s entire discography, which is full of references to anthropomorphic machines as well as mechanically-mediated humans. The particular choice of the phrase “man-machine,” as opposed to words like “android,” has a fun vintage flair to it, which matches the use of early 20th Century visual art quite nicely.

As might be expected from the album’s stylistic diversity, *The Man-Machine* would prove to be something of a transition point in Kraftwerk’s career. Their 1981 follow-up, Computer World, would return to the song cycle format, but with increasing emphasis on ideas from the pop sphere, championed by percussionist Karl Bartos. By the time of the last classic-lineup Kraftwerk LP, 1986’s Electric Cafe, they had not only amped up the pop, but also incorporated influence from the electronic dance music of the time. Ultimately, Bartos would leave the group, chiefly due to discontent with his treatment by founding members Ralf Huetter and Florian Schneider-Esleben, and their persistent lack of musical productivity.

On a somewhat lighter note, my personal favourite track on this album is its opener, “The Robots.” Per my typology from earlier, I classified this as a pop-oriented song, and it certainly is an approachable one that’s proven to be quite popular. But it’s got just enough more experimental touches to keep things quite interesting. From an ominous, dissonant intro, a slightly more pop form, hinting at a verse/chorus structure, soon emerges and contrasts. I love the groove of the rhythm and percussion here, as well as the very heavy vocoder, rich in texture and certainly a Kraftwerk staple.

While the lyrics can be read as sort of light and silly, I like to think that the robots in question might also be dangerous. The track “Metropolis” seems to reference the seminal 1927 silent film of the same name, which is famous for its portrayal of an evil, mechanical doppelganger. Likewise, the choice to translate the lyrics of the song’s interlude into Russian is likely inspired by another great work of art from this era: the stage play R.U.R.--Rossum’s Universal Robots. Written by Karel Čapek in 1922, it’s the progenitor of the “robot revolution” trope in science fiction, the source of the word “robot” for autonomous machines in almost every human language, and one of the first entries in the illustrious career of an author who helped make Czech a true literary language. While the titular robots take time to assure us that they’re programmed to do what we humans want, should we really trust them...?

[thebibliomancer]

Essential Avengers: Avengers #234: The Witch’s Tale!

August, 1983

“Seasons of the Witch!”

If Wanda offers you a free Halloween mask, politely tell her no thanks.

A lot going on in this cover. Because this is one of those issues that summarizes a character’s continuity because wikipedia doesn’t exist yet and back issues aren’t super easy to get. 

Last time: There was an Avengers/Fantastic Four sorta crossover where Annihilus tried to blow up the universe. The primary fallout of that is that Vision walked into a null-field and then collapsed. He’s basically in a robot-coma recovering.

This time: the Avengers bring Vision home in a tube.

It looks like the kind of coffin you shoot into space but it’s not. It’s just a life-support capsule that looks like a space coffin.

Now though it sucks that Vision is in a robot coma, this does mean that he and Wanda are back involved with the book again. We briefly checked in with them during the Trial of Yellowjacket arc.

But we’ve been pretty short of Scarlet Witch and Vision since #211 when they left the team to try to have a go at a regular life. I’ll summarize in brief how that’s been at the appropriate time. Point being, that’s twenty some issues with a very low amount of my second favorite comic couple.

She-Hulk and Thor carry the capsule into the basement of Avengers Mansion because that’s where their medical center is. The basement. Of course. Why wouldn’t you put your medical center in the basement. Best place for it.

Wanda thanks Wasp for inviting her (and Vision) to stay at the Mansion when they could have stayed at the Baxter Building.

Wasp: “Nonsense! That place was left in a mess by Annihilus! Besides, the Avengers take care of their own!”

(Tangentially, the Avengers have always been more of a family to Wanda than anyone else aside from Django and Marya Maximoff who raised her and Pietro. The Avengers are Wanda’s family basically.)

Also, it’s not said anywhere but I feel like probably Reed Richards never did do that procedure that was supposed to help Vision recover more quickly as distracted as he was by Franklin’s injuries.

While Wanda hovers (metaphorically) around Vision’s tube, Wasp reflects on how hard this is hitting her.

Wasp: “She and the Vision were such a strange match, but they’ve been so devoted to each other their marriage worked -- !”

Oof, that bold hurts, Jan.

Wanda asks for some time alone with her husband so the Avengers leave the basement level medical center, all thinking thoughts as often happens.

Wasp feels guilty because she’s the one that called Wanda and Vision into action but justifies that they were needed. Even though they didn’t really accomplish much.... Kinda makes it worse.

Captain America asks Thor off to have a private chat.

Captain Marvel laments that they couldn’t destroy the field before Vision was injured. And Starfox muses about the sensitivity he senses from Captain Marvel.

Kinda wondering if Stern is trying to set up a love triangle between Starfox, Captain Marvel, and She-Hulk.

Speaking of She-Hulk.

She-Hulk: Any of us could’ve wound up in a tube... or on a slab. But that’s the risk we have to take!

A very typically She-Hulk of this era kind of thought. She’s very direct.

Wasp calls a rain-check on apartment hunting. Which is what she and She-Hulk were doing before the whole invisible dome thing.

And She-Hulk finds other ways to occupy her time.

She-Hulk: “Hey, Starfox! You have any plans for tonight?”

Starfox: “Well, I’d considered checking out the local sights, but if you have a better offer -- !”

She-Hulk: “Spaceman, I can show you some things you won’t believe!”

She’s very direct.

Over at Captain America and Thor’s private conversation, Captain America catches Thor up on the happenings re: Iron Man, i.e. Tony Stark.

Cap(tain America): “It’s Iron Man, Thor... the Wasp and I paid him a visit to find out why he’d resigned from the Avengers. I... don’t quite know how to say this, but... Tony Stark hasn’t just left the Avengers! He’s given up his identity as Iron Man... turned his armor over to another man!”

Thor: “Eh? ‘Tis most passing strange!”

Cap: “That’s not the only thing that’s ‘most passing strange!’ When we talked to him, Stark was so drunk, I’m surprised he was able to stand up! And when I suggested that he’d had too much to drink, he ordered Jan and me out of his apartment!”

Turns out that off-panel at some point, Tony confided his problems with alcoholism to Thor.

Another example of the close relationship that Thor and Iron Man used to have and lamentably don’t seem to have anymore.

Cap even says that Thor has known Tony longer than the rest of the Avengers. While Wasp has been on the team just as long as Thor has, yeah, Thor has known the man in Iron Man longer.

So Cap asks Thor to try to talk to Tony because maybe he could get through to him.

Thor: “I could try, Captain! But if he rejected your advice, while under the influence, I fear for my ability to do better!”

Cap: “What about your mortal identity? Maybe if you approached him as Dr. Don Blake... man to man...”

Thor: “Mayhap. I shall give this thought.”

Thor then hammer-whirl flies off, leaving Cap to think about whether there’s anything additional that he could do, maybe in Iron Man #172, which was on sale at the same time.

Since this issue is otherwise going to be a lot of recapping Scarlet Witch’s entire life, why not pop into another book briefly for some additional content?

I’m the boss and I’ll allow it.

So over in Iron Man in general and issue #172 specifically, Tony Stark is on hard times. We know about the alcoholism and Rhodey taking over as Iron Man. But a man called Obadiah Stane is also attempting an incredibly hostile takeover of Stark International. He’s bought up all the company’s debt (and it has a lot), he has a bunch of civil suits pending against the company, and he’s secretly been the architect behind Tony Stark’s imploding life. That and Tony himself. Takes two to implode.

The last hope Stark Int. has is a writ that will force Stane to back off for a week or two. It’s not a lot but it’ll be some breathing room. Only problem is that it needs Tony Stark’s notarized signature before 5 PM and they kinda lost track of him after he broke into a museum to put on some knight armor and had to be bailed out of jail.

Rhodey decides to call Captain America for help and that’s how we get the asterisk indicating that you should check out Iron Man #172.

Cap does find Tony but unfortunately, Tony slips away in the confusion when an old Iron Man foe called Firebrand (unfortunately not a gargoyle) sets the hotel on fire because he’s just incredibly pissed off at the idea of Tony Stark.

Cap’s less-nice confrontation with Tony about his drinking is decent drama (but possibly not the right tactic to take) though so have some of that.

Anyway. Back to Avengers.

Meanwhile, over on Long Island and at the Cross Technological Enterprises building, industrial espionage gets aggressive as some men in jumpsuits and balaclavas climb the building to sneak in.

One of them is worried because that Avenger guy Hawkeye is in charge of security but the boss is like pssh Hawkeye is a chump with a broken leg.

Then Hawkeye arrives on a hover scooter because insulting Hawkeye probably just summons him to prove you wrong. He has that kind of contrarian energy at times.

He shoots all of their guns out of their hands and pins them to the wall with arrows all before they can really do anything.

His leg may be broken but his arms aren’t. And those are the limbs that do archery.

Sure, his style is slightly harshed by having only one swashbuckler boot on but that still doesn’t stop him from shooting arrows.

A woman and a photographer show up instantly to take pictures of Hawkeye’s cool victory. Apparently the woman is Sheila Danning and she says that she’s in charge of PR for Cross Technological Enterprises.

People showing up to take pictures of how cool he is makes Hawkeye feel very appreciated so he happily poses for some pictures with the captured intruders.

I feel like this is going to end up related to the Hawkeye solo miniseries that’s published around this time. The events of the miniseries cost Hawkeye his hearing but gain him a wife. So we’ll call it a net positive for Clint.

I’ll possibly summarize the relevant parts of the series when it becomes relevant to Avengers, which I’m sure it will.

Several hours later, back over at Avengers Mansion, She-Hulk wakes up after a night with Starfox.

So let’s discuss a thing.

In a later She-Hulk series, the moral iffyness of Starfox’s ability to shoot pleasure at people’s brains and make them become infatuated with him is explored. In a legal sense. As in, Starfox gets put on trial for sexual assault and accused of using his powers to seduce people.

The question is raised whether he had ever used his powers to seduce She-Hulk in regards to them getting together like this in Avengers. And when he won’t give her a straight answer, she beats the shit out of him.

Eventually, the case goes all the way up to the Living Tribunal, the cosmic judge of all realities because of course there’s one of those, and a mind probe proves that Starfox did not use his abilities to influence She-Hulk’s decision to have sex with him.

They’re both just horny people.

Anyway, Starfox and She-Hulk get on first name non-codename basis with each other. Then Starfox takes off to go explore New York, but he and She-Hulk do make plans to get together again in the evening.

She-Hulk’s post-implied-coitus giddiness is rained on when she learns that Wanda hasn’t slept at all and has spent the whole night at Vision’s side.

So now its time for She-Hulk brand very direct friendship.

She tells Jarvis to go make breakfast and she’ll deal with Wanda.

As we saw in and about the Trial of Yellowjacket, She-Hulk doesn’t really beat around the bush.

So when Wanda says she’d rather stay at Vision’s side rather than get breakfast, She-Hulk grabs her and tries to physically drag her towards self-care.

She-Hulk: “Look, watching your hubby won’t make him get well any faster. You’re coming with me! You’ll feel a lot better with a little breakfast in you!”

It doesn’t go over well.

Wanda blasts She-Hulk away and now Jen and Wanda are angry at each other and Wasp arrived just in time to play baffled mediator.

She-Hulk: “I hope you have a good dentist, Red!”

Wasp: “Jennifer!”

She-Hulk: “She started it, Wasp! I was just showing her some hospitality, and she sent me flying with her crummy hex bolts!”

Scarlet Witch: “What?! You physically pull me from my husband’s side, and you call that hospitality?!?”

Wasp: “Girls, girls! We’re all friends here! I know how upset you must be, Wanda, but you mustn't let worry get the better of you! I think we all need a spot of breakfast! Please join me, Wanda. The She-Hulk will relieve you at watching over the Vision... we all will!”

She-Hulk: “That’s what I was trying to tell her!”

Jen’s heart was in the right place but she lacks much in the way of tact?

Anyway, Wasp and Wanda set up in the library and Jarvis brings breakfast pastries to them, though Wanda refuses any.

Free breakfast aggros Captain Marvel and now she’s here too. That and She-Hulk trying to make up through a proxy.

Captain Marvel: “A little bird told me that you were serving your continental special, and I just couldn’t stay away!”

Wasp: “A little bird, C.M.?”

Captain Marvel, whispering: “Well, a big bird! She-Hulk radioed me that the Scarlet Witch was still a little down, and suggested that I might be of help, cheering her up!”

You have a good heart, Jen-Hulk.

Also, Monica just beams right in through the library window as a sunbeam before forming back into her human shape. And that’s delightful. But would be startling. Jarvis is startled. He’s seen it all but all keeps expanding.

Monica and Wanda briefly bond over both speaking French when Monica praises that Jarvis’ pastries rival the best of the French Quarter. Jan is a bit lost because she doesn’t know any French but Monica and Wanda were just very excited because they don’t get to French very often. The language.

AND with the ice broken, Monica smoothly shifts topics over to asking Wanda about herself.

Captain Marvel: “You know, there’s so much I’d like to ask you. I’ve read all about you in the files, of course -- but they’re so impersonal. You’ve led such a fascinating life.”

Scarlet Witch: “Fascinating? I suppose... but I was too young to appreciate some of the more fantastic moments.”

AND THEN WANDA LEGIT, NO FURTHER PROMPTING, STARTS NARRATING HER WHOLE LIFE STARTING FROM BIRTH.

DAMN WANDA, exposition under pressure?

So Wanda tells Monica about how she was born in WUNDAGORE, a Balkan mountain in Transia with a super-advanced city built on it. The High Evolutionary was making furries for reasons which escape me but it explains why a cow-woman answered the door when Magda, supposedly Wanda’s mom although that has changed, came knocking on the door.

She was double pregnant and on the run from a husband who had developed terrible problems and an attitude problem.

The cow-woman Bova, invited Magda into the city and helped deliver her children Pietro and Wanda. And then Magda walked off into the snow to die, pulling a Padme-on-purpose-but-years-ahead-of-time by dying just after having twins.

Her thought process was that Mystery Husband would come looking for her but if he found her frozen in the snow, he wouldn’t find out that she’d had children? I dunno, this logic is a bit spurious.

I’m glad that Wanda’s current in the year 2021 real mom isn’t someone who walked off into the snow to die because it seemed like a good idea.

Showing what an awful idea this was, Magda left Wanda and Pietro in the care of Bova who had no idea what to do with two babies. So she took the matter to the High Evolutionary who also didn’t want to deal with it and decided to dump the babies on a childless Roma couple.

High Evolutionary: ‘DOES ANYBODY WANT SOME BABIES?’

Except the comic doesn’t say Roma, they say the g-slur. I don’t think Marvel ever stops doing that. Its a weird case where the portrayal is overall sympathetic but tinged with stereotypes and using a slur.

Shape up, Marvel.

I also notice that Wanda’s recap leaves out Fake Dad Robert Frank, the Whizzer.

The first time Wanda’s parentage was Totally Revealed For Real, it was revealed that not only Magda but Robert and Madeline Joyce Frank were hanging around Wundagore waiting to give birth.

I’ve already been into it before but originally it was just the Franks kids but the Whizzer whizzed off in grief when he learned his wife died in childbirth. Then when someone got it into their head to retcon otherwise, Magda was at Wundagore and gave birth to twins and then the High Evolutionary had Bova try to give the kids to Robert but he ran off in his grief so shrugged and passed them off to Django and Marya Maximoff AKA the real parents even if not biological.

To editorialize, the Maximoffs actually raised Wanda and Pietro so no matter what, I’ll always consider them the twins’ real parents.

Anyway, the Franks aren’t part of this retelling. Which is funny because for a while Wanda thought the Whizzer was their dad and treated him like one and now she’s dumped him like raw meat for ease of retelling. Tsk tsk.

So, Wanda and Pietro lived a good life and “better parents could hardly have been found.” Then when adolescence happened, Pietro suddenly could run really fast and Wanda “discovered that strange, unpredictable things would happen if I was in a certain frame of mind and gestured in a particular way.”

That’s a pretty specific mutant power. And she relates that she kept causing accidents by gesturing in the particular way while in a certain frame of mind, it’s like, Wanda, don’t gesture that way? Get mittens or tie your fingers together. Its not hard.

Your powers are so specific!

Stereotypes happen and an angry mob burns down the Maximoffs’ camp.

Pietro ran Wanda to safety and the shock was so great that they got AMNESIA.

Marya, I think, died but Django survived and went a little mad with grief, assuming he lost his wife and kids.

For a couple years, Wanda and Pietro just kicked it around Eastern Europe, Pietro using his superspeed to catch game. Things were going okay but not great up until the time that Wanda wandered into a village and made the fuck-things-up gesture and whoops fucked things up.

I’m telling you, Wanda, mittens.

Anyway, she set a house on fire, WITH HER MIND, and now there’s an angry mob after her assuming that she’s a witch.

As sometimes happens in Marvel Eastern Europe.

The mob chased Wanda to camp where Pietro lost his shit and superspeed tried to beat up a mob but wound up getting pinned down and beaten.

Then Magneto showed up and yanked all the crude farming implements away and told the mob to gtfo.

Magneto: “Come no further, homo sapiens! The two whom you attack are under the protection of Magneto!”

An idiot: “With power such as his, he can only be Satan himself!”

An idiot who has the right idea: “Run! Run for your lives!”

Wanda thanks Magneto for the save and he demands “Let neither of you ever forget what you owe me... ever!”

Cool. Cool cool cool.

Wanda: “He took us in... fed and clothed us... but never did he show us any human kindness. We were supposed to be above that, he said... we were mutants, and under his tutelage, we became Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch!”

What a dick.

Anyway, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver were forced to join Magneto and his other agents Toad and Mastermind.

Magneto’s Brotherhood clashed with the X-Men multiple times. And then the Stranger just sorta yoinked Magneto into space.

Early X-Men is a bafflement to me.

Wanda: “Our debt had been repaid to Magneto many times over. We were beholden to him no longer... We were free. And... we were alone. We had just begun to realize the potential of our mutant powers, but we did not know how best to use them. Cut off from Magneto’s cruel exploitation, we didn’t know what to do. I don’t know what would have become of us, had we not been accepted as Avengers! The Avengers gave purpose to our lives, gave us something to be part of.”

Anyway, being on the Avengers meant dangers and foes to fight but it also meant allies, friends, and ROBOT BOYFRIENDS.

Wanda: “Were it not for the Avengers, I might never have met the Vision! He was the product of a laboratory -- and many thought him to be inhumanely cold -- but I grew to love the warm, feeling inner man.”

Of course, if you tell Vision he has feelings he gets mad and insists NUH UH.

And dating Vision pissed off Quicksilver who basically disowned Wanda for a while.

But who gives a fuck what Pietro says, Wanda also learned WITCHCRAFT and (although not explicitly mentioned) how to summon METEORS TO SMASH HER FOES.

And she got married in a double ceremony where the other bride married a tree! That tree part doesn’t get mentioned.

After this, Wanda and Vision went on a short honeymoon but found that the hashtag Avengers life kept them so busy that they didn’t have a lot of time to themselves.

Then Real Dad Django Maximoff showed up and Wanda and Pietro went with him to Transia to learn their backstory.

Annnnnd Wanda got possessed by Chthon. Won’t be the first time ha ha.

Thankfully, the Avengers managed to do a care bear stare to unpossess her. Oh, and Django died. A misstep if you ask me. There was too much character potential to just kill him off after one arc.

Alas, alas.

Anyway, the recap skips over a whole bunch of stuff and doesn’t mention Moondragon’s role but we get to the point where Wanda and Vision quit the Avengers.

Wanda: “When the Vision and I were finally reunited, our thoughts began to turn inward. Our life with the Avengers was fulfilling, but apart from our careers, we had no real private life of our own. Would society accept us on our own, away from Avengers Mansion? We didn’t know -- but we had to at least try to find out. Taking our accrued Avengers salaries, we bought a modest little home in Leonia, New Jersey.”

So a brief recap of their adventures in the first Vision and Scarlet Witch miniseries.

In the first issue, Captain America’s Halloween housewarming gift of a cursed book winds up being cursed and contains Samhain. When Wanda didn’t immediately free him, he got angry and turned some trick or treaters into monster versions of their costumes to attack Vision while Samhain attacked Wanda. She manages to set the cursed tome on fire, ending Samhain’s power. FOR NOW. Then Not-Actually-Their-Father-But-Doesn’t-Know-It-Yet the Whizzer shows up.

In issue two, the Whizzer is looking for Wanda’s help in regaining custody of his son Nuklo the Nuclear Man. With their help, Whizzer manages to get the court to agree to release Nuklo to his custody. But the lead doctor managing Nuklo is secretly ISBISA! ... Y’know, the Whizzer’s old foe from his All-Winner’s Squad days? No? Okay, well he also masterminded the nuclear ‘accident’ that led to Nuklo’s birth in the first place. And now he’s back to finish the job with radiation siphoned from Nuklo. In anger at Wanda being drawn into Golden Age drama, Vision reveals that Wanda isn’t the Whizzer’s kid but it little matters because Whizzer has a massive heart attack and dies. Nuklo helps defeat Isbisa and both of them are drained of atomic power leaving them human. Oh and Vision’s arm gets melted off. That’s kinda important.

In issue three, Vision is in a robot coma and he needs an energy donation from Wonder Man, his brain brother, to recover. Comic books! Vision has a meaning laden coma dream where Ultron screams at him a lot. Grim Reaper attacks and tries to kill Vision and Wonder Man while they’re incapacitated because he has one character beat and its that. But Vision manages to subdue him.

In issue four, is the pertinent one for this issue.

I’m going to say, I think the second Vision and Scarlet Witch series is better. This was a series of loosely related mishaps. The second volume does more with Vision and Scarlet Witch living in suburbia as a concept.

Anyway, in the fourth issue and in this Avengers recap of Wanda’s entire life, after Vision lost his arm, he and Wanda went up to Attilan to get it replaced. Because the Inhumans can casually just build him a new arm that works with his powers.

And people say the Inhumans aren’t good for anything.

While on the moon, Wanda and Vision decide to visit with Pietro and Crystal and their new daughter Luna. Pietro was even not a dick to Vision. It was a nice moment until Magneto barged in and started a fight by insisting he wasn’t here to fight while trapping everyone inside the building. Also, he threatened Bova to get information on who his kids were and frankly, that’s unforgivable. Bova is an angel. A cow angel.

They fight fight fight and then the fight is ended when Luna cries and Magneto realizes he’s doing a big superhero/supervillain fight in the same room as a fragile child and realizes ‘wow maybe i’m the dick here.’

Now the Vision and Scarlet Witch series ends with the internal-reveal that MAGNETO is the father (for now) of Wanda and Pietro. Magneto asking them to accept him as such. And on a confused moment of ‘shit what now.’

The Avengers issue picks up on that and finishes out the scene.

While Wanda is too stunned to know what to say, Pietro has some choice words.

He snatches his daughter away from Magneto and tells him fuck off, you’re no father to me.

Magneto’s argument is ‘hey genetics is the only thing that matters you’re my son like it or not.’

Pietro’s counter argument is ‘nuh uh’ and that Django Maximoff is the only man he calls father. And Wanda agrees.

Its good to see some Django respect.

Magneto tells them they’ll see the error of their ways and flies off.

Which is the wrong tack to take to prove that you’ve changed and are ready to get some good dadding in and won’t kill your granddaughter for being a human.

He’s super bad at this.

After that, Wanda and Vision went home to New Jersey and just stayed at home for a while, Wanda was so horrified by the reveal.

Wanda: “Even now, I can hardly begin to express the horror, the shame! It’s as if I suddenly discovered Hitler lurking in my family tree! Part of me wishes that he is really sincere about tempering his hatred for non-mutant humans. But even if he was telling the truth, that can never excuse his past crimes... Nothing can!”

Its really surprising how ready people are in-universe to compare Magneto to Hitler. From Wanda to Cap to Xorn.

Wasp: “Wanda... you mustn’t torture yourself this way! Magneto has no claim on you, and you’re certainly not responsible for him! I know it must be tough, but you can’t let him ruin the rest of your life!”

These are helpful things to tell Wanda to calm her down.

Less helpful is when Wasp speculates that hey maybe it was okay not to believe Magneto when he said he’s changed because maybe he’ll become worse! Maybe his newfound tolerance of humanity will lead him to try to save humanity from itself rather than wipe it out. In reference to how Moondragon tried to do that on that planet we never heard from again.

Wanda: “Heaven help us, if such a thought occurs to Magneto!”

I’m pretty sure he’s going to be too busy in the near future trying to be teacher to the most death-prone idiots this side of Westchester. And then after that when he decides to be evil again, he’s going to do some nonsense with Asteroid M. But I don’t think he ever hits the ‘save humanity from itself’ point.

Anyway.

Wasp and Captain Marvel reassure Wanda that if Magneto Strikes Again the Avengers will be with her!

The following day, Wanda returns to Leonia, New Jersey to put together a suitcase of stuff since she’s going to be staying at Avengers Mansion for a while.

Wanda: “Jan was nice enough to offer me a few of her things, but they’re all too small for my figure. And that robe the She-Hulk lent me last night fit like a tent!”

Wasp and Scarlet Witch usually look the same size and shape but that’s important canon body shape information for someone, I guess. If they wanted to draw Avengers But Not All The Same Paper Dolls character designs.

Anyway, the issue really ends with Dr Strange showing up to pull Wanda into a crossover with his own book in Doctor Strange #60.

Ergh. This era sure has a lot of stuff going off on the sides.

I’ll synopsize Scarlet Witch’s time in Doctor Strange’s book if it becomes necessary but I’ve already looked at five non-Avengers issue for this post and am probably going to have to cover the Hawkeye series in brief too when it intersects with Avengers.

Follow @essential-avengers​ for grudging contextualization of everything that’s happening in Avengers, when I feel like it. Like and reblog if you liked.

[radiojamming]

[WARNING: In-depth discussion of human remains along with relevant images, some of which may be disturbing.]

In the electric hustle of the mid-1980s, there weren’t many eyes turned toward the loneliest corners of the Canadian Arctic. It was a forward-momentum period, caught up the 20th century’s mach-speed technological progress and cultural change. In all of this movement, it took something quietly monumental to turn heads toward the past and look, quite literally, into its eyes. The world looked into three 140-year-old graves in permafrost, and found three sets of eyes wearily looking back.

Their names were John Torrington, John Hartnell, and William Braine. In Victorian society, they would have faded into the backdrop of the social tapestry. One was a working-class petty officer, another a former shoemaker that had recently joined the Navy, and the third a private in the Royal Marines. In their world, they were perfectly ordinary—but it was their deaths that made them extraordinary. In time, they would be called the Beechey Island or Franklin Expedition mummies, and would become instrumental in helping to solve one of the greatest mysteries in exploration history.

In this first Mummy Monday, we’ll explore the lives and deaths of the Beechey Island trio, as well as their forensic results, cultural impact, and a further look into their unique process of mummification.

The Franklin Expedition

In international news, the Franklin Expedition has been something of a hot topic as of late. New artifacts, incredible discoveries, and potential vacation routes; not to mention a critically-acclaimed television series in 2018! Its impact is present in multiple facets, but it can be hard to gain a full scope of what it was and why it matters.

The quickest, dirtiest summary is this: in 1845, the British Admiralty sent two well-fitted bomb vessels—HMS Erebus and HMS Terror—into the Arctic to ply the waters for the fabled Northwest Passage. It got very, very cold to the point that the land was inescapable and all 129 men aboard succumbed to any number of horrible fates—disease, starvation, exposure, and possibly even more violent ends. Say what you will about ominous-sounding names for these ships and risking fate, but the results were horrifying across the board. Scottish explorer John Rae even made discoveries of cannibalism among the wreckage of what was to be the most promising of Her Majesty’s exploration attempts, much to the public’s disgust, chagrin, and fascination. 

There is, of course, so much more to the story than just a few quick notes about the horrors nature can inflict and the question of imperialistic hubris. One peek into the fae realm of Franklin-related academia is a little bit mind-boggling, and there have been plenty of glorious attempts to parse it all out. The sources range from contemporary to theoretical, and as much as people agree or disagree, the siren call of Frankliniana can be hard to resist.

So where the hell do you start?

For the sake of Mummy Monday, we’re starting where most of Franklin’s rescue attempts did:

Beechey Island.

Beechey Island

It’s a forbidding corner of the Canadian Arctic, even today. Nestled at the foot of Devon Island in the Wellington Channel of modern-day Nunavut, it can appear either unremarkable or dread-inspiring, depending on the day and the weather. Its nearest inhabited neighbor is the town of Resolute, although its name in Inuktitut gives a better sense of the landscape: Qausuittuq or ‘the place with no dawn’. 

Most explorers tracing the steps of Franklin stop in Resolute to charter passage to Beechey Island. Although there are animals living near the area (different species of sea bird and the iconic polar bear), the tourism sector of Beechey Island is profoundly dedicated to the quiet contemplation of the remains of Franklin’s first winter camp. Scattered across the stones are broken pieces of wood and rusted rings of old Goldner’s cans. To this day, it’s possible to see the ongoing decay of history in the shadow of memorials left behind by past searchers. 

And then there are the graves.

The original headboards are now stored at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife. Weather-resistant replacements still bear the same messages as the originals, each recalling the names, statuses, and death dates of three of Franklin’s men. Two graves, from Erebus, have ominous-sounding Bible verses tacked on to the epitaphs. 

There is a fourth grave belonging to Thomas Morgan, an able-bodied seaman (AB) from the HMS North Star who died during a search for Franklin in 1854. Morgan is entombed alongside his Erebus and Terror predecessors, but he has not yet been exhumed.

And yeah, exhumations. That’s what we’re here for on Mummy Monday, after all!

In 1984, Dr. Owen Beattie of the University of Alberta led a crew of researchers and scientists to this lonely point in the Arctic Circle. At the time, he was entertaining the possibility of lead poisoning being a factor in the ultimate fate of the Expedition. Part of this consideration came from the bajillion cans littered across the extensive trail, each soldered shut with clumps of lead that Beattie believed leached into the food the men were eating. Beattie had good reason to pursue this theory! His belief was that the acidic nature of some of the canned food would have caused a breakdown in the lead solder, causing the food to become contaminated. Even without this theory, he wouldn’t have been off the mark at all. Later discoveries contemporary to the Expedition found other cans manufactured and sealed by Stephen Goldner to have gone completely rancid. That, outside of the lead-poisoning theory, certainly wouldn’t have helped matters. Another explanation pointed to the lead piping installed in the ships themselves. Would water passing through these pipes have poisoned the men in the process of drinking or breathing? What about lead-based paints, often needing to be applied throughout the year in new coats, and condensation to follow on steam-powered and heated ships? What about the nature of being a person in the Victorian era in the first place? You were probably about as leaden as a musket ball.

So Beattie made his trek north, intending to exhume John Torrington and crossing his fingers on the possibility of exhuming John Hartnell. People knew these men had died young, even by Victorian standards. Torrington was 20 years old, Hartnell 25, and William Braine 32. Torrington and Hartnell died within three days of one another at the beginning of January, 1846. Braine died only a few months later in April. If Beattie’s theory was correct, then lead may have played a part in why these men were dropping like flies after only a few months on the Expedition. 

As detailed in his book, Frozen in Time, great pains were taken to get permits and carefully exhume John Torrington. It was far from easy. Beattie and his team had to dig, pick, and melt their way through around six feet of gravel and cement-hard permafrost. They had entertained the possibility that permafrost might have preserved the bodies; they had no idea how right they were.

After uncovering one black coffin, edged in decorative white tape and bearing brass handles (one was still in the ‘up’ position), they carefully melted through layers of ice until one researcher reached a piece of blue wool cloth. As gently as possible, he tugged aside the cloth and revealed the frozen face of John Torrington.

Petty Officer and Lead Stoker John Torrington seemed to wearily peer back at the researchers. And he was, in fact, peering. Torrington’s body had been almost perfectly preserved, including his eyes, other soft tissue, and cartilage. His striking appearance startled the researchers, understandably. They had been expecting some degree of preservation, but not this. 

He was only 5′4″ (163 cm) and weighed just under 88 lbs (40 kg). Dressed simply in clothing that showed exactly how underweight he was at the time of his death, something about his appearance struck some emotional chord with the team. In Frozen in Time, Beattie quietly makes the comment that Torrington looked, “just unconscious” and “anything but grotesque”. 

“The expression on his thin face, with its pouting mouth and half-closed eyes gazing through delicate, light-brown eyelashes, was peaceful. His nose and forehead, in contrast to the natural skin colour of the rest of his face, were darkened by contact with the blue-wool coffin covering. This shadowed the face, accentuating the softness of its appearance. The tragedy of Torrington’s young death was as apparent to the researchers as it must have been to his shipmates 138 years before.” (pp. 171-172)

His jaw was bound shut with a polka-dot kerchief (think Jacob Marley) and his limbs were tied together using cotton wrapping. Researchers made note of his hands, which showed some of the greatest degree of his preservation.

What was even more incredible was the full degree of flexibility his body retained. Beattie and a team member lifted Torrington from his coffin for his full autopsy, and as they did so, Torrington’s head rolled onto Beattie’s left shoulder. Beattie also noted how light and limp Torrington was more or less like lifting an unconscious child.

Samples were taken of Torrington’s hair, nails, organs, and brain. The fact that these samples could be taken at all was incredible, especially in their state of preservation. After this was done, Torrington was reburied with the utmost respect and the expectation that the grave itself would refreeze from encroaching water. Not only would Torrington be preserved physically, but his photos were about to preserve his memory in ways no one could really expect.

But, of course, he was just one of three.

John Hartnell and the ‘Face of Death’

Researchers literally brushed the surface of Hartnell’s grave in 1984 as time constraints prevented them from doing a full exhumation. They had enough time to do an initial dig and uncover part of him, which was enough to sate their curiosity for the moment. Undoubtedly, they still thought of Torrington’s repose and his more delicate features.

They weren’t really prepared for, uh...

Probably the most pissed-off mummy known to man. At least, that’s what he looked like. One researcher, Walt Kowal, might have summed it up best when he remarked, “This guy is spooky. The quintessential pirate. This guy is frightening.” (p. 184)

He wasn’t entirely wrong. Something about John Hartnell’s face seemed angry, and it didn’t help matters that his right eye was missing. As the water drained away, John Hartnell grimaced where Torrington had just seemed to passively observe. In time, the entire figure of AB John Hartnell emerged.

Dark-haired and hazel-eyed, Hartnell appeared to be something of Torrington’s opposite. Both men had the distinct features of mummification-in-ice, such as the receded and pursed lips from the water and the half-open eyes. That was where the similarities ended, however. Hartnell was bundled up in a blanket and shroud with his head resting on a pillow, where Torrington laid on a bed of sawdust (often mistaken in pictures as his hair). Pains had been taken to make Hartnell look presentable; his hair was combed and cut, his nails trimmed, and his body dressed in three shirts and a hat (no pants, though). 

The question remained almost tangible: why were these men so different?

As the researchers reburied the remains and returned to Alberta to pore over lab results, so to am I going to take a step back and look at their lives in detail.

The Men Behind the Mummies

There’s not much I can say about Torrington that hasn’t been beautifully covered in magnificent detail by my Torrington research counterpart, @entwinedmoon​. Her Torrington research series absolutely floored me with its depth and clear passion for the subject! Literally everything about his life, death, and afterlife is covered in there, so I can’t recommend it enough. And I absolutely agree with the sentiment that tracking Torrington down is like cryptid-hunting. Oof. 

What I can say in a pale shadow of entwinedmoon’s work is that John Shaw Torrington was born around 1825 in the city of Manchester, making him around 19 or 20 at the time of his death. He hadn’t served in the Navy prior to being assigned as a petty officer on HMS Terror, but his lung tissue showed that he’d definitely been exposed to the amount of smoke expected of both a lead stoker and a Manchester resident (given its Victorian reputation as a pollution-belching beast of a city). Exact details of his life are hard to follow, making him something of a shadowy figure for being so front-facing after his death. Examination of his hands showed that at the time of his death, he probably hadn’t done much work between his illness and the fact the ships were frozen in and thus not really needing someone to work their locomotive engines.

And he’d been sick. Really sick.

In the end, it was a combination of tuberculosis and pneumonia that sent John Torrington to his premature grave. He’d been, as discussed, incredibly underweight, but had been well enough to pass a health check in Greenland when some of his comrades had been sent back to England for similar health issues. The when of his illness isn’t known, but it had lingered long enough to thoroughly emaciate him. Had he been sick prior to leaving England and just covered it up? Possibly. Had he been sick but had a flare-up at some point after the health check? Also completely possible. 

In short, after his autopsy it became clear that everything about Torrington’s body was at active war against his life. He’d been small in build and had lungs so scarred with smoke and illness that lung tissue adhered to his chest wall. This wasn’t a man destined to live very long.

As opposed to his neighbor.

A personal aside, John Hartnell is my favorite. I’ve spent years researching his life, his family, and every detail I can hunt down about him, and it’s taking a lot not to just fly right into overshare mode. I can say that Hartnell’s mummy wears a lot of reminders of his life, along with the life of another one of the Expedition’s non-mummified members.

John Hartnell was born in 1820 in Gillingham, Kent. He was the oldest of five siblings and after the death of his father in 1832, immediately went to work as an apprentice shoemaker. Yeah, not a Navy man or a dockyard worker like his father. He signed his name on a form dedicating his time and effort under one Henry Sarge and went to work crafting footwear. A necrotic right wrist bone tells a story of repetitive movements and damage. Growth arrest lines in his ankle bones say that the 5′11″ (180 cm) Hartnell had actually had his growth stunted around the onset of puberty, possibly owing to malnutrition. However, letters from his mother Sarah and brother Charles paint the image of a close-knit family avid to support one another.

So close-knit, in fact, that John was one of two Hartnells on Erebus. His brother, Thomas, was two years younger than him and accompanied John as an AB. Their names appear beside one another in the muster books (possibly including a cousin, John Strickland) and John was buried in one of Thomas’ shirts, with the initials embroidered on a shirttail. 

Although no known letters exist from John or Thomas Hartnell, the grave contents alone paint a remarkable picture of family ties in extraordinary conditions. 

A new question arose, however. Torrington may have been marked by fate with his illness, but Hartnell had been healthy even past the health check in Greenland. What had happened to him? 

For that, we need to go back to Beechey Island in the summer of 1986.

‘Son of a bitch! He’s been autopsied!’

Beattie and his team returned to Beechey Island in June, 1986 with a renewed sense of purpose and, of all things, an x-ray machine. It was set to be the first time such a machine would operate above the Arctic Circle and the team was both eager to try and dreading the worst case scenarios. Results from Torrington encouraged them, as the lab gave the news that Torrington’s hair had showed lead levels far above average, further pointing toward the lead-poisoning theory. Now the researchers were prepared to see if the same held true of John Hartnell and William Braine.

Unfortunately, very little is known of Royal Marine William Braine, aside from the fact that he was a private from Somerset. He’d been married prior to his departure, and seemed to come from a large, poor family. Economic reasons may have led him to join the Royal Marines, and he’d had no choice in where he was set to be assigned. Just as with the rest of the Marines in the Expedition, they were to serve in the Arctic regardless of their choices, and at a regular pay rate as opposed to the regular crew’s double pay. Aside from this, Braine’s life is well-obscured by history at the moment, so I won’t go into his results as much as Hartnell’s which can be correlated with his personal history.

The team re-exhumed John Hartnell after a good deal of difficulty, as shown in this incredible NOVA documentary aired in 1988. In the two years since the last exhumation, very little had changed in Hartnell’s appearance. The main difference was that his remaining eye appeared more sunken, but clearly the ice had done its job in preserving him.

This time, the team cut away his toque and revealed, of all things, a full head of hair.

Brian Spenceley, a physics professor at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, stood in as a photographer during this exhumation. What made his presence remarkable was the fact that he was John and Thomas Hartnell’s great-great nephew. It’s somewhat eerie to see him in the NOVA documentary, juxtaposed with images of Hartnell that are clear enough to show some family resemblances. 

Like Torrington, Hartnell was removed from his coffin for a full autopsy. Unlike Torrington, Hartnell was subjected to x-rays which required removal of his clothing. And very much unlike Hartnell, removal of his clothing revealed another detail that, at risk of sounding clickbait-y, shocked the researchers.

He’d already been autopsied.

Hartnell bore the scars and stitches of an upside-down Y-incision that terminated at his hips rather than his shoulders. It correlated with some initial results of his x-ray which showed a scrambling of organ material, some in places where it shouldn’t have been (his liver in his shoulder, for instance). 

According to Beattie, John Hartnell had been autopsied while still on Erebus, presumably under the hands of assistant surgeon and naturalist Harry D.S. Goodsir. The autopsy appeared hurried, with Hartnell’s chest plate being replaced upside-down as well. Beattie estimated that the entire procedure lasted no more than a half hour. However it had gone, someone had quickly cut out his organs, examined some (such as his heart) in detail at the point of a scalpel, and then shoved the organs back in without a care as to where they went. There are plenty of explanations for the time constraints, including the cold, the threat of disease, and the possible pressure of doing an autopsy under the scrutiny of superstitious sailors and a distraught younger brother. All in all, it gave the team a remarkable chance to observe a Victorian autopsy as they did their own.

As with Torrington, the team took samples of organ, bone, nail, and hair for later analysis. Hartnell’s appearance pointed yet another accusing finger at tuberculosis, but not with the lung damage as sustained in Torrington’s body. It was possible there was something else at work with Hartnell. 

Also, a polar bear interfered, leading to one of the best forensic case notes I’ve ever seen.

Once autopsies and x-rays were concluded (the x-ray machine worked fine, provided it was being warmed by a fish tank water heater), Hartnell was wrapped in a linen shroud with his clothes placed in a bag to be buried with him. With Spenceley present at the reburial and the thought that Thomas Hartnell had been at the graveside 140 years prior, the whole situation carried an extra emotional weight. As Spenceley recalled, at the end he felt as though he was burying someone he knew. 

Once the grave was replaced as accurately as possible following archaeological diagrams and photographs, the time came to exhume the third mummy, William Braine.

And he didn’t look quite right.

Whereas Torrington and Hartnell had retained something of a lively appearance (loosely, at least), Braine looked well and truly dead. He had clearly decomposed to some degree before the preservation qualities of the permafrost could take effect. His eyes were sunken into his head, his skin wax-like, skull prominent, and body slightly twisted in the coffin. One arm was tucked under his body to make him fit into what seemed to be an ill-fitting coffin that, unlike the other two, was not fitted to his measurements. Even the lid had been shoved down until it pressed against his nose and deformed it slightly. And even worse, the skin of one arm showed rat bites. Obviously, it had taken a good while for poor Braine to actually be buried. Like I said, he was 32 at the time of his death. His body sure doesn’t make him look 32.

His x-rays were far more conclusive in the cause of his death, but less so in the case of his burial. Braine’s spine had been literally twisted by tuberculosis.

It clearly had more time to wrack his body. He weighed about as much as Torrington had but stood at 6′0″ (181 cm). A theory arose that Braine had possibly died in a sledge group, causing his companions to haul his body back to shore. He had probably been kept in the hold for some time, in accordance with the bite marks and level of decomposition. 

Sadly, as said, little is known of Braine’s life. He was illiterate, having made an X mark in the muster records. No letters have been found addressed to him or from any of his siblings. While one cursory biography was written by a possible descendant, not much research has been done to solve the mystery of his life (yet).

Braine was thereafter reburied, and this chapter of the Beechey Island’s saga was nearly done. And yet, the exhumations only provided more questions than answers.

Heavy Metal

Lead. Pb. Atomic number 82. 

Zinc. Zn. Atomic number 30.

Neither are innocuous, and both bore some of the blame for what killed the men of the Franklin Expedition. The question is to what degree is the blame well-placed?

Dr. Owen Beattie set about to find out. Sample results from Hartnell and Braine came back from the lab with more bad news on the lead front. Both bodies showed high levels, furthermore damning the solder and piping. However, both Hartnell and Braine showed markedly less lead in their systems than Torrington. 

Results left the cozy realm of academia and out into the great, wide international world. As will be discussed, the photographs of the mummies alone had caused something of a media frenzy, inspiring a new cultural Franklin-themed wave of music, art, and literature. But the lead-poisoning theory rang some discordant bell in the public’s imagination and became less of a theory and more of an accepted fact. Most decided that Franklin’s men had been killed by the lowest bidder of the Admiralty’s victualing department.

Those naughty, naughty Goldner’s tinned foods.

It would be some years before this theory was questioned. In fact, by all appearances, it was Hartnell who seemed to question it the most. After all, the lead content of his body had gone down after leaving England. And how did we know that?

His nails told us so. And that wasn’t the only information they decided to divulge. Because of these findings, scientists could figure out when his sickness began nearly down to the day. Not only that, but they also discovered that John Hartnell had a very severe zinc deficiency.

‘Hartnell’s time machine’ as it was nicknamed became an incredible source for vital clues to the mysteries posed by the Beechey Island trio. The spike at the end of the chart shows the point that Hartnell’s body began to break down and essentially devour itself for one last effort at keeping itself alive. What this revealed was that Hartnell’s illness was practically a flash in the pan; he’d only really been sick for about a month and a half before his death. How did such a dramatic downturn occur?

So far, it seems like a combination of bad genes and that little demon of a zinc deficiency. John Hartnell’s autopsy reports revealed a whole slew of issues from a sprained ankle to a compacted vertebral disc (which would have been painful). It was clear he had lived a hard and active life, with the wear and tear showing on his very bones. The zinc deficiency’s symptoms would have manifested as weight loss, fatigue, poor wound healing, night blindness, and an increased risk of infection. The last symptom in that last may point the most damning finger at what finally killed John Hartnell. If he had a zinc deficiency as severely as it appears, his immune system would have been compromised and he wouldn’t have been able to fight off infection as well as some of his comrades.

Not only that, but lining up historical hints adds another sinister factor to the list.

In 1853, an exhumation attempt was carried out on his grave under the auspices of Sir Edward Augustus Inglefield of the HMS Isobel and his physician, Dr. Peter Sutherland (the group that put the pickax through his arm). One letter refers to the body as:

“perfectly preserved by the intense cold, exhibited no trace of scurvy or other malignant disease, but was manifestly that of a person who had died of consumption, a malady to which it was further known that the deceased was prone.” (Sir Roderick Murchinson, Royal Geographic Society, 1853)

Again: “known that the deceased was prone.” Someone apparently knew or believed that John Hartnell had previously been consumptive. Not only that, but plying a Maidstone newspaper brought up another point:

John Hartnell’s father, also named Thomas, died from a ‘lingering illness’. While there are multiple possibilities as to what this illness was, it lines up nicely with both the historical record and the clues in Hartnell’s body. It’s possible he was ill with tuberculosis prior, had his immune system compromised by his zinc deficiency, and had his previous illness exacerbated by Arctic conditions. 

And all this was learned from one mummy.

While this doesn’t solve the deaths of every member of the Franklin Expedition, the findings at Beechey Island provided incredible insight into their lives and deaths, and may have opened a door into further understanding. 

‘God have mercy on the frozen man’

The forensic results of the exhumations were astounding in themselves, but the cultural impact can’t be understated. The world was taken by the images of Torrington, Hartnell, and Braine. Torrington in particular had his image splashed across magazines and newspapers, becoming the quintessential poster boy of the Expedition. He haunted no lack of dreams (mine included, circa age 7) with his gaunt face and hazy, half-lidded eyes. One might say something about a man straddling the precipice of life and death, as it isn’t often that the dead look at you.

As said, the trio inspired a small but noticeable culture wave, with just a few key and oft-cited examples provided below:

Iron Maiden’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ 

James Taylor’s ‘Frozen Man’

Margaret Atwood’s short story ‘The Age of Lead’

Also, this particularly recognizable scene from AMC’s The Terror!

Paintings, sculptures, tattoos, poems, short stories, cosplay, dolls, and on and on! You could even argue that the discoveries on Beechey Island reignited new interest in the Franklin Expedition, creating a wave of discovery which eventually culminated in the discovery of the shipwrecks of Erebus in 2014 and Terror in 2016. Suddenly, the men of the Expedition were real, as tangible as you or me. People saw their faces, realized that these men were reaching across from the Victorian era into the 20th century. Sure, now they’re mostly condemned to Listverse-type categories of scariest mummies, but they’ve certainly drummed up emotional reactions in their time.

The Process

Now that we’ve covered the who, what, and when, it’s down to the how. How is a body preserved so well in ice and permafrost? The answer, my dear, is as simple as this picture.

It’s refrigeration on a natural level! Just as a refrigerator or freezer slows or completely stops bacteria from causing decay in food items (freeze your meats, my dudes!), permafrost and ice extends the same courtesy to anything buried in them. Of course, the conditions have to be specific! Other bodies found of the Expedition haven’t had even close to the same amount of preservation as the Beechey Island mummies. Wind, animals, and other natural processes have left a trail of skeletons rather than mummies. Clearly, something about depth of burial and level of protection is important as well.

Other ice mummies set to be covered include Ötzi the Iceman, and the Qilakitsoq mummies of Greenland. While there’s some variation as to their causes (glacial freezing and cold, dry air, respectively), the process is essentially the same. Cold stops naughty bacteria! The deep freeze kept the Beechey Island mummies from complete and utter decay, like freezing beef in an ice cube. Granted, if the mummies were ever exposed to warmer-than-freezing air for a pronounced length of time, they would eventually decay. 

Conclusion

The Beechey Island mummies are an invaluable information source for questions about the final, mysterious fate of the men of the Franklin Expedition. Their bodies have provided incredible clues and beautiful insight into their lives as well as the lives of men like them. Not only that, but their cultural impact inspired a new wave of interest and the thought that the border between life and death is a surprisingly fragile one. While their initial appearance may be frightening or shocking to some, it’s important to remember that these were young men thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Their memory and impact is still felt to this day (which I hope makes them happy, wherever they are!). 

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions on this inaugural Mummy Monday, feel free to hit me up through my askbox or DMs! It’s a lot of fun for me and I’m totally open to any and all comments about how I’m doing! And the next Mummy Monday installment will be about the Qilakitsoq mummies!

Thanks for reading!

[aion-rsa]

15 Worst NES Games of All-Time

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The worst NES games of all time are a truly special breed of bad video games. Say what you will about the downsides of the modern video game industry (and there is certainly a lot to say), but there is, in most cases, a baseline standard of quality ensured by better, cheaper technology, experience, and more controlled distribution channels. You may get the occasional indie game that is basically a scam, but when it comes to major releases…well, even Cyberpunk 2077 was pretty good in a lot of ways.

That wasn’t the case during the NES era. At a time when console gaming was basically the digital wild west, it was incredibly difficult to tell good games from bad ones, and developers often exploited that fact to get us to buy titles that refuse to leave the deepest, darkest parts of our nostalgia all these years later.

That’s the thing about these games. Are they among the worst NES titles ever? Absolutely, but years later, there’s something about remembering the pain of playing them and sharing those memories with others that is strangely enjoyable. 

15. Tag Team Wrestling

Even with all of the other bad wrestling games for the NES (and there were many), Tag Team Wrestling manages to stand apart largely by virtue of being fundamentally unplayable in nearly every way you can imagine.

In a dream world where you manage to overcome this game’s all-time bad animations and unresponsive controls, you still have to deal with the fact that there are times when the opponent A.I. difficulty is raised to such a degree that it becomes quite literally impossible to win. If it weren’t for the fact that this game eventually inspired Homestar Runner’s Strong Bad character, it would be entirely worthless.

14. Friday the 13th

There are some who will credit Friday the 13th for being unique and ambitious. We shall not speak their name in this house of truth where we recognize that the Friday the 13th franchise was never scarier than the moment you tried to play this game as a child.

This game’s bewildering map and unforgivable controls were practically designed to eliminate the possibility of fun. It’s easy to love Jason’s weirdly stylish purple jumpsuit in this 8-bit nightmare, but much like Patrick Bateman, no amount of style can hide the monster beneath.

13. Super Pitfall

There’s no shortage of NES games that are difficult to the point of being fundamentally unenjoyable, but Super Pitfall may just be the king of that particular trash heap.

Super Pitfall‘s developers seemed to believe that the reason people love video games is that they offer the chance to listen to repetitive music while dying all the time to obstacles you have little to no chance to avoid. Just in case that level of abuse wasn’t enough to make you love their project, the developers decided to just go ahead and fill their game with essentially invisible items that no sane person would ever find organically despite the fact that they’re required to progress. To it’s credit, this game does recreate the sensation of being trapped in a dank underground cave.

12. Operation Secret Storm

While it almost feels too easy to pick on developer Color Dreams (the studio responsible for many terrible unlicensed NES games, many of which were based on the Bible), Operation Secret Storm is really on another level in terms of all-time bad games.

Even if we can put aside the often blatant racism and bizarre Gulf War storyline, we’re left with a game where control commands are more of a polite suggestion and hit detection is a bug, not a feature. From top-to-bottom, this may be the “best” example of just how bad those old-school unlicensed NES games could be.

11. Where’s Waldo?

You know, it’s pretty amazing that Where’s Waldo? the video game can’t offer an experience comparable to the Where’s Waldo? books considering that the books weren’t exactly the great American novels.

Beating this game will either take you five minutes or 50 years. It really all depends on your ability to determine which of the blurred on-screen figures the game is trying to pretend is supposed to be Waldo. It’s truly impressive that this game manages to botch a concept this simple, but that’s the magic of the NES era. 

10. Back to the Future Part II and III

The first Back to the Future game for NES was bad, but at least it followed basic video game logic in terms of its level structure. Back to the Future Part II and III, meanwhile, somehow beats Primer for the title of “most confusing use of time travel in entertainment history.”

To be honest, I still don’t know what this game expects from me. It’s supposed to offer a time travel adventure that spans the scope of the last two Back to the Future films, but I dare you to play this for more than 20 minutes without feeling tears in your eyes and the words “What do you want me to do?!?!” escape your lungs. If it’s not the most unintuitive bit of 8-bit game design, it’s certainly one of the most unenjoyable.

9. The Adventures Of Gilligan’s Island

There are two things worth remembering about Gilligan’s Island: the theme song and how annoying Gilligan was. To its credit, this game nails both of those elements.

This game is basically the result of escort quests and bad comedy games forming an unholy union. Imagine being dropped into a hedge maze and being forced to endure the constant jeers of the dumbest man you’ve ever met while trying to figure out where to go. Also, your legs are tied together. That’s basically the Adventures of Gilligan’s Island experience. 

8. Bad Street Brawler

It’s tempting to overlook the golden age of beat ‘em ups for their seeming simplicity, but as Bad Street Brawler shows, it’s very much possible for those kinds of games to go incredibly wrong.

Bad Street Brawler was designed to be used with the NES Power Glove, which should probably tell you everything that you really need to know about what it’s like to try to “play” this game. Manage to master its nearly unplayable controls, and you’re left with a beat ’em up with bewildering visuals and fundamentally unsatisfying gameplay that leave you wondering how the industry lasted this long.

Read more

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7. Mario is Missing

Look, there are a lot of bad video games on the NES, but there’s something especially insulting about a terrible Mario game on NES that passes itself off as an educational experience.

This game feels like it was made by a dentist who wanted to give young patients a way to pass the time in the waiting room while also making them less afraid of the impending pain. Nothing in this game makes sense, and the fact it fooled young gamers into thinking it was an actual Mario game makes it that much more infuriating.

6. Ghostbusters

You know, it really shouldn’t have been that difficult to make a respectable Ghostbusters game. Honestly, the only way to go wrong is to pass up the more obvious genre opportunities and try to do something weird and stupid that nobody ever asked for.

As you probably guessed, that’s exactly what we have here. Ghostbusters has the audacity to try to be this strange combination of various gameplay concepts when the fundamentals of controls, visuals, and logical progression so clearly elude it. It’s genuinely hard to believe someone had the chance to make a Ghostbusters video game and came up with this.

5. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

There are some who say that you really need to learn to play this game before you can judge it. The fundamental flaw of that premise is that it assumes that there’s a game here that’s worth playing in the first place.

I genuinely can’t imagine what Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s developers were going for when they concocted this unintuitive blend of confusing mechanics, overwhelming (yet unimpressive) enemies, and controls that only seem to work seconds before you convince yourself to give up on the game entirely. You can read every guide about this game that’s ever been written to try to understand how its needlessly complicated mechanics work, and they still wouldn’t answer the one question everyone has about this title, “Why are you like this?”

4. Action 52

It almost feels bad to pick on Action 52 considering that it is an unlicensed collection of 52 small games that were clearly made by underfunded and inexperienced programmers working on a project that legally probably shouldn’t have been “released.” Then again, that’s perhaps all the more reason to make fun of it.

Against all odds, not one of Action 52’s 52 games manages to be even remotely playable. These games would have been embarrassing even if they were released for the Atari 2600, but in the age of the NES, they offered young gamers the chance to quickly realize that the world is full of scammers and they will try anything to part you with your money.

3. Deadly Towers

Every NES gamer has that one game they just couldn’t beat and never seemed to understand no matter how hard they tried. Well, Deadly Towers is all of those games of your respective childhoods rolled into one.

There is not a single aspect of this game that makes any kind of sense that I’m familiar with. Imagine you’re trapped in the maze from the movie Labyrinth, but instead of getting to meet sexy David Bowie at the end, you have to listen to Eric Clapton tell you what’s wrong with your generation. That’s about what’s it like to play Deadly Towers. Even if you bother to learn the game’s structure, you quickly find you don’t want anything to do with the “rewards” that follow. 

2. Dragon’s Lair

How do you take a game like Dragon’s Lair (an innovative arcade experience that combined FMV visuals with QTE gameplay) and port it to the humble NES? Well, if this port is any indication, you…don’t.

I don’t know if there’s ever been another game that inflicts so much pain on its first screen. I’m willing to bet that 90% of Dragon’s Lair players never figured out how to cross that first bridge and actually enter the castle. That’s probably because the solution to that “puzzle”makes no sense and is fundamentally unenjoyable to execute. Those 90% will be happy to know that the game only gets worse from there. 

1. The Uncanny X-Men

Imagine how easy it would have been to make a decent X-Men game for NES. Just take Batman, Mega Man, Castlevania, or any number of the other great NES games, throw some X-Men designs on the whole thing, and you have a game most of us would probably fondly remember to this day.

Infamous NES developer LJN decided to go a different route, though. They decided to make a top-down action game where hit detection is basically non-existent, the music constantly assaults your ears, half of the characters are essentially useless, the graphics are so bad that you quite literally can’t tell where you are or what you’re supposed to be doing, and the AI is useless to the point that I”m pretty sure the in-game characters have become aware of the game they’re forced to exist in and are doing everything in their power to get out.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

There’s no shortage of bad NES games (clearly), but when it comes to wasted potential, this is truly the worst of the worst. 

The post 15 Worst NES Games of All-Time appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[littleeyesofpallas]

The other day i had a kinda drunken rant I went on with a friend that I had wished I could’ve written down.  But today I read an article about the shift in hollywood marketing from star power to IP and character driven power instead: the idea being that an original movie used be able to draw crowds with the basic idea of “your favorite star as <insert role>” but we’ve moved more towards the appeal of familiar franchise names like “from the creator of XYZ.”  But I think this is an interesting place to draw the line because it does go back to that drunken rant.  So, here I go again... this is gonna be lo~ng and boring (and this is the shortest possible version) and without pictures, but god knows i have no idea what i would put to accompany this super tangent-filled tirade, so I guess just buckle up...

(I apologize now for all the weird side subjects that I’m going to name drop but just not take the time here to go in depth with.)

I don’t even remember where my drunken rant with my friend the other night started so my first obstacle is finding a place to even begin with this because it has so many entry points and none of them are any closer to where this all ends than any other so like.... whatever...  Shakespeare.

It’s a super complicated thing but in the first era of professional english theatre  that Shakespeare ushered in (from the mid-late 1500s to early-mid 1600s) there were strong strong associations with theatre and prostitution.  Maybe it was exactly what it sounded like, maybe it was elitist slander against the revolutionary accessibility of the arts to the poor as self debasing, maybe it was the church being really angry about literally everything all the time, maybe it was a little of all of that...  But either way the persisting notion was that a theatre, established or travelling, was a place one could ostensibly go to pay for sex with the troupe’s actors.  of course at the time women weren’t a part of that profession, and while they may have been as much a part of the theater going demographic as anyone else it’s hard to pinpoint how much of the already vaguely defined theatre sex trade they patronized --Point being when we talk about theatres prostituting their actors we’re talking about male theatre goers paying to have sex with male actors, and predominantly those young boys playing female roles.  In most classic academic circles this is either wholly ignored, brushed aside/glossed over, or sloppily chalked up to “homosexuality.”  But there’s a lot more nuance to that... which is part of the big mess of stuff I’m just not getting into here...

But this is where I draw my line of connection to Kabuki theatre.  Kabuki somewhat infamously had similar practices as all-male theatre and as duel industry for theatre and prostitution.  And as a parallel development it seems to make sense... In England and Japan alike, you have a group of people who by nature of their jobs charm people and constantly move from town to town.  Even if a community or government thinks what they’re doing is wrong, by the time they can take notice or do anything to stop them: they charm, they fuck, they leave.  But unlike Shakespearean theatre, kabuki has a slightly more convoluted history of development.

See, Kabuki started with Izumi-no-Okumo, a shinto shrine maid (ironically also in the 1500-1600s cusp, same as shakespeare) and although a lot of her personal history is lost to time you can imagine the basic development here: a shrine maid tells the myths, she tells the myths dramatically and with with character voice, then all that but with props, and costume, and then dividing roles into separate actors, and collecting donations for the shrine as regular practice anyway but hey look people donate more when they’ve come for a story they enjoy... and then oops you’ve invented theatre.  Also on account of this being started with shinto shrine maids, the form naturally took an all female slant.

Whether it started with Okumo herself or not, as theatre became an established form, and a lucrative one at that, non shinto affiliated women quickly seized the chance to make a living outside the bounds of common peasantry, and with the growth of travelling theatre as an industry that same side venture of prostitution developed.  But here’s where it gets interesting...

Due to things that, again I won’t dive into here, the untaxed revenues of prostitution painted a target on the backs of kabuki actresses, and women were eventually outlawed from theatre.  The art form was of course immensely popular however so to keep the gravy train rolling the theatre form continued but now with all young-male casts, to retain the feminine aesthetics of female kabuki.  This did absolutely nothing to stop the rate of prostitution however, so they outlawed it again and replaced the young boys with grown men.  This still didn’t stop the prostitution but there was other stuff going on in Japan at that point and legislative attentions were pulled elsewhere.

And here’s my weird little take away from this...  it’s not like Kabuki theatre suddenly went from being popular with horny straight men to horny gay men in a seemless and perfectly balanced transition. (and granted japan at the time was a lot more open about their grasp of sexuality compared to now and to the west in general) so presumably a lot of these thirsty theatre goers were just overwhelmingly indiscriminate in their tastes in fucking actors...  But stick a pin in that, we’ve got a tangent to go on!

So around this same time Japan was having kind of a second rennaissance: japan’s high arts culture had first really risen to prominence in the heian period right before the long long descent into the civilwar we all know and lover for all its flashy samurai drama.  When that 400-ish year civil war finally ended and then stabilized under the Tokugawa shogunate in the Edo period, the art scene finally had some room to breathe again, and among many other things ukiyo-e wood block prints saw a huge explosion in popularity.  And part of this tied into Kabuki theatre, as an extremely popular genre of prints were actor portraits and theatre scenes.  Actor portraits in particular are kind of culturally fascinating, because they weren’t simply prints of character illustration, they were frequently labeled with both the character played, the story they featured in, and the name of the actor playing them.  moreover, despite the reverence of classical art historians now, these weren’t fine art at the time; they were mass produced, affordable and disposable.  In major cities, everyone went to see theatre, and everyone bought, kept, and even collected actor portraits.  As theatre seasons and troupes came and went actor portraits came to occupy and kind of cultural value space a lot like American baseball cards in how prestige, rarity, and trading became an entire subculture in and of itself within the sports/theatre community.

Now we see how Japan had created this thriving popular/mass culture, and celebrity culture for itself.  And while the notion of a “parasocial relationship” wouldn’t be formulated and explored until the 1950s-60s in the wake of things like Elvis fever and Beetles mania, that brand of one-sided relationship where you as an audience member form a “relationship” with a celebrity that involves collecting information about their heavily curated persona is exactly what japan stumbled into some 300 years earlier.  And in fact Japanese pop culture would maintain a lineage of parasocial relationships during the intervening years (in a way the deification and worship of the emperor as a god-king was a kind of parasocial relationship in the way a secular monarch doesn’t quite achieve) So it’s no surprise that when Takarazuka Revue opened in the 1910s as a new modern all-female theatre form, it attracted a familiar old brand of horny theatre audience --one that maintained a very nebulous relationship with the now much more stringent notions of gender and its relation to sexuality.

taking this tangent a little further, Japanese pop culture has always shown this interesting, self-aware approach to the parasocial relationship dynamic that western cultures seems to lack.  I remember that when the 1990s put boy bands briefly into the spotlight, the thing that sunk them in the American eye seemed to be this weird sense of betrayal that the boys werent some garage band rags to riches story, and they didnt write their own music, or make their own dance moves, or even sing live at their own concerts.  America seemed to be repulsed by this notion of a manufactured pop hit.  Japan however (and Korea soon to follow) seemed to thrive in this instead; there was no pretense that J-pop idols weren’t manufactured, and in fact they took pride in the rigors of having been hand picked and raised to stardom --of course they were scouted and trained, because the idol could’ve been any of millions but it was them who got picked, it was them who sang the best, performed the best, climbed the charts, and fought to stay there.  Stardom wasn’t an art form, it was a contest, and they were WINNING.

And the manufactured nature of that J-pop idol business model is what gave rise to Hatsune Miku (in fact there were multiple attempts in the 1980s to design and market a wholly fictional pop idol, but if anything they were too ahead of their time and lacked the technology to really sell the idea in its best form) because when your entire product is about making and curating your performers’ public persona, to the extreme level at which them having their own lives actually starts to contradict their stage persona and hurt their marketability... why bother projecting the persona onto a real person?  Why not just cut the human component out all together and just market the persona for what it is?  And for Japan I think that kind of relationship was one that they were culturally always just a few steps away from being ready to accept anyway, so it just took a little persistence.

Then came the anime waifu thing...  Dating sims, and body pillow marriages, etc... and I think the pretty unanimous impulse to turn this into a enormous joke (and lets be real who could blame anyone for that) overlooks what actually happened here: paraosocial relationships in the purest form, with the fleshy middleman removed and with it the lie, not less false but somehow now false yet honest.  A bizarre paradox to be sure...

But now lets back this up...  Kabuki theatre.  Prostitution.  The change from women to young boys to men, and the almost hilarious unflappably bisexual audience who embraced it.  I don’t think it was a component of sexuality as any historians who have looked at that time period bothered to conceive of it.   Because even in an early japanese mass culture scene, the relationship was between the audience and the persona, and not the audience and the actors; The audience was always in love with the characters in their collectible trading prints, with their 15th century waifus, and they paid to have sex with those personas regardless of the bodies or real people involved.

...

okay, so, I typed all that out weeks ago and then just left it in my drafts, not even really intending to come back to it.  And now that I’m here, I don’t know that I had a point to this when i went on my drunk rant.  But i guess if there was any kind of a take away from this, it’s that I find that people have a lot of trouble separating personal identity from gender, from performance, from social dynamics... and in western culture, especially within recent history/memory, that’s kind of understandably hard to untangle. But historically people’s sexuality and sense of attraction have basically always been based implicitly on attraction to an idea made manifest in a persona first, and a body to match it only secondarily to that;

Society’s abiding dedication to forcing you into a gendered box, and to box gender into a narrow range of performance, is equitable to screeching fans being “in love” with celebrities they’ve never met and convinced that the steady feed of curated marketed personality traits constitute “knowing” those celebrity strangers.  The idea that the person and the persona are the same is a lie told to sell product.  Gender is just the brand.  You’re the rockstar.  Fuck marketing.

[chicagoindiecritics]

New Written Review from Mike Crowley on You’ll Probably Agree: 10 Reasons Why ‘Blade Runner 2049’ is better than ‘Blade Runner’

If you haven’t’ seen the movie, see it then read this. No intro, let’s jump right in.

1. K is a replicant

The reveal of K’s genetic code, or lack thereof, flips everything we assume the movie will be on its head. We are learning along with K what it means to exist. Do we as humans, live like replicants? Do we obey a society that treats us like trash but breath anyways out of the fear of death? Where we viewed “Blade Runner” mostly through Deckard’s eyes who didn’t have much of a personality, K’s lack of a character is his entire purpose for existing. For K to emote is to face death.

Where Harrison Ford’s Deckard entire arc was us questioning if he’s human or not (despite what Ridley Scott unequivocally says), there’s nothing much of substance to Officer Deckard. He gets drunk, retires replicants, that’s it. Name one thing that makes Deckard standout? I’ll wait. Ryan Gosling’s Officer K goes from a machine that is dying spiritually on the inside to someone wanting to have a purpose in life. All while maintaining his composure, if perhaps too much poise for the film. Anything with a conscious can feel. Whether or not how it was made is as relevant as where you were born or what skin color you are. The importance is that you’re here.

K doesn’t seek gratitude nor affirmation. He doesn’t suffer from a narcissistic personality. All he wants is not just to be another useless piece of metal.

2. Deckard has depth this time

Being a daddy changes you a lot. Rick isn’t just a slouchy drunk who likes to shoot robots out of legal obligation. He’s a man who’s principles and love for forbidden things cost him his life. What kind of soul did Deckard have in the first film? Who did he care for? Please don’t say, Rachel, we all know why he was attracted to Rachel. Like Winston in 1984, Deckard rejects Big Brother for a life of pain to gain a glimmer of happiness. 

3. It’s horrifyingly relevant

Denis Villeneuve based the imagery in 2049 on a planet that has become degraded with pollution. The buildings are extrapolating enormous amounts of water into the atmosphere, the sea wall at the end of the picture will be our new Mount Rushmore, the orange Vegas is happening now. Denis Villeneuve didn’t predict the earth looking like this, but his production team was still spot on. A picture that transcends its very style, developing a look that will be discussed on its merits separate from the ubiquitous original, is a stunning achievement.

Everything isn’t dystopian because that’s the way it was in the book. It’s what will happen to us in real life, why we’d look for colonies to live on if we had the technology or funding towards NASA to do so. God help us all.

4. The love story questions the essence of relationships

The story between K and Joi further examines the meaning of love, sex, and mortality, with the two being different versions of artificiality. When the default sexed-up version of a naked Joy pops up on the screen, we are emotionally mortified. Some of us may be repulsed to observe a character we care for utilized like a thirsty Godzilla.

The towering ad tries to seduce K tempting him to buy it, rendering everything Joi said to K throughout the picture questionable. Its manipulation solidifies his final decision in life to help another man. We’re not sure if she loved him or said what it thought it wanted him to hear throughout the narrative. Possibly Joi herself didn’t know her intentions. An unusual amount of nuance and uncertainty rests in the love story. Who do we love? Why do we love? Do we love by the heart or the heart of our designers whom we don’t know?

Meanwhile, Deckard was just drunk and horny when he bashed Rachel up against the wall. Sorry, that really was all there was to their passion despite what Wallace says.

5. The movie was an honest commentary about how the world views woman

Here’s a controversial one. A lot of women were disgusted by the way they were depicted in the film. Outwardly watching the movie, I can’t blame them. I’ll let Mr. Villeneuve speak for himself. “I am very sensitive to how I portray women in movies. This is my ninth feature film and six of them have women in the lead role. The first Blade Runner was quite rough on the women, something about the film noir aesthetic. But I tried to bring depth to all the characters. For Joi, the holographic character, you see how she evolves. It’s interesting, I think. What is cinema? Cinema is a mirror on society. Blade Runner is not about tomorrow; it’s about today. And I’m sorry, but the world is not kind on women.”

Villeneuve is right. Women today are still sexualized. Even with the Me Too movement, women are continually seen as sex objects or subservient slaves in a male-dominated society. Villeneuve isn’t interested in painting a rosy picture that Hollywood does for female roles to make the audiences feel comfortable. It’s an honest reflection on who we are. What we see is what we don’t want to see, but that’s part of the honesty of cinema.

6. The score is mesmerizing

Another point in which I may face some contention. Yes, Vangelis’ score is iconic, but it only works for the era it was composed in. Much of its mixture of bleeps, blops, and wind chimes are a product of its time. A lot of emotion is missing from the score other than the opening theme and “Tears In Rain.” Hearing much of the soundtrack while on the road, I sometimes thought I was listening to something from a porno. Take a listen to “Wait For Me” in the soundtrack and tell me otherwise. Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Walfisch’s score is timeless while also paying respect to Vangelis’ synthetic use in the original. It dives into the character’s mind providing a replication of something more human than what Vangelis composed.

7. It thematically ties more directly to “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” than “Blade Runner” does.

“Blade Runner” got the overall gist of Phillip K Dick’s novel. Replicants are scared, trying to find a way to survive as Deckard hunts them down. However, the Andies in the movie almost deserve to die. In their quest for more life, they torture and kill multiple civilians. What did the guy making the eyes do to deserve being frozen to death? What about J.R. Sebastian? He was nothing but pleasant to Roy and Pris. Did Roy eye gauge him when he was done with Tyrell?

Aside from Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), our replicants are fully rounded people. Sapper Morton is a watchful protector who was meant to be a NEXUS 8 combat medic; Joi’s true intentions come into question for herself and us. K’s inner conflict is the central core of the story. All of this revolves around the meaning of existence within a world that has forgotten about you. The introduction of Robo procreation is an evolution of Dick’s ideas, widening his notion of why life exists in the first place.

8. It doesn’t get lost in the scale

Many sequels love scope over characters. Remember “The Matrix”? Remember how they talked about Zion and all these other things we didn’t see? When the sequels brought in Zion, the focus got lost in the spectacle. “The Matrix Reloaded” was a bumbling CGI mess of Agent Smith Clones and cave orgies. “The Matrix Revolutions” was a glorified “Space Invaders” game. Shoot as many sentinels as you can before becoming overwhelmed. Amidst the sequels bumbling chaos, I missed the smaller scale of the Nebuchadnezzar crew.

The story of “2049” could have focused on the replicant uprising with thousands of robots slamming into humans. We could have gone off-world to finally see what all these other colonies we’ve heard about are like. Some have argued that the movie could have borrowed some of its source material from the later novels about replicants creating humans, so on and so forth. All of that sounds incredible in theory. In execution, you would likely get “The Matrix” sequels.

A movie that overreaches in scope, attempting to please fans by showing everything. What we got was an incredibly meaningful story that further explores the themes of the original while building upon its world without going too far. We see what’s beyond L.A. on the dilapidated west coast. The answer is not much. The film aims at minimalism over extravaganza.

9. We’re still talking about it

After being MIA for decades, “Blade Runner 2049” isn’t forgotten. I can’t say the same for “Superman Returns,” “Monsters University,” “The Incredibles 2,” “Live Free or Die Hard,” and “Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull.” In fairness, people do talk about Indy 4, but not in a positive fashion. “Blade Runner 2049” returned to the limelight with disastrous box office results yet high accolades, even gaining the Academy’s attention. Ironically it seemed destined to live the life of its predecessor.

“2049” may have tanked because it was a multimillion-dollar art film that respected its audience’s intelligence. Maybe “Blade Runner” was too far gone amongst the public to gain an interest geared almost entirely towards comic books and Disney. I think the trailers after the reveal teaser looked too generic for my own two cents, turning me off from the film for a short while.

Here we are with Honest Trailers in 2020, making a video about a film that came out in 2017. Bloodsoaked orange skies from the headlines mention the atmosphere of this film. Somewhere, about 100 other people are writing their analysis of “Blade Runner 2049” as I type right now. Seven years from now, we’ll be talking about why the world is still like “Blade Runner 2049.” Villeneuve made a timeless sequel to be remembered.

10. It’s better than the first film and one of the best films in the last ten years

Here’s why you’ll probably agree with this one when you put your pitchfork down. Remove your nostalgia goggles. I know it’s hard to do, please, trust me. Look at the points I made above. Think about how ironic the love story is to our lives. The layers of meaning behind K’s existence is lightyears beyond the featureless Rick Deckard. The picture isn’t flawless. Niander Wallace is spectacularly corny in his scenery-chewing grim monologues. Dr. Eldon Tyrell had some ambiguity regarding the morale of his intentions. For that, I’ll give the original the benefit of my doubt. I understand Ryan Gosling was cast to be intentionally deadpan, but it’s okay to emote once. His distant stare in all of his other performances made it difficult for me to discern myself from the actor’s rather dull persona.

With this said, “Blade Runner 2049” understands cinema. Its atmosphere is why we venture into a dark room that takes us to a different place. Denis Villeneuve’s masterful follow up is one of the most orgasmic cinematic experiences I have witnessed in the last ten years that demands a re-screening in 2022 when theatres reopen at an entirely safe capacity. The style doesn’t overshadow its substance, which is far richer in detail than the original without grasping at blatant metaphors. “Blade Runner 2049” is slow cinema at its finest, letting us into the character’s heads, knowing when to be quiet and when to be loud.

Like “The Empire Strikes Back,” not everyone appreciated the movie at first. Time has been incredibly kind to it, though. I wish the Academy recognized “Blade Runner 2049” beyond its technical marvels in 2018. I suppose it wasn’t the type of picture that catches Oscar voter’s eyes. But it has acquired the audience’s to this day. Now, if you could just look up and to the left for me?

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[jeyne-stark]

To the lovely anon who sent me a delightful message detailing how Theon and Robb couldn’t get married because it isn’t historically or canonically accurate for the North to be accepting of gay relationships:

Amazing. Every word you just said was wrong.

Let’s begin.

To the first claim, that it isn’t historically accurate for two men to marry, let me discuss the case of Bertrand du Guesclin and Olivier, Lord of Clisson, who, in October of 1370, swore several oaths to each other. Most of them were martial, fittingly for a pair of warriors: mutual protection in case of attack, a division of the profits of war, and so forth. These oaths were written out, sworn on a Gospel book in the presence of a priest, and sealed with a kiss. None of that is terribly unusual for an oath at the time; perhaps they were merely brothers in arms—and indeed, they do refer to each other as brothers.

Except that they held joint property, and swore to love the other’s wife and children, and they had provisions in these oaths for what should become of their joint property in case that they didn’t have heirs. (It was to be used for masses said for their souls and their parents’, incidentally.)

And they weren’t the only ones swearing such oaths. The practice of “brother-making” in the Western Church was fairly common (and distinct from what was going on in the Eastern Church, who continued performing such ceremonies until the 1980s, and who get very annoyed when it’s compared to same-sex marriage). Among the lower classes, there is less pomp and splendor, but the tax rolls regularly show two apparently unrelated men cohabitating.

To say nothing of the various unofficial relationships, particularly common among monks and nuns, which don’t usually get mention in the official records but do crop up in literature.

(And yes, the medieval era was a really terrible time to be queer, please do not take me saying “there were established ceremonies similar to marriage in the medieval era that bound two men or two women together in a life-long bond” as “there was no homophobia in the medieval era,” those two statements are not at all the same thing.)


And this is only western medieval Europe; get even a little bit further afield in time or place and you find records of two men marrying all over the place—or at least having official, recognized, accepted relationships, which is marriage by any other name. 


So, it’s not in fact unrealistic for a fictional country that’s only pseudo-medieval at best to have an established tradition that two men can marry if they want. 


All of that said, let’s be real here, if Westeros was even pretending at historical accuracy, all of that long flowing hair should be tied up and covered, long hair is a bitch to wash with modern technology and only worse with the technology level indicated in Westeros, and covering hair protects it from the need for frequent washing by keeping the dirt off.


To the second point, the idea that Westeros canonically has homophobia: does it? Do we see that? You’d imagine that Stannis would use it to discredit Renly’s claim, but it never seems to come up.

There is one solitary instance that indicates a slight stigma around it in the North, which is that it’s implied that the prostitute who tried to rob Hothor “Whoresbane” Umber was a man, and that the gender of the prostitute is why it’s only talked about in whispers, but that isn’t confirmed on any level—either that the prostitute was a man, or that the gender of the prostitute is the reason why the incident isn’t discussed openly. Regardless, Hothor still holds a position of power in the Greatjon’s household, indicating that whatever the reason for that incident having a stigma—which could be simply because it was a prostitute—it isn’t considered a significant mark against him.

The show did add a layer of homophobia into the culture: Joffery’s threat to make homosexuality punishable by death is show-only, and it’s not clear whether that gets carried out and established as law. Similarly, the Faith’s position on homosexuality is only a factor in the show, and the High Sparrow was rather making shit up as he went along during the trial, so that doesn’t really indicate that Renly and Loras’s relationship was forbidden because they were both men. (Although, since Renly was married to Loras’s sister, it would be forbidden for adultery and possibly for incest, depending on exactly how closely the Faith hews to real-world canon law.)

Even in the show verse, however, one of the first things we learn about the North is that they’re different than the South. It’s the Seven “with all the rules,” as Ned puts it, and the Old Gods don’t particularly care about what their followers do, aside from the big stuff like incest, kinslaying, breaking guest right, and suchlike. The North keeps the Old Way, and nothing we hear of what the Old Way is indicates that homophobia is actually part of it. They also officially break away from the South, meaning that any laws that apply in the South, such as Joffery’s hypothetical edict, do not apply to the North.

In conclusion, there’s no indication of established homophobia in Westeros at all, let alone in the North, only an implication of a slight stigma or scandal. The North doesn’t have to be homophobic unless you want it to be, and if you do, maybe take a moment to reflect on why you want that.

Historical accuracy is not, I’m afraid, a very good figleaf.

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

Marvel Team-Up Volume 4 #3 Thoughts

And so comes the end of this arc and I guess Eve Ewing’s whole run???? Didn’t know this was an anthology team up title jeez.

Did it go out with a bang or a whimper? Well...a bit of both.

...And by both I mean there were literal bangs in the issue so the whimpers...you get it...

 Okay so for starters the cover lies again like in issue #1. The cover promises us Peter in Kamala’s body with spider powers and Kamala in Peter’s body with Inhuman powers.

And in the issue we get...the same shit from the past 2 issues, standard Freaky Friday.

It’s less bad here than in issue #1 though. Issue #1’s lie was actively reductive to the reading experience. Here it’s just artistic licence and really the idea of seeing Spidey with Kamala’s powers and vice versa is only good for a strong visual. If Peter in Kamala’s body got the same power set it’d seriously undermine the creative legs of the Freaky Friday dynamic in the first place. So a quick cover for an eye catching visual is good enough.

Moving on...this issue is kind of the weakest instalment in this already kind of shakey arc. If you turned your brain off you could kind of enjoy issues #1-2 but the creative energy in this issue was waning a lot.

You can tell this because once the Jackal, the villain of this arc, gets defeated the issue continues for over 11 pages. Over 11 pages of restoring the status quo.

And when I say restoring the status quo I don’t simply mean Peter and Kamala inevitably swap back, I mean they swap back and also forget everything that happened, leaving you wondering what the point of any of this was.

Kamala will go forward in life never knowing the impending dread of job interviews or unpaid bills and Peter Parker will never remember the pain and discomfort of a period or the sweet taste of cotton candy lip gloss...okay maybe for both parties forgetting this ever happened isn’t the worst idea.

But the issue could’ve been mitigated if Ewing had just restructured the story a little bit so that the swap lasted way less than two days. In fact even if they forgot what happened wouldn’t it raise big red flags that 2 days have elapsed within which they remember nothing?

Even putting this aside the story continues the trajectory of having a lot of small problems that add up. Some of these don’t break the issue per se but the numeracy of them adds up to an over all lack of thought and planning put into the story.

Let’s talk about one example I actually forgot to bring up in issue #2. So in the first issue when the Jackal showed up and declared Rosario’s Polly tech would be useful in his cloning experiments my first thought was ‘how’? But I let it slide because maybe the story would elaborate.

And in issue #2 it did but having Spidey throw out a theory, and in issue #3 we got that theory confirmed.

The plan goes like this. The Jackal’s wants to use Rosario’s tech alongside his cloning tech to create clones with the consciousness of another person.

When that happened my thoughts Digivolved from ‘how?’ into ‘why?’

Like...okay, the Jackal has a God complex.

OBVIOUSLY.

Even shitty BND era writers picked up on that.

This would definitely come under the remit of playing God, but even during the nadir of the Clone Saga (we call that Maximum Clonage kids) you could just about see the method in his madness. It wasn’t rationale but it added up within his warped logic. He wanted to destroy life on Earth and replace it with the life HE created.

Cool.

Now in this story he wants to...basically transfer someone’s mind into someone else’s body, but not even their actual body a copy of their actual body.

What possible purpose would that serve?

I could KIND of see it if he wanted to transfer people’s minds into clones of their own bodies. Like what happened to Xavier after he was infected with the Brood.

But into a clone of someone else’s body?

That’s some Underpants Gnome level planning.

Not to mention can’t he basically already do that?

He created the Carrion virus IIRC which genetically reprograms the infected subject into basically believing themselves to be Miles Warren. He was also able to update Ben Reilly’s memories so they’d match Peter Parker’s. If you can do that then surely you could already put someone’s consciousness into a body that isn’t theirs? Or at least the scientific leap from one to the other isn’t that huge.

Another rather significant issue with the plot revolves around the Isotope Genome Accelerator. Yeah remember that? The thing that separated Peter and Spider-Man back in Spencer’s opening arc.

Remember how it heavily implied to explode in ASM v5 #5 and thus merge Peter and Spidey back together? Apparently not. It was either undamaged or got rebuilt apparently. Even better it has plot convenience powers now. It’s used to swap Peter and Kamala again.

So just so we are clear the Isotope Genome Accelerator’s scientific applications include:

-          Irradiating shit

-          Irradiating house spiders to the point where biting people gives them spider powers which may or may not include organic webbing

-          Removing super powered mutations (see Spider-Man: the Final Adventure #4)

-          Temporarily ‘masking’ super powered mutations (see above)

-          Separating people into different sides of themselves (and also maybe creating different clothes for them too?)

-          Swapping people’s minds which is somehow an extension of the latter application

-          Copies and/or transfers the super powers of one person to another (we’ll get back to that)

Holy shit this thing can do everything short of toast bread!

Good lord...the issue tries to explain that it’s ability to separate people into two different entities is how they’re going to affect the swap but...that doesn’t make a lick of sense even by the already bullshit science in play.

How is physically separating the thrill seeking adventurer from the responsible everyman out of the one person (or in theory the man from the cannibalistic lizard monster) remotely similar to swapping the minds of two people?

What did it separate both minds from both bodies and then...they just snapped back to where they belonged?*

This isn’t even mentioning how for what is presumably a gag the Accelerator also apparently gave Rosario Kamala’s powers. How? Why? Does this mean Kamala lost her powers? Does it mean the Accelerator copied her powers into Rosario?

Never explained who fucking knows the Isotope Genome Accelerator is the plot device that just keeps on giving.

There are other lesser contrivances in the issue that are contrivances nevertheless.

Remember how I said in issue #1 how it’s weird that everyone is so concerned about destroying Rosario’s polly device because surely she has the plans to another one? Well this issue confirms she does, she has schematics to another device.

Which raises two big questions.

a)      If the device is going to make all the difference in swapping Peter and Kamala back...why do they need the accelerator? Why the drama and tension over that, they could just build another device and swap back easy peasey

b)      Why was there any tension over destroying the device in issue #1 and thus kicking off this whole arc’s premise?

Another piece of technological contrivance comes from the chip Peter off panel implanted in his brain ages ago without telling the readers. So apparently it was useless all along because it’d only work if whoever was trying to mind swap with him also had a chip.**Oh and it’s eroded away any how.

This is a mind bender this one.

We have a non-Spidey comic by a non-Spidey office establishing Spider-Man did something major that was very smart and very obvious provided it was possible (which we were never led to believe it was in Spidey stories proper). That same non-Spidey comic upon establishing this plot device then uses it as a possible explanation for the scenario it’s setting up. Then in resolving that scenario reveals the plot device wasn’t working, never was going to work, wasn’t a factor in the first place and thus paints Spider-Man as stupid.

WTF!

WTF was the point of the anti-body swap chip then?

You might as well have never had that in the comic and thereby not made Spider-Man storytellers look dumb for not considering that or made the character look dumb for not considering it enough.

Just lose that plot point altogether and nothing changes.

Everything else wrong with this issue is less egregious, it’s smaller things that further spell out the lack of attention being paid to the story.

They range from minor stuff like typos to pretentious narration at the start of the issue.

Not only pretentious by the way but pointless given how they forget what happens and it doesn’t seem to serve the story. It pays lip service to us as people accepting our good and bad traits but...that hasn’t got anything to d with this story in the first place. Also after 2 issues of talking out loud NOW thought captions are a thing?

Let’s see what other shit is wrong with this issue.

Oh right, Rosario has been tied up and conscious in her office at ESU (on a weekday no less) all night but NOBDOY heard her calling for help in all that time? Or she didn’t try yelling before Peter and Kamala conveniently showed up?

Not to mention Kamala says her spider sense (which wasn’t working in the last issue for no explained reason) is alerting her to maybe getting the right location for Rosario but...didn’t they have her office listed? Wasn’t that what they were following? And why would the spider sense (from her and Peter’s POV) tingle if there wasn’t any danger the issue implies it’s the mere fact they’re zeroing in on Rosario.

Other smaller problems include Peter complaining that teens are so mean as though this is a revelation. Peter...Parker...is learning teens can be jerks....um...did Ewing not read Amazing Fantasy #15...page 1...?

Similarly talks about how he’s learned to focus on the problems of the present and not worry about the future. My kneejerk reaction to that is to call BS, Peter clearly does fret over the future.

Final little complaints Spidey bangs on about his knees not hurting when Kamala in his older body never brings them up and seems fine. Aaaaaand there is a line of dialogue from kamala about how the Jackal doesn’t understand that humans are more than bodies and stored ideas yadda yadda yadda,. But like...from her point of view the Jackal never said any of that shit. I guess maybe she’s right but she shouldn’t know to be right if you see what I mean.

I’ll finish off with a little positivity.

The art was lovely again.

Spidey owning Jackal with Kamala’s powers was bad ass.

Spider-Man acting the older mentor figure to Kamala was awesome, just wish it wasn’t undermined by him being in her body when he was doing that.

So all in all...this arc is very unimpressive.

You know how online, maybe on tumblr, maybe on CBR, maybe on Google images or scans daily you see a selection of pages from a comic book story? Basically the highlights?

Yeah if you were to experience issue #1 and #2 like that that’s how I’d recommend experiencing this story.

Reading or God forbid buying it is highly NOT recommended.

*Shit now I think about it the way Roasrio’s device was explained it doesn’t even add up to being able to mind swap. It turns the mind into data and stores it. Okay...how does that mean we’re swapping the minds of two meatbag humans with no mechanical storage device or interface involved?

**Even though again Doc Ock DIDN’T  swap minds with Peter he uploaded a copy of his mind into his head and vice versa, Peter’s real mind was still in his body the whole time but buried.

[arecomicsevengood]

Stuart Immonen Superman Comics Circa 1998

There’s a lot of “best of the year” lists that appear at the end of the year, but after that flutter of activity, tied to commercial imperatives, there are moments for reconsideration, as we approach the year to come and ask ourselves what it is we want. So now is as good a time as any to talk about some Superman comics Stuart Immonen drew some twenty-odd years ago. The artist announced earlier this year that he was “retiring” from comics, but this didn’t mean he was going to stop making comics, just that what he did would be “personal” work, in collaboration with his wife. They recently launched a comic on Instagram, and they’ve done some graphic novels together previously, none of which I can recommend.

I do think it’s interesting that these personal works are scripted by his wife, rather than him writing them himself, though; because back in the nineties, working for DC, he took a few stabs at writing. This was done within a framework that must’ve removed some of the risk involved: The four monthly Superman series that together constituted a weekly serial split between different creative teams had him drawing Karl Kesel’s scripts for a few years before he took over a separate title for his own. In my mind, much of the overall plotting would be hashed out at a conference, and then kept coordinated by an editor. Ideally this process would be oriented around what it was each individual creative team wanted to write and draw: Immonen’s artwork was a little softer than his compatriots, a little more likely to seem like he could’ve drawn romance comics in a different era, maybe younger than the others and more interested in youth culture and fashion, probably more likely to admire Jaime Hernandez. Maybe all this just manifests in the context as being the one who could draw women, but in a era where none of the Superman comics are showy about what they do and all aspired to being solid and well-crafted, his were the most enjoyable.

This softness I appreciate in this work isn’t really present in his subsequent work, which is sharper, shinier, where figures and their wardrobes seem consistently sculpted out of plastic. Part of it’s the coloring, but there also seem to be changes in how scripts call for layouts. He’s also maybe working with ink wash underneath the digital coloring and delineating more how he wants values of light to be approached, I don’t know. I don’t really want to diminish the work the man’s been doing in the years I haven’t been reading superhero comics. I can look at the years of intervening work and see how the choices he’s making are confident ones, the result of years of drawing action comics. I haven’t really read any of them, but that’s not to say I wouldn’t.

Still, if you’re anything like me, you probably generally think that comics created by one person are better than those made in a collaboration mediated via a written script, so if I’m going to read anything by the guy, it’s going to be work created under those circumstances. I’ve heard that DC sort of has structures in place against writer-artists: this is why those “Bizarro World” anthologies where they brought in alternative cartoonists forced them all to collaborate with each each other. Maybe this rule was a little looser with the Superman books: After John Byrne relaunched the line in the mid-eighties, both Dan Jurgens and Jerry Ordway would write and draw chunks of their subsequent runs. Otherwise it’s pretty rare: The only other thing I can think of would be that Rick Veitch Swamp Thing run, the circumstances of its ending probably be why they don’t let that happen too often. A little after Immonen and Kesel did the event The Final Night, Immonen wrote and drew a 4-issue miniseries spotlighting the Legion Of Super-Heroes character Inferno. It’s not good or anything, but it does seem to revolve around the strengths or interests I understand him having at this time: It’s a comic about a young woman, hanging out in the mall with a group of other young women, who might be understood as punks, as some are homeless. Before Immonen worked for DC, his initial small-press work, Playground, made in collaboration with his future wife, was described in “punk rock” terms. He states in the Inferno letter column his goal was to make something someone who didn’t read other DC Comics could read and enjoy. I don’t think it gets anywhere near being able to achieve that, it’s confusing on multiple levels. The covers are probably the most memorable part, but because you can track those down easy enough, I’ll include a bit of interior sequential art.

Not long after that, he took over writing Action Comics. I haven’t read that many of those either! I had stopped reading the Superman comics regularly not long before this happened. It was during the time period when Superman had electric powers and a blue costume. I was in middle school. I found out he’d started writing when I found a couple issues in a bargain bin and picked them up, but I didn’t get back in the habit of reading Superman comics, as the story was pretty difficult to follow if you attempted to only read the series with the best art. He also didn’t really work as a writer for that long: After a little while, Mark Millar gets credited for providing scripts.

But a little while back, around the time I wrote that post about why I’m willing to read superhero comics with some degree of hope that they’ll be good, I ordered a three-issue arc that seemed kind of self-contained. Looking online, it seemed like after the whole “electric Superman” story wrapped up with a special called Superman Forever, each of the four monthly books told their own stories, set in different historical eras, for a few months. Immonen’s Action Comics issues had covers suggesting they were united in progressing from one to the other. I was pretty into them, though in some ways it was an unsatisfying experience. The first issue in the arc is drawn by a fill-in artist, the third part focuses on this separate narrative thread- It’s narrated by this new villain, with god-like powers, who I guess was behind the whole “multiple timelines” thing in the first place, so you there’s exactly one fairly self-contained normal Superman comic written and drawn by the dude, though that third issue kinda rules, as aside from the narration, you’re reading all the normal Superman storytelling stuff happen wordlessly, calling attention to the clarity of the storytelling. It might fail to live up to expectations for a third act based on the way serialization has it setting up the next big arc, but as an episode in itself, this would be a pretty fun surprise to come across in your pile of the week’s comics. Which, if you remember that post, was exactly what I claimed to be looking for.

There’s also an original graphic novel that’s a little later still, “End Of The Century,” which seems like it’s partly tying up a long-running subplot in the Superman comics about Lex Luthor and his wife. It honestly has WAY too much plot, and too many narrative threads, and it’s all still fairly generic. While I picked it up hoping to see cool visual storytelling, the amount of story there is to tell gets in the way. The visual art is good, Immonen’s linework shifts to be a little finer. There’s also this weird thing where real images are photographed/scanned and inserted like they’re laying on the edges of the page, which is dumb, but the technology to achieve this effect was probably only recently made available. There’s also some sepia painted pages, and the most likely reason the “graphic novel” exists is because Immonen wanted to do the painted pages and have the time to work on them. That’s as good a reason as it is to try writing comics for a few years because you’ve drawn them for a few years and writing doesn’t seem hard and you would get paid more, and reasoning resulted in work I thought was better than what you usually get.

Ambition is a wild thing, in that it can really just stir inside you feeling frustrated even as you have no idea what you want to do with it in particular. It can easily be applied to other people’s ends. Work might be personal not because of the importance of what “the artist” has to say but because it’s an outgrowth of a personal relationship. It’s worth noting, looking at his career, the importance of cultivated professional relationships: He had those comics scripted by Mark Millar, and decades later they did a comic together which has probably resulted in a development deal and a sizable paycheck. He did two creator-owned comics with Kurt Busiek, largely forgotten I’d say, and then worked with him on a Superman comic which is pretty well-regarded. He’s collaborated with both Warren Ellis and Brian Bendis multiple times. It is sensible to view all those professional relationships as having had their respective culminations, while working with one’s wife is more of an ongoing long-term project.

At the same time: Having someone write for you, and what they see as your skillset, is going to present different challenges than seeing what you can do and pushing yourself, even if the latter results in what can be easily described as failure. It’s fine either way. Career paths in the arts are always going to be weird and haphazard, because there are so many decisions to make in creating a piece of art that progress is never going to be linear. I don’t know if any of these collaborations embraced what I like about his work, but maybe what I like in his work isn’t what he sees as his strengths, but is just what was emblematic of his style at the point in time I was initially exposed to it. The questions of who we are in relationship to others vs. what our true potential is is always up for negotiation.

I think those Superman comics excel because I came to them with very particular set of expectations. Not only can I not expect anyone else to share those expectations, I don’t even really want to convince anyone to have them: There’s no small part of me that thinks of the fact that I tracked them down to write about them is in some ways squandering some bit of potential inside myself I can’t expect anyone else to care about. I don’t know what 2019 looks like, though I hope I won’t spend too much of it looking back twenty years at comics from 1999. I don’t like doing this thing where I try to make something “personal” to rationalize my talking about some some comic while actually just talking in vague generalities because I’m very reticent to talk about myself, but I’ll probably continue to do so. I’m probably not going to spend the next year looking at Stuart Immonen’s Instagram feed. But here at the end of this year, as I contemplate my own inertia and depressive laziness, I have to give an honest accounting and give it up to that dude for putting in the work.

[blkloligamer]

I finally played BioShock Infinite

First of all yes, it’s racist. Especially at the beginning. If you are Black, you will not be able to even pretend to insert yourself into this game because the main character is literally shown to be a scruffy white guy.

The first third of this game is incredibly upsetting to play. It’s basically a steampunk confederate fantasy fueled by American Exceptionalism.

(Spoilers ahead if you haven’t played)

The entire setting of the game, Columbia, succeeded from the union after a war with China in Peking (There’s a good bit of anti-Chinese racism too, and exactly one reference to the Irish-American “problem” from before they “became” white) and the government told our main antagonist, Comstock, to lay low in the aftermath (he actually stole the credit from a guy named Captain Slate).  So his solution was to use technology that didn’t exist in the early 1900s (nitpick of mine) to create a floating city in the sky that looks like a futuristic Leave It To Beaver in color with American propaganda everywhere.

Your very first choice in this game (because BioShock has a morality system) is whether or not to be the first one to pelt a tied-up White man/Black woman interracial couple who are convicted of being together. With a baseball. On a stage. In front of a crowd of bourgeois white people who participated in a raffle for a chance to do so.

After the obligatory “learn how combat works” section, you go to a Masonic Temple type-thingy that houses a fraternity called “The Order of the Raven”, which is really a chapter of the KKK. But their hoods are colored purple! So it’s fun! (It’s not.) There are also big-ass emblems that say “Protecting Our Race” everywhere. Which the designers reused for the police stations and such, just replacing “race” with “values” or some shit. Sure, you get to gun them down, but it’s not satisfying at all because you’re positioned as The Bad Guy by everyone around you at this point.

You also get to rummage a safehouse owned by some white equalist couple where Abraham Lincoln’s portrait is on the wall. As if that makes up for anything.

Elizabeth, the girl you save, is the quintessential white girl in distress, because only white girls are allowed to be tragic. I admit I kind of like her character, but she’s still a tragic white girl. I forgot to mention George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson are literally worshiped as gods with Comstock serving as the prophet of them, God, and the archangels. Which is disturbingly close to reality, even if we weren’t in a Trump era. He’s also Liz’s “father” (her actual origins are convoluted as fuck). At some point you fight the vengeful ghost of his late wife. For some reason.

Once you and Liz get out of the civilian side of Columbia, it’s mainly just you two, and the racism isn’t nearly as heavy-handed, but it’s still there. The second leg of the game is spent dealing with the Vox Populi.

Oh my fuck, the Vox Populi

This is a Latin phrase meaning “voice of the people,” and it’s literally made up of all the Black people that exist in this game rebelling against the discrimination of The Negro™ and the exploitation of them by Jeremiah Fink (An absurdly rich capitalist). So if you’re wondering where they all went, this is your answer. And they also all live in the literal ghetto called “Shantytown” which looks like a generic poor Black neighborhood. But it’s fine because Liz has feeeeeeeeelings and wants them to have a better life n shit.

(”Negro” is used a few times and the voice actors sound a bit too comfortable using it)

The leader of the Vox Populi is Daisy Fitzroy, a militant Black woman who has no character traits aside from “kill whitey.” Literally, Liz ends up killing her before she can kill Fink’s son. The only Black NPC in this game with more than two lines. Fucking gone.

The last leg of this game is the most decent, with you and Liz largely traversing alone, but now you have to deal with Comstock’s forces and what remains of the Vox Populi, who again, are where all the Black people are in this game. So your shooting down Black people.

(Spoilers End)

I’m….disappointed in this game. I’m not really angry. Just disappointed. The first two BioShock games are fantastic. And I only played Infinite because it was easier to get the PS4 remaster collection than get 1 and 2 separately.  Like everyone said when this game first came out, the racism is used as an environmental prop. Nothing meaningful is said about it, nor is it handled responsibly. The NPCs talk about PoC like dirt and you’re just supposed to….I guess accept it because you’re an unrelated scruffy white guy with a tragic past and a job to do. The most you get as far as commentary is Liz asking why there are separate “White” and “Colored” bathrooms at a theme park and her saying it “Seems like an unnecessary distinction.”

This game isn’t vicious or an intentional “fuck you” to Black players. It’s an unfortunate consequence/side effect of how agonizingly white the games industry is. Only a team of out-of-touch white people could think this was okay– or convince themselves that it is. A team of Black people would take full advantage of creating an alternate universe, if we absolutely had to go with this time period. Because it’s supremely fucked up to use our great-grandparents struggles as a prop in a goddamn videogame. They’d probably haunt our dreams at night wondering what the hell we were thinking.

It’s just a shining beacon of how the industry doesn’t listen to gamers of color. Or anyone who isn’t a white guy. 

I hesitate to say I like it. The gameplay is great although I had to retrain myself from the first two, and the story is...okay. There’s just a fuckton of baggage here that I shouldn’t have to power through to enjoy the experience. That’s the entire point of entertainment. It should be effortless. And this game is...not that.

[kinetic-elaboration]

September 19: 3% (as of 2x07)

I had this sudden bout of need to write done some thoughts on the 3% after watching 2x07 last night and--they felt deeper in my head but anyway here they are.

Basically some attempts to figure out the exact contours of the Offshore/Inland relationship.

*

What we know about the Offshore/Inland relationship:

The central idea of the Offshore is that everyone earns their way in; no one is born into that society. A consequence of this rule is that the Offshore is entirely reliant on the Inland for at least one resource: its population. From the point of the view of the Offfshore, then, the children of the Inland are a potential resource, to be protected and nurtured at least to a degree, and the adults of the Inland are the 'unworthy,' who deserve not just their squalor, but the Offshore's contempt. Their main use--their only canonically confirmed use--is to produce more children. Otherwise, they are derided, and the Offshore has no (obvious) reason to care for them in the way it might care for their children up to the age of 20.

The Offshore residents do sometimes return to the Inland, but only for specific purposes--to serve as soldiers or doctors for particular events. They do not routinely visit or hold regular 9-5 jobs on the Inland. The separation is supposed to be as complete as practically possible.

What we know about the universe:

It's the future, clearly. There have been huge strides in technology, but in recognizable directions from current tech: we see sensitive communication devices, high tech computers, high speed submarine travel, and of course the simple sterilization techniques. So we can guess that this universe once looked like our present day, but that its technological capabilities have greatly expanded with time. We also know that not only have those advances been hoarded by the Offshore, but apparently all tech, even that from our current era, has been stripped from the Inland. They not only lack fancy communication devices in the form of rings and headsets, they lack cell or landline phones, computers, televisions, radios. They have toasters, according to Elisa, and perhaps some other appliances, but little else. It is also notable that there used to be at least 2000's level tech in the Inland: there are old computer screens stacked in the background of one scene, and tech-savvy people like Fernando can salvage parts for a makeshift walkie-talkie.

We also know that animals like lions and zebras have become extinct, as Rafael mentions in 2x07. In fact, except for fish, it's not clear which animals still exist.

We know that just as there used to be technological wealth in the Inland, there was more general wealth as well. The abandoned bank where Michele met the Old Man is architecturally quite beautiful. It's also...abandoned, as are the orphanage, and various other houses and buildings in the Inland.

We know that the Process has been going on for about 100 years and juuuust enough about the Founding 'Couple' to assure me that (either in the last season 2 eps I haven't watched or in future seasons) we'll find out more about them, and, hopefully, the state of the world at the time they founded the Offshore.

The History of the Inland/Offshore

Is the destitution of the Inland and/or its technology gap with the Offshore artificially created along with the Offshore and the Process, or is it the result of some other natural event? The extinction of the animals makes me think that there was already environmental damage being done, either long-term or in one fell swoop, following some sort of disaster. And, we know from the way the actual, real world works that some people are always going to hoard resources, that disasters can occur and poverty can increase while some people remain remarkably rich. So my assumption is that the Founding Couple just exacerbated that gap, hoarding the last of the wealth (in terms of money but also technology, natural resources) in one place, and leaving the Inland to spiral down into an ever worse state of poverty and destitution.

But I'm interested in the timeline: had this society suffered through a disaster, perhaps an environmental disaster tied to a mass extinction, before the Process began? Were the Founders interested only in increased fairness, or did they also have a certain sense of human survival in mind? I'm picturing a scenario in which a resource crunch makes it impossible to share what remains with everyone, prompting the creation of a special paradise where those resources can be enjoyed by some, at least, and from there the creation of the Process, which determines which people are 'worthy' of enjoying those resources. Some characters seem to assume that there are enough resources for everyone, if only the Offshore would stop hoarding--but we don't know that to be true. If there truly is not enough for everyone, not only does 'merit' seem like the most fair way to determine who 'wins' the best of those resources, but it also seems the best way to improve humankind's situation as a whole: the smartest and the hardiest and the most creative get access to the most technology, etc., allowing them the best chance to make discoveries and advances that could solve long-lasting resource-deficiency problems. (Basically the same argument that underpins the existence of selective schools and universities; the smartest people 'deserve' the most help in becoming even smarter, the most support in growing and learning.)

Similarly, I'm curious as to how all of this society's tech ended up concentrated in the Offshore? Was there a mass disabling of the Inland's technology? Suddenly your computers/phones/tvs/radios stop working? That would be an extremely effective way to subjugate a large population.

The relationship between the Inland and Offshore

I have a lot of questions about this aspect of the universe but it basically all comes down to: what is the extent of the Offshore's control over the Inland?

At the very least, the Offshore needs the residents of the Inland to continue having children, to replenish the population of the Offshore. This is more complicated than it sounds: the Offshore needs the right number of people, it needs the right sort of people--healthy, smart, educated, and loyal to the concept of the Offshore/Inland divide and the Process itself. It also needs those children to survive the first twenty years of their life, which means it needs to ensure some level of basic safety on the Inland.

Like any minority elite ruling over a majority population that vastly outnumbers it, the Offshore also needs to keep the Inland powerless, for its own survival: to quash revolts, and to ensure complacency wherever possible.

Keeping all of this in mind, what would the Offshore do to meet these goals?

Precisely what it's shown to be doing, first of all.

Surveillance: We see this more in S1, but the Inland is littered with cameras. Aside from the registrations/ear pieces, the cameras are the only tech around, and it appears that there's fairly little respite to be had from them. Not none, obviously: the Cause members have found plenty of places to meet in S2. Still, my impression of the Inland is very much a surveillance state.

Sewing mistrust between neighbors: at least when necessary, as when Marcela makes a call for information on Cause members linked to Ezequiel's death. She's able to dangle a carrot (help in the Process) rather than threaten a stick, but it comes out the same. People will jump to turn on each other.

Military presence/Violence or the threat of violence: This is a little murky, because, aside from the build-up to the Process, when we know there are Division soldiers in the street, it's not clear how often or how extensively the Inland is patrolled by Offshore agents. However, Marcella does have contacts in 'the militia,' and is possibly even their official or unofficial leader; people like Gerson police the Inland for the Offshore, in an admittedly less...uniformed way, and to their own gain.

Registration: Being counted and officially registered is not dissimilar to being surveilled. The keeping of data on everyone (or nearly everyone, or everyone in theory) is a way of exerting control over a large population. It implies that you can always be found, that you can never escape. This is also the practical structure that underpins the Process itself, as Fernando explains, the organizational structure of their whole society relies on this human data.

Control over communication: It's quite obvious that the tech gap between the two societies isn't accidental; it's too complete, and the presence of dead or outmoded technology in the Inland shows it was not always a wasteland in this way. But in the present, the Inland people have no phones, no email--possibly no mail--no TV or radio news created for and by themselves. They have only the devices in their ears, through which they can hear the Offshore, but the Offshore cannot hear them.

Religion: A fervently believed narrative, imbued with the reverence assigned to religious faith, keeps the majority of the Inlanders from revolting. They accept their poverty as being their own fault, if they failed the Process; believe in a bright future for their children, if the children are under 20; and celebrate the success of the Offshore residents, as their due--and anyone who disagrees with these tenets is amoral, disgusting, a traitor to the ideals of the Founding Couple. (I imagine there is other cultural and quasi-religious propaganda going on too, for example the pre-Process procession, a sort of gift or treat for the people of the Inland, which also reinforces their belief in the power structure that aids the Offshore at their expense.)

Total control of the government: There is a Council, and it appears to make decisions for both the Offshore and Inland--but no Inlanders serve on it, of course. I doubt they have any sort of voting rights either.

Brain Drain: taking the top 3% of each year's children from the Inland not only plays into the "reward" narrative that underlies the whole system, it also ensures that the smartest and most creative people leave the Inland and give their allegiance to the Offshore instead. If you conceive of the relationship between the two as a 'war,' or adversarial in any way (as Marcella at least seems to), then it makes sense to want to poach all the best 'warriors' from the other side. (I don't know if this is a conscious thought on the part of Offshore authorities, but S2 does show how dangerous a 3%-er or two can be if left to rot on the Inland.)

Continuing extreme inequality: I'm not sure what other methods the Offshore uses to ensure that the two areas remain sharply diverged in terms of wealth distribution and resources, or even if, at this point, they have to do anything at all to keep up the status quo, but they do gain political power from this discrepancy in quality of life, especially when combined with the existence of the Process as a possible bridge from one life to the other. The Inlanders won't revolt against the Offshore if they hope to someday join it. And if they are rejected, they can hope that their children will advance, a nearly as powerful incentive. This system will self-perpetuate, but only as long as the Inland is a hellscape and the Offshore is a paradise. If there were a reason to hold allegiance to the Inland, people would take it.

Squashing of dissent: And of course, when pockets of organized dissent do form, like the Cause, the Offshore can gather all of these tools together to defeat them: use surveillance to find them, torture and violence to eliminate their members, and their control over the majority populace to reign in their influence.

(An aside, but, considering this list, it's pretty clear that Fernando's ideas to disrupt the Process are better than Ezequiel's bomb idea. The Offshore has formidable weapons, including propaganda weapons, and probably wouldn't have the hardest time recovering even from the death of a generation of Process applicants. They could spin it into a positive for them, probably incredibly easily by--correctly--blaming the Cause, and then broadcast their narrative to the whole of the Inland. Fernando is striking at their tools of control: those communication networks, their monopoly on information, the registration system that makes the Process possible, etc.)

Overall, we know quite a bit about how the Offshore keeps the Inland from starting a revolution, though fairly little about how it nurtures its primary Inland resource, the children.

What else might the Inland be doing, which we haven't yet seen?

Population control: I doubt we'll actually see this, since the Offshore seems intent on encouraging the Inlanders to have as many kids as possible, but if there is a resource crunch in any way in this universe, or if they ever anticipate one on the Offshore, they'd need to exert some control over the total population's numbers. The Offshore always stays in proportion to the Inland, taking 3% of its population every year, which makes sense if they wish to keep a balance that is apparently working. But that means that a population explosion on the Inland would create a population explosion on the Offshore, and perhaps cause a rationing in their resource among themselves.

Use of the Inland population for labor:

It is incredibly unclear to me what people actually spend their days doing, on either the Offshore or the Inland. I suppose the Offshore people could spend a lot of time in leisure activities--except we don't see any of that, what leisure might mean on the Offshore, and at least some of them DO have jobs: we know that some work for the Process, or serve in the military, or on the Council, or as doctors. Even more strangely, we don't know what people on the Inland do when they're not preparing for the Process. We know Silas is a doctor and Fernando's father a preacher. Money does seem to exist. But what other jobs do people have, or could they have? And how do they become qualified for those jobs? Is it all apprenticeships and informal learning, or are there schools? (I'd guess the first but it wouldn't be a retcon to include a school in a future season.) How do people earn money? What do they use that money for--just food and other essentials? Are there are stores? Is housing free and assigned or do people rent?

Looking at this from the Offshore's point of view, I would say that the people of the Inland should definitely not be idle. A large, idle population living in squalor is a potential boiling pot of rebellion.

I also think that the Offshore would want to prioritize leisure for its citizens as much as possible. The jobs they definitely have not outsourced both cannot be outsourced and are prestigious anyway. But there are always jobs that have to be done and no one wants to do. For example--the manufacture of their tech?

Putting all this together, I'd guess that the Offshore assigns work to the people of the Inland as much as possible and is probably in as much control as possible over the issuance and flow of money--probably in a way that appears to be hands off (they seem to have no money themselves) but nevertheless is near complete in practice.

Control of Inland bodies: I'm a little vague on this (see outstanding question 2), but I noticed that the upcoming Process participants not only have their registrations checked and their photos updated, they also get vaccines. And we already know that 'vaccine' doesn't always mean 'vaccine' in this universe. I'm wondering if the Offshore is doing something to the 20 year olds, and if they also have the habit of taking over Inland residents' medical care in other ways. I'm not even suggesting something nefarious. I'm thinking more along the lines of maybe literal vaccines, antibodies, vitamins, strengthening agents, or other sci-fi innovations, to keep their child population healthy--in other words, to protect the most important Inland resource, the crop from which they'll cull their future members.

Outstanding questions:

The Offshore and Inland children's education: The Offshore would definitely want the Inland children educated, because if they are not educated, they can never be good Offshore citizens. Even more specifically, the Offshore values particular skills and traits. It's not just looking for the general 'best,' but has an idea what 'best' means. So it would probably want a hand in molding the children. (Canonically, it looks they actually rely on failed Process participants to train up-and-coming Process participants, as Fernando does, but it seems...like a risk to put all your faith in failures, imo.) But how does it do so? Outside of running schools, which would require much more day to day involvement of Offshore people in Inland life, I'm not sure how they ensure they get a proper crop of new Process participants each year.

The Offshore and Inland children's health: We know that the Inland has doctors, and that their medicine isn't as good as on the Offshore. And I doubt the Offshore cares much about what happens to adults--provided enough of them are healthy enough to have healthy children and, perhaps, to work. But how do they keep the children safe and healthy? The Process is physically grueling in places. It is not for the weak or the half-starved. How do they draw the line between making the Inland a terrible place to live, a place from which all children would be desperate to escape, and also ensuring not only the most basic health and safety, but a general environment in which children could thrive enough to grow into 'the 3%'? (I doubt we'll get an answer for this, and perhaps we're supposed to assume that the very best of the best will rise to the top no matter what: if a child is naturally sickly, he doesn't 'deserve' the Offshore anyway, for example, or if a child would be smart with the proper training but isn't naturally smart on her own, she's not quite 3% material. Characters like Fernando and Joanna bear out this theory some: he is physically disabled and she came from the lowest of even the Inland low, no family at all, and they still both passed the Process, essentially. I'm not entirely sure I buy this, though... The crowd that gathered at the beginning of 1x01 didn't exactly look like they were malnourished as a whole, so at least some needs must be being met.)

I feel like I had some other thoughts but these are already excessive! So I'm done for now.

[a-questionable-amount-of-eyes]

Postmortem: Racing (End of Cycle 3)

Better late than never. In my last post, I wrote about how the game works, so it’s time to get into the why.

Turbo Type wasn’t intended to be a ‘serious game’ initially. I started with the multitasking concept, using keys for speed and mouse for steering at the same time, thinking of it as a simple challenge for the player. However, as I got deeper into development, I realised that performance in Turbo Type is tied directly to a very pertinent life skill - typing. I grew up in the golden age of CD-ROM educational games, and I learned to type with Spongebob Typing Tournament, which is the most useful video game I’ve played to date. The original Typing Tournament game is still alive and kicking, a reminder of the consistent relevance of learning to type in this era of technology, and Turbo Type turned out to be yet another gamification of this concept. Once I had this realisation, I switched gears, cutting the mouse controls and shifting the focus solely to the keyboard.

For the 2nd assignment in IGB220, I had to create a one-page game design document, and a promotional sell sheet for the game. This led to thinking about what a fully realised version of Turbo Type would include, and I decided to commit to the educational track. The prototype only had one level, with semi-fixed speeds for the CPU cars, and picked letters from across the whole keyboard. Most of the development in scaling Turbo Type to a full game, consequently, would include various levels using smaller sections of the keyboard, and variance in car speeds according to the player’s skill level. Speaking of which, one of my proposed selling points was a series of trackers and analytics, including timers for each level, accuracy checkers, and time comparison charts to show progress. It would also include tutorials, like graphics for hand positioning and which fingers should ideally hit which keys, to give new typists some instruction on the correct way to type.

Playtesting highlighted balance/difficulty issues, and a lack of instruction. While I thought the concept was self-explanatory, my playtesters spent a good chunk of time trying to steer the car with the arrow keys and pressing different buttons on the keyboard before they realised how to play. My first player decided that the optimal strategy was to scrape his hands down the keyboard, hitting as many letters as possible. I’m not here to question his ingenuity (because it seemed to work, to a degree) but I realise that I should’ve made the educational nature of the game more clear. Without any of the trackers I mentioned for future development, it’s unclear that Turbo Type is intended to provide a measure of typing skill, and so strategies like this can develop.

Also, none of my playtesters were able to beat the CPU cars. While I was able to consistently place 1st during development (not to brag), every playtester was unable to even see the CPU cars on screen again after they left from the starting line. The fact that they all took some time to get accustomed to the controls aside, it was noticeably disheartening for them to be running dead last with no hope of catching up to the other cars. Had the CPU cars been slower, putting them neck-and-neck with the players, the racing would have been more exciting, but if they’re all off the top of the screen then there’s no observable feedback for typing keys and the game is boring. This is where the necessity for varying difficulty levels comes from.

Overall, this is my most polished concept, and the prototype that I think has the most potential. I also think this is a game that I wouldn’t hate fully fleshing out in GDevelop, despite my complaints in previous postmortems. It’s simple and repetitive enough that it would be easy to program as a full game, and it doesn’t rely on engine-specific mechanics (like a decent physics engine, Bumpy’s Battery Block was a nightmare) to function.

[sketchysaniwa]

Halfway Saniwa (Ch.3)

{Chapter 3: Welcome to the World}

<Japanese> “English” ‘thoughts’ The next week was a big day, it would be the first time she could step outside of the sterile room.  Dressed in with a simple attire, Kaiita waited with baited breath outside a door which attached to a partition chamber separating her from the outside world. She could see people on the other side of the room, some resembled doctors or something she’d  assume to be so- and the other- was dressed unlike anything she’d been prepared for. 

< Ready Kaiita-san?>

The text dialogue translated the Japanese for her spoken over the intercom, and swallowing any doubt she gave a curt nod in reply. There was a sound of hissing air passing back and forth through a vent as the first pair of doors opened, slid apart for her, and only then did it finally click they were oddly ornate- resembling a technological version of shoji partition doors. Kaiita steps inside the inner chamber and they slide closed behind her with a finality that made her neck break into goosebumps. “I’m detecting an increase in your heartrate Kaiita-sama, please relax, everything will be just fine.” Spoke the four legged companion in her arms. Ever since the Konnosuke arrived, he hadn’t left her side; they patiently acted as a companion and part time stuffed animal with complimentary warmer pads inside their body to curl up next to during the night. Now they accepted role of confidant, held secure against the girls front like a cat but giving off a sense they were anything but a simple PET. “ I-…right, you’re right.”

Another hissing sound reached her ears and she could sense the air moving around her. Instantly she could tell the difference- there was an aroma other than just… nothing reaching her nose. Over time in a perfectly sterile room smells like that which came off her food, and the soaps she was provided for cleansing, were much more pronounced.  But unlike those, this hit her like a wave- and she knew EXACTLY what it was. “..sakura?” she uttered the word and a picture of what they were came to mind- but why would she smell something like that? “Ah yes- it is spring after all! We are on the 2nd floor and this wing is close to the open balcony of the building. Come come-! Let’s go see them Kaiita-sama! I’m sure they will lift your spirits.”

The second doors cracked open and more air flooded in, gliding over her skin, informing her that outside it was much warmer. Standing before her as she exited, were 2 people who she could confirm now were doctors due to their name tags, someone who looked like a secretary or manager- basically they wore a suit and beside them was-

“Hajimemashite- Kaiita-san, watashi wa Keiko desu, mata aete ureshii.” < It’s a pleasure to meet you Kaiita-san, I’m Keiko, I’m happy to see you again.> The translation of what Keiko spoke appeared on a clear tablet plate she was holding and spoke it verbally as well in her own voice. “Amazing…” she breathed, watching as it translated even her reaction back to the woman … making the miko laugh.

Yes, a miko, at least she appeared to be.

Kaiita could recognize the crimson hakama, the clean white haori, and even the patterned outer coat or robe that was tied from shoulder to shoulder in a red cord. “I mean- it’s good to see you face to face Keiko-san, “ she continued, unable to stop herself from analyzing the woman’s attire. This didn’t go unnoticed and Keiko smiled almost knowingly. <Unless your companion has already explained, I am not just a miko, as you will come to understand, I am a saniwa as well. There will be much more to explain but first, tell me- how do you feel?> While she hadn’t had much time to get to know this woman very well, up close Kaiita could get a sense now that this woman was somehow…’ bigger’ than she really looked. Somehow her presence didn’t match the petite figure and demure face. It was like something other than her body heat was pressing up against Kaiita and it make her fidget in place- unable to do anything about it. “I feel good.” She replied, “ It’s nice and warm out here. It smells good too, Konnosuke said there are sakura outside?” <Ah! Yes, I suppose you can smell them couldn’t you, come with me and I’ll show you to the balcony.  However, I must ask you to prepare yourself, while I’m sure you’ve never seen Japan before… this is more than just simple city. > Ah- yes, this was the distant future right? She almost forgot- what? Were their flying ships or space stations in the sky? Kaiita wondered this and more as she followed behind Keiko who walked with a soft sound of a bell in her step. The doctors meanwhile were following, along with that person in a suit. They were talking amongst themselves as they passed little batons and tapped various menus and devices on their own tablet screens. Out of the corner of her eye Kaiita could think she saw an MRI scan of herself, with various other similar charts that overlapped different parts of her body. What stuck out also was an odd fluctuating image of her body that almost reminded her of one of those new age color spectrum maps of the human aura. 

The hall didn’t go for very long, and she noticed a few other rooms of similar fashion to her own but all were empty it seemed. They took a right and the hall became a windowed view, and that’s when Kaiitas breath did catch her throat. 

Keiko touched a section of the window and suddenly it parted- after forming edges seemingly out of nowhere! They too slid aside from one another like a shoji door and Kaiita followed her outside onto the balcony.  There was the city below them, and from this edge she could see their building was done up in a style resembling a castle- but it was far more complex with  several other towering sections with the same ornate tiered roofs. Below a rather modern city sprawled out before her, and it wouldn’t have been so impressive than any other metropolis in the 21th century had it not been for the small details. Many sky trains rode back and forth on tracks that seemed to hover in the air. Cars looked more or less the same if more a bit more stylized, and then she could see projected signs from the second floor on the street across from their building. They changed and animated on their own! Thankfully it wasn’t too overdone- like some sci-fi vegas- but the city gave off a far more automated look than anything she could think of. 

This was okay, it wasn’t too startling for her at all, but it DID hammer in the idea she wasn’t in her own era any longer. Thankfully the future didn’t look too alien that Kaiita couldn’t handle it- for now. Coming closer to the edge of the balcony she could see a heavy tree line of blooming sakura illuminated by floating lanterns. They were attached to nothing, they just hung in mid air with no strings and probably no flame inside. Yet they glowed and flickered with a light unlike any bulb she’d seen. The breeze blew a waft of their flowers perfume up to her and she visibly sighed.

< What do you think?> Keiko was looking at her, and Kaiita thought it over a moment before answering.

“…its…different, but not too much. I think if I saw space ships I might have freaked out. “ < Oh they exist, just…  they are out in space- like satellites would be. And they are certainly not for commercial use.> “Oh…” all the girl could do was blink at the senior saniwa, who proceeded to giggle in amusement. At least someone was finding this funny. Still Keiko was sympathetic, and she reached out to pat Kaiita’s shoulder- albeit..hesitantly, seeing if she was relaxed enough. Kaiita didn’t resist and in that moment of non-verbal consent Keiko smiled more warmly at her. < I understand you’re being very brave right now. There may come a time soon when you may feel overwhelmed, and I would advise you to not bottle that up. Be open as much as you can, it will make your adjustments easier if you can face those emotions directly. For now, you needn’t be too concerned about acclimatizing to an alien world- not where you are going.> This was... comforting but odd, what did Keiko mean by that last part? She conveyed her curiosity with a raised brow at the tiny creature still held in her arms.

“What Keiko-san means is you will be leaving this building and being sent somewhere else. Somewhere… a ‘bit more your pace.’ The arrangements are being made, as it appears the doctors have approved you are ready for transfer.” Konnosuke’s response drew the girl’s attention back to the doctors who indeed seemed to look approving of her and were singing off something with a stylus and mailing it digitally before handing it to the person in a suit. “Where am I being taken now?” she asked Keiko who had followed her line of sight. Before the woman replied she spoke something to the two doctors who would nod and then bow to her before leaving them alone on the balcony. The person in the suit followed as well, but not before looking back once more at Kaiita as they door closed behind them. Keiko turned to her and nods, < Kaiita-san, after the head bureau signs off on your bill of health, you will be assigned a Citadel.>

“A citadel?” Was she hearing this right? “Like-… as in- a citadel, citadel? A big- place? Like castle or-“ Maybe the translation wasn’t working, surely they meant maybe a little apartment or a place to stay. As if reading her mind the Konnosuke nods to confirm there was no mistake. “A citadel is assigned to every participating member of the E.S.C. It acts as their home base and place of residence. The size is expected as well in your line of work, as you will come to understand.”

“So… I’m going to move into a town?”

“Not exactly, it’s rather a large property of land with various specific buildings which come standard to every saniwa’s needs. Each citadel is very special, and will be under your complete control.” The fox continued, tail beginning to swish with excitement, “After all, as Master of the house, it will become your home.” <Konnosuke can explain more, but first, how about we get you something to eat? Outside maybe? There is a nice shop across the street.>  Keiko suggested pointing to something with an animated sign that had a kettle pouring something into a cup. A Café? Despite all the heaviness and gravitas of what was just dumped on her, distracting herself with a familiar concept was a welcome idea. All Kaiita could do was nod, and allow Keiko to lead her away and down stairs.

Master of a Citadel? Yeah she could use a coffee right now, surely she was dreaming.