#in fact one of my favorite characters in the star wars universe unironically

[grilledcheese-savage]

Unironically loved The Acolyte. Got some genuine questions on why so many Star Wars fans hate it though. As someone who knows a DEEP amount of lore from both the movies and the non canon books, I feel like I’m inclined to speak on this.

Here’s some questions to ask yourself

1. Do you hate the acting and the “plot holes” or do you just hate women and gay people?

2. Does it actually break the Star Wars lore? Or does it just add more to the general universe?

3. Have you ACTUALLY watched the show up to now? Or did you just assume it was going to suck as soon as you saw Disney made new Star Wars content?

Listen, if you hate that Disney keeps throwing away shows for money, I AGREE. I hate that they seem to put 3% of effort into my favorite universe. But some of the discourse I am hearing on this show is getting eerily close to a hate crime.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, and you can tell me a definitive answer on the first three, I’d love a could discussion on this show. Free from preemptive opinions.

Spoilers now

Here’s what I liked about this show:

- I liked that they showed someone else created by midichlorians. They insinuated in the prequels that it was how Anakin was born and some people are saying that makes him not special anymore. I disagree with this because palpatine was not the first sith, if you listen to the darth plagueis story, he says “He could even use the force to influence the midichlorians to create life.” They never said he was the only person. They just said “ITS A SITH LEGEND”. Don’t you think a cult of sith lesbians would know the story of darth plagueis the wise? I mean yeah, it makes for some grey area in terms of timeline but we have 300 year old Jedi masters and he’s a sith that gets a clone in the sequels it’s not that impossible.

- I love the idea of twins when it comes to Star Wars. One dark one light.

- The costumes!!! The costumes tell a story. For one, I actually love that they aren’t weathered because this was a time of peace for the Jedi, most Jedi wouldn’t have as much time in the field to weather their clothes, so they’re very bright and colorful.

- The settings were so beautiful, and gave me MAJORRR dark fantasy vibes. Especially the space suit, it was giving a different vibe for Star Wars yet still get very George Lucas to me.

- And of course, I have to talk about the fight scenes. They are so fast it really feels like these people know what they’re doing. You can understand their train of thought in every move. It’s fun to watch.

- The lightsabers. I love seeing more yellow lightsabers and more variety. I love seeing the lightsaber whip, I need more of it tho.

- I loved Jecki and Sol, they were pretty fun and original characters. I like how morally grey Sol is, and jecki is my fave type of character… rip.

Here’s what I didn’t like:

- why did that one chick have a purple lightsaber? I was fine with it at first but now it kinda messes with how I saw purple lightsabers. I know the colors don’t technically have a meaning, or at least a set one. Especially since Samuel Jackson just wanted a purple one. But I always saw it as someone who was morally grey and walked the line between the dark in the light. Someone who has a code, but will kill for their own obligations. Which would actually work for this character… it’s the fact that the color is supposed to be rare. I always thought Mace was the first and one of the only to have a purple lightsaber. I’m not against there being multiple purple lightsabers, I just wish they explained it a bit more. Idk. This one’s just me.

- The acting isn’t necessarily bad… it just isn’t great either? Idk, I got mixed feelings. Because there are some episodes where I think “Amandla’s doing pretty good this episode playing two people.” And then I see another scene and think “Damn… I wish they chose some different actors because this is just clunky.” ESPECIALLY the children. I thought there acting was rough, but I’m pretty lenient when it comes to that because they’re kids and they’ll grow with age. Plus, it’s hard to find twins who look like amandla who can act.

-the dialogue is not great a lot of the time. But I’m a Star Wars fan, so I know for a fact that’s never been just “The Acolyte”’s problem. I think we were spoiled Andor.

- I was kinda nervous about the addition of sith witches, but that’s again, just a personal opinion. It’s not that I’m against just sith witches, I just had to get used to the idea of people other than the Jedi, understanding the force but using it differently. Which, wasn’t just an acolyte problem for me. It was a Dave Filoni adding witches to sci fi problem. It’s just, when I think “witches” I don’t think “Star wars”. Because the force isn’t really magic. But I’ve gotten more used to it the more they developed all the different tribes, and especially after watching rebels and clone wars a while back. I’m actually pretty okay with it now, it just took some getting used to, which the live action only haven’t had to deal with until Ahsoka the series, which was less of a problem because they were focused on Hayden coming back. At least in my opinion that’s how I saw it.

- I didn’t like that jecki used ahsoka moves, despite it being the past, it being the first time they duel blade, and the fact that THEY DIE so they can’t even teach these moves to people who then show ahsoka etc. It leads to my next problem,

- it kinda seemed like they were too focused on references. Like they wanted to prove themselves, like “Hey, this isn’t breaking canon, see, I know a ton about Star Wars lore!” It felt like hand-holding. It was cute the first couple times, but it wasn’t spread out enough.

- Yoda is pretty old, and this show is only 100 years in the past, right? So where is he? In fact, where are most of the Jedi masters. I’m sure a lot of them would be babies, but isn’t Shaak ti like, 240? Huh??? Where is everyone? This is probably why I was so confused in the first episode, thinking it was like, 2000 years in the past.

- and lastly, they run into the problem many prequels run into, which is, not knowing what the past of a futuristic world would look like. It’s hard to come up with, old looking lightsabers when lightsabers are inherently futuristic. Etc.

Other than that, I didn’t actually notice it breaking any canon. It should be obvious to most viewers that it’s going to end with everyone who saw the Sith, dying with his secret. That would fix the “plot hole” that they are apparently making.

Also the number one complaint I’ve been seeing is that they have a black main character, who’s a women and they automatically assume that Disney is being woke. They haven’t done anything remotely woke about this. I’ve also seen people complain that two women had a child.

They’re Sith, wouldn’t that be the OPPOSITE of being woke??? Also this is the future, why do you think that a galaxy of aliens with all kinds of genders would be homophobic? That makes less sense than them moving a birthday around. Also please remember clones exist and Anakin’s mother was a Virgin Mary.

😭💀💀💀 Some of the haters are NOT Star Wars fans and get all of their points from Star Wars theory.

[knifeonmars]

Capsule Reviews - May 2020 - The Cape Stuff

I read a lot of comics in May. Here’s what I thought of some of the superhero and superhero-adjacent comics I read.

Arms of the Octopus

A nostalgia pick, the collection of several annual issues containing a crossover between Superior Spider-Man, The Invincible Hulk, and the All-New X-Men. It is an artifact of a very specific and bizarre time in Marvel Comics, when Doc Ock was Spider-Man, the Hulk worked for SHIELD, and the original five teen X-Men were stranded in their own future. For a pure, relatively straightforward crossover romp, it's quite enjoyable. Spider-Man is a jerk, the Hulk fights a robot, the X-Men are befuddled by the present, all of the major beats for that particular moment in the Marvel Universe are there, and it's got some really great art. Jake Wyatt, during his regrettably short-lived stint with Marvel and the great Kris Anka unfortunately overshadow the other contributors, but it's all very good, if not the most accessible comic.

Maxwell's Demons

I came to Maxwell's Demons having heard a lot of critical buzz and with my expectations set rather high. I did not care for this book at all. Ambitious is the best word for this series, and that's not a bad thing. It's got ideas, about the craft, about the genre, about philosophy in general. It never quite manages to carry things off though; it's not as smart as it wants to be, and the high-minded ideas are never incorporated in particularly elegant ways. Three of the story's five chapters are essentially extended monologues in which the main character rambles on about some glorified shower thought for 20-plus pages. The first and second chapters are the exceptions to this pattern, and are quite solid as far as pointedly derivative superhero riffs go, even if the second chapter's riff on "What if Miracleman #17 was significantly less intelligent" is more than a little shameless in its lack of originality. The fourth chapter, by contrast, is the nadir of the series, easily the most embarrassing Manic Pixie Dream Girl tripe I've seen played straight in literal years. I'm reminded a lot of Translucid, another superhero pastiche, which essentially sought to do for Batman what Maxwell's Demons seeks to do for Lex Luthor. I warmed to Translucid significantly on my second read and I wonder if the same will end up being true for Maxwell's Demons, but I find that Translucid simply did a better job of incorporating original ideas and stating its themes in ways less stupefyingly clunky than Maxwell's Demon's ever manages. I hate to call a book pretentious, especially an ambitious one, but at present that's how I feel about this book.

Twilight

Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Howard Chaykin's Watchmen-for-mid-century-space-heroes epic. It's good. Fabulous art, some really interesting ideas and a great premise. It's also more than a little Chaykin-y, with most of the male characters having fraught but amiable relationships with their much-too-good-for-them-and-they-both-know-it ex-wives. It has this particular brand of low grade misogyny that idealizes women but in doing so denies them interiority and, ultimately, humanity. Leaving that aside, though it is a major point to leave aside, it’s story of humanity rotting over eons of immortality, mad space gods, and humanity’s proclivity towards colonialism and genocide, it's great. It’s not an altogether pleasant book, it can be nasty and strange, in ways both intentional and unintentional, but it’s original and engaging and decidedly well made. Something of an overlooked classic of that era’s DC output.    

Green Lantern: Earth One

Literally the only one of DC's Earth One graphic novels that's worth a damn. Where most of the other Earth One books choose to start things off in a world resembling our own, Green Lantern starts off in a scifi future resembling something along the lines of Ad Astra or The Expanse, with Earth controlled by an only alluded to totalitarian government, humanity colonizing and mining the solar system, and Hal Jordan as a spacefaring roughneck who dreads the prospect of returning to Earth. Earth One is the rare Green Lantern story that manages to make Earth as interesting as the rest of the universe. The bulk of the action leaves this behind to focus on unearth the lost legacy of the Green Lanterns and refits their mythology in a clean way which will be unsurprising for anyone with a passing familiarity with the original comics but is still satisfying ad fresh. Fabulous art, fun take on the mythology, I'm left both wanting more and being satisfied with what we got.

Spider-Man: Life Story

In a just world, Chip Zdarksy, one of Marvel’s best writers these days, would be writing both Spider-Man and Fantastic Four, instead of having been relegated to shortlived spinoffs. Because life just isn’t fair sometimes, instead he was given this admittedly ambitious project, his all-encompassing take on the Spider-Man story as played out in real time. In the end it’s bold and engaging, but more than a little clipped in execution. Each issue is a snippet of Peter Parker's life as we catch up to him in a new decade so readers only get a quick glimpse of the action and are left to fill in the substantial gaps by drawing on our knowledge of continuity. The obvious comparison is John Byrne's Superman/Batman: Generations, but where that story really only took the broad strokes of those characters' continuity into account in writing its decades spanning story, Spider-Man: Life Story is dedicated to the remixing of Spider-Man's publishing canon. So it can’t just take an archetypal view of Spider-Man and play that out to its logical conclusion, instead it’s stuck trying to incorporate version of prominent Spider-Man stories like Kraven's Last Hunt, Venom, and Civil War. The result means that there’s a ton of exposition in each issue, and frequent use of shorthand to gloss over things which have happened since the previous issue, and it never manages to explore the series’ original ideas in detail. Also, I'll die mad that Michel Fiffe, the genius behind COPRA and one of my favorite cartoonists, public pitched basically this exact story a year or so before this project was announced, and even if Marvel didn't actually steal the idea, I'll forever pine for Fiffe's take on this premise.

Star Wars: The Crimson Empire Saga

Long before the Disney's take on Star Wars, with their codified takes on the mythology and careful curation of the franchise, there was the old Star Wars Expanded Universe, where seemingly anyone could tell any story they wanted using the mythology of Star Wars. While it resulted in some good stuff, like Timothy Zahn's fondly remembered Thrawn books, the vast majority of it was workmanlike or even bad. Crimson Empire falls firmly into the category of bad, a dumber than dirt story about an extremely cool space guy and his code of honor. It's the kind of story where multiple characters say "He's just one man!" right before or right after seeing their legion of anonymous flunkies getting demolished by the hero. It's got an inexplicable and bad love story. In the three miniseries collected here it spends about two pages total dealing with the idea that maybe, just maybe, the fact that it's main character is dedicated to the lost honor of Emperor Palpatine, a space fascist, maybe his code of honor is completely fucked. Of those three miniseries, only the first story is anywhere near something that could be called good. I wouldn’t called Crimson Empire utterly abysmal, but it’s not unironically good. If the name Kyle Katarn means anything to you, you might get something out of this as a nostalgia trip, but otherwise it has no redeeming qualities.

Deathstroke: Legacy

The first of the New 52 Deathstroke stories, which was never well regarded until Christopher Priest took it over with Deathstroke: Rebirth, I was driven to read this by a conceptual fondness for this era's Deathstroke basically looking and acting like an action figure. Through that lens, it's quite enjoyable. It's not as obviously in on the joke in the way that the classic Taskmaster: Unthinkable is, but it's over the top, has fun designs and baddies, and Joe Bennett (years before his career best heights in Immortal Hulk) provides consistently good art. As a pure action comic, it's good.

Wolverine MAX: Permanent Rage

Here's the thing about Wolverine: There are very few good Wolverine solo stories. Wolverine is a genuinely good character, but most of his solo stories are dumb action affairs, and there's literally never been a Wolverine comic that's even halfway as good as the Logan movie. Permanent Rage, the first storyline from the Wolverine MAX series though, is actually pretty decent. It plays out a lot like you might imagine a Wolverine movie made around 2004, with no superheroes, a Japanese setting that allows for some distracting orientalism, unrelenting violence, and a noir-inspired storyline. The present day storyline is all well and good, not great, but solid and relatively low-key, but what makes the book is the presence of Sabretooth as the main villain. His relationship with Wolverine, fleshed out through flashbacks drawn by some really talented artists, is probably one of the best takes on that relationship that Marvel has ever put out. The casting of Wolverine and Sabretooth as two lonely immortals, bound together by hate and the knowledge that they are each other's only true companions, absolutely makes this book. Is it great? No, but it's got enough interesting things going on that fans of dark superheroes stories would probably find something to enjoy. Subsequent volumes of Wolverine MAX moved even further from the character’s superhero trappings and supporting characters, which is a pity, but this one remains readable and enjoyable on its own.

Marshal Law Omnibus

A collection all of the non-licensed and non-text-only Marshal Law stories. It's weird, it's punk, it's violent, it's sick of superheroes but self-aware about it own silliness in a way that Garth Ennis' work like The Boys has never been (Incidentally, the fifth story contained here, Super Babylon, is just every self-righteous complaint Ennis made about superheroes in The Boys but presented with a modicum of good humor). It's quite fun as a mean-spirited anti-superhero romp, but anyone who is particularly invested in the moral rectitude of, like, the Flash, might find it an unpleasant read so I would advise avoiding it if that's you. It's also not perfect, even for what it is: it's approach to sex work and kink is very dated, it relies on sexual violence a little too much, and by the time you get to the final story, Secret Tribunal, it's come to revel in its previously ironic fascist and misogynist imagery and characters just a little too much. The third installment, Kingdom of the Blind, is for my money, the strongest of the lot, featuring both the most straightforward premise and the most incisive satire the collection has to offer.

[xhxhxhx]

its-okae-carly-rae replied to your post:I ask the tough questions

please make a post with the answers you discovered

Done!

Why do nerds like The Princess Bride so much?

Joshua Glen Tanenbaum at Quora:

So much of my experience of the film is wrapped up in a quilt of childhood nostalgia: I have vivid memories of being wrapped in blankets with a hot mug of soup and watching The Princess Bride on sick days, or snow days.  I remember cajoling friends into reenacting the swordfights in exacting detail, memorizing every line.  I credit the movie with introducing me to the pleasures of wordplay, and rhyming games, and banter...things which I've found unite the geek clans almost universally and which have remained social litmus tests for friends and partners throughout my life.   Like Star Wars and Ghostbusters, The Princess Bride is deeply lodged in the geek cannon for reasons that transcend the film itself.  Objectively...yeah it's a bit hokey; a bit dated; a product of a more innocent era of film making; and it may not stand up to the standards of more contemporary geek classics like Lord of the Rings.  But what it shares with Lord of the Rings is an utterly genuine and unironic commitment to its source material (the book, which is also a joy to read), and an absence of the cynical, sarcastic, post-modern impulse to try and deflate itself, or wink at the audience about what it's doing.  For this reason I cannot help but love it.

Why do anime openings always have people running?

TV Tropes:

In a lot of anime, a character (usually the protagonist) will show up in the opening or ending credits, running along while remaining on a fixed spot on-screen. The character could be running the whole time, or start out walking slowly and gradually pick up speed. The background is usually of the scrolling kind, but sometimes the character actually seems to run through a changing scenery. In any case, it's rare for characters to maintain a leisurely speed the whole time; usually, this has something to do with either the pace of the music, or the animators' need to keep opening and ending themes moving fast at all times.

Side-on running and walking cycles are often created by animators as a way to get a feel for the characters, and these cycles will no doubt be used at some point in the show, so this could count as a cross between Shown Their Work and Stock Footage.

Why do producers get the Oscar?

Ankit Sethi on Quora:

The producers are the group of people who help develop the initial idea, obtain rights, do the hiring and the casting, secure funding or finance it themselves, keep track of costs and schedules all through the shoot, managing post-production, VFX, scoring, publicity etc. A limited number of individual artists, directors or writers might have provided the exact je nais se quoi that swayed Academy voters, but the producers are more holistically responsible for getting the ball going (and keeping it in the air) on every major step in the creation of the film. And as Dan said succinctly, they put up the money and that counts towards ownership in both law and LA.

Why do my yolks always break?

Quora:

My best guess is it is the way you crack them.

Why do we put down dogs that kill? Why don’t we euthanize killer whales?

I didn’t find a good answer to this one. The killer whales live to kill again.

Why do furries exist?

Quora has some incomplete but still-useful answers. Adam Hartline:

Ever hear of the Tiger Crane form in kung fu? Humans drew on what they saw in nature to apply it to their own bodies.

Furriness is just the next iteration of these processes, applying ample imagination to create pictures and stories out of that taking on of animal properties, as well as imagining the taking on of those properties.

The internet is helping along that process as well. Before the internet, we would exist in isolation and our imagination would eventually move back in line with the society we live in. Now, we can just google search it and find other people willing to draw your ideas into stories, pictures, animations, dress up, etc. And it becomes a form of play; practicing possibilities in a social setting, which results in the behaviors being reinforced. Without that reinforcement, it would just be another thing imagined. With our play directed elsewhere, with other humans, we would be more likely to move on, or at least would be forced to rely solely on their own talents while still needing to live within cultural boundaries.

Mckennah Richardson:

I cannot answer for others, but I can answer for myself. 

Furries allow for you to build yourself in the sense how you actually picture yourself. It just so happens that they do this through exploring the realms of anthropomorphic states. Personally, I am drawn to animals, and therefore the fandom provides an opportunity for me to express myself as I truly see myself. The anthropomorphism is truly just a realm of expression. 

When a newcomer joins the fandom, they create a fursona, which is in essence a projection of themselves into an anthropomorphic state. It can represent who they are now, or it can represent what they wish to become.

Why do wires tangle?

James Vincent at The Independent :

It was probably the 21st century’s preeminent sage Bill Murray that summed up the problem most succinctly: “How to tie the strongest knot ever: 1) Put some headphones in your pocket 2) Wait one minute”.

But have you ever wondered exactly why this happens? Well, scientists have and to find out what mysterious pocket-sized-goings-on are going on they did what any sensible researcher would: they put different pieces of wire in a box and shook them up to see if they got knotted. They did this a lot, in fact, 3,415 times in all.

The results (detailed in a now quite venerable 2006 paper entitled "Spontaneous knotting of an agitated string" by Dorian M. Raymer and Douglas E. Smith) showed that two key factors cause complex knots to “form within seconds”: “critical string length” and “agitation time”.

The probability of knot forming versus string length.

Essentially the longer the lengths of cable and the more they’re shaken the more likely it is that a knot will spontaneously form. Qualities such as cable rigidity and diameter also play a part but it's length and time spent tumbling that matter most – and unfortunately, these are the factors you’re least likely to change.

Raymer and Smith came to their conclusion by experimenting with cables of varying length and different “agitation times," finding that cables shorter than 46 centimetres will rarely – if ever – get knotted, with the probability increasing with cable size before plateauing just after 2 metres in length.

For the average pair of earphones (defined as 139 centimetres in length) this means the probability of a knot spontaneously forming in an enclosed space about the size of your bag is just under 50 per cent. That’s right, every time you dump your earphones after arriving at school or work there’s a one in two chance you're dicing with death going to be slightly annoyed later in the day.

Knot formation in action. The box on the left is the rotating container used by Raymer and Smith, with one crossed wire quickly leading to chaos.

Raymer and Smith also noted that the Y shape of earphones increases the chance of knotting substantially, with only one end of the wire or cable having to cross another to start off the tumble-weed reaction of a spontaneous tangle.

All in all, the pair identified 120 different types of knot in their trials, including “all prime knots with up to seven crossings”. Next time you drag a sorry clump of cables from your pocket just be glad you weren’t assisting on that particular un-tangling.

Why do humans have irises?

Carrie Poppy at Tech Times:

In fact, among the 633 species of primates, only one has visible eye whites: humans. That white part is actually called sclera, and while other primates have it, theirs are colored, typically about the same color as the iris, so we don't see them unless we get up really close. Humans have no pigment in their sclera, giving us what we commonly refer to as "the whites of our eyes."

So, why should we have white sclera while everyone else's is colored?

The answer comes down to evolution. Again, as with all good things, you can understand it best if you consider my dog.

Have you ever tried to tell your dog where her favorite toy is by pointing to it? Unless she has known you a long time and picked up on humans' weird habits, she probably looked at your finger, not where your finger is going. However, if she knows you long enough, she may learn that, in your weird little human mind, there's an invisible line between your finger and something off in the distance, and if she follows your delusional pattern of thinking and traces the invisible line, she can figure out what you're looking at.

However, try not even pointing at the toy. Try just looking at it. If your dog is like my best friend, Ella, she will stare back at you, not knowing you're trying to tell her anything at all. Even if you and your dog have known each other a long time, she may never pick up on your subtle indicator that her toy is over there by the bookcase, darn it.

That's likely because your dog doesn't have eyes like yours. If she looks at another dog, she will just see a pupil inside a colored sclera. Unless she's up close, she won't see where that pupil is actually pointing. As a result, it's not intuitive to her to follow your line of sight, because she literally doesn't know that's what you're looking at. Turn your head, and she might have a better idea. It turns out, apes are the same way. In studies, they won't follow your gaze unless you literally turn your head to face the thing you're looking at.

However, humans know to follow each other's eye movements intuitively. Why? We don't know for sure, but our best theory is called the "Cooperative Eye Hypothesis."

The Cooperative Eye Hypothesis says that one of the things that has made humans so successful is cooperation: we can work in large communities, all benefiting others in our tribe. While a herd of elephants maxes out at about 70 individuals, wolf packs don't usually have more than 30 and chimps can form communities of up to 120, humans interact with a nearly limitless number of other humans, and need to cooperate with as many as possible, to survive, especially as we began to develop a transaction-based economy.

So, subtle eye movements help us detect emotion, read one another's intentions and interact in delicate ways that promote kinship with the people around us, all of which is evolutionarily advantageous. As our ancestors developed these traits, those who could cooperate the best passed them on to their descendants.

All this cooperation meant that we needed to be able to communicate as well as possible with other members of our species. We also needed to be able to sniff out deception in the traitors among us. When we know we're being watched, we're more likely to be good. That promotes altruism, which is ultimately good for a community. You scratch my back, I scratch yours — which is why lying is something we can pick up so easily in eye movements. How can you best tell if someone's eyes are moving suspiciously? If they have big sclera that tell you exactly where their eyes are moving, to a hair's width. That's how.

Why don’t they just give other people the Captain America serum?

Mark Hughes at Quora:

There are. Or, rather, were. In the comics, several other people became super-soldiers like Captain America. A couple in particular are worth noting...

In an attempt to recreate the super-soldier serum that made Captain America, the U.S. government uses several black soldiers as guinea pigs, with a single soldier -- Isaiah Bradley -- surviving the tests and becoming a super-soldier. These events are told in the excellent comic series Truth: Red, White, & Black. 

[...]

William Burnside is another person who was not just a super-soldier but in fact was Captain America for a while. The government supposedly recreated a flawed/incomplete version of the serum that slowly drove the test subject insane, but Burnside didn't know this. Nor did he know he also needed vita-ray treatment after the serum injections. So he took the serum himself, in order to become a replacement Captain America after the real Cap disappeared at the end of WWII (frozen in ice and later found by the Avengers).

[...]

The government made all sorts of other, different attempts to resurrect the super-soldier serum, but the specific formula that made the real Captain America was lost when its creator was shot dead by a Nazi spy -- or, a Hydra spy, depending on which version of the story you read/watch. And Selim Jamil is absolutely correct that besides the serum itself, a key ingredient to the success of Captain America's serum-induced transformation is the fact of Steve Rogers as a person -- physically, morally, intellectually, and so on. It's been said in the comics from time to time that besides the formula itself, it was the combination of uniqueness in Rogers that was the final missing piece of the puzzle that made it all work for him.

Cliff Griffey at Quora:

In the comic books, Steve Rogers was the only person who successfully completed the "Vita-Ray" bombardment, and immediately after that, Prof. Erskine was assassinated.  As Erskine was the only one who knew certain parts of the process, the exact process to create another "Captain America" was lost along with him.  There have been many storylines whereby the Super Soldier Serum has been attempted to be recreated, to a variety of effects - but nobody else has survived the exact same process that created Captain America.

Why don’t browsers clean out their own cache?

I didn’t find a good answer to this question.

Why don’t you move to Somalia?

I didn’t find a good answer to this question.

[wolfie-dragon-rider]

Voltron LD, Season 2 review

I finished watching Voltron season 2 on Friday (Finally!), and I wanted to write down my thoughts on it. What did I like, what did I not like, what worked, what didn't? A sort of review, I guess. Note that I'll go into spoiler territory below the cut, so if you still have to watch it, do that first. Also, I can't be bothered to find tons of pictures for this post, so I apologize for not having the images to represent the scenes I'm talking about.

Also, DISCLAIMER: I am not a shipper for this show. I honestly don't see the Klance or Sheith or whatever. I've got terrible gaydar. I'm not gonna comment on romantic relationships in this review. Ship whatever you wanna ship, I don't care. Just don't bash me for it.

Okay, quick first thought/summary: Overall, I liked it. I liked the first season better, but it was close. But there were some… trends in this season that I didn't like, and I hope those don't get worse in future seasons. I'll now go into a bit more detail on various aspects, and explain what I mean with the previous sentence. It was far from perfect, and this is not going to be some “SQUEE! I Love it so much!!!1!” post. I'm not writing this to bash on anything, but to collect my thoughts for myself, and maybe in some vain hope that the writers will see it and think a bit about it.

Pacing

I am honestly not quite sure why, but the pacing felt off to me. Clearly they tried to create a more overarching plot and narrative, especially in the latter half of the season. But it didn't really work for me. I think one problem I had is that there were several episodes that were clearly linked, but there was very little connection between these 'groups' of episodes.

For example, the first two episodes dealt with the cliffhanger at the end of Season 1, detailing how the Paladins found each other again. But it felt very out of place to me. It felt like they added these episodes just to justify having a cliffhanger in the first place. Pretty much nothing that happened in these episodes actually matters for the rest of the season. No one has any real character growth, nothing is set up, and the only meaningful thing is the “If I don't make it...” line, which, in my opinion, could have been set up in a better part, such as in the Blade of Marmora arc.

Then there are the Blade of Marmora arc and the 'Zarkon is chasing us, shit shit shit shit' arcs, which are pretty much intertwined strangely weirdly. The Blade arc started in Episode 3, with Ulaz' introduction and subsequent death. Then there are some episodes with Zarkon chasing them.

And then there's Space Mall. Oh my gods, what were they thinking with this episode? Look, I loved this episode, I did. It was funny, even if it was ridiculously silly a bit over the top and clearly written for a younger audience than me. But as for pacing? It felt so ridiculously out of place. It was all death and destruction and barely escaping Zarkon, and then along came a goofy episode like this. Now, I perfectly understand you need humor to break up the dark parts. But it did it so… unironically. It might have been nice if the show itself acknowledged how silly this episode was, especially compared to the narrative as a whole. It was like a Big-lipped Alligator Moment, something ridiculously silly, out of place, and then never mentioned again.

Anyway, after Space Mall, we suddenly go back to the Blade of Marmora, who I'd half forgotten about by now, and we get Keith's arc. I'll go into more detail about this in other sections, but I'm just saying I didn't really care about the Blade by now.

Finally we get the whole 'bait Zarkon' arc, which was… badly set up, in my opinion. Several of the episodes, especially the prison break and Slav's character in Escape from Beta Traz, came out of nowhere. I spent all of that episode wondering who the frick Slav was and why they needed him. The plan to trap Zarkon was unclear and explained too hastily. Many of these episodes had the same problem the first two episodes seemed to have: They were very disjoint, and seemed not to really fit in the overall jigsaw puzzle, so to speak. Ill go into this more in the next section.

So overall, to me it felt like the pacing was weird and all over the place, with episodes that didn't seem to have much to do with each other. Season 1 did it much better, with episodes and arcs following each other much more organically. The Balmera arc followed the 'siege' arc, and the episodes following that flowed naturally from the infected crystal. While in this season in went to and fro, with episodes and twists coming out of absolutely nowhere.

Worldbuilding

In this section I'm going to be a bit salty, because worldbuilding and overall plot is something I've had a problem with in the first season as well.

My biggest complaint is just that the world doesn't seem very logical, and not very alive. I've been thinking a lot about this over the past few days, and I realized it is like a videogame, with a very protagonist-centered world. What I mean by that is that it doesn't seem like anything at all happens in the universe, apart from the places where the Castle of Lions happens to be at that moment.

For example, in Greening The Cube (which is my favorite episode, by the way, for reasons I'll get into later) apparently the Olkari have been enslaved for years or longer (given that they have build an entire new civilization in the woods, and the SOS spores travelled halfway across the galaxy before reaching Voltron), but literally the very day Voltron arrives the cube is finished. Also, given how easily the Olkari defeated the Galra when they finally rose up, it makes you wonder why they didn't rise up earlier, or how they lost in the first place.

But the most notable example is that the Galra Empire, this vast, evil, conquering nation that (or at least, so we're told) spreads through the galaxy like a cancer, doesn't really seem to do anything. They don't seem to gather forces or mobilize in preparation for a great war with Voltron. They don't follow Voltron and take back the planets they liberated, such as Arus and the Balmera. Why do they not do this? They have an empire spanning a million stars, why don't they spare a few ships to take back the Balmera the moment Voltron leaves it defenseless?

On this note, the Galra Empire seems to be so… cartoonishly evil. In the first season they were at least logically evil, enslaving the Balmera and harvesting the crystals they need for fuel. But in this season… I'm honestly surprised these Galra commanders don't all have huge moustaches they twirl all the time as they do EVIL acts. It's this stupid evil, the silly corrupt aristocrat who sabotaged the Taujeer ship in The Ark of Taujeer for no real reason other than reminding us of how EVIL the Galra are, or the commander enslaving the Olkari who commands the execution of the king in ridiculously hammy fashion.

I get that it's a cartoon, but instances like this make it very hard for me to take the Galra seriously. Also, maybe a minor note and I'm reading way too much into this, but the Galra empire doesn't seem to be that bad? I say this because in Space Mall, things certainly seem to be safer than when the Alteans were still in charge. Coran remembers seedy bars, black markets, places controlled by mafia and thugs. And now, the mall is clean, safe, and calm. It's not like the population is controlled by fear, either. The girl Coran tries to bribe literally doesn't understand what could be dangerous about this place. 

I know it's just a joke, but there are many such instances and jokes, and it gives me the impression that the whole Galra Empire doesn't seem… well thought out. It's evil when Voltron needs something to fight, but for the rest the galaxy seems pretty peaceful and okay.

Also, there are a ton of complaints I have about worldbuilding in general in this universe. It simply feels incomplete, and many episodes just generate more questions. Do the Galra control everything, or are there independent nations? How common is space travel? Why does everybody speak English? How did they get videogames from Earth? Not to mention the cow?! I know they're minor things, but together they make the world feel empty and illogical.

Characters

The characters are… mixed, in my opinion. Some are good, some are great, and some are bad. I'll go over the notable ones. The order is somewhat from bad to best.

Let me start of with the worst: Hunk. What the hell happened to you, man? What did they do to you? They turned you from an adorable smart mechanical genius into a one-dimensional idiot who pretty much only talks about food. I guess about 90% of his lines are food jokes. Another 5% is him being nervous and second guessing everything, and about 3% is him being an utter jerk to Keith. Seriously, that was not cool, man. The rest is him being actually productive. Hunk had no arc, no character development, and what character development he had in the first season (relationship with Shay, determined to defeat Zarkon) seems to have disappeared. I'm sorry, but I can't really say anything positive about Hunk here.

Slav. What the hell. Okay, I will admit this is mostly a personal pet pieve of mine, but I HATE the mad scientist trope. You'd think with a show that got Pidge perfectly right (more on that below), they wouldn't go down that path, but they did. He was funny, and seeing Shiro blow up at him was great, but  he just didn't really seem to add anything to the team or plot. They could have replaced him with Ryner, the Olkari chieftess, and used the Beta Traz episode for something more interesting.

Next worse, probably Lance. Okay, I'm gonna say this upfront: I don't like Lance. In general, even in the first season. So keep that in mind as you read this. Don't kill me for it.

He's not as bad as Hunk, if only for the fact that he's pretty much invisible this entire season. He has some weird moments with Keith, but his 'Casanova' behavior just keeps getting him into trouble, like with the mermaids. You'd think he'd learn at some point not to think with his penis all the time. He sort of had a small arc in Beta Traz, but it was… weak, easily resolved, and he managed to become ridiculously smug about it in about five minutes. Sorry I'm so negative, maybe I'd like him more if he stopped being a jerk for five minutes.

Zarkon was a bit of an idiot. I guess they tried to make him obsessed and determined about the Black Lion, but it came across to me like a toddler having a tantrum because he lost his favorite toy. Not much comment on him. Hagar was a LOT more competent than he is, and it makes me wonder how he even managed to rule for 10 thousand years.

Next up: Coran. I get that Coran is the comic relief here. I do. And I'm probably too old for the jokes here, but many of his scenes just fell flat for me this season. He seems to become sillier and stupider over time, with his worst moment when he became sick and refused to accept it. He had some good moments, for example comforting Allura, but overall I felt he was less good than in Season 1.

Allura was mostly the same as Season 1. I don't have much notable to say about her, to be honest. Her arc where she started hating Keith, then accepting him was a bit sudden (especially the accepting part), but overall I liked it, and it was one of the best (if not THE best) overarching subplots this season.

I liked Shiro this season. He's growing into his role as leader, and is clearly grooming Keith to be his successor (whether that's wise or not is… questionable, IMO). His defense of Ulaz was admirable, and his bonding episode was good, even if it went pretty quickly (only need like an hour to bond with your lion?). This season made me feel for Shiro, and I'm very worried about what happened to him.

Keith's character development was good! I didn't like him much in season 1, but I'm more fond of him now. His blade arc was good, though I have to say the whole 'Keith being Galra' thing kind of… it didn't come out of nowhere, but it wasn't resolved very well. His entire arc was about finding answers. But in the end, we didn't get many answers. Who were his parents really? What happened to them? Why did the Blade come to Earth? We never get any explanation about any of that.

Now, I will admit upfront that Pidge is, has been, and probably always will be my absolute favorite character in VLD. I was nervous watching this, because I was scared they were gonna ruin that. But they managed to make her (I will refer to Pidge with female pronouns here. I personally think she's a girl, but if you think she's transgender or nonbinary or whatever, that's perfectly fine. It doesn't matter to me what her gender or sex or whatever is. Please don't kill me) even better.

Holy freaking crap, I LOVED Greening the Cube. It was such an immense relief for me to watch that, because for the first time I've ever seen, they got a nerd right. They didn't bash Pidge for her nerdiness, she was allowed to be smart, praised for it. And that's rare.

I'm gonna go into a bit of a sidetour here and try to explain why Greening the Cube was so good. If you don't care about math or science or philosophy, go ahead and skip this part.

One thing I liked even back in Season 1 was that the writers actually know their science. Remember when they infiltrated the transit hub in episode 12, and Hunk started rambling about something when explaining how the hack worked? He ranted about something that actually exists, and makes sense in that context, and if you know the terms you see what they're getting at. It's not just buzzwords randomly strewn together.

Pidge is a mathematician and computer scientist. And one important thing about those disciplines is that they aren't limited by physics. A central paradigm in computer science is so called Turing Completeness. Basically, the idea is that any computing device, programming language, or other concept, is equally powerful, and effectively the same, as long as they can do some simple operations, because that's all you need to be able to do everything. It's hard to explain here, I might make a separate post about it if people are interested, but the important part is that you can make a computer from almost ANYTHING. You can define computers based on card games, ant colonies, DNA strings, cell biology (I did my bachelor thesis on this, actually, about representing data as molecules which are modified by biological cells), musical notation, anything.

That's what the Olkari were talking about when they said everything is connected and the same. That's why Pidge was able to bend the wood into something else. Because it's all the same computer, just with a different interface. All Pidge had to do was understand how to convert the magic wood computer into a regular Turing machine, and she can use it. That's what the echo cube was about as well, a learning AI that emulates and copies everything it sees. And the writers get this. They understand this concept which can be so hard to understand when you haven't studied computer science. And it isn't ridiculed. Pidge is initially dismissive, saying she prefers the indoors (implying she prefers her regular computer), but she is curious, open to it.

It's no surprise that Pidge said Turing is her favorite scientist (I'm going to be smug here and point out I totally called this in my fanfic The Imitation Game). Because Turing was the guy who figured this out. And Turing wasn't just a mathematician. Turing was ALSO a biologist, a chemist, a philosopher. He was interdisciplinary and versatile, just like Pidge. No matter how much she moans about sunburn and mosquitos (I sympathize with her, though), she's still curious about the Olkari, and eager to learn.

Anyway, the point is, it's so liberating to see a tech junkie math character who isn't ridiculed or made fun off or made one-dimensional. This show gets what it's like to be a math nerd. It gets the philosophical and scientific concepts. And it uses that knowledge to let Pidge grow further.

Pidge was great in the rest of the season as well. She doesn't give up on searching for her brother, but she learned to give saving the universe higher priority. I liked the moment in the prison where she searches the database for him without compromising the mission. She's badass as always, settling into her support role. She doesn't always have to fight to help the team, sometimes helping Coran with repairs or overseeing security systems.

I loved her moment in the first episode where she made copies of the other paladins and mocked them, it was hilarious and not mean-spirited. It shows how she's the 'jester' on the team, keeping them levelheaded and pointing it out when they are acting like idiots. And the way she made that giant antenna by herself was amazing. She didn't sit back and wait to be rescued.

If there's one criticism I have it's that she didn't get another companion. I want to see a new Rover, or another robot she builds herself. She hacked a robot in Beta Traz, but it kind of disappeared without a word. But I'm eager to see where her journey takes her next.

Conclusion

I guess my review comes across as fairly negative, but I did like it. There were pacing problems, and the world seems kind of empty and lifeless at times, but I still like it a lot. Action was great, the enemies were less gimicky and silly than in the previous season (though the suddenly reborn Robeast in Stayin Alive was kind of weird). The team as a whole is doing great, working together more and more, though Hunk and Lance's characters are regressing a bit. I loved loved loved Pidge, and I can't wait for Season 3!

If you want clarification, or discuss something about this review, you can always send me a PM. Have  a great day!