#screamsanalysis

[screamsviakeyboard]

Just watched Cyberpunk Edgerunner. Overall very good! I really enjoyed the beginning and there were lots of things I quite liked about the story, however there were a few things that lost me towards the end. Spoilers and more under the cut.

Everything post timeskip felt worse to me, but I think that's almost completely because of David's design. I understand that it's supposed to be jarring, you're supposed to see our sweet little boy juxtaposed with the hulk of chrome he's become. But I just don't like the way it looks. I felt like his head didn't fit properly onto his body and it kept taking me out.

With stories like this, I think it's important that they keep you inside them the whole time. Stuff like Lucy and David having dogshit communication isn't frustrating if you're immersed in the tragedy of it all. David accelerating towards cyberpsychosis in his pursuit of Lucy's dream works if you don't step back and wonder why he doesn't do things in a slightly more sustainable way and get them both to the moon in, like, a decade. These aren't unbelievable decisions for the characters, and they work thematically, but if you get uninvested then they stick out and become negatives, to me at least.

That being said, I was adjusting to it all. Then they made David's design even worse. The exosuit(skeleton? idr) just... does nothing for me. It's kind of undefined, it's not posable enough to have any good hand to hand or gunplay scenes, both of which are areas where the show shined before. It compensates for this with the gravity stuff, which is a very cool effect, but can't recapture what makes everything else so dynamic.

It just falls flat for me, which is a shame because everything involving the cyberpsychosis and David's mind is really good! It's so good I honestly could forgive the design his head and oversized torso were stuck on. If it weren't for Adam Smasher.

There's nothing wrong with Adam Smasher as a character or an entity, because there's basically nothing there. He gets mentioned once, if you're already familiar with Cyberpunk you know a bit, and then he shows up and kills David. And that sucks.

It sucks mostly because David doesn't even get a good hit in. I know he "wins" because Lucy gets to the moon, but he and Rebecca die and Adam just goes "huh, that was actually pretty fun," without a scratch. It's incredibly unsatisfying!

And I get that's the point. The series is about the overwhelming cruelty of the world of Cyberpunk. It beats you down, it kills your friends, it's too controlled to let you be free and too chaotic to let you feel safe, and all you can do--the best you can hope for--is to die in a way that'll inconvenience the monsters responsible. And maybe, if you're lucky, if you're Special, you save one person. They get to feel the sun on the moon. Without you.

It's a good tragedy, but the flaw that gets me is the unbeatable strength of the corpos feels unearned, and I think it's because of the exosuit. Up until then Maxtec is set up as this completely terrifying, basically unbeatable force. The series opens with a cyberpsycho who is better trained, better armed, and better augmented than the main character getting killed by them. Then the mc gets one part of that dude's arsenal and is immediately able to do all this wild shit. It instantly establishes just how strong maxtec is. No matter how good Maine and the rest are, no matter how good David is, there are things that are unfuckable with in this world that they need to be scared of.

But then David gets the exosuit and he destroys a whole fleet of corpos and three Maxtec helicopters. The ceiling gets blown clean off the setting. He's unstoppable now.

Except he isn't. Adam Smasher stops him like it's nothing. And the setting does treat AS with the respect this ability deserves, but it doesn't show us that until he's killing David.

And their fight... isn't even really a fight. David wants to save Lucy and kill Farady. He gets distracted and gets shot, accomplishes those things and gets blown out of the building, he stops Adam once with the gravity thing and then gets torn to shreds. David is so unfocused on Adam that there isn't enough resistance for his feats to be impressive. In my opinion, the whole confrontation winds up feeling unsatisfying.

And it's a shame, because I think that if they had actually been able to fight it would have worked much better. As is, David loses so quickly that I had a hard time really processing that he was losing, and then I had to go "oh, I guess it's over." Ironically, if David had been able to resist getting literally dismantled, I think it would have made Adam seem more threatening.

Alright and, uh, so I was rewriting how I'd have liked the scene to go and I wound up just doing fanfic. So I'm including that in a reblog.

Anyways, just wanna say I still think it was a good show.

[screamsviakeyboard]

I watched Scott Pilgrim Takes Off last night and while I did enjoy it I was ultimately a little disappointed. I thought the idea to focus more on Ramona was cool, and it was fun watching her interact with everyone. While I didn't really personally feel much from her reconciling with her various exes, it was still nice and the jokes and characters were enjoyable enough to watch even if I wasn't emotionally invested. I also think the idea of Scott himself being the ultimate evil ex is fun and feels like a natural direction for the story to take. The animation and fights were neat, although I've been poisoned by sakuga so excepting a brief section of Lucas Lee skateboarding most of it didn't really feel like anything to write home about.

That all being said, my disappointment stems from two main sources of criticism. The first is that the story doesn't do enough to immerse itself in Ramona, and the second is that I don't think the emotional narrative of the story manages to properly impact the final battle between EO!Scott and the rest of the cast.

To preserve your scrolling, I'll go more in depth under the cut.

Criticism 1 - Ramona Doesn't Play Video Games

I think the main culprit is ultimately the video game-ness of the setting. In the original comic and movie this works really well. It attracts nerds who will be able to connect to Scott on that level, and shows us a world fundamentally colored by how Scott sees it. By simply observing this world, we're empathizing with Scott. The evil exes are the bosses of a video game because that's how Scott would see things, and we as an audience, immediately identify them as obstacles to be overcome through battle before he can win the game/get the girl.

The story is able to subvert this to a certain extent by giving Ramona more agency and introducing alternative solutions to these boss battles, but the video game nature never vanishes. We're always firmly grounded in Scott's perspective.

This is a problem for the new series, because the story isn't really about Scott. The main protagonist is Ramona looking for him. However, even when he's not present, his perspective remains. The video game homages continue, with fight announcements, point counters, and the pee gauge all happening around Ramona as she undertakes her journey. Even though none of these elements of perspective are hers.

The story is still perfectly serviceable with these elements. They're cute and charming. I find them relatable. So why am I whining?

Because it could have been more!

Ramona's own perspective goes unexplored, even when the story focuses on her. What interest of hers is comparable to Scott's video games? How does she see the world? How has the media she consumed as a child shaped that? How do her past experiences affect the way she sees future obstacles?

For Scott, you only need to look at the screen and you have your answer, but for Ramona there's barely anything. Her character is still defined as "the girl who dates people." Every flashback she has involves her relationship with her exes, and every action she takes is driven by either a desire to find her new boyfriend or to reconcile with the exes.

What little she does get is only partially there, and is never really touched on by the story, in my opinion. She dyes her hair every episode, she gives people particular tea and sets a timer for it to steep, and she likes Columbo.

That last bit is the closest glimmer we get, and arguably the "whodidit" nature of the show is meant to align with that. Now, I could go on a rant here about how the structure of a whodunnit is actually not present in Columbo, and so the whole thing falls flat on that front, but even if we imagine that it made sense Ramona's detective idiom is barely even able to fit in the same space as the omnipresent video game of Scott. And even then there is also a depth to Scott's video games, there are references to actual things! Reversals, DP inputs, virtual guuy! Ramona gets a notebook, a pen she uses to cross things off, and rough knowledge of when Columbo was on.

While the show is still good and enjoyable, in my opinion this is a huge missed opportunity, and once I realized it was there, I was disappointed it wasn't seized.

Criticism 2 - It Didn't Make Them Punch Gooder

In my opinion, one of the most satisfying parts of having an action adventure emotional journey is the final climax, when your growth as a person gives you the strength to overcome the final challenge. This is often catalyzed as a distinct realization had during the climax, giving the good guys the inspiration or strength they need to reverse a disadvantageous position, and ultimately come out on top.

This does happen!

Ramona realizes she's been running away. Not from what she loves, but from herself loving things. She chooses to embrace her past, present, and future, becomes super Ramona, boops EO!Scott back to his abandoned house, and destroys the A.K. machines to kiss her boyfriend. Woo! Happy End!

Except, what? Why? Where did this come from? How was this a problem when she originally married Scott anyways and they were happy together for at least a decade?

You can argue that this theme was developed. First of all, every time Ramona left one of her exes it was always characterized by a sort of silence. She doesn't want to talk with them, she wants to get out of there. Even when there's nothing about the ex in particular that should make her afraid of confronting them, she still can't even bear to say good-bye.

In addition to this, when she talks with Scott on their date, she obviously tries to avoid discussing the past in any detail. On first glance this is because she has seven evil exes that are going to come try and kill him, and that's probably part of it, but you can make the argument that this is because she doesn't want to talk about herself when she was dating them either. These two things are intrinsically connected, so avoiding one means avoiding the other at the same time.

Finally there's the hair thing. I'll be completely real with you, Ramona dyeing her hair went over my head. I don't know why it's there, really, other than to ground the episodes in her perspective. Scott only sees the different hair, in the Ramona series we see her dyeing it each time. It works for that, even if it doesn't really build to anything other than more hair dyeing. You could make an argument that this also has something to do with her discomfort with herself, but I don't know how much meat is there. Even in the epilogue, she's still dyeing her hair.

So this is kind of there, but it's also kind of not. This is the big realization that wins the day, but it's so subtly included in the rest of the story that I was just kind of confused when it happened. It's also not actually presented as a hindrance in the plot the way Scott's foibles are in the originals.

Ramona doesn't run from anything, herself or otherwise. She would obviously rather not be dealing with her exes, but with the motivation of finding Scott driving her, she doesn't hesitate much at all. Instead the obstacles to her interrogating them are usually external to her relationship with them. Functionally, Ramona's Big Problem isn't a problem at all.

Now, that's not necessarily bad by itself. A more subtle problem that someone is already in the process of overcoming, which then reared its head again ten to twenty years down the road is an interesting thing to focus the climax on. And presenting that problem in the background is a neat idea. But! I don't think it worked for me. I didn't get any catharsis seeing her solve it because it hadn't really made any impression on me.

As a result of that, it made the emotional journey leading up to the final confrontation feel, if not pointless, then at least disconnected.

This wasn't helped by the fact that the climax includes the entire cast of the show, only for everyone other than Ramona and Scott to be poofed out of the fight without meaningfully contributing. EO!Scott isn't beaten by brute force, and none of the other characters even gave Ramona any advice at the end, so, like, what were they even doing there?

The battle between Scott and EO!Scott doesn't even seem to be very connected to their relationship. Scott doesn't seem to understand how he eventually became this person. Which is kind of funny, but means there's no real emotional obstacle for Scott to confront in this either. Scott's not fighting himself, and he's not trying to change the parts of himself that led to this. He's fighting some hairy buff red-eye dude who's coincidentally also named Scott Pilgrim.

As a result of this, a very interesting theme winds up getting muddied and practically lost. The relationship between our past selves and our future selves.

3 - Who I Am Will Be Who I Was

Both Scott and Ramona aren't really going anywhere in the present, Scott has a past he sort of wants to return to (represented by Knives), while Ramona has a past she wants to escape from (the exes), they find each other, and the future inside of themselves together.

In this future, however, they split. Scott spirals back into being depressed and living with Wallace (the past) while Ramona drifts in the present again, looking for the space she needs even while she doesn't communicate to her (very stupid) husband that she still loves him. The exact breakdown of communication isn't delved into, but it doesn't need to be, in fact it's better that it isn't. Just like Scott and Ramona, we can't ever know whose fault it actually was, but the result was something neither of them wanted, and if either of them had been able to reach out to the other one, it would have been something they could have solved.

When she finds out that O!Scott wants to change the past, O!Ramona does her best to ensure that the record of her relationship with Scott remains, even if the relationship itself is lost.

Even though O!Scott is back in his past habits, he thinks that the problem is in his own past and wants to change that, even if it means he loses his relationship with Ramona (ironically, the loss of that relationship is the very thing causing his pain in the first place. He wants to have never had it at all, a return to the true peace of the past.)

Ramona wants to preserve the past, which shows growth on her part. She can know she still loves Scott and accept her past with him, but this growth turns her into a person all the more trapped in the present. She's more willing to adapt a novel into a screenplay, go back in time, and launder it into a movie, than she is to skate over to Wallace's house and talk to the man she still loves. Both characters have found themselves in slightly different, but still eerily similar predicaments to those they faced when they first met.

Scott's disappearance from the present forces Ramona to confront her own past, in the form of the exes, in an effort to find the future she sees in Scott. She reaches out to them and finally breaks the cycle. Then in the future, EO!Scott drags everyone to fight him, eventually forcing EO!Ramona to intervene before he can completely erase their past. The Ramona of the future finally confronts her present in order to preserve her past. But, in the end, she tells her past to give up and skate away. All of this has just been another failed experiment. Don't even bother saying goodbye.

EO!Scott's outburst in response to this finally crystalizes the thing past Ramona has been fighting all along. She doesn't run, the person she was and the person she will be accept that they are one in the same.

Super Ramona can finally talk openly with both Scotts. She tells EO!Scott that he's a mess, but a mess that can be cleaned. There's hope for him. There's hope for them. And while it may not be the ending he was hoping for, EO!Scott goes back home to work on fixing things.

As for present Scott, Super Ramona is finally free from the baggage of the future. She can cross the emotional distance, break the A. K. machines of EO!Scott's regret, and finally, finally, kiss her boy.

Woo! Happy end!

So that's basically what I think the themes could have been. I just think they got muddled along the way and became so subtle the resonance didn't hit properly in the finale. The show somehow almost felt starved for time to me, which doesn't make sense given the length, but oh well. I think with more proper focus on this, and unfortunately maybe less focus on the hijinks of the various exes and side characters, this could have shined through.

Present Scott doesn't really do anything here. But he does get kissed, and we're very happy for him. He already had his story told anyways, and he got to watch the musical of it, so that's probably enough.

[screamsviakeyboard]

I watched Joker today. I enjoyed it quite a lot! The cinematography and Joaquin Phoenix's performances were a real treat. The subject matter was very dark, but I thought it did a remarkable job of not getting bogged down in itself. A problem I run into sometimes is that when a movie or show has so many bad things happen to its lead I begin to sort of roll my eyes, like, "we get it, could you please move on already?" but that didn't happen here. The bad things were interesting on their own, they didn't overstay their welcome, and they all fed directly into the development of the plot.

Spoilers to follow if you haven't watched it yet. Personally I'd recommend it with the caveat that it is still very dark and I think lots of folks will find it heavier to bear than I did.

What struck me the most, though, and I think what got me the most engaged was the lack of wanton cruelty on the Joker's part. The movie's atmosphere and music often presents him as more dangerous than he actually is. The scenes with Sophie are a perfect example of this, where the tension is ratcheted up as Arthur stalks her or invades her apartment. The audience is led to think he's about to do something, but then he just... doesn't. He realizes that all the time he spent with her was just a delusion and he leaves on his own. This is repeated when he kills Randall but lets Gary go, even apparently genuinely apologizing for using a lock too high for Gary to reach. And when he kills Murray, he doesn't do anything to the guests or the audience, or even resist arrest after that point.

I think it allows for him to feel much more sympathetic, which creates that much more engagement with his politics, or lack thereof. Arthur is excellent because he doesn't conceive of his own rage as political, even as he directs it towards seemingly political targets and revels in the political effects. Everyone he kills he does so for personal reasons: the three stock brokers in self-defense, his mother for abusing him and misleading him due to her own delusions, Randall for throwing him under the bus to their boss and quite likely preparing to do so again with the police, and finally Murray for making fun of him and then bringing him on to do so again. This is all outwardly misconstrued as political actions, because the public only knows about the first and the last.

Then there's his speech to Murray, which is so excellent. They talk past each other perfectly. Murray keeps insisting that Arthur's trying to make excuses for killing the stock brokers, but Arthur never even mentions that it was in self-defense.

Arthur rants about the state of things, how cruel people are to each other and the disregard the wealthy show for the poor and "people like him." It all sounds political, and to be clear, any serious analysis of Arthur's situation shows that politics are to blame, but it isn't to Arthur. It's just all the bad things that happened to him that made him mad. And now he's not an advocate for societal change, he's just personally hitting back at the world that's been beating him for too long. When he watches the protest go by laughing and smiling, he's just happy to see chaos, he's happy to see the world hurting because of him. It's an act of revenge just as personal as stabbing Randall with scissors or shooting Murray, writ large because the target is not a man that can be killed, it's the society he inhabits.

This, I think, is the most interesting thing the film has to say. Arthur genuinely isn't political, but the causes and the effects of his actions are. The one time he actually speaks at length, all the words he uses are political. The news parading all around him is political. It is almost absurd that someone who dresses up like a literal clown and performs for children is so deeply steeped in politics that he doesn't need to actually care about them at all--we don't even need to talk about who the president is, or who the senator of whatever state Gotham's in is--the clown is still political. Because he's poor, because he has a mental illness, and then because he's angry, and because he lashes out, his whole existence, inaction and action alike, is politics.