#third-person global subjective point-of-view

[togglesbloggle]

What to Watch at the End

I've been happy to run in to a couple pieces of media back-to-back over the last week or so- plenty of down time, since I have that bug that's going around. They make pretty interesting companion pieces to one another, actually. With the end of the world so close now, we're starting to get a bit more genuinely thoughtful art about the subject, stuff you really can't say until you have this kind of vantage point.

They are The Power Fantasy (written by Kieron Gillen), an early-days ongoing comic of the 'deconstructing superheroes' type, and Pantheon (created by Craig Silverstein), one of those direct-to-streaming shows that get no marketing and inevitably fade away quickly; this one's an adult cartoon with two eight-episode seasons, adapted from some Ken Liu short stories, with a complete and satisfying ending. I'll put in a cut from here; targeted spoilers won't occur, but I'll be talking about theme and subject matter as well as a few specific plot beats, so you won't be entirely fresh if you read on.

Pantheon is a solid, if wobbly, stab at singularity fiction, with more of a focus on uploaded intelligence than purely synthetic (though both come in to play). It's about two-thirds YA to start, declining to about one-fifth by the end. The Power Fantasy, by contrast, is an examination of superpowers through a geopolitical lens that compares them to nuclear states; I'm not as good a judge of comics over all (particularly unfinished comics), but this one seems very high quality to me.

The intersection of the Venn Diagram of these two shows is the problem of power, and in particular the challenges of a human race handing off the baton to the entities that supersede it. They're both willing to radically change the world in response to the emergence of new forces; none of them even try to 'add up to normal' or preserve the global status quo. Both reckon with megadeath events.

I'm a... fairly specific mix of values and ethical stances, so I'm well used to seeing (and enjoying!) art and media that advance moral conclusions I don't agree with on a deep level. I used to joke that Big Hero Six was the only big-budget movie of its decade that actually captured some of my real values without compromise. (I don't think it's quite that bad, actually, I was being dramatic, but it's pretty close.)

Pantheon was a really interesting watch before I figured out what it was doing, because it felt like it was constantly dancing on the edge of either being one of those rare stories, or of utterly countermanding it with annoying pablum. It wasn't really until the second or third episode that I figured out why- it's a Socratic dialogue, a narrative producing a kind of dialectical Singularity.

The show maintains a complex array of philosophies and points of view, and makes sure that all of them get about as fair a shake as it can. This means, if you're me, then certain characters are going to confidently assert some really annoying pro-death claims and even conspire to kill uploaded loved ones for transparently bad reasons. If you're not me, you'll find someone just as annoying from another direction, I'm sure of it. Everybody has an ally in this show, and everybody has an enemy, and every point of view both causes and solves critical problems for the world.

For example, the thing simply does not decide whether an uploaded person is 'the same as' the original or a copy without the original essence; when one man is uploaded, his daughter continues thinking of him as her dad, and his wife declares herself widowed, and both choices are given gravitas and dignity. He, himself, isn't sure.

This isn't something you see in fiction hardly at all- the last time I can think of was Terra Ignota, though this show lacks that story's gem-cut perfection. It's that beautiful kind of art where almost nobody is evil, and almost everything is broken. And something a little bit magical happens when you do this, even imperfectly, because the resulting narrative doesn't live in any single one of their moral universes; it emerges from all of them, complexly and much weirder than a single simplistic point of view would have it. And they have to commit to the bit, because the importance of dialogue is the core, actual theme and moral center of this show.

The part of rationalism I've always been least comfortable with has been its monomania, the desire to sculpt one perfect system and then subject all of reality to it. This becomes doomerism very quickly; in short order, rationalists notice 'out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made', and then conclude that we're all very definitely going to die, once the singleton infinite-power system takes over, because it too will be flawed. (e.g. this joking-not-joking post by Big Yud.)

And don't get me wrong, I do take that concern seriously. I don't think I can conclusively, definitely convince myself that rationalism is wrong on this point, not to a degree of confidence that lets me ignore that risk. I don't at all begrudge the people devoting their entire professional lives to avoiding that outcome, even though I don't take it as given or even as particularly likely myself.

But it is precisely that monomania that is the central villain of this show, if it even has one. Breakdowns in dialogue, the assertion of unilateral control, conquering the world for its own good. The future, this show says, is multipolar, and we get there together or not at all.

That's a tremendously beautiful message, and a tremendously important one. I do wish it was more convincing.

The Power Fantasy works, quite hard, to build believably compassionate personalities into the fabric of its narrative. It doesn't take easy ways out, it doesn't give destroy-the-world levels of power to madmen or fools. Much like Pantheon, it gives voice to multiple, considered, and profoundly beautiful philosophies of life. Its protagonists have (sometimes quite serious) flaws, but only in the sense that some of the best among us have flaws; one of them is, more or less literally, an angel.

And that's why the slow, grinding story of slow, grinding doom is so effective and so powerful.

In a way that Pantheon does not, TPF reckons with the actual, specific analysis of escalation towards total destruction. Instead of elevating dialogue to the level of the sacred, it explores the actual limits and tendencies of that dialogue. It shows, again and again, how those good-faith negotiations are simply and tragically not quite good enough, with every new development dragging the world just an inch closer to the brink, making peace just a little bit more impossible. Those compassionate, wise superpowers are trapped in a nightmare that's slowly constricting around them, and they're compassionate and wise enough to know exactly what that means while remaining entirely unable to stop it.

It's most directly and obviously telling a story about the cold war, of course, not about artificial intelligence per se. The 'atomics' of TPF are just X-Men with the serial numbers filed off, and are therefore not constructed artifacts the way that uploaded and synthetic minds are; there's some nod to an 'superpowers arms race' in the AI sense of the term, but it's not a core theme. But these are still 'more than human' in important ways, with several of the characters qualifying directly as superintelligences in one way or another.

The story isn't complete (just getting started, really), so I don't want to speak too authoritatively about its theme or conclusions. But it's safe to say that the moral universe it lives in isn't a comfortable one. Echoing rationalists, the comic opens with an arresting line of dialogue: "The ethical thing to do, of course, would be to conquer the world."

In his excellent book Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom discusses multipolarity somewhat, and takes a rather dim view of it. He sees no hope for good outcomes that way, and argues that it will likely be extremely unstable. In other words, it has the ability to cloud the math, for a little while but it's ultimately just a transitional phase before we reach some kind of universal subordination to a single system.

The Power Fantasy describes such a situation, where six well-intentioned individuals are trying to share the world with one another, and shows beat-by-beat how they fail.

Pantheon cheats outrageously to make its optimism work- close relationships between just the right people, shackles on the superintelligences in just the right degree, lucky breaks at just the right time. It also has, I think, a rather more vague understanding of the principles at play (though it's delightfully faithful to the nerd culture in other ways; there's constant nods to Lain and Ghost in the Shell, including some genuinely funny sight gags, and I'm pretty sure one of the hacker characters is literally using the same brand of mouse as me).

TPF doesn't always show its work, lots of the story is told in fragments through flashbacks and nonlinear fragments. But what it shows, it shows precisely and without compromise or vagueness. It does what it can to stake you to the wall with iron spikes, no wiggle room, no flexibility.

But all the same, there's an odd problem, right? We survived the Cold War.

TPF would argue (I suspect) that we survived because the system collapsed to a singleton- the United States emerged as the sole superpower, with the Pax Americana reigning over the world undisputed for much of the last forty years. There were only two rivals, not six, and when one went, the game functionally ended.

In other words, to have a future, we need a Sovereign.

So let me go further back- the conspicuous tendency of biospheres to involve complex ecosystems with no 'dominant' organism. Sure, certain adaptations radiate quickly outward; sometimes killing and displacing much of what came before. But nature simply gives us no prior record of successful singletons emerging from competitive and dynamic environments, ever. Not even humans, not even if you count our collective species as one individual; we're making progress, but Malaria and other such diseases still prey on us, outside our control for now.

TPF would argue, I suspect, that there's a degree of power at which this stops being true- the power to annihilate the world outright, which has not yet been achieved but will be soon.

But that, I think, has not yet been shown to my satisfaction.

Obligate singleton outcomes are a far, far more novel claim than their proponents traditionally accept, and I think the burden of proof must be much higher than simply having a good argument for why it ought to be true. A model isn't enough; models are useful, not true. I'm hungry for evidence, and fictional evidence doesn't count.

It's an interesting problem, even with the consequences looming so profoundly across our collective horizon right now. TPF feels correct-as-in-precise, the way that economists and game theorists are precise. But economics and game theory are not inductive sciences; they are models, theories, arguments, deductions. They're not observations, and not to be trusted as empirical observations are trusted. Pantheon asserts again and again the power of dialogue and communication, trusts the multipolar world. And that's where my moral and analytical instincts lie too, at least to some degree. I concern myself with deep time, and deep time is endlessly, beautifully plural. But Pantheon doesn't have the rigor to back that up- this is hope, not deduction, and quite reckless in its way. Trying to implement dialectical approaches in anything like a formal system has led to colossal tragedy, again and again.

One narrative is ruthlessly rigorous and logically potent, but persistently unable to account for the real world as I've seen it. The other is vague, imprecise, overconfident, and utterly beautiful, and feels in a deep way like a continuation of the reality that I find all around me- but only feels. Both are challenging, in their way.

It's a bit scary, to be this uncertain about something this consequential. This is a question around which so much pivots- the answer to the Drake paradox, the nature of the world-to-come, the permanence of death. But I simply don't know.

[disregardcanon]

some new project 2025 pages, some new analysis

the third "promise" focuses on "sovereignty, borders, and global threats"

"ordered liberty" is SUCH an interesting choice of wording as a national ideal! who exactly gets to "order" this liberty! i have about 40 guess for you.

the woke left does not trust "the american people" and "disdains the Constitution's restrictions on their ambitions"! what are these restrictions, exactly? you haven't argued for why exactly you think the "administrative state" is unconstitutional? is it perhaps because you don't have evidence, you just have buzz words?

never seen such anti-intellectualism in my life.

however... there are some points being made towards legitimate, justified anger that was not at all addressed by the democrats going into this election. the line "contemptuously call fly-over country" is. just an accurate description of how a lot of people on The Side of the Aisle I Belong To view me and mine.

they really hate being part of international clubs and being beholden to other nations. at all. like oh no nato treaties that didn't go through congress! un treaties that didn't go through congress! yeah. we kind of. share the planet. american isolationism is back in!

.... are they really alluding to fucking waco as the pillar of american ideals? WACO?!?!

"intellectual sophistication, advanced degrees" have "no bearing" on a person's knowledge of how to live well. well actually people who know things about subjects tend to know How To Make Those Things Happen. that kind of. comes with the territory.

apparently they hate woodrow wilson specifically with a passion. that's new info to me.

..... open borders are not an example of "cheap grace". i don't think that anti-nazi lutheran theologian dietrich bonhoeffer would agree with you that Actually Some People Broke The "Right" Law that Makes Them Subhuman.

environmentalism is "not a political cause but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals' ruthless pursuit of absolutely power in the holy water of environmental virtue". huh. have you ever heard of a little concept called... projection? like it is not WRONG that some people take environmentalism to religious extremes and that ecofascism exists, but that doesn't make The Very Concept of Not Killing the Planet something you should get rid of to own the libs. again, nuances that aren't being addressed properly on the left because we're so holier than thou and eat each other with infighting

there is a point to be made about the way that the american business industry has shifted most production overseas has hurt this country, but the idea that this must make Everyone Else Everywhere Else the super scary bad guy is absurd.

"the corporations profiting failed to to export our values of human rights and freedom" i don't trust your view of those concepts "rather they imported China's anti-american values" again, don't trust your view of "anti-american" document that views me personally as a sex offender for being kind to trans children at work.

wall street "outright cheered the elimination of america's manufacturing jobs (learn to code!)" this cheerful If You Were Only As Cool and Smart As Me You Would Be Fine IS an issue, and it is one that hasn't been addressed or rectified. however.... the way that people are allowing the President Utilizing This Document, who put elon "worst offender on earth" musk in power proves that they don't care!

"illegal immigration should be ended; not mitigated." well that's fucking terrifying. "the border sealed, not reprioritized" again: terrifying.

.... how the hell do they expect america to "control the global energy market". this is at least partially about greenland oh my fucking gOD

[dankdungeonsrpg]

Magicians in The Raven (1963)

Have you ever listened to the Sword Breaker podcast? You should, but more on that later.

Recently…

Spencer of the Keep Off The Borderlands podcast hosted a Movie Monday call in episode.

The idea behind these episodes is that once a month the podcast host picks a movie and all the listeners watch it. Then they call in to the show to share their thoughts. Since this is primarily a gaming podcast there’s an optional topic of how elements of the movie can inform our gaming.

Spencer is, I believe, the third person to take up the mantle of Movie Monday. With the previous host being Jason of Nerd’s RPG Variety Cast.

This month’s movie was Roger Corman’s The Raven from 1963.

I adore this film. It’s fun and full of petty wizards…also has nothing to do with the Poe poem, but that’s okay.

The Renaissance Wizard

One of the things that strikes me about the film is that it’s set in 1506, which is in the renaissance rather than the middle ages as I would have expected for the subject matter.

This allows the movie to do two very interesting things:

We get all the trappings of the middle ages fantasy, like castles and magic

Magic gets to be viewed as a science, or more specifically, a leisurely academic pursuit

To further drive the point home that wizards are rich academics, each magic-user in the film has a doctorate.

Boris Karloff plays a dastardly sorcerer opposite Vincent Price’s kindly magician. They’re both excellent in the film and their motivations are perfectly mundane.

Price just wants to “practice his magic quietly at home”. Whereas Karloff, the head of a brotherhood of magicians, is envious of Price’s magical powers. He doesn’t want anyone to be a threat to his position in the brotherhood and seeks to coerce Price’s knowledge.

There’s no global conquest or ancient prophecy. The Brotherhood of Magicians and Sorcerers seems to be little more than a social club. Peter Lorre’s character (also a treat in the film) even mentions how wizards meet each other at conventions. It all conjures up images of an academic society or elks lodge.

So Karloff’s character is willing to do horrible things so he can…stay president of a social club? So he can get speaking invitations to conferences and have his academic papers peer reviewed. Probably good money in being the keynote speaker at the college of alchemy’s commencement.

This is peak petty wizard comedy to me. Very reminiscent of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, specifically Rhialto the Marvellous.

Never Let Writing Go To Waste

Now I love silly wizard stuff, particularly organizations. The absurdist bureaucracy really tickles me.

This brings us back to Sword Breaker. In this all-killer no-filler podcast Logan generates lists around a single topic per episode. It’s all incredibly usable stuff. Wonder if he’s ever published it somewhere…

Anyway, for the gaming aspect of my Movie Monday call, I decided to create a table of magical societies in keeping with the mood of the film. Here they are, for your amusement:

d6 magical societies

1 - The Hermetic Order of Psychonautics

A loose knit collective of high level magic-users seeking to transcend the physical world. Meetings take place in total silence on underground lakes which are used like a giant sensory deprivation tank. Magicians then project their spirits and “sail” on metaphysical yachts in the astral sea, where they discuss enlightenment and free-form jazz. Members often dress in bright colors and carry tuning forks.

2 - The Grand Priory of Illuminates

Chaos magicians who seek to undo their alignment’s negative public perception. Specializing in happy accidents, this group uses subtle magic to alter the course of events in positive but unexpected ways. To become part of the organization, applicants must successfully add to an ever more complex Rube Goldberg machine.

3 - The Society of Reformed Diabolists

Demon worshippers, dread necromancers, and blood magicians trying to turn over a new leaf banded together to form this support group. Members meet regularly to share their experiences with foul sorcery and celebrate monthly or yearly mine stones of being evil-magic free. They also speak at local magic colleges about the dangers of dark rituals.

4 - The Brotherhood of Neptune

These far-seeing astrologers wear blue robes, are excellent swimmers, and perform divination through use of tide pools. They revere the number 8 and as such must spend 8 days a year in meditation, meet every 8 months in groups of no more or less than 8, and establish headquarters 8 blocks from any coastal city center.

5 - The Ancient Order of Pseudepigraphas (soo-di-pig-ra-fa’s)

If you’ve ever wondered how magical knowledge stays so hidden and confusing, it’s probably because of this secret society. Its members spend their time placing errors into magical texts, thwarting efforts to translate or catalog arcane information, and misattributing manuscripts. The extreme secrecy of this sect prevents meetings but they still communicate through scribbles in returned library books.

6 - The Unseen Eye

The least secret secret order you’ll ever see. These occultists are typically high society ladder climbers who seek to manipulate global events from the shadows. However, their attempts at subterfuge are undone by their need to be recognized. Meeting fliers are often posted everywhere and initiates are sent home with all manner of branded merchandise, including wristbands, tea cozies, and hats.

[redsolon]

That's fair. The political line has to be developed through struggle, and you can mess it up if you have no process. But based on what I've seen there are a lot of people who talk a radical game, but when you push them on things, you see that on some level they don't care about winning.

I suppose I'm talking about the more serious and committed forms of error, not the kind of thing that can be fixed with a tweek to practice. The people whose communist identity is built on a sense of tribal loyalty to a specific org, or staking out a radical brand while only prioritizing their own career, over and above the desire to see the war won. I know people who think communists should be seeking connections with established non-profits and union leadership above all, because the point for them is just to be Influential™️. There's a lot of people out there who've given up, even if they won't admit it to themselves.

When a group like the CR-CPUSA/Red Guards shat on everyday people for rejecting their out of touch commandism, to continue on that path in the face of countervailing evidence from the people requires that, on some level in your mind, you're placing victory on a lower level. You get in because you care about the struggle, and you stay in because you end up caring more about the org, or getting your career in politics, or whatever path it is you've chosen in the face of failure.

People can be short sighted, and stumble into opportunism and tailism, but those people are easy to correct and I don't view them as the primary problem. Getting them out of error is just a matter of political education, experience, and mentorship. It's the people who dig their heels in when you try to pull them back that I view as a threat. The kind of people who gave up on communism in the 90s and 00s but still cling to leadership positions in parties across the planet.

The dogmatic ultra-leftists may imagine themselves to be the opposite, but I still see the most egregious prioritizing themselves or their orgs over the victory of communism in some way, while calling it communism. And some have admitted to me that they view revolution as so far out it's irrelevant, or they think it's impossible because of the inherently reactionary nature of the people. Third-Worldism becomes their ideological cover for giving up while holding on to their self-identification as a radical.

People can say they intend whatever, but at a certain point you have to analyze their priorities by what they do and what they push for. This is the subjective condition of humanity, that our consciousness imposes a faulty unity on the contradictions within our own brain. If you believe in victory and prioritize it, then you'll have a motivation to check and correct yourself. If you stop believing, the sides that care about clout or personal advancement can take over, even if you're still saying all the things you learned to believe.

To reverse it: I'd argue a key part of correcting a comrade's tendency for opportunism or dogmatism, is to remotivate and refocus them on the primacy of winning actual victories, here and now, for global communism.

Not sure now how I would phrase it to communicate that.

Both opportunism and dogmatism arrise from a common source: nihilistic subculturalism. Once you give up on the possibility of victory, revolutionary politics can only be driven by personal goals--professional advancement, or clique membership. It no longer matters if you fail to attack capitalism or the people reject you. Political struggle becomes ritualized.

[kathydavie]

Book Review: Michelle Sagara's The Emperor's Wolves

Book Review: Michelle Sagara’s The Emperor’s Wolves

First in The Wolves of Elantra fantasy series (and 0.1 in The Chronicles of Elantra series) revolving around Severn Handred, the Wolf first assigned to work with Kaylin Neya in Cast in Shadow, 1. My Take Sagara has, er, had been making me wonder about Severn and how he ended up with the Wolves. Now, at last, we get to find out. I love that we learn more about Kaylin’s background from Severn’s…

[ireallylikejonouchi]

ℙ𝕤𝕪𝕣𝕖𝕟 ℝ𝕖𝕧𝕚𝕖𝕨

Originally, this was just going to be my quick thoughts after reading the manga, but as I wrote this, I realized I have more to say than I intitially thought. Reading the manga before reading this is recommended, not only because of plot spoilers but because of the plot details I may leave out. I’m mentioning only what I think is relevant to the point I’m making, so if something sounds amiss to you, a non-Psyren reader, then the manga itself probably has what you’re missing.

This is the second review I’ve done, and it also happens to be on a Shonen manga that was mildly popular enough to get an official English translation but never popped off in the west, or in the case of Psyren, sadly never got an anime. I hope to do more of these in the future, since I imagine there’s not a lot of thematic analysis on these types of manga. The average person seems to assume there’s nothing of worth to get out of these childrens’ manga, and only series with big enough followings like Naruto or One Piece seem to get the analysis they deserve. Hopefully, I can right this wrong just a little bit with my reviews.

Psyren is about the nature of humanity. Very original, I know. It’s not the greatest manga ever made, but I’m a firm believer that every piece of media like this has something of worth to say and I would like to hear it out.

Ageha Yoshina is a troubled high schooler. It doesn’t really show in how he acts, though. At least, not at first. Before he time travels into the future and obtains psychic powers, he’s introduced gleefully beating up some school bullies after being paid by a girl from his class. Whether he’s doing it out of the goodness of his heart, to make money, or simply to let out some anger, is left ambiguous. With the context of the entire series, however, what he did it for doesn’t matter. In my opinion, the reason he did this was a combination of all three. Ageha is shown to be unnaturally kind and helpful to people that he has sympathy for throughout the course of the manga. He is also known for being self-interested, not so much to be considered a bad guy, but enough to be considered a teenager making his way through an unsatisfying life. Lastly, and most importantly, Ageha is a bit destructive. This will be fleshed out much more later on, but Ageha himself seems intrinsically tied to destruction.

To imply that destruction is inherently negative, however, is deductive. Drastic measures for the sake of your own justice are common place amongst the heroes and villains of this series. Ageha, who gets himself into the action of the story through his desire to help a sad girl, ends up finding himself unable to feel sympathy for a member of the villain organization that he ends up nearly killing. This character is not written in a sympathetic manner, but this will come up later with Ageha’s refusal to see our main antagonist’s point of view. Other characters in the final arc, who are previously shown to go out of their way to spare villains, swiftly go for the kill during the final arc when the stakes are high.

In chapter 1, Ageha is shown to be deep in thought regarding the current state of the world. Needless wars, global warming... He can’t imagine a future in which these issues are solved. However, he resolves to himself to keep living in the present and not let the future worry him. This is a good and healthy mindset more often than not, but as we see from how Ageha’s future fighting friends feel about it, and how Ageha himself comes to resonate with their feelings, lying back and accepting your fate isn’t good enough. The series makes it very clear that humanity is corrupt, but this is a hopeful story about doing everything you can to fight against the “fate” you’re given.

Before we can continue talking about Ageha, we must discuss our main antagonist.

Miroku Amagi was the third subject of the Grigori project, a project funded by the government which implanted children with psychic powers and subjected them to physical and emotional torment for the sake of gaining their powers. Miroku and his sister, Number 7, were both very kind, sweet children. They were sent to the project by their parents for a large sum of money. Number 7 quickly learned to shut off her emotions to prevent as much mental damage as possible, but Miroku remained cheerful, and hopeful that he would be able to meet his family again soon, which he was lied to about. His parents had abandoned him, they had no means of contacting them. Eventually, as Miroku grew, he became jaded, and the kindness had left his eyes. A sympathetic scientist allowed him a moment of rest away from his psi-reducing technology for his birthday, which gave him the chance to burn the facility to the ground with his psychic powers, leaving only the sympathetic scientist alive, albeit leaving him under strict surveillance to assure he wouldn’t become a detriment to Miroku’s plans. Miroku offered his sister a spot in the new world he would soon create, a world where people with special gifts wouldn’t be subjugated and tortured for their gifts, but she denied, unable to see the man that was once her brother doing such a thing. Number 7 would then go on to create the Psyren game, which lead Ageha and the protagonists into the future world, so that they may find out more about the future and inevitably stop Miroku’s schemes. 

Miroku’s ability to steal the souls of others is likely symbolic of his innate hatred of humanity, not merely their actions but the way that humans are able to shamelessly embody hypocritical traits, such as kindness and destruction, without acknowledging that the things they hate about psionists are present within themselves. While labeling Psionists as monsters without a heart, they themselves created them out of pure greed. The heroes, also Psionists, refuse to accept Miroku’s drastic measures, yet they themselves will kill for what they believe, from Miroku’s perspective being the same thing as he is doing. Such hypocrisy doesn’t compute with him, and so must be destroyed. By using their souls to power himself and leaving them an empty husk, he strips them of such contradictions and leaves them the same as him; empty.

In contrast, Miroku Amagi himself may very well be void of contradictions, at least on the surface. The mask he wears to others is that of a God, beckoning destruction and creation for a new future. Unbeknownst to him, however, he is not completely void of the feelings which he observes in humans. He longs to fix this corrupt world just like Ageha, but their methods and points of view are very different. To be described later, he is also a person that wants love. 

“I am the sky around which destiny revolves.”

This quote was in my head for the majority of the climax. It took me a bit to realize what the core message of this manga was, or at least how it tied into the story and characters. I realized after reading, however, that I was focused on it for the wrong reasons. Psyren isn’t a story about fated rivalries or destiny, but it’s about the issues with deeming people as “special.” Miroku, who is artificially created to BE special, is naturally, well, special. However, out of hatred for his captors, and for the human world that allowed such a thing to be acceptable, he seeks to remake the world to accommodate special people like himself. A world filed with PSI, where normal people are either given psychic powers, transformed into monsters, or killed.

Both normal humans and Psionists are portrayed as complicated people, not intrinsically good or evil. Not to say that every character is morally gray, but for every twisted monster from one group there’s a genuinely good, yet troubled person, or an awful person now attempting to do good.

Miroku attempts to ascend above the humans that made him. He attempts to distance himself from this gray cycle by establishing himself as the dominant force in this new world. However, in his final encounter with the heroes, he would get to meet his sister again, and through receiving her will, he recalled her words.

He realizes his mistake. In his delusions of grandeur, he lost track of what made humans truly happy. It’s easy to get lost in the despair of the modern world, as Psyren’s post-apocalyptic setting makes clear, but despite being capable of both great good and great evil, humans are simple beings that need only love to get by. In the final battle, Ageha as well is nearly killed, but is awakened by his friends calling out to him. In this battle, may I add, Ageha and Miroku work together for the first time, in order to defeat the embodiment of Psionic energy that was attempting to swallow the planet. Although unfortunately rushed thanks to the series’ early cancellation, the idea here is clear. The two opposites, the Sun and the Moon, manage to overcome the physical representation of the idea that some people are special, as in they are exempt from what makes humans human. Nobody can escape the nature of humanity within them, as much as a person may try to shut off their emotions, like Number 7 or Sakurako, or attempt to force everyone into subjugation, like Miroku or Grana, everybody is human, and everybody does what they believe is right for a cause they believe is just. 

While I’m not here to analyze every character, the majority of the main cast serves to strengthen the general theme, while mainly serving as their own characters. Kyle’s overwhelming desire for the thrill of combat during the final arc when stakes are the highest they can be, Kirisaki’s cowardly nature coming back around and causing him to become an incredibly powerful anti-psychic powers combatant, and Oboro’s original nature of being a curious, slightly emotionless man becoming warped by his long trip through the future as he implants himself with Taboo cores, the power sources of the monsters that live in the future, and acts purely out of his own desires to have an interesting life, chaotically “supporting” the protagonists near the end. Most notably would be the main love interest, Sakurako Amamiya, who stores the emotions that she can’t handle away in her subconscious, becoming a cold woman. However, her deep thoughts become a sentient personality and threaten to overtake her, but through accepting this part of herself, the two sides may fight together, expressing both sides of her personality and both sides of humanity. Sakurako harnessing this power and fighting alongside it is an inherent contradiction. One part of her was born from hiding her emotions away, and the other is the result of lacking said emotions, so how can they both exist? The answer is, they are not so simple. They are people, they are humans. They have their own will beyond why and how they were created.

Getting back to Ageha for a moment, his character arc is not inherently a positive one. If it were purely positive, it likely wouldn’t get across the message the way the author wanted. My only complaint is how quickly he comes to terms with himself and his issues, but this is due to a forcefully rushed ending by cancellation and I’ll be discussing it nonetheless, as the core idea gets through, simply subpar execution.

In the final battle against Miroku Amagi, Ageha is overcome with rage at Miroku’s attempt to kill his sister and cut off the last bit of human connection he has stopping him from reaching true impartiality. His ability, the Melzez Door, takes over his body and gives him a new form, where he becomes unable to hold back his anger and hatred for this man. While it had been heavily suggested up to this point that the nature of humanity is to act according to one’s own beliefs and not what is correct or incorrect, Ageha here refuses to listen to Miroku, and simply crushes him. Whether this is morally justified or not, Ageha is becoming more and more like Miroku. Number 7 even notes that she chose Ageha to help her because he reminds her of Miroku.

In the aftermath of the fight, Ageha is once again worried by his own turbulent emotions. If Ageha represents destruction, then one can only invoke change by accepting the destruction within themselves, however Ageha was swallowed by it. The one who can change the world is one who can accept the destructive nature of humanity, not one who denies it as Miroku does.

Ageha struggles to accept, however. Naturally so, no one person can achieve true enlightenment, and “accepting destruction” is not a naturally positive thing either. The light and the dark, human nature, is complicated, nobody will ever be satisfied with one single conclusion, other than the one you decide for yourself.

The final battle is against Ouroboros, which was earlier mentioned to be a reference to the deity of creation and destruction, the snake which continuously swallows itself in an endless circle. Wholeness, infinity. Ageha confronts the present Miroku, in his new “monstrous” form. By becoming a monster, he’s able to confront humanity’s destroyer. However, he is gravely injured during the fight and nearly dies. He is awakened from his 6 month coma by his friends calling out for him. The only way for one to truly confront humanity’s, they must steep themselves in said darkness, but through the bonds and connections you’ve formed, you tether yourself to reality, no matter how far gone you may be, no matter how hopeless the future may be.

A common symbol that reappears throughout the series is phones. By picking up mysterious phone calls from Nemesis Q, later revealed to be Miroku’s sister Number 7, the heroes are transported into the future, so that they may find out the truth about Miroku for her. Although Number 7 portrays herself as a hardened, empty person, describing herself as above the good and bad that humans are so engulfed by, ultimately she began the story so that she could get closer to her brother and learn why he became such a person, even if she doesn’t say it like that.

Phones are the method through which the characters are able to communicate with themselves in the present and future. Phones connect people. Nemesis Q’s catchphrase whenever transporting the heroes between times is “This world is connected.” You see how it becomes relevant by the end of this manga. As much as it may feel impossible to communicate with people sometimes, or as much as you may feel like you can’t even communicate with yourself, through basic human kindness, embodied by Number 7 through her message to Miroku and telephones through their connection to Number 7 herself, the world may become connected once again, and we can face our future with a smile. 

No matter what happens down the road, our world is connected. Thank you for reading.

[rawliverandcigarettes]

Mass Effect Retribution, a review

Mass Effect Retribution is the third book in the official Mass Effect trilogy by author Drew Karpyshyn, who happens to also be Lead Writer for Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2.

I didn’t expect to pick it up, because to be very honest I didn’t expect to like it. 9 years ago I borrowed Mass Effect Revelations, and I still recall the experience as underwhelming. But this fateful fall of 2020 I had money (yay) and I saw the novel on the shelf of a swedish nerd store. I guess guilt motivated me to give the author another try: guilt, because I’ve been writing a Mass Effect fanfiction for an ungodly amount of years and I’ve been deathly afraid of lore that might contradict my decisions ever since I started -but I knew this book covered elements that are core to plot elements of my story, and I was willing to let my anxiety to the door and see what was up.

Disclaimer: I didn’t reread Mass Effect Revelation before plunging into this read, and entirely skipped Ascension. So anything in relation to character introduction and continuity will have to be skipped.

Back-cover pitch (the official, unbiased, long one)

Humanity has reached the stars, joining the vast galactic community of alien species. But beyond the fringes of explored space lurk the Reapers, a race of sentient starships bent on “harvesting” the galaxy’s organic species for their own dark purpose. The Illusive Man, leader of the pro-human black ops group Cerberus, is one of the few who know the truth about the Reapers. To ensure humanity’s survival, he launches a desperate plan to uncover the enemy’s strengths—and weaknesses—by studying someone implanted with modified Reaper technology. He knows the perfect subject for his horrific experiments: former Cerberus operative Paul Grayson, who wrested his daughter from the cabal’s control with the help of Ascension project director Kahlee Sanders. But when Kahlee learns that Grayson is missing, she turns to the only person she can trust: Alliance war hero Captain David Anderson. Together they set out to find the secret Cerberus facility where Grayson is being held. But they aren’t the only ones after him. And time is running out. As the experiments continue, the sinister Reaper technology twists Grayson’s mind. The insidious whispers grow ever stronger in his head, threatening to take over his very identity and unleash the Reapers on an unsuspecting galaxy. This novel is based on a Mature-rated video game.

Global opinion (TL;DR)

I came in hoping to be positively surprised and learn a thing or two about Reapers, about Cerberus and about Aria T’loak. I wasn’t, and I didn’t learn much. What I did learn was how cool ideas can get wasted by the very nature of game novelization, as the defects are not singular to this novel but quite widespread in this genre, and how annoyed I can get at an overuse of dialogue tags. The pacing is good and the narrative structure alright: everything else poked me in the wrong spots and rubbed how the series have always handled violence on my face with cruder examples. If I was on Good Reads, I’d probably give it something like 2 stars, for the pacing, some of the ideas, and my general sympathy for the IP novel struggle.

The indepth review continue past this point, just know there will be spoilers for the series, the Omega DLC which is often relevant, and the book itself!

What I enjoyed

Drew Karpyshyn is competent in narrative structure, and that does a lot for the pacing. Things rarely drag, and we get from one event to the next seamlessly. I’m not surprised this is one of the book’s qualities, as it comes from the craft of a game writer: pacing and efficiency are mandatory skills in this field. I would have preferred a clearer breaking point perhaps, but otherwise it’s a nice little ride that doesn’t ask a lot of effort from you (I was never tempted to DNF the book because it was so easy to read).

This book is packed with intringuing ideas -from venturing in the mind of the Illusive Man to assist, from the point of view of the victim, to Grayson’s biological transformation and assimilation into the Reaper hivemind, we get plenty to be excited for. I was personally intrigued about Liselle, Aria T’loak’s secret daughter, and eager to get a glimpse at the mind of the Queen Herself -also about how her collaboration with Cerberus came to be. Too bad none of these ideas go anywhere nor are being dealt with in an interesting way!!! But the concepts themselves were very good, so props for setting up interesting premices.

Pain is generally well described. It gets the job done.

I liked Sanak, the batarian that works as a second to Aria. He’s not very well characterized and everyone thinks he’s dumb (rise up for our national himbo), even though he reads almost smarter than her on multiple occasions, but I was happy whenever he was on the page, so yay for Sanak. But it might just be me having a bias for batarians.

Cool to have Kai Leng as a point of view character. I wasn’t enthralled by what was done with it, as he remains incredibly basic and as basically hateable and ungrounded than in Mass Effect 3 (I think he’s very underwhelming as a villain and he should have been built up in Mass Effect 2 to be effective). But there were some neat moments, such as the description of the Afterlife by Grayson who considers it as tugging at his base instincts, compared to Leng’s description of it where everything is deemed disgusting. The execution is not the best, but the concept was fun.

Pre-Reaperification Paul Grayson wasn’t the worst point of view to follow. I wasn’t super involved in his journey and didn’t care when he died one way or the other, but I empathized with his problems and hoped he would find a way out of the cycle of violence. The setup of his character arc was interesting, it’s just sad that any resolution -even negative- was dropped to focus on Reapers and his relationship with Kahlee Sanders, as I think the latter was the least interesting part.

The cover is cool and intringuing. Very soapy. It’s my favorite out of all the official novels, as it owns the cheesier aspect of the series, has nice contrasts and immediately asks questions. Very 90s/2000s. It’s great.

You may notice every thing I enjoyed was coated in complaints, because it’s a reflection of my frustration at this book for setting up interesting ideas and then completely missing the mark in their execution. So without further due, let’s talk about what I think the book didn’t do right.

1. Dumb complaints that don’t matter much

After reading the entire book, I am still a bit confused at to why Tim (the Illusive Man’s acronym is TIM in fandom, but I find immense joy in reffering to him as just Tim) wants his experimentation to be carried out on Grayson specifically, especially when getting to him is harder than pretty much anyone else (also wouldn’t pushing the very first experiments on alien captives make more sense given it’s Cerberus we’re talking about?). It seem to be done out of petty revenge, which is fine, but it still feels like quite the overlook to mess with a competent fighter, enhance him, and then expect things to stay under control (which Tim kind of doesn’t expect to, and that’s even weirder -why waste your components on something you plan to terminate almost immediately). At the same time, the pettiness is the only characterization we get out of Tim so good I guess? But if so, I wished it would have been accentuated to seem even more deliberate (and not have Tim regret to see it in himself, which flattens him and doesn’t inform the way he views the world and himself -but we’ll get to that).

I really disliked the way space travel is characterized. And that might be entirely just me, and perhaps it doesn’t contradict the rest of the lore, but space travel is so fast. People pop up left and right in a matter of hours. At some point we even get a mention of someone being able to jump 3 different Mass Relays and then arrive somewhere in 4 hours. I thought you first had to discharge your ship around a stellar object before being able to engage in the next jump (and that imply finding said object, which would have to take more than an hour). It’s not that big of a deal, but it completely crammed this giant world to a single boulevard for me and my hard-science-loving tastes. Not a big deal, but not a fan at all of this choice.

You wouldn’t believe how often people find themselves in a fight naked or in their underwear. It happens at least 3 times (and everyone naked survives -except one, we’ll get to her later).

Why did I need to know about this fifteen year’s old boner for his older teacher. Surely there were other ways to have his crush come across without this detail, or then have it be an actual point of tension in their relationship and not just a “teehee” moment. Weird choice imo.

I’m not a fan of the Talons. I don’t find them interesting or compelling. There is nothing about them that informs us on the world they live in. The fact they’re turian-ruled don’t tell us anything about turian culture that, say, the Blue Suns don’t tell us already. It’s a generic gang that is powerful because it is. I think they’re very boring, in this book and in the Omega DLC alike (a liiittle less in the DLC because of Nyreen, barely). Not a real criticism, I just don’t care for them at all.

I might just be very ace, but I didn’t find Anderson and Kahlee Sanders to have much chemistry. Same for Kahlee and Grayson (yes we do have some sort of love-triangle-but-not-really, but it’s not very important and it didn’t bother me much). Their relationships were all underwhelming to me, and I’ll explain why in part 4.

The red sand highs are barely described, and very safely -probably not from a place of intimate knowledge with drugs nor from intense research. Addiction is a delicate topic, and I feel like it could have been dealt with better, or not be included at all.

There are more of these, but I don’t want to turn this into a list of minor complaints for things that are more a matter of taste than craft quality or thematic relevance. So let’s move on.

2. Who cares about aliens in a Mass Effect novel

Now we’re getting into actual problems, and this one is kind of endemic to the Mass Effect novels (I thought the same when I read Revelation 9 years ago, though maybe less so as Saren in a PoV character -but I might have forgotten so there’s that). The aliens are described and characterized in the most uncurious, uninspired manner. Krogans are intimidating brutes. Turians are rigid. Asaris are sexy. Elcors are boring. Batarians are thugs (there is something to be said with how Aria’s second in command is literally the same batarian respawned with a different name in Mass Effect 2, this book, then the Omega DLC). Salarians are weak nerds. (if you allow me this little parenthesis because of course I have to complain about salarian characterization: the only salarian that speaks in the book talks in a cheap ripoff of Mordin’s speech pattern, which sucks because it’s specific to Mordin and not salarians as a whole, and is there to be afraid of a threat as a joke. This is SUCH a trope in the original trilogy -especially past Mass Effect 1 when they kind of give up on salarians except for a few chosen ones-, that salarians’ fear is not to be taken seriously and the only salarians who are to be considered don’t express fear at all -see Mordin and Kirrahe. It happens at least once per game, often more. This is one of the reasons why the genophage subplot is allowed to be so morally simple in ME3 and remove salarians from the equation. I get why they did that, but it’s still somewhat of a copeout. On this front, I have to give props to Andromeda for actually engaging with violence on salarians in a serious manner. It’s a refreshing change) I didn’t learn a single thing about any of these species, how they work, what they care about in the course of these 79750 words. I also didn’t learn much about their relationships to other species, including humans. I’ll mention xenophobia in more details later, but this entire aspect of the story takes a huge hit because of this lack of investment of who these species are.

I’ve always find Mass Effect, despite its sprawling universe full of vivid ideas and unique perspectives, to be strangely enamoured with humans, and it has never been so apparent than here. Only humans get to have layers, deserving of empathy and actual engagement. Only their pain is real and important. Only their death deserve mourning (we’ll come back to that). I’d speculate this comes from the same place that was terrified to have Liara as a love interest in ME1 in case she alienated the audience, and then later was surprised when half the fanbase was more interested in banging the dinosaur-bird than their fellow humans: Mass Effect often seem afraid of losing us and breaking our capacity for self-projection. It’s a very weird concern, in my opinion, that reveals the most immature, uncertain and soapy parts of the franchise. Here it’s punched to eleven, and I find it disappointing. It also have a surprising effect on the narrative: again, we’ll come back to that.

3. The squandered potential of Liselle and Aria

Okay. This one hurts. Let’s talk about Liselle: she’s introduced in the story as a teammate to Grayson, who at the time works as a merc for Aria T’loak on Omega, and also sleeps with him on the regular. She likes hitting the Afterlife’s dancefloor: she’s very admired there, as she’s described as extremely attractive. One night after receiving a call from Grayson, she rejoins him in his apartment. They have sex, then Kai Leng and other Cerberus agents barge in to capture Grayson -a fight break out (the first in a long tradition of naked/underwear fights), and both of them are stunned with tranquilizers. Grayson is to be taken to the Illusive Man. Kai Leng decides to slit Liselle’s throat as she lays unconscious to cover their tracks. When Aria T’loak and her team find her naked on a bed, throat gaping and covered in blood, Liselle is revealed, through her internal monologue, to be Aria’s secret daughter -that she kept secret for both of their safety. So Liselle is a sexpot who dies immediately in a very brutal and disempowered manner. This is a sad way to handle Aria T’loak’s daughter I think, but I assume it was done to give a strong motivation to the mother, who thinks Grayson did it. And also, it’s a cool setup to explore her psyche: how does she feel about business catching up with her in such a personal manner, how does she feel about the fact she couldn’t protect her own offspring despite all her power, what’s her relationship with loss and death, how does she slip when under high emotional stress, how does she deal with such a vulnerable position of having to cope without being able to show any sign of weakness... But the book does nothing with that. The most interesting we get is her complete absence of outward reaction when she sees her daughter as the centerpiece of a crime scene. Otherwise we have mentions that she’s not used to lose relatives, vague discomfort when someone mentions Liselle might have been raped, and vague discomfort at her body in display for everyone to gawk at. It’s not exactly revelatory behavior, and the missed potential is borderline criminal. It also doesn’t even justify itself as a strong motivation, as Aria vaguely tries to find Grayson again and then gives up until we give her intel on a silver platter. Then it almost feels as if she forgot her motivation for killing Grayson, and is as motivated by money than she is by her daughter’s murder (and that could be interesting too, but it’s not done in a deliberate way and therefore it seems more like a lack of characterization than anything else).

Now, to Aria. Because this book made me realize something I strongly dislike: the framing might constantly posture her as intelligent, but Aria T’loak is... kind of dumb, actually? In this book alone she’s misled, misinformed or tricked three different times. We’re constantly ensured she’s an amazing people reader but never once do we see this ability work in her favor -everyone fools her all the time. She doesn’t learn from her mistakes and jump from Cerberus trap to Cerberus trap, and her loosing Omega to them later is laughably stupid after the bullshit Tim put her through in this book alone. I’m not joking when I say the book has to pull out an entire paragraph on how it’s easier to lie to smart people to justify her complete dumbassery during her first negotiation with Tim. She doesn’t seem to know anything about how people work that could justify her power. She’s not politically savvy. She’s not good at manipulation. She’s just already established and very, very good at kicking ass. And I wouldn’t mind if Aria was just a brutish thug who maintains her power through violence and nothing else, that could also be interesting to have an asari act that way. But the narrative will not bow to the reality they have created for her, and keep pretending her flaw is in extreme pride only. This makes me think of the treatment of Sansa Stark in the latest seasons of Game of Thrones -the story and everyone in it is persuaded she’s a political mastermind, and in the exact same way I would adore for it to be true, but it’s just... not. It’s even worse for Aria, because Sansa does have victories by virtue of everyone being magically dumber than her whenever convenient. Aria just fails, again and again, and nobody seem to ever acknowledge it. Sadly her writing here completely justifies her writing in the Omega DLC and the comics, which I completely loathe; but turns out Aria isn’t smart or savvy, not even in posture or as a façade. She’s just violent, entitled, easily fooled, and throws public tantrums when things don’t go her way. And again, I guess that would be fine if only the narrative would recognize what she is. Me, I will gently ignore most of this (in her presentation at least, because I think it’s interesting to have something pitiful when you dig a little) and try to write her with a bit more elevation. But this was a very disappointing realization to have.

4. The squandered potential of Grayson and the Reapers

The waste of a subplot with Aria and Liselle might have hurt me more in a personal way, but what went down between Grayson and the Reapers hurts the entire series in a startling manner. And it’s so infuriating because the potential was there. Every setpiece was available to create something truly unique and disturbing by simply following the series’ own established lore. But this is not what happens. See, when The Illusive Man, our dearest Tim, captures Grayson for a betrayal that happened last book (something about his biotic autistic daughter -what’s the deal with autistic biotics being traumatized by Cerberus btw), he decides to use him as the key part of an experiment to understand how Reapers operate. So he forcefully implants the guy with Reaper technology (what they do exactly is unclear) to study his change into a husk and be prepared when Reapers come for humanity -it’s also compared to what happened with Saren when he “agreed” to be augmented by Sovereign. From there on, Grayson slowly turns into a husk. Doesn’t it sound fascinating, to be stuck in the mind of someone losing themselves to unknowable monsters? If you agree with me then I’m sorry because the execution is certainly... not that. The way the author chooses to describe the event is to use the trope of mind control used in media like Get Out: Grayson taking the backseat of his own mind and body. And I haaaaate it. I hate it so much. I don’t hate the trope itself (it can be interesting in other media, like Get Out!), but I loathe that it’s used here in a way that totally contradicts both the lore and basic biology. Grayson doesn’t find himself manipulated. He doesn’t find himself justifying increasingly jarring actions the way Saren has. He just... loses control of himself, disagreeing with what’s being done with him but not able to change much about it. He also can fight back and regain control sometimes -but his thoughts are almost untainted by Reaper influence. The technology is supposed to literally replace and reorganize the cells of his body; is this implying that body and mind are separated, that there maybe exists a soul that transcends indoctrination? I don’t know but I hate it. This also implies that every victim of the Reaper is secretely aware of what they’re doing and pained and disagreeing with their own actions. And I’m sorry but if it’s true, I think this sucks ass and removes one of the creepiest ideas of the Mass Effect universe -that identity can and will be lost, and that Reapers do not care about devouring individuality and reshaping it to the whims of their inexorable march. Keeping a clear stream of consciousness in the victim’s body makes it feel like a curse and not like a disease. None of the victims are truly gone that way, and it removes so much of the tragic powerlessness of organics in their fight against the machines. Imagine if Saren watched himself be a meanie and being like “nooo” from within until he had a chance to kill himself in a near-victorious battle, compared to him being completely persuaded he’s acting for the good of organic life until, for a split second, he comes to realize he doesn’t make any sense and is loosing his mind like someone with dementia would, and needs to grasp to this instant to make the last possible thing he could do to save others and his own mind from domination. I feel so little things for Saren in the former case, and so much for the latter. But it might just be me: I’m deeply touched by the exploration of how environment and things like medication can change someone’s behavior, it’s such a painfully human subject while forceful mind control is... just kind of cheap.

SPEAKING OF THE REAPERS. Did you know “The Reapers” as an entity is an actual character in this book? Because it is. And “The Reapers” is not a good character. During the introduction of Grayson and explaining his troubles, we get presented with the mean little voice in his head. It’s his thoughts in italics, nothing crazy, in fact it’s a little bit of a copeout from actually implementing his insecurities into the prose. But I gave the author the benefit of the doubt, as I knew Grayson would be indoctrinated later, and I fully expected the little voice to slowly start twisting into what the Reapers suggested to him. This doesn’t happen, or at least not in that slowburn sort of way. Instead the little voice is dropped almost immediately, and the Reapers are described, as a presence. And as the infection progresses, what Grayson do become what the Reapers do. The Reapers have emotions, it turns out. They’re disgusted at organic discharges. They’re pleased when Grayson accomplish what they want, and it’s told as such. They foment little plans to get their puppet to point A to point B, and we are privy to their calculations. And I’m sorry but the best way to ruin your lovecraftian concept is to try and explain its motivations and how it thinks. Because by definition the unknown is scarier, smarter, and colder than whatever a human author could come up with. I couldn’t take the Reapers’ dumb infiltration plans seriously, and now I think they are dumb all the time, and I didn’t want to!! The only cases in which the Reapers influence Grayson, we are told in very explicit details how so. For example, they won’t let Grayson commit suicide by flooding his brain with hope and determination when he tries, or they will change the words he types when he tries to send a message to Kahlee Sanders. And we are told exactly what they do every time. There was a glorious occasion to flex as a writer by diving deep into an unreliable narrator and write incredibly creepy prose, but I guess we could have been confused, and apparently that’s not allowed. And all of this is handled that poorly becauuuuuse...

5. Subtext is dead and Drew killed it

Now we need to talk about the prose. The style of the author is... let’s be generous and call it functional. It’s about clarity. The writing is so involved in its quest for clarity that it basically ruins the book, and most of the previous issues are direct consequences of the prose and adjacent decisions.The direct prose issues are puzzling, as they are known as rookie technical flaws and not something I would expect from the series’ Lead Writer for Mass Effect 1 and 2, but in this book we find problems such as:

The reliance on adverbs. Example: "Breathing heavily from the exertion, he stood up slowly”. I have nothing about a well-placed adverb that gives a verb a revelatory twist, but these could be replaced by stronger verbs, or cut altogether.

Filtering. Example: “Anderson knew that the fact they were getting no response was a bad sign”. This example is particularly egregious, but characters know things, feel things, realize things (boy do they realize things)... And this pulls us away from their internal world instead of making us live what they live, expliciting what should be implicit. For example, consider the alternative: “They were getting no reponse, which was a bad sign in Anderson’s experience.” We don’t really need the “in Anderson’s experience” either, but that already brings us significantly closer to his world, his lived experience as a soldier.

The goddamn dialogue tags. This one is the worst offender of the bunch. Nobody is allowed to talk without a dialogue tag in this book, and wow do people imply, admit, inform, remark and every other verb under the sun. Consider this example, which made me lose my mind a little: “What are you talking about? Kahlee wanted to know.” I couldn’t find it again, but I’m fairly certain I read a “What is it?” Anderson wanted to know. as well. Not only is it very distracting, it’s also yet another way to remove reader interpretation from the equation (also sometimes there will be a paragraph break inside a monologue -not even a long one-, and that doesn’t seem to be justified by anything? It’s not as big of a problem than the aversion to subtext, but it still confused me more than once)

Another writing choice that hurts the book in disproportionate ways is the reliance on point of view switches. In Retribution, we get the point of view of: Tim, Paul Grayson, Kai Leng, Kahlee Sanders, David Anderson, Aria T’loak, and Nick (a biotic teenager, the one with the boner). Maybe Sanak had a very small section too, but I couldn’t find it again so don’t take my word for it. That’s too many point of views for a plot-heavy 80k book in my opinion, but even besides that: the point of view switch several times in one single chapter. This is done in the most harmful way possible for tension: characters involved in the same scene take turns on the page explaining their perspective about the events, in a way that leaves the reader entirely aware of every stake to every character and every information that would be relevant in a scene. Take for example the first negotiation between Aria and Tim. The second Aria needs to ponder what her best move could possibly be, we get thrown back into Tim’s perspective explaining the exact ways in which he’s trying to deceive her -removing our agency to be either convinced or fooled alongside her. This results in a book that goes out of his way to keep us from engaging with its ideas and do any mental work on our own. Everything is laid out, bare and as overexplained as humanly possible. The format is also very repetitive: characters talk or do an action, and then we spend a paragraph explaining the exact mental reasoning for why they did what they did. There is nothing to interpret. No subtext at all whatsoever; and this contributes in casting a harsh light on the Mass Effect universe, cheapening it and overtly expliciting some of its worst ideas instead of leaving them politely blurred and for us to dress up in our minds. There is only one theme that remains subtextual in my opinion. And it’s not a pretty one.

6. Violence

So here’s the thing when you adapt a third person shooter into a novel: you created a violent world and now you will have to deal with death en-masse too (get it get it I’m so sorry). But while in videogames you can get away with thoughtless murder because it’s a gameplay mechanic and you’re not expected to philosophize on every splatter of blood, novels are all about internalization. Violent murder is by definition more uncomfortable in books, because we’re out of gamer conventions and now every death is actual when in games we just spawned more guys because we wanted that level to be a bit harder and on a subconscious level we know this and it makes it somewhat okay. I felt, in this book, a strange disconnect between the horrendous violence and the fact we’re expected to care about it like we would in a game: not much, or as a spectacle. Like in a game, we are expected to root for the safety of named characters the story indicated us we should be invested in. And because we’re in a book, this doesn’t feel like the objective truth of the universe spelled at us through user interface and quest logs, but the subjective worldview of the characters we’re following. And that makes them.... somewhat disturbing to follow.

I haven’t touched on Anderson and Kahlee Sanders much yet, but now I guess I have too, as they are the worst offenders of what is mentioned above. Kahlee cares about Grayson. She only cares about Grayson -and her students like the forementioned Nick, but mostly Grayson. Grayson is out there murdering people like it’s nobody’s business, but still, keeping Grayson alive is more important that people dying like flies around him. This is vaguely touched on, but not with the gravitas that I think was warranted. Also, Anderson goes with it. Because he cares about Kahlee. Anderson organizes a major political scandal between humans and turians because of Kahlee, because of Grayson. He convinces turians to risk a lot to bring Cerberus down, and I guess that could be understandable, but it’s mostly manipulation for the sake of Grayson’s survival: and a lot of turians die as a result. But not only turians: I was not comfortable with how casually the course of action to deal a huge blow to Cerberus and try to bring the organization down was to launch assault on stations and cover-ups for their organization. Not mass arrests: military assault. They came to arrest high operatives, maybe, but the grunts were okay to slaughter. This universe has a problem with systemic violence by the supposedly good guys in charge -and it’s always held up as the righteous and efficient way compared to these UGH boring politicians and these treaties and peace and such (amirite Anderson). And as the cadavers pile up, it starts to make our loveable protagonists... kind of self-centered assholes. Also: I think we might want to touch on who these cadavers tend to be, and get to my biggest point of discomfort with this novel.

Xenophobia is hard to write well, and I super sympathize with the attempts made and their inherent difficulty. This novel tries to evoke this theme in multiple ways: by virtue of having Cerberus’ heart and blade as point of view characters, we get a window into Tim and Kai Leng’s bigotry against aliens, and how this belief informs their actions. I wasn’t ever sold in their bigotry as it was shown to us. Tim evokes his scorn for whatever aliens do and how it’s inferior to humanity’s resilience -but it’s surface-level, not informed by deep and specific entranched beliefs on aliens motives and bodies, and how they are a threat on humanity according to them. The history of Mass Effect is rich with conflict and baggage between species, yet every expression of hatred is relegated to a vague “eww aliens” that doesn’t feed off systemically enforced beliefs but personal feelings of mistrust and disgust. I’ll take this example of Kai Leng, and his supposedly revulsion at the Afterlife as a peak example of alien decadence: he sees an asari in skimpy clothing, and deems her “whorish”. And this feels... off. Not because I don’t think Kai Leng would consider asaris whorish, but because this is supposed to represent Cerberus’ core beliefs: yet both him and Tim go on and on about how their goal is to uplift humanity, how no human is an enemy. But if that’s the case, then what makes Kai Leng call an Afterlife asari whorish and mean it in a way that’s meaningfully different from how he would consider a human sex worker in similar dispositions? Not that I don’t buy that Cerberus would have a very specific idea of what humans need to be to be considered worth preserving as good little ur-fascists, but this internal bias is never expressed in any way, and it makes the whole act feel hollow. Cerberus is not the only offender, though. Every time an alien expresses bias against humans in a way we’re meant to recognize as xenophobic, it reads the same way: as personal dislike and suspicion. As bullying. Which is such a small part of what bigotry encompasses. It’s so unspecific and divorced from their common history that it just never truly works in my opinion. You know what I thought worked, though? The golden trio of non-Cerberus human characters, and their attitude towards aliens. Grayson’s slight fetishism and suspicion of his attraction to Liselle, how bestial (in a cool, sexy way) he perceives the Afterlife to be. The way Anderson and Kahlee use turians for their own ends and do not spare a single thought towards those who died directly trying to protect them or Grayson immediately after the fact (they are more interested in Kahlee’s broken fingers and in kissing each other). How they feel disgust watching turians looting Cerberus soldiers, not because it’s disrespectful in general and the deaths are a inherent tragedy but because they are turians and the dead are humans. But it's not even really on them: the narration itself is engrossed by the suffering of humans, but aliens are relegated to setpieces in gore spectacles. Not even Grayson truly cares about the aliens the Reapers make him kill. Nobody does. Not even the aliens among each other: see, once again, Aria and Liselle, or Aria and Sanak. Nobody cares. At the very end of the story, Anderson comes to Kahlee and asks if she gives him permission to have Grayson’s body studied, the same way Cerberus planned to. It’s source of discomfort, but Kahlee gives in as it’s important, and probably what Grayson would have wanted, maybe? So yeah. In the end the only subtextual theme to find here (probably as an accident) is how the Alliance’s good guys are not that different from Cerberus it turns out. And I’m not sure how I feel about that.

7. Lore-approved books, or the art of shrinking an expanding universe

I’d like to open the conversation on a bigger topic: the very practice of game novelization, or IP-books. Because as much as I think Drew Karpyshyn’s final draft should not have ended up reading that amateur given the credits to his name, I really want to acknowledge the realities of this industry, and why the whole endeavor was perhaps doomed from the start regardless of Karpyshyn’s talent or wishes as an author.

The most jarring thing about this reading experience is as follows: I spent almost 80k words exploring this universe with new characters and side characters, all of them supposedly cool and interesting, and I learned nothing. I learned nothing new about the world, nothing new about the characters. Now that it’s over, I’m left wondering how I could chew on so much and gain so little. Maybe it’s just me, but more likely it’s by design. Not on poor Drew. Now that I did IP work myself, I have developed an acute sympathy for anyone who has to deal with the maddening contradictions of this type of business. Let me explain.

IP-adjacent media (in the West at least) sure has for goal to expand the universe: but expand as in bloat, not as in deepen. The target for this book is nerds like me, who liked the games and want more of this thing we liked. But then we’re confronted by two major competitors: the actual original media (in ME’s case, the games) whose this product is a marketing tool for, and fandom. IP books are not allowed to compete with the main media: the good ideas are for the main media, and any meaningful development has to be made in the main media (see: what happened with Kai Leng, or how everyone including me complains about the worldbuilding to the Disney Star Swars trilogy being hidden in the novelization). And when it comes to authorship (as in: taking an actual risk with the media and give it a personal spin), then we risk introducing ideas that complicate the main media even though a ridiculously small percent of the public will be attached to it, or ideas that fans despise. Of course we can’t have the latter. And once the fandom is huge enough, digging into anything the fans have strong headcanons for already risks creating a lot of emotions once some of these are made canon and some are disregarded. As much as I joke about how in Mass Effect you can learn about any gun in excrutiating details but we still don’t know if asaris have a concept for marriage... would we really want to know how/if asaris marry, or aren’t we glad we get to be creative and put our own spin on things? The dance between fandom and canon is a delicate one that can and will go wrong. And IP books are generally not worth the drama for the stakeholders.

Add this to insane deadlines, numerous parties all involved in some way and the usual struggles of book writing, and we get a situation where creating anything of value is pretty much a herculean task.

But then I ask... why do IP books *have* to be considered canon? I know this is part of the appeal, and that removing the “licenced” part only leaves us with published fanfiction, but... yeah. Yeah. I think it could be a fascinating model. Can you imagine having your IP and hiring X amount of distinctive authors to give it their own spin, not as definitive additions to the world but as creative endeavours and authorial deepdives? It would allow for these novels to be comparative and companion to the main media instead of being weird appendages that can never compare, and the structure would allow for these stories to be polished and edited to a higher level than most fanfictions. Of course I’m biased because I have a deep belief in the power of fanfiction as commentary and conversational piece. But I would really love to see companies’ approach to creative risk and canon to change. We might get Disney stuff until we die now, so the least we can ask for is for this content to be a little weird, personal and human.

That’s it. That’s the whole review. Thank you for reading, it was very long and weirdly passionate, have a nice dayyyyy.

[aion-rsa]

Streaming on Plex: Best Horror Movies and TV Shows You Can Watch for FREE in October

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This article is sponsored by Plex. You can download the Free Plex App now by clicking here!

When October hits, the folks at Den of Geek almost exclusively consume horror content. Any spooky story that has ghosts, ghouls, goblins, or any chill-inducing monster that doesn’t start with a G is fine with us. Whether it’s a campy B-movie or “prestige horror,” we embrace all horror subgenres and relax with old favorites and new cult classics in the making alike. Now that Spooky Season is in full force, we are grateful that Plex TV is here so we can stream all of the creepy content that our black hearts’ desire for free!

Plex is a globally available one-stop-shop streaming media service offering thousands of free movies and TV shows and hundreds of free-to-stream live TV channels, from the biggest names in entertainment, including Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM), Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution, Lionsgate, Legendary, AMC, A+E, Crackle, and Reuters. Plex is the only streaming service that lets users manage their personal media alongside a continuously growing library of free third-party entertainment spanning all genres, interests, and mediums including podcasts, music, and more. With a highly customizable interface and smart recommendations based on the media you enjoy, Plex brings its users the best media experience on the planet from any device, anywhere.

Plex releases brand new and beloved titles to its platform monthly and we’ll be here to help you identify the cream of the crop. This month, we’re keeping things strictly scary, but view Plex TV now for the best free entertainment streaming, regardless of genre, and check back each month for Den of Geek Critics’ picks!

DEN OF GEEK CRITICS’ PICKS

The Ninth Gate

Though director Roman Polanski is a horrific figure himself, this 1999 neo-noir horror film, The Ninth Gate is superb. Thirty years after Rosemary’s Baby, Polanski conjured the devil once again and injected it with some of the pulp from his noir classic Chinatown in a movie that finds Johnny Depp as a man in Satanic Detective mode. Depp is a classic book authenticator hired to authenticate De Umbrarum Regis Novum Portis (The Nine Doors To the Kingdom of Shadows), a book believed by cultists capable of raising Satan to Earth. 

The Ninth Gate doesn’t provide cheap thrills; it tightens the suspense like a noose. Polanski subtly creates an uneasy atmosphere using minimal effects. The director knows where evil lives and lets the settings and sound make the invitations with subliminal references to recognizable horror and cinematic danger, using framing and music similarly to Stanley Kubrick. The Ninth Gate packages its scares with classy style that the characters deliver with sexily provocative intelligence. Dean Corso may be Johnny Depp’s greatest spiritual transformation, from odious to ultimate evil and the audience cheers on his descent, happy to ride with him straight to hell.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Perhaps the world’s first horror film and a go-to example of early German Expressionist filmmaking, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has been unsettling audiences for over a century. 

The film’s main story centers on two young friends, Francis and Alan (Friedrich Feher and Hans Heinrich von Twardowski), who, while jockeying for the affections of Jane (Lil Dagover), visit a local traveling carnival. There they take in the act of the mysterious, top-hatted and wild-haired Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss). As they watch, Caligari awakens his somnambulist subject, Cesare (the great Conrad Veidt), who under hypnosis answers questions from the audience. When Alan jokingly asks when he will die, Cesare responds “Before dawn.” We’ll let you guess the rest.

The film isn’t remembered much for its story, but for its arresting visual style, featuring painted backdrops that make the entire production feel like a fever dream. The painted townscape is filled with curved and pointed buildings teetering at dangerous angles, almost as if they were alive and shrieking. Roads twist and spiral to nowhere. The perspectives are deliberately mismatched and inconsistent, with the props and sets sometimes being too large for the characters, and others too small. The result is a transgressive, deeply influential film that has been unsettling audiences for over 100 years.

The Exorcist III

Based on his 1983 novel Legion, writer-director William Peter Blatty’s Exorcist III arrived 17 years after William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Despite the still-looming pop culture presence of the original, The Exorcist III is sneakily the most interesting film in the series. Less a horror movie than a psychological thriller with supernatural and spiritual overtones, The Exorcist III takes place 17 years after the events of the first film, and with no reference whatsoever made to the events in the second. It finds Lt. Kinderman confronted with the apparent reappearance of two figures from his past who had supposedly died. The first is father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), who had died after bouncing down an endless flight of steps while performing an exorcism in the original movie, and the Gemini Killer, a serial killer loosely based on the Zodiac Killer that had been executed 17 years prior. However, there’s been a new string of murders around town carrying all the hallmarks of the Gemini.

While the studio famously mangled Blatty’s original cut of the film, there’s still a lot to like here, including a terrifying performance from Brad Dourif. Blatty is fantastic at creating dread-inducing atmosphere and has a keen attention to character and detail. It may not be as exciting as the original, but it’s a smart-slow burn film worthy of the Exorcist mantle.

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The Devil’s Rejects

An homage to sleazy ‘70s C-movies, Rob Zombie’s sequel to House of 1,000 Corpses will leave you in the need of a shower, but it’s delightfully demented and the musician turned filmmaker’s finest effort. The shock-fest finds the Firefly clan, Otis (Bill Moseley), Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie) and Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig) – on the run from die-hard determined sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe). What unfolds is a nasty thrill ride full of twists, turns, and more gore than most audiences are comfortable with. How Zombie still manages to make such repulsive content entertaining, how he manages to get you to almost root for the despicable Firefly clan, is inexplicable magic trick, but indebted to Zombie’s use of black humor and deep knowledge of genre conventions that he sometimes subverts, but often gleefully leans into.

Train to Busan

The overused and increasingly predictable zombie genre got a shot in the arm with Train to Busan, a South Korean film from director Yeon Sang-ho about a young father desperately attempting to get his little daughter to her mother via train as a zombie pandemic breaks out all around them. Even if it veered close to outright sentimentality at times, Train to Busan differed from most of the films and TV shows we’ve seen in this genre due to its genuine bond of love between its main characters, and the flickers of empathy and humanity found therein. 

And on a technical level, Yeon crafted his film with a kinetic energy that had been missing from the genre as of late. Train to Busan was not just a monster hit in its native land but amassed an international following as well, along with critical acclaim across the board. It’s easy to see why given the film’s well-drawn characters, subtle social commentary (some on the train feel they are more worthy of survival than others) and frightening action sequences that add up to a thrilling and emotionally powerful ride.

More Horror Films Available to Stream FREE on Plex TV

The Descent  

Train To Busan  

The Ninth Gate  

Rec  

Coherence  

Night Of The Living Dead  

The Host 

Hannibal Rising  

The Devil’s Rejects  

Nosferatu  

Monsters  

I Spit On Your Grave  

Eden Lake  

Wolf Creek  

Day Of The Dead  

The Collector  

The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari  

Red Lights  

The Wailing  

Grave Encounters  

Colonia  

Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse  

Diary Of The Dead  

Black Death  

Alone In The Dark  

The Descent: Part 2  

Maggie  

Teeth  

Ginger Snaps  

After.Life  

John Dies At The End  

Black Christmas  

The Last House On The Left  

Nosferatu the Vampire  

Splinter  

The Void  

Deep Red  

P2  

Phantasm  

The Changeling 

Feast  

Hatchet 

The Prophecy  

Pulse  

Fido  

Open Grave  

Cell  

The Blob  

The Exorcist III  

Vanishing On 7th Street 

House On Haunted Hill  

Penomena  

Eye See You  

Cooties  

The Werewolf 

Pumpkinhead 4: Blood Feud 

Messengers 2: The Scarecrow

Sugar and Fright Collection

Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies 

All Cheerleaders Die  

Another Evil  

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes  

Bad Milo 

Better Watch Out  

Bitter Feast  

Cooties  

Corporate Animals  

Crimewave  

Dead Snot 2: Red vs. Dead  

Deathgasm  

Deep Murder 

Drive Thru 

Excision  

Fear, Inc.  

Feast 

Fido  

Ghost Killers vs. Bloody Mary 

Hansel & Gretel Get Baked  

Hatchet  

Hell Baby 

Hellboy Animated: Blood & Iron 

Hellboy Animated: Sword of Storms  

Hobo with a Shotgun  

John Dies at the End 

The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu 

Lesbian Vampire Killers  

The Love Witch  

Night of Something Strange  

Nina Forever  

Office Uprising  

Shrooms  

Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror 

Stan Helsing  

Stitches  

Suburban Gothic  

Survival of the Dead  

Teeth  

Turbo Kid  

WolfCop 

Yoga Hosers 

The post Streaming on Plex: Best Horror Movies and TV Shows You Can Watch for FREE in October appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[theatticoneighth]

Watching The Queen’s Gambit; on the Remarkable Unexceptionality of Beth Harmon

‘With some people, chess is a pastime. With others, it is a compulsion, even an addiction. And every now and then, a person comes along for whom it is a birthright. Now and then, a small boy appears and dazzles us with his precocity, at what may be the world’s most difficult game. But what if that boy were a girl? A young, unsmiling girl, with brown eyes, red hair, and a dark blue dress? Into the male-dominated world of the nation’s top chess tournaments, strolls a teenage girl with bright, intense eyes, from Fairfield High School in Lexington, Kentucky. She is quiet, well-mannered, and out for blood.’

The preceding epigraph opens a fictional profile of Beth Harmon featured in the third episode of The Queen’s Gambit (2020), and is written and published after the protagonist — a teenage, rookie chess player, no less — beats a series of ranked pros to win her first of many tournaments. In the same deft manner as it depicts the character’s ascent to her global chess stardom, the piece also sets up the series’s narrative: this is evidence of a great talent, it tells us, a grandmaster in the making. As with most other stories about prodigies, this new entry into a timeworn genre is framed unexceptionally by its subject’s exceptionality.

Yet as far as tales regaled about young chess wunderkinds go, Beth Harmon’s stands out in more ways than one. That she is a girl in a male-dominated world has clearly not gone unremarked by both her diegetic and nondiegetic audiences. That her life has thus far — and despite her circumstances — been relatively uneventful, however, is what makes this show so remarkable. After all, much of our culture has undeniably primed us to expect the consequential from those whom we raise upon the pedestal of genius. As Harmon’s interviewer suggests in her conversation with Harmon for the latter’s profile, “Creativity and psychosis often go hand in hand. Or, for that matter, genius and madness.” So quickly do we attribute extraordinary accomplishments to similarly irregular origins that we presume an inexplicability of our geniuses: their idiosyncrasies are warranted, their bad behaviours are excused, and deep into their biographies we dig to excavate the enigmatic anomalies behind their gifts. Through our myths of exceptionality, we make the slightest aberrations into metonyms for brilliance.

Nonetheless, for all her sullenness, non-conformity, and her plethora of addictions, Beth Harmon seems an uncommonly normal girl. No doubt this may be a contentious view, as evinced perhaps by the chorus of viewers and reviewers alike who have already begun to brand the character a Mary Sue. Writing on the series for the LA Review of Books, for instance, Aaron Bady construes The Queen’s Gambit as “the tragedy of Bobby Fischer [made] into a feminist fantasy, a superhero story.” In the same vein, Jane Hu also laments in her astute critique of the Cold War-era drama its flagrant and saccharine wish-fulfillment tendencies. “The show gets to have it both ways,” she observes, “a beautiful heroine who leans into the edge of near self-destruction, but never entirely, because of all the male friends she makes along the way.” Sexual difference is here reconstituted as the unbridgeable chasm that divides the US from the Soviet Union, whereas the mutual friendliness shared between Harmon and her male chess opponents becomes a utopic revision of history. Should one follow Hu’s evaluation of the series as a period drama, then the retroactive ascription of a recognisably socialist collaborative ethos to Harmon and her compatriots is a contrived one indeed. 

Accordingly, both Hu and Bady conclude that the series grants us depthless emotional satisfaction at the costly expense of realism: its all-too-easy resolutions swiftly sidestep any nascent hint of overwhelming tension; its resulting calm betrays our desire for reprieve. Underlying these arguments is the fundamental assumption that the unembellished truth should also be an inconvenient one, but why must we always demand difficulty from those we deem noteworthy? Summing up the show’s conspicuous penchant for conflict-avoidance, Bady writes that: 

over and over again, the show strongly suggests — through a variety of genre and narrative cues — that something bad is about to happen. And then … it just doesn’t. An orphan is sent to a gothic orphanage and the staff … are benign. She meets a creepy, taciturn old man in the basement … and he teaches her chess and loans her money. She is adopted by a dysfunctional family and the mother … takes care of her. She goes to a chess tournament and midway through a crucial game she gets her first period and … another girl helps her, who she rebuffs, and she is fine anyway. She wins games, defeating older male players, and … they respect and welcome her, selflessly helping her. The foster father comes back and …she has the money to buy him off. She gets entangled in cold war politics and … decides not to be.

In short, everything that could go wrong … simply does not go wrong.

Time and again predicaments arise in Harmon’s narrative, but at each point, she is helped fortuitously by the people around her. In turn, the character is allowed to move through the series with the restrained unflappability of a sleepwalker, as if unaffected by the drama of her life.  Of course, this is not to say that she fails to encounter any obstacle on her way to celebrity and success — for neither her childhood trauma nor her substance-laden adolescence are exactly rosy portraits of idyll — but only that such challenges seem so easily ironed out by that they hardly register as true adversity. In other words, the show takes us repeatedly to the brink of what could become a life-altering crisis but refuses to indulge our taste for the spectacle that follows. Skipping over the Aristotelian climax, it shields us from the height of suspense, and without much struggle or effort on the viewers’ part, hands us our payoff. Consequently lacking the epochal weight of plot, little feels deserved in Harmon’s story.

In his study of eschatological fictions, The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode would associate such a predilection for catastrophes with our abiding fear of disorder. Seeing as time, as he argues, is “purely successive [and] disorganised,” we can only reach to the fictive concords of plot to make sense of our experiences. Endings in particular serve as the teleological objective towards which humanity projects our existence, so we hold paradigms of apocalypse closely to ourselves to restore significance to our lives. It probably comes as no surprise then that in a year of chaos and relentless disaster — not to mention the present era of extreme precariousness, doomscrolling, and the 24/7 news cycle, all of which have irrevocably attuned us to the dreadful expectation of “the worst thing to come” — we find ourselves eyeing Harmon’s good fortune with such scepticism. Surely, we imagine, something has to have happened to the character for her in order to justify her immense consequence. But just as children are adopted each day into loving families and chess tournaments play out regularly without much strife, so too can Harmon maintain low-grade dysfunctional relationships with her typically flawed family and friends. 

In any case, although “it seems to be a condition attaching to the exercise of thinking about the future that one should assume one's own time to stand in extraordinary relation to it,” not all orphans have to face Dickensian fates and not all geniuses have to be so tortured (Kermode). The fact remains that the vagaries of our existence are beyond perfect reason, and any attempt at thinking otherwise, while vital, may be naive. Contrary to most critics’ contentions, it is hence not The Queen’s Gambit’s subversions of form but its continued reach towards the same that holds up for viewers such a comforting promise of coherence. The show comes closest to disappointing us as a result when it eschews melodrama for the straightforward. Surprised by the ease and randomness of Harmon’s life, it is not difficult for one to wonder, four or five episodes into the show, what it is all for; one could even begin to empathise with Hu’s description of the series as mere “fodder for beauty.” 

Watching over the series now with Bady’s recap of it in mind, however, I am reminded oddly not of the prestige and historical dramas to which the series is frequently compared, but the low-stakes, slice-of-life cartoons that had peppered my childhood. Defined by the prosaicness of its settings, the genre punctuates the life’s mundanity with brief moments of marvel to accentuate the curious in the ordinary. In these shows, kindergarteners fix the troubles of adults with their hilarious playground antics, while time-traveling robot cats and toddler scientists alike are confronted with the woes of chores. Likewise, we find in The Queen’s Gambit a comparable glimpse of the quotidian framed by its protagonist’s quirks. Certainly, little about the Netflix series’ visual and narrative features would identify it as a slice-of-life serial, but there remains some merit, I believe, in watching it as such. For, if there is anything to be gained from plots wherein nothing is introduced that cannot be resolved in an episode or ten, it is not just what Bady calls the “drowsy comfort” of satisfaction — of knowing that things will be alright, or at the very least, that they will not be terrible. Rather, it is the sense that we are not yet so estranged from ourselves, and that both life and familiarity persists even in the most extraordinary of circumstances.

Perhaps some might find such a tendency towards the normal questionable, yet when all the world is on fire and everyone clambers for acclaim, it is ultimately the ongoingness of everyday life for which one yearns. As Harmon’s childhood friend, Jolene, tells her when she is once again about to fall off the wagon, “You’ve been the best at what you do for so long, you don’t even know what it’s like for the rest of us.” For so long, and especially over the past year, we have catastrophized the myriad crises in which we’re living that we often overlook the minor details and habits that nonetheless sustain us. To inhabit the congruence of both the remarkable and its opposite in the singular figure of Beth Harmon is therefore to be reminded of the possibility of being outstanding without being exceptional — that is, to not make an exception of oneself despite one’s situation — and to let oneself be drawn back, however placid or insignificant it may be, into the unassuming hum of dailiness. It is in this way of living that one lives on, minute by minute, day by day, against the looming fear and anxiety that seek to suspend our plodding regular existence. It is also in this way that I will soon be turning the page on the last few months in anticipation of what is to come. 

Born and raised in the perpetually summery tropics — that is, Singapore — Rachel Tay wishes she could say her life was just like a still from Call Me By Your Name: tanned boys, peaches, and all. Unfortunately, the only resemblance that her life bears to the film comes in the form of books, albeit ones read in the comfort of air-conditioned cafés, and not the pool, for the heat is sweltering and the humidity unbearable. A fervent turtleneck-wearer and an unrepentant hot coffee-addict, she is thus the ideal self-parodying Literature student, and the complete anti-thesis to tropical life.

[astrology-with-charu]

As the clock is about to strike 12 & reset our life, I thought of you and the journey that we have been on. Still walking the tight rope between the past and the future with a knowing that life is about to be structurally shift forever in this magnificent year that’s upon us. We are together part of a history that’s being written in our own personal capacity & as each cell of our body contributes to us similarly each one of us contributes to the collective universe we create - together we are creating a new world & we collectively have a choice how we want it to look like.

When Saturn Pluto start their 34 year synod on 12th Jan (geocentric) or 10th Jan (heliocentric), we reset the very fabric that creates our little microcosm of existence. It’s the set of life rules, structural boundaries that we live by which help us decide every big decision we take e.g. what road we take when we arrive at a fork. And usually year before this final conjunction is spent in creating this fork cause decision doesn’t just suddenly comes with this conjunction. We are given time & 2019 was that time cause 2020 is showtime. So fork roads were created, choices presented, multiple options created when Jupiter in Sagittarius expanded our vision in 2019 to include more choices in life, making us aware that we are & can be & should be more than we thought we were. We thank 2019 for presenting us through push or pull choices - yes gift of choices that we have.

Now with Jupiter joining Saturn Pluto in Capricorn participating in two other synods in 2020 will tell us to choose. Choose one path. Cause duality isn’t a path of choice for earthy mountain goat Capricorn which will dominate 2020. We are being given the gift of Long term prosperity & growth but at the cost of loosing a few detours & focussing our gifts. There are no wrong choices - but there is always one that our soul chooses cause that’s what we want to experience in this lifetime. What’s the experience your soul wants to choose - it doesn’t have to feel easy - when we try to imagine the path forward it seldom feels easy. Cause it’s new with a lot of unknowns & yeah many always have not made it. But what fundamentally feels like “you”, we didn’t come here to live another’s life - each life is unique like our prints - our prints left after us would be each unique. What legacy you want to leave ?

At this stage I will quote Yoda “Do or do not, there is no try” - Jupiter in Capricorn is Yoda’s words personified - choose a path, make it your own, own it live it eat it drink it in 2020. That’s the road to success in no uncertain terms of this year that’s upon us. Three synods, 5 eclipses, multiple retrogrades of planets in their ruling signs - there is no question that world globally as we know it will turn to what we have never seen before in 2020. We would be writing history. What is yours ? Jupiter in Capricorn rewards the focussed, the well planned, the one that’s willing to burn the boats cause it knows in its soul that he or she will take over the island in 2020.

You have to do one thing in this eclipse season which will accelerate the process - choose.

That’s why Mercury has just joined the party of planets in Capricorn- in this period between the two eclipses - Solar eclipse that just passed on 26th Dec and Lunar eclipse that’s upon us on 10th Jan - you will find yourself getting clarity on your choice. We want to dedicate 2020 to one & only one goal. It’s gotto be material, it has to have an end goal in mind - mountain goat doesn’t climb to infinity - it has an end goal material one - well we are material beings having a substantially material experience & using that for our souls evolution. We do have to be careful though on the material part taking over - don’t forget this is for YOU - this experience this life this goal is for YOU so it has to fulfil you - it’s not about what’s “material” to the rest of the world. Cancer eclipse of 10th January will bring that message loud & clear.

There is no way for us to miss our destiny & cosmos in 2020 will make sure of it - more importantly it will teach us how to successfully live our destiny. Sometimes we get there but don’t know how to keep it.

Saturn in Capricorn creates base of a legacy that lasts - you would never again respond to life’s structural challenges in the way you did before. It’s not a New Years resolution - it’s just the new way of life that’s born & lived - with Saturn - there are no fireworks but we never go back to old rulebook. We can never go back & you would in no uncertain terms know when you are back tracking. 8th January Jupiter Ketu conjunction will remind us of old ways of clinging to a comfort zone we must not go back to anymore. Comfortable is subjective - it’s more of familiar that we are clinging onto - 8th Jan events & those around will give you a clue what boat you aren’t burning still - holding you away from your future as past feels too rosy.

Pluto in Capricorn makes sure we are being true to our power & not compromising it for the sake of worldly success as much as we would be driven to “succeed” in all material senses in 2020. Drive will be at its peak but can’t compromise our truth - you would never again suppress your strength & power to “smooth over” the ripples that you would create in 2020. You would never again doubt who you know you truly are. Again it’s not a New Years resolution cause resolution self extinguish by third week of January- this is the new structure of our life which is there up on us to be lived. And sometimes Pluto pushes us to that optimal breaking point before the element we are made of shifts from dusty carbon to diamond - Pressure will be dialled up from day 1.

Read the writing on the wall of your new life when it comes with a clear messaging on 12th Jan as Mercury is a participant in Pluto Saturn conjunction so new world order doesn’t begin in silence - it begins in a clear exchange of words. Actions of the new start come in full swing in March but January early & bright we know in clear words what 2020 is going to be about. As I said focus is key this year & focus is created early & bright. Mercury is grounded, intellectually, fantastically structured in Capricorn so we discuss objectively, decide for our prosperity & future what’s best & we do the right things. It couldn’t be in a better sign at this time & we couldn’t have a knowing more clear as we would in my view at this time. But voila just like that fate is written & crafted and administrative structures shift, rules seem to be rewritten, decision seem to be decided and we spend 2020 in making the path we have chosen a success..

That’s how I see it.

There will be bubbles that would pop cause Pluto Jupiter synod is known as a bubble buster of dotcom bubble burst fame. Mid year in July we would see certain industries & companies or enterprises which were never meant to be Long term or took short cuts in reporting etc not following the moral code of signature earth sign year - disappear into the thin air from where they suddenly came. Credit will be tight from the get go & we would see corporate greed rampant in first half as earth’s shadow side breeds overly focus on resources & power hog by a few which would ultimately not go well. If there was a year to thoroughly follow a moral code, it would be 2020 cause karma in my view would be instant. It’s not about loosing your flexibility, it’s about showing that you want it enough & you are willing to follow the right route to get to it. Don’t loose sight of following the requisite steps in drive to get there.

Dedicate less hours to wondering why it can’t happen for you & more on making your effort efficient - darkness of thoughts is a side effect of too much earth energy but a working cloud makes its darkness rain hard & makes it count - make every dark thought coming to you count for it indicates how much more you want it - and a strong desire finds a way. Get busy working, planning, finding answer - when you see a dark cloud, make it rain!

Never before a sea of people were gifted with such defining aspects that would shape history - let’s make each day of 2020 count.

Happy new year!

2020 key focus areas of each sign

♈️ Aries - Career growth, public image, leadership style & positions, life structure & path, father, dealings with authority & becoming the authority of ones own life. Physical body & health

♉️ Taurus - Travel, education, publication of significance, becoming a teacher, sharing your higher knowledge, philosophy & higher mind, expanding the framework of your mind by exposing yourself to totally different & variant experiences & thoughts. Growing in knowledge, influence & gaining back sense of adventure

♊️ Gemini - Year of regaining personal & physical strength through learning the art of merging resources, talents with other people & standing your ground in partnerships. Period of rebirth as you finally find your life purpose & come in your full element especially after May.

♋️ Cancer - Partnerships, contracts, significant others & their place in your life versus you & your life path. Year of walking your life purpose but more importantly learning how to walk it with your committed partner/s. Partnerships come in more than one form & shape, learning what’s the model of yours

♌️ Leo - Mind body connection - finding the job or work environment that fulfils you & gives your sense of purpose - healing your body health. Understanding you & only you are the master of your life & your daily life events - taking control of your daily environment & hence health.

♍️ Virgo - Love, passion, hearts desires - living the life on your terms for your passions - betting it all in some senses - taking a chance on yourself & for yourself. Finding what floats your boat emotionally & professionally - leaving now stone unturned to find it & get it. Children or the child like joy from within filling your heart up & your Life - like a karmic blessings from beyond

♎️ Libra - Home, family, real estate - your grounding your base - like coming home to yourself in peace & security . Coming from a place of security & confidence propelling you on solid ground to new big professional shifts & life path changes that are upon you in tandem

♏️ Scorpio - your words your mind your communication skills & commercial aspect of your skills - writing, reading, selling, talking, Publishing - reframing restructuring your mind & reaping the rewards of what you have learned by sharing it with the world in commercially viable ways

♐️ Sagittarius - Finances, assets, your values & ability to generate material abundance from your skills - the skills you mastered or learned or honed in 2019, nows the time to reap commercial & financial rewards from it - creating new assets & monetary growth from existing assets. Establishing your valets system & your self worth as you master the art of turning around financial situations for you & for yours

♑️ Capricorn - You - you are surely the focus & in spotlight with so many major planets focusing their light on you - your life path, physical body, leadership skills reset to a trajectory you didn’t know existed as you are introduced to you in all your strength. Use each day of this year wisely with focus towards your goals as you are gifted with expansion opportunities not seen before as the very frame from which you looked at your life is expanded & enhanced. Happy birthday & it’s surely the year of Capricorn!

♒️ Aquarius - Long distance travel, healing, psychology, untapped potential/ skills / talents - time of God’s timing with hidden support & strength opportunities showing up as your life resets from end 2020, this year will feel like your soul journey where you might be alone sometimes but always with support from beyond - huge amount of faith & rebirth of belief in life & your place in the universe. Lot has been happening below the surface much of which comes above the surface from March.

♓️ Pisces - Network, social influence, big wealth, vision, platform, mass influence, friends, business network, your position in social networks & society of influence - your vision & social influence and position is given a boost as you walk boldly on the path you think is your life’s purpose with the set of people who support you, help you, build you up to bring out your natural gifted talents to larger set of audience or people to benefit the society. World needs good leaders but more importantly it needs visionaries and you fit the bill.

Good luck & much love and success for 2020 💕

Love & more

[wonderlustxennial]

Thoughts on TFATWS Season 1, Episode 3

This shit has gotten ridiculous, so I’ve decided that I’m going to start doing reaction posts, rather than posting 20 individual observations. The following was written after my second viewing.

DISCLAIMER: Some of these are my observations, but others I didn’t notice until my favorite YouTube and Tumblr analysts pointed them out. I’ll try to drop credit where it’s due.

NOTE: There’s something I wish more people were talking about, and it’s down in the Madripoor section. If I’m reading this wrong, I would appreciate getting some help in seeing it. So, if you’re game, please check it out and let me know your thoughts. (#tw:racial bias)

[spoilers below the cut]

Walker Raiding the Flag Smasher Sanctuary

Here we get a further illustration that Walker not a defender; he’s working in the interest of fascists. Also, he’s on an invisible countdown to flip his shit. ALSO-also, dude just told the GRC cops not to give anyone “a second…to breathe.” (Marvel, what are you doing? I am not accustomed to relevance from you.) Did you notice the juxtaposition of Bucky asking the cops, “Don’t you know who he is?” to get the cops to stop harassing Sam, against Walker asking, “Do you know who I am?” while roughing up a refugee for not cooperating with him? Same asshole move, very different contexts. Anytime someone thinks it’s a good idea to say, “Do you know who I/this am/is?” they’ve already lost face.

Zemo in His Cell

Clearly, I’ll have to get better about zooming in on stuff, because this is the first time I’ve seen anyone catch that the book Zemo is reading in his prison cell is about Machiavelli AND Leonardo da Vinci; specifically, about how their friendship and exchange of ideas was highly influential on the future of the world. So, does Zemo think he’s Machiavelli or da Vinci, AND who is his “silent” partner? [I didn’t notice that, until The New Rockstars pointed it out (at 04:00 https://youtu.be/xHXhbw_EGL8) annnnnndddd now I’m going to have to read that fucking book (Fortune Is a River: Leonardo da Vinci & Niccolò Machiavelli’s Magnificent Dream to Change the Course the Florentine History by Roger D. Masters, and the bump in book sales is about to have Masters owing Marvel BIG TIME).]

Zemo Is “Royalty”

And here we have my first problem with this episode. BARONS ARE NOT ROYALTY. They’re nobles—low-ranking aristocracy. But do you know what does check out? Zemo and his butler’s thinly veiled distain at entertaining the two low-born Americans.

On the Plane

Look out, y’all: Satan just took the wheel.

THE NOTEBOOK/S

If Bucky has Steve’s notebook, what happened to the one he had in Romania? In CA:CW, I was stressing throughout that WHOLE fight and chase sequence that followed Bucky running from his apartment; not for his safety, but because I hated how vulnerable it left him to have to run without his notebook. I’m not even kidding. Because Steve picked up that notebook, right? Did he think to take it with him? Surely, an embassy or intelligence service swept Bucky’s living space afterward, so who has it now? THIS is the shit I obsess over. Who has that fucking notebook? WHO??!

TROUBLEMAN

There are at least three different things at play here. First, Sam’s enthusiasm and nostalgia for this relic made me tear up a little. He was so hopeful that Bucky would share Steve’s appreciation this classic piece of socially aware art. Second, we get more evidence that Bucky might be having a harder time adjusting to life as a white man in the 21st Century than we’re led to believe Steve did. Third, we know from Zemo’s interactions with his steward just seconds before that, when he praises Troubleman, what he’s actually doing is virtual signaling to build trust with Sam and put Bucky on the back foot. Fourth, I don’t think Sam knows for sure if Zemo appreciated it as much as it says, but he intuits enough about Zemo’s character to be aggravated at the inference they might have something in common; or, that Zemo might be manipulating him to empty rapport. (RIP, Marvin Gaye. You weren’t done.)

DAS OFFENE NEIN IN DER LIEBI

The New Rockstars win again. (Seriously, I have to start paying closer attention.) A book using mythology to explain the psychology of relationships, just before Zemo namechecks Red Skull. Oh shit, y’all.

ZEMO’S PHILOSOPHY ON SYMBOLS & POWER

The slipperiest thing about Zemo is that nearly everything he says has a kernel of truth; you just have to dig out what his true intentions are. Honestly, this is what makes him…I don’t know that he’s the most dangerous villain in the MCU, but it certainly sets him apart. He’s both educated AND smart (the latter doesn’t necessarily follow the former), and he’s particularly insightful in his ruminations on power and its potential to corrupt both the people who hold it and the people who admire them. Bucky and Sam both loved Steve deeply and believed wholeheartedly in the capacity he served as a defender; however, they have a tendency to over-romanticize both. Multiply that problem by the millions who never personally knew him and, when he’s gone, you get…fake!Cap.

More Relevance from Marvel

I read that Marvel had to do reshoots because a few of the themes in this show hit a little too close to home after the pandemic hit (also because the Black Widow movie was supposed to hit first, but again…global fuckery, so they had to shuffle a few plot points.) But also, refugees? “Displacement” camps? Hoarded resources? You don’t say?

Madripoor

Or “When Murder-Sugardaddy Goes Slumming with His Awkward Sugarbabies and Heinous Fuckery Most Foul Ensues”

AT THE CLUB

THE POWER BROKER. THE POWER BROKER. THE POWER… Soooooooo. Many. Name drops. At this point, I don’t even care to speculate on the identity of the mother-fucking Power Broker. Just surprise me already.

And here’s my (potential) second problem with this episode: The Black bartender doesn’t recognize the Black man he’s presumably seen before.

A CAVEAT TO START: I bartended very briefly in one of my many former lives. I was terrible at it. But here’s what’s relevant for the moment: when you work in the service industry, you meet a lot of fucking people, and you don’t necessarily remember them all. I would work giant events where I would serve 1,000+ people in a night, and people would complain all the time that I was carding them even though I’d served them previously. (1) I live in a state where alcohol is highly controlled, and the ABC Board is zealous about doing stake-outs to catch vendors serving to minors. The ABC Board enforcers would only see me serving someone without having carded them first—not all the times I served them previously. None of these people were EVER worth going to jail for over alcohol. Get your fucking card out—EVERY. GODDAMN. TIME. (2) Dude-man-bro, I’ll have served 1,000+ people by the end of the night. Get your fucking card out, EVERY. GODDAMN. TIME.

I’m not saying this bartender in a rogue nation should’ve carded all of his patrons; I’m only saying that when you work in the service industry, you can sometimes serve someone 20+ times before you finally recognize their face or learn their names, and the process can start all over again if they haven’t come in for a while.

Here’s the real issue with this scene, as I see it: In-group bias is an actual thing. There are disciplines of social psychologists and sociologists who specialize in studying it. We’re supposed to believe that the “Smiling Tiger” person Sam is posing as is well-known enough, both by reputation and in that establishment, that the bartender remembered his favorite drink but not Sam as an imposter? I can believe Selby, a Caucasian-European woman, didn’t recognize him on-sight. [Frankly, Whites can often (regrettably) get away with not making any effort to overcome cross-racial bias.] But what about this bartender not recognizing a notable local criminal’s face when they belong to the same racial group, when we’re led to believe he’s served him many times before? And how did he know Tiger-whatever’s favorite drink if the guy had never been in the club? Are we to infer this guy wasn’t high enough on the local criminal food chain to have merited an introduction to Selby?) Is this a plot hole, or am I reading too much into this? I just wonder, given how much this series has devoted to exploring racial relations.

Sam just saw Bucky the most vulnerable as I think he ever has. For the first time, very little was left to Sam’s imagination as to what it must’ve been like for Bucky and Isaiah to have been exploited. And Sam is so good, he can’t help but jeopardize the mission to check on the friend he can’t acknowledge to himself he’s found in Bucky. (He also has no guile, which is so very Steve of him! I’ve just loved Mackie’s performance this whole show.)

I don’t know what to think about how easily it came to Zemo to objectify and use Bucky, again—even if only to pretend.

Bucky is the MCU character I most identify with, but I don’t care to analyze the way the bar scene made me feel. I will say this much, though: THIS is how badly Bucky wants this whole thing resolved. He subjected himself willingly to the stuff of his nightmares, even if to just to perform in the world’s most dangerous live-action role play. As many people were taking pictures in the bar, it’s pretty safe to say that this charade is going to going to have long-term consequences.

People are talking about Bucky “suddenly losing his super-speed” when they had to hoof it away from the bar like it’s a lapse in characterization, but it’s not. Bucky could’ve taken off and left both Sam and Zemo sucking dirt, but he lagged to stay with them. He didn’t ghost them.

SHARON IS A BLACK-MARKET ART DEALER

Godammit. I despise the practice of the filthy rich removing fine art and cultural artifacts from the public view so they can use them for tax breaks and currency. Way to push my buttons, Marvel! And I’m so sure the National Art Gallery of Art and all other art museums worldwide will I mean WON’T appreciate Marvel calling into question the authenticity of their collections, seeing as museum funding and attendance is already anemic thanks to the pandemic. I know it’s bad priorities on my part, but that’s temporarily preempted how much I should probably sympathize with her after her abandonment.

EDIT: The person who gave Sharon the intelligence will figure she had something to do with his demise just a few hours later. I wonder if that will help/harm her ability to do business. Also: holding the barrel of that assault rifle while it fired off rounds should’ve burned her hand horribly.

ZEMO BREAKS THE INTERNET

Did anyone else think “Sprockets!” when Zemo started dancing??!

NAGEL

This is two references to Langley in one episode. For anyone not aware (especially non-Americans), “Langley” is commonly used to reference Langley, Virginia, which is where the most prominent institution is the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) headquarters. Both Hoskins and Nagel name dropped them in the same episode. Shit.

The Sugars Roll Up to Zemo’s Latvian Bolthole

Bucky’s mission just got a helluva lot more complicated. Sam might have bought the “just going for a walk” bit, but I doubt Zemo did. Bucky owes the Wakandans, but he still needs Zemo. Oh, boy.

Wrap-Up

I’m going to keep coming back to how unexpected it’s been to me that Marvel has finally started to course correct, focusing on characterizations and bringing in themes that are relevant to current events. WandaVision’s explorations of Wanda’s mental health and Monica’s forging of her new identity and TFATWS trying to engage with the audience on topics like race, violence, exploitation, and identity is hugely compelling to me. It’s a fucking TV show, but at this point in popular cultural history, I can’t think of anyone/anything else better positioned to address all of this in an entertaining and accessible way.

[charliejrogers]

TENET (2020) - Review & Analysis

It’s hard to write about this movie without spoilers… so… fair warning… spoilers ahead. Though they don’t start til like halfway through the review.

One of my friends recently asked, “So how was TENET.” My answer: “When I read about the plot after I watched it, my mind was blown.” Therein lies the problem. This is a classic, “It’s better the second time” kind of movie, something Christopher Nolan isn’t a stranger to (I lovingly saw Inception twice in theaters and The Dark Knight a whopping three times in theaters… and both countless times since). The difference is, both of those movies were great the first time around too. They just got even better with subsequent viewings.

My personal problem too is that with rare exception (and especially as I’ve gotten older), I don’t like watching movies more than once. While there’s too much out there that I know I’ll never see, I still want to do my best and see as much as I can. Therefore, I don’t put too much credence into “It’s better the second time.” If it’s not good the first time around, I don’t care if might be better the second time.

TENET continues Christopher Nolan’s fascination with toying with time. It’s a theme and gimmick that’s been a staple since his ground-breaking major debut with 2001’s Memento, but featured heavily in both 2014’s black-hole-time-warping space opera Interstellar and 2017’s timeline jumping war epic Dunkirk. In some ways, this is Nolan’s most straightforward manipulation of time, it’s just time travel. Here, the central conceit of TENET is that scientists at some point in the distant future have figured out a way to get objects (and people) to travel backwards in time, and to do so in real time. In other words, whereas in Back to the Future, Marty and Doc flash back from 1985 to 1955 in a millisecond, in the world of TENET that time-travelling would occur only after Marty and Doc wandered about Earth for the equivalent of 30 years’ time. And, importantly, during those thirty years, Marty and Doc would exist in the same plane and realm as all other “forward-time” people. They can even interact with the world like anyone else… just the interaction would be… interesting to say the least. The backwards-time person would appear to be moving in reverse from the perspective of the forwards-time person, and vice versa.

This idea leads to the most interesting part of the movie: the visuals and effects. Characters in the movie hold guns that don’t shoot out bullets so much as just absorb bullets from environments which travel with the same momentum as if they had been shot out of a gun. Bombs that blow up a building in the world of the forwards-in-time people, are experienced as fallen buildings that spontaneously reassemble from the perspective of the backwards-in-time people. The result is a movie in which the director clearly relished the opportunity to create little clever puzzle boxes of scenes. I’m sure there are countless of YouTube videos that will happily show you why this movie is a masterpiece, and I agree from a design and plotting perspective, it was satisfying to watch many of the same sequences (a car chase, a vault heist) from two perspectives (one forward-in-time and one backward-in-time) and to notice all the little details about how actions in one timeline ultimately affected the other.

That said, my head legitimately hurt as I watched this movie. As Clémence Poésy puts it in perhaps the movie’s most famous line, “Don’t try to understand it; just feel it.” I wish I could. The temptation to try to wrap your mind around what is happening on screen is too large.

Perhaps what most threw me off (and both impressed and annoyed me) is how it deals with the central paradox of time travel. Namely, what happens when you change the past… and can you even do that? To put it briefly, it tackles this subject head-on without trying to cut corners or introduce alternate universes.  Other films, like Avengers: Endgame address this issue by just explaining that each time characters go back in time and mess with the past, they are creating an alternate and parallel universe. This makes sense to me… as much as time travel can make sense that is. But the parallel universe solution means that truly whatever happened happened. The Avengers can go back in time and stop Thanos, but there will always exist a timeline where he wins.

This movie doesn’t subscribe to the parallel universe theory. It outright rejects my linear understanding of time and seems to subscribe to the same circular notion of time that was (not introduced but) made popular by the 2016 film Arrival. In this view of time travel, someone can go back in time and influence the exact same reality the live in. AND furthermore, the fact that one has traveled back in time makes it so that it has always been like this. In other words, traveling back in time erases any previous universe where one hadn’t traveled back in time. I think of it this way. Imagine someone poisons my Mom’s box of Cheerios. She dies. I manage to go back in time and throw away her poisoned Cheerios before she could eat them. In the Avengers view of things, my mom would still be dead in the original timeline, but I created a new parallel universe where she’s now alive, having never been able to encounter the poisoned Cheerios. In the TENET view of the world, by travelling back in time to throw away the Cheerios, I effectively undo the fact that my Mom was ever in danger. Though I as a time-traveller may remember my harrowing Cheerios journey, she has no memory of the experience since I went back and prevented that reality from ever happening. What this does mean though is that as soon as I time-travel far back enough to get rid of the Cheerios, there are now two of me in the world. There is one who time-travelled and one who is unaware that his Mom was ever in danger. Time-traveller-me now cannot simply return to his home and normal life… as the other-me is living his life unaware that time travel was ever necessary (creating a Prestige-like scenario where maybe the time-traveller is better off just offing themselves, and honestly I wouldn’t have minded Nolan retreading themes from that superb movie).

It’s that last part about the time traveller being unable to return to his old life that marks the biggest difference from time travel in the vein of Back to the Future. In the Back to the Future model, after throwing away my Mom’s poisoned Cheerios, I can zap back to the moment in time I initially decided to time travel, and insert myself back in the correct time (technically there could still be two of me... but we’ll ignore that for now). However, in the TENET model, you cannot “zap” back to the future. The only to go back to the point when you first went backwards is just to live that amount of time. That’s why two of the same person will have to essentially co-exist. And since the movie stipulates that two of the same person cannot come into contact, the time-traveller is likely to live a life of exile.

It’s the sort of head-scratcher that makes sense on paper (and hopefully I clarified something for someone), but when watching this stuff play out on screen it made for a very unsatisfying movie. WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD! We as the viewer are used to seeing things as they unfold in real time. What this movie doesn’t allow us to see are the countless times various characters fail to do something and going back to undo their mistakes. Instead, we are experiencing the new reality created by past timetravellers, unaware (til the end of the movie) that they were previously realities that were erased (or prevented from coming into existence). We learn at the end of the movie that our Protagonist (John David Washington who’s cleverly named just The Protagonist… ugh) is actually the founder of the elite, global para-military force called TENET which is designed to thwart efforts by the future to erase the past. Setting aside how illogical the future’s plan is (something which the movie acknowledges… which doesn’t necessarily help matters), the reveal that The Protagonist is the original founder of TENET means that there’s a whole lot more to the plot we don’t see in the movie. The original Protagonist clearly had a long life with life events that were very different from what we see in this movie. Namely and most importantly, he at one time lived in a world without TENET. Presumably, the initial Protagonist discovers the future’s scheme and fails to stop it. In order to undo his failure he goes back in time to form TENET. In doing so, he completely erases the TENET-less reality he had actually experienced. And interestingly, the Protagonist involves his younger self in his plan for the eventual of TENET. So as I said, the Protagonist we follow in this movie is NOT the original Protagonist, but instead one who lives a reality that was manufactured by an older version himself.

What I think is crucial, (and maybe I’m dead wrong here, who knows?) but at the end of the movie when it is revealed that the Protagonistis the founder of TENET, it is implied that our Protagonist (the one we follow in the movie) will go on to do the same acts as his prior self (namely, as an old man, he will travel back in time and found TENET again). But I don’t think this is true, and it’s here I think the movie approaches time travel in a unique way. A figure has already founded TENET, so there’s no need to do that again. What’s happened, happened. In essence, the Protagonist we see at the end of the movie is free to do whatever he wants. What’s happened has already happened and the TENET-founding Protagonist has already done his thing.

What I like about that is that it avoids the weird, paradox circular shit that infects time travel fiction. Take the third Harry Potter, for example. Harry is about to get destroyed by Dementors until a Patronus spell is fired. As we discover later in the movie, it was actually Harry who cast that spell. But how is that possible? If a future Harry is the only way to save Harry… then how does he get saved the first time? Maybe there’s an alternate reality we don’t see where Ron saves Harry last second and Ron dies so Harry goes back in time to prevent that reality from happening and we just never see that. Regardless, it’s a large plot hole that is unexplainable. What I give credit to Nolan and co. for is crafting an incredibly complex time travel tale that avoids any obvious plot holes and time paradoxes. We are left with a fairly intelligent piece of science fiction. Also it doesn’t chalk it all up to, “aliens think and speak in circles so time is circular”… you know that bullshit that Arrival pulled.

That’s more than I intended to write about the plot. The point is, as I said at the beginning, reading about and discussing the plot is superbly interesting and hats off to Nolan and crew for putting it together.

Watching the plot is a different story. Nolan is needlessly confusing in this picture. The fact that reading about the story offers a great deal of clarity should be a red flag. Not that every movie needs to or should be clearly understandable immediately… but it shouldn’t be so confusing that your head hurts.

I think the most disappointing thing is that I would be willing to set aside the confusing story for the pleasure of some well-choreographed, mind-bending action sequences. While the previously mentioned car chase is one such sequence, the grand finale invasion/battle was (for me) incredibly hard to follow. Shot to show two simultaneous operations, one team moving forward, one moving backward, I had no fucking clue what was happening.

And then once we start to actually think about the characters and humans who make up this story… it’s clear more work went into designing the action/set pieces than in developing the characters. I hated… HATED John David Washington’s performance as the Protagonist. He was written to sound like a quick-quipped, witty, charming Bond-like hero, and this just isn’t the movie for that. Though a former CIA agent, he’s not in a spy-thriller. And when the dialogue isn’t a showcase to show off how witty our hero is, it is just an excuse to explain boatloads and boatloads of exposition. I’ve become a real stickler as of late for how films do this. Classically, films use a newbie character as a stand-in for the audience as an excuse for other characters to explain the particulars of the world to them. It’s a little trite, but it’s perfectly functional. What isn’t functional is what this movie does. Half of the dialogue is the The Protagonist meeting someone and them asking him a question like, “What do you know about this Russian base?” and the Protagonist responding, “That Russian base? Well it’s… blah blah blah” and proceeds to talk for a minute answering the person’s question exactly. They reply, “Correct.” And the movie proceeds. It just doesn’t do much to make me care about any characters.

And then, yes, we have to talk about it, the way Nolan’s film deals with its lone female character, Kat Barton (Elizabeth Debicki). She’s the wife of the film’s villain, Andrei Sator (Kenneth Brannagh, doing his best impression of a Eastern European maniac since the last time he did this for 2014’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit… which admittedly he does a good job of). The men in this film just don’t give a shit about this woman. But that would be OK if the movie was honest about this, or in particular made the Protagonist feel guilty about how he uses Kat, discards her, and gets her unnecessarily involved in her husband’s affairs. If you can’t tell, I hated the Protagonist, which is never a good sign when watching a movie. I didn’t much like Washington in BlacKkKlansmen either, so maybe he’s just not my guy. In both movies, he seems to have a confident swagger about him that doesn’t match the characters he plays.

Robert Pattinson is in this movie too. He’s good. I don’t know. Nothing special here from him. He doesn’t detract from anything, but he’s not a great addition. Same goes for the performance from Debicki. Branagh as the villain is good. He’s a good actor even if his beard/facial hair just looked off the whole time. Maybe a larger make-up budget would have helped? At least he was an interesting character, even if deeply flawed and the movie goes a bit too far to make him sympathetic.

So it’s not the complete mess that some people say it is online, and while I understand and appreciate and really like the complexity of the plot and time travel mechanics on paper… they are certainly not a joy to watch. If you do watching, then be prepared to do boatloads of mental gymnastics or just resign one’s self to not understanding what’s happening. While I’m happy to hand-waive some shady plot points or time paradoxes from a movie, when the whole movie is a time paradox, that becomes hard to do. Alas, this is still the best Nolan film for me since Inception, but still a far cry from the highs of his 2000s run of The Prestige, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Inception. If some of the character moments were better developed, this would have been a better film. Instead, really, don’t try to understand and just be awash in this time-loopy, messy, but clever film.

**/ (Two and a half out of four stars)

[zelvyth]

 From a very young age it was reinforced that my ADHD was a disability I was meant to overcome rather than a tool I could use to better myself. I didn’t even know that I had been diagnosed, and that my mother had chosen not to medicate me, until I was partway through highschool. By that point I had already begun to give up on ever truly “making it” in life. The hurdles I needed to overcome had demoralized me to the point of near total apathy. Between my sexuality and early coming out in a small town highschool, and my various mental health problems, I felt like no one in the world saw things from my point of view. The last blow to my self esteem came when my grade 12 english teacher, the true decider of fate to any young person, told me my final thesis on Lady Macbeth being one of the greatest example of the flaws in Machiavelli’s “The Prince” was brilliant, but due to formatting and scattered grammar issues, she could give me no higher than a 60%. After years of getting consistent high 90’s in my english classes as well as other subjects, I had failed this extremely crucial essay due to the idiosyncrasies of the most frustrating language known to humankind. I passed that class with a 68, and felt like my fate was sealed. No chance at getting into any University in the country without redoing 5 months of work because one person believed that following the rules was a more important indication of intelligence than original ideas and the ability to make an argument. It crushed me. I admit that I didn’t put in the effort, but I had spent my entire life being told I was incredibly intelligent. It was the one thing I held onto. I felt betrayed by the education system. Though it was also due to many other factors at the time, this contributed to the second of my four suicide attempts. Today, I reject that philosophy. 

    When a person with ADHD is thinking, they connect ideas in their heads much faster than the average person. It can be confusing and disorienting to the people around them. I constantly have to explain how I got from point A to point B because the points connect automatically in my head. It’s exhausting, so I frequently do not bother to try. It’s extremely helpful when crafting an argument, however it can be debilitating in many aspects of modern life. Things the average person doesn’t think about, can be crippling for me. Without a true passion towards something, my ability to focus becomes hazy and my thoughts become scattered. I spend the majority of the day stuck in my head having conversations with myself instead of doing “normal” things with my time. I have spent my life being told that ADHD is my weakness, today I can tell you with the utmost certainty that it is my greatest strength.

    When the international pandemic of the respiratory disease “Covid-19” truly began and the world went into full nationwide lockdown, the bistro that I had, for the most part, happily been employed at shut down. After 8 years of honing my culinary craft certain that my skills, though undervalued, would always be needed somewhere, I was out of a job. Indefinitely. So was most of the country that worked with their hands or, in some capacity, physically with other people. Unless you were able to conduct business through zoom conferences or were a suddenly “essential” employee like a fast food worker, you were left with little to do but sit and think or try desperately to distract yourself from the increasingly troubling world around you. Luckily, to my surprise, the conservative government had pledged to keep us all fed and watered as best they could. What deeply worried me was the knowledge that my friends south of the border, through no fault of their own, and already mostly furious with their government, were not being treated with the same bare minimum of respect. I knew it was a recipe for true disaster and widespread civil unrest as early as march.

    I watched while the culture of social media, at least from my own lgbt bias, slowly started to shift and I picked up a lot of the big picture through memes and personally shared anecdotes. Celebrities were being ripped apart as they tried to get our attention again from their huge mansions while people sat at home worried about how to feed their children. Using insensitive phrasing like “we’re all in this together” when they undeniably weren’t. It quickly became a social caste system. The desperately poor trying to creatively make money any way they could. The often needlessly endangered. And the upper class for whom, little had changed besides the inability to do whatever they want at any given time. The lines were very clearly drawn. While the rich bemoaned their accessibility to haircuts, the poor argued with landlords about rent. All the while another group was frequently paid minimum wage to work on the proverbial front lines; flipping hamburgers, being yelled at by the rich because you were out of everything with the supply chain so damaged, or literally saving peoples lives. The anger and frustration quickly took over nearly every form of social media. Subtly, but day by day it grew. There was only so much one could do from inside their apartments, and globally, the havenots found solace and comfort with one another. The narratives of meme culture, which had matured and specialized far beyond the early days of “lolcats” and “trollface” comics, became almost exclusively about mocking the rich and their inability to deal with slight inconveniences.

Nearly every month of 2020 was a new major nationwide crisis and people had little else to do but talk about it or ignore it. The year kicked off with serious threat of a third world war because Donald Trump was tweeting intentionally inflammatory remarks towards the fascist leader of North Korea. All while nearly the entire country of Australia was ravaged by forest/bush fire. January saw a clearly corrupt president unbelievably not be impeached. Sparking outrage among, in my humble opinion, any sane individual. This also exposed, to anyone who knew all the facts, that the systems to hold those in power accountable was clearly broken and corruptible. Towards the end of January, beloved basketball player Kobe Bryant died in a horrible helicopter accident involving his daughter. Late February leading into early March was when global fears over Coronavirus began to be taken extremely seriously by every government in the world, the exception being the United States and the Trump administration. By late April, the country had over a hundred thousand dead, and nearly a quarter of its population out of a job. The irony of this, is that the calls to reopen the country didn’t come from those that had lost their jobs, but the upper class that had grown restless deprived from their usual comforts. Meanwhile we openly mocked them on instagram, tumblr, and twitter. Trying desperately to make light of a horrible situation and bring at least a little levity to their lives. News that a new breed of dangerously fatal hornets had migrated to North America was derided as a filler episode. One of my personal favourite takes on the year as a whole so far was a comparison to the four horseman of the apocalypse. January representing War, February representing Pestilence, March representing Famine, and April representing Death. In fact a lot of meme culture started to take on an extremely apocalyptic vibe. The message for many was clear, and depressing.

Then things started to happen really fast, so fast that for many it would make your head spin looking at it from the outside. It began with a video featuring a white Canadian woman from Waterloo named Amy Cooper that went viral across the globe. In the Ramble area of Central Park in NYC, this woman was filmed by a clearly peaceful, yet insistent, black man named Christian Cooper, no relation, asking her to leash her dog. This is a bylaw of the area. The woman refused and began to become very distressed, roughly handling her dog by the collar. She started dailing 911 and accused the man of assaulting her to the dispatcher. What many understood about this act, and rightfully called her out in outrage over, is that she was using her knowledge of how police handle black people in America to threaten this mans life over leashing her dog. She has been fired, and the shelter has taken her dog back.

Two days later, as I was travelling to my family’s cottage to “get away from it all and unplug”, a friend sent me a snapchat video from Minneapolis. It was on fire. I immediately did everything I could to try to find out what had happened. That, is when I saw the video of 8 minutes and 46 seconds of a police officer with his knee on the neck of another human being. This did not shock, nor suprise me. I had followed the many accounts of police killing people on video since 2014 when I was 16. When the Ferguson protests over Michael Brown’s killing by police officers were broadcast over most of the developed world. I had seen little change, despite Barrack Obama being President. This continued to happen for the next 6 years, though there were no more protests. Some of the people of those original protests that started the Black Lives Matter Movement, went missing over the next several years. Mainly those that had been photographed.

George Floyd’s death, I feel, was the straw that broke the camels’ back. Which is how anyone who has personally experienced police mistreatment and injustice would understand watching that video. A societal contract had been broken. And Minneapolis started to burn down the city that would let this happen to their friend, their neighbour, their father, their brother, and most importantly, their son. The words that chilled me to my very core… And continue to make me cry when I think about. Continue to make me want to punch every cop I run into.The words that have caused me to continue having this argument every day with everyone I know. The words that make me want to scream and rage and burn that country to the ground….  “Mama”

In his dying breaths this man called out to his mother. Who had died 2 years earlier. Who could not come save him. The police officer casually, with his hands in his pockets, knowing he could get away with it, murdered that man while he called out for his dead mother. Suffocated him to death in the middle of a global pandemic driven by respiratory disease. If I had been in Minneapolis that night, I would have helped burn it to the ground.

Something I didn’t expect happened then. Something I didn’t expect when I saw the fires and the rage from mostly black citizens of the city. As I watched Fox News try to turn the story into a conversation about rioting and looting rather than Police accountability. Other peaceful protests started up in other cities. My entire social media feed from multiple sources was filled with people discussing their anger and vowing to protest it. I don’t like to admit that I didn’t see this coming. But on May 26th, as I ravenously tried to keep up from the comfort of a cottage on Crystal Lake Ontario, a spark of hope for humanity that I had lost a long time ago started to ignite.

Something interesting happens when you get most of your information from social media. It either makes you hyper critical of everything you’re told and willing to research anything important, or it makes you willing to believe anything your friends tell you. As the protests kicked off in major cities across America, after months of inactivity, my ADHD kicked into high gear. I used every neuron of my brain power to follow the protests from as many different angles as I could. Most importantly, I followed the story from the people who were at them. That’s what growing up in modern society makes you do. After months if not years if not decades of being lied to for personal gain constantly. It makes you pay attention to the people who have nothing to gain.

I got back to my appartment from my cottage a day later, still glued to my phone. Barely talking, barely eating, barely sleeping. I watched police officers in riot gear throw tear gas into peaceful protests in every city in America. Tear gas, by the way, is an international war crime in combat situations. I watched media with an implicitly right wing bias condemn the protests. Convincing people that looting was worth a war crime. I watched it work. It worked with my own father. It did not work for me. I watched the news from political biases of both sides but took most of it with a grain of salt. That’s what I had been taught to do from as young as 14 by the world I grew up in. The news could give me general information. However, the story was on the ground and I knew from experience that people would try to bury it so I had to watch it as quickly as possible. I watched friends of mine in the states get tear gassed and beaten while exercising their first amendment rights. I watched the news condemn the protests. I was horrified. I watched the peaceful protesters of police brutality in New York get beaten and gassed from a minimum of 30 different perspectives of the people I knew and trusted, and those I didn’t. I watched the peaceful protestors in LA get beaten and gassed from the same amount of perspectives. I watched them throw flash bombs and shoot rubber coated bullets into the faces of my friends in every city in America. I watched the President of the United States order the peaceful protestors in front of the White House to be beaten and gassed so he could have an awkward photo-op with a fucking bible. I watched this for a week straight from every angle available. Day in and day out. Every hour I was conscious, I watched fascism try to grab power in in every city in America. I watched people in powerful positions deny it.

It wasn’t just paying attention to the protests and the news of them explicitly. I wasn’t just filled with horror. I was also watching something wonderfully unexpected happen. I watched my black friends, my gay friends, my asain friends, and my intelligent friends, begin to weaponize social media. I watched them beg all of their friends to do the same. So did I, even though I felt like there wasn’t anything I could really do from cozy liberal Waterloo. I watched us all turn the algorithms against the people who made them. I did everything I could to make sure you couldn’t turn away. I told my gay white friends condemning the actions of protestors that his rights came from a riot. I watched them shrink in fear of my voice. My father told me I was getting caught up in left wing rhetoric. I tore his arguments to shreds. He told me broad angry statements don’t do anything. I told him broad angry statements create the conversation we’re having. Resistance is a highway with many lanes, and I knew my lane.

You grow up, especially in my age, especially when you’re gay, especially when you are exposed to a lifetime of stories of rebellion against tyranny, hearing about the power of resistance. As I marched in Waterloo with over thirty thousand people I didn’t know, I realized that I have never truly understood that power. How it surges through your body like electricity as you scream until your voice is hoarse. It’s a high better than any drug known to man, than any pride parade where I was pandered to by corporations for hours. It took my fear, and my anger, and my helplessness and turned it into raw power exploding from my body. I continued to watch people I knew deny reality. 

The protests grew. They spread across the world like wildfire. I went to facebook, a place I avoid because I don’t agree with the majority of people on it, and told anyone who would listen to me that this is what Pride means. What it truly means to be proud of your community. Not a rainbow flag in a store window, not a corporation asking you to buy it’s rainbow backpack. But turning apathy in face of evil into raw unbridled electricity. I watched the protests spread to Montreal and Toronto, I watched the police mishandle things there too. I watched violence perpetuated by the state against my friends, people I’ve known for years. The power I felt merely grew. It grew with every flash grenade and bullet and tear gas canister shot at my friends. It will not subside till this is over or until I die. I’m going to spend the next decade giving up the comfortable life of good food, great drinks, and fantastic company that I found in the restaurant industry. I’m going to spend a decade getting my Law degree to fight for every last one of us in the courtroom because that is a place I can make it count. 

Today is June 8th of the year 2020 and I began writing this piece at Noon, it is now 4:11 P.M. I have done zero editing and I refuse to. I submit this as my revised final essay. I want to know when you got behind the protests. Because if it was as you were reading this, I deem you unworthy to judge my critical thinking skills. If it was yesterday I think you should be ashamed of yourself. I was with them from hour one. You should have been too. How dare you spend years teaching children about racism and oppression. How dare you tell me that I’m not worthy of higher education in any form. Telling children that wikipedia is unreliable as a source is idiotic, it’s one of the most peer reviewed encyclopedia’s to ever exist. How dare you tell me and the young adults you teach that you don’t give out scores higher than ninety percent. What is the point of forcing teenagers to write in cursive. Why must I live the experiences you write about in your precious properly formatted essays. In this country a 68 is two percent shy of getting into any University.  It’s sentencing an intelligent person with an array of disabilities a life of believing they have no power. Despite my own mistakes at the time and the amount I have grown as a person since, I will hold you personally accountable for that. 

As a closing statement, to every English teacher in this province, no, to every English teacher in the great country of Canada. Think very hard about when exactly you put your full support behind this movement. Because your curriculum is outdated, and absolutely useless in the real world. And your racism is showing.

Post Script.

There is no bibliography of unbiased sources because all sources are biased. You have a supercomputer in your pocket and this should all be public information. Look it up.

[litabrown]

YouTube Shows Supremacy Amidst The Pandemic

During the pandemic, YouTube was able to show what they are capable of in terms of fact-checking as more conspiracy theories emerged on the platform.

The company started seeing these first months of YouTube-related pandemic developments as a broader narrative.  The tale follows in a broadly imaginative manner of a portrait of human needs that are met. Both the needs and how they were discussed were a simple collection of subjects that the company defined with a little sociological framework. It sounds abstract, but as you simply see through the YouTube plots, different stories can unfold through the screen.

YouTube Teams Around the World

Ben McOwen Wilson, the Regional Manager of YouTube for North America, the Middle East, and Africa, said that the pandemic has provided an opportunity for YouTube to demonstrate what the world’s biggest video-sharing platform can do in terms of fact-checking. Throughout the pandemic, YouTube has continued to delete videos that were against its community guidelines. Grow your YouTube channel in a minute. Here’s the easiest way. 

The fact-checking function has also been launched in the United States, India, and Brazil. International U.S. and organizations based in India may also perform fact-finding reviews in English.

Fact-check collaborations are also presented earlier this month in Germany. Wilson, Chief Executive YouTube U.K., said that specific political partner accessibility was crucial for delaying globalization of the YouTube knowledge fact-check committees.  Today, YouTube collaborates with related organizations such as the BBC Reality Check, Full Fact Service, FactCheckNI, and many others.

Wilson also stated how TikTok could play a significant contribution to the online removal of violent material. TikTok was in the hot seat since scenes of a man perpetrating suicidal acts on Facebook Live had been extensively spreading on various website over the last few weeks. Wilson said that TikTok had a special problem with their systems, which proved to be favorable. He added that for such a small platform, if any other site had had the problem, the issues would have been much larger.

However, he believes that it is an essential step if people want to take part in forums across the sector and that they would be welcome in their company. In September, Theo Bertram, Director of Governance and Social Policy for TikTok in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, appeared before the Congressional Committee on digital hazards and misinformation and told the CEOs that all-important social media sites like YouTube had appealed to the organization to work collaboratively to delete malicious content.

Wilson said that such alliances were always in existence. Since before, teams and social networking stakeholders have set up a series of operating groups in various areas of damage. TikTok becomes a huge member of most of the groups.

He added that the company would partner with other platforms and agencies to establish guiding principles around networking. So far, the company believes that they had addressed issues regarding violent extremism and a broad scope just before TikTok became more popular. In all ways around the changing approaches to knowledge exchange, the company promises to continue playing a significant role in protecting its community.

YouTube Personalities on the Rise

"Cobra Kai," a YouTube program that has appeared on the network for two years, was bought by Netflix and will be released in 2021 for the third season. With both sides taken into consideration, it was considered as an adult decision, according to Wilson. It seems less difficult for a massive platform than it is for the BBC or any other station because it does not own the content being shared on its platform.

In the 3rd season, the lead protagonist, Miguel Díaz, played by Xolo Maridueña, is still bent on the violent war among rival secondary school karate dojos. Daniel from Macchio is finding answers from his experience, while Johnny from Zabka is seeking salvation. On the other hand, John Kreese, played by Martin Kove, aims to get his pupils into line with his supremacy view.

The television series was created and managed by the producer, Counterbalance Entertainment, by Jon Hurwitz, Josh Heald, and Hayden Schlossberg. The executives will produce, in collaboration with Sony Pictures TV,  James Lassiter, Will Smith, and Caleeb Pinkett for Overbrook Entertainment. Cobra Kai's co-executive producers are Zabka and the Macchio, who are members of an early film series.

A YouTube personality Mo Gilligan, for example, is mentioned by Wilson on Channel 4 and Netflix. He added that he was not feeling bitter but rather a huge pride for being part of the enormous success. Wilson shared that otherwise, because of the pandemic, YouTube noticed an increase in health material use. The executive also spoke on the website about different materials regarding the community guidelines.

Analysis by Oxford Economics has shown that 71% of people have accepted that YouTube houses allow improved content and 76% of the data in media. Furthermore, entertainment corporations in the U.K. polled through a popular YouTuber who decided to promote a wide selection of content producers, while the site sheds light on unexplored talents. Eighty-three percent of British media and music respondent firms use YouTube.

YouTube's artistic environment was funded in 2019 with 30,000 packed jobs with a financial figure of £1.4 billion ($1.81 billion) to the national GDP of YouTube's innovative community. Ninety-six percent of adults in the United Kingdom utilize YouTube. Typical internet adult in the U.K. every month monitor YouTube 46 minutes per day based on Comscore figures.

Conclusion

The pandemic that has shaken the entire world is not yet over. However, its startling inception has taught the people surprising consistency in the networks' content trends. This unity explains people's mutual needs, including feelings of attachment, well-being, and a clear sense of identity. It is a point the disease outbreak seeks to assume frequently that people are all human regardless of how different they behave. The world tries to resolve the needs of isolated people watching the same kinds of videos halfway through these hectic days.

[karazetian]

What’s happening is that Disney is not doing its job.

I ended up doing an essay lol. I obviously appreciate someone reading it but given that is really lengthy, I don’t expect anyone to do so. I’m also not Asian so, there’s that. And my English leaves a lot to be desired (I corrected the orthography but I’m prone to grammar errors). 

I do recommend checking out the sources I linked, especially 1 (youtube video made by a Chinese person), 2 and 3 (the descriptions are below).

I talk about what Disney is doing is not out of naive idleness. Idleness yes, but naivety no. 

I keep thinking, where the hell did this movie go wrong? Because yes, this is not the first time nor the last time Disney is going to deliver a less than mediocre live-action remake, but, despite all of their track record, I still had hope for this one. 

Because, while the other movies are classics, they had certain aspects that didn’t age perfectly, which it is understandable. Beauty and the Beast, although arguably the best Disney animated movie, had these “Stockholm Syndrome” connotations* (bear with me) and we also had to consider how much of Beast’s personality could stay in the remake (since he could have been read really wrong if he lashed out on Belle too much, not only because of his appearance but for the power dynamics of him being the one in calling the shots of Belle’s wellbeing, hope that made sense). 

Cinderella could have made some* audiences criticize her for her apparent submissiveness, Aladdin is a whole can of worms in the subject of orientalism (which they kept in the remake, anyway), etc., etc.

*This is not the post to discuss whether or not Belle suffered Stockholm Syndrome during her movie, nor to discuss whether or not Cinderella was actually submissive in the original. Many people have already done that, my point in bringing that up is, Disney used that as an excuse to change scenes and plot in the remakes. 

But Mulan, aside from minor problems that come from an American company writing an eastern story (and the values and trends present when the movie was made), had a very strong plot that still holds up to this day (I say that like the movie was made in the 30s lol). 

Not only it is a “feminist” movie but also, the story is very well written and made, in my opinion. There was not a lot that you needed to change. The main character had already a well-rounded personality (unlike, for example, my girl Aurora), the story was already very rich, etc. The removal of Mushu (and the whole dragon symbolism), although sad, it’s understandable how it was necessary.

However, is not just the removal of important and nostalgic characters like Mushu or grandma Fa, but the removal of the soul of the movie.

Mulan 2020 is a soulless movie. 

This is not unique to this remake, as this is not even unique to remakes, imo. But it is one of the most painful ones, because this movie meant a lot to a lot of women (and people) and the beauty of it all was that you didn’t need to be Chinese, or a woman, to appreciate it (that’s a good thing in the sense that is good when you can relate to a story, even if you don’t share some of the traits with the main character. Not that it’s good despite being the story of a Chinese woman, is that clear? Sorry if it’s not).

And it’s also painful because it could have been so easy to... not do that. Other people have already talk about this (and in a much briefer, better way) but yes, what made Mulan so great in the original was that she was your average girl, even worse because she lived in a very conservative society yet she managed to become a badass while, not only discovering who she was in the process, but also staying true to that. That was the reason she was great. She had flaws, she couldn’t adapt, she was the underdog but she, through her unwillingness to give up, her tenacity, wits and compassion, overcame that, eventually becoming a hero. 

It was not because of her qì. Again, I’m not going to do a deep dive in that because others have already talked about how they made her a Chosen One. What I want to discuss is how sad it is that they went for that route and my confusion as to why they did it. 

And I think it was more than laziness. It’s definitely a lack of motivation but, when you dwelve on it, I don’t think that laziness goes hand in hand with carelessness. But first, with the laziness, a google search would have made them see what progressive crowds now deem as feminist values. Both eastern and western crowds. 

Because yeah, sure, I doubt the Chinese government is well versed in intersectional feminism. Yet, there are movies both the Chinese government and its people have liked and appreciated. Weren’t they the ones that, upon watching Kung Fu Panda said something like “how did we not come up with that?” 

I saw this video made my Chinese youtuber Accented Cinema (links below: 1, I highly recommend watching it) and he even mentioned his school taking his class to watch the original movie in theaters. So, yeah, believe it or not, you can make a feminist movie set in a third world country (I also come from a third world country, sorry if this sounds like I’m being mean to Chinese people). 

So, why did you not do your homework, Disney? Again, I understand they couldn’t have made the most leftist movie, not only because it’s Disney, but because they wanted to appeal to both governments, however, you could have made the remake be satisfying enough for that audience and the rest of the world. But they didn’t even satisfy the Chinese audience, with a lot of them saying how the movie reinforces ideologies the Chinese themselves have already moved on from (the “devotion to family” inscription in the sword has received a lot of criticisms: 2).

This means that they failed to do even the only thing they seemed to compromise on. You could have had still appealed to the government. That is to say, I don’t expect Disney to be the wokest of them all and go full anarchist on their movies because that’s not even what Disney wants anyway.

They could have still done some things that wouldn’t have anything to do with western or eastern values. For example, they could have given Mulan’s sister a personality. Giving your character one is not a western/Americanized value, it’s part of what means to make a well written story.

Without that, her character seems completely pointless. Seriously, I keep thinking what was the point of her character, besides being a disappointing replacement of the grandma. I’d like to think that she was the movie’s way to represent how more conservative values are still valid, if the woman chooses so. Her wanting to get married and have a traditional family doesn’t diminish her value as a person. They could have made a scene with the two sisters still being able to bond with each other, even if they had very different views of the world.

But since we never find out about her motivations or desires, it is left unknown whether this is what she chose for herself or if she is just another victim of her circumstances. And I ask myself why, since it could have been so easily to do that. You could have replaced the scene where kid Mulan is combing her sister’s hair (which, for what I can remember, only serves to further stablish the sister’s fear of spiders… which they make clear in other two scenes) if the movie’s duration was a problem.

Being left with no logical answers, I can only conclude that it was out of laziness. But it doesn’t end there, does it? Because I think “ok, so they were lazy, then they could have done what every lazy student does when they don’t have any motivation left and copy-pasted the original. Didn’t they do that with the Lion King already?”

And I get that it didn’t work with that one, but that’s because you shouldn’t somber up a movie that has anthropomorphic animals, that also heavily relied on being an animated movie. Mulan doesn’t rely on that; Mulan was inspired by a legend. Live-action Mulan had already been made with good results, so what couldn’t they have just copy pasted their own original? If they didn’t have the energy to give it a proper, well-made twist (i.e., Maleficent), the least they could have done is respect its predecessor.

But they took away all the things that made Mulan great in the first place, to made her what every writer will tell you not to do. Making her being born with extraordinary skills, which then results in her not having to work for her merits, is something even I, a nobody, knows not to do. I’m not even going to address how taking agency away from her sends the wrong message to the little girls that are going to see this sad excuse of a movie.

What I’m trying to say, it may not be comparable to a lazy student copying the homework of one of the most accomplished students, but it is as if they based their work on that, just butchering all the parts that made the accomplished student’s work good. And, unlike with the lazy student whose reasons might be justifiable, Disney had no excuse to do so, because it is their job.

It is their job to deliver a well written story or, if that’s too demanding, to at least make a movie with a happy-go feeling (is that grammatically correct?) that sends a well-meaning message. Instead, the message this movie (I would say, purposefully) delivers is that you can only accomplish great things if you’re born special.

Us, regular folks, especially regular women, especially regular women born in less than ideal circumstances, are doomed. And that’s what’s sad.

 Links to sources used:

1.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZccG-wtt5FA&ab_channel=AccentedCinema

2.    https://twitter.com/tony_zy/status/1302743527240142849

Why “boycott” Mulan 2020 (not only because of what the lead actress said):

3.    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/07/why-disneys-new-mulan-is-scandal/

4.    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/whats-happening-in-xinjiang-is-genocide/2020/07/06/cde3f9da-bfaa-11ea-9fdd-b7ac6b051dc8_story.html

5.    What the actress did say: https://time.com/5653973/mulan-boycott-liu-yifei/

[kathydavie]

Book Review: Shelly Laurenston's Badger to the Bone

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