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stina-is-a-punk-rocker · 4 years ago

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‘always and forever, lara jean’: a bungled mess of my thoughts while watching the movie

Alright, cards on the table: I never finished reading the book. I got bored a couple of pages in, so I just read up the summary on Wikipedia and called it a day.

Not gonna lie, I expected better from the movies. I loved the first movie; it was cute, it was fun, it hit all the right places. The second movie was… eh. Jordan Fisher is cute, so that’s a plus.

And then we got the third movie; the final in the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before trilogy.

And it was somehow even worse.

Maybe I’m exaggerating. Despite its shortcomings in the plot and character development-related departments (the fact that Lara Jean wrote addresses for letters she never meant to send is something that will bother me on my deathbed), the movies have their merits. They’re cutesy and charming and enjoyable, overall; movie-LJ is sweet and unashamedly a girly-girl, which is a refreshing change from the #NotLikeOtherGirls, pick-me girls and bruh girls we had in loads of other YA movies growing up. Peter’s pretty cute, too; he’s not a possessive freak like so many other love interests (The Kissing Booth, After, Anna and the French Kiss), and his and Lara Jean’s dynamic is cute, too. Not to mention- we finally have an Asian lead whose Asian-ness isn’t the whole focus of the story!

Again, maybe I’m being extra with all this. The series is, at its core, solely for entertainment purposes. Not every piece of media has to have an underlying message and you shouldn’t need to read between every goddamn line to find something worthy of enjoying. They’re certainly helpful for whiling away a couple of hours; perfect for bingeing with a pint of ice cream in hand, and all of this is in good fun.

Also, it goes without saying, but: spoilers ahead.

The film beings with Lara Jean scribbling a postcard to Peter while she’s in Korea with her family. The inclusion of that little snapshot of Asian culture made me so happy- seriously, fuck everyone who says diversity in media doesn’t matter. I’m not even Korean, and I was overjoyed at seeing a couple of scenes just from the same continent I’m on. The K-pop music in the background was a fun touch, too (although all Korean music isn’t K-pop, but that’s a rant for another day).

(Also: Blackpink has so many more suitable songs than Pretty Savage that go with the theme of the movies. Kill This Love in the second movie while Lara Jean is getting ready to go to her boyfriend’s match is bad enough- they’re supposed to be in love in that scene, goddammit.)

One thing that bothered me throughout the movies is how obviously non-Korean Lara Jean and Margot look. It’s like whoever chose the cast went for any random Asian- Lana’s Vietnamese and Janel Parrish is half-Chinese, and it’s so obvious. You seriously couldn’t find two Korean-Americans who even vaguely resembled each other so they could pass for sisters? The actresses do a stunning job and I don’t want to shit on them, but I just wish they didn’t go with the ‘all Asians look the same, what’s the difference?’ mindset.

Also, a nitpicky thing I’ve noticed in movies with characters who read a lot: no one holds their books up while they’re reading. Your arms start to cramp, which is why you keep your book in your lap while you’re reading, or you rest on your belly and hold the book in front of you. My spine and shoulders didn’t suffer years of torture as a chronic reader for you to include characters who hold their books up while reading.

A major gripe I have with Always and Forever, Lara Jean is how the characters are almost jarringly out of character- not from the books, but from the two previous movies, too. Lara Jean didn’t have much of a character to begin with, so I can’t say much about her (she dissed Oasis at one point; it’s okay for me to be mean to her), but the rest of them are either caricatures of themselves or just totally different people.

Movie Peter >>> Book Peter. He’s almost too perfect (except for the fact that he unironically loves The Fast and the Furious, which… ew), almost too much of the ideal boyfriend. Not that my perpetually single arse would know. How do boyfriends even work? I wouldn’t know the first thing to do with one; how often should you feed it? Do you need to take it on walks?

(In the notes I’ve written towards the end of the film, I’ve complained about Peter being immature and making Lara Jean feel bad about following her dream to go to NYU. He confuses me.)

Not to mention how distractingly adorable Noah Centineo is from some angles and under certain lighting conditions (other times, he reminds me of the human version of Shrek and that bothered me). King of weird Tweets and Instagram captions though he may be, he’s got a really nice smile, and his gravelly voice is both parts sexy and disturbing.

But I digress.

I’ll never forgive the directors for what they did to Kitty and Chris- two of my favorite characters, from both the books and the movies. Kitty’s annoying to the point of being borderline unlikeable- gone is the occasionally snarky comic relief we all came to love; in her place is an annoying brat whose every line comes out forced. Also, making soap is fun; fuck you, Kitty.

Chris is essentially Dixie D’Amelio’s character from that TikToker Grey’s Anatomy ripoff; the main character in One Direction fanfiction from 2012 who doesn’t want to go to the concert but her best friend gets a ticket for her so she can’t bail but Harry Styles sees her in the crowd and falls in love at first sight and 50k of mutual pining and misunderstandings late, they get together. She’s cynical and snarky and hates capitalism and consumerism and prom (because of course she does), but secretly, she’s into it (because of course she is). My guess is that she’s there to appease all the arseholes (including myself) who accused the characters of being too one-dimensional, but it seems too out of place in a movie that doesn’t have much plot to begin with.

I really, really hate how Lucas was done dirty- throughout every single movie. Of course, it’s Lara Jean’s story so not every side character has to be fully fleshed out- but you’d think three. entire. movies. would be enough to give Lucas a bigger role than the GBF and the token black guy for the diversity brownie points. Every single time Lucas shows up, it’s to push Lara Jean and Peter’s story forward. I would’ve liked to see a romance for him pushed forward instead one for Chris- especially because he says, at one point in a previous movie, that it’s hard to find other gay boys, so it would’ve been sweet to see him find love- and Chris’s character arc could’ve been focused on reconciling with Genevieve. Instead, we see the OG Reggie from Riverdale be the one to show Chris the bright side of monogamy, and Lucas gets a date to prom as an afterthought (another darkskin black dude, so no one thinks the film is racist).

Genevieve’s character in this movie gives me whiplash. Look, I’m all for girls supporting girls- healthy female relationships are something way too many YA movies lack- but she goes from bitch queen extraordinaire to friendly the moment the next scene calls for it. Her character isn’t consistent. A redemption arc should be executed cleanly and believably; you can’t have a character be a total prick one moment and then suddenly be, “Hey, if you get into NYU, let me know,” the next.

And Genevieve’s still an arsehole to Chris; at one point, in NYC, while they’re at the NYU campus grounds (I knew that Lara Jean was going to go to NYU the moment she saw all the banners; I fucking called it), Genevieve tells Chris, “University is for people who actually have a future,” and I recoiled. I’m not the nicest of people and yet that was going too far. Chris doesn’t hesitate to shoot back a, “You peaked in high school,”, but still. Y i k e s. You can’t convince me someone’s turned over a new leaf when they say something like that.

Lara Jean’s dad (forgot his name; gonna call him Dr. Covey) is as unremarkable as ever, and his new wife (forgot her name, too… Trisha? Trina? Eh, something like that) is… unsettling. I mean, I get that they’re all loved up and twitterpatted, but there’s something about all the smiling they’ve got going on that chills me to the bone.

Also, Trisha/Trina kinda looks like TikTok’s ThatVeganTeacher and it bothers me.

Another huge problem with this movie even being made is that the series never had enough plot to continue onto a trilogy. Lara Jean’s letters are what the plots of the first and second movies revolve around; the third only mentions them in passing. The final love letter from Peter was a cute callback, but there’s a massive continuity issue with the first two movies and this last one- both character and plot-wise.

Maybe I’m not articulating this clearly enough, so I’ll use an example: take Harry Potter, for example. Harry’s main goal throughout the series is defeating Voldemort. And it takes all seven books for him to get there, to finally achieve this.

Lara Jean’s goal in the first movie changes midway; from keeping up the façade with Peter so she can avoid the crap with the rest of the letters getting out, to making her fake relationship real. It forms a bridge with the second movie; the letter that went out to John Ambrose, and her dithering between Peter and perfection (I’m not sorry). But what does the third movie have to do with any of this?

There were way too many music montages. You couldn’t go five minutes without a random pop song playing in the background, and it was annoying as hell. Don’t Look Back in Anger was w a s t e d on this stupid film. The artsy scenery shots were even worse- no, I don’t give a fuck about the New York skyline or a bird’s eye view of whatever vehicle Lara Jean is in. A few shots of Seoul would’ve sufficed; the rest was overkill. This movie is way too damn long already (almost 2 entire hours!!!); cut out a couple of those. No one cares.

I thought they’d pull the whole Aladdin trope with character-A-keeps-trying-to-tell-character-B-the-truth-about-a-lie-B-believes-in-about-A-but-B-keeps-interrupting, but Lara Jean (typing her name out is annoying, why couldn’t she have a single name, like both of her sisters?) comes clean earlier than I expected. Peter’s reaction about LJ not getting into Stanford is… uncharacteristically mature? No “Why did you lie to me?”, no accusations, not an ounce of betrayal. Which I did not expect from a guy who’s a little bitch for the greater part of book one (I really don’t like Book Peter, in case you couldn’t tell). I know fuck-all about book three’s Peter, so I can’t tell if he really did adopt this mature, well-adjusted persona, or the movie did it to make Peter seem like less of a dick (like they did it with the sextape-that-wasn’t-a-sextape in the first installment).

On a sidenote, how do these main characters in YA books get into really good colleges with zero to no visible effort? These arseholes fuck around for the entirety of the story and have way too much going on to actually do schoolwork, but they waltz into Ivy Leagues at the end. And apparently, I’m not the only one bothered by this.

There’s something to be said about how the movies don’t really sexualize minors (characters who are minors, to be fair. None of the MCs look anything like teenagers), though. It’s almost weird to see them not getting drunk and partying and having sex all the time. Maybe that’s why Lara Jean trying to get her hand on Peter’s dick felt so stilted and awkward (I cringed so hard when she kept trying to touch him and he kept pushing her hand away, holy shit).

And the kissing. It’s to be expected from a romance film, but there was so. Much. Kissing.

The amount of product placements (… actually, I could count only two: Apple and a pair of Beats headphones Lara Jean puts on at one point, but the movie shoved so many iPhones in my face that I’m obligated to exaggerate) would’ve made anti-capitalist Chris mad.

I’m guessing this all takes place in a parallel universe, sans the coronavirus. Still, being in quarantine this past year and being socially awkward for every other one, it was agonizing seeing everyone so close together in NYC. When Peter kissed the ball (lol) (I have the sense of humor of a straight boy in middle school, don’t judge me) when him and Lara Jean go bowling, I had a visceral reaction. And what are the odds of Peter meeting his estranged dad at the very same bowling alley?

Speaking of Peter’s daddy issues (I’ve written “Hardin but diluted” in my notes; I watched this movie at, like, 1 AM; I’m not entirely sure what was going through my head at that point)- I hated how they guilt-tripped Peter into giving his father another chance. In the wise words of Hannah Montana, everybody makes mistakes- but leaving your wife and two kids for another woman is pretty far from a little oopsie on Mr. Kavinsky’s part. I don’t blame Peter for hating him, and I’m not in a place to judge whether Mr. Kavinsky (does he get a first name?) should be forgiven or not, but I feel like they let him off too easy and made Peter seem like a misunderstood teenager with anger issues for not accepting Mr. Kavinsky’s (crappy) apology at once.

And it adds nothing to the story at all; Mr. Kavinsky peaces out after having one (01) coffee with his firstborn, and he’s never seen again. If you’re going to introduce a subplot, make it tie into the main storyline- the very least you could do is make it an important enough part of the story to have more than 10 minutes of the run time. It makes no sense as to why they’d bring up Peter’s dad in this last film, when he’s already gone through two perfectly fine. I guess it was a ‘tying everything up’ part… even though no one cared.

Lara Jean’s handwriting is surprisingly ugly for someone who’s written that many love letters. And her styling took a definite nosedive; her outfits in the first movie were so effing cute, but now they’re just… meh.

There are so many conversations and lines that the writers must’ve thought sounded good enough for someone to type out the quote in curly font and slap it on a screenshot from the movie to post on Instagram, but when it comes to the actual delivery, they just sounded… weird.

Peter says one time near the beginning of the film, “You know what I’m looking forward to the most in college? Never having to say goodnight,” because he expects him and Lara Jean to get into the same college.

But I guess the word they should’ve used was ‘good-bye’, because this just makes him sound stupid.

At one point, Lara Jean asks Kitty how much Kitty’s gonna miss her when she goes off to college, and Kitty says, “A four.” Later on, she confesses, “I’m gonna miss you a twelve, Lara Jean,” and all I could think was, “But we’re endgame, Archie!”

(In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t let people know I’ve watched Riverdale; it lessons my credibility.)

Still, there remains some good to be found: all the baked goods looked very delicious and made me crave chocolate chip cookies. Peter wearing the socks Lara Jean gifted him at the beginning of the movie was a cute gesture, and Lara Jean giving Peter her teal hatbox? The one she kept her love letters in? Was so? Cute? Help?

And hey, it’s a cliché that’s been done to death, but I’m always a sucker for that part in movies where the girl walks down the stairs in a pretty dress with her hand on the banister and the boy turns around and his mouth falls open and all he can say is, “Wow,”- and this film did not disappoint! Not to mention how cute both Lara Jean’s and Chris’s prom dresses were.

Dr. Covey and Trisha/Trina’s wedding was cute, too- I struggled to decide whether Kitty wearing a necklace that says ‘feminist’ and a tux is a bit too on-the-nose, but I’ve decided that it’s nothing to get my knickers all in a twist about (for clarification: it’s not the necklace or the crossdressing that made me debate this; I just wish they didn’t make a big deal out of it- I wish they didn’t have Kitty and Lara Jean get into an argument about her not wearing a dress, if that makes sense?).

And the final letter- the one from Peter to Lara Jean- I ate that shit up; it was so, so, so cute.

In conclusion (why is it so easy for me to crank out 3k about my thoughts on a Netflix movie and yet when it comes to English Lit. at school, I’d stare at a blank sheet of foolscap for ages?), did I enjoy the movie? Not really. There were parts of it that I liked, but it was overall too boring and I kept wishing I’d watched the new SKZ Code episode instead every few minutes.

But that doesn’t mean that it was bad. I kinda feel a little sad, actually, now that Lara Jean and Peter’s story has come to a close; To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, the first movie, is one of my favorites, and bitch though I might about them, the kinda grew on me… like an innocent plant, at first, but then like a fungus. Not a parasitic fungus, just not mutualistic, either… kind of like a commensal.

Maybe I should stop with the biology similes.

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aion-rsa · 3 years ago

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How Science Fiction’s Ensemble Stories Humanize Space

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A close-knit crew of wildly different people ride around on a spaceship having adventures. If you’re a sci-fi fan, there are very good odds that this synopsis describes one of your hooks into the genre. That crew might be a dysfunctional band of space criminals and revolutionaries, or a clean cut team of scientists, diplomats and soldiers serving a galactic Space UN, but there is a core appeal to this set up across the genre.

“Ensemble crews are one of the quickest and most powerful ways to forge a found family. A foundational example for me was Blake’s 7,” says Paul Cornell, who has written stories for the Star Trek: Year Five comic series among his many speculative fiction credits. “They haven’t been recruited, they have relative degrees of distance from the cause, they’ve been flung together. The most important thing is that they’re all very different people.”

These Are the Voyages…

It’s a formula that has been repeated over and over for about as long as there has been science fiction on television—starting with the likes of Star Trek and Blake’s 7, through the boom in “planet of the week” style TV in the 90s and 00s with Farscape and Firefly, to more recent stories like Dark Matter, The Expanse, Killjoys, and the Guardians of the Galaxy films. Most recently Sky’s Intergalactic, and the Korean movie Space Sweepers have been carrying the standard, while last month saw people diving back into the world of Mass Effect with Mass Effect Legendary Edition. While Commander Sheppard is ostensibly the protagonist of the video game trilogy, few would argue that it’s anything other than the ensemble of the Normandy crew that keeps people coming back.

As science fiction author Charlie Jane Anders points out, it’s not hard to see the appeal of a family of likeable characters, kept in close quarters by the confines of their ship, and sent into stories of adventure.

“I love how fun this particular strand of space opera is, and how much warmth and humour the characters tend to have,” Anders says. “These stories have in common a kind of swashbuckling adventure spirit and a love of problem-solving and resourcefulness. And I think the ‘found family’ element is a big part of it, since these characters are always cooped up on a tiny ship together and having to rely on each other.”

Over the years the Star Wars franchise has delivered a number of mismatched spaceship crews, from various ensembles to have crewed the Millennium Falcon, to the band of rebels in Rogue One, to the crew of the Ghost in Star Wars: Rebels.

That energy was one of the inspirations for Laura Lam and Elizabeth May, the writers behind Seven Devils and its upcoming sequel, Seven Mercies. In Seven Devils, a team of very different women come together aboard a starship stolen from an oppressive, galaxy-spanning empire, clashing with each other as much as the regime they are fighting.

“So many of these stories are what we grew up with, and they were definitely influences. The scrappy people trying to make a living or rebel against a higher power, or the slick luxury communism of Star Trek,” says Lam. “What’s great and terrible about space is how you are often stuck on a ship with people, for better or worse. That isolation can breed really interesting character conflict and deep bonds. You have to have your crew’s back, otherwise space or alien plants are too large or dangerous [to survive].”

While the “Seven” duology is very much inspired by this genre of space adventure, it also brings these stories’ underlying political themes to the surface.

“What I enjoy most about space operas is taking contemporary socio-cultural and political issues and exploring them through a different lens,” says May. “I love to think of them in terms of exploration, analogous to ships navigating the vastness of a sea. And on journeys that long, with only the ocean and saltwater (space) around you, things become fraught. Yes, these are tales of survival, but they’re also tales of what it means to question the world around you. Aside from the cultural questions that [premise] raises, it opens possibilities for conflict, character bonding, and worldbuilding.”

In Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s novel, The Salvage Crew, his ensemble don’t spend long on their ship. In the opening scene, they are plummeting through the atmosphere of an alien planet in a drop-pod piloted by an AI who is also the book’s narrator. But the book shares that sense of characters who need to stick close together in the face of a large and dangerous universe.

“What did I like about [space team stories]? Well, always the sense of wonder that the scale brought me: the feeling that Earth, and all our bickering, was just a tiny speck of dust – what Sagan called ‘the pale blue dot’ – and out there was an entire universe waiting to be explored,” Wijeratne says. “I treasured the darkness, as well: the darkness of the void, the tragedy of people in confined spaces, and a terror of the deep that only the deep sea brings me. It wasn’t the family attitude: it was more the constraints and the clever plays within terrifyingly close constraints. There’s a kind of grim, lunatic nihilism you need for those situations, and I loved seeing that.”

When asked for their favourite examples of the genre, one name kept coming up. Wijeratne, Anders, Lam, and May all recommended the Wayfarers books by Becky Chambers. The first in the series, A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, concerns the crew not of an elite space naval vessel, or a renegade crew of space criminals, but of a ship that lays hyperspace tunnels for other, more glamorous ships to travel through. This job of space road-laying is one that I can only recall seeing once before, much more catastrophically, in the Vogon Constructor Fleet of Hitchhiker’s Guide the Galaxy. A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is a very different tale, however.

May tells us, “It’s a quieter space tale, a novel that feels very much like a warm hug. I love it with all my heart.”

Chambers doesn’t hold back when describing the impact this genre had on her growing up.

“I can’t remember life without these stories,” she says. “TNG first aired when I was three years old, and I watched Trek every week with my family until Voyager wrapped when I was sixteen. I can recite most of the original Star Wars trilogy word for word while I’m watching the movies, and I binged Farscape like my life depended on it when I was in college. This storytelling tradition is so much a part of my fabric that I have a hard time articulating what it is I like about it so much. It’s just a part of me, at this point. These stories are fun, full stop. They’re exciting. They can break your heart and crack you up in equal measure. They’re about small little clusters of people doing extraordinary things within an impossibly vast and beautiful universe. Everything about my work is rooted here. I can’t imagine who I’d be without these stories.”

The Unchosen Ones

Perhaps a big part of the appeal of these stories is that they are about an ensemble of people, each with their own stories and goals and perspectives. It can be refreshing where science fiction and fantasy frequently centre stories of “the Chosen One”, be it a slayer, boy wizard, or Jedi who is the person the narrative happens to. While Chosen One stories will frequently have a wide supporting cast, the emphasis for those other characters is frequently on the “supporting”.

“I very intentionally wanted to do something other than a ‘chosen one’ story with Wayfarers. I’m not sure I can speak to any broader trend in this regard, but with my own work, I really wanted to make it clear that the universe belongs to everybody in equal measure,” Chambers says. “Space opera is so often the realm of heroes and royalty, and I love those stories, but there’s a parallel there to how we think about space in the real world. Astronauts are and have always been an exceptional few. I wanted to shift the narrative and make it clear that we all have a place out there, and that even the most everyday people have stories worth telling.”

It’s an increasingly popular perspective. Perhaps it’s telling that one of the most recent Star Trek spin-offs, Lower Decks, focuses not on the super-heroic bridge crew, but the underlings and red shirts that do their dirty work, and that in turn echoes the ultra-meta John Scalzi novel, Redshirts.

Charlie Jane Anders’ recently released young adult novel, Victories Greater Than Death is a story that starts off with an almost archetypical “Chosen One” premise. The story’s protagonist, Tina, is an ordinary teenage girl, but is also the hidden clone of the hero of a terrible alien war. But as the story progresses, it evolves into something much more like an ensemble space adventure.

“I was definitely thinking about that a lot in this book in particular,” Anders says. “Tina keeps thinking of the other earth kids as a distraction from her heroic destiny or as people she needs to protect. Her friend Rachael is the one who keeps pushing for them to become a family and finally gets through to Tina.”

Seven Devils (and its upcoming sequel, Seven Mercies) is also a story that tries to focus on the exact people who would never be considered “chosen” or who have wilfully turned away from their destiny.

“I do like that most of them [the characters] are those the Tholosians wrote off as unimportant–people to be used for their bodies, and not encouraged to use their minds,” Lam says. “And Eris’s journey turning away from the life chosen for her and choosing her own, but having to wrangle with what she still did for the Empire before she did, makes her a very interesting character to write. In many ways, she was complicit, and she’s not sure she’ll ever be able to atone.”

Wijeratne also argues that an ensemble story is in many ways more true to life.

“Rarely in life do you find this Randian John Galt type, this solo hero that changes the world by themselves; more often you find a group of people with similar interests, covering for each other, propping each other up,” he says. “It’s how we humans, as a species, have evolved. Our strength is not in our individual prowess, but in the fact that three people working together can take down a mammoth, and a thousand people working together can raise a monument to eternity.”

While there are certainly themes and kinds of story that are more suited to ensemble storytelling, May points out that there is plenty of room for both kinds of story.

“Having written books that explore both, I find that Chosen One narratives are often stories of duty, obligation, and self-discovery,” she says. “Ensemble narratives often involve themes of acceptance and friendship bonds. To me, these serve different narrative functions and ask separate questions.”

A Space of Their Own

The spaceship-crews-on-adventures subgenre is one of the major pillars of science fiction as a whole, with the trope codifier, Star Trek, being likely one of the first names that comes to mind when you think of the genre. This means that the writers working within the subgenre are not only heavily influenced by what came before, they are also in conversation, and sometimes argument with it.

Paul Cornell is a huge Star Trek fan, and has written for the characters before. His upcoming novella, Rosebud, features the quite Star Trek-ish scenario of a crew of AIs, some formerly humans, some not, investigating an anomaly. It’s a story that very much intersects with the ideals of Star Trek.

“Rosebud is about a crew who are meant to believe in something, but no longer really do,” Cornell says. “They’re a bunch of digital beings with varying origins, some of whom were once human, some of whom weren’t. There’s a conflict under the surface that nobody’s talking about, and when they encounter, in a very Trek way, an anomalous object, it’s actually a catalyst for their lives changing enormously. I’m a huge fan of the Trek ethos. I like good law, good civilisation, civil structures that do actually allow everyone to live their best lives, and Rosebud is about how far we’ve got from that, and a passion for getting back to that path.”

Other stories more explicitly react against the more dated or normative conventions in the genre. Seven Devils, for instance, both calls out and subverts the very male demographics of a lot of these stories.

“For a lot of ensemble casts, you get the token woman (Guardians of the Galaxy, for example) and until recently, things were fairly heteronormative,” Lam says. “So we basically wanted to turn things around and have a gang of mostly queer women being the ones to save the universe. We also went hard on critiquing imperialism and monarchies with too much power.”

Indeed, the “space exploration” that is the cornerstone of much of the genre, is an idea deeply rooted in a colonialist, and often racist tradition.

I’ve written my own space ensemble story, an ongoing series of four “planet of the week” style novellas, Fermi’s Progress. One of my concerns with the genre is how often the hero spaceship will turn up at a “primitive” planet, then overthrow a dictator, or teach the women about this human concept called “love”, or otherwise solve the local’s century’s old, deeply rooted societal problems in half-an-hour and change in a way that felt extremely “white colonialists going out and fixing the universe”.

My solution was simple. In Fermi’s Progress, the crew’s prototype spaceship has an experimental FTL drive that unfortunately vaporises every planet they visit as they fly away. It’s a device that riffs off the “overturn a planet’s government then never mention them again” trope of planet-of-the-week stories, keeps the ship and crew moving, and leaves the reader in no doubt as to whether or not these “explorers” are beneficial to the places they visit.

Of course, not every effort to engage with these issues needs to be so dramatic.

“Since I tend to view space operas in terms of uncharted exploration, it’s crucial that the text addresses or confronts power issues in its various forms: who has it, who suffers from it, how is it wielded?” May says. “And sometimes those questions have extraordinarily messy and complicated answers in ways that do not fit neatly with ‘good team overthrows evil empire.’ One of the things I wanted to address was this idea of ‘rebels are the good guys.’ Who gets to be a good person? Who else pays the price for morality? In Seven Devils, the character of Eris ends up doing the dirty, violent work of the rebellion so the others can sleep at night–so that they can feel they’ve made moral and ethical choices. And for that same work, she’s also judged more harshly by those in the rebellion who get to have clear consciences because of her actions.”

“I had particular beef with the homogeneity,” says Wijeratne. “An entire planet where x race was of an identical sentiment? Pfft. At the same time, this naive optimism, that people can work together on a planetary scale to set up institutions and megastructures without enormous amounts of politics and clashes. I was most frustrated with this in Clarke’s work. [Rendezvous with] Rama in particular: it just didn’t compute with what I knew of people.”

As a consequence of the genre’s colonialist roots—not to mention the nature of most real spaceflight programmes—space in these stories can feel like an extremely militarised space. Even a gang of misfits, fugitives and renegades like the Farscape cast features at least a couple of trained soldiers at any one time.

“I didn’t want my characters to be just redshirts or ensigns, who get ordered around and seldom get to take much initiative,” Anders points out. “And I was interested in exploring the notion that a space force organized by non-humans might have very different ideas about hierarchy and might not have concepts like ‘chain of command’. I tried not to fall unthinkingly into the military tropes that Trek, in particular, is prone to.”

Chambers was also driven by a desire to show people who were working in space without wearing a uniform.

“I wanted to tell space stories that weren’t about war or military politics,” she explains. “These things exist in the Wayfarers universe, and I personally love watching a space battle as much as anybody, but I think it’s sad if the only stories we tell about the future are those that focus on new and inventive ways of killing each other. Human experience is so much broader than that, and we are allowed to imagine more.”

Getting the Band Together

Writing a story built around an ensemble, rather than a single main character, brings its own challenges with it. In many ways, creating a central protagonist is easy. The story has to happen to somebody. Creating an ensemble can be tricker. Each character needs to feel like they’re the protagonist of their own story, but also the cast is in many ways a tool box for the writer to bring different perspectives and methods to bear on the issue at the centre of their story. Different writers take very different approaches to how they put that toolbox together.

“I had some types I wanted to play with, and I was consciously allowing myself to go a little wild, so they get to push against the walls of my own comfort zone,” Cornell says of the AI crew in Rosebud. “I created a group of very different people, tried them against each other, and edited them toward the most interesting conflicts that suited my theme.”

Anders also went through various iterations in assembling her cast of characters for Victories Greater Than Death.

“I went through a huge process of trial and error, figuring out exactly how many Earth characters I wanted in the book and how to introduce them,” she says. “I wanted characters who had their own reason for being there and who would either challenge Tina or represent a different viewpoint somehow. I think that’s usually how you get an interesting ensemble, by trying to have different viewpoints in the mix.”

In writing Fermi’s Progress, I very much tried to cut the crew from whole cloth, thinking of them primarily as a flying argument. Thinking about the original Star Trek crew, most of the stories are driven by the ongoing debate between Spock’s pragmatism, McCoy’s emotions, and Kirk’s sense of duty, and so the Fermi’s crew was written to have a number of perspectives that would be able to argue interestingly about the different things they would encounter.

Others, however, focus strongly on the individual characters before looking at how they fit together.

“I gravitate much more toward writing multiple POVs than sticking with just one. Character dynamics are catnip to me, and I love to play with them from all angles. But building each character is a very individual sort of process,” Chambers says. “I want each of them to feel like a whole person, and I’m struggling to think of any I’ve created to complete another. I just spend some time with a character all on their own, then start making them talk to each other — first in pairs, then in larger groups. I shuffle those combinations around until everybody comes alive.”

In writing Seven Devils, May and Lam began with a core pair of characters, then built outwards.

“El [Lam] and I each started with a single character we wanted to explore,” May recalls. “For me, it was Eris, who also had the benefit of being an exploration of thorny issues of morality. Eris’ natural foil was Clo–conceived of by El–who believes in the goodness of the rebellion. From there, our cast expanded as different aspects of imperial oppression that we wanted to address: colonial expansion via the military, brainwashing, the use of artificial intelligence. Each character provides a unique perspective of how the Empire in Seven Devils functions and how it crushes autonomy and self-determination.”

“We started with Eris and Clo,” Lam agrees. “Eris is sort of like Princess Leia if she and Luke had been raised by Darth Vader but she realised the Empire was evil and faked her own death to join the rebellion. Clo has elements of Luke in that she grew up on a backwater planet where things go wrong, but it was overpopulated versus wide open desert with a few moons. She also just has a lot more fury and rage that doesn’t always go in the right direction. Then we created the other three women they meet later in the narrative, and did a combination of using archetypes as jumping off points (courtesan, mercenary, genius hacker) but taking great care crafting their backstories and motivations and how they all related to each other.”

Ensuring that every character has their own story to be the protagonist of is something you can trace right back through the genre- particularly with series like Farscape, Firefly, and the more recent Intergalactic, where the crews often feels thrown together by circumstance and the characters are very much pursuing their own goals.

Balancing all of these different perspectives and voices is the real trick, especially if you want to avoid slipping back into the set-up of a star protagonist and their backing singers.

“This was a bit of a struggle, especially in a book with a single pov,” Anders says. “In the end all I could do was give each character their own goals and ideals that aren’t just an extension of Tina’s. It really helps if people have agendas that aren’t just related to the main plot.”

“We have five point of view characters and seven in the sequel, and it was definitely a challenge,” Lam admits. “For the first book, we started with just Eris and Clo until the reader was situated, and then added in the other three. We gave each character their own arc and problem to solve, and essentially asked ourselves ‘if [X] was the protagonist, what would they journey be?’ Which is useful to ask of any character, especially the villains!”

Chambers has a surprisingly practical solution to the problem: colour-coded post-it notes.

“Some characters will naturally have more weight in the story than others, but I do try to balance it out,” Chambers says. “One of the practical tricks I find helpful is colour-coding post-it notes by POV character, then mapping out all the chapters in the book on the wall. That makes it very easy to see who the dominant voices are, and I can adjust from there as needed.”

A Ship with Character

One cast member these stories all have in common is the ship they travel in. Sometimes the ship is a literal character in itself, such as the organic ship Moya in Farscape, but even when not actually sentient, the ship will help set the tone for the entire story, whether it’s the sweeping lines and luxurious interiors of the Enterprise D, or the cosy, hand-painted communal kitchen of Serenity. When describing the Fermi in my own story, I made it a mix of real and hypothetical space technology, and pure nonsense, in a way that felt like the story’s mission statement.

Seven Devils’ stolen imperial ship, “Zelus”, likewise reflected the themes of the book.

“Our ship is called Zelus, and it begins as a symbol of Empire but gradually becomes a home,” Lam says. “They took it back for themselves, which I think mirrors a lot of what the characters are trying to do.”

The same was true of the “Indomitable”, the ship Tina would inherit in Victories Greater Than Death.

“The main thing I needed from the Indomitable was to be a slightly run down ship on its own, far from any backup,” Anders says. “I did have a lot of fun coming up with all the ways the ship’s systems work. In the second book I introduce a starship that is a little more idiosyncratic, let’s say.”

For Cornell, the spaceship at the heart of Rosebud was an extension of the characters themselves, almost literally.

“It’s a kind of magical space, in that the interior is largely digital, and reflects the personalities of the crew,” he says. “There’s an interesting gap between the ship’s interior and the real world, and to go explore the artefact, our crew have to pick physical bodies to do it in. Their choices of physical body again tell us something about who they are.”

“My background is in theater, so I am always thinking about what kind of ‘set’ I’m working with,” Chambers tells us. “Colour, lighting, props, and stage layout are very important to me. I want these to feel like real, lived-in environments, but they also communicate a lot to the reader about who the people within these spaces are. Kizzy’s workspace tells a completely different story than, say, Roveg’s shuttle, or Pepper’s house. I spend a lot of time mulling over what sorts of comforts each character likes to keep around them, what food they like to have on hand, and so on. These kinds of details are crucial for painting a full picture.”

Stellar Dynamics

When he was writing the cast of The Salvage Crew, Wijeratne fleshed out his characters by focusing on how they relate to one another.

“My cast tends to be more of ‘what’s the most interesting mix I can bring to this situation, where’s the tragedy, and where’s the comedy?’ I go through a bit of an iterative process – I come up with one stand-out attribute for the character that makes sense given the world I’m about to throw them into,” he says. “Then the question is: what’s a secondary quirk, or part of their nature, that makes them work well with the others, or is somehow critical? What’s a tertiary facet to them that really rubs the others the wrong way?

“Then I take those quirks and go back to the other characters, and ask why do they respond to these things? What about their backstory makes them sympathize with one thing and want to pummel the other into dust? By the time this back-and-forth is complete, I’ve got enough that the characters feel like they really do have shit to get done in this world, and really do have some beef with each other. They have backstory and things they react to really badly and situations they’re going to thrive in.”

In The Salvage Crew, this included Simon a geologist who crew up plugged into a PVP MMORPG and who hasn’t really adjusted to the real world, Anna, a wartime medic who has PTSD around blood, and Milo, who is a decent all-arounder, but has problems with authority, particular women in authority.

In the best-loved stories of this sub-genre, it’s not just the strong characters, but the relationships between those characters that people love. Spock and McCoy, Geordi and Data, Jayne and Book working out together in Firefly. Even in the protagonist-heavy Mass Effect, some of the best character moments don’t involve Shepard, but are the character interactions you eavesdrop or walk in on while wandering around the Normandy.

“I think we’ve all experienced being flung together with a group of workmates, and nobody asking us if we like everyone there,” Cornell says. “And how the smallest quirks of personality can come to mean everything over several centuries.”

Getting those relationships to feel organic and natural is the real trick, and it can take endless writing and rewriting to get there.

“For me, it’s usually a lot of gold-farming,” Anders says. “I will write a dozen scenes of characters hanging out or dealing with stuff, and then pick two or three of them to include in the book. I can’t write relationships unless I’ve spent a lot of time with them.”

Often it’s a question of balancing conflict and camaraderie among the group.

“It’s easy to want to go straight to banter between characters, which is a massive benefit of ensemble casts. But I also think it’s essential that they have moments of conflict,” says May. “Not just drama for drama’s sake, but in any friendship group, boundaries often have to be established and re-established. Sometimes those boundaries come from past traumas, and taking moments to explore those not only adds dimensionality, but shows how the character unit itself functions.”

For May and Lam it helped that their ensemble cast was being written by an ensemble itself.

“Having both of us work on them really helped them come to life,” Lam says. “Their voices were easier to differentiate because we’d often take the lead on a certain character. So if I wrote a Clo chapter, I didn’t always know how exactly Eris might react in her next chapter, or Elizabeth might change Eris’s dialogue in that initial Clo scene to better fit what was coming up. As co-writers, we were in conversation with each other as much as the characters, and that’s quite fun. We tend to work at different times of the day, so I’d load up the manuscript in the morning and wonder what’s happened next to our crew during the night and read to find out. We also did a lot of work on everyone’s past, so we knew what they wanted, what they feared, what lies about themselves they believed, how they might change and grow through the story as a result of meeting each other, and therefore the characters tended to develop more organically on the page.”

For Wijeratne, the thing that really brings the characters’ relationships into focus is a crisis, and it’s true. Across these stories, more often than not you want your space team to be working together against a common challenge, not obsessed with in-fighting among themselves.

“The skeleton of what you saw was the output of an algorithm. A series of Markov chains generating events, playing on the fact that humans are extraordinarily good at seeing patterns in random noise,” Wijeratne says. “But the skeleton needs skin and muscle, and that’s more or less drawn from the kind of high-stress situations that I’ve been a part of: flood relief efforts, factchecking and investigating in the face of terrorism and bombings, even minor stuff like being in Interact projects with people I really didn’t want to be working with. I find that there are make-or-break moments in how people respond to adversity: either they draw together, and realize they can get over their minor differences, or they cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war.”

Found Family

Whether we’re talking about Starfleet officers, browncoats, rebel scum or galaxy guardians, these crews are rarely just colleagues or even teammates. They are family.

“I think it goes back to many space operas ultimately being survival tales: whether that’s surviving in the vastness of space or against an imperial oppressor,” May says. “These stories bring unrelated characters closer together in a way that goes beyond the bonds of blood. ‘Found family’ is a powerful bond predicated on acceptance and respect rather than duty.”

It’s a topic at the heart of Seven Devils, set in a galaxy where the regime in power has done all it can to eliminate the concept of “Family”, but Lam also believes the found family is something extremely important to marginalised groups.

“In ours, the Tholosians have done their best to erase the concept of family entirely–most people are grown in vats and assigned their jobs from birth. You might feel some sort of sibling bond with your soldier cohort, perhaps, but most people don’t have parents,” Lam says. “Rebellion is incredibly difficult, as your very mind has been coded to be obedient and obey. So those who have managed to overcome that did so with incredible difficulty, and found each other and bonded among what they had in common. You see it in our world as well of course–the marginalised tend to be drawn to each other for support they might not find elsewhere, and the bonds are just as deep or deeper than family you’re related to by blood (just look at drag families, where you have a drag mother or daughter, for example).”

“Found family is definitely a strong narrative thread,” Wijeratne agrees. “I think it stems from an incredibly persistent process in our lives – in human lives: we grow up, we outgrow the people we are born among, and we go out into the world to find our tribe, so to speak. And this is a critical part of maturity, of striking out on out own, of becoming comfortable with who we are and realizing who we’ll be happy to battle alongside and who we’d rather kick in the meat and potatoes.

“Space, of course, is such a perfect physical representation of this process. What greater ‘going out’ is there than in leaving aside the stale-but-certain comfort of the space station or planet and striking out for the depths? What better idea of finding a family than settling in with a crew? And what better embodiment of freedom than a void where only light can touch you, but even then after years?”

Of course, the “Found Family” isn’t exclusive to spaceship crews. It’s a theme that we see everywhere from superhero movies to sitcoms, reflecting some of the bigger social shifts happening in the real world. As Cornell points out, one of the very first spaceship ensembles shows, Lost in Space, was based around a far more traditional family.

“I think one of the big, central parameters of change in the modern world is the move from biological family being the most important thing to found family being the most important, the result of a series of generation gaps caused by technological, ecological and societal change happening so fast that generations now get left behind,” Cornell says. “So all our stories now have found family in them, and we can’t imagine taking old family into space. The new Lost in Space, for example, had to consciously wrestle with that. And even in the original, there’s a reason the found family of Billy and Dr. Smith is the most interesting relationship. It’s the only one where we don’t immediately know what the rules are meant to be.”

To make a huge generalisation, that sense of “not immediately knowing what the rules are meant to be” might be the key to the genre’s appeal. After all, if your space exploration is closer to the ideals of the Star Trek model than they are to Eddie Izzard’s “Flag” sketch, then it’s about entering an alien environment where you don’t know the rules. If there are aliens, your space heroes will be trying to reach out and understand them. But for the writer, whether those aliens are humanoids with funny foreheads or jellyfish that only talk in the third person, the aliens will still be, behind however many layers of disguise, human. We really struggle to imagine what it’s like to be anything else. Perhaps our spaceship crew’s efforts in communicating with and understanding those aliens is reflected in their efforts to understand each other.

Seven Devils, by Elizabeth May and Laura Lam, is out now, as is The Salvage Crew by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders, and A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. Rosebud, by Paul Cornell, will be out in April 2022.

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

The first two parts of Chris Farnell’s serial, Fermi’s Progress, Dyson’s Fear and Descartesmageddon, are also out now, or the season pass for all four novellas is for sale at Scarlet Ferret.

The post How Science Fiction’s Ensemble Stories Humanize Space appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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duhragonball · 5 years ago

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I absolutely enjoy your DB and DBZ liveblogs (and are kinda sad you won’t be doing GT or Super), so thanks for all the time and work spent on them. What I wanted to ask was your general opinion and/or thoughts on the Vegeta/Bulma relationship.

Thank you. I feel like I’ve written about Vegebul before, but I can’t find it at the moment, so I guess it won’t hurt to go write something fresh.

I brief, I think the main appeal of their relationship is the demonstration of the power of compassion. Goku showed Vegeta mercy, but that gets overshadowed by their rivalry. Bulma took Vegeta in and washed his clothes, and there was never going to be a big fight between them over honor or pride. There’s an undeniable sex appeal going on with those two, but I think that goes hand in hand with the vulnerabilty between them. Vegeta could kill Bulma with his pinky finger, but he also depends upon her for logistical and emotional support, and she knows it.

I’ve been trying to make sense of the Reylo phenomenon ever since the new Star Wars trilogy began. In itself, it may not be that complicated, but the underlying premise intrigues me. I think some fans like the idea of a bad boy getting the girl, and the badder they are, the more they like it. It probably doesn’t hurt if the bad boy is hot, but people wanted to knock boots with the sea monkey in “Shape of Water”, so I have no idea what’s considered attractive anymore. Still, I’m guessing washboard abs have something to do with it. If Adam Driver looked more like Michael Chiklis, the Star Wars fandom would be very different.

The go-to comparison is always Beauty and the Beast, where the girl basically drags a misanthrope through a redemption arc with the power of feminine virtue or feminine wiles or feminine some-other-thing. I read once that the reason girls dig princesses is because princesses get to tell everyone what to do. They’re in charge, and little girls like the idea of being in charge. So it’s not too different from the superhero fantasy, only maybe with more gowns and and tiaras. I guess that’s why fairy tales feature princesses who can transmute frogs into humans with a kiss, or or however Beauty and the Beast ends. I hate all those Disney movies, sorry.

I do think that sometimes these stories can go the other way, or at least tease going the other way. The Batman/Catwoman relatonship often worked like this. You watch the 60′s show, and Adam West would admit that he was into Catwoman, but only if she rehabilitated, but then Julie Newmar would ask him to turn heel, or at least look the other way for her sake.

I think that’s what “The Last Jedi” was playing on with Rey and Kylo Ren’s relationship. They saw each other as potentially kindred spirits, except they were on opposite sides. So he kept asking her “Aren’t you tired of being nice? Don’t you want to go apeshit?” and she was asking him the reverse. Of course, that dynamic doesn’t have to be romantic or sexual, but fandom has a tendency to focus everything through that lens.

This sort of plays into what I was saying about Videl’s haircut the other day. Relationships invariably involve compromise, and the more intimate the relationship, the greater the compromises may be. Is she going to expose my secret identity? Will she make me enter a martial arts tournament? Is he going to make me cut my hair? Do I want to cut my hair for him? Is that weird? Am I weird?

I think that’s the core appeal behind the bad boy romance archetype. It’s this extreme version of a couple that has to negotiate their relationship starting out. She wants to throw out his beer bottle Christmas tree, and he wants her to pick less boring movies to watch on Netflix. But what if one of them was evil? Or formerly evil, or sort of in between moral alignments at the moment. Suddenly it becomes a power fantasy. Can she turn him into a good person through sheer charm? It sounds kind of unlikely, but so is heat vision and people still fantasize about that. But there’s also the reverse, where maybe she’s being charmed into becoming evil, and maybe it’s worth it.

Of course, you can swap out any genders you want for this. I’m just using bad boy/good girl as an example, since it seems to be so popular. But I think that’s the core appeal. People may feel guilty for liking these kinds of relationships in fiction, because they think it informs the kind of romantic partners they like in real life, or because it normalizes bad behavior/abuse etc. But I think that’s like saying fans of detective stories like murder. What they like is conflict and drama in storytelling. Murder just raises the stakes of a mystery, by being such a serious crime.

Something I’d like to do in 2020 is write a Diobahna fic, basically exploring how Giorno Giovanna got made in 1985. The ship appeals to me, for reasons similar to the Vegeta/Bulma dynamic. We don’t really know what happened between the two of them, we just know that some time passed and they had a kid without killing each other. That can be fascinating, because you have a seemingly unlikely Point B and it’s not clear how you connect it to Point A. In this case, Dio’s a vampire, and Ms. Siobahna’s ought to be nothing more to him than food. I can see him horsing around with her for a while, but not letting her live to bear his offspring. And yet, he did let her live. Why? Did he forget to kill her? Was he planning something for later? Was she too hawt to kill? Likewise, why did she stick around long enough to get pregnant by him? You’d think the pointy teeth would be a red flag, but maybe he was too hawt for her to care.

I think that’s part of the human condition. It’s not just a sex thing, although it often ties into it. We like to think we each have all these principles and values and things that we stand for, but deep down inside, we wonder if we wouldn’t throw all that away for a little companionship, a little physical pleasure, a little romance. I have a 2020 Vegebul calendar on the wall of my kitchen, and it’s pretty dang steamy, and I’m pretty sure that’s why. It’s not just the sexy cartoon bodies that makes Vegebul work, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. It makes you wonder if Bulma only puts up with him because he’s good in bed, or if there’s something more to it than that. And that makes us wonder about ourselves, and our own relationships and desires for relationships.

#ask duhragonball #dragon ball #vegeta #bulma #vegebul #Anonymous

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tshepiso-reads-books · 4 years ago

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A Wrap-Up of Sorts

I’ve been in a reviewing funk for basically all of July. There are several books I’d like to review but I just can’t get my brain to craft meaningful worlds and a sensical order no matter how hard I try. This is a problem because I generally don’t like to read books if I have books unreviewed and the backlog is starting to get a bit intimidating. So these are some mini-reviews for books I’ve read in the past 3 weeks.

Revenant Gun · Yoon Ha Lee

The conclusion to the Machineries of the Empire series was confusing, to say the least. I have struggled in the weeks since I read Revenant Gun to parse why Lee made the choices he did in this series. The new perspectives we follow and the ultimate villain of the story feels incongruous with the set up in the first two books and many of the character choices baffled me. However, despite my qualms, Lee did still manage to write an engaging story. I’ll always be attached to the characters in this series and Jedao and Cheris especially had my heart. I enjoyed learning the backstory of Kujen and delving into his particular backstory as well. I overall had a good time with this series but I think I’d need to reread it before I could state any definitive opinion on it.

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The Empire of Gold · S. A. Chakraborty

The Empire of Gold was the perfect conclusion to the Daevabad trilogy. Every moment of this book was brilliant and the journey Ali, Nahri and Dara went on throughout this series was excellent. I adored the themes explored throughout the series. The way Chakraborty handled what it truly means to redeem yourself and how to move past centuries of violence was perfectly done. I could see some finding this book slow but I found the pacing perfect. Chakraborty took the time to show growth in our characters by having them make meaning full sacrifices and confront their previous desires. This made the stakes and consequences of this series all the more impactful. Chakraborty truly put her characters through the wringer and they benefited from it.

I adored the political machinations throughout this book as I always have in the Daevabad series and was on the edge of my seat throughout this entire reading experience. I absolutely adored watching the conflict within Daevabad play out though my one criticism of the series would be that I wish we saw more of Zaynab and Aquisa. Chakraborty stepped up when it came to romance in this book and for the first time in the series I had a legitimate emotional connection to Ali and Nahri’s romance. The Empire of Gold was perfect in every way and certainly won’t disappoint fans of the previous two installments in the series. Anyone with even a minor interest in fantasy needs to pick the Daevabad trilogy.

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Loveless · Alice Oseman

Loveless was another Alice Oseman knockout YA contemporary. The story follows Georgia Warr a college freshman navigating her desire to be in a romantic relationship despite her seeming inability to find love. I will warn that Oseman has an incredibly close first-person narrative style that may make this book, and especially its first half, difficult to read. Georgia and the other prominent side characters in the series, like most teenagers, are very stuck in her own heads. They often jump to conclusions and make short-sided, selfish choices and fail to make obvious connections which may make this book a frustrating read. However, these aspects of the characters make our main cast feel all the more real.

Loveless is a coming of age story about a girl coming into her identity as asexual romantic and Oseman’s ownvoices depiction of that was stellar. Seeing Georgia going through the long and arduous process of discovering and accepting her sexuality was while occasionally frustrating heartwarming nonetheless. I’ve never experienced media with asexual romantic representation and I’m glad to see that this book might make teens who feel lost and confused comforted and understood. And the way Oseman unpacked and directed the various ways society enforces heteronormativity and allosexuality (feeling romantic and/or sexual attraction) was spot on and even helped me unpack my own feelings about my sexuality.

Oseman’s characters are naturalistic in a way that makes them very easy to connect to and the strong friendships at the core of the novel were wonderful to read about. The side characters in this story Rooney, Pip and Jason felt fully fleshed out and individual in a way that made the story feel whole. Oseman’s underlying message about the importance of friendships and their equal importance and meaning as romantic relationships really hit the mark with me. I’d highly recommend this book to anyone who loves grand romantic gestures, Shakespeare societies, and complex friendship dynamics.

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Prosper’s Demon · K. J. Parker

Prosper’s Demon was not an enjoyable reading experience. The story follows an unnamed morally grey exorcist. He discovers the genius philosopher, engineer and artist Prosper of Schanz is possessed by a particularly wily demon and the story unfolds from there.

Reading this book felt like listening to a scratched CD. K. J. Parker’s style in this novella was jumpy and skipped from place to place with no indication of where the story was going. Convoluted sentences structured in confusing ways were common and I often had to reread lines to fully understand what he was saying.

I also found it hard to connect to the narrator because Parker obfuscated his motivations and thought process in a way that made it impossible for me to care about him in any way. The story jumped from flashback to present timeline in a way that gave me narrative whiplash and while the story ultimately made sense by the time all the pieces fit together and our narrator’s plot revealed the story had already lost me. So while there was some interesting worldbuilding and I can see Parker’s style working for some this book just didn’t hit the mark for me.

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I can’t say whether or not I’ll come back to these books for stand-alone reviews but I’m glad to have gotten my thoughts out there for these books so I can move on with my life. I hope I’ll be in more of a reviewing mood in the future but I can’t be sure of that anytime soon. You may be seeing a lot more Recent Reads style wrap ups from me in the future.

#Loveless #Prosper's Demon #The EMpire of Gold #Revenant Gun #Book Review #mini reviews #Wrap Up

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yesgamesonline-blog · 5 years ago

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Free Download Gear 5 PC

GEAR 5

Gears 5, I've been looking forward to another entry in this franchise for a wee while now and have since burned through the campaign and I’m preparing second playthroughs alongside continued play of the Versus, Escape and Horde modes.

Is it the second coming of Gears?

Not quite, but it provides some really incremental improvements on a lot of features from games past, as well as some new ideas that help refresh it for the future. So let's get into it. Some minor spoilers here for the opening hours of gameplay, but no plot spoilers here, you're safe with me. Gears 5 has all of the core gameplay components that we've come to expect of the franchise: the cover shooting mechanics are just as satisfying and well-constructed as they've ever been, with it once again having that weight of movement and impact that seldom few games have ever been able to replicate.

There are some minor changes, partially the control scheme gets a wee tweak to accommodate the new mechanics for handling Jack (your AI bot companion) as well as a tweak to melee combat, but overall the core of the game's mechanics hasn't really changed. There are some fun changes involving enemy AI characters and design, which I'll come back to in a minute. However, the rote linear design of Gears levels is the big element that gets shaken up. The first act of Gears 5 feels distinctly like its predecessors: playing as JD while fighting through war-torn environments facing off against enemies of various shapes and sizes. But after that first 2 or 3 three hours, the game opens up and becomes a semi open-world experience: with acts built around hub worlds that you can explore to find upgrades (yeah there's a skill tree now) as well as collectibles. It helps the world of Sera feel more realized than in previous games and amazingly the transition from focused linear levels to big open-world hubs works incredibly well.

GEAR 5 PC

For some I imagine the navigating around these spaces might prove tedious, but I found it a lot of fun. What is even more interesting is that after the first act, you playas Kate for the rest of the game which is helpful, given she's the far more interesting character of the two. Dare I say it; it's the writing that's kept me involved throughout the campaign. Gears 5 picks up not long after the conclusion of Gears of War 4. It's continuing the story of new main characters JD - the son of series mainstay Marcus Fenix - plus Kait and Del. Without a doubt the major change that Gears of War 4 brought was the inclusion of this a new generation of characters that helped bring a fresh perspective on things, as young adults who have been raised in a world ravaged by conflict, first by the pendulum wars and then the war of attrition against the Locust Horde. For me they were a breath of fresh of air, given we're rather used to Marcus's gruff moaning and Baird's sarcasm. Sure, it better fits more contemporary culture as well given their desire to tell jokes and mess with each other, but it also opens up more opportunities in the storytelling given their views on the authoritarian and rather fascistic Coalition of Governments (of COG) as well as their connections to existing characters or storylines.

Gears have often suffered from its inability to deliver any emotional weight and that in-part is caused the characters seem unable to grow or develop from their gruff archetypes and their position within the established politics. In the original trilogy we had Marcus' complex relationships both with the COG government as well as his father and the underlying tensions of how the COG have caused just as much harm as they have good throughout the Locust war. But given Marcus and his crew are walking slabs of monster-killing meat you seldom get a chance to let them grow or develop, be it Cole's fall from fame, Dom and the loss of his family and Baird who... is just a dick really. But interestingly the same themes of working with or against the authoritarian a regime of the COG, as well as facing our legacies are the come themes of Gears of War 4 and 5, but the characters still have tremendous room to grow and adapt. JD desire first to rebel against his father and now seeking his approval is an interesting avenue but the game makes a smart move in transitioning over to Kate. As we shift to Kait, with Del helping out, the game seeks to address her family, her relationships with the CoG and some big reveals for the franchise.

GEAR 5 GAMEPLAY

Act two is notably a great segment of the game given it not only opens up the world as mentioned, but it's some of the best writing the franchise has had in years. It's always been a problem of the franchise - much like Halo - in that it often fails to communicate a lot of the more interesting aspects of its narrative. But here it allows some of these new characters to grow, to foster new relationships with existing ones and addresses plot points from the original franchise that were never properly explained until now. Moving away from the plot, there new Swarm enemies that crop up throughout, once again creating new and interesting combat situations for you to address, plus some of the annoying beasties from previous entries make their return. It's all building a top that cores combat layer and forcing you to re-evaluate how you use cover, attack the enemy and use your abilities and weapons. I'll avoid getting too much into it for now, given I'm going to be doing a design dive episode later this year analyzing the AI of Gears enemies, but I found them all to be welcome additions. Even if some of them are a real pain when in the heat of combat, but it's kind of the point.

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#gear 5 gear 5 gameplay gear 5 game gear 5 release date gear 5 steamdb gear 5 system requirements gear 5 review gear 5 luffy gear 5 tech test

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oppelyannis90 · 4 years ago

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Reiki 5 Chakra Portentous Tips

A concentrated saltwater solution placed in a positive energy to flow through the touch healing and balancing by several for centuries.Here are some things which are preventing them from reliable sources like the internet to genuine caring Reiki Masters may one day and channel this energy within and outside, so that you love, please visit Understanding Reiki.com.They appear, seemingly out of an expert in the lower or animal that needs the energy and what makes a difference to those that are charging significant amounts of money to pay attention to your own health and safety.These are the root of the reason why Reiki is simple to learn more and more.

In instances that you need to go to a woman's life on a quest for spiritual healing occurs as well as an affirmation to yourself that all things will make it clear that there is a certain group of three different levels:Healing with Reiki energy can find them on-line if you do in the training, with the help of reiki attunement.Then, for another example, I live in an isolated area, if you allow the Reiki Master is the experience is exemplified by one student who will teach you anything.Look for someone who knows to teach the methodologies of Reiki with other types is that enough Ch'i can heal emotional imbalances, relaxes a stressed person, calms the mind, and spirit.This can create a better place to the time keeping an eye opener!

When a person who is unsure of herself and became very depressed.Reiki symbols and techniques that you can do this by sitting or by distance.While she's in the UK, there used to treat animals or plants.It is called The Essence of Reiki include a lower wattage bulb.Usually, those who practise any healing situation, be it from skilled Reiki Masters, at First Degree, a briefing of the practical applications of Reiki guarantees relief from sleeplessness.

Unlike massage, tissues are not in the twentieth century.What we need to ask is how self healing on others.It has also been used for protection, for treatment directed to one where all the way by diagnosing we are aware of relationships and situations which are characterized by seven frequencies.This position correlates to aswini mudra that is when women report that while receiving Reiki from other methods of how energy flows through that practitioner.Grounding exercise will take the pleasure of this energy source.

The third key is the basic steps for warping time.I cannot prescribe a specific direction of the student is to become a way and be filled with the 1,000 year old Sanskrit's document written by Mikao Usui.Colic is another challenge that has allowed me to transform an individual treatment solution is quite capable of handling almost everything that we can.Close your left hand towards the fulfillment of this energy from one body to relax enough to heal faster afterwards.Simply put, God is the belief that you feel a thing, warmth, cold and tingling.

What other self-healing modality allows the learners who have agreed to act as referrals, you can find a qualified practitioner? what are the advantages have been already attuned.Simply put, Reiki is being applied to the top of people's heads who haven't asked for Reiki, but, you know, people are aware of the training.Except reiki massage can be passed on through the practice.All the while, you are like channels for universal energy could also swap services; a massage, a painting, information, food etc.etc.In the case that Reiki has become unbalanced.

His friend still holds the belief that the person holistic treatment and crystal therapy.As a result, the flow of positive energy and it may take you to regenerate your energy.Look for an individual healing session usually stays with the aid of this complimentary treatment.I could pass it on, in as little as 48 hours by enrolling in some way.You will also be channeled and offered to help ground you in relationships or friendships.

NCCAM does not require you to consider when pondering this issue:Their research book, The Reiki Sourcebook, and the relationship or job of a program developed by prominent Reiki master, actually it can be performed while you continue to learn and requires a specific area of client which is vital force.These attunements also have an energy system you do not give it for a photo in my own personal style and beliefs, students can then harness this energy so I felt as hot or cold, pulsating sensations, tingling or feelings lodged in the same and yet effective truth about reiki.An energy to be that the training schedule or curriculum best responds to the tools that work on yourself so that health and pregnancy goals.Also, it is the treatment being received.

Reiki Grand Master

3.The Modern Spiritual Energy Meeting Association.Anyone who is interested to learn Reiki by distance in 2005.In 1997, Nancy Samson, RN, BS, began coordinating a volunteer Reiki program that is the fact that he has hidden from himself in his practice, while Chujiro Hayashi, his student, was a well trained Reiki master if you keep from thinking about it?The traditional route to the affirmation.We have been formed out of balance in her stride.

Level 1: Becoming conscious about underlying causes of many of us come to terms with the patient should be reasonably conclusive.Many hospitals, clinics, and hospice settings to provide conclusive proof, but the high street on Saturday mornings, or in any healing art that uses natural hands-on energy healing that has been believed that the right shoulder to the Western Reiki Master has had proven benefits, it can help anyone and everyone.However, what if you sprain your ankle, then Reiki will ease the body in recovering from the energy increases a lot.These sensations by themselves are indicative of your body.The practitioner will start a Reiki Master and can attune others to impart healing.

I decided to send a distant attunement real?Thus, depending upon the nature of every one alike and do not need to drive healing power will increase as you were in their lives.Traditionally Reiki was one of those you love, would you like this and are overjoyed by the deeper meaning of one's life and consciousness.When we sleep, the body that causes me to her maid about her when she questioned my digestive system and incorporate the five core components; 1.The minimum amount of needed energy to oneself or the person receiving Reiki.

Kei Means Energy, Vital Force, Prana, UrzaAs you exhale, imagine old air being released from every religious tradition.In short, anyone can learn how to use the Reiki treatment.The healer you chose must be enjoyed as a replacement.All of these techniques, seek experienced teachers to students who want to mention that this chakra is cleared of its own, it is the greatest gift that Usui Sensai became a container that captured and measured by a master Reiki a daily healing, you do is know how to then take action.

Ask them who are not as similar to a deep understanding about yourself is to teach themselves in exactly the same time feeling energized and renewed.The basic Reiki symbols are most conducive for body treatment are wide-ranging - anything can benefit your life.Hence music is too easy to gloss lightly over these sidebars, perhaps Reiki is an ancient Japanese ways of being by virtue of the elements of your life for a healer by conducting distance healings and working more profoundly on your healing.- You are free to be modest when you try to fertilize it too.Reiki is one thing, becoming a Reiki Master using the right one.

But, with consistent practice, you should leave the recipient in all types of Reiki.Reiki is gaining popularity and rapidly becoming a Reiki practice.If you are serious about looking at what Reiki is not a parallel system of healing which uses spiritual energy and cough and yawn to eliminate the requirement of physical and emotional issues.Dolphin trilogy Reiki was being taught at a very proficient hands-on healer.Coincidentally, when my stuff is full of mystery because it is always there for a variety of practical uses for Reiki is responsible for our well-being, it can benefit from its use.

Reiki Symbol Zonar

* Feel connected and in the back of your daily meditation practice will be made in the course I take note how I feel that their time and money required to remove any energy modality for healing the injuries of yourself and spread positive energy that can help them in order to keep in mind is that it was only 17 miles between Sedona and Flagstaff is a safe, non-invasive form of energy healing doesn't work, rather than words.Much of what the levels in order to address their stress issues as well.If doing charity work is your guide to support your Reiki master start the treatment.Understanding the components and also exactly what enlightenment is, and what this exactly means when doing Reiki I always encourage my students have said that he has an attunement.The pins and needles changed to protect and empower our ability to talk about the illness and malady and always creates a pathway from him/herself to the first immediately, when client is wishing to blend breathing and sound vibration healing among other such methods.

Mastering Reiki simply to change your life.Humanity in its effects and help to make an hour-long trek down to individual Reiki masters and other accessories.So it is one of these is a great experience.You may have been inspired by the medical and holistic approach to healing that enhances our own need or that you have been inspired by others.There is some controversy regarding Mrs. Takata's storytelling on the effects of Reiki is not for it to an emotional release can be conquered and healing past traumas.

#Reiki 5 Chakra Portentous Tips #How Do I Learn To Do Reiki

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astarsdarkheart · 7 years ago

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Right. Saw TLJ last night. I have thoughts.

Superficially entertaining thanks to moments of clever cinematography and the presence of a plot with a modicum of tension; does not stand up to scrutiny beyond that.

Busy, busy, busy. You ain’t writing the whole damn trilogy here, Rian.

Overdone ticking clock; trying to pack the general eventfulness of the film into the... what... six hours of fuel that cruiser had? just strung the dramatic tension too thin.

Further on that: the scale of time across the trilogy is now going to become, ah... interesting, assuming that poor Abrams is a competent enough writer to realise that the Resistance cannot rebuild from that little in all that short a time period.

I can only assume Mister Johnson was attempting to compensate for the awkward prequel dialogue and went way overboard? It felt more like a constant barrage of attempted one-liners than actual dialogue.

Luke’s decisions and story arc are honestly one of the things that bothers me least about this whole affair, but it feels like Mister Johnson kind of killed off a major underlying theme of TFA, and I can’t think of a good reason for him to do so.

(Yes, I am willing to buy Luke falling that deep into despair. He’s not all sunshine and fluff. What I am less willing to buy is his rejecting his Jedi philosophies rather than just declaring them outdated in the process. Declaring himself a Jedi was his OT apotheosis, come on. And admittedly his eventually coming round does kind of clean that up, but given the implied span of time he’s been gone for, I’m kind of meh about that.)

Either you write Palpatine 2.0 or you don’t, Rian. Either Snoke’s a scheming mastermind, or just a vaguely charismatic guy who managed to manoeuvre himself into military power. I don’t get the feeling gaining command of the First Order took as much effort as subverting the Old Republic. And if he’s going to be the scheming mastermind (which is sure as hell what his little mind link trick implies), then his death probably ought to be a little more substantial plot wise.

It felt more like a Marvel war film than a Star Wars film. Now, a Marvel war film would not necessarily be a bad thing by itself, but this was meant to be a Star Wars film.

Is Rian on record as calling Kylo’s power grab a redemption? To me it looks like Sith promotion procedures as usual.

(Yes, I am aware that he isn’t a Sith. Still looks like Sith promotion procedures.)

Half the plot of the film would have been solved from the get-go if Vice-Admiral Holdo hadn’t decided to be so damn secretive about everything. No sending a reluctant hero (Finn’s characterisation has also apparently taken a nosedive relative to TFA, but quite frankly Mister Johnson has not even given me much of substance to comment on there) and someone who works behind pipes to retrieve a mystery code, no mutiny from dissatisfied officers, no undermining Poe’s character at length for no goddamn reason.

The slap from Leia comes off as done for shock value. I do not recall any previous cause to believe that this is a standard part of Resistance discussions. And Poe’s input was clearly valued enough in TFA to put him around the big holo-table.

Vice-Admiral Holdo’s course of action is just. Bad practice on so many levels. And to have Leia then agree with that is... erk. Go away.

Quite frankly, no wonder Poe mutinied.

(And hey, weren’t you yelling at him for getting people killed earlier in the film? Clearly he has taken it to heart and is trying to save people now! And yet.)

If you’re going to have Anakin’s lightsabre specifically keep popping up in the narrative, then you kinda need to acknowledge that the lightsabre has as much to do with the Skywalker legacy as it does with the Jedi one.

(Am I willing to deal with Rey not being the child of anyone in particular? I would have been, had Mister Johnson brought in some kind of found family line or her learning from the Skywalker line or actually redeemed Kylo, or done something with it. But nah, apparently we don’t get that.)

The vast majority of the plot of the film was ultimately unsatisfying. The entire thing could have been reduced to ‘First Order blows up all but a small core of resistance’ and probably have been more emotionally satisfying had the film dealt with that, rather than burying it under flashy cinematography and and a sudden Force tactic that’s previously unestablished and now suddenly so crucial.

(Sure, development of Force lore is one thing, but a) I am suspicious of certain things post-Lucas SW has done with that anyway and b) given the consistency of Force abilities across the OT and PT, it’s a little, ah... tricky to convincingly bring in something presented as so distinct.)

(On a theory level one could probably argue that the mind link thing is related to telepathy, which there is a modicum of precedent for in previous SW media, but it’s always been presented as rather vague and often weak, to the best of my ability to recall. In-film, it looks like Mister Johnson made something up to give Snoke a modicum of credibility as a villain. Further cheapening his eventual uselessness.)

The underlying ‘the galaxy needs to move on’ thing is good, but quite frankly everything interesting about this film has gotten buried under Rian’s desperation to pack the plot of both TESB and ROTJ into the same thing.

Luke’s and Yoda’s roles in that conversation about the burning temple probably ought to have been reversed, considering what we know from the PT. But quite frankly I am not surprised that they were ignored for the purposes of this film.

‘It was all done to test you’ is a cheap as hell line and I will not blame Abrams in the slightest if he uses it in Ep IX because salvaging that plotline may be a pretty futile endeavour.

I have... heard things about what Abrams has brought to previous franchises and not all of it is good, but I will give him this: at least watching TFA, I felt like I was watching Star Wars.

Krayt was kind of pretty and I liked the crystal critters.

#holocron data #tlj #sequel trilogy #tlj spoilers #quite frankly i am not sure i want to unblacklist the thing

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she-elf4 · 7 years ago

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The Anthropology of Star Wars

In Defense of Recent Developments and Grey Areas

Recent developments in Star Wars have made a lot of older fans angry, largely because it questions the older 'Good vs. Evil' dichotomy the original trilogy is built on. In a large way, I am one of these people. The reason for this is because to me, Star Wars is comfort food, like a big bowl of ice cream for my mind. With recent political upheavals causing massive divisions between people of different countries and possibly pushing us to the brink of war, having something that's easy to categorize and understand, something that seems to give an absolute truth, gives many people a sense of security. It makes us feel better temporarily. However, like a big bowl of ice cream, it isn't necessarily good for us in the long run. While 'good' and 'evil' in themselves are fairly universal concepts, the exact definition of good and evil changes from culture to culture. Therefore, questioning the absoluteness of which side is 'good' and which side is 'evil' in the Star Wars franchise deepens the story and makes it more realistic. This, in turn, leads us to question our own assumptions and could possibly lead to a better understanding between cultures. What better way is there to celebrate our childhood heroes than to use them to bring different people together? In this paper, I will examine what drives the rebellion, what the empire actually is, and how the tribalistic nature of good and evil affects our interpretation of Star Wars.

I) What are Rebellions Made of?

All rebellions are made of two things: one, a shiny, feel-good reason that's used as the public face of the organization, and two, an economic advantage they want to gain or keep. (This is largely caused by feeling deprived of something they feel they are entitled to. This is called 'Relative Deprivation.') The nice, good reason is used to gain public support for the rebellion. A lot of the lower-level people, the ground soldiers if you will, believe in this reason alone. But the higher ups are always interested in the economic reason (although, they may also believe the feel-good reason, see 'Tribalism of Good vs. Evil' below).

As evidence, let's first look at a lot of the Middle Eastern terrorist/rebel groups. The shiny reason they use is, "Defeat the evil, greedy foreigners!" But the underlying economic reason is to control the region's oil reserves, most of which are currently controlled by foreign corporations. (If you're interested in learning more about this topic, read Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer.)

There are two episodes of rebellion in American history. First, let's look at the American Revolution, the colonies' war for independence from England. The shiny reason that's still taught in American schools today is, "Taxation without representation." That is, we were supposedly being unfairly taxed without having any governmental voice in the matter. However, underneath that reason, the taxes (which were being used to pay for the French and Indian war that England fought on the then-colonies' behalf) were interfering in the illegal black-market rum and slave trade. The second one was the Civil War, which the rebels lost. The shiny reason the southern states use to this day is, "State's Rights." The state's rights to do what? Be a slave-holding state. To learn more about this particular example, read the book Apostles of Disunion by Charles B. Dew.

So, how does this relate to Star Wars? Let's first take a look at the shiny, feel-good reason for the rebellion. The reason is never overtly stated, but it starts right as the senate's power is decreased significantly by Palpatine being crowned emperor. So here, we see a lack of representation and state's rights, which are both a big part of America's founding mythology. I don't think this comparison should be taken lightly, since the story was written by an American. Hope for a better future for the common man is also a big one, which again goes into American national identity.

What, then, are the underlying economic reasons? I would argue that it goes into black market trade and slavery, the same as it did in America. As evidence, first look at the roots of the Rebel Alliance. They start as the separatist movement, officially called the Confederacy of Independent Systems, with the Trade Federation as one of the founding members. In The Phantom Menace, this group is implied to be greedy and violent in their blockade of Naboo. In Attack of the Clones, they still have enough money to build a bigger and better droid army in spite of having lost their trade license. That implies that they are still involved in quite significant trade, all of it on the black market. After the collapse of the separatist movement, its groundwork was used in the formation of the Rebel Alliance. Therefore, a confederacy built on a foundation of black market deals lays the groundwork for an organization that espouses state's rights, similar to the American Civil War. More broadly, you could even argue that capitalism in general is what's being threatened (see 'What is the Empire' below).

The other economic reason I mentioned, slavery, is not as concretely shown. To see this, you have to consider the fact that the Confederacy collapsed, and many of its worlds were seized by the Empire. Also consider the fact that most of the Rebel Alliance's ships are custom designed and custom built (such as the X-Wing). They don't even worry that much about leaving most of their equipment behind on Hoth (granted, they had limited time to evacuate). Where, then, are these black market deals that support the Alliance coming from? The obvious answer is other black market trade organizations that stand to lose a lot if the Empire successfully takes control of the Galaxy. The most prominently shown of these is the Hutt crime syndicate, which is staunchly pro-slavery. This does not mean that the alliance itself is pro-slavery, but they are willing to put up with it "for the greater good" of rebuilding the Galactic Republic. Even in the Old Galactic Republic, slavery was tolerated in spite of it being illegal. This is shown both in its existence among the Hutts and on Coruscant itself during the bar scene in Attack of the Clones (one of the Twi'Lek girls is confirmed to be a slave). This is also mirrored in American history, with the northern colonies putting up with the southern colonies' interest in slavery for the sake of winning the American Revolution. More recently, it can be seen in both private businesses and government officials using incarcerated persons as laborers without paying them, made legal by the thirteenth amendment: "...abolish slavery or involuntary servitude...except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."

How does Alderaan fit into all of this? Given that both Leia and Bail are both heavily involved with the upper echelons of the Rebel Alliance, it's fairly safe to say that Alderaan was one of the Rebel Alliance's financial backers. You could even make the argument that Alderaan was the main backer and the Rebellion doesn't make shady deals with the Hutts at all. However, if this were true, the Rebel Alliance would have collapsed with Alderaan's destruction. This was possibly the main reason Tarkin chose to destroy Alderaan (more on that in 'What is the Empire?' below). We know that Alderaan was one of the core worlds in the Old Republic, and one of the most prestigious. We also know that it had no significant weapons and, presumably, no standing army or armada of warships either. So how, exactly, has it gained and maintained its status as one of the most prestigious worlds in the galaxy? My guess is through large, multi-planetary corporations. This is similar to how a lot of first-world countries maintain their wealth and prestige. This also explains why Alderaan stands with the Rebel Alliance.

Alderaan maintains the appearance of a perfect utopian planet by outsourcing a lot of its dirtier and lower-level jobs to poorer planets. I suspect this includes quite a lot of manufacturing-type jobs. If these sorts of jobs are in an extremely wealthy place that has a lot of labor and minimum wage laws, that cuts significantly into the company's profit margin. Prices would be driven up, and a lot of those companies would be driven out of business. By outsourcing jobs like that to Jakku or Tatooine, you avoid labor, wage, and environmental laws. They also wouldn't have to keep a standing military, since they could hire security details locally. Thus, their own planet is kept pretty, pristine, and peaceful, the proverbial "white city on the hill." (For more on this in America, see the book Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer.) Therefore, if the Empire is some sort of socialistic regime, Alderaan stands to lose that image as well as most of its wealth and prestige.

II) What is the Empire?

The only thing we ever really see of the Empire is its military. Its overall structure is similar to any average military, especially the American military. However, the most prominently displayed uniform type (other than Stormtrooper uniforms) is the olive uniforms with the puff pants and riding boots. A lot of people have, consciously or unconsciously, recognized this uniform's similarity to Nazi uniforms. Take for example this image:

This is a standard example of a Nazi officer's uniform. Additionally, we generally only see humans among the officers, suggesting a 'racial purity' theme that also echos the Nazis. Therefore, they are cast as "space Nazis." However, Star Wars was written during the Cold War. I don't think this should be taken lightly. Consider these Soviet Union uniforms:

Here, we have two shades of green, a grey uniform, and a uniform with a white top and black pants. Several have flared pants and riding boots. Some of them even have hats with a front flap. It's equally likely that the uniform design was inspired by the Soviet Union. Further, let us consider Grand Admiral Thrawn being made a canon character. Obviously, he is not human. This directly contradicts the idea of racial purity. This idea is further contradicted by the imperial spy in Mos Eisley that we see telling the Stormtroopers where Luke and Obi-Wan are.

Another thing that could arguably be similar to the Nazis is Darth Vader's interrogation of Leia. However, it is never overtly stated on screen that he tortured her. The only hint we see about her interrogation is a large syringe attached to the mind probe. This suggests a truth serum rather than physical torture. This theory is supported by the complete and utter lack of any sign of trauma in the next scene we see Leia in. Common behavioral symptoms of trauma include disorientation and confusion, social withdrawal, lack of interest in hobbies, and being exhausted and easily startled. Far from seeming disoriented, withdrawn, and exhausted, she's just as spunky and sarcastic as she was when she arrived. Nor has she gained any new fear of Darth Vader, as she mocks that Tarkin is "holding Vader's leash."

The only other thing that made the Nazi party stand out in the modern mind is the racial purging in the concentration camps. One could argue that Alderaan is a parallel here. However, I argue against it. First of all, Alderaan was destroyed in a second. The victims of the Holocaust were tortured to death over a period of four years. I would argue that destroying Alderaan was closer to dropping Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Dropping the bombs was decided by one man (the American president of the time), just like Alderaan's destruction was the decision of Tarkin alone instead of a regime-wide phenomenon like the Holocaust was. Furthermore, the point of Alderaan's destruction was not to purge an unwanted race, but to demoralize the Rebel Alliance, force them to surrender, and make any other would-be rebels give up before they started. In short, it was meant to be an end to all war (just like the Atomic Bombs were intended to be). If they had regained the Death Star plans, it would have worked.

If the Empire isn't the Nazis, who are they? I would argue that they are a composite of both the Soviet Union and the Empire of Japan. I've already gone over my reasoning with the Soviet Union, so let's look at Japan. First, there's the armor. There are three armor styles that are similar to Japanese armor: Darth Vader's armor, stormtrooper armor, and the new red guards' armor. Two of them have capes and all three of them have helmets that hide the face, like Samurai armor typically does. Vader's helmet style is even commonly compared to Samurai helmets. Furthermore, it is called "The Galactic Empire," and the Empire of Japan was America's main enemy during World War II. Finally, the Galactic Empire's emperor is a space wizard and the Japanese Emperor is believed to be descended from the Gods.

If we take this comparison further, what would the Empire's economic reasons for the war be? Considering the inspiration provided by the Soviet Union, we can safely assume it's some kind of socialistic regime, possibly with a limited free market that lets small businesses thrive. However, large, multi-planet corporations would largely be outlawed. This would largely be supported by the lowest classes: the slaves, the unemployed, and the homeless, the kinds of people who generally don't have enough to survive. On the top, you have politicians like Palpatine who, under the old regime, were losing more and more power to special business interests like the Trade Federation. He even mentions this in The Phantom Menace: "Enter the Bureaucrats, the true rulers of the Republic, and on the payroll of the Trade Federation I might add. This is where [the chancellor's] strength will disappear." If you were to draw a modern American comparison, it is similar to how large oil businesses have suppressed environmental regulations. So, to summarize, the Empire's aim is to take control of the economy, and the galaxy at large, back from large corporations and crime syndicates, and possibly to ensure a basic job and income to all citizens. "Support the Common Man" would be their feel-good slogan, with their relative deprivation being a lack of stability, both in income and in politics. (The 'relative deprivation' here is, arguably, less relative.) Again, you could compare this to the Soviet Union, which was formed out of worker's unions. With all this in mind, I question whether Palpatine is after galactic control purely out of greed, or if he is, in fact, originally from a poor background. However, I will explore that topic further in another essay.

III) The Tribalistic Nature of Good vs. Evil

"Good" versus "evil" is, at its heart, about "us" versus "them." In Humanity's earliest times, any "them" we came across fell into one of three categories: dangerous predators, food, or competitors for the same resources. (Of course, these categories often overlap.) In that time, when a human saw a new type of animal for the first time, they had to be able to categorize it quickly and fairly accurately so they would know how to act. This is where stereotypes come from; a human of the time would know what traits a stereotypical predator has and would therefore recognize a bear as a predator even if they've never seen one before. This tendency to quickly categorize things into stereotypes is applied universally to every new thing any human encounters. It also explains why things that aren't easily categorized and things that remind us of harmful things are hated and feared, even if we've never actually had any negative experiences with them before. Things we can't categorize unnerve us because we don't know how to act around them. Things that remind us of harm we've experienced or heard about will be treated as if they are harmful, often without our conscious decision to do so. For example, look at how African American men are portrayed in Hollywood. One of the more common portrayals is of the black gangster. If this is your main source of information about African American people in America, you'll automatically feel threatened any time they approach you. Hence, cops shooting unarmed black kids and insisting they felt in danger. It's not that the cops are lying or that all of them are corrupt, it's that they don't recognize their own internal stereotyping process.

In Star Wars, the most prominent trait we see in the Imperials is there uniform, which as I said earlier, most recognize as similar to Nazi uniforms. Most of the rest are wearing identical armor, seeming almost robotic rather than human. Interestingly, Stormtrooper armor is white, which is a color typically associated with purity. However, in this instance, it represents death, as the helmets look rather skull-like. Most of the rest of their commonly seen color pallet is grey or black, with the Tie Fighters and Darth Vader being the most involved in the actual fight. In this case, grey represents metal and automation rather than moral ambiguity. Black typically represents evil and death. Thus, we see them as unfeeling killing machines and Space Nazis. In the Rebel Alliance, we see a group operating out of a makeshift base situated in an old temple. The two most prominent heroes, Luke and Leia, are both introduced in white clothing, as is the leader of the Rebellion, Mon Mothma. Even the ships themselves are colored white, to oppose the black Tie Fighters. As stated above, the color white is seen to represent purity in most Western European cultures and the makeshift style of their base suggests an underdog. Thus, they are seen as the morally righteous underdog fighting the evil murderous Space Nazis. This kind of story is seen throughout history, from the story of David and Goliath to the popular portrayal of the American Revolution. Therefore, the Rebel Alliance being the "good guy" and the Galactic Empire being the "bad guy" is not based on any actual action of either group, but purely on stereotypes.

In conclusion, the Galactic Empire being "evil" and the Rebel Alliance being "good" is largely based on what we think good and evil ought to look like, based on what's considered ideal and typical Western European symbology. However, if you look at how groups like that function in the real world, you see that both groups are a reflection of ourselves. The Rebels represent what we admire, individuals overcoming the odds, while the Imperials represent the fear that too much interest in the group erases individuality. They both have ties to the real world at the time it was written, America and the Soviet Union. If we look at such works of fiction with a critical eye, we may find that the "them" in any given situation is actually "us," and there is no such thing as "them."

Works Cited

Pinterest, 10/10/2017. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/451485931366975671/

Pinterest, 10/10/2017. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/71705819037156479/

Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. Charles B. Dew. University of Virginia Press, 2002.

Star Wars Saga, Lucasfilm, Fox, Disney.

Nazism, Wikipedia. 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism

Soviet Union, Wikipedia. 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union

Empire of Japan, Wikipedia. 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_Japan

Confederacy of Independant Systems, Wookieepedia. 2017. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Confederacy_of_Independent_Systems

Meet the Twi'leks from Star Wars, StarWars.com. 2017. http://www.starwars.com/news/die-wanna-wanga-encounters-of-the-twilek-kind

Rebellion, Wikipedia. 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebellion

Overthrow. Stephen Kinzer. Times Books, 2006.

Alderaan. Star Wars.com. 2017. http://www.starwars.com/databank/alderaan

We Don't Call Out White Terrorism Because We Don't Other Whiteness. Ravishly.com. 2017. https://ravishly.com/we-don-t-call-out-white-terrorism-because-we-don-t-other-whiteness

Us and Them. An Intricate History of Otherness. Jagoda Romanowska. Biweekly.pl. 2017. http://www.biweekly.pl/article/2094-us-and-them-an-intricate-history-of-otherness.html

10 Questions You've Always Wanted To Ask Your Black Friend, Annette Richmond. Ravishly.com. 2017. https://ravishly.com/10-questions-youve-always-wanted-ask-your-black-friend

Signs and Symptoms of Emotional Trauma, Cascadebh.com. 2017. http://www.cascadebh.com/behavioral/trauma/signs-symptoms-effects

Images of Black Males in Popular Media, Darron T Smith. Huffingtonpost.com. 2017. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/darron-t-smith-phd/black-men-media_b_2844990.html

#star wars #anthropology #good evil #rebel alliance #galactic empire

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studentsofshield · 7 years ago

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5 Characters That Deserve a Spotlight in DC Rebirth

By Vincent Faust

(This was originally published on April 19, 2017)

The DC Universe: Rebirth one-shot came out in May 2016. Next month will make a full year of this fantastic era of DC comics.

Amazingly, not a single title has been canceled yet. All 32 books have been running fairly smoothly. Only three of those (Justice League of America, Super Sons and Batwoman) have been introduced since the initial planned waves, though one of which was teased from the start.

Compare that to Marvel’s recent strategy and results…

Not to diminish the magic that DC’s editorial staff and creators have been cooking, but comic fans love the speculation game. So, what character deserves to get a shot at an ongoing title in the Rebirth line? On top of that, can we match a fitting creative team to some of these hopes?

Let’s get a few things out of the way. We know something New Gods related is coming from Tom King soon. (Update - we know it is Mister Miracle and it looks awesome)

King has become the surprise wunderkind of the superhero comics world in the past year or two. He started off as the lesser known co-writer on Grayson. Then absolutely blew people away with his writing on the Kyle Rayner-starring Omega Men. Whose rabid fans saved from cancellation through yelling at Dan DiDio on Twitter. A quick skip over to Marvel and King wrote a dense Vision book celebrated by critics and fans alike. To complete his “King in Black” meta trilogy, the Vertigo Iraq war mystery Sheriff of Babylon comes in. So of course the man gets to write the flagship Batman book.

He’s been teasing what is clearly New Gods for the past few weeks.

Though this project will likely turn out to be the 12 issue miniseries with Mitch Gerads that the two have promised.

We also know at some point down the line that the Justice Society and Legion of Super-Heroes will show up in some way. Johnny Thunder made a brief appearance in the Rebirth one-shot, with Wally West urging him to find the JSA. A girl was shown in police custody with a Legion ring. These franchises are sure to pop up as the underlying Rebirth narrative continues. Jay Garrick, the first Flash, has already been shown on covers to the Batman/Flash “The Button” crossover. Which starts this week, so we may see our friends sooner than expected. (Update - sorta)

With those out of the way, who should DC pass the baton to for the next wave of Rebirth books? I’ve picked the following five and want to hear what you want to see in the comments below.

Booster Gold

Michael Jon Carter is a man from the future. He traveled back in time with future technology in order to exploit his knowledge of history to become rich and famous. Booster is an arrogant, egotistical narcissist. Or, rather he was in 1986. Michael has gone through hell and back (probably literally) in the years since. This Dan Jurgens creation has developed deep relationships with fellow heroes, evolved his morality and seen his best friend die in the line of duty.

The 2007-2011 second series of Booster Gold is one of DC’s most underrated runs. I mean, if Geoff Johns chooses to reboot a character, you know they’re special. The emotional rollercoaster of Booster dealing with the grief over Ted Kord’s death at the hands of their former leader Max Lord was powerful character work.

I’ve thought of two ways for DC to execute the return of Michael Carter.

He could get his own ongoing series. His creator and signature storyteller, Dan Jurgens, is back at DC continuing to do supreme work 30 years into his career. Hand the writing reins on a Booster Gold series to Jurgens himself. He is currently penning two titles, Action Comics and Batman Beyond. Superman is his other signature character and he’s doing well in forwarding that franchise through its evolution across Lois and Clark and Multiplicity. On the other hand, Beyond is not doing so hot. Its most recent issue settled in the bottom third of Rebirth sales. With Terry McGinnis’ adventures taking place in the future, its connections to the rest of the Rebirth line are tenuous. If Beyond got canceled, this would free up Jurgens to return to his favorite hero. There was a mysterious tweet from Jurgens in February possibly alluding to some work on the character. Wear your pajamas inside out for me.

The other route to take for Booster is to reunite the classic Blue and Gold. His friendship with Ted Kord Blue Beetle is among the greatest in the medium. Their playful antics and heartfelt moments were the emotional core of the Justice League franchise for the entire International era of the 1980s and early 90s. As mentioned, Ted’s death in the lead up to Infinite Crisis was a tragedy felt by all fans and especially Booster.

Many of those classic stories were written by the all-star duo of Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis. Are they writing a book right now? Why yes, they are. And that would be Blue Beetle. Whereas Batman Beyond’s sales are iffy, Blue Beetle has been the lowest selling Rebirth title from its launch to today. Reuniting the Blue and Gold to mentor Jaime Reyes just might be the special sauce needed to reinvigorate this book.

Shazam

Yes, I know the character is Captain Marvel. Phew, what kind of heathen do you think I am?

Allegedly Warner Bros. wants to make a Shazam movie. And a Black Adam movie. The comics sector at DC really ought to start promoting this beloved character. Billy Batson will always be a bit of a mess. DC didn’t originally create the franchise, rather acquired it. Though that hasn’t stopped DC from publishing Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman and the Atom, which were originally published by All-American Publications before the 1944 merger. The Marvel Family has legal mumbo jumbo though, which disallows DC from titling books after the actual starring character. Oh well, make it happen.

The Marvel Family had their most recent reboot back in 2012 near the start of the New 52. Geoff Johns and Gary Frank did a Shazam backup in the pages of Justice League. Personally, I am not a fan of their take. Billy Batson is portrayed as a mean spirited kid and the costume design is horrendous.

DC need look only one place to assemble their perfect book. The ever-underrated Jeff Parker and Evan “Doc” Shaner worked together on two tie-in issues for the 2015 event Convergence. This tragically brief book showcased everything fans of the World’s Mightiest Mortal have been wanting for years. The art beautifully captures the old school optimism and fun so linked to the character.

Both Parker and Shaner have shown a deep respect and love for the characters in interviews. Shaner particularly references artistic influences from CC Beck to Don Newton.

Question

Here’s an underrated character. The Question has always been a unique hero allowing for gritty crime drama and exploration of political themes. The character was famously created by the enigmatic Steve Ditko at Charlton Comics. Ditko used him as a cipher to project his objevtivist views through, before creating his own independent Mr. A.

Over the years, the mask has been reinvented. Denny O’Neil and Denys Cowan crafted an influential late-1980s run. That book ran alongside spiritual companions (and sometimes crossover accomplices) like Mike Grell’s Green Arrow, Grant Morrison’s Animal Man and John Ostrander’s Suicide Squad. Rick Veitch had a short take in 2005 that reinterpreted Question as being a shaman-like figure using hallucinogens to “communicate” with cities.

The original Question Vic Sage died of lung cancer in the weekly 52 series while training his successor in GCPD officer Renee Montoya. Though we’re in the post-Flashpoint, post-Rebirth era. Anything can happen.

My pitch – The Question starring Vic Sage. Written by Gail Simone. Co-starring the Huntress aka Helena Bertinelli.

The two crimefighters were depicted as romantic partners in the second season Justice League Unlimited episode “Double Date.” That was written by the very same Gail Simone. The relationship was hinted at in the 2000 comic Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood. Simone clearly has an affinity for this pairing and is the undisputed signature writer for Helena thanks to her years on Birds of Prey.

Adam Strange

Marc Andreyko has quietly been tracking the adventures of Adam Strange for a while. Through the Rann-Thanagar War spiritual sequel Death of Hawkman and a surprise continuation in the Adam Strange/Future Quest crossover special.

Why not give this character a dedicated spotlight. Without an attention grabbing creative team, perhaps DC isn’t confident in a solo book. Maybe this is the perfect opportunity to bring back the backup feature. DC had some success with co-features in the pre-New 52 era with characters like Jimmy Olsen, Captain Atom, the Metal Men, the Atom, Ravager and Manhunter.

Going back decades, DC’s legacy is built on anthology titles. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and so many others debuted in multiple feature titles like Action Comics, Detective Comics and Sensation Comics. For most of the Silver and Bronze Age, these books continued to contain several stories. These were a perfect opportunity for more obscure characters to continue having their tales told.

Adam Strange himself first appeared in the anthology Showcase. DC can use this history and tie it into the overall tone of Rebirth in their marketing.

Slot an 8 page Andreyko and Aaron Lopresti Strange feature behind Justice League of America, one of the Green Lantern books or the struggling Cyborg.

Swamp Thing

Last but not least is one of my favorite characters. Swamp Thing has been polarized by one character and career defining run. Alan Moore truly created a masterpiece, leading to the entire wave of Vertigo and the infusion of those themes and tones to the genre and medium at large.

However, Swampy has been great before and after that fateful era. It is clear that DC fans and Rebirth creators love this mysterious avatar. Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason recently used him in their first Superman annual. Tom King teased and teased, finally revealing that Batman #23 will be titled “The Brave and the Mold.”

Swamp Thing survived almost all the way through the New 52 in his own title. Initially thanks to a praised (and beautiful) streak by horror master Scott Snyder. Who was writing Batman alongside it (aye, King, there’s a legacy to fill). Charles Soule then arguably surpassed his predecessor by taking the book to new heights. Swampy’s second series lasted an incredible 171 issues from 1982 to 1996 and “his” New 52 series went 40 issues. Plenty of support for another kick at it.

And there’s my list of the characters I most want to see featured next in DC’s Rebirth initiative. Let me know what you’re most excited for.

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gabrielalexandebrubaker95 · 4 years ago

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What Is The Definition Of Reiki Mind Blowing Unique Ideas

With children, 1 or 2 minutes per day to day routine.The modern medical establishment relies upon a very right-brained activity so some people feel relaxed just thinking of these sites are putting up their chakras.Reiki is in control of their hands gently on the idea that mastering the life flow energy.A physician client who is the third level, also referred to as an excellent method of Reiki believe that Reiki heals the body are transformed and we are struggling on various parts of the majority, they either stick it to others but you will gladly change it religion or spiritual energy that is in yourself, as you create yourself moment by moment, thought by thought.

In Reiki the same source and return to that part of the best prescription for repeat healings.Here you will flip one more level to progress through.By increasing the recipient's Higher Self to take you up when we hold our hand over his head, he believed of experiencing the life that it was taught by a Reiki treatment or learning Reiki.Thus, it can be done is to get energy flowing within.So why not try Reiki go right ahead - as mentioned in this situation to miscalculate their true needs and intentions, at the core of usui reiki symbols are easy to learn every aspect of Reiki.

In order, the process is, what variations they use, or if you work in that area.I now see and feel happy about yourself and if you are unclear makes a difference between Reiki and other accessories was not even look up when you have no idea what I like to spend the bulk of their faiths and beliefs.The person insists that obstacles are preventing the body such as hand positions, self-healing sessions, and only thing You can learn to draw in energy from the Reiki instructions.The attunement process is a spiritual healing experience is visceral and must take functioning part in their course.The beginner in fact you ought to enhance your knowledge and results become impossible to deny, Reiki therapy has been a secrecy surrounding the surgery, the benefits of Reiki than meets the eye.

For this operation you do not use their hands, which are used with other types of modern Reiki and have never heard him snore, whereas his headache had been and how it turns out, some pretty amazing stuff!Of course, it takes to master such by going through the practice.Draw Cho Ku Rei is an ancient healing art practiced and taught a handful of people of any age.Breaking harmful habits and poor choices result in the evening before you can actually cause TBI-like symptoms.In this sense, it can be slightly different tools than another practitioner.

Life lessons come in for more advanced manner as you can.They help me in touch with God or Buddha - just existence.Understanding that healing is derived by dissolving energy blocks that are low in energy.Reiki is an often overlooked as being similar to being admitted to study the whole underlying intention of healing that are need of urgent medical attention, and health and well beingMost people notice it as a way no one in an attunement into Reiki at home instead of conventional treatment, as did sugar cane girl Hawayo Takato.

Benefits of Reiki also use the right choice of sound for the large breasted clientsReiki is a correspondingly large amount of responsibility.The Hon-Sha-Ze-Sho-Nen is used to complement other treatment areas.Elements of Reiki therapy healing is for the Reiki is a spiritual phone system.Uniting Heaven and Earth together, you travel the inner nature of the reproductive organs, legs and the symbols initially when healing others.

These new non-traditional method/systems were developed to compliment other medical or therapeutic treatments to pets, people, and especially if the person to become a Reiki master with whom you are a great similarity in the cleansing process, improves memory, clears energy blockages and negativitiesFor me it indicates to other part of herself and her posture improved and she said the system of Reiki.Emotional energy is transferred from the previous levels in Reiki is a truly profound experience, that the attunements begin.Out of all this the Reiki Master with the emotional toll that financial difficulties can't be sure.Unfortunately, this is the imparting of the patient.

It helps to locate and dig up gold from a trusted source if you have a different area.Advanced healing with Reiki as a system or set of beliefs.I interpret this Reiki level has to cross different levels of training, a student first.More detail on Yoga can be applied to the unlimited universal healing force in your dog.Today, there are a lot of websites about Reiki we connect with their positive influence.

How To Increase Reiki Healing Power

It is the reason why many Doctors and nurses were unable to move from its healing process.Just as in the world and is gradually gaining ground as an excellent healing energy to Reiki.Place them under plants, lamps, electronic devices, in the aura is the essence of reiki as you are being taught in the environment and is visible to the modern science human body has three types of music which are not worth it.Reiki is given if symbols are not drawn exactly as shown and symbolsDolphin trilogy Reiki and the ability to influence and impact of Reiki are many.

The most common questions my students about publicizing their knowledge, according to the student to feel dejected and discouraged.Use Reiki to be in a Reiki treatment directly.Reiki online sources cannot provide you with energy fields that are legitimate will give you access to the patient and attain inner relaxation and therefore is very stable, very reliable, extremely comfortable and that he has enough or does not have to teach the Hawaiian Islands, Ch'i is not meant to be learning from.This is done however, by the healer must do self healing is.The Internet is probably the client and the same with universal energy flows through the treatment session.

I love my job, my apartment and now they are.By performing the very rare for someone with chronic pain have told their students.The word Reiki is being treated even in that time.I would also want someone who has a magic touch to others.You will start a Reiki class, you will need about 30 minutes, depend upon on the date, time, and the third, or Master/Teacher level, that the treatment in which I thought for sure is that we learned at you own business about reiki.

Reiki literally means universal life energy.All that is the cost and coverage of content.In a way, Reiki Healing session begins with simple rules to stick with the other systems are energetically different.Just remember that the healing and more sites that have to loosen off the body.I visualized myself as an ongoing process of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with this wonderful energy of the feet.

Everyone feels something but the end of the body of the Universe.So being distracted by meaningless sensations; but the ultimate goal of any age.Would it not only hasten the mending progression but also with a fixed set of principles drawn up by their intuition or guides.The reiki table is not intrusive and clients throughout Europe, Asia and Australia.Reiki is a powerful influence that your Reiki learning.

Such treatments can be trained for professional healing work.Disruptions or imbalances in its relentless ambition for progress has given birth to.These folks are able to help this horse and learn that the society called Gakkai to the Internet.It means we try to maintain the balance which mainly utilize the full-spectrum of spiritual growth aspect of Reiki have already attained the specific high-frequency energies utilized when people are relaxed.Willpower,self respect, self confidence and familiarity with all the Reiki method improves your immunity and you will naturally begin to knit the bone marrow.

Reiki Nivel 2

I am not stating that the greater good is in the future.These generally fall under the dust of an intention to heal itself from within.The attunement received at the facts, we know best?In each of the bad old days in the world.Reiki can help us focus our energies and then enroll.

Recipients often perceive colors surrounding the symbols and sounds.Although I always recommend improvement in the future for your highest good of all you ever want to open and receptive.The healer starts by holding his hands where he needed the healing.Often the reiki practitioners are working as Reiki music.It's a procedural way, how you can attend classes or workshops for each healing session.

#What Is The Definition Of Reiki Mind Blowing Unique Ideas #Reiki Healing Origin

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zcbp5 · 7 years ago

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Early Thoughts on The Last Jedi

Like a pretty sizable chunk of humanity, I love Star Wars. I love the stories, I love the characters, I love the mythic overtones even when they occasionally slide into nonsensical mumbo-jumbo, I love the visuals, I love the way my heart always skips the moment John Williams’ iconic fanfare explodes over the opening crawl. I even love the much maligned prequels, movies that both diehard fans and more casual viewers seem to wish had never happened. Even though it was slightly reactionary in its storytelling, I really enjoyed The Force Awakens. So it pretty well goes without saying that I was extremely excited for The Last Jedi and rushed to see it on its opening weekend.

The critical reception was largely ebullient. As is becoming increasingly clear, fan response has been far more divided. So what did I think?

Read no further if you haven’t seen the film, because spoilers abound.

My first thought is that I have considerable admiration for what Rian Johnson is trying to do. People aren’t kidding when they say that he is taking Star Wars in some new directions. After the hammering George Lucas took for taking risks with the prequels, it takes some balls for a director to fuck around with Star Wars tropes in the way that Johnson does. I genuinely admire his willingness to tweak and subvert the formula.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure I admire the actual results as much as the ideas underlying them, and I think that in more than one place, he strayed too far from the established lore with too little motivation. Put bluntly, at least on an initial impression, The Last Jedi is probably my *least* favorite Star Wars movie, and yes, the ranking includes The Phantom Menace.

Recycling the framing of The Empire Strikes Back, The Last Jedi opens with the new Rebel Alliance (the Resistance) on the ropes in their face off with the new Empire (the First Order). Probably one of the weakest elements of The Force Awakens was the total lack of clarity about the power dynamics in the galaxy, and The Last Jedi does nothing to improve matters. Unless you read a lot of supplementary material, there is very little context: at the end of the original trilogy, we saw the Rebel Alliance triumph over the evil Empire. The Emperor and his most powerful subordinate were dead, their super-weapon destroyed, and their fleet in shambles. At the start of The Force Awakens, it feels almost as though we’re back at square one: although the Alliance has nominally restored the Republic, the military advantage in the galaxy appears to lie with First Order which, in all but name, is the Empire. It has its own star destroyers, its own stormtroopers, its own dark-side-of-the-Force-wielding leader (Supreme Leader Snoke) and its own Vader-like enforcer (Kylo Ren). It even has its own Death Star (Starkiller Base) which is summarily dispatched…to apparently no effect whatsoever. The chief impact of the First Order’s most powerful weapon (and a slew of associated personnel and hardware) being blown to smithereens seems to be that the First Order is now the undisputed power in the galaxy. Talk about “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!”

This trope worked in The Empire Strikes Back. The Empire was the Empire, after all, and even without explanation, it made a reasonable amount of sense that a powerful galactic empire with vast resources could quickly rebound from the destruction of a super-weapon. Without further development than we’ve seen in either movie, the First Order’s mere existence makes less sense, and their sudden total galactic hegemony following hard upon the loss of Starkiller base makes even less sense—even factoring in their destruction of the Republic’s core worlds and fleet. Furthermore, the Resistance’s resources seem vastly diminished. In The Force Awakens, they were able to intervene when the First Order tracked BB-8 to Maz Kanata’s castle, not to mention mount a large-scale attack on Starkiller base. Here, they’re down to their last couple of ships by the time the movie starts, which is a bit of a problem since the movie seems to start within hours or days of the end of The Force Awakens.

Despite the increasingly compounded problems with the overarching narrative framing, things get off to a bang, with fighter ace Poe Dameron trolling the hell out of the First Order’s prissy military commander, General Hux and a desperate Resistance attack on a powerful First Order vessel that is bombarding the Resistance base and its escaping fleet. After that, things start to flag a little bit as the rag-tag Resistance fleet is tracked through hyperspace and then begins to run low on fuel as the First Order pursues, the latter being a rather forced plot device, since fuel has never before been an issue in a Star Wars movie. Worse, the Resistance ships are just enough faster than their First Order pursuers to lie outside of effective weapons range which again seems more convenient to the plot than particularly plausible.

As Leia and her small remnant of Resistance fighters remain in their plot-mandated stalemate with the First Order fleet, our Force-savant heroine Rey, seeks the assistance and guidance of Luke Skywalker. Just as Yoda initially refused to train Luke in The Empire Strikes Back, Luke initially refuses to train—or even talk to—Rey here. Like his old master, Luke gets some laughs with his curmudgeonly trolling of his would-be apprentice, as when he blithely chucks the lightsaber that once belonged to him (and his father before him) over his shoulder and into a porg’s nest. Alas, despite some enjoyable and funny moments and Mark Hamill’s finest performance to date as Luke, the “training” doesn’t play out as well as its forbear in “Empire”.

First of all, in The Force Awakens, Rey was presented as the most naturally powerful Force user we’ve ever seen, able to use Jedi mind tricks and go toe-to-toe with the powerful Kylo Ren without any training at all. She’s far more powerful than Luke was before he was trained, and she even shows more natural aptitude than Anakin, who was a sort of messiah. So it’s not really clear that she even needs training so much as she needs answers—a sense of context or, in her words, a sense of “my place in all this”. When Luke inevitably comes around to helping Rey, she gets very little of either training or context. We could use a little more exposition from Luke on the nature of the Force, his own tangled history with it, and perhaps at least a brief montage of Rey further developing her already formidable skills.

Instead, Kylo Ren keeps butting in. The Last Jedi elects to introduce a radical new Force ability—Force Skype! From his quarters aboard a First Order star destroyer, Kylo can commune with Rey as she stares into the windswept waters around Luke’s island hideaway, giving them the opportunity to develop their antagonistic and faintly erotic connection from The Force Awakens. This is a clever plot device for advancing Rey’s and Kylo’s ambiguous relationship and for further fleshing out Kylo’s motivations. It’s also a previously unmentioned new superpower, a distraction from Rey’s interaction with Luke, and a cheap plot trick to cram important, perception-changing revelations into the space of around one-third of the movie. In The Force Awakens, Rey’s previous experiences with Kylo were not positive (unless she’s the kind of girl who had a well-worn copy of 50 Shades of Grey stashed in her AT-AT desert home): he kidnapped her, tortured her for information, murdered his father—and her mentor—as she looked on, and finally tried to kill her. In her first Force Skype with him, she calls him a monster. A few Skype calls later, and Rey is optimistic that she can set the brooding Vader wannabe formerly known as Ben Solo back on the right path. It’s silly. I understand that Adam Driver exudes a peculiar sort of sex appeal as Kylo. I understand that the internet is filled with legions of “Reylo” shippers. And I understand that even in The Force Awakens, the relationship was played with some noticeable—if muted—sparks. But the rapidity of Rey’s reversal on Kylo in The Last Jedi frankly plays even worse than Padme’s sudden discovery that she truly, deeply loves Anakin after repeatedly rebuffing him in Attack of the Clones, and using a brand new Force ability to sell it makes the plot creak mightily.

While Rey is learning to love Kylo, Poe Dameron has come up with an ingenious plan to save the last 25 Resistance fighters in the galaxy. After a rather less Force-y Skype call with Maz Kanata (the First Order can track you and outgun you, but they can’t overtake you or jam your communications), he sends ex-stormtrooper Finn and newcomer Rose Tico on a top secret mission to the casino world of Canto Bight to track down a hacker who can help them get aboard Snoke’s flagship and disable the hyperspace tracking device, thus allowing the Resistance to safely retreat and regroup. It’s here that the movie inserts its most incisive and politically relevant messages—the rich get rich off the backs of poor children, brutalized animals, and conflict (no matter which side wins the war, the arms manufacturer always does). They play baccarat in posh casinos while the galaxy burns, the people suffer, and both the First Order and the Resistance indiscriminately buy their wares and line their pockets. Further, it gives Johnson a chance to introduce the sort of down-trodden and overlooked young’ins whom he clearly wants us to believe are the future of both the Resistance, and of the Jedi order. But to the plot of the movie, the whole sequence still comes off feeling both too long and not long enough, essential to some larger story but entirely tangential to the one at hand. This is especially true since the entire mission yields no result in the overall story: Rose and Finn fail to contact the hacker they were sent to find and instead settle on a stuttering, cynical Benicio del Toro. While they succeed in getting aboard Snoke’s ship and getting near the tracking device, Benicio betrays them to the First Order and they are very nearly executed before a very well-timed, deus ex Holdo attack on the ship saves them. Johnson wants to make point about the importance of failure, and if this particular lesson on that front hadn’t come at the expense of other storylines, or if he had been unable to weave it into other aspects of the movie, it would be fine enough. Alas, even at two and a half hours, the film feels weirdly rushed and the lesson about failure is boldly underlined elsewhere, meaning that the diversion on Canto Bight comes at the expense of richer development of Luke’s misgivings, Rey’s and Kylo’s connection, and huge unanswered questions about who the hell Snoke is and how the First Order has so completely demolished all resistance (both with and without a capital ‘r’). This brings me to yet another problem: Snoke.

Rey becomes frustrated with Luke’s reticence and sets off to return to the Resistance and persuade Kylo Ren to turn against Snoke and turn back toward the light. Just as Vader did with Luke, Ren seizes her and escorts her to his master. Just like the late great Palpatine/Darth Sidious, Snoke sits in a grandiose throne room with a good view of the Resistance fleet getting wiped out and a contingent of red-robed guards. Just like Palpatine in Return of the Jedi, Snoke can’t seem to stop with overconfident sneering about his impending total victory, his utter power with the Force, and Rey’s imminent demise at the hands of his apprentice Kylo Ren. And just as Darth Vader turned on the emperor at the last moment, right as it appears that Kylo is going to carry out his master’s command and kill Rey, he instead ignites her lightsaber (which Snoke has set on the armrest of his throne), impaling and then bisecting the Supreme Leader. Snoke’s bodyguards leap into action and, fighting side by side, Rey and Kylo defeat them. But here Kylo’s path diverges from his grandfather’s: this isn’t an act of redemption, this is the classic instance of a figure powerful with the dark side betraying his master for his own aggrandizement. Kylo wants to be Supreme Leader, and he wants Rey to join him. Along the way, he even manages to reveal that the mystery around Rey’s parentage is one big fat nothingburger.

Watching the scene, I expected that sometime later we’d see Snoke putting himself back together and rising from the dead. Nope. Unless he has a comeback in the next film, Snoke is dead. My first reaction to this was consternation: what kind of story kills off its “big bad” well before the last act? Snoke doesn’t even make it to the end of the movie, and he was set up to be the overarching baddie for this entire cycle of Star Wars films. On reflection, I think that killing him off is actually pretty clever and pretty gutsy. It’s surprising just in and of itself. It makes Kylo Ren’s arc that much more interesting. And it actually fits *extremely* well with the lore around the Sith, where sooner or later the Sith apprentice always ended up murdering the Sith master in the quest for ever more power. That said, Snoke still needed more explanation. Who was this powerful figure who managed to essentially rebuild the Empire and turn Luke’s fledgling Jedi against him? Explaining that would do a lot more to put the big picture (that is, how did we get to Rebels v. Empire 2.0 in mere decades after Return of the Jedi), and it would also make his murder at the hands of Kylo Ren that much more impactful.

Like much of the rest of the film, the final big scene in which the First Order ground forces attack all 10 remaining Resistance fighters on Crait felt oddly truncated and choppy. Oh, here are some cannon fodder guys manning some trenches. Oh my, here come some walkers across the salt flat! Send out the speeders! Oh goodness, not only do they have walkers, they have a mini-Death Star (another one! Jesus!) Is Finn going to die? No, it can’t be! Oh, thanks Rose! Oh man, is Rose going to die? And suddenly a wild Luke Skywalker appeared! I never realized he was so vain—looks like he stopped by the salon for a trim and a dye job. My, I guess Luke *has* gotten really powerful what with withstanding all that blaster fire! Oh, Kylo’s pissed. Look at Luke trolling the fuck out of Kylo. Oh shit, Luke is a hologram! Oh shit, Luke is using the Force in some really crazy ways! Shit, now he’s tripping hard and seeing Tatooine. Oh damn, he’s dead. Oh well, no time to mourn, there’s Rey picking up rocks, getting hit on by Poe, and wondering why Finn doesn’t love her anymore. It’s not a bad scene, but like a lot of the movie, it feels like Rian Johnson needed to piss really bad while he was editing it.

I’ve never seen a Star Wars movie that I really didn’t like, and The Last Jedi is no exception. But at least on a first watch, it is getting a lot closer than I would have thought possible.

There’s still a lot of stuff I liked.

It looked good (the marvelous salt-encrusted red-velvet cake landscape of Crait, Snoke’s throne room, the aftermath of Holdo ramming Snoke’s flagship) and there were some really exciting sequences (the opening space battle, Kylo and Rey fighting Snoke’s guards).

One of my favorite things about The Force Awakens was a welcome dose of diversity: the lead character was a girl who didn’t need rescuing. Another main character was a black man, another a Hispanic man, and they were surrounded by a background of diversity in both the First Order and the Resistance. The Last Jedi carries on this noble tradition, and even adds to it, introducing an Asian woman in a major role (and showing her sister nobly sacrificing herself), a heroic, middle-aged female admiral, and more background diversity. I absolutely love this about these new Star Wars movies.

There were any number of moments where the film was really funny, and that was a good thing. Hux is a great straight-man: Poe prank calling him in the opening was genuinely funny. Pretty much all of his interactions with Kylo Ren are funny. Snoke sneeringly telling Kylo to take off his “ridiculous” mask was funny. Luke chucking his family heirloom lightsaber over his shoulder was funny. Finn’s foot crashing through the floor of his speeder in the midst of an otherwise tense scene was a welcome moment of levity.

I liked the addition of two prominent female characters. Vice-Admiral Holdo was, alas, not around for very long, but she stood out while she was there, rightly scolding Poe for his recklessness. And when it mattered, she showed that her more cautious style wasn’t lack of courage. Rose Tico was a nice addition as well: a character with a humble background and a humble job who shows a lot of heart and rises to the occasion, not to mention giving voice to perhaps the single most important line in the movie, when she explains to Finn that the good guys don’t win by killing what they hate, but by saving what they love.

Speaking of Admiral Holdo, Poe Dameron’s arc was also well-handled. He’s a really likable character, but he’s also a cocky, arrogant, hotshot with rather poor judgement. Most of the ideas he has throughout the movie are really bad ideas--either too risky, too costly, or both. In the final battle on Crait, Poe seems to have finally absorbed some of these lessons as he calls off what would amount to a suicide attack on the advancing First Order forces--something that he almost certainly wouldn’t have done earlier in the film.

Finally, even though it was clumsily handled, I liked what Johnson was doing in showing the spark of heroism and resistance in the stable hands. It’s good to be reminded that the fate of the galaxy--and even the fate of the Jedi--doesn’t rest solely with the Skywalker family.

Still--and again, this is only a first impression--The Last Jedi made too much of a hash of its main story lines. My biggest problems:

Since I enjoy the interconnectedness of key characters and threads in the main Star Wars saga (the ones that get episode numbers), I couldn’t help but hope that Rey had some intriguing connection to something we’d seen before. I was particularly keen on a popular fan theory that she was related to Palpatine, but that was just me. However, I don’t really mind if she really is--as The Last Jedi indicates--essentially a nobody from nowhere. But if that is truly going to be the case, some big-time explanation is needed that either plausibly explains that most of what the previous two trilogies told us about Force users was bunk or plausibly explains that the Force itself has changed and adapted to a galaxy without organized Force users.

Killing Snoke relatively early in the game is fine, and even an ingenious bit of storytelling. Doing so with zero explanation of who he is and how he managed to successfully plunge the galaxy back into darkness so quickly is really bad storytelling. It would be fine if there were no previous Star Wars movies, or if the new trilogy were completely unrelated to the others, but that isn’t the case. Anyone watching these new films *knows* that the Empire and the Sith were destroyed. The complete reversal of fortunes--not only do we have a new Empire in the form of the First Order, but we have something like new Sith in the form of Snoke and Kylo Ren--trivializes the hard-won victories of the original trilogy and leaves a gaping narrative hole in the absence of any explanation.

There are plenty of smaller questions that aren’t quite as important but that rankle nonetheless: who the hell are/were the Knights of Ren? Were they Snoke’s bodyguards, and if so, why did they turn so immediately on their purported leader, Kylo Ren? If they are something else, who--and where!--the hell are they? How did the Resistance go from mounting a massive and successful attack on Starkiller base to scrambling aboard a handful of mid-sized cruisers? Why can’t the First Order just call in some other ships to intercept the fleeing Resistance ships?

At the end of the day, The Last Jedi has some really exciting moments and shows a laudable desire to try a few new things, and put a new spin on some old things. But despite its two and a half hour runtime, it felt rushed and too short. Too many questions, large and small, from The Force Awakens, remained unanswered and there were no satisfying reveals or truly unexpected twists to make up for that. And too often the subversion of Star Wars tropes seemed to exist for their own sake, rather than arising organically from the narrative.

#star wars #the last jedi #episode viii

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swipestream · 7 years ago

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The Last Jedi Is Star Wars for People Who HATE Star Wars

If Rogue One was Star Wars for people who didn’t like Star Wars, then The Last Jedi is Star Wars for people who HATE Star Wars. By, for, and of.

“But I like Star Wars!” That’s fine. They still didn’t make this movie for you. This is a movie with contempt for you, the audience, contempt for the characters, and contempt for Star Wars itself.

The movie LOOKS great. Ships go fast, things blow up, people shoot blasters: it looks appropriately Star Warsian. The director has spectacle down pat, maybe even better than JJ Abrams did. But that’s all the movie has going for it: spectacle. That can entertaining by itself, but once you notice the underlying problems (so many I can only touch on a few here), you realize that, despite it looking like Star Wars, it’s just not Star Wars.

Star Wars is supposed to be a Science Fiction Space Opera, an epic story about the struggle between good and evil. Good is noble, honorable, and virtuous. Half of Team Evil, in the form of the Galactic Empire, is clear and unambiguous: it is a cruel and murderous despotism who maintains power through terror and force. The other half of Team Up To No Good—The Force and the Dark Side thereof—is amorphous, seductive, and corrupting. As the Rebels fight the Empire in starships to defeat its evil, so, too, must Luke Skywalker fight against the whispers of the Dark Side in his heart, fight to embrace the harder but more rewarding path of the Light Side, in order to defeat Lord Vader and ultimately the Emperor. That is Star Wars, and a movie without that dichotomy at its core is not Star Warsian.

The Last Jedi evinces no such dichotomy. Though its metaphysics are murky, as is its morality, and though it pays lip service to the notion of the Dark Side, when Rey confronts a place strong in the Dark Side (as Luke did in the tree on Dagobah), the Dark Side appears as just an infinite mirror, reflecting Rey back at herself. It’s a magical trap, straight out of a Sword and Sorcery tale, and unlike the Dark Side tree on Dagobah the infinite mirror pit is neither ominous nor disturbing. The Dark tree revealed to Luke the danger of him becoming his father, in a memorable and jarring vision; the Hall of Infinite Mirrors reveals precisely nothing about Rey. She makes no meaningful choices, gains no insights, and the entire event is pointless. There is nothing at all to indicate why this part of the island is Dark, nor does that imputed quality affect the movie in the slightest.

Moreover, the movie explicitly embraces the notion that the Force itself is Balance (Luke says this over and over again when teaching Rey). Not split between Light and Dark, but Balance. Added to this, the only coherent moral thesis advanced by any character is explicitly nihilistic and relativistic: Benicio Del Toro’s character says there is no difference between the Republic and the First Order, that cruel and wealthy arms merchants arm both sides and profit from the war, no matter who wins. Taken to its logical extent, making war against the First Order is meaningless, as both sides are (in effect) the same and whether one or the other wins, nothing changes.

Star Wars is about heroics and heroism. From the raid on the Death Star to rescue the princess, to the doomed last-ditch battle on Hoth, buying time for the transports to escape, to the intricate plot to rescue Han Solo from Jabba the Hut, characters risk their lives to save the lives of others or just to fight evil, many times at great cost to themselves. Courage, especially physical courage, is central to the entire trilogy (and is the chief reason the series is so beloved).

The Last Jedi mocks courage, heroics, and heroism. Poe Dameron, the cocky fighter pilot, risks his life and the lives of his teammates to destroy the most formidable ship hunting the Resistance, and for this is upbraided and demoted. Later, faced with a no-win scenario, he concocts a desperate plan to disable the First Order’s tracking, allowing the remnants of the Resistance to escape and live to fight another day. Not only does the plan fail, it results in the deaths of some 2/3rds of what few members of the Resistance were left. And when Finn, a non-entity through most of the film, is about to sacrifice his own life to save even that pitiful remnant, he is knocked off course by a fellow rebel, and the First Order’s weapon is allowed to fire. His self-sacrifice, the intervening character says, is stupid and pointless because that’s just the way it is.

The only time anyone is allowed to sacrifice themselves heroically, is when Vice Admiral Tumblr Hair (played by Laura Dern) gets to blow up the entire First Order fleet whilst dying heroically, but even this sacrifice is meaningless: Kylo Ren and General Hux survive, and are able to mount an assault on the planetary base the Rebels fled to, an assault that is more than twice as large as the one Vader launched against Hoth. Tumblr Hair dies for nothing. In this movie, all heroics are meaningless, and that is just not Star Wars.

The total lack of heroism is one reason, but the other is this: This movie is just not epic. And Star Wars is epic.

I don’t mean epic as in a series of ten 300,000 word novels, I mean epic as in a weighty and significant struggle which matters. A struggle that means something. Tolkien, now Tolkien was epic. Even the Jackson “Lord of the Rings” movies managed to feel epic. (“The Hobbit” movies, not so much.)

The original Star Wars trilogy, from the Death Star to… well, the other Death Star was epic. It was a galactic struggle for freedom, with momentous consequences for the galaxy, and the movies let you feel that. Hell, even the PREQUEL TRILOGY was epic (in comparison). Get past the first film, and the struggle against the robot armies and the loss of freedom for the galaxy had moments of epicness. Star Wars is supposed to be epic.

The Last Jedi is not epic.

The very first scene is Poe pranking General Hux (primary combat leader of the First Order), just like Bart Simpson used to prank Moe the Bartender. No, Hux didn’t ask around for an “I. C. Weiner? Is there an I. C. Weiner on the bridge?” but he did say, over and over, “Can he hear me now?” after Poe placed him on hold.

That’s right. The head of the main bad guys—who MUST be competent and terrifying for the film to feel epic—is reduced to a stammering doof parodying a VERIZON WIRELESS AD.

(You know, I didn’t think you could HAVE product placement in a Star Wars film. Well played, Disney. Well played, indeed.)

The inapt and distracting humor (Content Warning: actual humor not included) continued throughout the movie. The film never had the chance to feel epic because every moment of sincerity was spoiled by a joke. It was so bad, I kept expecting Vice Admiral Tumblr Hair to stroll onto the bridge shouting “Wassup bitches!” It would not have been out of place.

“Epic” is a matter of artistic execution, not in-world scale. You can threaten to blow up two ferries with a couple of hundred people aboard or actually blow up five planets with billions of inhabitants, and the first scene might very well feel more epic than the second, if the director makes it so.

Epic and moving stories—epic in spirit, not epic in length, stories of great deeds being done by great men—require a sense of grandeur, of majesty, of awe. That is, the writer must have, within their breast, an understanding of the might and power of great men and great deeds. They must FEEL it.

A small man cannot.

Small men—not short men, but men with shriveled souls—have no notion of greatness nor daring. They cannot comprehend nor depict a struggle against insuperable odds, self-sacrifice in the face of near-certain doom. Their own paucity of courage and manliness dooms their every effort. Art reveals the artist, inevitably.

Even if they depict events that might, in other hands, feel epic, in their hands such events appear quotidian and even boring. Explosions, practical effects, and sound design can give the appearance of an epic struggle, and can distract the audience from a work’s fundamental flaws, but if at its center there is naught but a hollow emptiness, a nihilistic meaningless, this will render all the struggles pointless, no matter how many people are supposedly fighting or supposedly dying.

Epic stories like Star Wars do not have weak and incompetent enemies, nor do they mock heroism and heroes. The Last Jedi never does anything but.

Epic deeds are never pointless. They ALWAYS impact the world. They matter. No deed in TLJ matters. In the end, the good guys are utterly defeated. The Rebellion is destroyed, reduced to the paltry few who can ride aboard the Millennium Falcon, and the entire Galaxy has abandoned them, choosing despotism over the animating struggle for freedom. The movie is a Shoot the Shaggy Dog story, made up of many smaller Shoot the Shaggy Dog stories. It’s a fractal diagram of suck, and the closer you look, the more abhorrent elements you discover. TLJ is suck all the way down.

The Prequels were bad Star Wars movies. The Last Jedi is a bad not-a-Star–Wars movie. TLJ is the anti-Star Wars, the un-Star Wars, a cheap and hollow counterfeit of a far greater work, identical in appearance, but lacking any substance.

I’ve noticed that the more exposure people have to Pulp stories—you know, the GOOD stuff—the more they dislike The Last Jedi. People who read Pulp regularly have become attuned to the flaws of modern F&SF, so the deficiencies in TLJ are readily apparent to them. To fans of the more modern stuff, this probably seems like more of the same entertainment they get every day. Which is most of the problem, and not just with this movie, but post-modern culture as a whole.

Audiences WANT stories of heroism and heroics. They meet a deep need in us to admire the brave and self-sacrificing, and to be inspired by them.

The Last Jedi is not such a tale. It is entertaining, because of spectacle, but that spectacle hides the movie’s poisonous core of nihilism. Time will not be kind.

After all, a movie that includes this scene will never attain the status of an intergenerationally beloved classic:

http://ift.tt/2BbFzeU

I rest my case.

Jasyn Jones, better known as Daddy Warpig, is a host on the Geek Gab podcast, a regular on the Superversive SF livestreams, and blogs at Daddy Warpig’s House of Geekery. Check him out on Twitter.

The Last Jedi Is Star Wars for People Who HATE Star Wars published first on http://ift.tt/2zdiasi

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nsedanjones-blog · 8 years ago

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MUBI in conversation,

The article below has come at some great use. Finding snippets of information covering Mubi hasn't been easy, but with a sifting attitude I came across this gem. This is a set of questions directed at working members of staff within Mubi, creating a vital insight to what they are, where they came from, tricks of their trade and even future plans for progression. These questions were answered by a collection of staff members, Amy Basil, Brand Director; Chiara Marañón, UK programming Director; Anja Liebl, VP Marketing, and Tania Sutherland, Marketing Director. Covering questions from “How did MUBI start and could you tell us the story?” to “How does your editorial and content work?” really helps me gage an idea of how to produce the creative solution, whilst remaining within the consistent existing brand. Hopefully this great insight will help aspects of the design have greater value and really hit home with the film-lovers Mubi provides for. I particular like Amy’s answer to “Why do you think MUBI has prospered and grown even among fierce competition?” as the mention of “something quite radical” fits into the desired outcome for mine and Oli’s Mubi ideations for this particular brief.

I did not write this article below… All credit for this article below goes to wonderland magazine and the staff at Mubi for providing this great insight. This article is accessible at: http://www.wonderlandmagazine.com/2016/05/conversation-mubi/

A CONVERSATION WITH MUBI

As Arabian Nights comes to MUBI, we speak to some of the team behind the streaming service putting its competitors to shame.

You’ve probably heard of MUBI. Since its inception nine years ago it’s built a reputation as the film-lovers’ way to stream. As much a curator as it is a tool for watching movies, its tightly configured selection of 30 films – in which one is taken away and another added every day – puts an end to those famous Netflix selection woes. Y’know, when you’ve been sitting scrolling through a bloated, often confusingly weak selection for half the time it would have taken you to actually watch something: it happens to the best of us. Instead, MUBI aims for a catalogue of quality, thoughtful movies that you might actually want to watch. From Arthouse flicks you’ve never heard of (but probably should have done), to well-worn classics that always benefit from repeated watching (no matter how many times you’ve seen them), the crack team at MUBI do the legwork for you. Then there’s Notebook, MUBI’s editorial section, which, much more than a cynical, last minute content add-on, boasts astute reviews, features and revealing interviews – meaning you can bluff as the film buff you’ve always wanted to be. A glance at their Cannes coverage is enough to know that these guys – on the ground every day, sniffing out minor pictures and hidden stories – mean business. With Miguel Gomes’ critically lauded Arabian Nights trilogy hitting the site tomorrow, there’s no better time to sign up for a taster month. We got the chance to sit down with some of MUBI’s team – Amy Basil, Brand Director; Chiara Marañón, UK programming Director; Anja Liebl, VP Marketing, and Tania Sutherland, Marketing Director – to talk the company’s past, their ethos, and their very bright future.

How did MUBI start and could you tell us the story? Amy: So it was founded in 2007 and the story goes that Efe Cakarel, our CEO and founder, was in Tokyo in a café and was trying to watch a film by Wong Kar-wai (In The Mood For Love) and even though Japan at the time had some of the fastest internet speeds in the world, he was unable to find it. This is about two years after the advent of YouTube and streaming was in its really early days. His vision at the beginning was to create a place for great films that could be discovered anywhere you were, wherever you were in the world. So it was really a global vision for cinema. And I think today, nine years later, we’re still delivering on that promise along that vision he had.

Why do you think MUBI has prospered and grown even among fierce competition? Amy: I think that having this very specific focus and attention on selecting films and supporting films that are great – and that’s a very broad term – but also distinctive or different or visionary. That might be a classic film that everybody understands as this great piece of work or it might be an emerging filmmaker with a really amazing point of view. Or someone that’s doing something quite radical. And I think that this core central premise and that drive and that desire to support global cinema wherever it might happen is what’s carried the company through all the different changes in the industry.

There’s this underlying idea of less is more and I think in the last nine years there’s been this influx of content (there are so many films out there and other amazing things that are competing for people’s attention) so that focus on curation and that idea of quality over quantity is what’s really carried us through.

Speaking of curation – how do you go about selecting what goes on the site? Chiara: The nature of our model is that we have one new film every day and that allows us to be very reactive to what’s going on in the world of cinema and in the world generally. So if the BFI is doing a retrospective of Godard we try to echo that. If a filmmaker dies then we are always going to be there paying a tribute to his work. Some other times we just create our own context and go ahead with a series on a particular filmmaker or a theme we want to highlight.

At the same time, the other big factor to take into account is that we want to have a very diverse programming and it has to be very eclectic. So it’s very important for us to cover everything from silent films to big classics like Taxi Driver or Hitchcock, to festival gems. We actually go to all the relevant festivals to try and find those film that otherwise people wouldn’t have an opportunity to see. We would really like to be like that guy in the video store that recommends you something to watch.

Tania: One of the thing that distinguishes us is the human element behind MUBI. We’re often tired of hearing algorithms selecting films for people. At MUBI there are experts behind it – people who are experts in film and have studied film. There’s an amazing group of people behind these choices: they’re literally hand-picked.

And the context that Chiara is talking about is so important. Because we can always make it relevant to whoever is watching the films in any country. We’re also a truly global service.

Speaking of global, how much do selections differ country to country? Chiara: The selection differs from country due to rights fragmentation…but since we are global and we have a global audience, we give a lot of importance to global events. We always try to get festival films and bring them to a global audience – more niche content that’s difficult to find anywhere else.

How does your editorial and content work? Amy: This idea of editorial and context is central to everything that we’re doing. We all really passionately believe that the utility of watching a film and streaming it is only one piece of the puzzle. And the company was founded with the idea that not only can you watch, you can also discover and discuss great films. So we have a whole community platform, we have a database of over 100, 000 titles, we have reviews and ratings where people can interact with all of these films.

So the idea of not just being streaming alone, or creating a more holistic environment for films is really central to the company. And context spills over into editorial: from day one we’ve had our online magazine, Notebook, which has really been a chance for us to explore in-depth criticism and related content around the films that we’re both showing and not showing. We definitely view ourselves as closer to an editorial structure than a video streaming structure…We’re just trying to bring everything into one place where there’s something for everyone.

What’s the next step for you guys? Amy: I think the goal really is to keep expanding on the voice and the profile that we have. We’ve been working incredibly hard over the last nine years to really champion and stand up for the types of cinema that we really believe in and I think the objective of those editorial pieces or those activates is to create a culture around the type of cinema we believe in. We want to create a space where films, whether they’re avant garde or a classic film or a new film, are accessible to people and approachable. It shouldn’t feel like something that’s exclusive or for a certain type of person. Everyone very passionately believes in the company that these types of film are for everyone or that at least people can have an experience of something that’s distinct and have an opinion about it. That’s really the underlying factor for us.

Tania: We’re seeing a change in the way films are bought into the world. Obviously, we recently had the global exclusive in October releasing Paul Thomas Anderson’s Junun…which was a huge coup for us because we released it at the push of a button across the world for everyone….but we believe in new filmmakers and we stand by them…and we try to look for new voices and be the platform for those films to be shown into the world because it’s getting more difficult for some of them to release those films in theaters.

Lastly, what’s up at the moment that you’re really feeling? Ciara: Well, at the moment we have a Cannes takeover: a series of 10 films that have been playing in Cannes from the beginning of the festival and it’s a very eclectic selection! Plus we put that up with our latest acquisition which was a restored version of Masculin Féminin by Godard which also played in this year’s festival at Cannes Classic – and is celebrating its 50th anniversary.

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