#the 2000s were a hell time. this is from 2001. for context. | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

demonfox38 · 2 years ago

Text

Completed - Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete

Never sleep in the nude. Especially not when an emergency might happen. Like, say, a home invasion.

Have you been keeping up with the latest hot debate in video games?

Recently, video game publisher Naoki Yoshida revealed a perspective that surprised American audiences regarding the term J-RPG. While seen in the west as a classification of a certain flavor of role-playing games produced in Japan, it is seen as derogatory and reductive to Japanese developers, particularly in how many people use the term to mock design choices in both the game rules and story structure. Which, man, it sucks to hear that it causes pain and sour feelings. Like, a lot of the best video games I've played fall under that categorization. Hell, I grew up in the era where Japanese companies were the most trusted and revered in game development. I'm not saying that the likes of Nintendo, Konami, and Capcom are perfect little angels, particularly when it comes to overworking staff members. But, even today, I still have a positive bias towards Japanese games and developers. Hell, that was my first major link to a culture outside my own. To think anyone would consider them inferior when they both saved the goddamn industry and continue to make major contributions to it is infuriating.

It was definitely a weird time to play "Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete," all things considered. Because man, is "Lunar 2" ever the most game of that game type.

"Lunar 2" takes place about 1,000 years after its predecessor. A silent threat is building behind a false front of benevolence, triggering a strange woman to come blasting to Lunar to stop it. She subsequently gets nerfed so hard that even a paper weight could take her out. Lucky for her, a hero named Hiro (lucky that!) comes to her aid. Through various tribulations, Hiro, the strange woman from the Blue Star, and their friends manage to quell the rising threat without using the same destructive power that once killed an entire celestial body. And then, when the strange lady ditches the planet to return home, Hiro re-discovers space travel to reunite with her.

Like, buddy. She says she loves you, then ditches you hard enough that you have to create NASA? Maybe think twice about this.

Are you old enough to remember "The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés" website? Like, pre-TVTropes TVTropes? This game could literally be that list codified. Like, there are several rules on that page that are named after both "Lunar: Silver Star Story" and "Lunar 2" characters and situations. It's not to say "Lunar 2" is derivative, necessarily. A lot of the party members are creative in the same way that a teenager's fantasies are brashly unique. It's just what you'd expect out of an RPG story. Church bad; dragons good; Satan's a thot; only your girl is pure enough to fight them.

"Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete" gets strange when put into the context of time. Like, this remastering was released in 2000. This poor game was released in the same year as "The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask" and "Final Fantasy IX." Like, holy shit, right? It's wild how much technology varied between 1999-2001. Absolute cowboy years of gaming. I can't find sales numbers for this particular variant, but if it were sentient, I'd have to imagine it took to drinking with "Wild Arms 2." What a rough time to roll out. Hell, depending on how you look across international markets, even the original game would have had spicy competition from "Shin Megami Tensei" 1 and 2, "Final Fantasy 6", and "Phantasy Star IV." Aspects from those RPGs might make this one look sweet and baby-faced by comparison.

There is one major structural difference between "Lunar 2" and most games. This is the inclusion of its post-game epilogue, where Hiro strives to reunite himself with his lost love. Honestly, this may have been one of the earliest games to try this narrative structure out. Like, it's so unique that I thought this was added to the Playstation version to quell angry players of the Sega CD version. (It's not, but more on the Sega CD version at the end.) It's probably most comparable to "Tales of Graces F" or more recent "Pokémon" games, in terms of content addition. Despite some hang-ups I have about Hiro's relationship, I do think it is critical to play through. It's an additional 15-20 hours on top of the 24 it took you to get to it, but honestly, it feels wrong to let this plot thread hang. Might as well do all you can!

Like its predecessor, "Lunar 2" has a generally likable cast. Most of them are flawed, but still endearing (particularly, alcoholic gambling addict/ex-priest Ronfar, assassin-turned-dancer Jean, and money-hungry, driven mage Lemina.) Even some of the villains are surprisingly kind, once you kick their ass. (Although, Lunn and Borgan probably should have had some subsequent ass beatings for what the hell they pulled. Fucking karma escape artists.)

There was one major character hang-up I had, and that was with the main heroine herself. Like, I get that Lucia is a weird space girl from thousands of years ago, so she might not have the best sense of social cues. But, there are several times where she tries to ditch the party to continue her mission alone, only to end up putting either herself or the party in danger. She initially bails on helping a sick baby because it might take too much time. She gets weirdly prudish as she starts falling in love with Hiro, which seems backwards. Then, there's the whole ditching humanity to go back into a freezer to wait for the Blue Star to recover. Like, hello? Girl? What the hell? Did you learn nothing this entire time about working with humans to accomplish your goals? Could you not have learned about agriculture or the fine points of sustainable space travel? Did you think any less of your goddess for going mortal and abandoning both the Blue Star and Lunar? Do you think any new life on the Blue Star would automatically revere and listen to you like in the past? How are you a princess of a dead planet? What's the governance on that? Is this mike on? Hello?

Oh, well. At least she didn't nuke anybody.

The gameplay of "Lunar 2" is pretty much the same as it was in the first game. It's mostly mazy dungeon exploration + turn-based combat + inventory management on lean funds. I didn't have to stat boost Hiro as much to get through bosses this time, but there's definitely an item in the epilogue that makes stat boosting totally spammable. Absolutely worth it. While Lucia is in your party, you have no control over her actions. It's weird (and honestly irritating in some circumstances), but comparable to the Sega CD variant of Luna from the first "Lunar" game. I don't think you'll find anything too surprising here. It's just mostly about stacking your dominoes in the right order.

The engine for this game is so similar to the first game that I literally encountered the same audio-loading hard lock bug. This time, it hit with a vengeance. Like, if I did not own a disc repair machine, there's a good chance I would not have been able to beat this game. The discs were just in that rough of shape. I guess I can't blame a game for failing if its physical media is melting into sludge. It did make for some frightening moments, though.

Seriously—don't get into physical media collecting if you're not going to put the work into keeping your collection functioning. A lot of the games I like are running on consoles that are between 20-40 years old. It's only a matter of time until a clock battery runs dry or an electrolytic capacitor blows or even a disc reader fails. You've got to be ready for when that happens. Otherwise, you're just making an elaborate garbage pile.

Media degradation isn't the only way this game is rough. A lot of the translation is very of-the-times. Which, for the late 90s/early 200s, means that there is a significant amount of crude language. Like, I gave "Final Fantasy VII"'s translation shit for Tifa's single R-bomb. Ronfar is handing them out like party favors. I'm assuming if you're reading this on Tumblr, you're also well aware of the international discussion of terms used to describe those of the Roma ethnicity. And, okay. I want to be a good international citizen. So, I try to be mindful about the wrong term in the same way one has to be careful about using Eskimo, Indian, or Oriental. And then, Jean literally shouts "Gypsy magic!", and I end up snorting pop up my nose. Like, goddamn. Times really change, don't they? And that's not even getting into one character being solely dragged for his weight! Shit, man.

Oh my God. Anybody remember that bit with the woman in Zulan having amnesia and forgetting she was a mom? That was pretty fucked, too. Like, imagine how horrific being in that position would be for all parties considered. Although, I guess that’s also the plot to "Overboard", in a way. 🙃 Jeepers. Times change, indeed.

This is a minor nitpick, but Hiro's run option was driving me nuts in game. I'm used to using it like you would in an old "Pokémon" game to blast through everything as fast as possible. Hiro's run is very limited. Like, maybe 4-6 tiles out limited. Also, don't expect to gain any invincibility frames from it. The damn thing is really near useless, especially when trying to evade enemies. But, I guess it's there, so…thanks?

If you are interested in playing this game, definitely play "Lunar: Silver Star Story" first. It does add a lot of meaning to the game, although you could probably follow along without that experience. The Playstation version of this game is a must, particularly for those in the NTSC region. I mean, those of us in the U.S. are used to companies dicking around with international releases. There's beefing up enemy stats and increasing item costs, and then there's consuming the experience points used to beef up spells so that you can save your game. Like, okay, Satan. As if 40 hours of grinding weren't enough already!

Whatever you decide to do, I hope you come away from this introspection with at least one important thing to remember. Keep your games clean. And I don't mean linguistically. Although, it can be thoughtful to do that, too.

There's no reason to shit up the world before Space Satan does it.

#post game evaluation #lunar 2: eternal blue complete #cw: slurs

11 notes · View notes

derekfoxwit · 4 years ago

Text

Doctor Dorpden’s Critical Tips of Prestige

Note: This post was made with satirical intentions in mind. I’m only emphasizing because I’ve had a couple of comments on previous joke posts I’ve did take it seriously. With that said, here we go.

Tip 1: For starters, remember that when looking at the work, if the Mystic Knee twitches fast enough to punch a hole in a wall, this suggests that the work should be near the lowest of the low. No further development of opinion is needed.

Tip 2: For an equal degree of sophistication, give the warm comfort of nostalgia at least 5 times more chances than the new thing that MAY seem actually poggers.

Tip 3: If you have the anecdote of encountering shitty fans, then use them as a scapegoat for the show they flaunt over being shitty. Clearly, they’re always making the show the way it is.

Tip 4: If you haven’t heard much about a newer film or show you’re yet to watch, there’s an 85% chance that film or show is actually not worth your time. The Father (2020) isn’t as widespread as Joker (2019) for a reason.

Tip 5: At this point, just go for the Asian Artist Dick. I’m actually in the mood to see merit in that because I want to look edgy against cute doodles. Stop attacking Uzaki-Chan, you cowards!

Tip 6: Avoid the electronic tunes. They’ll make you smell like a bum, for there’s no structural in a music album that’s nothing but wubs.

Tip 7: If you see a Tweet that looks dumb, use it as a means of generalizing all the fans of a work as sharing that same opinion.

Tip 8: If the cartoon I’m given doesn’t provide me with mature ideas such as slicing an Arbok in half or fake boobs, then the cartoon might as well be on the same level as Teletubbies.

Tip 9: You know the music is (c)rap when it brings up drugs, regardless of lyrical context.

Tip 10: Raw mood is the indicator of quality cartooning. If you’re quick to assume the worst in the newest HBO Max original cartoon, then you got thyself a stinker. Same thing if you were super bummed out when watching a new thing, regardless of anecdotal context.

Tip 11: When you’re not given continuous throwbacks, ensure you’re as reductive and over-generalizing about the works shown as possible.

Tip 12: If your hazy and imperfect as hell recollection of a children’s film, whether it’s Wall-E or Lilo & Stitch, would describe said film as “too sugary” or “key-waving schlock”, then that HAS to be the case. No meat on that bone whatsoever.

Tip 13: Simpler, more graphic style that isn’t as realistic as old-school Disney or Anime? You got yourself a lazy style with zero passion put into it.

UPA? Who’s THAT?!

Tip 14: Don’t trust anyone saying that western children’s cartoons had any form of artistic development after 2008 (with, like, TWO exceptions). If it did, why didn’t we go from stealing organs in a 2001 cartoon to showing opened stomachs in a 2021 cartoon?

Tip 15: Big booba is always important to the strong female character’s quality.

Tip 16: Only MY ships count, for they provide me with a feeling of intelligence.

Tip 17: “PG-13″ and “R” rating just simply mean you’re not caring for expressing themes in a sophisticated manner. It’s just THAT simple until I dictate otherwise.

Tip 18: In this age of smelly radicals, “Death of the Author” is more important than ever. Without it, this’ll imply that a classic like The Matrix was secretly toxic, due to what the Wachowskis have to say about it being an “allegory of trans people.”

Tip 19: Turn the fandoms you hate into your torture porn. Ask in Tweets to Retweet one sentence that’d “trigger” them. Go out of your way to paint all of them as blind consoomers. That’ll show them, and it’ll show how much more intelligent you are compared to those clowns.

Tip 20: Whatever the Mystic Knee dictates upon the first viewing of a work is what shall indicate the full structural extent of the film.

Tip 21: The mindset of a 2000s edgelord is one that actually understands the artistry of the medium of animation. Listen to that crazy but ingenious man.

Tip 22: Because sheer ambition makes me feel manly, the high pedestal you bestow upon a cartoon work should be based mostly on the mere mention or mere suggestion of serious topics. This means that pure comedy is smelly.

Tip 23: Is the new work tackling subjects that you’ve loved a childhood work of yours for covering? Just assume it’s super bare-bones in that case compared to the older case, for there’s nothing the older work can do to truly prove itself otherwise. Seriously, Letterboxd. Stop giving any 2010s cartoon anything above a 4/5

Tip 24: If the Mystic Knee is suggesting that the work is crummy, then consider any explanation off the top of your head for why the work in question is crummy.

Tip 25: Sexual and gender identity is inherently political, so don’t focus on them in the story. It’s no wonder why Full Metal Alchemist has caught on more than the She-Ra reboot.

Tip 26: Since I got bothered by a random butt monkey type character in a crummy cartoon, I’m now obligated to assume that having a butt monkey will only harm the writing integrity of the cartoon.

Seriously, Mr. Enter....what?!

Tip 27: We’re at a point where pure comedy for a kids’ cartoon is doing nothing but dumbing down the children. Like seriously...... I doubt Billy and Mandy would ever use farts as a punchline, unlike these newer kids comedies.

Tip 28: The difference between the innuendo in kids’ cartoons I grew up on and the ones Zootopia made is the sense of prestige they give me. Just take notes from the former instead.

Tip 29: Wanna make a work of artistic merit? Just take notes from the stuff I whore out to. It’s just THAT simple until I dictate otherwise.

Tip 30: Always remember this golden rule: If the newer work, or a work you’ve recently experienced the first time, was truly great, why isn’t it providing the exact emotions from your younger, more impressionable years?

Tip 31: If the Mystic Knee aims to break the bones of a character doing certain things (.i.e. having body count of thousands; lashing out to character; etc.), that means the character is bad and deserves no redemption.

Tip 32: If you want me to believe there’s any intrigue or depth in your antagonist, give them redemption, for I am in need of that sorta thing being spelled out. Looking at you, Syndrome. Should’ve taken notes from Tai Lung.

Tip 33: In a case where you’re going “X > Y” (.i.e. manga compared to western comics), ALWAYS CHERRY PICK! Use the recent controversies of the “Y” item while pretending that the “X” item has never had anything of the sort.

Tip 34: BEFORE you bring up those comments that shat on the original Teen Titans cartoon back when it was new, whether for making Starfire “more PC” or whatever.......the DIFFERENCE between them and me is that THEY were just bad faith fools that couldn’t see true majesty out of blind rage. I, however, am truly certain that calling any western TV cartoon from 2014-onward a work that transcends its generation suggests a destruction of the medium.

Tip 35: Based on fandom growth, it shows that any newer show isn’t being watched much by kids, but rather loser adults that act like children. Therefore, there’s more prestige in what I grew with.

Tip 36: The focus on children is bad at this point since the children of today have attention spans that flies would have.

Tip 37: A select few screenshots (or even one) of either a less elaborate attacking animation, less realistic game graphics, or a less on-model image in a cartoon indicates EVERYTHING about the work’s quality.

Tip 38: Consuming or writing media where characters go through constant suffering is little more than gaining pleasure out of it. YOU SICKOS!

Looking at you, Lily Orchard!

Tip 39: Whether it’s a sexual awakening story or just simply a romance, focus on a character being lesbian, trans, bi, etc., then it shouldn’t be in a kids’ work. It’s too spicy for them by default. Kids don’t want romance anyway.

Tip 40: The very idea of a western cartoon with no full-blown antagonist (i.e. Inside Out) is a destruction of animated artistry. Sorry, but it’s just THAT simple until I dictate otherwise.

Tip 41: Unless it’s my fluffy pillow, such as Disney’s Robin Hood, it should be obligated to assume the inserting of anthros is only there to pleasure the furries. Looking at YOU, Zootopia!

Tip 42: With how rough and rash The Beast was, it shows that he was more of an abusive lover. Therefore, I refuse to believe that Beauty and the Beast has any of the meticulous moral writing that most of Disney’s other 90s films has.

Tip 43: When you suggest one work should’ve “taken notes” from another work in order to do better, BE VAGUE! Those who agree will be shown to be geniuses.

Tip 44: Remember how morally grey Invader Zim was? That really goes to show how little the Western Animation scene has been trying since that show. Really should just be taking notes from that series (and of course anime).

Tip 45: Even if I have a radar that clearly indicates such, hiding the item I look for inside an enemy is always bad, for I refuse to believe it would be inside the enemy.

Goddamn it, Arin!

Tip 46: People struggle understanding your gender identity or pronouns? All there is to see in that is a giant cloud of egotism that reads “My problems” zapping another smaller cloud that reads “other people’s problems”. Seriously, kids are starving, so WHAT if you identity confused someone. Grow a spine!

Tip 47: Stop pretending that adaptations should colorize how a story or comic series should be defined. No way in FUCK can a cartoon or film incarnation become the definitive portrayal of my precious superhero idol.

Tip 48: Enough with your precious “limited animation” techniques, YOU WESTERN HACKS! All you’re doing is admitting to sheer laziness and lacking artistic integrity. Now if you excuse me, I’ll be watching more anime, since that gives me a sense of prestige.

Tip 49: If getting five times more detail than the 2D animated visuals have requires someone getting hurt, so be it. No pain, no gain after all.

Tip 50: Yes, I genuinely struggle to believe there’s this majestic level of layered material without having the most immediate yet still vague re-assurance practically yelling in my face. But that’s STILL the work’s fault, not mine.

Tip 51: Every Klasky-Csupo cartoon has more artistic integrity than any of them cartoons with gay lovers such as Kipo or the Netflix She-Ra show.

Tip 52: If Sergio Pablos’ Klaus is anything to go by, we have no excuse to utilize those smelly as fuck digital animation “styles” found on Stinky Universe, Suck-Ra or Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turds.

Tip 53: Stop projecting your orientation onto works of actual talent. Seriously, how does Elton John’s I’m Still Standing expel ANY rainbow flag energy?

Tip 54: Hip hop and electronica have been the destruction of music, especially the kind that’s actually organic and not farting on the buttons of a beeping or drumming gadget.

Tip 55: The audience for cartoons has become significantly less clear over the years. We should just go back to Saturday mornings of being sold toys or shit kids actually want.

Tip 56: PSAs for kids shouldn’t be about ‘woke’ content. They should be actual problems such as doing drugs; not playing with knifes / outlets / matches; or acceptance.

Tip 57: The instant you realize a detail in a childhood work that’s better understood as an adult, you’re forced to paint that work as the most transcendent thing in the world. It’s just THAT simple until I dictate otherwise.

Tip 58: Before you lash out on ALL rich people, remember this: #Not All Rich People.

Tip 59: There’s nothing to gain out of the (c)rap scene other than becoming a spiteful, gun-wielding thug that sniffs weed for breakfast.

Tip 60: Since the Mystic Knee told me to get anal about prom episodes in several gay cartoons, this shows that writing about one’s younger experiences just makes you look pathetic.

Tip 61: Another smelly thing about Zootopia is how it was painting a police chief as stern and exclusive. #Not All Chiefs

Tip 62: Me catching a glimpse of Grave of the Fireflies as a kid and turning out fine shows that you may as well show kids more adult works without worry. No amount of psychological questions being asked will suggest otherwise.

Tip 63: There’s a reason why the Mystic Knee keeps leaning more toward the 90s and early 2000s than most decades. That knee KNOWS where there’s a sense of true refinement.

Tip 64: The BIG difference between rock and electronica? Steward Copeland actually DRUMS. All that the likes of Burial, Boards of Canada, Depeche Mode and several others did was push drum buttons.

Tip 65: One exception to the golden nostalgia is when the work in question doesn’t stuff your face with fantastical, bombastic stories. At which point, there can only be rose-colored blinds covering Nickelodeon’s Doug. Nothing of merit or personal resonance to be found.

Tip 66: Remember that the sense of nuance in the work comes down to there being everything including the kitchen sink, whether it involves multiple geographic landscapes; giving us hundreds of characters; etc. Only through the extremes will I be able to tell there is nuance.

Tip 67: Once you see a joke that has an involvement with sexual or violent content, just ignore the full picture and just reduce it to having nothing to it but “sex, violence, gimme claps.”

PKRussel has entered the chat

Tip 68: With all the SJWs messing up the art of comedy, lament the times where you could be called a comic genius, NOT a monster, for shouting out the word “STAB,” calling a gay weird, painting Middle Easterns as inherently violent, etc.

Tip 69: Guitar twang will always win out over (c)rap beats. There’s a reason your grandma is more likely to listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd than Kendrick Lamar.

Tip 70: Once the Mystic Knee notices a lack of squealing at the video game with linearity, that shows there’s more artistry in going full-blown open world.

Tip 71: Related to Tips 66 and 68, ensure your comedy gets as much information and mileage out of each individual skit as possible. EMPHASIZE if you need to. Continuously spout out your quirky phrase of “STAB” if needed.

Tip 72: Based on the onslaught of TV shows with many seasons and episodes, animated or otherwise, it shows that there’s more worth going for that than simply having a miniseries or a 26-episode anime.

Tip 73: Building off of the previous tip, you’re better off squeezing and exhausting every little detail and notable characterization rather than keeping anything simple and possibly leaving a stone unturned, especially if there’s supposed to be a story.

Tip 74: Playing through the fan translation of Mother 3 made me realize how much some newer kids’ works just try too hard to get serious. Why even make the kids potentially think about the death of a family member?

Tip 75: The fear I had over Sid’s toys from the first Toy Story and similar anecdotal emotions are the be-all indicators of what kind of show or film is fitting for the children.

Tip 76: Seeing this British rapper chick have a song titled “Point and Kill” just further exemplifies the fears I’ve had about rappers being some of the most harmful folks ever.

Tip 77: The problem with attempting to make a more “relatable” She-Ra is that kids aren’t looking for relatability. They want the escapism of buff fighters or something similar. This is why slice-of-life is so smelly.

Tip 78: Based on seeing the rating of “PG-13″ or “R,” I can tell that the dark humor is little more than “hur dur sex and guns.” Given the “TV-Y7 FV” rating of Invader Zim, the writers should’ve taken notes from that instead just so I can sense actual prestige.

Tip 79: The original He-Man has more visual intrigue in its animation than any of those smelly glorified doodles found in the “styles" of the 2010s and early 2020s.

Tip 80: It’s always the fault of the game that my first guess (that I refuse to divert from) on how I have to go through an obstacle won’t work.

Tip 81: Zootopia discussing prejudice ruins the majestic escapism I got from my precious childhood films from 1991-2004. Them kids might as well be watching the news. Now to watch some Hunchback after I finish these tips.

Tip 82: There is no such thing as an unreasonable expectation, and there’s especially no wrong way to address the lack of met expectations! For example, if you expect some early 2010s cartoon on the Disney Channel to be a Kids X-Files, yet you get moments such as some girl getting high on stick dipping candy, you got the right to paint the worst out of that show for not being “Kids’ X-Files.”

Tip 83: Related to my example for Tip 82, if you get the slightest impression of something being childish, you know you got yourself a children’s work that does little than wave keys and has basically nothing substantial for them. In this situation, those malfunctioning robots found in Wall-E are the guilty party.

Tip 84: Without the extensive dialogue that I’m used to getting, how can one say for certain there was any amount of characterization in the title character of Wall-E?

Tip 85: Ever noticed yourself gradually being less likely to expect an upcoming work or view a work you’re just consuming as “the next best thing”? That’s ALWAYS the fault of smelly “artists” (hacks really) and their refusal to give a shit.

Tip 86: It’s obligatory for your lead to be explicitly heroic just so there is this immediate re-assurance that they’re a good one.

Tip 87: Without the comforting safety net of throwbacks, one cannot be for certain that there has been an actual evolution of a series or the art of animation and video games.

Tip 88: Don’t PSA kids on stuff they give zero fucks about. That means no gender identities or pronouns, race, etc.

Tip 89: Don’t listen to Mamoru Hosoda saying that anime women tend to be “depicted through a lens” of sexual desire. He’s just distracting from the superior prestige found in anime women.

Tip 90: If you’re desperate to let others know that your talking points are reasonable, just repeat them over and over with little expansion on said talking points.

Tip 91: 7 or more seasons of art is better than 26 episodes of art. EVERY TIME!

Tip 92: Always remember to continuously talk up the innuendo and mature subject matter of the childhood work as the most prestigious, transcendent thing of all time. With that in mind, there’s a high chance that your favorite childhood work will be better known than Perfect Blue (1997), and there’s likely a reason for that.

Tip 93: An art style that gives many characters relatively more realistic arm muscle details will always shine through more than any sort of art style done for “simplicity” (laziness, really).

Tip 94: Seeing a few (like, even VERY FEW) people show more enthusiasm for Steven Universe over Invader Zim really shows the lower bar that has been expected out of the western animation scene compared to anime.

Tip 95: Electronic music makes less conventional time signatures cheap as hell. REAL music like rock makes them the exact opposite.

Tip 96: If your Mystic Knee suggests that the 90s cartoon being viewed doesn’t showcase a vague sense of refinement or artistic integrity, then every related assumption of yours is right. EVERY TIME!

Tip 97: Doing everything and the kitchen sink for one series or movie shows a better sense of refinement and prestige than any form of simplicity. THIS includes character design as well.

Tip 98: The advent of that Star Wars: Visions anime really shows just how stinky western cartoons have become.

Tip 99: For those wondering, no, Europe isn’t being counted in my definition of “western animation”. Doing so is a complete disservice to prestige.

Tip 100: If even less than half of these tips aren’t being considered, you can kiss that prestige badge goodbye. After all, I SAID SO!

8 notes · View notes

timextoxhajima · 4 years ago

Text

Grounded: Level 8

Level 7 | Level 9

Member: Minho (Lee Know)

Genre: idol minho x idol trainee reader

Taglist: @jaehyvnsvalentine @licorice526 @lolwhatameme @felixn-recs @yunapixie @rindomo @sleeping-hero-of-procastination

A/N: This chapter includes fake character idol profiles so please don’t attack me that your face isn’t there. No, I am not glorifying the fact that only korean girls are pretty, but this is in fact the most culturally accurate account of a fake profile I can create given the context.

WI5HES (위셔스) is a South Korean girl group under HYBE (previously known as BigHit Ent.). The group currently consists of Ju Rin, l/n, Ga Hyun, So Eun and Min Jung. WI5HES debuted on March 15, 2021 under HYBE. They are HYBE’s first girl group since 2014.

Stage Name: Ju Rin

Birthname: Wang Ju Rin

Position: Leader, Lead Vocalist, Sub-Rapper

Birthday: May 10, 2000

Zodiac Sign: Taurus

Height: 167cm (5′5)

Weight: 48kg (106 lbs)

Blood Type: A+

Stage Name: l/n y/n

Birthname: y/n

Position: Main Dancer, Lead Rapper, Sub-Vocalist

Birthday: June 15, 2000

Zodiac Sign: Gemini

Height: 164cm (5′4)

Weight: 49kg (108 lbs)

Blood Type: O

Stage Name: Ga Hyun

Birthname: Choi Ga Hyun

Position: Lead Vocalist, Lead Rapper, Lead Dancer, Visual

Birthday: October 25, 2001

Zodiac Sign: Scorpio

Height: 170cm (5′6)

Weight: 51kg (112 lbs)

Blood Type: O

Stage Name: So Eun

Birthname: Kang So Eun

Position: Main Rapper, Lead Dancer, Sub-Vocalist, Center

Birthday: November 5, 2001

Zodiac Sign: Scorpio

Height: 172cm (5′6)

Weight: 50kg (110 lbs)

Blood Type: B

Stage name: Min Jung

Birthname: Gwang Min Jung

Position: Main Vocalist, Lead Rapper, maknae

Birthday: August 15, 2003

Zodiac Sign: Leo

Height: 163cm (5′3)

Weight: 46kg (101 lbs)

Blood Type: AB

“Five is better than three, annyeonghaseyo, WI5HES-ibnida!” The echo of your introduction rings through the dressing room, backstage of the MCountdown stage. It draws goosebumps from your arms and your back. Min Jung grits her teeth, attempting to contain her anxiety when she sees herself on stage through the recording for the first time.

So Eun’s sobbing into Ju Rin’s shoulder, and Ga Hyun has her phone out, randomly snapping photos of So Eun’s slightly smudged make-up.

“Yah, haven’t you taken enough?” Ju Rin wraps the rim of Ga Hyun’s phone with her palm, covering the camera, unable to contain her grin.

“Aw, come on!” Ga Hyun pouts, retracting her phone and wiping the lens with her sleeve. “It’s not everyday we get to debut.”

Knock Knock

“Who is it?” Ju Rin cranes her neck behind her, nodding for Min Jung to get the door. Already halfway down a bow, Min Jung opens the door to reveal a strange mixture of Hyunjin, I.N, Soobin, Yeonjun and Beomgyu.

“Oh, annyeonghaseyo,” Min Jung’s reflexes are to greet Hyunjin and I.N first.

“Annyeonghaseyo,” Hyunjin and I.N bow to the lot of you, and suddenly everybody’s bowing. “Congratulations on your debut!”

Ju Rin releases So Eun to receive the adorable box of cupcakes from Hyunjin and I.N.

“Chan-hyung and the others send their regards. They couldn’t be here today for a separate schedule.”

“Oh, we’re not the ones you should be reporting this to,” Ga Hyun snickers, pulling away from what looks like a handshake routine with Beomgyu. Eyes turn to you, forcing the blush on your cheeks to be of natural effect and not the make-up.

After the scandal with Yeonjun, things died down relatively quickly. More pictures of you training with the other members were released, diluting the idea that you and Yeonjun were dating. Furthermore, there was no other evidence of you and Yeonjun going out on secret dates that the company didn’t know about.

But of course, WI5HES and TXT know about Minho’s confession, and needless to say, they had to be reeled back under control.

“My God, it’s like you want Lee Know hyung to pass out from jealousy,” Hyunjin’s eyes narrow with mischief, holding out his phone screen to you.

“What? Why would he be jealous? There’s not a single person on that page that’s a threat to him,” Scrolling through the pictures absent-mindedly, you scorn at his baseless remark.

“He’ll be jealous solely from the fact that you look good in your photos,” Jeongin sucks on the upper row of his teeth.

“I know,” A shy smile appears on your lips. “We’ve had this conversation before.”

“Eugh,” Hyunjin shudders, shoulders reaching his ears as he groans in disgust. “Glad I wasn’t around for that conversation.”

“Anyway, thank you all for coming by our Debut Stage today, but we gotta head back to BigHit to handle some new scheduling,” Ju Rin’s waving her hands, telling the girls to pack up and for TXT to help.

Walking past Sunmi, Chungha and other idols while you make your way out of the building felt so strange and alien, you almost couldn’t believe you were at the end of your first promotion. You were an idol now, and there was no going back. Everything you did, every move you made - would be under public scruntiny now, regardless of the reason, whether you liked it or not.

“Thank you!” The bodyguard nods at you as he shuts the door. Sat in the middle with Ju Rin to your right, and the three younger in the back, you can smell the odd mixture of perfume and that strange scent of new costumes and clothes. BigHit - no, HYBE - had invested so much into your costumes though they looked nothing like the price they cost.

Then again, half of you were wearing YSL pullovers and Dior jeans.

“You okay?”

“Hmm?” Turning your head as it leans against the headrest, your eyes meet Ju Rin’s. “Yeah, you? I’m surprised you haven’t cried yet.”

Ju Rin laughs under her breath, glancing out the window as the car starts. “Oh, believe me, I’ve cried. I just don’t do it infront of you guys.”

“Aw,” The sides of your lips curl downwards. There’s a pinch in your heart you can’t take, only because Ju Rin has to keep up such a strong facade for you and for the rest of her members. She’s responsible, and time and time again she reminds you why she was chosen to be leader. “You know you can cry infront of us. You don’t have to act or put up a strong front.”

“I know, but I wouldn’t be able to see you guys crying tears of... happiness if my vision is blurred out by my own, right?”

You can’t contain the scoff that runs out your throat, eyes darting to look at the city outside, now coated with the drizzle that’s blurring the city sights.

“Fucking full of shit,” You chuckle under your breath, unable to hide the smile that’s stretching across your face.

Ju Rin snickers and purses her lips, reaching her left hand out to you. Her hand is warm and soft (from all the moisturizer products she’s using - HYBE’s trying to get her some make-up CF already), but the smile on her face is more home than anything will ever be.

Time to count the number of days before the world is made your home. Tours, meeting new people, inspiring others with your love for performance and dance, the same way you were inspired into chasing a dream that you didn’t even think you had a chance of achieving. Some might say it’s unfair, how the chance fell unto your feet all so easily, like it had been planned. It’s unfair that of all the crew members to be scouted, you were the only one.

But that wasn’t your dream. At that point of time in your life, all you wanted was to fulfil your need to be perfect in dancing; to be by Minho’s side. So, in some way, fate had pulled you away from him instead.

He didn’t tell anybody he auditioned for Cube. He didn’t tell anybody he’d auditioned for JYP before that either, only for JYP to call him back to be part of that cursed show.

And before you knew it, you had lost the one thing you didn’t want to lose: Minho. It was heartbreaking, watching him live his life of a dream that he’d been chasing without you knowing in the first place. You couldn’t decide if you were angry with him for leaving you out of his happiness or if you had simply convinced yourself he had forgotten about you.

But you caught yourself tripping over your own feelings of hurt and love when you realise you started searching for some bit of Minho in someone else, and you were lucky it was Yeonjun. Yeonjun who had a pure heart and nothing but kindness.

The things that could’ve happened had you searched for a part of Minho in someone else who might’ve taken you for granted.

Minho made up for that heartbreak though, when Hyunjin had told him you were alone with Yeonjun, walking to some desolate part of the building but only spotted Yeonjun coming back alone. Minho, who at that point of time already known you a good three (or was it four?) years, knew you well enough to know that you were somewhere sobbing your eyes out.

His scent when he had his arms around you was stuck in your nostrils for days and weeks because that was just how long he had spent being away from you. You didn’t even know how much you missed his scent until it was in your system again.

The risk you both had chosen to take that fateful day when the scandal of you and Yeonjun was released was of astounding magnitude.

Who the Hell confesses their love to another celebrity, so close to their own debut date?

“You,” Minho trills, almost crumpling the Uno cards on the table. The tears in the corners of your eyes are threatening to dribble over your lids, but then Changbin is sitting behind you on the sofa, trying his best to hide his laughter through his gritted teeth. “We’ll see if the two of you can still laugh after this.”

Minho picks up twelve cards with a disproportionate amount of strength, the cards nearly being folded under his fingers.

“Yah- hyung!” Changbin yells and points at the cards, glaring at the elder.

“What? You complain about me damaging the cards as if you can’t afford a new deck yourself.”

“This is our fifth deck!” Changbin nearly screeches, and the exchange forces you to fall to your back at Changbin’s feet, your arm clutching your tummy from how much it hurt from your laughter.

“Oh my God!” The words are struggling to leave your voice box, between silent giggles. “This- this is your- oh, my God- this is your fifth deck?”

“We’ll need a sixth deck soon! Can you tell your man to be a little less aggressive?!” Changbin loses his patience and gets up, hands sweeping the cards off the table and plucking Minho’s set out from his hands.

“Yah!”

“‘Yah’,” Changbin’s distorted imitation of Minho calls for the elder to surge to his feet, suddenly towering over Changbin who cowers on the couch behind you. “Ah- Ah- OkAy, take your stupid cards back-”

“I’ll get you a new deck if I destroy this one, but first I gotta destroy you.”

The finger in your face goes unnoticed when you laugh again, stomach hurting from the aggressive giggling.

“My God, she’s lost it!” Minho sings sarcastically, holding his hands to his head with the cards still in his palm. “No, quick, Earth to y/n, come back so I can win!”

“Eugh,” Changbin groans and squints his eyes. Minho never says these kind of things, so when he does, it’s weird, and unlike of him to do so, making it ultra-

“CriNGe!!!!!” Hyunjin yells at the top of his voice as he exits his room and heads for the kitchen. “Just get a room already!”

“HYUNJIN!” Chan’s voice booms from elsewhere in the apartment.

#lee know #skz lee know #lee know scenarios #lee know fanfic #stray kids #skz #stray kids lee know

28 notes · View notes

untitledtallgeesepodcast · 5 years ago

Text

[TRANSCRIPT] Episode 0: The Anime They Once Saw (Or Didn’t See)

Kat 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Untitled Tallgeese Podcast, a podcast where four of us will watch Gundam Wing and then tell you all about Gundam Wing. My name is Kat, I write about comics on the internet, and I will be your episode moderator for today.

Mallory 0:17

And I'm Mallory, and I also write about comics.

Cathy 0:20

I'm Cathy, I don't write about comics. I am actually a lawyer, which sucks.

All 0:26

[laughter]

Caitlin 0:28

I am Caitlin. I'm a PhD researcher in Tokyo right now working on Japanese film. Yeah.

Kat 0:33

Extremely legit.

Caitlin 0:35

Are we?

Cathy 0:36

and we're all here to talk about the Gundam Wing.

Kat 0:38

[crosstalk] I mean we might be.

Kat 0:41

We are here to talk about Gundam Wing, the maybe not critically acclaimed, but fandom, okay, audience favorite anime that was released in 1995 in Japan and then made its way to the US in March 2000 on Toonami. So, we're going to talk about our fandom history and our history with the show Gundam Wing and I guess I will kick that off. So I-- I grew up watching anime because my dad is a huge nerd. So we were obviously watching Toonami. And the promos blew my mind. My friends and I all got really into it in middle school. Then we discovered fanfiction and we started with Heero/Relena fan fiction. [Caitlin: Ugh.] And then then we realized people could be gay.

Caitlin 1:29

Uugh, thank god.

Kat 1:30

That opened up like, I know it was like the clouds parted. rainbows fell from the sky. We were like, Oh, wow.

Mallory 1:39

[singing] "A whole new world"

Kat 1:40

[laughter] And then I don't know. I wrote a lot of fanfiction posted it on FF dotnet, got into fandom and then stayed in fandom. So, Mallory?

Mallory 1:53

I didn't have cable growing up. So whatever anime exposure I got was like, whatever was on Saturday morning cartoons. So Digimon was my first fandom and I was really into that.

Kat 2:08

Hell yeah

Mallory 2:09

And that sort of like bled into Gundam Wing somehow, I don't really remember how. But I found my way to Gundam Wing, read a lot of fanfic, hadn't ever really watched the show. And then in high school, my friend had some like random episodes from the first season question mark. I have no idea. So I watched those, and really enjoyed that? But I have no idea what their context was, so I'm coming at this pretty, pretty new.

Cathy 2:44

So you have never watched it from beginning to end?

Mallory 2:47

No.

Cathy 2:47

Got it. This will be fun.

Mallory 2:50

I'm expecting to be really disapproving of all the adults in the room. I find that like, now that I'm watching anime about kids, I'm really protective of these kids like, "Hey, this is really unethical!"

Cathy 3:02

So I'm like Kat, I started watching anime when I was I think around Middle School. I had a friend who got me into Sailor Moon, then I think it was Dragon Ball that was on Toonami at the time? I can't really remember the chronology.

Kat 3:16

Yeah.

Cathy 3:17

But then they did the promos for Gundam Wing, so then I started watching that on Toonami. And it was my first mecha series. And my first Gundam series, I think it's a lot of people's first Gundam series in the United States.

Cathy 3:31

I have attempted to do similar projects to this multiple times where I go back and I rewatch, and I haven't really had the opportunity to actually finish those rewatches. But my memory of it is still kind of stuck of when I was in middle school slash high school. I did get into fandom, so I expect to remember a lot of inaccuracies about what happened. [laughter] Because a lot of what my facts have with this series are have now mutated and changed. But I was a huge Gundam Wing fan, I think it still remains my favorite of the Gundam series just because I have so many memories of it? But I really excited to talk to Mallory, about what you feel and your experiences because it's been so long since I've talked to somebody who actually has never seen the series and doesn't know the story. So I'm super excited about this.

Caitlin 4:24

Yeah!

Cathy 4:25

All right, Cait, tell us about your family history.

Caitlin 4:27

Yeah, so similar to all of us, I guess, I watched anime growing up. I got into Sailor Moon sort of through an accident of just happening to see a very specific episode on Toonami in like 1999, 1998 maybe. So after that, I got really into anime and really into the internet. I think I was very depressed as a child. [laughter] So I spend a lot of time online. I believe that like my my first memories of Gundam Wing are when it was on Toonami: Sailor Moon was on first and then Dragon Ball Dragon Ball Z, and then Gundam Wing. And then they also were showing like the quote unquote unedited versions late

Cathy 5:09

Yes!

Kat 5:09

Yes, the midnight run

Cathy 5:11

The midnight run Right.

Cathy 5:12

Yeah. So very specific memories of like, I think I was mainly attracted to the, like, team format of Gundam if that makes sense? [Cathy: Yeah yeah yeah!] where it was used to sailor Sailor Moon where you have a team of color coded characters. And I'd, at a younger age been really into Power Rangers, where you had a team of color coded characters. So the marketing of Gundam Wing really appealed. You know, cuz I was just a kid watching on TV, I never really, I don't know if I watched the whole thing as a kid, but I got really into the fandom. And by 2000, 2001, I already knew about gay stuff online.

Kat 5:48

Wow. Look at you early bloomer.

Caitlin 5:50

Yeah. So So I got really into the various Gundam Wing pairings, I think it was mainly, I was mainly a 3x4, I think as a child. I went through some, 1x2, and then 2x5 phases. [laughter]

Caitlin 6:09

I still am a big advocate for 2x5, I think it's underrated.

Kat 6:12

I'm a big 2x5.

Cathy 6:13

2x5 is a good pairing, it definitely is.

Kat 6:16

Yeah.

Cathy 6:16

It's a better pairing as an adult.

Kat 6:17

So okay, I think that's actually a pretty good bounce off. So these are the things we remember about Gundam Wing. It was marketed, like, I remember the Toonami marketing 'cause I was really hype for this show. They had like these really extreme commercials.

Caitlin 6:34

Yeah.

Kat 6:35

Um, and I thought the voice acting was good. I don't know, maybe we'll revisit that during this watch, to see if it still is,

Caitlin 6:43

[crosstalk] Was it dubbed?,

Cathy 6:44

[crosstalk] It was dubbed, yes.

Kat 6:44

But I was ready for it. It was dubbed.

Caitlin 6:46

It was dubbed. One thing with the with the Japanese voice acting though, is that it's every single famous voice actor from the 90s. And so you can, you can use Gundam Wing is like a six degrees of every single voice actor from the 1990s.

Caitlin 6:59

Oh, that's cool.

Mallory 7:00

I mean, there are a lot of big American or like, dub dub names on the dub side, too.

Cathy 7:06

One of the things that I remember very strongly about Toonami is that they had what I think we would now call anime music videos, AMVs.

Kat 7:16

Yeah

Cathy 7:17

But they would play

Caitlin 7:18

Yeah,

Cathy 7:18

These montage trailers, where they'd stich together all their different series. And as they accumulated more anime series, these became really, I think, cinematic and gripping tales, where they would kind of try to tell a story to be about, like bravery or honor or like,

Kat 7:36

It's like, plugged directly into my little 11 year old brain like, Whoa,

Cathy 7:40

Yes. And one of them was, I remember was called, like, "technological development" or something like that, that featured a lot of the Gundam Wing clips.

Kat 7:47

Oh, yeah, cuz you only download them from like, KaZaa, or whatever horrible thing I was putting into my computer.

Caitlin 7:52

Yeah. We gotta see if we can find those. [crosstalk] They must be online somewhere.

Cathy 7:56

They are online. And I think they actually came out with like, I think somebody had either like hand by hand remastered them.

Kat 8:03

[crosstalk] Oh sick.

Cathy 8:02

Or they created a remastered version of it. They're wonderful. But that's I think one of the things about Toonami that I remember really strongly was Gundam Wing kind of is one of their, like epitome of like, Cool Anime that I feel like Toonami did and what it did was like they stiched together all these different things Outlaw Star and Tenchi Muyo and all these other stories to create a story about teenage growth, which is kind of strange and also weirdly fitting at the end of the day about like where Gundam is in the whole universe.

Kat 8:07

I think that's one of the reasons it blew up so much here because the marketing was really intense. Like Toonami, like it sort of right at the beginning, like people were into Sailor Moon, Dragonball Z was getting big. And like the manga boom was sort of happening in bookstores. So contextually, I think, Cartoon Network knew what the hell they were doing. They were like, "We can market the hell out of this."

Caitlin 8:55

And also objectively speaking, Gundam Wing was one of their cooler series. Like, Sailor Moon is cool. Tenchi Muyo is not cool.

All 9:04

[laughter]

Kat 9:06

Yeah.

Caitlin 9:07

Even even if you love it, it's not really cool. Dragon Ball. Love it. I don't know if it's really cool. Gundam Wing had like a very strong -

Kat 9:14

[crosstalk] like the chad of animes

Caitlin 9:16

- adult aesthetic to it, even though it was like, relatively, well, relatively appropriate for like 12 year olds.

Kat 9:23

And they swore during the midnight show.

Caitlin 9:25

Oh yeah,

Kat 9:26

They swore and there was blood.

Caitlin 9:27

So it was very cool. And so I felt very adult watching it even though I didn't really understand what was going on because it's all this fake politics crap.

Kat 9:35

Yeah, I was gonna say I did do a rewatch in like, like, right after college, so it was probably around 2010 ish, maybe? And I don't think we finished the series, but it was like, wow, I used to think this was very deep. [laughter] And I thought all the people in it who are the adults like Mallory, you were mentioning earlier, like they're actually like 17 and 19

Cathy 10:01

Yes!

Kat 10:01

in this show. So watching it at the age of 21, I was like, "Ooh no, don't give these people anything."

Cathy 10:09

I was actually thinking about that. Because when you said Mallory, "oh, well, I become very protective of the children. I disapprove the adults," in my head of thinking "what adults?" [crosstalk, Caitlin: yeah what adults?] because actually, in Gundam Wing, there's a funny thing where people are either 15, 25 or like 70. And there's no in between and nobody really makes adult decisions. So it, That was one thing that really shocked me because as I go back to revisit it, I think, "Oh my god, I'm actually older than almost everybody in this series."

Caitlin 10:39

How old, how old is Treize supposed to be?

Cathy 10:41

He's like 23, or 24.

Kat 10:42

He's 19.

Cathy 10:43

No, Zechs is 19.

Kat 10:44

Oh, Zechs is 19. Right.

Cathy 10:47

I just the idea of giving people who, you know, would have either been in college or just graduate college in my worldview, huge robots.

Kat 10:58

I think the ages of all the characters gets obscured by the anime art style, you know?

Cathy 11:03

Yeah.

Kat 11:03

In a lot of anime fandoms.

Mallory 11:04

And when you're watching this, when you're a kid, you want to see yourself as the protagonist. So it makes sense that, you know, a 17 year old seems like old and cool, and I want to be that person. And then when you're 30, you're like, the 17 year old should not be at war.

Kat 11:23

Relevant is that we definitely watched Evangelion. That was our last series.

Caitlin 11:29

I don't know, I think, I think Heero Yuy is doing fine in war. I'm gonna, I'm gonna be honest, as a 30 year old, I think these kids are much better at war than I would be.

Cathy 11:39

Well, so that's what I find kind of interesting, is that I think this series actually... I don't, I know this wasn't the point but when I rewatched it recently, or just like the first couple of episodes, it seemed, it made a lot of sense, because they were like 15 or 24. Like the series, actually stitches together...

Caitlin 11:58

Yeah.

Cathy 11:58

...really well, because of how young they are, and kind of like the purity of feeling that they have, which I think is

Kat 12:05

Yeah, it is, like

Cathy 12:06

only maybe

Kat 12:07

like that [indistinguishable?]

Cathy 12:07

which I think is like only really, truly possible because I have to think of them as like 15 or 21 or 19 year olds. that is not at all when I took away when I was watching in high school. Right?

Mallory 12:21

Well, I mean, right.

Caitlin 12:22

Part of the ideology of Gundam in general is like trying to restore a form of hope, and youth to, like, young people growing up in Japan, who are the target audience for this, and this idea that, like, you still have the power to change the world, you still have the power to bring about peace in a way that you want, even though you're being manipulated and oppressed by all these crazy adults who make you pilot giant robots. So I think there's a significant, like part of the series is the fact that they are kids who have been recruited into child warfare, and now have to find some way out of that. And like my memory of the series is that even though most of, most of the decisions made are very bad, the kids in general are not making terrible decisions. They're making pretty good decisions.

Kat 13:12

Yeah, the pilots themselves...

Mallory 13:14

[crosstalk] Yeah

Kat 13:14

...are like doing the best they can be doing in that circumstance.

Cathy 13:17

[crosstalk] Exactly, exactly

Kat 13:19

But I think it's sort of interesting, 'cause it's like, to me Gundam Wing is definitely like a fandom era, because I think a lot of stuff exemplifies like...there's like a lot of tropes cycling through it. But also like, the series itself, is so perfectly...like, I think of it as a series that are so perfectly set up for fandom because there's a lot of like, here's my one episode mission, and we have to be at a safe house, I guess. And it's just like, a long interminable war. So there's like, a big, a lot of world building. Yeah, that creates all these spaces that sort of separate from all the political machinations of the series.

Caitlin 13:58

And that's also I think, a lot of what it was meant to be when it was created within the Gundam franchise like it was it was designed to have sort of a BL appeal to girls writing for comic market and that sort of thing. So it had like the setup of five hot guys who you could combine in various forms. And then also like Gundam itself, in general, it's designed to be and a sort of open universe that you can step into at various points, which also facilitates fandom engagement

Mallory 14:28

[crosstalk] literal fandom bait.

Caitlin 14:29

usually in the form, yeah, usually in the form of model collecting, which is like one of the main Gundam forms of fandom which we probably won't talk about too much on the show. But you, you kind of

Kat 14:41

Uh I've definitely built some Gundam models.

Caitlin 14:43

Yeah. Well, you will be the expert on that because I've never touched a Gundam model in my life. But that is like the big thing where you can you can get the model you can construct it, you can learn a little bit more about the, like, the technology and the different like details of the models and stuff like that. And it just gives you like a slight, like Little bit more of these like tiny narratives and that sort of what the fans are consuming rather than an overall plot that makes sense, which is not what Gundam has really.

Kat 15:11

So Gundam [Wing] has like the cool robots but also these hot boys in them.

Caitlin 15:15

That's what I want.

Mallory 15:16

I mean Well, that's exactly what I want to show right now. So it sounds perfect?

Kat 15:21

Honestly, yeah.

Mallory 15:23

I think Evangelion, sort of, because, Kat, you and I just finished -- or are almost finished with -- Neon Genesis Evangelion [Kat, crosstalk: we haven't done all the movies yet] which was also it was my first time [Cathy, crosstalk: Congratulations, laugh] watching the whole series...wow, grim

Kat 15:40

I also only consumed

Mallory 15:42

[crosstalk] grim

Kat 15:42

[crosstalk] I consumed it like piecemeal too

Mallory 15:44

And depressing

Kat 15:45

It was great.

Mallory 15:46

Very good but um grim.

Kat 15:50

Yeah it's pretty grim.

Cathy 15:52

Yeah, it's interesting to me because I feel like Evangelion doesn't make a lot of sense as a cultural product unless you've consumed a series like Gundam or its ancestors before watching it and yet Evangelion is a lot of people's introduction to giant robot series. So I always find that kind of interesting...

Caitlin 16:13

[crosstalk] It's very weird.

Cathy 16:14

because it, it is subversive, and I think it's subversive even if you don't know the tropes of the giant robot series, of which Gundam is perhaps a prime example. Gundam Wing...

Kat 16:27

So I was gonna ask that and like, would you say, since Evangelion is definitely a like the subversion of this genre, would you say Gundam Wing is like the type of series that it is subverting? Or do you think it's in a different place?

Caitlin 16:41

Gundam Wing and Evangelion came out the same year? Gundam Wing is in some ways a, it's already like a parody form of the original iteration of Gundam.

Kat 16:55

Okay, so it's--is it like, um, like the pure essence of teens-robots.

Caitlin 17:02

It's, it's more like, I feel like by the time of Gundam Wing, the tropes of the original Gundam series are so well set that a lot of things in Gundam Wing to, like the fans who watched the original Gundam or like later Gundams, seemed like a rehash but it was designed to bring in new fans. So something like Zechs Merquis is very clearly like a Char Aznable character. It's just sort of a reiteration of that.

Kat 17:29

So is it like a Star Wars, like a Star Wars sequel?

Caitlin 17:33

Like how the Force Awakens is kind of a rehash of yeah, of A New Hope. And then, but it still brings in a lot of fans and has appealing characters and good aesthetics

Kat 17:43

Right, yeah, I guess I think of them, the two shows, as sort of like, splitting the take on... like, what would you say is like the ur-mecha show?

Cathy 17:52

The original Gundam

Caitlin 17:54

Original Gundam?

Cathy 17:54

Yeah, Mobile Suit Gundam.

Caitlin 17:56

I mean, they're, they're older iterations, there's other robot shows. But I feel like when people think of mecha, the first thing they think of is Mobile Suit Gundam.

Cathy 18:06

So the way like I now think of Gundam Wing after the fact of experiences I have now is that like Gundam Wing is actually a perfect like K-Pop boy band way that they built it and so if you can kind of think of it like that, like it's, you need enough of the tropes and symbols, so that everybody watches it and immediately knows it's a Gundam series.

Cathy 18:30

Like the colors of Wing Gundam are so obviously

Kat 18:34

Yeah.

Cathy 18:34

a Gundam Mecca and you need that you can't get away from it. And same thing with like Zech's having a mask it the reason I think of it as being in in the Kpop industry is like there's a derivative sense. And that's animated by both like Merchandising, and advertising and what audiences want but at the same time, it's like this incredibly pure understanding of what makes us like things? And like when you get that when you really get it, like, it doesn't matter how like, quote, unquote manipulative or exploitative it can seem like you love it. And that's enough, right to make it like a thing that we all want to keep coming back to.

Mallory 19:12

And there's basically like, an archetype right? In all of the different characters like you have the more

Kat 19:18

Yeah, you have the serious one.

Mallory 19:20

That's what I was thinking.

Kat 19:21

Like, the goofy one.

Mallory 19:23

Yeah, the goofy one, the sort of mess

Kat 19:25

the ugly one,

Mallory 19:26

like really cute one.

Kat 19:29

Yeah, that's why I was thinking American boy bands cuz they all have to have like a type of heartthrob. Yeah, I'm a bad boy. I love death.

Caitlin 19:38

One of them's, one of them's a rapper.

Kat 19:40

Okay, so we talked a little bit about how we got into it. We talked a little bit about fandoms. And we touched on pairings, do we want to go into pairings at all? Or like our fave characters, or who we think our fave characters will be Before this rewatch?

Cathy 19:54

You know before we do that--Mallory, can you try to tell us what you think this series is about? I'm actually really curious, like before you do a complete viewing, like what? what is what is your understanding of what happens in Gundam Wing?

Mallory 20:08

Um, there's a long interminable war. These boys are recruited by some shadowy government whatever. And they're piloting these mecha. Uugh, I just remember Duo being really annoying.

Caitlin 20:28

[loud gasp] [laughter] [crosstalk] Oh my god.

Mallory 20:29

I mean, not annoying, like, being sort of...

Kat 20:32

Wow.

Mallory 20:33

...the one the pushy one like, he's the challenging one to Heero's "I'm serious and dour." Literally, I have the most broad strokes impressions of what this show is. I just know it looked really fucking cool every time I saw it in, like, a commercial and couldn't watch it.

Cathy 20:55

Fascinating.

Caitlin 20:57

Honestly, even having seen Gundam Wing, I'm not sure I could explain it much better. I don't remember who recruited them.

Mallory 21:03

Okay. Okay, that does make me feel better. Because I was like, Oh, I don't? Do I actually know what the show is? What am I getting myself into?

Caitlin 21:14

There's there's a lot of weird politics.

Mallory 21:17

Well, I'm really excited for that. And I don't mean that sarcastically. Like, I'm really excited to, to see what this world is like, because I remember, like images or impressions. But everything is like out of context. So it'll be cool to see what that context is. Like deja vu? Oh, I remember that. I've seen that in AMV.

Kat 21:48

I remember this from fics that just rewrite scenes from this show.

Mallory 21:55

Yeah, like, what do I know? What do I know of Gundam that is from fanfic only, or is actual canon? I'm curious to figure out.

Kat 22:10

I think everyone's a lot less obnoxious in canon.

Caitlin 22:14

That's true.

Mallory 22:15

Okay, okay.

Caitlin 22:16

This was a this was a really good fandom for the the fandom phenomenon of, you take a character's most, like, annoying trait, and you emphasize it like times 10 in your fanfic.

Cathy 22:28

Yes.

Kat 22:28

Yeah

Caitlin 22:28

Just so everybody knows you know what that character is like.

Kat 22:31

Heero's gonna threaten to kill everybody all the time, constantly.

Caitlin 22:34

"Omae o korosu."

Cathy 22:36

[laughing crosstalk] And so, it's funny that you guys mentioned safe houses, because actually, there are very few safe houses in the original series. In fact, I think there's like maybe one or two scenes ever, where they are all in a safe house provided by one of their allies. And it's a really fascinating trope, because it like pervades the fanfic? But I remember, that I remember was like a big deal, like, I went back and I was like, actually, these people spend very little downtime with each other in the actual series and I find that fascinating.

Kat 23:12

Right? So you have to fill it all in.

Mallory 23:13

Oh, wait, what?

Caitlin 23:14

They actually barely know each other.

Cathy 23:16

Yeah, they truly barely know each other. [crosstalk]

Mallory 23:18

Wait. Oh no, I thought, I thought this was going to be like..

Kat 23:23

[crosstalk] They actually never interact.

Mallory 23:24

we're going to get together and become like a team

Caitlin 23:26

No, no.

Cathy 23:26

Absolutely not,

Caitlin 23:27

They don't fight together; It's 50 episodes of them not interacting.

Cathy 23:31

They, they literally have like, they like, there's probably one or two scenes in which all five of them are on the same battlefield at the same time. And almost every single one of those scenes involves them fighting with each other because like,

Kat 23:44

[crosstalk]Oh, yeah, they fight each other alone.

Cathy 23:45

What's going on? And this was the thing that I'm sure we'll come back to when I came back to this is when I was rewatching. It in college, I realized that of the two people who spend the most time with each other, it's like Trowa and Heero. Because, yes, it is what arc where they actually go on a road trip, which like,

Kat 24:03

it's great. I wrote a thing

Cathy 24:04

like wiped it from my memory when I was thinking about the series, but it really drives home. You know, again, to your point like what of this series do I did I remember that was just from fanfic, and was just what like the fanfic I read very specifically. And so that was one of the things is like, when you come back as an adult, I was like, all of this stuff is so much more interesting to me because like, I actually, like, I don't get me wrong, I still have shipping opinions. But like, I'm older and I have I I'm famous for this. And Kat knows this. I like don't have OTPs. And I'm like not very good about actually being very loyal to pairings. And so as an adult coming back to this, I was like, Oh, this is actually really interesting because the permutations that fandom came up with also came from, like, non-canon material, because there's a lot of non-canon material, like promotional images that bear no resemblance whatsoever to canon.

Kat 24:54

Okay, I would, I would call those extra canonical, right?

Caitlin 24:58

No, they're, they're extra canonical, they count in some form.

Kat 25:02

Right? 'Cause they're official.

Cathy 25:04

I guess so. I mean, sure, we'll talk about that as time comes but like.

Caitlin 25:08

Listen, a canon is not just the story. It's the entire media mix around it. It's those, it's those things that you can collect. It's the extra manga. It's Frozen Teardrop,

Cathy 25:18

Like, Gundam Wing actually, I think is one of the few franchises I know where like "pair the spares" was a real merchandising tactic.

Kat 25:26

Yes, it was.

Cathy 25:27

And so, so everybody had somebody... gay, I mean, like, not like,

Kat 25:34

Wufei had two!

Cathy 25:35

They had a gay and a straight interest that they were paired up with. And so, um, so it's like, fascinating to me to come back and be like, actually, the canon is a lot more flexible and interesting than I remembered it.

Caitlin 25:49

The canon for me is like, remarkable in its commitment to not officially putting anyone together. Like it was, it's very good at balancing out all of the different pairings that it wants to support.

Mallory 26:01

Mm hmm.

Caitlin 26:02

Um, it's interesting to see which ones got picked up as the main two in fandom, which for me, were always 1x2 and 3x4 dominated the fandom, because they're both like, friendly, maybe talkative, personable guy and like silent, brooding, weirdo,

Kat 26:22

Warrior.

Caitlin 26:22

What fandom loves! Fandom loves that exact dynamic in every form. And so like, what 1, 1 and 3, were never going to work together because they're both silent and brooding. Fandom was never gonna pick that up. It's too It's too boring. It's not dynamic enough, right?

Mallory 26:37

Like, you can't fight. There's no banter,

Cathy 26:39

Which is actually weird, because if you go back and watch the episodes, you'll see it. Heero actually is not that quiet. And Trowa is like a nutcase. And so

Kat 26:48

they're really funny together,

Cathy 26:49

when they are together, they're actually incredibly dynamic in ways that in fact, the canon doesn't establish 1x2, or 3x4 to be. And so it is really fascinating, because I do agree with Caitlin. What came out of this canon is very different from what I think the show gives. And I don't know the show was like, open minded because it wanted to sell as much merch as possible or

Caitlin 27:13

It's that.

Cathy 27:13

Yeah, so I don't know.

Mallory 27:14

Capitalism.

Kat 27:16

I am gonna say I think the show is a 3x4 shipper. Like I think if the show had a pairing, it would be a three, it would be 3x4, like from my recollections of the show

Mallory 27:26

Yeah

Caitlin 27:26

I always thought that was true. But now

Cathy 27:28

I disagree.

Caitlin 27:29

I feel like I'm gonna go into this and and be like, they never

Kat 27:32

Nobody else has a musical interlude.

Cathy 27:34

But the but the thing is, here's Okay, so not to, like, make this too much about the pairing... But I also think 1x2 and 3x4 become established. I put that in quotes early in the series. And so it becomes entrenched and people assume that that's the pairing. But actually, I just remember so strongly when I went back and rewatched that I was like, there really is not that much evidence for Trowa and Quatre's like instantaneous connection because Quatre has that with almost every other pilot, and Trowa's relationship with Heero is like so much more interesting when I come back to it, even though I definitely think they would never work. They would like killing each other and instead as an adult.

Kat 28:12

And I mean, I love that pairing. And like the one thing that came out of my rewatch a million years ago was I wrote a 1x3 fic cuz I really love those episodes, and fandom didn't do anything with it. But I feel like, I feel like Quatre and Trowa are framed slightly differently than all the other potential pairings so that they could be together.

Cathy 28:33

Even up until Endless Waltz like, I really just feel like that that was an early series thing. And then as you go on into the series, that relationship while still important, was not really emphasized any more or less.

Kat 28:47

But I mean, if it, if it comes out of the gate strong, [laughter] like

Caitlin 28:51

That's all that matters

Kat 28:52

I still think that the show was pushing that one if it pitched. Like if it was giving the most evidence to any one of them, I think the early stuff was really like, ~look at this beautiful pairing.~

Caitlin 29:04

So wait do we all want to, maybe to end this episode, we should all go through and predict what are OTP or pseudo OTP for Cathy will be by the end of this rewatch.

Kat 29:16

But also tell me your fave character because that's what I asked like, 15 minutes ago.

Cathy 29:21

Okay, Kat you first.

Kat 29:23

Oh, well, my favorite character has always been Duo Maxwell. And I'm predicting that he's still going to be my fave character. And I am going to stake my flag on Duo/Wufei, 2x5.

Cathy 29:36

Mallory?

Mallory 29:37

I think from what I remember, I really liked Trowa, I thought Heero was too dour, but I also think that I might relate to him a lot more this time around. So I'm going to say that Heero is going to be my favorite character. And I've always liked...see, I don't know about fandom pairings. I want to say it'll be...well it was Duo/Heero before? No, but I've-- I really like Duo/Wufei so, like, I think that's just always gonna be my Gundam Wing ship.

Cathy 30:20

So when I was a kid watching it my favorite was Duo Maxwell, but I know from my prior rewatching, or attempts to rewatch the series, that as an older person coming into the series, I actually like the girls a lot more, like Relena and Dorothy and Noin became my favorite characters and I did not give them the credit they deserved when I was watching it as a younger person.

Cathy 30:41

I also was 1x2 shipper but again, I know that what I came out of the series really shipping was disastrous Heero/Trowa, and then Duo/Wufei.

Caitlin 30:56

Okay, I see we are all Duo/Wufei fans now.

Kat 30:59

[crosstalk] That's why this is going to be the superior Gundam Wing podcast.

Caitlin 31:02

Yeah. I feel like so, my favorite character when I was originally watching as a kid was Quatre. I think probably because like I always liked like, the friendly blondes in boy bands?

Kat 31:13

That go apeshit?

Caitlin 31:15

When I got older, I was more into Duo and Duo is was probably still my favorite character. I was into Duo/Wufei for a long time. I just think that they are funny together and terrible. And I actually really like Wufei a lot. I sort of admire that fake honor sort of thing. But I, since everybody said Duo/Wufei, I feel like I should say something else, which is that I think that I will get more into 3x4 again after this rewatch, because it's a comforting pairing, in some ways. It's a return. And we're all very full of anxiety right now. [laughter] And so we just need Quatre and stupid, crazy Trowa, you know, having their pure love connection that fandom imagined for them from the beginning.

Kat 32:02

It's real.

Mallory 32:03

I look forward to it.

Cathy 32:04

I do too. I also look forward to hating Treize because that's what happened the last time I rewatched this. He's such a fuck boy.

Kat 32:12

I'm excited to love Dorothy and Relena.

Cathy 32:14

My god, they're so good. Yeah, they're so good. That's what I should have said is my favorite pairing.

Kat 32:20

Fandom definitely ruined me for a little bit, like, "urgh, Relena!"

Caitlin 32:24

When I was a kid, part of the appeal of Gundam Wing fandom was in some ways that it was so sexist, and so I could like act out my own internalized misogyny at the time. And so like, I like I was definitely participating in that of like a group breaking up the boys, whatever. And then in later iterations, I like love Relena. So.

Kat 32:45

Yeah, she was just such an easy reason for them to get together, right? For 1x2, but in the show, she's way more than a plot device. So that was kind of frustrating.

Caitlin 32:56

In the show, she's easily the most one of the most interesting and active characters for sure.

Kat 33:02

As podcast Daddy, I declare Episode Zero officially over. Thank you everyone for your time and catch us in two weeks with Episode One: The boy whose wings killed adolescence.

Caitlin 33:16

Byeeee [laughter]

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

#gundam wing #untitled tallgeese podcast #transcripts #mobile suit gundam wing #gundam #episode 00

2 notes · View notes

hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger · 6 years ago

Text

Spider-Man: Life Story #4 Thoughts

*graons*

Positives out of the way.

Bagley’s art+Bagley’s rendition of Morlun+the armoured looks of some of Tony’s squad.

Okay now onto the negatives.

I think I might’ve figured out what the REAL premise of Life Story is.

‘What if Spider-Man didn’t have the illusion of change and therefore everything was terrible so readers will now just accept the illusion of change forever’.

Seriously that makes the most sense at this point.

The illusion of change isn’t there and so everyone ages and everything falls to shit.

Spider-Man gets divorced, his child dies, his brother dies, etc.

But if that wasn’t the point then Zdarsky continues to make Life Story a total clown show.

He is consistent in only the following regards.

a) Events from Spider-Man history happen randomly differently from how they happened in canon even though that wasn’t how the series was advertised to us

b) Superheroes have a more realistic impact upon the real world except not really, it’s basically as realistic as Zdarsky wants it to be because fuck world building and consistency I guess

c) Real life history is toxically inconsistent within the context of a world of heroes where things are different

d) The story is inconsistent even in and of itself

e) Peter Parker is an irresponsible, dumb asshole

f) Various elements of the story have no intersection with one another. Remember how Flash died in Vietnam and this had...nothing to do with Miles Warren cloning Gwen????

Lets kick off with two things that can be looked at as bad points of the story but arguably forgivable...arguably.

So firstly...Morlun is in this story and then dies!

Ummmmmmmmmmmmm...Wasn’t there not one but TWO massive Spider-Man event crossovers (one as recent as LAST YEAR) which firmly establish that there is in fact just one version of Morlun in the entire Multiverse? This story is royally contradicting that. Now in fairness...that was always bullshit because we have had What Ifs and other alternate universe stories before Spider-Verse clearly depicting more than one Morlun in the multiverse.

Secondly...Civil War....fucking Civil War.

I loathe and despise the original Civil War storyline from 2006. You guys have no idea how much I honestly wish that story never existed.

A big part of that is how it wrecks the verisimilitude of the Marvel universe before and after it. Civil War was unsustainable as a status quo shift long term for the Marvel Universe and it made no sense given it’s established history. It took the realism of superheroes too far and consequently forced writers and readers to wilfully ignore it after it was done so things could go back to normal. If you do a Civil War style story it needs to either be set in an AU or end your universe and that’s it. A change of pace simply cannot work without wrecking everything.

So seeing it again is gross buuuuuuuuut, given Life Story’s mission statement of taking things more realistically and being an AU itself it actually fits better in this story than in 616 Spider-Man. The same can be said of Spider-Man’s identity being unmasked although this too wrecks the idea that this is Spider-Man aging in real time. If it was about that then the ramifications of the unmasking wouldn’t stick around any more than they did in 616, because that had nothing to do with a sliding timeline or whatever.

However the idea of Civil War fitting better in Life Story because it’s more realistic is utterly destroyed when you consider that in this universe where superheroes have a more realistic impact upon the world, where the military has Tony Stark level weaponry, where intangible nuclear missiles are a thing...9/11 still happened...

...I’m going to repeat that.

In a world where there has been near Star Trek level technology since the 1960s...a handful of terrorists with conventional weapons (not even the most high tech weapons and technology available in the real world in 2001!) are able to fool airport security, hijack some planes and destroy the Twin Towers...in New York city...where ALL THE SUPERHEROES LIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Look...in the Marvel or DC universes 9/11 happened. You can choose to interpret the 9/11 Spider-Man issue as canon or not canon, but it is a fact Spider-Man lives in a world where the 9/11 disaster happened. He didn’t stop it, the Avengers didn’t stop it, the Fantastic Four didn’t stop it.

Even though they definitely could have. Collectively all the superheroes of New York have weapons, technology and resources which would’ve enabled them to have intelligence on the hijackings, possibly before they even happened, probably during the hijackings and definitely as the planes were incoming. And they sure as hell had the ability to avert the disaster.

Are you telling me Al Quaeda could trick or stall or fend off the Avengers! Get the fuck out of here no they couldn’t.

The reason that 9/11 still canonically happened in the Marvel universe is simple. The Marvel universe’s realism doesn’t stretch so far as contorting the real world into something unrecognizable to the world of today. The Marvel universe has always been our world but superheroes are there. Their realistic social, political, economic and philosophical impact though isn’t. It’s why Christianity is still the dominant religion in Marvel’s America even though Thor is a thing. 9/11 being such a globally changing event means that the Marvel universe needed to retain it occurring in order to continue to reflect a relatable world to the readers.

More poignantly, just how during WWII superheroes didn’t simply end the conflict by flying into Germany and killing Hitler, to have had superheroes realistically avert 9/11 as they could have would’ve been deeply insulting and disrespectful to the real life witnesses and victims of the tragedy and their loved ones.

Zdarsky didn’t have that constraint though. He could’ve imposed it on his story had he wanted but just as with so much of the real world history his grossly mishandles (a reminder everything after issue #3 is bullshit because the world should’ve been consumed in nuclear Armageddon) he cherry picks what will and won’t be affected by superheroes existing and whether their effects will be realistically and logical or if they’ll be...whatever he randomly wants.

Case in point superheroes existing means nuclear missiles are intangible now, but superheroes existing doesn’t mean airport security is any different from what it was in 2001!

*head desk*

The ONLY way 9/11 happens in this Marvel universe is if like HYDRA did it instead of Al Quaeda or if the latter had backing from super villains.

But just like with all the altered real world history Zdarsky doesn’t explain anything. He’s lazy as a world builder. Thus we’re left to presume 9/11 happened as it did in the real world even though Tony Stark has already created technology that ended the Cold War by America beating Russia’s ass.

I mean for fuck’s sake, GALACTUS has invaded Earth and New York specifically, you telling me Tony or Reed or Hank Pym or someone hasn’t created at least some sort of alarm system to alert them to incoming threats. WTF was Doctor Strange doing!

Let’s stick to Tony for the moment. So in this issue...he’s the villain. He’s been on the wrong side ever since issue #1 really. This is another case of something bad that is arguably defendable.

See back in Civil War if you were reading Spider-Man you experienced a Tale of Two Tony’s (not my turn of phrase by the way I stole that).

You didn’t need to read Spider-Man to follow the main Civil War book but if you were reading Spider-Man you did need to read the main CW book to follow the story as pivotal events happened in the latter that were then followed up upon in the former. The most famous example would be Spider-Man unmasking which was only built up to in ASM but actually depicted in Civil War #2. However another more relevant example would be how when Spidey decided to switch sides Tony attacked him in ASM and was clearly painted as outright villainous, but then the action continued into the main Civil War book where Tony was written more conflicted and sympathetic, before the action cut back to ASM where he was very much a villain. The characterization wasn’t consistent at all, and the Spider books were not alone in this. Sue Richards’ break up with Reed happened very differently in the pages of Fantastic Four than they did in Civil War.

This is relevant to Life Story because the Tony in this book is very much the Tony of ASM era Civil War, the villain on the side of the law and the fact that Zdarsky planted the seeds for this back in issue #1 is I will admit commendable. Too bad it took until issue #4 for him and Peter to interact but whatever. I also confess that seeing the polar opposite of the Iron Dad relationship gives me life at the moment.

However given how Zdarsky’s convoluted M.O. with this book seems to be to reflect a wider real time aging Marvel Universe and not just Spider-Man’s story this characterization is fundamentally broken. Because Iron Man...was totally out of character in Civil War. Even in the main series where he was written more sympathetic he was out of character and in ASM it was truly ridiculous. So Zdarsky is again being inconsistent and terrible at characterization. He’s even being awful in how the story tries to remix elements from the 2000s era Spider-Man regarding Tony (and other stuff we’ll get to).

If you are going to factor in Peter’s unmasking and Iron Man into this story shouldn’t the once friendly relationship they had or his Avengers membership play a factor? I mean Spidey being an Avenger was such a huge deal in the 2000s that when Marvel made variant covers for his 50th anniversary showcasing something from every decade of Spidey his being an Avenger was used to represent the 2000s.

Getting back to the Civil War elements though, something mind boggling is that Iron Fist is on the pro-registration side when he was very much NOT in the real Civil War event. Making this matter worse is his best friend Luke Cage being on the anti-registration side. Even without giving anyone any lines Zdarsky srews up characterization. Compounding this is Iron Man’s claims that young heroes fell in line with the registration act...what?

Let’s ignore how bowing to the government isn’t typically what teens like to do...you telling me that the opinions of most teenage heroes was to sign up with the government? Bullshit, even in the original story their views were more mixed. There is also the implication that somehow...9/11 was the thing that prompted the SHRA...hoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow??????????????????????????????

Finally Tony tells Peter he could be arrested for not registering with the government that he was a hero because...his spider sense is like insider trading.

I need to explain how stupid this is.

To begin with the SHRA wasn’t enforced when Peter was running Parker Industries so he was literally not breaking the law. If a law is passed that wearing a watch is illegal you can’t go to prison because prior to that law’s passage you wore a watch.

Secondly...no....no the Spider Sense is really not like insider trading at all. Let’s presume it could warn him about dangerous business deals...that’s not insider trading at all, that’s literally Peter having better business instincts than everyone else. That’s not cheating or illegal it’s just having a natural advantage over other people.

Thirdly...Captain America is leading a resistance group....again.

This is the dumbest damn idea in the original Civil War story and for some reason even though Zdarsky wants this series to be ‘more realistic’ he replicates that stupidity.

Captain America’s plan in the original Civil War boiled down to going on the run, recruiting other superheroes, attacking the registered heroes and then....somehow this would repeal a law designed to keep heroes in check.

Let’s say that this is a more realistic world and the Registration act is totally reasonable. Putting aside how framing it as a bad thing does not then make any damn sense, Captain America’s method for fixing the problem is utterly nonsensical, especially for a guy who could be president by merely running for office. He’s Captain America for God’s sake he’d win and could repeal the law from within!

The final problem with this plotline in the issue is how it really has NOTHING to do with the other plotline, and how t weirdly hijacks the issue and becomes the main plotline when initially the book presented something else as the main thrust of the story; not the first time Zdarsky has basically superglued two plotlines together even though they have little-nothing to do with one another

That thing of course was Morlun. This opens up a whole other can of stupid we need to talk about.

So first of all Morlun shows up in 2006 not 2001, further fucking up the idea this is Spider-Man aging in real time. Morlun DID appear in a 2006 story of course, the Other, but that was his return not his debut. Why is Morlun debuting 5 years later than he should be? Because Zdarsky wants to include the most famous villain who debuted in the 2000s but actually wants to make the story about Civil War which did happen in 2006 that’s why.

Speaking of Morlun, I might be wrong here but...a fucking tree? That’s how he dies? I’m not even complaining he doesn’t come back in a clone body, I’m talking strictly about how a tree stabs him like he’s Mystique in Dark Phoenix. Maybe I’m wrong but I’m preeeetty sure he could survive that unless Life Story’s Morlun is pathetically weaker than his mainstream counterpart.*

More egregiously is Peter’s handling of Morlun. He explains Ezekiel showed up to warn him about Morlun’s coming.

In the original story these two events happened close together, Morlun appeared shortly after Ezekiel’s warning. Let’s say we let Zdarsky slide on the timeframe and even the fact that Morlun actually was looking for Ezekiel not Peter...why did Peter do nothing about this warning.

In the original story Ezekiel offers Peter a bunker to hide out in. Presumably he did the same in Life Story. But instead of taking advantage of this or warning Ben Reilly or his potentially spider empowered children Peter...ignores him?

WHY?!

Peter didn’t disbelieve Ezekiel, he just rejected his offer of sanctuary because he had responsibilities to live up to. In this story Peter has even bigger responsibilities and a family potentially at risk and he just...did nothing?

And low and behold his elderly wife and daughter have to flee for their lives whilst he dicks around in New York and his brother and son straight up DIE.

That’s 3/3 relatives named Ben who are dead because he was a selfish dickhead!

And before we dive into Peter’s character I just want to take a moment and lament how piss poorly Mary Jane has been treated this whole story.

Issue #1: She is little more than a background character

Issue #2: She is totally out of character, and just drunkenly yells unreasonably at Peter then gets unreasonably yelled at by him

Issue #3: She gets shit on by Peter, inadvertently Aunt May and is left being pregnant and giving birth to twins with a senile old health hazard for company, then gets yelled at for suggesting getting her health, then is tasked with going out alone in a dark and stormy night to potentially kill her super powered husband

Issue #4: She shows up at the end and just welcomes him back as her husband and the father of her kids no questions asked apparently

Issue #5: We continue to never get a word about how she feels about their general lives, of Peter and her reconciliation, of their children. She just waits and worries in front of the TV or runs away from Morlun. How the Hell does her daughter get more agency in this one issue than she has pretty much this whole series?

Anyway back to Peter....yeah this is not Peter Parker.

You know how Peter Parker is all about with great power there comes great responsibility....well Life Story Peter Parker totally isn’t.

He abandons his company, employees and superhero duties to an untrained, underprepared, equally old clone of himself who has to quickly learn how to pretend to be him, how to run a company and fight more experienced super villains whilst fending off a corporate takeover by the secretary of defence for the United States of America. And then he gets murdered by an indestructible (except to wood) mystic vampire that Peter neglected to mention to him.

Ben Reilly DIED directly because Peter was an idiot.

And selfish, don’t forget that. He moved his family out into the woods in a secluded area so that he wouldn’t interact with too many people and thus not feel the need to intervene. Let’s ignore how he was able to resist this urge in Spider-Girl for a moment. You are telling me Peter Parker abandoned his great responsibility by finding basically doing the equivalent of sticking his fingers in his ears, closing his eyes and yelling “lalalalalala If I can’t see or hear anyone in trouble I can’t be responsible for not helping them lalalala”

FUCK OFF ZDARSKY!

This is toxically against the entire premise of the character at this point and getting older wouldn’t change that. Apparently all it took to snap him out of this funk was Ben Reilly dying and a pep talk from his friggin teenage daughter!

All in all this is another beautifully drawn shit show of an issue in a string of beautifully drawn shit show issues.

*Oh and let’s not forget that Morlun just...knows where the fuck Peter lives. That isn’t one of his powers. He needs to make contact with his target in order to track them down anywhere they go. He can’t just generally sniff them out. It doesn’t even make sense if he was tracking his kids.

Not to mention this story claims you can hurt Morlun when he’s feeding. But that’s not his weakness. Radiation is something he’s vulnerable to. If you can just kill him or the Inheritors by attacking when they are feeding then Spider-Verse and Spider-Geddon wouldn’t have been as dangerous it’s not that difficult to kill them.

#Spider-Man #chip zdarsky #mark bagley #Peter Parker #Ben Reilly #Iron Man #Tony Stark #Morlun #Ezekiel Sims #Civil War #Civil War 2006 #Marvel Civil War #avengers #Captain America

17 notes · View notes

hadarlaskey · 5 years ago

Text

Discover the out-of-time futurism of this ’90s Philip K Dick adaptation

In 2058, the mining corporation known as the New Economic Bloc (or NEB) discovered a new energy source known as Berynium on the planet Sirius 6B. But when miners learnt that its extraction also released radiation and other pollutants, they organised as ‘The Alliance’ and ceased all work.

This miners’ strike led to all-out war with the NEB, who nuked the planet’s civilian populations and reduced its surface to a toxic wasteland. The only thing that saved the remaining miners was the invention of ‘screamers’, self-replicating bladed automata which tear apart anything with a heartbeat that trespasses onto Alliance-held territory.

Now, in 2078 (and after a decade of constant war), the bunkered-in Alliance Commander Joseph A Hendricksson (Peter Weller) decides to accept an invitation sent by the enemy’s survivors, and to undertake the dangerous journey to the NEB’s headquarters, in the hope of reaching a peace. The ‘screamers’, however, have changed in unexpected ways, and now represent a far greater threat to all humanity than any off-world war.

Most of this sci-fi plotting is laid out in the text (and voiceover) which opens Christian Duguay’s Screamers. But all the decades of suffering which it chronicles serve equally to figure the many years of development hell in which the production of Screamers itself became stuck after Dan O’Bannon, screenwriter of Alien, Dead & Buried, Return of the Living Dead and Lifeforce, delivered his adaptation of Philip K Dick’s short story ‘Second Variety’ back in 1981.

In those 14 intervening years, much of the dialogue had been rewritten by Miguel Tejada-Flores (although O’Bannon, who only learnt that Screamers had finally gone into production after its release, has stated that the characters and basic plot remained intact).

More importantly, though, between 1981 and 1995, times had also changed. The British coal miners’ strike of 1984-5 which might have made the film look prescient had long since come and gone. The Cold War which the science fiction of both Dick’s story and the film’s narrative was clearly referencing was effectively over, making the New Economic Bloc now look more like Bush Sr’s New World Order.

This political shift from endless war to what was, from the early ’90s, being termed the end of history, created a new context for the film’s preoccupations (the possibility of détente, the development of unexpected consequences). Coming at a time when the USSR had dissolved and Western liberal democracy was in the ascendant with no obvious rival, Screamers was newly prescient in its recognition that peace and stability never last, and that the buried effects of past conflicts always, in the end, return to the surface to bring new threats.

Remember that Al-Qaeda’s bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998, and of the USS Cole in 2000, were all just around the corner when Screamers was released in 1995 – and they would culminate in Al-Qaeda’s destruction of the Twin Towers and part of the Pentagon on 11 September, 2001, bringing a decisive end to the ‘end of history’, and changing the geopolitical landscape for ever.

With the delayed production of Screamers there also came its belatedness in the history of cinema. Where a 1981 version of it might at least have coincided with the replicants of Ridley Scott’s Dick adaptation, Blade Runner, and would have directly influenced the robo-apocalypses of The Terminator and Hardware, the under-sand predators of Dune, and the Newt character (miraculously evading massacre, although here with a twist) from Aliens, in fact the influence was all now in the other direction, leaving Screamers looking like a mere ripoff of these other films.

As personae from either side of the conflict – the war-hardened Hendricksson, his lieutenant Chuck Elbarak (Ron White), the crash-landed crack shot Ace Jefferson (Andrew Lauer), NEB soldiers Ross (Charles Powell) and Becker (Roy Dupuis), blackmarketeer Jessica Hansen (Jennifer Ruben), and the abandoned boy David (Michael Caloz) – all try to determine if they can get along with each other and back to Earth, their mutual distrust is only amplified by the discovery that the Screamers have now evolved new forms, some of which are very hard to distinguish from humans.

The ensuing Darwinian struggle combines space opera skirmishes and Cold War paranoia – although the characters rarely rise above cardboard cutouts, and their dialogue involves the kind of grizzled tough guy/gal posturing overfamiliar from the sort of ’80s action movie that this was in fact supposed to be.

Screamers is available on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK from 101 Films Black Label on 25 May.

The post Discover the out-of-time futurism of this ’90s Philip K Dick adaptation appeared first on Little White Lies.

source https://lwlies.com/articles/screamers-1995-philip-k-dick-blu-ray/

#movie

0 notes

junker-town · 7 years ago

Text

The 58 silliest bowl game names of all time

A list so amazing, the Poulan Weed Eater Independence Bowl isn’t even No. 1.

Lots of college football bowl games have silly names. That has always been the case. At any point in history, however, certain bowls stand above their peers, whether due to absurd sponsors, a weird poetry collision between location and sponsor, or what have you.

Setting aside the many bowls whose sponsors are just trying to sell pretty normal products, here are the strangest bowl names ever. If you haven’t heard the news yet, let me just warn you that the one you’re thinking of right now, the one that’s long been the weirdest ever, has just been beaten.

58. Visit Florida Tangerine Bowl (2001) in Orlando

All bowls were originally tourism things. The verb shows commitment, and all bowls should use one. Come on down to the Test Drive Jeep Eagle Aloha Bowl.

56. (tie) AdvoCare V100 Independence Bowl (2008-12) in Shreveport, La. AdvoCare V100 Texas Bowl (2014-16) in Houston

The company frequently accused of being a pyramid scheme travels the bowl landscape, like a medicine salesman in the Wild West.

55. Progressive Gator Bowl (2011) in Jacksonville

“The medium-sized animals I eat in one big bite are all locally sourced.”

50. (tie) Blockbuster Bowl (1990-93) in Miami IBM OS/2 Fiesta Bowl (1993-95) in Tempe, Az. CompUSA Florida Citrus Bowl (1994-99) in Orlando EA Sports Las Vegas Bowl (1999) Sega Sports Las Vegas Bowl (2001-02)

The wave of pre-2000s technology bowls. Let the awkward nostalgia wash over you. There’s an even weirder wave like this one, later on in the list.

Nothing says “fiesta” quite like IBM’s operating system.

49. Rose Bowl presented by PlayStation 2 (2003) in Pasadena, Ca.

The Rose Bowl is too important to have a title sponsor, technically, so it’s been doing this “presented by” thing since 1999. This sport’s grandest and most serious game being Presented By a video game platform whose latest releases included The Clone Wars, Nickelodeon Party Blast, and The Simpsons Skateboarding: perfect.

48. Alamo Bowl Presented By MasterCard (2002) in San Antonio

That year when the Alamo Bowl was just as fancy as the Rose Bowl.

47. Popeyes Bahamas Bowl (2014-16)

That’s about the most pleasant combo of three words I can imagine, but here’s the silly part:

I am in a stadium built by the Chinese government in the Bahamas, watching an American football game.

Central Michigan is lateraling to almost complete the biggest comeback in bowl history.

When the Chippewas come up just short, the Hilltoppers eat Popeyes. There are no Popeyes in the Bahamas.

46. Famous Idaho Potato Bowl (2011-)

Fake it ‘til you make it, and at this point, the Idaho Potato Bowl is somewhat Famous, I guess.

45. Gotham Bowl (1961-62) in New York City

youtube

24. (tie) AXA Liberty Bowl (1997-2003) in Memphis Sylvania Alamo Bowl (1999-2001) in San Antonio Culligan Holiday Bowl (1998-2001) in San Diego GMAC Mobile Alabama Bowl/GMAC Bowl (2000-2010) ConAgra Foods Hawaiʻi Bowl (2002) PlainsCapital Fort Worth Bowl (2003-04) R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl (2006-) Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl (2006-13) in Fort Worth EagleBank Bowl (2008-09) in Annapolis, Md. uDrove Humanitarian Bowl (2010) in Boise Bridgepoint Education Holiday Bowl (2010-12) in San Diego Franklin American Mortgage Music City Bowl (2010-) in Nashville Military Bowl presented by Northrop Grumman (2010-) in Annapolis BBVA Compass Bowl (2011-14) in Birmingham National University Holiday Bowl (2013-14) in San Diego Heart of Dallas Bowl presented by PlainsCapital Bank (2013-14) Royal Purple Las Vegas Bowl (2013-15) Lockheed Martin Armed Forces Bowl (2014-) in Fort Worth Raycom Media Camellia Bowl (2014-) in Montgomery, Al. NOVA Home Loans Arizona Bowl (2015-) in Tucson, Az. San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl (2005-16)/Holiday Bowl (2017-) in San Diego

The “how could bowl sponsorship possibly inspire anyone to spend money on these things?” group.

AXA is a French insurance firm, Sylvania is a subsidiary of a German lighting manufacturer, Culligan is a water treatment company based in Illinois, GMAC was an auto lender, ConAgra is a huge company with dozens of food brands, PlainsCapital is a bank that’s probably not in your town, R+L Carriers trucks stuff, EagleBank is a bank that’s probably not in your town, Bell sells war vehicles to governments, uDrove was some sort of trucking app, Bridgepoint is a for-profit university, National is a non-profit university (this was when the Holiday Bowl went legit), BBVA is also a bank that’s probably not in your town, Northrop Grumman also sells war vehicles to governments, Franklin American Mortgage sells entire houses, PlainsCapital is yet another bank that’s probably not in your town, Royal Purple sells industrial lube, Lockheed Martin sells war vehicles to governments, Raycom is a TV thing you either get or don’t get, NOVA will sell you an entire house, and the SDCCU is probably not in your town.

23. Salad Bowl (1947-55) in Phoenix

Lots of games have been named after funny foods. This is the funniest of the genre.

22. Zaxby's Heart of Dallas Bowl (2014-)

You’d think the last word this very salty chicken chain — folks, so much salt, you wouldn’t believe, so many people are telling me about the salt, everywhere I go — would want people to think about is the word “heart.” If ever I were to consider ordering a bucket of Zaladz, and in that moment, someone said to me the word “heart,” I would stop.

12. (tie) Insight.com Bowl (1997-2001) in Tucson, Az. HomePoint.com Music City Bowl (1999) in Nashville MicronPC.com Bowl (1999-2000) in Miami Crucial.com Humanitarian Bowl (1999-2003) in Boise Ourhouse.com Florida Citrus Bowl (2000) in Orlando galleryfurniture.com Bowl (2000-01) in Houston EV1.net Houston Bowl (2002-05) PapaJohns.com Bowl (2006-10) in Birmingham GoDaddy.com Bowl (2011-13) in Mobile, Al. TaxSlayer.com Gator Bowl (2012-13) in Jacksonville

I still can’t believe we had football games named after websites for almost two decades. I can’t believe that happened.

11. TaxSlayer Bowl/TaxSlayer Gator Bowl (2012-) in Jacksonville

All these years in, and I still don’t know what to say. What a stupid series of words!

10. Cheribundi Tart Cherry Boca Raton Bowl (2017-)

Really biased in favor of the ones with lots and lots of verbiage, like NFL play calls. Walk into the huddle and bark this out, then see if you don’t put 25 yards on the Colts.

9. Duck Commander Independence Bowl (2014) in Shreveport

WAR DUCK WAR BOWL.

8. BattleFrog Fiesta Bowl (2015) in Glendale, Az.

WAR FROG PARTY BOWL.

4. (tie) magicJack St. Petersburg Bowl (2008) St. Petersburg Bowl Presented by Beef 'O' Brady's (2009) Beef 'O' Brady's Bowl (2010-13) in St. Petersburg, Fl. Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl (2014)

Basically every name the St. Pete Bowl has ever been known by, other than the current one. We swore this game would never top being sponsored by a faux-Irish restaurant that cannot use apostrophes correctly, a USB device, and invisible internet money, and yet, see No. 1.

3. Poulan Weed Eater Independence Bowl (1991-97) in Shreveport

For decades, this was the go-to example anyone would use when listing off consolation-prize games or complaining about there being too many bowls. Saying “the Poulan Weed Eater Bowl” just does not happen, unless the speaker is making fun of something about bowl season.

This name became so synonymous with the idea of an embarrassing bowl trip that, 19 years after it’d changed, then-Houston head coach Tom Herman summoned it to mock rival SMU.

If you're satisfied with going 7-5 and going to the Poulan Weed Eater Bowl, then great. Then you're in the wrong program and we'll find a place for you to go. I hear there's a private school up in Dallas that's really looking to try to get to seven wins.

(Herman then lost an upset to that private school, proving the mere mention of the Poulan Weed Eater Bowl lowers one’s talent levels.)

Topping the legendary Poulan Weed Eater Bowl was something I never thought I’d see happen in my lifetime. This was the 47-game Oklahoma win streak of terrible bowl names, and yet, see No. 1.

2. Makers Wanted Bahamas Bowl (2018-)

Textually alone, that’s not a silly name. It’s the context, though. Oh my god, the context. Bowl owner ESPN explains:

The Makers Wanted tagline serves as a call-to-action for Elk Grove Village’s thriving community and the thousands of businesses that are based there.

“Elk Grove Village is home to the largest industrial park in the United States, spurred by our village’s commitment to being beyond business-friendly,” said Elk Grove Village Mayor Craig Johnson.

Here’s a map from Elk Grove Village to the Bahamas:

Google Maps

A town near Chicago’s airport that literally has an elk grove sponsors a bowl game in the Caribbean. No further questions, your honor.

1. The Bad Boy Mowers Gasparilla Bowl (2017-) in St. Petersburg

The St. Pete Bowl is the absolute god of incredible names. If the entire top five of this list was nothing but St. Pete Bowl names, no one could complain.

This one is so good that it was hard to believe it was real, despite one of the sport’s best reporters breaking the news. He had to circle back and announce on Twitter that he was not kidding.

It’s not fake news: St. Pete Bowl really has been renamed Bad Boy Mowers Gasparilla Bowl. Really! https://t.co/fcxi8GKyeI

— Brett McMurphy (@Brett_McMurphy) August 18, 2017

Is this brand as midlife-crisis-y as it sounds? Oh hell yeah it is.

Even better: the game was initially brought to you by lawnmowers IS PLAYED ON FAKE GRASS IN A BASEBALL STADIUM. Fake grass THAT USED TO BE SOME OF THE WORST TURF YOU’VE EVER BEHELD. The game’s sponsor was completely useless within its own stadium. Diabolical.

The greatest thing about the St. Petersburg Bowl is no longer a thing. Mourn with us. https://t.co/AqbQpXw6kp

— SB Nation CFB (@SBNationCFB) April 1, 2017

It’s since moved to the Bucs’ stadium, the one with the huge fake pirate ship in one end zone.

Please put lawnmowers in the pirate ship.

What’s a “Gasparilla?”

Well, you see, Tampa has an annual event (about a month after this bowl game) called the Gasparilla Pirate Fest.

gasparillapiratefest.com

OK, but what’s a “Gasparilla?”

Per Wikipedia:

The theme of the Gasparilla Festival was inspired by the local legend of José Gaspar, a Spanish naval officer who turned to piracy. [...] Despite this colorful history, there is no evidence that a pirate named Gaspar or Gasparilla ever operated off the Florida coast. [...] In fact, researchers have found no contemporaneous records either in Spain or the United States that mention Gaspar's existence, and no physical evidence of his presence in Florida has ever been uncovered.

To sum up: the bowl that was mostly known for ugly fake grass is now brought to you by an unnecessary lawnmower company that is CERTIFIED BADASS, BABY and has the same name as Diddy’s record label, all in honor of a pirate who might not’ve been real and who definitely had nothing to do with Tampa, St. Petersburg, colleges, football, lawnmowers, Bitcoin, USB connectors, Steamy Queso ‘O’ Poppers, or bowl games.

That’s one of the dumbest sentences ever typed, and I could not possibly love this sport more.

Wanna make your own? Here you go.

We threw a ton of bowl names into a computer and had AI generate a bunch of fake names:

0 notes

latestnews2018-blog · 7 years ago

Text

This Year's Hot New Self-Care Regimen: Sleeping Through The Whole Thing

New Post has been published on https://latestnews2018.com/this-years-hot-new-self-care-regimen-sleeping-through-the-whole-thing/

This Year's Hot New Self-Care Regimen: Sleeping Through The Whole Thing

It’s the summer of 2018, and America seems sapped of hope. We swap self-care techniques and links to “Abolish ICE” petitions with equal desperation. Sometimes, as Tina Fey suggested on “Saturday Night Live” last summer, the political reality looks so bad that it’s tempting to just skip the protests, hide at home and devour an entire sheet cake.

In her monologue, Fey called this technique “sheetcaking,” a way to keep at bay the rigors of living in hell. The joke, as many critics argued and Fey herself later admitted, was also a manifestation of a certain kind of privilege ― that for many white, well-off liberals, American upheaval is an external disruption that might be upsetting, but can be comfortably ignored.

In Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the unnamed narrator takes sheetcaking to the max ― not with sheet cake precisely, but with sleeping pills, with online shopping, with animal crackers and Thai takeout and pizza. She’s a gorgeous 20-something gallery girl in Manhattan whose parents died when she was in college. At the outset of the book, she decides to spend as much time sleeping as possible in hopes of curing her existential angst. She’s been alienated, lonely, unsure why she feels contempt and boredom for things she’s expected to love and enjoy, like her best friend Reva.

At first she just wants drugs to numb her. “Life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me,” she thinks. Soon, she embraces sleep, in hopes of being reborn a new person, someone who feels warmth and hope again. “My hibernation was self-preservational,” she insists. “I thought that it was going to save my life.”

She loses her job, but it doesn’t matter: She has savings, rent from the tenants of her late parents’ home, a high credit limit, her own apartment and nothing to prevent her from spending her nights and days in an Ambien haze. Her accomplice is an unscrupulous psychiatrist named Dr. Tuttle, a slightly batty woman with a sharp strategic mind when it comes to getting as many downers covered by insurance as possible, but a general fogginess about anything else related to her patient’s mental health.

Moshfegh’s vision of a retreat from the world mimics sheetcaking in another way: It’s all about comfort, not quality. That goes for food ― either a sugary cake, or a steady diet of takeout and cookies ― and for everything else. She sleeps so much, and eats so little, that this fatty diet actually leaves her skinnier, more modelesque, than ever. The narrator eschews art, books and provocative movies. She willfully ignores the news.

Instead, she wears out her VCR watching and rewatching Whoopi Goldberg comedies and Harrison Ford action flicks she already knows by heart. “The stupider the movie, the less my mind had to work,” she notes. Feeling rowdy, sad, cheerful or any other profound emotion yanks her out of her perpetual daze; that would be a problem.

It all sounds painfully familiar. When we’re not wearing ourselves to shreds with political agita, we’re retreating into our mindless distractions of choice: “Real Housewives,” “Fortnite,” Hallmark movies, “SportsCenter,” anything that doesn’t make us feel or think something too exhausting.

But for this woman, politics isn’t the catalyst for her withdrawal. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is set in 2000 and 2001, at the close of the Clinton boom years. The narrator dwells in a cocoon even before her studied retreat from the world; she has a job at a gleaming art gallery, a nice apartment in an impersonal Upper East Side building, expensive gym memberships, nights to spend out clubbing. As she begins her year of sleep, afloat on a sea of Dimetapp, she notes that it’s never been easier for her “to ignore things that didn’t concern me.” “Things were happening in New York City ― they always are,” she writes, “but none of it affected me.”

Moshfegh’s book isn’t by any means a response to Tina Fey. But in the fun house mirror she holds up to the self-care fetish of the privileged, the reality of sheetcaking comes into focus: It’s the furthest thing from political. The tradition it belongs to is not one of social protest, but of consolidated wealth and social status.

And it’s not a quirky new idea ― it’s part of a long tradition. Fittingly, My Year of Rest and Relaxation feels almost out of time, despite its near-contemporary setting. The cover, featuring a 1798 Jacques-Louis David portrait of a languid young woman, evokes the vintage concept of ladylike idleness, as does the genteel-sounding title. “I’m just taking some time off,” the narrator tells Reva early in the book. The framing harks back to a not-so-distant era when ladies of the upper classes did little but dress themselves for meals and complain of their ennui, and when women were frequently prescribed months-long rest cures for psychological disorders like depression.

This kind of feminine privilege was, of course, a gilded prison. Being kept in showy leisure, as accessories to signal a husband’s wealth and status, prevented women from advocating for their own interests or pursuing invigorating work. Those rest cures, as immortalized in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ”The Yellow Wallpaper,” were not always voluntary and could be little more than psychological torture. But compared to other roles available to women, like a lifetime of backbreaking labor interspersed with childbearing, idleness was surely preferable.

In Rest and Relaxation, the narrator’s own mother, a beauty queen who married young after getting pregnant, was also given to long bouts of sleep, while her father, a much older professor, supported the family and a housekeeper took care of the chores. “I could make a case for my mother’s rejection of domesticity as some kind of feminist assertion of her right to leisure,” the narrator muses, “but I actually think that she refused to cook and clean because she felt that doing so would cement her failure as a beauty queen.” Her mom aspired to a certain level of decorative idleness; robbed of being decorative, she clings to the idleness.

Moshfegh certainly doesn’t seem to be making a feminist case for leisure, and neither does her narrator, who is comfortably aware of her own good fortune. (“Compared to me,” she thinks of her best friend, “[Reva] was ‘underprivileged.’”) She doesn’t try to justify her rest as empowering through some out-of-context Audre Lorde quotes. Nor does she wallow in guilt about it, even as Reva snips that she’d love to take time off to “loaf around, watch movies, and snooze all day… I just don’t have that luxury.”

Alienated characters populate all of Moshfegh’s stories ― the thwarted drudge in Eileen, the cynical misfits of Homesick for Another World. This languidly lovely, monied heroine is unusual for her, though her humorously flat cruelty is familiar.

Reva, a college pal the narrator still sees out of habit but views with unadulterated disdain, is a classic Moshfegh character: despicably basic, suspiciously emotional, grotesquely normal. Reva is a striver, who “came from Long Island, was an 8 out of 10 but called herself ‘a New York three,’ and had majored in economics.” The narrator recoils from her friend’s class anxiety and quest for status, and from her messy grief over her mother, who is dying of cancer. She sniffs at the thought of Reva ending each night “probably drunk and full of Aspartame and Pepcid. In the mornings, she prepped and set out into the world, a mask of composure. And I had problems?”

Reva, by any definition, is just getting by; the narrator is rebirthing herself, or so she imagines.

As self-destructive and semi-suicidal as the narrator sounds, one expects that My Year of Rest and Relaxation will evolve into a cautionary tale of addiction and idle hands making the devil’s work. Instead, her self-medication ― which she herself treated with veiled suspicion ― turns out to be effective.

It’s seductive. While her pharmaceutical-fueled hibernation hardly seems safe or healthy (her own mother died after mixing pills with alcohol), disconnecting from work, the news and social obligations while indulging in lots of sleep seems like a great recipe for de-stressing. As I read, I struggled with spasms of bitterness. Taking a year off to sleep and slough my mind of all baggage sounded glorious: to give my mind and body exactly what they ask for, with no shame or fear, and to let them heal themselves.

That kind of vacation from stress and stimulation is available, even in fiction, only to a rarified handful. If the narrator’s self-treatment works, so what? It’s like learning a cure for cancer has been discovered and it costs $50 million. To the average patient, it’s hardly a relief to know that the cure is out there when they have no hope of accessing it.

But My Year of Rest and Relaxation isn’t, at any rate, a prescription: It’s an eerie exploration of how class dictates the degree to which we can care for ourselves, and the degree to which we must ceaselessly engage with a world that batters our souls.

0 notes

how2to18 · 8 years ago

Link

IN HIS 2004 GQ essay “Upon This Rock,” about an excursion to the annual Creation Festival of Christian music and worship in central Pennsylvania, John Jeremiah Sullivan describes his take on the difference between rock music that happens to be made by Christians and “Christian rock” music:

Christian rock is a genre that exists to edify and make money off evangelical Christians. It’s message music for listeners who know the message cold, and, what’s more, it operates under a perceived responsibility — one the artists embrace — to “reach people.” As such, it rewards both obviousness and maximum palatability. […] A Christian band, on the other hand, is just a band that has more than one Christian in it.

Assuming this is accurate and supposing it is applicable to other art forms, what are the implications for Christians looking to make an impact on (or through) popular (or high) culture? For individuals with the talent and gumption to look at an entire pantheon of artists and try to force their way among them, circumscribing their output entirely to a genre that “rewards both obviousness and maximum palatability” is clearly not the best route. According to Sullivan, “Talent tends to come hand in hand with a certain base level of subtlety.”

Denis Johnson, who died earlier this year, called himself a Christian, although he once told David Amsden of New York, “I’m sure you could find any number of Christians who could assure me that I’m going to hell.” To say Denis was a great writer is not controversial. There have been many eulogies and appreciations of his work written in the months since his death, and while many allude, in a cursory way, to the spiritual character of his writing, none that I’ve seen explore the details of the realities he described or questions he posed, much less Denis’s personal beliefs and religious experiences. The closest is Will Blythe’s moving New York Times Book Review essay “A Lot Like Prayer: Remembering Denis Johnson,” and in the course of writing this I encountered Justin Taylor’s insightful “Gonna Try for the Kingdom if I Can” in n+1.

I had the incredible good fortune to be Denis’s friend, and I know some of his beliefs concerning God and religion. I observed him practicing his spiritual disciplines, which included prayer and daily readings of Alcoholics Anonymous, The Bible, and A Course In Miracles. I am a massive fan of his writing. I believe Denis’s faith suffuses his writings, although I could be wrong about the ways the two correlate. While Denis was incredibly, and famously, open and vulnerable among his friends and acquaintances, I suspect this had the unintended effect of pushing the unknowable parts of his identity even deeper. I would hate for any reader to think I were trying to shoehorn Denis’s work into a literary genre akin to Christian rock music, but my hope is that readers will be edified through my sharing, just as I have been by Denis’s life and work.

Denis believed he was personally affected by miracles, that God is supernaturally active in individuals’ lives in profound and unexpected ways. God saved Denis from alcoholism and addiction through Alcoholics Anonymous and the 12 Steps. Denis named his Idaho property “Doce Pasos North” and dedicated two of his novels (Angels and Tree of Smoke) to “H. P.,” which, I assume, stands for “Higher Power.” I’m tempted to say that in the firmament of Denis’s beliefs, faith in a Higher Power at work through AA and the 12 Steps is the fixed star. Substance abuse and addiction figure prominently in Denis’s fiction and plays, and he always extends to his characters the possibility of the same grace that he himself experienced.

Getting clean through AA marks the dividing line in Denis’s life. In his 2000 Paris Review essay “Hippies,” he describes his youth as a “criminal hedonist” followed by growth into “a citizen of life with a belief in eternity.” AA meetings provide ritual, prayer, and fellowship that includes the sharing of struggles, confession, and accountability. Denis, who regularly attended meetings as long as I knew him, told me that he hated small talk and that AA meetings spoiled him in this regard — people there only talked about real, personal issues.

He also read Alcoholics Anonymous, the program’s so-called “Big Book,” throughout his sober life. In it, alcoholics working the steps are encouraged to use whichever religious tradition, if any, works for them — “We think it no concern of ours what religious bodies our members identify themselves with as individuals” — while the foreword to the Second Edition (1955) claims that AA includes “Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Hindus, and a sprinkling of Muslims and Buddhists.”

I believe this perspective colored Denis’s thinking on religion. The last time I visited him, in 2015, something I said reminded him of an Emo Philips comedy bit that illustrates the absurdity of denominational hair-splitting, and he pulled it up on YouTube to share it with me. Viewed from the perspective of AA, doctrinal disagreements and accusations of heresy can seem like narcissism of small differences and thus suitable subjects for ridicule. This perspective dovetails with that of Denis’s hero Walt Whitman, who says in the introduction to Leaves of Grass, “argue not concerning God.” Denis felt that paying attention to or participating in these disagreements obscured the most important thing about God: He is active in one’s life.

Denis did get more specific in his faith, however. I know from many visits with him that he read the Bible regularly and found great, practical solace in it. The first time we met, in 2006, he told me he was a convert to Catholicism and that he had encountered Jesus during a Cursillo retreat. He said he had not been to Mass in years. I asked him if anything had changed in his faith since he wrote his “Bikers for Jesus” essay (from the 2001 collection Seek: Reports From the Edges of America & Beyond), and he said that nothing had.

“Bikers for Jesus” includes the clearest description in Denis’s oeuvre of his relationship to contemporary American evangelical Christianity. Describing his visit to the Eagle Mountain Motorcycle Rally sponsored by televangelist Kenneth Copeland in the 1990s, Denis writes:

In the heart of someone who might have just stumbled onto this rally, the man from Idaho, let’s say, fifteen years a Christian convert, but one of the airy, sophisticated kind, the whole business is a millstone — if he’s going to Heaven, shouldn’t he be more excited? Is he going to Heaven? In his questions, his doubts, his failure to submit unconditionally, hasn’t he been nothing but a cruiser, a shopper? Impressed with the drama of his own conversion — but as drama, rather than conversion — was he ever really broken? And more important, was he ever really healed?

This questioning of his own faith and sincerity is not surprising in the context of his familiarity with Jesus’s teaching that people will be surprised at the Final Judgment regarding whether they are counted among the saved or the damned (Matthew 25:31–46), and Paul’s teaching that Christians are to work out their salvation “with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12).

Denis recounts — not uncritically — the messages preached to him and the fellowship he shared with other attendees over the course of three days, and his reaction is one of increasing approval: “The white buckets ride the rows. On the first day the Idaho man put ten dollars in, twenty dollars on the second day. This time it’s a fifty.” The 1992 story collection Jesus’ Son, which is almost universally beloved by worldly literati and was recently hailed as a “modern masterpiece” by John Williams in the New York Times Book Review, was authored by a man who donated money at an event sponsored by the Reverend Kenneth Copeland, one of Earth’s ripest targets for ridicule.

“Bikers for Jesus” also contains details that point to Denis’s willingness to believe in God’s continuing revelation. When Denis encountered people who claimed to be hearing God’s voice, he tried to take them at their word. One particular exchange at Eagle Mountain seems to justify his faith in this approach:

The Idaho man introduces himself to the nearest person in his row, a middle-aged black woman who turns out to be Nancy, from Chicago. “God is saying something,” she says intensely as they shake hands, and won’t let him go, staring into his eyes … “He says you’ve been seeking, and just go ahead, you’re doing fine. He says you got a cross in your back, but that’s healed. And He says be sure and take a pen and a notepad with you, so you can write things down.”

The man turns away, but something about what she’s said strikes him now — more than the coincidence of the pen and the pad and the seeking. “Excuse me,” he says, returning to her. “Nancy, did you say something about my back?”

“You got a cross pinching your right back, down low. But it’s gone now. He fixed it yesterday.”

For four months the Idaho man has been undergoing weekly treatments for a pinched sciatic nerve in his lower right back. It hasn’t occurred to him until this minute that it didn’t bother him last night and hasn’t bothered him all day. “I believe you’re right,” he tells Nancy.

“You didn’t want to ask for healing,” she says, “but He healed you anyway.”

“Do these little incidents happen to you very often?”

“Every day.”

While all believers necessarily employ heuristics to address claims of supernatural revelation, Denis’s stance was skewed, more than anyone I have ever met, toward curiosity and the reservation of judgment. He was drawn to claims of miraculous new revelation just as he was drawn to settings of political collapse and anarchy (in Liberia, Somalia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere). He believed his encounter with Nancy was a miracle from God. Denis also visited the Children of the Light at their Agua Caliente commune and recorded their stories of miracles in his essay, “Three Deserts.” This attitude toward the miraculous, that “[m]iracles are natural. When they do not occur something has gone wrong,” is actually one of the principles listed in the first chapter of A Course in Miracles.

In “Hippies,” Denis references a friend of his, “Mike O,” who at the Rainbow Gathering dispenses “information about the Course in Miracles, a heretic sort of gnostic brand of Christian thinking that doesn’t recognize the existence of evil and whose sacred text is mostly in iambic pentameter.” I met the famous back-to-nature hippie “Barefoot” Mike Oehler of Idaho in 2006, and after I overheard him speaking with Denis about the Course I bought a copy and attempted to read it. When I saw Denis in 2008, I told him I had not been able to make much sense of the book, and he sympathized. He told me he only read the Workbook section, and he gave me a copy of what he called the “Reader’s Digest version” of the Course: a slim paperback with cartoon illustrations called Love is Letting Go of Fear by Gerald G. Jampolsky, MD.

A Course in Miracles, which resembles a Bible, is purportedly a divinely inspired text that failed to fully convince the person who wrote most of it down. Beginning in the mid-1960s and over the course of several years, psychologist Helen Schucman heard an inner voice and transcribed what it said with the help and encouragement of her colleague Bill Thetford. The voice claims to be that of Jesus Christ, who teaches that the world we perceive is an illusion and that the way to return to God is through love and forgiveness.

The Course also refers to a concept called the “holy instant.” I don’t claim to understand it, but to the extent that the concept describes how much import can be packed into a moment of subjective experience, I see a relationship between it and Denis’s writing. Some of the most moving and memorable passages in Denis’s stories deal with radical subjectivity and time slowing down, especially in moments on the border between life and death, and how these moments reorder the characters’ priorities: Bill Houston’s death in the gas chamber in Angels (1983); Grandmother Wright floating endlessly in the sea after fleeing the fall of Saigon in Fiskadoro (1985); Nelson Fairchild Jr. making his way, bleeding, down to the beach of the Lost Coast in Already Dead (1997).

There are other echoes of the Course in Denis’s books. The narrator of The Stars at Noon (1986), a sometime-prostitute who insists that Nicaragua in the year 1984 is Hell itself, states: “Anger is fear. Lust is fear. Grief, excitement, weariness are fear — just feel down far enough, look hard enough.” This thought aligns with the Course, which simplifies all human experience to two reactions or choices: love or fear. There are probably more such examples, but it would be difficult in most cases to determine whether Denis’s use of metaphysical concepts and vocabulary springs from the Course or from orthodox Christianity, as there is substantial overlap.

Did Denis believe in the Course? All I know is that he used it. I think of his use of it in the context of his remark to David Amsden noted earlier — it could be that Denis did not want people categorizing him, boxing him in, from either within or without Christianity, with all the judgment and baggage it carries in our culture. Denis was a storyteller fascinated by the question of who has authority in spiritual matters, but he didn’t want to force a set of answers on his readers. He was not a theologian, but he knew what worked for him.

Denis was a Bob Dylan fan (he was the first person I ever heard suggest that Dylan deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature), and it may be that in living out his faith he was reacting to or mirroring Dylan’s conversion experience. A final point regarding Denis’s use of the Course: it is something I am personally grateful for, because meeting me — a stranger who approached him at a gala — presented him and his wonderful wife Cindy with an occasion to choose either love or fear, and they welcomed me and offered me friendship without reservation. This seems like a miracle to me, looking back.

When I first traveled to Northern Idaho and met with Denis, he was still writing Tree of Smoke. The first night I stayed at Doce Pasos North, I slept on a sofa bed in Denis’s office with a draft of the novel sitting next to me in a cardboard box. I noticed Denis had handwritten notes taped up by his desk. One was from Emerson: “God will not have his work made manifest by cowards — SELF RELIANCE.” Another said this:

If I’m some kind of James Hampton and this is some kind of Throne of the Third Heaven, if it’s two thousand pages and two hundred years, SO BE IT.

A photo of the Throne, Hampton’s midcentury religious art assemblage, was taped up underneath. Readers of Denis’s poetry will not be surprised at this reference to Hampton’s famous work; Denis’s collected poetry was published in 1995 under the title The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly, and it includes his poem of the same name, which describes a visit Denis made to the Throne with the painter Sam Messer:

Sam and I drove up from Key West, Florida, Visited James Hampton’s birthplace in South Carolina, And saw The Throne At The National Museum of American Art in Washington. It was in a big room. I couldn’t take it all in, And I was a little frightened. I left and came back home to Massachusetts. I’m glad The Throne exists: My days are better for it, and I feel Something that makes me know my life is real To think he died unknown and without a friend, But this feeling isn’t sorrow. I was his friend As I looked at and was looked at by the rushing-together parts Of this vision of someone who was probably insane Growing brighter and brighter like a forest after a rain — And if you look at the leaves of a forest, At its dirt and its heights, the stuttering mystic Replication, the blithering symmetry, You’ll go crazy, too. If you look at the city And its spilled wine And broken glass, its spilled and broken people and hearts, You’ll go crazy. If you stand In the world you’ll go out of your mind. But it’s all right, What happened to him. I can, now That he doesn’t have to, Accept it.

It’s not hard to imagine the Throne as a sort of visual analogue to A Course in Miracles. Both Hampton and Schucman had private conversations with God, and the message imparted to each was “FEAR NOT,” the highest words written on the Throne.

Denis appreciated, sought out, and befriended outsiders, mystics, and misfits, past and present. They included Julian of Norwich, mathematician/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and the anonymous author of the 14th-century religious text The Cloud of Unknowing, in addition to Hampton and Schucman. I was blessed to be one of the misfits.

Finally, Denis believed in the power of prayer. In 2007, he told me that he had had an addiction relapse while in Vietnam doing research for Tree of Smoke, and that prayer was what saved him. He and I prayed for one another as we both went through cancer diagnoses and treatments. I was surprised when he died, because he had shared that his treatment for liver cancer was successful. I had thought he was in the clear. I now suspect he was simply adopting a perspective increasingly aligned with the eternal. One of his last emails to me paraphrased the message Julian of Norwich received from God: “All is well, all will be well, all was always going to be well.”

Brian B. Dille recently finished his doctorate in Policy Analysis at Pardee RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica. He now lives in Georgia.

The post Books of Revelation: Christianity and Miracles in the Life and Work of Denis Johnson appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2zbjEPh via IFTTT

#Blogger

0 notes

tweefunk · 8 years ago

Text

Fuckin’ things man.

IDK, my BFF Jill? I want to write nice things I really. I don’t like being a negative Nancy.

The Orwells-Terrible Human Beings

4/10

Eh. Dangerous sexuality only works as an aesthetic when it's tragically hip and elegantly disheveled. See all hyped indie-rock from 2001-2005.

When a bunch of gangly-ass white eggheads from the suburbs consciously re-create it a decade late(r) as a marketing ploy it's just nauseating.

Unfortunately, this isn't that entertainingly awful. It's worse. Boring.

Suicide Silence-S/T

3/10

Suicide Silence attempts what other metalcore acts have done more successfully; transition to an accessible mainstream rock sound and audience. It worked for BMTH and ADTR, but here it just further accentuates that Suicide Silence is a one-trick pony.

The terrible lead single “Doris” set the bar low and became an instant meme, but unfortunately, it’s one of the comparatively bright spots on this underwhelming record.

Suicide Silence’s attempts at a radio-rock crossover sound come across like a garage band stumbling through bad Deftones covers at their first practice. The sheer ineptitude, combined with the fact that a label was even willing to release this, is astounding.

This mediocrity (to put it mildly) casts the remnants of Suicide Silence’s old deathcore sound in an unfairly favorable light. The brief forays into competence provide welcome relief.

I expect a severe course correction on their next release.

Dirty Projectors-S/T

2/10

Let’s just get this out of the way early. Dave Longstreth is exceptionally talented. He possesses an Ivy League music degree, and it shows. His understanding of melody, harmony, and tonality is nearly unparalleled in pop music, and I’m just some jackass with a tumblr page.

I guess now is as good a time as any to admit (if you couldn’t figure it out for yourself) that I don’t review music in an objective, structural sense. I review music in a subjective, what-does-it-all-mean, how-does-this-relate-to-the-culture-at-large, how-does-this advance-the-medium/genre kinda way. I don’t get into the nuts and bolts of production, or cadences, or harmonic structures unless it’s distracting from the overall message of the product.

Take punk for example. No one would ever mistake the Ramones for virtuosos, but you would be an idiot to write them off since pretty much all mainstream rock since the late 70′s owes at least a foundational aesthetic to them.

Speaking of punk, (SEGUE!) the first Dirty Projectors album anyone cared about was 2007′s Rise Above the post-modern circle jerk in which the group re-imagined (read: drained of all life, and ignored the cultural context behind...) Black Flag’s 1981 opus. The ironic, self-satisfied condescension of a bunch of literal art-school rejects layering dense fussed-over harmonies onto songs that were imagined as blinding, cathartic rage against both internal emotional and external structural oppression is still nauseating a decade later.

Some dipshit tried to fight me in college for saying that once.

While Dirty Projectors are once again a solo act, the same sense of narcissistic genre-superiority is still alive and kicking. Except now there is nice dollop of nice-guy woe-is-me misogyny AND a desperate attempt to fit in with the kids and their hippity-hop. In “Up in Hudson,” Longstreth whines “Now I'm listening to Kanye on the Taconic Parkway/riding fast/And you're out in Echo Park/blasting 2Pac/drinking a fifth for my ass.” As you might know, this record is about the breakup of Longstreth and his lover/bandmate Amber Coffman. The above lyric might not be so gross if it weren’t for the fact that opening lines of the record are “I don't know why you abandoned me/You were my soul and my partner.” Well, I’m sure your whiny victim mentality didn’t have anything to do with it.

This tack continues as Longstreth continues to make not-so-subtle jabs at the moral and artistic credibility of his ex. Returning to the opening track, Longstreth delivers this particularly pissy kiss-off: “What I want from art is truth/What you want is fame/Now we'll keep 'em separate/And you keep your name”

Taking this line in context of his east-west dichotomy (LA a symbol of fake plasticity and NY is gritty realism) and the long standing truism that women in the performing arts are often viewed as superficial entertainers providing fun escapism whilst the men get on with such lofty things like “Real” Art, Objectivity, Reason, and Truth.

And in a roundabout way this bring me to my major gripe with the cult of Dirty Projectors and hipsterdom in general. It’s no secret that I grew up as disciple of the early 2000′s pop-punk and emo scene, which has rightly been critiqued as cesspool of vengeful, beta-male “nice-guy” revenge-misogyny. Say Anything’s “Every Man Has A Molly” is perfect example of this with lines like “Molly Connolly ruined my life/I thought the world should know.”

However, I would argue that Say Anything’s treatment of the subject is more palatable since Max Bemis seems to be capable of self-reflection and critique. In contrast, every time Dave Longstreth comes to close to admitting a fault, it comes caked in backhanded sarcasm since he knows he has to pay lip service to being magnanimous.

And now I turn on the critics: Why the fuck is it ok for an effeté ninny (oh the beautiful irony) to spew this venom, but when a bunch of skate rats in a garage whine about girls ignoring them, it’s an affront to music and good taste? At least the latter group can have a sense of humor about themselves and their genre. But go ahead and lionize the 30-something Yale grad pandering to modern production trends in a desperate bid for self-aggrandizing relevance.

However, as my rating shows, this record isn’t all bad. The mid-album ballad “Little Bubble” is actually quite beautiful and one of the few moments where Longstreth allows his mask to slip and recognizes that this is maybe, partially, his fault.

And lastly, can we laugh at that album art? It’s a fucking broken Nutter Butter.

Thundercat-Drunk

7/10

If you’re into jazz or funk, this essential listening. Thundercat is an incredible musician and his songwriting manages to be hilarious and personal at the same time.

Seriously, one of singles is about Goku. Unfortunately, it gets a little noodly at times, but if you’ve enjoyed his work with Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar, definitely check this out.

Also, the guest appearances from Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald may be final confirmation that the yacht-rock aesthetic is being revived.

Sun Kil Moon-Common as Light and Love are Red Valleys of Blood

9/10

Anyone who follows my writing knows that one of my biggest complaints about records is that they’re too long, so with a running time of over two hours, I should probably hate this.

Not so.

Mark Kozelek does not make songs, or by extension records, in any traditional sense. Since 2012′s Among the Leaves, he has slowly transitioned away from folky songs about mundane happenings in his life, to creating backing tracks to accompany dramatic readings of his diary.

Ok, that’s an oversimplification, but on many tracks here he drops al pretense to lyricism and recites letters, or just recounts what he was doing on a particular. Right down to giving us the exact date and the entreé he ate for dinner.

On a sonic level, the record moves away from the classical guitar stylings of the last few albums, and bases the sound around hypnotic bass lines and synth textures.

I’m really not doing a good job of selling this, but there’s something disarming about a man who has long ago achieved his place in the music world giving absolutely no thought whatsoever into sales, critical appeasement, or fan expectations.

With the exception of critics, none of this seems to be motivated by angst or spite, but rather from an intense desire to document all that he feels and thinks.

It’s almost Chekovian in a way. The droll observations on daily occurrences, and in some cases, dubious urban legends, allow for the profundity of the human condition to be put on full display.

CALALARVOB works because it takes the listener on a journey of discovery, not only of the world around them, but their own soul as well. If you’re willing to follow Kozelek down the (long, twisting) rabbit holes he regularly detours down, you’ll be in for a treat.

The only sections that fall flat are Kozelek’s anti-technology rants. He spends so much time mocking smartphone users, that his very valid criticisms of the political climate or music industry circle-jerks at SXSW can get buried under his admittedly self-aware curmudgeonliness.

This record will drain you with blunt depictions of the world’s horror, and build you up with a steadfast commitment to love and joy wherever you can find it.

Strap in, it’s gonna be a hell of a ride.

0 notes