mugasofer

[mugasofer]

googling shit like "why do i feel bad after hanging out with my friends" and all of the answers are either "you need better friends" (i don't; my friends are wonderful) or "your social battery is drained, you need to rest and regain your energy levels" (i don't; i've got tons of energy, it's just manifesting as over-the-top neurotic mania). why is this even happening. it's like some stupid toll i have to pay as a punishment for enjoying myself too much

[mugasofer]

happy "closer to 2050 than 2000" day everyone

[mugasofer]

Bilbo: wait I get it now. The dragon is a metaphor for greed and power. We need to ‘defeat’ it by being humble when we get the treasure.

Thorin: Bilbo, for the last time, it’s a real dragon and it has my gold

[mugasofer]

having an online persona is kind of funny bc you post abt something like twice and suddenly that’s the only thing ur known for...u post about cheese a couple times and suddenly ur the cheese mutual

[mugasofer]

someone in the UK threw eggs at Charles and was arrested and has been banned from openly carrying eggs in public and has since been sent death threats but their statement on the matter was so fucking good

[mugasofer]

Do superheroes even really "fight crime" these days? Modern superhero movies seem much more interested in having them fight alien invasions, governments, cosmic beings planning to destroy an aspect of reality, etc.

There was some discussion on the discord about how most "superhero fiction" gets tainted by the fact that there are such established things as "superheroes" and "supervillains" in these settings, and that this then taints everything about these pieces of fiction because wide swathes of psychology and character immediately get swept to the side. There's a flattening effect to that, I think I would agree with that, and anyway, it's well-mined territory.

So instead, you could write a superhero novel (or comic) where the entire concept of "superhero" doesn't actually exist, in the same way that zombie movies don't recognize the concept of zombie.

And I think that this would be interesting, but would also immediately introduce a few constraints of its own:

The timescale is relatively short. There's very few imitators, and not enough coverage/traction that people have started to say "hey, these guys are all kind of like each other".

The scope is relatively narrow, probably not more than ... ten characters? And they can't overlap with each other all that much. Maybe you can have small clusters that expand the cast, I guess, a recognized subset of the unrecognized superhero.

This works best in a novel, not in a webfic, because webfic loves to sprawl (and this is one of the best things about webfic).

So to game it out a bit, you have all these different characters, and none of them thinks of themselves as a "superhero". We're pretending the whole concept doesn't exist in this universe. We're making no sweeping generalizations about superheroes, because they're just not a thing here.

Instead, we draw from as many different genres and ideas as possible.

People aren't wearing costumes, there's one guy who's wearing a costume, dressing up like a mascot. Someone else is wearing a uniform. Another guy is wearing a disguise, totally different thing meant to protect his identity, nothing more. There's a guy who summons armor around himself, a guy that transforms, they have distinct individual powers that come from different places, there's nothing that unites them except that they come into conflict with each other. There's no ethos of superheroism or supervillainy.

Part of the idea is that you cannot sort these people into typologies, each of them is individual, except maybe there's a brother-sister couple in there, or a group of five super sentai types or whatever, because we also don't want to make a rule that each and every person is a unique individual.

I think there's a lot that you could get from this. Normal superhero fiction tends to have a lot of ideology in it, and here, because these people don't recognize each other as being the same thing, you have more room to move around. No one is doing things because it's expected of them, except the people who are, who are fighting crime because this is part of their family legacy, or the guy who's a space cop and this is just literally his job. There's greater room for intersectional discussion if you drop "superhero" from the vocabulary.

And it's much closer to what superheroes used to be, before the genre calcified and congealed, when everyone was just their own weird person with their own weird agenda. There is something fresh about that, I think, something that I haven't seen very often, a way of writing superheroes that tries to be in the genre by being outside of it.

I'm not sure I have any ambition to actually write something like this, but I do think that it's probably worth doing. (And I also imagine that if I had infinite depth of knowledge on superhero fiction I would be able to point to three specific pieces of media that did this exact thing.)

[mugasofer]

Oh my god

[mugasofer]

I was exactly the right age at exactly the right transitional period in history to have been an unsupervised preteen on dial-up BBSes, Usenet, IRC, and first-generation web forums, more or less in that order, so all things considered I think I'm doing pretty well.

[mugasofer]

"If it's amazing, they'll know."

When talking about "George Lucas' vision" and the original six Star Wars films, there's one thing to bear in mind and that's Lucas' style of filmmaking.

These are movies for kids, designed to emulate the Saturday matinee serial format from the '30s, à la Flash Gordon. You see this most of all in the dialog. But something else you notice is George Lucas' filmmaking style, particularly in how he films and edits.

Take Darth Vader's introduction, for example.

Look at the composition: Vader stands tall, in contrast to the - as the script puts it - "fascist white armored suits of the Imperial stormtroopers". They're all in white, he's all in black, he's bigger badder, emerging from a cloud of smoke. What an entrance.

But if you think about it, it's just a single full shot. Very basic.

Compare this to Kenobi, wherein Vader is treated like a monster out of a horror movie. First, you glimpse his shadow, people reacting...

... then ominous bits and pieces like his boots or his lightsaber...

... and finally Vader himself, in all his terrifying glory.

That's a modern way of shooting it and it admittedly makes ol' Darth seem that much more imposing and absolutely badass.

But Lucas comes from a background of editing, experimental filmmaking and used to work as a documentary cameraman.

So what he did is just put the camera down and have Vader walk in. It's a faster yet differently-efficient way to introduce the character. It's more about dynamic pacing and visuals.

And that is Lucas' style. In his words:

"The way these films were put together, they're shot very much like a documentary film and the action of stage, and then I shoot around it. I don't stage for the camera. And as a result, there are a lot of things that happen pretty much by accident. It lends an aura of authenticity to everything." - Star Wars - Episode I: Podracing Featurette, 1999

Another example: the introduction of General Grievous.

A door opens revealing his ugly mug and he walks in. Boom.

But in Star Wars Storyboards: The Prequel Trilogy, you find that - as envisioned by the storyboard artists - our introduction to Grievous would've been very different.

"We wanted to have the introduction to Grievous be a series of really close shots that would be a series of details: his creepy foot, his creepy hand...

... his scary alien eyes...

... but George brought up an interesting point. He didn't want the film to concentrate on one design detail or one element— but rather let the world be there and let the viewer find those things without necessarily having it shoved in their face." - Derek Thompson, SW Storyboards: The Prequel Trilogy, 2013

"George nixed the idea, saying: 'I don't want something to be special because of how it's filmed, but because of what it is. Just put the camera on it and let it play out in front of the audience. If it's amazing, they'll know.'" - Iain McCaig, SW Storyboards: The Prequel Trilogy, 2013

That's it in a nutshell. "If it's amazing, they'll know."

The above storyboards look awesome and seeing Grievous be introduced that way would be great... but it wouldn't be Lucas' Star Wars. It would be some other director taking a crack at it.

And this way of shooting can be weird, even boring, at times. I mean compare Mace leading his troops into battle...

... to Aragorn leading his, in Return of the King.

The latter is so much more emotionally impactful. For a number of reasons (eg: Aragorn is a deuteragonist, Mace is a secondary character with less development), but one of them is that the moment is just shot in a way that's more interesting.

First we have an angle on Aragorn as he smiles and charges. Then the rest of the other characters as they react and follow suit, then the troops do the same.

With Mace it's, uh, *checks notes* he flourishes his saber and charges, the clones follow. Hell, for half a second we're looking at just an empty screen.

But y'know what the shot does look like?

It looks like something out of a WW1 documentary.

It's that authenticity he was mentioning further up.

At the end of the day, you can call it campy or bad... it's Lucas' style. It's cinema. There's a logic to it.

"To me, the script is just a sketchbook, just a list of notes, and, sometimes, I prefer the documentary feel of free flow, so I let my instincts tell me where to go. I like to create cinematically; I don't like to have a plan. I like to have a rough idea of what I'm going to do-certain themes, certain issues I'm going to deal with-and then I try to do so." - The Making of Revenge of The Sith, page 116, 2005

He doesn't try to make a character look particularly badass with camera angles or make the shot too choreographed, he just goes with the flow, and makes the deliberate choice to shoot it that way, because for better or for worse... it's his movie.

So yeah, just a tidbit I thought would be interesting.

Edit:

@schilkeman added this very interesting point in the replies:

"He doesn’t stage for the camera, but he does compose for the camera. The documentary style, while somewhat detached, requires the filling of the screen with motion and light. The way things move through frame seem very important to him. These are things his films excel at."

[mugasofer]

stolen from that social media site gay millennials and grumpy boomers use

[mugasofer]

I honestly thought Cassian was just part of a group of kids who crash-landed in a Lord of the Flies situation.

Apparently that's wrong, they were meant to be the orphaned children of the native population after the adults were killed? Or maybe the children of the (native?) miners? That's ... odd, but I guess might cause some tech loss.

The guys from the Northern Lights planet where they do the heist, though, yeah, they're clearly framed as indigenous. I don't think we see enough of them to say that they necessarily didn't have spacecraft before the Empire came, just that they were kind of... rural. But even if they didn't, I think a lot of indigenous groups who arrived by boat didn't maintain the same boating/navigation technology? AFAICT the Maori didn't.

I have begun watching Andor; my first Star Wars media after the the Rise of Skywalker burned all possible hope and legacy the series could ever have. It is pretty good! Finished Season 1, am a few episodes into Season 2 so far - though as usual my thoughts lean towards the complain-y side, don't let that bias you:

Andor at its best is portraying the Empire "in transition", moving towards greater levels of centralization and authoritarianism but no longer at the breakneck pace of coups and gigantic wars. Having say private military contractors filling enforcement gaps, and then being annexed by central authority as the knee-jerk response to the inevitable failures that accrue, causing the center to be overburdened? Very kino stuff. We need more stories about bureaucracy and Andor, while not committed to the bit, at least flirts heavily with it.

What makes the above work is the hard commitment to "realism", and that only works because the show is harshly pretending so much of Star Wars doesn't exist. All these grubby human stormtroopers and officers, making mistakes, defecting, and so on? Why aren't you using, oh I don't know, the clone army you made in the prequels bred for loyalty? I know you have an answer for that in one of your infinite spinoffs, but the answer is stupid and half-baked. Even if you couldn't make everyone a clone, you would still be using the clones, and robot soldiers, and force-sensitive ninja warriors, and all that stuff. Same with a dozen other things - the show will hand-waive away why they are using slave prison labor over droids with "droids are more expensive" but bro - I have seen Star Wars droids, they cost as much as a trash bin because they are sometimes literally trash bins. This is the right decision, to be clear! Just very funny.

Honestly Andor really throws into relief the, uh, arc of both Star Wars & sci fi more broadly? The original films are very "classic adventure", for all audiences - the sci fi elements are aesthetic, the magic elements are loose and mystical, the plot is a Hero's Journey in war. As the franchise grew in the 1980's, it made "1980's content" for nerd audiences at the time - pulpy, action-oriented, and with a lot of "technobabble plots". Oh the Emperor has a clone machine! Oh now we have the Sun Crusher, it crushes suns! This alien species can drink luck somehow! Stuff like this is the bread-and-butter of the EU, and a lot of the ~vibe~ if not focus of the prequels. Time marched on, Star Wars broadened while sci-fi declined, and these stories lost their appeal alongside the audience for Star Wars fully morphing into an "every generation" affair with many older adults wanting content. Andor is of course the answer to that demand, a fully gritty political drama with an entirely-human main cast. But it sits in the same universe as Jar Jar Binks and you can't really escape that.

While the median "expression of political hatred for the Empire" is via a longing for democracy & political freedom, it is very cute to me how "70's liberalism" a lot of the more concrete complaints are coded? There are a lot of vibes of central authority is bad, localism should rule the day, let each unitary planet make its own decisions. The successor government is gonna have a TON of NIMBYs opposed export-focused mining projects on its hands, I do not envy them that. #TeamStripMineGhorman

Why does the galaxy have all these human indigenous tribes all over the place? Did humans evolve independently on all these planets? Presumably these humans are settlers, which means they would have the kind of culture an expansionist, space-faring, scientific civilization would have, right? Awful lot of people crash-landed and lost all their digital books it seems.

Okay, an actual, real complaint now: what is the empire currently fighting? I know that fascist regimes "invent" security crises to justify their authoritarian control, but, well, they kind of don't actually do that whole-cloth, 1984 isn't a history book. It typically is tied to real events, even ones of their own making. If Franco's Spain wanted to allocate 25% of GDP to massive military projects, it was gonna need a reason. And all the senators, who are not imperial propaganda pieces, seem to accept the need for expansive military preparations. So what enemy are these for, exactly? You might say "the rebellion, duh", but that actually doesn't track - for one at the beginning of the show they are explicitly small fry, that is the entire plot. And they are also at this point entirely insurgency-based - not something building more Imperial Star Destroyers really helps you address. The Empire-as-portrayed acts like it has peer adversaries somewhere? It seems like it is conquering planets (and in the lore I think it is). But we never see any of this, it is never actually mentioned. Add Andor to the list of hundreds of stories that finds itself in need of a scene of a dozen people sitting around a big map displaying current strategic threats, priorities, and status-quo force deployments, but is too much of a coward to do it.

*Extremely* cute that apparently the galactic financial system still heavily relies on physical currency. This admittedly isn't a crazy anachronism, I can see how communicating digital exchanges across space might be difficult (ofc Star Wars is completely inconsistent along these metrics but w/e). Someone has gotta tell the Emperor about the blockchain...

Cassian is so much hotter with a beard, he needs to own that and stop all this shaving nonsense he does on and off, get your priorities straight. Bix meanwhile is hotter with ___; it is literally impossible for Bix not to be hot in any context and boy does this show try to disprove that! Fails every time.

[mugasofer]

Why does the galaxy have all these human indigenous tribes all over the place? Did humans evolve independently on all these planets? Presumably these humans are settlers, which means they would have the kind of culture an expansionist, space-faring, scientific civilization would have, right? Awful lot of people crash-landed and lost all their digital books it seems.

Isn't this also true of all IRL human indigenous groups (outside Africa)? In some cases surprisingly recently, expecially by Star Wars timescales - e.g. New Zealand was first settled in the 1200s.

I have begun watching Andor; my first Star Wars media after the the Rise of Skywalker burned all possible hope and legacy the series could ever have. It is pretty good! Finished Season 1, am a few episodes into Season 2 so far - though as usual my thoughts lean towards the complain-y side, don't let that bias you:

Andor at its best is portraying the Empire "in transition", moving towards greater levels of centralization and authoritarianism but no longer at the breakneck pace of coups and gigantic wars. Having say private military contractors filling enforcement gaps, and then being annexed by central authority as the knee-jerk response to the inevitable failures that accrue, causing the center to be overburdened? Very kino stuff. We need more stories about bureaucracy and Andor, while not committed to the bit, at least flirts heavily with it.

What makes the above work is the hard commitment to "realism", and that only works because the show is harshly pretending so much of Star Wars doesn't exist. All these grubby human stormtroopers and officers, making mistakes, defecting, and so on? Why aren't you using, oh I don't know, the clone army you made in the prequels bred for loyalty? I know you have an answer for that in one of your infinite spinoffs, but the answer is stupid and half-baked. Even if you couldn't make everyone a clone, you would still be using the clones, and robot soldiers, and force-sensitive ninja warriors, and all that stuff. Same with a dozen other things - the show will hand-waive away why they are using slave prison labor over droids with "droids are more expensive" but bro - I have seen Star Wars droids, they cost as much as a trash bin because they are sometimes literally trash bins. This is the right decision, to be clear! Just very funny.

Honestly Andor really throws into relief the, uh, arc of both Star Wars & sci fi more broadly? The original films are very "classic adventure", for all audiences - the sci fi elements are aesthetic, the magic elements are loose and mystical, the plot is a Hero's Journey in war. As the franchise grew in the 1980's, it made "1980's content" for nerd audiences at the time - pulpy, action-oriented, and with a lot of "technobabble plots". Oh the Emperor has a clone machine! Oh now we have the Sun Crusher, it crushes suns! This alien species can drink luck somehow! Stuff like this is the bread-and-butter of the EU, and a lot of the ~vibe~ if not focus of the prequels. Time marched on, Star Wars broadened while sci-fi declined, and these stories lost their appeal alongside the audience for Star Wars fully morphing into an "every generation" affair with many older adults wanting content. Andor is of course the answer to that demand, a fully gritty political drama with an entirely-human main cast. But it sits in the same universe as Jar Jar Binks and you can't really escape that.

While the median "expression of political hatred for the Empire" is via a longing for democracy & political freedom, it is very cute to me how "70's liberalism" a lot of the more concrete complaints are coded? There are a lot of vibes of central authority is bad, localism should rule the day, let each unitary planet make its own decisions. The successor government is gonna have a TON of NIMBYs opposed export-focused mining projects on its hands, I do not envy them that. #TeamStripMineGhorman

Why does the galaxy have all these human indigenous tribes all over the place? Did humans evolve independently on all these planets? Presumably these humans are settlers, which means they would have the kind of culture an expansionist, space-faring, scientific civilization would have, right? Awful lot of people crash-landed and lost all their digital books it seems.

Okay, an actual, real complaint now: what is the empire currently fighting? I know that fascist regimes "invent" security crises to justify their authoritarian control, but, well, they kind of don't actually do that whole-cloth, 1984 isn't a history book. It typically is tied to real events, even ones of their own making. If Franco's Spain wanted to allocate 25% of GDP to massive military projects, it was gonna need a reason. And all the senators, who are not imperial propaganda pieces, seem to accept the need for expansive military preparations. So what enemy are these for, exactly? You might say "the rebellion, duh", but that actually doesn't track - for one at the beginning of the show they are explicitly small fry, that is the entire plot. And they are also at this point entirely insurgency-based - not something building more Imperial Star Destroyers really helps you address. The Empire-as-portrayed acts like it has peer adversaries somewhere? It seems like it is conquering planets (and in the lore I think it is). But we never see any of this, it is never actually mentioned. Add Andor to the list of hundreds of stories that finds itself in need of a scene of a dozen people sitting around a big map displaying current strategic threats, priorities, and status-quo force deployments, but is too much of a coward to do it.

*Extremely* cute that apparently the galactic financial system still heavily relies on physical currency. This admittedly isn't a crazy anachronism, I can see how communicating digital exchanges across space might be difficult (ofc Star Wars is completely inconsistent along these metrics but w/e). Someone has gotta tell the Emperor about the blockchain...

Cassian is so much hotter with a beard, he needs to own that and stop all this shaving nonsense he does on and off, get your priorities straight. Bix meanwhile is hotter with ___; it is literally impossible for Bix not to be hot in any context and boy does this show try to disprove that! Fails every time.

[mugasofer]

youre monogamous? oh… it’s ethical, right? ethical monogamy? okay good for you! i mean pretty much every monogamous couple i’ve met didn’t work out but maybe you guys will beat the odds! haha. so is it a sex thing? you guys have sex with- just each other? huh. how does that work? i could never do monogamy, i’m too jealous, i’d worry my partner would leave me for someone else instead of dating us both… how do you deal with the jealousy? is it hard? like, how hard? extremely? do you think you’ll break up? i mean in the long run these things rarely work out,

[mugasofer]

One of the greatest additions to a post ever

[mugasofer]

If we're talking actual Lovecraft stories...

The Call of Cthulhu (Cthulhu): nominally, the cultists believe that the Old Ones will usher in an age where humanity will be free from the shackles of morality, as the Old Ones are. In practice a lot of the rank and file are probably in it for the parties. Possibly some magic/tech/monster assistance, like strange poisons.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth (Dagon/Deep Ones): gold from beneath the sea, better fishing. In some cases, the weird fish orgies and/or immortal fish children. For later generations, mainly community with other immortal fish people.

The Dunwich Horror (Yog Sothoth/Old Ones): kids with superpowers, possibly other magic stuff. For the second generation, the idea is that as part-Old Ones, they'll survive the Old Ones' arrival and be rewarded.

The Rats In The Walls (seemingly in it for the love of the game, but there's some mention of a "Magna Mater", so maybe Shub-Niggurath): people taste delicious.

The Dreams in the Witch House (Nyarlathotep/Azathoth): standard witch magic, pretty much.

The Whisperer in Darkness (Mi-Go): probably cash for the less important minions. Various arcane secrets, potentially some access to advanced tech. But mainly getting to travel space and time as an immortal cyborg.

The Haunter of the Dark (Nyartlathotep/ the Shining Trapezohedron): mystical secrets and visions, implied to be addictive.

There's a general sense in a lot of the less cult-focused stories that people, and monsters, treat a lot of mythos deities as essentially normal gods. E.g. a guy in The Haunter of the Dark exclaims "Azathoth have mercy! ... Yog-Sothoth save me", at one point; he's not even really a cultist but, hey, you never know.

So what was in it for the cultists in the Lovecraft stories? For your normal God or demon or whatever there's some sort of reward or benefit, or the very least some duty to society (ala the Vestal Virgins). What's in it for you if you're worshipping the Guy Who Barely Knows You Exist

[mugasofer]

[mugasofer]

this duck LOVES pink drink