#and I’d rather be upbeat and postive about it

[kazscrows]

I think this is an absolutely perfect way of putting it. I really really enjoyed season 1 and it already changed some things involving the Crows, but it was still amazing!

[dukeofriven]

Brevity Isn’t My Jam: Musings on Nerd Culture 2017 [An Adjuration for Compassion]

Watching the news flow out of SanDiego Comic Con I am realizing just how much Import Nerd Stuff there is that I used to watch but stopped caring about because it’s mediocre. It feels like 99% of what’s hip and mainstream in nerdom right now is stuff with great visuals, punchy dialogue, and no soul - bonus points for confusing cynicism and violence for mature storytelling. I stopped watching the Marvel Netflix TV shows after Daredevil Season 2 demonstrated that it had a lot to show about violence but nothing to say about it. I walked away from Game of Thrones a long time ago when I realized that great cinematography and great acting don’t make-up for a show whose real themes all end up being bleak, cynical, and rather juvenile - GoT smears a lot of mud on everything, but it’s a simulacrum of realism, not the real thing. Westworld? I enjoyed the first few episodes, but when I went away on a trip and came back the impetus to pick it back up again was gone. I knew what I’d get watching it: some pseudo-serious philosophic musing intercut with bloody violence and titivating nudity that in the end don’t actually mean anything.

It’s not that any of these shows are bad per-se - but they’re not great, either. They’re fine. They’re okay. It feels like the entire scope of Nerdom industries is just... biding it’s time, waiting for something to effect actual change, while everything else just sort of continues on, like Bilbo aging with the ring of power. HBO-esque blood dramas look and feel like this, super hero movies look and feel like that, indie hits all bleed into another. It’s why I watch a lot of cartoon shows - it’s like they’re ten years ahead on finding post-modern deconstructed narratives played-out. They’re not afraid to be sincere in their emotions, they’re not afraid to experiment in truly unusual ways. They’re not afraid to be kind. I struggle a lot with kindness. As an often-bullied, thinks-he’s-so-smart hey-there-faggot sort of kid, sarcasm and irony were my tools of survival, the shows I enjoyed often as sarcastic and ironic as I was - or, like with MST3K, a celebration of heckling itself.* But for irony to have any meaning it has to have some kind of sincerity to bounce off of, just as a deconstruction needs a construction to be a reflection of. What’s GoT a deconstruction of, exactly - Lord of the Rings? Our nearest filmic touchstone is the Jackson movies, which - like GoT’s - were incredibly violent. The biggest difference, besides their postive-versus-cynical tone, is that LOTR has far less female characters, but doesn’t treat them so brutally or disposable. Is that really what we needed in our lives? “Man LOTR was all-right but what it lacked was violence against women, especially sexual violence. And tiddies. I hope someone with an extremely dim view of humanity comes along and rectifies that on TV”** It was hip to be cynical when your reference point for fantasy films was 1985′s Legend and saccharine Disney flickers, but almost every fantasy film since Shrek has felt the need to acknowledge within the text that the conventions of fantasy are unrealistic: every fantasy movie seems to feel the need to reassure its audience that it knows better than to be a fantasy movie. Shrek came out in 2001, which means no teenager alive came of age in a time when animated movies didn’t have someone hanging a lampshade on the conventions of the genre and winking at the camera. In others words, none of them came up in a world experiencing any of those lamp-shaded conventions our cynical, deconstructive media is skewering in the first place. (Also, no one under 20 remembers the merchandizing world that existed pre-Pokémon, which blows my goddamn mind.) What has all that wink-and-a-nod cynicism done to our psyches? Preserved ironic teenaged detachment well into adulthood, certainly, which is possibly the only reason something so ridiculously juvenile as Frank Miller’s take on Batman can be enjoying such a renaissance. My point, which I’ve largely let drift away from me here, is that it is very hard to be kind when your instinct is to be cutting - to get a laugh from the crowd by bringing someone down rather than raise them up. The impulse to wander over into the AvClub and treat everyone to my rapier wit about how their crummy show sure likes stacking up the bodies is a strong one, but what’s that get me? I want to be kinder. I want to be better at it. For the time being if you hit my particular buttons (like defending your right to use noxious fabric softeners that can be smelt a block away and make scent-sensitive people physically ill) I’m going to get riled up and pissy - but I don’t want to be. There’s a Vonnegut quote, good for any occasion 

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.” that I wish was more in circulation. Take a look at the crop of today’s nerdy properties and what binds most of them together is the shared belief that kindness is so rare as to be miraculous. A brief, unexpected respite from the awfulness that is the default human existence is almost unbelievable to the rational mind. Kindness is the exception, not the rule - left to their own devices the people of Westworld will abuse robots with no thought to morality. The Fates in Westros do nothing but punish the hubris of anyone who acts with honourable intentions. Don’t know what is happening on Marvel TV, but it probably involves a lot of slow punching, corrupt politicians, and the most fleeting reprieve from grinding, eternal despair. The real world is awful enough as it is right now without all of our media feeling the need to double-down and reinforce the air of cynicism and disheartenment; nobody finishes an episode of The Walking Dead and feels upbeat about the future. I’m not asking for endlessly cheerful propaganda, but in the bad times our media should reflect the best of us, just as in good times it should check the hubris of gilded tunnel vision. Modern Nerd media has vey little to say about the modern: it merely holds up a mirror to the real world to reflect its worst elements. I get that every day from the news - I’d like my stories to be a little different. I’d like a world where ‘Cruel to Be Kind’ is only a great Nick Lowe song, not a mantra that demands that our only heroes be as morally compromised as our current crop of political leaders. I’m tired of a media landscape that tells me that kindness is a rarity: I want a landscape that repeats the opposite over and over until people stop thinking the former is true and start finding kindness in unexpected places - such as within themselves. The most adult movie ever made has no gore and no brutal violence against women in the name of realism or verisimilitude. It’s called My Dinner With Andre, where two theatre people sit and eat dinner for an hour-and-a-half and talk about the nature of happiness and spirituality. They talk about what it means to be human - and not a single horde of zombies needs to make an appearance for either of them to make their respective points. I don’t need GoT or The Walking Dead to be nothing but people having mature conversations - but I would like to kill the notion that watching people be awful to each other is some kind of profound or meaningful insight. It’s not anything but a choice the show made: the world is not inherently horrible just because it is in Game of Thrones. I’d like to kill the notion that kindness is a unicorn, and that stories are better when compassion is rationed and withheld from the audience (because they would find a surfeit unrealistic.)

If nothing else, I’d like to end the notion that the best way to wind-down after a miserable day is to watch five nominally different TV shows that all have the same story: people are miserable and are capable of nothing but creating more misery.

_______________ *This is not entirely fair: outside of some real atrocious stinkers like Monster-A-Go-Go. MST3K always had an affectionate love for the cheesy movies it was showing; its humour rarely came from a place of malice or cruelty. That is why I prefer it to Rifftrax, which often comes-off as three grumpy old men getting cranky about having to watch a film that has people under the age of sixty in it.

**More than once George R.R. Martin has compared his works to LOTR, and every time has shown a remarkably poor understanding of LOTR, to the point that if you told me he hadn’t engaged with the work since he was fifteen I would nod my head and go ‘yeah that’s obvious.’