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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Star Trek: How Dr. Pulaski Helped The Next Generation Find Its Feet

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This Star Trek article contains minor spoilers for The Next Generation Season 2 and Lower Decks.

If you’ve been watching Star Trek: Lower Decks, then you’ve probably noticed that Dr. T’Ana is clearly based on the notorious Dr. Pulaski from Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s not that Gillian Vigman is trying to channel the performance of Diana Muldaur—because she’s clearly doing her own thing—so much as the entire vibe of Dr. T’Ana is as though our collective opinions about Dr. Pulaski were channeled into a cranky, sentient cat-alien. Pulaski was human, but if you were going to reboot the character as an alien species in Star Trek, everyone would choose to make her a Caitian, or perhaps, the other cat aliens, the Kzinti. (There are a lot of cat aliens in Trek!)

The larger point is simple: Dr. T’Ana is, in some ways, a hilariously exaggerated version of Pulaski. But I’m here to argue that the actual character and impact of Dr. Pulaski are both much more nuanced than anyone remembers. Here’s why Dr. Pulaski was surprisingly pivotal for The Next Generation, and why you should never talk bad about her ever again!

Dr. Pulaski Made Starfleet More Realistic

The story of Gates McFadden being forced to leave TNG for its second season is not a pretty chapter in Trek history. Ideally, it just shouldn’t have happened. But, if we’re only focused on the fiction, the onscreen side-effects oddly created some realism. As Picard tells Wesley in the TNG second season opener, “The Child,” the unpredictability of getting new assignments is just part of what life in Starfleet is all about. The fact that Pulaski is simply assigned to replace Crusher and Crusher takes a job at Starfleet Medical is odd, but in life, these things do happen. People’s jobs change, and other people are brought in to replace them. Khan joked that “we are one big happy fleet,” but the stories of Starfleet are very close to fiction about workplaces. And in this way, the Pulaski transfer was relatable and down-to-Earth.

Dr. Pulaski Made Data Interesting Again

Arguably, Data was TNG’s purest representation of everything that everyone loves about Star Trek. Exploring the human condition through science-fictional means is what Trek is all about. Still, as outrageous as the concept of real humanoid robots are in real life, we tend to take them for granted when it comes to science fiction.

If Data were a real person, and you’d never met a sentient android, it would be mind-blowing to know him. The leap that TNG made with Data wasn’t just to convince us that he was artificial; somehow, that was a given. The idea that Data didn’t want to be thought of as artificial is what made him compelling. But, because the TNG crew all just accepted this right away, you could argue that some of Data’s story potential wasn’t really mined in Season 1.

Pulaski changed all that because unlike the rest of the crew, she didn’t accept the basic idea of Data right away. In her very first episode, “The Child,” Pulaski objects to Data comforting Troi during the birth of her baby, telling Data that Troi doesn’t want the “cold touch of technology.” Naturally, Troi objects and is fine with Data holding her hand while giving birth. In the same episode, Pulaski mispronounces Data’s name as “DA-TAH” instead of “DAY-TAH.” This leads to Data’s classic retort, “one is my name, the other is not.” By making Data stick-up for his basic Data-ness, Pulaski created a foil for the character, which only made the writing for Data stronger as the series went on.

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Some might say the best Data episode ever is “The Measure of a Man,” which occurs during the second season. Although Pulaski is pretty nice to Data in this episode, it’s almost impossible to imagine this episode during a Crusher season. Even as Data accepts the possibility that Maddox may take him away and dismantle me, he quotes Dr. Pulaski when talking to Geordi, saying, “life is rarely fair.” Through her initial opposition to Data, Pulaski helped Data become more human in specific ways the other characters never could. She made Data stick up for himself. She also is the one who went to the holodeck with Data and Geordi to meet Moriarity in “Elementary, Dear Data,” and for that alone, she’s awesome.

Pulaski Was Better For Wesley

The season 2 premiere of The Next Generation, “The Child,” is a wild episode. Based on an unused script for the ill-fated 1970s Trek series Star Trek: Phase II, the story also has to convince the audience of three major changes in the status quo: First, this episode introduces Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) and the basic concept of Ten Forward. Second, this episode introduces Pulaski as the replacement for Dr. Crusher. And third — which everyone seems to forget — this episode also had to figure out what Wesley’s whole deal was now that his mom wasn’t on the Enterprise.

Because Wil Wheaton’s Wesley was such a big part of the ethos of early TNG, it’s also easy to forget how much he became himself in season 2. After “The Child,” Wesley decides to stay on the Enterprise, which formalizes his role as an acting ensign in a way that the first season didn’t. Again, it’s hard to imagine this hitting the same way had his mom still been on the ship that year. Just by not being his actual mother, Pulaski’s presence allowed the character of Wesley to grow and change. No one would say that Wesley in season 1 is better than Wesley in season 2. And that fact is connected to Pulaski.

Pulaski Helped Shake Up The Next Generation

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To be clear, it feels wrong to say that Pulaski should have remained a regular character on The Next Generation. Bringing back Dr. Crusher in season 3 works. The tapestry of TNG is so complicated, that, as Q taught us, pulling at one of these strings could unravel the whole picture. In other words, it’s hard to imagine early TNG shaking out differently than it did. The third season of The Next Generation is clearly the moment where the series becomes the confident and prestigious show we think of today. Season 3 wouldn’t have worked with Pulaski, but it’s possible it needed her to get there.

Just like Tasha dying in season 1 of TNG, Crusher’s departure in season 2 was useful in one: These events let the audience know that no character was safe. People could die. People could leave. And, in season 3, that meant people could get assimilated by the Borg. Pulaski’s presence in season 2 subtly helped push the show into darker and more serious territory. She wasn’t a good replacement for Crusher. The return of Dr. Crusher in season 3 is essential to making TNG what it became. But before that could happen, Pulaski had to arrive and make everyone uncomfortable.

In the Lower Decks Season 2 debut, Mariner joked about how Starfleet officers aren’t supposed to have interpersonal conflict. But, that’s exactly what Pulaski provided to The Next Generation. She was the lighting rod for conflict in the early days of this great series, and imagining its journey without her is impossible. Star Trek: The Next Generation streams on Paramount, Amazon Prime, and Netflix.

The post Star Trek: How Dr. Pulaski Helped The Next Generation Find Its Feet appeared first on Den of Geek.

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thanksjro · 4 years

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Eugenesis Part Two, Scene Six: A Very Large Friend Wakes Up From His Nap

The Autobots are getting slaughtered. Ultra Magnus makes the call for Metroplex to be woken up.

See, Springer’s a classy addict- he only gets high on the name-brand stuff.

Back on Cybertron, Nightbeat’s just as appalled as I am that High Command wants him to bring back Optimus Prime. Prowl’s made this choice because he doesn’t think he has the metaphorical balls to lead in this large of an impending crisis, and that’s not me trying to be funny about it.

You’ve had this job for an hour and you’ve already given up. Have a little self respect, Prowl.

So, here’s the plan: Nightbeat goes back in time to when the Ark was buried under Mt. Hilary on Earth, grabs Optimus, has him lead the cause for a bit, then hits him over the head with a shovel and stuffs him back into the proper time and place once they’re done with him, that way the fabric of reality- which at this point is more of a fishing net with how many holes it’s got punched through it- doesn’t tear. Sounds simple, right?

But Nightbeat brings up a good point:

Optimus needs better friends.

This is where Perceptor brings out the memory-wipe device, which they’re planning to use on Optimus once this whole thing is over. This is an integral part of the plan. Wiping their leader’s memory with an experimental device. Has it been tested? Is this a cruelty-free mind-wiper? We just don’t know.

Nightbeat brings up some very good points, both within the story, and in reference to the meta here. He’s very genre-savvy like that. He isn’t on-board with this at all, especially because with how dangerous things are about to get. Perceptor spits out some science to try and ease his mind, but Nightbeat is having none of it. Prowl attempts to appeal to his more empathetic nature.

You read that right. Prowl.

"Yeah, he’d want to live, but fuck his personal agency in any of this!”

-Prowl Transformers, Eugenesis

They eventually get Nightbeat to agree to the plan, if only to move the plot along. He pulls together a team, and they’ll be heading for the Acid Wastes to use the time-travel rift very soon.

Meanwhile, on the Quintesson warship, Lord Xenon is taking a gander at the teleport, specifically the bodies of a couple of folks who just got back via said teleport and the armor they were wearing to keep from getting torn apart by the process.

I hope that womb-juice is pulp-free. This is just planting the seed, we’ll get back to this plot point later, I suppose.

Back on the ground, Mindwipe’s busy with waking up the big guy, plugging in all the codes and passwords needed to get things rolling.

Mindwipe, sweetie, you’re doing amazing.

Everything’s going to hell- the Autobots are losing ground rapidly, the ground won’t stop quaking, the lower levels of the city are flooding, and there’s still another two-and-a-half minutes to go before Metroplex is up.

He finishes plugging in the codes and BAMFs on out of there, alongside every single other citizen of Autobot City. You don’t want to stick around when the big boy wakes up to kick some tail, it would seem.

Roberts, stop trying to make me want to fuck a city; it isn’t gonna happen, regardless of how good a tan it has.

Metroplex wakes up, pissed. The city explodes, repeatedly, all over, and standing in its wake is the giantest of giant robots.

And General Rodern couldn’t be more pleased.

---

Brief aside, while we’re on this topic:

The Titans are a weird part of the lore for me. They’re sentient, living beings, with the same level of intelligence and individuality as all the other Transformers… and yet they never seem to have any agency. Others are always telling them how to live, how to exist, what they’ll do and how they’ll look. Not just short-term, either- Autobot City’s been established for at least a year in this story. What would the Autobots- hell, what would anyone- do if a Titan just said “no thanks, I’m good”? It’s not like they could really stop them.

I’ve yet to see any of the Transformers media touch on this as a concept. Maybe I’ve missed something, but an entire city just going rogue seems like it’d be a fun story. You could get some mileage out of exploring the moral issues with locking a sentient being within their own body for years while tinier people live inside them. Talk about body horror.

Okay, aside over!

---

Rodern orders for the transformation to begin- what exactly this means hasn’t been established, but I imagine it’s going to be something positively wild. Outside, the troops start dive bombing Metroplex.

That’s friggin’ poetry right there.

Rodern fires everything he’s got at Metroplex, who reacts as if he’s been swarmed by bees. Metroplex, of course, retaliates, and nearly rips the plating off the warship. Rodern tells them to keep going. Rodern may not fully understand just what he’s up against.

While this is going on, we take a look inward, into the depths of Metroplex, to find Wheeljack passed out in his lab. He wakes up to find Centurion and Mainframe hard at work to get the space bridge up and running.

Back outside, the Enslaver transforms into a giant cannon, still floating in the air. It fires and takes Metroplex’s arm off. Good for the Quintessons. Now they just have to not die while the damn thing recharges for nearly a minute.

Wheeljack’s joined in on the space bridge work, and getting generally furious that things aren’t working out perfectly. The bridge eventually gets its act together and shows us a spot on Cybertron. The intent here is to get Prowl’s attention by way of the power surge this whole thing is going to cause, so he can send reinforcements. That’s Wheeljack’s whole plan. Sure hope Prowl isn’t too distracted to notice.

Hey, cannon’s recharged! They shoot Metroplex in the gut. He definitely feels that one. Rodern may actually fully understand just what he’s up against after all.

Wheeljack instructs Metroplex to head for the space bridge. The moment the Titan’s foot touches the portal, another shot is fired and Metroplex snaps in two, his upper half landing on Cybertron. The space bridge cuts off. Metroplex is frickin’ dead. Wheeljack, you plan sucks.

Add him to the tally, I suppose. That’s three characters who have died on-screen, so to speak. Man, now I feel bad. Poor Metroplex.

#transformers #jro #eugenesis #part two #maccadam #Hannzreads #text post #long post #prose writing

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anhed-nia · 5 years

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I LOVE RAVENOUS MORE THAN YOU DO

RAVENOUS is one of my favorite movies of all time. It may not be the prettiest, or the deepest, or the most refined movie or all time, but it is a true original, and one that insinuated itself into my mental DNA from the moment I saw it. It arrived on home video around the time that I was about to leave for college, so it makes a certain amount of sense that it would have such a lasting impact on the rest of my adult life. I was initially attracted to the its excessive violence, its salt-in-the-wound humor, and its style of rustic perversion to which I was well-disposed since THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE first ruined my life as a teenager. But, there is more to RAVENOUS than these broad strokes descriptors, and looking back, it is easy to see how this unusual film catalyzed my ability to read films, and at the risk of being dramatic, my ability to understand myself.

(why does this movie only have awful posters?)

RAVENOUS is the only horror movie I can think of that takes place during the Mexican-American war, an unconventional setting that is the first sign of how truly odd this movie will be. Guy Pearce plays John Boyd, a soldier who is being celebrated for turning the tide of a major battle. The reality is that he survived the fray by hiding under a pile of his countrymen's corpses, bathing in their blood and viscera, until an unexplainable burst of rage drove him to capture the Mexican commanders, garnering him the undeserved mantle of hero. General Slauson (John Spencer) has Boyd's number, though, and ships the coward off to the impossibly remote mountain outpost of Fort Spencer, a sort of depot for undesirables like himself. No sooner has Boyd resigned himself to his fate, than the group's stasis is destroyed by the arrival of a wandering frontiersman (the incomparable Robert Carlyle) who claims to have escaped from a Donner Party-like tragedy. Naturally, their ingratiating guest turns out to be the villain at the heart of his own story, and worse yet, a carrier of the supernatural wendigo virus that rewards cannibalism with virtual immortality. The whole situation quickly devolves into a Darwian competition to sort out the predators from the provisions, seasoned liberally with analogies to Manifest Destiny and American consumerism.

Writer Ted Griffin's prismatic metaphors could be pretty clunky on their own, with cheeky comparisons between cannibalism and communion, and handy food-related quotations from founding father Benjamin Franklin. Happily, Antonia Bird's distinctive directorial style prevents RAVENOUS from degenerating into a broad-side-of-the-barn satire of American history. Griffin's overly familiar arguments act as stabilizing road signs, as the viewer navigates the otherwise hostile and alien territory explored by Bird. In the broadest sense, RAVENOUS is a movie about bodies out of control: cravings and terrors that annihilate one's self-control, that erode one's dignity, that blend repulsion and eroticism into a noxious but irresistible brew. The body wages war on the personality, the morals, the institutional rank and decoration; it wages war on other bodies, and ultimately on itself. Griffin the cultural critic has his place here, but it is Antonia Bird's unique understanding of frailty and hysteria that makes this movie so affecting.

RAVENOUS begins with a gloriously shocking opener that joins pornographic closeups of the celebratory steak served at Boyd's promotional dinner, with Boyd vomiting violently outside of the dining hall. The body is turned inside out right away in this movie, and this stunt is immediately followed by a similarly disorienting trick turned by the film's main theme. The experimental score, a collaboration between the great Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn from Blur, establishes its power with a composition that is written in 6/7 time, creating a rhythm that is very difficult to follow for the average ear. Thus the viewer is first nauseated by the imagery, then disoriented by the sound, and it is in this unsettled state that one remains for the rest of the film.

There are a number of such bizarre formal techniques to discuss, and they are well matched by Bird's management of her cast. Even for a horror film, RAVENOUS is an extremely physical movie. The terminally guilty Boyd seems to be on the verge of literal implosion; the squirrelly and barely verbal religious fanatic Toffler (Jeremy Davies) scrambles around breathlessly at a pace that puts him in danger of killing himself (which he finally nearly does); the only "real" soldier in the bunch, the nightmarishly aryan Private Reich (Neal McDonough), is first seen screaming half-submerged in a frigid mountain stream, suggesting that even the the conventional trappings of heroism are purely pathological here. Other characters are chronically drunk or high, struggling just to stay awake or walk a straight line. The radical loss of identity in which the organism transforms from a sentient being, into stew in a cauldron, almost seems like a natural eventuality of the abjection and loss of control suffered by everyone at Fort Spencer.

This moral and physical degeneracy, that is the status quo with Boyd and his cohorts, eventually contaminates the mind as well. When I first saw RAVENOUS, I was entirely ignorant of real artistry in film, and whether I knew it or not, my malnourished brain was in dire need of deviance from Hollywood norms of beauty and power. At that time, I was mainly accustomed to two approaches to human behavior in films: First, the James Bond model, in which characters only behave as if they have perfect foresight and complete control of their emotions and deliberation even in the face of catastrophe. I use "James Bond" as the most recognizable face of this hyperrationalism, but this approach pervades most mainstream films involving any kind of peril. How many times have you, the reader, had to sit through a screening in which some know-it-all picks apart the decisions and reactions of every character, as if it were reasonable to expect any person on either side of the screen to behave with robotic pragmatism regardless of their circumstances? But people do expect this from fictional protagonists on the whole. The second approach that I want to identify is mainly relegated to slasher movies; According to this model, characters are permitted to make the stupidest possible choices at every juncture, because the audience has a preexisting assumption that these victims will be sacrificed on the altar of our prudish morals, or simply for the vicarious enjoyment of the power wielded by a Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers. What we rarely see in the mainstream, outside of the comedy genre, is shock, mania, hysteria, the loss of one's faculties that comes when one experiences a violent divorce from accepted reality.

Other than the aforementioned TEXAS CHAIN SAW, RAVENOUS was the first movie I had ever seen that addressed the neurological reality of trauma. Boyd's uncontrollable vomiting at the very beginning of the film is just a taste of Antonia Bird's mastery of this subject. She has ample opportunity to address this with her cast when the interloping cannibal "survivor" Colqhoun, first leads the unsuspecting Fort Spencer crew to the cave where he says the "real" cannibal is hiding out. Upon their arrival, Colqhoun throws himself into an alarming fugue state, apparently reliving the trauma of the nightmare from which he fled. He pants and gasps, smirks and grimaces, claws at the air and at the earth, as if to bury himself, effectively scaring the shit out of everybody. After he reveals his true intentions and massacres most of the crew before chasing Boyd and Reich off the edge of a cliff, another interesting neurological event transpires. At the bottom of the hole into which they have plummeted, with Reich's last spasm of life, he clamps his fingers around Boyd's throat until his maniacal laughter turns into a death rattle. An even finer example comes after Boyd has returned to camp, having shamefully mended his wounds by dining on Reich's corpse as per the wendigo myth. Still recuperating, Boyd greets the arriving officers who are escorting the Fort's replacement commander--who turns out to be Colqhoun, now dressed neatly as the "Colonel Ives" on whom he blamed the cannibalistic murders of his fellow frontiersman. At the sight of this shocking enemy, Boyd pivots wildly and slams face first into the nearest wall, crumbling like a swatted insect on the floor and shaking uncontrollably.

These are some of the principle moments that won RAVENOUS my heart, and that really let me know what I was searching for in films. In fact, this movie was so formative for me that it led to a sort of impromptu ritual of breaking with my childhood. As with all cultists, my desperation to rope in everybody I knew intensified along with my obsession. I couldn't imagine that anybody would reject this beautiful and fabulously unusual work of art. I pulled a lot of wins, but I was in for a rude awakening where it should have counted. I refer to my "best friend" and "high school sweetheart" of about ten years, a guy who dominated my cultural life for almost as long as we were pals, since he was slightly smarter and had slightly better taste than our high school peers, but very little interest in having his mind expanded, as I eventually realized. When I showed him my new favorite movie of all time, I was brutally disappointed by his scoffing at every scene that I considered to be the movie's crowning accomplishments. He scrunched up his face and rejected Reich's murderous dying breath as "stupid" and "fucked up" and "making no sense". Today I'm not sure how hard I tried to explain that, look, we're talking about a character who is on the brink of death, whose final moments were in especially ugly combat, and who is really extremely brain damaged; more to the point, he really hates Boyd, the coward, and may have tried to kill him at some point even if he were fully possessed of his faculties. I mean, we're finally seeing something psychiatrically real here...aren't we? I got the same snotty dismissal from my viewing companion when Boyd went into shock at the sight of Ives--shock, a real acknowledged medical condition--and really during any scene that he considered too awkward and bizarre to be "cool" and heroic. It was at that very moment that I knew we wouldn't be friends for much longer, and we actually fell out of touch a few years later.

With that personal digression out of the way, though, I'd like to return to the cave (don't I always?) to discuss how Antonia Bird, her DP Anthony B. Richmond, and her editorial team work together to keep the audience in more or less the same state of discomfort and disorientation as the characters. RAVENOUS was also the first movie that taught me how to interpret the visual grammar of film, since I watched it so often that, eventually, I couldn't miss what was going on. Bird and co. have a way of distorting and compressing space that prevents the viewer from ever really knowing where you are. When the crew arrives at the low, carbon black mouth of the cave, there is a sense that it couldn't possibly be as deep as Colqhoun's story suggests (and in practical reality, it isn't). When Boyd and Reich creep inside, the tunnel plunges promptly into a weird homey sublevel where Colqhoun had been subsisting on his fellow travelers. This is sort of weird, but not as weird as what happens outside. When Colqhoun plunges into his fugue state, we see in it a sweaty, spittle-flecked closeup. His behavior spooks Toffler, who in his own closeup cowers against his commanding officer Colonel Hart (Jeffrey Jones, playing essentially the same character as in Deadwood). Colqhoun appears to stalk closer and closer to the camera, but how close is he to Toffler and Hart? We have no idea, until he circles back to the pit he just dug and then lunges through the air to plant a knife in Hart's abdomen, gutting him. Then, when Boyd and Reich give chase, there is a moment where Reich stares into the camera, giving Boyd an order. Boyd looks shyly into the camera before glancing off, suggesting that he flinches away from Reich's hateful gaze--but in the next shot, we see that Boyd is actually behind Reich, looking in a completely different direction. Part of me suspects that Bird and her crew were making the most of the small and somewhat sparse-looking patch of woods that they had for this scene, but it gets more interesting later on. As Colquhoun-now-Ives surreptitiously prepares a human stew back at camp, the permanently drunk Major Knox (Stephen Spinella, who seems determined to turn RAVENOUS into a balls-out comedy) shouts down the hysterical Boyd--all in closeup, so where are they? As it turns out, Ives is in one building, Knox stands in a passageway outside the door, and Boyd sits shackled in a separate building in the distant background. Finally, in Boyd's epic showdown with Ives, there is a fascinating moment in which Boyd saunters into the room, gazing staunchly ahead, ready to kill. Cut to Ives standing in front of a roaring fire, spinning neatly to face his adversary--but when we cut back to Boyd, we see that he is completely alone in the space. Shortly, Ives plunges through the ceiling behind him; they were never even on the same floor. RAVENOUS consistently leaves the viewer as disoriented and untethered as its characters are emotionally.

This battle itself harkens back to the movie's crucial focus on the often degrading and humiliating experience of piloting a human body. In both the James Bond and slasher movie models of movie behavior that I previously discussed, a climactic showdown should be fast-paced, furious, with impressive feats of athleticism by the combatants. Not so in RAVENOUS. The final scene is accompanied by an eight-and-a-half minute minimalist trudge through hell by Nyman and Albarn that never threatens to raise your blood pressure with stings or arias. The music perfectly matches this sluggish fight between two men whose bodies have been repeatedly destroyed and recreated. Their weapons are a letter opener, a meat cleaver, a pretty substantial log, and finally, a massive bear trap. The conflict is no clash of the titans, no beautiful realization of the full potential of male aggression. It is gruesome, tragic, and in some way, romantic.

I would be remiss if I failed to dig in to the eroticism of this movie. Like all vampire movies, there is a virgin and a seducer, a victim who calls their lack of worldliness dignity, and a predator who sees chastity as a shameful waste of life. RAVENOUS is one of at least three movies that Antonia Bird made about the unique relationships between men in traditionally male situations. Her heist movie FACE has been compared to HEAT, though I am really thinking of the incendiary drama PRIEST. In this, her impressive directorial debut, a young man of the cloth struggles with the disturbing intrusion of sex into his chaste life, be it in the lives of deviant clergyman, or abused child parishioners, or in his own struggle with homosexuality. Robert Carlyle plays the unhappy lover left out in the cold, drifting down the street on a skateboard like a hovering ghost, trying to convince the eponymous character that love is greater than its stingy biblical proscription. While there are no literal love scenes in RAVENOUS, it takes place in a similar world, made up almost only of men--men who are brothers in arms, who look after each other's souls and bodies, and who even consume each other's bodies, who gain strength from one another by breaking the ultimate taboo. The closing image, of Boyd and Ives pinned chest to chest by the bear trap, bleeding to death in each other's arms, remains for me one of the tenderest images in all of horror cinema.

I would like to close by asserting that Bird's deft exploration of male sensitivity is nowhere more powerful than in her direction of David Arquette, the unlikely shining star of RAVENOUS. The often intolerably wacky comedic actor plays Private Cleaves, an absolute reject from society who (barely) functions as the help around Fort Spencer. He and George (Joseph Runningfox), one of two Native American appendages to the crew, are consistently high out of their minds, which may make them look like fools, but it also designates them as being the most wisely in touch with the genuinely hopelessness of their situation. When George is slaughtered by Colqhoun, Cleaves is left all alone tending the Fort, and he has a few scenes of powerful vulnerability before his inevitable demise. In between two key plot beats, we find Cleaves and George's sister Martha (the quietly wonderful Sheila Tousey) standing together in the snowy yard, observing the new commanding officer's arrival. What should be a forgettably dry piece of exposition concludes with Cleaves instinctively turning to Martha and stroking her hair, which causes both of them to dissolve in tears. In an adjacent scene, Boyd watches through the window as the agonizingly bereaved Cleaves chops wood in the yard, alone. Cleaves, certainly intoxicated, weaves and sweats, giggling in an unnervingly forced manner to try to resurrect the perpetual good time that he once enjoyed with his murdered best friend. The scene dissolves into a fantasy in which Boyd gives in to his mounting cannibalistic urges and eviscerates Cleaves--throughout which Cleaves laughs and laughs with escalating insanity. It is difficult to convey the raw force of the sequence in words, so I will just say this: Early this year, I dared to point out that among the many strange virtues of STARSHIP TROOPERS is the fact that terminal screwball Jake Busey is so warm, so funny, and so emotionally available in that movie that it almost throws off the deliberately boneheaded artificiality of the entire rest of the cast. So, I would just like to conclude that, if your movie involves somebody from EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS or Shasta McNasty, and you get that person to provide you with one of the most sensitive performances in the whole show, you're probably doing something right.

#blogtober #horror #cannibal #cannibalism #wendigo #vampire #antonia bird #robert carlyle #guy pearce #david arquette #stephen spinella #neal mcdonough #john spencer #ted griffin #jeffrey jones #jeremy davies #ravenous

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gunterfan1992 · 6 years

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Episode Review: ‘Come Along with Me’ (S10E13-16)

Airdate: September 3, 2018

Story by: Ashley Burch, Kent Osborne, Adam Muto, Jack Pendarvis, Julia Pott, Pendleton Ward & Steve Wolfhard

Storyboarded by: Tom Herpich, Steve Wolfhard, Seo Kim, Somvilay Xayaphone, Hanna K. Nyström, Aleks Sennwald, Sam Alden & Graham Falk

Directed by: Cole Sanchez & Diana Lafyatis (supervising), Sandra Lee (art)

In August of 2012, I had just moved into a university dormitory to begin my second year as an undergraduate. On one of the last days of the month (the date escapes me), I was relaxing in the hall recreation room with my roommate. To my left sat another friend, watching something intently on his laptop.

His focus was remarkable, and so I was intrigued. “What are you watching?” I asked.

He glanced over and responded, “Adventure Time!”

I’d heard of the show, and seen a few clips. At the time, I was taken aback by its combination of high brow and low brow sensibilities. But I saw how much joy it gave my friend, I put down my guard and decided to give it a watch.

He tilted the screen towards my face, and what was I greeted to? Why a geometric space-god with a flaming blue sword attacking a green individual in a bright yellow jacket. Suddenly, a boy and his dog were in the picture. What was going on?

As it turns out, I was watching season four’s “Sons of Mars”, one of the show’s wackiest episodes. In time, I was enthralled by the bright colors and the silly jokes. There was Abraham Lincoln. There was death. By the end of it, I was won over.

I still think fondly of that day (as readers of this blog might be able to attest), for it was then that I was introduced to my favorite show, Adventure Time.

For years, it seemed like Adventure Time was just an omnipresent facet of popular culture. From t-shirts to Happy Meal toys, Finn and Jake were everyone, blending into what Marshall McLuhan would call the “beaten paths of impercience.” When we all learned that the show was ending in late 2016, it was sad, but because there were dozens of episodes left to air, this reality never really hit me.

But this week, it finally hit me. The end was nigh.

At 5 pm today, I sat nervously on my couch as the intro started, and we were off to the races.

The episode opens 1000 years after the lives of Finn and Jake. We are greeted to two new heroes: Shermy (voiced by Sean Giambrone) and Beth (voiced by Willows Smith). The two are heavily implied to be Finn and Jake reincarnated, and the latter is likely a descendant of Jake himself. After an encounter with the Prizeball Guardian (last seen in “Grabyles 1000+”), the two discover Finn’s robot-arm. They decide to journey to Mount Cragdor (where the Enchiridion was once kept) to find the all-knowing King of Ooo.

Once our new heroes make the journey and reach the top of the mountain, we the audience learn that the King of Ooo is not our favorite charlatan, but rather BMO. After Shermy and Beth present our little robot with Finn’s arm, BMO begins to tell the story of the “Great Gum War”:

1000 years prior (that is, during the show’s normal timeline), Princess Bubblegum and her Uncle Gumbald had each amassed armies to take one another down. Just before the battles are to commence, Finn devises a plan to stop any blood shed: He calls one last meeting between the Candy Kingdom and Gumbaldia, and then, using the magic, nightmare-inducing potion given to him by Nightmare Princesss in “Orb”, he knocks everyone into a subconscious world, where he hopes that they will make nice.

Everything goes a bit haywire, but in the end, Bubblegum and Gumbald realize that their is no real reason for them to fight one another: they each want different things, and are rightfully ticked off at one another, but through dialogue they can likely work things out. Finn and Fern, too, realize that they share the exact same fears that they have locked in their collective “Vault”. Putting aside their differences, they team up and kill the grass-curse spider that has held Fern a prisoner for so long.

At this point, our heroes (and villains) wake up and decide to make amends. Gumbald, however, is tripped by Aunt Lolly, and after being splashed with dum-dum juice, reverts back to Punchy. Lolly, however, vows to maintain the peace with the Candy Kingdom.

Just then, King Man crashes out of the sky and reveals that he, Betty, and an unconscious Maja donked up in a major way. He and Betty were trying to use magic to summon the primordial space demon/god Golb so as to undo the magic of the Ice King’s crown. However, their magic was too effective, and they accidentally summoned Golb to this plane of existence.

Golb begins to use his chaos magic, mutating candy kingdom and Gumbaldia citizens alike into grotesque monsters. Ice King is summoned by King Man and told to try and stop Betty from completing her ritual, but in the commotion (which sees Maja literally explode) they, along with Finn, are accidentally swallowed by Golb, where they start to get digested.

Things start to go downhill fast. Golb’s monsters are extremely effectively, and decimate Bubblegum’s forces and those of her ragtag allies. As Bubblegum is standing on a rock, one of the Golb-monsters lunges at her and seemingly crushes her!

Marceline turns around and seeing the death of her past paramour, loses it. Unleashing both the beast and magic girl inside her, our favorite vampire turns into the Dark Cloud, last seen in Stakes and absolutely wails on the Golb-monster, tearing it to bits. She is absolutely furious that her best friend has been smooshed.

But luckily, it turns out that Bubblegum’s advanced battle armor had a handy shield, and she was saved from any danger. Marceline is overjoyed, and flies into the candy monarch’s armies, weeping tears of joy. The two hug.

And then comes the Bubbline kiss.

As Marceline and Bubblegum were holding each other close after the latter was very nearly squished, I knew it was now or never.

I was on the edge of my seat, as a tearful Marceline tells PB: “Even back when we weren’t talking, I was so afraid that something bad would happen to you and I wouldn’t be there to protect you and... I don’t want to lose you again!”

There’s some cute back and forth, and then the two quietly, effortlessly kiss.

The debate online as to whether or not the two were in a relationship has raged on- and offline since “What Was Missing” first aired years ago. As the two’s friendship evolved over the years, I came to believe that a romantic relationship was the next logical step for both the characters and the show itself to explore. Marceline and Bubblegum are unique in that they are two strong, intelligent, and emotionally complex female characters who often spend time exclusively with each other; the two ace the Bechdel test, a fairly rare occurrence in modern media.

It’s a bummer that the show waited until the very end of the series to canonize their relationship, but perhaps that makes it all the more rewarding? We have worked towards this culmination, and now we have a fully-acknowledged lesbian relationship between two major cartoon characters! How ground-breaking! Furthermore, regardless of when this canonization happened, the confirmation that Marceline and Bubblegum are “more than just friends” will inevitably help to undo some of the erasure that queer communities have faced since the dawn of media (if not time).

To sum up my feelings, let me just leave you with a (heavily) modified quote from Virginia Woolf:

“‘Marceline liked Bubblegum...’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes half-demon vampires do like sentient pieces of Bubblegum.”

(Of course, I am curious as to what their future holds. We seem them together snuggling in the epilogue, but they are not around one thousand years in the future. This is, honestly, the biggest question that will bug me about the finale!)

Despite taking a literal pounding from Marceline, Golb’s evil creatures pull themselves back together and march towards the Tree Fort. Jake gives chase, but is not able to reach them in time: they smash Finn and Jake’s beloved home, and seriously injure poor BMO.

Jake is beside himself! His house is gone! But then, BMO comes over to him, and lovingly calms him down. BMO points out that Finn and Jake have long been a parent to the little robot, and now it is time for BMO to be the parent. And then, BMO begins to sing a tune “for his son Jake”, entitled “Time Adventure”.

"Time Adventure", written by storyboard artist extraordinaire Rebecca Sugar herself, encapsulates the best of the series: it's sad but uplifting. Melodic but rough-around-the-edges. It celebrates the wonders of life while also admitting that we can't really see all there is to it. Some people online criticized it for being too obvious (yes, the song’s title is just a flipping of the show's title), but in some way, I find that it's the most poetic and philosophical thing that its ever done.

When I was 11, I had my first real panic attack. I was out with my family when I was struck by a thought that has not left my head since: I'm going to die. Not that I can die, or that death might hurt. No. I am going. to. die; presumably, my consciousness will disconnect and I will not exist. I want to believe in an afterlife, but it’s an idea that seems oh so very hard to accept when faced with what we know about nature (but that’s a whole ‘nother discussion). These revelations horrified me, and it has taken years to really process what death actually means—and I’m still not there. None of us really are.

But as I’ve aged, I've been comforted by some rather Stoic ideas, like the idea that what will be will be and we should not stress about things that we simply cannot change. I also like the idea that we are all part of the cosmos, and while we will die, we don’t cease to exist: we just merge back into where we came from.

These musings are adjacent to another comforting idea: the fourth-dimensional view of time that BMO sings about:

Time is an illusion That helps things make sense So we're always living In the present tense ... Singing, will happen Happening happened [...] And will happen Again and again 'Cause you and I will always be back then

It’s true. Perhaps my “arrow-of-time consciousness” will be blasted into nothingness once I die, but I’m not ceasing to be. I eternally am. What happened is happening will happen. “Time is an illusion/That helps things make sense.” While this idea might not extinguish a fear of death, it’s a nice thought. And just like Adventure Time, when you combine enough nice thoughts, you often get something beautiful.

And beauty is all that was really needed for our heroes. It turns out that Golb is a creature of chaos, meaning that the only weapon that the citizens of Ooo can effectively use is concordance—harmony in music. It might seem a little silly that “beating the baddie with music” is how Golb’s minions are defeated, but considering the sort of magical role that music has played in the show, it’s not too much of the stretch. It also remains me of how the show used (and subverted) “defeating a baddie with heart” to great effect did in Stakes.

BMO (who hilariously declares, “My art is a weapon!”) is joined by Marceline and Bubblegum, and soon by Jake and the rest of the crew. Their combined harmonizing weakens Golb, allowing Finn and Simon to escape from his belly. However, Betty decides to remain behind. She realizes that the singing has also reset the ice crown’s phantasmal magic. Putting it on, she wishes for the power to ensure Simon’s safety, which entails her transforming (in a stunning sequence that IndieWire writer Eric Kohn refers to as “straight out of Don Hertzfeldt”) into Golb him(her?)self. Golb promptly leaves this reality, dropping the crown onto the ground. Gunter grabs it, and—despite Jake’s warnings that the naughty penguin will wish to become Orgalorg once again—Gunter merely wishes to turn into the Ice King (or, “Ice Thing”).

Finn and Jake return to the ruins of their tree fort, where they plant Fern’s seed. A new tree immediately sprouts from the ground, with the Finnsword embedded within it. Bubblegum arrives on the scene and thanks Finn for directly disobeying her. She gives him an appreciative kiss on the cheek and then muses that he is getting taller.

We cut back to Ooo 1000+, where BMO wraps up the story. Shermy and Beth still have questions (just like the audience!) about ‘Phil’ and Jake, and Marceline and Bubblegum. BMO shrugs these questions off, saying, “You know, they kept living their lives.”

Shermy and Beth set out to find the “Ferntree” to verify BMO’s story; they eventually realize that the large tree reaching up to the heavens near their stomping grounds is almost certainly it.

We cut back to Finn and Jake, who are sitting around the Music Hole from the episode of the same name. The hole tells our heroes that she has a new song for them, and she begins to sing “Come Along with Me” (which every Adventure Time fan knows is the show’s closing number).

While the Music Hole sings, we see Shermy and Beth climb to the top of the tree. We are also greeted to a montage of what happened to all our friends in Ooo:

Lumpy Space Princess is crowned a bonafide princess (or perhaps even a queen)

Ice Thing and Turtle Princess get married

TV becomes a private detection (just like his grandparents!)

Sweet Pea graduates from school and eventually becomes a super-huge hero, who carries Finn's Nightosphere-sword

Aunt Lolly and Bubblegum seemingly make up and learn to love each other as family members

Lemongrab gets one of Jermaine’s paintings to hang above his bed, which brings him peace

BMO blasts Moe's harddrive into space with the help of Banana Man

Flame Princess and NETPR get popular and perform at Hamburger Hills Cemetery to a huge crowd

Magic Man is the happy King of Mars

Simon spends quality time with Marceline and Bubblegum, and seems to try and summon Betty back using Prismo’s wish magic (sadly, it doesn’t work)

Marceline and Bubblegum, meanwhile, are shown snuggling on the couch in the former’s house; it is implied that they are raising Peppermint Butler, who once again is showing an interest in the dark arts

Humans return to Ooo, and Finn is likely reunited with his (digital mother)

We also see what the Jiggler, Tiffany, the Crabbit, Susan Strong/Kara and Freida, the Candy Kingdom citizens, Tree Trunks and Lemonhope are up to

The episode ends with Shermy and Beth finding the Finnsword in the Ferntree. After Beth pulls the sword from the (metaphorical) stone, Shermy holds it up, just like the show’s title card.

So now let’s talk about what worked and what didn’t. The last half of the finale, if I do say so, was wonderful. Nothing to complain about here: we got arc resolutions, emotionally touching moments, and a nice sense of closure. In regards to this latter point, I specifically like how the show gave use an ending but emphasized that this finale was not really the full-stop end of the characters that we know and love—it was just the end of the story that we’re privy to. As BMO says, everyone kept living their lives and the world kept on spinning. That’s a very nice way to end a show like this, and it feeds into the existential ideals of Adventure Time: there is no grand, overarching story that has to have some big punctuation at the end. Finn and Jake are heroes, but long after they’re gone, the world will still be here, and there will be other great heroes to take their place.

With all this said, I must admit that the finale’s first half is something of a missed opportunity. Opening with Shermy and Beth was a totally inspired move (and the new intro is gorgeously animated, courtesy of Science SARU Studios), but I believe the show lingered on their introduction for just a little too long. Likewise, the weird trippy nightmare portion of the finale was about 15 minutes too long. We did not really need 1/4 of the episode to be devoted to wacky dream imagery that both “King Worm” and “Orb” did more effectively. And given that the show chose to linger on these sections—sections that, in the grand scheme of things, are not super essential—the final portions of the episode came across as a bit rushed. The storylines are all satisfying, but it would’ve been nice if we had gotten a little bit more focus on Betty, Simon, and Finn, or Simon and Marceline, rather than Bubblegum and Gumbald’s wacky nightmares.

And speaking of Gumbald, his ending was a total cop-out. I’m not too torn up about this, given that he was never the main baddie in this episode (that was Golb), but his deciding to make peace and then accidentally reverting to Punchy was contrived and anticlimactic. To go back to a criticism I had of “Gumbaldia”, if the show had been given just a little more time to flesh his character and motivations out, I think his role in the finale would’ve been much better served.

But like I said, I wasn’t too torn up about this, because the main focus of this episode was on Golb and the horrors that such a being could unleash upon Ooo. And the show did this wonderfully. Indeed, it was quite exciting that the show finally had a villain that Finn couldn’t just punch a lot until it died (remember, he beat the Lich this way). Golb was, arguably, invincible. It was only the extremely broken magic of the ice crown could do anything.

Speaking of satisfying, “Come Along With Me” also gives Fern an excellent conclusion. The poor grass-doppelgänger was never evil, just confused. By finally coming to terms with his existential crisis of a life, he and Finn were able to patch things up. Sadly, this came at the expense of his dying (the scene in which Finn and Fern kill the grass-curse spider was quite fun). But even in death, there is life, and Fern’s demise allows a new tree to replace the old tree fort. How sweet is that?

Finn coming to terms with his disability was also a nice touch. As I mentioned in my review of Islands, Adventure Time seems to have a somewhat pessimistic view of technology. With this episode, Finn loses his robot arm once and for all, and instead of having PB build him a new one or dabbling in arm-magicks, he decides to let it all be. This is a very important lesson for the show to emphasize. Finn is still Finn with or without his arm. By constantly trying to ‘fix’ himself, Finn was trying to fill a hole that didn’t need to be filled. After experiencing all this Golb biz, it seems that Finn has come to terms with his essence and who he is as a person. And arm or no arm, he is still Finn.

But as satisfying as I found the episode to be overall, I still have some lingering questions! What happened to the Candy Kingdom that resulted in it getting totally razed in the future? Why was the Prizeball Guardian built? What happened to Marceline and Bubblegum, given that they, in their own ways, can evade death in various ways? These of course are questions that will likely never be answered, and they certainly can be filled in in the minds of fans, but these quandaries are probably going to bother me for awhile! (Heck, I just want to know what Marceline and Bubblegum’s future looks like: I don’t really care too much about that other jazz!)

As I write this, I’m both happy and heartbroken: I’m happy because my favorite show of all time has just aired perhaps the most satisfying finale that I have ever seen. I’m heartbroken because the story is now over.

But hold on.

Like BMO and Co. sing in “Time Adventure”, just because the story is over from my point of view does not mean it has slipped away into the ether of oblivion.

It’s comforting to think that in the fourth-dimensional view of existence, I still am in that rec room with my friends, watching “Sons of Mars” for the first time. In a way, I’m eternally laughing and smiling at the jokes. I’m eternally still realizing what a wonderful program Adventure Time really is.

And in that way, it’s true what they say: the fun will never end.

Final Grade:

Season Grade: Were this a standard season, I would probably have been a little harder on it. The Gum War, having been developed two or so episodes, really came out of nowhere and needed more time to be properly developed. It also seems a little odd that the series finale is at least partially focused on an antagonist who was only introduced this season. But these issues were not the fault of the production staff; they were problems with the show being cancelled by the network and the staff having to tidy-up everything before it was all over. Muto et al. honestly did the best they can with the hands they were dealt. And make no mistake, the result is pretty good, even if things are rushed. Yes, there is a lot to love about season 10. It’s got humor and heart, action and adventure, and plenty of romance! It’s not my favorite season by any means (that’s a tie between season 4 and 7), but its episodes are definitely in the upper-tier of the series, as far as quality goes.

Series Grade: Do I even need to say this?

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horsepriest · 5 years

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Hirudian Empire History

Basically, all-natural Hirudians (so without the parasite) are kinda gangly humanoids that could fit in well enough with humans. They come in a range of colourations, similar to the range present in humans.

They discovered interstellar travel earlier than most other cultures but did not make many waves at first (unlike humans). They originally sat back and watched how the universe lives and puzzled over how to deal with the Others (anti-matter beings that are destructive to everything around them, they’ll get further information in the future).

Eventually, they discovered a planet of purely mechanical lifeforms (the planet is now known as Hirud). Plant-like structures were sophisticated solar arrays and mineral processors, fish-like creatures swam through the natural ethanol and processed it into more useful materials, and birds ate the fish and plants to process it into even better and more useful things. A whole ecosystem of mechanical beasts had evolved on this planet.

The Hirudians were fascinated, these creatures could adapt on-demand to whatever problem came up. If a beak could not break a shell, then replace the beak with a vice, if a vice breaks your shell, convert the material into larger jaws to eat the other bot faster than they could eat you. At first, it seemed that there were no sentient/sapient life forms anywhere.

Also at first, the water and carbon dioxide brought along in the Hirudian's breath caused these creatures to begin to rust and suffer.

Naturally, these explorers tried to help and quickly deduced that the beings had no protection against water, but also that the species were adapting to it. Structures resembling cooling systems had started to develop on the creatures, biting mouthparts started converting to thin needles and scalpel-like blades. The creatures grew aggressive towards the research team, tearing one of them to shreds and integrating their materials into themselves.

The survivors fled underground to save themselves from the solar-powered beasts, but in the darkness another, far more intelligent threat lurked. The sentient robots underground were listening to the radio chatter above and to the constant chatter of the plants, birds, and fish about these strange creatures and their red water, so they adapted and waited. Their initial adaption resembles a beautiful white sarcophagus with a mask-like face, perfectly capable of speech in the darkness and strange enough to draw in the curious. They promised impossible things, eternal life, full of happiness and contentment and free from fear.

As soon as the researchers drew close, it opened and dragged them inside of itself. The researchers returned to their vessel but changed. They did not move quite right, whole sections of their body replaced with excessively advanced robotics that no one had ever seen before and they would go dormant as soon as the light level dropped below twilight. They spoke of a new era of prosperity and freedom. Where some could rise above and live eternally, with little need for things like food or water. Death, dismemberment were trifling things once liberated, body parts could be regrown and once the cities are built there minds were not tied to the physical being. Whether people wanted it to or not, the parasite spread bringing more to the cause. But as more organic beings caught it, the less power the mechanical beings could hold over all of them. It also brought along the problem of needing organic beings to feed off of, as blood carries all kinds of good raw materials mechanical beings need (like copper and iron) Their culture flourished, but as a result, a caste system developed.

Those that refused the parasite were trodden underfoot of those that have it and the Hirudians started to invade other planets to harvest them for soldiers, servants, and blood cattle. A part of the enslavement is liberation utilizing lesser forms of the parasite as other species are not as prepared to fight off the mechanical being's influence as the Hirudians are. Their earlier explorations set them as prime invaders, they already knew of tons of great places for materials and possible "voluntary recruits" are. Delphtea was hit hard, huge swathes of Vacconsians had been either captured and converted or outright slaughtered, leaving the native population in ruins. But humans/humanoids are also popular captures as their reasonably personable and Hirudian looks makes them for great night patrols in citizen districts (they do not require the sunlight nearly as much as the Hirudian elite do now.) One little quirk about the elite is that the entire planet is covered by the parasite, which is why it all looks clean, cultivated, and mechanical. The elite can literally take control of everything around them to do mundane tasks, even the “liberated”. It makes it difficult for the "liberated" to escape, but it sure is possible.

Their outposts on other planets are the same, overly clean and pristine metal, glass, and stone machine work that can be controlled by the elite. There is also a sect where the parasite learned to use bone instead of metal, resulting in a horrifying but also really cool version of the elite and the "liberated" They're basically bone-based cyborgs.

#//aylanhistory #//horsecanon #//((Some of the terms I need to think of more clear things for #but basically the process of liberation is a form of enslavement to the parasite #the Hirudians specifically got good at resisting it and became equal with it.#It's a mutually beneficial symbiosis))

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howtohero · 6 years

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#091 Gestalt Consciousness

Some superheroes are more than the sum of their parts. They’re a bunch of robots glued together, they’re people inhabited by ghosts or the consciousness of their high school science teachers, they’re three kids stacked on each other’s shoulders wearing a trench coat. These guys are what happens when people don’t follow the “one person per teleport chamber” rule or when two guys with healing factors accidentally merge with each other after they both get hacked to pieces by Knife-Man, the man who is made entirely out of healing-factor-possessing-heroes-hacking-knives. They’ve got more minds or personalities than they outwardly appear to have. They’re the heroes with gestalt consciousnesses (“gestalt” is a German word and “consciousnesses” isn’t a word at all because clearly this is not a circumstance the English language was adequately prepared for).

For starters, if you’re here reading this post because you’ve got your gym teacher living in your brain or you and your buddies are the limbs of some super robot then I highly recommend you go read our post on team-ups first. If you’re just reading this post because it popped up on your dashboard or this is what you were up to during an archive trawl or a handy link brought you here, then you should also go back and read the post on team-ups because I like to think there’s something in there for everyone (except for you Professor Paleontologist, nobody wants to team-up with you). Being able to function as a team is especially important for gestalts because if the base components of the gestalt can’t work together than guess what, you’re not doing anything. Or at least, in most cases you’re not doing anything. In some cases, where different people form different, discrete, parts of the larger whole it might transpire that when the different limbs or parts disagree they can retain some degree of autonomy and do what they want, to some extent. Just bear in mind that they’d still be attached to four or five other guys and might find it difficult to really go off and do their own thing without detaching from the core whole.

But some gestalt personalities don’t have the luxury of being able to separate from the other members of their mind. They’re the ones who were merged together during mad science gone awry (or really mad science gone exactly according to plan). The people who were merged in order to save one of their lives, the parasitic alien leech victims, the people with tinier people trapped inside their brains. Really gross stuff. Just, ew. Alien leeches? Sucking your alien blood? And also taking partial control of your body? No thanks. That’s disgusting. But anyway... People in these situations really need to get on the same page as their body-mates because if they’re not, things can get pretty bad for everyone involved. It’s like having a roommate you don’t get along with except instead of a shared apartment which you can reasonably split and in which you can just avoid each other even if it’s a little awkward, you’re sharing a body with them. Like, depending on how petty they are and how much they hate you they can cut off their nose just to spite your face. Things can get pretty ugly in these types of situations. And not just because of the gross, pulsating, slime slug from another galaxy attached to your forehead.

Members of a gestalt-consciousness, whether they can separate or not, should spend some time getting to know and understand their partners so that when they need to operate as a single being they can do so flawlessly and fabulously. For those of you who can separate and merge at will, come up with a game plan, a list of things you want to accomplish when your bodies and minds are merged. Determine the style of crime fighting you’d like to employ (I’m just assuming you’re going to fight crime because that’s what this blog is about, but obviously some gestalts just wanna knit or collect ceramic elephants or whatever), whether or not you’re the kind of hero that stops fighting crime to help cats down from trees or telekinetically hurl old people over and across busy freeways, what kind of voice disguising tactics you’ll use to mask your identities (if you’re the kind of gestalt personality who resembles one of your base components, try using the voice of one of your other components). If decisions like these are made in advance, the time you all spend merged together will be a lot smoother, productive, and even more enjoyable.

Members of a shared consciousness also need to have the other members of their consciousness’s backs. Anything that hurts them will inevitably hurt you when you merge and this extends beyond even just physical maladies. People (and when I say “people” I mean in the general “sentient being” sense, I’m not just limiting this to human beings from Earth) whose minds meld upon combining with one another can often feel any strong emotions their partners were feeling before the merge. So members of a gestalt should do their best to make sure their partners are always emotionally healthy as well as just physically safe. Additionally, this mind-meld means that you can’t keep secrets from other members of your team. So if you’ve been keeping something from someone else in your combiner team you should either have a chat with them before you next combine, or have that memory extracted from your brain and kept in a jar or something until after you’re done fighting crime in someone else’s body. (Who better to call for such a job than Jerry’s Homegrown Condiment Jars? Please think of us for all your horrible secret jarring needs!) (Ok this is getting out of hand!)

It would also be smart to keep that fact that you’re a member of a gestalt consciousness, or that you’re the combined form of several individuals, a secret. Which could be difficult, especially in the beginning before you master the whole “respond to the voices in your head with your thoughts not your voice” thing. Until you have that down you’ll just need to let people think that you’re slightly unhinged and argue and shout at yourself sometimes. This might be a little uncomfortable, but trust me it will be worth it in the long run. If the information that you are more than the sum of your parts gets out you can be sure that all of your enemies will start coming up with ways to separate you in the midst of a battle. And some of them won’t even be especially clever about it! They’ll just show up with giant circular saws and try to cut you in half or something. Or they’ll come up with some sort of beam. In my experience, the right amount of evil science can create a beam for any situation. Single-consciousness superheroes don’t have to deal with stuff like that. Why would a bad guy try to split a hero into more heroes? Additionally, they may deduce who all of your components are and capture or kill one of them so that your combined heroic form can never be again. Unless the nature of your combination is such that members can be replaced. Then it’s not even a big deal, you can just find some other chump to join your fusion dance or fiery high five of combination or whatever. But still, best to keep that information a secret. As always.

If you do need to find a replacement for one of your components, whether it be due to death or retirement, you should try to find someone who is similar to the person you’ve lost, in order to keep the combined form as close to normal as possible (for relative degrees of “normal” that is, you’re still a bunch of guys attaching or merging to become one new guy, it’s super weird). In order to find this person, we recommend holding auditions. The remaining members of the consciousness can act as judges and you can ask prospective members invasive questions about mental hygiene and greatest weaknesses. You should also try to get a feel for what they spend most of their time day dreaming about and maybe a list of the last ten songs they’ve had stuck in their head, because pretty soon those are gonna be your daydreams and stuck-in-head songs too. A fun thing to do is to not even tell the people auditioning that they’re auditioning to be part of a nuclear superhero or a giant robot made out of dinosaurs and then record the winner’s reactions when they find out. You can get a lot of funny video footage out of a thing like this and you need to make sure you milk it as much as you can.

If the person you’ve been inadvertently merged with is a person who holds views and opinions that are different from your own (opinions such as “I believe the world needs to be dominated by me, a supervillain,” or “I only like to eat strawberry ice cream and I will spit out any other food that is put in my mouth”) then your best bet would be to explore avenues of separation. I mean sure, you could try bringing your mind-mate around to your way of thinking (other ways of thinking include, “hey, maybe the world doesn’t need to be dominated by a supervillain,” or “hey, maybe other foods are ok too,”) but really you should try to get that supervillain or absurdly picky eater out of your body (or you should try to escape their body, somehow, can you burrow out of a brain? I’ll look into it for you guys). Try talking to some of your super-scientist pals, or perhaps if there’s a local village mystic that you haven’t upset or blackmailed you can speak to them. With the right tools, extracting a consciousness or separating a gestalt, can be relatively simple. In some cases it’s as simple as shooting at the point of connection a few times (this usually only applies to giant combiner robots, don’t do this with people). Sometimes you can even find Consciousness-Extractinators online for relatively cheap. If you can stand to wait a bit, or if you want to get one in advance just in case, I recommend waiting for Black-Friday/Cyber-Monday/There’s-Not-Really-A-Large-Market-For-Consciouness-Extractinators-So-If-Nobody-Buys-Them-They’re-Just-Going-To-Sit-In-A-Warehouse-Taking-Up-Space-So-I’d-Better-Mark-Down-These-Prices-Tuesday sales.

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bk-lostintranslation · 4 years

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ESSAY: Globalization - Limits & Liminality as Explored in “Paprika”

Kon’s animated film Paprika, through symbolic and stylized means, serves as a critical frame for the phenomenon of globalization.

X-Posted at Pangaea Journal

Inspired by Yasutaka Tsutsui’s titular novel, Paprika begins much in the same fashion as it ends: in medias res, with a phantasmagorical montage of cultural iconography, quirky characters and surreal scenery interwoven at a frenzied pace, each scene jumping into the next with a fluidity that coalesces time and space itself into a distinctly Einsteinian continuum. Audiences are left dazed, disoriented, yet intrigued: there is no way to know whether the introductory sequence is chronicling a dream, or reality, or a freakish blend of both. This destabilizing visual narrative is fairly typical of Satoshi Kon’s craft, yet what calls for critical focus is the unique symbolism underpinning his work. Beneath its rich and densely-layered imagery, the film tackles a number of pertinent issues: from whether multimedia has warped from a benign platform into the jealous architect of our desires; to the tragic dissolution of individual ideas and complex cultures into a miasma of grotesque transnationalism; to whether the weakening friction-of-distance within a digitized world has brought us closer together, or merely distorted the very axes upon which time-space functions and is perceived. Indeed, at its crux, the film embraces a broad spectrum of issues uniquely linked to globalization, all while invoking relevant aspects of human fallacy and social degradation.

Central to Paprika, from the beginning, is its clear disdain for the linearity and two-dimensionalism of traditional narrative. Instead, like a hallucination, there appear to be no distinguishable boundaries between characters or places, no fixed destinations or rational coordinates. The most vivid example is the introductory sequence, where the eponymous protagonist, Paprika, leaps winsomely out of a man’s dreams and into the physical world: flitting from brightly-lit billboards as static eye-candy to a well-meaning sentry spying through computer screens to a godlike specter freezing busy traffic with a snap of her fingers to an ordinary girl chomping hamburgers at a diner to a stylized decal on a boy’s T-shirt to a motorcyclist careening through late-night streets (0:06:12-0:07:49).

Space and time are rendered meaningless – or, rather, are reshaped into something entirely novel and surreal. As Paprika navigates through a complex and dynamic mediascape, she effectively embodies the spilling-over of the virtual into the physical world – and, more significantly, of both the subtle and blatant permeation of media-based globalization in every step of our lives. Indeed, with its alternately fascinating and disturbing chaos of imagery, the very premise of Paprika blurs the boundaries between the inner and outer-worlds, conveying through both symbolic and subtextual allusions the phenomenon of globalization run riot – a dreamscape that unfolds with the benign promise of forging new connections, only to seep past the barriers of reality and engulf and reshape the world to the imperatives of dystopian homogeneity at best, and the subjugation and disintegration of individual autonomy at worst.

It can be argued, of course, that it is hypocritical for animation – in many ways the nexus of metamedia in its most intrinsically illusory form – to lambaste globalization. The media pivots on globalization in all its multifaceted vagaries, and vice versa. Renowned social theorist Marshall McLuhan, who coined the phrase ‘the global village’ in his groundbreaking work The Medium is the Message, was one of the first to point out that the form of a medium implants itself inextricably into whatever message it conveys in a synergistic relationship: “All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered (26).” That the media and the phenomenon of globalization go hand-in-hand, shaping and influencing one another, therefore goes without saying. However, what the imagery of Paprika draws attention to is how the multiplicity of media leads to unpredictable consequences and vicissitudes – which are not always quantifiable or even tangible. Much in the same way technology and global interconnectivity have narrowed – at times even erased – the demarcations of time and space, so too have they led to paradigm shifts of what it means to belong to a static, physical place as a cultural and individual identifier.

Globalization is often defined as fundamentally kaleidoscopic, with a dizzying mobility of ideological, economic, physical and cultural interchanges across a rhizomatous network – but one that is increasingly powered by its own unstable energies and its own besieged and untidy logic. Of particular interest is the ‘disembodied’ component of globalization, where the flow of information and capital is increasingly encoded and abstract, and thus increasingly more likely to permeate local spaces that may not always be open to such profound transformation, imposition and redefinition. In their work, The Quantum Society, Zohar and Marshall liken the chaotic, fractal nature of the modern world to quantum reality, stating that it

…has the potential to be both particle-like and wave-like. Particles are individuals, located and measurable in space and time. Waves are ‘nonlocal,’ they are spread out across all of space and time, and their instantaneous effects are everywhere. Waves extend themselves in every direction at once, they overlap and combine with other waves to form new realities, new emergent wholes (326).

Unarguably, the focal point in Paprika is globalization as a catalyst of “new realities.” But while these can be captivating and edifying, allowing us to create or explore new identities, or to grow more closely tethered together, they can also represent the sinister infiltration of exploitative elements within our most intimate lives. This is made chillingly evident through the plot of the film, which centers on the theft of the DC Mini – a futuristic device that allows two people to share the same dream. While intended as a tool to help treat patients’ latent neuroses and deep-seated pathologies, the film makes clear that, if misused, this prototype can not only allow an intruder to access and influence another’s dreams, but can unleash the collective dream-world into the sphere of reality itself. The DC Mini, on its own, would function as a tepid metaphor for the symbiotic dance between globalization and technology. But following its theft, the resultant chaos it invokes sets the riveting, psychedelic stage upon which the inner-world of dreams erupts out into mundane reality, a fantastical convergence that not only threatens the safety of the entire city, but also denies each citizen their own private realm of dreams, within which they have the freedom to nurture a true inner-self. As Dr. Chiba – the no-nonsense alter-ego of our dreamscape superheroine Paprika – remarks: the victims of the abused DC Mini have become mere “empty shells, invaded by collective dreams… Every dream [the stolen DC Mini] came into contact with was eaten up into one huge delusion.” The scene is made particularly memorable by its vivid visual symbolism: two droplets of rainwater on a car window merging into one, highlighting the irresistible flow between not only dreams and reality, but the liminality of globalization as a fluid force that cannot be bound by temporal or spatial delineations (0:52:12-0:52:37).

It is precisely this unpredictable fluidity that runs rampant across real-life Tokyo in the film, wreaking havoc in its wake. Of particular interest is the gorgeous riot of imagery employed to represent the collective ‘delusion:’ the recurring motif of a parade, in all its clamorous splendor, that unfurls through the city streets, infusing spectators with its own peculiar brand of madness. For its eye-popping and mind-bending details alone, the sequence warrants close examination. But accompanying the visual feast is the nightmarish gamut of cultural, technological, social and historical commentary embedded within its imagery. To the cheerful proclamations of, “It’s showtime!” a procession of Japanese salarymen leap with suicidal serenity off of rooftops; below, the bodies of drunkenly-staggering bar-hoppers morph into unbalanced musical instruments, while families frolicking through the parade transform into rotund golden Maneki-neko to disturbing chants of, “The dreams will grow and grow! Let’s grow the tree that blooms money!” Here, in a scathing political lampoon, politicians wrestle one another in their eagerness to climb to the top of a parade-float; there, a row of schoolgirls in sailor uniforms, with cellphones for heads, lift their skirts for the eager gazes of equally cellphone-headed males.

Satoshi Kon does not bother with coy subtext; he announces the mind-degenerating effects of globalization on both dramatic and symbolic planes: a parade that swells into disorder and eventual destruction, headed by a clutter of sentient refrigerators, televisions, microwave ovens, vacuum cleaners, deck tapes and automobiles. Traditional Japanese kitsch competes with lurid Americana; cultural symbols like Godzilla and the Statue of Liberty waltz alongside such religious icons as the Virgin Mary, Vishnu and the Buddha, while disembodied torii arches and airplanes soar overhead to the discordant serenade of money toads and durama dolls. The effect is at once hypnotic and horrific; the vortex of collective dreams lures in countless spellbound bystanders, transforming them into just another mindless facet of the parade, from a robot to a toy to a centerpiece on a parade-palanquin. Witnessing the furor, one character dazedly asks, “Am I still dreaming?” and is informed, “Yes. The whole world is” (1:11:09-1:12:42)

In her book, Girlhood and the Plastic Image, Heather Warren-Crow remarks that Paprika “…proffers a visual theory of media convergence as not only an issue of technology, but also one of globalization… [Its] vision of media convergence is one in which boundaries between cultures, technologies, commodities and people are horrifyingly permeable… While our supergirl is eventually able to stop the parade… these multiple transgressions cause mass confusion, madness, injury and death (83).” If this seems a dark denouncement of globalization, one cannot deny that it is in many respects fitting. With the vanishing delineations between nations, cultures, ideas and people arises the phenomenon of “cultural odorlessness,” or mukokuseki. The term was first applied to rapid social transformations in Koichi Iwabuchi’s book Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism, although the phenomena can just as readily be applied to postmodernity in all its miscellaneous facets (28). While globalization has engendered new intimacies and easier connections (on the surface), this overwhelming grid of interconnected information has simultaneously become a web trapping human beings inside it. Individuality – on a national, local, or personal scale – has been pushed aside in favor of a real and virtual superhighway powered by pitiless self-commodification and voracious consumership, within which the cultivation of a true self no longer holds meaning. One particular scene in the film captures this with wistful succinctness. As a weary Dr. Chiba gazes out of the window of her office, her livelier alter-ego Paprika (real or imagined) appears superimposed before her reflection. “You look tired,” Paprika says, “Want me to look in on your dreams?” to which Chiba replies, “I haven’t been seeing any of my own lately.” Against Paprika’s winsome overtones, her own demeanor strikes a chord that is dismal in its flatness. Although Chiba’s profession is to dive through the colorful welter of others’ dreams, it is her grasp of her own self that proves the ultimate fatality in this venture (0:24:10-0:24:23).

Indeed, it has often been argued that as both the physical and disembodied aspects of globalization grow increasingly more pervasive, so too do diverse organs of surveillance – from institutionalized dogmas meant to restrict personal development by branding it as outdated or subversive, to internal and external disciplinary structures meant to monitor and subjugate a person’s ‘inner-self:’ the very stuff of his or her dreams. Such themes, while hardly novel, are nonetheless relevant, tethered as they are to such iconic works as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, both of which – through literal and metaphorical means – examine societies wherein people are subject to relentless government scrutiny, mind-policing and the absolute denial and denigration of privacy. Foucault’s work, in particular, is useful for deconstructing social mechanisms. Utilizing a genealogical historical lens, Foucault traces the slow and oppressive transformation – as opposed to ‘evolution’, a phrase often touted by proponents of liberal reform – of the Western penal system. His main focus is to illustrate how, despite our self-congratulatory complacence at moving away from the barbaric model of medieval punishment, in favor of gentler and more civilized modes of discipline, we have in fact simply transferred the imperatives of controlling human beings – be they deviants or conformists – from their bodies to their souls. As Foucault states, “Physical pain, the pain of the body itself, is no longer the constituent element of the penalty. From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights,” thus intimating that the organs of institutional control have not grown less harsh or restrictive, but simply less overt (11).

Certainly, by relying on a framework of internal rather than external constraints, it has become possible to erode the very modicum of individuality, reducing human beings to what Foucault describes as “docile” bodies complicit in their own exploitation. Foucault lays the blame for this phenomenon on a capitalist system whose economic and political trajectory has led society to a place of commodification and classification (“governmentality”), where the complexities of dynamic individuals are pared down into reductionist categories of ‘acceptable’ or ‘unacceptable.’ According to Foucault, surveillance and regimentation as a means of producing compliant individuals is the crux of modern economies, to the point where society has transformed into an industrial panopticon – a nightmarish perversion of Jeremy Bentham’s original ideal. As such, whether individuals live as offenders within a prison, or as free citizens, is irrelevant. The scant difference in both their constraints is measured by mere degrees (102-128).

In Paprika, these issues are not explicitly announced, but are instead woven through the story’s fabric in an alternately lulling and disquieting fashion. Noteworthy scenes – such as where Paprika, a captive chimera with butterfly-wings, is pinned to a table while a man literally peels away her skin to paw rapaciously at the prone body of Dr. Chiba, nestled pupae-like within, to the moment where Detective Toshimi Konakawa, harried by recurring nightmares, bittersweetly comes to terms with boyhood dreams he had suppressed in order to survive by the dictum of a cold and prescriptive adult world – are all reminders that it is our inviolate inner-space that makes us uniquely human. To allow it to be invaded, subjugated and erased is to reduce ourselves to passive automatons, our every desire governed, our every choice predetermined. In Paprika, this knowledge blossoms only when each character delves deep into themselves, to find at their core the dream-child that remains untouched by reality’s smothering hold, and to discover within that dream-child both untapped softness and strength. “She’s become true to herself, hasn’t she?” Paprika playfully remarks of the somber Dr. Chiba, when the latter finally comes to terms with her repressed affection for the bumbling genius Tokita (1:15:42).

For Paprika, it is evident that social or technological transformations cannot be powered by the erosion of individual dreams. To do so is to condemn the world to an eldritch darkness sustained only by greed. The film’s penultimate scene, where the egomaniacal chairman – the true thief of the DC Mini – looms as a monstrous giant over the despoiled city, proclaiming, “I am perfect! I can control dreams and even death!” could almost serve as the critical foreshadowing of globalization taken to its bleakest conclusion: the desecration of nature and humanity alike by a self-serving force that, in its thirst for absolute control, will cancel out the very diversity of dreams that once made globalization possible. It is only when Paprika – fusing with Dr. Chiba and Tokita – reemerges in the form of a baby to battle the chairman, is equilibrium restored. “Light and dark. Reality and dreams. Life and death. Man and woman. Then you add the missing spice [Paprika],” she recites, as if listing ingredients to a recipe (1:19:50-1:20:32). Yet, in keeping with theme of liminality and indeterminacy, the key to vanquishing the chairman is not in these binary oppositions, but in their capacity to combine together and shape the world into more than one thing at once. As Paprika swallows the chairman whole, reversing the shadowy post-apocalyptic city to its original state, battle-scarred but still intact, the audience is reminded of fluidity of the quantum world. Life and death, dreams and reality, destruction and rebirth, all coalesce within an ever-transforming continuum.

So too, as the film’s open-ended yet distinctly uplifting ending makes clear, is the process of globalization inherently free-flowing and malleable in its interaction with its environment. Rather than focusing on the split between globalization as a force of cultural erasure versus a celebration of differences, the film highlights the alternately delicate or brutal negotiations between the two: a friction that is necessary to keep the phenomenon in flux. Zygmunt Bauman’s book and selfsame concept of Liquid Modernity proves especially useful here, in that in order to comprehend the mutable nature of the modern world, it is necessary to look beyond traditional models and regimented perceptions. As he makes clear:

Ours is … an individualized, privatized version of modernity, with the burden of pattern-weaving and the responsibility for failure falling primarily on the individual’s shoulders… The patterns of dependency and interaction … are now malleable… but like all fluids they do not keep their shape for long. Shaping them is easier than keeping them in shape. Solids are cast once and for all. Keeping fluids in shape requires a lot of attention, constant vigilance and perpetual effort – and even then the success of the effort is anything but a foregone conclusion (8).

Of course, the exchange of images and ideas across a would-be deterritorialized realm does not mean that the myriad components within must lose their separate identities. Rather, those identities become more essential than ever, bringing with them their own consequences and questions – all of which must be understood through the dynamic lens of globalization, until we come to understand not only the frailties of the social order, but how they can improved, in order to make connections both genuine and mutually-beneficial for a polyphonic future. The answers lie not within the inherently-shifting structure of globalization, but rather in its creative use. In the film’s final segment, where Detective Toshimi Konakawa purchases tickets to the movie, Dreaming Kids, after decades of stultifying self-repression, speaks of the capacity of globalized multitudes to enthuse as well as to ensnare the individual’s dreams. Globalization does not exist in a vacuum; even as it threatens to engulf nations, localities and persons into a bilious swamp of depersonalized shells, so too can it be transformed by the nature of the worlds it encounters. The change is double-edged and double-sided; the effect is a living, breathing bricolage that grows and alters as we do – and how we do.

That said, it is evident that Satoshi Kon’s message is not one of a facile globalized utopia. Rather, it is about the dangers of losing ourselves within such a seductive phenomenon, whose effects can too easily be maneuvered toward mass surveillance and subjugation. For Paprika, the cross-flow of cultures, ideas, commodities and people is illustrated as an unceasing process, but one that we ourselves are responsible for shaping. If done right, there is the tantalizing promise of a happier, freer life, within which globalization may enhance rather than exploit our dreams. But if done wrong, Kon’s narrative is bleakly apocalyptic – a world fallen victim to a hostile and all-pervasive force that gnaws away its very humanity. While the film’s content-driven, as opposed to structural, formula can be mystifying and overly-abstract at times, there is no denying its visual ingenuity: a multimedia extravaganza that beautifully translates the welter of dreams into reality. With its alternately fascinating and disturbing chaos of imagery, Paprika blurs the boundaries between the inner and outer-worlds, conveying through symbolic and subtextual allusions the phenomenon of globalization run riot – a dreamscape that yields both brighter possibilities and special connections if we do not allow it to diminish us, yet also a sinister agency of mass domination and dystopian homogeneity if we fail to put it in its proper place.

Works Cited

Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2015.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York, NY, Random House LLC, 1977.

Iwabuchi, Koichi. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham, Duke University Press, 2007.

Kon, Satoshi, director. Paprika. Madhouse Studios, 2006.

MacLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Message. Corte Madera, Gingko Pr., 2005.

Warren-Crow, Heather. Girlhood and the Plastic Image. Lebanon, University Press of New England, 2014.

Zohar, Danah, and I. N. Marshall. The Quantum Society: Mind, Physics and a New Social Vision. New York, Morrow, 1994.

#essay #review #academic writing #paprika #satoshi kon #japan #globalization #anime #published

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thesffcorner · 5 years

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Terminator: Dark Fate

Terminator: Dark Fate is the 6th film in the franchise, directed by Tim Miller. It follows Grace (MacKenzie Davis) who travels back to the present day from the year 2024, to protect Dani (Natalia Reyes) from a terminator (Gabriel Luna), who’s come to kill her. As they rampage through the streets of Mexico City, they run into an old veteran of the terminator threat, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and together they must find a way to defeat an unkillable machine, or humanity is doomed.

I have complicated feelings on the Terminator franchise; I saw Terminator 2: Judgement Day when I was a kid, and then every subsequent film as it came out. Outside of 2, I haven’t really liked any of them: I hated Rise of the Machines with a passion, thought Salvation had some interesting ideas, but a bland execution, and found Genisys fun, but infinately stupid, not helped by a truly awful trailer. I was excited for Dark Fate because it was the first time Linda Hamilton was reprising her role as Sarah Connor, and I always want to see MacKenzie Davis in more things. But I’m sad to say that this movie was not good, and I have a lot to say so strap in: there’s going to be SPOILERS.

Let’s start with the positives. Tim Miller is a good director, but here his talents are stretched thin. He’s helming of the action is excellent; there are some truly impressive action set pieces in this film, especially the opening chase scene through the GM factory and then the highways of Mexico City. It’s fast, relentless and suspenseful, and opens the film on a high note, managing to be exciting while also introducing all the characters. The film has an R rating, so Miller is allowed to let loose and break some bones; as such Davis gets to shine in some rather gruesome and physically tasking action scenes. The stand out for me was a brawl at a Detention Center at the Mexican-American border, but her opening fight with Luna’s terminator was also really well choreographed and executed.

The second positive are the actors: everyone is good in this film, and they are all trying with the limited material they are given. The standout by far was Davis as Grace, though Schwarzeneger steals every scene he’s in.

That’s where the positives end. Like most things these days, this film fails where it’s most important: the story and the characters.

Now, Miller is a good director, but he seems to be way out of his depth here. The film doesn’t really have a distinct style; there were bits that looked like Terminator 2, bits that looked like Deadpool, Logan and even the entire middle section could have been stolen from Siccario. While his action is good, the quiet, character parts are a letdown as none of the characters have any real motivation or personality outside of survival, and as such the action too feels underwhelming because after the 5th massive explosion it all starts looking the same.

Miller is not helped by a truly god awful script, that takes itself too seriously. There is barely any humor or levity in this film: it’s two hours of gloom, and even when we get little bits of levity, you still don’t understand what the characters are fighting for.

In terms of plot, this is a mix of Terminator 1 and 2 with some Salvation mixed in. The filmmakers make a decision at the start of the film, that will make or break this film for you, and for me it broke it. I hate films who pull this kind of trick, because not only does it hurt the story here, it also retroactively makes the plot of 2 pointless because we know that it amounts to nothing. The decision is meant to cast Sarah and Schwarzeneger, who calls himself Carl in this film in a new light, but the story doesn’t do anything with this development.

We find out that Sarah and John prevented Skynet from rising. How exactly that happened I’m not sure, but a new AI, this one developed for cybernetic warfare called Legion rose up. We know nothing about Legion; we don’t know if it’s sentient, if it’s self-actualizing, if it has a goal, nothing. We don’t know how it took over, how it managed to build the new terminator or even how the humans of the future have both the technology and the resources to augment themselves or send people into the past.

What little we see of the future through Grace’s backstory looks exactly like the future in Salvation, but this isn’t the same timeline; in this universe Skynet never took over the world. There could have been a really interesting story here, with Sarah realizing that it doesn’t matter what she did or how many Terminators she destroys, mankind will always create a different version of an AI that will take over, and another version of John will always need to be saved. Unfortunately, not only does the film never explore this, but it has the gall to have the new character belittle Sarah for being crazy, or self-aggrandizing for saving the world! Excuse me?

This film is too serious to not explain anything about it’s world or premise. If they didn’t want to bother, why not just use Skynet? It’s functionally the same thing!

The script is so jam-packed full of action scenes that it doesn’t have time to develop a story or even it’s own characters, resorting to really bland and uninteresting exposition between set pieces. Why should I care about preventing this future from happening, when it doesn’t look different from the last one? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but at least in Genisys we got to spend time with Kyle and John in the future, get to know them and connect to them, so we know what’s at stake if John fails. Here, all we have to go on is Grace, and her one-sided relationship to Dani, but it doesn't matter because we know nothing about Grace.

There are so many moments in this film where characters act and make decisions that are completely nonsensical or driven entirely by the plot. Why does Grace belittle and hate Sarah? I understand Sarah being suspicious of Grace; she has devoted her whole life to hunting terminators and this woman from the future not only appears to have the powers of one, but also claims there is an entirely new AI that’s after Dani, and refuses to say anything else. Why doesn’t Grace explain to Dani what’s happening and who sent her? And don’t give me that you won’t believe me bullshit; Grace is perfectly willing to be angry at Sarah for her naturally assuming that Dani is the same as her, but not explain why she’s wrong? They keep up this rivalry for the entire film, and there is ABSOLUTELY no reason why they would do this, when clearly all 3 are on the same side!

Grace makes a lot of decisions that can only be explained by ‘the script says so’. She is very quick to point out that she’s human, but she spends the entire film protecting Dani with an unrelenting devotion we have only seen from machines in this franchise, not to mention she can go toe to toe with an indestructible terminator and hold her own. She seems to entirely not understand how someone like Dani might want to protect her family or friends, or other people, even though SHE KNOWS DANI PERSONALLY, and acts no different than Arnold’s Terminator did in Judgement Day.

There are also so many plot threads that go absolutely nowhere. In the 20+ years since the end of 2, Sarah has killed 2 other terminators and has become a wanted celebrity fugitive in 50 States; she also has connections strong enough to get a US Marshall to commit treason for her, and get her a jet, but not a contact that could smuggle her across the border? How did she get these connections? Why was she a criminal? Sounds like a more interesting plot than the one I’m watching. Moreover the whole Marshall plot point is just so we can get 2 EMPs that promptly get destroyed in a completely irrelevant actions scene. They acquire a chopper they never use. They teach Dani how to shoot an assault rifle and she never uses it again.

The most infuriating subplot has to do with how they defeat the terminator. Like I said, Grace is augmented, and she is powered by some kind of energy source that’s apparently the only weapon that could destroy a terminator. If she had this all along, why didn’t she use it earlier, if she always thought the situation was hopeless? She was willing to lock Dani in a mining shaft, knowing full well that wouldn’t stop the terminator, but remembered she had a bomb in her chest, 10 mins before they needed to use it?

The characters are likewise a mess. Arnold Schwartzeneger was the best part, and he was so underutilized. He is completely unnecessary here; he can’t defeat the new terminator, and they aren’t even made by the same people like they were in 2 or Genisys, so he could have knowledge the others didn’t. He has some funny lines (the only funny lines), and there was an interesting premise to his plotline: what happens to a terminator that has accomplished his mission, but stopped receiving orders? What does he do? The movie doesn’t really explore that. Like sure he has a family and he calls himself Carl, but what else?

The new terminator was also underwhelming. Diego Luna is good in the part, but he has nothing to work with. He’s got the unsettling glare down, but he’s not sly or intimidting like the T-1000, nor is he funny like Arnold or conflicted like Marcus. He’s just a robot who occasionally tries to fool people into thinking he’s a person. He does get a mini arc in that he gets better at fooling people as the movie goes on, but nothing ever comes of it.

He’s also extremely overpowered and has no limits to what he can do. He has a liquid metal skin that he can shed from his endoskeleton, and both can act independently. Neither seems to be vulnerable, and we don’t get any indication that they need to be fused for him to recharge or something similar. So why even have the skeleton?

He can form weapons, but he only forms a gun once and then never again; and despite having so many powers and being so indestructible, Grace, who is still just a human manages to deal with him rather effectively, so either he’s terrible at his job, or his infinite powers aren’t as cool as it seemed to, at the start.

Dani was infuriating. She is just John, but a Mexican girl, and if possible, even less agency than John did in Rise of the Machines! Her only motivation is wanting to live, and possibly her attachment to Grace which is never really explained, even though the actresses try. She spends the entire movie being shuffled from place to place, she never takes active part in her story and the only thing she does the whole film is get a way to get her group across the border, only to be immediately captured. There’s no arc to her character; she doesn’t become more capable or brave as the film goes on; she starts as a sweet, spunky girl and ends a sweet, spunky girl, with less family now. Even the end, which should be her moment of defeating the literary decomposing skeleton of the terminator she still can’t do it, and has to have Arnold help her.

There is also no sense of her age; she looks to be about 20, but everyone treats her and acts like she’s a child, when she’s clearly an adult. However, the one scene we see of her in the future, she looks to be the same age so… I’ve got nothing.

Then we have the two characters that are the most frustrating, because they both had so much potential.

First we have Grace, who is this film’s Kyle Reese. Davis is the best part of this film, and manages to give this terribly written, shell of a character some much needed depth and pathos. She really sells how much she cares for Dani; every scene she’s on screen I wanted her to win, and she has lots of small mannerisms that give some humanity to her character.

She was also amazing in the action scenes; not only did she bulk up, but she uses her height to her advantage, towering over the rest of the cast, even matching Arnold. She gets to do some impressive fighting, and I liked how she needed to recharge and cool down, which was probably the only real limit to her abilities.

Unfortunately, her character was a complete waste of her talents. She volunteers to get augmented after she almost dies during battle, but by this point, she has presumably known Dani for years, so this decision is in no way related to protecting her. Likewise, having grown up in a world fighting machines, she seems to have no qualms about essentially being part machine; no one tries to take over her electronic parts, mess with her sensors, and she herself never seems to question her decision to get augmented. I’m not saying she needed to be more like Marcus, but Marcus had actual concerns and had an arc where he had to decide what he was, human or machine. Grace just… is.

Now look, I’m not a person who complains about romance, especially in action films. I don’t need Terminator to have a romance. But God Dammit, if I had to watch Jai Courtney and Emilia Clarke who had 0 chemistry make out, then why couldn’t Grace and Dani be a thing? The way Reyes and Davis play the rolls is clearly romantic, especially Davis; not once did I get a mother-daughter attachment from either and yet we get this limp attempt to make it such at the very end of the film. Let your character be gay, you cowards.

Finally we have Sarah, who was the most frustrating part of this film. First, she’s a supporting character in her own franchise; she has no real reason to be a part of this plot and the film has to invent ways to get her involved.

I don’t hate the decision to make her jaded and bitter in theory; she lost her son and spent 20 years of her life with no purpose other than revenge. But the film never does anything with this, other than have her be angry and antagonizing Grace.

There could have been a real story here, Sarah connecting to Dani because she sees Dani as how she was once too, and mentoring her through Dani losing her entire life. We have attempts at that, but really it’s just 2 scenes that are really short, and didn’t really make me believe in their relationship.

This film needed to chose if it was going to be Terminator with new characters, or a sendoff to the old, and it tried to do both. As a result, we have a Sarah who isn’t interesting, feels superfluous, and doesn’t even really do anything. I wanted her and Arnold to have more time together, to come to terms with what he’d done to her, and ask really if a machine can learn and change; instead we just got a limp attempt to remake Judgement Day, with none of the things that made that film good.

I don’t recommend this film. It was joyless, relentless, and didn’t bring anything new to the franchise. It pains me to say this about a film that has 3 female leads, and 3 genuinely good actresses, but it’s the truth. It wasn’t fun and it wasn’t good, and I would rather watch Genisys or Salvation instead.

letterboxd

#terminator: dark fate #terminator #film review #moni talks

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ask-ironbeak · 7 years

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AWISE

Hey all!

After an EXTREMELY LONG HIATUS, I am back in the habit of writing an illustrating for Ironbeak’s Journal again. So where are the new entries? Well, this week, they are actually ... the old entries. I’ve been doing some editing of art and writing on the first 30 or so entries to bring them in line with the style of the more recent ones (the ones where I’ve actually planned out what I’m doing in advance and have a better handle on what Ironbeak looks and sounds like).

And I’ll be continuing to edit art and text through tomorrow.

Most of the text edits are minor, but I wanted to assure anyone who’s rereading and has a really good memory that they aren’t going crazy. The only major overhaul of an entry occurred with Log 20: The Reading Room, which is now quite a bit different to bring it in line with the lore I’ve decided on for the Glitch.

Here’s the old version for your enjoyment (or not--I always wanted to redo this one cause it bothered me, lol).

Log 20: The Reading Room

"Mr. Vanderbuilt--" I said, rising from my seat, as he entered the Reading Room. "Please, just Vander." He spoke in Glitch, but dropped the conversational expressives in favor of greater intonation, as I did. His voice was hoarse without the audio filters running. It sounded as though he was still smiling beneath what I now knew was a helmet. "A pun," I said lamely. "I took it as my pseudonym when I first arrived here. That was almost thirty years ago." He removed his metal head and set it gently upon a desk, then turned to face me. This was my first look at an Apex in the flesh. Even in the dark, it was clear he cut his own hair. The reading room was cozy and warm, with three couches encircling a low, round table, and several desks messily crammed with writing utensils. On the wall appeared to be the library's reserve collection of artwork. Mr. Vanderbuilt Vander lit an oil lamp on the desk beside his false head, and we both took a seat.

"When word gets around that your beacon summoned the Penguins, there's going to be a lot of distrust coming your way," he said. "You know?" "Of course I know. Some of us even saw the ship as it descended. But none of the townsfolk has ever actually seen a Penguin ship. A few may have read about them, as I do have a book or two on the topic. But it won’t be until Dosskey spreads the word that most folks here will get the news. And that's when your status as the Friendly Foreigner may erode a bit.” He put his ironclad feet up on the table. "There are already a few who don't take kindly to your presence. Maybe you've noticed. They think you'll corrupt the youth, put harmful ideas about space travel in their head." "I know nobody from this town has flown since ... well, since it was founded, that much was clear as soon as I started asking around for ship repairs. But--harmful ideas? Really?" "This town was founded by Outcasts. As you well know, having borrowed Founding Forges last week. You did read it, didn't you?" "Well ... yes, I did. But ... not in full. I admit, I found the book on sellomander biology to be a little more captivating." "Having seen your illustrations, I figured you might. But I'll fill you in." Vander stood and began to pace the room, hands behind his back, like a professor giving a lecture.

"Do you know what an Outcast is?" "I didn’t know there would be a test," I said, and he responded with an appreciative laugh. "I know the Glitch on Avos were ejected from Glitch society for whatever reasons. But for a lot of them, it happened generations back. Space travel must have brought those to the Alpha Hamal system just as it brought those to Avos." "Yes. There are quite a few independent colonies in the galaxy. But traditional Glitch society is a sort of feudal collectivism. In its truest form, every member of society is intimately connected via a massive neural network called a Hivemind. Serverside, thankfully, has no such thing. If it did, I would have no chance of passing as an ordinary citizen. Serverside does, however, closely ahere to the same collectivist culture in which most Glitch are comfortable. Those that stray from traditionalist values of work ethic, family values, simple living ... let me put it this way: despite being a direct example of extremely advanced technology, the Glitch themselves are Luddites. It’s not in their nature to explore, but they will out of necessity. And more often than not, those who are cast out are most apt to survive elsewhere." "So they excommunicate people for what, studying engineering?" "Exactly that. Mechanical though they are, Glitch are not robots. But they didn't evolve like you or I. They were created, and they were programmed. Legend has it that they were created to enact some sort of grand social simulation. The truth is hard to uncover, because those of the original Glitch civilizations don't believe they are acting on programming at all." He sounded like he was rambling. Perhaps he’d been waiting to talk to someone about this for a long time. "But ... they program their own children,” I said. “When they’re created, or what have you. Even if they believe the code to be as fundamental as DNA ... surely they must realize that there was a ... prime mover?" "Ha, aptly said. But that's just it. The Kluex priesthood--would they have you believe that your existence is the result of evolutionary happenstance? That the whole Avian race is just a byproduct of its surroundings, and that a few mundane twists of environment or inheritance might have had a different race rise to sentience on Avos? Of course not. It is for the Glitch as it is for many of your people: their existence was divinely foretold. What many have tried to explain to them is hardwired by their creators, they believe to be divinely inspired." Considering the fantastical mythology I’d grown up with, the difference between divine creators and mundane inventors seemed like semantics. Still, I asked, “And you think it's their programming that causes them to remain technologically primitive?" "I do. But some Glitch break the mold. Like genetic mutants, they often benefit from their unique abilities. They are aware that their fellows appear to be stuck in the feudal era, and they seek to surpass it. Most Outcasts have an innate fascination with astronomy, space travel, and alien cultures. And they're almost always persecuted for it." "Even in a town like this? So recently founded by space travelers? You don't really think Serverside would ostracize someone just for an interest in space travel, do you?"

"I know they already have,” he answered. "Outcasts simply don't do well in traditional Glitch societies. Usually, sudden self-awareness is brought on by an injury. Occasionally, it is present from birth. Even more rarely is it inherited. The Founders of Serverside, I think, were hoping that if they brought together enough Outcasts, that they could hand it down from generation to generation.

But many Glitch colonies suffer similar fates. Though the founders did their best to build and program their children, they could not fight nature.” As a biologist, I couldn’t help a derisive snort. Vander paused to shoot me a you know what I meant glare before continuing. “By bringing so many Glitch together in this community, the Founders have most likely doomed them to repeat history." "Are you saying the Glitch can't ... evolve, socially?" "I don't know. But when this town was founded just a few hundred years ago, it was by all accounts a peaceful anarchy. Not lawless, mind you ... but no formal judicial system existed for nearly a hundred years. Now Serverside is a democracy, and there have been talks for decades of holding a mayoral election. How long do you think it will be before they have a king?" "I'm no political scientist, but it seems just as likely that this is a natural progression of government. Any sentient race could have walked down the path you're describing." "Maybe so. But I have been living in this town and curating its history for quite some time now. To me, the pattern is clear: the townsfolk are growing more fond of a traditional lifestyle every day. Even Dosskey's interest in guns is seen as questionable." "Can't they be ... deprogrammed, somehow?" "Attempts have been made by the Glitch themselves to create a Better Glitch. The experimentors found that tampering with the software--even slightly--had dire consequences. I'm sure you read about that in 'Mistakes to Avoid,' eh? "I did. It wasn't specific on the consequences, but it was fairly heavy-handed about following the instruction manual, yes. I assumed it was a matter of tradition." "And so it is, my good fellow. But you may unravel that mystery soon enough."

#the great edit of 2017

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 Episode 1 Easter Eggs and References

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This Star Trek: Discovery article contains spoilers for the Season 3 premiere.

You’d think that a new Star Trek series set centuries and centuries beyond any of the shows and movies wouldn’t have that many references to the series and films that came before, right? Well, Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 might be set in a brand new time period — the year 3188 to be precise — but the narrative is built atop the layered history of Trek’s future history super carefully. Showrunner Michelle Paradise and Alex Kurtzman have mentioned several times that 930 years from 2257 puts them well past the constraints of canon, and yet, the debut episode of Discovery Season 3, demonstrates a meticulous understanding of where this show came from, and a desire to keep everything about the larger story of Star Trek, as tightly knit as possible.

In other words, there were a lot more Easter eggs and references in the newest Discovery episode than you might think. Here’s every Easter egg and reference we caught in the first episode of Star Trek: Discovery Season 3, “That Hope Is You, Part 1.”

The saucer of a Federation starship

The first thing we see as Book flies his impressive starship in an attempt to outrun Cosmo, is the wrecked saucer section of what looks like a Starfleet ship. The dead giveaway is the letters “NCC.” Was this a Federation ship from the 31st century? The 30th? Even older? We don’t know, and we probably never will. Every wondered what “NCC” stands for? Well, it’s never actually been established in canon, but in the early days of The Original Series it was designed as an homage to American ships having an “NCC” as part of their registry and Russian vessels using “CCC.” Some apocryphal books claim “NCC” stands for “Naval Construction Class” or “Naval Construction Contract Number.” Basically, the idea that Starfleet still views itself as a kind of Navy would support this theory, but since it’s not actually a Navy, that also doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Space-time anomaly detected

Book’s onboard ship computer tells him that a “space-time anomaly” is detected. This anomaly is the wormhole created by Burnham and the time crystals from the Discovery Season 2 finale, “Such Sweet Sorrow Part 2.”

3188

Burnham lands in the year 3188, which is actually one year further than most fans guessed. Discovery jumped from the year 2257, which means we thought 930 years later would be 3187. But, as we learn later, Burnham also didn’t land on the planet Terralysium, even though that was her destination. Terraylsium was first seen in the Discovery Season 2 episode “New Eden.” Book tells Burnham the planet she ended up on is actually called Hima. Terralysium was in the Beta Quadrant. We have no idea where Hima is.

Burnham is happy there is life

You might wondering why Burnham is so happy that the computer says “Multiple life signs detected.” Well, the whole point to jumping in the future was that in all other scenarios, both Spock and Burnham’s mom, Gabrielle Burnham, saw a future in which an A.I. called Control had eradicated all sentient life in the galaxy. Clearly, that didn’t happen. Which means Burnham’s mission was successful. This is why later, she says, “I saved all the things.”

The last Red Signal is for Spock!

As the computer tells Burnham the wormhole is closing, she frantically sends an energy signal through the wormhole. This is the last of the seven red signals from Discovery Season 2. In “Such Sweet Sorrow Part 2,” Spock waited for four months to see the Red Signal, which was a message from Burnham that the crew had made it through the wormhole safely. Basically, this scene happens “at the same time” as the final scene onboard the Enterprise in the Season 2 finale.

“Delta shield”

As Burnham goes through her inventory she mentions her “emergency ration pack,” her “phaser,” and her “Delta shield.” The Delta shield is her Starfleet badge. Fans have referred to this symbol as a “Delta shield” for years, but it’s never been uttered on screen.

New opening credits

The Discovery opening credits have changed again! Here are the most significant changes

The generic male-ish face now appears to be more female.

There is a line of Starfleet robots. Will they have a larger role to play later in the season?

In the first two seasons, the image of the Discovery-era phaser morphed into the TOS-era phaser. But now, it becomes a FUTURE PHASER.

Book’s ship is in the opening credits.

The new “future” Starfleet logo appears twice—nce by itself, and again, in the transporter. In season 2, a Section 31 badge appeared during this segment.

Michael busts out some Suus Mahna

While fighting Book, Burnham seems to employ at least a few moves from the Vulcan martial art known as Suus Mahna. This martial art originates in the prequel series Enterprise, but we first saw Burnham do it in “Context Is For Kings” in Season 1 of Discovery. We also saw two Synths practice Suus Mahna in the Star Trek: Picard Season 1, episode 9, “Et Arcadia Ego Part 1.”

The nearest natural wormhole could be a DS9 reference

Book mentions that “the nearest natural wormhole is 100 lightyears from here.” This could reference the Bajorian wormhole from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. After all, there aren’t that many stable wormholes. That said, technically, the Bajorian wormhole isn’t “natural” since it was constructed by the Prophets, but from Book’s point of view, that might not matter.

The Gorn destroyed subspace

Book says: “Wasn’t bad enough for you that the Gorn destroyed two lightyears of subspace?” This references two things at the same time. First, obviously, the Gorn, the lizard-race first seen in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Arena,” and subsequently referenced in nearly every new Trek series, including several references in Star Trek: Picard. But, the mention of the Gorn having destroyed subspace means that parts of the interstellar communication network have been obliterated. Subspace is how people get messages around the galaxy in Star Trek. If parts of subspace are destroyed, this could explain why, the Federation representative, Aditya Sahil (Adil Hussian) mentions that long-range sensors “failed, years ago.”

Book references Scotty….and Tilly’s other best friend

When Book says he wants to “whip-up a dilithium recrystalizier,” he’s referencing the idea of dilithium crystals being reconstructed artificially. In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Scotty does this to help get a stolen Klingon Bird-of-Prey home. And, in the Short Treks episode “Runaway,” Tilly meets Po, the Queen of Xahea, who also invents this technology.

Benemite and Quantum Slipstream Drive

Book also wonders if there is some “Benemite lying around.” This references the Voyager episode “Timeless,” in which the crew tried to build a Quantum Slipstream Drive. Basically, if Book had a Quantum Slipstream Drive, he could get around a lot faster.

Tachyon Solar Sails

Book says “tachyon solar sails are slow as shit.” This references the DS9 episode “Explorers,” which sees Ben Sisko building an ancient ship that runs on tachyons solar sails.

Don’t Even Get Me Started On Trilithium

Book completes his rant on different types of Star Trek propulsion and fuel by saying “don’t even get me started on trilithium.” This seems to be kind of a joke. In the TNG episode “Starship Mine,” Trilithium resin was kind of a waste byproduct of the warp engines that could be stolen and turned into a weapon. But in the film Generations, trilithium was something described as a “nuclear inhibitor,” meaning it could make stars implode. So, which is it? Both? Also a form of fuel for space propulsion? Don’t get Book started.

Orions and Andorians

Burnham is shocked that the Orions and the Andorians are working together. The green-skinned Orions originate in the very first (filmed) Star Trek episode ever, “The Cage,” though their culture was later fully explained in the Enterprise episode “Bound.” Orions have appeared in the Discovery era in the Season 1 finale, and also in the Short Treks episode “The Escape Artist.” The blue-skinned Andorians originate in the TOS episode “Journey To Babel.” Why is Burnham surprised the Andorians and the Orions are working together in some kind of official capacity? Well, the Andorians are founding members of the Federation. The Orions, meanwhile, were, at least in Burnham’s time, never part of the Federation.

Burnham is basically selling Star Trek collectables

Book tells the Andorian that “there’s a real market for this stuff,” when he’s trying to sell Burnham’s tricorder. This seems like a wink to the idea that vintage props from TOS or TNG are worth a lot of money IRL. Basically, what Burnham has is a vintage Star Trek prop.

Portable Transporter!

Burnham is wowed by the personal transporters. In the TNG episode “Captain’s Holiday,” time-traveling aliens from the 27th century called Vorgons, appeared to have similar types of transporters.

Burnham says Tilly can’t do space drugs

While trying to get her to talk, Burnham is hit with some form of future narcotic that makes her a slap-happy. She says that the drug makes her talkative and then says “I have a friend with red hair, you cannot give her any.” This references Tilly, of course, but more specifically, the idea that Tilly did some space drugs in the Discovery Season 1 finale, “Will You Take My Hand?”

Aliens rebooted from TNG and DS9

The mercenary who is pursuing Book appears to be a Yridian. In TNG, these aliens were mostly thought of as “information brokers,” notably in the episodes “The Chase” and “Birthright Part 1.” Meanwhile, at least one alien who is in pursuit of Burnham and Book is very clearly a Lurian. The famous patron of Quark’s Bar in DS9 – Morn – was a Lurian. He’s the guy with the long face.

Book references the biggest plot arc from Star Trek: Enterprise

After Book and Burnham have a frank conversation about time travel, Book says: “All time travel technology was destroyed after the temporal wars. Outlawed.” The Temporal Wars references the Temporal Cold War in Enterprise, and probably, the outright Temporal War that happened at the end of Enterprise Season 3 and the beginning of Season 4 in the episodes “Storm Front Parts 1 and 2.” One fashion from the Temporal War Cold War came from the 31st Century, about a hundred years or so before 3188.

Aditya Sahil references Spock

When Burnham meets Aditya Sahil, a Federation liaison in this time period, they have a serious chat about just how long it might take for the USS Discovery to actually show up. He says: “By the laws of temporal mechanics, they could arrive tomorrow…” And Burnham says: “Or in a thousand years.” This references a similar speech from Spock in the TOS episode “City on the Edge of Forever.” Like Burnham and the Discovery crew, Spock and Kirk are separated by time travel wonkiness. Spock says: “There is a theory. There could be some logic to the belief that time is fluid, like a river, with currents, eddies, backwash.” But later, Spock points out that “we can’t be too sure of our facts.” Even the earliest Star Trek time travel episodes dealt with people arriving at their temporal location at different times than people who were “right behind” them in the time portal.

Federation Flag

The episode ends with Burnham and Sahil raising the flag of the United Federation of Planets. We already saw this flag in the trailers, but it’s worth noting that it does appear to have fewer stars on it than the flag from the era of TNG and Picard. Sahil tells Burnham he has been watching this post for 40 years, which seems to imply that this Federation flag is at least 40 years old, if not older. So, the question is, how accurate is the flag? Did the Federation start losing members before the Burn? Or is this flag pre-Burn?

At this point, we don’t know. But because Season 3 of Discovery is all about rediscovering the Federation, this flag might be the visual representation of not just the themes of the season, but the literal plot too.

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

Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 airs new episodes on Thursdays on CBS All Access.

The post Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 Episode 1 Easter Eggs and References appeared first on Den of Geek.

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shirlleycoyle · 5 years

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The Fleshlight Is a Portal to the Future of Sex

“It’s quite possible someone’s having sex with me right now and I don’t even know it,” adult performer and director Stoya told me.

Her vulva is for sale on the internet and in stores. Or rather, a rubbery, lifelike mold of her vulva is, in the form of a Fleshlight. The outside of it looks almost exactly like her actual body. The inside is a labyrinth of corkscrew shapes, nodules, and ridges. It’s dubbed “The Destroya,” a name that, nine years after the product launched, still makes her laugh.

Fleshlight manufacturer Interactive Lifeforms LLC has sold more than 75,000 Destroyas and more than 15 million Fleshlights total since the company started 20 years ago. It averages around 20,000 retail orders every month, according to a spokesperson for the company.

At around 1.63 pounds each, that’s nearly 24.5 million pounds of fucktoy floating around, taking up space in closets, nightstands, and under beds around the world.

The Fleshlight is an artifact of the sexually adventurous, technologically innovative 90s, but it’s become the face—and lips, and anus, and lips—of the male sex toy industry. The fact that a disembodied vulva and vaginal canal to jerk off into exists in 2019, the era of #MeToo and grabbed pussies and tabloid uproar over sex robots, shows the often contradictory intersection of sex and technology.

On one hand, the Fleshlight is a portal to new forms of sexual openness, allowing people, even those who think of themselves as heterosexual men, to engage in sex that moves away from old notions of gender and the biological body in general. On the other, the Fleshlight is also the reduction of a person to a replica of their reproductive organs. But 21 years since its inception, Fleshlight, the people who use them, and sex toy experts are realizing that maybe people don’t need an exact replica of a vulva or anus to get off. Sex toys are increasingly taking on more abstract, functional forms, and the future of the Fleshlight and toys like it may rely less on using replicas of disembodied genitals.

Today, the Fleshlight is polarizing even for the people who use it. No matter your opinion of the ubiquitous brand, it’s made an undeniable mark on human sexuality and the world.

Hundreds of years from now, if sentient life still exists on Earth, when archeologists dig up the still-intact bits and pieces of plastic casings containing rubberized genitalia, what will they think of the Fleshlight? Will it be considered an antiquated representation of how society literally objectified and commodifed sexual pleasure, or a turning point in the normalization of sex toys for all people, and our first step into a world where technology is an inseparable part of sex?

The answer, according to people who make them, use them, and are them, is both.

WHAT MAKES A FLESHLIGHT

The original Fleshlight model consists of a 10-inch plastic tube casing with a soft sleeve inside. You stick an erect dick (plus some water-based lube) into one end, grip ridges on the outside of the casing, and stroke the penis inside of the sleeve. You fuck the tube, come in the tube, then (ideally promptly) unscrew the whole apparatus and rinse it out with water (soap could degrade the material) and dry it.

Earliest archived version of Fleshlight.com, captured May 1998

Why the Fleshlight exists is a complicated story that’s become seminal sex toy lore. If the many interviews given by the company’s founder Steve Shubin are to be believed, the Fleshlight was born from his desire to get off while his spouse was pregnant.

In the late 90s Shubin, a former member of the Los Angeles Police Department’s SWAT team, and his wife Kathy were expecting twins. Both in their 40s, the couple was advised by doctors that because of their age and the fact Kathy was having two babies, the pregnancy was high-risk. He claims they were told not to have sex again until after the baby was born.

“I asked my wife ‘would you think I was a pervert if I told you there was something that I could use, sexually?'” Shubin told Wired in 2008. “But the adult store had only junk. Just crap. I thought, I can make something better, and took $50,000 of our savings to start working on it.”

Image from the 1997 patent filing for a “discrete sperm collection” device.

Shubin’s first patent filing, in 1995, was for a “female functional mannequin,” a hard sex doll torso. He called his next invention, which boiled the whole doll down to just the genitals, a “device for discreet sperm collection.” The proto-Fleshlight.

This version of the Fleshlight was pretty similar to what we see on the market today. But the description Shubin laid out in the 1997 patent filing was much more clinical. The product was framed as useful for sperm banks or doctors’ offices.

It also predicted some of the embarrassment many men feel from tucking a sex toy away in their own homes:

While my [sex doll] patent succeeds admirably in fulfilling the objects of that invention, it has several characteristics that prevent it from universal acceptance. When the torso mannequin is used in sperm banks, doctor’s offices, and other public facilities, it is sometimes intimidating to the patient being treated or may have an adverse effect upon the patient’s sexual desire and ability to deposit sperm. […] When the device of my patent is used in the home, or by those who find such a mannequin to be positive in nature, there is the concern that others will still find the object during a casual visit to the home.

The earliest version of Fleshlight.com that’s archived online, captured in 1998, shows a company attempting to carve a path as the first widely-accepted male sex toy by characterizing it as a requirement of virility, manliness, and insatiable sex drive. From an archive of Fleshlight’s “Our Philosophy” page circa May 1998:

The need for sexual gratification is as present and as powerful in a man as it is in the stallion. But where the stallion has no ability to wait, relentlessly pursuing his desire until he is satisfied or restrained, man has the ability to control his desires through fantasy… That release has to be done in a responsible way or we risk our relationships, expose ourselves to disease, take a chance with unwanted pregnancy, or even, in extreme cases, break the law.

The market, and we as a species, were primed for this thing to succeed. Hallie Lieberman, sex historian and author of Buzz: The Stimulating History of the Sex Toy, told me that artificial vaginas and sleeves date as far back as the 1600s—the first being Japanese masturbators made from tortoiseshell and velvet, she said. Artificial vaginas were sold in the U.S. as early as the late 1800s, she said, and Doc Johnson debuted the “pocket pal” in the late 1970s. Pocket pals look a lot like Fleshlights without the hard case around them (therefore, like long fleshy sandworms), and the labias themselves are a lot more realistic-looking compared to Fleshlights’ more smooth, almost cartoonish aesthetic.

Doc Johnson’s “Pocket Pal,” as seen for sale on Amazon.

When Fleshlight hit the market in the late 1990s, sex toys marketed to male customers still mostly consisted of “pocket pussies,” “those disembodied, often clunky looking artificial vaginas—sometimes with fake pubic hair,” Lynn Comella, associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and author of Vibrator Nation, told me. “They were really kind of gross looking and for years, many women-friendly retailers, such as Good Vibrations, refused to carry them because they felt that displaying disembodied female body parts didn’t fit with their women-friendly vibe.” (San Francisco-based Good Vibrations became the first sex-positive, women-friendly sex shop in the U.S. in 1997.)

“Some Fleshlight designs actually depict women’s genitals beautifully, like a more commercialized version of a Georgia O’Keefe painting.”

Since time immemorial, men have been fucking whatever they can get their hands on, whether it be rubber gloves, toiler paper rolls, couch cushions, fruit, teddy bears, etc. A story about a Redditor who jerked off into a coconut, then later had his penis covered by maggots (he did it multiple times with the same coconut), has become treasured Reddit lore. There are also communities committed to exploring upscale DIY masturbators by refashioning Pringles cans, sponges, and building a better Fleshlight.

The Fleshlight arrived in a perfect pro-masturbation societal storm, Lieberman said: On the heels of the safe sex messaging of the 1980s AIDS crisis, in the midst of cultural landmarks like Seinfeld’s 1992 episode “The Contest” which grappled with masturbation both male and female, and as the White House forced Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders to resign in 1994 for suggesting masturbation should be taught in school. In the 90s, masturbation, for better or worse, was discussed more openly than ever.

Shubin couldn’t have happened into a better time to unveil a tasteful sex toy for penis-having people. But the Fleshlight founder’s reputation is controversial: he’s waxed nostalgic in interviews about his time as an aggressive LAPD cop, and the company’s Glassdoor reviews are generally abysmal.

In 2010, Stoya stopped by the Fleshlight headquarters in Austin, Texas before her mold was made, and described Shubin as a “mountain of a man” who normalized the absurdity that surrounded him.

“He was like, ‘We’re having a meetin’ about selling your vulva, in a can, in a box,'” she said. “It suddenly seems so reasonable and everyday when you’re talking, but you get back to regular life and it’s like, Ha, there are like 100,000 replicas of my pussy floating around.”

USER EXPERIENCES

When I went looking for Fleshlight users, nearly 200 people messaged me to voluntarily talk about their Fleshlight experiences.

“It felt a lot better than I thought it would, which kind of depressed me tbh,” one Fleshlight user told me. “Made me miss actual physical intimacy. Hence why I only used it like 5 times.”

I offered all of them anonymity in order to speak freely about their private, sexual experiences, and asked the ones who requested anonymity to explain why they didn’t want to be named. Almost all of them cited some element of social stigma or shame.

The overwhelming majority of these people were male-identifying. Many said they were lapsed Fleshlight or non-Fleshlight pocket pussy enthusiasts—guys who told me they’d been gifted a masturbation sleeve of some kind, years ago, or bought one on a whim, and used it once or twice before casting it aside again. Several cited the difficulty of cleaning the Fleshlight for why they don’t use it more.

At least three cited some hazing ritual in college, or sharing one pocket pussy with an entire group of male friends.

Several described feeling a sense of disgust with themselves after using it.

“Used it like 4 times, post nut clarity hit extra hard, & now it’s somewhere in my closet soaked in semen & dust,” said one person.

Almost everyone who spoke to me said the feeling of masturbating into a fake vagina is nothing like the real thing.

“They’re billed as lifelike, and they simply are not,” one said. “Of course! It’s a chunk of rubber at the end of the day. It’s not a bad thing, they feel good.”

A few men told me that they use Fleshlights due to physical disability, to increase stamina, or conditions that make it difficult for them to have sex otherwise. One said he bought his online when he was 22. Because he has cerebral palsy, finding sexual partners is difficult. A Fleshlight, he thought, would make imagining the experience more vivid.

“It was what I expected, but it was also more difficult to enjoy for me as my hand would cramp from using the plastic container thing it came with for extra suction,” he said. “As a disabled user, it allowed me the freedom and knowledge that sex toys were definitely for me! It helped me deal with some of the loneliness that I was experiencing.”

I also spoke with Dan Cooper, senior editor at Engadget, about his experience reviewing a Fleshlight Launch—the company’s digital product made with teledildonics company Kiiroo, that moves up and down on its own, in tandem with porn scenes. Cooper’s childhood phimosis (a condition that causes over-tightening of the foreskin) led to him needing a medical circumcision, which he said gave him limited sensitivity during sex or masturbation.

“Even as someone who thinks of themselves as sex-positive, I’ve always held the view that Fleshlights were a bit sad,” Cooper told me. “I’d assumed that they wouldn’t have worked with my broken genitals, but it was revelatory how effective (and fun) they are to use.”

A few wives and girlfriends told me why they bought their male partners Fleshlights as gifts. Their stories usually involved buying masturbators as a couple, to use while traveling or in long-distance relationships. Some said they were gifts to use during military deployments.

Karabella, a trans woman and porn performer, told me that she first encountered a Fleshlight in 2012, on her first big production shoot. “I’d never even heard of a ‘pocket pussy’ before, but [the director] pulled out a brand new one and handed it to me,” she said. “It wasn’t exactly inviting when I first slid into the butthole-shaped slit of cold silicone, so I initially started to lose my erection. However, as it began to warm up around me it was increasingly difficult to differentiate between it and real flesh.” Seven years later, using a Fleshlight has become a staple of her cam shows and performances.

HOW IT’S MADE

Beyond what’s publicly available on the Fleshlight website, specific details about the production of Fleshlights are a closely-guarded company secret. No one outside the company seems to know what the soft, skin-like material—trademarked as “Real Feel SuperSkin”—is made out of.

Kristen Kaye, Fleshlight’s Head of Business Development until late last month when she left the company, said that the material “is indeed proprietary.” She told me she believes it is biodegradable, and “made of natural materials, mostly.”

The closest I came to finding the secret recipe for SuperSkin was through the founder of FleshAssist.com, a website devoted to all things Fleshlight and masturbators. A 24-year old web developer who goes by the pseudonym John started FleshAssist in 2014 after years spent frequenting Fleshlight forums. He told me in an email that ever since buying his first name-brand Fleshlight at 20 years old, he was “hooked.”

John told me that SuperSkin, as far as he’s aware, is made from “amorphous polymers,” a mixture of PVC and silicone. It’s similar to CyberSkin, another type of thermoplastic faux-skin material used in lots of non-Fleshlight brand sex toys and dolls (but not patented, like SuperSkin).

“The trick with softer materials is that they will inevitably not feel as velvety or suede-y as harder silicone,” Emily Sauer, founder of sex wearable company Ohnut, told me. “So there is in the development of the product, there is a constant battle between, you know, does it feel too sticky? Does it feel gross in any way? There’s a very fine line.”

“The hand is just way easier. Boner. Hand. Done. It’s that simple.”

Micropores in the Fleshlight’s PVC make their “skin” more realistic to the touch, but also can never be fully, truly sterilized once it’s used. The top complaint I heard from all of the Fleshlight users I spoke to was that it’s too hard to clean to use regularly.

“That’s really gross to me that guys don’t even rinse them out right after, now I’m thinking about it,” Kaye said. “How hard it would be to clean…. If you were to let things dry in there, how disgusting that would be?”

After our call, I borrowed a friend’s (unused) Fleshlight to find out for myself. It’s relatively easy to unscrew the pieces and take apart, and there’s a hole in both ends of the removable soft sleeve to run water through it. As In Bed Magazine’s YouTube review notes, the most inconvenient part of cleaning is leaving it out to dry in the open long enough that you can safely store it without worrying about mold growing in a wet, airtight can—but not so long that your roommates or family stumble across a silicone worm with a vulva on the end of it.

“I think it just comes down to laziness, to be honest,” Kaye said about why people don’t regularly clean their Fleshlights.

According to my very informal online polling, she’s right.

“The biggest annoyance for me was the clean up,” Twitter user and self-proclaimed “vaginal aficionado” @BurlClooney said. Burl first heard about Fleshlight on an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, which had a partnership with the company from 2010 to around 2012, according to Rogan’s tweets at the time.

“Your semen goes down into a base at the bottom and you should really clean that shit immediately,” he said. “But, I usually just wanted to sleep right away and would leave it until the next day or I would forget until I next used it. It was absolutely fucking disgusting. The cum would turn a weird color and it was so gross to clean out then. However, I mainly stopped due to all the prep work. The hand is just way easier. Boner. Hand. Done. It’s that simple.”

BECOMING A ‘FLESHLIGHT GIRL’

Stoya told me she once fucked a man with a mold of her own silicone vagina.

“It was so like, bizarrely narcissistic, but kind of beautiful,” she said.

She’s featured in one of Fleshlight’s most popular product lines, the Fleshlight Girls. There are also Fleshlight Boys (anal molds), and Guys (dildos), all modeled after real porn performers’ anatomy. Fleshlight currently offers around 45 models of Fleshlight Girls, including Stoya, Riley Reid, Jessica Drake, and Kissa Sins.

“I was laughing and talking a lot, and they told me to be careful, because your asshole actually moves a little bit when you laugh.”

Becoming a Fleshlight Girl is a career goal for many in the industry. Kaye, who led the selection of Fleshlight models, told me that three or four years ago the performer’s popularity rank on Pornhub, for example, would have been a deciding factor. Now, she looks at a variety of metrics—social media following, engagement online, how entrepreneurial and invested they are in their own success.

As secretive as the SuperSkin material recipe is, the process of molding a real vulva into SuperSkin is kept even more tight-lipped.

Fleshlight Girl Elsa Jean told me that the process of getting her custom mold done involved going to the Fleshlight headquarters in Austin and having someone cast a mold of her vulva and anus. Fleshlight models’ genitalia are also photographed using a 3D camera, and the final mold is hand-sculpted by a professional artist to get the details as accurate as possible.

“For my butthole, I had to go into a doggy[-style position],” Jean said. “I was laughing and talking a lot, and they told me to be careful, because your asshole actually moves a little bit when you laugh.”

Once they’re finished making the silicone mold, the models are given the product to check out. When Stoya saw a Fleshlight modeled after her own anatomy for the first time, the first thing she did was text a handful of her former lovers a photo of the silicone vulva. They’d know, she reasoned, if it was realistically accurate. (They said it was.)

“It was a very like, holy shit moment,” Stoya said. “You feel a bit like an action figure.”

Models are paid in royalties instead of a flat fee. The more that sell, the more money they personally make. For Stoya, being recruited for a Fleshlight of her own was a springboard into independence in the adult industry. “It’s what’s enabled me to start independent porn companies like Zero Spaces,” she said. “It’s sold well enough that it gives me the extra resources to do creative things.”

“Having my vagina and butthole on sale for people is actually pretty amazing,” Jean said. “Believe it or not, it was one of my goals when I first started in the industry. It’s as close as they can get to having the real thing.”

The actual objectification—turning a woman’s body into an object—involved in making a custom Fleshlight has brought the company, and anatomically-correct masturbation sleeves generally, some criticism.

“I don’t think it’s objectifying,” Lieberman said. “In fact, I’d even say that some Fleshlight designs actually depict women’s genitals beautifully, like a more commercialized version of a Georgia O’Keefe painting.”

I asked Stoya how she feels about the objectification criticism, as someone who’s worked in the adult industry as an actor, director, writer and business owner. Is the idea that hundreds of men could be fucking “her” right now weird at all?

After all, hundreds of people could be jerking off to her porn right now, too—and isn’t that kind of the same? Not at all, she said.

“People like don’t give a fuck largely about who’s doing the fucking [in mainstream porn], who’s coming up with the fucking, but with a Fleshlight—someone has looked [for me],” she said. “And even if they don’t know who I am, or my work, or care who I am as a person? They’ve still chosen my vulva. And that’s qualitatively different.”

People choose the Stoya Fleshlight because they’ve seen her work, or read something she’s written, or even just read the description on the product page of her persona, she said—and liked what they saw enough to pay $79.95 to fantasize about fucking her.

“That feels really humanizing,” Stoya said. “Whereas seeing one of my videos pirated on Pornhub with a sentence in the description that says, ‘Don’t mention the performers name so she can’t find this and get this removed’? That’s really dehumanizing, and really separates you from your work. With the Fleshlight, it’s the opposite.”

THE STIGMA

As the woman charged with marketing a plastic pussy to the masses, Kaye had a big job. And a huge part of that job, she told me, is overcoming the stigma attached to masturbation sleeves, and the men who buy them. Kaye’s worked in the adult industry—in advertising, consulting, and marketing—for 13 years, but for the last three with Fleshlight, she’s made it her mission to drag that shame out from under men’s beds and bring masturbation tools into the light.

“Unfortunately, for men, there are stigmas attached to using a masturbation device… because for whatever reason, if a guy’s masturbating or talks about masturbating, it’s like they’re not getting laid,” she said.

“For cis-gendered males, revealing you have a fleshlight gives implications that you can’t ‘get a girl’ on your own, which inhibits the positive ramifications of using sex toys,” one anonymous user told me. “In reality, they can help people explore what satisfies them, and healthily masturbating can relieve stress or just clear one’s mind, at least in my experience.”

“I feel like a lot of men feel ashamed or embarrassed for using one, but when you’re having a dry spell or not getting laid often, it’s very beneficial,” Twitter user @g0dsparadise said. “I have given Fleshlights as gifts in the past, I have told my closest friends about it, and I am hoping that one day it becomes very common to own one just because this whole stigma is ridiculous to me.”

Some pointed out a percieved double standard between male and female-gendered sex toys. “There’s an interesting dichotomy,” Cooper said. He attributed it to women’s sex toys being seen as “luxurious” and respected, while men’s typically aren’t. “But it all drills back to the idea that we should somehow be ashamed of sex.”

FleshAssist founder John told me that while the stigma itself isn’t as bad as it used to be, it still exists.

“I saw a comment before that said something along the lines of ‘a dildo looks potent, it shows that a woman doesn’t need a man,’ making it a symbol of female independence and empowerment,” John said. “I think if we flip that around, and say ‘a man with a masturbator shows that he doesn’t need a woman’ it doesn’t have the same resonance at all.”

Liberman said that she has noticed this stigma, too—and that despite toys like Fleshlight in the mainstream, it hasn’t changed much. “I think that’s because men are supposed to be self-sufficient and not need additional tools to get off,” she said. “Their hands are supposed to be all they need.”

THE FUTURE OF FUCKTOYS

It’s possible that the Fleshlight and other toys like it are a decent oracle for the future of sex.

If the analog Fleshlight was a step toward destigmatizing male sex toys, its interactive, internet-connected iteration could help bring virtual reality sex to the mainstream.

Fleshlight’s Launch device syncs automatic, motorized movement with interactive porn content. It’s a Fleshlight sleeve inside a casing shaped and sized like a wine chiller that moves the sleeve up and down in rhythm with the porn it’s synced with.

Fleshlight isn’t the first sex toy to combine porn, virtual reality, and a connected device that syncs the two. Around the time the earliest adult-themed virtual reality films were revealed, in 2015, people started wondering if porn would be the thing to finally push VR into the mainstream.

Sex toys that interact with film and VR open new worlds of transcending what your physical, corporeally-limited body could experience. Companies like Camasutra exist today that scan real humans into avatars for fuckability in virtual worlds. There’s no limit to what you can embody, sexually, in these virtual environments.

“The porn and sex-toy industries have always led the way in technological innovation: from the electrification of the vibrator in the late 19th century to the early adoption of VHS by porn directors,” Lieberman said. “VR and the Fleshlight are just extensions of this trend that stretches back all the way to the printing press and erotic literature.”

She attributes this innovation to a need for something novel. Putting your dick inside a mechanized stroker-bot certainly is that, and Fleshlight, as it chases the interactive trend, knows it.

As our identities become more openly fluid and less binary, so do our toys. Ohnut, another wearable, doesn’t look like anything anatomical at all. Even the color, a pale jade, is meant to evoke a neutrality without being skin-like. Like Kaye, Ohnut’s founder Sauer also mentioned the concept of enhancement. “It’s not trying to replace skin. It’s not trying to replace a person or anything. It enhances,” she said.

Sauer points to Tenga, a Japanese company that’s been making disposable soft strokers and sleeves since 2005, as an example of where the industry could continue heading: Toward a less gendered, more pleasure-centered future of sex. One of their products, the Tenga Egg, is a handheld stroker shaped like a gummy, hollow egg, and they’re sold inside Easter egg-hunt-shaped packaging.

“They’re de-misogynizing the male masturbator,” Sauer said. “[Tenga products] are so delightful, but they’re just as dirty. They’re meant to be thrown away, but they come in really fun patterns. And what’s less masculine than a white egg?”

“I think that sex toys now are moving away from realism: the idea that a person would only want to masturbate with a replica of genitals is kind of going away,” Lieberman said. “People are more focused on both the utility of a device (does it give me an orgasm) and the design: they want something that looks beautiful.” She noted that the Eva II vibrator by Dame, and Unbound’s Bean and Squish are geometric—not dick or vulva-shaped.

Fleshlight is no exception to this trend. According to Kaye, the Fleshlight Turbo, a newer, non-anatomical sleeve, is creeping up in reviews. It looks nothing like human anatomy. It doesn’t even come in “skin” colors—only “Blue Ice” and “Copper.” (However, a helpful cross-section of the Turbo labels where you’re meant to imagine the lips, throat and tongue would be.)

Screenshot via Fleshlight.com

“I think marketing the other stuff—the stuff that’s not like, pardon my French, fucking a rubber pussy—that’s how we’ve transitioned our marketing approach,” Kaye said. “The exact replica of the genitalia? I think that’s kind of getting tired. I see that the younger people are more inclined to get the stuff that’s non-anatomical, that’s a little more discreet.”

“The idea that a person would only want to masturbate with a replica of genitals is kind of going away.”

“There’s more of an acknowledgement that many people don’t fit into the gender binary and our toys should reflect that,” Lieberman said. “I think that gender neutral sex toys are popular now because sex toys always reflect the culture of the time they’re created in; they reflect the current gender norms…. I think this shift in sex toy design to gender neutral reflects both a profit motive and a desire for inclusivity.”

For some companies, this might be an inclusivity effort, but for others, “it’s a response to the fact that inclusivity can be profitable,” Comella said. “A business that de-genders vibrators or ‘queers’ sex toys also expands its potential market reach by eliminating labels that don’t have to be there in the first place.”

But for those who still want the visual illusion of another person, Fleshlight isn’t going anywhere.

“That’s the thing to always keep in mind with the adult industry: It’s the business of fantasy,” Stoya said. “It’s like magic or professional wrestling. The audience who enjoys it comes in, ready to suspend their disbelief.”

Lieberman believes that lifelike sex toys impact our sexuality mostly for the good. If you want the feeling of fucking a penis or vagina or butthole without another person attached to it, that option is available to us, here in the future.

“I’m not sure that our society is that much different for having the Fleshlight in the world,” Lieberman said. “But our society is better when more people are having orgasms, and since Fleshlights provide orgasms, then our society is a bit happier thanks to the device.”

The Fleshlight Is a Portal to the Future of Sex syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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orokinarchives · 7 years

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TennoCon 2017 Developer Art Panel

Hey guys! The Developer Art Panel at last week’s TennoCon gave us a glimpse into what’s in store for the future of Warframe. The link to the whole video is here, but if you don’t want to watch an hour-long video, I’m going to break down the whole thing here.

First, there’s a picture of the art team. Of those pictured, only Lucas Hug was actually at the panel. Also at the panel were Geoff Crookes, Keith Thompson, Mat Tremblay, and Raymond Dela Cruz. The panel was moderated by Rebecca Ford.

Tintmasks for the old Vandal and Wraith weapons! It looks like the ability to recolour these uncolourable weapons is coming soon! We already had the customisable Supra Vandal, but Lucas (at Rebecca’s insistence) went and added tint layouts to all existing Vandals and Wraiths. If you’re wondering what that “Wraith” syandana on the left is, that’s the Rakta syandana from the Spectres of Liberty event.

EDIT: these weapons are now colourable as of Update 22.0 (171012).

New Grineer armour set. It comes with a four-barrelled rifle (NOT a shotgun, Lucas insists), and an “Uzi”-like handgun.

EDIT: these weapons have since been added into the game as the Quartakk (rifle) and Stubba (pistol), along with the Maggor armour set (17221).

This is the Corpus pump-action shotgun that was shown on a DevStream a while back. As an update, Geoff says the weapon hasn’t been sent to rigging yet. Not sure what that means (I’m not an artist or video game designer), but it looks like it’s still going to be a while. The shotgun is accompanied by a sniper pistol, similar to the Knell.

EDIT: these have since been added into the game as the Arca Plasmor (shotgun) and Arca Scisco (pistol) (170907).

A glass-themed weapon set meant to accompany the next warframe, who, as revealed at TennoLive, will be glass-themed. A syandana (”more like a backpack”, says Lucas), a glass hammer, a shotgun, and a kunai set. It’s a good thing they mentioned that those were kunai, or I’d have thought they were more armour pieces.

EDIT: these have since been added into the game as the Astilla shotgun, Fusilai throwing knives, Volnus hammer, and Hyalus syandana (171012).

Up top, an awesome-looking Prime sugatra, and then below, a new set of Prime armour. I really hope this is like the Prime Eos set where Baro brings them, cause there are only so many Prime Accessories packs I can buy, and these look beautiful.

EDIT: these have since been added into the game as the Spritsail Prime armour set and Sardin Prime sugatra with Hydroid Prime (170829).

This is… from the community-designed weapons? I’m not sure; it was hard to make out what they were saying at this point. I think this is a Grineer blade and whip. Regardless, it looks cool.

EDIT: this has since been added into the game as the Jat Kusar blade-and-whip (170726).

Now we get to the good stuff! Hopefully you didn’t get bored and stop reading before now. This is a Tenno ship, much bigger than the Lisets and other landing craft. Keith Thompson talked about how he designed it. The idea is the old Solar Rails don’t work anymore (Presumably the ones travelling to the Dark Sectors, as we have junctions and rails to move between planets that seem functional. Or maybe it’s the Solar Rail to the Tau system!), so this ship sort of generates its own solar rail and moves along it. Notice the cylindrical structures oriented along the anteroposterior axis, which presumably contain or generate the solar rail.

As it travels, however, it will come under attack, and shift into this defensive state, where it stops moving along the solar rail and remains stationary while a squad of Tenno defend it. There are four gun turrets (white turrets, with red-tipped barrels, visible in both pictures) that can be manned, and Tenno can jump out the ship into archwing to defend it, and the ship can be breached by boarding parties, leading to ground combat. It was somewhat implied that this would be a 4-person squad as per normal missions, but it was also stated that this would be a clan-focused mechanic, with perhaps the ships being constructed by clans (if you spend any time on the official fora, you’ll no doubt see many suggestions for something like this). It was also discussed that the ships could also serve as a communal hub (again, mostly for a clan) outside of a combat scenario.

I think this was an absolutely mind-blowing reveal, almost as much as Plains of Eidolon (okay, about half as exciting as Plains of Eidolon). No word on how quickly it’ll get implemented. I imagine everyone’s hard at work on PoE and Umbra, so it’s unlikely this is anything more than concept art at this point.

This is a Sentient outpost. They came from the Tau system – but are there any left behind? It seems like the answer is yes! They’ve been rebuilding their outposts and space stations, and soon we’ll be bringing the fight to them! (Soon™) Keith Thompson said that he was told to make it cathedral-like, and I can see it. Especially if you’ve ever seen the interior of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which was patterned after nature by its architect, Antoni Gaudí.

(Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família interior – photo credit Jesus Solana)

This is a broken-off piece of an outpost that is being rebuilt into its own separate structure. The inner skeleton of the structure is markedly different from the material that sheathes the exterior. And some additional functionality is being built onto the arm on the right.

Keith and Geoff explain that the first Sentient the Orokin sent to the Tau system was giant – and knowing how big Hunhow is, that must be quite impressive to be “giant” by Sentient standards. It was a massive creature/robot/structure that was destroyed or broken up (how or why is never discussed), and the Sentients use pieces of it to build their outposts. The curved shape of it is meant to evoke a deeply sinister feel. The long strings take in detritus or material floating in space, likely for building materials or fuel. Geoff says it was patterned after a baleen whale, always inhaling, always taking in. Like a black hole.

Another Sentient outpost, with a closeup of the centre. It’s build around another piece of the first Sentient, with more baleen-whale-like intake. However, it’s being built much bigger than the original fragment. The skeleton of this structure has already been built, and the exterior sheathing will likely be laid on soon. This is a fascinating glimpse into Sentient construction methods and design philosophy.

These Sentient concepts are, Geoff says, an example of DE working far into the future. With all the focus on PoE, Umbra, and clans (Are we still focusing on clans this year? C’mon, Steve), I don’t think we’ll see this come into game for a year or more.

The Grineer ghouls, as revealed in the Top Cow comic! I haven’t read it yet, so I’m not sure what their role is. Rebecca and Geoff talked about them though (and Keith). Rebecca says, “As deformed and ugly as the Grineer are, you haven’t seen the bottom yet. These guys are much worse than what you’re used to.” (paraphrased) They’re incubated in these underground wombs (shown on a DevStream recently), and are brought out when needed. You can even see an umbilical-cord-like feature on the top one. The top ghoul is meant to be a sort of suicide unit, grappling on to you and exploding, while the bottom one features the return of the Grineer Sawblade, with a much bigger saw than before (anyone remember those?).

EDIT: these Ghoul enemies, along with two more variants not pictured here, were added into the game with Operation: Ghoul Purge (171221).

Lastly, we have some concept art of Ballas. Again, this is DE working far into the future, so I don’t expect to see this soon, but they were discussing how they’d like to bring him and possibly other Orokin into the game. This is our first look at what an Orokin actually looks like.

EDIT: Ballas was finally seen in-game, as depicted here, in the quest Apostasy Prologue, added with Update 22.8 (171221).

Hydroid Prime and his weapons, as well as the upcoming glass warframe, were shown here as well, but I won’t put them here because they were covered during TennoLive and in the TennoCon recap on the official website.

After this was audience Q&A. Some of the highlights:

More scarf-like syandanas (as opposed to cape-like?) are coming.

Fan concept warframes are not out of the question.

The Sentient arm-cannon weapon previewed a few DevStreams ago might be linked to the Sentient outpost, and come whenever that rolls out.

Geoff actually designed an in-game manifestation of the Tenno orbiter a couple years ago (!), and even made a docking animation with the landing craft. He was surprised it had never been shown. Rebecca made a note to show it during the next DevStream. Related: the orbiter (they said “Tenno ship”, but I assume that means the orbiter) is probably going to be expanded soon. Sure, there’s the still-locked door downstairs, but more than that, they talked about expanding the size of the orbiter and adding more stuff there. The decoration limit is not likely to go up any time soon, unfortunately, due to performance on low-end rigs when you place as many noggles in your ship as Rebecca has.

(EDIT: the Tenno orbiter was not shown on the next DevStream (170728).)

Sentients are supposed to be the highest-level content in the game, with the upcoming Sentient outposts. Those are where the veterans are supposed to go to test their skills. Not sure why this came up during an art panel.

The Sentient outposts will allow the art team to explore what Sentients other than Hunhow look like. (Right now, all the Sentients we encounter in-game are pieces of Hunhow).

That’s mostly it for the art panel. It was super interesting and a cool look into what’s in store for the future of Warframe. Really looking forward to all of this!

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