#it’s just a whole lot of obvious imagery that builds a bigger picture

[9w1ft]

@bwhammy don’t really know if i should say 🙈 but the moment i listened to it this way it completely clicked and it became an incredibly heartwarming song. no way this is a breakup song to me.

[skxllz]

rant on stranger things because my brain doesn't shut up

now that I'm thinking more into it, the last season is probably gonna circle all the way back to season one. just.. think about it.

byler stans have pointed out multiple times how the behaviors of will and mike, even some of the others, all have interpreted the same setting from at least one episode in season one. personally, I can't remember that shit cause I haven't watched season one since 2017, but looking over all of the posts it makes so much sense.

everything is paralleled for a reason, obviously. It's to give the audience the initiative of making up their own theories to where they break it down to something totally suspected, which is why the duffers, this season, made everything so obvious. In my view, now that I think about it, it's reverse reverse psychology. a typical writer, for a book or movie or whatever, always follows the same classic yet audience catching trope of regular reverse psychology; “ we'll do this so that they fall for that, but in reality they knew all along that it'd be this - what we're doing now ”. the duffer brothers are doing the complete opposite.

If I'm wrong, oh well, but just hear me out.

they're show has been a huge success thus far. sure, other writers were thrown into the mix along the way, but let's not forget it's the duffers' show at the end of the day, so they're calling the shots regardless; meaning they approved of that writing, yeah? so obviously they're thinking logically.

they gave us a scoop of what was to come beforehand through hints, edited pictures, etc. but, even though a lot of clues that were involved were put in, it didn't actually follow out with the way everyone thought. that is the thought process of an open minded writer that has the imagery of a thousand suns - they throw you off then build it up, to where it's still a surprise, but you eventually find out. with this, they threw us all off, and it made it seem like they're gonna be predictable. they'll still do the same shit over, and over, and over, but in different ways. then, at last minute, they'll flip the switch; pull a fucking nicolas cage and blow the audience away with unexpected foreseeing - the facts that were there all along.

I can't say for sure eddie will be back, not all ideas and hopes always work out, but everything else? I highly doubt all the shit mentioned will just be let go like that. it'll all circle back to the principal, which is what has been slowly happening. there's probably way more hidden things in season one that no one has pointed out because they're so plain or even shadowed, that no one would think “ oh that definitely means something ”.

like don't get me wrong, there's so many brainiacs in this fandom, but sometimes things can go over anyone's head.

for example, shit in the background. a mere blurred out picture can refer to something and you wouldn't even catch it because it's made to look like decoration. but, in reality, it could be the main plot's key to the entire story. like karen wheeler? she was spot-lighted in both season 3 and 4. yeah it was for like, what, five minutes each time? not even? but it has to be for a reason, not just spiced up detail. I guarantee you she plays an even bigger part in the last season, even if it's just to make nancy realize it's okay to be single and yadda yadda yadda.

but these types of stories are always the best, because it'll have you thinking “ oh my god, it was right under my nose the whole time ” and that's literally the entire point of syfy and thriller, which is why it's so beautifully infuriating.

[douxreviews]

Cloak and Dagger - ‘Vikingtown Sound’ Review

"You have the face of a system that has done nothing but hold me and mine down."

Cloak and Dagger starts laying out some answers as season two heads into the home stretch.

But Ty's mom, though...

We got a few big reveals in this one, and yet none of them feel nearly as compelling as every single moment of Connors and Adina Johnson's discussion over dinner prep. That just shouldn't be possible.

Let's start with some talk about those revelations, because there's a lot to talk about and I don't want them to seem like an afterthought after I go on a good long rave about Gloria Reuben. Spoiler alert: I'm going to go on a good long rave about Gloria Reuben.

After a few notable teases of the mystery veve, most notably in all of the picture frames in Ty's family home inside Tandy's dreamworld last episode, we get the reveal of whose veve it is. It turns out to be one of those reveals that makes you think, 'I should have thought of that,' and yet is still a surprise. The answer, as is obvious in hindsight, is that it's Andre's veve. The twist here being that Andre himself didn't know that until now. That's a clever way to obfuscate the issue. Andre's lack of recognition of the symbol made it seem clear that it must belong to someone else, but of course who else would have caused it to be plastered all over the inside of the visions that Andre was causing Tandy to have. He just didn't know he was doing it.

So Andre is on the cusp of becoming a loa, and had no idea. That's an interesting development, and casts a whole new light on what he's been trying to accomplish this season. It turns out that so far all he's been after is to use the despair of kidnapped girls to make his migraine pain go away and didn't really have a bigger picture goal. Now we find out that the bigger picture had a larger goal for him.

Great use of Auntie Chantelle this week, as relates to this plotline. It made perfect logistic sense that Andre would find Chantelle in Ty's memories and immediately go to her to get some answers about this mysterious veve that he's finding everywhere. It was also satisfying that Chantelle was perfectly honest and straightforward with him, not even being ruffled by the abrupt transition into his 'record store.' Chantelle hasn't always been well used by the show, and it was nice to see her get some good material here. Particularly if she's really dead as the show seemed to indicate. It's hard to be certain; from what we saw it appears that Andre slowed her heart to a stop, trapping her spirit in her happiest memory. At least I think that's what happened, it leaned kind of heavily into visual metaphor, so it's hard to say.

That's not a flaw, buy the way. I'll take 'atmospheric, moving, and vaguely defined' over 'detailed and boring' any day of the week. And it was touching, if unsurprising, that her happiest memory was the birth of her niece Evita. The record seemed to be leading up to Chantelle giving her sister some bad news that she only specifies with 'No, not Evita...' I think we were finally just told why Evita was raised by her aunt. Goodbye Auntie Chantelle. We'll probably never get to learn where you got that 3-D printer now.

In other reveals, Tandy has finally arrived at the Viking Motel, final destination for the kidnapped girls. After weeks of speculation as to what could be going on there, it turns out to be the saddest and least surprising explanation. The girls are there to clean during the day and then get pimped out at night. Although the show is incredibly discreet and tasteful about how explicitly it states that second part. I think in this specific circumstances, that was the right call. There's certainly an argument to be made that if you're going to depict sex slavery that you have an obligation to make it as confrontationally blunt as possible in order to get across how horrific the issue really is. In this case, however, I think the decision to leave the johns as almost entirely faceless and the details of what was happening only implied was the right one because it allowed the focus to remain on the girls as the real victims of the situation. As I said, opinions may legitimately vary on that point.

One thing that didn't entirely gel this week was the way they were using the metaphor of 'losing all your hope' as the real chains that kept the girls in the motel and in slavery. I get what they were going for with that, but it gets muddy when they're also using hope as a real and tangible 'thing' that powers Tandy's light knives. And so the 'imprisoned by the absence of hope' metaphor works in the case of Del; that's absolutely what keeps her from being able to walk out the open door when it's offered to her. But that's absolutely not the case for Tandy. She's not held back by despair, she's held back by a big security guard who physically carries her back inside. They're playing the 'absence of hope' thing metaphorically in one case and literally in another, largely because that allows them to cancel Tandy's powers for a bit, and the two never really dovetail with one another. It's a minor point, but it bugged me a little bit. Not so much that I didn't grin like an idiot when the act of inspiring hope in Del caused Tandy to regrow her own hope, all of which was conveyed to the viewer by the simple device of shining a light on Olivia Holt from below at a key moment.

Meanwhile, Ty gets briefly sidetracked by a run in with Andre and appears to be going the route of despair, but is saved by Mayhem, still trapped in the dark dimension, simply changing the record being played in Andre's store. More, she saves him by using the 'Tandy's perfect life' record that we saw being played last week, which was just a really wonderful tie back to prop detail as metaphor, which is something this show really excels at.

OK, let's talk Adina Johnson and her hostage, Connors.

Everything about this series of scenes was brilliant. Well written, well acted, just note-perfect drama. From the way the dynamic is established with Adina setting the starting point for their discussion through to its resolution, this was raw and real and you could really just excise these scenes from the rest of the series entirely and do them as a one act play, because any outside info you need to understand what's happening is given to you quite naturally in the dialogue. Actually, could someone please do that?

Adina sets up an interesting dilemma for herself. She needs to determine if Ty's need to have Connors alive so that he can clear his name outweighs her need for him to pay for Billy's death. That is one hell of an ethical riddle, and addressing it through the preparation of food was a great conceit. When the meal is ready and Adina goes to the cupboard, it's absolutely crystal clear what we're waiting to be told and how we're going to be told it. If she takes out two plates, Connors lives. If she takes out one, Connors dies. It could not read clearer that that's the situation and it's never even hinted at in the dialogue. I'm not sure how much of that is good writing and how much of it is good directing, but it's amazing. I was on the edge of my seat over dinnerware.

Bits and Pieces:

-- I'm worried about how Evita is going to react to the events of this episode. Now I think of it, Evita has always been kind of a wild card.

-- It's a little odd how the records being played in Andre's dimension affect reality. For example, it was a great visual and really told the story well, but how exactly did playing 'Tandy's Perfect Life' pull a dozen child ballerinas into existence? Or the ambulances that get summoned later?

-- When Ty and Andre clasped hands, Andre read Ty, not a hint of the other way around. Is Andre stronger than Ty? Has he just had more practice? Is it because Ty's powers are so linked with Tandy's and she wasn't there? I'm curious.

-- I adore how little care Mayhem took in putting the records back after she played them.

-- Was Ty's collapse at the end because Mayhem trashed the record store? His dark dimension seemed to be bleeding out of him, and it was intercut with Mayhem trashing the place, so it feels like those are connected. Time will tell.

-- For a metaphorical despair catalog, the record store had a surprising amount of object permanence. Changes Mayhem made to it were still there when Andre came back, so it isn't just a visualization of a metaphor.

-- I didn't expect them to take down the trafficking ring this quickly. They must need to clear that plot out of the way to get to Andre's ascension. Only three episodes left.

-- Connors knows where the real Billy's body has been all this time. That makes them claiming to need 'extra evidence' a couple episodes back even more ridiculous. The actual body, with DNA matching Adina and Otis would probably have been pretty persuasive.

-- They're really building up Connors' off screen Uncle as a threat. I wonder if he's been cast yet. Will he be the villain in season three? Because we're going to get a season three... right?

-- It's a minor point, but Lea knows Tandy's mom. Melissa Bowen has been going to that same group. How is she not remotely worried about her?

-- The opening image of the missing girls flyer falling down and being taken away in a garbage truck was not subtle imagery.

Quotes:

Adina: "I’m in kind of a bind here. Stuck between two forces." Connors: "Good and Evil?" Adina: "Billy and Tyrone."

Del: "My dad was a hammer. My mom was a nail."

Connors: "I get a call from a resident, says that she saw a young man in a hoodie skulking about." Adina: "A young man, or a young black man?" Connors: "She used a different word."

Andre: "What does my symbol mean?" Chantelle: "I’m not so sure I’m keen on telling you that right now."

Chantelle: "If you can’t be merciful when you play god, what kind of god will you be when you ain’t playin’ no more?"

Another great episode, marred only slightly by a couple of small thematic metaphor things that felt a little bit unreconciled to me. Not nearly enough so to spoil the story, however.

Three and a half out of four place settings.

The 'next time' preview seemed to indicate that I was inadvertently right about something last week. That's always a nice feeling.

Mikey Heinrich is, among other things, a freelance writer, volunteer firefighter, and roughly 78% water.

[vaultt-tec]

How did Fallout 1 ever get made?

PCGameN sat down with the Fallout 1 team and discussed its making.

This is in a read more because it is SUPER long. I added it all here but click the link and read it on their site, there are more pictures!

Tim Caine was at PAX when he first saw Vault Boy as a living, breathing entity - it was a cosplayer of 16 or 17 years old, hair gelled to replicate that distinctive swirl. ‘This is weird’, he thought.

Feargus Urquhart remembers walking into Target and seeing that same gelled haircut and toothy smile, not on a fan this time, but emblazoned across half a metre of cotton. ‘How is it that a game that we all worked on somehow created something iconic?’, he wondered. ‘How did it show up on a t-shirt in a department store?’

Related: the best RPGs on PC.

In the years since, Bethesda have taken Fallout into both first-person and the pop culture mainstream. Vault Boy has become as recognisable as Mickey Mouse. The series’ sardonic, faux-’50s imagery now feels indelible, as if it has always been here. But it hasn’t.

It took the nascent Black Isle Studios to nurse the Fallout universe into being, as an unlikely, half-forgotten project in the wings of Interplay, where Caine and Urquhart were both working in the ‘90s. The pair helped create one of the all-time great RPGs in the process.

“The one thing I would say about Interplay in those days, and this isn’t trying to pull the veil back or anything like that - there was just shit going on,” Urquhart tells us. “It was barely controlled chaos. I’m not saying that Brian [Fargo] didn’t have some plan, but there was just… stuff.”

One day, Fargo sent out a company-wide email to canvass opinion. He wanted Interplay to work on a licensed game, and had three tabletop properties in mind. One was Vampire: The Masquerade. Another was Earthdawn, a fantasy game set in the same universe as Shadowrun. And the third was GURPS, designed by Games Workshop’s Steve Jackson.

The team picked the latter, overwhelmingly, because that was what they played in their own sessions. But GURPS wasn’t a setting - it was a Generic Universal RolePlaying System. And so Interplay’s team had to come up with a world of their own.

“I would send out an email saying, ‘I’m in Conference Room Two with a pizza’,” Caine says. “And if people wanted to come, on their own time, they could do it. Chris [Taylor, lead designer], Leonard [Boyarksy, art director], and Jason [Anderson, lead artist] showed up.”

Interplay at the time was almost like a high school, as map layout designer Scott Evans remembers it: incredibly noisy and divided into cliques. Caine was building a clique of his own.

Traditional fantasy was the first idea to be dismissed. The team actually considered making Fallout first-person, a decade early - but decided the sprites of the period didn’t offer the level of detail they wanted. Concepts were floated for time travel, and for a generation ship story - but one after the other, they were all pushed aside and the post-apocalypse was left.

“One thing I didn’t like was games where the character you’re playing should know stuff that you, the player, don’t,” Caine says. “And I think the vault helped us capture that, because both you the player and you the character had no idea what the world was like. The doors opened and you were pushed out. And I really liked that, because it meant we didn’t have to do anything fake like, ‘Well you were hit on your head and have amnesia’.”

There was plenty about the Fallout setting that wasn’t as intuitive, however. Players would have to wrap their heads around a far-future Earth and a peculiar retro aesthetic, even before the bombs started dropping. The question of how Fallout ever survived pitching is answered with a Caine quip: “What do you mean, pitch?”

For a short while, Interplay had planned to make several games in the GURPS system. But soon afterwards they had won the D&D license, a far bigger property that would go on to spawn Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. As a consequence, Caine’s team were left largely to their own devices.

As for budget - Fallout’s was small enough to pass under the radar. Although Interplay are best remembered for the RPGs of Black Isle and oddball action games like Shiny’s Earthworm Jim, they had mainstream ambitions not so different to those of the bigger publishers today. During Fallout’s development they were primarily interested in sports, and an online game division called Engage.

“It was almost like a smokescreen,” Urquhart explains. “So much money was being pumped into these things that you could go play with your toys and no-one would know.”

Which is exactly what the Fallout team did, pulling out every idea they’d ever intended for a videogame.

“Being just so happy and fired up that we were making this thing basically from scratch and doing virtually whatever we wanted, we had this weird arrogance about the whole thing,” Boyarsky recalls. “‘People are gonna love it, and if they don’t love it they don’t get it.’

“Part of it was a punk rock ethos of, every time we came up with an idea and thought, ‘Wow, no-one would ever do that’, we always wanted to push it further. We chased that stuff and got all excited, like we were doing things we weren’t supposed to be doing.”

The team laugh at the idea that Fallout might have carried some kind of message (“Violence solves problems,” Caine suggests). To these kids of the ‘80s, nuclear holocaust felt like immediate and obvious thematic material. The game’s development was guided by a mantra, however.

“It was the consequence of action,” Caine puts it. “Do what you want, so long as you can accept the consequences.”

Fallout lets you shoot up all you want. But if you get addicted, that will become a problem for you, one you’ll have to cope with. The team were keen not to force their own views onto players, and decided the best way to avoid that was with an overriding moral greyness. The Brotherhood of Steel - in Fallout 3, a somewhat heroic group policing the wasteland - were here in the first game simply as preservationists or, more uncharitably, hoarders. Even The Master, the closest thing Fallout had to a villain, was driven by a well-intentioned desire to bring unity to the wasteland. His name, pre-mutation, was ‘Richard Grey’.

“Everyone needed to have flaws and positive points,” Taylor says. “That way the player could have better, stronger interactions whichever way they went.”

Although the GURPS ruleset eventually fell by the wayside, the Fallout team were determined to replicate the tabletop experience they loved - in which players don’t always do what their Game Master would like. They filled their maps with multiple quest solutions and stuffed the game with thousands of words of alternative dialogue. “The hard part was making sure there was no character that couldn’t finish the game,” Caine says.

Fallout’s dedication to its sandbox is still striking, and only lately matched by the likes of Divinity: Original Sin 2. It was a simulation that enabled unforeseen possibilities.

“I am shocked that people got Dogmeat to live till the end of the game,” Taylor says. “Dogmeat was never supposed to survive. You had to do some really strange things and go way out of your way to do so, but people did.”

During development, a QA tester came to the team with a problem: you could put dynamite on children.

“Where you see a problem…,” Urquhart says. He is joking, of course, yet the ability to plant dynamite - achieved by setting a timer on the explosive and reverse pickpocketing an NPC - became a supported part of the game and the foundation of a quest. This was a new kind of player freedom, matched only by the freedom the team felt themselves.

“We were really, really fortunate,” Boyarsky says. “No-one gets the opportunity we had to go off in a corner with a budget and a team of great, talented people and make whatever we wanted. That kind of freedom just doesn’t exist.

“We were almost 30, so we were old enough to realise what we had going on. A lot of people say, ‘I didn’t realise how good it was until it was over’. Every day when I was making Fallout I was thinking, ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this’. And I even knew in the back of my head that it was never going to be that great again.”

Once Fallout came out, it was no longer the strange project worked on in the shadows with little to no oversight. It was a franchise with established lore that was getting a sequel. It wasn’t long before Boyarsky, Caine, and Anderson left to form their own RPG studio, Troika.

“We knew Fallout 1 was the pinnacle,” Boyarsky says. “We felt like to continue on with it under changed circumstances would possibly leave a bad taste in our mouths. We were so happy and so proud of what we’d done that we didn’t want to go there.”

Fallout is larger than this clique now. Literally, in fact: the vault doors Boyarsky once drew in isometric intricacy are now rendered in imposing 3D in Bethesda’s sequels. And yet Boyarksy, Taylor, and Caine now work under the auspices of Obsidian, a studio that has its own, more recent, history with the Fallout series. Should the opportunity arise again, would they take it?

“I’m not sure, to be very honest,” Taylor says. “I loved working on Fallout. It was the best team of people I ever worked with. I think it’s grown so much bigger than myself that I would feel very hesitant to work on it nowadays. I would love to work on a Fallout property, like a board game, but working on another computer game might be too much.”

Boyarsky shares his reservations: that with the best intentions, these old friends could get started on something and tarnish their experience of Fallout.

“It would be very hard for us to swallow working on a Fallout game where somebody else was telling you what you could and couldn’t do,” he expands. “I would have a really hard time with someone telling me what Fallout was supposed to be. I’m sure that it would never happen because of the fact that I would have that issue.”

Urquhart - now Obsidian’s CEO - is at pains to point out that Bethesda were nothing but supportive partners throughout the making of Fallout: New Vegas, requesting only a handful of tiny tweaks to Obsidian’s interpretation of its world. “I’ve got to be explicit in saying we are not working on a new Fallout,” he says. “But I absolutely would.”

Caine has mainly built his career by working on original games rather than sequels: Fallout, Arcanum, Wildstar, and Pillars of Eternity. But he would be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about working on another Fallout.

“I’ve had a Fallout game in my head since finishing Fallout 1 that I’ve never told anyone about,” he admits. “But it’s completely designed, start to finish. I know the story, I know the setting, I know the time period, I know what kind of characters are in it. It just sits in the back of my head, and it’s sat there for 20 years. I don’t think I ever will make it, because by now anything I make would not possibly compare to what’s in my head. But it’s up there.”

[zenosanalytic]

Wonder Woman

Ok, so I saw this yesterday, and I liked it, and I thought it was a good movie, but I felt it was weighed down by the necessity of tying it into the DC continuity, and I found it philosophically unsatisfying in certain particular, idiosyncratic ways.

As a movie and an Action Movie I thought it did a great job. All the performances were excellent. The lack of male-gaziness, the placing of a guy in the traditional love-interest role, the allowance of said love-interest to be a full and complex character which so few conventional action movies with conventional male directors is willing to afford to women characters and actors, was Wonderful.

I could have done without the frame story. I understand why they did it, but it detracted from the film, i think, and they could have made it much smaller and accomplished the same thing. It could have been as easy as having the frame be a question from Bruce at a party, or Diana seeing the picture in her house or at work and remember. Or heck, have no frame at the start and fade from her looking at the picture on the memorial to her looking at the picture in her hand or on the wall or in a museum or something in the present.

I wanted MORE Movie. Yes, I realize it was almost 2 1/2 hours long, but it felt rushed to me; like they didn’t have much time establish the setting, background, and supporting characters in. There were a lot of good ideas there: the motley, dispossessed nature of Steve’s team being a implicit example of how destructive war is; Charlie’s PTSD; the revelation of the horrors behind Steve’s American optimism, but none of these felt like they were given the time they needed, or the development they deserved.

Every action sequence in the movie was in the trailers. This is Bad, and I kinda feel like it’ll alienate those fans who came to the it as an actiony summer blockbuster, though idk how big a sector of the audience that’ll be.

I’d have liked a bigger time-frame for the plot. Excepting the backstory section, the whole movie takes place in, like, a week or two at most. You see Diana go to sleep three times, so it’s possible it all happens in three days.

I don’t think you needed the McGuffin of the gas, and I’d have preferred a full-war time-frame, akin to First Avenger. Diana’s motivation is to find and defeat Ares, afterall, so the war in itself, its scope, and its world-wide, apocalyptic tones, would have been enough to draw her out through her desire for adventure and sense of obligation.

Pitch: Steve crashes, she learns about the war, she decides Ares is behind it and goes to find and defeat him, she confronts the cabinet/high command/whatever to offer her aid, being raging sexists they laugh her out of there, enraged she goes to the front and proves her worth ala the village sequence, now she’s a national figure and command HAS to use her but they use her in ways that keep her out of the main action and away from where the can end the war quickly, through all this she comes to see and learn the nature of war, of humanity, that her allies aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, how hopeless and stupid and wasteful The Great War was, and starts to question her OWN joy in and desire for violence, and what that says about who she is, who humans are, Who/What “Ares” is, and what it means to be good and just. And then you can do your ending, which I’ll get to later.

More could have been done with Etta.

The unashamed inclusion of dysfluency/fillers in the dialogue, both in response to Diana ‘s not-so-mere Presence and just for their own sake, was something I deeply appreciated.

The Romance stuff was Wonderful, and Good, and Pure. I Love that they did the “sex scene” with a simple room walk in and jump cut to their lighted window during the night. I think it could have been better though :| I am going to write-up how I think it could have been better, and when I do I will link it here :| :| Though I might wait until I can rewatch it online so I can make sure I get the dialogue right and everything right.

I agree with @purified-zone that including the Ares bit, and the way they did it, undercuts the really excellent and interesting Existential and Humanitarian message the film had been building up until then, only to replace it with a deeply unsatisfying, poorly done, and confusing Idealist ending that somehow manages to feel both enormously tacked on, utterly out of the blue, and unnecessary and clumsily foreshadowed for much of the movie. I mean, it wasn’t even much of a twist I was like “that dude is totally Ares because the movie so much wants us to believe it’s the other guy and he’s set up in opposition to him” the minute I saw him. I have more idiosyncratic Opinions about this bit, which I’ll get to below.

The Ares effects were really badly done ohmygods X| X| X|

I don’t like how the death of Steve was done, though I don’t really mind him dying in the movie. A WWI movie that doesn’t feature the protagonist and audience losing their dear friends is a bad WWI movie, and the more needless, horrible, and senseless those deaths are the more accurate the movie will be. Every WWI movie should be an anti-war movie.

IDIOSYNCRASIES

I felt the visual symbolism was confused in a few places. Like: you have a bit where Diana, through the power of Friendship, destroys the belltower(an architectural bit that often includes a crucifix) of a church to save a village, because a German sniper is sheltering in it. Then she stands above them all, in the ruins of said belltower, framed by clouds and shining golden light, and is cheered as a hero. That’s a pretty pro-pagan, or at the very least anti-church/clerical, image religious-politics wise. But then you have her killing Ares by floating into the sky, in the crucifixion pose(was she backlit here? I forget) and shooting a beam of pure white light(ning?) out of her chest at him. Pretty unabashed(and action-movie-conventional) Christian symbolism there. Then you have the obvious parallels the back story draws between the Abrahimic God and Zeus, and the “Fall” of Ares and the “Fall” of Lucifer. So the way the movie uses religious imagery is all over the place, and it didn’t come off to me as being meant in a positive and syncretic way, so it was just confused.

And why make the Olympians all dead in the first place? That’s such a dumb and utterly pointless thing to do. You can explain why they exist and do nothing to stop evil in the world as simply as having Hippolyta tell Diana that, after seeing the devastation and anguish caused by Ares and their necessary war against him to stop his destruction, the Gods swore to never directly interfere in the mortal world again. It’s literally that simple, and that would even leave open the possibility of indirect influence and “help” given to Diana by the Gods.

Ok so about the ending. One where there was no Ares would have probably been the best, and played better into the monologue Diana has at the beginning of the film. I think, if they really wanted to though, they could have included Ares in a way that didn’t undermine the movie’s message about existentialism and the protective lies Hippolyta had told Diana growing up.

Like, gods aren’t just beings, they’re ideas personified. They kind of play with this idea in the movie by having Ares “influence” humans towards self-destruction, but they could have done a better job with it. Ares’ motivation could have been sincere but mistaken. As a god of war, anytime and place he would have been able to manifest in the mortal world would have been one of conflict and destruction; simply by being around people, he would have encouraged their violent and impetuous traits. He would have seen, due to his nature, the worst in Humanity. From that perspective, it’d have been no surprise that he held them in the low opinion he did. Zeus tries to explain this to him, he won’t understand(no one ever accused Ares of ebing smart), and that misunderstanding is what leads to the first god-war, his weakening, and his banishment to the mortal realm.

So the conflict between Ares and Diana would be a rehashing of this -him being unable to see the truth of humanity and himself, her trying to get him to see it through the example of her own experiences- and that would have allowed the godly showdown at the end without undermining the existentialism message, and indeed could easily play into it by involving Ares’ own agency, choices, and beliefs in the film’s resolution(which would easily allow an ending without Steve’s Captain America esque death).

I also think playing that “showdown” as a wholly physical one was a mistake. Like, you could have had that be a conceptual battle -Diana and Ares fighting as their divine selves in, essentially, human brainspace- that resolves with Diana “winning” the argument, and is mirrored by Steve or Sameer talking the people at the base out of gassing the front and destroying the armistice; resolving the problem in the real world without violence. You would have Diana’s fight with the God of War be a manifestation of Steve or Sameer’s rhetorical “fight” with the desire for conflict that god represents in the real world, and have in genuinely be a fight for peace, through the methods of peace. I doubt that’d have much connection at all to the Wonder Woman of the comic books, but it’s an ending I would have Dug to see done, and it would have done something genuinely interesting with the whole “god” concept, rather than just having gods be really tough and magical humans.