#like the bad guy is a monster whos genetically predisposed to be evil or to serve a master or something?

[chibikittens]

cant believe im posting this on the website that loves wednesday eep

[animebw]

Binge-Watching: Brand New Animal, Episodes 10-12

WOW, that ending was disappointing. Guess it’s time to complain about bad writing again!

Mixed Messages

It was apparent from the outset that Brand New Animal’s central metaphor wasn’t going to be a perfect metaphor to any one social issues. The nature of beastmen in universe is too complex to map one-to-one onto race, class, ethnicity, or any related subject. And I’ve given it the benefit of the doubt on that front as I’ve waited to see where it took its commentary. Fiction is built for imagination, after all; it’s okay if a fictional concept is just a fictional concept that draws inspiration from various real-life topics without mirroring any single one of them. But the longer BNA’s gone on, the more confusing and tangled that concept has gotten. On the one hand, it has clear metaphorical connections to certain aspects of racial identity and the experience of living as an outsider. On the other hand, a lot of its worldbuilding directly contradicts how racial identity and race as a concept functions in the real world. On the one hand, Michiru feels tokenized and fetishized as a beastman in the human world and struggles to come to terms with her identity, much like real minority groups do. On the other hand, beastmen are apparently genetically predisposed to turn into hulking rage monsters that pose a real danger to everyone around them, much like the conspiracy theories racists and bigots make up to justify discriminating against real minority groups. And now that we’ve reached the end, I’m forced to realize that these metaphors... just aren’t well thought out. They’re not complex or only partly applicable to real life, the writers just didn’t put a whole lot of thought into what they were trying to say.

Like, let’s run down some of the shit we learn in these last few episodes. Unlike real identities, being a beastman is a condition you can erase with a vaccine, which I guess you can read as a hyper-literal assimilation metaphor if you’re feeling generous (”If there are beastmen who want to become human, let them! But deciding for them is seriously creepy as hell!”) Alan’s the evil human bad guy because he wants to forcibly assimilate beastmen against their will, rather than let them choose whether they want to stick to their “cultural roots” or adapt to society as a whole. But then it turns out Alan’s actually the most beastman of all beastmen and is another immortal wolf god like Shirou. He’s a pureblood who looks down on beastmen who intermarry with different species of beastmen, so I guess this is now a show about race-mixing? And also Alan says that pureblood beastmen apparently run the world and pull human’s puppet strings, which is, like... what? Is BNA really saying that the fucking Jewish Cabal conspiracy theorists are right and the world is secretly run by a select group of supposedly marginalized people? I don’t think that’s what it’s trying to say, but that’s basically what it ends up saying. Why set up such obvious oppression parallels between humans and beastmen and then go “Psych! Turns out the oppressed people were the real oppressors all along!” What goddamn sense does that make? Even putting the obvious moral grossness aside, it’s just bad, nonsensical storytelling that comes out of nowhere and clashes hard with so much of what this show was trying to be. Was it just to give the animators a cool bad guy to animate for the final battle? Because if so, they really should’ve just embraced going full bonkers and not bog things down with such half-baked stabs at depth.

Dropping the Ball

What’s doubly frustrating about all this is that the failings of BNA’s writing aren’t just confined to how it bungles its metatextual elements. No, this script is so poorly thought out that it falls apart in universe as well. Like, even if I accept that Shirou’s village was actually destroyed by rampaging beastmen instead of humans (Which, hey, way to double down on that whole “Oppressed groups are their own oppressors actually” energy), how did Shirou not know that? Did he somehow miss the part where it was his own people slaughtering each other and spend a thousand years believing it was all humanity’s fault because... reasons? I’m not being facetious here, the show doesn’t explain this misunderstanding at all. Alan just says “You were therer, so you must know it was all beastmen’s fault, right?”, and apparently Shirou does know that, so then why the fuck did he believe it was humans instead? It’s the kind of bad writing that almost seems to want you to know how bad it is. The writers wanted to have Shirou believe the wrong thing about his past, but they couldn’t think up a convincing reason why he’d believe that wrong thing, so they just threw up their hands and said, “Fuck it, he believed the wrong thing because we say so.” It’s such an obvious contrivance, and it makes me angrier the more I think about it.

And that’s not even the dumbest plot thread in these final episodes. That comes from Nazuna planning to announce she’s really human to all of Anima City. Honest to god, this is one of the dumbest excuses for a villain plan I’ve seen in a long time. It should be blatantly obvious that Nazuna revealing herself to be a sham in front of all her devout believers will result in them going absolutely apeshit and triggering the rage syndrome. This is the Silver Goddamn Wolf, the most important figure to all beastmen, and she’s just gonna up and admit she’s been playing god to the entire city? And she somehow thinks this is going to calm them? “Hey, guess what, I’ve just been lying about being your god and strung your sincere beliefs along under false pretenses, but cheer up, cause everything’s gonna be okay!” I seriously cannot fathom the logic here. But apparently, Shirou’s the only guy with enough brains to realize that this is very obviously a bad idea and we shouldn’t do it. And once again, the writers don’t even give us a reason why! Everyone just conveniently doesn’t realize how this plan is obviously going to play out until Shirou comes in and says, “Hey, this is obviously not going to work and make everyone super mad,” at which point everyone else says “Oh shit, you’re right, guess we shouldn’t do that!” Who do the writers think they’re fooling here? Kazuki Nakashima’s never exactly been a flawless scriptwriter, but his work has never felt this half-assed before.

Brand New Me

Look, I’m not happy to be so down on these episodes. I really wanted to like Brand New Animal at the start, but every second that’s passed since Nazuna’s introduction has just gotten dumber and less interesting. And what kills me is that there are moments in here where the show BNA should have been comes through. Michiru and Nazuna bantering over their favorite songs (”You always look so ugly when you sing this song.”) is another detail that goes such a long way to humanizing their relationship, and I wish we didn’t have to wait until the final episodes for their friendship to click. And Michiru and Shirou’s conflict over the beastman serum is the one part of this finale that really feels genuine. Shirou’s driven by hatred towards all humans, and that spills out onto Michiru when she tries to get in his way. In his eyes, even if she’s turned into a beastman, her human heart will always mark her as an outsider. And in truth, Michiru is still kind of an outsider. As a human-to-beastman transformation, she doesn’t have the same lived experience as Shirou and the rest. But even so, she’s willing to learn, and she’s willing to embrace her beastman side as part of her life moving forward. The moment where she begs Shirou at gunpoint to let her into his life, to help her understand what he’s going through so they can help each other, was easily the show’s most emotional moment since episode 4. It even wrangles a coherent intersectionality metaphor; Michiru doesn’t have to be defined by any one side of herself. She’s part beastman, part human, with feet in more worlds than one, and only she gets to decide how much of each world she wants to define her. And she can love her beastman half just as much as her human half. If that idea was given more focus in BNA’s back half- if that was the emotional core, instead of whatever the fuck was up with Nazuna and the church- this show might have been something really special. If only that’s the version of BNA we actually got.

Odds and Ends

-”I may be a horse beastman, but carrots are no replacement for cigars!” askjdahsd fuck’s sake Marie you can’t just commit a microaggression like that

-oh god those hoof fingers are so disconcerting

-Okay, but these warehouses better have good Rampaging Monster Insurance with the amount of battles being dragged here.

-One more bit of praise: the show did a good job showing how Alan’s able to hide his villainy behind seemingly well-meaning efforts. I bought why Michiru initially trusted him a little too much, despite his suspicious nature.

-”You sure switched fast.” pfft

-Jackie’s kind of annoying, ngl. She’s like someone airdropped an obnoxious Kill la Kill reject into this otherwise more muted Trigger affair, and it doesn’t fit.

-okay but how did lizard guy know where the mayor was imprisoned

-Ahahaha, she copied his scent powers! Nice!

-”Can you do that again? Your howling is out of this world.” OH MY GOD MICHIRU YOU ABSOLUTE LUNATIC

-Wait, Michiru’s blood is the cure for beast madness? That’s... shockingly convenient.

-Oooh that’s some gnarly snake arm animation

-Oh hey, it’s the return of Ryuko Michiru.

And that’s it for BNA. Expect my series reflection in a bit, as well as what show will take its place!

[ohmygodtheywereparabatai]

kinda pissed ngl

This post wasn’t supposed to be a rant...

I originally began by wondering what Valentine’s father must have been like, for him to be so influenced by him.

We’re told that he had a similar upbringing to Jace and Sebastian, one involving the expected manipulation and abuse. However, those two completely disavowed any association with Valentine, and hated him with a passion: one was prepared to kill him, while the other acknowledged him only though blood, downright saying “I’d like to spit in his bastard face” behind his back. I wondered why Valentine didn’t have this attitude toward his own father. How, instead, he destroyed himself and everyone around him while pursuing revenge. How a son in an abusive situation could love his father that much.

And, yeah, there’s many other factors that tie into Jace and Seb’s hatred, but that’s exactly my point. When it comes to Valentine’s relationship with his father, it’s a big, fat blank — and I hate it. First of all, there wouldn’t even be a Mortal Instruments series without the initial villain that propelled the plot, and this is that villain’s story! Why don’t we know more? Why is there this empty gap between Valentine being a “gentle, kind boy” who had “an intensity bent toward doing what was right, what was good” and then suddenly the murderous, raging sociopath takes center stage? With... zero elaboration??

Part of the reason I’m tired out by the hate is because we never get to find out why. Sebastian’s why is the demon blood coursing through his veins, his determination to bind his family to him, no matter how unwilling, and to raise Hell. It’s in his nature. He had no choice. His eyes were meant to be “green as spring grass”. We bawled for a reason.

All I’ve ever been trying to do since I became fascinated with Valentine’s character was filling in that why. The blank in his character arc – the blank that makes him look cartoonish, and just a bloated allusion to Hitler. It made him so easy to hate, and so difficult to understand. Why did he fight so hard for change, and as early as twelve years old? Why was he so good at manipulating people, at filling in a hole where they felt lacking, at being able to charm his way out of deadlines and due dates with just a smile? (That sounds like a legit superpower. Sign me up.) Why does he say the word “party” with such revulsion, as if at fifteen years old he wouldn’t even allow himself to have fun?

Who were Oskar and Seraphina? (He even had an uncle.) How do they fit into this villain’s backstory, the grief-fueled rage that ultimately defines his transition into the bad guy, and decides the fates of so many other characters? They have to be more than just a mention in the Shadowhunter Codex in order to flesh out Valentine’s character, in order to help us empathize with his downfall, and see his flaws echoed in ourselves. That’s the tried and true way to write a fantastic villain. To capture the very evil that resides in all of us – instead of taking abuse, racism, bigotry, whatever feature of modern politicians or conservative alt-rights you can slap onto a fictional character in order to evoke the strongest response from a target audience. Relying on real life and nothing else to give your antagonist dimension is a cheap move. I hated that Valentine was a springboard for Sebastian’s narrative. I hated that he was sidelined as the psychopath, when in reality he wasn’t genetically predisposed to violence at all – he became a monster. He wasn’t born one. He aligns with the criteria for a sociopath much more accurately, and on plenty of different levels (I did my research, Sherlock!!) But all for what?

This is the man that dies “unable to distinguish between force and cooperation, between fear and willingness, between love and torture”. This is the man that tells Jocelyn in her deleted story: “I’m afraid of losing myself in all this sometimes, Jocelyn. It’s why I need you. You keep me human.” ... and who loses himself anyway. This is the man that learned, painfully, that “To love is to destroy, and to be the one loved is to be the one destroyed.” Not Jace. Not Sebastian. This is the man that came to the conclusion that he was meant for a higher purpose, that he had driven away everyone he loved – and was forbidden from trying to retrieve them – because they were distractions, that he couldn’t allow himself to be human. We probably expected Valentine’s flower card to do with pride, or vanity, or rage. Instead, it was the anemone – a flower that means forsaken.

For·sak·en: abandoned or deserted.

There’s an underlying tragedy behind Valentine Morgenstern, and I’ve struggled to dig it up, at least for the last four years now. Though his actions are inexcusable, and there is no doubt that racism, bigotry, and abuse are the extents of his monstrosity... he was once the good guy. The hero, even, set on reforming the future, ensuring that the world would be safe. Instead, he becomes “the very monster he sought to destroy”, and the only word from him is? That he parallels himself to Milton’s Lucifer, and that’s about it. Fuck this.

.......

I just think the very first villain to ever grace Cassandra Clare’s seductive, compelling Shadowhunter universe – deserves a little bit better.

[princeescaluswords]

D. W. Griffith, Call Your Office

I’ve been snookered again.

Suddenly, the Unsullied are the Bad Guys.  The Dothraki are monsters.  

Daenerys, who two episodes ago, risked her life, her children’s lives, and the lives of everyone who followed her across the ocean is now the Evil Mad Queen. 

Why?  Because on the brink of victory, she snapped like a dry twig.  No, getting sold to Drogo for an army didn’t break her.   Drogo getting murdered by a deranged sorceress didn’t break her.   The Red Wastes didn’t break her.  The Warlocks of Qarth and the Tower of the Undying didn’t break her.   Getting recaptured and dragged once more to Vaes Dothrak didn’t break her.   Losing Viserion didn’t break her.  The Army of the Freaking Dead didn’t break her.  

Bells did it.   They had to ring those bells. 

Daenerys, who pledged to break the wheel, who fought to free slaves, is inherently untrustworthy because, as a woman, she’s emotional and undisciplined.

Cersei is given a sympathetic end.  You read the right -- Cersei is given a sympathetic end crying for her baby.    All those poor white people!

But don’t worry -- the White People are coming to save you from Genetically-Predisposed to Madness Queen and her Colored Hordes!

I PAID MONEY FOR THIS?

For this sexism, racism, and shitty writing?