#the first one for the sheer amount of plot contrivances that happen in order for it to occur

[shigayokagayama]

mob psycho scenes that are shocking and dramatic exactly one time then become funny on every subsequent rewatch:

- fire scene

- mob gets hit by a car and fucking dies

[miraculouscontent]

All the thoughts:

First off, the plan.

I don’t get Shadow Moth’s plan or Optigami in general. Like, it was already weird that we had the phone that picked up on a kwami’s voice (I’ll hold my tongue on that one until we have all the episodes that take place before this, though my hopes aren’t high), but both Optigami and the phone happening in the same episode when it’s been resaid in this season that kwami can’t be seen/heard by technology is just silly. I get that Optigami is a sentimonster so it’s “magic technology,” but I dunno, something feels weird about it.

The reason I bring it up is because what’s shown contradicts what happens later in the episode. The footage shown by Optigami shows Carapace de-transforming and Wayzz popping out of the miraculous right afterwards, but when Senti!Carapace and Rena Rouge detransform at the end of the episode, the kwami don’t pop out. The former is also consistent with most detransformations; the kwami usually pops out (for the easiest reference, the beginning of “Miraculer” does this with both Alya and Nino, and Alya detransforming in “Gang of Secrets” also does this).

I presume this was done to force Ladybug to use her Lucky Charm in order to figure out that Senti!Nino was Shadow Moth’s sentimonster, because otherwise I just imagine Wayzz popping out to complain that there’s something in his miraculous and how it isn’t even paying rent.

Gabriel also non-subtly invites “everyone” to the event, yet “everyone” apparently only means conveniently the people who Shadow Moth knows as heroes, plus Marinette for no explained reason whatsoever. Chat Noir could’ve even noted after the fact that everyone invited were past heroes (because he knows Multimouse and probably wouldn’t think “wait, that doesn’t make sense--”), or the characters themselves could’ve noticed it, but that would’ve meant the show pointing out the blatant plothole that Marinette is lobbed in there. This could’ve also been a chance for the characters to all establish, “hey, we were heroes!” and have a cool camaraderie between them (presuming they know that they were outed), but instead they serve no purpose beyond being essentially background characters for Style Queen to tick off like a checklist. They had the perfect moment to do something to give everyone more character and they wasted it to do an unneeded scene of Alya trying to shove Marinette towards Adrien (I’ll get there).

It also puzzles me that Gabriel’s plan was to cause an akuma that would force Ladybug to bring another miraculous when...

Style Queen didn’t cause her to do that?? Now, if one isn’t really thinking (like it seems the writers didn’t) and/or only vaguely remembers the episode (i.e: that Chloe got a miraculous and Queen Bee/Wasp is the immediate follow-up), then they’ll recall that Ladybug did indeed go to Master Fu’s to get a miraculous, but only did she not need it in the end, the reason the Lucky Charm sent her there in the first place was to get Plagg, i.e: the cat.

And yes, Shadow Moth does have Style Queen glitter the building so that no one can get in, which ends up blocking Chat Noir off, but that only works if he knows that Ladybug is in the building but not Chat.

Speaking of Ladybug, and this one is more of a nitpick, but she delays using Miraculous Ladybug and I feel like it could’ve been done better, like if she went to use it but stopped herself because something didn’t feel right, but instead she points out the weirdness of not using her Lucky Charm while not thinking further on it until she sees the handshake. Regardless of the comments she makes towards the Lucky Charm, the episode leaves a weird feeling of, “Why haven’t you used Miraculous Ladybug yet? The akuma is gone.” Marinette even saw the sentimonster, which clearly isn’t Style Queen, yet the episode forgets about it because--oh wait, it was just there to build up to an attempted identity reveal that went nowhere.

So, yeah--the elevator...

Say it with me: it’s stupid, it’s pointless, it makes no sense, it serves no meaning to the plot, its only roles in the episode is for love square fuel and to embarrass Marinette.

And on that last note, I know I said I’d keep quiet on the phone, but I swear, if it’s not explained in any form why the kwami can communicate with her, then it was literally just invented so that it could startle/embarrass her.

Also, to the surprise of no one, the kwami who live with her still don’t understand how to deal with her. :|

Not only does the scene draaaaag and the chances of Adrien and Marinette not only thinking of the same hiding place (an elevator, something that both makes no sense because Style Queen can easily pop up if she hears the elevator, but also that they rarely ever choose as a transforming spot; in fact, I can’t think of a time they’ve chosen an elevator??), but also happening to pick the same elevator.

As for it making no sense, the identity reveal was completely unnecessary. Either of them telling the other their identity would’ve done nothing, and even if they planned to tell the other to block the eyes watching them so they could transform, it wouldn’t matter, because that just makes it obvious what they’re doing. Plus, if the concern was needing to tell the other so they could get out of the elevator somehow, then there would’ve been no reason not to tell them after the eyes were gone. Marinette could’ve texted Alya at any time when they were being quiet.

And as if the setup wasn’t already contrived enough, Nathalie takes far too long to leave Adrien and Marinette alone. Optigami goes into the elevator on Nathalie’s orders (which is the whole thing that makes the two go quiet and consider doing a reveal in the first place), and it takes fourty seconds before Nathalie finally notes that it’s just Adrien and Marinette. Like, unless she got up to make a sandwich before she analyzed the footage, I just--???

Anyway, the last thing to really talk about is Alya and oh my gosh, the sheer amount of double standards here...

Like, just starting with the scene where Alya physically shoves Marinette towards the elevator, despite Marinette’s protests, it just makes me shake my head all the more, especially after “Mr. Pigeon 72.” I already knew the show wasn’t going to follow up on the whole “when you’re ready” stuff in “Gang of Secrets,” and “Mr. Pigeon 72″ just forwarded that with Alya immediately pressing for Adrien, but I didn’t expect Alya to try and force things this hard.

Just gonna add as well that both Luka and Kagami saw Alya do this, which would’ve been a great opportunity for it to trigger alarm bells for both of them (Luka going, “oh, it’s no wonder Marinette struggles with Adrien when--” and Kagami like, “hey this is familiar, almost like Marinette thought it was okay because it happens to her all the time and maybe I should step in to say something”; by the way, for those who want another fix-it, yeah, that’d what it’d be), because Marinette was literally totally fine until Alya tried to force the matter.

But again, blatant show of “fine if it’s for the love square, not fine if it’s not.”

And after “Mr. Pigeon 72″ and now this, do the writers really think that I wasn’t going to notice the fact that Marinette is only getting the “damsel in distress” role now that the kwami and Alya are conveniently there to save her? It’s like they knew the backlash that would happen from Marinette telling Alya her identity (the rightfully deserved backlash, not even because of the identity thing - I understand narratively that Marinette was at her breaking point, though the timing is awful - but because Alya was like--one of the worst choices), so they decided to justify it by having Marinette be put into peril multiple times this season to the degree where Alya would have to swoop in and save her. Essentially, they’re nerfing their protagonist and forcing her into these situations to lift Alya up and make Alya look like a better/more intelligent friend.

Marinette didn’t need a confidant because she was constantly one step away from danger, she needed one emotionally, yet now the show has been continuously letting Alya figure out important guardian matters and saving Marinette’s backside because apparently, “Marinette is more emotionally stable now that she has someone who knows her secret,” wasn’t enough. Handing Alya the win on Lila and either ignoring or excusing all of her past actions to make her look good wasn’t enough.

Trying to make everything about Adrien instead of Marinette wasn’t enough. Now they’re throwing in Alya and giving her stuff to do while Marinette sits idly and just waits to be saved. Yes, Marinette ultimately does the most in the end and Alya screws up, but what happens?

Alya gets rewarded for it. She gets to have the fox miraculous given to her permanently, which the narrative lowkey chided Marinette for not doing (with Trixx’s snippy comments and Alya pulling a “Gang of Secrets” where she’s suddenly 100% “on Marinette’s side” so that it makes it feel like she deserves whatever she’s going to be given). The show is both setting Marinette up to fail so they can continue having their drama (regardless of how well permanent Rena Rouge goes, they wanted to leave the episode on a cliffhanger) and getting on her case for breathing while rewarding other characters after they’ve failed.

Which, spoiler alert for the next episode, ends up working out, thus making it the “”“right”““ decision. Apparently Marinette is meant to suffer and be given all these consequences/embarrassment when she screws up, but people like Adrien Alya get rewarded and given a free pass to do whatever they want with no consequences (Marinette doesn’t even remotely get on Alya’s case or be upset that Alya made decisions without her; even Fu gave Marinette, Tikki, and Plagg a look in “Sandboy” and made them explain/apologize; but of course, that’s because Marinette was involved, I guess).

And... look, it’d be one thing for Marinette to want an understudy, or to want someone to have a permanent miraculous as a form of protection in case she needs it, but Alya wasn’t even suspicious when Senti!Nino didn’t give her their usual high-five. Alya claims to be this great reporter and tries to imply in “Gang of Secrets” that she suddenly knows all things about Marinette, yet doesn’t change her expression at all when the person she thinks is her boyfriend gives her a regular high-five instead of the one they made up? I guess the show wanted to give Ladybug something more after Alya and Kaalki did a chunk of the work, but if they wanted to present Alya as a worthy guardian, then that should’ve set off red flags, especially after the whole Ladybug reveal and Alya realizing that Lila’s full of it (which I know still hasn’t been shown but if she’s gonna be Ladybug’s confidant then she has to step up her suspicion game).

Like, I don’t know if they’re just trying to have Alya work off any bad things that the fandom might have on her, but with this episode and the next episode, it just feels like they want Alya to stay in the role that she had with Marinette: the “Alya knows best, is presented as a supportive friend, and has a leg up on Marinette in terms of mental/power dynamic.”

Because, despite knowing that she’s Ladybug now, Alya’s relationship with Marinette really hasn’t changed. She’s still forcing Marinette into situations with Adrien, she’s still got the doubtful eyebrow raise whenever Marinette does “Marinette things,” and Alya still has the, “I got you, girl!” attitude about everything, even if she really doesn’t have Marinette’s back in the right way. Heck, even the kwami (or at least Trixx) seems to go to Alya over Marinette, the kwami themselves just whining and behaving like children around Marinette herself.

At this point, why not just hand Alya the ladybug earrings and call it a day? If Alya’s not only an understudy for being guardian but is also apparently going to keep saving Marinette, she’s clearly “better,” and that moment with Senti!Nino ended up getting her rewarded, why not just let Marinette hand over the metaphorical mantle and be officially stress-free? Then Paris would have a “““non-clumsy, less emotional, less anxious”““ Ladybug.

Well, because that would mean lessening Marinette’s suffering and the show would be over without that. *sigh*

I don’t know, it’s just upsetting. It’s the "Malediktator”/”Gang of Secrets” thing where Marinette tries to follow something she’s been taught by other characters (who are presented as wiser than her) and it ends up blowing up in her face. “No permanent miraculouses” wasn’t her rule - it was Fu’s - and then the show immediately chides her for it.

Basically, Marinette tries to make her own decisions and it blows up in her face. Marinette tries to follow her own rules and it blows up in her face. It’s the love square all over again: she can’t confess to Adrien, but she can’t move on either.

That’s why “Optigami” is so insulting. It puts its double standards on display for the world to see and sets things up to go exactly the way it wants with no regard to making sense or working to an interesting story.

[sepublic]

Starkiller Base was unnecessary

           Re-watching The Force Awakens, and… It’s occurred to me that, even more than I initially thought, Starkiller Base is a genuinely useless, pointless part of the plot that’s just shoehorned in for the sake of arbitrarily raising the stakes, in a blind attempt to redo the Original Trilogy while one-upping it at the same time; Taking pot shots at the original Death Star’s ‘absurdity’ to try to make Starkiller Base’s destruction feel more ‘involved’ and ‘sensible’ with having an inside job to sabotage and blow up key components, yadda-yadda; Almost feels like the writers are punching down at the Original Trilogy in a vain attempt to look more clever and ‘self-aware’, without considering how reckless power-scaling doesn’t work (Which we see once more and somehow even worse in The Rise of Skywalker).

           The thing about why the Death Star works is like… It’s relevant. It has build-up. We’re introduced to it from the start, the entire story revolves around destroying it; R2-D2 is important because he has plans to the Death Star, Vader is seen chasing Leia because she had those plans. It all comes around to and circles back to the Death Star, we have a sense of what it is from the start, there’s build-up. You NEED the planet-killing machine for the climax of A New Hope, because the only reason to go there is because, surprise- The Death Star IS there, it just arrived right besides Yavin IV!

           But Starkiller Base… When you watch the movie, it just pops in out of nowhere, amidst the pre-established plot threads. Without any prior context or build-up, we’re just suddenly treated to a shot of this huge, mechanized planet, and then Hux almost casually drops that the ‘superweapon’ is ready, and then suddenly it’s firing and blows up the Hosnian System. The Death Star is justifiable because it’s the first of its kind, Starkiller Base is the third. In canon and Legends, there’s a lot of side-material going into the sheer enormity and horror of the Death Star, the amount of manpower it takes to construct such a thing, its formation is treated with gravitas; And yet something WAY bigger and more advanced comes out of nowhere, from a group even less powerful than the Empire?!

           Again, you need the Death Star, it’s why the rebels are being chased, it’s why Leia was captured, it’s why R2-D2 meets Luke and then Obi-Wan, bringing up the Rebel journey; It’s why Luke’s aunt and uncle die, it’s why there’s no Alderaan and instead the Death Star itself to capture the protagonists when they arrive there. But Starkiller Base is pointless- The plot is about BB-8 because he has the map to Luke Skywalker, it’s about finding Luke through BB-8. Starkiller Base is just so casually dropped for something that should be so much bigger than the Death Star in the narrative… And likewise, we don’t need it for anything.

           Is it to prove to Finn that the First Order is dangerous, that he can’t just ignore its destruction? The thing is, he already has Rey’s capture to motivate his participation. Starkiller Base could not fire, but Finn would still help the Resistance infiltrate, because Rey would still be captured. It’s not needed for Poe and the Resistance to arrive on Takodana, because they came for BB-8 after getting that message, the Hosnian Cataclysm totally unrelated. You could argue it gives the Resistance an excuse to fight back against the First Order in the film’s climax… But that does not justify creating another superweapon, much less one as implausible and redundant as Starkiller Base.

           Like, maybe the writers wanted to REALLY return to the status quo, so having the New Republic be devastated was a requirement… But was it really? Just have the New Republic continue to be ineffectual, it’s even a plot-point in side material that its military is embarrassingly small; So just say the Resistance IS the full extent of that military! You still get an underdog situation. And again, if you really want to forcibly cut off any support for the Resistance… You don’t need a giant superweapon to one-up the Death Star. Just have the First Order demonstrate its traditional military power, by having a fleet invade the New Republic’s capital, unexpected, able to waltz in because everyone is so incompetently lax about these rising fascists; And with recent real-life events, it only makes more disturbing sense.

          Instead of getting a pointless superweapon, have a bunch of Star Destroyers attack Hosnian Prime and take it over, show a montage of destruction and civilian death, etc. This still establishes the danger of the First Order and how it’s quickly decapitated the New Republic and left it in shambles, setting the stage for the underdog conflict; But you don’t have to rely on something as absurdly over-the-top as Starkiller Base, which has no build-up to its unprecedented firepower besides “Oh yeah this exists” and then watching it fire and finding out firsthand.

          The death of trillions with the Hosnian System is senseless violence both in-universe and from a narrative, writing perspective… And again, this arguably establishes the First Order as a threat better, because they don’t need to rely on a superweapon; And even after The Force Awakens ends, the audience still knows that they have access to an entire fleet… Whereas with Starkiller Base, that threat is lost by the end of the film and thus made redundant. The scene could become even more disturbing if we straight-up see some civilians on Hosnian Prime welcome the First Order, adding additional world building that helps explain why the First Order was able to develop, how it got support- And again, being topical to what happens today. It connects with canon lore about the First Order’s supporters in other worlds (such as Coruscant), and could even be a callback to liberty dying with thunderous applause in Revenge of the Sith! We could still have the people on Takodana react in horror, through the Holonet’s broadcasting of the coup.

           Of course, this is Star Wars- And what’s more iconic than thrilling space battles and trench runs? Sometimes you want sci-fi fun and stuff for the sake of it, nothing wrong with that, that’s always important too… But again, you don’t need a giant super-laser to have that. Just make up something else; Like Starkiller Base is the planet that the First Order has taken over. Perhaps they intend to launch a bunch of new Star Destroyers, or are about to finish production of a whole new batch, which would make things even worse. Instead of destroying a superweapon, you could have the Resistance crippling the factories that finish these Star Destroyers- There’s your trench run! Have them blow up a power plant that’s running the factories, instead of a thermal oscillator. There’s still a victory at the end, and while the threat is far from over, time has been bought- And it makes the First Order’s immediate retaliation in the next film more sensible, adds to the idea that every second, every bit of progress helps, you gotta take what you need… Even an extra day to prepare and evacuate is a miracle that furthers the underdog motif.

           Plus, with a batch of Star Destroyers that need to be stopped- There’s still the need to rescue Rey. The Resistance still needs to cause damage at the First Order’s base, and Finn is still needed to infiltrate and lower the shields, while taking advantage of this operation for himself and Rey. Most importantly, you don’t get a contrived superweapon that only adds to the bland, carbon-copy standard of the Sequel Trilogy; And perhaps best of all, we don’t have to see Ilum retroactively bastardized and destroyed, with Starkiller Base’s identity revealed AFTER we see it get blown up… The legacy of the Jedi and its history is not further destroyed with the loss of this sacred planet of kyber crystals.

          And that’s better, because this trilogy about passing the torch, seems as insistent as Kyle Ron, the villain, on interpreting this theme as utterly wiping out all traces of the past, and leaving nothing for the next generation to work with. Which, I’m not surprised at a corporation thoughtlessly razing and salting the earth in selfish disregard for those who will need and use it afterwards, but still. And while a star that burns brighter than most thanks to its heart of Kyber IS a neat concept that could be worked with, especially with what Chirrut Imwe says, in addition to the motifs of flames of rebirth and the Phoenix… It’s not something that justifies the further eradication of Jedi history and effort on a level that even the Empire didn’t go, just to arbitrarily raise stakes with yet another uninspired superweapon.

           Like, the Duel of the Fates script and its concept of a device that blocks off all inter-galactic communication is MUCH more interesting, clever, and innovative than the Death Star Lite, and it hits closer to home in this age of internet and mass communication; In contrast to the Death Star, which fit more in its time as a criticism of the stockpiling and development of nukes, and how that tapped into the public’s fear at the time of nuclear Armageddon. And a device blocking off intergalactic communication provides good reason for why the Resistance doesn’t have the full might of the New Republic behind them, because they can’t even communicate to collaborate, and it adds to that idea of people made to feel ‘alone’ or whatever and thus isolated, so they can’t band together and rise up. That adds to Rey feeling alone, and makes Poe and Zorii’s discussion at the end of the trilogy that much more meaningful… Not that the Sequel Trilogy was planned to consider the latter, of course.

           (Actually, I wonder if it’s possible to cut Starkiller Base’s superweapon scenes from the film. Like a cut where any references to its superweapon, and the scene where it fires, is cut out; I think the film might still work that way.)

[popculturebuffet]

Loud House: 11 Louds A Leapin Review or It’s My Bobby in a Box

Happy Holidays errybody! Christmas returns to this blog after a bit of a break to tie up some loose ends, and celebrate my birthday with a return to the loud house.  It’s honestly good to be back. While it can be a struggle to cover a pure comedy, I genuinely like the show a lot, even with it’s flaws i’ve gone into, and my regular reviews gave  me a running gag in my hatred of rusty and a new respect for the show. It’s just with a buiser schedule and me not actually trying to have something resembling order to things, I kept shoving Banned Together back despite really wanting to see it since.. you know.. Luna episode.. until it ended up sliding into ANOTHER set of episodes. It’s things like this why I have a queue now: while it’s not set day by day, in case I want to do more than one i na day, it is there to keeep some semblance of order and keep me on track so this dosen’t happen again.  So with all that being said.. why did I choose to do A DIFFRENT loud house episode for the second time in a row before getting back to the current season? Simple.. i’ve been putting this episode off personally for even LONGER. I meant to watch 12 louds a leapin back when it first came out at the start of season 2... and just never got around to it. And just kept never getting around to it, wanting to watch it at christmas but then forgetting to do so for the last 4 years. Spare a thought there.. 4 years. In that time 80 years have passed, an era of marvel movies have come to an end, a tick series has come and gone, She Ra has come and gone, ducktales premiered then annoucned it was ending.. my point is way too many shows are ending too soon, and i’ve let this slide for far too long. So I bumped this one up to finally take a look at it, as i’ve waited this long and didn’t want to risk missing it a fifth fucking time. So yeah i’m taking look at what’s probably a classic episode in the fandom with fresh eyes. Let’s see what I thought shall we? It’s Christmas Eve at the Loud House and Lincoln is once again Zach Morrising it up .

Not what I meant.. whatever that is. It’s been 30 years since that episode aired, probably a good 12 since I first saw it and I still have no idea why they did this or if it was giong to end in a three way before the girls showed up. We just don’t know and the greatest minds in the country are baffled.. and you know working on the vaccine and making sure it’s safe. 

No Linc is talking to the camera about it being christmas while gearing up to go sledding with his sled big red. Meanwhile the rest of the louds are doing their usual christmas activities which we get introduced to as Lincoln gets ready. The girls sub-plots here are, outside of Lori’s., less plots and more running gags, various shenanigans by the girls tying into their personalities and christmasy stuff. It works perfectly.. while it’s a bunch of gags.. the gags are funny and it’s neat to learn more about just how the girls celebrate christmas and what they get up to every year. It’s part of what’s to love about holiday specials as you get a once or twice in a series chance to see how our heroes celbrate the holiday and thus a look into stories, gags and character stuff very unique to the holiday. It also uses the fact LIncoln was the protaganist at the time very well, using him as our viewpoint to set up all the christmas goings on as he makes his way out of the house, so we can cut back to them later as his plot goes on. It’s really good stuff. So what are the girls up to? Let’s go down the list by age shall we?

Lori: Lori has the most involved plot anyway so it’s best to start here. Lori and Bobby are having their first christmas together... though it does bring up the fact that they’ve only been dating 2 years at most, yet plan to get married.. I mean that is a lot but your also 18. Then again time is nigh incomprehinsiable to unpack in the loud house, and at least 3 years passed in the one year it took to get them all aged up, so I wouldn’t think about it too hard.  Lori, still being in huge bitch mode as she was early on, pressures bobby to get a good gift. She later gets said gift but despite being told to open it immideitly, her siblings chide her on her habit of tearing presents open and thus get her not to open it. So that’s a runner through the special, with Lana even putting her on a leash at one point, which I found hilarious. Less hilaroius is the conclusion as it turns out in the box on christmas day.. is BOBBY, who understandably is not looking so good...

Thankfully bobby’s not dead or they all would be, but still the poor boy missed christmas eve with his mom  and sister for this stunt. I mean I get it’s his fault, he’s apparently LITERALLY too dumb to live it turns out and should’ve you know made a noise sooner and probably didn’t want to ruin the suprise.. but we still nearly got an episode where a 4 year old had surivviors guilt for letting her older sisters boyfriend suffocate in a box. That’s dead santa from gremlins levels of fucked up. Thankfully Lori loves it and I assume bobby’s worried family joined them for christmas eve. That image fills my heart with hope. But seriously bobby never again we can’t loose you. At least not before Sergio. 

Leni: Leni’s is very simple it’s just a running gag of her taking various christmas things, making them into outfits then saying shhhh to whoever’s around when she hears, or in later cases is right there, with the person asking. Just a funny bit.  Luna: Is working on a christmas song. It’s one of the weake runners as the failed songs just aren’t that funny, but the payoff for the main plot makes up for it. WE’ll get to that.  Luann: Has one of my faviorite bits, her 12 puns of christmas which is both really adorable and leads to an adorable moment with her dad. Always loved their relationship. 

Lynn and Lucy: Are teamed up this episode which makes me genuinely miss how the two would be used as a pair ocasionally earlier on but just .. arne’t anymore> The rest of the girls status as roomates is used liberally but not so much these two. IT’s just weird and disheartning to me. That being said their plot is simply the two digging around to find where the presents are hidden, which I never got as why would you want to know weeks ahead of time. You can’t use any money to buy the stuff you dind’t get or they’ll know and they usually figure out you knew ahead of time and it just brings thigns down. But from a kid’s perspective I guess I get it and while it’s weird to have Lucy be one of the ones following I like it, as it shows that benath her gothy demanor she’s still just an 8 year old girl excited for christmas, and that’s adorable. A decent enough runner. 

Lana: Gets  a good one: She keeps accidently catching people, and a passing car in one case though she has a jack to help, in her reindeer traps. Its not only funny but really adorable especially since she dosen’t care about trapping SANTA persay, she just wants her own pet reindeer and frankly who wouldn’t want a rideable woodland critter who can fly. Dammit now i want one too. 

Lola and Lisa: Lola gets a fairly standard one tha’ts still pretty damn funny; She wants to get offf the naughy list by playing good for a day. What makes it funny is that last part.. that instead of doing it over a few days like most of this plot she’s trying to cram it all into one day while also trying not to strangle Lisa, who keeps showing up to say santa’s route is impossiuble. As ducktales covered he slows down time.. also you know.. not every kid celebrates christmas so ther’es probably a good number of houses he dosen’t have to cover in one night.  Lily: Just randomly pops out of stockings a bit. it’s precioous as it sounds.  The Parents: It had honestly been so long both since i’d seen a season 1 episode, and since the two had been both given actual names and fleshed out considerably, that i’d forgotten Rita and Senior had their faces obscured for all of season 1. It’s REALLY weird and jarring to go back to after getting to know them as fully formed people of their own over the past 3 seasons, and especally gorowing to love Senior, as he’s a loveably goofy dad but without the incompetence of most comedy dads. He can bumble but he’s also genuinely supportive, talented and pulls his weight in his marriage and family.  We do however start to really see their fully formed , full member of the cast perosnalities here: Rita is clearly tired from the sheer amount of shit she has to juggle, but is also nice and warm and while Lynn Sr.’s goofiness was established already, here it’s tempered into his current shape and his love of cooking and through role as the family chef is established. While he was established as cook earlier he goes from someone who’d use frozen food just to get by to a master chef who probably does use a lot of frozen stuff but can make anything taste good and will eventually have his own restraunt. It’s really fascenating to see them slowly emerge. They don’t really have plots themslves, and Lynn’s only real gag is wanting everyone to try his figgy pudding. 

So with the rest of the family covered let’s get to our main plot. Lincoln is sledding.. on the slide out back.. for some reason. 

The reason is simple.. his sled ends up in the yard of Mr. Grouse, their neighbor and old man who yells at louds. Lincoln explains grouse keeps everything that ends up in his yard and has taken a lot from the Loud Kids over the years. So lincoln.. uses the slide to sled.. DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF HIS YARD. 

I’ve been wanting to use pigtail kim since I made that one recently. But her points stands. What?!. I mean Lincoln can be stupid, he’s  only 12 it’s allowed, but usually more out of not realizing what he’s getting into or using kid logic. He’s not this brain dead. That’s Leni’s job. It just feels like plot contrivance. Just have him build some sort of contraption as a makeshift hill and tell the audience he’s doing this because his family dosen’t want him going to an actual hill on christmas or is too busy to take him. There are easier ways than this half assed rube goldberg machine of a setup. So naturally his sled ends up in the yard.. and he calls on Clyde to help....

Now if you’ve been reading my reviews for a while, you know that reactoin is normally reserved exclusivley for this guy. 

But since Rusty was in his larval state with only a few apperances and hadn’t emeerged from his coocoon as the douche I know and love to take pot shots at, there was actually something WORSE. Something more obnoxious. And with far far worse implications. And that my friends was seasons 1 and 2 Clyde.  Clyde in the early seasons CAN be fine, and the self we know now. In fact I wish he interacted with the sisters more as the slumber party episode early on gave him a nice dynamic with all of them and the episode with him and leni was terrific. The problem one there was running gag with him, one character trait that utterly sucked the joy out of the room at best and made him into an unlikeable little shit at worst; HIs crush on Lori.  When she’s around at BEST he has a Master Roshi nosebleed, stammers her name and passes out, something that wasn’t funny the first time and quickly became grating the 80 other times they did it. But at worst, as he is here? He’s creepy, obessevie and worst of all. .a real dick to bobby. Who as we’ve established is...

So that was NEVER going to go over well and even ignoring that is still very bad. The little creep just constantly treats Bobby with hostility, which given this is Bobby, he dosen’t realize is going on. Any time their relationship is threantned Clyde’s main goal is to swoop in during the aftermath and win lori over. He constantly wants Bobby out of the way, The ONE TIME he dosen’t come off as a massive dick is when Lincoln thinks Bobby might be cheating, and that’s because Clyde isn’t planning on swooping into the wrecakge of someone’s relationship to get a girlfriend, but to punch the guy out for cheating on her. Bobby wasn’t and Clyde obviously isn’t capable of that, but it’s a bit more understandable and even CLYDE wants to make sure there’s evidence first. But more often than not he’s just under the assumptino Lori will be his despite the massive age gap, her having made it obvious she’s not intrested, and her being in  longterm relationship she’s really happy in with someone else. And this was season 1 lori who reacted to this, so the fact she’s not being the queen of all bitches about it only makes him look that much worse. And to add to that, Bobby not only KNOWS he has as crush on Lori but is suppportive of clyde, cheering him on when she kisses him once for doing something noble, and generally treating “Clydsdale” like he would any of Lori’s blood siblings. It was excurating then to sit through this every few episodes.. and it’s even worse now because the gag’s complete dissaperance from Season 3 onwards really paints the picture that this gag was entirely because series creator Chris Savino thought this was FUNNY and no one else did. And given he got fired for, you know, HARASSING WOMEN  AND NOT TAKING NO FOR AN ANSWER  you kinda see how an already bad bit was made worse. So yeah while the sled thing is bad this.. is objectively worse and drags the special down more. It’s thakfully not omniprescent but man is it hard to watch.  Clyde being in full dickhead mode is trying to get a kiss from lori and is using a missletoe hat for it.. And can we just agree that while Missletoe can be used well in stories, to help two shy people finally kiss or to ramp up romantic tension or what have you, that it’s often used by creepy douchebags to get kisses they don’t deserve both here and presumibly in irl before the plauge hit? We can? Good. But yeah that’s his plot, no suprise he gets one, bah hum bug. He also throws in some Bobby bashing by fantasising about him ending up in the yard and clyde ending up with lori since Grouse keeps bobby.. even though instead Lori would just ignore clyde, storm over there and rip an old man’s spine out mortal kombat style. 

So yeah Lincoln wants his sled back, but he can’t do it alone as the old man scares him, hence Clyde coming in. They make an elaborate plan using some careful blueprints. 

Their real plan is to have Clyde disract grouse while Lincoln grabs the sled but it fails and mean mr mustard finds it and takes it inside. Desperate, Lincoln prepares to do some crimes and head into his house. Clyde is afraid he’l end up in jail and never get to visit because only family can. Clyde you are family. Plus Prison visits aren’t limited to relatives only, any show with a character in jail storyline will tell you that. But Lincoln makes a valid point that Grouse stole his property.. I still dont’ think this is the right way to handle it and his parents should just go over and ask the loud, irate asshole to give the kids stuff back he stole to be a dick, but this is a kids show and again we wouldn’t have a plot but unlike last time my head dosen’t hurt from this. He’s desperate, he knows that probably wouldn’t work and again he’s 12. 12 year old logic is fine.  Naturally he ends up getting caught as Grouse didn’t leave for long, though having found a photo of Grouse with a sled as a kid, understandably fires back on him that he wasn’t always like this. Why he like this. He also has the much farier point that again, it’s his property and “My yard my rules” is about as much a legal rule as a note saying “I can do what I want, ron”. But Grouse understandably, hey he’s a dick but the boyd id be and e, makes him clean up and after Grouse fails to get the loud parents Lincoln, via a comination of a charming family photo and Grouse talking to his sister on the phone, finds out the real reason he acts like this: He misses his family and being on a fixed income can’t visit them often as he tells his sister he won’t be home for christmas to see his sprawling family. 

And while it doesen’t excuse his actions.. it does explain why Grouse is so bitter: you would be too if you had a massive family who clealry loved you and your on good terms with.. but through no fault of your own and presumibly despite working hard toa fford retirment you just.. can’t see them. Their there and you have the phone, but you don’t know how to work the internet and it’s just.. not the same as seeing them. Your just seperated from them and can’t be near them or hear their voices or get hugs. Which.. given the current pandemic i’m sure MANY of you can relate to that.. to being seperated from your loved ones and trapped, and especailly many people mr grouses age are facing that. While this special is good even without the context of seeing it this year it especailly resonates and i’m glad I waited this long simply beaause it came at just the right time. Grouse tells him to leave not planning on calling his parents.

So in christmas special fashion, Lincoln is touched byt his story, and feels bad for the old curmudgeon. Sure they don’t get along and the bastard broke his sled.. but again you’d be bitter too in his shoes. The guy has nothing and is alone.. and Grouse has done nothing to deserve that, even with his actions resulting from it. No one should be alone on christmas.  So Lincoln tells his sisters, all of whom rally around him, including Luna whose writer’s block is broken as she finally realizes... 

And not singing about that was holding her back. Luna has her song and Lincoln, as expected has a plan.  And we soon see that plan as Grouse gets a knock on the door.. and finds the Louds, parents included, and The McBrides all there singing him a christmas song. It’s pretty decent and the first time we really get to see Nikka Futterman sing and i’ts beautiful> Ther’ed be better, and worse luna songs to come but this is still pretty neat and sweet. THey came to offer him deocrations, dinner, company.. and a one way bus ticket to his family... presumibly the family will pay the other way or he can easier the day after christmas. Point is he’s touched, and genuinely and sincerly thanks them and invites them in, with Grouse’s actor John DiMaggio REALLY selling it hard. 

So our heroes gather for Christmas Eve all together, and under Grouse’s roof with Grouse giving the kids their stuff back having had a change of heart. Sure he misses his family.. but the Louds and Mc Brides have shown him he dosen’t have to shut everyone out as a result. And while Grouse apologizes tht his sled is gone.. Lincoln’s fine with it he got something better.  So the next morning we end on the kids opening presents, and Lori saving her boyfriend from axphisxiation, seriously between this and strife of the party i’m really starting to sour on lana. Regarldess Lucy finally belivies in santa both due to gifts nd seeing him last night, while Lincoln finds a sled from santa.. and then goes outside to see Mr Grouse off, recognizing he’s the one who played santa in  a really sweet and senitmental bit. The two part on good terms even if Lincoln breaks another window. Things have changed if not that much.  Final THoughts:  If it wasn’t obvious, I REALLY loved this one. While it has it’s flaws, and Chris Savino sucks dirty ass in thunderstorms obviously.. it’s still a really sweet, well constructed special and I really recommend checking it out. It’s on the nick app if you have cable and on CBS All Acess if you have that. Until next time merry christmas to all and to all a good day. 

And if ther’es an episode of the loud house you’d like me to review leave it in the comments or you can comission a review of it for five dollars. Just direct message me to work out the details or send an ask for my discord. 

[sadhikamalladi-blog]

Adjustment Day by Chuck Palahniuk

Introduction

As a kid, I would devour books. I used to read a book every few days, and I spent so long refreshing the NYT Bestsellers List that I decided to just set it as my home page. This habit continued through high school. Any genre, any length, I wanted to read and learn everything there was to know. I loved how books moved at a pace that the author and I negotiated, instead of the wholly intractable speed of film. Sometimes, I'd spend hours rereading a line, relishing the image and rhythm the words and their pronunciations formed in my head. I wondered if the author intended for me to come back to that line, or if they simply wrote it while reaching blindly for a cup of coffee.

One of the first authors to pull me into their world, depraved and demented as it was, was Chuck Palahniuk. I read Fight Club, and I walked through life for months wondering if there was a fight club out there, literally or metaphorically, and if I would glean joy from joining. Through Palahniuk, I learned how to take an objective lens to everything, instead of arbitrarily assigning value and designating things or people as "good" and "bad." I read and reread all of Palahniuk's books, shaken as Seth turned into Manus and Tyler morphed into the narrator I had come to rely on and maybe even respect. Palahniuk let me be self-righteous only so he could dismantle me.

The truth is, Palahniuk's game has always been the same. He throws uneasy situations at you and lets them blossom into colossal shitstorms that you somehow find yourself at the eye of. His work is known for the employment of an unreliable narrator, one who's often equal parts bored and boring for the majority of the novel. So, I was especially surprised to find out his latest work, Adjustment Day, was a decentralized narrative.

Why I Hate Decentralized Narratives

Another book I read this summer was Into the Water by Paula Hawkins. Much like Palahniuk, Hawkins is known for unreliable narrators. Her previous book, Girl on the Train, captured my attention and twisted my judgments against me in the most Palahniuk-esque way I could've imagined. And she did it all without the gore and sheer shock value that accompanies Palahniuk's language. I had high hopes for Hawkins' novel, which ultimately left me unsatisfied because of its decentralized narrative.

Decentralized narratives are ones in which there are many narrators (at least 11, in Hawkins' case) of varying credibility. It's meant to provide us with the immersive experience of investigating the mystery as though we were living it -- through a series of short vignettes that inevitably reference context we don't have access to. And as readers, we're meant to wade through this mess and attempt to form loyalties and suspicions that are inevitably incorrect.

All of this is fine with me in theory. I love a good puzzle, and putting together conflicting narratives from ulteriorly motivated characters is an exciting prospect. Unfortunately, it's very hard to deliver this kind of novel.

The excitement of the style is also its downfall. The author has to maintain a careful balance across characters, placing red herrings and minor storylines with as much importance as the main plot. We're meant to have no indication from the writing alone who did what. And if we judge a character based on their past, we're bound to be wrong. However, the sad truth is that if we don't judge characters then we have very little incentive to remember who's who in the story. We also require some sense of coherence in order to follow a character's story.

About fifteen pages into Hawkins' Into the Water, I found myself pulling out a piece of paper and a pen, jotting names and bullet points down. Several hundreds of pages later, I was extremely displeased. Sure, there was a cohesive network of small tidbits that added up to a bigger story. But there were also loose ends galore -- to the extend that I found myself wondering if The Room was easier to follow (it wasn't).

I haven't seen a decentralized narrative executed properly. It does feel like the next natural step in literary evolution, from a single unreliable narrator to many.

Novel Overview

So, Palahniuk's Adjustment Day. I have to say, the novel brought up some exciting themes but ultimately fell a little flat for me, mostly due to issues with relating to characters. The ending left me especially dissatisfied, wondering why Palahniuk teed up situations primed for sharp and incisive social commentary and then didn't follow through. It really isn't his style to back off.

Parts of the novel felt clichéd, but I guess that's to be expected. We are consuming such a massive amount of criticism of different social phenomena that nothing really strikes me as surprising anymore. I've read stories about how Trump has planned his coup for decades and stories about how if only a few tiny things were different we would be in a vastly different social climate right now. Regardless, Palahniuk does his usual work of harnessing fiction to raise deeper questions about what's happening around us.

Youth Bulge

Every Palahniuk story is anchored by a simple social circumstance. Women feeling self-conscious about their appearances, men feeling inferior in comparison to their evolutionary ancestors' raw athleticism, etc. In Adjustment Day, it's all about the youth bulge, a phenomenon in developing countries where infant mortality rates plummet but fertility rates continue to skyrocket, resulting in a large number of youth.

Palahniuk focuses on male youth. He paints them with broad strokes, characterizing them as an aggressive, war-mongering group. He describes world governments in collusion with one another to construct aimless wars simply to expend these youth and occupy them. If they're not occupied, Palahniuk seems to claim, they'll run rampant and seek increasingly self-destructive ways to express masculinity.

The messiah-like Talbott character recognizes this trend and decides to harness the power of these young men. He spouts off various platitudes throughout the novel, many of which carry the ring of deep wisdom but lack nuance. The young men, proud to be part of some kind of covert movement, hang on his every word and seek to bring about Adjustment Day.

Adjustment Day

Adjustment Day is a largely circular idea. Basically, the idea is to divide the nation into three subnations: Blacktopia, Caucasia, and Gaysia. Through some increasingly contrived set of requirements, people are delegated mercilessly through these nations. As Talbott puts it, minorities only rebel when there's a majority to subvert. By placing the gays in one nation, the blacks in another, and the whites in a third, the new order will ensure that everyone exists solely in homogeneous communities and thus in eternal harmony.

But the first problem is that people are not willingly going to go into these subnations. What about interracial couples? What about young gay children being separated from their heterosexual parents? Talbott sees these as collateral damage.

To set the gears in motion, he establishes a new currency by which people can wield power in the new order. A humble list starts on the internet -- "America's Least Wanted." People nominate anonymously, and others can up- or down-vote names. As a name gained traction, the bounty on their head increased. Well, it's not literally their head -- the job is actually to slice off the person's left ear.

Preparation and Execution

The first half of the novel focuses on the preparation for this fateful day. Talbott recruits people who seek redemption -- addicts, disgruntled veterans, etc. -- and lets them start a lineage. They can recruit another man who can recruit another one and so on. The pride of the youth bulge ensures that no one recruits someone who will spill the beans too early.

Police officers and politicians are brought in on the deal, effectively making it hard to organize the state in response. The day of, the bloodbath occurs surprisingly quickly. People are slaughtered en masse, their ears sliced off and taken as tokens to establish influence in the new world order.

The Aftermath

We follow a few characters throughout the novel, seeing how they act before, during, and after Adjustment Day. In the aftermath, Palahniuk describes people forcing themselves to fit in just to maintain a semblance of their old life. An interracial couple pretends to be gay so they won't get separated into Blacktopia and Caucasia. A gay teenager enrolls himself in a glorified internment camp as he waits transfer to Gaysia.

Misfits scattered across the nations eventually stumble onto each other in some unspecified location and start anew.

What Worked

Palahniuk's language was as sharp as ever. He describes the justification for a temporary type of cash (the paper loses value in a few weeks).

Hoard food and it rots. Hoard money and you rot. Hoard power and the nation rots.

He so clearly cuts down to the core of our greatest fears about society -- that the effort we put toward a communal welfare may not ever benefit someone we care about.

Imagine there is no God. There is no Heaven or Hell. There is only your son and his son and his son, and the world you leave for them.

Palahniuk wrote about the desires of the youth bulge with passion that felt extremely familiar:

He was tired of learning history. He wanted to be it. Charlie wanted the history of the future to be him.

What Didn't Work

The decentralized narrative again made it hard to care about any of the individual characters. And although I felt some concern for the overall fate of the new order, I never really cared much about its ramifications on particular individuals. Arguably, that was where the punch of this entire story was hidden. If I could see the goodness of the overall arch but the badness on an individual level, we'd have another Fight Club situation. But I couldn't.

The horrifying descent into chaos was unsalvageable. If Palahniuk had just ended the book with Adjustment Day, I might have had a different perspective. But he continues on with this murky Reconstruction-esque tale that is neither interesting nor easy to follow. As NPR describes, Palahniuk tried to build the appeal of Fight Club into a bigger, more global movement but ultimately failed [1].

Conclusion

I still love Palahniuk. And I still let phrases from Adjustment Day roll around in my head. They don't have as much power to me though, because I can't contextualize them in any wonderfully meaningful way.

[1]: NPR article

[sazorak]

My Hero Academia’s hero and villain are not very good

My Hero Academia,  Kohei Horikoshi’s shounen manga take on Western super hero comics, has been running nearly three years now. I am something of a binge-reader when it comes to media; I don’t care for the drawn-out schedule that comes from following serialized releases. But My Hero Academia (alongside One Piece, Berserk, and One Punch Man) is one of the few that I actively follow. Lately though, I’ve been wondering why.

It’s not that the comic has taken a particularly egregious downturn in quality or pacing – it’s been fairly consistent all in all. The current arc about the class becoming intern sidekicks has been interesting, and it’s been moving at a rather brisk pace. The issue I’m struggling with is more fundamental. It’s a problem My Hero Academia has had since the beginning, and it’s done little to ameliorate over time.

The main protagonist and antagonist of My Hero Academia are just not very good.

The lead of My Hero Academia, Izuku Midoriya, isn’t a bad character per se. The angle of an ordinary kid born into a society of supermen finding himself entrusted with power by his world’s urhero is a pretty good one. It’s an underdog story with tons of good karma built in as Midoriya is forced to struggle to surpass those who had mocked his lack of abilities. It’s also good for hitting those power-fantasy notes that are so crucial to making the shounen genre work. He’s earnest and likeable. It’s easy to root for Midoriya and put yourself in his shoes as he is manages to pull himself to the front of the pack by sheer heart and willpower alone. These are all good attributes for a protagonist in a heroic work!

But as time has gone on and as his powers have developed, he has ceased to be the underdog. Where he was once only keeping up with his classmates’ inborn genius by hard work and determination, now he’s not only the most driven but also the most talented. Midoriya’s climbed what should have been the first foothill on his journey to the top, and we’ve found that there is actually nothing else on the horizon— the foothill was the mountain. Midoriya’s journey of growth being essentially complete is dire, because it’s all Midoriya actually has: It turns out he’s REALLY boring.

Midoriya’s character revolves entirely around his desire to become a hero and imitate the super hero paragon, All Might. That’s it. This is literally all there is to him. He has no other interests. No particular ambitions beyond the dream to be The Best Hero. The only real struggles remaining for him are narrative happenstance and the gradual power-ups that are practically prescribed at this point. There’s nothing else to his story.

Here’s an example: In order to convince All Might’s former side kick to give him an internship, Midoriya has to make him laugh. This isn’t going to be easy; the sidekick is a straight-laced nerd, AND he has the ability to see the future. This concept has a lot of good goof-potential. You could conceive Midoriya in all his earnestness constructing an elaborate comedic scenario that, while perhaps falling on its face, would at least show off his good qualities. Maybe he’d screw up and it’d result in the kind of unplanned comedic pratfall that would be easy for the sidekick to laugh at. 

Instead, what does Midoriya actually do? He does a bad impression of All Might of course, because “I want to be like All Might!” is his entire character! It pisses off the sidekick so much that the whole laughing angle is completely abandoned, and instead a scenario is contrived where Midoriya has to steal the approval stamp from the future-seeing sidekicks hand. Ultimately? He gets the internship because he didn’t damage any of the All Might memorabilia in the room. Midoriya’s All Might-mania would be a funny gag if it wasn’t the crux of who he is.

The only other aspects to Midoriya’s character beyond his hero-crush is his very typical shounen budding romance with Ochako Uraraka (that has not and will not ever be developed until the very end of the story, as is the staid shounen manga way), his willingness to occasionally break the rules in order to save lives (and then let McGruff the Crime Dog unironically say that he should have let his friend be murdered in front of him), and a mostly one-sided rivalry with his childhood bully Katsuki Bakugo. Only the rivalry actually feels that impactful to the story, and that has more to do with Katsuki’s personal arc than Midoriya’s.

The issue isn’t that Midoriya doesn’t have any major flaws necessarily – though that certainly doesn’t help – it’s more that there’s not much else to his personal story at this point beyond the narrative events unfolding before him. He fundamentally lacks agency and meaningful personal struggles. Things happen, and he reacts to them; his arc is essentially complete. It’s a foregone conclusion. His single-mindedness makes the story flat in a way that it really need not be.

Narratives revolving around villains doing nefarious things tend to lead to reactionary heroes, but the best heroes are ones who are more than just the mask—they’re also people. Peter Parker has a day job, has to deal with people trying to constantly hunt him down and kill him, and has to fight to balance his romantic dalliances with the responsibilities of being Spider-Man. Bruce Banner may fight the occasional radiation monster, but the Hulk’s story is more about his struggle with his own inner demons than him punching real ones. Hell even Superman, the poster Generic Nice Boy, tries to have a personal life beyond the cape and liven up his Fortress of Solitude.

There’s more to good stories than Good Man Beats Up Bad Guy. While personal struggles can be completely ancillary to the action at hand, they can also be far more challenging for the hero to surmount and far more engaging. Even if the are trivial, that doesn’t make them unimportant. Diversions may not matter much to the ongoing “plot” always, but they give the characters character. Something as inconsequential as the heroes going out to get Italian food can be huge as far as characterization goes; it speaks volumes to the interests of the characters, it humanizes them, and makes their situation more relatable.

The tragic thing is that there are major characters in My Hero Academia who would make for far better protagonist material than the actual lead if the story had been built differently. The frog-girl Tsuyu Asui is a good example. She’s been raising her siblings on her own while going to hero school due to her parents being constantly away at work. Her powers seemingly have low potential (she does whatever a frog can do), but she rises to the top by being smart with them. She wants to become a hero to help people— but seemingly doesn’t have too much of an interest in getting into the bad-guy fighting side of things. Throughout the story, she’s also wrestled with the whole legality / morality of saving people without a license, which frankly the most under explored aspect of the narrative by far given how weird and complicated the subject matter is. These are all interesting angles that easily have been built out to create a different, more engaging My Hero Academia.

Not having an engaging protagonist for your narrative puts a greater onus of the villain being interesting. For My Hero Academia, this is a BIG problem. If the hero Izuku Midoriya is uninteresting, the main villain Tomura Shigaraki is outright lame.

As is the super hero convention, Shigaraki is dark mirror of Midoriya— where Midoriya is a child who looks up to heroes and wants to grow up to be like All Might, Shigaraki is a man child who never grew up, doesn’t like heroes, and wants to murder All Might. And just like Midoriya that’s literally all there is to him. He has some kind of tragic past due to heroes not saving him when his parents died, but even that’s paper thin. Ultimately, he’s just a petulant kid who never grew up; he occasionally sends mutants his spooky adopted dad made for him to punch trucks. Because that’ll show ‘em.

The narrative openly acknowledges the fact that he doesn’t have any particular beliefs beyond disliking heroes. Other villains with actual raisons d’etre confront him about it,  and he no joke throws a tantrum over the fact that they have views. Like Midoriya, the single-note nature of the character comes across as borderline comical. (Also: his character design looks stupid.)

Villains, like protagonists, need motivations to be compelling. That motivation can be as small as being a crazy mofo or just plain greedy, but it should at least be understandable. Shigaraki isn’t a revolutionary— he’s a child with a gun. An inordinate amount of power has been thrust into his hands for no particular reason. That doesn’t actually make him feel like that great of a threat to society as a whole; it just makes him a deadly nuisance if anything. Earthquakes are unpredictable and can hurt a lot of people but that doesn’t make them particularly compelling villains.

Villains need to be likeable. Not necessarily as a people— far from it in most cases, really. But they need to have some trait that is inherently admirable to make them work as the foil for the protagonist. In X-Men, Magneto is a fantastic villain because he’s ultimately a flawed idealist; his charisma and the fact that his views sometimes seem attractive is what makes him so compelling. He’s complex. Single-mindedness too can be admirable if it’s portrayed well. Kira Yoshikage, despite being an outright serial killer still has admirable traits in just how ruthlessly efficient he is at maintaining his “ordinary life”. That doesn’t make him less reprehensible— if anything those traits are what makes him so potent a threat, far more than his murderous tendencies.

Totally uncharismatic antagonists can work as small-bit villains – but there’s a limited lifetime for which their existence is tolerable. Past that point, their continued position as a central part of the narrative just becomes annoying, if not totally implausible. How are we the audience supposed to believe that Shigaraki can amass followers and inspire loyalty in them when we cannot muster the slightest bit of admiration for him ourselves? He’s not even shitty enough for it to be played up for comical effect!

This situation is all the more crazy when you remember that My Hero Academia serializes alongside One Piece.  One Piece’s Oda Eiichiro has writing good bad guys down to a science. His bad guys range across the whole spectrum, from the immeasurably bad at their job to the point where you’re actively rooting for them (who the hell doesn’t like Buggy the Clown?) to the dark-mirror of the lead that you just love to hate (Blackbeard you monstrous son of a bitch), to a whole heap of over-zealous enforcers of law and order (go to hell Akainu). Oda’s a master at manipulating the audience’s feelings and creating characters that work in both short and large doses. Characters with short-lived appeal are dealt with appropriately, while those more sweeping interest and unexplored complexities are kept around for years. Oda will occasionally even turn past arc’s main-villains into bit-players in ongoing ones. Knowing when and how to subvert expectations like this speaks a lot to Oda’s abilities at constructing characters and narratives.

The sad thing is that I just can’t see Kohei pivoting with My Hero Academia. The trajectory My Hero Academia is on looks to be the one it’ll stick to for the future. The foregone conclusion of Midoriya’s journey is in plain sight; while I’m sure the ongoing story will take some amount of twists and turns, there’s not a lot of mystery left in how Midoriya fits into it. Shigaraki taking his place as the main villain is outright uninteresting and unappealing at this point. While the actual writing of characters and the flow of the chapters is good, the broader sweep of the work viewed from a weekly-perspective now leaves something to be desired.

I suppose there’s nothing left for me to do at this point than to let it fall to the wayside and just read at my own pace when more of the material is built up. Actively following a work as it releases requires considerably more personal investment, and I’m not sure I can muster that for this story anymore.

Oh well!

[shepgeek]

Deus Ex Machina in Films

Spoilers for Slumdog Millionaire, Jaws, Angels & Demons, Contact and Signs.

If a tale is worth the telling, then should it not be extraordinary?

From our very origins, where stories of gods and monsters were told around a flickering campfire to our modern multiplexes, it has been the stories of the most dramatic shifts in people’s lives that we long to hear. These tales bring with them an inherent problem: should the piece prove to be too fantastic, too far removed from what we can connect with, then the spell is broken. Suspension of our disbelief is only a part of this, and often a film may cause a snort if it takes a dramatic step too far, or when the mechanics of an author making a story fit can be readily sniffed out. This magical balance, of spinning a yarn but never yielding the sense that the tale itself has a fundamental ring of truth to it, has plagued storytellers for centuries and the term “Deus Ex Machina”, dating from Aeschylus, has come to be associated with this issue in the modern cinematic age.

Meaning “God from the Machine”, it refers to when a story takes a contrived turn. In Ancient Greece, there would be a literal contraption that would lower actors playing the Gods into the theatre and such divine interventions would often allow direct solutions to whatever dramatic tangle the characters found themselves in. The fine line between this dramatic “Get out of Jail Free” card and writing resolutions that thrill and inspire audiences has ensnared storytellers for millennia. Modern audiences will complain when a film hits moments of what feel like implausibility, despite the entire picture up to that point involving a man who can talk to fish or a Prime Minister courting a tea lady. The moments that shunt audiences out of the experience of watching a film are both fickle and, of course subjective and, since no storyteller sets out to leave themselves open to this vulnerability, there is seemingly no way to protect your film from it, hoping instead that a crumbling of verisimilitude never manifests.

This is different from implausibility or fantasy. Films go to huge lengths to make the audience invest in a story: the reason Jaws is held up as one of the finest the medium has to offer is not due to the convincingness of the shark but how much we have invested in the three lead characters, and the shading to make them and their worlds real to us over the first hour of the film demands our investment such that, when a 25 foot plastic shark finally leaps from the water, our terror is welded to theirs. Our human biology is a problem here, since the idea of the extraordinary is what inspires the very best stories but is undermined by our animalistic understanding of coincidence. In evolving our way to the top of the food chain, we have learned to spot patterns and are built to learn from mistakes in order to thrive, so that if an extreme event happens it is programmed into us to be intrinsically suspicious. Phrases such as “truth is stranger than fiction” are accepted truisms, and yet some films are criticised if they rely too much on remarkable events, despite this often making them the stories worth telling. The logical response would be that nobody would want to see a film in which one of the other double-O agents dies in the attempt at saving the world: show us instead the spy that survives ludicrously improbable traps to win the day.

Slumdog Millionaire is a fascinating example of this contradiction and is based around the concept of a penniless boy appearing on the world’s most famous TV quiz show. What happens, however, is far from a typical appearance and the boy, who has no schooling, is in fact using the show to search for his lost love. Along the way he is asked questions that he happens to know the answers to, with the film flashing back to explain how he would know each of these facts. Statistically this is an interesting approach: given that there are hundreds of thousands of people who must have appeared on a version of this quiz over decades, one of them would have to be ranked as the luckiest in terms of the questions they happen to have been asked and, therefore, would not their story not be the most compelling? There is an intriguing idea within the film of defining intelligence as being asked the questions that we happen to know the answers to, but the role of chance in shaping a person’s destiny can prove divisive in audiences and it is this friction that blurs the line upon which audiences’ readiness to accept the story we are spun is founded. Slumdog Millionaire is ultimately not that interested in the mechanics of this since the boy himself is not motivated by the money, using the show playfully to up the dramatic stakes and revealing more about the characters involved, but the boldness in using such a unusual framing device is relatively rare.

We can take a certain amount of improbability in our stories but the dangers of invoking anything beyond chance are arguably greater, and whilst there are many examples of outrageousness in the plotting of modern films there are few, if any, whose audacity in terms of confronting these shades of grey are as remarkable as 2009’s Angels & Demons. Having made a career from inferring conspiracies around artistic and historical fact, Dan Brown’s book is adapted by Ron Howard and builds to an unforgettable climax. A series of grisly murders are investigated by symbologist Robert Langdon and escalate to a finale in which a priest detonates an antimatter bomb in the skies above Vatican City, bailing out of his helicopter with a parachute at the last minute. We soon learn that said priest had, in fact, planned both the murders and the bomb (stolen from CERN) in order to get himself elected as Pope. As preposterous plotting goes, this is pretty much as far on a limb as even the most ridiculous of Hollywood thrillers has gone but there is something to be said for the gusto and straight face that the film commits to in bringing it to a screen. What makes it completely outrageous, however, is the concluding scene, where a kindly cardinal thanks both Langdon and God. As an atheist, Langdon demurs, but the cardinal replies that, given the remarkable nature of what has happened, how could this be anything other than God’s plan: a literal use of Deus Ex Machina in the modern cinematic age!

Angels & Demons’ approach is far from unique, although perhaps not in terms of sheer nerve. Raiders of the Lost Ark’s denouement also sees the God of the Old Testament wipe out the villains (The Big Bang Theory delighted in pointing out that, for all of Indy’s heroics, he plays no role in actually saving the world) whilst the Eagles in the Middle Earth films have a strong whiff of godliness to them. The moments when a storyteller is clearly fumbling for a way to get themselves out of a sticky corner will now be increasingly exposed online, whilst even knowing moments that try to poke fun at the fourth wall have a tendency to get lynched, such as Ocean’s 12’s set piece where Tess Ocean (played by Julia Roberts) bumps into actor Bruce Willis (played by Bruce Willis) and is then coerced into saving the day by pretending to be actress Julia Roberts, whom Tess apparently resembles. The only moments when such brazenness can be allowed are when a film dives wholeheartedly into the silliness, such as the moment in Life of Brian where our hero is saved from falling to his death by some convenient passing aliens.

Many films dance around this fault line in fiction but M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs chooses to confront it by forcing each viewer to reflect on their own choices in terms of how they each decide to see the world. Following The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, narrative twists had become the director’s trademark so the marketing of the film was stealthy, with the only knowledge circulated that the film was centred on the frivolous phenomenon of crop circles. Audiences who had been thrilled by Shyamalan’s first two films came expecting to find another sting in the tale and, whilst they would have that expectation met, for many it was not in the manner in which they were expecting.

From its propulsive opening credits, which musically and visually invoke Saul Bass and Bernard Herrman’s work for Hitchcock, the film casts a macabre spell, introducing us to a close family broken by bereavement. As enigmatic shadows, ominous animal behaviour and melodramatic news reports seem to imply that the world may be on the verge of disaster, the film spends our time focused on this household who is living as if Armageddon has already happened. Far from casting a morose tone, however, the focus is very much on their love and support for each other and the film is surprisingly funny, with a dryness and drollness that invites you to emotionally invest in them and their world to a huge degree, with various idiosyncrasies cleverly painted in to seemingly deepen their credibility, as is the norm for this genre. Charisma was always Mel Gibson’s strongest suit but, in this film, he uses it sparingly behind an expression of a man whom life has utterly defeated; a minister who has abandoned his faith after the cruel and arbitrary loss of his wife. His performance as Graham Hess is incredible and, in one scene, he processes rage, humanity, forgiveness and sorrow within the space of a few seconds. Joaquin Phoenix plays Graham’s brother Merrill, an honest and simple man whose awkwardness belies a gently painted integrity, whilst Cherry Jones also adds considerable emotional heft as the kind and empathetic local Sheriff: the world these characters inhabit, whist harsh and simple, makes it clear that these people are good-hearted and worthy of our empathy.

Shyamalan takes what would be the hugest event in human history and focuses upon the least significant of locales. He called Signs his “most popcorn” movie and takes many cues from Spielberg, with the juxtaposition of ordinary with extraordinary, a cast of children and a troubled, failing father (literally and professionally) all Amblin tropes, and the film is notably produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall. As the eeriness builds with the aid of an impeccable score from James Newton Howard, the crop circles increasingly seem to be the work of alien visitors. Throughout the film however, there is a mischievous sense of ambiguity and the film continuously undermines this fantastic possibility: Shyamalan plays on the audiences’ expectations with masterful sleight of hand, continuously teasing us with the prospect of a narrative twist that we are all trying to spot ahead of time, knowing all the while that, whilst we focus on this, our attention remains away from the ace he has hidden up his other sleeve. Everything we see seems to be developing this potential alien threat, but the film is subtly sowing very different seeds and Shyamalan uses a full array of tricks to keep our attention away from his final intentions. The most memorable of these is where Merrill watches a blurry Brazilian news report whilst hiding inside the cupboard under his stairs. This simple scene is edited to creepy perfection and, as the announcer intones “what you’re about to see may disturb you”, we share Merrill’s ghoulish excitement at finally discovering the truth behind the mystery. The reveal of a creature looming for a split second, out of focus but stalking us with predatory malevolence is one of cinemas great shocks: simple, matter of fact but unexpectedly stark. As Shyamalan tears away the ambiguity, this extraordinary image pays off the patient teasing shown by the film up to this point and, crucially, keeps us frightened for this family and what this all might mean for them.

Set almost entirely set around the family’s farmhouse, the key moment of the film comes as Graham attempts to comfort an alarmed Merrill. Gibson is shot in shadow throughout the film but with a light from behind the camera reflecting in his pupils, keeping the whites of his eyes prominent and obscuring our view of his lost soul. Graham’s speech about two truths and the choice we have in how we interpret the world appears, on first viewing, to be a charismatically sad mission statement of how Graham’s faith has been lost although, as we soon discover, he has not stopped believing but has moved away from his God in rage at the loss of his wife. Graham tells Merrill that we always have a choice to either interpret the world as a confluence of happenstance or as the plan of a deeper, bigger force. Shyamalan brilliantly undercuts this hugely significant moment with an immediate distraction, as Merrill recounts his experience of once narrowly avoiding getting vomited on by a pretty girl, but the scene is of fundamental importance to the whole purpose of the film. There is a way to read Signs as Shyamalan viewing himself as the god of his own worlds, with the characters he writes bending to his will (and his subsequent film, The Lady in the Water would see him develop this idea to memorably baffling effect) but the message of this film is centred on choice. When Graham is at his lowest ebb in the final reel, he does not appeal to God but simply repeats “not again” and, eventually, “I hate you”: he has failed to disavow himself of his faith, despite trying walk away from it. Graham spends the film in a purgatory of his own making and one reading of the piece is that of a man beset by demons on his way back to the path, which is finally triggered in the film by an emotive Last Supper. Shyamalan himself comes from a Hindu background but attended a Catholic school and the film wisely stays far from any one dogma, always ultimately returning to the choice of the individual to read the world as they see it and Shyamalan invites us to do the same with his film.

In the final act, Graham has an epiphany that all the events of his life are coalescing in this single moment: his brother’s failed baseball career, his wife’s death, his son’s asthma, his daughter’s habit of leaving glasses of water everywhere: all of these factors converge simultaneously and with specific purpose. This extrapolation, whilst fantastical, only involves the joining of a handful of dots and the film never demands that the audience agrees with Graham: we have the choice ourselves to view this confluence as coincidence or as part of a wider plan. This is the genius of Shyamalan’s film, to make a film about faith, call the film “Signs” and then conceal the entire purpose of the film within an alien invasion. Another outstanding film about faith, Robert Zemeckis’ Contact, has a similar denouement, where the lead character is forced to make a choice about whether they can believe what has happened to them but Signs does not repeat the only error of that film, where the audience is privately told what really happened.

As Signs concludes, we are left alone with our own choice to make and this is what many viewers objected to, feeling that the contrivances were too silly, or maybe that water would be an unlikely vulnerability for invading aliens (despite the definitive text on this, War of the Worlds, invoking a common cold for the same dramatic purpose). I can sympathise if a viewer felt they were promised plotting to resolve the tale and it must be conceded that ambiguity from a story is dangerous if it comes as a surprise, but the conceit, showmanship and storytelling guile in making this twist thematic instead of narrative makes it, for me, Shyamalan’s masterpiece. He plays it with astonishing skill and total assurance.

We all always have a choice of how to accept what the world presents us with, and the gift of a great storyteller is to blend the meeting of the extraordinary with characters to ground our interest and our emotional investment, whilst simultaneously building a world which audiences can recognise as real. Such alchemy is so delicate, so complex that this makes a potent reminder of why so many films miss that mark, but the reality that so many storytellers have it in them to keep reaching for this delicate balance is the reason why we will always keep coming back to that campfire, waiting to be enveloped in a new, fantastic tale.

[havinganormalone]

Anime review: Dorei-ku

I want to start by saying that I thoroughly enjoyed this anime. I enjoyed it for all the wrong reasons, but that doesn't change the fact that I derived pleasure from its existence. This anime is a hot, steamy witch's brew of plot holes, contrivances, and WAY TOO MANY CHARACTERS. The story is about people engaging in high-stakes games where the loser is psychologically compelled to become the winner's slave. However, the narrative is too disjointed and forced to deliver on any of the tension or intrigue. Instead, it's a sea of constantly changing power dynamics, coincidences, and weird sex stuff.

The only way I would honestly recommend this show to someone (based on its own merits, and not on so-bad-it's-good voyeurism) is if someone is looking for a light BDSM romp. MAL currently doesn't list this as ecchi, but the master-slave dynamic is definitely taken to its logical conclusion. If that's your thing, then I'm glad you've finally found something to scratch that itch. Anyways, the story is too all over the place to be anything other than an increasing amount of absurdities that dogpile onto each other like a drunken, disorganized orgy until some sort of climax is reached and everyone heads home without making eye contact. 2/10 The animation is...something else, that's for sure. Characters are off-model as often as they are on-model. I genuinely couldn't tell you what some characters' hairstyles are supposed to be, because the second they start moving, it dissolves into mush. The dog is a particularly fine example of the animation team being incompetent and lazy. Like, most of the time they weren't even trying. Add in the bland color pallet and awkward facial expressions, and there are no good visuals to be found. 3/10 The soundtrack is passable. It was never standout, but neither was it stand in the way. It's bare competency stands in stark contrast to the rest of the production. 6/10 The anime's biggest flaw is its characters. That's not to say there are no good characters, as a few of them have interesting motives and backgrounds. However, the cast is so crowded that none of them are given enough screen time to really develop. You could have still had a complex, high-stakes game with a lot of players if you cut the cast in half. As it is, you aren't given enough time to get attached to any of them. Except the dog. The dog is a fucking rockstar (more on him later). 4/10 When all is said and done, there were several occasions that I laughed out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of what was happening onscreen. It has the feel of an old-school anime, with its wacky plot that is going to take itself deadly serious no matter how zany things get. If you bother paying attention, the plot holes are so face-palming delightful. In no particular order, here are some of the gems from this series (SPOILERS): -If the little shota wanted to free his mother so bad, why didn't he just trick the head gangster into a battle with the slave device? Like he's passing the gadgets out like candy to his underlings, even though these things are millions of yen and he's trying to save up enough money to free his mom. -We are supposed to believe that this device that can force the loser of a contest to become a slave was originally developed...to help train pets. Yup. If Fido's having some trouble being housebroken, just challenge him to a contest to make him SUBMIT TO YOUR WILL. Especially since the explanation we are given for how the device controls the wearer is by inflicting them with a crushing since of responsibility. Because we all know our pets are emotionally complex and bound by duty and societal expectations. -The self-described crazy lady has apparently never heard of Craigslist's missed connections. The entire reason she's doing all this is...to reconnect with a one-night stand. You DO know that private eye's exist, right? That there are other, better ways to track someone down than to wonder around town betting your free-will and collecting slaves. -THE DOG. THE DOG IS SOMEHOW THE SMARTEST CHARACTER. Like not only is he able to understand humans completely, he grasps the nuance of the situation and the life-or-death battles. And like...no one finds that weird. They all just take it for granted that the you can explain the rules of the game to him and he'll bark in agreement and go to town. "Hey dog, first person to omnomnom this flatware WINS." "ARF!" Does this take place in an alternate universe where dogs are super intelligent? Is that why the SCM was designed as a dog-training device? So when all is said and done, Dorei-ku provided a decent amount of enjoyment (6/10). However, even on the grounds of so-bad-it's-good, there are better shows out there you could watch if you want to laugh at some bad anime. Additionally, I honestly couldn't tell you how this show stacks up when it comes to BDSM fan-service, as that's not my area of expertise. Overall, I'd give this show a 4/10, and tell people to give it a pass. But that dog, man. That dog is my hero.

Link to the orignal review: https://myanimelist.net/reviews.php?id=286124