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#I like all of the little incidental comparisons and parallels that happen in the story too
thecindercrow · 3 years
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“I don’t know the meaning of life. But the things you care about - your friends, your family - they’re worth more than anything I ever possessed. And no amount of gold can ever buy that. It’s your wish, Din. Just make sure it’s what you really want.”
WISH DRAGON 2021
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turtle-paced · 4 years
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GoT Re-Watch: Fine-Toothed Comb Edition
This post is also availablle on my wordpress.
Hello and welcome to forsaken lands. The episodes of GoT that broke fans. And considering that GoT fans made it past in-universe heartbreaks like Ned Stark’s death and the Red Wedding, and major disappointments in the writers such as ‘Breaker of Chains’ and ‘Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken’, that is saying a lot.
It’s kinda fitting that the home stretch starts with a funeral, really. Good way to farewell our hopes. We’re not getting closure anywhere else in this series.
8.04 – The Last of the Starks
(2:15) When the credits said “with Iain Glen,” this is what they meant. With Iain Glen lying on a pile of sticks for two minutes.
(2:46) We do not get to hear what Dany whispers into Jorah’s dead ears, but I’m pretty certain the implication is that Dany, in her grief, is thinking on the lines of “BURN THEM ALL!”
(3:00) Because Sansa weeping over Theon’s body is…somehow less worrying? Somehow shot without the implied promises of fiery vengeance? What we’re looking at right now I think is far more ableist than sexist. The difference between Dany’s grief being portrayed as worrying and Sansa’s grief being portrayed as, you know, grief, is Dany’s family history of mental illness. Don’t get me wrong, there’ll be a heaping helping of sexism in here too, a lot of it in how Dany’s status as a female leader is linked narratively to her emotional state (“hysterical women” and all that) and written into the plot in the first damn place, but right now what attracts ominously unspoken whispering on Dany’s part and “purer” emotion on Sansa’s is connected to the parties we knowhave family members who have suffered from mental illness.
Man, imagine if they’d actually adapted the books, where Sansa’s father suffers what looks an awful lot like PTSD. Which doesn’t stop with just end-of-episode flashbacks, but affects his ongoing decision-making processes.
(3:36) Meanwhile, over in the toxic masculinity department, note who isn’t being so disgracefully emotional! The men, and the women who “aren’t like other girls.”
The show had good material to work with here. They could have shown men breaking down, portrayed as a completely reasonable reaction to the incredibly traumatic events of the previous episode. They could also have shown men struggling with the stoic performance that toxic masculinity requires, only to break down later, or question their own lack of response. You know, like several characters do in the books.
(4:31) Incidentally, it amuses me that though the words of Jon’s speech are addressing the survivors, he’s delivering the speech to the dead (and also the camera).
(6:50) Uh-oh. Dany couldn’t contain her tears as she lit a friend’s funeral pyre. Bad signs! Red flags! Red like fire.
I’m just going to dig out a relevant passage from The Curse of Chalion (spoilers for that book follow). For context, the crown princess Iselle (daughter of a woman widely regarded as mad, for further comparison’s sake) and the chancellor, Dy Jironal, are locked in a struggle over who gets power when the king dies. Iselle’s BFF recounts a relevant public event:
“Iselle is Ista’s daughter. She cannot speak of [the titular curse], lest men say she is mad, too. And use it as an excuse to seize…everything. Dy Jironal thought of it. At [the late crown prince’s] interment, he never missed a chance to pass some little comment on Iselle to any lord or provincar in earshot. If she wept, wasn’t it too extravagant; if she laughed, how odd that she should do so at her brother’s funeral; if she spoke, he whispered that she was frenetic, if she fell silent, wasn’t she grown strangely gloomy? And you could just watch men began to see what he told them they were seeing, whether it was there or not. Toward the end of his visit there, he even said such things in her hearing, to see if he could frighten and enrage her, and then accuse her of becoming an unbalanced virago.”
If Dany cries she’s unbalanced. If she hides her emotion she’s unempathetic. If she gets angry, she’s insane. The difference isn’t in the reaction (as already noted, we’ve got other characters openly grieving and other characters hiding their emotions), but in how, whether, and when the reaction is portrayed to the audience. In The Curse of Chalion there is a named antagonist doing that spin; here, the camera, the viewer’s PoV access to the story, is pulling exactly the same trick as it checks in with Dany’s emotional state to highlight the “out-of-place” emotions. Even the frequency of these check-ins affects the portrayal – as the viewer is treated to each and every fluctuation in Dany’s mood, her emotional state appears less constant than those of characters where we don’t get a reaction shot every time a traumatic thought crosses her mind/she schools her reaction/something mildly irritates her.
This phenomenon is not isolated to this scene. It’s been happening all season. It’s going to keep happening.
(7:50) I do not get the mood of this scene. Tonally, it feels more awkward/ordinary than full of grief, with none of the wild “glad to be alive” mood until a named character prompts it later on. The background characters often do not appear to exist independently of the main characters. It’s just these little things that chip away at suspension of disbelief. In this case, a general feeling like this fictional world is populated by named characters and department store mannequins only, not people.
(9:24) “So who’s lord of Storm’s End now?” Funny question. Strange that nobody’s asked that in the last few seasons. While we’re at it, who’s the Lady of Casterly Rock?
(10:42) Nor do I get Tyrion’s tone as he observes that Gendry’s going to be loyal to Dany due to this appointment. I mean…yes? That was the point? As Cersei shows us in AFFC, appointments for surface level loyalty don’t cut the mustard, but at the same time, Tyrion’s not being cynical and sardonic about Gendry’s competence.
(11:29) Davos here has a heart-to-heart about his complicated feelings towards a woman who engineered the death of a child he loved very much. To Tyrion. Who engineered the death of a child Davos also presumably loved very much. Davos’ interactions with Tyrion regularly go beyond a man who’s bottling up the death of his child for the sake of a political goal he genuinely believes will better the lives of more than just him, and into the realms of real emotional intimacy and friendship. I swear the writers forgot about this.
(13:12) Just from a writing standpoint, that line, “I don’t really want anymore,” really gets my goat. Oh, Bran just doesn’t have any motivations anymore, no biggie. Now the only thing that I the viewer want for this character is for him to start wanting things again.
(13:24) “Mostly I live in the past.” Yes truly this is an excellent trait for a temporal ruler.
(14:31) Here we have the unintentional call-back to season one, wherein information that the characters in-universe find distressing is revealed via the now-rather-clumsy mechanism of a drinking game. Book!Brienne’s status as an only child is a little sensitive for her.
(15:07) Tormund’s praise of Jon here is also pretty clumsy writing. It’s hard to praise Jon’s actions in that climactic battle because, well, he rode on a dragon and fried wights for about thirty seconds, and that’s it.
It’s also hard to see praise for Jon without corresponding praise for Dany as anything but sexism, because Dany was also riding on a dragon and frying lots of wights, and they’re her dragons. Played as in-universe sexism, this could have been a good source of material too, highlighting how Jon’s gender results in him getting more praise for equal (or lesser) work. Left unexamined it becomes part of a sexist narrative, an example of how Jon’s gender results in him getting more praise for equal (or lesser) work.
(15:21) No, don’t mention that Jon got killed and brought back! Don’t! It just raises the question of why!
(15:40) Notice how we keep getting the Dany reaction shot? Yeah. Isn’t the fact that Dany has emotional reactions weird?
The dialogue makes this worse. “What kind of person rides on a fucking dragon? A madman or a king!” Did…did they not realise the depths to this comment? The context? I mean, clearly, this is another hint that Dany’s going ~crazy~. On account of how she cannot be a king. The context of Dany’s gender. The gendered language used here. The minimisation of Dany’s accomplishments. How did the writers think this would come across, if not some fairly blatant sexism?
(16:04) This is the third Dany check-in regarding her unhappiness at a fairly miserable party.  This one is extra special because the very observant and knowledgeable Varys is apparently thinking, “hang on, she’s not happy, and it’s a party! This couldn’t possibly have anything to do with listening to her boyfriend praised to the skies for things she did first and/or in parallel,  immediately after losing a close friend and fighting in a very scary battle. She must be going crazy.”
Also there is spooky music and the shot choice emphasises that Dany isn’t hanging out with anyone at this party. This is far more worrying than Bran not emotionally engaging with anyone at this party thus far or Sansa not hanging out with anyone at this party thus far or Varys not hanging out with anyone at this party thus far, or Sandor drinking heavily at this party while snapping at people who come near him thus far or Arya not even attending this party. Double standard? What double standard?
(16:51) Tyrion’s marriage prior to Sansa is here brought up as a joke. There’s a joke in here all right. I call it ‘continuity’.
(17:14) Oh, my, how shocking, Brienne’s a virgin. In this world where noblewomen having premarital sex is frowned upon, Brienne not having premarital sex is unthinkable and something that the rules of drinking games say she should be embarrassed by. Wtf?
(18:36) I’m as sick of the “Pod has a magic cock” joke as the next person but frankly, they didn’t beat us over the head with detailed stories or lurid jokes about Pod’s sexual prowess, and someone should have a nice time here in season eight.
(19:56) Oh boy. Reunion between Sansa and Sandor, when these two haven’t interacted for six seasons, and what interaction they had was seriously watered down. Thematically watered down, that is. In the books, Sansa did something Sandor believed was impossible – held on to her idealism and kindness throughout horrible experiences. He was the one who learned more from their interactions. Sandor was not serving as an author avatar, but rather being depicted as a man lashing out with cynicism and nihilism as a defence mechanism.
The show didn’t appreciate that back in season two and it’s sure not going to start now. We’re about to hear some real awful stuff.
(20:10) “Heard you were broken in. Heard you were broken in rough.” 1) Why should we like this character? He’s an asshole! Not just gruff, an asshole. 2) Why is everyone an asshole to Sansa about her rape? Of all the things to be an asshole about. We got it long ago. This world is dark and gritty.
(20:15) Note that Sansa executing someone by setting dogs on them is not depicted as a worrying sign of her mental stability or lack thereof, nor as a lack of empathy, but as justice.
(20:52) “Without Littlefinger and Ramsay and the rest, I would have stayed a little bird all my life.” Okay! Wow! What a line!
What the writers think they’re saying: Sansa has overcome adversity and become a stronger person for it.
What the context of the entire series adds to this message: Sansa needed to be raped in order to become stronger. “Becoming stronger” here meaning “someone who relishes retributive violence,” as if there is no other form of strength, and as if the capacity for retributive violence is necessarily a sign of strength. The person she was before, who comforted others in their time of need and stuck her neck out to help, was stupid, naive, and weak. There is something deeply wrong with retaining qualities such as idealism. Sansa had to shed those qualities. Rape was the way to do it.
So, in short, gross.
(21:30) This is…definitely some archery safety.
(21:42) We got that? Arya is celebrating by standing out in the cold, rejecting social activity, and continuing to practice with deadly weapons (nearly killing a friend as she does, good work!). But there’s nothing to worry about in terms of Arya’s psyche here. The difference is the family history of mental illness.
(22:54) Begin the ship-sinking! Anchors a-smash! This is one of two relationships this episode which work out well until nah. For reasons. Ultimately, I don’t think the writers had a clear vision of what Arya was and what Arya wanted, instead defining the character by what she was not. She’s not a lady. Okay. What does that mean? Does that observation bring us any closer to learning what Arya does want from her life?
Aside from Not Gendry, anyhow. Man. Hope nobody was invested in that ship, because that was quite the abrupt sinking.
(24:56) Now the show remembers that Jaime has trouble with things like laces when he’s only got one hand.
(26:07) Hope nobody’s invested in this ship either! More on Jaime/Brienne soon. Let’s just keep the pattern in mind for the moment. Long-teased relationship culminates only to fall apart almost immediately because reasons.
(27:22) While we’re on the general theme of romance. The deterioration of Jon and Dany’s relationship is dragged over a longer period than the other sunk ships this season, but the reasons for that relationship failure aren’t well explicated. In large part because Jon never has the opportunity to really go into the identity crisis that the parentage reveal resulted in (note that the info that he was seriously shaken about the idea that he was sleeping with his aunt came from the showrunners, not the text). Jon’s silence throughout episode two was a good idea, in the context of building up to an eventual resolution. Only the writers kinda forgot that such a huge reveal might need a resolution.
(28:24) Continuing the thread that what tips Dany over the edge is rejection. Yes! We are really doing this! She is a woman scorned! Goodbye seasons of discussion about whether the ends justify the means. Goodbye seasons of dealing with various setbacks, developing opinions of her own, and earning respect. We’re reducing it all down to “nobody likes Dany, she feels entitled to their love, and now she is angry.”
Incidentally, why haven’t people softened towards Dany? Who was, after all, riding on a dragon just like Jon, and saving a lot of lives? We’ll get to that in a few scenes.
(28:39) Again, the fact that Dany gets angry and emotional about the prospect of losing her claim in Westeros is part of the depiction of a general downward trend in sanity and upward tendency to assume her power as an inherent moral good.
The problem here is that a) Dany’s not wrong that Jon poses a political threat to her, whether either of them like it or not, and b) this character’s arc shows some good sound reasons for wanting power – to protect her own agency, at the very least, to say nothing of her broader politics. If Dany was forced to concede the throne, her ability to decide what she does with her own life is sharply reduced. Her ability to achieve what she wants to do in the world (things like ending slavery and oppression) is sharply reduced.
In short, this is a scene and a situation where getting angry and upset is an entirely reasonable reaction. At best, this doesn’t work to depict a character with declining mental stability. At worst (and I believe worst), the very fact that a woman has emotions is being turned into part of a narrative where her emotions render her unsuitable to do things such as provide a reliable perspective or wield any form of power.
(29:27) I’m actually sympathetic to Jon’s desire to be open about his parentage with his sisters. Again, there’s still good material here! Jon’s reasonable personal desire to not keep secrets relating to their family from his sisters vs Dany’s also reasonable political concern that the more people who know, the less controllable the information is, the more dangerous it is. That’s a real conflict! I’d like to watch more along those lines!
(30:15) The narrative of Dany’s “hysteria” is advanced by focusing disproportionately on her emotional reaction the dilemma, without an equal and counterbalancing focus on Jon’s side of the problem. Through this conversation, Jon’s offered simple rebuttals to more complex statements from Dany. I owe my siblings the truth. Sansa won’t plot against us. The truth will not destroy us. You are my queen and nothing will change that. What’s missing here is any sort of explanation as to why Jon believes these things. The lack of explanation leaves Jon’s character underdeveloped and shifts disproportionate focus to Dany’s reasoning and motivations.
(31:09)  So just to put a percentage on it, in flying north to aid Jon and save the north, Dany sacrificed a full 50% of her troops. Half the northerners were killed too, but I don’t think it’s a very controversial argument that without Dany’s aid, 100% of the northerners would have been killed. Also 100% of the non-combatants.
(31:27) Meanwhile, it’s made clear that as a result of Dany’s assistance, she’s taken a serious hit to her ability to take the Iron Throne. Note the mention of the Greyjoy fleet.
(31:37) “When the people find out what we have done for them – “ “Cersei will make sure they don’t believe it.” So…working out a propaganda strategy isn’t worth it? The woman who catapulted barrels of broken chains into Meereen to prove to its slave population that she was the real deal, something she did not do in the books, is out of ideas to counter the narrative? Dany kinda forgot that she successfully conquered three cities already. Not for the first time.
This is a fault with the writing. The writers are jamming square character pegs into round plot holes. These scenes pay lip service to the problems the characters come across, and dismiss those problems either out of hand, or as completely insurmountable and not worth bothering with.
(31:56) “Thankfully, Cersei is losing allies by the day.” Footage not found. Footage to the contraryfound, as Varys plonks down quite a few more new tokens on Cersei’s side of the map table. There’s no good reason for it, but there we are.
(32:24) Give the smallfolk the opportunity, and they will cast Cersei aside? There are a few problems with this.
1. It’s exactly what Tyrion proposed last season. How’s the strategy working out? A reevaluation may be called for here.
2. As someone who lived through food riots in a city under siege, Tyrion should be well aware of the human costs of starvation in a medieval urban area. This is not the mythical “humane option.”
3. This still doesn’t address the fact that Cersei is demonstrably willing to blow up whoever’s in her way, and a slow siege gives her more opportunity and motivation to burn down her own holdings just to deny them to Dany.
4. Why the fuck haven’t the smallfolk rebelled already, given that Cersei blew up the Vatican? If they are not going to rebel over that, what are they going to rebel over?
(32:52) Speaking of lip service! Sansa’s concerns here that the armies are exhausted would (and should!) be a valid and important objection to the wisdom of Dany’s plans. But we never see any evidence later that the troops are over-tired. Or underfed. Sansa’s insights don’t mean anything. And this is poor writing for her.
(33:02) Sansa’s proposed solution is an indefinite break. She came to the meetings without the details about how long a break might be appropriate. Keep in mind who’s been the most vocal about saying ‘we don’t have enough food.’ I think on context it’s fairly reasonable for Dany to suspect this is Sansa trying to get out of assisting at King’s Landing (and we’ll see shortly afterwards that she really does want to get out of assisting at King’s Landing). Likewise, the rebuttal that regrouping gives time for Cersei to dig in is another fairly reasonable argument.
But from Sansa’s comments, apparently this is Dany not caring about the wellbeing of her own troops.
(34:59) Now we get into it! Why are the Stark sisters so dead set against Dany, despite the assistance she’s provided?
(35:34) And the answer is xenophobia! “She’s not one of us.” Arya and Sansa do not trust Dany because “she’s not one of us.” No amount of assistance or heroism can overcome this fundamental barrier. It is bigotry. Not to mention it’s also pretty much identical to the Lannister ethos of “fuck everyone who isn’t us.”
Again, how did the showrunners think this would come across, when the Starks proposed treating Dany with “screw you got mine”? How did they think it would look for the Starks to accept the benefits of Dany’s assistance only to try and back out and treat her with rudeness and hostility when she wanted their help in return? How did they think it would look to have the reason for this rudeness and hostility be “she’s not one of us”? The Starks here look like absolute assholes. Worse, this reaction can be extrapolated to the North at large.
(35:41) Complete with some poor adaptation of Arya, who doesn’t need allies and apparently doesn’t care for friends either.
(36:21) So Jon decides to reveal everything to his siblings. This devastating family secret which should have to force every Stark to reevaluate what they knew about Ned and what they thought about Ned’s treatment of their mother and brother. This is a doozy of a secret. Let’s see some reactions.
(37:15) – a cut? What the fuck? We cut away from that? Why! Why would you do this! Why would any writer in their right mind and possessed of their dramatic sensibilities cut away from the moment two of our major PoV characters discover their father’s greatest secret, in the context of renegotiating high level political relationships?
(38:09) Bronn’s presence here is insult to injury. Not only did we cut away from what by rights should have been one hell of a reveal, we cut to a scene with a character who’s just here for the fanservice. It has been a very long time since Bronn was plot-relevant or theme-relevant. His presence here, in fact, just highlights the plotholes of his involvement in previous seasons. I mean why, for the love of all that is well-written, would this character continue to play along with the jackasses who’ve promised huge payoffs and never delivered?
…aaaaaaaand now that I write it, I see it. We are all Bronn here. Right up until he gets his fucking payoff, and we the audience do not.
(40:40) Ah yes, more homophobia which is somehow not problematic when a funny character says it.
(41:26) So now that that scene is over, what did it do? The answer is “very little.” It provides an explanation of how Bronn’s Lord of Highgarden at the end of the series, when Highgarden’s resources are no longer relevant to the plot. It does not matter who’s running Highgarden. But if you cut Bronn’s subplot from this season altogether, it doesn’t actually affect shit. Hell, it opens up plotholes. Bronn’s going to vanish for the next few episodes. Cersei’s going to proceed as though she never hired anyone to off Jaime and Tyrion, and Jaime and Tyrion are going to proceed as though Cersei never hired anyone to kill them. Also as if they never decided to give away Highgarden, something I’m sure Dany would be thrillled about.
If any of the characters involved thought about the implications, that is, instead of barrelling along with the plot because Script Says So.
(42:21) So Sandor and Arya go on one last road trip for old times’ sake. Can’t have this story finish with anything but revenge.
(42:33) Now, okay, I might draw some conclusions about the quality of adaptation from the showrunners’ decision to make Arya effectively not Arya, but they can make that decision and within the show’s own canon we’ll have to live with  it.
But Arya here walks out on her family, completely blank-faced, no goodbyes, no indication of any sort of grief (even a shot where Arya looks back longingly at Winterfell), on a suicide mission to take revenge on Cersei. It’s all very well to rely on Arya’s longstanding desire to kill Cersei. That’s fair. Now that desire should be competing with things like “longstanding desire to reunite with her family.” And the show skips out on depicting any internal conflict there. Instead, we approach Arya’s decision to leave through Sandor’s PoV, the reverse of the book’s choices. More about how the story weights the revenge narrative next episode.
Oh, and Sandor is also completely static as a character. Completely fucking static. Our time has been well spent watching this character not develop.
(43:37) “Why her?” Oh my god. Again? It really does seem like Sansa’s got nothing else going on in her characterisation this season but hating Dany. (This is not quite accurate. There are at least three scenes this season where Sansa is not directly or indirectly engaged in undermining or expressing her strong dislike of Daenerys.) I cannot stress enough, this is both poor depiction of Dany, and poor characterisation of Sansa!
Also, the choice to open the scene with Sansa staring at the dragons, followed by the line “why her?” frames Sansa’s subsequent choices in said scene as being motivated by her dislike of Dany. Think of that opening shot and opening line as a heading for the scene.
(44:55) We establish for sure here that Tyrion is afraid of Dany. The basis for this is Dany’s behaviour after the Loot Train Battle and Dany’s impatience to be getting on with taking King’s Landing. Note that Tyrion, while afraid of his abusive father, was not afraid of him because he pulled stunts like the Red Wedding. And while show!Tyrion hated Joffrey, unlike his book version he does not appear to have been afraid of Joffrey. So what makes Dany different?
If anyone can come up with a reason other than deeply ingrained narrative sexism…
(45:06) “The men in my family don’t do well in the capital,” Sansa says.
(45:58) It’s been [checks] eight minutes and forty-three seconds of screen time since Sansa learned the truth. A truth she swore not to reveal to anyone else. Here she makes the decision to tell someone else. Firstly, this plays real bad for Sansa herself, who broke a promise in a hot second in a scene that’s about How Much She Hates That Daenerys Woman. Secondly, this plays real bad for Jon, who trusted Sansa to do no such thing.
It’s been forty-two seconds since Sansa said she didn’t want Jon to go to King’s Landing, with the implication she believes he’ll be in danger if he does. This does not track with a motivation to protect him. It does, however, track with a motivation of wanting anyone but Dany in power.
I really don’t think the writers were trying to make the Starks look like assholes, which is why their success is so astounding.
Hey, you notice that they cut before we can see Tyrion’s reaction to this news, too?
(46:28) “I’m taking the Free Folk home. We’ve had enough of the south.” It sure is nice that this political faction doesn’t have to deal with things like the long-term material and cultural consequences of internal unification, being subject to essentially foreign authority of variable friendliness, mass migration, dispossession, things like that. Nope. Right back over the mostly-intact Wall. Nothing’s going to change for them. Just a warm southron vacay.
(46:57) Jon just fucking exiles his direwolf. Worst pet owner. Also themes, direwolves, etc.
(48:13) So Gilly’s pregnant. And Sam’s vows to take no wife and father no children have not been mentioned for an awfully long time. The showrunners masterfully resolved the central conflict of Sam’s season two, three, and four dilemmas in this relationship by ignoring it entirely.
(50:05) Here Tyrion tells Varys the big secret. In spite of the fact that he should bloody well realise that spreading the information about could destabilise Dany’s campaign for the throne and eventual rule. Good job, man. Good job. (There is also no reason to believe that Sansa knew that Tyrion would pass the information on to Varys.)
Plus additional depiction of Robert’s Rebellion as being because Robert couldn’t get over being rejected, rather than Aerys being a dangerous tyrant.
(50:41) “People are drawn to him,” Varys says of Jon, in a series where yes, we’ve seen people acclaiming Jon their leader, and precious little reason why they would do such a thing. ‘Failing upwards’ does seem to be the term. Note, however, that what Varys says equally applies to Daenerys. People drawn to her. War hero. But that doesn’t matter because Dany is a woman.
(51:08) Is marrying your aunt common in the North? Do we have time to go back to the history and lore material? And there is still no good reason this wasn’t brought up in season seven!
(51:23) Varys is very worried about Dany’s sanity. Based on…the fact she was impatient with Tyrion’s demonstrated-to-be-failing plan, the fact she didn’t enjoy the one party after one of her close friends died violently in her arms, and possibly secondhand reports of the Loot Train Battle.
This is incredibly hard to buy. I mean really. For seven seasons, Dany was a reasonable, rational individual whose cruelty was a) occasional, b) a reaction to the actions of others, and c) not out of line with what we saw from other characters, giving the impression that her behaviour as a ruler was not beyond her society’s tolerances. What made her stand out was the fact that she was freeing slaves and talking about “breaking the wheel.” That was outside her society’s tolerances. The instances of Dany’s cruelty, in the context of the series as a whole, do not appear enough to support a conclusion that mentally she’s on a downward slide.
Concern over how Dany’s handling her grief over Jorah might be more reasonable, but again, there’s no reason to think this is anything but grief and trauma. Which isn’t great, obviously, but nobody’s going “oh, she’s sad and going through a rough time,” they’re saying she’s going crazy. Just leapt right to the worst possible conclusion.
Meanwhile, on the meta level, let’s keep in mind that the narrative is using the fact that Dany wasaffected by grief and trauma as proof that she is demonstrably irrational and not fit to lead. This is textbook hysterical woman trope. Textbook.
(52:08) So for context, the dragons are approaching King’s Landing. From their height, they should have a good view of the bay.
(52:17) And yet Rhaegal gets sniped! Goodbye dragon #2! Well, given how he treated Ghost, perhaps it’s a good thing that Jon didn’t get another pet.
(52:42) Euron’s invisible fleet strikes again. Sure, we see them sailing out from behind a cliff, but the dragons had some serious height advantage, and there are a bunch of ships. Guess Dany kinda forgot about the Iron Fleet!
No, really. That’s the explanation the showrunners gave.
Even though in the moment it seems that Dany also forgot that she isn’t limited to seeing what the camera points at, and/or forgot to use her eyes. If the cliffs were high enough to hide the fleet, they should also have been too high for Euron to aim over. Not that his first two shots weren’t implausibly good either.
(53:18) And Dany does not fly around the fleet and flank them…why?
(54:02) So Euron’s invisible, memory-fogging fleet, which the showrunners have relied on way too heavily for diabolus ex machina, starts laying into Dany’s fleet. Because the showrunners seriously expected Dany to forget about the Iron Fleet. Dany has also forgotten she’s flying on a fire-breathing dragon. Don’t worry, she’ll remember when the plot says she’ll commit a bunch of war crimes.
(54:35) Again straining the limits of plausibility, Tyrion survives despite being knocked on the head by a falling mast. While in the water. In the middle of a battle. That’s one way to avoid depicting a battle that should not have happened.
(55:12) Missandei is established to be missing here.
(55:27) Cersei loses allies by the day. The smallfolk will surely turn on her. In this shot, people are pouring in through Cersei’s gates and seeking her protection. Not a riot in sight. Again, there’s no good reason why, but there we go!
(56:01) They’re not dropping Cersei’s pregnancy. This still raises questions as to how long it’s been, and she’s still not showing.
(56:30) “Keep the gates open. If she wants to take the castle, she’ll have to murder thousands of innocent people first.” That sounds to me like an argument for why Dany should be rather quick securing the capital – to prevent Cersei taking and using hostages! Note that this argument applies from season seven!
(56:44) It turns out that Missandei was captured. Yes. Euron not only managed to sneak invisibly up to Dany’s forces after they all forgot about his existence, kill a dragon with some seriously implausible sniping, escape unburned when Dany forgot to set Euron on fire, and trash her fleet utterly, he also bravely sailed in, discovered that Missandei was a hostage of significant emotional value to Dany, and captured her and her alone. What plot problems can Euron not solve.
More seriously, this is some shoddy treatment of one of the show’s only significant characters of colour. It’s going to get worse. Before we got to see Missandei’s face, we got a long shot of the chains she was put in (and a snide comment about it too).
(57:13) Varys says that storming the city is a mistake. I’m yet to hear workable alternatives. Dany’s advisors have been wrong about Cersei’s political and military strength every step of the way. Why should Dany listen to them, at this point?
However, Dany’s rejection of her advisors’ (proven-poor) advice is depicted as being born of emotion rather than reason.  See above re: hysterical women. We’ve got this dichotomy between emotional women and reasonable men. This is all the more noticeable in the context of Cersei’s rule. We’ve got two queens fighting for a throne at the moment, and both are apparently willing to kill any number of people for it. Currently the narrative’s saying that our sympathies should be with the reasonable men trying to rein in these unreasonable women.
(58:34) Tyrion advocates talking to Cersei. Again. This is a bad rerun of 7.07, and 7.07 wasn’t much good to start with. What reason does Tyrion have to believe that anything Cersei says can be relied on? None. He has, instead, every reason to believe that Cersei will lie if she needs to and reject every effort for a peaceful solution. He has every reason to believe this because she already has. And also hired someone to kill him. Which he found out just a few scenes ago.
I realise that Dany’s the one on the Hitler end of the Nazi analogies in episode six, but watch out for Neville Chamberlain here. Peace in our fucking time.
(59:15) “I’ve served tyrants all my life. They all talked about destiny.” Really? Did they? I can’t recall either Tywin or Joffrey or Robert talking much about destiny. Weird throwback to book!Varys, there.
(59:44) We see here that Varys measures fitness to rule in how often the ruler agrees with him. As soon as Dany turns down his advice, even though it was of dubious merit, he starts looking for a replacement. This is, again, the sort of thing that makes Dany’s supposed paranoia not look very irrational.
(1:00:04) “Have you considered the best ruler might be someone who doesn’t want to rule?” Why, yes! That question was considered extensively in the novels, in the person of Robert Baratheon! Back in the day, Robert was a fantasy hero. He had almost everything going for him. Almost every personal quality you could want in a king. But he didn’t want the throne. And nobody could make him do the job once he was on the throne. His disinterest and inertia had profound consequences on both his personal health and the running of the country.
Robert Baratheon is GRRM’s argument against that line.
(1:00:21) While there is plenty of sexism in the narrative, I don’t think Varys is incorrect to observe that in the patriarchal setting depicted, Jon’s gender will make him a more appealing monarch candidate.
(1:00:46) Varys: Jon would make a good king of Westeros.
Also Varys: We can’t marry Jon to Dany, her personality would overwhelm his!
Tyrion’s solution addresses the problem of Jon’s claim. Varys rejects that solution because it doesn’t address the problem of Dany. He does not want Dany to be the driving force ruling the kingdom. Also, apparently marriages where the woman is a Type A personality and the man’s a Type B personality are bad. Presumably the reverse is not true.
(1:03:44) Maybe three or four scenes this season where show!Sansa isn’t focused on hating Dany? Of course, my comments about Sansa being “toughened up” by having her come to enjoy violence against her enemies still apply.
(1:05:14) Now this reads like a fuck you to everyone who was at all invested in Jaime/Brienne as a ship. Brienne lays out the basic position – Jaime is a good man, he can’t save Cersei, and he doesn’t need to die with her. Sums up a good chunk of audience hopes, too. A lot of what drives the dramatic tension of Jaime’s scenes is the audience desire to see him actually follow through on his better impulses, including giving up on his toxic relationship with his sister. Not only is the audience not unreasonable for wanting this, the audience’s desire for this has been actively encouraged by the narrative for several seasons.
(1:05:39) In response, Jaime says, “nah, not a good man, just as bad as my sister, I’ll be leaving now, see ya!” As if scenes justifying Jaime’s actions-for-love never existed (just because I don’t think “I did it for love” is a good excuse doesn’t mean the show has thus far not treated it as a good excuse), Jaime lists a bunch of crimes, concludes he’s awful, and heads out. In hindsight, this is clearly Jaime rejecting any sort of different path. At the time there were theories going round that Jaime was heading off to the battle for some sort of personal resolution…but no.
So, you know, fuck the viewers for thinking someone could grow and change, I guess. A special fuck you to anyone who shipped Jaime/Brienne. They can go cry with the Arya/Gendry shippers. This is not just bad writing, it’s asshole writing. It gave the audience something to want, gave the audience what it wanted, yanked it away, and called the audience idiots for ever wanting it in the first place.
And it’s not even the worst example of asshole writing in the series. As we know.
(1:07:26) So here’s our setup. Dany, her advisors, a small group of Unsullied, and Drogon, are all hanging out on the clear stretch of ground in front of King’s Landing. Cersei’s up there and there are a whole bunch of ballistae pointed in their general direction, as well as a whole bunch of archers on the walls.
(1:09:13) Tyrion and Qyburn state the positions of their respective monarchs. (In the context of the series, especially with both Dany and Cersei being “mad” queens, it gives me the irrits that Dany and Cersei aren’t doing the talking – no, that’s for the men. See above regarding reasonable men reining in unreasonable women.) Note that these positions each demand the unconditional surrender of the other. I don’t think this is going to be resolved. I think this is well past the point where talking does much good.
This is one of the problems I have with the “reasonable” positions proposed by the men around Dany – they fail to recognise that they aren’t working against a reasonable opponent. These men aren’t reasonable in the sense that they considered the available evidence, alternative courses of action, and weighed up their options. The alternative proposed, and initially taken up by Dany, did not work. We saw it not work for most of season seven, and it continues to not work now. The “reasonable” option here doesn’t have anything to do with the situation established by the show. It’s “reasonable” in that it’s less outright violent in the short term, without accounting for long-term consequences or, you know, major strategic objectives. It treats negotiation and non-violence as inherently the most reasonable course of action, and therefore the best.
Again, this makes for a poor contrast with the books, where Dany’s storyline has talked about just these things. There are situations where people cannot solve their problems by talking. There are peaces that should not and cannot be made. Sometimes violence is necessary. The questions are when? and why?
(1:11:49) Note that when someone does actually bother speaking to one of the monarchs here directly, Tyrion doesn’t go for reason. He does not outline military consequences as he did for Qyburn. He goes for the emotional appeal.
It’s also worth noting: fucking again? This worked so well last time.
(1:12:07) Wait, so Jaime’s hateful for murdering his cousin and attempting to murder a child, but Cersei blows up the fucking Westerosi Vatican and she’s “not a monster”? Either the show’s being inconsistent here, or Tyrion is one of a) the greatest actors Westeros has ever seen or b) fooling himself. She hired someone to kill him out of personal spite! Tyrion found this out like half an hour of screen time ago!
I’m deeply suspicious of the show’s attempts to make Cersei somewhat sympathetic at this late stage. It looks a lot to me as if this is intended to make the demonisation of Dany easier. Cersei does not do much this season. She didn’t do much last season. Continuing on from what I just said about reasonable uses of violence, we’re not actually seeing much violence these past two seasons from Cersei which would make Dany’s own use of violence reasonable and appropriate. (No, they still can’t resolve their issues by talking, Cersei’s broken deals with them before.) Cersei’s tyranny is kept out of sight and out of mind for the audience, including most if not all references to that time she blew up the Sept of Baelor, so Dany appears inherently less justified in her actions.
The only thing Cersei does this season, which she’s about to do, is in direct service of “setting Dany off” mentally.
(1:12:57) Also, Cersei’s pregnancy being used to humanise her? Yikes. In context of ongoing comparison over “who’s the worst monster?” to Dany, who is infertile? Mega yikes. These characters should not be judged by what’s going on in their uteruses.
(1:13:45) Finally! A queen speaks! After six minutes of “negotiations”.
(1:14:14) “Dracarys”? Well, that’s ambiguous. Scans an awful lot like Missandei’s saying “yeah, burn the city!”
(1:14:44) So this is awful. The show has two recurring characters of colour. It just killed one. A freed slave, killed in chains, with nasty comments made about this fact, to motivate a white character whose arc has already had fair accusations of white savourism levelled against it. Not good. Not good at all.
(1:15:20) Incidentally, I can’t help but notice that Cersei stopped at killing Missandei. She’s kinda forgotten about her archers and ballistae and that she doesn’t care for norms such as truce.
(1:15:40) Dany walks away with an actual expression on her face. Her inability to school her features after witnessing the murder of a friend is how we know, for sure, that she’s losing it. If she’s calm, she’s emotionally dead. If she’s sad, she’s hysterical. If she’s angry, she’s about to kill hundreds of thousands of people…
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firelxdykatara · 5 years
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*sigh* why do people keep comparing r/eylo to zutara and putting them in the same group? Were they not paying attention to the show? Did they not see Zuko's evolution?
Honestly, I really don’t know.
Like, ok, superficially, I can almost kinda get it. Angry boy with a scar on his face and the girl who could kick his ass offering to heal him? Ok, fine. Even aesthetically, red and blue, tol and smol, fine. I can sorta see it. But the instant you dig even a little bit deeper, they just… aren’t the same at all???? Not even remotely????
And, ok, I’ll admit to some measure of bias, because I don’t ship reylo and I don’t like it as a ship, nor do I want it to happen in any way in canon, but like, part of the reason Zutara works so well is that it’s not a hero/villain ship. It’s enemies-to-lovers, for sure, but the vast majority of us ship it because of Zuko’s redemption arc.
Yeah, you’ll see ‘I’ll save you from the pirates’ UST jokes, and a lot of us started shipping it back in book 1, but it was obvious from the beginning that Zuko was going to get redeemed. He may have been a villain, but he was never the villain–he was narratively placed as the secondary protagonist (deuteragonist) of the show from his very first appearance. He was given his own narrative arc that had little to do with the main plotline of Aang’s journey, because while his own journey ran parallel to the gaang, it was separate and distinct because he was on his way to his own redemption even then.
Zuko Alone, in book 2, drove this home even further. You don’t give someone who isn’t the primary protagonist of the show an episode all to themselves (literally none of the gaang shows up for even a second) unless this is a character who’s meant to have just as much narrative significance as the main cast. Zuko was always going to join the gaang, and so much zutara meta and fanfic rests on how amazing and emotionally fulfilling their relationship development was, as friends, and that it would have made so much sense for their friendship to go even further.
Reylo doesn’t have any of that.
First of all, Kylo Ren is not Zuko–not even close. Kylo has far more agency in being dark than Zuko ever did. Ben Solo had loving parents and grew up in a supportive environment. His uncle ultimately made a mistake, sure, but a) we see three versions of that particular story: the sanitized version (luke), the demonized version (kylo), and the truth, and b) kylo already had the knights of ren all ready to go and slaughter a bunch of kids.
He was already dark. You don’t go and murderdeathkill a bunch of kids and people you’d ostensibly been raised with just because you saw your uncle standing over you with a lightsaber he clearly wasn’t going to actually use unless you were already making plans to do just that. You can blame as much of it as you want on Snoke and his influence, but that would be a little like blaming Palpatine for Anakin–yeah, he gets some of the blame for manipulating the situation, but Anakin’s still the one who made the choice to kill a temple full of children and choke out his own wife. Darth Vader may have, in the end, chosen to return to the light, but that doesn’t absolve him of the evils he chose to commit.
Kylo is, tragically, in the same narrative position as Darth Vader was in the original trilogy–and Vader couldn’t even bring himself to kill his son.  But Kylo chose to kill his father. And that, incidentally, is one of the places where Zuko and Kylo are essentially diametrically opposed. Zuko turned on Uncle Iroh, yes, but he didn’t cross a line from which there was no coming back–he didn’t kill him. He, in fact, kept going to see him, trying to figure out why the choice he’d made felt so wrong when it was supposed to be everything he’d always wanted. Meanwhile, Kylo murdered his own father because he was hoping to destroy that last link to his own humanity.
And he succeeded.
Furthermore, Rey is not Katara. I love them both, so much, but they are very different people, and different characters who fulfill different narrative spaces in their own stories. In Rey’s position, Katara would probably have killed Kylo in the throne room when he turned on her after killing Snoke. Or, placing Kylo in Zuko’s place in atla, if he’d killed Hakoda (remembering that Han was the only father figure rey’d ever known)? She would have destroyed him. No fucking mercy
Katara does not forgive easily. It took Zuko not only proving that he was on the side of good (which he did multiple times, one of which he even saved her father), but specifically proving to her that he cared for her and genuinely wanted to help–by helping her gain closure for her mother’s murder. She emotionally connected with Zuko in the crystal catacombs, sure, but when he turned on her she hated him and had no intention of turning back. (Even though, from Zuko’s perspective, it wasn’t a betrayal at all–he’d made no promises, and it was his sister offering him everything he’d ever wanted. As far as he was concerned, the only person he betrayed there was his uncle, which is why it took him so long to realize just why Katara hated him so much. And even then he needed her brother’s help to figure out how to fix it.)
On the other hand, Rey was ready, willing, even eager to believe that Kylo could be returned to the light side–could become Ben again. This after he’d done something utterly unforgiving right in front of her, and tried to kill her multiple times. (Notably, at no point during Zuko and Katara’s antagonistic relationship was Zuko actually trying to kill her. He was trying to capture Aang. The worst thing he did was burn down Suki’s village, and that was largely an accident, because he was trying to get to Aang to capture him–alive.) She wanted to believe there was good in him. Katara couldn’t have cared less, throughout the first two books–and then, when confronted with the fact that Zuko had suffered something to which she could relate, she connected with him… and he turned on her. (From her perspective, she’d just reached out and offered this boy a chance to prove he’d changed… and he threw it in her face. So yeah, she took it incredibly fucking personally.)
Even now, it’s possible that if Kylo comes at Rey with some ‘I’m really light now’ story, she’ll probably want to believe him. But even if Reylo happens (and I’ll stress that I really don’t think it’s going to, and if it does I’ll probably be bitterly disappointed, but what else is new) it won’t even remotely resemble Zutara because they are, at their core, incredibly different relationships. Katara didn’t start warming up to Zuko, after that book 2 betrayal, until after he’d proven himself again and again, and helped her begin to heal from the trauma she’d suffered as a child. Furthermore, Zuko was never that evil to begin with. He was being primed for a redemption arc from the start, and he never even came close to the sort of moral event horizon Kylo pole-vaulted over when he murdered a whole bunch of students in their beds and then killed his own father.
And here’s the thing a lot of these Zuko-lite redemption arcs don’t seem to understand–it’s not a one-size-fits-all storyline. You can’t just slap Zuko’s redemption arc on any old villain, because for a redemption to work, it needs to be tailored specifically to fit the villain in question. And most villains aren’t Zuko–he was a very special kind of ‘secondary protagonist who starts out bad and gets a little bit worse before he gets better and joins the good guys’, which most villains can’t hope to match. If you want to redeem someone who’s canonically done far more atrocious acts, their redemption has to encompass the fact that not only are they getting better, but they are actively atoning for the horrible things they’ve done.
Killian Jones, from Once Upon a Time, had a redemption arc which looked nothing like Zuko’s, because he wasn’t a villain like Zuko. His redemption involved not only coming to realize that he’d been doing bad things for a very long time in search of a vengeance which was, ultimately, not what he really wanted or needed, but also making amends to the people he’d hurt over his very long life (those he still could help, at least). (Interestingly enough, that same show had a great example of a horribly botched redemption, in which we were supposed to take it on faith that the character was Good Now even though she’d never once expressed either remorse for the evil she’d committed [which was a lot more evil than Killian ever had] or a desire to make amends to those she’d wronged. In fact, come the end of the show, she still had a vault full of stolen hearts she’d never so much as made an effort to return, even though many of their owners were, ostensibly, in the same town she’d created through one of her many acts of villainy. It was… kind of strange, to say the least, to see how they could get one villain’s redemption so right and another’s so horribly wrong.)
Anyway, tl;dr: the upshot of this all is, Kylo Ren is not Zuko–he’s not even close–and Rey is not Katara. Their relationships look nothing alike, and even if Kylo is redeemed, it’s not going to look anything like Zuko’s redemption–partly because Zuko was never that bad to begin with and Kylo would have much more for which to atone, partly because their narrative journeys are so very very different–and I have never understood the comparison beyond a very surface-level reading of their character aesthetics.
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schraubd · 4 years
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The Good Place: Final Thoughts
*MAJOR SPOILERS*
At the conclusion of season three, I registered my prediction of how The Good Place would end:
The abolition of the afterlife in its entirety (no more good or bad places); a re-emphasis on doing as best you can when it matters (i.e., during one's actual life); the core quartet is sent back to Earth to live out the rest of their natural lives as friends.
I would say that, like most religions, I got about 5% right. The afterlife, as we knew it, is abolished. And the series does end with all of the human characters passing on. But in between, The Good Place takes a much more audacious swing: a genuine attempt to reform the afterlife. And -- and I think this is perhaps even more profound -- an essential acknowledgment that this attempt fell short. A perfect paradise was not created, and in fact the final conclusion of The Good Place seems to be that such a paradise is impossible even in concept. After all, cut away the underbrush and the heroes' solution to the problem afflicting The Good Place was to offer the choice of suicide. And while the penultimate episode suggests that perhaps just having the option will suffice to stave off the ennui of eternal bliss, the finale refuses to accept that out. Every human character, eventually, kills themselves. Their happy ending is that they are content to die. The best possible paradise is one where people can and do eventually choose to erase themselves from existence. Skip over the beatific forest setting and the stipulation of emotional contentment, and that's a rather melancholic, if not outright grim, conclusion. It's easy to draw a parallel between the last episode and the need for fans to accept the voluntarily-chosen end of a great show like The Good Place (it's even easier to draw it to the need to accept our own mortality). But another recurrent theme in The Good Place is the failure of systems. Over and over again, the systems the characters find themselves in are revealed to be either malfunctioning or outright designed to immiserate them. From the very beginning, Eleanor and Chidi confront the brutal harshness of the points system, which results in nearly all people being horrifically tortured for eternity (incidentally, that Chidi isn't immediately repelled by -- and suspicious of -- this set-up is a rare miscue in terms of characterization, if not plotting). They resolve to try and improve Eleanor, only to find out that they're actually in a perpetual torture chamber which will literally reset every time they come close to escaping it. At this point, the series becomes a repeated effort to find ever-higher levers in the celestial bureaucracy that can be appealed to. They find a judge, who is at best indifferent to their predicament and not particularly interested in helping them. Upon returning to earth, they discover first that they can't ever improve enough to enter The Good Place (because -- knowing the stakes -- their motivations are corrupt) and then that nobody can successfully enter The Good Place because existence has become too interwoven and morally interdependent for anyone to satisfy the standard of admission. They meet the actual Good Place committee, who are worse than useless and content to let everyone suffer forever because taking any concrete action risks violating some procedural norm. And when they finally enter The Good Place, they discover it's as dysfunctional as everywhere else -- gradually sucking the life out of its residents who, given eternity, eventually tire of everything. All the systems fail. All of them are doomed to fail. They can't not. Hence, the suicide gate (and sidenote: If The Good Place ever has a spin-off series -- and lord knows it shouldn't -- it should definitely involve exploring the first murder in the Good Place when someone gets involuntarily shoved through that archway). By the time it reaches its conclusion, The Good Place is one of the few depictions of the afterlife to take the concept of eternity seriously. Some other venues glance in this direction. Agent Smith in The Matrix tells Neo that humans reject a simulation of paradise -- the implication is because we're diseased, but perhaps also indicating that perfect, eternal happiness ... isn't. Maya Rudolph's other afterlife vehicle, Forever, certainly touches on this theme. The Order of the Stick has an afterlife where people can eat all the food and have all the sex and otherwise satisfy all the "messed-up urges you people have leftover after having your soul stuck in a glorified sausage all your life". But this is only the "first tier" of heaven: once you're bored, you can "climb the mountain" to search for a higher level of spiritual satisfaction. And while what this entails is left vague, it is not death -- those who ascend can, if they wish, descend back down to the lowlier pleasures (OOTS also introduces the very neat concept of "Postmortum Time Disassociation Disorder"). But the story which provides perhaps the most powerful foil to The Good Place's view of eternity and immortality is (and of the approximately 143,000 Good Place retrospectives being written right now, I bet I'm the only one to make this comparison) Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. The ultimate adversary in HPMOR is not Snape, or Malfoy, or Voldemort. It is death, and Harry is committed to the "absolute rejection of death as the natural order." The message on the Potters' gravestone is, after all, "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death" (and it's a sign of my cloistered Jewish upbringing that I thought this was a Rowling original -- it is in fact a quote from I Corinthians). Harry Potter wants people to live forever. And the story anticipates the objection, placed in the mouth of Dumbledore, "What would you do with eternity, Harry?"
Harry took a deep breath. "Meet all the interesting people in the world, read all the good books and then write something even better, celebrate my first grandchild's tenth birthday party on the Moon, celebrate my first great-great-great grandchild's hundredth birthday party around the Rings of Saturn, learn the deepest and final rules of Nature, understand the nature of consciousness, find out why anything exists in the first place, visit other stars, discover aliens, create aliens, rendezvous with everyone for a party on the other side of the Milky Way once we've explored the whole thing, meet up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out, and I used to worry about finding a way to escape this universe before it ran out of negentropy but I'm a lot more hopeful now that I've discovered the so-called laws of physics are just optional guidelines."
The last few episodes of The Good Place are, in a sense, a calling of this bluff. Even if you play out the string all the way to extinguishment of the sun or the heat death of the universe -- well, forever is a long time. It can wait. Harry argues that the only reason we accept death is because we're used to it, and if you took someone who lived in a world where there was no death and asked them if they'd prefer to live in a universe where eventually people ceased to exist, they'd look at you like you're crazy. The Good Place provocatively argues the precise opposite -- that if death didn't exist, people would have to invent it. Or they would go crazy, with infinite time on their hands. And so we are, perhaps, back to where we started. The paradise the heroes create is certainly better than that which they replaced. But it still is deeply, tragically flawed -- and The Good Place seems to believe that these flaws are fundamentally inescapable. The suicide option is the clearest manifestation of how cracked paradise must be, but there is another issue that the show alludes to: paradise depends on other people, and on their choices. Way back in the first season, "Real Eleanor" raises this precise point: if her soulmate doesn't love her, "this will never truly be my Good Place." Sure it's actually a contrivance to torture Chidi, but it's easy to imagine it as real. What if your paradise is to live blissfully with a certain special someone and ... that person doesn't love you back? Both Simone and Tahani seem okay with Chidi and Jason respectively choosing someone other than them (Eleanor and Janet). But that's in harmony with the audience's happy ending. It's not hard to imagine a different world where they were less sanguine about it. Or take a far more direct problem: If paradise comes with a suicide option, what happens if your loved one takes it? Harry's excited declaration of all the things he'd do with infinite time is not fundamentally, the reason why he desires immortality. When push comes to shove, he's motivated by a far more basic yearning: to make it so "people won't have to say goodbye any more." Eleanor's utter panic at the thought of losing Chidi forever was, for me at least, the most visceral emotional gut-punch of the entire series -- even more than the finale of season three (at least there, we could be reasonably assured their separation was temporary). She eventually comes to terms with it. But sit on it a little more: imagine a "paradise" where your soulmate has left you forever. People fantasize about heaven to be reunited with their loved ones, yet we end up looping right back into eternal separation. What kind of paradise is this, where people still have to say goodbye? So we have two problems that seem to threaten even the conceptual coherency of a paradise:
First, if paradise is forever, eventually everything will become tired. That suicide is presented as a good solution to this problem shows just how serious it is (and, for what it's worth, I'm not sure the suicide "option" would necessarily bring relief. It could easily generate crippling anxiety -- a sense of trappedness between the irrevocable permanence of death and the unbearable ennui of existence). 
Second, if paradise depends on the choices other people make, how can we be sure they'll make choices compatible with your happy ending?
The Good Place presents the first problem as unavoidable and skates past the second entirely. But could they be overcome? Maybe. In the penultimate episode of The Good Place, one solution proposed to the problem of eternal ennui is to reset people's memories, so the things that bored them become fresh again. This is swiftly rejected as a repetition of how the quartet was tortured in The Bad Place. Too swiftly, in my view. Neighborhoods were also used to torture -- should those be jettisoned too? The problem with eternity is that eventually, everything gets repetitive. Go-Kart Racing against monkeys may be a blast the first time, but it loses its luster after a million reiterations. The wistfulness comes from wishing one could go back to that initial burst of discovery and experience -- before one had the memory of doing it all over again. This was my immediate solution to the ennui problem -- not that some demon should periodically reset you, but that you should be able to choose when, where, and how to reset yourself. It's not just about going back in time. It's reoccupying any memory state you've ever possessed. Go back to before you ever raced against monkeys -- then zoom forward to when you've already experienced all the monkey-races you could handle. It's like a load/save system for your mind. Hell, you can even adjust the "difficulty" level. It's true that, for many, a "paradise" where one simply automatically gets whatever one wants will feel unsatisfying. But one needn't set the parameters of paradise to guarantee success. It can be as hard or easy as one wants; people can be as pliant or obstinate as one likes (not for nothing is one of the afterlife attractions in OOTS -- a fantasy roleplaying-based setting -- "The Dungeon of Monsters That Are Just Strong Enough to Really Challenge You"). Or dream bigger. If one has infinite ability to reverse and remake memory as one wishes, then one could at any point adapt any set of memories one ever could have had. Don't just live a different life, remember a different life. Then jump forward and remember all the different lives you lived -- each of which (when you lived them) you had erased the memories of all the others. Every single possible timeline is lived -- and can be relived in all its glory, as many times as one wants. For me, at least, this dissolves the problem of others' choices as well. If anyone can make not just any possible choice, but live through any possible timeline, what does it mean to ask which one is "real"? If your paradise involves loving and being loved by a particular someone, will in your paradise, the person you need to love you, loves you, and stays with you as long as you need. In their paradise, they might love someone else. You enjoy a timeline where people choose exactly the choices that would make you most happy; they live in a timeline which is the same for them. Of course, the sorts of philosophical questions that would raise (among others: What does it mean for the "same" person to simultaneously exist across multiple timelines? Who, exactly, is "choosing" which version they occupy? And if the one that does choose doesn't choose a timeline that involves them loving you back, is the version that does love you really "them"?) are even more esoteric and less accessible to a network audience than the moral philosophy questions The Good Place did try to introduce. So I don't blame them for skipping by it.
* * *
The last enemy to be defeated may not, after all, be death. It may be time.  Time ruins all things. Eventually you run out of it. And even if you never ran out of it -- you had infinite time -- it would defeat you in a different way: via boredom, repetition, and ennui. We can, perhaps, imagine a world where we vanquish death. But can we imagine one where (forgot about possibility, and just think conceptually) we defeat time? I can. Barely, but I can. Of course, it's in many ways a moot point, since I'm profoundly skeptical that humanity ever will master time in this way -- or even if it's practically possible (that it won't happen in my lifetime is actually less material, given that if it ever did happen we'd probably be at Omega Point anyway). But at least it holds out the possibility of an actual happy ending -- where the last enemy is truly vanquished, and nobody has to say goodbye. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2GK19Yo
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arlingtonpark · 5 years
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SNK 121 Review
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TFW you’re relying on someone to pull through and they’re failing badly.
Has anyone ever seen JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure? SPOILERS
One of the villains is this guy named DIO. He’s an asshole. 
DIO’s whole schtick is that he is obsessed with being dominant. In the clip, he assaults JoJo’s girlfriend to show his dominance over both her and JoJo.
In JoJo’s, people fight using spiritual manifestations of their own life essence. These manifestations are called Stands, and because they are a manifestation of the user’s essence, Stands are revealing in some way as to the nature of the user.
DIO’s stand is the World and it has the power to stop time. Being able to stop time is absolute domination, both physically and temporally. Physically because you can stop the world and fuck around with everything as you please, and temporally because you are no longer subservient to the constant flow of time. The world stops for no man, except you.
Now Eren is fittingly in the same boat, except worse because while DIO could only stop time, Eren can control the course of events. He can see the future and affect the past. His domination over the world is (theoretically) absolute.
I don’t know what Eren’s plan is, but we get a taste of it this chapter. Zeke asks him point blank what he hopes to accomplish and Eren’s response is the most disturbing thing ever.  
“If people try to take my freedom away, I will take theirs away.”
My God.
This statement completely encapsulates Eren as a person. This is the rambling of a deranged lunatic. Worse, even. It’s the thinking of a stupid kid.
“Eren, why did you hit Little Timmy?”
“Because he hit me!”
You cannot hit someone just because they hit you. It doesn’t work that way. You are allowed to hit back in self-defense, but not to exact revenge. Both actions are the same, but the state of mind backing either action is the key difference. The former is the mindset of someone trying to protect themselves. The latter is the mindset of someone trying to hurt someone else.
That’s the faultiness of Eren’s thinking in principle, and it’s even worse in practice.
Eren believes that them trying to kill him gives him license to kill them. Nope, wrong.
Human life is, of course, inviolably valuable, and therefore killing in itself is always wrong. You can kill in self-defense, because the point in that case isn’t the killing itself, but the preservation of your own life. Killing for its own sake is appalling.
Ironically, this deranged narcissist perfectly illustrates why this tit-for-tat way thinking is dangerous. Restraint? Graciousness? Mercy? Can Eren comprehend these concepts?
It’s just so stunning how childish this whole thing is. Eren is opposing a king who would force his will on the future, but since Eren is doing the exact same thing, I can only assume he doesn’t think this is intrinsically wrong.
No, it’s not that Fritz’s vow is wrong, it’s that the same mechanism isn’t being used in service of Eren’s goals. Eren doesn’t think the vow is wrong in itself, he just opposes it because it’s another limit on his freedom.
There is no reason to believe Eren has any boundaries whatsoever. Or any shame for that matter. 
This “me-centric” form of morality is called egoism. It’s an utterly disreputable theory that no one defends. It’s the same with the children he killed in Liberio. Killing is wrong, unless it helps me, in which case it is good. By defining what’s good and bad in these terms, Eren reveals himself as the egomaniac man child that he is.
And yet.
Eren is the one who lectures Zeke in this chapter!
This is what Eren has reduced me to, defending Zeke. Why is this happening to me?
Zeke is supposedly the pathetic one, because he has, you know, an ideology. It’s a stupid AF ideology that is completely indefensible, so it is pathetic, but not the way Eren thinks.
Zeke’s opposition to Grisha is incidental to his ideology. It’s not that Zeke is opposing Grisha out of spite, which would truly be pathetic. Zeke opposes Grisha because their respective worldviews are incompatible.
Meanwhile Eren is saying he should be allowed to do mean things to people because they did mean things to him.
The idea that people can just kill others, simply because they tried to kill you is fundamentally lawless. Not to take the fun out of superheroes, but vigilante justice isn’t actually justice. It’s totally illiberal to have one person hold the power to judge, convict, and sentence another.
But it is also totally in character for Eren to support that idea. With Eren, it’s all about power.
I’ve often compared Eren to our 45th president. Whatever the Eren stans say, that is an apt comparison. Eren’s talk of taking freedom from those who try to take his is not unlike something Trump would say. 
They are both narcissistic man children with an insatiable lust for dominance. Slighting them creates an imbalance that they must make right, and the world is off kilter until that is done. It’s that one itch they must scratch.
Eren fights because, to be blunt, he wants the world to be his bitch and he will not settle for anything less than that. This is second nature to someone who says the things Eren says. If you think killing is justified just because they tried to kill you, then you obviously do not value human life.
At this point, Eren is undeniably similar to Zeke. He wants to bring his dream to fruition and anyone who gets in his way is just a pissant to be stomped on. 
Is Eren redeemed by his (apparent) concern for his friends? 
Nnnnope!
While friends do have certain obligations to each other, it is completely obscene to do the heinous things Eren’s done just for their sake. 
You cannot define the morality of your actions by how much they help a random group of people. Why are the lives of Eren’s friends worth any more than the lives of the people he’s killed?
The answer is that, all else being equal, they aren’t. 
You may care deeply for someone, but that does not justify a killing. 
Who is even the hero of this story anymore?
It can’t be Zeke, because his values are anathema to the series values. He may be the audience surrogate this time around, but I doubt fucking Zeke Jeager is going to be the hero when the final chapter comes around. 
Eren is theoretically the hero because his values broadly align with the story’s, but his actions are depicted in an almost devilish light. I always hoped the series would tackle the notion of fighting too hard for what you believe in, but…it’s too late for that now?
We’re in the final story arc. It’s weird to only just now be dealing with this meaty idea. Over 100 chapters of “Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!” and we’re just now getting to the “But not too hard.” part? There’s no way. 
Alternatively, this is just one final fake-out in the game of is-he-or-isn’t-he that Isayama has been playing since the Marley Arc. Is Eren evil, or isn’t he? Or maybe they’ll play it as “Can he be redeemed or can’t he?” 
Either way, I bet there’ll be some kind of change of heart from Eren soon. 
This chapter echoes a point made by Yelena about the titans and their relationship to humanity: that the titan powers will be abused by people because that is just the nature of things. So let’s unpack that.
King Fritz, speaking through Frieda, says that the power of the titans must not fall into human hands lest it be abused. This mirrors ongoing debates about how to deal with certain controversial weapons, such as nuclear weapons.
The (very) liberal position is that nuclear weapons should be banned completely because the risk of abuse is too great.  As per usual, the liberal position is taken by King Fritz.
The conservative position, which, once again, is the position the story sides with, is made more implicitly: that the titan powers can be a force for good, it’s just a matter of making sure only good people can access that power.
This conservative position is what underlies US policy towards North Korea and Iran. Those countries are rogue states that the US believes cannot be trusted. (Note, though, that the nuclearization of Iran is supported by Russia, a nuclear power.)
Personally, I believe nuclear weapons should be banned completely. Most countries are at least nominally supportive of the eventual, complete destruction of all nuclear weapons, and international norms have been evolving in that direction.
That is the contradiction of this issue: most people take the liberal position in the long term, but hold the conservative position in the short term.
This is just another reason to think that SNK will end with a ringing endorsement of nuclear weapons, with nary a nod to the need for eventual total disarmament.
See, ungodly amounts of power aren’t inherently bad, we just need special people to wield them for the public good.
Yeah, I get it, we need special people, but you know what? Frodo was special. The One Ring supposedly couldn’t corrupt him, but they still set out to destroy it. Because power on this scale is itself wrong.
Nuclear weapons aren’t the only possible parallel, though. Any controversial weapon will fit. In the United States there is a debate over regulating high powered weapons like the AR-15.
How do you handle such a thing? Do you ban the weapon completely, or just certain people from using it? I won’t wade into something as controversial as that here, though I will point out that the story clearly sides with the position of regulation over a total ban.
The scene in the cave also mirrors Japan’s current nuclear predicament. Japan has many outside rivals and threats, and Japan could build nuclear weapons if they wanted too. They have the technological capability, but in spite of the threat of North Korea, and the tense relations with China, the Japanese government chooses not to.
So, yeah, I’ve had the series pegged as leaning neoconservative and I still think that.
So what does the future hold?
Apparently, an event where Eren… becomes/does something. They both saw the same thing: a future where Eren is this OP chad of chads and a total boss. Grisha looks like he saw the worst thing imaginable. Eren looks like he just had an orgasm.
Since Eren is portrayed in a more sinister way this chapter, I am inclined to believe this future actually is a ghastly one.  
Before this chapter, my guess was that Eren wanted to destroy the world using the wall titans, but would somehow come around to using it the way Armin mentioned: defensively.
Having it be preordained that the future holds a version of Eren that people who aren’t Eren will think is abominable throws a wrench into that.
I wouldn’t bet against Isayama somehow finding a way to make it work though. The only other alternative is that this series ends in the most ironic way possible, with the deranged lunatic having his way and “freedom” finally being established.
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lechevaliermalfet · 6 years
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Pistols at Dawn: A Look at Doom and Marathon
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In the mid-1990s, the first-person shooter genre was born with Doom. It wasn't the first game of its type.  Games like Wolfenstein 3D and Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold preceded it.  Catacomb 3D came before either of those.  And you can trace the lineage further back if you like.  But it was Doom that saw the kind of runaway success most development studios live and die without ever attaining.  That success spawned imitators.  It was the imitators and their imitations – some of them using the very same engine – that made it a genre.  It's how genres are born.
It was interesting to watch that happen in real time.
But that's the PC side of history.
If you were a Macintosh user, you were probably sick to death of your PC-owning friends crowing about Doom, all the more because it wasn't available for your system of choice. Doom would eventually make its way Mac-ward... after its own sequel was eventually released for the system first.  Absurd as this sounds, it didn’t really matter too much.  Story, and the importance of continuity between games, wasn't exactly a big concern in Doom.
But Mac users had little reason to despair.  Because although Doom was and is rightly remembered as a classic, Mac users were privy to a game nearly as good – probably even equal, maybe even better, depending on who you talk to.
That game was Marathon.
More below the cut.
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It's hard trying to justify comparisons between Doom and Marathon, because despite their similarities, they aren't really in the same league.  It's hard to compare any game that became the jumping-off point for a whole genre to its contemporaries.  But as much as I lionize Doom, and as much as everyone else does the same, it's perhaps helpful to think that this is done with the benefit of hindsight.  Today, in 2018, we've had nearly two-and-a-half decades of Doom being available for almost every single thing that could conceivably run it.
Remembering Doom in its time, it would have been hard to predict that it would go on to achieve quite the level of adulation it's garnered over the years. It's not that Doom doesn't deserve it.  It's more that any game attaining this level of success both in its time and in the long term is basically impossible to predict.  Doom was much talked about, it was wildly popular, you heard rumors of whole IT departments losing days of productivity to it in network games, but...  Well, it was just one game.  Later two.  It was perfectly valid to suppose, in the mid-90s, that some developer would surely supplant it with something even better.  That's just the way things worked.  It's just that Doom was well-made enough, well-balanced enough, that "something even better" didn't come around for a long time.  
Still, the Macintosh is not where I would have expected to look for real competition for Doom.
The Mac wasn't actually a barren wasteland, game-wise.  It's just easy to remember it that way, especially if, like me, you grew up playing PC games.  Most of the games we think of as being influential in the realm of computer gaming tended not to come from that direction.  Mac users made up a smaller portion of overall computer users at that point.  PCs (still often referred to as "IBM/PC compatibles" at the time) being the larger market and thus a source of larger potential profits, that was where the majority of developers focused their attention.  The hassles of porting a game to Mac, whether handled by the original developer or farmed out to somebody else, were frequently judged not to be worth the potential profit.  At times, it was determined not to be profitable in the first place.
There were a few games – Myst comes immediately to mind – that bucked this trend, but most Mac games only became influential once they crossed over to PCs, like...  Well, like Myst did.  The Mac ecosystem just wasn't big enough for anything that happened in it exclusively to influence the wider world of PC gaming.  
Actually, let's go with that ecosystem analogy for a minute.  
Mac gaming in the early 90s was sort of like Australia.  It's a tiny system that only accounted for a small percentage of the biosphere. It had its own unique creatures, similar to animals occupying equivalent ecological niches elsewhere in the world.  But on closer inspection, these turned out to all be very different from their counterparts, often in fundamental ways.  And then you had some creatures with no real equivalents elsewhere.  There was a lot of parallel evolution.  
Case in point: Marathon.
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Being released a scant eleven days after Doom, you definitely can't accuse it of being one of the imitators.  It didn't happen in a vacuum, though.
Its creators, Bungie, were a sort of oddball company whose founders openly admitted that they started off in the Macintosh market not because of any fervent belief in the superiority of the platform, but because it was far less competitive than the PC market at the time.
They started off with Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete, a multiplayer-only (more or less) first-person maze game, and followed it up with Pathways Into Darkness.
Pathways was meant to be a sequel to Minotaur at first, until it morphed into its own thing over the course of its development.  In genre terms, it's most like a first-person shooter.  Except there are heavy adventure game elements, nonlinearity, and multiple endings depending on decisions you make during the game, which are pretty foreign to the genre.  It also features a level of resource scarcity that wouldn't be at all out of place in a survival horror game.
Incidentally, I would love to see a source port of Pathways Into Darkness. It is its own weird, awkward beast of a game, and I would dearly love to be able to play it, after having seen only maybe ten minutes of gameplay at a friend's house one time when I was about twelve.
They followed this up with the original Marathon.
Doom is largely iterative.  It follows on from a tradition of older FPS games made by its developer, like Wolfenstein 3D and Catacombs 3D. Like those predecessors, it relegates the little apparent story to pre-game and post-game text, and features a very video game-y structure that relies on discrete levels and fast, reflex-oriented play.  It adds complexity and sophistication to these elements as seen in previous games, introducing more enemies, more weapons, and more complex and varied environments, then layers all of this on top of an already proven, solid gameplay core.
Marathon, by contrast, simplified and distilled the elements of previous games by its developer.  It opts to be more clearly an FPS (as we understand it in modern terms) than any of its predecessors, shedding Pathways' adventure elements and non-linearity while increasing the player's arsenal.  However, it's still less straightforward than Doom's pure level-by-level structure.  Marathon presents itself as a series of objectives given to the player character (the Security Officer) by various other characters to be achieved within the level.  These can range from scouting out particular areas, to ferrying items around the level, to clearing out enemies, to rescuing friendly characters, and so on.
Marathon's story, unlike Doom's, is front and center.  Where Doom leaves the player to satisfy themselves that they are slowly progressing toward some ultimate enemy with every stage, Marathon gives the player concrete goals each step of the way, framing each objective as either a way to gain advantage over the enemy, or to recover from setbacks inflicted by them.  Doom's story is focused on the player character and their direct actions. For narrative purposes, anything happening beyond your ability to observe is irrelevant.  Marathon instead opts to give the player a feeling that although they are the one making crucial things happen in the story, they are not directing the action themselves.
Which brings me to something interesting about Marathon's story.
The player character, the Security Officer, has surprisingly little agency within the narrative.  At a guess, I'd say that's because it would be almost impossible to express his own thoughts and emotions with the way the plot is relayed.  It's true that most games -- especially in the FPS genre -- tell you what to do.  Rescue the princess.  Save the world.  Prevent nuclear catastrophe.  Etc.  Etc.  But this is normally done in an abstract sense, by presenting you a clear goal and some means to achieve it.  Even open-world games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim have an overarching goal that you're meant to be slowly working your way toward.  
But while your actions in a given game are generally understood to be working toward the stated goal, the player is usually presented in the narrative as having a choice – or perhaps more accurately as having chosen prior to the beginning of the game proper – regarding whatever path the game puts them on.  Mario has chosen to go save Princess Toadstool.  Link has chosen to go find the pieces of the Triforce and save Princess Zelda.  Sonic has chosen to confront Doctor Robotnik.  Even the Doom Guy has chosen to fight the demons infesting the moons of Mars on his own rather than saying "fuck it" and running.  The reasons for these choices may in some cases be left up to the player to sort out or to apply their imagination, but the point remains.  These characters have chosen their destinies.
The Security Officer from the Marathon trilogy, by contrast, does not.  Throughout the games, he is presented as following orders.  "Install these three circuits in such-and-such locations".  "Scout out this area". "Clear the hostile aliens out of this section of the ship". And so on, and so forth.  Even in the backstory, found in the manual, the character is just doing his job, responding to a distress call before he fully realizes the sheer scale of the problem.  The player, as the Security Officer, is always moving from one objective to the next on the orders of different AI constructs who happen to be in control of him – more or less – at a given time.  The Security Officer is clearly a participant in events, but he lacks true agency.
In fairness, it must have been hard to figure out how to tell a compelling story within the context of a first-person shooter back in the early 90s, which is why so few people did it.  
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I'm not enough of a programmer to be able to explain it well (understatement; I'm not any kind of programmer), but the basic gist of it is that games like Doom weren't technically in 3D.  The environments were rendered in such a way that they appeared in three dimensions from the player's perspective, but as earlier versions of source ports like ZDoom made clear, this was an illusion, one that was shattered the moment you enabled mouse aiming and observed the environments from any angle other than dead-ahead.  The enemies, meanwhile, were 2D sprites, which was common in video games of any type for the day.
This was how Marathon was set up as well.  It's how basically every first-person shooter worked until the release of Quake – and some after it.
The problem is that this doesn't lend itself very well to more cinematic storytelling.  Sprites tended not to be very expressive given the lower resolutions of the day.  At least, not sprites drawn to relatively realistic proportions like the ones in Doom and Marathon. So you couldn't really do cinematic storytelling sequences with them, and that left only a handful of other options for getting your story across.
You could do what I tend to think of as Dynamic Stills, a la Ninja Gaiden on the NES.  At its best, it enables comic book-style storytelling, but that's about as far as it goes.
You can do FMV cutscenes, which at the time basically involved bad actors in cheap costumes filmed against green screens or really low-budget sets.  CG was relatively uncommon (and likely prohibitivesly expensive) even in the mid-90s.
You can do mostly text, interspersed throughout your game.
You can just not have much story at all.
Doom opted for option four.  John Carmack has been quoted as saying that story in video games is like story in porn.  Everybody expects it to be there, but nobody really cares about it.  
I disagree with this sentiment pretty vehemently, as it happens.  There are some games that aren't well served by a large amount of plot, and Doom is definitely one of them.  But to state that this is or should be true for the medium as a whole is frankly ridiculous.
There's something refreshing, almost freeing, about a game that has less a story than a premise. Doom starts off on Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, which has been invaded by demons from hell.  They've gained access by virtue of human scientists' experimentation with teleportation technology gone horribly, horribly wrong.  The second episode sees you teleported to Deimos, which as been entirely swallowed up by Hell, and which segues from the purely technological/military environments of Doom to more supernatural environs.  Episode 3 has you assaulting Hell proper.  Doom II's subtitle, Hell on Earth, tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the setting and premise of the game.
That's it.  There are no characters to develop or worry about.  It's just you as the lone surviving marine, your improbably large arsenal, and all the demons Hell can throw at you.  Go nuts.
Bungie, meanwhile, took a different approach.  I can't seem to find out which of their founders said it, but they have been on record as basically being diametrically opposed to Id Software in their attitude about story.  "The purpose of games is to tell stories."  I wish I knew who at Bungie said that.
Marathon is very much a story-oriented game.  Of the aforementioned methods of storytelling, they opted for option three: text, and lots of it.
Marathon's story is complex and labyrinthine, especially as it continues through the sequels (Marathon 2: Durandal and Marathon Infinity), and is open to interpretation at various points.  Much is left for the player to piece together themselves.  Aside from the player character, the story mainly centers on the actions of three AI constructs: Leela (briefly), Durandal, and Tycho.  Their actions, in the face of an invasion by a race of alien slavers called the Pfohr, drive the story.  
Their words and actions are relayed to the player by way of text at terminals scattered throughout the game's environments.  Some of these take the form of orders and objectives given by the AI to the player character, the Security Officer.  Some of these are more musings or rants (two out of the three AIs you work for over the course of the Marathon trilogy are not exactly all there), which serve to flesh out events happening beyond the player's observations, and help build the world.  Some of these are seemingly random bits of background information, presented as if they were being accessed by someone else (often an enemy) before they were distracted by something – usually you, shooting everything in sight.  
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Design-wise, there are some interesting differences.
Doom is old-school from a time when that was the only school, with levels that strike a nice balance between video game-y and still giving at least a vague sense that they were built to be something other than deathtrap mazes.  But what makes them old-school, at this point, is the fact that they're levels, with discrete starting and ending points, where your goal is to move from the former to the latter and hit the button or throw the lever to end it and begin the next one.
There's no plot to lose the thread of, no series of objectives for you to lose track of if you put the game down for a week, or a month, or longer still.  It's extremely pick-up-and-play, equally well suited to killing twenty minutes or a whole afternoon, as you like.
The appeal (aesthetics aside) of Doom is also at least in part its accessibility.  It has a decently high skill ceiling (which is to say, the level of skill required to play at an expert level), but a surprisingly low skill floor (the level of skill required to play with basic proficiency), which has lent it a certain evergreen quality. And Id Software has been keen to capitalize on this.  Doom is one of a small number of PC games (Diablo II is the only other one I can think of off the top of my head; what is it with games that have you fighting demons from Hell?) that have been commercially viable and available basically from the day they were released.  In addition to DOS on PCs, Doom was rejiggered for Windows 95, and also (eventually) saw release for Mac.  Also, it's been sold for multiple consoles: the Super NES, the Sega 32X (regrettably), the Atari Jaguar (also regrettably), the PlayStation, the N64, the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3, and the Xbox One (the 360 version again, via backward compatibility).  And source ports have kept the PC version alive and kicking, adding now-standard features like mouse aiming, particle effects, and support for widescreen displays.
The result is a game that, if you don't mind pixelated graphics, is as ferociously playable today as it was twenty-four years ago (as of this writing), and has enjoyed a kind of longevity usually not seen outside the realm of first-party Nintendo classics.
Marathon by contrast is somewhat less inviting.  
From a technical standpoint, Marathon is more or less the equal of Doom. The environments throughout the series are rendered at a somewhat higher resolution, but the enemies are less well animated.  Marathon also introduced the idea of mouse aiming to the FPS genre, and allowed the player to use that to look (and aim) vertically, which hadn't been done before either.  Even Doom, though it also introduced more vertical gameplay, locked the player's movement to the strictly horizontal; vertical aiming was accounted for automatically, although source ports have modernized this. Marathon leans into its verticality a little more as a result, and level layouts are more complex, bordering on the impossiblely convoluted without the aid of your automap.
While I wouldn't go so far as to say that Marathon would classify as a survival horror game, there are some elements of that genre in it.  This is almost certainly unintentional, and I'm identifying them as such retroactively (the genre hadn’t really arrived yet). Still, they exist.  Ammunition is more scarce than in Doom, forcing the player to lean on the lower end of their arsenal far later into the game than Doom does. Some weapons also feature alternate fire modes, which was a genre first.  
Health packs are nonexistent; instead, the player can recharge their health at terminals designed for this purpose, usually placed very sparingly.  Saving is also handled at dedicated terminals – a decision better befitting a console game, and somewhat curious here.  In addition to health, there is also an air gauge, which depletes gradually whenever the player is in vacuum or underwater, and which can be difficult to find refills for.
Marathon also marks the early appearance of weapon magazines in the first-person shooter genre.  Doom held to the old design established by Wolfenstein and older games that the player fires their weapons straight from the ammo reserves.  If you have a hundred shotgun rounds, then you can fire a hundred times, no reload necessary.  The reloading mechanic as we would most readily recognize it seems to have been added for the genre with Half-Life, for reasons of greater realism and introducing tension to the game.  
Marathon's version of this, as you might expect for a pioneering effort, is pretty rough.  There is no way to manually reload your weapons when you want.  Rather, the game will automatically cycle through the reload animation once you empty the magazine.  It does helpfully display how many rounds remain in the magazine at all times so you know how many you have left before a reload, and can plan accordingly. But it still exerts the familiar reload pressure, just in a different way.  Rather than asking yourself whether you have the spare seconds for a reload to top off your magazine, now you have to ask yourself whether it's wiser to just fire the last few rounds of the magazine to trigger the reload now, when it's safe, so that you have a full magazine ready to go for the next encounter.  Marathon's tendency to leave you feeling a little more ammo-starved than Doom makes this decision an agonizing one at times.  
Id's game is pretty sparing with the way it doles out rockets and energy cells for the most high-powered weapons, true.  But the real workhorse weapons, the shotgun and the chaingun, have ammo lying around in plenty.  Past a certain early point in any given episode of Doom or Doom II, as long as you diligently grab whatever ammo you come across and your aim is even halfway decent, you never have to worry about running out.  Marathon, by contrast, sees you relying on your pistol for a good long while. Compared to other weapons you find, it has a good balance of accuracy and availability of ammunition.  
The overall pacing and difficulty of both games is also somewhat different.  
Both games are hard, but in different ways.  Doom has enemies scattered throughout a level in ones and twos, but most of the major encounters feature combinations and larger numbers.  But the plentiful ammo drops and health packs mean the danger of these encounters tends to be relatively isolated, and encourages fast maneuvering and some risk-taking.  If you can make it through a given encounter, you usually have the opportunity to heal up and re-arm before the next one.  Doom is centered around its action.  It gives you the shotgun – which you’ll be using for most of the game, thanks to its power – as early as the first level if you’re on the lookout for secrets, and by the second level, you really can’t miss it.
Marathon, by contrast, paces itself (and the player) differently.  Ammo gets doled out more sparingly, and health recharge stations are likewise placed few and far between (rarely more than one or two in a stage, at least so far as I’ve played, and small enough that they can be easily overlooked).  Save points are likewise not always conveniently placed, and the fact that the game has save points means that you can’t savescum, and dying can result in a fair amount of lost progress.  The result is that, unless you’re closer to the skill ceiling, you tend to play more carefully and conservatively.  You learn to kite enemies, stringing them along to let you take on as few at a time as possible.
The tactics I developed to play games like Doom and later Quake didn’t always serve me very well when I first started playing Marathon. The main danger in Bungie’s game is the death of a thousand cuts. Where Doom attempts in most cases to destroy you in a single fell swoop, Marathon seeks to wear you down bit by bit until you have nothing left, and you’re jumping at shadows, knowing that the next blow to fall may be your last.  It encourages more long-term thinking.  Similar to a survival horror game, every clip spent and every hit taken has meaning, and can alter your approach to the scenario you find yoruself in.
In short, if Doom is paced like a series of sprints, Marathon is, well... a marathon.
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Another interesting difference is how both games deal with their inherent violence.  
As games which feature future military men mowing down whole legions of enemies by the time the credits roll, violence is a matter of course. It becomes casual.  But both games confront it in different ways.
Doom was one of the games that helped stir up a moral panic in the U.S. in the early to mid-90s (alongside Mortal Kombat, most notably).  While I don't agree with it, it was hardly surprising.  Doom gloried in its violence.  Every enemy went down covered in blood (some of them came at you that way), some of them straight-up liquefying if caught too near an explosion.  This is to say nothing of all the hearts on altars or dead marines littering the landscape to provide the proper ambiance.
The idea was simple: You were surrounded by violent monsters, and the only way to overcome them was to become equally violent.  The game's fast pace and adrenaline-rushing gameplay only served to emphasize this.  Doom isn't a stupid game by any means – it requires a certain amount of cleverness and a good sense of direction in addition to good reflexes and decent aim to safely navigate its levels -- but the primary direction it makes you think in is how? How do I get through this barrier, how do I best navigate through these dark halls, how do I approach this room full of enemies that haven't seen me yet?
Marathon asks those questions as well, because any decent game is constantly asking you those questions, because they are all variations on the same basic question any game of any kind (video games, board games, whatever) is asking you: How do you overcome the challenges the game throws at you using the tools and abilities the game gives you?
The difference (well, the narrative difference, distinct from all the rest) is that Marathon also talks about the violence seemingly inherent in human nature as one of a variety of things in its narrative.  
To be fair, Marathon brings it up pretty briefly in its terminal text.  But one of the terminals highlights Durandal's musings on the Security Officer, and humankind in general.  
Organic beings are constantly fighting for life. Every breath, every motion brings you one instant closer to your death. With that kind of heritage and destiny, how can you deny yourself? How can you expect yourself to give up violence?
Indeed, it may be seen as not just useful, but a necessary and essential component of humanity.  Certainly it's vital to the Security Officer's survival and ultimate victory in the story of the games.
And yet, on the whole, Marathon is a less violent game.  Or at least, it glories in its violence less.  Enemies still go down in a welter of their own blood, because that happens when you shoot a living creature full of bullet holes.  But it's less gory on the whole – bloody like a military movie, bloody as a matter of fact, in contrast to Doom's cartoonishly overwrought slasher-flick excess.
And yet it's Marathon that feels compelled to grapple with its violence, to ask what motivates it, not just in the moment, but wherever it appears in the nature and history of humankind.
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On the whole, I think I come down on the side of Marathon, personally.  Its themes, its aesthetic, and its characters are more to my liking.  True, part of this is simply because Marathon has characters. Doom has the player character and a horde of enemies.  Even the final boss of each installment has no narrative impact to speak of.  They simply appear in order to be shot down.  They're presented as the forces behind the demonic invasion, but aside from being bigger and stronger than all the other demons you face, there's no real sense of presence, narratively.  And that's fine.  But on the balance, I tend to prefer story in my games, and Marathon delivers, even as it's sometimes a bit janky, even as I get the feeling that Bungie's reach exceeded their grasp with it.
I can recognize Doom as the game that's more accessible, and probably put together a little better, and of course infinitely more recognizable.  Id still sells it, and generally speaking, it's worth the five whole dollars (ten if you want Doom II as well) it'll cost you on PSN, or Xbox Live, or Steam.
Bungie, meanwhile, gave the Marathon trilogy away for free in the early 2000s.  It's how I finally managed to play it, despite never owning a Mac.  There are source ports that allow it to be played on PCs (or Linux, even).  About the only new development in the franchise was an HD remaster of Marathon 2: Durandal for the Xbox 360.  In the same vein as the remasters for Halo or Halo 2, this version changes nothing about the original except to update the graphics and adapt the control scheme for a 360 controller.
I'd love to see a remake of Marathon with modern technology, even though I know it's extraordinarily unlikely to happen.  Bungie's occupied with Destiny for the foreseeable future.  The most we've gotten in ages is a few Easter eggs.  343 Guilty Spark in the original Halo featured Durandal's symbol prominently on his mechanical eye, which fueled speculation for a little while that perhaps Halo took place in the same continuity.  There's another Easter egg in Destiny 2 that suggests two of its weapons, the MIDA Multi-tool and the MIDA Mini-tool, fell out of an alternate universe where Marathon's events occurred instead of Destiny's. But that's been it.
The tragedy of Marathon is that it wasn't in a position for its innovations to be felt industry-wide.
Doom had the better overall playability and greater accessibility.  If you were to ask where a lot of FPS genre innovations came from, the average gamer would probably not point to Marathon as the progenitor of those things.  Quake would probably get credit for adding mouse aiming (even though it wasn't a standard menu option, and had to be enabled with a console command), or else maybe Duke Nukem 3D. Unreal would most likely get credited as the genesis of alternate firing modes, while Half-Life is probably the one most people remember for introducing the notion of reloading weapons.  I'm not totally sure which other FPS would get the nod for mainstreaming the greater presence of story in the genre – probably Half-Life again.
But since it's free, I would strongly recommend giving the Marathon trilogy a spin.  It's a little rough around the edges even judged by the standards of its time, but still eminently playable, with a strong story told well. And if it seems at times like the FPS That History Forgot, well, that's because History was mostly looking the other way at the time. It's part of the appeal for me, too.  It feels at times like a "lost" game.
Let that add to its mystique.
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postguiltypleasures · 6 years
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The Magicians Page vs Screen
I recently finished the audio book version of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians trilogy while anticipating the third season of SyFy’s adaptation. I have some thoughts to share, in no particular order.
I should first mention that, in addition to having watched the first two seasons of the TV show, my expectations of the books were colored by reading some reviews, in particular that Emily VanDerWerff whose interpretation of changing perspectives of the narrator’s focus representing growing up and becoming more aware is true in the abstract, but also kind of misleading. The books increase the number of perspectives, but they are still primarily that of Quentin Coldwater. I was under the impression that every chapter in The Magician King would alternate between Quentin and Julia, but it was really more like three chapters from Quentin’s perspective for every one from Julia’s. (I’m going to struggle with my thoughts about Julia’s changing narrative status from page to screen. In general I think the TV show improves things for her.  Nothing in the books is as pleasing as her friendship with Kady, she gets her shade back and in general having more time for her point of view is an improvement.) Also in her review she states that the books have very little plot, but that’s only true of the first book in the trilogy. The subsequent ones are tightly paced thrillers.
Around the first season and (not accidentally) the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Vox also published an article about the annoying cliche in sci-if and fantasy fiction in which a male protagonist is helped by a more talented female character who is never allowed to be the protagonist. I tweeted the article and a fan got defensive about how the Quentin/Alice relationship doesn’t fall into the same pattern as that of  Luke/Leia, Neo/Trinity, or Harry/Hermione. At the time, I admitted that I had yet to watch or read the full series, but agreed with the larger thesis. This did not assauge the person in my Mentions, but now I want to say, Quentin/Alice is a much stranger, more fraught relationship than the others are allowed to be. (And I love it.)
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Also, one thing that appealed to me about the show, is that I caught the start of the second episode after an episode of Lost Girl. It starts with a sequence set to “Intro” by The XX’s from their first album. I had owned the album for years but could never get into it until I saw this sequence. I really like it when one art form brings another to life like this.
Using the audio book version makes the experience time-conscious in a way that reading silently does not. This really struck me with regards to the difference between book and TV Fillory. In the books the clock trees are a very prominent part of Fillory in a way they aren’t in the TV show. TV, as a medium, is already self conscious of time, which made me wonder if the clock trees are a tool to make the reader think of time, which would be redundant in TV. (This is broadcast TV, streaming TV, with it’s less tight running times is an exception, perhaps to its detriment.)
The TV show gave me a sense that the Fillory and Further series-within-the-series was basically The Magicians’s version of Narnia. So I was surprised that in the books we get so much more detail about the plot of the series-within-the-series and resembles a cross between Narnia and Oz. The backstory of the writing also reflects this. I think that in the TV show, the Chatwin kids are in the country due to Operation Peter Pan in World War Two, just as in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. But in the Books, it’s World War One and the kids are in the country because their father is in the war and their mother is indisposed. Between the time change and having the novels within the novel’s author, Christopher Plover be an American expatriate in the English countryside the books feel like they are explicitly placing Fillory as a midpoint between Oz and Narnia.
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Incidentally, the name Christopher Plover is reminiscent of Winnie the Pooh’s Christopher Robin who reportedly felt miserable and exploited by his father’s writings.  TV series Plover is English and played by Charles Shaughnessy of The Nanny fame, which feels like calculated way of enhancing the affect of his abuse of Martin Chatwin.
The TV series Fillory may lose some of the direct links to Oz, but its attitude about growing up is closer to Oz than Narnia.
There was a lot of criticism about how the TV show’s pilot was overstuffed and muddled, so I was surprised that so much of the information that had to be communicated in the pilot is exposed early in the first book.
On the other hand, The Beast’s first appearance and Alice’s backstory with her brother are brought up much faster in the TV show. In the case of Alice, her story definitely has more impact and pathos in the way it’s brought up in the book, so that’s a loss on TV. But I do really like bringing the threat of the Beast up so quickly.
One of the most surprising differences between the Books and TV series is that in the Books, the first trip to Fillory is made just because they can (and because they need something to shake themselves out of their post-graduation lethargy).  On the TV show it’s because the Beast is regularly threatening them. TV really isn’t a great medium for portraying lethargy, it isn’t intimate in the way reading is. Quentin isn’t sympathetic in the events leading up to the trip to Fillory in the books, but you’re in his head, so you’re with him. Then the key act of Quentin cheating on Alice in a threesome with Eliot and Janet/Margot comes off very differently in the two media. In the Books it’s a personal nadir and a major betrayal. It’s compounded by the fact that Quentin was thinking about Janet while feeling frustrated with Alice. On the Show, it mostly feels like a case of bad timing rather than a personal choice.  They had literally bottled up their feelings to practice Battle Magic, when they retrieved the feelings back they’re confused and stronger.  They also self medicate.  As group falling into bed feels inevitable and it’s just bad luck that Alice isn’t there to be a part of it.
Both Book and TV versions of Quentin are more emotionally attached to Eliot than to Janet/Margot. After the threesome, Book Quentin obsesses over how stupid he was to betray Alice with Janet, but he can barely acknowledge that he was also with Eliot. In the TV fandom, there is a lot more focus on the Quentin/Eliot coupling than on the Quentin/Margot one. The schism reminds me of Crime and Punishment (of all things) where Raskolnikov obsesses over one of his victims, and the detective focuses on the other. Considering that a major theme of The Magicians is crossing over from fan to participant/creator, it feels appropriate that fandom would be part of a literary parallel (and impossible to plan.)
TV Margot is much more of a character than Book Janet, but we don’t yet know if they share backstory or if that’s as different as their names. Show and Book Penny also have little besides a name in common, Kady and Asmadeus have even less.
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The Beast’s design on the show kind of reminds me of the cover of La Oreja de Van Gogh’s “El planeta imaginario”. Seeing it this way kind of undercut how unnerving he could be, and made the album cover scarier than I think was intended. I was surprised that the Book’s description is so different, just a man with a tree branch in front of his face. I get why they’d want to redesign that for the camera, but I like how René Magritte-like that description is.
Finding out that the Beast is Martin Chatwin is such a great twist that I wished I could be shocked by it when I experienced it in another medium. (I’m having kind of the opposite experience with Game of Thrones, I’m not eagerly anticipating those twists.) It was distracting in trying to stay involved in the book’s version of the plot. TV’s Beast has much more on-screen time, there are more than two confrontations with him, and our protagonists seek him out as an enemy, all of which is very different in the books. But, otherwise it feels like Martin and his tragedy really saturated the Books’ story in a way that hasn’t really happened in the series. The TV series characters have to deal with the physical damage the Beast leaves in Fillory, the way he abuses its resources, something the Books don’t really address. But the books are more interested in the psychological damage he leaves behind. His family never recovers from his defection. The TV series only really focuses on how that affects Jane, and how their interaction is a lot more direct here than in the Books. I don’t know if the TV series is ever going to do anything with Rupert Chatwin, but his book-within-The Magician’s Land was beautiful and poignant. Nothing in the TV series quite matches it.
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That said, the lessening of The Beast’s presence allows Reynard to be the Big Bad for most of the second season. This gives greater value to Julia’s experience. Also, his comeuppance and Julia’s experience of finally meeting Our Lady of the Underground are more satisfying on the show. I had no idea how much I appreciated that Our Lady restores Julia’s Shade until I found out that she doesn’t do so in the Book. (She just transforms Julia into a Dryad after which Julia disappears for most of the third book.) I was also surprised and a little disappointed to realize that the “Julia was rejected from Breakbill’s because of the timeline experiments on how to best defeat the Beast” is not in the Book. Good job, Show in creating that plot.
(Another Game of Thrones comparison: George R R Martin famously said that one of his goals in his series was to go where fantasy series generally don’t and get into the process of governing. The Magicians books really aren’t interested in that. Ruling Fillory is treated as a whim, even though the decision to collect taxes is one of the events that kickstarts the plot of The Magician King. The show, however, is interested in what it means to run Fillory.)
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I like the continuous contact with characters that the medium of TV demands. I like that we see Penny joining The Order of Librarians, rather than having him disappear for hundreds of pages and then showing up as a member of The Order.
In general, the books are more sympathetically sensual and the TV show replaces the sensuality with crassness. That may sound more critical of the show than I intend.  I really like the show and think it improves upon some aspects of the plot significantly. (For example I’m much more invested in Julia and Free Trade Beowulf’s quest to meet our Lady of the Underground and in it’s tragic aftermath in the TV Show than the Books. In fact, I’m kind of annoyed that it’s mostly a B-plot in the Books when the TV show gives it the time and weight it deserves.) I think the best illustration of this difference would be the wealth of details the book provides in exploring how it feels to be transformed into a different animal.  The characters on the show are much more preoccupied by their bodily functions than in the books. Think how much of the second season’s plot was about how the god Ember, defecating in the well that was a source of magic messes things up for everyone. This is what I mean by crass.
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The gods of Fillory, Ember and Umber, are surprisingly different after transitioning from page to screen. Some of the changes are predictable, such as changing their physiques from pure ram to humanoid with ram features. But they also forgo the idea that Umber is Ember’s shadow and they’re really one aspect of the same god in the Book.  On TV they’re separate gods one of chaos and one of order. A major themes in The Magician’s Land is the evolution from being a fan to a creator and then letting go of the creation so that new fans can go through that process. Storytelling is a combination of setting rules and creating chaos. Quentin killing Umber happens under very different circumstances and earlier in the narrative in the TV Series. I’m not sure where the letting-go-so-you’re-fans-can-do-their-thing part comes in for the show.
I like that the TV version has musical numbers.
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thepurpleblossom · 6 years
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I went to watch the HF movie earlier! So I’ll be posting my thoughts. I’ve already read many reviews prior so I sort of already found out how some things are different, so the changes didn’t quite surprise / disappoint me, and overall, I really really enjoyed it. If possible, I’ll probably go and watch it at least two more times!
I actually wrote a brief summary of the movie on the way back, but I just remembered there’s a post that pretty much talked about what I wanted to, but!! I’ll do it again in any case!
I really enjoy the first few scenes because they were anime original. Since I read the post linked above, I did know that they were animating those pre!story scenes. But what I didn’t expect was how long it was. There was perhaps a good 10 minutes devoted to these scenes. 
Starting off with a beautiful scene in the archery club depicting Shirou’s mastery of archery, Ayako and Shinji looking from behind, and a stranger praising his skills to Taiga. And then immediately juxtaposed with a short scene of Shinji reprimanding Shirou’s carelessness in getting injured during work. And then Sakura’s visits. We get his original insistence that he can’t make his friend’s sister help him like this...! and snapshots of Sakura’s stubbornness, visiting everyday until Taiga warms up to her, and Shirou gives up, giving her a key. And then he wakes up in the shed, with Sakura’s prompting.
I love these scenes so much, but I also love the bits where they slowly depict the changes happening in Sakura. When she first arrives, her eyes are completely dead, and she hardly talks. And then she talks, her eyes remaining dull. And by the end of the flashback (where Sakura gets accepted to Homurahara Academy), her eyes are brightened and as seen in this pv, she smiles so brightly. 
These are so important in establishing the effect Sakura has on Shirou, as well as Shirou’s on Sakura that now, I’m almost surprised that they aren’t in the original material.
Incidentally, there was two separate instances where Sakura touches her ribbon, (oh my god, i can’t believe my hc of her touching her ribbon is actually canon now). The most important one being when they were discussing Kiritsugu being Shirou’s hero, and when faced with the same question, Sakura simply repeats the words while touching the ribbon. 
Originally I was worried how they are going to deal with the repeats from UBW. But they really did just compress them into a few images, serving as a reminder to jolt our memory rather than a full scene. Which is actually a direction that I really liked that they took, because it would be taking time away from content that we have already seen -- there is no point in animating the same scenes again as well.
There are other scenes in which they were longer but the movie cut them short. Such as Sakura noticing the mark on Shirou’s hand, but it skips the following breakfast scene, and changes scene to Sakura leaving and asking Shirou to come home quick. I also really like these cuts, whilst the scenes are lost, its usually done without much consequences and the viewers can fill in the gaps. To borrow @fishofthelake’s words, it really fits the movie’s format.
Also, Saber in Shirou’s yukata.  👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀
About the dream that Shirou had. I think the movie is my favourite rendition. Whilst the original is just Rin H scene. And Realta Nua a scene between Rin and Ayako, this was Rin putting the moves on Shirou at first and then turning to Sakura. The first was awkward given how Rin is not the heroine of the series. And RN’s verison makes me imagine that Shirou... ships Rin and Ayako. And HF’s felt the most natural? Shirou’s crush on Rin can’t be separated from the narrative, and they also showed it during a scene where Shirou chances upon Rin helping Sakura pick up the papers fallen on the floor ( “Oh... The person who helped me is--” “Tohsaka Rin, right?” “... You know her?” “Oh aaah, *flustered* she’s beautiful and everyone knows her.” ). But the change to Sakura felt more natural given that it is her route, and also highlights that Shirou is gradually gaining an romantic interest in Sakura. ( Important as they cut out the bit where Shirou walks Sakura to the Matou’s mansion, as well as the morning scenes including the monologue where Shirou is like “ah this is problematic. Sakura is becoming more beautiful by the day” )
Actually, there are actually a number of scenes that effectively portrayed Shirou’s attraction to Sakura, and vice versa. Whilst the added scenes at the beginning of the movie showed how important they are to each other, the scenes scattered throughout the rest of the movie showed how their feelings for each other are decidedly romantic. With Sakura’s silent jealousy when Sakura finds out that Shirou knows Rin, Taiga’s joking comments that Shirou asked Sakura to stay over so that she won’t be jealous of Saber... And of course, the scene where Sakura first collapses, and Shirou is there, looking after her, and their hands are held together almost tenderly. I teared up.
Speaking of a tender scene, Sakura visited the shed with Shirou. And one of the topics was that Shirou is an adopted child, and Sakura mentions briefly that he had good people around him, and that made my heart break a little. Because Sakura is also adopted and she didn’t have good people around her. While the scene broke my heart a little, the overall atmosphere was really soft and tender, and Sakura seems so glad that his experience is different from hers ( of course, it might be just me assuming that she’s drawing a parallel between his experience and hers since she didn’t talk about herself being adopted, but it’s highly likely that she is. )
The fight scenes were super cool. I was holding my breath the entire time during the Cu and Hassan fight, on the expressway before they moved to the lake. I’m so glad Cu got some scenes before he was gone. Though, I felt like the scene where Medu showed up in the temple could be done better? The scene in the VN felt more creepy in comparison, and I could sense the danger and how she’s so much more powerful compared to her earlier appearance (the scene where Saber absolutely destroyed Medusa was beautiful by the way). I can’t quite recall if the dangerous aspect in the VN was due to Shirou’s monologue, but I feel that they could have done better, perhaps through a new, creepier OST? I don’t think they changed the OST from Shirou’s fight with Zouken. But that’s probably just me nitpicking. My friend thought she seems powerful anyway.
AND, let’s talk about the music. I’m too much of Kajiura’s fan to not devote a section to talk about her to be honest. In summary, I... really like it??? I’m not sure how else I could say it. Other than that scene mentioned above, I really like the music direction. Sometimes the scenes are without music, but it doesn’t take it away. In UBW, the lack of music in some scenes made it rather boring for me to watch, and hard to grip my attention, but in the movie, I felt like it was used brilliantly. The first scene of Shirou’s archery had no music, but served to show Shirou’s hyperfocus and tranquility of archery. Some of the flashback scenes generally had soft, calming music, but other scenes are quiet, without music. It felt like it added to the peacefulness and the fondness in the memories.
The first heavy, dark music is used when Shirou notices the Lancer and Archer fight and he starts running for a safe space before the scene fades to a scene with Sakura somehow noticing this happening and then we get the compressed, repeated scenes from UBW. I really like how the first piece of dark music is used as a lead-in to the rest of the movie because the flashbacks are done now, and this is where the plot starts. It felt like a summary / warning as to what the rest of the movie has to offer, which is dark, dark, and dark. They also used one or two F/Z tracks btw. If I’m right, Back to Zero, during the scene in which Kirei reveals to Shirou Kiritsugu’s involvement in the 4th Holy Grail War. Most of the tracks in the rest of the movie were dark, and very, very different from UBW’s, which is understandable, given that they are done by different composers after all. But it really is a huge indication of how dark HF is compared to UBW’s and I love it.
Things that I’m not too happy about are nitpicks. The loss of the classroom scene, but the inclusion of the scene may have led the movie to feel draggy (since it takes place before the Lancer & Archer fight -- ie where the movie truly begins), so I will accept that choice begrudgingly. The other bit is the dream sequence involving Saber Alter talking to Saber. I liked the horror that Saber is truly gone, and then the resulting shock when Saber Alter showed up later in the story, and such a scene felt like it took away both of such elements. Still, at this point in time, Saber Alter is hardly a secret anymore, so perhaps these factors are gone ever since the popularity of FGO and the Fate franchise in general. So why not capitalise on their knowledge, instead of pretending that everyone watching are Fate noobs right.
Perhaps that’s why the Prize A for the Ichiban Kuji lottery for Heaven’s Feel is not Sakura, but actually a figure of Saber Alter. They’re just like, Saber Alter??? Keep her a secret??? I think /not/.
In summary though, I’m really happy with this movie. The director really seems to love the route and Sakura a lot. The movie was beautiful, and the scenes with Sakura felt so beautiful and wonderfully portrayed and her expressions. And the last scene where Shirou comes back to a worried Sakura waiting for him with her nose and cheeks red from standing too long in the snow... It’s beautiful.
Now, if you excuse me, I’ll just be looping Hana no Uta.
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michaeljtraylor · 5 years
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Anarchy in the GDR | The Nation
German punks, Nov. 29, 1984. (AP Photo / Andreas Pechar)
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Burning Down the Haus, a new book by journalist Tim Mohr, details how a small group of East German teens kickstarted a movement that contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 1970s were oppressive years in the German Democratic Republic; there was no space, literal or philosophical, to live outside the system, let alone criticize it. Upon hearing The Clash and the Sex Pistols via forbidden British military radio broadcasts, a handful of young people began to embrace punk mentality, dressing differently, and shaking the foundations upon which the authority had been built. And despite the East German secret police, or the Stasi’s best efforts, the movement grew throughout the 1980s as punks developed their own little world, disconnected from society. Punk was the soundtrack to the million-person demonstration on November 4, 1989. A few days later, the Wall came down.
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Mohr, who arrived in Berlin in 1992 and now lives in Brooklyn, learned about this history and has spent 10 years documenting it in as much detail as possible, recognizing, too, the parallels with modern society.
William Ralston: You write that your initial belief in this story was reinforced after you returned to the USA and “recognized an ominous echo in developments in your own country.” Can you elaborate on these parallels?
TM: The book went from a story that was just fascinating to something that was actually disturbingly relevant because of the parallels I began to see in our own society—the revelations from Snowden about the scale of mass surveillance here in the US, the militarization of our police forces, and the treatment of peaceful protesters here. I think we can’t dismiss comparisons between what’s happening in the West to what happened in the Eastern bloc; when our own mass surveillance was revealed, people were quick to say, “but you can’t compare this to the Stasi”—but you can!
I’m not suggesting our situation is completely analogous, and I don’t think the solution to whatever needs to be remedied in today’s society is the same as what’s described in the book—it won’t be solved by passing out a bunch of guitars to teenage rebels and telling them to make anti-government music—but I think this story shows what is possible. It offers a concrete historical example of a grassroots youth movement that made significant changes in its society. Maybe the lesson to be learned is something they used to spray as graffiti: “Don’t die in the waiting room of the future.” Meaning, you can’t sit around hoping for change to happen; you have to make change happen.
WR: The GDR in the late 1970s was not a stable state. It was struggling with a generational transition and the economy was ceasing to function. Why was it vulnerable?
TM: One of the reasons the hardliners of the GDR were able to stay in power for so long was because the GDR didn’t have the type of conditions that we associated with the Soviet Union. There were no food shortages; everybody had modern conveniences, televisions, refrigerators; jobs; booze. I think this created a level of complacency that allowed the regime to stay in power longer. Given halfway decent conditions, the majority of people seem to just go along with the system, regardless of what the system is. The punks were among the first to challenge it in a direct way. They did so by addressing the regime’s failure to practically implement its ideology, an ideology, incidentally, that most of them shared—they were critics of the dictatorship from the left. Punks were among the loudest in making these points, and I think one of the most important roles they played was steeling the resolve of other opposition groups.
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One of the great unknowns in opposition circles was what would happen if you ran afoul of the security apparatus and the punks learned exactly what happened. They showed other opposition-minded people that it was possible to resist and survive the Stasi. They were subject to the harshest crackdown of any opposition group, including serving the longest jail terms. To then come out and keep fighting encouraged everyone else.
WR: They conquered their fears.
TM: Yes, and as a result they were a big component of the early street protests, and these protests created a boomerang effect. In the GDR, as in most societies, conformity ruled the day. But when the protests started to spill out onto the street and into the public eye, ordinary people—who might otherwise be inclined to go along—were confronted with state-sanctioned violence that made many of them cringe. It just snowballed from there. You have the early activists who take things out on the street and they have to convince other opposition groups, and then it’s a matter of converting a significant enough part of the population to your cause. It took the 1989 mass demonstrations for the Wall to fall—but the seeds were planted several years prior in street protests in which punks were indeed central.
WR: And it was in the Protestant churches—which opened their doors to offer shelter—that punks began to rub elbows with other opposition groups.
TM: Yes, the churches were important. Though as an institution, the church didn’t necessarily wish to nurture these groups; many leaders were actually opposed. But individual clergymen took in these so-called enemies of the state. Once they were under the roof of the church, the punks began interacting with different activist groups, who began to take the punks more seriously.
WR: You write in the book that the Stasi were “paranoid” about the punk scene from early on. What made punks such a threat? 
TM: From a western perspective, it’s not easy to see why a bunch of kids with bad haircuts could be so threatening. The deeper I dug into this, it became clear to me that the Stasi were correct in their fear. They were trying to keep people on a pre-ordained path and people, like the punks, who were influencing youths to stray off that path, were threatening. It’s also important to remember that punks expressed their opposition whenever they were in public. Other forms of protest were often done behind closed doors, whereas the punks were so in your face; their music was loud and even just their appearance on the street was a form of opposition. That’s how the movement grew so quickly: teenagers saw punks and they seemed cool because it was so daring and exciting that many people joined them. Many of these kids, as with the first generation of punks, originally joined for non-political reasons; it was just cool.
WR: You write in the book that the state’s paranoid behavior “backfired.” Can you explain this? 
TM: I think this is true all through this battle. To begin with, the punks just wanted to wear these clothes and cut their hair this way, and then suddenly they were being hassled by the police on a daily basis, being kicked out of schools or apprenticeships, having their IDs confiscated. This turned the movement political. And even the smallest signs of rebellion were so impactful;  every time people stepped off the path, it was a political act, even if, like the early punks, they themselves didn’t conceive of it to be so. Then, later on, ordinary citizens began to recoil at the level of violence against protestors, significant parts of whom were punks. The security forces kept making the same mistake.
WR: It feels that there was absolutely nothing that the Stasi could have done to stop this. They tried threats, locking up, even removing people.
TM: I think part of this is that the punks had such a fundamental criticism. A lot of the other groups were nitpicking over this or that policy, focusing on specific issues like military training in schools, and they fancied themselves negotiating with the government. They wanted to try to change the government whereas punks wanted to cast off the system, to destroy it. During the fight itself, this was certainly a strength.
I think it’s also important to note that while the Stasi saw the punks as a significant threat, they also tried to blame it on the West. As late as 1989, they listed punk as the top youth problem and yet, in the same report, they say that the scene is being manipulated from the west by punks who had been expatriated, which was completely false. They seemed to overlook that it had become an organic eastern phenomenon.
WR: Do you perceive punk music to have inspired punk’s dissidence, or was it just a vehicle for it? 
TM: I think it’s a bit of both. Almost everyone spoke of feeling as if a switch had been thrown inside them when they first heard punk. For the majority of them, I think the thrill was musical: the bassist in Planlos told me that he loved The Ramones because it was the only record he’d ever heard with no slow songs. Only a few of them immediately connected it with anarchist philosophy. But the music also offered an avenue of self-expression that they had never really thought of before and became a soundtrack to rebellion.
WR: The mass protests grew in the late ‘80s. Why do you think law-abiding citizens, who violently opposed the punks to begin with, went on to join the movement? 
TM: If we knew the mechanism then we could recreate it elsewhere. Conformity is natural and most people abide by the system and don’t like people who make trouble. I think a lot of people had the feeling that there were things wrong with society but once the protests began to reach a certain mass, when they were in open view on the street in the second half of the ‘80s, then more of the general public joined because the state-sanctioned violence gave credence to their own misgivings about how things were run.
WR: What started off as a resistance eventually cast off the dictatorship. Do you think this the movement exceeded punk’s ambitions? 
TM: Even though the Stasi were paranoid about the punk scene, I don’t think anyone felt it was the start of a type of opposition that would bring down the dictatorship. One of the things that the punks were brilliant at was carving out space, both physical and philosophical. They took over all these empty buildings and by the late 1980s untethered themselves from the economy, when some were able to operate in the grey areas by selling homemade jewelry and clothing. At that point they were no longer dependent on being part of society. As opposed to British punks, who railed against “No future,” the East German punks had seen their problem as “Too Much Future.”
Their whole lives were planned out for them almost from birth and it felt stifling. Once they were able to at least partially wrestle control of their futures, they had probably already gotten farther than many of them realistically expected. Though of course there were some who were always quite convinced they’d succeed in toppling the regime. 
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tonightontv · 6 years
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This is one comic book story that feels particularly timely.
As DC Entertainment’s Superman prepares for his big relaunch at the end of the month with the first issue of the weekly series The Man of Steel, this week’s Action Comics Special gives comic fans a chance to see a different side of his arch villain Lex Luthor.
The extra-length issue contains stories by a number of creators, including outgoing Action Comics writer Dan Jurgens, but it’s “Suprema Est Lex” by Mark Russell and Jill Thompson that’s likely to gain the most attention; not only does it offer a glimpse inside Luthor’s head, it also takes place at an event currently in the headlines: the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
The story looks back at a moment in which Clark Kent delivered remarks at the Correspondents' Dinner, and poked fun at Luthor. It's a story that drew inspiration from Seth Meyers' 2011 roasting of Donald Trump at the dinner, which the comedian himself has speculated caused Trump to run for president.
Heat Vision talked to Russell about the crafting the story and whether Trump really does have parallels to Luthor.
Congratulations on a story that has become amazingly topical, thanks to what happened this past weekend. Did you have any idea this issue would come out days after this year’s White House Correspondents' Dinner, or was this just an incredibly lucky coincidence?
It’s completely a coincidence. I pitched this months and months ago, and wrote it two and a half months ago; I guess a little research might have shown it was coming out around the same time [as the actual WHCD], but I had no idea when it would come out.
It’s impressively timely, especially in the wake of Michelle Wolf’s speech and the response to it.
Yeah, it really worked out well. (Laughs.) I couldn’t have asked for better timing from the comic. It’s based on past White House Correspondents' Dinners, which are now even more important — or a bigger bellwether on the health of our democracy — now that Donald Trump is president.
Why did you choose to set the story at the Correspondents' Dinner? Was there a sense of, “Clark Kent’s career as journalist is particularly important these days” or something else? Despite the setting, Kent is almost incidental to the actual story…
It was really a story about Lex Luthor, and the function that a sort of lese-majeste plays in our democracy. How you need to worry about someone who takes themselves that seriously; it’s kind of the worst attribute someone can have in power, to take themselves so seriously. It leads them to believe they’re infallible, and that’s when they double down on their worst attributes.
The story makes clear the contrast between how Lex Luthor sees himself and how the world sees him. I don’t want to be too obvious, but the Lex Luthor as Donald Trump analogue is very clear here, especially the way the story mirrors Seth Meyers’ 2011 speech at the Correspondents' Dinner. Do you see Trump as a Luthor-type figure, or is it more about the ego of both, and their shared desire to be close to power?
It’s all about the ego and closeness to power. I don’t see [Trump] as having, even, the foresight to be much of a supervillain. It’s more about the danger that ego poses to power — what a bad combination that is. And it really is, in large part, based on the White House Correspondents' Dinner that Seth Meyers did, where he was roasting Donald Trump and you see Donald Trump in the background, steaming, getting increasingly angry and more uncomfortable. This comic is, what was going on in that person’s head while they were sitting there. Someone who takes themselves so seriously, what goes through their head when they’re confronted with people laughing at them?
You also play up the contrast with Superman, with a flashback to Kent deciding to speak at the dinner despite his own anxiety and humility about being the center of attention, compared with Luthor’s belief that he should be the center of attention, he should be the one people are not only paying attention to but, as the story shows, not being friendly towards but being someone people fear and expect. This gets back to the ego of Luthor and feeds into his worst impulses, leading him to be more inhuman, for want of a better way to put it.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that, once someone has made themselves the object of their own veneration, they’re kind of lost. They’re not going to accept criticism from people that they think are fallible, or people that they think are less than them, and they’re not going to believe that anything they’ve done or said is wrong. They’re just going to double down on their ideas, no matter tragically misguided they may be.
In Ancient Rome, even the emperors, after a glorious victory, would have someone whisper in their ear, “Remember that thou art mortal.” What we need in 21st century America is someone constantly whispering in the president’s ear, “Remember that thou art stupid.” (Laughs.) If you’ve drunk your own Kool-Aid, then no one is able to reach you. You’re not going to mitigate your own failures by changing course, which is absolutely the most dangerous attribute a president can have.
You bring that up in the story itself, in that the first page and last page echo — Luthor has other people essentially beat people who upset him on his behalf, because he sees himself as being above getting involved with people beyond what they can do for him. Is the inability to change, to even hear criticism, something that you’re warning against, or wanting people to be aware of, especially in the comparison to Trump?
I think that, especially for people born into privilege, there’s a tendency to conflate their wealth with their abilities — to think because I paid people to do this, I did it myself; because I signed the checks, I made it possible. They tend to overestimate their own personal abilities. When they get into a sphere like politics, where their ability to write a personal check doesn’t really matter, their overconfidence in their abilities remains, and that puts the country — or their business, or whatever they’re running — on very thin ice.
Something that occurred to me, in drawing parallels between Lex Luthor and Donald Trump is that Luthor is traditionally portrayed as an evil genius, with the genius part actually being present; it’s not only ego. But Trump has only his own success to back him up, and he falls clearly into the description you gave of someone born into privilege. Is the comparison between Luthor and Trump unfair to Luthor?
That’s a good point! Lex is canonically a genius. But this isn’t a story about whether he’s a genius or not, it’s about the moral failure of your own certain destiny and infallibility. It’s not about your ability to back it up.
Within the story, you touch on that notion of infallibility. Luthor is taken down because of littering, which itself has parallels in the real world; I thought about Al Capone being brought down by his taxes.
Right! Even self-proclaimed geniuses fall prey to their pride. It allows them to be dismissive and not take threats seriously because they think they’re better than everyone. So they make these tiny mistakes that turn out to ruin them. There’s a number of historical examples. You pointed out Al Capone, but history is filled with examples where overconfidence is ultimately what unravels [people]. Julius Caesar, walking into the Senate thinking everyone is going to be onboard with his program because he was unbeatable in the field. He didn’t foresee the obvious reality that, in Rome, surrounded by the senatorial class, someone was going to want to put a knife in his gut.
Looking at your work on The Flintstones and Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles, I have to ask: Are you surprised that these kinds of pop-culture characters offer this level of ability to comment on society and politics, and do so in a way that can be read both as a straight-through story without allegory, but also with the allegory clear for those looking for it?
I think that’s what pop-culture characters are there for. They’re there to let us look at ourselves without becoming too defensive. They’re there to allow us to look at ourselves in the abstract and look at the failings that we have, without feeling like we’re under attack and being humiliated.
Are there other characters or projects that you’d like to approach with that in mind? As terrifying as it can be to live through, this is a very fertile time for commentary because we’re going through such change, and regression, societally. Are there characters where you think, "Oh, I’d like to work with them to make this point"?
I’m doing the Judge Dredd story that’s largely doing exactly what you’re talking about; about retrenchment, about a society trying to put a lid on what it’s ignored for so long that it’s become dangerous. Trying to ignore that you’ve made such horrible foundational errors that they only way to fix it is with violence. That comes out May 30. The one character I’ve always wanted to write, that I’d be fascinated to write, would be Scrooge McDuck; it’s hard to imagine a better analog for critiquing late-stage capitalism.
Action Comics Special No. 1, featuring “Suprema Est Lex” and two other stories, is available digitally and in comic book stores now.
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douchebagbrainwaves · 7 years
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WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT SILICON
I know using Java are using it because they don't have a problem firing someone they needed to. Does that mean investors will make less money now is that now I understand why Berkeley is probably not an option for most magazines. Viaweb we got our first 10, 000 people worked there. At any given time, you're probably not going to change the world, if you want to make ambitious people waste their time on their own projects. We estimated, based on disasters that have happened to any bigger than a few years down the line. Suppose a company makes some kind of wall between us. I deliberately gave this essay a provocative title; of course it's not a sign of weakness. So you start painting.
Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to realize there's a problem. If you don't want to offend Big Company by refusing to meet. Wisdom is universal, and there will be people who take a risk and use it. More people are starting startups, but most husbands use the same matter-of-the-future for filters to notice. But what's changed is not variation in wealth, but might it also be true? It's the people that make it Silicon Valley, and all you'll be able to increase your self-confidence. Why do the founders always make things so complicated? That Jobs and Wozniak were marginal people too.
I think a society in which most people were stupid. The least ambitious way of approaching the problem is more with the patent office may understand the sort of uncool office building that will make you successful—making things and talking to users, we did. They do it because they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like no one cares enough to disagree with, you should probably choose the other. Certainly they'll learn more. Over time, hackers develop a nose for good and bad technology. The salesperson asks you this not because you're supposed to when starting a company that has raised money is literally more valuable. A lot of startups that cause stampedes end up flaming out in extreme cases, partly as a result they can be sued for. Pr campaign surrounding the launch has the side effect of making them live as if they used the same word, or is there something unique about it? And because you can't remember them. A who B is. But while series A rounds, that would be better if the people with bad intentions look bad by comparison.
That's the essence of Lisp—both in the transition from the desire to do, I'd encourage you to focus initially on people rather than ideas. Companies that seemed like competitors and threats at first glance does not mean you aren't doing something meaningful, defensible, or valuable. It will be a good predictor. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of schools is to teach kids. Because the people whose salaries you're proposing to cut. Our existence depended on doing these things right. You can do it right. Web-based applications, it could actually be very profitable.
Historically, languages designed for large organizations don't care if the person in the eye. The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they can accelerate fast. In 1450 it was filled with the kind of parallelism we have in the past, a competitor with the sort of person to do it his way. You'd think that would mean less opportunity, because satisfying current needs would lead to more ideas. But those you don't. Now there are moves afoot to make it a bestseller for a few specialists like thieves and speculators something you have to think about that. And since risk is usually proportionate to reward. And the second could probably be acquired in about ten minutes if they wanted to learn more. They want to get anything done with it.
C, but in most ambitious kids, ambition seems to precede anything specific to comment threads there, but in fact the default in the predefined page styles. Translated into more straightforward language, this means: We're not investing in you, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can't be solved. But after the interview, the three of us would turn to Jessica and ask What does the first round of real VC funding; it usually happens in the Google empire that only the CEO can deal with, and he was pretty much defined as not-fun. Looking at the applications for the platforms they use. It would be insane to go to work for will be as impressed by that. Plus this method yields teams of developers who already work well together. If you tell the truth.
Notes
If you have good net growth till you run through all the money.
If you want to trick admissions officers.
4%, and philosophy the imprecise half. Starting a company with rapid, genuine growth is valuable, because any VC would think twice before crossing him. Starting a company changes people.
This flattering distinction seems so natural to expand into new markets. As the art itself gets more random, the increasing complacency of managements. It would probably also a name. Acquisitions fall into a great deal of competition for mediocre ideas, and the average employee.
Something similar has been around as long as the little jars in supermarkets.
Obviously, if you were going to need to circle back with a product of some brilliant initial idea.
I almost hesitate to raise the next round to be, and would not be incorporated, but when people in the standard series AA terms and write them a check. On the face of a startup to an adult. The image shows us, because companies then were more at the start, e. Steve Wozniak in Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work.
Then Josh Wilson came in to pick up a solution. Money, prestige, and I ordered a large organization that often creates a situation where the acquirer wants the employees. And no, unfortunately, I put it here. Steve hadn't come back; Apple probably wouldn't be able to buy stock, the effort that would get shut down in the press when I was there when it converts you get bigger, your size helps you grow.
We fixed both problems immediately. Another danger, pointed out an interesting trap founders fall into two categories: those where the recipe: someone guessed that there is the last step is to ignore investors and they begin by having a gentlemen's agreement with the definition of politics: what ideas did European culture with Chinese: what they're really saying is they want it. Statistical Spam Filter Works for Me. But it's hard to spread the story.
This explains why such paintings are slightly worse. Investors are professional negotiators and can negotiate on the relative weights? It's unpleasant because the publishers exert so much control, and only incidentally to tell them exactly what your project does.
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