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thebestpersonherelovesbucky · 3 years

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Falcon and the Winter Soldier Ep. 6 Takeaway

First let me say that I really truly enjoyed this show. I was so nervous at the beginning and I was so nervous for the end, and though there are things that I didn’t like (as to be expected with pretty much any media) my overall excitement was rewarded. I definitely give the show an A and can only hope that we keep getting things like this and WandaVision with their next shows.

Anyway.

Sam and Bucky (and Sharon) coordinating from their different spots. I always like seeing the tactical side of working together in addition to the badass fighting together stuff.

The officer not questioning Bucky’s presence and calling him Sargent Barnes made me SO happy.

The facial mask thing-y that Natasha had in Cap 2 making a reappearance. Idk why I like that but it’s nice to know that these things are still being utilized.

CAPTAIN AMERICA’S FIRST ENTRANCE!!!! my GOD did Sam ROCK that!!! Fucking AH-MAY-ZING.

Sam’s new costume is perfect like the comics!! It’s so often changed that it’s so great to see it on screen!

“I’m sorry, wait. Who are you?” “I’m Captain America.” The parallel between this is Steve’s “Um...Captain America.” in the First Avenger.

The subtitles saying “Captain America” now whenever Sam in uniform talks.

Bucky trying to talk Karli down, approaching from a different angle than Sam because it’s what he knows and honestly does want to stop her without it coming to a fight. Especially when he realizes it’s a trap and is all “oh fuck me” and needs to haul ass lol. That is Bucky Barnes to a T.

“Seriously, Bucky, you had one job.” Omg, Sharon. lmao

Sam’s fight with Batroc was so cool. No serum. Just straight up ass kicking plus the au revoir at the end. Yes please and thank you.

Redwing!!!! Yaaaay!!!! (”a little birdie told me” lmao, Sam.)

Seeing the Vibranium wings in ACTION. Bouncing a freaking helicopter off them! FUCK!!!!! SO COOL!!!

I can watch Bucky Barnes throwing himself off a motorcycle all day long.

Bucky stopping his fight to save everyone.

John Walker and his stupid Walmart Shield arriving just in time to add fire to fire. Thanks, bro.

Bucky specifically being thanked for rescuing them. He’s spent so much time with so much guilt that having just one person say “thank you for rescuing us” actually made him pause. He’s spent so much time as the “villain” that he’s forgotten he can be the hero and it’s so good to see that finally hit him.

The metal arm scraping across the ground. Good god.

Sam popping out of the water and “Boy, you earned this ass whooping!”

That helicopter scene holy SHIT is Sam amazing.

And some applause for Ayla, too!!!!

John Walker ultimately choosing to save people instead of going on with his vendetta. Very comic book in character.

Bucky watching in horror as the van is slowly going over the edge and then smiling in wonder and awe as Captain America saves them all.

“That’s the Black Falcon there! I tell you!” “Nah. That’s Captain America!” Tears. Actual tears. SO MANY TEARS. Sam Wilson IS CAPTAIN AMERICA, baby!!!

Uh, yeah, so Bucky stopping weapons mid-air is one of my favorite things ever.

Okay, Batroc, go the fuck away now, we’re done with you.

I do like that when push comes to shove, the mission outweighed their personal grudges and Sam and Bucky “teamed up” with Walker. Not that it was 100% trust on their side. I think Bucky followed Walker bc “eeeeh....can we really trust him?” and since he has no doubt Sam can handle himself, but also, we’re fighting the same thing right as of this moment so lets just keep our heads and do it.

I am absolutely not thrilled with the direction they took Sharon. Like. Not at all. I’m...reserving full judgement for what I’m assuming will come in the future but like. No. Nuh-ah. Not happy with it.

Sam trying so hard to help Karli. The fact that he legit refused to fight her and she tried so hard to get him to fight back and he just wouldn’t. So beautiful and poignant. Sam’s fighting style. Sam perseverance. Just. Everything about that.

As good as the scene was (and I think it was great. The set up. How it all went down. The raw emotion) I’m kinda bummed they killed Karli. I was hoping Sam could at least talk her down first. However, the emotion and symbolism of her dying in his arms, and whispering “i’m sorry” was so heartbreaking.

The way Bucky and Walker got the rest of the Flag Smashers was hilarious.

Sam carrying Karli’s body cradled in his arms and flying down with her like a literal angel? I mean. Just rip my heart out.

“You have to stop calling them terrorists.” and “Your peacekeeping troops carrying weapons are forcing millions of people into settlements around the world, right? What do you think those people call you.” These first few lines of Sam’s speech. God, thank you.

Sam’s Captain America Speech. No fuck’s given. I’m so glad they didn’t hold back and just let him really give that powerful speech. Unabashedly saying “I’m a Black man carrying the stars and stripes. What don’t I get?”. Admitting the weight that comes with it and the judgement he feels. Not backing down. Telling the world he is Captain America “no super serum, no blond hair or blue eyes”. Defending Karli and trying to get them to understand what she was trying to do and why she was trying to do it. Sam was 100% born to be Captain America.

Everyone watching Captain America’s speech. Bucky. Walker. Isaiah and Eli. Joaquin. Sarah. The world. Beautiful watching Captain America deliver his first speech.

“Sorry I was texting so all I heard was Black guy in stars and stripes...nice job, Cap.” That back clap Bucky gives Sam there? ((#boyfriends))

“Can you help?” “Always.”

Very happy that Zemo had another villain move up his sleeve. Didn’t really dig the whole “i’m so graceful feel sorry for me” thing.

John Walker becoming US Agent.

Oh and, excuse me while I geek out over Valentina, Walker, Zemo...@marvel, I see where this might be headed. Please don’t let me down!

Bucky making his amends with Nakajima. The overwhelming emotions. The fear of admitting it. I kinda wish we saw a little more but I’m also okay with the ambiguity of it and knowing that Bucky knows that he at least gave him closure and is coming to accept that his role as the winter soldier was not his fault.

Also liked Bucky giving the book to his therapist. I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but I take no issues with her and I do think that Bucky felt she helped him.

Eli Bradley is fucking adorable.

Sam’s conversation with Isaiah. All that hope he represents while not erasing the pain that Isiah and generations before them suffered. Still wanting to fight for what’s right just because it’s the right thing to do. Isaiah not condemning Sam’s choice. Beautiful and poignant.

Um. The museum scene? Yeah, I had to pause for a good ten minutes before I could actually continue with the show. Isaiah Bradley and all his men deserved that ((and so much more)) for so long. The catharsis so visible when Isaiah hugs Sam so tight. The zoom in on the statue. Okay, I’m crying again.

Yeah, so when Bucky’s boyfriend has a BBQ he shows up like dancing like a dork with a cake and plays with all the kids.

Honestly, happiness looks so good on him. It’s so nice to see that again.

They really ended it with Sam and Bucky embracing and walking off together in the sunset.

CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE WINTER SOLDIER

Again, still not thrilled with what’s going on with Sharon but clearly they’re setting up for something so...I’m putting a bookmark in to hold my judgement.

Bc honestly, my biggest focus is:

CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE WINTER SOLDIER

Seriously though, overall, I think this was one of the best things Marvel has put out there in a while and I know I’ll come back to it again and again. Here’s hoping to more Cap to come!!!!

#sam wilson #bucky barnes #captain america #john walker #falcon and the winter soldier #captain america and the winter soldier #mcu #marvel #disney plus #my stuff #long post #capws spoilers #fws spoilers

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lligkv · 5 years

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many are called, few are chosen

Until I picked up The Razor’s Edge on a sale rack at Moe’s Books in Berkeley, W. Somerset Maugham was an author I’d known only as a name. The book sat on my shelf for a few weeks after I bought it, too. I didn’t feel any particular pull to it, and the list of books I have to read always outstrips my capacity. But when I did finally start it, I read Maugham’s comment that “Even so subtle and careful an observer as Henry James, though he lived in England for forty years, never managed to create an Englishman who was through and through English,” and I knew I was in for something good.

The Razor’s Edge centers on a couple, Laurence Darrell and Isabel Bradley, who break their engagement over their entirely different visions of life. Isabel wants a conventionally wealthy one; Larry, a war veteran who watched a good friend die for his sake, aims to leave society to discover what’s truly meaningful. The narrator, also named Maugham, tracks them as they pass in and out of each other’s life trajectories in the years after. He also tracks others in Isabel and Larry’s orbit: Gray Maturin, son of the businessman Henry Maturin, who also loved Isabel and wins her when Isabel and Larry decide to part ways; and Elliott Templeton, Isabel’s uncle, the brother of her mother Louisa, a dilettante and social butterfly who’s also a friend of Maugham’s.

Elliott often comes off ridiculous or outright irritating for his sociality—say, his determination unto his death to be invited to all the gayest parties in Paris, London, and the French Riviera, far past the time others in his social circle are willing to grant him dignity—and the determination with which he cleaves to the mores of that circle, as when he continually steers Isabel toward Gray because Larry continues to refuse to get a job for reasons Elliott can’t discern, “loafing” and losing himself in books instead. Maugham nevertheless regards Elliott with real affection, because he recognizes that under Elliott’s trivial shell lies real kindness. One pleasure of The Razor’s Edge is just how perceptive Maugham as writer-narrator is, always seeing both sides of everything and everyone. Isabel often seeks Maugham’s counsel both before her split with Larry and after, when he returns from his long sojourns in Europe and India. And while Maugham’s ultimate judgment of her—as lacking tenderness—proves too much for her to take, she admits several times that what he thinks of her means a great deal to her.

Indeed, what to think of Isabel? Initially she’s young, loving, yet clear-eyed. She’s patient with Larry, gently pushing past Elliott and Louisa’s concern with the time he’s taking to commit to her, or to a job, or to anything. As it becomes clear that what Larry’s going through isn’t just a phase, and she won’t get the life she’s used to with him, she breaks the engagement. She’s not without ambivalence about it—as she tells Maugham, “I know that I’m not playing the star part in this.” She also knows she’s the one who’d suffer for Larry’s genius. What’s more, as Maugham points out, there’s no guarantee Larry’s desires will amount to anything:

Years ago, when I was young, I knew a man who was a doctor, and not a bad one either, but he didn’t practice. He spent years burrowing away at the library of the British Museum and at long intervals produced a huge pseudo-scientific, pseudo-philosophical book that nobody read and that he had to publish at his own expense. He wrote four or five of them before he died and they were absolutely worthless. He had a son who wanted to go into the army, but there was no money to send him to Sandhurst, so he had to enlist. He was killed in the war. He had a daughter too. She was very pretty and I was rather taken with her. She went on the stage, but she had no talent and she traipsed around the provinces paying small parts in second-rate companies at a miserable salary. His wife, after years of dreary, sordid drudgery, broke down in health and the girl had to come home and nurse her and take on the drudgery her mother no longer had the strength for. Wasted, thwarted lives and all to no purpose. It’s a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, but few are chosen.

That last line haunts me. As a writer, I feel like one of the called. I fear I’m not one of the chosen.

And next to that, wouldn’t it be wiser to be an Isabel. Who does get what she wants when she marries Gray Maturin: the chance to travel, the chance to enjoy herself, children and a stable life. At least until the depression hits and Gray loses everything.

The years pass. In time, the five—Maugham, Isabel, Gray, Larry, and Elliott—reconnect in Paris. Elliott lives there; Isabel and Gray join him for a time to rally their funds and health; Maugham and Larry arrive at their bachelors’ leisure. Once there, the group runs into Sophie Macdonald, a childhood friend of Isabel, Larry, and Gray who, having lost her husband and child, has become utterly dissipated. Larry becomes determined to save Sophie. Isabel feels nothing but contempt for her, and fear Larry will be ruined.

It’s as though as Sophie’s star rises in Larry’s universe, Isabel’s star in the novel falls. She’s become crude. When she originally rejected Larry, it was because she simply wanted a conventional life, not because she felt contempt for those who didn’t lead such lives—in fact, she knew then Larry was one to admire. As an adult, on the other hand, she goes so far as to set a bottle of Polish liquor Elliott’s gifted her out in the drawing room specifically to tempt Sophie into drinking and falling back into her old life, out of Larry’s. Conventional culture coarsens people. It takes away their ability to make their own choices and to let others make theirs. You go so far into the role you play, like high-society wife, that you lose all self-awareness. Indeed, you have to bury any awareness of the nobler life to subsist in your social one. And Isabel’s has been buried so far she can’t see the spiritual valence of Larry’s attachment to Sophie. She’s no longer willing to dignify his desire or his choice. She can see only the social ruin—never mind that Larry doesn’t really have any social capital to speak of at this point; there’s no ruin to defend against. Whatever tenderness was once in her—whatever human feeling and spiritual sensitivity—is gone.

The sensitivity remains in Larry. Who’s something of a saint figure, if less like Christ than the stereotype of the Eastern sage that you could write about in Maugham’s day. As Maugham puts it, he’s possessed of a passion for self-sacrifice that “whirls the victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality.”

He’s also, as you might expect, a figure of doubt. The question that occupies him is “a basic question, but an eternal one: “If an all-good and all-powerful God created the world, why did He create evil?” Why did God allow a war that took his friends’ lives; why did God create humans with spiritual voids that drive them as Larry himself is driven? And if God made humans to be capable of sin, like Sophie with her drinking, why does he fault them for demonstrating that capacity?

After the conclusion of the Sophie Macdonald affair, the drama of Larry and Isabel’s relationship falls away; the question of God becomes the novel’s most pressing. Maugham also tags the chapter in which he and Larry have their deepest conversation about God as nonessential—and indeed the novel could stand fine without it. But it’s Razor’s secret heart. Larry’s ultimate argument in that chapter, as he reveals to Maugham what happened during his five years in India, is:

In the West, the structures of faith are elaborate (e.g., the Catholic church) and faith itself is tortured and ambivalent. In the East—again, speaking broadly—faith is lived; its structures are woven into daily life. Essentially, history’s spiral spins, over and over, into all time; we’re caught up, we live and die, in its churn. We don’t contemplate the churn until something like war brings us face to face with its reality. When you’re confronted by the nature of life in this way, you can either fashion a philosophy in which there is a God in charge of it all and fear of this God and obedience to Him give you a door out of this world and into Heaven. Or you can live your life in such a way that you might be able to renounce earthly life and exit the spiral of reincarnation or repetition for all time.

It’s an age-old opposition, nothing new, and Larry’s foray into Hinduism does feel like an orientalist answer to the question of occidental faith. But I think it’s hard to deny the appeal that non-duality—the idea that the mind and the body, the self and the world that surrounds it, are not separate; that all that is is “awareness”—can have for philosophically dualist societies and belief systems predicated upon Cartesian conceptualizations of the mind and body: the materialist idea of a concrete, distinct self tied to each body, which interacts with a world outside of it, that persists despite it.

Larry’s contention seems to be that in non-dual traditions, questions like “why did God create evil, or make evil possible?” can be answered—the answer being that there is no God who creates this evil or can save you from an original sin that’s intrinsic to your being, and nor is there any such sin. There is simply an Absolute from which the stuff that is your eternal soul is descended, to live out temporal loops of incarnation—as many as it takes to live a life free of misdeeds. And it falls upon you, in your soul’s current manifestation, to live in such a way that you might earn an exit from these loops—a return to the Absolute.

How do I feel about Larry’s argument? I can imagine that the idea that no evil really exists is comforting when you’ve witnessed something that’s otherwise entirely aberrant, senseless, unconscionable, like a person you love being blown to bits in front of you. Even if the other possible answer—that evil exists, and you’ve just witnessed it—seems just as plausible to me.

And while I’m sympathetic to Larry’s desire for truth. I don’t know that non-duality is where I’d find it. Or traditional religion, for that matter. I don’t consider the question of sin in terms of the state of one’s soul pressing. I consider the question of sin in terms of wrongs and harm done to others pressing. And something about the former way of thought feels a little self-absorbed to me—as though you’re interested in spiritual truth because of what it might mean for you, as opposed to what it might help you do, how it might help you minimize the harm to others that you might commit if you didn’t think in terms of right or wrong and about what’s ethical and what’s not.

But I say all this as a product of my particular historical moment. As I read The Razor’s Edge, my own distance from essential questions of goodness and evil felt very clear. I don’t know that I could imagine a Larry Durrell type living in 2019. I came to wonder if living in late-capitalist liberal democracy, post-religion, has robbed me of a capacity for deep moral or spiritual investigation like Maugham’s (or Graham Greene’s, another very moral writer I’ve read quite a bit of lately). After all, I too live in interesting times, times whose questions are full of moral stakes. (E.g., you live in a world that’s capable of separating migrant children from their families, keeping people who are blameless for their own conditions penned in arbitrary borders and denying them the right to live where they please based on the contingent fact of their citizenship. Do you participate in this world? How?) But—and I realize how self-indulgent this sounds; what the times I live in mean for my art is hardly the most relevant question I ought to be asking about them—I don’t seem able to write anything of real depth about the times in which I live. Let alone come up with substantive answers to any of my moral questions.

After I finished this novel, I came to think: maybe religion gives you the terms for a moral understanding of the world. And when you’re shaped by conditions that don’t mandate a faith—when the structures of your world are entirely liberal-democratic, or commercial, and not moral in any way—and you live a pretty safely bourgeois life, and you are not driven through an experience, like the war that Larry Durrell survives, that sends cracks through those conditions and reveals how contingent they are and the depths of human suffering that their prosperity can obscure—you become complacent. No questions like the ones that inform this novel ever occur to you.

Or rather, by the time that the things you’ve gotten used to break down, revealing the questions that you thought the End of History had rendered moot, you’re left with no sense of what the answers to those questions might be, and only the most unfit tools to find them.

#literary #books #novels #w. somerset maugham #the end of history #religion vs. secularity

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miasswier · 5 years

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miasswier’s ultimate glee ranking: no 28

28: Thanksgiving

Written by: Russel Friend and Garret Lerner. Directed by: Bradley Buecker

Overall Thoughts: Remember when Glee did a Thanksgiving episode that could have aired on Thanksgiving but instead they aired it the week after? That was great. I mean, I’m Canadian, so Thanksgiving was way over for me, but you know. I know this sounds snarky, but I really love this episode. It’s great to have so many of the original cast members bac k together, while Kurt and Rachel continue to thrive in New York. We finally get a bit of closure on the Klaine break-up, and Isabelle Wright aka the love of my life is back to bestow upon Kurt wisdom and upon me her amazing hair and amazing personality. Honestly, even the newbie storyline doesn’t annoy me as much as it could, because they manage to include a lot of the original ND members in said storyline, making it far more bearable.

What I Like:

QUINN IS BACK

I love the opening scene of this episode. It’s so wonderful and emotional and UGH when Finn fucking joins in I always cry it’s so goddamn amazing.

Everyone going out to Breadstix and catching up like the adorable best friends that they are.

Rachel and Kurt both look so good in that scene where they’re walking around NYC, and Rachel’s excitement about New York and their future is so invigorating.

ISABELLE IS BACK! I lover her so fucking much why wasn’t she in every episode o this season?!

It’s so nice to see an adult giving a young adult actual adult advice about how to move on from a very painful experience. Isabelle clearly has experience with this thing, and she is so genuine in her desire for Kurt to at least accept Blaine’s apology, even if that doesn’t mean getting back together. Seriously, I love her so much.

While I found it frustrating back in “Special Education” that what Rachel was really angry about was that Finn slept with Santana, not that he lied about being a virgin, in this situation I think it makes sense for her to be angry about the fact that Brody slept with Cassie, not just that he slept with someone else. And I think Rachel makes it really clear that that’s what she’s upset about. I’m totally on her side here.

When Brody is making the turkey and he goes “but no singing!” and Kurt looks so affronted and Rachel’s annoyed, “What?!” and pointing the peas at him.

I do appreciate the sentiment of Jake letting Ryder get the dance solo, even if the reason behind it kind of frustrates me (more on that later), and I also like how Ryder tells Jake to take the dance solo after all.

Marley saying she specifically doesn’t want to disappoint Jake and Ryder, hi, hello Glee, why weren’t they in a poly relationship?

Santana looking out for Marley, even if it was in that unique Santana way of hers.

The way Kurt flirts so easily and casually with Brody during “Let’s Have a Kiki” like Lima!Kurt would NEVER feel that comfortable being so casually flirty with a straight boy it makes me so happy to see

Emma being so excited to see Will back and Sue just deadpanning “America is thrilled” I love Sue so much

Kurt and Blaine’s conversation! Gosh, it puts me through so many emotions. The way Blaine just bursts into tears when Kurt admits he misses him, the way he can’t help but laugh when Kurt makes the quip about the mouse (he always seems to be the only one who really appreciates how hilarious Kurt is), the way he can’t stop himself from telling Kurt he loves him, and how he has to hang up right away as soon as Kurt says he loves him back because he obviously doesn’t want Kurt to hear him continuing to cry. And Kurt putting himself out there, admitting he’s not ready to forgive Blaine, but he misses him so much. The fact that he actually lets himself tell Blaine he loves him back. GOD THAT SCENE KILLS ME. It’s probably one of my favourite Klaine scenes ever.

I really like how they showed us what Marely was going through in her eyes, how disoriented she was becoming, etc. It makes for an even stronger “shock” (I mean, we all knew this was coming) when she passes out.

When they’re trying to figure out who should be the male dance lead and Sam goes “Hello? White Chocolate?” and starts dancing and Mercedes just goes “Oh, no, no, no, no”

What I Don’t Like:

I don’t know why Glee always insists on putting so much goddamn pressure on one single character to lead everybody to victory. Tina has more of a solo than Marley, so why do they all depend on Marley to be her best to win? Why is it on Marley’s shoulders? I get her feeling that way in her own head, but like, there are multiple mentions throughout the episode that they won’t win unless Marley is in peak performing condition. I don’t know if this was meant to be foreshadowing, or what, but it’s seriously frustrating.

It does frustrate me that Jake and Ryder continue to act like Marley has no agency in which one of them they date. The fact that Ryder basically says “Nah, it’s cool, you can date her, just give me the dance solo” as if Marley doesn’t get a choice is really annoying.

Kurt and Rachel continuously referring to their Thanksgiving as an “Orphans Thanksgiving” like you two made the decision not to come home? What are you doing.

Rachel forgives Brody WAY too quickly, and honestly, he basically shames her into doing it. He claims she isn’t being an adult or whatever, because apparently adults aren’t allowed to be angry when someone does something that hurts them? He also makes a super mysoginistic comment about how she’s being “that crazy girl who expects people to read her mind” when she’s literally mad because he slept with someone he knows hates her and she hates back. You don’t have to be a mind reader to know that she would be angry about that? Honestly, I wish they’d pulled the plug on Brody/Rachel here instead of having them suddenly jump into a super intense relationship. They could have made really good friends, maybe casual friends with benefits? I don’t know, I just really wish she’d stayed angry at him longer.

WHY IS KITTY SO GODDAMN MEAN WHAT IS HER MOTIVATION I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY SHE HATES MARLEY SO MUCH.

Songs:

Home/Homeward Bound: I love this song so much. It’s so gorgeous and so sweetly nostalgic, and such a beautiful blend of the best voices in the club. Absolutely gorgeous.

Come See About Me: Not really a fan of this one, but more-so because the song isn’t really my style. The performance is fun, though, and it’s really nice to see Quinn, Santana, and Brittany performing together again.

Whistle: I actually really like this cover a lot. They managed to have a white guy covering a rap without actually having him rap? Or, at least not really rapping? It sounds good, I don’t know. That being said, I do find it ridiculous that they would perform this song at a high school glee club competition. I don’t think so.

Live While We’re Young: I love this song, mainly because I love Sebastian so much! Although I will say, I’m not even a Seblaine shipper but it’s always felt there should have been a shot of Blaine in the audience while Sebastian is singing.

Let’s Have a Kiki/Turkey Lurkey Time: Would have preferred this not be a mash-up, but still a decent song, and a really fun performance.

Gagnam Style: Whose idea was this and why was this allowed to happen? I feel so bad for Tina because she finally has a solo in a competition, and it’s this. Seriously, I don’t get why so much pressure was on Marley. Tina is out here singing a song in Korean. Christ. They would have lost even if Marley hadn’t passed out, because this is just… Yikes.

Final Thoughts: This is an awesome, sweet, well-balanced episode. Obviously there’s stuff I don’t like, but it’s overshadowed by all the stuff I love. It’s just the right balance of nostalgia and new. Also, Quinn is back. I missed Quinn.

#ultimate glee ranking

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kingofthewilderwest · 6 years

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FMA 2003 Anime First Runthrough Thoughts

So people saw, in the last few weeks, me liveblogging my first runthrough of the 2003 Fullmetal Alchemist anime. I still have yet to finish the story by watching Conqueror of Shamballa, but before I do so and before I forget to do so, I’m going to post some of my thoughts - more coherently - about the 2003 series.

There are lots of angles I could look at, both pros and cons, and certainly all have points to talk about in length. I’m not going to go into everything now, though. What I’m writing here are some of the biggest first impressions I take from the 2003. Here I’ll mainly write a list of analytical qualifications of how FMA 2003′s storytelling structure differs from Arakawa’s - and consequently how the 2003 anime comes across (to me) as less effective. None of this is in disrespectful criticism of the 2003, which I did end up enjoying enough I’ll potentially do a rewatch (and some episodes I adore so much I actively recommend them to others, too). This is just for me to reflect, in fascination, at how 2003′s different writing choices create some different results and effects.

My response would be better nuanced and FAR more accurate with a second watch through, of course. So don’t take everything I say as a concrete, flawless handling of the topic. We don’t catch everything structurally and informationally the first time watching something, and a story feels different the second time through. However, these are points I take from a first run through regarding (what I feel to be) the odd, limited efficacy of the 2003:

FMA 2003 has an overall grimmer take on reality and achievement. How events unfold and how characters respond in the 2003 show a different level of cynicism versus motivational optimism than in FMAB / the manga. What moral lessons are expounded upon and taken away from has a huge effect on mood. Furthermore, to what extent characters achieve their goals, and feel satisfied with that, and how much characters receive a happy ending... plays into this overall mood difference between 2003 and 2009 / the manga.

FMA 2003′s pacing doesn’t have as much drive. This is due to several factors, like how much time is spent focusing on equivalent materials (ex: one versus two episodes in Liore with Father Cornello), how many filler episodes there are, and how pacing is weighted. FMA 2003 and FMAB have opposite pacing weights. The 2003 anime has a slow start and a faster end, whereas FMAB has a fast jump start but is climax heavy at the end. All of this results in FMAB having a much smoother flow and exciting build, whereas FMA struggles with momentum.

Arakawa is extremely solid for logical clarity, explanations, and follow-through - be it in why events happen in the story, or how clear the story feels to us audience members. Explanations, clarity, and follow-through of various points is more convoluted and inconsistent in the 2003.

So, to talk about it in more detail:

I have downright adored Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist storyline for almost a decade now and believe she has captured one of the most brilliant stories ever told. With the 2003 anime, it’s interesting to see creators take material just from the start of her writing and attempt to finish that story separately from her. There are some cool elements to it - the idea of the homunculi being created from failed human transmutation experiments is rather clever, for instance. But there are also some things which make the anime’s story less clean, directed, and powerful as what Arakawa does.

The writers don’t handle explanations and follow-through as well in FMA 2003. By “follow-through” I mean continuing storyline elements forward or using details from past episodes to build material in future episodes. So, if someone completely forgets to follow through on information, then plot threads are left hanging. FMA 2003 doesn’t usually leave threads hanging, but it’s like the story neglects to braid threads together evenly. This results in story threads feeling like a machine spurting on and off, material being less explained, story arcs being awkwardly handled, and the plot as a whole containing more logic holes.

It’s easy to talk about this with some examples. For instance:

Mustang assassinated the Fuhrer in an overt enough manner to be accused, and even if he and Hawkeye had managed to kill all nearby security, reports would have made it to other military personnel. In fact, reports of the event were how Archer got onto the scene to try to halt Mustang. At the LEAST, Roy would be obviously suspected of killing Bradley due to heavy lacerations across his body (plus wouldn’t an ambulance show up at Bradley’s location to take him to the hospital, showing where Mustang was at the time of the event??). And there would be other manners in which Mustang could be put in a position to be incriminated.

Edward said that Mustang could never be a leader again because he couldn’t get people behind him. Bradley himself said Mustang could never again hold a leadership position after assassination. And yet not only does Mustang have no seen dirt on him at the end of the anime, but he retains his high military rank - not even a demotion for disobeying orders, subverting northern troops, and killing the nation’s leader.

(Note: I know he drops in rank in Shamballa, but I hear that’s due to choice, not repercussions of the assassination - by the end of 2003 when he’s recovering, he’s still got his high rank. He gets off clean for literally murdering the country’s most powerful individual).

In fact, you have to wonder how everyone gets off the hook. It’s not like I’d expect them to pin down Havoc specifically impersonated Mustang, but higher-ranking officers like Alex Armstrong led troops to attack Central and that can’t be denied. Why is Alex stepping off free? For all this story focuses on the concept of equivalent exchange and unpleasant consequences, this story sometimes drops odd logic holes on the responsibility front.

Did you even notice Ed accepts Hohenheim as his father at the end... without obviously emotionally working through all the grits of Hohenheim’s backstory and information regarding Philosopher’s Stone creation? There might have been something here to explore the consequences of. It’s like Ed almost accepts his father more effortlessly in London after hearing Hohenheim’s worst side and past... than he does at the start of the story reuniting with Hohenheim.

The truth is that follow-through throughout the anime is uneven. The strangeness of the Elric brothers’ missing father gets hit hard in the starting episodes, gets dropped completely off the radar, then at once cumbersomely, in full force, is relevant again. That plot thread is neither paced nor juggled well. There’s a difference between hitting key moments to progress and build a plotline throughout, versus jumping in and out of the concept to the point it feels sporadically addressed. Many things get turned on and off like light switches. Mustang’s trauma with the past is something that gets hit heavy, dropped, and feels like it’s an on-off light switch several times... until the end where they retroactively discuss some (though not all) of the issue. Even things as major as the Ishvalans’ plight just disappear after Liore. What happens to the Liore refugees upon escaping? With Amestris still being an aggressive military power in a state of widespread racial discrimination, who decides to reverse Ishvalan policies? Why? There is no development, explanation, resolution - just a quick, vague comment at the end of the anime giving an unexplained positive nationwide social turn.

And these sorts of starts and stops and off-balanced jugglings of plots happen all too frequently in 2003. Interweaving of ideas doesn’t feel well-braided... more like a braid with uneven strands, some thin, some fat, some loosely pulled together, some clumps forgotten, some tightly cinched together. Things are connected in FMA 2003, yes, and sometimes in cool ways, but the presentation can be imbalanced.

This sense of uneven content distribution and execution ties into plot pacing.

FMAB starts with unashamed alacrity - not rushed, but nevertheless boldly throwing viewers into the fray. It has a quicker start but focuses on a longass, heavy, high-intensity climax lasting many episodes. Materials build up from the start into increasing stakes for an amazing end. Furthermore, the distribution of episodes in FMAB cleanly follow Arakawa’s three act structure - the East and Central, the North, and the Promised Day arc.

I don’t get the same sense of cleanliness in 2003. Maybe with a rewatch I’ll get the scaffolding, but in a first watch... not so clean. Opposite to FMAB, there is a very slow start, with beginning adventures feeling almost like small, segmented, episodic, low-stakes quests rather than some tension-building gestalt. And the climax, instead of being drawn out and grand for full effect, is proportionally short to the anime - with no time spread for a full denouement either.

So what’s the result? A complete contrast to FMAB. FMAB starts fast and draws out the climax, while FMA 2003 starts slow and shortly squeezes in a climax... which is a great way to stagnate momentum.

And as for the middling section... well. In 2003, there don’t feel to be as cleanly demarcated arcs proportionally. I feel like there is a lot of stop-go motion in the middle, too. Nothing builds to its full capacity and the other events don’t piggyback off well enough to keep momentum flowing throughout. There are a fair number of fillers. The excitement doesn’t vamp up near as much, nor feel as long sustained, nor make one event pull you grippingly into the next as well. Now, it’s true I could feel differently with a second rewatch and catch more of the flow. But I think it’s undeniable that there are different effects between how 2003 and 2009 are scaffolded - and goes to show how 2009 makes the much cleaner, more momentum-building plot building choices.

The 2003 series might also have felt more intense if they had created a greater range of character dynamics. More emotional range is effective, but 2003 doesn’t give us near as full a range as 2009. FMAB both gives us higher, more thrilling heroics... and worse pits of vulnerability.

In 2003 we talk more conceptually about Mustang’s grief over Hughes than show it; he is stable mentally even when he takes his boldest move on that front, assassinating Bradley. And in that scene, we never quite get the feeling “This is for Hughes.” Earlier, when Mustang works to rise his rank (and we barely see any of that), we don’t get much sense “This is for Hughes” either. Frankly, if people didn’t directly say it in dialogue, you almost wouldn’t have known.

Contrast this with Arakawa’s manga and the 2009 anime, in which something so small as Roy taking initiative (to ask every homunculi if they were Maes’ killer) gives us ongoing, lasting understanding Roy hurts. Then, once Flame of Vengeance and Beyond the Inferno happen, Mustang’s reaction is far, far, far more emotional and vulnerable. He goes to emotional levels 2003 doesn’t give him. We see Roy not just cry at a funeral one time, but here completely break down into a vengeful monster. Arakawa pulls Roy into downright VULNERABILITY and HUGE emotional failings, and because of that, we audience members take away so much more about his care for Hughes. We take away so much more emotion-wise ourselves!

So. We see Mustang at a far more extreme emotional low in 2009. (He breaks down three times in three distinct ways during the Promised Day arc!) AND. We also see him at more extreme moments of greatness. Fighting Bradley is undoubtedly Roy’s best, most dramatic moment in 2003, and while I enjoyed it immensely, there’s something to be said that Roy’s easily more badass in FMAB by episode nineteen. Death of the Undying is a powerful, jaw-dropping, eye-widening, fist-pumping, ultimate badass moment for Roy... and he hasn’t even hit his greatest OP strides. FMAB builds the heroes up to greater, longer, more intense battles that make you root for them and shout. There’s rarely even a single shout out “Yyyeees!!!” moment for our main characters in the 2003. It’s literally not until the last episode I felt any thrill for Roy fighting.

You know how much more emotional and amazing stories are when you give us these greater highs and lows???

And that’s just ONE example. List any character, and you’ll see the same pattern. Which feels more momentous? Ed punching Envy in 2003, or Ed whaling on Father in 2009? Sure, Ed might defeat more homunculi in 2003, but don’t the fights feel so much more epic and victorious in the manga? And which Riza makes you cry more: the woman who makes one (admittedly rather agonizing!) scream for Roy, or the woman who flips out in a gun firing spree when she thinks Roy is dead, guides a blinded Mustang after getting her throat slit, and declares at one point she’ll commit suicide after executing her commanding officer? Riza’s got many more cracks, depth, vulnerability, and badass heroicism in 2009.

Our big moments are bigger in 2009. Our low moments are lower in 2009. Our casualties hurt greater. Our successes feel more monumental. This range of emotion is critical to making story dynamic. Many ideas in 2003 don’t dig out their full potential because they restrict dynamic range. We NEED our characters to be vulnerable. We feel AMAZING when they’re big damn heroes. You walk away with so much more then.

Now, part of the 2003 not having anyone be big damn heroes is because of the grimmer take. Both FMA and FMAB tackle extremely serious topics with depth. But their takeaways are different. 2003 is a lot more about how life has problems; 2009 is a lot more about how life has solutions. Both stories have problems and rewards, but there’s a skewing in how the animes handle each.

For instance, FMA 2003 digs in deep with the Ishvalan people. There is a great amount of content and interesting, nuanced material showing a minority people suffering at the hands of an unsympathetic military state. I appreciate that significantly. The story does a great job calling out the military and questioning the state for their wrong actions. The story does a great job showing what injustices a people group can undergo, and how emotionally they are going to respond to such injustices. In another part of my liveblog, I described the sense of this plot arc as, “The military is shit. They destroyed us. We have the right to be angry. You can argue we have the right to fight back.”

There’s a lot of truth to what 2003 says. It’s a grim concept but quite true in the workings of the world. However, while 2009 also shows us how horrifying Ishval is and how terrible the workings of the world can be, it doesn’t stop at this grim perspective. FMAB also calls out the Amestrians for baselessly killing Ishvalans; Riza points out that even if upper command gave orders and Envy started the war, she and her fellow Amestrians carried out the bloodshed with their own hands. But. FMA 2003 says, “This is bad shit and people can be shit.” FMAB 2009 says, “This is bad shit. We should fix it.”

2009′s message states, “The military is shit. They destroyed us. We have the right to be angry. But that DOESN’T mean we have the right fight back. What we need to do is work to fix the horrors of this work.”

That wraps into one of Arakawa’s biggest, most widespread message throughout all of her manga, from start to end: All humans are important. All souls deserve to be treated with the utmost respect as human beings. It doesn’t matter if you’re a suit in armor. It doesn’t matter if you’re a pig chimera. It doesn’t matter what your race is. It doesn’t matter who started the bloodshed… you should be the one to end it. You are a human, human is good, and the best thing we can do is help each other. FMAB is about breaking out of the cycle of “an eye for an eye.” In 2003, Scar dies carrying out acts against the military. He doesn’t break the cycle. We understand why he responds the way he does, but it’s in 2009 that Scar and his brother become the damndest heroes in FMAB. Scar goes from someone with vengeful purpose for what the military has done to him… to trying to be the better person, the HERO, who fights back and gives back when no one else would before.

In the end, 2009 gives the Ishvalans new hope, too. It’s a lot more balanced in coming, especially as we see characters like Scar work through themselves... changing from a man taking vengeance for Ishval’s destruction, to someone working to rebuild Ishval. The Ishvalans’ return to their homeland is built up with good reason, hope, and moral messages. 2003 shows attention to the grimmer realities in how Scar’s life ends. 2009 gives us the greater perspective of growth and solutions in how Scar’s life moves forward.

How most characters’ goals are met - or not met - is another series of instances in which 2003 comes out less optimistically. Edward Elric and Roy Mustang have an entire conversation near the end of the 2003 anime about how both of them cannot achieve their goals in the way they initially intended. Mustang planned to rise to Fuhrer by distinguishing himself in military leadership. Ed planned to find his body by working as a State Alchemist. Both of these characters abandon their plans, Mustang commenting, “Both of us are like children, trying to be faithful in living out our dreams.” There’s a good lesson to be learned in this - don’t swallow evil into your plans, but purge it, even if it means stepping away from that initial dream - but it’s also got a lot more of the less pleasant grits of reality to it, than does FMAB in its messages.

For in the end of 2003, Roy Mustang never becomes Fuhrer, is not brought up any further up in military command to seem he could achieve that goal in the future, and is in fact set further behind his goal’s progression because of his injury. He wanted to become Fuhrer “for Hughes,” decided instead to kill Bradley “for Hughes” - but the result is a battle he barely wins, an encounter with Archer that makes him lose an eye, and a scenario in which he collapses unconscious in pools of blood from his injuries. Conqueror of Shamballa may of course change this state, but currently, by the end of FMA 2003, Roy Mustang’s life position is no great momentum forward. There are some good things about what’s become of his choices. He seems to be thankful to have Riza Hawkeye around him as he’s recovering. Still. It’s a more grim reality with grim results.

FMAB and the manga show a more positive future for Mustang. It’s also not ideal, but it’s a more optimistic angle. He’s going to regain his vision - the big injury he sustained during his final encounters with the enemy. Mustang is promoted to Brigadier General fairly quickly after the Promised Day arc. Only a few years down the road from that, he’s the second most powerful man in the country. The final photograph of him at the end of Chapter 108 shows us an esteemed General Mustang. And the way Grumman talks suggests he’ll be giving the Fuhrership to Roy down the road. Instead of Roy throwing away his goal’s hard work because it was imperfect, and instead of finding himself no noticeably further in life by the end of the story, Arakawa gives us a much brighter ending for Mustang.

Even if Conqueror of Shamballa may give Mustang a little bit more of a step forward, how Edward and Al regain their bodies still hits my point hard that how characters achieve their goals, and to what extent, is grittier in the 2003. It’s more imperfect in how life goes down. Al actually uses the Philosopher’s Stone inside him in the 2003; he and Ed sacrifice their well-being for each other to try to help one another; Al returns as a ten-year-old boy with lost memories; he and Ed find themselves in different worlds; and on and on. There are a ton of unideal angles in how Ed and Al return to their initial bodies in the 2003. You’re not celebrating a great, hard-earned victory. It’s CERTAINLYy not the same sort of exciting, fist-pumping achievement we get in FMAB when Ed finds a way to outsmart Truth and carry his brother home, arms wrapped around one another’s shoulders.

The way I like to phrase the end of FMAB is that most characters achieve 85% of their goal. There are some things that aren’t going to be ideal, and Arakawa acknowledges life isn’t ideal. Al gets Ed’s arm back but Ed will always have an automail leg. Edward Elric has to give up his alchemical abilities to return Al home. Roy Mustang has more years of work ahead of him before he can reach his goal. Ling Yao becomes Emperor, but doesn’t carry home with him an exactly immortal body. Mei Chang doesn’t become Empress, though she earns what she most wished to accomplish: secure the well-being of her clan. Winry, Ed, Al, and Mei all have wonderful relationships to grow through, too. Even though they don’t get every aspect of their goal achieved, that’s okay! It’s still the case that these characters earn through very hard work their own happy endings. These endings are more satisfying, and feel like a greater sense of accomplishment and resolution to their original goals.

2003 moreso undercuts what the characters want. What they achieve and how they achieve it is much less a sense of accomplishment, and focuses even more on the imperfections of the world around them. Ed and Al getting their bodies back isn’t a time to celebrate. It’s just another point in their long journey of trying to figure out how to make their life okay.

And we can continue looking at many more instances to see the pattern 2003 has a less optimistic spin on events. Both stories show imperfections in life, but 2003 hits that sense of imperfection harder and with less payoff to characters. Equivalent exchange and the suffering we endure in life - that’s definitely more positively spun in Arakawa’s tale than the first anime.

Even the ending words of the two anime, while both being similar in their idea, give a sense of the differing levels of focus between imperfection and inspiration:

FMA 2003: Man must pay an equal price in order to obtain anything. That is the Law of Equivalent Exchange. At the time, we believed that to be the true way of the world. But the real world is imperfect, and there was no law that could explain everything. It’s the same with the Law of Equivalent Exchange. Even so, we believe that man cannot obtain anything without paying a price. The pain that we received must have been the price we paid to obtain something. And, by paying the price of effort, everyone will certainly be able to obtain something. Equivalent Exchange is not the law of the world. That’s the promise Brother and I made to each other until the day we meet again.

FMA 2009: There’s no point to lessons that don’t bring with them pain. People can’t gain anything without sacrificing something, after all. But once you’ve successfully endured that pain, you gain a heart that is stout enough not to become overcome by anything. Yeah, a heart made of fullmetal.

Both of these endings acknowledge that we gain something when we go through pain. But in 2003, Al says that the world is imperfect and what he and his brother believed about equivalent exchange was imperfect. Al also is trying to say that he wants to step beyond the imperfect and incomplete Law of Equivalent Exchange and through that find a way to reunite with his brother. There’s a lot more focus on imperfection and the fact that life continues to bring imperfection to him. In the 2009, stating that we gain something through pain is given a more positive spin: once you do that, you can overcome everything. It’s not just that paying the price of pain will gain you a mediocre “something” - it’s that it will turn you into someone with a steel-strong heart that can overcome anything. Mentioning the Law of Equivalent Exchange in FMAB isn’t to talk about how the world is imperfect, but here it’s to say that the experiences we undergo give us a great end result. Hardcomings build our character and give us a happy ending.

There’s certainly a difference in mood between these two closing monologues, similar as they are in conceptual content. FMAB is far more inspirational.

Now. Don’t let this long analysis suggest that I think FMA lacks good quality. There are some extremely cool topics that FMA 2003 discusses in depth, especially regarding our responsibilities in war. And typically I tend to enjoy stories that acknowledge the imperfections of our experiences, and how situations never resolve in the glittery manner we imagine. However, in the case of FMA versus FMAB, I have to say that Arakawa’s story is by far more successfully emotional, satisfying, and inspirational. There has to be some payoff for characters to undergo their challenges. The way FMA 2003 is written, there is less payoff and less inspiration.

These are just some of my thoughts about how FMA 2003 is framed, and how that makes it feel in comparison to FMAB. I’ve had a hoard of fun watching the older series, and I could certainly talk about its positive sides, too. However, I think that’s enough yakking for now. These were my biggest impressions of the series before heading off to Conqueror of Shamballa.

#long post #non-dragons #fma #Fullmetal Alchemist #Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood #FMAB #Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood #analysis #my analysis

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junker-town · 3 years

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Anti-vaxxers are getting way too much say in NBA Covid protocols

Set Number: X163652 TK1

The majority of the NBA is vaccinated, so why is the anti-vaxx minority calling the shots?

Every sports league has had to find ways to deal with trying to run professional sports in the middle of global pandemic. Concessions have been made, plans altered — all in service of trying to keep games going while ensuring players and fans are protected. Intelligence prevailed when the the NFL and NFLPA eventually found common ground on a way to proceed in 2021. Now the NBA is in the midst of its own negotiations, and the league is on the verge of collapse because of it.

There is no point trying to mince words on the issue or dance around what’s happening. NBAPA vice president Kyrie Irving, who has always had a penchant for conspiracy theories, is now in a position of power in helping decide the biggest health issue the league has ever faced. While an estimated 90 percent of the league has been vaccinated, a loud, anti-vaxx cabal is using the NBA/NBAPA negotiations as a soap box to peddle their misinformation, and nobody is stepping in to stop it.

On August 7 an NBAPA meeting was held to discuss the league’s desire to have players reach 100 percent vaccination by the start of the NBA season. It was an important topic the union needed to discuss, but was met with a widespread unwillingness to even talk about the issue. According to a piece by Matt Sullivan in Rolling Stone, while the majority of NBA players who have not yet been vaccinated are guided by misplaced skepticism, a small, but vocal minority of anti-vaxx conspiracy theorists are railroading proceedings by killing conversations.

As NBA media days started this week, Irving was among those dancing around the topic of vaccination when asked directly is simply an effort to preserve his public image. Instead of accepting the damage he’s doing, Irving is touting the “personal choice” line, which has been repeated ad nauseam by vaccine skeptics as justification not to get the jab. Overwhelming scientific evidence indicates that choosing not to be vaccinated is a societal choice, not a personal one — because of the myriad ways it impacts those around us.

Meanwhile Bradley Beal is out here peddling the notion that NBA players are getting sick from the vaccine, despite there being absolutely zero evidence of that being the case.

Bradley Beal on his bout with COVID-19, which cost him the Olympics: "I didn’t get sick at all. I lost my smell. That’s it.” Beal adds that no one will talk about adverse reactions to the vaccine and how it impacts player health. No NBA player has missed time due to the vaccine.

— Ben Rohrbach (@brohrbach) September 27, 2021

On the plus side, Beal can’t smell his own bullshit.

A recent tactic by the anti-vaxx contingent has been to try and seek religious exemption as a means to avoid getting vaccinated. Andrew Wiggins was denied vaccine exemption from the NBA on Friday, meaning he needs to either comply with orders mandated by the San Francisco Department of Health, or not play in any home games this season.

The NBA has announced the following: pic.twitter.com/6t1spKMU35

— NBA Communications (@NBAPR) September 24, 2021

A similar provision in New York City will prevent Irving from playing in Brooklyn this season, and there’s no evidence he plans to get the shot.

Jonathan Isaac of the Magic, one of the players who chose to stand during the national anthem inside the NBA bubble and not side with players supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, is also vehemently against vaccination, citing his religious beliefs as a key factor. He told Rolling Stone:

“If you are vaccinated, in other places you still have to wear the mask regardless. It’s like, ‘OK, then what is the mask necessarily for?’” Isaac continues. “And if Kyrie says that from his position of his executive power in the NBPA, then kudos to him.”

Let’s be abundantly clear: Wearing masks is not some huge hidden secret warranting discussion. This is not Scooby and the gang zooming around in the Mystery Machine to solve another groovy mystery. The topic of masks has been discussed, again, and again, and again since the pandemic began. Saluting someone for “asking the tough questions” is simply acknowledging that you have done ZERO research on the topic.

Vaccinated individuals can still spread Covid

The more Covid spreads the greater chance of mutation into more harmful variants that vaccines may not offer protection against

Children who can’t be vaccinated and those who are immunocompromised deserve consideration and care, making masks the bare minimum society can do to help protect them

Isaac’s choice is to ignore science and put his faith in God. He has every right to do that. That right does not extend to allow him to play in the NBA with any impact on his career. Furthermore, invoking religion as a defense is a particularly insidious rhetorical technique that positions religion and science is oppositional forces. This is something that particularly frustrated Enes Kanter, who is a devout Muslim and also in favor of players being forced to be vaccinated.

“If a guy’s not getting vaccinated because of his religion, I feel like we are in a time where the religion and science has to go to together,” he tells RS. “I’ve talked to a lot of religious guys — I’m like: ‘It saves people’s lives, so what is more important than that?’”

Kanter plays for the Celtics, a franchise intimately aware of the risks of Covid. Celtics forward Jayson Tatum, a 23-year-old with no prior health conditions, is still experiencing “long Covid” symptoms requiring him to use an inhaler before games, this despite contracting the virus in January of 2021.

Karl-Anthony Towns, another healthy, elite athlete who already had to deal with the tragedy of losing his mother to the virus, told Sports Illustrated that he lost 50 pounds after contracting Covid himself. Now players like Towns and Tatum, ravaged by the virus, are forced to sit back while decisions are being made by the least-knowledgeable people.

The fight is taking front stage in the NBA, but the concern is that the sensible voices are not the loudest. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is doing his part, explaining why it’s so critical that current superstars lead the charge to combat the public health crisis.

“Which is why it’s so shocking and disappointing to see so many people, especially people of color, treat the vaccination like it’s just a matter of personal preference, like ordering no onions on your burger at a drive-thru. While I can understand the vaccine hesitancy of those who have been historically marginalized and even abused by the health care system, enough scientific documentation has been given to the public to set that past behind us for now. Yes, we should never forget. Those experiences should sharpen our critical thinking to not accept things blindly. But it doesn’t mean we reject things blindly. The drowning man doesn’t ask if a racist made the life preserver keeping him afloat, only that it works to save his life.”

Kareem went on to say that “those who claim they need to do “more research” are simply announcing they have done no research.” To take this a step further, I would add that people who want to do “more research” are specifically waiting for something, anything to support their biases, regardless of whether it’s intelligent or not.

That’s how we reach the point where numerous vetted, supported medical journals are thrown out in favor of one, which has not been corroborated, but supports an opposing view. It’s how hundreds of millions of vaccinated individuals who have had zero complications are ignored in favor of one person saying their cousin’s best friend’s daughter’s mail carrier died after getting the vaccine. It’s how Dr. Fauci and dozens of other respected virologists are branded as “liars.”

There is no doubt this is a supremely difficult situation. It is not right to ignore the concerns of people of color when they talk about trusting a government, which for generations has established a pattern of abhorrant behavior designed to put their needs last. However, there has to be an intelligent way to broach this topic that doesn’t involve outwardly rejecting any vaccine mandate, while siding with beyond ludicrous conspiracy theories. We can have the discussions, like Kareem is trying to, where we address this distrust, but also champion saving lives.

Unfortunately as it stands it’s a question of whose voice is the loudest, and sensible people like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jayson Tatum, Karl-Anthony Towns and Enes Kanter are being drowned out by uninformed, unintelligent stupidity. The NBA and the NBAPA need to do more, and do better — and not accept that inaction is the path forward.

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briangroth27 · 6 years

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Avengers Infinity War Review

I went into Avengers: Infinity War completely bored with the drawn-out Infinity Stones plot (it’s been going on for 6 or 7 years—since First Avenger or Avengers—depending on how you want to call it and Guardians of the Galaxy devalued the Stones by calling them meaningless McGuffins), uninterested in Thanos (Josh Brolin) as a villain, and not at all ready to say goodbye to original Avengers like Captain America (Chris Evans) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). However, the movie definitely dispelled the vast majority of my doubts! It was very well-made, expertly wove a huge amount of characters together, and absolutely felt like an epic event movie. That said, while I didn't dislike it by any means, there also weren't any moments that really wowed me; I liked it a lot, but didn’t love it.

However, it’s obvious the creators did. It’s clear this movie isn’t a cash grab, but a celebration of the universe Kevin Feige and his numerous writers, directors, and actors have crafted over the past 10 years (which is a bit odd to say, given this movie gets dark). Infinity War never feels cynical or forgets to treat its heroes as heroes, despite their imperfections. Gone are the days of severe hero infighting; when a universe-threatening enemy shows up, everyone puts their differences aside to save the day (even if they bicker from time to time). I love that writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely changed the source material (Infinity Gauntlet) to make the Avengers the main characters out to stop Thanos instead of cosmic characters we haven’t met in the movies. It would’ve been extremely disappointing to have an entirely new group of characters come out of nowhere to steal our heroes’ thunder. Script-wise, this movie feels like meeting old friends again, as the writers captured the various heroes' voices well. While less-skilled writers might have washed out nuances between characters due to the similarity of trademark MCU snark, everyone still felt distinct here and there were plenty of standout comedy moments balancing the dramatic beats perfectly. Even though I haven’t previously been invested in some of these characters, everyone came off as likable. I do wish we’d gotten more character moments out of more of the heroes: all of them (somewhat necessarily, given the scope) come in as we left them in their last adventure, even though for about half of them, two years (or more, in the case of the Guardians) have passed since we last saw them. This lack of development wouldn’t be as much a problem for me if there were more solo films coming, but given we know whose contracts are expiring, it seems several Avengers have run their course in the MCU and are leaving interesting stories on the table. I have no problem with a universe-threatening villain in a sprawling adventure, but given the choice between that and digging into the characters more, I’d prefer solo films. Still, there’s only so much screentime the acting was strong across the board; even when the script didn’t give some actors a lot to work with, they were able to play to their characters’ iconic true north really well. The writers and the Russo Brothers brought everyone together seamlessly, creating several fun new dynamics. Tony (Robert Downey, Jr.), Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), and Star-Lord’s (Chris Pratt) similar attitudes irked each other perfectly while Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Rocket (Bradley Cooper), and Teen Groot (Vin Diesel) came together organically and Captain America’s crew mixing with the heroes of Wakanda felt totally natural.

Full Spoilers...

There are a lot of character beats I loved. Black Widow consistently being the deadliest of the Avengers was great (and I’d love to see these skills put to the test as her enemies come after her in a solo film, allowing her to finally clear her Red Ledger), and her kickass team-up with Okoye (Danai Gurira) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) was a great (if brief) showcase of the MCU’s heroic women. Likewise, I loved that Shuri (Letitia Wright) was the obvious person to turn to when it came to super-science, and her reaction to Stark and Banner’s (Mark Ruffalo) construction of Vision (Paul Bettany) made it absolutely clear that her tech abilities far outstrip theirs. I’ll take any Shuri appearance I can get and I wonder if she'll get to be the Black Panther in her brother's (Chadwick Boseman) absence like in the comics. I do wish she could’ve met Peter Parker (Tom Holland) and that they could’ve become science besties. Spidey’s enthusiasm for superheroics and his drive to protect his neighborhood was a breath of fresh air, particularly when played against the more cynical characters. I do think his willingness to come up with a plan to kill a villain was a little alarming morally, but otherwise I love his youthful energy. I wish we could’ve seen the fallout of Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) discovering Peter is Spider-man at the end of Homecoming as part of Peter’s introduction here, because that certainly needs to be dealt with onscreen. Maybe he could’ve finally said “with great power comes great responsibility” and mentioned Ben in that moment, which would also fuel his decision not to leave when Tony tells him to get off the ship. I get the urgency of giving Peter the Iron Spider suit (which looks much better than in the comics), but I was kinda bummed that we’re yet again having Tony hand all these toys to Peter instead of Peter developing them himself (I prefer a self-sufficient Spidey using homemade tech). Speaking of Tony, it was great to see him come up against egos as big as his, particularly when Star-Lord threw his plan away outright and came up with a better one. His reaction to Strange’s magic was what you’d expect from Stark encountering the supernatural and I wish they’d had time to dig into a science/mysticism dichotomy between them a bit more. Tony’s arc of telling Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow) about wanting to have kids to losing his surrogate son Peter at the end was much more emotional than the “last man standing” fear vision he had in Age of Ultron. I thought his reluctance to call Steve as the crisis started was a fine—if underwhelming—continuation of their rift from Civil War, though I think it’s worth noting that he kept the flip phone on him for use at a moment’s notice (even if he didn’t end up calling Rogers personally).

Steve's "We don't trade lives" is a great motto and, like others have noted, it’s the answer to Thanos’ argument. I just hope it's not reversed in the next installment by the original Avengers sacrificing themselves for Thanos' victims. I also liked that they dealt with the potential dissonance with Cap sacrificing himself at the end of First Avenger, though Banner's justification was essentially that Steve didn't have a choice. I worry that Cap and the others will be forced into a place where they don't have a choice in Avengers 4. It would’ve been nice to dig into Cap’s thoughts on having become a nomadic vigilante after the events of Civil War and to at least hear what he and his crew have been facing in that time. I’m glad he hasn’t lost his upstanding personality, but he, Nat, and Sam (Anthony Mackie) don’t seem very changed by their time on the run, which felt like a missed opportunity: you’d think losing the Avengers’ insulation would be the perfect time to expose Steve to how the common people’s ideals and dreams have changed, which would be a fantastic conflict for him. I really wish we were getting one more solo Cap film to deal with just that: are his ideals outdated? What kind of symbol does America want now, and does he need to remind us of what we should be aiming for? What of citizens who spout hate and call it patriotism? Maybe they can persuade Evans to come back for a Logan-scale solo film set before Infinity War to explore this kind of thing. Still, it was good to see Steve and Bucky (Sebastian Stan) reunite, but I wish we (and Rogers) had gotten an idea of Bucky's newfound peace. I like the idea of Bucky finding his place as White Wolf in Wakanda instead of taking over as Captain America, so some idea of what he's been doing beyond recovering would've been nice. I wish that Cap's other bestie, Sam, had gotten more than an extended cameo here; at the very least, both he and Rhodey (Don Cheadle) should've have something to say upon seeing Wakanda for the first time (as pointed out here). I guess the writers wanted to focus on the characters who'd be vanishing so their loss would hit harder—and the original heroes are said to get the spotlight in the next film before we say goodbye—but small moments like that would've added a lot (especially as Sam vanished). However, I was glad to hear Rhodey had turned on the Sokovia Accords in the time since Civil War; it seems all the heroes on Tony’s side have realized how bad an idea it is, which is a nice vindication for Cap (Spidey hasn't signed or commented on them at all, perhaps because he's a minor and isn't thinking about the big picture).

It would've been nice to see more of how Wakanda had begun opening itself to the world beyond staging the final battle there. Does T’Challa have a specific plan for his outreach centers? Okoye's comment about imagining Wakanda taking part in the Olympics or getting a Starbucks was funny, but I wanted more. More pointedly, how do the people view T'Challa's decision? Is there any dissension, especially when his choice immediately brings a war to their doorstep? I really would’ve liked to see T’Challa convincing the people to take on this struggle (at the very least, Black Panther 2 needs to discuss this). If nothing else, his role as King could’ve made him a starker contrast to the other heroes. It seems T’Challa and Cap’s strategy held off Thanos’ forces long enough for Shuri to copy Vision’s AI, so even though his body was destroyed he could come back though honestly I'm not sure he's necessary. I don't really get Vision, so it could just be me, but his story seems to have come to an end. I appreciate that he isn't written like a cliché robot seeking humanity (or seeking to eliminate it), but his purely analytical outlook from Age of Ultron and Civil War seems to have largely faded, he isn't protecting the world like Stark created him to at all (as a friend of mine pointed out), he seems potentially too powerful to fully use his abilities, and I don't really see what he adds to the overall universe at this point. I do buy his love for Wanda (and hers for him) as well as their connection over the mysteriousness of their origins, though. Given all she's been through and the incident that sparked the Sokovia Accords, I don't blame Wanda for wanting a normal life with Vision. However, it would've been nice to get a glimpse of her view on the world post-Civil War and how she felt about being tied to a cosmic force like the Infinity Stones that already mutated her and her brother and now threatened her love. I liked the twist that Wanda could destroy the Mind Stone since it was used to create her powers and that she was perhaps the most powerful Avenger. One of the other most powerful, Hulk, got an unexpected arc that didn't fully land for me. I'm all for Hulk having his own character development, but if his refusal to show himself really was fear after his beating from Thanos (as fans have speculated), that wasn't clear. Instead, it felt like they played Banner's inability to transform as a joke. I was also underwhelmed by the moment touching on the Bruce/Nat relationship. I'm not a fan of that relationship in general—she doesn't need to date anyone, but if she were going to, she and Cap had the best chemistry and "opposites attract" spark—but this is what we've got and they need to deal with it. The awkwardness of their reunion didn't cut it for me.

As far as reunions go, it was a bummer that Thor and Loki’s (Tom HIddleston) peace after Ragnarok was immediately cut short here. While I felt it was time for Loki’s death—too many wishy-washy alliances and betrayals over the years wore out his welcome for me and Ragnarok established that he was aiming to be a lazy king, defanging his villainy—I’m glad he finished his arc and found real peace with Thor. I thought telling Thanos to kill his brother felt a little off at first, but I suppose making it seem like he’d put up a fight to keep the Tesseract was part of his elaborate plan to try to kill Thanos (as was bringing up that he’d worked for him before). It was also a little disappointing that the Asgardians took another huge hit to their population here and are apparently just left floating in space. I certainly hope Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) survived and can join the fight to get revenge on Thanos; losing so many of her people again has got to have an impact and I'd love to see the lessons about heroism Thor imparted to her inspire her to stand up rather than run away this time. Maybe she could become something of a queen of Asgard and lead the survivors to a new home! Even beyond losing half of his people, Thor going over all the family and friends he’d lost with Rocket was a somber moment and Rocket’s attempts at consolation were a nice gesture. I felt like Infinity War found a perfect balance of Thor’s humorous and serious sides, and I hope it sticks around. The bond Thor and Rocket developed was a highlight of the film, even if their quest to get Thor a new weapon a movie after establishing he didn’t need one was a little odd (as others have noted). I can’t wait to see how Rocket grows after losing all his family, especially now that we know Teen Groot’s last word to him was “Dad…” That’s heartbreaking! Moody Teen Groot was a very entertaining addition to the Guardians and they got a lot of mileage out of making the Guardians his “parents.” Mantis (Pom Klementieff) is another strong addition who gelled well with the rest of her crew thanks to her enthusiasm for “kicking names and taking ass!” I’m glad she stuck around after Guardians 2. I was impressed that she got to play such an important and powerful role against Thanos when they tried getting his glove off. I still prefer Drax’s (Dave Bautista) original “takes everything literally” personality from the first Guardians, but I liked his humor here a lot better than in the second film (where it seemed to settle on “states the obvious” instead). “Perfecting” invisibility by standing totally still was hilarious! I’m glad he got a chance to avenge his family, even if it didn’t work out and nearly cost them everything. If only Quill had learned a lesson from that failure! I don't think the movies should follow the comics in having Thanos see the error of his ways while Nebula (Karen Gillan) becomes the real villain. It's a cliché that a woman achieves ultimate power only to become evil, so I’d be much more interested in seeing her interact with Tony (maybe they make something of their biology-infused tech similarities?) than going off the deep end. True Thanos' torture of her was horrific, but I'd like to see her take a healthier path instead of spiraling into insanity after all the pain she's had to endure.

I was wary of Gamora (Zoe Saldana) making Quill promise to kill her if things went bad in their attempt to stop Thanos from collecting all the Stones because she knew where the Soul Stone was hidden, as it seemed like that could lead to fridging her. Ultimately, though, that request being her choice and the fact that she was killed for more than fueling Quill's angst avoided that (though she does fuel Thanos’). I don't have a problem with him getting emotional and punching Thanos when he found out about Gamora, but I wish that scene had been staged differently. I thought we got a good amount of range from Pratt in the film, from that sadness to his romance with Gamora to bickering with Stark to the comedy surrounding his confidence issues around Thor. Star-Lord copying Thor's accent was unexpectedly fun and it was great to see Stark's dismissive attitude thrown back in his face. The similarities between Stark and Strange were also fun, and I enjoyed Strange's completely different point of view from everyone else when it came to saving the day: he had no problem sacrificing anyone. That perspective is one I would've thought would belong to someone with universal experience like Thor or who’s coldly calculating like Vision, but it was nice to see a human thinking beyond their planet, even if I agree with Cap's "we don't trade lives" philosophy and not Strange's "sacrifice whoever it takes" outlook. I thought he'd given Thanos something other than the Time Stone when he traded it "to save Tony," and like a friend of mine suggested, he probably rigged it in some way to give the heroes a chance.

I thought it was incredible that, despite some iffy CGI in a couple of wide shots, Josh Brolin was able to emote so clearly as Thanos. I'm not sure I've seen a CGI villain in a live-action movie done this well technically, and it certainly helped that the writers let Thanos experience loss and remorse. I was impressed they included his emotional side and gave him an arc, but I do have an issue with that remorse: despite Brolin selling the feeling of a man who thought he was giving up what he loved most, Gamora is right and what he's framed as love is anything but. It's abuse and as others have pointed out, I'm not sure why he loved Gamora in the first place. His "adoption"/kidnapping of her felt a little random and turning her face away from the murder of half her people did nothing to convince me he was a caring parent (I'm also unclear as to why she was so transfixed by a knife he gave her that she forgot about her missing mom), nor do the facts that he turned her into an assassin and later killed her. As a friend pointed out, I wish we’d seen more focus on Gamora's view of being raised by Thanos in Guardians 2 to increase the complexity of their relationship. Even if we had (and her laughing in his face when she finds out he has to sacrifice something he loves gives us a good indication of it), I still wouldn’t sympathize with Thanos…if he really loved her, he would’ve let her live and would’ve abandoned his plan when it came down to choosing between them. The more I think about it, the more troubled I am by the implications of the Soul Stone trade. Since Thanos' task is to sacrifice something he loves and he's successful, it implies that whatever cosmic judgment holds the Stone agrees that what he felt for Gamora is love. Unless the Young Gamora (Ariana Greenblatt) in the Stone at the end is a punishment to torture him for an impure trade (which I'd be fine with)—I imagine she’s actually adult Gamora using a form that will turn the screws on Thanos harder, and her Soul enduring there will allow her to come back to life—this is a pretty messed-up message and it’s my biggest issue with the movie.

I would've preferred keeping Thanos' comic motivation of becoming the universe's greatest killer to impress the physical embodiment of Death by showing what an awesome guy he is (to which she shrugs, having done better herself); playing the galaxy's greatest scourge as a Nice Guy would've been an unexpected way to make him relatable and of the moment without really having to modernize him at all. That said, trying to kill half the universe to save it from overpopulation is a fine egomaniacal supervillain motivation (no, internet thinkpieces, he is not a hero), even if I wish the heroes had pointed out the flaws in his logic (as others have pointed out online) and how foolish this plan is. For example, unless he also makes the survivors immortal and sterile, people will still breed and kill each other, throwing his precious balance out of whack within a generation or two (and his sunset retirement at the end doesn't imply he thinks he’ll have to conduct regular cullings). He also gives no consideration to how the resources he's "saved" will be used on each planet, leading me to think that things are going to immediately descend into chaos as the survivors try to take all they can (especially if the majority of any given people's governments survived to maintain their status quo). And as I've seen elsewhere, what if a people were already using resources responsibly and he killed them without bothering to check? Better yet, why doesn't he just create an infinite set of resources with his all-powerful glove? Forcing him to confront flaws in his plan would give us more insight into his thought process, or at least the justification he's sold himself. If the Gauntlet can only destroy and not create for some reason, explaining that would've served to make Thanos seem more backed into a corner and desperate, making his thought process seem slightly more "necessary." Instead, he comes off as a lunatic (yes, he’s known as the Mad Titan) who couldn't get over his one terrible idea because he confused the mismanagement of Titan's resources with proof he was right and not crazy. I've seen comments suggesting he be seen as a conservative politician, only concerned with fawning over his ideology instead of seeing the detrimental effects it has on the people, and that's not a bad take: looking at him as an outdated fringe "visionary" who won't learn/evolve his thinking or question his way of doing things helps quite a bit. I feel like these questions and the sheer outlandishness of his plot ranks him far below the best MCU villains like Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), Vulture (Michael Keaton), and Hela (Cate Blanchett), who all went to terrible extremes, but at least had motivations that were somewhat understandable and tethered to reality. He was still a powerful threat who truly required all the heroes working together, though.

Thanos' "children" (Terry Notary, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Carrie Coon, Michael James Shaw, Monique Ganderton) were fine as lackeys, which is all they needed to be. I wish X-men Apocalypse had taken a similar tack with the Horsemen instead of using famous mutants: we don't need to know characters who are essentially zealot thugs. I did appreciate how warped they were to Thanos' way of thinking, though. They also proved to be worthy matches for the heroes before facing the Mad Titan himself.

Infinity War has an incredible sense of scope, giving the impression that the Marvel cosmos are vast, but it was odd they were largely devoid of people (even on Earth). Showing more than just wreckage would've upped the stakes and impact of Thanos' climactic actions while also showing the overpopulation “problem” he seeks to solve. The pacing moves the film along really well, even with the film being as packed as it is (though it doesn’t feel overstuffed). I loved that they were willing to have imaginative fun with the Infinity Gauntlet's powers, like turning laser blasts into bubbles, throwing a moon at our heroes, literally unraveling Mantis, and turning Drax into blocks. I’m all for more weirdness like that! The action is thrilling and moves very well for the vast majority of the film, with one major exception. A pivotal battle with Thanos on Titan has Iron Man, Spidey, Strange, and several Guardians struggling to hold him long enough to steal his Gauntlet. They almost succeed, but Star-Lord messes up his own plan (when it's revealed Gamora is dead) by punching Thanos in the face, knocking Mantis (who's psychically subduing him) away and freeing Thanos. I don't have a problem with Quill reacting to the news emotionally, but the staging of the scene offers at least two ways the heroes could've won right there: Nebula does nothing when she could've been stabbing Thanos in the face, and either she or Strange could’ve cut off his arm to free the Gauntlet. I know the movie can't end there, so knock Nebula out or otherwise busy her and Strange before writing yourself into a situation that raises these questions. Or they could've let Thanos lose his arm, yet still regain the glove through brute force or cunning before the heroes could get a handle on how to use it: showing him as a scrappy underdog for a moment would make him look more dangerous (and more appealing to the audience).

Despite an ad campaign suggesting a culmination of the MCU, Infinity War feels more like a seamless continuation of it. I'm glad they hit the ground running and didn't take the time to re-introduce everyone, except when it made sense, like the Guardians and Thor meeting for the first time. This will be detrimental for anyone coming into the film having missed earlier entries, but I think it works for this series. Reveals of familiar characters and locations, like Cap and Wakanda, made me smile. It was also great to finally get an answer to a dangling question about Red Skull's (recast with Ross Marquand) whereabouts in a completely unexpected way! I understand why they ended the movie on the beat they did, but part of me wishes this hadn't been a two-parter: I'd like there to be more adventures than just Thanos Round Two. I don't have a problem with the MCU going on indefinitely, but I do want them to take the time to continually develop and change the characters, and disparate threats would be a great way to challenge them differently. Between changes, we also need to spend time in their status quos to see how they react to each new normal. That's the weakness of movies vs. shows, though, and it seems highly unlikely the MCU is willing to give that much time to its movie heroes.

Infinity War felt like a true comic book crossover and that's the direction I want the Avengers films to take: they should be the crossovers with MCU-altering events while the solo franchises are just that, exploring the worlds of each character while focusing on character development. However, like the revolving door of death in the comics, a lot of the impact of this finale is going to come down to how the fallout is handled. I feel there are three necessary components to making the ending of Infinity War matter: the survivors need to be changed by losing their friends and half the general populace, the victims need to be changed by their experience as well, and we need to see what happened to the world in the wake of Thanos' Snap. Regardless of how the Snap is undone, everyone should remember what happened to give the events weight. Since I don't think Infinity War 2 will have time to deal with (and say a final goodbye to) the original Avengers, let everyone have a moment to shine, chase down Thanos, undo what he did, and really explore the state of the post-Snap world (one scene of Cap and Co. stopping a riot or something and saying "it's gotten crazy out here" would be deeply unsatisfying IMO), the world-building should be mostly left to the MCU offerings that are coming out next. Ant-Man & the Wasp and Captain Marvel are coming out before Infinity War 2, but Ant-Man is supposedly happening concurrently with/just before Infinity War and Captain Marvel is set in the 1990s. However, Luke Cage Season 2, Cloak & Dagger, and possibly The Runaways Season 2 would all fall into this range and could explore the world from several different angles. I thought the mass vanishing would've been the perfect chance to finally let the TV characters join the Avengers in a unified universe, but I'll settle for the shows handling the fallout.

There's so much potential with this scenario that it would be a massive wasted opportunity not to do anything with it. With the world losing half its population, there are plenty of opportunities for supervillains (or just regular people) to exploit the problem. Do people stop caring about values and basic decency in a world where half the planet can vanish? Are they all hoarding resources and killing each other over them, fearing another culling? Are there others who find their inner, everyday hero and help their fellow people? Maybe superheroes are forced to take extreme measures to defend their local turf. What happens to religion? Do some people think this is the Rapture (a critic referred to it as "the Snapture," which might be perfect)? Are there new religious beliefs rising out of this; perhaps a cult that believes in what the Snap "accomplished?" Society as we know it could crumble and every nation could be in danger of falling. This is the perfect time for superheroes to step up and for SHIELD to finally reclaim its position as a global force for good. It’s a shame Agents of SHIELD isn’t coming back until the summer after Infinity War 2, since it would’ve been the ideal vehicle to explore this world. Even when Infinity War 2 undoes this, it'll only have weight if everyone remembers what happened, so SHIELD and other heroes working to save everyone from themselves wouldn't be in vain even if the Avengers are the ones who actually save the world. No matter what happens, half the population vanishing is a fascinating premise fraught with drama, and something in the MCU needs to explore it; if they gloss over all that, this will have been truly empty.

That emptiness is a problem I had with a lot of the deaths. It's not just that it's clear these heroes will be brought back—if they remember what happened and it changes them, it won't be pointless—but they didn't die for anything. They were slaughtered for nothing, which left a bad taste in my mouth; if they'd at least chosen to go out fighting or if Thanos cared about who he was killing instead of being randomly "fair" about it, I feel like I would've felt them more. I was disappointed to see a few of them go, like T'Challa, but it was Tom Holland who really got me with his "I don't wanna go." That was heartbreaking and nearly made me cry!

It would be nice if the Defenders who survived the Snap got promoted to Avengers status in the interim, but I doubt that will happen. I've seen suggestions elsewhere that the heroes who got Snapped could form a "New Avengers" within the Soul Stone to fight their way out and that could be cool, but I hope the focus of Infinity War 2 is on the original six Avengers since it will probably be their last mission. They can deal with what the Snapped heroes went through in their future solo films.

I think it'd be cool if Nick Fury's (Samuel L. Jackson) beeper actually contacted Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) in the 90s (just chalk the time zone difference up to Kree or Skrull tech). This could be why he chose to summon her for help: being in the past, she wouldn't be affected by the disintegration wave.

In terms of the longer-term plans, I don't want another long build-up to something; I hope Infinity War 2 is the end of long-form plotting in the MCU, at least for the next few phases. We don't need a years-long build-up to Secret Wars or something, and not every threat has to spring from the previous one in some manner.

Infinity War is big, fun, and action-packed with plenty of crowd-pleasing moments (and some that truly pull at your heartstrings), but it's not one of my favorite MCU films. I think it falls somewhere in the middle, but in terms of spectacle it's one of their finest outings. It's definitely worth a trip to the theater!

Check out more of my reviews, opinions, theories, and original short stories here!

#avengers #infinity war

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rhetoricandlogic · 6 years

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CLADE BY JAMES BRADLEY

NIALL HARRISON

ISSUE: 13 JULY 2015

By the half-way point of Clade, the world has changed. Setting out for a walk, Ellie, an artist, helpfully reminisces about the history of the valley she now calls home. The pastoral farmland she knew as a child was replaced by managed carbon-capture plantations in the twenties and thirties, which have themselves now—following bankruptcy—given way to a return to wildness. It's an effective tour, local history implying the changes underway in the wider world, which Ellie knows as news: drought in Asia, flooding in Europe, unspecified "horrors in Chicago" (p. 119). She fears a tipping point, collapse. But she also has more immediate concerns. Her biracial grandson Noah, evacuated from England without his parents, is coming to visit for the first time. And she is distracted by the potential of her latest project, a study of bees that she hopes will capture both their longevity and their vulnerability to climatic change, and perhaps communicate what she feels when she looks at them, "something that is not quite wonder, not quite grief, but somehow both" (p. 116). The clash of scales and concerns—the planetary and the personal; ephemeral and enduring—is typical of the best parts of James Bradley's fourth novel.

It is a novel shaped around the story of the family of which Ellie is a part. It's obvious from quite early on that the Leiths, as middle-class professionals in a rich nation, will be insulated from the worst environmental crises; elsewhere hundreds of thousands may starve or drown, but for the Leiths such events are, for the most part, remote. Intellectually, Ellie knows that mass migrations are underway; but Noah, who is in the country because she and her husband were able to wrangle him through the bureaucracy, is the only climate refugee she has actually met. So when, on a later walk, she encounters Amir, the keeper of the beehives she has been studying, and discovers that he is an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh, whose wife and child are dead, she is thrown. When "trying to imagine their lives" she is unable to move beyond easy outrage that their situation is "ridiculous, monstrous"; awareness of the inadequacy of this response leaves her feeling uncertain, "raw as a teenager" (p.131). A few pages further on, Amir—a doctor in his previous life—asks Ellie to pose as the parent of a friend's child, so that they can receive emergency surgery without questions. She asks why Amir didn't say anything sooner, says she could have helped, and Amir replies sharply: "Could you? How? We don't just need access to hospitals, we need medicine, schools, jobs, not to be frightened all the time" (p. 136). It's the first glimpse the novel has given us of one of the other narratives implied by the future the Leiths are living through.

It's also a moment that points to the most serious critique of Clade, namely that it is a novel about crisis in which the lives of those most affected take place off-screen. There are strong arguments to be made that that is not enough—moral arguments, that suffering should not be mood music for the privileged; narrative arguments, that it would simply be more dramatic. Amir's appearance is, on the face of it, a rebuke to the first of those points; yet not as forceful as it would be if he, and not Ellie, had been the viewpoint character in their encounter. Bradley, I think, sticks with Ellie as a reflection of his own privilege (and an assumption about that of his audience), but deliberately so, because one of the questions Clade asks is: how can someone insulated from its worst effects learn to internalise, and respond appropriately, to a global crisis affecting millions of people over decades? Humans, by and large, crave personal connection, yet there is a real sense in which individual experiences will never be sufficient to grasp the whole of what we are doing to our planet. Put another way, there is a risk that inventing Amir's experience would provide false catharsis to readers like me. The challenge is to achieve a broader empathy, and come to terms with a story that is fundamentally impersonal.

Structured as a novel-in-stories, Clade flows from now to the second half of the twenty-first century, and for at least its first half is sure-footed about its juxtapositioning of the immediate and the emergent. Bradley begins with Adam Leith—the closest thing the novel has to a central character, in that he headlines three of the ten chapters—on a research trip to Antarctica, waiting for news of Ellie's fertility treatment. They are a contemporary cosmopolitan couple; Adam reflects on the ease of their meeting and how, "though neither was quite sure how it happened, they found themselves a couple with careers and a future" (p. 9). What they don't have, however, is children, and their failed efforts to conceive become a barrier between them, one that sends Adam deeper into his research on melting permafrost and shifting ocean currents. There he finds, or perhaps justifies, a reluctance to become a parent at all: Bradley is detailed about the moment-to-moment see-saw of Adam's emotions, but I think leaves it up to us to decide to what extent his abstract understanding of the future is defining his choices in the present.

The second chapter takes place a few years later. Adam and Ellie have a young daughter, Summer, and the world is warmer. (Subtlety in character names, you may have gathered, is not Bradley's strongest suit.) In Australia, the power grid is struggling to cope with the demand for air-conditioning; on the news, famine and floods in South Asia. (Reading the novel a second time, I wondered what Amir's life was like at this point.) Adam and Ellie's relationship remains tense. Responding to another rant about climate-denying journalism, Ellie accuses her husband of self-indulgence: "I think you get off on being angry" (p. 29). Adam recognises some truth to her comment, though he won't admit it out loud; he "does not know the person he is becoming," feels himself "falling faster and faster without any idea of when and where he will land" (p. 30). Once again it is hard to separate Adam's frustration with his family from his impotence in the face of accelerating climate crisis; his emotions are as much a product of the world as of the people in it; the two are inseparable. After a couple of chapters away from Adam—during which we meet Maddie, Ellie's mother-in-law, and then Summer as a rebellious teenager—we rejoin him for the novel's big disaster set-piece, a tropical storm that devastates the South of England while he is visiting for a conference and the one time when Leiths are directly in harm's way. Travelling out of London to visit Summer, Adam looks at the landscape in a way that anticipates Ellie's valley walk. The idea of a "natural" countryside has been a fiction for centuries, he thinks; England's hedgerows were always as much an imposition as the new "triffid" trees intended to suck carbon from the air. We have always remade the world. Left unrecognised (by Adam) is the extent to which the world has remade him.

Adam and Ellie's reflections on changing landscapes are, for me, the crossroads of Clade. To this point, the novel has been entirely a story of life in a time of escalating environmental crisis, with a tone often reminiscent of a writer like Maureen McHugh: personal but crisp. Yet after these two chapters, we inexorably leave Adam and Ellie behind, and the future becomes something else. Subsequent chapters focus on Lijuan, a teenager whose family are killed by a pandemic, and who ends up more or less adopted by Adam; Dylan, a twentysomething programmer (when we spend time with him) who will eventually become Lijuan's partner; Noah, by this point an astronomer; and then, finally, Lijuan's daughter Izzie, going to a party out in the Floodline fringe of her city. None of these chapters is quite as successful at exploring character as those dealing with Adam, Ellie, and Maddie, but each of them grows the clade, makes it more than blood, incorporates more disparate personal narratives: this is good. Moreover, the decisive shift to a new generation reframes environmental crisis as the environmental status quo, without it ever being clear that we have done much to stabilise the situation (the carbon-capture plantations in Ellie's valley went broke, after all). New and more conventionally science fictional changes compete for the characters' attention, be it the creation of AI surrogates for dead relatives, or a rekindled search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The novel feels slightly less specific, slightly less possible. In the end, if Clade is asking how we might internalise impersonal stories, its answer seems to be that, as a species, we won't: we will just drift on and make do.

The other thing that is happening in the second half of the novel, however, is a thematic broadening, revealing climate change as a specific example of the more general challenge of wrestling with change over time. And Bradley, it turns out, has been here before. His second novel, The Deep Field, was published in 1999 and set in a version of 2010 imaginatively recreated by a narrator living in the twenty-second century. On a line by line basis it doesn't have the cool focus of Clade—at times it feels rather strained—but the extraordinary conflation of timeframes achieves the same end as the restless structure of the more recent novel, exploring a human experience while ensuring the reader is always aware of the fleeting nature of that experience. It is a theme to which I am deeply sympathetic, that I wish was more central in contemporary SF, and for which I will forgive a lot; so if in Clade it requires accepting an increasing narrative diffuseness, I accept, and if it means that it becomes slightly too easy to decompose the book into its component parts and separate out the bits that work and the bits that do not, I will look away. Because in the end I'm with Noah, the astronomer, who knows that looking up into the sky really means looking out into time.

A coda about categories. Clade is obviously not published in isolation. Already this year Sara Taylor has used a similar structural conceit to related ends in The Shore, and Antonia Honeywell, Kirsty Logan, EJ Swift, and others have published novels that to varying degrees explore the personal and social effects of environmental crisis; and they are only the latest crop. All of these examples are, obviously enough, kinds of science fiction, but there is a sound political logic for discussing them as a group unto themselves. For one thing, climate change is already happening, which means it is in a different class of speculation and social relevance to, say, a pandemic: writing about it is a question of degree and perspective, not whether or not it will happen at all, and the degrees and perspectives that writers choose can be usefully compared. For another, precisely because it is already happening, there are entirely contemporary books that should be included in any such discussion; Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour (2012), which is set in one time and place but uses a different structural conceit to open its readers' perspective out to the global and ecological, would be a fine example. So there is this interesting cluster of work, which may not quite be a subgenre of SF but which certainly contains a lot of SF and SFnal thinking, that I want to talk about; but unfortunately I don't think anyone has yet got the terminology for it quite right. "Apocalypse" (soft, contemporary, or otherwise) and "dystopia" now flatten and obscure more than they illuminate—Clade is neither but has been described as both. A more recent coinage with some traction, "cli-fi", a) tends to be used to claim that what it describes is an entirely new thing (erasing the existing history of environmental SF and indeed environmental non-SF literature), b) is the brainchild of a man with an unfortunate propensity for relentlessly haranguing people who disagree with him, and c) is just a supremely ugly collection of letters. Then at the more esoteric end of the debate we have suggestions such as Jeff VanderMeer's "hyperobject fiction," which he proposes in part because it is unlikely to catch on, but which nevertheless describes a book like Clade quite neatly. At least, it does once you know that a hyperobject is, as defined by Timothy Morton, "an object so massively distributed in space and time as to transcend localisation"—which is why it is unlikely to catch on. I'm carping, but not just that; categories matter because, like families, they both include and exclude. The rejoinder to the charge that Clade's viewpoint is unduly privileged is the psychological specificity it employs, but that defence only carries weight if it is an equal member of a literary family that also includes, say, The Swan Book by Alexis Wright (2013), a novel that explores the Aboriginal psychology of landscape as it responds to climate change with great vigour and inventiveness, but which has not received nearly the same level of international attention. I should end all this with a pithy suggested label of my own, naturally, but unfortunately I don't have one; just a sense that this is a vital literary area, and that we need to get better at describing and discussing it.

#James Bradley #Clade #mahreviews

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darrencrissource · 7 years

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This is the third installment of Ryan Murphy’s acclaimed anthology, American Crime Story: Versace.

Edgar Ramirez stars as the openly gay designer, who was tragically gunned down on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion in 1997 by serial killer Andrew Cunanan, played by Darren Criss.

The limited series chronicles the bizarre murder and the manhunt for Cunanan, who targeted gay men and was responsible for five murders.

Casting Darren Criss as Cunanan

Ryan Murphy: I didn’t have to convince him at all. What I like to do is give people opportunities sometimes that they would never have. And Darren is obviously a brilliant singer and a performer and a showman and did “Glee” and has been on Broadway. When Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson and I were first talking about this idea of doing Versace as sort of the O.J. follow-up, which was around two years ago, I immediately called Darren. Because to me he was the only one for that part. And I just said, I’m thinking about doing this, would you be interested. And he said, well yes, very much so because it’s such a great part. And I said, ok I’ll get the contracts drawn. And then it took two years because you have to write it and you have to get it green-lit. But he was always the only person I had in mind for it because I knew that he would push himself because he was so hungry to prove himself in a different way. And it’s a truly insane dramatic part. And he really wanted to go there. So he was the only person we talked to. He hadn’t heard from me and then he was getting ready to do another show and the day it was announced that Versace was up, he was, oh shit what am I going to do. But we all worked it out so he was able to get out and commit pretty much a year to it. And he was great. Brad and Nina went to see him in “Hedwig” and he knew they were in the audience so of course he came out and sat on Brad’s lap and did the whole showbiz thing.

Relationship to Versace

RM: I never met him but I know a lot of people who did meet him. I sold my first script in late 1996 so I was just starting. And he obviously was killed a year later so I never got to meet him. I knew a lot of people who were very close to him. I’ve worked with Naomi Campbell who was very close to him, who told me a lot of interesting things about him. Madonna, there’s the Madonna guest suite upstairs which is the first place I went to when we came here. She used to sit in the bathtub and stand up and tease them all out in the courtyard. I never got to meet him, but he was always somebody I was very interested in. I loved him. I felt like I had a lot in common with him, what he did and where he came from and how he really dedicated his life to beauty and style and was obsessed with a vision of things. And I related to him. I was at restaurant called Off Vine in L.A. when I first heard the news. And weirdly was also at the same restaurant when Princess Diana died. So I’ve stopped going to Off Vine after the Princess Diana announcement. I was just very moved and shattered by it. It was somebody who’s gay, who is in the gay community, of course then, half the people I knew who had had ties to Hollywood and San Diego said, I was at a bar, I met Andrew Cunanan. So there was always a very mythical thing about that guy. But it was just a real tragedy. And the reason I wanted to do this story so badly was because if you do O.J., what do you do to top O.J.? You have to do something completely different. And I wanted to do something smaller and more intimate. And, it’s a different kind of crime. When we do “American Crime” we’re not just going to do Jon Benet, we’re not going to just do something salacious. It has to be about something that has American social issues in it. And this period of time that we’re talking about, 1997, there were really two people who were out in entertainment, Elton John and Gianni Versace.

Versace as Openly Gay

RM: Versace really struggled with it. There were a lot of conversations with Donatella. Should I come out of the closet? Because my business is going public. He was terrified that by not being able to be himself he would be discriminated against and lose everything. That was also the period of don’t ask, don’t tell, which we dive into. The reason why it’s such an interesting American crime is because Gianni Versace was only killed because of homophobia. Andrew Cunanan killed and targeted people who were gay or who were in the closet. And his murders tend to out them. There was a gentleman who was in his 70’s named Lee Miglin who was one of the early victims, whose family was so upset and terrified of his personal life coming out that they just sort of said, motive unknown. And the police didn’t pursue it. And by the time Cunanan got to Miami, the police officers in town had thousands of wanted posters in the trunks of the cars that they would not put up because they would not go to gay bars. They just wouldn’t do it. So we’re delving with all this very dark period of American society that is obviously personal to me, and very upsetting.

Cunanan as Character

RM: We had the book that we optioned, “Vulgar Favors.” The thing about Cunanan was a mystery in many ways. The things that I was fascinated about is the creator-destroyer idea of Cunanan and Versace sort of were the same beginning. They came from immigrant families, they wanted to be famous, they wanted to be celebrated and one person did the work and took the risk, which was Versace, and one person didn’t, who was Cunanan. Cunanan was also a tragic story. He was lied to by his parents, specifically his father, who told them they were incredibly wealthy, almost royalty in the Philippines. And in his teenage years he discovered that his father had been lying the entire time. He was treated like a celebrity in his own family. When he was very young his parents gave him the master suite. So he sort of grew up with this kingly idea of who he was and who he could be. And then it was all taken away and he was shattered by it. And he had real psychological difficulties dealing with. There was also what we could never verify or prove, sexual abuse in his family. So he was also a very tragic figure and wanted fame and fortune so desperately that what happened with him was when he killed someone, the first victim, that probably was in a fit of pique and rage, he decided well, I’m going to go to jail, I’m going to be destroyed, so I want to be famous so I’m going to move towards that. And in taking the life of the famous person became his fame which is also a very American story that we see time and time again, that’s gotten progressively worse with social media over the years and threats and violence. When you have somebody like Cunanan, who is thought of in many circles as a monster, and the person that took away Gianni Versace from us, you also have to with the actor say, well let’s talk about his childhood. He was a real person. Something along the way made him snap. So we’ve talked a lot about that. And Darren did a lot of research on his own and showed up ready to go.

Edgard Ramirez as Versace

RM: Whenever I do something like this, or like O.J. or, I always have one person in mind that I think of, always. So, Darren was the obvious choice. I was friends with him. I knew him. And I wanted people to see something that I saw which was a great dramatic actor. In the case of Edgar, if you look at Edgar, Edgar looks exactly like Versace. When we have the prosthetic and the wig and can show you pictures it’s amazing. And Edgar has that sort of grandiose gravity as a human being that Versace had. And he was my only choice. And I met him. And I always have this thing when I give this really long, impassioned spiel, I’m going to die if you don’t do it. And at the end of the meeting I was, what do you think? And he was, well, let me think about it. I was, what? What do you mean? And then I was, ok I’m going to get you no matter what, and I did. And he met with Brad and Nina and loved them and I really pushed hard. And by the time I gave him a second script you can’t deny the power of the part. And he was, ok, I get it, I love it, I’ll do it.

Ricky Martin as Versace’s Lover

Ricky was another example of somebody that, people think of Ricky as “La Vida Loca” and a Vegas showman and he’s doing Sting. But Ricky is so soulful and intimate. And I just saw something in him. I’ve also worked with him once before. And you know the boyfriend, Antonio, was a very tragic figure because he was with Versace for 15 years and loved him and Versace was killed and he was out. He was thrown out of this palace and this life. And he had suicide attempts. And I thought, well I think Ricky could really go there and would want to do this. I met Ricky, I just called him up and said, can I talk to you? And I explained to him the role. And then I offered him the role. And at the end of the meeting we both got really teary because he didn’t tell me that he and Edgar were very close friends. And Edgar was, oh I want you to do this part so bad but I’m not going to, do that.

Penelope Cruz as Donatella

RM: was a little bit trickier because I obviously know and adore Gaga. And we briefly discussed it but she was doing “A Star Is Born” with Bradley Cooper, that’s basically shooting this whole year and I had to shoot the show this year. So then I was sort of thinking about people and I know Penelope because of Javier and “Eat, Pray, Love” and I spent a lot of time with them. And I just asked if I could speak with her. And she is friends with Donatella. And I thought that was a great in because she knew her, she would be an advocate for her. But again, she is an Oscar winning actress and a great one at that so I thought it would be interesting. And she said yes instantly too. So I had great luck with it. And I also love that for all of them, you’ll see a different side of them. You’ve never seen Penelope do something like that. You’ve certainly never seen Ricky Martin or Edgar do something like that. And it’s been exciting to see.

Suprises: Versace was HIV+

We have a brilliant writer named Tom Rob Smith who’s writing the episode and has really taken an auteur approach to the material. And so he’s really immersed in it. And he’s constantly coming up with great nuggets that are surprising. I think the most devastating thing for me that I learned was that he had HIV and almost died. And at that time there was no cocktail. And he was really devastated because he was a person who loved life and he was trying to figure out a way to pass the company to Donatella because he was going to die. It was a death sentence. But miraculously, right around the time the cocktail had started to come back and he took the right cocktail of pills and got his health back. He felt he had so much left to say and then he was killed out on his steps that morning. He was creating again and designing again and he was crying all the time because his life had been given back to him. You can imagine for Donatella and Gianni and Antonio to have this second life, this great lion of a man was restored to vigor. And he was just snuffed out instantly with two bullets to the face. That was really devastating to me.

Other Victims

The Lee Miglin killing was just so barbaric and cruel and awful. He was a closeted gay man. And Cunanan did that and had such rage, obviously self-loathing, that he killed him in such a violent way. And then dressed him up as a woman with panties and lot of sex toys around so that his family would find this and be humiliated. We spent two days shooting that assassination. And it was really tough. The crew was crying and the actors were crying because it was the exact spot he was killed and you can feel him. Like, who does this in a room? And what else could he have done? He was taken so soon. And you can just imagine the gifts he would have given us.

Actual Filming

Every story has its own organic thing. So for this story we did a really cool thing, we’re starting the story with, the first 15 minutes are music, opera, no dialogue, and it’s Versace restored to health, getting up and starting his day with his staff and then walking to the News Café, intercut with Cunanan stalking him and tracking him. It starts with his murder. And then what we wanted to do was tell the story backwards. Versace was the last murder but in our show he’s the first. And then we go back in time. We tell the story backwards, ending with the Cunanan figure as a young man and Versace as a young man trying to make a stab of it as a designer. There’s only violence and murder in the first four or five episodes. And then you really get into the psychological struggle of how does one person become a creator and how does one become a destroyer. And then the last episode is Cunanan on the houseboat making a decision to kill himself before they arrest him. I’ve never done anything backwards. But I loved the storytelling of it because I think you’ll be so moved because it starts with a violent act and by the time you’ll get to the end you will really realize what Versace had to go through to become Versace and what Cunanan went through to become that killer.

Donatella

RM: We have had some contact with Donatella. I met Allegra when she was younger, she came to the “Glee” live tour. I was very excited to meet Allegra Versace. Donatella had been very kind and very lovely. As a mother she really has been very protective of her children. And that was really her only request was, which she conveyed to Penelope and thus to me, is she really wanted to make sure that her kids weren’t portrayed on screen and that there was nothing about them in the show. I’m a parent and I can understand, I don’t want them to see that and go through any pains. We removed them at her request. And I think it was the right thing to do. But that was it. She has been sort of hands off, and that was her only request. I’m sure it will be incredibly difficult to see. But in a weird way I hope that the family can see it because it really is a tribute to his genius. And also, she comes off incredibly well because it’s really a very modern idea about a woman who is the sister of a very famous person. She’s also creative but suddenly he’s dead and what do I do? Do I fold up the tent or do I keep the business alive? That was incredibly difficult for Donatella to do. And I think she did a very heroic job of it. She saved the company. She mobilized the family. She kept the business afloat and became a modern heroine.

#darren criss #edgar ramirez #penelope cruz #ricky martin #ryan murphy #acs #acs versace #july 2017 #press

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sage-nebula · 7 years

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(if you don't mind me sending a second one) top ten fma characters?

Of course I don’t! This one is going to be hard, though, because there are so many fantastic characters that I feel it’s inevitable I’m going to end up forgetting someone.

Roy Mustang --- Roy didn’t used to be my favorite character way back in middle / high school when I was first introduced to FMA (through the 2003 series), and even then, he wasn’t my favorite character when Brotherhood first aired in 2009, or even on multiple re-watches. Instead, he is a character who has steadily grown to be my fave with each new re-watch. I swear to god, every time I revisit this series I love him more, and more, and more, and now he’s undoubtedly my favorite. I love Colonel Badass. More than that, I love how he’s Colonel Dad even as he tries to argue it and claim, without anyone suggesting otherwise, that he’s not Fullmetal’s father, ffs. (Yes you are, Roy. You’re one of his dads. Just accept it.) I love . . . so much about Roy. I love how clever and intelligent he is, that he recognizes the machinations of the government and how he plays his pieces correctly in order to advance up the ladder, but how he does that specifically so that he can a.) protect the people most important to him (and did you notice? In the Japanese version, he uses the exact same language Alan does when saying he wants to protect his most important people! Taisetsu mono!), and b.) protect everyone in Amestris by sitting at the very top as Fuhrer President (which is exactly why I think Alan would make an excellent Champion---he can protect everyone in Kalos that way, that’s literally the Champion’s job, but that’s a meta for another time). Roy also wants to atone for everything he did during the Ishbal extermination---he wants himself and all other state alchemists held accountable for their war crimes, but only after they help with Ishbal’s restoration, which I think is just incredibly admirable. Like, it’s not just that Roy feels guilty and feels he’s deserving of punishment. He knows that the lives lost can never be restored, knows that the destruction can never be undone, but he still wants to help restore Ishbal to a land of prosperity first, so it’s not just that he’s punishing himself (and others), but that he’s actively giving back to Ishbal instead of just leaving them destitute. Like, goddamn. That is the right fucking reaction to what happened.Additionally, Roy is so good about keeping his cards close to his chest, about not showing how he feels most of the time, but the truth is that he cares so fucking much. He’s obviously in love with Riza. His team means everything to him (he’s fucking crushed when Havoc is paralyzed, crushed), he cares about the Elric boys, he cares about---just about everyone. Roy keeps up an unaffected exterior most of the time because he has to, but the truth is that these things cut him pretty deeply and they do keep him up at night. There’s so much to him and so much within him and goddamn I love the fucking Flame Alchemist. He’s definitely my fave. I adore him.(Also, not for nothing, but PokéAni actually paid him a homage, using Alan, no less. Feast your eyes. There’s no way using that very specific number wasn’t intentional. None.)

Edward Elric --- Ed was always my favorite in the past, and to be honest I still relate to him a lot and still love him dearly, so he’s just #2 now. (Sorry, Ed . . . but in the Flame vs. Fullmetal battle of my heart, you lose.) Aside from also being quite short (though he inevitably surpassed me in height, damn him), I used to be sensitive about it in childhood. Whereas I’m comfortable with the fact that I’m tiny now, I used to have quite a temper about it as a kid . . . so in that sense, honestly, I found him to be quite relatable!Aside from that, though, he’s yet another Determinator. He’s a hothead sometimes, but he has a heart of gold, and he’s a very protective big brother. These are all traits I find very attractive in characters. On top of which, although I feel like in many ways Ed would nearly be a Hat Stall between Gryffindor and Ravenclaw, in the end I feel like the Hat would either put him in Gryffindor, or he’d choose to be there, but Ravenclaw would be a very close secondary---and that’s something I relate to, because I am a Gryffindor, but Ravenclaw is my secondary. (Or to use the Ilvermony Houses, I’m a Gryffindor at Hogwarts and Horned Serpent at Ilvermorny---a Serpendor, if you will. I feel that Ed is very much the same way.) We have similar ways of looking at and doing things, to the point where Ed is certainly one of those characters that I point to when people want to get to know me through fictional characters. I’ll always love the Fullmetal Alchemist. Even if he’s not technically an alchemist anymore, he’ll always be the alchemist in my soul. Even if he’s #2 now, I’ll always cherish him. ♥

Izumi Curtis --- MAMA IZUMI GETS SHIT DONE. I loooove Izumi, so very much. I love her not only because she’s a badass housewife / alchemist who strikes fear into the hearts of all who meet her---who easily tosses Sloth across the room even though Sloth was giving both Olivier and Alex trouble---but also because she has a heart of gold and is allowed to have her moments of vulnerability without that diminishing how badass she is. Izumi is allowed to be a grieving mother who lost her only biological child, she’s allowed to be there for her surrogate sons Ed and Al, she’s allowed to show moments of grief and pain without at all losing how incredible she is. Every moment that she goes Mama Boy over the boys is pure gold and just---every moment she has is pure gold, including when she sends Bradley packing. Izumi is amazing. I love her.

Riza Hawkeye --- I also really, really cherish Riza! What I love most about Riza is that I feel like, in a lesser shounen manga, her love for Roy would have been her motivation for enlisting in the military and swearing to follow him “into Hell, if necessary.” But that’s not the case here. Riza is in love with Roy, but her motivation for doing what she does is because she believes in his vision for their country, not because she loves him. This is why she is capable of shooting him (killing him) if necessary, if it seems as if he’s no longer going to be able to fulfill his promise and will instead actively work against it. Yes, it would break her heart to do so. It’s very obvious how much pulling the trigger would break her, but she can and will do it because what she swore to was his vision for Amestris. She won’t let anything, even her feelings for him, blind her to that. Riza lived through having an abusive father, survived the Ishbal Extermination, and has gone through so much more. She’s so strong, not only because she stays stoic in the face of most things, but because she continues to fight even though we see on numerous instances how much all of this has gotten to her. Her relationship with Roy is by far my favorite ship in the series (for so many reasons), but overall the reason why I love Riza so much is because of who she is shown to be outside of him. She’s compassionate, brave, wonderful with children, a very good dog mom, and overall just a believable and wonderful character. I love Riza. Riza is so good.

Ling Yao --- THE PRINCE OF MY HEART!! What I love most about Ling is how easily he flips between comedic relief and an actually serious character that shouldn’t be brushed aside. So many of his early scenes are full of shenanigans, but even those that are rife with shenanigans are peppered with moments of seriousness because of how serious Ling is about his duty to Xing. He wants immortality---and he doesn’t want it for himself, but for his people, and that’s not just limited to the Yao clan. Ling is willing to do anything for his people, because he believes that’s what a king should do, even if it means sacrificing his own autonomy to do it. I do think that was a reckless, irresponsible choice, but it is one that paid off in his favor, big time, so hey. Ling is great, though, and his relationship with Ed is amazing, a+++. I definitely love him.

Maes Hughes --- MAAAAES, RIP. I’m pretty sure Maes Hughes is one death that anime fans as a collective will never be over (however much we may make jokes about it sometimes). Particularly since Brotherhood made the mistake of rushing through to the point of divergence in the beginning, it always feels like Hughes died too soon. But the truth is that, no matter what, he did. He was an excellent husband and father, and he was a father not only to Gracia, but also to Winry and the Elrics. He was always, always there to support Roy, and however much Roy might have felt annoyed by the constant long phone calls at times, the fact that Roy is so severely affected by Hughes’ loss so late into the series . . . I mean, he doesn’t get his revenge on Envy until the very end, and when he does? Holy hot fucking damn, he’s downright terrifying. (I mean, I love it, but jesus fucking christ.) But anyway, back to Hughes himself, he was just such a sweet person and his life had such an impact and he just knew too much too soon. He was too smart, he had to be killed off so that the plot wouldn’t be solved too early. I know that, but it still hurts, and Elysia crying at his funeral will still slaughter me every single time, fuck.

Alphonse Elric --- I feel kind of bad for having Al so low on this list, but make no mistake---I do love him! It’s just that I find his scenes / subplots a little less compelling than the characters listed above him. I do think he’s wonderful, though; he’s a complete sweetheart, and though it happens less often than it does with Ed, there are times when Al has a snarky little sassmouth on him as well, and those moments are always delightful. Also, he, too, had to deal with a lot of bullshit over the course of the series. He damn well does deserve his happy ending.

Maria Ross --- Maria is so underappreciated in the fandom, and like---I get that she spends the majority of the series off-screen because she had to go into exile in Xing (since she was framed for Hughes’ murder), but at the same time, she’s so good! She acts like a stern big sis for the Elrics (which they need at times, tbh), and she’s loyal and dedicated and hardworking and smart. I love her relationship with Denny, and I also love how she came back for the final fight, and this was a surprise to Mustang, he didn’t actually make this choice, she just did it and ajsldgjdsagda. Maria is great, I love her.

May Chang --- Honestly, this post (written by someone else) says everything about May that I could ever say and more. I love how well-developed she is, how she’s allowed to be feminine but is still focused on her goals, and how much depth there is to her character. May is absolutely fantastic. Princess of my heart, tbh.

Olivier Mira Armstrong --- And finally, the QUEEN OF THE NORTH HERSELF. While Olivier is obviously a badass who takes shit from absolutely no one, I love that she’s still allowed to be a person outside of that. She’s not vulnerable in the ways that’s expected of her, but at the same time she doesn’t abhor femininity either (and in fact, the expectation that she would is what she and Roy take advantage of in order to communicate without arousing suspicion). She cares deeply for her team at Briggs, you can tell she’s deeply affected by Buccaneer’s death, and while she’s frustrated by her brother and doesn’t really respect him, it’s clear that she also cares about him in her own way as well. Yeah, she takes command of the Armstrong family manor, but that’s because she had to in order to sneak the Briggs soldiers in, and she didn’t want to put responsibility on Alex’s shoulders that he wouldn’t be able to handle. (I mean, like, no offense to him---he obviously came through in a big way and she sees that later---but from her perspective, he left the battlefield during Ishbal, so therefore combat and combat pragmatism are not his strong suits, not in a wartime situation. She didn’t want to put him in that position, so she didn’t. She handled it herself. She did so in an abrasive way, yes, but I still think she had compassion for him at heart.) Olivier defies expectations and shatters them into pieces. It’s why the soldiers at Briggs follow her without question. I love her, she’s great.

#top 10 characters meme #long post for ts #tangelomadness

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cinephiled-com · 5 years

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New Post has been published on Cinephiled

New Post has been published on http://www.cinephiled.com/interview-mike-wallace-offers-riveting-portrait-hard-hitting-journalist/

Interview: ‘Mike Wallace Is Here’ Offers a Riveting Portrait of the Hard-Hitting Journalist

Avi Belkin’s fascinating documentary, Mike Wallace Is Here, provides an unflinching look at the legendary reporter who interrogated some of the most important figures of the 20th century. Wallace’s famously aggressive reporting style that he honed during more than 50 years on the air redefined what we expect from broadcast journalism today. To make this film, Belkin unearthed decades of never-before-seen footage from the CBS vaults, exploring what drove Mike Wallace throughout his career as well as what plagued him. Using only archival footage, Mike Wallace Is Here is a highly entertaining, compelling film that reveals the evolution of a man and of journalism itself. I sat down with Avi Belkin in Los Angeles to discuss this powerful doc and how Mike Wallace’s legacy is more important than ever in these times when journalism is under constant attack.

Danny Miller: It’s astounding to me that this film consists entirely of archival footage. Did you know when you started that you were going to be able to access that wealth of material?

Avi Belkin: Not at all, although I knew the film depended on me finding it. It was a tough process. This was the first time ever that CBS opened up their vaults to a filmmaker as well as the 60 Minutes archives.

Wow. How did you convince them to?

Timing? Luck? The initial idea was to do a Mike Wallace-type interview with Mike Wallace — to put the microscope on him. But when I started researching, I quickly discovered that everyone did that — every time anyone talked to him they tried to do a “Mike Wallace interview” on Mike Wallace.

With varying degrees of success.

Absolutely, but they all tried it. I think one of the best ones was with Barbara Walters, oddly enough. She really grilled him as you see in the film, she was amazing. So I had this idea of building an interview of him through the archives, and I decided to go to the family first before approaching CBS because I thought their blessing would help. I talked to Chris Wallace and Mike’s stepdaughter, Pauline Dora — they are the ones who handle his estate. And they liked the idea of doing an honest portrait in that way and so did CBS who ultimately opened up the library to me.

I love the mix of Mike Wallace’s interviews along with interviews of him. The Morley Safer one was particularly revealing, almost shockingly so.

Mike retired in 2006 so for his retirement they did a video in which all the correspondents he worked with interviewed him: Morley, Steve Kroft, Ed Bradley, and Lesley Stahl. But they only used a minute or two of the interviews and each one was about an hour long. I watched all of that footage in the archives and it was fantastic, it really told a story. Morley Safer’s long interview with Mike was just unbelievable — it seemed like he knew Mike better than Mike knew himself! Morley was such a deep observer and he worked with Mike for almost 40 years. Mike was not very prone to reflection but Morley kind of dissects Mike in his interview, he really hits the point of everything that Mike is about. One thing he says about Mike is that at some point in Mike’s life he adopted this tough guy character called Mike Wallace and played the role for the rest of his life. He really understood this person. I wanted to get at the complete man. I don’t think it was that well known that Mike was prone to depression and had tried to commit suicide. He had this insecurity about him that was not obvious but I think showing some of that helps to create a much fuller picture of him.

I wasn’t aware of all that work he did in commercials and on game shows.

Yes, and he was ashamed of that throughout his whole journalistic career. Once you understand that, a lot of things fall into place. You understand that Mike was an actor, which most of us are even those of us who are never in front of a camera.

It’s true, we all have our various personas. I know I’m a slightly different person online than I am in real life.

Right, we all are. And so many people are very, very different at home than they are when they’re working. Mike’s home life was a big complicated.

Seeing all of those amazing interviews that Mike does is so refreshing in this era of journalists being debased. For all his eccentricities and challenges, I couldn’t admire Mike Wallace more. Not that I’d ever want to be facing him in an interview setting!

He always said that the most frequent question he got was, “Why would anyone agree to sit down to talk with me?” And he always said the same thing: “Because people like it!” And it’s true — for all the fear people say they have about being interviewed by Mike Wallace, most of them looked forward to going face-to-face with the champ!

I know how hard-hitting he was, but one thing really surprised me in the film was that when he talked to some of the most reprehensible people he interviewed such as Leona Helmsley and even Vladimir Putin, he communicated with them in a way that made me feel more empathy for them than I ever have before.

I think you hit the nail on the head with those two. Mike was one of the only people around who had the ability to disarm them. Leona Helmsley and Putin are a little bit like Mike — these tough characters who have a very specific image and yet when you go into their back story you find a lot of vulnerability. They build these tough-guy personas to hide their own insecurities just like Mike. Getting past that was one of Mike’s most valuable skills.

He always seems to know just the right question to ask to get someone going. Like that very interesting interview you show with Barbra Streisand.

Yeah, he had this uncanny ability to hit the core of the subject with his questions. You sit down with Streisand, you can ask her a million different questions. But Mike goes right for the kill: “What are you afraid of?” That’s an amazing question to ask Barbra Streisand and it leads to one of my favorite quotes in the film, that fear is the energy for your best work. That is basically the core of Barbra Streisand.

And yet it was also fascinating to see in the film when people called him on his technique, like Streisand and Shirley MacLaine did in the clips you show.

Yes, Mike usually knew exactly what his subjects felt about his line of questioning, and he loved to be challenged.

It was kind of disappointing to see how different his interview with Ayatollah Khomeini was. I thought maybe he’d get something out of Khomeini, but it seemed impossible. That one was almost scary to watch.

Yeah, that was a crazy set-up. I mean, it was in the middle of the revolution and Iran had just taken the hostages. The CBS bosses must have been going nuts that he was even there.

What other interviews in the film do you find the most revealing of who Mike is?

One of the best moments for me is during the interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. She’s like the female Mike Wallace, one of the world’s toughest interviewers, and in their long unedited talk you see these two forces of nature colliding. It was great to see them going at it in the hours of raw footage in the archives. I especially loved the moment when Mike asks Fallaci if she’s an entertainer. That is the question that Mike has been asking himself all those years. And Fallaci says, “No, I’m a historian.”

And he’s like, “Oh, come on!”

Right. Mike sees historians as people who look at a subject 50 years or more after it happened and dissect it. Fallaci said, “No, we are historians because we document history as it happens,” and she felt that this is the best way to write history. That line spoke to me and why I like that the film is all archival footage — we made the decision not to bring in any new footage in of people reflecting about Mike Wallace. I think it’s so much more interesting to tell Mike’s story by showing what was going on with him as it was happening instead of analyzing him later.

He did so many fascinating interviewers, was it agonizing making the choices of which interviews to include in the film?

It was, but my rule was that every moment had to have something to do with the reveal of Mike. The parts that I chose were never about the person being interviewed but was always about what that exchange revealed about Mike. That’s also why I don’t identify any of the people until the end of the film. In a way it’s not really about them.

I also love that you mix interview with very renowned people, from world leaders to Bette Davis to Donald Trump to the head of the Ku Klux Klan with those of people who are not that well known today. Two that come to mind are Diana Dors and Lillian Roth — both well known in their day but largely forgotten today. I think some of those obscure interviews reveal so much more than the ones with the huge names.

Thank you for saying that because that’s exactly what I was going for, and those two women are the perfect examples. The first one, Diana, talks about how being successful is very different than what you think, how the dream doesn’t really live up to what you have in mind, and that is very much what happened to Mike. And the second woman, Lillian, talks about how we’re all lost, that there’s nobody who is not lost in this world. Mike is like, “What are you talking about?” And she says to him, “You never feel that way?” Which leads right into the period where he loses his son which — the time when he felt the most lost in his life. All through the making of the film it was always about how a certain moment in an interview helped to reflect on Mike’s life.

youtube

Mike Wallace Is Here is playing in select theaters around the country and will be opening in additional cities in the coming weeks.

#60 Minutes #Avi Belkin #Mike Wallace #Mike Wallace Is Here #Interviews #What's Hot

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nonamememoir · 5 years

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The Ethics Behind the Conservation of Endangered Animals by Tori Bloom

It may seem like common sense to want to save endangered species from extinction. However, animals species sometimes go extinct from natural causes. Some argue that going out of our way to protect animal species actually goes against what is natural (Michael, 2005). In grade school we were taught that the death of a species could throw off the food chain and lead to drastic consequences. Yet, this is not always the case. In fact, the impact of different animal species on their environment differs across the board. For example, the snail darter, a type of fish, is one that could easily be replaced by another type of fish (Bradley, 2001). Does this mean that the snail darter holds no value? Perhaps it has aesthetic value, or maybe there is some value to biodiversity. However, if we hold that we should protect endangered species because of their aesthetic value, we are taking an anthropocentric view of the value animals, and some philosophers take issue with that. If we value species for their contribution to biodiversity, that still does not answer why biodiversity is important. There is also contributory value, of course, which is akin to the food chain metaphor. Perhaps species have value because they contribute to their environment, but does this mean that animals that are not needed are not valuable? Finally, there is the idea of intrinsic value. Maybe animals have a value of their own. However, when it comes to preserving an endangered species, sometimes the practices used harm the individuals of the species. Finally, if there is indeed a value to protecting endangered species, there is also the question of how to go about it. Trying to save one species may very well put another species at risk because, ultimately, we cannot predict every possible outcome of the complex web of nature. Then there is the question of how to go about protecting species, and whether conservation can be conducted in an ethical manner. I plan to explore the value of endangered species in relation to humans, to nature, and out of their own intrinsic worth. Furthermore, I want to examine the ethics of protecting a species through conservation, and how all of these issues come to a head in specific cases, like that of the polar bear.

Before considering the value of protecting animal species, one must consider what cases, if any, merit protection of an endangered species. Humans certainly have an impact on the extinction of animals, through things like deforestation, climate change, and desertification (Keulartz, 2015). However, animals also go extinct through natural selection on their own. For example, natural selection sometimes occurs due to a surplus of predators or some other competing species. Even, in the case of animals who become endangered due to human interactions with the environment, there is still debate on whether or not intervention should be taken at all. After all, humans are animals whose growth occasionally coincides with the extinction of another species, which would seem to be a natural process (Michael, 2005). Mark Michael argues that the use of the word natural to describe behavior should be completely done away with when it comes to the theoretical framework for and against protecting the environment because it is too ambiguous and has no set definition. The idea of “acting naturally” can mean many things, including behaving how one does in their specific community, under a specific set of beliefs, due to their environment or biology, etc. Basically, acting naturally encompasses all of human behaviors, and to propose that behaving naturally is moral would mean that everything we do is moral because we are always following our natures, in one way or another. Regardless, even if one specifies that acting naturally is moral when it is driven by a need for flourishing of one’s species, Michael says that driving a species toward extinction can actually work against humans. After all, it is in the best interest of humans to have a healthy environment, and so it would seem that it is more natural to preserve species. The ambiguity of the claim that we ought to follow our natures, Michael says, is unnecessary for both sides of the argument, when what we really should be saying is either that there is some value to nature that we ought to preserve. This is where the argument moves toward what exactly the value is.

The first case to be made for endangered species is their value for humankind. Robert Goodin (1999) notes that an anthropocentric view of preserving nature is not necessarily a bad thing, as species are typically concerned with the preservation of their own first, and from that stems concern for a sustainable healthy environment. He uses fisheries, for example, which concern themselves with the maximum sustainable yield fish so that their practices can continue. It would not be in the fisheries’ best interest to overfish, even if it had an immediate positive outcome, because it would destroy the industry’s future. He further details the desire for sustainable future as one that errs on the side of caution. Receiving a large profit immediately that may not last forever is less desirable than a steady, reliable, income that would allow one to continue their lifestyle indefinitely. Goodin also notes that a desire to protect species is not only good for individuals, in a self-centered manner, but also for the protection of humans and future generations. While some argue that it is unfair to expect the current generation to consume to a lesser extent than previous generations, Goodin argues that what has already occurred should hold no bearing in what we do for our future generations. After all, as time passes our opinions about the environment change, our population fluctuates, and our knowledge about the effects of our practices increases. We cannot change what happened in the past, but he says that, if we assume it is our duty to ensure a fair lifestyle for future generations, we should not let the past define our future. Yet there is still the question of why we should ensure such a future for later generations. After all, there can be no reciprocity. Goodin cites David Hume, saying that despite the lack of reciprocity, we have a duty to protect the vulnerable, as the future generations’ lives are dependent upon what we do now and they have no ability to change the hand that they are given. While future generations cannot give back to us, they also have no ability to defend themselves against the choices we make. This asymmetry, he says, suggests that self-centered actions need to have a limit. He cites Rousseau’s call for promotion of the common good, meaning that individuals should not think only of their own benefits, but the benefits for others as well. Consider Kant’s categorical imperative, in this instance. If we decided that we should not consider sustainability, in favor of our own flourishing, we would be abusing our position of power over those who cannot defend themselves. If this behavior was applied universally, all those in a position of power would abuse that power and those who could not defend themselves would be systematically disadvantaged. Now this argument for sustainability assumes, of course, that the protection of endangered species is important only in that the species provides benefits for humans. However, like in the case of the snail darter, not all species have an obvious value for human use.

Ben Bradley (2001) considers the value of species outside of their instrumental value. This issue comes down to preservation versus conservation, where a preservationist would assume that endangered species have some inherent value even if they are of no obvious use to humans. Bradley says that preservationists face a problem in trying to argue for the value of a species because they assume that intrinsic value and instrumental value are the only ways to argue for the protection of species. He presents a third type, which is contributory value. This value is different from intrinsic value, in that it suggests that species value is not necessarily innate. However, it is not instrumental value, because it does not rely upon a species causal relationships with other things. Bradley explains the contributory value assumes that a species, while it may seem unuseful or ugly on its own, has value in that it makes the whole of the environment more beautiful because of its relation to the different parts of the environment. It is not that the species is important because of what it does to other parts of the environment, but because what it does changes our conception of the whole. Bradley uses the example of two exactly alike paintings and a piece of music. While it would seem that that paintings and the music all have the same intrinsic value, one could argue that the combination of one of the paintings and piece of music has more value than the combination of both of the alike paintings. This, he says, makes the case for a value in variety, in that variety contributes to the conception of the whole. Extending this to endangered species, Bradley says that the last few animals of an endangered species have more contributory value than the animals of a species that is not endangered because if one were to kill those last animals, the variety of animal species would be decreased, thus altering our perception of the whole. He further specifies that contributory value explains why we would find it less morally good to eliminate the last reptiles than simply eliminating the last alligators. Alligators share traits with other reptiles, while reptiles do not share as many traits with other groups of animals. Eliminating the last reptiles decreases the variety of the environment much more than eliminating just one specific animal species.

Oscar Horta (2010) argues that an anthropocentric view of a species value is, in fact, speciesist and therefore immoral. Speciesism is defined as the unjust treatment of animals that are not considered to be a part of one’s own species, and in particular the exploitation of animals outside of one’s species. However, Horta notes that this definition is fluid and often debated. The key point is not that all species should be treated in exactly the same way, but that animals should not be treated disadvantageously because of their species. Horta also notes that, despite its name, speciesism does not necessarily mean disadvantaging the species as whole, but rather treating the individual animals in an unjust way, even if for the good of the species. Consider contributory value, for example. Contributory value certainly makes the case for protecting a species based on its value to the whole, but it does not say much for the individual animals themselves. Horta cites the culling of ruddy ducks, which is a practice that has been defended for the sake of protecting another endangered species of duck. This practice could be defended if one thinks that the endangered species of duck have a higher contributory value than the ruddy duck. Perhaps then, we should consider both the contributory value of the species, and our treatment of the individual members of a species. Perhaps it would be for the best to slaughter ruddy ducks to save an endangered species, but it is a practice which places the individual animals of the ruddy duck species at a disadvantage, and it is certainly not a necessary practice. Perhaps a compromise could be made; for example, the endangered duck species is placed in captivity and bred so as the preserve the species without harming the individuals of another species.

The case for the value of species is ambiguous, but with compromise, and considering the different values that a species may have, it would seem like preserving endangered animals is the morally right thing to do. However, there is still the matter of when it is the morally right thing to do. As mentioned before, animal species go extinct due to natural selection, and in some cases it would appear that preserving a species is actually not in the best interest of the environment, or for the individuals of another species. Nancy Sturman (2013) mention the proposal to exterminate animals that the endangered speartooth shark does not eat to help preserve the species. Not only does this proposal present moral issues, but there is also doubt about whether the extermination would actually help. The consequences are unpredictable, and the measure of the possible benefits against those consequences are equally as unpredictable. After all, at what point do environmentalists decide that there are enough of the endangered shark species in specific locations? Sturman concludes by saying that these issues do not suggest that saving endangered species is wrong; after all, it is always best to avoid suffering when possible and as discussed previously, preserving diversity in nature would appear to be the morally good thing to do. Rather, these are issues that must be considered when making plans to help endangered species.

Keeping the value of species and the complications of preserving a species in mind, there remains the question of finding a solution that works to protect endangered species whilst promoting the individual well being of animals. One suggested way of doing this is by placing animals in captivity, such as in a zoo. The ethics of captivity are debated and yet with the increasing movement of animals due to global practices, the option of keeping animals in their native areas is becoming more difficult to implement, especially in cases where the animals’ habitats are affected by processes like climate change, for instance (Keulartz, 2015). Josef Keulartz considers the ethical implications of captivity for conservation and the balance between species conservation and animal welfare that zoos must consider when using this method to protect endangered species. He says that one problem that conservationists face is actually relocating animals, which can bring on stress and lead to an unlikelihood of the individuals in the species becoming self-sustaining. The ethics of captivity for the species boils down to the argument between those who consider the species more important than the individual animal and those who consider the individual animal more important than the species. As mentioned earlier by Oscar Horta (2010), it is argued that it is speciesist to treat an individual animal disadvantageously even if that treatment could result in beneficial outcomes for the species as whole. Keulartz cites the utilitarian Peter Singer, who says that if a species were endangered and could be safely captured, set in the same conditions that they would be in the wild, and then released, captivity for conservation would be ethical. However, he also says that this is not usually the case. Keulartz also notes that other ethicists hold similar and even stronger views than Singer, such as that captivity infringes upon an animal’s right to liberty and that it could only be justified if the benefits could be proven to outweigh the consequences of infringing upon this right. Then there’s the fact that zoos themselves do not exist solely for endangered animals and, in fact, breeding programs are not widespread, are not very effective, and also have low chances of reintroducing the animals into the wild. Keulartz presents possible solutions for these ethical and practical issues. For instance, he says that animals should be introduced to environments which closely mimic their natural environment, while taking into consideration the limits. For instance, Keulartz says that it is difficult to have predators feed in the same way that they would in the wild, as the sight of an animal ripping another apart is not one that visitors would typically like to see. Practically, he suggests that zoos contribute more of their funds to conservation, as current estimates place the contribution to be less than 5% of zoos incomes. Keulartz also suggests a link between zoos with similar conservation goals in mind, so that visitors at each zoo can learn about the conservation efforts of another zoo whilst simultaneously viewing the work done by the zoo that they’re at, thus providing more education for the public. Informing the public, raising money, donating funds, and increasing the quality of these animals’ habits are practical efforts, but they would also aid in increasing the quality of life for the animals by allowing for more spacious and naturalistic habitats and for better efforts at breeding and releasing animals back into the wild. Although these suggestions aren’t necessarily a solution for the rift between those who argue that captivity is speciesism and those who argue that captivity for conservation is for the good of the species and is moral, it does show how captivity and conservation efforts can be amended so that the individual animals’ right and the species’ rights are equally considered.

Now that the ethical debate has been broadly explained, perhaps we should consider the problem in the context of a specific situation. One case of a species that has been listed as threatened and that may need human intervention to protect it is the polar bear (Palmer, 2009). The issue with this species is that the melting of arctic ice is linked to climate change, a topic that is still controversial and doesn’t have any easily implementable solution. Clare Palmer begins by discussing why we should care about the possible extinction of the polar bear. Not only is the species culturally significant to native people, but its extinction could have an impact on the ecosystem it comes from. However, as mentioned earlier, weighing the costs and benefits of a species extinction is a gray area that doesn’t say much about the species’ actual value. Rather than focusing on the polar bear’s instrumental value, Palmer claims that the polar bear has moral status. Yet, she notes that arguing for the value of individual animals and species as victims of another species is tricky because one has to balance the rights of the individuals with the rights of the group. Clare considers Lawrence Johnson’s argument that animals are indeed individuals worthy of moral consideration. The first argument of his that she presents is that animals should be considered as individuals because the individuals of the species may have interests that lie outside of the species’ interests. Furthermore, she discusses mentions his argument that although animals may not be aware of morality, awareness is not necessary for an animal to merit moral status, in the same way that a human being who is not aware that they have been wronged would still have a right to not be wronged. These arguments further evidence that animals should be considered as individuals that merit protection. Unlike Oscar Horta (2010) who proposed that harming an individual animal, even for the good of the species, could be considered speciesist, Palmer argues that not protecting a species is actually committing harm to the group. Palmer also says that, while it is still debated as to whether a group can have more or different rights from its individuals, it is typically agreed that groups can be harmed. In this case, it would almost seem like either way rights would be violated. If we assume that climate change is a result of human behaviors, then the consequences to the polar bear species if we choose to do nothing is a harm against the group. Although undesirable for the individual animals, perhaps, until we can figure out some solution for the destruction of the polar bear’s habitat and climate change, it is best to avoid harming the group by taking them into captivity, in the manner that Keulartz suggested. Although this may cause harm to the individual, there is a fine line that must be balanced between consideration for the harm we cause a species and the harm of the individual animals.

Ethical considerations for protecting endangered species are still widely varied and debated. For instance, considering endangered animals as individuals or as a species only presents various issues. If we consider them only as individuals we risk losing biodiversity and systematically harming groups of animals. If we consider them only as a species we risk doing harm to the individuals or violating their rights. If we look at things only from an anthropocentric view and what our future generations could stand to lose, we lose sight of the moral status of the animals themselves. Ultimately, it would appear that conservation efforts need to improve in ways that cause less stress to animals, that provide better education and funding, and that make it easier to reintroduce animals to the environment (Keulartz, 2015). If steps toward this goal are taken, the gap between animal preservationists and conservationists might not be completely bridged, but we can work toward better treatment of both individual animal groups and species.

References

Bradley, B. (2001). The Value of Endangered Species. The Journal of Value Inquiry, 35, 43-58.

doi:10.1023/A:1010383322591

Cohen, S. (2014). The Ethics of De-Extinction. NanoEthics, 8, 165-178.

doi:10.1007/s11569-014-0201-2

Goodin, R. E. (1999). The Sustainability Ethic: Political, Not Just Moral. Journal of Applied

Philosophy, 16, 247-254. doi:10.1111/1468-5930.00127

Johnson, L. (2009).(Singer, EE, 98).

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy, 23, 587-603.

Keulartz, J. (2015). Captivity for Conservation? Zoos at a Crossroads. Journal of Agricultural

and Environmental Ethics, 28, 335-351. doi:10.1007/s10806-015-9537-z

Horta, O. (2010). What is Speciesism? Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 23,

243-266. doi:10.1007/s10806-009-9205-2

Michael, M. A. (2005). Is It Natural To Drive Species To Extinction? Ethics & the

Environment, 10, 49-66. doi:10.2979/ete.2005.10.1.49

Sturman, N. (2013). Many Hurdles for the Translation of Species Preservation Research:

Comment on 'Ethics of Species Research and Preservation' by Rob Irvine. Journal of

Bioethical Inquiry, 10, 531-532. doi:10.1007/s11673-013-9472-5

#philosophy #environmental science #conservation #animals #essay

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aion-rsa · 7 years

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15 Characters Peter Dinklage Could Play In Avengers Infinity War

Award-winning “Game of Thrones” actor, Peter Dinklage, is apparently going to be appearing in the upcoming “Avengers: Infinity War.” What is not yet known, however, is exactly what role he will be playing in the film.

RELATED: Infinity War: 15 Villains The Avengers Could Face Next

Dinklage is an acclaimed actor with a great deal of range, so he could play a number of roles. In addition, he has such an excellent voice that he could easily be doing a voice for the upcoming film, especially as the movie is set to have a much larger, more cosmic scope. As we have seen with Vin Diesel and Bradley Cooper in the “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise, and Josh Brolin in a number of films, Marvel is not shy about enlisting A-List actors to provide the voices of major cosmic characters. With that in mind, here are 15 comic book characters that we could see as possibilities for Dinklage in the film.

M.O.D.O.K.

M.O.D.O.K. (Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing) is a classic Captain America villain created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. What’s interesting about him is that since he is such a fantastical creature (literally a giant floating head), he did not really fit in well with the tone of the first couple of “Captain America” films, which used a more realistic, spy-oriented vibe. Now that the films are going to be more cosmic in scope, a character like M.O.D.O.K. would not stand out quite so much (after all, there will be a talking raccoon in the film and a talking tree).

Most importantly, though, one of the “Captain America: Winter Soldier” screenwriters, Christopher Markus (who is co-writing “Avengers: Infinity War”), specifically said about M.O.D.O.K…

“I love MODOK and I think you could make a terrifying movie with MODOK but nobody seems to be on my side at the moment… I will win you over to Peter Dinklage as MODOK. If he came around the corner and you saw him floating there you would be terrified. It would be amazing.”

So you would certainly, as we have done, have to place M.O.D.O.K. somewhere on the list of possibilities.

A.I.M.’S SCIENTIST SUPREME

A real possibility is Dinklage playing a role similar to that of Martin Freeman in “Captain America: Civil War.” Freeman, of course, played a character named after the comic book character Everett Ross, but really was playing a brand-new character who just had that name (a common enough occurrence in film adaptations of comics). With that in mind, Dinklage could take on a major role as just, say, the head of Advanced Ideas Mechanics (otherwise known as A.I.M., the group that created M.O.D.O.K.).

Andrew Forson is their Scientist Supreme, but really it would be more about the role than the character himself; while Forson is a good character, a film adaptation of him would pretty much just be “the guy in charge of A.I.M.” So, instead of Andrew Forson, the character could be a brand-new A.I.M. scientist, but it would serve the same purpose. In fact, Dinklage could do a double shift as Forson, who would lend his likeness or brain patterns to create M.O.D.O.K. It would not be surprising to see A.I.M. having access to an Infinity Stone, as well.

PIP THE TROLL

During his run on “Warlock,” writer/artist Jim Starlin did an amazing job creating a great supporting cast for Adam Warlock pretty much out of thin air. One of the characters Starlin created as a Warlock cast member was Gamora, the deadliest woman in the universe. She, of course, is a major character in “Guardians of the Galaxy.” The other most important Adam Warlock supporting cast members was Pip the Troll: a gruff, hard-drinking, but ultimately endearing friend to Warlock.

As we have seen for years on “Game of Thrones” as Tyrion Lannister, Dinklage can certainly portray an outlandish, but ultimately endearing character who loves to drink. Also, of course, Dinklage was specifically cast as Tyrion because of his height, and that would be key to the portrayal of Pip, as well. This would depend on Adam Warlock appearing in the film, though, which is still unclear at the moment if it will happen. There are, after all, dozens of characters in the film already.

UATU THE WATCHER

One of the major points that Marvel is stressing in “Infinity War” is that it will be a major cosmic event. This is going to be a very big deal. Therefore, when you look at the Marvel Universe and ask yourself, “What happens in major cosmic events?” one of the things that always happens is that the Watcher shows up. Each universe is monitored by a being known as a Watcher, with the main Marvel Universe being monitored by the one they call Uatu.

Watchers show up to observe every major cosmic event, but they are not allowed to interfere with them. Uatu, of course, always ends up interfering. Honestly, if you take a scientific approach to things, simply letting people know that they are being observed is, in and of itself, interfering with things. That all notwithstanding, Uatu would be a must-have character for “Infinity War.” The only problem is that since Uatu was created in the pages of “Fantastic Four,” his movie rights almost certainly belong to Fox, not Marvel. Perhaps they will cut a deal, though, like the one that allowed Marvel access to Ego the Living Planet for “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2.”

MEPHISTO

Up until very recently, the thought of a demonic character like Mephisto playing a role in a major Marvel superhero film would have seemed extremely unlikely. However, with both the success of “Doctor Strange” and the news that the good doctor will be crossing over into the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe, beginning with “Thor: Ragnarok,” it opens things up dramatically.

In addition, when you think of a character who would connect to both Doctor Strange and Thanos, Mephisto stands out well, due to his significant role in “Infinity Gauntlet” as Thanos’ slimy consigliere. Thanos is going to have to have someone with him at his side, and Mephisto would be an intriguing choice (he’d be all CGI, of course). Taking it a step further, despite being a demonic character, Mephisto’s debut came in a cosmic comic book — Stan Lee and John Buscema’s “Silver Surfer” — so he clearly can work on the cosmic scale.

ETERNITY

Speaking of that intersection between “Doctor Strange” and the cosmic, the character of Eternity — i.e., the cosmic embodiment of time and space itself — made his debut in a famous Steve Ditko “Doctor Strange” storyline before then becoming a part of the larger Marvel cosmic landscape. Eternity typically takes on a command position in Marvel’s informal collection of cosmic beings. When something goes awry, it is typically Eternity who brings the band together, as it were.

Eternity is one of the most powerful beings in the universe, but by the same token, it tends to be headstrong and prone to rash decisions. This has led the universe into some ill-advised situations over the years, as Eternity seems to constantly end up getting captured by villainous forces. With Thanos in the films collecting the Infinity Stones, you can be sure that Eternity would be highly interested in seeing that things don’t get out of hand.

LIVING TRIBUNAL

When things invariably do get out of hand, the seemingly final say in the Marvel Universe is the cosmic being known as the Living Tribunal. The Tribunal serves as the judge of the universe, and also as the guardian of the Multiverse in general, which is why the Beyonders sought to destroy the cosmic being in the stories leading up to Marvel’s most recent “Secret Wars” event. The Living Tribunal is so powerful that when it decided that the Infinity Gems (AKA, the Infinity Stones in the movies) could not be combined and used as the Infinity Gauntlet, it happened just as the Tribunal commanded.

When Eternity draws all of the cosmic entities together, it typically is so that Eternity can present a case to the Living Tribunal, acting as a sort of prosecutor to the Tribunal’s judge and demanding he take action one way or another. Dinklage could really do a strong, solemn Tribunal, if that was asked of him.

LORD ORDER / MASTER CHAOS

The counter-balancing cosmic beings known as Lord Order and Master Chaos first showed up in the final work of Jim Starlin’s initial cosmic work at Marvel, “Final Threat,” which ended with the deaths of Adam Warlock, Pip the Troll, Gamora and Thanos (don’t worry, they all got better). They conspired to affect Spider-Man so much that he would head into outer space with the Thing to rescue the Avengers and stop Thanos from destroying the Milky Way.

They continually interfere to push their agendas, although ultimately they answer to Eternity’s commands. The dual head look that they rock would be a really fun exercise for an actor, particularly if they play both parts (what actor wouldn’t want to play opposite him or herself?). When they want more direct action, they have a being called the In-Betweener, who serves them. That character would also be a theoretical role for Dinklage, but it seems unlikely that he would play the servant of a cosmic being rather than the cosmic beings themselves.

KREE SUPREME INTELLIGENCE

An interesting continuation from the stories of “Guardians of the Galaxy,” and thus, a good way to connect their story to that of the Avengers, would be to introduced the Supreme Intelligence into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the first “Guardians” film, they fought Ronan the Accuser, who was a member of the Kree. The Supreme Intelligence is the cybernetic/organic computer head of the Kree people. By head, we don’t always mean that he is the literal ruler of the people, as he most often acts in secret, behind-the-scenes. He was a main motivator of both the Kree/Skrull War and the Kree/Shi’Ar War.

Famously, during “Operation: Galactic Storm,” he manipulated events so that the Shi’ar would create a devastating bomb that he then had stolen and detonated on his own planet, as he saw his race dying out and knew that the detonation of the bomb, while killing billions, would also mutate a certain number of survivors and make them stronger. That’s the kind of underhanded deception that Dinklage has played well for years on “Game of Thrones,” albeit there with just a touch more altruism.

EON

It appears likely that, just like how “Captain America: Civil War” was used to introduce Black Panther ahead of his own upcoming film, so too will “Avengers: Infinity War” serve as an introduction for Carol Danvers before she gets her own “Captain Marvel” movie. She likely will become Captain Marvel during the “Avengers” films, so there is a strong case to be made that Eon should be introduced in the films now, as well.

Eon is the offspring of Eternity and Infinity, and he has served as protector of the life energy of the universe for billions of years. It was Eon who took Captain Mar-Vell from his point of “just” being a cosmic hero to becoming the Protector of the Universe. He granted Captain Marvel “cosmic awareness” to help him in this task. Therefore, it seems very possible that Eon could be introduced, by playing that same role with the new Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers, in the upcoming “Avengers” films. Eon later named Quasar Protector of the Universe following Captain Mar-Vell’s untimely death. With Quasar, Eon also supplied powerful “quantum bands” (Captain Mar-Vell had his own powerful weapons, so he didn’t need the bands). All of this makes for a rich potential of Marvel movie mythos.

MENTOR

With Thanos taking center stage in “Avengers: Infinity War,” it is only natural that we are introduced to his father. Mentor was the head of Titan, the moon of Saturn that served as the home base for a sub-group of Eternals who had colonized it many years ago. He had two sons, Eros, who later became the Avenger known as Starfox, and Thanos, who killed Mentor’s wife, Thanos’ mother, very early on.

One of the interesting aspects here is that Thanos is a mutant, so he was born much larger than Mentor and Starfox, and it would not be out of the question for Mentor to be played by Dinklage, as Mentor’s height is not important to his characterization. Dinklage would do a good job carrying the gravitas that would go well with a ruler resigned to the fact that his own son has become one of the vilest creatures in the universe.

GARDENER

Since Thanos will obviously be pursuing the Infinity Stones in “Avengers: Infinity War,” it would make some sense to introduce more of the Elders of the Universe. The Elders of the Universe are a group of inter-connected cosmic beings, each the sole survivor of a long-lost planet and each with their own special interest. In the classic mini-series, “Thanos Quest,” which led directly into “Infinity Gauntlet,” Thanos had to defeat a number of Elders to collect all of the Infinity Gems that were in their respective possessions.

Of the Elders present in that miniseries, the two most famous ones, Collector and Grandmaster, will both be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe by the time “Avengers: Infinity War” comes out, so it only makes sense for another Elder, the plant-loving Gardener, to make an appearance, as well. The Gardener was distinctive in his lack of interest in violence, which the other Elders never shrunk from. Dinklage could easily play the Gardener, and he has even shown that he can grow one hell of a beard.

EBONY MAW

As noted earlier, if Thanos is going to play a prominent role in “Avengers: Infinity War,” then he almost certainly is going to have people working under him. We’ve already seen in “Guardians of the Galaxy” that Thanos is keen on having lieutenants serve him. During his run on “Avengers,” writer Jonathan Hickman introduced an entire group of under-generals that served Thanos called the Black Order.

While Dinklage could theoretically play any one of the male members of the Black Order, including Corvus Glaive, Black Dwarf and Supergiant (some would require more CGI than others), the member of the group that he would do the best job on would definitely be Ebony Maw, who is the brilliant and manipulative member of the group (and, unsurprisingly, one of the few who has managed to avoid being killed so far). After years of playing a similar character on “Game of Thrones” (though again, with a much more altruistic bent to his methods and machinations), Dinklage could play Ebony Maw in his sleep (although that would be a strange artistic choice).

BEYONDER

A real wild card for the film would be if they added the Beyonder to the story, though his inclusion would feasibly escalate things beyond the Infinity Gauntlet, at least in terms of scope. The Beyonder was introduced in the original “Secret Wars” as a mysterious being who pulled a group of heroes and villains to a mysterious planet and made them fight each other for his amusement. However, the character is probably best known for the sequel miniseries, “Secret Wars II,” which saw the cosmic entity come to Earth and create a body for itself inspired by the bodies of Captain America and Michael Jackson (hilarious but true). Beyonder then tried to learn what it meant to be human.

After “Secret Wars II,” the Beyonder fell by the wayside as a character, although Jonathan Hickman re-visited the idea of the Beyonder (and the Beyonders) in the stories leading up to 2015’s “Secret Wars.” It is unlikely that Marvel would want to go into great depth with the Beyonder in “Avengers: Infinity War,” but perhaps introducing Dinklage as, say, an aspect of the Beyonder could set up future story ideas. Just imagine the original “Secret Wars” done as a film!

BOLIVAR TRASK

The biggest wild card, though, is if Dinklage, in “Avengers: Infinity War,” was playing a role well-known to fans of comic book movies: that of Bolivar Trask… from “X-Men: Days of Future Past!” In that film, he was a brilliant inventor who determined the existence of mutants and then began experimenting on them and using his studies to create the mutant-hunting Sentinels.

He seemed to honestly believe that he was helping the world by uniting all of mankind against mutants, but he also experimented on people, so he was obviously deranged. Thanks to the time-traveling efforts of Wolverine, his Senitnel program was discredited and junked, avoiding the dystopic future of “Days of Future Past.” He would be an old man in the timeline of “Avengers: Infinity War,” plus his presence would require the help of Fox, so it is almost certainly not going to happen. However, it would be super interesting to see if Fox might want to do it as a sort of symbolic olive branch between the two studios. Just think of all the money they could make…

Who do you think Dinklage should play in the film? Let us know in the comments!

The post 15 Characters Peter Dinklage Could Play In Avengers Infinity War appeared first on CBR.com.

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