“The Mutant Cure or Social Change: Debating Disability”

The next essay in “X-Men and Philosophy” is “The Mutant Cure or Social Change:  Debating Disability” by Ramona Ilea.  This takes the idea of the cure for the mutant gene in “The Last Stand” and applies it to the question of whether the best way to approach “disabilities” is with what is called the “medical model” or what is called the “social model”.  The “medical model” is the traditional approach, where the focus is on providing cures or physical workarounds for the issue, while the “social model” focuses on removing social barriers to the participation of people with those issues in society.  One could argue that the medical model musters various people to provide ways for the individual to overcome their issue, while the social model tries to muster society to, in general, see the issue as, well, not being an issue at all and to work to remove the barriers that society has placed in the way of these people, and in so doing these people would be considered no more disabled than anyone else, as they would be different but not disabled.

As it turns out, I’ve talked about this distinction before, and had a reaction from the writer of the original post that I was replying to that I must not have experienced that sort of condition.  I didn’t mention it there, but I am, in fact, likely almost legally blind without my glasses, and so certainly have some experience with those sorts of conditions.  And, in fact, while I likely could get corrective surgery so I wouldn’t need glasses anymore, my reasoning for not doing that could sound like an argument that an adherent of the social model could accept:  aside from the argument that my vision is so poor that they might not be able to correct it completely anyway, I’ve lived with glasses for so long that wearing them isn’t an issue and getting rid of them wouldn’t be worth the effort and cost of the procedure, and the only reason for others to argue otherwise is some sort of social idea about what wearing glasses means (glasses were denigrated and unpopular a while ago, but have become more in vogue lately).  So it seems, then, like I might be somewhat sympathetic to the social model.  Then again, I wasn’t all that sympathetic to it in my original article, so it definitely seems like I’m more sympathetic to the medical model.

As it turns out, a couple of posts from Shamus Young’s site would be illustrative of the divide.  In the first, Shamus talks about his daughter Rachel and their discovery that she had serious hearing loss, which caused her a lot of stress in social situations.  But after they tried a cheap hearing aid, she said this:

I just got my first set of hearing aids today, (Being about 45% deaf) And after the roller coaster of emotions today with sensory overload and hearing good for the first time in probably about 7 years. I just tried listening to music for the first time with them in just as I was about to go to bed.

Oh my gosh guys, I’m actually crying right now. I mean today I learned that water makes noise but music oh my **** I mean I listen to music all the time but GUYS. HOW DO HEARING PEOPLE NOT SPEND THEIR EVERY WAKING MOMENT LISTENING TO MUSIC? ITS LIKE PURE HEAVEN OH MY GOSH.

So for me the push for the medical model is for things like this:  things that we simply cannot give someone without curing their condition.  There is no change to society that will allow someone who is deaf to experience music.  There is no change to society that will allow someone who is blind to experience the beauty of a sunset.  And this also applies to smaller physical issues, like someone who is lactose intolerant being able to experience the taste of full cream ice cream without getting sick, or someone with certain allergies being able to eat various types of candy (Shamus commented on this in one of his posts, too).  For these sorts of cases, it seems like the medical model is the only option; there are things that are valuable that they simply could not experience or have without a “cure”.

But then there is another post from Rachel, talking about her Dissociative Identity Disorder and noting that she sees herself as a “system” and that attempted cures to reintegrate the identities would have her lose that, which she doesn’t want to happen.  I can freely admit that as what she calls there a “non-system”, it would be easy for me to say that the integration is what should happen, but that doing that might take something away from her that she values, and so maybe a push for a cure is less crucial than an attempt to understand the condition and not look down on it.

In the essay, Ilea uses the example of cochlear implants being given to children at birth that would allow them to hear, and then the debate over whether that should be done or whether that would take something away from them that they could only experience by being deaf.  Again, the medical model would point out that there are things that changes to society cannot provide, and so it seems obvious to perform the operation.  But someone who had grown up deaf might find things good about it like Rachel does for her DID and hesitate.  While for things like deafness and blindness I definitely side more with the medical model because of how serious the things that those conditions deprive people of are, ultimately I’d lean to the side of it being their choice, and in that case the parents deciding that, say, they love music so much that they can’t imagine their child being deprived of it that they feel they need to give them the procedure is certainly understandable.

Which falls back into the reaction I had to my original post, and ties into Storm’s comments in the movie:  the feeling that people who want the condition cured are giving in to social pressure and only need to be convinced that they are fine as they are and to have society stop telling them otherwise and do some basic accommodation and everything will be fine.  This is easy for Storm to say because, as noted in the essay, her mutant abilities don’t have a significant downside.  She was, in fact, able to use her powers to become a goddess, and her only problem really is the reaction of society to her being “different”.  But as Beast notes, not everyone is as lucky as she is, and Rogue is the prime example of someone whose abilities are for the most part not at all a blessing or benefit, to say nothing of those who are deformed and/or have more painful mutations.

It’s always struck me as being meaningful that Wolverine is completely neutral on whether Rogue should get the cure or not, noting that he’s not her father but her friend, and telling her to make sure that it’s what she really wants.  The reason for that is that, as Ilea notes, Wolverine’s mutation is in some ways both a blessing and curse.  Ilea talks about how his healing ability allowed him to survive the adamantium bonding process which is the downside of it, but I don’t see that as being the real downside to his mutation.  First, while his healing ability is impressive and both allows him to survive things that would kill others and also extends his life by slowing his aging process, it’s also the case that it does nothing to dull the pain.  The wounds won’t kill him, but that won’t make them any less painful.  And second, it has always been implied that his animalistic and berserker nature also comes from his mutation.  Sure, he gets to heal, but it also makes him more likely to go into a berserker rage and hurt or even kill people he cares about.  So he clearly sees benefits and downsides to mutations, which makes him able to see that it really has to be the choice of the person with the mutation.  Storm and the commenter on my post don’t seem to feel that way.

But I think that most people are willing to provide at least some of the elements of the social model, especially if we cannot reasonably cure a disability.  We pretty much all agree that some accommodation should be made to people with such conditions.  And yet we pretty much all seem to accept that it would be better to cure the condition, and that the conditions themselves cause more problems than society’s treatment of them, even as we agree that society’s treatment of them might need to be improved.  Why?

The first reason is, again, the one I gave above:  for the more serious conditions, we can easily see how their lives would be improved if the condition was cured.  Even arguments that at a cure might cause discomfort — with someone having to learn to filter out sounds if they were suddenly cured of deafness or having issues with light if they were suddenly able to see — it seems obvious that the benefits would eventually outweigh the detriments, and that societal changes cannot provide them those benefits that they are lacking.  So even with societal changes, they’d be better off with the condition cured, and so that’s what we ultimately should strive for.

The other issue is that there’s a bit of a contradiction in the societal model.  For the most part, their claim is that there are benefits to their condition that they want to maintain for themselves, and that then they want society to accommodate them in various ways so that they can retain those benefits.  That we seem to be willing to accommodate them in some things now seems to justify that ask.  There are a couple of issues with this idea, though.  The first is that we are willing to accommodate them because there is no way to cure the condition and they cannot reasonably do anything on their own to work around it.  We are willing to provide Closed Captioning and Described Video and even mandate it despite the cost because otherwise those people simply wouldn’t be able to use those things and would end up unfairly segmented from society.  But if they decide that whatever benefits they feel they get from their conditions outweigh the downsides, we would be less likely to accommodate them.  When they have no choice but to be in that condition, we are willing to accommodate them, but if they have chosen it, then we are more willing to let them live with the consequences of their choice and will be quite annoyed if they decide to live with that condition and yet still demand that we go out of our way to accommodate them.  For example, my insistence on wearing glasses meant that when I was playing soccer I couldn’t play in the rain, as my glasses would get wet and I’d be unable to see.  My team would go so far as to accept that I wouldn’t play in the rain — even as they did — but if I insisted that they had to get all the games rescheduled that would likely have been met with a response of “Or, you could just get contacts!”.

Which leads into the second issue:  the social model pushes for social change, which means that it ends up being these people demanding that other people change to make their lives easier.  Whenever you do this, you have to accept that people might reasonably think that your demands are going to far.  For example, during COVID I debated with someone over wearing masks in public, with him commenting that since he was in a high risk category people needed to do that to help prevent him from getting COVID.  I pointed out that for things like shopping he could easily utilize delivery or contactless pickup, and he said that for various reasons he preferred to shop himself.  It would be totally valid to point out that he was demanding that other people go out of their way to do things that they didn’t really want to do so that he could avoid doing something that he didn’t want to do, and then ask why everyone else should sacrifice so that he wouldn’t have to.  It’s only that in general masks were so minor an imposition that we could argue that wearing a mask was a reasonable accommodation.

So we already have a notion that the accommodations demanded by people with these conditions have to be reasonable, at least in the sense that it has to be significantly harder for them to adjust to their condition than it would be for us to accommodate them.  But making their condition a choice as opposed to something that they have no control over lowers the bar for what demands would count as “reasonable”.  After all, as noted above, they chose it and so we would always be able to compare what it would take for them to cure it as opposed to what it would take for us to accommodate them.  At the same time, the societal model puts the focus on society rather than the individual which then would likely result in them placing more demands on society than they had originally.  So if you combine demands that require more effort on the part of people in society to accommodate with the fact that they have decided that their condition has benefits that they want to retain, you will reasonably get more push back on whether their demands are reasonable.  As an example, developing and retaining sign language is something that it would be reasonable to demand, but demanding that everyone learn sign language in case they encounter a deaf person would seem beyond the pale, especially given that, say, older people might have conditions like arthritis where they won’t be able to make those hand signs properly and so wouldn’t be able to use it anyway.  Thus, the more people with these conditions insist that they benefit from them in specific ways, the more other people will feel it unnecessary to accommodate them and the more they will feel the demands are unreasonable.

Which then runs into another issue:  if the benefits of these conditions are such that they are valuable to society as a whole, then we could maintain it even without the conditions that spawned it.  For example, it might have required the existence of deaf people for us to develop sign language, but if it is beneficial to society it will survive even if we cure all the deaf people.  And if it would fall away without the need of deaf people to use it, then how valuable was it?

The only other argument is one that is, again, similar to the mutant one:  the feeling that pushing for cures is an attempt to “eliminate” such people, and thus making calls to notions like eugenics or even genocide.  In order to make a claim that it is akin to genocide, we would need to consider people with these conditions a strongly separate group, and it seems to me that that takes self-identification too far.  Deaf or blind people should not, in fact, make being deaf or blind a key part of their identity so that curing them would be eliminating them.  But eugenics is indeed a potential issue, as an argument can be made that the thrust of the medical model is to eliminate the conditions themselves without consideration of the people who have them.  This, then, is why the “choice” part is so important, as ultimately people will need to make the choice themselves or, if the treatment needs to be given when they are too young to make such choices, by their parents who are, we presume, making the choice they think is best for their children.  But even in that case, we need to note that it being a choice makes it so that people will, reasonably, be less willing to accommodate the conditions.  If you choose to accept what we commonly call a disability because you think the benefits outweigh the detriments, you cannot base that on a demand that other people take up the slack.  No one is obligated to do so, and no one can demand that people “subsidize” their choices in such a way.

Thoughts on “Bone Tomahawk”

So when I first came across this one during my normal horror-movie-watching timeblock, I was astonished to discover that it was almost two and half hours long!  That didn’t really fit into that block all that well, and so I decided to skip it for the moment and planned to watch it later, although I was a bit wary of it because it sounded like it might not be really the sort of horror that I was most interested in.  But it didn’t fit the definition of an animal horror movie, and so I ended up watching it over that weekend after shoveling some snow, and had some fairly high hopes for it despite my wariness.

The movie opens with two criminals attacking a camp, and then getting scared off by the sound of riders, and then they enter into a burial ground where one is killed and the other seemingly killed.  We then switch to a western town, which has gone somewhat quiet, and meet a few of the people living there, including a cattleman who has a broken leg — which he broke going up on the roof to fix it in a rainstorm — and his wife who reminds him that she told him not to do it and seems happy that he’s home.  We also meet a man who dresses a bit like a dandy but is revealed to be rather skilled with weapons later on, and the sheriff and his “back-up deputy”.  A stranger comes into town and the deputy says he saw him burying something, and so the sheriff confronts him, ends up shooting him in the leg, hauls him off to jail, and gets the wife in to treat him because she has some medical training and the town doctor is drunk.  The sheriff and the deputy go off to bed, and during the night a stable boy is killed and in the morning they discover that the woman, the stranger and the official deputy who was watching her have all been kidnapped.  Consulting with a local Indian, they believe that they were taken by troglodytes, and the sheriff, the backup deputy, the husband, and the dandy all set off to rescue them, despite the Indian’s admonishment that they will all get killed.

I’m not really going to summarize the rest of the plot, at least for now, because not much really happens for the movie.  The first reason for this is that the pacing is plodding.  In fact, one might call the pace glacial, but the better word really is plodding because that’s what it seems like it is:  plodding along doing nothing of importance and dragging out scenes filled with things that are not at all important nor are they at all developed.  Thus, their long journey to the caves of the troglodytes ends up reminding me of the “The Green Knight”:  a string of events happen but none of them really connect up to do character development or plot development or anything like that.  The husband struggles with his broken leg and there are hints that it is infected and might need to be amputated, but nothing comes of that, even after he breaks it again, and he ends up eventually coming to the rescue and the ending implies that he might even make it back to town at the end.  He breaks it again punching out the dandy for making the same sort of joke about his wife that they made at the beginning of the movie, and it is revealed that the dandy was interested in the man’s wife before they got married, but ultimately it just seems like a way to have the husband get hurt and have to stay behind.  There are a number of these little character moments but they are never paid off at all and even when they are referenced the references are too far apart and the references are buried in too much extra dialogue to really have an emotional impact.

This is also another movie where we know how it should go and yet the movie obstinately refuses to do things that way, but doesn’t do anything else either.  In this sort of movie, either they set out and are constantly harried by the troglodytes, wearing them down and causing them incredibly fear, or else they don’t meet the troglodytes but the rigors of the journey wear them down and cause their disparate personalities to clash.  While there are hints of the latter — as noted, the leg getting broken again is the result of such a conflict — there aren’t enough to them for that sort of story to work.  So we don’t really get that, nor do we get a real development of the characters despite again there being hints of them being deeper than we originally expected.  The “backup deputy” seems like a doddering old man who likes to talk too much, but he was a surgeon in the army and has clearly seen things.  The dandy himself is an Indian-hunter, and hates them so much because they killed his mother and sister when he was a child, and his often callous attitude and paranoia seems to have been developed from the hunting that he does.  But while all of this is mentioned, nothing is done with any of it and so again it just comes across as things the movie says but never really develops.

Which ultimately makes it hard to decide what sort of movie this is.  It’s not really a horror movie, because there’s no real horror in it until the very end when the official deputy is brutally murdered to be eaten and the sheriff is then attacked.  It’s not really a western movie, because it doesn’t do the sort of shoot-outs and other things that a western movie would do despite having a western premise.  It’s not a subversion of westerns because despite the fact that the wife — when the sheriff and “backup deputy” come to rescue her only to get captured — calls them idiots none of the failures up to this point were from them trying to follow the western tropes and having a realistic outcome from doing so, the husband being reckless is what ultimately, at least, saves the wife and the “backup deputy”, and, really, what else were they going to do?  It’s not a thriller because there’s not much suspense involved due to the plodding pace.  It’s not a drama again because of the plodding pace and a lack of development of any dramatic plot points.  It’s not a character piece because none of the characters are focused on and none of them are developed enough for that.  So what kind of movie is it?  It’s not necessarily bad to be unable to classify a movie into a simple category, but most of my analysis here is not about how the movie blends genres, but how it fails to achieve what is needed to find into any of the categories.

The movie also raises a number of puzzles that it never tries to answer, such as the aforementioned debate over the husband’s leg.  This only gets worse at the end since it is he, the wife, and the “backup deputy” who set out for home after killing all of the troglodytes, with the sheriff killing the last three after getting shot in what appears to be the lung and making a last stand to clear them out so that they won’t find the town again.  Except, the husband’s leg was supposedly bad enough to need to be amputated and it was implied that he would die, and they have to walk back, so are any of them going to make it?  After all, an early encounter had them attacked by bandits and having their horses be stolen, so won’t they run into bandits like them again?  But the movie just ends there, and I assumed at first that the implication was that they would make it back, but again that’s not certain at all.  It would have been an interesting ending to take the sheriff’s comment to the official deputy when he was being killed — that the cavalry were coming and were going to avenge him — that he admitted was a lie end up being true, and that the sheriff’s comment to the person staying behind in town to call out to the local army for help had the army send a detachment to follow them and aid them and they ended up rescuing them all, even if it was too late for the sheriff, because it would have paid off that comment from the beginning of the movie and paid off the comment from the sheriff, and guaranteed that the three survivors would, in fact, survive, without relying on the rather unlikely prospect of the crippled husband doing it.  But, alas, that’s not what they did.

I will say that the performances are pretty good.  Kurt Russell does a good job as the sheriff, and the wife has a more academic speech pattern that her husband kinda shares which contrasts with his and the deputy’s speech pattern, while the dandy’s is closer to that.  I would have liked to see these differences explored more and explained better.  But then the movie would have been actually doing something, and that would have disturbed the plodding and irrelevant pacing that is it’s hallmark.

The pacing is, as I have said a number of times, plodding.  Nothing really happens at all in the movie, and there is no theme to the movie at all, leaving it to be a movie about nothing.  There are a number of times when it starts to get interesting but all of those events are quickly buried under the plodding pace, leaving a long movie that is just long, and not interestingly long.  I will not watch this movie again.

The Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Passing the Torch, and the Passing of the OT Characters’ Stories

So the word has come down that Kathleen Kennedy is stepping down as the head of Lucasfilm, which had been teased a few times before and has generally been met with at least low-key cheering by at least a certain segment of Star Wars fans, and not the segment that Kennedy might claim are cheering her departure.  What I think can’t really be denied is that, for whatever reason, Kennedy’s reign over Lucasfilm hasn’t managed to revive any of the franchises under its bailiwick and has pretty much killed them, with Star Wars being perhaps the biggest example.  Speaking as a Star Wars fan, I went from being someone who was excited about Star Wars, bought most of the EU books and series whenever I could, and looked forward to both the prequels and the sequels to someone who until very recently hadn’t even seen all of the ST and hasn’t watched any of the TV series despite having the streaming service that they are on.  The idea that Star Wars as a franchise wasn’t revived but was instead killed seems pretty accurate to me.

But in his “Drinker’s Chasers” roundtable-type podcast thing, the Critical Drinker gathered a bunch of people together and they talked about how the issues with the ST went beyond the fact that, well, they weren’t very good and featured dueling writers and directors who didn’t want to play in each others’ universes, but that they made a fundamental mistake in sidelining the OT cast.  Drinker commented that he thought that they should have given the OT characters one last adventure, and MauLer commented that when they were saying that the cast needed to pass the torch to the next generation that that wasn’t necessarily the case (he does do by raising that point and succinctly responding “Why?”).  They also talk about the fact that in the ST the three main characters from the OT were never together at all, and that that was done in story as opposed to being a reaction to actor demands — Carrie Fisher passing away and Harrison Ford not really wanting to do more movies — because they killed off Han Solo in “The Force Awakens” long before they reintroduced Luke in the second movie.  This was highlighted by a clip from Mark Hamil in an interview/podcast thing where he revealed that he was still bitter over that.  So we can conclude that for them the big mistake in the ST was sidelining the OT characters in favour of the new ST characters.  In thinking about it, I kinda agree, but not for the same reasons.

Before I delve into that, though, it’s useful to raise another point that is raised in reference to Kennedy, where she comments with George Lucas in the room that Star Wars is easier than something like Harry Potter because there weren’t a lot of books that they had to stick to.  Most of the responses I’ve seen have called her out for ignoring the EU, but when we think about the EU we can note that her statement is actually correct.  The EU was actually tagged as being lower canon than the movies, which meant basically that as long as the movies didn’t contradict them they were fine, but that Lucas wasn’t in any way bound by them.  If he wanted to do something that contradicted things in the EU, then, well, that was just too bad for the EU.  And in the prequels he did exactly that, by retconning what the Clone Wars actually were supposed to have been (the EU tended to treat the Clone Wars as a war against clone soldiers, not a war with clone soldiers on the same side as the Jedi).  So anything that was done in the EU was something that any movie could happily ignore — like they did with “Rogue One” ignoring the multiple takes on getting the Death Star plans that the EU had — and the only thing that covered the time period that the ST was set in was the EU.  Thus, Kennedy was right:  Star Wars was easier to deal with than Harry Potter because the only materials that covered that time period were things that not only could be ignored, but that fans of the EU already accepted could and would be ignored, in contrast to Harry Potter where all the fans wanted to see the stories they had consumed in the books adapted, not written out of existence.

Now, when the announcement came down that the EU was getting shifted to “Legends” and that the new movies would be ignoring it, I was a bit disappointed.  But, of course, it made sense.  I believe that the timeline that the ST was going to hit was right around “New Jedi Order”, which would have been the “Vong War”, which was a completely different sort of thing than classic Star Wars, by design.  While the reaction to “The Last Jedi” might have suggested that at least some fans were ready for something new, trying to revive the franchise with something that different wouldn’t have been a good idea, even if the creative sensibilities of, well, anyone who ever comes into an existing franchise would allow simply copying that idea.  I also thought that shifting the EU to “Legends” was a good idea, because it allowed them to carry on with it in at least some limited fashion if it was still popular and so not burning all their bridges.  So for me the biggest disappointment with that was mostly how it was announced, as instead of simply restating the already existing canon statement — the movies aren’t bound by the EU canon and we don’t really want to do what would be done there — it sounded more like a dismissal of the EU completely, with the implication if not outright statement that none of those characters or stories would play a part in the ST and so in the canon going forward.  Instead of a claim that the characters might not be there, the claim was that none of them would be there at all and all of that was just going to be ignored, and my impression of the tone from Abrams was that it was because he didn’t think they were all that good.  For me, I would have said that they were going to respect that and would be more than happy to think about adding fan-favourite characters if it made sense creatively, but that this was not going to be that universe.  Now, you can argue that Abrams et al didn’t want to add those characters due to issues with royalties and the like, but then they added characters like Thrawn later on, so using those characters obviously wouldn’t have been completely out of bounds.  In my discussion of how I would have done it, I would have used Mara Jade and Wedge Antilles’ daughters (eliminating Poe, but he wasn’t that interesting a character anyway).  But, ultimately, ditching the EU actually made sense even if they did seem more dismissive than I would have liked.

So now we return to the OT characters.  Going in, I did pretty much accept the idea that the ST was ideally going to be a passing of the torch from the OT characters to the new characters in the ST.  While the commenters in the video above wonder if their being a bit old should have forced that, the fact is that it was a concern.  Harrison Ford was getting a bit old for that sort of action movie, and there was no indication that he was interested in doing it anymore.  Carrie Fisher in fact sadly did pass away during the filming of the ST.  The idea that the actors were getting a bit long in the tooth to anchor a new franchise made sense.

As we’ve seen with things like Star Trek, passing the torch in this way is certainly possible.  Despite its stumbling in the first season, “Star Trek:  The Next Generation” did manage that really well, reviving the franchise.  And Star Wars had an advantage here in that the ST was happening while the actors were, in fact, still around and able to pass that torch while being too old and having been out of Star Wars long enough that simply putting them in the movie wouldn’t necessarily have them dominate it.  Due to the fact that the Star Trek:  TOS characters were still making movies at the time that Star Trek:  TNG came out, putting them in that universe would have had them dominate, so the series was set late enough that they wouldn’t be around and we only got a brief cameo from McCoy to pass the torch.  Yes, later, Scotty, Spock and even Kirk came in for a few episodes, but for the most part TNG didn’t get a full “passing of the torch” from TOS … and succeeded anyway.  The ST was going to be able to get a full passing of the torch from the OT characters, which in theory was a huge advantage.

This, then, also ties into the question of whether the story of the OT characters was complete and it was time for the stories of the new characters.  I find that I kinda agree with that, too.  While there were still more things you could do with the characters — the EU, in fact, proves that since that’s pretty much what it did — for the most part their arcs were given satisfying completions, and we could pretty much imagine how things would progress.  Han had managed to land the princess and through that and his generalship was entering into the world of the “respectable”, but we of course imagined that he wouldn’t quite fit in and would be a bit hesitant about it, and would have kept his hands in the “scoundrel” side of things given his comments about Lando leading the fighter attack because he’s the “respectable” one right before it was announced that he was leading the ground mission.  We imagined that Luke, finally a Jedi, would try to revive the Jedi.  And while Leia’s arc wasn’t quite as … pronounced as theirs, we expected that the politician and diplomat turned rebel leader would work to help rebuild the legitimate political order, like she did in the EU.  Their stories were reasonably complete, and for the most part all we wanted to see was them acting that way and using that to guide the new characters in their arcs, and their stories were such that led naturally to that:  Luke mentoring a young Jedi or set of Jedi, Leia mentoring new leaders, and Han mentoring the new “scoundrels” who weren’t in it for their “Rebellion” or their new political order but got sucked into it anyway.

So given the characters, we could easily see Luke mentoring Rey and being a guide for her, given that her arc was a Force Sensitive’s arc.  Leia could have been mentoring Poe, and if that arc had been her pointing out that he needed to lead and so needed to be more of a diplomat than simply a good soldier that could have worked.  And the stormtrooper-turned-Rebel Finn could have been mentored by Han, who knows how it feels to be someone on the outside looking in.  And would it have killed them to use Lando as the contact instead of who they did in the first movie?  He would have had the contacts, would have had an interest in getting Luke’s saber, and it would have been just another passing of the torch, and would have allowed him to be in all three movies so that his showing up in the last movie wouldn’t have seemed so contrived (and proven that he could do it).  So, given the above, no, I didn’t really want to see the OT characters have one last adventure on their own or with them as the primary characters, nor do I think they would have just overwhelmed the new characters.  So I don’t think the ST’s mistake was not focusing on the OT characters and instead trying to pass the torch.  But I still think they made a mistake.  So what was that mistake?

Remember, I just said above that it did seem like the arcs of the characters were completed in a satisfactory way, and so all we wanted was to see them in the roles that those arcs suggested and then help to build up the new characters from those roles.  But if you look at the characters in the ST — starting from TFA, so it’s not just Johnson’s attempts at subverting expectations — all of those arcs were, in fact, wiped out by the ST.  People have joked about Leia being demoted from “Princess” to “General”, but that does overturn her entire arc — such as it was — from the OT, as her political and diplomatic side is eliminated completely and she’s just a Resistance Leader again, a General fighting against a seemingly overwhelming foe.  This actually helped to kill the emotions of the new superweapon attack because given her position I was under the impression that the New Republic had fallen and the First Order as completely ascendant, and so didn’t get that the attack had wiped out the New Republic capital system and main fleet.  So I saw it as akin to Tarkin’s “demonstration”, not a crippling blow to a still-existent New Republic.  If they had even simply said that Leia was visiting the Resistance to rally the troops and talk to them about the political blow she was about to strike against the First Order, then we would have had a better idea of the situation, would have known that the New Republic still existed, and would have had yet one more reason to be devastated about the attack because it would have scuppered that political movement, leaving the Resistance alone which would have played better into TLJ where they are trying to rally politically and mostly failing.

But, sure, Leia’s arc getting wiped out might not be that big a deal since it wasn’t that strong of one anyway, and most people might not have really noticed it except for jokes about her demotion.  But people definitely noted that happening to Luke and Han.  The big objection to TLJ is that character whose arc importantly contained his seeing the good in someone that no one thought had any good in him and being right, and also proving himself dedicated to the ideals of the Jedi suddenly almost kills his own nephew because he sees him as being evil and then runs away to hide in bitterness and for the most part rejects the Jedi teachings completely.  While I didn’t see it as being as big an issue as most people did — it was clear to me that it was a brief moment that he immediately rejected and regretted, and Luke even in “Return of the Jedi” showed that he does, in fact, have a tendency to that kind of impulsiveness — I think it was just the most visible example of this destruction of his arc.  Luke is not the Luke we saw him as at the end of “Return of the Jedi”, the optimistic Jedi proven right in his contention that no one can be completely lost to evil, and not even the impulsive youth of “A New Hope”.  Instead, he’s a bitter old man.  Given what happened, I don’t necessarily see that as being outside the bounds of possibility, but to accept that complete rejection of his arc and what we expected would happen after that we would need a really good explanation, and we didn’t get one.

Han, of course, is the most obvious case.  Han’s entire arc in the OT is about him moving from the complete scoundrel only concerned with himself to someone concerned about the issues of others.  We also see that while he is overly impulsive which gets him in trouble he is competent.  The only big trouble he was in was with Jabba, and that seemed more like bad luck than incompetence and an inability to think things through.  But in the ST, he has completely rejected the Resistance and even Leia.  He has no ideals or nothing he’s even working for.  He’s somehow lost the Falcon which is a ship that the movie also makes clear he still loves.  And he’s taking on very dangerous jobs with no clue how to actually perform them, and thus his entire character is, for the most part, the bumbling character that we saw in a brief moment in “A New Hope”.  He’s not the Han Solo from “Return of the Jedi”.  He’s not even the Han Solo from “A New Hope”.  While his son slaughtering the Jedi might well have caused a radical change in his character, this is just too radical a change from who Han Solo was established to be in the OT.  We would have needed a really good reason for that to happen, and we didn’t get one.

So, to me, the biggest mistake was not trying to pass the torch.  It was, instead, that the OT characters they brought back were not the characters from the OT.  So they didn’t feel like those characters, and so we didn’t accept their passing the torch to the new characters.  And, on top of that, the movies themselves didn’t actually have them do that.  Rey takes the book herself and gets limited teaching from Luke, with maybe a little from Leia.  Han gets Finn into the facility and talks to Rey a bit, but never really mentors them.  Poe gets chided by Leia but doesn’t really get taught anything from her.  The OT characters, then, are not the characters that we wanted to see mentoring the next generation, are not the sort of characters who could mentor them, and didn’t do it anyway.  Thus, you can’t successfully pass the torch from existing characters to new ones if the entire structure of the work is instead working against that.  And that’s the structure the ST ended up with, which is a big reason why it failed.

Thoughts on “Once Upon a Time (Season 7)”

This the final season of “Once Upon a Time”, and it seems to fit the adage of “The more things change, the more they stay the same”.

This season is basically a soft reboot of the series, picking up from where the last season left off with Henry having gotten older and having a young girl show up at his door like he did for Emma and say the same things he said to her to him.  As it turns out, Emma, Snow, and Charming were all mostly dropped from the season, and they have been moved from Storybrooke to a suburb of Seattle, and are under a new curse.  The premise for this one seems to be based on Cinderella, with an alternate Cinderella coming in — who is a Latino single mother, and so not at all like Cinderella — and turning out to be Henry’s true love … although he doesn’t remember her and thinks that his wife and daughter were killed, and she thinks she was married to someone else and had her daughter with him.  Regina runs the local bar, and the person most likely to have created the curse is the stepmother, who runs a development company and is trying to develop the land against the little girl’s wishes, and she’s “supported” by her daughter who would have been one of the stepsisters.  Hook and Rumpelstiltskin are local detectives.  As things progress, we find out that the stepmother is obsessed with reviving her other daughter at the expense of the one who is following her around, and that ultimately we find out that the first daughter is the one who cast the curse.  As things progress, we find out that the Hook here is an alternate Hook, with an alternate Alice as his daughter, and as usual new threats in a coven of witches and an alternative Rumpelstiltskin come into play.

One thing that really struck me about this season is how badly they did Cinderella, especially in terms of the aesthetics of the character.  I probably wouldn’t have been bothered too much by the shift from even their own previous presentation of her to make her Latino, but the issue is that, well, she’s just not all that attractive.  What would have been the “ugly stepsister” in the original tale is actually quite a bit more attractive than she is.  Heck, the stepmother is more attractive than she is.  On top of that, she appears fairly old, which is distracting given that she’s supposed to be Henry’s first love and the actor playing him — who is not the actor from the previous systems — still looks rather young.  So there seems to be a bit of a discrepancy there.

Now, of course, one could argue that they’ve done similar things like that before that I didn’t mind, like having Regina be more attractive than Snow White.  But in that case they managed to build in a different motive for Regina than jealousy of her looks, and so it worked well, and Snow White being pretty worked well for her Mary-Margaret persona.  Here, Cinderella’s backstory still has her trying to attract the Prince’s attention at the ball — in order to assassinate him — and she clearly isn’t someone who would stand out enough in terms of looks to do that.  If she was still the Prince’s true love — even if she didn’t know it — then that would work as true loves would recognize each other … but she’s Henry’s true love, not the Prince’s, so that entire storyline doesn’t work.  And, again, that she seems significantly older than him, especially in the real world, is a bit jarring.

The show continues its trend of many convoluted plots and villains that are unstoppable until they are defeated with bigger villains coming in to replace them.  The stepmother gives way to the witch who gives way at the very end to the alternate Rumpelstiltskin, but the last few plots are resolved within the span of a few episodes.  Along the way, we have alternate Hook’s relationship with Alice and her relationship with Zelena’s daughter Robin, which is built up as a love relationship which has no impact on the plot.  No, seriously, even when she is seemingly somewhat possessed by the witches’ ritual and Robin appeals to her to stop it Alice doesn’t even bat at eye at shrinking all of them.  Rumpelstiltskin also has a subplot of trying to find a way to die to be with Belle, but that’s not all that interesting either.

The ending of the series is also an attempt at a bit of a bait and switch.  Everyone is back together in the Enchanted Forest, with Emma returning not as a returning hero but as a flustered mother showing up late, as they all participate in a ceremony making Regina their leader, where she is declared to no longer be the Evil Queen, but instead the Good Queen.  Given that this is the last scene and it is focused entirely on her, one might be inclined to think that this was the key to the series:  the redemption of Regina.  But as I was watching it, my thought was that the series wasn’t fooling me.  The show spent far too much time focusing on Emma and not on Regina to make me believe that her arc was the prime arc for the series, especially since she was sidelined even in this season to focus on Henry, who solves the witch problem through the true love he had for his adopted mother.  And they didn’t even give her a true love to give her a truly happy ending, despite that possibility being set up in the previous season.  That, then, makes this scene a poor final scene for the series, as it doesn’t really reflect the main arc and characters for the series, with Emma and Henry sidelined and the focus on supporting characters like Regina, Snow and Charming.

For me, one of the best parts of the season was the stepsister, who was an interesting character and could have moved from the shallow character she started out as to someone who wanted to help the heroes.  The revelation that she was the one behind the curse somewhat hurt that, but she still got a more or less interesting arc.  The little girl had her moments, although she was more annoying than Henry most of the time, and Hook as detective was somewhat interesting and the interactions with Alice — especially when it was discovered that he couldn’t be near her due to a curse — was somewhat interesting as well.  But ultimately, the soft reboot didn’t work, as the characters and town that we had gotten to know are mostly absent from the season, the ones who did make it into the season are given different personalities, and none of the new characters and arcs are all that interesting.  Suffice it to say that if this was what they might have been planning for going forward, it was better to let the series end with this season, as series fatigue would have likely had many fans leaving the series before any of this could have been developed properly.

I’ll have one more post summarizing my views of the entire series.

Tori Vega Diary: The Outskirts

Well, I guess I can say that at least Tatooine isn’t a toxic swamp.  For it to be a toxic swamp, it’d have to have some water somewhere, and Tatooine is the most desertest planet of desert planets.  Sigh.

So, again, I was supposed to help out the Republic on Tatooine as well — although I can’t see what anyone would want on this planet — but my mission tied into that pretty well, because there were some strange bombings going on in the settlements and that seemed like something the Republic would want stopped.  We went to check it out and then these droids started walking towards us.  Now, droids walking around isn’t all that strange, but there was something off about them.  And then I figured out what was strange about them once they started exploding!  Yeah, the bombings were being done by droids that had bombs hidden in them.  We managed to draw them to us and fight them off enough to stop them from killing more civilians (hey, aren’t I a civilian?) and then set out to figure out who was building them and why.

At the same time, I had a call from some SIS agent asking me to come and talk to him.  When I got to the underground base on the outskirts of the settlement, he wasn’t there, but some guy who worked for Czerka was … and so were a lot of Czerka guys who wanted to kill him.  So of course when they saw me they decided that they wanted to kill me, too.  And while, sure, looking at me you might think that that’s a good idea, but remember, I have a really big gun and lots of explosives, so they really should have known better.

Anyway, once that was all cleared up, it turns out that that was the agent’s plan:  have me show up and protect that guy.  I don’t think he expected me to show up after the other guys showed up, but he was happy with the results anyway.  But I really, really wasn’t, and I would have just left him then and there without helping him any more because he clearly wasn’t to be trusted, but then he dropped the bomb:  he was trying to find some sort of planet busting device that Czerka had abandoned and was trying to dig up again.  Augh!  I can’t let this yahoo try to find something that could destroy an entire planet on his own!  He’s likely to screw it up again!

That being said, after that he was a lot more competent, sending me out to find an old Czerka employee who might be willing to help us find it.  When I got there, it seems that the sun kinda got to him, and he thought I was a technician there to fix his machines that were breaking down.  Someone else might have just smacked him around a bit (maybe even a Jedi?) but I sighed and went out to fix his stuff in the hopes that getting that off his mind might clear his mind a bit (yeah, I’m too <bleeping> nice) and it worked!  Of course, then Czerka started bombing the place, but it turns out that he had some kind of bomb shelter and told me how to get there, and then told me how to find the Czerka base … or at least start the process of finding it.  So that was all good.

At the same time, I’d found out that the bombs were being made by these bug creatures called “Geonosians”.  Ugh.  I hate bugs.  And, even worse, I got the information from the Havoc Squad guy here, Fuse, the bomb guy.  Well, that makes sense.  Anyway, I found the bug guys and convinced them to share their information with me, and then Fuse helped me find the Imperial base where they were being made.  I managed to get to Fuse, but I had a choice between saving Fuse or chasing the bomb they had made.  I chose saving Fuse, even though he wanted me to chase the Imperials.  As you might imagine, when I reported that to General Garza, she wasn’t pleased with it, but was happy that I hadn’t had to kill Fuse, so that was something.  But I don’t think she likes me.

After that, it was further into the desert to use the data that that Czerka security guard had hidden to figure out how to do some scans to find the base.  Once I did that, we found that it was in the Dune Sea, and there were a bunch of old comm towers that could be used to track down the old research base.  They also had some messages from the things that were going on, and it started from some strange artifacts and the researchers being their normal, petty, corporate selves to them trying to test the artifact and then some strange techno-zombies attacking the head guy.  Yeah, sounds like exactly where I wanted to go!

But that sort of thing, if it got out, could take over a planet and maybe more planets, so I kinda had to go (see above).  And when I got there it turned out that this was all run by an alien who was trapped in some kind of prison.  First, he threatened me and sent some of his zombies and droids to kill me, but with Dorne’s help I managed to take out the things that were creating them and they all died, and then he promised me all sorts of things if I helped him take over the galaxy, and I was just about to decline when the Czerka guy who had been calling in and mocking me showed up, saying that he used our data to figure out where to go and offering to cut me in on his deal if I gave him the device.  I decided “Screw that!” and shot the device, destroying the alien and really pissing him off.  So he attacked.  And again, I have a big gun and lots of explosives.

So that cleared that up, and the agent guy was thrilled with what we’d done.  And I’d started to like him better since he was more competent once he was able to stop trying to deny that he was doing anything and, well, actually started doing anything.  So despite spending all that time in a dry, hot environment — which really didn’t do good things to my hair — I felt pretty good about what I’d done at the end of the day.  Hopefully that will carry on to the next planet!

Ordinary Heroes (Chapter 16)

Rachel was absolutely thrilled with how things were going.  The battle against Doctor Destructobot and then the drama over her finding out that the heroes she was mentoring were more problem cases than up-and-coming stars had really brought the team together.  They were all paying attention in classes and their training sessions were working out really well.  Superheroes higher up in the chain were paying attention to what she was doing with them and discovering that treating them the way they wanted to be treated and putting them more into the roles they wanted to be in was the way to get remarkable performance from them.  They were all happy, unified, and loyal.  And now …

“They’re talking about giving the team small missions together!” Rachel gushed to The Stoic in a review session at one point.  “Isn’t that great?”

The Stoic raised an eyebrow.  “Yeah.  Great, ” he replied with a decided lack of enthusiasm.

She looked at him, puzzled.  “What?” she asked.  “You don’t want to run missions as a team?”

“No, that’s not the issue, ” The Stoic replied.

Rachel was even more puzzled.  “Then what is?”  she asked.

“Let’s just say that I’m more … suspicious of the motives of the administration than you are, ” he replied.

Rachel paused for a moment.  “Why?” she finally asked.

“Well, we’ve experienced the administration trying to push us into the roles they wanted us to play for far longer than you have, ” he replied.  “I’m a bit skeptical that they’d suddenly give up now.”

“But, I mean, how well you’ve been doing should prove you right and them wrong, right?” she asked.

“I’ve found that it’s pretty difficult to convince people that they’ve been wrong, ” he replied.  “Especially people in as high a position as the administrators.”

Rachel scoffed.  “Oh, come on!”  she replied.  “Don’t you think you’re being a little …”

She trailed off, looking puzzledly at the screen where she was reviewing the data on the team.  “What is it?” The Stoic asked.

“Do you know anyone who would be accessing these files other than us?” she said.

“Well, the administration might, ” he replied.  “Why?”

“Because I’m seeing a lot of anonymous accesses, looking up all sorts of data on the team, ” she replied.

“Anonymous?” The Stoic replied.  “In order to be anonymous, you’d need a really high security rating.”

“How high?” Rachel asked.

“Well, Captain Courageous’ level, basically, ” he replied.

Rachel paused to think for a second.  “Why would he be so interested in the team’s data?” she asked.  “He gets full reports from me on the team’s progress!”.

The Stoic shook his head.  “That’s not what’s puzzling, ” he replied.

“Then what is?” she asked.

“Why would he decide to access the team’s data anonymously?” he replied.

A Musing Inspired by “The Will to Power”

While still stylistic, “The Will to Power” is indeed a bit more clear and makes a bit more arguments than “Beyond Good and Evil” and “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”.  I’m barely into it and so don’t want to make too many comments about Nietzsche overall, but one section (on page 36 in my version), says this that I want to talk about:

Morality treated the violent despots, the doers of violence, the “masters” in general as the enemies against whom the common man must be protected, which means first of all encouraged and strengthened.  Morality consequently taught men to hate and despite most profoundly what is the basic character trait of those who rule:  their will to power.

Again, it’s far too early for me to say that for Nietzsche the Will to Power really is the sort of Will to Power that drives the despot, but it does hearken back to a comment that I made earlier in my discussions of Nietzsche, differentiating the “Will” from the “Will to Power”.

For me, when it comes to power we ought think of it like I think we ought to think about money:  wrt them we should strive to have enough to fulfill our needs and desires and be reasonably secure, and at least not worry about having any more than that.  Now, as I’m Stoic-leaning if one has more power or money than one strictly needs that’s not really an issue, as money and power are in the Stoic philosophy indifferents and so don’t have moral value in and of themselves, and even out of that philosophy they are clearly instrumental values and so don’t have intrinsic value themselves.  So if, say, someone invents something as part of achieving the money they need to be reasonably secure and it takes off and makes them a billionaire, as long as they achieved that money by simply selling that product to people who want to buy it for a fair price without engaging in unfair business practices or gouging people, then that’s perfectly fine.  And if someone, say, engages in political debates in order to deal with minor issues around their own home, and if someone else points out that they are good at that and could use that to run for office and help more people, if they decide to do so and gain political power then that’s fine too as long as they don’t use underhanded tactics to get there.  The principle is to only strive for the power and money that one needs to make themselves personally secure, and any power or money that they achieve from that would accrue from acting “virtuously” or properly and not from power- or money-seeking behaviour.

Yet the sort of “Will to Power” that the despot, the “masters” and the rulers would seem to have is not this sort of moderated will that is only after precisely what one needs for their own personal security.  At a minimum, we would have to imagine that having to be completely in control politically in order to be personally secure would reflect paranoia.  More likely, it is not the power to achieve their own personal security that they are really after, but instead power over other people that they are after.  They don’t simply want power, but want power over other people, and that’s why they strive to become a ruler or a master or a despot and won’t be satisfied with anything less.

Now, it’s obvious that not everyone who wants power over others will be able to become a proper master or ruler or despot.  But while they might strongly desire those positions, the underlying desire is a desire to have power over others.  As such, they will constantly strive to have power over others, and will attempt to get that power in whatever form they can, and over whomever they can.  This is a sharp contrast to the person who only wants enough power to be secure or, perhaps to put it better, in order to secure their non-power-desiring ends.  The person with the sort of “will to power” that I talk about above has “gain power over others” as a desire, and one that they attach a lot of importance to, which is opposed to the “common man” who either doesn’t have that desire or considers it far less important.

However, the issue is that people with that “will to power” will impact what the “common man” without that sort of will to power needs to feel secure.  In a society where no one is striving for power over others, no one needs to have the ability to prevent such people from claiming power over them.  However, if such people exist, then obviously everyone needs to strive to ensure that they have enough power to foil these people in their plans.  Thus, even the “common man” needs to strive for more power than they absolutely need, just for protection.  And since they can’t really know who might be striving for power over them until it is too late, they need to preemptively gain power to ensure their own security.

So given this, we can see that we end up in a sort of Hobbesian State of Nature power struggle.  Everyone needs to strive for as much power as they can to avoid having someone else — or a group of someones — gain enough power to dominate them and leave them without the power to secure their own goals and desires as opposed to the other desires of those persons.  Just like someone trying to earn more and more money to react to inflation or even the threat of inflation in order to feel secure in their retirement, we have to gain more and more power to react to the attempts of others to dominate us so that we can feel secure in our ability to hold on to enough power to achieve our own ends.

And the solution to this is indeed the same as that for the Hobbesian State of Nature:  we agree to limit the power that others can have over us and indeed to have the “common man” protected from such people so that we can all pursue our own ends without constantly striving for more power.  And morality is one such way, by punishing and potentially ostracizing those who would seek more power than they need or who gain more power than others through illicit means.  Thus, while Nietzsche’s comment seems to deride morality for doing so, to me this is indeed a major and beneficial aspect of morality, controlling the achievement of power to control the desire for power and thus to moderate the “will to power” to the proper, moderate sort that is about capabilities as opposed to the “will to power” that is about dominating others.  If we eliminate morality, perhaps we also eliminate that control on the “will to power”.  And if that “will to power” actually is Nietzsche’s “Will to Power”, then we’ll end up disagreeing.  But this will become more clear as I proceed through the book.

Thoughts on “A Desert”

So after the previous two movies on Shudder, I had to back up again — and obviously I was already backing up from the Cs to the As — to pick up this movie.  My cynicism towards Shudder made me wonder if it was even worth watching, but it had Sarah Lind in it, and I had watched her in “A Wounded Fawn” and “Wolf Cop”, and thought that it was worth keeping to my alphabetic progression through Shudder.

The movie opens with a photographer who is going around photographing abandoned buildings and places.  He stops at a motel and at one point calls the manager about the couple fighting next door and after that the man comes over to apologize, and then his “sister” comes over, they share some alcohol, there seems to be an alcohol-fueled dance and sex party, he wakes up the next morning to find them gone but meets up with the man again, who takes him to a couple of places and then kills him.  His wife — who he’d talked to a couple of times before — then hires a private investigator to find him after he didn’t check in for a week, and the private investigator has a past.  Anyway, the private investigator follows the man’s path around a bit and ends up at the motel.  He then is picked up by the “sister” who is posing or working as a prostitute, and he ends up drugged as well, with the original man stealing things like the picture of the photographer and his wife,  Meanwhile, the wife shows up, assumes that the private investigator was literally screwing around on the job, and drives away, only to get a flat tire and to have the man come by.  He kidnaps her to some sort of strange porn studio — we’d seen this in a flash scene earlier and a phone number in the bible in the room was for there — but the private investigator figured it out from some of the pictures he’d taken while looking for the photographer and shows up to save her, but ends up getting injured in the fight.  Then end up driving to a drive-in which calls back to a picture of the photographer’s that the wife liked, and the private investigator seemingly dies and the wife is catatonic watching the screen.  Then it cuts to some kind of flea market at the drive-in and the “sister” — who was not at the studio and so survived the fight — drops off an old camera like the one the photographer used and smiles as she walks away.

This is yet another movie where we know how these movies are supposed to go and yet the movie is completely incapable of providing anything like that.  The description says this:

A gripping neo-noir horror. A photographer on a road trip is lured into the dark underbelly of America after a chance encounter with a wild couple.

And so the obvious approach from that description is that we would focus on the photographer as he gets slowly drawn into this dark underbelly and does things that he wouldn’t normally do — like willingly and knowingly cheat on his wife or get involved in pornography — until the end where it is clear that he is in too deep and has to get out … or fails to.  But he dies before the halfway point.  Alternatively, they could have had a brief period — a half hour at most — following him around only to have him be killed, and then spend the rest of the movie focusing on the wife trying to find him.  Given that Sarah Lind is a pretty good actress and is able to make people feel sympathy for her, this would have worked as well.  But too much time is spent on the photographer to start the movie, and too much time is spent on the private investigator after she is brought into the picture for that to work.  They could also have focused on the couple themselves and their insanity, but while some time is spent on them we don’t learn anything about them or why they do what they do, which makes them simply uninteresting psychopaths.  This is highlighted by the ending where the scene with the “sister” provokes no emotions at all other than perhaps annoyance, since I’d be much happier with her dead but don’t consider her enough of a threat on her own to feel fear.

This movie also hit on something that I’ve been experiencing more and more with the movies on Shudder:  anxiously awaiting the end of the movie.  But it’s not — or at least not just — that I’m waiting for a bad movie to end, nor is it the case that I’m engrossed in the mystery and anxiously looking forward to the revelation at the end.  No, it’s the case that I’m anxiously awaiting the movie in the desperate hope that at the end, at least, I will finally understand what is going on or, at least, what the movie was trying to get across.  I spend most of my time completely and totally confused about what’s going on and what the movie is even trying to do, and so hope that the ending will finally reveal it.  The enemy of any kind of horror or thriller or tension is confusion, and I find I spend far too much time confused.  It seems to me that this is part of a trend where writers try to keep things tense by hiding information from the viewer instead of by using clever tactics and misdirections to give us all the information we need to figure out what’s going on but to never let us see why we need that information and how it can be used to figure out what’s going on.  This is bad for a mystery, but it’s far worse in horror and thrillers where we aren’t necessarily supposed to be puzzled about what’s going on and having a sense of the stakes is important.  And, of course, as in this movie it’s absolutely terrible if, at the end of the day, you forget to explain to us what was going on at the end of the movie.  I still have no idea what sort of movie the writers were trying to make here.

The movie spends time on following characters around doing relatively normal things without ever setting those things up as interesting or revealing in any way.  It also seems to have two or three different plot ideas running and never pays off any of them, and there’s no overarching theme to tie them together.  Ultimately, I was bored for almost the entire runtime of the movie and my confusion only made things worse.  I will not watch this movie again.

First Thoughts on “Suikoden II”

So after finishing off “Suikoden” and taking a short break, it was time to dive back into the Suikoden universe with “Suikoden II”.

The first thing I noticed was that it was definitely “Suikoden” that I had played back on the old PS2 (the PS1 version).  This game starts with a war camp for a youth brigade and then a betrayal where almost everyone gets killed and the protagonist and his best friend — who is almost certain to be a character who gets killed later on and who might be able to be revived if you recruit all the Stars of Destiny — have to escape by jumping off a cliff into a raging river.  Yeah, I would have remembered that if I’d played it before.

The plot, as you might be able to tell from the above paragraph, proceeds as quickly as it did in “Suikoden”, as in my first session of a couple of hours I did all of the above and managed to get back home until to discover that I was being framed for being a traitor by the commander of the brigade who wants to get power by selling us out, and end up being sentenced to execution, rescued by a group of mercenaries who had “captured” me earlier while rescuing me and who I escaped from with the help of my best friend who ended up somewhere else after we jumped off the cliff.  And then I went back to the mercenary camp — led by Flik and Viktor, who stayed behind at the end of “Suikoden” and might have been killed — and was told “Well, uh, just putter around for a bit and go recruit people if you can.”  That … was not at all clear on what I should do next, so I stopped for the day.

In my second session, I did wander around and recruit some people in various ways, but couldn’t figure out how to trigger the next part of the story.  I think the key was to actually go into one of the towns which happened to be where the best friend had recuperated after being rescued and then talk to the young daughter of the family who helped him and get a mission to buy an amulet from the local city so she can give it as a gift for her father.  So you go off and do that and to my complete surprise something bad happened to that family while I was away, which was that the entire town had been slaughtered and burned down by the main villain Luca Blight.  As things progress, we discover that he seems to be driven insane by his sword and needs to kill people to gain/retain his power.  He then sends his forces to attack the mercenary base, and Apple from the first game shows up again — and chides Flik and Viktor for not telling anyone that they were still alive, at which point Flik notes that Viktor said he’d do it but never got around to it — and we manage to fight off the first wave of enemies using the Fire Spears from the first game, but then we are overwhelmed and have to flee, and arriving at the city I can’t get in and so had no idea what to do, but stopped at a strangely placed inn and ended up triggering a quest to explore some ruins to get a pass to get into the city, which took me longer than I had expected and so seemed like a good place to stop.

One of the things that I noted about this game is that the plot is, of course, pretty serious but they like to slip in some humour, mostly generated by your sister who is … enthusiastic and also a fairly good fighter, and so early on she drags the protagonist around so that he’ll do what she thinks he should do, and then a little later when we go to rescue her after being rescued she’s freed herself and is running around beating up guards until she stumbles upon us, and later also tries to convince a guard to let us go back to our village — a similar scene happened earlier when the protagonist and the best friend go there accompanied by some performers who do manage to convince the guard to let us through — and fails, and later at the city she gets very angry at what the guard says and she has to be dragged away.  I find the events more or less funny, but sometimes they can clash with the mood, especially since they do a really good job with the sadder emotions, like with the little girl and when the wife at the inn is sick and we need to find a cure.

But, the same thing that I felt when playing “Suikoden” returns here:  every time I play it, I just keep getting reminded of how “Suikoden III” did it better and want to play it instead.  Here, the big thing was the recruitment, as with four separate groups that can all recruit you actually get reasons to recruit, and for Geddoe — head of a mercenary company — and Chris — head of the Zexxen Knights — you have full teams for the most part and have little need to recruit, while Hugo — son of the chief of a tribe in the grasslands — has some need to recruit to kinda fill out the group and Thomas — the kid in charge of what will become the main castle — really wants to recruit and level up to be able to win the battles he faces (although his section is optional) and so we have reasons to recruit without being told “Go recruit a bit now”.  If you aren’t in a recruiting section, you can’t, and if you are, then it is clear that you should.  That, as noted above, is not the case here.

Still, I think the plot is better in this game than it was in the first one, and that we know who the main villain is and have seen and can interact with him early on is a good thing.  I suspect that, like the first one, I will get through it but will constantly be wishing I was playing “Suikoden III” instead.

Thoughts on “Just the Ten of Us”

A long while ago, I was reminded of the sitcom “Just the Ten of Us” and watched a couple of episodes of it on Youtube.  I was recently reminded of it again while looking up some searches on TV Tropes, and decided to see if I could find more episodes of it.  I found a set of AI upscaled episodes, and so decided to watch the entire series.

The show was a spin-off of “Growing Pains”, where coach and English teacher Graham Lubbock ends up getting fired from his job by something Mike did (if I recall correctly) and has to find a new job to support himself and his large and growing family, with the four oldest being attractive teenage girls.  This series picks up with him having moved out to California to teach at a Catholic school.  The show focuses on him, his wife Elizabeth, and his children.  We have Marie, who is very religious and religiously torn over the fact that she still has the normal desires of a teenage girl, Cindy, the ditzy but otherwise normal teenage girl, Wendy, Cindy’s smarter but very sneaky twin, Connie, the typical angst-ridden teenager whose most legitimate angst is A-cup angst, J.R., the first boy, who has issues with being ignored, and Sherry, the precocious and intelligent younger girl who is much smarter than J.R. and while she fights with him a lot when they need to engage in shenanigans she’s the one running the show (there are two other children but they are too young to really engage with the show in any way).

One of the interesting things about the show is that it is for the most part unabashedly religious and specifically Catholic.  Elizabeth and Marie are very religious, with Elizabeth being devoted and Marie being obsessive.  There’s even an episode about Marie going to a convent that explores that sort of religious questioning, and there’s an early episode where Elizabeth claims that God is speaking to her.  These episodes often involve the priest who is running the school, who for the most part is quite materialistic and a bit shady but often has crises of faith over the events.  Sometimes, this focus can cause issues where it seems like the focus is somewhat inaccurate or overly harsh.  For example, in one two-parter where the other sisters lied to Marie to get her to join them on a trip and she turns their lies on them by pretending to marry the guy they told she had a crush on, at one point Elizabeth says that while she is claiming to be the victim of the lies she’s the worst out of them all because she pretended to have had sex with the guy and so wasn’t taking sex seriously, which seems to be a bit harsh.

But that was the sort of thing that the show did that other sitcoms wouldn’t do, in addition to its religious focus.  A number of times, the show avoided the pat and simple sitcom solutions to talk about issues with more nuance.  For example, in one episode Cindy tries to fend off the advances of a guy who thinks that she’s “easy”, and while she is portrayed as being in the right for not taking it — she ends up breaking the guy’s arm, twice (so both arms in the end) — Elizabeth points out that given how she looks it’s going to be an issue for her, so not saying that the behaviour was right but noting that she still needs to deal with it.  While often the lessons are heartwarming, they aren’t always the standard sitcom lesson that we would expect from a show like this.

This carries over to the sisters.  Cindy and Wendy are fairly standard sitcom characters, but while Connie and Marie could be standard sitcom characters they have attributes that make them non-standard.  Marie has her religious leanings and the conflict that creates, which elevate her above the simple “good girl” role that she more or less inhabits.  And Connie’s artistic tendencies and angst about her looks combine to make her a much more dramatic character than the standard artistic girl stereotype.  What this adds up to, though, is that Cindy and Wendy are the easiest to write for, they are also a bit boring compared to Connie and Marie, although Cindy has her moments from being very nice, if ditzy.  On the other hand, while Marie and Connie are more interesting they also seem to be more difficult to write for, as both often express their … unique perspectives in ways that are far too dramatic and out of place for who they are supposed to be, to the point of being excessively annoying about it.  This is something that would be fine once in a while, but entire episodes have them acting that way, which seems to me to be a failure of the writing.

I also found Sherry fairly interesting in the earlier seasons.  Her mix of high intelligence and snark reminded me a lot of Nora from “Thundermans”, so much so that I’ve pondered writing a crossover fanfic featuring the two.  However, later on in the series she shifted a bit towards having Wendy teach her about being a teenage girl, which had potential but came in a bit late, especially given that the focus really ended up being on the four oldest girls at that point in the series so it didn’t get properly developed, making the character feel like a bit of a waste.  Heidi Ziegler did a good job with the role, though.

The later seasons featured the oldest girls in a singing group called “The Lubbock Babes”, and this is cited as a reason why it hasn’t come to DVD, as they can no longer license the songs.  I’m not sure about that.  There are only a couple of episodes where the group is given a lot of focus, most of the songs could be replaced with more generic music without much issue (other than syncing with the dancing) and even if that couldn’t be done pretty much all of those episodes could be dropped, which I suppose is easier to do with streaming than with DVDs.  It’s also those performances that show that while Cindy and Wendy are portrayed as the “hot ones”, Marie and Connie are pretty much a match for them, so if you happened to find the latter more appealing than the former, even outside of the performances, you couldn’t really be said to be wrong.

At any rate, the show is quite funny and is fairly unique in how it does things, even if sometimes it goes a bit overboard in some of its portrayals.  I would definitely watch this series again.