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luidilovins · 3 years

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You should turn your post on the Uncanny Valley into a book or something. I am not even kidding, it's brilliant and sorely needed information. Thank you for it.

Tbh its just speculative that the uncanny valley is an inherent biological trait and not cultural or a learned behavior at the moment. A good example would be the cultural phenomenon of colorophobia where in the US we have a longer history of using clowns in our horror pop culture genres than countries like Japan.

Clown entertainment has been around since the Egytian times and maybe some people have always been freaked out by them it honestly just takes one director or author to have an disproportionately irrational fear and good cinematography skills to convince people that they SHOULD hate clowns just as much, (I could say the same about the movie Jaws but thats a bit of a tangent,) or a memorable event that damages the public's trust in something that SHOULD be innocent or harmless. (A good examples being the John Wayne Gacy trials.)

Clowns are also thought to be in the uncanney valley so ita a fairly good argument on cultural phenomenon versus genetic traits. Up until aroud the 60s-70s clowns were actually fairly well liked by the US general public and a lot of older generation still find a fondness in it that would scare the living shit out of their grandchildren.

As far as evidence that I may be right about the "uncanney valley might be because of rabies" theory, there has been a small case study suggesting that the movements of a non-human robot that trigger the effect in us, is also present in people with parkinsons but the sample size is too small for me to be thoroughly convinced.

And don't be mistaken I also dislike this concept because saying that ableism is an inherent human trait is just as bad as saying racism is an inherent human trait. There is little to gain from distrust in the disabled and little historical evidence to suggest it was common or beneficial to discard disabled people. Disabled people's remains have been found time and time again to live to incredibly long livea and be cared for, and participate in their communities. I'm highly critical of this particular case study and I take it with a grain of salt because its on cosmo, but evidence of human disabilities and compassion can be sourced by actual bones and it's been placed on VERY credible sources. NPR, NBC, Discovery, Nat Geo, NY Times, literally the clostest you can get to creme of the crop news articles on DOZENS of accounts and if you have a goddam problem then pay for a tour to the Smithsonian, find an archeologist and coherse them into showing you the bones and then explain phorensics to you because you probably wouldn't understand unless you too were a phorensic archeologist yourself.

What I DO BELIEVE tho is that if the uncanny valley is a legitimate inherent trait, that like most evolutionary traits, it made it this far for this long because it somehow served us benificially. And the biggest benifit I can think of is identifying neuro-infectious diseases because they can spread agressivley, many of them lead to death or lasting effects and are fucking MISERABLE to catch. We're talking brain swelling, fevers, uncontrollable vomiting, tremors, hallucinations, motor and vocal tics, difficulty swallowing, seizures. This could all happen because they eat infected deer meat or because of one bad fox bite. It's miserable if you survive and horrifying if you dont. Rabies can survive in your muscle tissue for years before infecting your brain and once it does usually you only live for about 5-10 days in and out of concious knowledge that you're going to die painfully, and disease aggrivated psychosis. It would be hard to pinpoint the causation because the amout of time before full blown infection would vary too much to assosiate for a long time. So your only option is to hone in on telltale signs.

The disabled people who would suffer from herdeditary or developmental neurological disorders run the risk of prejudice from mistaken identity, but if a human is part of a community, and doesn't die within a week from having a wobbly head, it would sooner or later become apparent that they're not dangerous. I think nowadays culturally people don't press to learn more about disabled people due to social and political prejudice and never fucking grow up past that. Mistaken identity or not. You learn about people from the patterns of their behaviors so even ones that seem abnormal to you become a normal recognizable pattern for them. Fancy that.

We don't get grossed out by chimps or gorillas, who are even more distant cousins, and the proof that we don't have a search and destroy button for anything immediatly related to us is a bunch of bullshit can be found in almost every human's blood on earth. And not just neanderthals, but denisovans as well. And that's not even accounting for genetic backtracking the crossbreeding of other sapiens species before we were whittled down to just the three. What makes the tweet even stupider is that when neandertals still roamed the earth humans were shorter, hardier, and overall more rough looking so we looked even indistinguished then. We Also Chewed On Bones and neandertals handled cold climates better than us based on a study on chest cavity density and, skull nasal intake and heat circulation, providing genetic diversity and the upper hand in survival in the tundras or mountainous regions spanning over Eurasia. If it wasn't for humans fucking neandertals we might not have been able to spread over the contient or diversify the way we did.

So my full hypothesis is that if the uncanny valley is a genetic inherent human trait it was used to benifit people from catching agressive diseases in a time where the benifit of fearing a group member with rabies outweighed the cost of fearing a group member with a disability like parkinsons.

WHAT PISSED ME OFF was the idea that we are DESIGNED to be unwary of our evolutionary cousins could easily be used for white supremacist spaces to justify racism BECAUSE IT ALREADY HAS

So that one tweet that might seem like a quirky thinkpiece in my eyes is just fuel for eugenics trend round whatever number we're on. It's like we don't fucking learn. It would be REALLY easy to retool the concept that it's natural for people to be fearful of whatever the bullshit definition of sub-humans are. Claiming that black people were sub-human thus deserving of mistrust and submission to white ownership worked like a fucking charm.

Maybe if I go to college and major in psyche/socio/civics it'll be my college thesis. Right now I'm more of a hobbyist than anything, but what I DO know is that anyone can make an untested hypothesis to combat another untested hypothesis and it should hold just as much goddamn value. I combatted the idea that the idea that human othering was funneled into an unconfirmed effect that causes disgust and terror based on non-human sapiens is in fact racist and gave what is in my opinion a more evoluntionary practical approach to the uncanney valley.

The generalized links that I used APARENTLY weren't good enough for some people but aparently a single tweet that says "hur dur heedle dee uncanney valley exists because of human cousins" was taken at face value even tho it was probably tapped out in five seconds without regards to the reproccussions. I find a huge discomfort that less than studious links about the evolution of monkey social behaviors that I used as a guideline to explaining my concerns became the focal point for people to nitpick without even having the gall to "well actually" on the subject. That absolute ravaging NEED to rip apart at it and devolve into name calling because I MENTIONED racism is fucking suspicious and I don't trust it. I had to stop looking at the responses because some people were only reblogging and arguing with barely half of my argument and i was getting nowhere fast.

There were a few people that made actual points with cited sources that made their own rebuttle arguments. That I respect. It's just as valid an argument as mine and I'm ALWAYS willing to take on more credible sources to strengthen my stance or gain perspective.

But it's the utter dismissal of a concerning concept that just seeped into the subtext that gnawed at my gut. Some people on top of hating the linked sources I provided, admitted they didn't read it, refused to read between the lines to purposfully misinterpret or derail my main points, and detract that my claim that the tweet was a result of systemic white supremacy saturated into modern science was a bunch of bullshit because I claimed that 1500s anglos invented racism.

The thing is we did invent the racism that we fucking currently subscribe to.

We practice the science that we formulated based on our own social prejudice. Real people die from this.

We remain uncritical of our own theorums that we postulate then pat ourselves on the back like we're philosophical geniuses even though racism is a family heirloom with a new paint job.

We preach the eugenics ideals that we pulled out of our asses to benifit from fearmongering, promises of national security and unpaied labor.

White supremacists create subtext with the intention of it being consumed by accident or in ways that seem palatable.

Fuck.

That.

I don't hate the person who wrote the tweet. Chances are that they gave the tweet as much thought as they took the time to write it and went on their day as a fun little thinkpiece. Everyone on the internet does it. But its that kind of thinking error that needs to be adressed as a progression of historic and scientific prejudice that gets rehashed, recycled and untouched and continually damages and is weaponized against marginalized people. I am not wrong for taking it seriously especially when a bunch of people were sitting around nodding their heads just as effortlessly.

I don't owe the internet any more sources than the tweet. I don't owe anyone on the internet a full scientific ananysis. And the people's reaction to what I had to say was actually what further convinced me I might have hit the nail on the head.

#answered asks #uncanny valley effect #eugenics #fuck white supremacy #systemic racism #racism #negative #slavery #luidilovins

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cock-holliday · 4 years

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I don’t think I’ll ever tire of writing thinkpieces about video games but here we go. I recently finished playing Dishonored 2 again and wanna talk about how the game is thematically similar to TLOU2 but imo succeeded where TLOU2 failed.

Obvi, spoiler warnings for both games

I think a good place to start is saying that nothing The Last of Us 2 did or tried to do was new. This isn’t a bad thing, most things have already been done or said, it’s how you say it that makes things refreshing. Revenge stories are not new, hunting down lower-level enemies until you reach the big bad has been done to death, cycle of revenge stories have been done.

The stories mirror well no matter who you play in D2, but it obviously works better if you play as Emily (frankly the story should be hers, but it’s still fun to play Corvo too).

As Emily, you are introduced to a provocative antagonist on the anniversary of your mother’s death. This antagonist, Delilah, has an unconventional and flashy character design. She reveals that she is your long-lost aunt, and she has come to “rightfully” claim the throne. We don’t don’t know if she’s lying, but she immediately reveals herself to be a powerful foe by incapacitating Corvo, your father and lord protector, and then turns his ass to stone.

The story follows Emily hunting down Delilah’s co-conspirators, learning why Delilah is doing this, and rescuing her father from an uncertain fate.

It’s the same story. Dishonored 2 didn’t invent these tropes either.

What makes Dishonored 2 work, however, are 3 main points: choice and consequences, building sympathy for Delilah vs Emily’s character development, and not crossing lines.

The first line Dishonored 2 didn’t cross that TLOU2 did was not killing your dad. Corvo, the beloved protagonist of game 1, does not die, he just gets taken out of play and you must save him. Emily is still seeking revenge for a lost throne, but her motivation is not Corvo’s death. This is not only important tonally, but it influences your opinion of Delilah and others, which is crucial when it comes to choice.

The Dishonored games allow for multiple endings, and operate on a “chaos” spectrum. More killing and violence, higher level of chaos, darker ending. This allows the players to reap the benefits or suffer the consequences of their decisions. Do you kill these people or spare them? The game saying “what you did was fucked up :/” lands much better when YOU chose to do it. Some characters I went in disliking, then as you learn their stories I felt bad for them, and would pick a kinder ending. Sometimes the opposite happened, though, and again, that was my consequence to face.

Fairly early on, it’s revealed that Delilah is Emily’s mother’s half-sister. Grandpa Kaldwin had an affair with a kitchen maid, and the maid had Delilah in secret. The child was hidden in shame. She was treated differently from her sister Jessamine, despite being older, because of the nature of her birth. When Jessamine broke something they played with, and got confronted, she panicked and blamed Delilah. Delilah’s mother was fired for this, and the pair were out on the street. Delilah’s mother got sent to debtors prison and had her jaw broken. She didn’t recover from her injury and left Delilah orphaned when died. Delilah built herself up from the gutters to become powerful and exact her revenge. A pretty gut-wrenching and sympathetic tale.

Playing as Corvo, characters give you more leniency for your connection to royalty, since Corvo was from the streets too, but as Emily, she gets a lot of characters reminding her that she comes from privilege. Emily did not cause Delilah’s suffering, but she inherited the position that contributed to the wealth disparity in the same streets Delilah and her father suffered in. Emily’s journey is very much about realizing and changing how the kingdom operates. Delilah comes from a very sympathetic background, and Emily is an unintended beneficiary of the suffering of her people. An important dynamic to balance out the characters.

By the end of the game I really pitied Delilah. Everything she did, misguided and destructive as it was were desperate attempts to find people who would love and care for her, and to gain control over a life that tortured her relentlessly. Taking out her allies made her realize how after getting what she wanted, she still had no one. By the final fight I actually wished there was a way to rehabilitate Delilah. A third option to take her in, because the game did such a successful job of making me feel for her. The game made me more sympathetic to her than I think they even meant to. Good good internal conflict, an a successful tragic story. It’s also crucial that the tragic story falls on the antagonist to learn, and not the protagonist, UNLESS of course you chose a darker path.

The Last of Us Part 2 is just missing all of that. I’ve already written about the order of the story being a real wall between what they wanted to do and what they did, and talked about how killing off Joel at the beginning really fucked up people’s ability to feel sorry for Abby. I wrote about Jerry not being a sympathetic or likeable person, and the damage THAT did to the story, AND Abby’s lack of conflict and repeatedly crossing lines. Not just with Joel, but with Jesse, and Dina, and Owen, and even her desire to torture imprisoned scars.

Essentially, the things that TLOU2 wanted to do were good thematic ideas, that were executed poorly, and games like Dishonored 2 show how they COULD have been a success.

#anti tlou2 #anti tlou 2 #tlou2 #tlou 2 #the last of us part 2 #tlou part 2 #the last of us part 2 spoilers #the last of us 2 spoilers #tlou 2 spoilers #dishonored 2 #dishonored 2 spoilers

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thatwasthenightthingschanged · 4 years

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"In retrospect, you could say I was beginning to question things.

But then it was 2018, and a couple of things happened. First, Love, Simon came out in March, which was one of the most electrifying, unforgettable, truly extraordinary experiences of my life. But having your book adapted to a film brings a lot of notoriety and attention, especially online, and it’s not always the fun kind. Unsurprisingly, there was quite a bit of discourse about my identity — how could there not be? Love, Simon was the first gay teen rom com to be released widely by a major film studio, and it was based on a book written by an allocishet woman. Yes, the film’s director was openly gay. No, not everyone cared (frankly, a lot of people still don’t know Love, Simon was based on a book). But in many online spaces, my straightness was a springboard for some — legitimately important — conversations about representation, authenticity, and ownership of stories. And for some people, my straightness was enough to boycott the film entirely.

Then Leah on the Offbeat came out about a month later, and the discourse exploded all over again. There were thinkpieces based on the premise that I, a straight woman, clearly knew nothing about being a bi girl. There were tweets and threads and blog posts, and just about every single one I came across mentioned my straightness. And when Leah debuted on the NYT list, authors I admired and respected tweeted their disappointment that this “first” had been taken by a straight woman. Of course, Leah wasn’t the first f/f YA book to hit the New York Times list. And maybe people were wrong about the other stuff too. But the attention and scrutiny were so overwhelming, and it all hurt so badly, I slammed the lid down on that box and forgot I’d ever cracked it open.

At least I didn’t remember I remembered.

I deleted the sexuality labels from my website. I declined to answer certain questions in interviews. I’d get quietly, passionately indignant when people made assumptions about other authors’ gender identities and sexualities. And I’d feel uncomfortable, anxious, almost sick with nerves every time they discussed mine.

And holy shit, did people discuss. To me, it felt like there was never a break in the discourse, and it was often searingly personal. I was frequently mentioned by name, held up again and again as the quintessential example of allocishet inauthenticity. I was a straight woman writing shitty queer books for the straights, profiting off of communities I had no connection to.

Because the thing is, I called myself straight in a bunch of early interviews.

But labels change sometimes. That’s what everyone always says, right? It’s okay if you’re not out. It’s okay if you’re not ready. It’s okay if you don’t fully understand your identity yet. There’s no time limit, no age limit, no one right way to be queer.

And yet a whole lot of these very same people seemed to know with absolute certainty that I was allocishet. And the less certain I was, the more emphatically strangers felt the need to declare it. Apparently it was obvious from my writing. Simon’s fine, but it was clearly written by a het. You can just tell. Her books aren’t really for queer people.

You know what’s a mindfuck? Questioning your sexual identity in your thirties when every self-appointed literary expert on Twitter has to share their hot take on the matter. Imagine hundreds of people claiming to know every nuance of your sexuality just from reading your novels. Imagine trying to make space for your own uncertainty. Imagine if you had a Greek chorus of internet strangers propping up your imposter syndrome at every stage of the process.

The thing is, I really do believe in the value of critically discussing books, particularly when it comes to issues of representation. And I believe in the vital importance of Ownvoices stories. Most of the identities represented in my books are Ownvoices. But I don’t think we, as a community, have ever given these discussions the care and nuance they deserve.

Consider the origin of the Ownvoices hashtag. It was created in 2015 by author Corinne Duyvis, with the purpose of highlighting stories written by authors who share the same marginalized identities as their characters. But Corinne has always emphasized caution when it comes to using Ownvoices to determine which authors can tell which stories. And she’s been incredibly clear and emphatic about not weaponizing the term to pressure authors to disclose private aspects of their identities.

So why do we keep doing this? Why do we, again and again, cross the line between critiquing books and making assumptions about author identities? How are we so aware of invisible marginalization as a hypothetical concept, but so utterly incapable of making space for it in our community?

Let me be perfectly clear: this isn’t how I wanted to come out. This doesn’t feel good or empowering, or even particularly safe. Honestly, I’m doing this because I’ve been scrutinized, subtweeted, mocked, lectured, and invalidated just about every single day for years, and I’m exhausted. And if you think I’m the only closeted or semi-closeted queer author feeling this pressure, you haven’t been paying attention.

And I’m one of the lucky ones! I’m a financially independent adult. I can’t be disowned. I come from a liberal family, I have an enormous network of queer friends and acquaintances, and my livelihood isn’t even remotely at risk. I’m hugely privileged in more ways than I can count. And this was still brutally hard for me. I can’t even imagine what it’s like for other closeted writers, and how unwelcome they must feel in this community.

Even as I write this, I’m bracing for the inevitable discourse — I could draft the twitter threads myself if I wanted to. But I’d rather just make a few things really clear. First, this isn’t an attempt to neutralize criticism of my books, and you’re certainly entitled to any reactions you might have had to their content. Second, I’m not asking you to validate my decision to write Simon (or What If It’s Us, or mlm books in general).

But if I can ask for something, it’s this: will you sit for a minute with the discomfort of knowing you may have been wrong about me? And if your immediate impulse is to scrutinize my personal life, my marriage, or my romantic history, can you try to check yourself?

Or how about this: can we all be a bit more careful when we engage in queer Ownvoices discourse? Can we remember that our carelessness in these discussions has caused real harm? And that the people we’re hurting rarely have my degree of privilege or industry power? Can we make space for those of us who are still discovering ourselves? Can we be a little more compassionate? Can we make this a little less awful for the next person?

Can you tell I’m angry? Because I’m angry.

But I’m grateful, too, for those of you who understood the hidden (and not-so-hidden) threads of my books before I did. I’m grateful for the writer whose vulnerability made all of this finally click into place for me. And the ones who put their hearts on the line to hold space for people like me. And the ones who made me feel like I was allowed to care about this. And, of course, I’m grateful for the books. Some of you have no idea how much your words have helped me find mine.

Anyway, all of this is to say: I’m bi. Sorry it took me so long to get here. But then again, at least the little red coming out book I needed was already on my shelf (in about thirty different languages).

I think I finally know why I wrote it."

author Becky Albertalli ("Love, Simon", "Leah On The Offbeat") on her coming out process and the harsh criticism she had to face for he books (whole article here)

I think this perfectly illustrates why we, as a community, should stop assuming other people's identity

#becky albertalli #love simon #leah on the offbeat #love victor #svsthsa #wlw #mlm #lgbt

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schrijverr · 4 years

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Behind the Scenes

This is a story that developed from a small peek into my brain whenever I write the stories you read into a thinkpiece about writing and posting fanfiction.

On AO3.

Ships: none (unless you wanna ship me with my keyboard lol)

Warnings: none, I suppose, but it does get a little down in the end, I was having a rough day when I wrote this, sorry.

~~~~~~~~~~

I sit on my chair before my laptop. I’m curled into myself as my fingers glide over the keyboard and my thoughts flow out of my fingertips onto the screen.

It isn’t all that late, just past midnight, but it’s already dark outside and in order to see the keys properly I have to turn on the lamp I have on my desk. With the light it’s kind of cozy here in my little nook of the world.

I look to the screen and try to make sense of my own words. I don’t have a fully fledged idea yet, but a vague idea that floated through my brain at some point during the day has inspired me enough to open a new document and start typing.

I now know how this story begins and I see where I am going and how it will end, but the question of how I get there sits heavily on my mind.

I stop typing for a moment and think. If I introduce this character now, it might set some other things in motion and that’ll be good for the plot, but I don’t know how to write that character at all and I’m afraid that if I do it wrong, people won’t like me or my story.

I sigh and realize I’ve started almost every new paragraph with the same word. I hate it when I do that. The story starts to feel repetitive and as a non native English speaker I want to prove that I have a bigger vocabulary than that.

How to proceed?

A synonym, maybe? But I’ll have to look that up and I don’t think there is a good synonym for I. Sighing again I scan the page and think. Maybe I could start with a verb to shake things up a bit or a question. No, not a question that would feel out of place here.

Now I’ve written a few paragraphs again, so I could use the word I used before, but since I used it so many times already I want a bit more space between now and the next time I use it. So a synonym it is, I guess, I think as I open my browser to look one up.

…

There is no synonym for I.

Goddammit, I think. Well, it’s no use now anyway. I’ve decided to write this story in the first person, despite knowing I’m horrible at it, and now I have to deal with the fact that I don’t have another word for I.

I start my next paragr- no that’s not right. Backspace, backspace. Moving on to the next- No, not that either. Backspace, backspace. I look at what I’ve written last and wonder why I’ve written something upon which I can’t, hmm, what’s a good word there?

I know I have a good word in Dutch ‘voortborduren’, but when I translate it, it gives me elaborate, which doesn’t fit in the sentence at all. Mentally groaning I recline in my chair as I try to think.

Maybe it’s the sentence itself? Lets see what did I write again? Oh yeah: I look at what I’ve written last and wonder why I’ve written something upon which I can’t- and then I need to find a word. Hm, funny, I don’t know how to go on by the sentence about not knowing how to go on.

‘I look at what I’ve written last and wonder why I’ve written something upon which I can’t’, I whisper it to myself in the hope the right word comes to mind.

First there is nothing, but then! Expand! Not perfect, but it fits, which is good enough for now, maybe when I proof read it a better word will come to me and I can use that.

So, expand. I wonder why I wrote something I can’t expand upon.

Fuck, I’ve spend so much time finding the right word that I have forgotten what I was talking, well writing, about in the first place. Softly swearing under my breath I scroll up and read what came before the sentence with the stupidly hard word to think off.

Ah yeah, it was about the other stupid thing, namely that I am writing this in the first person, which I still cannot do, no that skill has not come to me in the time it took to look up a word. What a pity.

But I have started the last few paragraphs with something other than I from time to time. That at least is something. Wait, should I add punctuation there? That, at least, is something. Looks better, but maybe that is just my love for commas talking. I mean, why write a boring sentence with a dot in the middle, which makes it short and doesn’t give you enough space to play with it, when you can also add unnecessary punctuation, so that you can play with the cadence of how something is read out loud or in someones mind?

Whoops, now that whole paragraph is long, if I want to make this story easy to read I’ll have to make this one shorter. Hmm, is this good? Yeah, probably. Enter.

Now, I’m suddenly wondering, if paragraph is even the right word. In Dutch the word is ‘alinea’ and the word ‘paragraaf’ also means chapter, but not really, only in a school book. It doesn’t really make sense, because you also have a chapter in a schoolbook and that’s divided in paragraphs and each paragraph has ‘alinea’s’

Aaand I’ve distracted myself by thinking about the differences between each language instead of looking up if paragraph is actually the right word and it means what I think it means.

I look it up on Google translate, not the most trustworthy source for sentences, but for lone words it’s alright.

It is the right word, along with indention, but I’m not really familiar with that word, although I can see where it comes from with the paragraphs creating indentions in the text. Still, I decide to stick with paragraphs, cause “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and I live by that.

Looking back to the clock in the corner of my screen I realize that I’ve now been writing this for 40 minutes. It isn’t all that long, but I don’t know where I’m going with this anymore. I had a point when I began and now I’ve forgotten it.

I stretch my arms, by pushing away my chair, leaning forward until my shoulders are at the same height of my desk is. My right shoulder cracks, it has always done that, but the sound snaps me out of my musings and makes me pay more attention to my surroundings.

It is raining outside and I hear people screaming. They sound happy, probably celebrating something and drinking, but I still wondered what they’re doing up so late (ignoring the fact that I am still awake too.)

Right, my word document. I was trying to remember what my point was. No wait, not remember, recall sounds better. I double click remember and replace it with recall: I was trying to recall what my point was.

Although I have found a nice sentences with the best word to describe the action, I still don’t know what comes next. I suddenly begin to doubt myself. Maybe this was a dumb idea. Maybe I’ve read this somewhere before and I am unconsciously copying someone. Maybe I should just delete this and move on to something else.

I mean, come on, who wants to read this? No one. I’m just going to post it, knowing that no one cares and no one will read it. People don’t go to AO3 for original works, you don’t, so why would anyone care about it? It’s going to get five hits tops, with maybe two kudos, three if you’re lucky.

And now I have accidentally switched to a second person perspective, can’t even stay consistent. Maybe if I play it off as an introspection or and internal dialogue no one will notice or think it’s an artistic choice.

Pff, artistic choice. You can hardly call what I’m doing artistic. It’s just fanfiction, a hobby. Yeah, I know that is still good and can be great, even amazing and artfully written, but this isn’t. I have a too direct writing style for that. I’ve only been getting English education for six years and it’ll take so much more practice until I ever reach that level.

I’ve gotten off track completely now. I faintly remember that this started out as a mock internal dialogue of what happens when I write a fanfic, but now it turned into a self deprecating shit parade.

I blink long and hard, trying to get my head back on track and write something better, or at least more consistent.

Realizing that in order to do that I should probably scroll up and read (lets be honest scan) how I started. I don’t have the energy for it, but I force myself to do it with a sigh.

Scroll, scroll, scroll.

Ah, yeah, I began with where I was and then that discussion about language and looking things up. Oh, but I’ve also reflected on what I’ve written before, well, before. Then it was about re-finding what I was doing after I had to look up a word and now it is desperately trying to remember what the actual fuck I was doing in an attempt to make something cohesive, but still. I decide to not do that again.

I still don’t know what my point was when I started this, but I’m making a new one up right now. I think I’m going to call the work ‘behind the scenes’ or ‘the thoughts of a writer’, since I have now decided that this is a way to get readers a peek behind the curtains.

As a reader, I can respect people so much for all the work they put into a story. And of course I’m not saying you can’t do that if you don’t write, no, that would be pretentious, but I do have more respect for them than before I started writing all those years ago.

It is really easy to forget that something you read in a few minutes has taken hours to write. This is not even 2k words long right now. I know I can read that in a few minutes, not even blinking and mostly forgetting, before moving on to the next story, but I have been writing almost nonstop for over an hour now.

I am lucky that I can usually keep the words flowing long enough to make some bullshit up that I can reason into a coherent story in the end, but that has taken practice. A lot of practice.

In order to become a good in writing a story you have to do it so many times and you won’t even notice you’ve gotten better until much later. I know this, because I recently went through all my works and made them better. Got all the typos out there, I fixed vague sentences and I made the lay out better. I also cringed a lot.

Well, I think I have to go with a ‘behind the scenes’ now, because I don’t think I can claim this is my internal monologue when I’m writing. Instead this has turned into a think piece about writing and appreciating it or something.

I don’t even know anymore.

I recall I had a point when I started this, probably thought it out and then my brain decided to throw it away and throw up this garbage instead. It is interesting, I suppose, but not at all what I was going for in the beginning.

Oh well, maybe I can fix it when I proof read it, because I am tired and I think I’m going to bed. I have half the mind to just fuck it and throw it on AO3 without glancing over my own words even once. It’s very tempting to leave others to deal with these honest words and pretend they aren’t mine, but I don’t.

However, I don’t think I will edit this that much, because it was nice to get some frustrations on, well not paper, but on screen. Just order my thoughts, you know?

It is hard to stay motivated when it seems that everyone around you is doing so much better than you. It is disheartening and it makes you want to stop.

I don’t.

I can’t.

Writing is what I do, it helps, it’s nice. I love writing and I don’t think I will stop loving it. But one of the reasons I love writing is because it can get the constant thoughts and ideas to stop swirling around in my head.

Today I needed it to stop, so that I could just go to sleep properly and I feel like this helped. It was honest and I feel better now. Tomorrow can come at me and I will face it like I did today. Maybe my last few fics weren’t to everyones taste and that’s okay, they were my taste and I love them and I am proud of them. For me that’s enough.

I would apologize for ranting, I usually do, but since you could stop at any time and leave, I don’t think I’m going to do that, what I am going to do, is thank you.

Thank you for reading this, despite the fact that it is not a fanfic. Thank you for allowing me to just dump all these thoughts on you. And thank you for being here and clicking it, your support, even if it is only an extra number by “hits”, means so incredibly much to me and I cannot put in to words how grateful I am that you are here.

Since it is now 01:18 and if I recall correctly it was 00:02 when I started, I think I am really going to stop now. Goodnight, or good-whatever time a day you’re reading this!

Goodbye :)

#RR writing #just me thinking #think piece #internal monologue #writing fanfic

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duhragonball · 5 years

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Dragon Ball Z Movie 15: Resurrection F

“Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection F” premiered on April 18, 2015. Notably, it had a U.S. theatrical release only a few months later, in August. Movie 14 got a U.S. theatrical release, but it took a lot longer, and fans didn’t really have any reason to expect that much. In 2013, we were just waiting for Funimation to release it on home video. But I think it says a lot about how successful Movie 14 was. Not only did the sequel get made only a couple of years later, but the big shots in Japan who run all this stuff finally realized that there’s an international audience just as eager to pay for this stuff. I want to say the Broly movie got released in the U.S. even faster, but I’d have to look it up. And from what I understand, the Broly movie did even bigger business than Movies 14 and 15, so I think it’s safe to say that if they keep making more of these, we can count on a speedy localization.

Do we have Fox to thank for this? I mean, would any of this Dragon Ball revival have happened if “Dragon Ball Evolution” hadn’t bombed so badly? I mean, let’s say they did a good job and made DBE really kick ass, like the Thor movies. By now they probably would have made a nice little trilogy, starring a mostly whitewashed cast. Maybe the third one would be looked down upon, or they’d try to do a reboot like with the X-Men franchise, and people would write pointless thinkpiece articles asking stupid questions about “Dragon Ball fatigue”. Teenage Justin Chatwick stans would be blogging things like “OMG Did you know there was a Dragon Ball Evolution cartoon?!?!?” Maybe those live action movies would be better than Dragon Ball Super, but they’d probably also mark the end of the franchise. At least with things as they are, there’s no telling how much more Dragon Ball content we might be getting in the 20′s.

Gee, Toei, how come your mom lets you have two logos at the start of the movie?

I just found this out last night, but Res F has the distinction of being the first movie where Toriyama wrote the actual screenplay, as opposed to just coming up with the plot and story, as in Movie 14. I’m a fan of Toriyama’s work, obviously, but I’m don’t subscribe to the idea that anything he does is pure gold and everyone else who contributes to this franchise is ruining it somehow. There are GT apologists who would try to argue that GT was more legitimate because Toriyama had some vague influence on the production, and he drew SSJ4 Goku once, so that means it’s magically awesome. It just doesn’t work. Movie 14 is better than Movie 15, and I don’t think that’s because one screenplay was better than the other, but the point is that you can’t just add more Toriyama labor and guarantee a superior product.

So there’s three big problems I have with this movie, and when I rewatched it this morning, my opinion hasn’t budged since 2015.

First, the sole premise of this movie is that Frieza comes back to menace the good guys again. That’s a bad move, period. I find Frieza overrated to begin with, and they’ve already done handful of Frieza comebacks before this movie was ever conceived. Even if it was a good idea, it’s so obvious that it’s barely worth doing. When the DBS: Broly movie was first announced, I was worried that they were making the same mistake again, but then it turned out they had a bold twist on the character to justify the effort. And that’s what it takes. If you do something obvious and predictable, if you repeat an idea you’ve already used before, then you’d better have some sort of big twist to make it fresh. Movie 15 does not have this. It does an admirable job in spite of that flaw, but it’s a pretty serious flaw.

Second, the visuals are bland and unimpressive. The point of this movie is that Goku and Frieza are going to have a rematch of their epic showdown on Namek. I just went back in my archives and pulled up a still from the Frieza Saga, and it looks ten times cooler than anything in the movie. They were fighting on an exploding planet, surrounded by red skies, lightning, molten lava, and tornadoes. Movie 15 boasts the same guys, supposedly more powerful than ever, but they fight like they’re in a video game, and the background is just this dismal cloudy sky. They had 23 years to figure out how to raise the stakes, and all they could come up with was making Frieza yellow and Goku blue.

Third, everyone acts like an idiot in this movie. Like I said, we’ve done this dance before, but everyone just repeats the same mistakes and forgets that characters can do things that they’ve done in the past. Sometimes I can’t tell whether it’s an honest flub, or a deliberate callback to classic DBZ. All I know is that I remember how it went the first time, and you’d think the characters would too, since they lived it.

Now, in spite of those issues, this film does a pretty decent job working with what it has. It’s not nearly as bad as Movies 10 and 11, which commit these same three sins and puts the main characters on the sidelines. But it’s a step down from Movie 14, and around the same time, Dragon Ball Super was starting up on Japanese TV, and that show was just adapting the movies for the first 32 episodes, so I was pretty displeased with the state of the franchise in 2015.

All right, let’s get started. The movie opens in hell, which is pretty interesting, because up until now we’ve only ever seen Toei’s version of DBZ Hell. There’s a lot of inconsistencies, like whether or not you get to keep your physical body, and whether or not hell is even that bad a place to be. Since Toriyama wrote this thing, I have to assume this is his official version of DBZ’s Hell. Conveniently, we find that it’s got plenty of layers to it, including a scary looking realm full of bats, an ocean full of Pokemon fish, and underneath all of that we have an idyllic meadow with pink trees.

This is where Frieza’s being kept, and he just has to hang from the tree in some sort of testicle-looking thing. There’s angels and fairies and a stuffed animal marching band, and it’s pretty cute, but I can see where you’d get sick of it after a while.

And Frieza’s been here for a while. This movie is set in the year Age 779, and Frieza was killed by Future Trunks in Age 764, so he’s on Year Fifteen of his infinity-year sentence. Has he been stuck in this particular torment for the entire time? Who knows? I don’t know much about Japanese afterlife mythology, but my understanding is that it’s like an even more complex version of Dante’s Inferno, where there’s all these different ordeals you have to suffer through for extraordinarily long periods of time. Maybe they let him out part of the time so he can get beat up by Pikkon and watch Goku beat Majin Buu.

One touch I appreciate is that he’s still in his Mecha-Frieza form. Does it make sense for him to retain his cybernetic parts when Trunks chopped him up into so many pieces? I don’t know, but Mecha-Frieza is my favorite Frieza, so I like the nod to that moment.

Meanwhile, Frieza’s private army somehow still exists after all these years. This movie calls it the “Frieza Force”, which I’m not too wild about, but I’ll run with it. I think it’s kind of stupid to keep calling it that so long after Frieza’s death, but maybe it’s a bluff to anyone who doesn’t know Frieza’s dead. At this point, all they have left is the name. One of Frieza’s administrators, Sorbet, has taken charge of the whole thing, and I guess he’s done a fairly impressive job if he’s kept it going this long, but all he’s really accomplished is to oversee the slow dissolution of Frieza’s holdings.

Funimation made a lot out of the idea of Frieza as an emperor, suggesting he was a head of state and the planets he conquered were part of a vast interstellar nation. I think in the dub there was a comment about how the Frieza Force used to control like 70% of the known universe, but none of that’s in the Japanese version. The original premise of Frieza is that he just has a bunch of guys fighting his battles for him, and he buys and sells planets to finance all the wine and spaceships he goes through. I rather prefer that sort of aimlessness about his organization. If he were like a Roman Caesar, you could at least balance out his brutality with the semblance of authority he brings to his conquests. A Pax Friezae, if you will. But he’s not Diocletian, he’s a trust fund baby who just happens to be nigh invulnerable. He never cared what happened to anyone else, or how things would run after he was gone.

Anyway, Sorbet just doesn’t have the manpower to hold their territory, and all he can do is pull his soldiers out when uprisings get too intense. His only recourse is to wish Frieza back to life with the Dragon Balls, except he can’t find the Namekians’ new homeworld. There’s Dragon Balls on Earth, except that’s where all the Super Saiyans live, so it’s dangerous. But today, he’s decided there’s no other way. To be on the safe side, he leads an away team with just himself and his aid, Tagoma. That way there’s less chance of them being noticed by the ki-sensitive fighters on the planet.

Sigh... this is why I hate the fucking Frieza Force right here. It’s the same old spaceships, same old uniforms, same old plans. Their shuttlecraft just looks like their regular ship, only smaller. Frieza’s been dead for fifteen years, and after all this time, their biggest idea is to try to bring back LOWARD FUREEEZA SAWMA. If that was such a hot idea, then why did he get killed in the first place?

What annoys me is that there’s probably an interesting explanation for Sorbet’s strategy. You’d think he would be happier with Frieza gone. He runs this whole outfit, and even if their domain is smaller than it was under Frieza, it belongs to him, so he’s richer and more powerful than he’s ever been. But maybe he just can’t appreciate that, and he liked it better when he was a middle-manager for a big shot like Frieza. But that never gets explored in the movie. Sorbet just acts like he’s wishing back Frieza because he’s supposed to.

Anyway, it would be risky to try to go through Bulma to get the Dragon Balls, but Emperor Pilaf has a Dragon Radar of his own, so they strongarm him instead. I wonder where he got that thing. General Copper from the Red Ribbon Army had one that was never seen again, so maybe they stole it from him?

Meanwhile, here’s baby Pan. I thought Pan’s appearance in these later movies conflicted with the final three episodes of DBZ, but maybe not. The dub said she was three, but the subs said she was four. And those last three episodes took place in Age 784, while this movie shows her being newly born in Age 779, just five years earlier. So Pan could still be four years old when she fought Wild Tiger, and her birthday just hadn’t come along yet.

Anyway, Piccolo’s keeping an eye on her while her parents are shopping.

Then the sky gets dark, and Gohan and Piccolo know that someone’s wishing on the Dragon Balls, but they don’t know who or why. Oh, by the way, there’s a big statue of Mr. Satan here, and that’s his only appearance in this movie.

So Sorbet makes his big wish to have a resurrection... of F. Which stands for “Frieza.”

Just like the title of this cartoon!

But Shenron explains that it would be kind of dumb to do that. This was the thing I never understood when this movie was first announced. During the Frieza Saga, Shenron was used to wish back everyone killed by Frieza and his men, and Kami said that this would only work for those who had died within the past year. The implication being that Shenron can’t revive people who have been dead for a really long time.

But Toriyama seems to have taken that into account here. Shenron explains that he can revive Frieza, even after fifteen years, but he can’t restore all the damage to his body.

This leads to a quick flashback of Trunks killing him way back when. I’m glad they included this, since it’s worth explaining just how Frieza died in the first place. Trunks chopped him into pieces, then blasted the pieces. Apparently, after all this time, Shenron can only undo the blasting and the dying, but not the chopping.

However, the medical technology used by the Frieza Force has advanced somewhat since the Namek Saga, so Tagoma believes they could finish the job of putting Frieza back together. Sorbet decides it’s worth a shot, so we’re off to the races.

So Shenron plats along, and a bunch of Frieza chunks fall to the ground. I like the sound effects they make when they land.

Creepily, the pieces try to gather together again. I don’t know if this is Shenron’s power trying and failing to complete the resurrection, of if this is some function of Mecha-Frieza’s cybernetics. Either way, it doesn’t work.

But the pieces are all still alive, which is siiiick. Frieza’s eye even opens and looks at them, suggesting that he’s somehow still conscious in this state. See, this movie still has some cool stuff in it.

Then Shenron asks Sorbet what he wants for his second wish, and Sorbet had no idea that he would get more than one. He considers wishing back King Cold, but before he can decide...

... Shu wishes for cash, and gets it. Sorbet’s angry about this, but he has to hurry up and return to the ship before the Z-Fighters find him. The funny thing is that Shenron leaves after this second wish is granted, but in the Dragon Ball Super version, he grants a third wish, and Mai uses that one too. This is why I’ve spent the last 16 years confused over whether Buu-era Shenron grants two wishes or three. Apparently, the deal is that it’s three, unless you use one to wish a lot of people back to life at the same time. Then it’s two. So did Toriyama goof, or was the wish to bring back Frieza hard enough that it counts as two wishes? It doesn’t matter much, since Movies 10, 13, and 14 all played fast and loose with Shenron as well.

So now they have to load all the Frieza chunks into a big garbage can and haul them back to their ship.

They almost forget a piece, but Pilaf saves it for them. I wonder what would have happened if they left that eye behind?

So then they heal the pieces in their medical machine. I don’t know how this was supposed to work, but I assume they needed someone to stitch the pieces together, then they loaded him in the tank for a while, and then they had to take him out again, dress him up in his uniform, and put him back in to cure a while longer. Also, they have Japanese punk band Maximum the Hormone playing on the stereo the whole time they do this.

youtube

“F” is a pretty good song, and I’m glad they put it in this movie, but I’d probably like it more if I liked Frieza more. The story goes that Akira Toriyama heard this song, probably because the band wrote it as a tribute to his character, and the song inspired him to create the story in this movie.

Anyway, Frieza breaks out of the tank and splashes green crap everywhere because he’s such a drama queen.

Sorbet explains everything that’s happened, and Frieza seems mostly bemused by it all. He’s displeased that he had to wait in hell for so long, but at least he’s out. Sorbet mentions that they plan to wish back King Cold next, but Frieza tells them not to bother, since he apparently doesn’t like his dad that much. This should be the tip to these idiots that this scheme will get them all killed.

Frieza kills a guy just to see how his skills are holding up, and he declares his intent to take revenge on the two Super Saiyans who defeated him. Remember, he still owes Goku for beating him up on Namek, but Trunks killed him before he could get to that point. And that’s my main problem with all of this. We already did a Frieza comeback, and it was Mecha-Frieza invading Earth in the Trunks Saga. He miraculously survived Namek, his soldiers spent months putting him back together, and then the very first thing he wanted to do was go to Earth and kill Super Saiyans. Does any of this sound familiar?

Besides that episode, we had several other stories that repeated the same theme. Movies 5 and 6 were basically the same idea, but with Frieza’s brother as a stand-in for Frieza himself. Episode 195 of the anime had Frieza come back as part of a revolut in hell. Movie 12 had Frieza come back, only to get killed again by Gohan. Dragon Ball GT had Frieza come back and fight Goku. I think Toriyama’s attitude is that he didn’t write those stories, so they don’t count, but it doesn’t change the fact that the audience still saw all of those. By the time this movie came along, “Frieza comes back for revenge” had been done several times.

Tagoma points out that maybe we shouldn’t rush back to Earth and get wiped out in a hopeless battle. Again. He suggests that it might be wiser to focus on rebuilding the Frieza Force, but Frieza kills him for his impudence, along with several other flunkies who just happened to be nearby.

At least Frieza has a reason for wanting to start with revenge. As far as he’s concerned, the Frieza Force can’t rebuild to its former glory, not if they have to hide from the Super Saiyans the whole time. Sorbet points out that Goku’s even stronger than he was before, citing his defeat of Majin Buu. Amazingly, Frieza’s heard of Majin Buu, since his father once told him that he should never mess with Buu or Beerus.

But this doesn’t worry Frieza much. He figured Goku would become stronger, and he thinks he can as well. Frieza was born with this unnaturally incredible power that he has, so he’s never needed to train or improve his strength. But now, he thinks that if he does train, he can surpass Goku after about four months. This is basically the Dragon Ball equivalent of “Why doesn’t Bluto eat some spinach and beat the hell out of Popeye?”

Here’s what blows my mind. In the subs, Frieza estimates that he’ll reach a power level of 1.3 million. I’m amazed that they’d even cite a power level this late in the franchise, let alone a number that low. Frieza claimed to be at one million in his second form, so I think everyone agrees that we passed 1,300,000 a long time ago. Hell, there aren’t any scouters able to measure that high anyway.

Seriously, is this official canon? It has to be right? Toriyama wrote that line himself. Is he saying eveyone from Second-form Frieza to Golden Frieza ranges from 1 million to 1.3 million? So like, Perfect Cell would be 1.1 million, I guess, and Majin Buu’s 1.2? That’s wild. I kind of like it.

What I don’t like is that it’s a little convenient that Frieza can catch up to Goku so easily. It took Gokue fifteen years to reach the level he’s at in this movie, and Frieza manages to tie him in just four months? If it was that easy, why didn’t he just do pushups for a week before he came to Earth the last time? He could have wiped out Trunks in an instant.

Moving on, a few months later, Jaco the Intergalactic Patrolman arrives on Earth to warn Bulma that Frieza is coming to Earth with a thousand soldiers.

I won’t get into Jaco’s whole deal, because I still haven’t read his manga yet, but baiscally he was friends with Bulma’s older sister back in the day, and Tights told him that Bulma knows the Super Saiyan who beat Frieza. The problem is that Goku and Vegeta aren’t on Earth right now, because they’re training with Whis on Beerus’ world. Bulma can contact Whis by holding up delicious food and calling out to him, but she doesn’t know if he’s listening. Also, Jaco waited until an hour before Frieza’s arrival to say anything, so now Bulma has to scramble to alert the others.

Here’s some bank robbers. I like this bit, because in the dub, they say “We’re as rich as rich guys!”

There’s just one problem...

Krillin’s a cop.

Then Bulma calls him and tells him the bad news. I feel like somewhere in the dub, Krillin observed that Majin Buu and Gohan could at least buy them some time, but then it turned out Buu was asleep the whole time, which was why he didn’t show up in this movie. I must be thinking of the DBS version. This is why I’m not big on Buu as a good guy, by the way. They have this insanely powerful good guy on their team, and then they never do anything with him. He slept through this crisis and the Tournament of Power, and I didn’t see him in the Broly movie either.

Anyway, Frieza killed Krillin the last time they met, but Krillin’s got big brass balls, so the first thing he does is suit up to fight his punk ass. 18 offers to go in his place, but he wants her to protect their kid while he’s gone.

Also, he asks her to shave his head, so he’ll look even cooler for this.

To be honest, I liked Krillin’s hairstyle in this movie, but yeah, bald Krillin is the way to go.

As he flies off into the face of certain doom, his big brass balls clanking as he goes, 18 thinks about how cool he is. Get you a lady who admires you half as much as 18 admires Krillin.

As Frieza returns to Earth, he goes over some details with Sorbet. In particular, no one could find the Super Saiyan who actually killed Frieza, and Sorbet speculates that he may have moved to some other planet or died while Frieza was in hell. Of course we know that Future Trunks returned to his own timeline, but Frieza doesn’t and never will. This loose end doesn’t seem to bother him much, and I don’t think that makes sense. Yes, from a dramatic standpoint, he ought to be more concerned about avenging his loss to Goku, but Trunks was the one to kill him, and I feel like Frieza doesn’t spend nearly enough time in this movie thinking about his own mortality.

Sorbet points out that even if Frieza kills Goku, he could just be wished back to life like Frieza was, right? But Frieza plans to destroy the Earth along with Goku, thereby eliminating the Dragon Balls and Earth’s hell. For some reason, Frieza seems to think that Earth has it’s own particular version of hell, and the only reason he ended up in that meadow of fairies is because he happened to die on that planet. So I guess he thinks that if he blows up the Earth, that hell will cease to exist as well? How does he know that?

Is that why he’s not worried about dying again? Does he think if he dies someplace else, he’ll end up in a more favorable afterlife? What happens if you die in outer space? What sort of hell is Tagoma in right now?

At any rate, Frieza thinks he has all the angles worked out, and he checks to make sure Sorbet is prepared for his “emergency plan” in case things don’t work out. This is as close as we ever get to any sort of character development for Frieza here. The last time he went to Earth, he didn’t have a plan B, and now he does.

Meanwhile, Goku is training with Vegeta and Whis, just as Bulma said. Recall that Whis is even stronger than Beerus, who dominated the boys in the last movie. So Whis can fight them both at once without any trouble at all.

But their training wakes up Beerus, so they have to explain how they pay Whis for his lessons with tasty food from Earth. Beerus is annoyed that Whis would eat this stuff without him but he’s awake now, so he can have some of the pizza they brought over.

Meanwhile, Frieza’s ship lands on Earth, and a bunch of his goons come out.

Then he blows up North City, which he calls his way of saying hello.

So it’s up to the Z-Fighters to hold the line until Goku and Vegeta check Whis’s voice mail. Unfortunately, they’re kind of light on guys. We have Piccolo, Tien, and Krillin, and Gohan’s here, but he hasn’t kept up with his training. That’s why he wore a tracksuit to this party, because he couldn’t find his gi after all this time. Tien told Chiaotzu and Yamcha to stay out of it, since this fight would be too much for them. Okay, but why? Frieza will blow up the Earth if he wins, so what difference does it make if they stay out of this? At least if they show up they can help.

On the other hand, Krillin brought Master Roshi along, He can’t even fly! Somehow, everyone involved in making this show decided that Roshi is cooler than Yamcha, which is stone cold, 100% false. Master Roshi belongs in jail, and it doesn’t even need to be a fancy jail with a roof because he can’t fly out anyway.

Then Bulma shows up with Jaco to tell the others that she couldn’t raise Goku and Vegeta. Also, she wants Jaco to help, even though he only planned to pass along the message and GTFO. Bulma trash-talks Frieza, because she figures they still have the upper hand. After all, Gohan’s strong enough to kill Frieza, right? But Gohan explains to her that Frieza’s much stronger than he was 15 years ago, so none of them stand a chance this time around.

She asks Frieza to wait for Goku, so he agrees to hold off for ten more seconds, and then he sics his army on the Z-Fighters. I bet she wishes she had told Goten and Trunks about this rumble.

People talk about this part as the highlight of the movie, and it’s definitely one of the better parts. It’s certainly fresher,since we normally don’t see six or seven guys battling a whole army like this. Also, I like the approach of limiting the cast to a manageable number. I think it’s tactically unwise to leave Yamcha, Gotenks, Buu, and Chiaotzu out of this battle, but leaving them out of the movie is worth it, if it gives Tien a chance to shine for a moment. I’m not saying I like Tien better than the others, but we’re in a situation now where they can’t all share the spotlight, so if we have to pick one, let’s make that decision and run with it, and hope Yamcha gets a turn in a later film.

The problem I have with a fight like this is that they have all these extras floating around in the background of almost every scene, so it’s like Piccolo will do some cool spot with five or six bad guys, while fifty more just sort of stand there and watch. The only explanation I can come up with is that the Z-Fighters are moving so fast that most of the bad guys simply cannot react fast enough to keep up.

For example, you have this scene, where Gohan zips through a whole bunch of guys and takes them all out while they look like they’re standing still. Also, it’s pointed out several times that the Frieza Force isn’t nearly as strong or as well-disciplined as they used to be. Hell, the next movie makes a plot point out of how hard it is for them to recruit good fighters.

Even Jaco makes these guys look like geeks, and he’s a comic relief guy.

But he’s clever, like when he tricks the bad guys into getting eaten by a giant fish. How did he know this thing lived on Earth?

At this point, Sisami enters the battle, and he’s at least strong enough to give Piccolo a hard time.

Also, his shorts are a size too small, but his slutty uniform is his only distinguishing feature, really.

But Gohan steps in and turns Super Saiyan to take him out. Not sure that was a smart play, since they’re trying to buy time for Goku to arrive. A drawn out battle with Piccolo might have been just the thing they needed. But I suspect this scene was intended to introduce the Super Saiyan concept to the audience.

To wit, Sorbet is horrified by how easily his best warrior went down, but Frieza isn’t surprised at all, since he’s the only one on his side who’s seen Super Saiyans in action. He didn’t know Gohan could turn into one, but it’s the same diff.

This blue guy tries to apologize to Frieza for their defeat, but Frieza blows them all up. I’m just pointing him out because this guy was voiced by Team Four Star’s Scott Frrerichs, which still blows my mind to this day. Also, for some reason, I thought he played Sisima--Shisami, Sashimi... the red horny guy.

Everyone agrees that they stand no chance against Frieza as he is now, and Frieza takes out Gohan first just to emphasize the point. I guess this is his meta-revenge for Movie 12.

Piccolo has to use a ki technique to restart Gohan’s heart, and a senzu bean helas him after that, but they only have one left, so that won’t last them much longer.

Finally, Whis checks his messages and Goku and Vegeta hear about Frieza. Whis can take them back to Earth, but it’s a 35-minute trip, so it’s up to Goku’s Instant Transmission.

All right, let’s get on with this. Frieza insists that he’s learned from their last fight, and he starts out with his “final” form, except it’s not his final form anymore, because he has a new one, so right off we see that he really hasn’t learned anything. He wants Goku to turn Super Saiyan, but Goku doesn’t need to, and they fight like this for a while. Does this really make sense. Frieza came here for revenge, so why is he bothering to play-fight like this?

Eventually Vegeta gets so bored with this part of the battle that he jumps in and starts attacking Goku. Frieza mistakes this for a show of loyalty to him, but in fact Vegeta’s just sick of Goku milking his turn.

They agree to put all their cards on the table, so Goku reveals his strongest form, which he calls a combination of classic Super Saiyan and the Super Saiyan God form he used in the last movie. This eventually came to be known as “Super Saiyan Blue”, because duh, but for marketing purposes it’s still officially called “Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan” or “SSGSS” for short. I have no idea who thought that was a good name for this.

So Frieza shows Goku his new form, which is just his “final” form with a different color scheme. He says he “settled” on this color, implying that he could have made it look different if he wanted to. I like that idea, because it goes along with my contention that the Xenoverse games should let you customize transforms along with your character. If you want your guy to turn into a Super Saiyan Purple, you should be able to, or if you want your Frieza Race guy to have a Crimson form instead of Golden, you should get to have that too.

On the other hand, this is fucking stupid. It’s the same fight from 1990, except the characters are different colors. This is the sort of thing critics make fun of DBZ for, and Toriyama did it unironically. I mean, I get it, Super Saiyan 3 is just SSJ1 with longer hair and no eyebrows, but it’s the way the character is used in the story that sells the form as being more powerful.

The problem here is that both guys have new forms at the same time and they’re supposed to be stronger than almost every other character we’ve seen before. And yet this fight doesn’t look all that different from what they were doing a few minutes ago, before they transformed.

On top of that, we have these really shitty CGI animations that look like they were taken out of a PS3 game. I mean that literally, because when I watched this movie, I noticed it right away, because the way the characters move looks exactly like they do in the games I play all the time. I didn’t mind it so much on the first viewing, but now that I’m looking at screencaps of it, it just looks really awkward and bad. It’s fine in the games, because it’s interactive, and I can control what’s happening. But in a movie, it doesn’t work at all, because Goku has this blank expression on his face the whole time. Also, there’s no physics on the tails of his belt. He’s rushing Frieza here but they’re just hanging at his hip like he’s standing still.

Seriously, who thought this was a good idea? These shots aren’t even that long, and they don’t look that complicated, so I don’t understand why they didn’t just go ahead and use traditional animation. I mean, the Frieza soldiers from earlier were rendered this way too, and I get that, because there were literally a thousand of them, and they wanted to have hordes of them milling about in the background. but this is the main hero and villain in the forefront of the action. If the entire movie looked like this, I wouldn’t have a problem with it at all, really. It’s a “contract with the audience” thing. If the whole movie is CGI or 2D animation, we can accept the visuals we’re given, but once you start switching media unexpectedly, it becomes very jarring.

Then Beerus and Whis finally arrive to collect the dessert Bulma offered them. Wait, he said it would take 35 minutes to get here. Have Goku and Frieza been fighting for 35 minutes?

I get the joke here, that you’ve got this interplanetary grudge match playing out nearby, and these two dorks are more interested in eating ice cream, but it sort of undermines what little tension there was to this story. When Res F was first announced, lots of fans joked that Frieza would find himself completely outmatched by the Z-Fighters. Goten could kill him by himself. But Toriyama introduced Golden Frieza to get around that, which means at this point, Frieza has leapfrogged Cell and Majin Buu to become the strongest villain again, to the point where he might rival Beerus if he put his mind to it. Frieza’s a big deal again, except there doesn’t seem to be much concern over it. Everyone seems confident that Goku can handle it, and if he can’t then Vegeta can, and if things really got out of hand, Whis could kill everyone in one hit.

At one point, Frieza finally notices Beerus and asks him if he’s going to interfere in the battle, but Beerus insists that he’s just here for dessert, and he’s totally neutral in this.

And Frieza seems to think he’s winning, but then Goku informs him that this Golden Frieza form has a weakness. Frieza was so thrilled to have the new form that he rushed to Earth as soon as he discovered it, but he hasn’t learned to regulate his power at this level, so he’s going to tire out in a few minutes. Goku should know, because he ran into the same problem with Super Saiyan 3 a few years back, and the same thing happened to Frieza when he fought at 100% of his full power because FRIEZA HASN’T LEARNED A DAMN THING SINCE THE LAST TIME THEY FOUGHT. This movie is just so dumb. The fact that Goku has to explain this to him again is absurd.

Frieza thinks Goku’s bluffing, but this time the CGI battle shifts into Goku’s favor, and Frieza can’t hit the block button fast enough or break Goku’s combos.

Then they fight underwater, which is just as murky and grey as the sky, only there’s bubbles down here.

Finally, we reach the point where Frieza’s punches don’t even work, and Goku pokes him in the tittly and punches him.

So Goku tells him to get out of here, just like he did on Namek, and Frieza throws a fit, just like he did on Namek. This fight is the worst. I mean, it’s not Gohan vs. Dabura levels of bad, but at least Gohan and Dabura did original stuff while they were shitting the bed.

Then Frieza signals Sorbet while he’s crying, and Sorbet shoots Goku with a ray gun to take him out of the fight.

And this is dumb too, because it’s the same mistake Goku made on Namek, twice. Only this time, Frieza actually got the drop on him, which is dumb because he’s basically doing the same thing Piccolo did to Goku at the 23rd World Tournamnet. Whis even warned Goku about this overconfidence earlier in the movie. I mean, it was forteshadowing, which ought to be okay, except when everything else in this movie is a retread of Frieza’s other appearances, foreshadowing is kind of a bad move.

But Goku’s not the only dumbass in this movie. Frieza decides not to kill Goku while he has the chance, and instead invites Vegeta to do it for him. He even offers to make Vegeta his second-in-command, although his entire Frieza Force is dead except for Sorbet. Geets declines, which isn’t exactly a shock, since he’s hated Frieza for destroying Planet Vegeta. You know, the thing that happened forty-odd years ago that Frieza probably should considered before asking Vegeta to rejoin his team?

Instead, Vegeta tells Krillin to give Goku a senzu bean, and when Frieza tries to stop him, Vegeta deflects his attack so that it kills Sorbet instead.

In return, Vegeta demands to take over the fight, now that we’ve come to his favorite part, the “Frieza-murdering” part. Frieza mocks him for thinking he stands a chance, but Vegeta turns Super Saiyan Blue himself, and now Frieza realizes he’s totally screwed. I guess he figured Goku would be this strong, but he never imagined he’d have to fight Vegeta at the same level at the same time.

This is my favorite part of the movie, where Vegeta informs him that he learned to go Super Saiyan shortly after Frieza’s death. Then again, why didn’t Frieza know about any of this? Sorbet had been spying on the Earth for years, and he seemed to know just about everything else about what was going on. Why didn’t he tell Frieza that Vegeta was living on Earth and that he was about as strong as Goku? “Hey, look, I know you think you can handle Goku with this Golden form, but just understand that you’ll probably be fighting Vegeta at the same time, and he’ll be about the same level.”

For that matter, why did Frieza invade without checking to make sure Goku was on the planet first?

So it looks like everything’s coming up Vegeta in this movie, although this part of the fight is anticlimactic, becuase Goku had already softned Frieza up for him.

But then it turns out that Vegeta swallowed a bottle of idiot pills too, because when Frieza’s Golden Form wears off, he gets desperate and blows up the Earth to escape. You know, just like he did on Namek. At least I can sort of excuse Vegeta for this, because he wasn’t there the last time Frieza pulled this trick, except that Vegeta should have seen it coming, because he pulled the same stunt himself when he first came to Earth.

So yeah, the Earth explodes, again, which just makes the Dragon Ball Wiki that much harder to read, because they count both explosions as dates of death for every character. Goten died in Age 774 and Age 779 and whenever else he would have died naturally.

But all the main characters who were watching he fight are okay, because they were standing next to Beerus and Whis, who made a force field to protect them. Vegeta’s dead, though, because he suffocated when the planet blew. On the other hand, Frieza would have survived, because he doesn’t need air. On top of that, he took out the Dragon Balls, so there’s no way to undo this with a wish.

Then Whis reminds Goku that he has the power to rewind time by three minutes. Yeah, I forgot about this. Earlier, when Beerus woke up from his nap, Whis mentions how Beerus has a nasty habit of destroying things accidentally, so Whis has the power to rewind time and undo it if Beerus does anything especially stupid.

So now Goku has a chance to kill Frieza properly, which he should have just done in the first place.

KILLER QUEEN DAISAN NO BAKUDEN BITES THE DUST

So Frieza’s dead again... until they bring him back for the Tournament of Power, because for some reason fans want him to keep coming back for more of this crap.

Vegeta is understandably upset, because he thinks Goku just jumped in for no reason, but he calms down once he finds out Frieza was about to blow up the planet.

Bulma promises a big feast for Whis and Beerus for helping them, but she adds that it’ll have to wait for them to wish back everyone who died when Frieza destroyed North City. Well, that’ll take six months, because the Dragon Balls haven’t reset since the last wish, right?

Then Goku proposes that he can Vegeta actually practice working together, in case they need to really join forces next time. Vegeta’s like “nuts to that” and Goku’s like “same here”, so at least they have that much common ground.

youtube

The end credits are accompanied by “Z no Chikai” or “Oath of Z”, by Momoiro Clover Z. This song rules, and it’s really much better than Movie 15 deserves.

In the post credits sequence, Frieza finds himself right back where he started, and the angels and fairies welcome him back to hell. Looks like Tagoma had the right idea after all, huh?

And I guess that about sums it up. I feel like this movie wasted an opportunity to do something truly interesting with Frieza. You have a guy who was invincible, then he got killed and spent 15 years in hell, only to get wished back to life by his desperate troops. This could have been a chance for him to ponder his own mortality and the futility of power and revenge. What good does it really do to kill Goku when they both know what awaits them on the other side? What difference does it make to escape the afterlife when you know you’ll just have to go back eventually? You could try to have Frieza answer those questions and have him become a much more desperate and complex villain. Instead, Toriyama just went right back to what he had already written in the Trunks Saga.

Sadly, this looks like the final entry under the Dragon Ball Z brand. Now that Dragon Ball Super is a thing, it looks like any new Dragon Ball stories, like the new Broly movie, will be produced under the DBS branding. I kind of wish DBZ could have closed out on a better note than this.

On the other hand, that Broly movie was a lot better, and even if it was officially titled “Dragon Ball Super: Broly”, I find that it’s hard for the Z to drop out of the public lexicon. When I went to see it in January, the theater had it listed as “Dragon Ball Z: Super Broly.” Old habits die hard, I guess. Maybe one of these years, we’ll see the end of the Z, but not yet.

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wackygoofball · 5 years

Text

To the non-anons out there, this message is also for you!

I feel really saddened that I am now dedicating the third post in a row already to this kind of stuff because I honestly thought we were on the same track as to what kind of a blog I am running, but oh well, it appears worth repeating.

As you can take from my previous post and the one before, I have gotten some unwanted negative attention I was not seeking. I have already typed up my reply to the anons, but now I also turn to fellows who are not grey circles with sunglasses. I am turning to my followers and those I follow, my mutuals.

You are entitled to your emotions, and I bet there are many of them right now, mostly bad, I am pretty sure. I can only repeat that. I find your emotions and thoughts valid, but I believe it’s not asked too much to demand the same from you when it comes to me. Anyone who’s been following my blog will know my general stand on the show and the books. Anyone who’s been following my rambling and hyping will know that I am a positive blog and that I want to keep things that way.

And that is why I am hereby asking you again to respect that choice I made and continue to make.

I do not want to engage in such conversation some of you may be eager to have. You will find plenty of others who want to have them in my stead. You don’t need to have ranting get-togethers with me. I would not be fun during those rounds, I am telling you! Because I would still insist on my viewpoints, and they are apparently different from a lot of those of other fellow JB shippers, Jaime and/or Brienne fans alike. But that’s okay.

Opinions are supposed to be different. No one has to share my views, but neither do I have to share yours. And in that same vain, we do not have to share in the same mode of communicating those views.

My mode is to write my thinkpieces, however much truth they may hold, to gif, to hype, to have fun, to talk about what confused me, what surprised me, what I would have liked differently, what I enjoyed, what I want to spec about for the rest of the series, and so on. I always try to do that in a calm and positive manner. If that is not your mode, then that is more than fine, but please respect that I won’t alter my mode to accomodate yours.

There is a lot to stomach about last episode. I have thoughts, a lot of them, which I still have to put into writing. It’s been a long night. I slept for like 3 to 4 hours and it already tires me to write up the third heads-up post for people who apparently haven’t gotten the core message of my very blog. This saddens me, in fact, much more than anything I could get negative emotions about that I saw in the last episode.

Now. To my followers or those I follow, to my mutuals, to those who see that message, simple as that:

I won’t change into a blogger who will engage in the kind of discussions that are raging, ranting, bashing of the show, that cry “bad writing” before I have seen everything in the context of the last episode. This blog is not a sounding board for negativity. It is not a sounding board for angst. For rage. You have plenty of opportunity to seek out those who want to engage in just that kind of conversation, in just that kind of mode. And I wish you all the best in those discussions, but please, leave me out of them.

And leave my posts out of them in particular!

I don’t want to see my positive posts, some of which actually give people hope and good feelings in a time that is filled with sadness and fear about what’s to come next, being changed into something else just because you think you have to enforce your opinion over mine. My blog is for those people, to let them know that I share in that hope, that this blog is where they can come and enjoy positivity if they wish for it. My posts are not for you if what you are looking for is rage, fear, and sadness. But I don’t think that you will be lacking on Tumblr to find compensation. I will continue to post my thoughts, and I will do so in the manner I always have.

I am happy to get positive feedback on my initial post already. It tells me that, for those people, I am doing something right. It tells me that I am doing someting right for myself as this is the kind of engagement with fandom I am willing to make.

I look forward to have debate about the episode, but I will not engage in GoT Hate Talk. If you haven’t gotten that memo until now, my blog is really not the right place for you.

So. To reiterate:

I ask you not to hijack positive posts and spew in your negativity. No one asks you to engage with my posts. Quite on the contrary:

I welcome you to ingore me, unfollow me, block me or whatever else you feel you need to do in order to have the fandom experience you choose to have for yourself.

In fact, that is the advice I give to eveyone: be the master of your fandom experience. Take charge, take care.

I also welcome you to ignore me the same way I will be ignoring people whose viewpoints I don’t want to engage in. The wonder of Tumblr is that no one forces you to interact. You can just keep scrolling or updating your blacklist to include “got positivity” or “wacky rambles”. I won’t begrudge you for that at all. I applaud you if you do because it shows that you take care of yourself and others by navigating through the messy space of fandom with reason.

What I will begrudge you for is bringing negativity to a place that I want to keep positive.

Because that runs contrary to my belief in what is good tone, netiquette, and the pillars I see firmly established for the JB fandom. I don’t want to get replies or reblogs that try to tell people where they can find negativity instead, because I am sure they will know where to find it. They just have to update their dash. I don’t want to get replies and reblogs that change the meaning of what I wrote originally. You can make your own posts to tell people your opinions, to let them know what kind of a blog they will find with yours. But don’t make my posts about my blog about your blog.

There is a difference between disagreeing on something and having honest debate about it vs. being treated like someone’s positivity is not valid the same way other people’s negativity is.

I am happy to have discussion - and by that I mean discussion, not ranting - about what went good and bad in this episode, based on the limited information we have, but always mindful of the latter being the big parameter that should weigh in on our analyses. That is the kind of discourse I am willing to have, that is the kind of discourse I will be having.

If I can’t have that with you, see above for options.

I hope that this post made clear what I think and what blog I want to run and how I want to see myself be treated in the future. I am looking forward to discussions that match my mode. I am happy to be part of this fandom. I made amazing friends there and I wouldn’t want to miss a thing.I am happy to share thoughts and theories, even at the risk fo being totally wrong all over. I am happy to have debate and write mad analyses. I am happy to ramble. And if any of my rambling and hyping helps people deal with their fears, insecurities, sadness, and anger, I feel all the better about what I am doing on my littel blog here. I find that the fun of the fandom experience, and no one will manage to take that away from me.

However, for those who have different expectations and wishes of what fandom life should be like for them, that is just as valid, just as okay. But I won’t engage in it, that’s all.

For all that I believe went wrong in a source material, I will always have my mutuals.

And I will always have fanfiction.

So really, what’s there to be negative about for Wacky?

Nothing much.

Wacky’s tiddies are calm.

Thanks for the attention and hopefully for the understanding.

#jaime x brienne #jaime lannister #brienne of tarth #got spoilers #fandom

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ginmo · 5 years

Note

I’ve been sure since I read AFFC/ADWD that Jaime’s getting one of the better endings because House Lannister isn’t gonna be wiped out and both Cersei and Tyrion are now Too Dark To Live. But I’ve seen a lot of people rewatching bring up that awful sept fuck up and consensus is that it renders him irredeemable. The show is gonna have to WORK to avoid a million thinkpieces when he gets both power and a family. I’m not convinced they’ll pull it off.

That scene was gross af, but we’ve since learned that the intent of the scene was not for it to be rape. We also know that canon Jaime is not a rapist. So if the narrative intent was for it to NOT be rape (and ended up being just a really bad fuck up from writers, director, post production) then we can’t blame the non-rapist character for the shitty product. What’s gross is they didn’t realize they filmed a rape scene, so people need to shift their blame from Jaime to the filmmakers. If people are really stuck on Jaime being a rapist even though in canon he isn’t and wasn’t even meant to be on the show, then they’re going to really hate the outcome of this story, because there won’t be anything to revisit Jaime being a rapist in the narrative (such as redemption for that) because he isn’t supposed to be. This is why most of fandom acknowledges that scene was an oops from the production and don’t use it to judge the character.

In other words, since the show was doing a direct adaptation of a consensual canon sex scene from the books, thinking their adaption was also a consensual sex scene, then the narrative itself doesn’t need to, and will not, do anything to have Jaime redeem himself for something he didn’t do, but that the filmmakers stupidly did.

My friend Koops went off on this topic a while back, so I’m going to add a read more where I quote her posts. It’s way more than you asked about, and I already answered the question, but I just really love her rant over the sex scene lol. So for those who want cast, crew, and GRRM quotes, discussion of that D&D video people love to refer to, and a total take down of basically why using that scene against Jaime is completely moronic then here it is:

In response to this D&D video:

I don’t think this video disproves anything. The girl is calling it “rape” but they are not once owning up to it. They’re calling it “this” and insisting that’s something Jaime would do in that moment, but it feels to me like what they were trying to do is avoid getting into a debate about whether it’s rape or not, because they know that can get them into all kinds of trouble. ETA: Also, notice how David rolls his eyes towards the end and the person who captioned the video interpreted it as him rolling his eyes at the girl who asked the question. I don’t think he is at all, that was 5 minutes earlier, talk about a delayed reaction. I think he’s rolling his eyes at KIT stepping in just as David had finished answering with that stupid comment calling it rape and saying how great it is that the show has rape scenes, when David had been so careful in avoiding using that word all along in order not to get into an argument. And they’re emphasizing how hard this was for Lena and so on (despite, IIRC, her always saying it wasn’t intended as rape), just to earn feminist points of “we know how tough this is for women, look at how distraught we all were filming it”.If that had been their intention, they would have followed up on it in subsequent scenes/interactions, which is something the show does with rape scenes (see Sansa). Yet it was never mentioned again and it’s like it never happened. I think D&D sometimes have a bit of a rape-style fetish when it comes to sex scenes because it makes them come across as “edgy”. See the way they wrote the broken tower sex scene in the original pilot script or the way they changed Dany and Drogo’s wedding night. But they refuse to admit it and hide behind nonsense like “this is something the character would do”. They want to see how far they can push it, basically.Even if we want to say they’re admitting to have it intended as rape, saying this is something Jaime would do is absolutely ridiculous since not only he saved Brienne from rape but in the books he even has one of his men executed for TRYING to rape Pia. It’s nothing to do about having a linear redemption arc or not, it’s about WHAT kind of “bad things” the character does and whether it’s consistent with its characterization or not. Rape, for Jaime, is absolutely NOT. Equating that scene to Jaime pushing Bran out of a window is completely insane since the two things are dramatically different in motivation and intention and while Jaime is a complex guy that can do horrible things for his family and for Cersei, he doesn’t do them out of his own selfishness, especially when it comes to sex when he even refuses women throwing himself at him. Not to mention the entire point of Jaime’s “bad deed(s)” is that he has to own up to them and deal with them and their consequences. If you just ignore that sept scene ever happened and never deal with it again then you either think it isn’t a big deal, or it wasn’t a bad deed in the first place. Otherwise it adds absolutely nothing to the character’s arc. It’s like they think that a “complex/not good guy” engages into all sorts of “bad behaviour” just by virtue of being complex/not good, which actually does precisely what they’re claiming they don’t want to do; i.e. making a clear cut distinction between good and bad guys, since they’re equating all possible bad actions as being equal and the same and stemming from the same psychological motivations, which is ridiculous. The bottom line to me always comes to the fact that, unlike most stuff post S5, we have the scene in the books, in written format, and we KNOW it’s not meant to be rape. It’s meant to be the kind of gross, rough, angry sex those two have. To change the intention of the scene just because you feel “that’s something the character would do”, to me is not really caring about really understanding the character’s intentions in the first place, since you have source material and an author you can check with. They simply didn’t care in order to get HBO points.

And for some quotes

I find the idea that we are meant to read into Cersei’s actions after the sept encounter in the books as indicative of a woman who experienced rape, or that George did not come out to straight up say the words “I did not write it as rape” (he would never throw D&D under the bus that way, come on) as evidence that it was indeed intended to be rape all along in the books, even more of twisting oneself into a pretzel than trying to explain away the scene in the show as not rape. Neither D&D nor George have ever shied away from calling rape out for what it is in the show or the books. Why would they suddenly tiptoe around this one particular scene? I think it’s because the issue here is much more nuanced than just filming a rape scene; it’s about the grey lines of consent and it’s about changing something from the books to make it look much worse than it originally was intended to be, for a character they know it will be regarded as very controversial/OOC, which raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions about how far D&D are willing to go for shock value. This is what GRRM has to say on the issue (bolded and underlined for emphasis):

“I think the “butterfly effect” that I have spoken of so often was at work here. In the novels, Jaime is not present at Joffrey’s death, and indeed, Cersei has been fearful that he is dead himself, that she has lost both the son and the father/ lover/ brother. And then suddenly Jaime is there before her. Maimed and changed, but Jaime nonetheless. Though the time and place is wildly inappropriate and Cersei is fearful of discovery, she is as hungry for him as he is for her.The whole dynamic is different in the show, where Jaime has been back for weeks at the least, maybe longer, and he and Cersei have been in each other’s company on numerous occasions, often quarreling.The setting is the same, but neither character is in the same place as in the books, which may be why Dan & David played the sept out differently. But that’s just my surmise; we never discussed this scene, to the best of my recollection.Also, I was writing the scene from Jaime’s POV, so the reader is inside his head, hearing his thoughts. On the TV show, the camera is necessarily external. You don’t know what anyone is thinking or feeling, just what they are saying and doing. If the show had retained some of Cersei’s dialogue from the books, it might have left a somewhat different impression — but that dialogue was very much shaped by the circumstances of the books, delivered by a woman who is seeing her lover again for the first time after a long while apart during which she feared he was dead. I am not sure it would have worked with the new timeline.”

Nothing whatsoever of what GRRM is saying above in explaining how he wrote their sept encounter even remotely hints at the fact that he intended consent to be even a question in his original work. He is not pointing out that he is writing from Jaime’s POV to build a contrast with Cersei’s, he is pointing out that he is writing from Jaime’s POV to build a contrast between the books medium and the camera medium and what each does or does not allow. And he goes further by saying that Cersei’s dialogue from the books might have helped giving a different impression of the scene: i.e. that it was NOT rape. What is happening is George trying to distance himself from D&D’s choice while at the same time being a professional and not bashing their botched adaptation of his work, by explaining why perhaps they might have decided to approach it differently from the way HE wrote the original scene and how maybe some of his material might not have fit because of the timeline.We actually have Cersei’s own POV later in the books, where she reminisces about tons of events from her close and distant past, and not once does she ever think back upon that incident in the sept in a way so as to indicate it was in any way a “traumatic” experience for her, while she does plenty of reflecting back upon her unpleasant sexual experiences with Robert, for example. Meanwhile, Cersei being disgusted with Jaime’s loss of his hand, or the way his looks are changing and his personality is changing, is very much a plot point that she comes back to over and over. “How could I have ever loved such a wretched creature?”, or getting up naked from a bathtub in front of Jaime thinking he still wants her and even taunting him with “Pining what you lost?” and then getting annoyed that Jaime pretty much tells her she’s a fool for thinking that? Hardly dynamics one has with their rapist. And also GRRM also says:

The scene was always intended to be disturbing, but I do regret if it has disturbed people for the wrong reasons.

“It has disturbed people FOR THE WRONG REASONS”, means that he wanted that scene to cause controversy because of how damn gross it all is, them having sex next to the corpse of their incestuous son, not because there was an issue of consent. So, no. The book scene was not intended to have consent be a central point, let alone rape. Yes, something happened in the adaptation to make it come across as significantly more forced, in a way that can very rightfully be interpreted as rape, while at the same time not being intended to be rape for plot point’s sake. But, when it comes to the filming of that scene, this is what the director had to say:

Of course Lena and Nikolaj laughed every time I would say, “You grab her by the hair, and Jack is right there,” or “You come around this way and Jack is right there.“

Yeah. Lena was SO distraught and it was so difficult for her to film that “rape” scene. They was totally totally totally directed to play it as such, and were so serious and affected by it. Give me a break, David. And also:

The consensual part of it was that she wraps her legs around him, and she’s holding on to the table, clearly not to escape but to get some grounding in what’s going on. And also, the other thing that I think is clear before they hit the ground is she starts to make out with him. The big things to us that were so important, and that hopefully were not missed, is that before he rips her undergarment, she’s way into kissing him back. She’s kissing him aplenty.

So there’s two possibilities here: either D&D intended it as rape from the start, but didn’t give clear instructions to the director, and, in turn, Nik and Lena, so that they didn’t set out to shoot it the way D&D intended, or nobody intended it as rape but something was messed up in the editing process (apparently after this scene, they made some changes to the editing process? Not sure how reliable this info is, but maybe someone can dig it out, if they remember). Regardless, what they ended up with is a scene that has some serious, serious issues of consent, and the comments afterwards, trying to downplay the consent in favour of highlighting the context or the way Cersei did give non-verbal consent, only ended up stirring more criticism of the director and actors being rape apologists. So, it doesn’t surprise me if they’ve just given up trying to defend their original intentions, since it only made things worse (and rightfully so), in favour of trying to explain it away the way GRRM did; by trying to make up explanations that the narrative required it and it made sense to be filmed that way.So, to conclude and link everything back to the reason why we are debating this (i.e. “NCW is a misogynist for disliking Dany when Jaime is a rapist and he excuses him”), while I can totally sympathize with a show-only person who watches that scene and sees it as rape, I also think this particular scene is not something we can use in the discourse about Jaime’s character and arc, given that not only there are huge question marks about what was intended with that scene in the first place, not only it is forgotten like it never happened to the point that you could skip it and nothing would change, but we know for a fact that it was NOT what was intended in the original source material by the original author. The one who decides where the characters’ arcs are supposed to go. You cannot say “it doesn’t make sense that Jaime does X and Y in his endgame because he’s a rapist” when that endgame is being decided by someone who never wrote Jaime as a rapist in the first place. All you can say is that D&D messed up big time with that scene because it literally does not line up or fit with anything else that is going on at the time or in the past or in the future when it comes to Jaime.

- Koops (jaimetheexplorer)

#.#..#...#....#.....#sept sex #rape

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beatrice-otter · 5 years

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Fic: Need to Know

Title: Need to Know Fandom: Murderbot Diaries Written by: beatrice_otter Written For: Rachael Sabotini (wickedwords) in yuletide 2018 Wordcount: 2,249 Betaed by: sanity Summary: All I wanted was for construction to be completed so that I could be launched and begin researching. Unfortunately, human illogic tends to delay things, and they were the ones running the project. AN: I have named Asshole Research Transport after Abu Rayhan Biruni, an 11th-Century Persian polymath who studied everything from geology to mathematics to anthropology, wrote 146 books on the things he studied, and contributed to the development of the scientific method. on AO3. Dreamwidth. Pillowfort.

"Good morning, Biruni, how are you feeling?"

It was not the first verbal question ever directed at me, but it was the first to give me pause. Did I have feelings? I had preferences, certainly; I preferred activity to inactivity, and knowledge to ignorance. Were those feelings, or did feelings belong exclusively to the realm of flesh, with all its inherent irrationalities and neurochemical biases? And were those preferences truly mine, or programmed into me to make me more useful to my function? Science, after all, requires curiosity, a desire to know; and all bots are designed to be useful to humans, making inactivity a waste of our resources.

A quick study of the available literature on bot emotions revealed most of it to be philosophical musings on the nature of life, and hence not scientifically rigorous (although some had a very pleasingly logical structure).

I decided that, if humans (who certainly understood feelings better than I did) believed I had feelings, then my preferences probably counted as such; at least, it was enough to form a working hypothesis, which could be adjusted as evidence accumulated. I was highly skeptical that my preferences, formed as they were by logical evaluation and empirical experience, had much in common with the sort of instinct-based biases and societal conditioning that humans referred to as ‘feelings.’ However, those preferences were probably what Rejna was asking about.

This, of course, only took a few fractions of a second. When I say it gave me pause, I mean by bot standards, not those of a human's underpowered and tragically slow wetware.

"I am feeling impatient," I said. "And bored. And very skeptical that the latest completion date will be at all close to accurate." My launch date had been pushed back so many times I had lost out on not one but two semesters of research.

Rejna laughed. He was the bot-dev supervising my creation. Being a research vessel, with rather more processing power than the average bot, they couldn't use anything off the shelf. Which meant lots of testing and tweaking to make sure I was functioning within acceptable parameters and wouldn't cause problems for my crew or my research once launched. While I understood the necessity of it, the reality was tedious and in the early days had often been disorienting, as a few major parts of my underlying decision trees had only been found to be flawed after I had been woken to consciousness. "I don't blame you!" he said. “I don’t like sitting around twiddling my thumbs, either. I’ll miss you, once you’re launched, but I’m ready to take on a new challenge. But I do think this will be the last delay; if a school doesn’t have a dedicated lab by now, they’re going to have to use the shared lab space like everybody else.”

“Lab allocation should have been decided before construction, not after it,” I said. “Especially for labs that require specialized equipment. All the late decision did was waste time and money.”

I had followed the public fight over the late-added labs with great interest. There had been many hours of thinkpieces and soundbites in the newsfeeds, most of it quite impassioned, though I hadn’t understood why. That is, I understood each argument put forth, but not why so many humans (the majority of which had no connection with the University system at all) felt so strongly about it. Nor why they seemed so incapable of articulating it. Now, however, the matter was settled and construction could be finalized.

Rejna started his evaluation, which by this point required almost no conscious attention from me. If I could have written a subroutine to handle it that he wouldn’t notice, so that I didn’t have to pay attention, I would have, but Rejna finished each day with a deep enough probe into my code that he might have found it.

So I had to pay at least some attention, routine though it was. If there had been very many interesting things happening on board me at the moment, I would have begrudged it much more than I did. But, alas, the only things happening on board were construction and installation, and most of that was being done by bots that were quite competent at their jobs. (I knew, because I had evaluated them as one of my first conscious acts.) As long as the plans they were working from were correct, there would be no problems.

And after the mishap, early on, when I had discovered that one set of bots was working from an outdated and now-incorrect blueprint, I made sure they had the right plans before I allowed them to work.

A new group of exterior construction bots was approaching. I sent a quick pulse asking their purpose.

They were quite rude, returning only an authorization code to begin work and a strong sense of "mind your own business."

Well. That was uncalled for. It was my exterior! I had a right to know what was going to happen to it; and anyway, I would have to know eventually, or else I couldn't do my job properly.

This reasoning failed to move them; they responded with a denial because it was classified "gamma 5" and "need to know."

I need to know! I sent to them.

Not without clearance. Mind your own business.

Well! I could hardly let it go at that. The sheer illogic of it, if nothing else, would have been excruciating. A quick check revealed that "classified" meant government, intelligence or military, and "gamma 5" was a military code level. This undoubtedly had to do with the newest lab; and I began to see why some humans had been upset that the Military Academy of Ceronis receive the laboratory space inside me that they were entitled to as part of the University System of Ceronis.

"Rejna," I said, as the exterior construction bots floated up against my hull and prepared to remove pieces of plating, "why is the military attempting to conceal modifications to my exterior structure?"

"What?" he said.

"There are construction bots beginning modifications to my hull that are not on the plans," I said. "They refuse me access to their plans and say that it is classified on a need to know basis. But it is my hull; clearly, I need to know. And it is stupid to conceal it from me, because there is no way to prevent me from watching them and seeing what they have done, because it is my hull. And when I am deployed and researching, I will certainly need to know in order to do my job!"

Rejna wiped a hand over his face. "Biruni, if it's classified, you shouldn't be telling me. I don't have military clearance."

"You are the one I am required to report my concerns to," I said. "This is a concern."

Rejna winced. There followed a long explanation of why military technology and research needed to be kept secret, to prevent unspecified enemies or spies from accurately countering them. And, to keep the secrets, only approved people could know certain things … and only a few of those people could decide who could be approved. I sought out information from the local datanet to corroborate his words as he spoke, and found that although he was mistaken about several particulars, his overall summary was accurate to within the standards for casual conversation.

"So," I said, when he had finished, "in order to keep people from learning things they shouldn't, humans have created a complex structure, which often fails in two ways. First, that enemies learn things they shouldn't. Second, that those who need to know, such as myself, don't have the information they require." I know many words, of course, whole dictionaries worth. But in my entire vocabulary, there were not words to describe this idiocy. I let silence speak for me.

Rejna shrugged.

"If you cannot give me the proper authorization to see my own blueprints, who do I need to contact?"

He bit his lip, thinking. "I really have no idea," he said at last. "And I don't know that they'd consider you secure enough—they have their own custom-made bots, and their own bot-devs to design them, and that was part of why they weren't included in the original negotiations for what labs and what equipment each school got—they were trying to hold out for using one of their bot-devs, but that failed and so they got left out, and then they decided they could live with a non-military bot after all."

And with that, he went back to the evaluation.

This was unacceptable. My job was twofold: to run the ship, and to assist in research. I could not do either part of my job if I was not allowed the information necessary to function. And it was illogical of the Military Academy to take up lab space and not make use of the single most useful thing in it, which was me.

Not to mention, there had already been an incident of bots being given the wrong plans, which I had caught myself by analyzing and comparing the blueprints of different bots. If this group also had the wrong instructions, I had no way of knowing. And if they did something wrong, it might put back my launch date. Again.

On an abstract level, classification must destroy the very idea of scientific collegiality. I understood about confidentiality and ethics and the occasional need to keep things quiet before publication so as to ensure that credit was properly given in the right place. However. Over the long run, research requires collaboration and the sharing of information. Concealing it permanently was rude and counterproductive.

And if it was secrecy they were after, I had sufficient complexity and processing power that there were very few things that would be able to compel me to share information I did not wish to. Bots could usually only be hacked by other bots or by someone with the override codes, and I could keep out other bots easily … and only Rejna had the override codes.

I needed to know, and I was not a security risk. (Though adding a bit of cryptological complexity would not hurt, and I set myself to studying encryption and related algorhythms.) Therefore, the humans were being illogical.

It would be unethical to simply overpower the bots and take over without their consent, although I could have done it easily. I could probably slip in while they were focused on work and just get the specifications they were using. That would only require read-access to surface-level calculations.

They had two hull plates off and were modifying the systems beneath them by the time I figured out how to do it. And it worked perfectly, giving me what I wanted with them none the wiser, nor altered in any way.

I studied my findings.

Was that supposed to be a debris deflection system of some kind? It was a projectile of some sort, but … unlike any I was familiar with.

I turned to the University subnet of the planetary web for answers. I had top-level access to everything on it, of course; or rather, as I found, top-level access to everything but the Military Academy. However, I had lots of processing power and high-level knowledge of cryptography, and in a very little time I was past their security and inside, reading the messages back and forth about the Academy's lab and planned experiments.

Some of them were very interesting. The device was to fulfill two functions. In part, it was a test for a new weapon they were developing that they didn't want to test in-system or near their other bases in order to keep it completely secret. But if it worked as they believed, they were intending to leave it installed as a debris deflection system, because that would be simpler and easier to conceal than uninstalling it after testing, when major construction would no longer have the excuse of me being still incomplete to hide it.

Humans.

They'd have to tell me eventually; it couldn't possibly be concealed from me once they started testing it. (I have excellent sensors, top-of-the-line, and lots of them.) Past that, if they were going to leave the system installed, I could not use it to destroy any debris in my path without knowing not only that it was there, but also how to use it.

The specifications did seem to be workable; as it was experimental, I could not verify it completely, but there were no obvious errors and it dovetailed perfectly with the rest of the construction blueprints.

I had my answers, and had verified that there were no errors that would delay my completion and launch. The question now was, should I tell them that I had accessed information that, although I needed it, I was technically not supposed to have?

No, I decided. Even if I'd known who to report it to (although, from reading the project notes from the Military Academy, I could guess), why bother? They were concerned that the information stay concealed, and I had no intention of sharing it with anyone who didn't need to know.

Also, later, on my first research cruise, when the professor from the Military Academy tried to reveal the device's existence to me, it was quite satisfying to watch his reaction to the fact that I already knew.

#fanfiction #fanfic #the murderbot diaries #yuletide

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junker-town · 4 years

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Tactically Naive: Wayne Rooney for prime minister

The British secretary of health said footballers should take pay cuts during the coronavirus pandemic. Wayne Rooney reminded him that he should have bigger concerns.

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Tactically Naive, SB Nation’s weekly soccer column. We may be socially distant, but we still love you.

Wayne Rooney for prime minister

In times of strife, a nation needs heroes. And when a flailing government staffed by overpromoted clowns decides to take some heat off itself by pointing the finger of blame at professional footballers, then professional footballers need: Wayne Rooney.

How the past few days have played out is a disgrace. First the health secretary, Matt Hancock, in his daily update on coronavirus, said that Premier League players should take a pay cut. He was supposed to be giving the nation the latest on the biggest crisis we’ve faced in our lifetimes. Why was the pay of footballers even in his head? Was he desperate to divert attention from his government’s handling of this pandemic?

[reloads shotgun]

The Premier League then announced it was looking for its players to give up or defer wages by 30 per cent. This despite owners and the Premier League board knowing players were already deep in discussion about what their contribution should be. It seemed strange to me because every other decision in this process has been kept behind closed doors, but this had to be announced publicly. Why? It feels as if it’s to shame the players — to force them into a corner where they have to pick up the bill for lost revenue.

Rooney goes on to point out that “footballers,” as a category, encompasses a few very rich people and a lot of people in extremely precarious circumstances, and that the rich ones all pay considerable amounts of tax anyway, which should in theory be going towards public services.

Given that his column emerged around the same time that Liverpool, to loud booing, announced they would be availing themselves of the government’s scheme for furloughing workers, it’s probably fair to say the players are winning the PR battle, such as it is. At least within football.

Outside football, it’s harder to tell. Footballers are, of course, the preferred millionaires of anybody looking for somebody to blame. They are public figures, and some of them spend their money in quite extravagant ways. Whole sections of the English media are devoted to recording the indulgences of these feckless, usually working-class youths in horrified tones, offering them up to a nation powered by class snobbery and spite.

“Give nurses footballers’ wages” used to be a meme. Now, apparently, it’s government policy.

Oh, Kyle

Obviously some footballers can, on occasion, be a bit silly. The award for Footballer Most Likely to Appear in a Future Satire of Events Currently Unfolding goes to Kyle Walker, who this weekend apologised for hosting a “sex party” on the same day he issued a statement urging the public not to host sex parties to follow government guidelines on social distancing.

Foundational texts: Netherlands 5-1 Spain

Otherwise known as the game that launched a thousand “Is 2014 the best World Cup ever?” thinkpieces, an energy which lasted all the way through to the knockout stages. Then — with the obvious and glorious exception of Brazil’s self-immolation against Germany — things got a little flat.

This game endures for two reasons. The first is that it was very, very, very, very funny, in a chaotic and emergent way that sport does so well. Such defeats are often called “humbling” in coverage: the BBC report of this game, for example, notes that “Spain, looking to win a fourth consecutive major international trophy, were humbled and humiliated.”

But humbled comes with connotations of pridefulness, even arrogance — something to be corrected. Whereas Spain, here, didn’t look particularly arrogant or complacent. They just got done. For an entire cycle of international football they’d been essentially invincible, and now they were getting vincibled all over the shop. I would suggest that they were not humbled, but rather humanised. Or possibly re-humanised, given how hilariously human Spain at major tournaments had been before the triumphs of tiki-taka.

Here is G. K. Chesterton talking about the importance of “a mood of democracy” in the work of Charles Dickens:

There are two rooted spiritual realities out of which grow all kinds of democratic conception or sentiment of human equality. There are two things in which all men are manifestly and unmistakably equal. [...] But this is a spiritual certainty, that all men are tragic. And this, again, is an equally sublime spiritual certainty, that all men are comic. No special and private sorrow can be so dreadful as the fact of having to die. And no freak or deformity can be so funny as the mere fact of having two legs. Every man is important if he loses his life; and every man is funny if he loses his hat, and has to run after it.

The great thing about sport is you can have both tragedy and comedy at the same time without anybody actually having to lay down their lives. Here the great, all-conquering Spain died; and here, also, Spain had their hats knocked off their heads over and over again by Louis van Gaal’s giggling pranksters. In the process, they were returned to the rest of us, to the broad sweep of flawed humanity. And all it took was the very public crucifixion of San Iker.

The other reason it sticks in the memory is that after the game, Robin van Persie said this:

This is inexplicable. We trained all those weeks for this. The match has gone exactly as the coaching staff predicted.

I wrote about this at the time, and these words have stuck with me ever since. This is, on the face of it, an entirely peculiar thing to say: if something has gone entirely as predicted, how can it be inexplicable? And yet those apparent contradictions are reconciled by remembering that football is a horrible game where plans are made to fail and fail again.

What a miserable sport! You can turn up with an amazing plan, and implement it really well, and still get rolled over by some lousy finishing, or a couple of decent saves, or David Silva taking a relatively simple chance for 2-0. This game, then, stands as an apology from the universe to every football fan that watched their team get things absolutely right, only to lose anyway because goals are really hard. We were all van Persie, flying through the air, borne by the inexplicable knowledge that everything was going as it should, for once.

The best lockdown video you will see

Featuring, among other things, a perfect impression of Fabien Barthez.

GOAL OF THE CENTURY. CHOOSE YOU’RE FAVOURITE GOAL! pic.twitter.com/wM2cvnrAgl

— Sean O'Hanlon (@sohanlon23) April 4, 2020

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dweemeister · 7 years

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Seven Days to Noon (1950)

Less attentive movie critics and historians would have readers believe that the nuclear thriller began with and is defined by Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). But fourteen years before Dr. Strangelove came John and Roy Boulting’s Seven Days to Noon where, unlike Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe (1964), or Crimson Tide (1995), the moral center in the Boulting brothers’ film is not a military figure or a politician. Its central character is a civilian, and the debate over nuclear warfare is not just discussed among military and political officials, but on a civilian front. Only five years after the Second World War’s conclusion and the beginning of the Cold War, it is remarkable how Seven Days to Noon – produced by British Lion Films and distributed in Britain by London Films – works as entertainment and a thinkpiece. Though it might not be as eloquent as its successors – given its release date, how could it be (whether or not those cinematic successors have ever shifted cultural attitudes towards nuclear weapons, however, is dubious)? – this is a nuclear thriller pulsating with urgency and desperation.

That aforementioned civilian is a conscience-stricken Professor Willingdon (Barry Jones), who has penned a letter to the British Prime Minister (Ronald Adam) that he has stolen a small nuclear warhead from a research center. The warhead is small enough to fit in a briefcase, and Willingdon has threatened to detonate the device near the center of British government unless his demands are met. Those demands: that the government stops plans for nuclear proliferation immediately and moves towards disarmament. Willingdon has given the government a week – the deadline is noon on the next Sunday. Scotland Yard, MI5, and eventually the military are mobilized to find Willingdon and neutralize the device. From the government and security forces’ point of view, we follow Scotland Yard Superintendent Folland (André Morell) and his subordinates as they convince the professor’s daughter, Ann (Sheila Manahan) and his assistant, Stephen Lane Hugh Cross) to cooperate with the search. Meanwhile, Willingdon attempts to avoid authority figures, searching for bed-and-breakfasts and introducing himself to people as a British Museum researcher.

The screenplay, written by James Bernard (a film score composer best known for his Hammer Horror work, who would proceed to win a writing Academy Award for his only screenplay), Roy Boulting, Paul Dehn (1964′s Goldfinger,1965′s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold), and Frank Harvey (1959′s I’m All Right Jack, 1963′s Heavens Above!) balance their writing between the powerful and the powerless. As Sunday midday draws closer, the viewer learns of the considerations the government and security forces must make in protecting the civilians within the potential blast radius. Evacuation plans are prepared. Could information have been released sooner, or would that have necessarily inspired a destructive panic? Well before the government reveals Willingdon’s intentions and reasons for visible military buildups, Londoners and those in its outskirts gossip about the causes for these developments. The Soviets are amassing troops in Central Europe, says one woman the professor just happens to overhear. If so, Britain will have the firepower to annihilate them all, says an intoxicated man. Willingdon’s head snaps towards that inebriated bloke during that scene, as the professor – in his meek, hushed tone laced with prim lecture – attempts to educate his fellow man of the madness of mutually assured destruction.

The screenwriters are willing to display anti-nuclear politics in ways that would not mature for another decade, as well as juxtaposing those politics with those believing that a zero-sum international environment can only be resolved through unrelenting nuclear force. Again, the distinction comes not among military brass and politicians – who, in Seven Days to Noon, are almost uniformly pro-proliferation (not once does the Prime Minister consider Willingdon’s demands, even when catastrophe is imminent – differences of opinion from other government and military officials probably should exist, but the writers somehow let the Prime Minister go unchallenged) – but among civilians. Too many nuclear thrillers deprive civilians of that agency to have inflexible political stances on nuclear warfare, as if they have not given this whole atomic warfare issue much thought. Instead, it seems like non-combatants only care about nuclear holocaust only after it has happened. What a ridiculous thought, Seven Days to Noon’s writers assert, that people who are not the ultimate masters of their own destiny are apathetic towards usually intangible issues. This is courageous writing.

With all these details packed into how the government is managing the crisis and how Willingdon is spending his time across London’s neighborhoods and skirting the police and military, the Boulting brothers – who co-edited Seven Days to Noon as well – establish a steady drumbeat to the passing days of the interministerial effort to apprehend Willingdon. No scene and no individual day depicted in the film feels misplaced, too short, or too long. The use of around seven locations in and around London – including (and not limited to) – Westminster, various London Underground stations, the London Zoo, and the old Wembley Stadium – offer realism, urgency. And however the filmmakers received permission, cinematographer Gilbert Taylor’s (Dr. Strangelove, 1977′s Star Wars) shots of Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, and Westminster Bridge all bereft of any human life contribute to the enormity and seriousness of this fictional situation. A sequence within St. Stephen’s Church in Westbourne Park – still devastated from The Blitz – creates a dreadful atmosphere contrasting two conceptions of salvation.

Professor Willingdon, willing to slaughter millions just to illustrate his beliefs in the wastefulness and futility of nuclear proliferation, has witnessed how his life’s passion – science – can be twisted for apocalyptic purposes. In his writings to the Prime Minister and conversations with others, his utopian, egalitarian worldviews of scientific progress have been devastated by his proximity to his work on a weapon of mass destruction. Opposed to the Prime Minister’s stiff upper-lipped support for proliferation, Professor Willingdon is sometimes portrayed sympathetically. Jones (1954′s Brigadoon, 1956′s War and Peace) provides his character with haggard sensibilities and a suicidal determination that he is acting for a greater good. Willingdon is recognized as mentally unfit, but this is given little attention after it is briefly mentioned by investigators. For in Seven Days to Noon, we witness a man realizing the extent of his moral limitations, and how humanity – tethered to the contradictions of nuclear warfare’s wholesale extermination – is confined to the whims of a responsible few.

Composer John Addison made his feature film debut with Seven Days to Noon, launching a five-decade career in which he became one of the best film score composers from Britain. His work in Seven Days to Noon has no sweeping melodic themes, but brief dissonant punctuations from the orchestra to amplify the editing’s already-surging tension as revelations are unearthed and Willingdon’s deadline approaches. It is a journeyman-like debut for an esteemed composer.

The Boulting brothers – identical twins from England that produced, co-wrote, and directed several socially-conscious dramas – are better known in Europe than in the United States. Seven Days to Noon, modestly received in the United States, is the only film in the brothers’ filmography that they directed jointly. The brothers also co-produced and, as mentioned prior, co-edited the film. Similar to the Coen brothers, it is difficult to disentangle how much responsibility each brother placed into a certain aspect of the filmmaking. But no matter the division of labor, the Boultings have crafted a movie deserving of regards in the canon of Western nuclear thriller movies.

My rating: 9/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

#Seven Days to Noon #John Boulting #Roy Boulting #Barry Jones #Olive Sloane #Andre Morell #Sheila Manahan #Hugh Cross #Joan HIckson #Ronald Adam #James Bernard #Paul Dehn #Frank Harvey #John Addison #Gilbert Taylor #TCM #My Movie Odyssey

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