To an extent. But I think the state of society proves that the issue is nowhere near as prevalent or as problematic as you suggest.

Yes, and that crapsack backdrop has made a whole lot of terrible decisions at least appear to be the right ones over the centuries. That's part of the setting too.

Don't put words in my mouth. The potential issue with the Inquisitor example was all about the context of how the character and her supporting characters are handled. The fact that she would be female didn't play into the discussion at all as a potential problem in and of itself, and I don't appreciate the way you're trying to insinuate that I said it was.

What I said was that it depends on context. Is this hypothetical black female lesbian Inquisitor a Mary-Sue? Is their race/gender/orientation used as a plot point, or is it merely incidental to the plot the way it should be given what we know of the setting? Is her character used to bash straight people, male people, or white people? Again, with that example, context and pattern recognition are the keys to determining whether such a character is designed to make a political statement, or whether they are designed to be an interesting character.

Sometimes people misread those patterns, because repeatedly being beaten over the head with them has made some fans oversensitive to the issue. But usually they're a pretty solid indicator of the intended message.

You can have politics in a story without them being real world politics. Real world politics have never been necessary to storytelling, and this should be obvious if you think back over your favorite literature, films and television. What real-world politics were in Harry Potter? None. Sure, elements of it like Death Eater ideology were based on real world politics, but it was both outdated politics that everyone agreed on and no one is particularly sensitive about (i.e. Nazis are bad), and it was re-skinned to fit the fantasy setting. What real world politics were in Lord of the Rings? War is bad and it traumatizes people? Not exactly a controversial sentiment, even if it could be considered technically political. What real world politics were in Star Wars? Fascism is evil? Giving in to anger and hate is bad? Yeah, no shit.

The problem is when people feel preached at. Whether you agree with what's being preached or not, preaching always gets annoying at some point. The difference between Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, compared to some other franchise like, say, the tv adaptation of The Boys, is that none of the first three try to push their creators' personal contemporary political views on the audience. They're just trying to tell a good story about good characters. Part of that does involve having their own internal politics, but they very plainly don't take sides in contemporary irl political squabbling, where shows like The Boys do, to their detriment. A Song of Ice and Fire is another great example. The whole series is almost nothing but politics, yet it never feels preachy because it's clearly Westerosi politics, not 21st Century American or British politics.

 

I'm not going to waste everyone's time by retreading ground that's been covered already since my last post, but I do have a couple of things to mention:

This touches on something I find myself wondering more and more of late. Why does it have to be necessary for it to be reasonable to make a character a non cis-het white male?

It seems to me that this argument is particularly neat because it gets diversity both coming and going.

It's bad to force a diversity-based narrative into the middle of a story because that's politics. But, ah hah! It's also bad to include a diverse character/cast unnecessarily because that's just forced diversity.

So we're left with never being able to include diverse characters in mainstream works. As I said. Very neat. Straight white dudes for everyone!

Right. Because bigotry, racism, intolerance, lust for power, lust for wealth, glorification of war, etc are all things of the past that humanity has uniformly moved past.

Sorry to say, we haven't. But no-one says bigotry is good, I hear you say. And you're right. You don't hear them say that. Because bigots don't call it bigotry. They call it natural, or rightful, or reasonable, or scientific to treat 'whoever' as lesser because reasons. I'm not a bigot, they say, because I have reasons.

 

I'm pointing out the that very existence of this character is making you ask these questions but you aren't demanding Cain and Vail's implied romance justify its existence in the same way. I'm all for trying to handle inclusivity well by having characters and plots be well-written, but I'm not sure we'd even agree on what constitutes bashing in the first place...

...which is fine! But it's an inherently political disagreement.

"War is bad and traumatizes people" can be intensely political: consider how differently that statement was taken in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Lucas has talked about how the Vietnam War inspired some of his construction of Star Wars, he did the same with the prequel trilogy being meant to comment on the War on Terror, and plenty of people did read into that both then and now. This again just comes off as you labeling anything particularly jarring to you personally as "political", but then glossing over other commentary that doesn't get the label.

 

So you're saying that the setting comprised of a race of football hooligans, another race that has to practice extreme BDSM to maintain their sanity and souls, walking cathedrals as the ultimate weapons of war, continent-spanning buildings that exist for the sole purpose of maintaining the last fragments of life in a shattered corpse, bureaucracies so vast and ponderous that planetary populations can be forgotten entirely because of a rounding error and people go to prison because the trial finally concluded for crimes their great-great-grandfather committed, a cult of technomonks that communicate almost exclusively in binary, and an omnicidal god getting shoved into a pokeball has never once struck you as maybe a little bit too absurd?

The whole setting is a joke, first and foremost, and always has been. It started as a parody of 'grim' sci-fi, a trend just starting to pick up real steam when it was first written in the late 80s, evolved from there into broader satire, and then after about 20 years, started being written by folks who, not unlike yourself, grew up with it, missed the point, and took it seriously (this is most of the problem with the Horus Heresy books, btw; where "the author is shit at authoring" doesn't apply).

I love the 40k setting, it's a ton of fun with nearly infinite amounts of really cool setting details and stories, with potential for anything you could want to see in it. But a serious setting that's meant to be both a) rigidly adhered to and b) taken at face value, it very much is not. It's a send-up of a whole bunch of stuff that someone then dialed to 13 and tore the knob off.

I'm eagerly looking forward to this show/universe/whatever Amazon does with it. Maybe it'll turn out shit, and I'll be sad if it does, but it's way too early to go full doomer on it yet.

For what it's worth, the generally 'right' way, insofar as there exists a right and wrong way, to handle this kind of thing is to simply not impose whatever it is on pre-existing characters. I.e., introduce a new character and/or replace a character's role in the narrative with a new character with whatever trait you want (though if the latter and the replaced character is of any significance, it's probably a good idea to give em an at least vaguely respectful send-off as well).

 

This actually doesn't look that bad for a sequel show

 

Did everyone in that 70s show also look 14 and I am noticing now because i'm older?

 

So only Mila Kunis was 15. Everyone else was late teens/early 20s if I remember right.

But I remember thinking they all looked like adults playing teenagers

 

I am pretty sure Mila Kunis admitted to lying about her age to get the audition too. Apparently the producers were expecting late teens/early 20s people to audition for the part. It was only after she got picked and bonded with the people behind the scenes that she admitted her age.

 

Well that's a throwback I didn't expect.

Im thoroughly jaded by Netflix now though, so expectations are low.

I've got to episode 4 with the ball, and am getting very tired of boring high school drama cringe. Does it get back to being interesting? I'm honestly at the point where I might drop it.

Really enjoyed the first few episodes.

 

My opinion on Wednesay was that it seems like the kind of show that did exactly what it came to do. It had a bit of mystery, mixed in with a very Tim Burton take on teen coming of age drama. I thought Jenny Ortega did a good job as Wednesday, and Edith was, while potentially annoying, pretty much her perfect foil.

I think my favourite part of it was probably Thing. I just absolutely loved the jank. Proper Dr Who vibes.

I did feel like Wednesday had a bit of a bad case of designated protagonist-itis, where all the characters around her just fell into her orbit without much reason. I guess 'she's hot' is reason enough for teenage boys, but as for the rest... yeah, I dunno.

So while it's not necessarily my kinda show, in small doses, I found it pretty enjoyable. Hardly a prestige show, but it did exactly what it set out to do, and it was refreshingly different enough from a lot of the other stuff I've been watching recently.

@Innomine The high school drama stuff doesn't really go away, but I think the cringe does drop off again a bit after the ball.

 

Amazon did a good job adapting Tolkiens long-winded complexity and making it 'digestible' for a modern audience and an amazing job toning down Garth Ennis depraved insanity in The Boys while at the same time making the greatest depiction of modern corporate activism shown on TV.

I've got high hopes for WH40K.

 

The Recruit - on Netflix - was surprisingly good. It's starts off as a relatively cheesy action/comedy, and then picks up and takes off.

The plot isn't anything special, but the characters doing a great job in their roles, and while you do have to suspend disbelief at points, it's was very watchable and entertaining.

 

HBO's version of The Last Of Us is, unsurprisingly, incredible. It's gonna get ALL the non-technical Emmy's.

Staying like 95% faithful to the game so far (not that it would've been too hard to do since they are basically just movies with interactive stealth/shooting).

I think TV version clickers are even scarier than game clickers if that's possible.

 

I am waiting for more to be released before I start, but I'm delighted with all the reviews so far.

Last thing I saw get this kind of praise is Andor, which was really quite something. Looking forward to this now.

 

Episode 3 was probably the best hour and fifteen minutes of television I've seen in a long time.

 

Really hoping they make the same sort of significant changes if/when they get to the Part 2 storyline like they did with the Bill and Frank stuff. It really needs it.

A) Don't make Abby such an abominable asshole hypocrite, and introduce her earlier so we actually care about her grief.

B) Let Ellie have the tiniest bit of happiness with Dina. The end of Part 2 is so fucking depressing and meaningless.

 

I'm of two minds about it. On one hand, it was incredible fucking television when taken in a vacuum, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

On the other hand, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's a terrible adaptation of the source material and an absolute waste of the character of Bill, who we don't even get to see interact. I just ... don't get it. Why do they insist on these changes that only take away, when they can just put this same level of work into the existing material that was much better than their changes. Every episode has had something like this.

 

‘The episode that made it to our screens was a cool one hour and twelve minutes long, but, in an interview with Deadline, Mazin said a two-hour cut was sent his way first of all. “I was like, oh, that’s probably not good. And I sat down, but I’m like, “OK, I’ll watch the two-hour version of this episode.” And I cried so hard that at one point, I actually said out loud, “Ow.” I mean, it hurt. I cried so hard; it hurt.”-

from GQ article.

I would love to see the 2 hr cut of this. Loved the two of them, really sweet.

 

It did change around with Bill and Frank's characters, but the way it set up connecting threads to Ellie and Joel, and later even to Ellie and Dina, probably makes it worth it. Moreover, while I'm sure watching Ellie and Joel dodge traps and kill infected in the city as in the game would've been fun, it might mean that in future episodes, killing infected and moving through areas would be less interesting because we'd already seen that. If we see too much of the infected, they might not be quite as terrifying and all that.

Great episode, though. Absolutely fantastic acting.

 

Lockwood and Co started off well with some interesting worldbuilding, but the main dude is just such an obnoxious prat that I’m finding it difficult to keep watching. Seems like a good verse for crossover, if nothing else.