Just a backup in advance of the detumblring
Hey folks! Sorry to give you two tumblr roundups back-to-back, but I didn’t want this week to go by without an update. The Riverlands essay is up to 13k words right now but I’m only halfway done (some of that 13k will go down as I cut out quotes I don’t intend to use, etc.). If I’m not finished by this weekend, I intend to put up what I have so far on Monday. Incidentally, I want to take a bit of…
Look at how trustworthy and amiable he looks:
No one in King’s Landing likes or trusts Littlefinger: not Varys, not Pycelle, not Cersei, not Jaime, not Stannis, not Renly, not Tyrion, not Tywin, no one. He’s an incredibly obvious schemer who can’t stop monologuing in front of people he’s trying to scheme against or reminding people he’s betrayed that he’s betrayed them. He should try to hide it, but his compulsive need to prove he’s smarter than everyone else won’t let him.
Littlefinger gets away with it because A. most people don’t see him as a threat because he’s got no lands and no armies, B. he’s made himself indispensible as the only person who understands the royal finances, and C. he’s pretty good at hiding his actions.
I never liked South Park.
I get that, but a ledger book would have been more appropriate. Petyr’s power isn’t in his poniard, after all.
Days of Future Past had a lot of things I liked – the central trio of Charles, Erik, and Mystique worked very well, I liked the 70s stuff and it felt like it was being used for something as opposed than just as wallpaper (although my personal preference would have been to do more with it), Quicksilver was great. However…it missed a trick by having Wolverine travel in time rather than Kitty Pryde, I felt the 70s Sentinels were underused in the showdown on the White House lawn, and it suffered from the same problem of how to manage a large cast while giving everyone a voice and character arc that previous and future X-Men films had.
Apocalypse I didn’t even see, because the reviews were too depressing. The 80s stuff seemed used for just background stuff – especially if your movie is going to involve nuclear panic, you need to do it justice. The character work was apparently a case of diminishing returns, with Erik once again trying to blow up the world and getting forgiven for no reason. But mostly, mostly, I’m infuriated that they blew it with the Phoenix storyline AGAIN. What is, hands-down, one of the best stories in comics ever, which stars a female protagonist with cosmic level power, and they just keep missing the point.
Generally, the ambassadors would be expelled during a war.
Let me just say at the outset, I used to LOVE grimdark. Huge fan of Warhammer (both 40k and Fantasy), read all of the “groundbreaking, adult” graphic novels of the late 80s/90s, bought as many of White Wolf’s RPG books as I could, even if I almost never got to play them, and so on and so forth. But, and I don’t mean this at all in a condescending way, I matured out of it. This stuff that had spoke to me when I was a teenager was less appealing now that I’m in my early 30s.
A lot of this of this comes from the way that my personality works. I’m fundamentally an academic and a policy wonk and a reformer, which means when I see a bad situation either in real life or in media, my mind immediately goes to how it could be fixed, how it can be improved – I look at Westeros and start thinking about economic development plans, after all. Grimdark, however, requires stasis in order to maintain mood and atmosphere and setting:
“Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war.”
You can see the contradiction there.
Another big part of this is my realization, after a while, that grimdark is ultimately just as as sterile and fomulaic and predictable as its opposite. If the universe is always doomed, if the bad guys are always going to win, then there’s no dramatic tension, no possibility of surprise or innovation beyond a point.
One of the truths I feel I’ve stumbled across over the years is that the essence of good storytelling isn’t found in extremes, but in variation. No matter whether it’s grimdark or its opposite, too much of the same thing leads to habituation and a decrease in effectiveness. The result is either apathy or a constant arms-race of intensity that eventually becomes ridiculous.
I like X-23 as a character, although as with any character she can be used well or used poorly – I thought Innocence Lost was pretty good, Target X was ok. NYX, which introduced the whole teen prostitute thing, I could really have done without. I’m really enjoying All-New Wolverine, although I am as puzzled as everyone else about the different characterization between that book and All-New X-Men.
Well, his record stands at 0 wins, 1 loss.
Not a huge fan of the Old Man Logan original series (the new one is ok, but still overdoes the grimdark, and I liked OML better in All-New with Laura up until Civil War II got its sticky fingers on the story).
Also, if I’m being honest, I’m not really feeling the X-Men movies either right now – Deadpool worked because it was completely outside, Apocalypse was an awful waste that in retrospect calls attention to some of the underlying weaknesses of Days of Future Past (which I still like, overall), and I’m increasingly of the opinion that the X-Men franchise’s potential was handcuffed the moment Matthew Vaughn got taken off the series.
RFTIT Tumblr Backup 