cusideabelincoln

@LMN8R

This was such a faithful interpretation. Brick laying is analogous to Poe's method of writing; you don't build a wall just to break it down in the end.

If everyone turns out to not have been spaghettified... well I don't know what our characters are going to do. I only know that everything they've been trying to do so far is thrown out the window. Doctor Strange appearance? Wanda?

Even if these characters return, seems like everything they have been doing doesn't matter. Feels like a blank slate going forward and they're going to come up with something new to do.

So they finally give us a proper explanation for the characters' plans and motivations in episode 4 only to reset everything, rofl. Well that certainly explains why the campiness was off the charts. Nothing made sense because it didn't matter, so I have to imagine the intention was to not take this season (so far) so serious. I'm assuming that now every timeline is possible and this is the MCU's excuse to reboot or branch (haha) out going forward.

WTH, I never got a notification for this. Anyway, I mostly agree with you how the general populous expresses their opinions. A certain, significant portion of the population have this implicit bias against women. Using the Dumbledore example was just my personal opinion of him being an idiot. Sidenote: Like, every Harry Potter story has major or minor contrivances to make each installment exciting and it's definitely best to not overthink them, because most of the plots of each movie/book revolves around not telling Harry something very important that could have been told to him way sooner. Back to TLJ: While Holdo as a character is likely an intentional choice to highlight misogyny, I'm still not convinced that every facet of the movie was made with this intention as Greatoneshere's articles pointed out. There are several themes Johnson explores and goals he had with particularly plot points and characters and it doesn't revolve around gender. One of the articles makes the argument that a central theme is about women showing men how to cope with their emotions. I dislike this take, because knowing real people in real life my experience is that women are as equally emotionally unstable as men. I guess if this how someone chooses to see what the movie represents... then fair, because there is some good to come from this messaging. But TLJ was purposefully ambiguous on some things - notably how it wanted to go about representing the Jedi Order and its future - so I think one its goals was to incite discussion and highlight different points of view. I mostly don't see, and if I do then avoid, the Star Wars women hating and women hating content in general, but holy shit is it really hard to avoid headlines or content about hating Bri Larson. Seems like the most forced narrative out there. I liked Luke's arc... until he died. Literally no reason for him to die in that story and his death doesn't accomplish anything for the other characters. It's also especially egregious to have hamstrung the trilogy's story knowing Carrie had died and they had plenty of time to rework that scene before release. The CGI deepfake shit is just never going to let the characters express any nuanced emotion; the technology is not there. Luke in the Mandoverse may as well be a robot since he's nothing like young or old real Mark Hamil.

The right has their scapegoat now. They will proceed to talk about solving mental health, not actually do anything about it, and let freedom riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing.

I just found a Sonic-inspired level in the Magma world, awesome I like big trunks and I cannot lie Those Mario Bros can't deny When the Princess walks in as an itty bitty Peach And jumps on that powerup with her feet You get sprung The mushroom makes you tough 'Cause you notice that trunk was stuffed With water from the pipes emerging Those Daisies aren't the only thing that's growing

Is Google next? Youtube is fucking kids up.

Nihilism born out of ignorance; ignorance perpetuated by the very corrupt, powerful entities that are actually rigging the system.

I just watched the first episode and for the first time I actually got queasy from the... realistic amount of blood being shown on screen. I didn't feel like this during the orgy massacre, despite being volumes more gore, because it was just so absurd. I'm not sure I can even continue to watch the series if it stays like this. I'm also unnerved by the fact our protagonist has to cut herself to make use of her powers... that doesn't seem so good for my mental health. Can I stop now? Does it get worse, or does it lean in to other types of weird shit?

Ok, I see that point. No doubt people other than myself wetn full on misogynistic with hate against Holdo while I personally thought Poe was acting like a dumbass the entire time... which you are arguing is on purpose to specifically point out toxic masculinity. Fair enough, there's probably more reason to believe this take over any other. Better yet, Palpatine represents how some crazy old cook could just make up any old lie, without providing any proof, and the masses eat it up. Here I thought the movies were just taking shorcuts with storytelling, while I'm sure Palpy had his own... intergalactic "Fox" News Network. Man, if George had just leaned in on the messaging about propaganda those movies would have hit harder.

Ok I've read them and they make the case pretty strongly. I knew there was an uptick for female equality and representation in the mid 2010's, but I didn't realize it came with a strong anti-patriarchy movement too. Probably not coincidentally, that must be the female perspective because all of those articles are written by women. While those themes do exist in the movie, I'm still not convinced they exist to the extreme level of detail that those authors see them as. Even the one article who summarized the OT being about "fighting the man" while the PT was about "turning a blind eye to Corpo-Govt takeover", you can make an arbitrary argument for any of the movies. I'm reminded of an assignment I had to do for a literature class my freshman year of college. The professor wanted us to write an essay about what the author meant by some assigned story. As usual I procrastinated to the night before, but I just went through the story and picked the examples that fit the narrative I was using. The professor gave me an A and wrote he hadn't heard that one before, and it wasn't because I was necessarily right. I just made some shit up, and really the only person who knows what the author meant was the author themselves. Also what I meant by "surface-level" was closer to... happenstance, coincidence. Maybe it is my male perspective, but for example if we take the Poe vs Holdo dynamic I think people would have hated it the same even if Holdo was a man. One popular circumstance that comes to mind happens in one of the Harry Potter movies. I was equally annoyed with Dumbledore when he chose to keep Harry in the dark and ignore him the entire time - I think that was in Goblet of Fire - and it was all for literally no good reason and done only to complicate the plot. Unspecified hostility and forced dramatic irony is annoying to an audience., so it's not necessary gender has anything to do with it. While those articles do a make a strong argument it was a deliberate choice to present a message, I don't agree with every one of their points of comparison. It would be much for me to go through all of them, but I could argue that gender for the newly-introduced characters in TLJ was just... balance, heuristics. They wanted to include (represent) more females in TLJ since they already established more male leads in TFA, Rose exists as a mechanism to detach Finn from Rey (because that 'ship was never going to happen *coughChina*), and RJ never bothered to make a commentary about Phasma since she is there to be a "cool-looking bad-person, but we already have too many bad-guys in SW so we need a bad-girl". I'll have to rewatch the movie to see if the anti-patriarchy runs as deep as the articles are saying, because I have surely forgotten or missed some nuances of the movie.

Yet again TFA is the poison of the well (ST). A lot of these issues people have started with the decisions made in TFA. I really didn't care for the no time gap between TFA and TLJ, and I think it added unnecessary constraints to the story, but considering TFA decided to "go bigger and badder" with its story maybe RJ felt that was the best way to tell his story.

Lately I look at these blockbuster movies, especially Disney ones, from the lens of a megacorporation trying to squeeze money from as many target audiences as it possibly can. The reason we have 10-30 year old remakes now is because us past kids have grown and have money to spend. So even though TLJ has a necessary message it wants to tell, I personally think they're just doing it for greedy reasons. I mean you can see the checkboxes of things the corporation wanted the ST to have to make sure it makes money. So the story and plot take a sacrifice in order to cram those checkboxes in. I'm definitely getting more jaded as I get older.

I'll read those later, but I will say it's a weird turn for TLJ to make to have everything revolve around toxic masculinity. And it doesn't just detriment the plot if Johnson's goal was to inject as many male-critique themes as possible. I'd argue Finn's character goes underdeveloped throughout the entire trilogy; the "brainwashed, kidnapped child soldier" is a more critical part of his core development than masculinity and it goes completely ignored in TLJ and TROS. edit: I mean, why does the movie need to go deep into toxic masculinity? Certainly didn't need to do either as it was certainly not a focus of past SW films. I always took any character flaws in previous films to be those of that particular character, not a whole subset of people.

Are there any quotes/articles that this was Johnson's intention? I think most of these subversions are simply in sake of a twist - a surprise for the audience - with some surface-level criticism of masculinity thrown in. Because it's quite odd for Rian to make this a central theme with all the male characters being a negative example of masculine tropes without any positive examples of masculinity. Positive re-enforcement is more rewarding to the audience. Also in making this point, the article is definitely ignoring some details, like even though Luke fakes the "testosterone-driven" fight he still heroically sacrifices himself because.... he dies. And corresponding the whole Jedi Order to unhealthy masculinity is some projection - also kind of odd that Rey really wants to save it. Perhaps the movie is trying to make those arguments, but it makes other ones too and isn't exactly clear-cut. My initial thoughts on opening night was the movie was trying to have its cake and eat it too with its messaging about the Jedi Order, and it's a bit messy. I walked out of TLJ loving it because it shat on all the dumb re-hashes JJ introduced in TFA, with the prime example being Snoke. However upon re-watching it much later, with the emotions dialed down, I think the movie does too much to try to be clever and "meta" in sacrifice of the logistics of the plot. Namely... the entire premise of the chase makes no sense. And the movie still falls into the SW trope of "rhyming" with the OT. Much like TFA took an outline of ANH and put a twist on it, so the TLJ does the same with ESB as a blueprint. Extended chase sequence? Check. Bunker assault on a white planet? Check. Protagonist seeking wisdom of a Jedi Master? Check. Antagonist making a "huge" reveal to the protagonist? Check. Somber ending, good guys take a huge hit, barely escaping? Check. But it's still the best movie out of the sequels because at least it forces you think and has some great shots, while you literally need to shut your brain off for the JJ flicks.

If Disney is going to continue to fill in the gaps between the OT and ST, they should absolutely recast a young Luke and Leia instead of continuing on the CGI-AI path. Luke's performances were too limited in Mando and there's no way the technology is going recreate lifelike actors anytime soon.

I meant to say Rennslayer and Loki both have the same shorter term goal of just getting Kang to the TVA; the way each party fought it was weird because both parties can travel there at will. So what happens after he gets there is the only thing that matters, not how he gets there. I'll still give the show a chance as there is potential to do interesting things with Ms. Minutes being the lynchpin of knowledge. I'm just not impressed by the execution so far, despite how charismatic individual scenes are.

The kindest perspective I can have on storytelling is the fact that just about any time travel narrative falls apart when you think about it too much, so they're not bothering to have believable world building for the sake of doing fun and interesting bits. But as is, the plot holes are too distracting for me. They didn't bother to explain why Loki was time slipping; they just wanted to do a bit. They haven't demonstrated why Loki now believes a million bad Kangs are coming; he hasn't seen any proof of malevolence yet. Loki and B-15 have no plan for what the TVA should be doing about these bad Kangs and branched timelines, while Sylvie has a half-baked one. There was no actual reason for X-5 to hold back information, they just wanted to do an interrogation bit. Rennslayer, Ms. Minutes, Loki, Mobius all had the same end goal for 1800's Kang, but the show just faked a reason to fight. The "love triangle" was cringe. In season 1 any oddity that was happening built towards a cohesive story or at least consistency - for example Loki time slipping should mean something to the upcoming story, and why did Loki time slip but Sylvie isn't . It was just an excuse to introduce Ouroboros "The Plot Explainer".

I almost want to believe there's something wrong with me because I find S2 irritating like most other recent D+ shows. However I rewatched S1, which I originally was neutral about and had a blast. My only big critique in S1 was the shortcut they took to evolve Avenger's bad guy Loki into redeemed Endgame Loki by looking at some tik tok footage, but otherwise the writing was quite good and cohesive. This season they are taking a lot of shortcuts, especially with characters, and the plot is all over the place. Sylvie is making absolutely no sense in any regard, but I find her contempt of Loki to be most head scratching. Also feels like a lot has been edited out. The tonal shift is also very jarring. This season feels like an imitation of Legends of Tomorrow.

Is the online friends only, or can you see random people in your game?

It's on PC

Into the second world now, and the game continues to be fresh. It's like SMW and Odyssey had a baby - tight controls of classic 2D Mario games along with the variety in gameplay of modern 3D Mario games. If you thought there were only so few ways to jump around a 2D level, think again because the game finds new ways for you to do it.

The SMW sequel comparisons also probably come from the fact the running/jumping physics and animations are much closer to SMW style than NSMB style.