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i'm sorry but the whole canticle-inspired "great burn" thing is really dumb and doesn't really make much sense in the context of b5, which kinda makes me think JMS did lift it as a deliberate nod or homage. earth gets burnt to pre-industrial ludditism by an unknown side of the second human civil war and then just kind of left there. where's the rest of the EA? unknown. why is the entire surviving population of the planet being punished for the actions of the anti-ISA faction--a war kicked off, i should add, by a pre-emptive strike by the pro-ISA human faction. imagine that in today's world. 'oh, sure, we bombed these people so far back that they don't know how to build a combustion engine and only understand their culture in religious myths, but now we're going to take the time to raise them the right way. the way that just so happens to correspond to our ideology.' how many people died? how many people continue to die on earth's post-apocalyptic husk? why aren't the rest of the EA colonies helping earth? it's just bewildering when you start to think about it. it echoes the vorlons (which we even see humanity kind of become) but without an ounce of self-reflection given, y'know, that kind of obedience-or-punishment talk was a bad thing.
Horizon Burning fucked around with this message at 08:32 on Oct 25, 2021 |
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Oct 25, 2021 08:00
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Horizon Burning posted:i'm sorry but the whole canticle-inspired "great burn" thing is really dumb and doesn't really make much sense in the context of b5, which kinda makes me think JMS did lift it as a deliberate nod or homage. earth gets burnt to pre-industrial ludditism by an unknown side of the second human civil war and then just kind of left there. where's the rest of the EA? unknown. why is the entire surviving population of the planet being punished for the actions of the anti-ISA faction--a war kicked off, i should add, by a pre-emptive strike by the pro-ISA human faction. imagine that in today's world. 'oh, sure, we bombed these people so far back that they don't know how to build a combustion engine and only understand their culture in religious myths, but now we're going to take the time to raise them the right way. the way that just so happens to correspond to our ideology.' how many people died? how many people continue to die on earth's post-apocalyptic husk? why aren't the rest of the EA colonies helping earth? it's just bewildering when you start to think about it. it echoes the vorlons (which we even see humanity kind of become) but without an ounce of self-reflection given, y'know, that kind of obedience-or-punishment talk was a bad thing. I always considered that vignette a Star Trek episode JMS wanted to write but never could.
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Oct 25, 2021 17:23
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LinkesAuge posted:Having said this... I'm generally curious how new SciFi will deal with topics like media, propaganda and misinformation. B5 for example just took modern day media (TV) and simply put it pretty much 1:1 into the future (Space CNN...) but nowadays that obviously looks and feels very dated so the question is what would the media/communication in general really look like in a futuristic scifi setting. You certainly can't just do it like in the 90s, it'd feel out of touch with reality and is imo the one thing that dates all SciFi stories more than anything else. I think I have yet to read SciFi that could really imagine how throughly technology would impact the way we communicate and share information on a very basic level and what that does to society, our politics etc. though I'm sure we will see more SciFi takes of this in the future (and I obviously don't claim that such stories don't exist, I simply haven't come across anything that seems to fit to this extent). https://medium.com/the-coach-life/this-is-a-quote-from-the-book-dune-but-its-also-a-current-trend-edc225b30631 
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Oct 25, 2021 17:45
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Horizon Burning posted:i'm sorry but the whole canticle-inspired "great burn" thing is really dumb and doesn't really make much sense in the context of b5, which kinda makes me think JMS did lift it as a deliberate nod or homage. earth gets burnt to pre-industrial ludditism by an unknown side of the second human civil war and then just kind of left there. where's the rest of the EA? unknown. why is the entire surviving population of the planet being punished for the actions of the anti-ISA faction--a war kicked off, i should add, by a pre-emptive strike by the pro-ISA human faction. imagine that in today's world. 'oh, sure, we bombed these people so far back that they don't know how to build a combustion engine and only understand their culture in religious myths, but now we're going to take the time to raise them the right way. the way that just so happens to correspond to our ideology.' how many people died? how many people continue to die on earth's post-apocalyptic husk? why aren't the rest of the EA colonies helping earth? it's just bewildering when you start to think about it. it echoes the vorlons (which we even see humanity kind of become) but without an ounce of self-reflection given, y'know, that kind of obedience-or-punishment talk was a bad thing. I didn't think post-burn Earth was actually luddite, just involuntarily pre-industrial. The brief clip we see doesn't really give much room for exposition. Since the Rangers are trying to do something, I assume that represents the entire IA trying to help. Why aren't they doing more? Nobody can say right now, unless JMS wants to trot out some authorial dictates, but I can easily think of reasons. One obvious one would be that the planet is still in widespread conflict, even if it's only over ruins. If the IA helps one side over another, they're taking sides in that war. There may not be a side worth empowering that way at the moment, in which case the responsible thing to do might easily be to (try to) aid all sides evenly, to make life more humane without tilting a balance of power. That's a slow and tedious process. Of course, that's just an explanation I made up on the spur of the moment.
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Oct 25, 2021 19:49
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Grand Fromage posted:Yeah you're right. I remembered there being a threat but it looks like they just dropped it pre-emptively to avoid it even coming up. In any case, it was because of the tabletop game. It's a little of both. Tri-Tac did threaten to sue, so JMS said they'd never use the name again. I thought he dropped the whole story line because of that, but according to DiTillo in the script books, it was just the name. Larry DiTillo posted:Did the departure of Andrea Thompson from the show derail plans for a renamed Bureau 13"?
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Oct 25, 2021 20:28
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I'm not sure how much I believe in the concept of being "bombed into the stone age" to recreate an earlier period of technological development. Even if a lot is destroyed and a lot of people die and some kind of weird movements crop up to destroy old knowledge, there'd still be loads of evidence of the old ways left, and anybody who does work to retain older knowledge will have advantages over those who don't. While a lot could be lost or destroyed through an enormous disaster or aggressive ignorance or deindustrialization, it's pretty unlikely that people will lose the exact right combination of things to recreate a specific previous time period. I think Nausicaa is a good take on that. They may not have tractors or factories or automatic weapons, but they have muskets and gas masks and some old airplanes that still work. The rest of Torumekia has access to armor-making and machine guns and the nearby Doroks are knee-deep in ancient-technology with golems and clones and hover platform, and there's even people living in the forest with their own mysterious ways. There may be some medieval-esque aspects, but they're not just arbitrarily the same as the past.
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Oct 25, 2021 20:38
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SlothfulCobra posted:I'm not sure how much I believe in the concept of being "bombed into the stone age" to recreate an earlier period of technological development. Even if a lot is destroyed and a lot of people die and some kind of weird movements crop up to destroy old knowledge, there'd still be loads of evidence of the old ways left, and anybody who does work to retain older knowledge will have advantages over those who don't. Admitting that I haven't seen that episode in a while, I could have sworn that there was an undercurrent that the survivors of the war had intentionally forsworn advanced technology as responsible for the apocalypse?
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Oct 25, 2021 20:45
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jng2058 posted:Admitting that I haven't seen that episode in a while, I could have sworn that there was an undercurrent that the survivors of the war had intentionally forsworn advanced technology as responsible for the apocalypse? Yea, this.
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Oct 25, 2021 20:46
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jng2058 posted:Admitting that I haven't seen that episode in a while, I could have sworn that there was an undercurrent that the survivors of the war had intentionally forsworn advanced technology as responsible for the apocalypse? That was definitely the case in Canticle For Leibowitz. If you tried to do anything that looked suspiciously technological (such as reading) you'd be torn apart by the mob
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Oct 25, 2021 20:58
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It's still up for grabs what counts as "technology", since not all developments that have been made are as obvious as others.
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Oct 25, 2021 21:08
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Nausicaa is about the assholes with all the advanced technology who brought the world to the 8th mass extinction sealing themselves and their knowledge away in the crypt of shuwa while leaving the survivors to fend for themselves, cobbling together a feudalistic semi-industrial society from the ruins, possessing both ww1-era weaponry and metallurgy but also space age ceramics and anti-gravity and genetically engineered supersoldiers. Of course they were planning on letting the forest of corruption wipe out the survivors completely before they awakened to their "pure" rejuvenated earth, but Nausciaa had other plans 
Assepoester fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Oct 25, 2021 |
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Oct 25, 2021 21:16
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I think their position is more complicated than that. The world was damaged horribly by the seven days of fire and the entire planet was poisoned (presumably by radiation although there's room for ambiguity), but the world was dying, so first of all, they engineered the forest of corruption to purify the earth's toxins, although in a way that ejects some of the toxins into the air. Humans by Nausicaa's time either adapted or were re-engineered to be more tolerant of the poison (radiation), and the Crypt of Shuwa is the time capsule for all the old life of Earth and the previous forms of humanity for them to be restored to the planet after the world is purified of the literal poison that the forest of corruption is cleaning up, because apparently none of the life currently on the planet can survive without a little of that toxin. But where that all goes more wrong is that the the Crypt continues to muck around in the world of postapocalyptic humans to its own ends, maybe to protect itself, maybe for other plans, it's unclear. I think it's ambiguous whether there's supposed to be any preserved actual humans in the crypt or if the whole thing is an elaborate AI, but what's clear is that it has gone rotten and corrupt with age, and detached from whatever humanity might've been there in the first place, and they were harming the world with their influence. So it makes sense that Nausicaa killed what was left of Shuwa because of what they were doing, but hopefully life will find a way on its own in the distant future, because otherwise all the life on the planet that has grown somehow dependent on the toxic remnants of the ancient war will go extinct after the forest finishes its work, leaving the earth a lifeless rock.
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Oct 25, 2021 23:26
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SlothfulCobra posted:I think their position is more complicated than that. The world was damaged horribly by the seven days of fire and the entire planet was poisoned (presumably by radiation although there's room for ambiguity), but the world was dying, so first of all, they engineered the forest of corruption to purify the earth's toxins, although in a way that ejects some of the toxins into the air. Humans by Nausicaa's time either adapted or were re-engineered to be more tolerant of the poison (radiation), and the Crypt of Shuwa is the time capsule for all the old life of Earth and the previous forms of humanity for them to be restored to the planet after the world is purified of the literal poison that the forest of corruption is cleaning up, because apparently none of the life currently on the planet can survive without a little of that toxin. B5 reboot outline looking weird.
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Oct 26, 2021 01:54
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So I keep seeing in this thread and the blind watch thread that it's better to think of B5 as a stage performance. Why is that? Maybe I'm just too simple to understand the nuance but what makes the difference?
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Nov 1, 2021 14:36
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Jows posted:So I keep seeing in this thread and the blind watch thread that it's better to think of B5 as a stage performance. Why is that? Maybe I'm just too simple to understand the nuance but what makes the difference? A lot of characters talk in soliloquy, and sets are reused in ways that are more theatrical than normal shows. It is very weighty and deliveries of speech aren't...I guess natural is the best way to put it.
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Nov 1, 2021 14:56
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In stage acting things to be a lot larger than life as far as the performance itself goes. Big hand movements lots of voice inflection basically the actors have to emote a lot oh, because the audience is not only physically further away but the actor itself also looks a lot smaller than usual. Also it's somewhat cultural, like stage production is that a certain way because it's always been done that way
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Nov 1, 2021 14:57
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I feel like it is really subtle stuff to do with camera movements and stage directions, lengths of shots, that sort of thing, that is really difficult to put into words but "you know it when you see it". That show Kevin Can gently caress Himself is great to study as an illustration of what makes two-camera sitcom-style staging different from one-camera feature-film/prestige staging. You don't usually see both styles so close together.
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Nov 1, 2021 14:59
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Jows posted:So I keep seeing in this thread and the blind watch thread that it's better to think of B5 as a stage performance. Why is that? Maybe I'm just too simple to understand the nuance but what makes the difference? It’s both a fair point about the show’s sensibilities and an overly-simplistic differentiation between acting/directing styles. A lot of it is budget-driven, like spare set design. Look at the sets in the S1 and S5 “inside someone’s head” stories, and you’ll see set elements from regular B5 sets surrounded by darkness. But actual places in B5 are shot the same way because they had no money, like the command center of a Minbari cruiser or the Centauri throne room. That’s stage sensibility. If you tried to shoot B5 on a handheld camera it wouldn’t fit the style of the show, even though most of their actual sets were 360 degree sets. Some fans think JMS’ tendency toward characters giving long speeches is stagey, too, although I’m less convinced by that. B5 also has a lot more naturalism on-screen in certain ways, like characters having a conversation in a bathroom or the repeated examples of dark humor. The almost complete absence of dark humor in BSG is part of why I don’t buy it as being as naturalistic as claimed, though the shot composition and direction scream that that show is not a stage performance. The B5/BSG comparison is useful for CGI as well (though The Expanse may be a better point of comparison). Again, part of this is tech and budget, and part is by choice. But B5’s CGI usually stands out in a way the other shows’ CGI doesn’t want to. It’s a bit dramatic and codes itself as an effect, not as naturalistic. Londo’s appendage while he’s cheating at cards isn’t a fantastic effect, but it’s a prop and aims to seem realistic in a way that a PPG shot or a Vorlon or Shadow appendage does not. Tl; dr version: B5 feels and looks more like Doctor Who than The Expanse.
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Nov 1, 2021 15:18
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B5 being so early and so ambitious in the history of CGI is what really drives that stylistic choice, or at least that's how I've always seen it. Like so many things in entertainment, your limitations dictate your look-and-feel, and then you lean into that. So you have "cramped interior shot featuring a bunch of characters talking" intercut with "whiz-bang CGI shot of space station and ships flying around each other, and no organic elements to be seen". So discontinuous from each other they might as well be from different shows, or like two adjacent segments from The Mind's Eye (which at the time was kind of the state of the art). It was to the point where having a camera shot that could continuously zoom in on a window in the station and show people moving around inside it was basically a huge visual joke, like "haha we can't even DO this! Check out this stunt shot we spent three weeks on!!"
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Nov 1, 2021 15:27
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https://twitter.com/straczynski/status/1453486219220774916
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Nov 1, 2021 17:06
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Here's the direct link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/57948595 (publicly accessible)
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Nov 1, 2021 18:14
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From the blind watch / younger races thread:Powered Descent posted:s01e05 The Parliament of Dreams: jms, talking about Chrysalis posted:The marriage was a red-herring, a bit of misdirection. The key for any magician is to get the audience to look at your hand so they don't see the elephant being wheeled onto the stage in full view. The line in "Parliament" is, "It's a rebirth ceremony all right, and sometimes doubles for a marriage ceremony." When I wrote that, I knew instantly that everyone would focus in on the second half (misdirection) and miss the first half. (Note that Delenn's "And so it begins" is echoed by Kosh in the last episode.) I put out something that I figured everybody would latch onto, ignoring the other meaning which is stated twice. The script: REBIRTH REBIRTH marriage? Everyone who watches it: "Are Sinclair and Delenn married now?" I just find it loving hilarious and I love that Powered Descent is hitting the exact same mark everyone did back in the day. It's wonderful. 
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Nov 6, 2021 07:07
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Vavrek posted:From the blind watch / younger races thread: Yeah. This is the only way us Old Ones can come close to the excitement of a first watch. Which is why we so vigorously protect the younger races from being spoiled. It’s awesome, isn’t it? 
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Nov 6, 2021 13:18
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Vavrek posted:From the blind watch / younger races thread: I just love how often JMS goes to that misdirect trick and fools everyone. Despite doing it frequently and showing us the trick. Most of the pleasure I take in watching Legend of the Rangers is trying to spot the misdirects. The obvious one is that Turk the Drazi, despite thinking himself strong and stupid and speaking in Drazi-style broken English, is as smart as you’d expect a trained Ranger to be, and probably smarter. I’m perpetually annoyed that the misdirects in the failed sequel series will probably remain obscured forever. Experienced watchers, please recall that Delenn does a second rebirth ritual later in the show whose importance is pretty drat obvious as being about rebirth. Note who skips out on the ritual. Note too how that episode actually advances the Delenn romance subplot that eventually leads to her marriage.
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Nov 6, 2021 15:02
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It is pretty clear that when Sinclair and Delenn started getting serious there was going to be a bit of dramatic irony about them already being technically married. Perhaps a small comedy-of-errors that would have involved Minbari politics that would have jump-started the relationship. Replacing Sinclair the character instead of replacing the actor for the character means that beat got lost.
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Nov 6, 2021 18:06
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Well "Confessions and Lamentations" (the episode where the Markab are all killed off by a virus) was more interesting on this rewatch.
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Nov 6, 2021 23:07
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I was about to get all mad about spoilers before i realized this isn't the blind watch thread, lol
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Nov 6, 2021 23:10
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Sorry, do we need to spoiler stuff here? Also, TV Tropes suggests there's a hint the virus was artificial. Anybody know where that was?
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Nov 6, 2021 23:11
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Naw go for broke here.
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Nov 6, 2021 23:17
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Small White Dragon posted:Also, TV Tropes suggests there's a hint the virus was artificial. Anybody know where that was? Lurker's guide raises the possibility but doesn't point to any specific part of the episode: quote:The timing of the plague's reappearance, with all the other events going on, is suspicious. Of course, it might be a simple coincidence, as Franklin suspects, just a dormant disease whose time has come. But another interpretation is that the outbreak on the Markab island centuries earlier was an early biological warfare test on an isolated population, and the events in this episode were the real attack. If that's true, who is responsible, and do they have any connection with the approaching Great War?
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Nov 6, 2021 23:19
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ultrafilter posted:Lurker's guide raises the possibility but doesn't point to any specific part of the episode: Note that this is speculation by the authors of the page, not JMS
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Nov 7, 2021 00:45
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Small White Dragon posted:Well "Confessions and Lamentations" (the episode where the Markab are all killed off by a virus) was more interesting on this rewatch. I still find it hilarious that German name for the episode was: ”Das Ende Der Markab” To the point and direct.
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Nov 7, 2021 01:36
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Exterminating the Markab doesn't seem like the Shadows' style, although maybe if there was a client race of the Shadows with a grudge against the Markab, that could maybe work. It could be the Vorlons' style if it turned out that the Markab were somehow being groomed by the Shadows. Maybe the Shadows figure out the whole "pose as a religious figure" trick. The Vorlons also screw around more with biology than the Shadows. But really, attributing it to either of the elder races takes away from the whole thing where it was the Markab's fault. They knew about the disease from their history books, they had a bunch of warning signs that the disease was spreading that they deliberately ignored, apparently they genocided the ethnicity that had a resistance to the disease long ago.
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Nov 7, 2021 03:13
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SlothfulCobra posted:Exterminating the Markab doesn't seem like the Shadows' style, although maybe if there was a client race of the Shadows with a grudge against the Markab, that could maybe work. A Call to Arms and Crusade are about the Drahk deploying a Shadow-designed virus that will exterminate all life on Earth. So there's some ground to be a little suspicious, given that the Markab appear to have some knowledge of the Shadow ships from the last war. But the plague in question is returning after a prior appearance, meaning that if the Shadows deployed it the first time, it failed for some reason. That seems unlikely. Also, Franklin manages to figure out how it works and develop a cure of sorts (with help); a Shadow-engineered virus wouldn't be so easy to beat. I think treating it as natural best fits the themes of the episode.
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Nov 7, 2021 03:22
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What would make it easier to figure would be the number and quality of Markab telepaths. If the Markab...who we see as they die are extremely religious and thus almost certainly on the Vorlon side of the street...have a lot of teeps then it might be worth it to take them out especially if there's little chance of swaying them to your way of thinking. But since we never see a Markab telepath, or even hear of one, there's really now way to back that line of thinking up. 
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Nov 7, 2021 03:28
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I took the theme of the episode being about discrimination and self-destructive bullshit. If it were a bioweapon attack it doesn't make sense.
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Nov 7, 2021 03:29
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I feel like a virus that can be dealt with by openly addressing it at the cost of massive social upheaval would be extremely the Shadow's MO. The Markab had a clear choice. They could have an honest discussion with sunshine as the best disinfectant and save themselves, or they could fall back on outmoded shibboleths of Order that may have served them at one point but now directly lead to their end. It's a Twilight Zone episode brought to you by the Shadows. We, as the viewer and as B5, are just on the periphery of it. Self-destruction and bigotry are what the Vorlons have on offer. JMS gets cowardly on this but if you scratch hard enough at the signature on the copy of LoTRs that JMS cribbed from for B5, right underneath JRR is a big old: WITH MICHAEL MOORCOCK OnlyBans fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Nov 7, 2021 |
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Nov 7, 2021 06:27
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Narsham posted:A Call to Arms and Crusade are about the Drahk deploying a Shadow-designed virus that will exterminate all life on Earth. It didn't genocide the Markab the first time because it appeared on an island and they were able to quarantine it completely before it got off. It didn't hurt that nobody on the mainland liked the people on the island either.
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Nov 7, 2021 11:34
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OnlyBans posted:I feel like a virus that can be dealt with by openly addressing it at the cost of massive social upheaval would be extremely the Shadow's MO. you have such an irritating way of putting things. do you just mean law v chaos? or the eternal champion? tanelorn? jerry cornelius? hawkmoon and his crazy beast mask guys? mother london? moorcocks savage 'epic pooh' takedown of JRRT? elric and his explicit penis metaphor sailing his traitor young kingdom ships through the labyinth around imrryrr, city of the dreaming spires? moorcock wrote a lot.
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Nov 7, 2021 11:46
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There was a weirdo on JMS' twitter not too long ago insisting Moorcock invented the order vs chaos thing from Babylonian mythology.
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Nov 7, 2021 18:26
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