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to try to get back on track, i'm not arguing about the patriot act I responded to this post about the show, because he was posting about the show: Mooseontheloose posted:It still exists now but 2003 there was extreme Muslim/Islamophobia in the United States... with evidence that supports the statement that violence against muslims was at a post-9/11 low in 2003, and indeed lower than the trump era, which i dont think most people actually realize how much worse its gotten. the showrunner moved this from 2013 to 2003 presumably for some reason. 2002-2003 bush was desperate to build an international coalition to support his warcrime against Iraq, and was particularly keen to win over Turkey and Saudi Arabia to be able to use their airspace and military bases in the war. He was absolutely pandering to the muslim world after 2001 and at least until the 2006 midterms, when the quiet part got louder, until it became the normal part in 2010 and then the loud part in 2016. if it was islamophobia they wanted to tap into, better to pick 2001 or 2016. 2003 doesn't make a whole lot of sense, unless they are after the international disdain for america of the time period. Arist posted:I think it's absolutely insane to suggest that there's no broader islamophobic trend in America a mere two years after 9/11 you're right, there was a broader trend for islamophobia a mere 2 years after 9/11, which was downward Shageletic posted:200,000 Muslims beg to differ, buddy. ok, speak for 200,000 people if you want to, i'm only speaking for the primary sources about 2003 that i've shared. Moltke fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Jan 24, 2023 |
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Jan 24, 2023 04:10
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Mister Speaker posted:Also the zombie kiss at the end is something that's really gonna stick with me. Was that in the game? I don't think so. By virtue of it being a video game, mostly the zombies run at you and bite you. That scene in particular is different, if I recall, in that Tess goes out taking on a squad of FEDRA troops, not zombies.
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Jan 24, 2023 04:12
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Tiggum posted:This show is still not doing anything new or interesting. When does it supposedly get good? I would watch an entire season of John Hannah trying to get his crazy fungus theories accepted in academia. I'd watch a season of Indonesian army dude and mushroom expert trying to figure out what's going on in Jakarta, but the future apocalypse thing is just the most rote, generic pap. Next week they've only got an hour to deliver a macguffin to save the town but, oh no, the bridge is down and there are zombies in the creek.
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Jan 24, 2023 04:17
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Moltke posted:if it was islamophobia they wanted to tap into, better to pick 2001 or 2016. 2003 doesn't make a whole lot of sense, unless they are after the international disdain for america of the time period. I think it's absolutely insane to suggest that there's no broader islamophobic trend in America a mere two years after 9/11 but also, they picked 2003 so the show could take place in 2023, which is the year it is now
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Jan 24, 2023 04:17
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Mister Speaker posted:Also the zombie kiss at the end is something that's really gonna stick with me. Was that in the game? According to Neil Druckman, the thing with the kiss is that once you're bitten and the infection has reached a certain point, the fungi zombies don't give a poo poo about you anymore and recognize you as one of them, that's why Tess isn't swarmed by the horde and devoured when they all rush into the building. So the cordyceps strands in that one dude's body recognized the ones that were growing inside Tess's and tried to reach out and make contact with them, which unfortunately involves coming out the mouth in full force.
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Jan 24, 2023 04:35
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happy to move on, but I was explicitly responding to this.Moltke posted:weird thing about this tho, bush era republicans had actually been working against post-9/11 muslim bigotry, and anti-muslim sentiment was actually at a low point by 2003. aside from the massive spike in 2001, you need to go to the 06 midterms, or obama's election in '08 to see when the mask started to slip and islamophobia became mainstream in american politics. george bush is a war criminal (maye he rot in hell) but he regularly denounced islamophobia and this definitely wasn't the zeitgeist in 2003. From which this poster refused to back away from Shageletic posted:uh as a muslim in the States during that era, let me just say you're completely wrong here. Moltke posted:sorry bud, happy to review any data or studies that disagree with the FBI stats and other first person accounts i shared about what life was like in 2003 specifically. 200,000 Muslims beg to differ, buddy. Anyway, the mouth fungi stuff is new, at least new to me. It adds a level of violation that isn't present in the game.
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Jan 24, 2023 04:43
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Iraq invasion was 2003, Islamophobia was in full swing at the time
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Jan 24, 2023 04:48
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Stop posting about 2003 politics please
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Jan 24, 2023 04:49
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Someone start a 2003 politics thread in D&D.
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Jan 24, 2023 04:50
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2003 was also the year that Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was released
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Jan 24, 2023 04:51
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Was I the only person who thought, in the beginning when the driver turned around to talk to the Fungus Doctor about the situation, that he was gonna crash, and that all of this happened because the Fungus Doctor who was supposed to stop it got in a big car crash
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Jan 24, 2023 04:57
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Rageaholic posted:Are they using that tech from The Mandalorian to film this or does Alberta just actually look like that? Give our current disaster of a provincial government a couple more years and it just might. Fun to see Edmonton on a major TV production! Looking forward to the mountain stuff in upcoming episodes!
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Jan 24, 2023 05:02
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I laughed out loud when the hallway collapsed behind them, because it's such a video game thing to do. I can't remember if that was explicitly in the game or not (side note: how do we feel about people continuing to draw comparisons with the game in this thread?), but it's exactly the kind of thing that modern video games love to do, to prevent you from excessive backtracking and to free up memory to load the areas ahead
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Jan 24, 2023 05:05
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404notfound posted:I laughed out loud when the hallway collapsed behind them, because it's such a video game thing to do. I can't remember if that was explicitly in the game or not (side note: how do we feel about people continuing to draw comparisons with the game in this thread?), but it's exactly the kind of thing that modern video games love to do, to prevent you from excessive backtracking and to free up memory to load the areas ahead I think its fine if they're going so close to the videogame and it doesn't really make sense narratively. It was a LOL for me too.
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Jan 24, 2023 05:39
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apatheticman posted:I think its fine if they're going so close to the videogame and it doesn't really make sense narratively. Oh poo poo! They're trapped!
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Jan 24, 2023 05:50
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Ersatz posted:I wonder what moments like those are like for non-gamers. If they don't register as cliches forced by the constraints of a medium, do they come off as clever? i couldn't stop myself from scoffing when this happened. will get my non-gamer GIRLFFRIEND to watch and see what happens.
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Jan 24, 2023 05:56
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Ersatz posted:I wonder what moments like those are like for non-gamers. If they don't register as cliches forced by the constraints of a medium, do they come off as clever? I think it depends many times they pull the same trick.
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Jan 24, 2023 06:08
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D-Pad posted:I know that this show isn't about that, but I have always wanted a show set in an apocalypse that is really focused on the initial outbreak and chaos/fall of society. I was very disappointed in the first season of Fear The Walking Dead because it was billed as that but didn't really show much. Moltke posted:I feel like the intent of the scene was to introduce a character as a fungus expert, spend time showing us that she is an expert thru conversation and microscope scene, and then to also try to stretch her into a medical professional with the autopsy stuff. basically a roundabout way for a scientific validation of the idea that humanity can't be helped and that the only solution is draconian violence against society.  Justin Credible posted:it was speculation of the wheat being a vector, that second prologue confirmed it. Justin Credible posted:Same with the 'no cure, no vaccine' bit. It was speculated at in the first episode prologue, and then confirmed in the second. Justin Credible posted:Which brings me to that expert herself. Portrayed as a quiet, somewhat timid woman, who is a fungus expert. Who is so intrigued and wants to figure out what's going on that she wants to examine where it came from, despite not being a medical doctor. And what she sees from that being enough to understand, or believe, that it's all over. The only hope would have been if there weren't numerous other missing workers. You can see her working down that nightmare set of calculations and coming to such a conclusion.
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Jan 24, 2023 06:13
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The collapsing hallway trope doesn’t actually happen at that point in the game, oddly enough.
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Jan 24, 2023 06:21
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Tiggum posted:You can tell it's a video game adaptation, because the story is about enough to justify the gameplay but not actually good. The premise is extremely overplayed, the details of the setting are clearly designed around gameplay constraints, and the story is very thin. Tiggum posted:Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat, and Street Fighter are all easily better than this show so far. Tiggum posted:This show so far is pretty uninteresting. Those movies were fun to watch. Tiggum posted:This show is still not doing anything new or interesting. When does it supposedly get good? Tiggum posted:I don't understand why anyone cares about this? It makes no difference to anything. It doesn't explain anything relevant to the actual story. Why are you still watching?
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Jan 24, 2023 06:21
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404notfound posted:Why are you still watching? CAN'T STOP WATCHING SHOW I HATE SEND HELP 
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Jan 24, 2023 06:25
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Beep boop how does writing work, if everything isn't 100% purely functional plot development what is its purpose, what is setting and background and characterization and vignettes
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Jan 24, 2023 06:28
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Reinforcing the narrative and past is something a lot of movies and series do continuously. You can't really judge if it's worth it or not until the series or season is completed because each episode isn't a fully contained thing and sometimes leaves plot lines to be picked up later. This has been basic storytelling explained
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Jan 24, 2023 06:33
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Shageletic posted:e: and then there's the Feigl-Ding crack. Let's try to keep politics out of this thread, please. The half-joking point I was making here was that there are a minority of epidemiologists, virologists etc who took (and take) a hard alarmist line on COVID and have been regularly proven wrong, so when a single expert suggests bombing the city as soon as the outbreak occurs you might want to convene a broader committee before scrambling the bombers. The flipside of course is that this thing actually is going to kill 99% of humanity, which is why it's funny to then watch the portrayal of Dystopian Boston now which despite simply being copied from the game gives off undeniable "drat GOVERNMENT trying to CONTROL us, SLIPPERY SLOPE!" vibes which ring very differently after the last few years than they did in 2013. Like, the original sin lies with the game here, but what actual considered point were they trying to make by having the characters traipse through the revolutionary war museum? I think the games had (and the TV show presumably will have) a very strong story, not just a strong-for-a-video-game story, but that story largely revolves around the two protagonists and the relationship between them; it's a character piece, not a world-builder. Neither game had anything particularly original or insightful to say about the collapse of human civilisation or the new societies that spring up in its wake.
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Jan 24, 2023 06:47
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Tiggum posted:I don't understand why anyone cares about this? It makes no difference to anything. It doesn't explain anything relevant to the actual story. I think it's even simpler than the other reasons people have said they liked it: The acting was good and some parts were gross and scary, and I like scenes that have good acting and gross and scary stuff.
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Jan 24, 2023 06:47
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404notfound posted:Why are you still watching? Sab Sabbington posted:I think it's even simpler than the other reasons people have said they liked it:
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Jan 24, 2023 07:05
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Tiggum posted:It's been two episodes. I'm giving it a chance. It's been said that the third episode is where it really picks up. If I don't like that episode, I'll stop. Most zombie movies / tv shows don't have even passable lore around how the infection started, how society has changed because of the infection, or nuances around how characters change because of it. Last of Us does all three comparatively very well, reinforced by great art direction. This means that some people enjoy little details, especially ones that deviate from the game.
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Jan 24, 2023 07:25
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Yeah I'll just broadly reply since I'm not going to go back and forth in some kind of debate about the merits and purposes of various storytelling and worldbuilding stuff. Plus I literally already explained why; to reiterate, the prologue of episode one is set like what? 40 years before the outbreak? Having confirmation of that expert's largely-dismissed speculation almost half a century ago, by another expert on the cusp of everything blowing up is like.. I don't know why that kind of writing needs to be defended? There's nothing wrong with doing that. The flour thing wasn't a revelation and I don't think it's anything but a confirmation, I also don't think the reaction to that bit of mechanics-explanation detail is anything but people like 'okay I was paying attention and picked up on the thing that the show confirmed in the next episode' feel-goods. It's not a Soylent Green reveal. Sure if you were paying attention you'd pick up it was the flour and it's briefly mentioned in the prologue but if this was a 'normal' show (one where the writing assumes the large swath of the audience eats paint chips) the flour thing would have been directly stated, possibly even a scene showing the outbreak in a flour factory or something. Then repeated reiterations. What we got was it shown, then confirmed, and confirmed in a way that was interesting and built an excellent sense of dread. While we also see how some people reacted at the start of it. Like, what do you want here? The criticisms come off as if everything is devoid of emotion and if it's not 100% purely plot-forwarding it should be excised. Everyone's entitled to like or not like something but it's just wild to me these particular things are being leveled at a show that is already shown to be in the top 90% of the quality writing percentile for film and television. Especially in a property that's widely regarded for the worldbuilding and story, and the dynamic and relationship of the two central characters.. it seems to be right in the pocket of 'good poo poo' with regards to that. I never played the games. People aren't just broadly acting like morons, except, like, the dude portrayed as a moron and gets his poo poo wrecked for it. There are some of what I think are valid issues that also isn't exclusive to the show; some of the outdoor greenscreening did.. not look great.
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Jan 24, 2023 08:06
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Boston just looks like a matte painting sometimes.
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Jan 24, 2023 08:12
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Platystemon posted:Boston just looks like a matte painting sometimes. When you think about it, Boston really is just Calgary and Edmonton. Boston doesn't actually exist.
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Jan 24, 2023 08:16
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So far the only thing I really didn't care for was the mushroom kiss. I don't like how this fungus can move like some anime tentacle.
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Jan 24, 2023 08:20
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Loving the show so far. Bella Ramsey has grown on me and I'm now fully on board with her Ellie. I'm loving the gorgeous environments, the creepy fungus, and the clickers are appropriately terrifying.
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Jan 24, 2023 08:36
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This is a mean thread sometimes! But hello lumpentroll
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Jan 24, 2023 08:44
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Tiggum posted:It's been two episodes. I'm giving it a chance. It's been said that the third episode is where it really picks up. If I don't like that episode, I'll stop. I guess we can't all be super brain geniuses like yourself. Thank you for gracing us with your presence and giving the show a chance, I pray that it may live up to your exacting standards eventually.
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Jan 24, 2023 08:45
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That opening in Jakarta was really awesome. That's all I wanted to say. (Edit: But I am curious to know if this disease can infect other mammals as well. Hopefully that will be answered at some point.) Small White Dragon fucked around with this message at 08:59 on Jan 24, 2023 |
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Jan 24, 2023 08:54
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Justin Credible posted:to reiterate, the prologue of episode one is set like what? 40 years before the outbreak? Having confirmation of that expert's largely-dismissed speculation almost half a century ago, by another expert on the cusp of everything blowing up is like.. I don't know why that kind of writing needs to be defended? Justin Credible posted:Sure if you were paying attention you'd pick up it was the flour Justin Credible posted:confirmed in a way that was interesting and built an excellent sense of dread. Justin Credible posted:Like, what do you want here? The criticisms come off as if everything is devoid of emotion and if it's not 100% purely plot-forwarding it should be excised.
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Jan 24, 2023 08:59
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Huh Jakarta has the worlds largest flour mill
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Jan 24, 2023 09:02
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Saving Private Ryan is just like, so devoid of tension. You know they are going to win the war, it already happened, why should we care? I mean it's in the title too, they win the war AND save Private Ryan. If you don't like it and aren't engaged by it, that's fine, no one can fault you for that. Everyone has different taste. But you're like trying to pick apart the framework and saying the writing's bad on.. some kind of level I am having a hard time wrapping my brain around. It's establishing some kind of rules, and as I have said multiple times, supernatural and horror elements need rules or else there isn't tension because literally anything can happen, and you don't know what particular risks for the characters are there at any given point because there aren't any specifics on the threat. You aren't going to be logic'd into having empathy for people in a situation just because you know some of the ultimate outcome. It's a human level connection and there is no amount of instruction or explanation is going to get you over whatever hump you have here, man. We can't teach you how to watch things. If you don't like it it's fine but you're trying to pick it apart like your personal reaction to it is some kind of structural failure of the writing, and it's just not happening, because those issues are in your head, and not objective script issues.
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Jan 24, 2023 09:28
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I played through the game twice. So far I like the beginning of the episodes covering more about the fungus and how it spread. I hope they continue with it. I've also enjoyed the slight changes to the original story. Probably because I've never been a fan of knowing what's about to happen. The more they branch off from the game, the better
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Jan 24, 2023 09:33
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Tiggum posted:I'd like for the show to have something to engage my interest. It's all very rote so far. What am I supposed to be invested in at this point? I don't care about any of the characters, there's nothing novel about the setting, and there's no mystery or even any question of what's going to happen. This sounds like a problem specific to you and not happening to most viewers of the show. I found Joel and Ellie interesting and sympathetic based on these two episodes. If the show hasn't clicked with you, that's fine, but you don't need to post every week that you didn't like it. Tiggum posted:You will never get that show. They always skip that bit because because there's no plausible way for it to happen. They go from one small outbreak straight to "zombies are everywhere and the world is doomed" because those two points will not join up. Steve Yun posted:Huh This seems to be how the show is explaining the fungus taking over the world - a whole harvest of tainted flour that hits the market in a thousand cities and causes a crisis everywhere. I think you could create a show about the descent into a zombie apocalypse - Romero made a good movie called Diary of the Dead with a similar theme. Part of the problem, though, is that depicting that many people dying would make it extremely bleak. Every episode would be like the first half hour of The Last of Us, with more elderly people and children getting killed every time. freebooter posted:The half-joking point I was making here was that there are a minority of epidemiologists, virologists etc who took (and take) a hard alarmist line on COVID and have been regularly proven wrong, so when a single expert suggests bombing the city as soon as the outbreak occurs you might want to convene a broader committee before scrambling the bombers. Twenty-one million people have died. The doomers were right. It's the old paradox that if you react in proportion to the threat, it'll look like you overreacted. If they had listened to Dr. Ibu Ratna and bombed Jakarta, they could've tried to save the world, but by the time she made that suggestion it was already too late.
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Jan 24, 2023 09:44
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