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Scrubs is actually great, watch the first seven seasons.
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Apr 21, 2019 20:38
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Wesley was a god awful character, though. Yeah Wil Wheaton doesn't deserve poo poo for playing a lovely character but nobody liked Wesley Crusher. I liked Wesley when I was a kid, and after rewatching the series as an adult, I thought he was not too bad. The main reason he gets a lot of hate is that during the first (or maybe second?) season, they wanted to do an episode focusing on him, and had three scripts in the works, with plans to develop one of them into a full episode. Then a writer's strike happened, and they just said "gently caress it" and ran all three unfinished scripts. The strike is also why they used the aforementioned Phase II scripts, afaik. After season 2, everything got better, including Wesley.
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Jul 3, 2019 22:17
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In real life, the idea that only former military can vote would obviously result in fascism, hence Charlesthehammer's post above referring to it as a military dictatorship. But in the fictional world of ST as depicted, this miraculously hasn't happened. The society is very similar to 20th century USA, but with way more equality of race and sex, more general prosperity, plenty of personal freedom, etc. It's practically utopian, apart from the war with the bugs. As a long-time Heinlein fan, I've generally concluded that ST isn't pro-fascist, but its ideas about society are definitely stupid anyway. The whole society is based on one incredibly flawed assumption that Heinlein seems to have believed was true - that people who enlist in the military must not be selfish. At first glance, this might seem to make sense - dying is negative infinity value for oneself, so anyone who is willing to risk it to help defend their society must value helping others more than they value themselves. But of course, in real life we know that's not true. People enlist for all kinds of reasons - to avoid homelessness, to get away from their family, for a sense of machismo, because it's the only way they'll be able to afford a post-secondary education, etc. Not since WWII has there really been a large number of people enlisting just because they felt it was their civic duty. (Speaking from an American perspective, here; Heinlein wasn't known for his multiculturalism.) And from there the incongruity between the ST society's principles and its actuality arises. If Heinlein had realized that those principles would, in real life, lead to fascism, he probably would have been against them.
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Sep 4, 2019 02:47
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Scaramouche posted:I thought the implication was Guinan was another different higher dimensional being No, Guinan was a refugee from a long-lived race that got mostly annihilated by the Borg. Her main deal is being wise because of being like a thousand years old or something. My memory is kinda fuzzy but I definitely remember the Borg thing since it comes up in the episode where Q and the Borg are introduced.
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Sep 6, 2019 19:37
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I've never watched Friends; what's wrong with it?
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Sep 25, 2019 17:59
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Pick posted:I liked the rabies episode. Oof. Legit the saddest piece of television of all time. "My Lunch", season 5 episode 20. It's the reason I cry every time I hear "How to Save a Life" by The Fray.
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Oct 4, 2019 18:20
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Krispy Wafer posted:You know, dressing in a smock with just enough flour on the front Hey 
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Oct 31, 2019 20:17
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The half-plus-seven rule is like a lot of rules - it's a bit arbitrary, obviously, but it exists so that you'll think about it before you break it. Like speed limits. Someone going 70mph in a 65 zone isn't really being dangerous, and in the same way a 50-year-old dating a 30-year-old isn't really being creepy. But someone doing 100 in a 65, or a 50-year-old dating a 19-year-old, is a whole different loving story.
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Jan 25, 2020 23:30
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oldpainless posted:B99 shows us that cops are like you and me, some good and some bad. People just trying to get through the day. You're right. Some cops are good:
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Feb 22, 2020 09:43
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I saw the Hobbit movies long after history had judged them as atrocious, and I was super surprised at how good the first one was. Certainly it had some dumb poo poo in it (Radagast, Goblin Town), but it honestly was way better than I had been led to believe. They established some interesting themes (home, revenge, and straight from the book, the clash between Bilbo's Baggins and Took sensibilities), and grew the relationship between Bilbo and Thorin, and I honestly was looking forward to seeing where it went from there. Then I watched the other two. Oof.
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May 14, 2020 19:43
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Moo the cow posted:I looked at the books for the trilogy. Then I looked at the booklet for the Hobbit and decided that there was no way that it would stretch to more than one film Well, here's the deal. The Hobbit absolutely could have worked as a 2-film thing. The Hobbit was written long before the Lord of the Rings, and although it uses some elements from Tolkein's larger mythology that he was already developing back then, he didn't really consider it "part" of that world until much later when he sat down to write a sequel (that became a trilogy). But Tolkein was a master of retconning, and so the Hobbit quickly became swept up in this great mythology. The Hobbit itself remains a Bilbo-perspective telling of the story, but ancillary information tying his quest in to the larger narrative and world was included in a few places. In the second, I think, chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, when Gandalf tells Frodo about the ring, we get some of that information. A bunch more was included in the appendices at the end of Return of the King. And a wider-perspective telling of the quest for the Lonely Mountain in a wider context, including the stuff with Gandalf and the Necromancer/Sauron (which in the original book is just a convenient excuse for Gandalf to leave Bilbo and the dwarves, that Tolkein didn't even have an explanation for in his head when he wrote the Hobbit), was something that Tolkein attempted to write at least a couple times in his life. One of those attempts was to be a full rewrite of the Hobbit, but ultimately he left it mostly unchanged (except for the bit about Gollum; that's why at the beginning of LotR Gandalf mentions Bilbo having lied about that encounter originally - the "lie" is the original, pre-edit edition of the riddle game, which modern readers don't even see anymore). Another such attempt was published posthumously as "The Quest for Erebor", though I haven't read that (I think it's from Gandalf's perspective). So the version of the Hobbit story as Tolkein envisioned it in a post-published-LotR world was very different from what is now published as The Hobbit. And in the post-LotR-films world, in which Middle Earth is already established with a certain tone and aesthetic, it made a lot of sense to synthesize the ancillary material together with the original Hobbit to produce a set of movies that wasn't just the Hobbit book. You'd be altering the tone of The Hobbit, of course. The original goes from "tra-la-la-lally" silly at the beginning to a semi-serious political intrigue plot at the end; the film version would have to be more semi-serious from the beginning (but with some room for light-hearted stuff; it doesn't have to be as grim as the LotR movies). And in a film, where the perspective is less focused on a single character and more omniscient, it would make more sense to weave in what's going on with the Necromancer/Gandalf/White Council, as well as more of the backstory of the Erebor dwarves and the history and politics of the Dale region. Really make the film version of The Hobbit fit in with the film versions of LotR, in the same way that Tolkein attempted to make the Hobbit fit in the post-LotR world. And that would probably take two long movies or three short ones. That's the endeavor that Peter Jackson and Phillipa Boyens and whatever other writers set out on, and I think the first film shows that there was potential there. Obviously things went off the rails (largely due to the film industry being loving stupid, especially the abrupt eleventh-hour change from 2 to 3 films), but it wasn't a bad idea on paper. Of course, in the book world, Tolkein ultimately didn't end up doing that much to the original Hobbit, because the original Hobbit existed already. It was done, didn't need remaking. But you couldn't make THAT version of a Hobbit movie with Ian McKellan's Gandalf and Hugo Weaving's Elrond in a post-LotR-films environment. It just wouldn't make sense, tonally. If that's what they wanted to do, they shoulda done The Hobbit first. I honestly think the attempt at the more serious expanded Hobbit was a much more reasonable idea. So my point is, the "more than one film" thing comes from much more than the relatively thin novel of The Hobbit, but without the background knowledge that comes from reading the appendices at the end of RotK or whatever, that's and understandable mistake to make. But don't judge the Hobbit movies for being a lame stretching-out of the Hobbit material; they weren't intended to be that, and the weird stretchy-outy-ness of them is due to a completely different stretching-out (one film script being stretched out into two with no time for rewrites). Tl;dr: They sucked for completely OTHER reasons.
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May 15, 2020 06:27
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Glagha posted:Granted it's been a long time since I've read LotR but the only completely superfluous story beat that advances nothing that I remember is like, Tom Bombadil but again it's been a while. And, ironically, that's the one part of the books that doesn't really fit with the big elaborate Silmarillion backstory. There's very little explanation for who Tom Bombadil is; it's the exact opposite of what Der Kyhe is complaining about. In fact, I definitely feel like most of the Lord of the Rings is kinda like that; you get mentions of names without any real explanation of who they are or what their significance is. Like, Frodo calls out "O Elbereth Gilthoniel!" and you have no fuckin idea who that is but it's clear from context she's a mythological figure that people call upon in times of need. It's the Middle Earth equivalent of saying "Oh Lord Jesus!" And that's all you need to know. You have to read the Silmarillion (or a wiki, in my case, since I still haven't gotten around to reading the Silmarillion) to get that she's a Vala, which are basically sub-gods under the boss god Eru, and that she created the stars, and elves revere her, etc. Tolkein doesn't go out of his way to explain this poo poo to you, he moves the gently caress on with the scene. Now, if you were to criticize Tolkein for unrolling the events of the plot too slowly, there I think you might have a valid criticism - I bounced off The Two Towers the first time I tried reading it at age 14 or 15, because the opening bits with Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas took way longer than they should. But those are still plot-relevant, important scenes! I'm just sayin', the slowness definitely doesn't come from Tolkein going into "a side-story or history lesson that goes nowhere and contributes nothing to the actual story." The closest thing I could think of is the poetry/songs, but those last like, a page or two, not the "100 pages" Der Kyhe mentioned. And there's the appendices, obviously, but those aren't meant to be narratives and they're definitely optional reading. Sassassin's being rude as hell about it, but they're right. DontMockMySmock has a new favorite as of 19:05 on May 15, 2020 |
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May 15, 2020 18:53
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pentyne posted:The golden age of SF wasn't golden for everyone Noooo, not Clarke  Please tell me Vonnegut is still cool.
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Jun 11, 2020 16:29
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Barry Foster posted:Vonnegut scholar chiming in! Phew! I do know that, at least at some points in his life, he had socialist tendencies. And I obviously know from his books that he was anti-war, anti-fascist, etc. I'm just worried that someone is gonna post a quote of him saying like "but also, i hate the gays" or whatever. Also, Slaughterhouse-Five is a strong contender for my favorite book of all time, and IMO no one who reads that can possibly think that Vonnegut didn't have PTSD or at least have intimate knowledge of it. So whether he's pediatrician or psychiatrist, I believe the son's diagnosis.
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Jun 11, 2020 18:31
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Baby Driver is now twice as difficult to watch as it was in 2017. Baby Driver is maybe the best action movie to come out in the last twenty years but BOY is it hard to watch Kevin Spacey "act" as a megalomaniac in a position of power over a teenage boy. And now the lead actor, too. 
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Jun 20, 2020 05:50
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Scaramouche posted:You night want to watch a movie called Fury Road... Hmm, you make a persuasive argument actually.
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Jun 20, 2020 20:29
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Also Doctor Who sucks. I've watched most of them. It sucked decades ago, it sucked ten years ago when all my friends were into it, it sucks now. Modern doctor who has like 1/8 good episodes, 3/8 bland episodes, and 1/2 loving awful episodes. Some of the good episodes really make me want to like the show, but I gave up on it around season 4 or 5 because of the many, many abysmally bad episodes.
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Jun 21, 2020 19:31
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rydiafan posted:It does have an episode where a guy face-fucks a paving stone, so there's that. TheKennedys posted:gently caress you for invoking the cursed episode
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Jun 21, 2020 19:43
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somepartsareme posted:i can unbookmark the ffxiv thread but i can't escape you complaining about emet-selch  I approve of this extremely niche posting grudge.have you heard of, like, call of duty? have you ever met a WH40k fan who likes space marines? you know there are legions of people who actually joined the loving united states marine corps and became war criminals themselves because they were inspired by Full Metal Jacket??? jus' sayin', very few people are gonna see that post and think "ah yes, just like fans of final fantasy fourteen".
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Aug 23, 2020 12:43
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WeedlordGoku69 posted:god drat i read the rest of the comment thread about that and now i want to break this fucker's jaw. lmao he gets so hung up on the fact that the person criticizing him named their reddit account "asspants" 
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Sep 12, 2020 12:36
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I'll always have "initiate laser dodgin'" and "commence explosion dodgin'" pop into my head when playing videogames.
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Nov 18, 2020 04:32
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rydiafan posted:Speaking of cop worship: https://youtu.be/tOlnmiayzGY Holy poo poo there's a cop called "Sundown," what the gently caress.
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Dec 12, 2020 02:21
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Personally I thought the fridge scene was funny and one of the better moments in an otherwise mediocre film. It did occur to me at the time that the idea of surviving that landing uninjured was incredibly unrealistic, but so is everything else in every action movie ever. You don't go to an Indiana Jones or a Batman or a Star War or whatever looking for realism. Realism doesn't matter. That scene only gets criticism because it's in a bad movie, and criticizing it instead of the things that actually make it bad (the dialogue probably? idk it's been a long time since I've seen it) is stupid. Even if you don't like that scene, it is not the reason why you didn't like the movie as a whole. Take, for example, the scene in The Dark Knight, an action movie that is generally considered good, where Batman is on a motorcycle chasing the Joker in a semi truck. Batman shoots some sort of cable out from his motorcycle at the truck's grill, then weaves through some light poles, which somehow this causes the truck to flip forward over its nose. How is some sort of grappling hook shot out of a motorcycle supposed to grip a metal grill hard enough to not break while lifting the weight of a semi truck? How does the grill itself not break instead of lifting the semi truck? How is such a thin cable strong enough? How does the cable even catch on the light poles? How does the truck have enough energy to be lifted that high? No one cares because the movie as a whole is good so the lack of realism doesn't matter.
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Jul 1, 2021 21:39
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Megillah Gorilla posted:The inflatable raft is, by movie logic, soft and floaty. Because it's inflatable, like a balloon. 
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Jul 2, 2021 17:53
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ishikabibble posted:For me that was Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles. I used to watch that before middle school. I don't remember much about that show except the theme song was cool as heck. Looking at it, the animation holds up surprisingly well, in my opinion, for late-90s CGI. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMJ7S4iwXSc
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Jul 4, 2021 19:42
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the_steve posted:Isn't that comic basically just "Male characters can't be sex fantasies because I'm not attracted to this particular type, only female characters can ever be objectified by creepers" ? No, it's saying that classic, mainstream superhero comics are dripping with "male gaze." They are made by men, for men. Female characters are big-titted sex fantasies with boob windows who constantly pose with their rear end in view, and male characters are just big and muscular. Both of these things are meant to appeal to heterosexual men - the male superheroes are who the men want to be, and the female superheroes are who they want to be with. The problem isn't that the bodies are unrealistic - since, after all, men and women are both portrayed unrealistically - the problem is that the bodies are unrealistic in different ways, both to serve heterosexual men. You never see male superheroes posed with their butts facing the camera, do you? Their big dicks are rarely visibly outlined by their superhero underwear. Because male superheroes are not sexualized to nearly the same degree as female superheroes. The real solution to this problem is to include lots of different characters with a variety of appearances, rather than just two cookie cutters labeled "big strong man" and "sexy lady." But the comic is presenting a humorous "solution" where male superheroes are sexualized as much as the female ones are, to level the playing field. This is called a "joke" and it is meant to be humorous how the male character is made uncomfortable the same way women are made uncomfortable by normal comics. It is not meant to be a statement about what specific things heterosexual women in general find attractive. So yeah, I'm sure there are a few heterosexual women out there who are attracted to a large muscular standoffish man with a strong commitment to family-friendly celibacy, punching bad guys, and disappearing into an alter-ego as soon as the action is over. I'm talking about overall trends, not talking about 100% of all comics and 100% of all comic book fans. And also, the problem isn't any one particular character - in the absence of the wider cultural context, there's nothing wrong with an individual female character who's sexy. But again, we're talking overall trends. You'd be an idiot to not realize that there's a large, systematic problem in the way women are depicted in comic books (and fantasy art in general). To put it another way, there's a reason you don't see nearly as many women as men hanging around comic book shops talking about Batman, and it's not 'cause women don't like fantasy stories or visual storytelling - it's because superhero comics constantly send out the message "this genre is for men," and women see that message and stay away. It is worth saying that comics, and fantasy art in general, have gotten a lot better about this over the last couple decades, and the growing trend of big-budget Hollywood superhero movies (starring real humans with exceptional, but not fantastical, bodies) has helped some, too. But there's still a long way to go. Plethora posted:That comic is stupid because it's just describing Jojo, which is universally known to be cool and good. The girl character is an idiot. I am confused, you say that her idea of sexy male superheroes is like Jojo, and therefore cool and good. And then you call her an idiot? Surely it's the male character, who rejects the sexy male (Jojo-esque?) superhero, who is an idiot??? Or maybe I don't understand what Jojo is like (I only know it from memes) and you mean that mainstream superheroes are like jojo, and so her idea to change them is bad? Help me out here.
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Jul 29, 2021 11:02
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CharlestheHammer posted:Wait you mean a big bad threat happened and the heroes defeated it. Honestly, yeah. Everything about the series would lead you to believe that the "heroes" (aka, a bunch of idiots and assholes) were hosed. The show explicitly stated many times leading up to the last season that if they didn't all work together against the white walkers they would be hosed, and then they kept squabbling and not working together. And then ??????? everything turns out fine for some reason. GRRM/the showrunners were cowards for not writing a "white walkers win" ending.
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Oct 24, 2021 12:11
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Elissimpark posted:* a mariachi band plays the GoT theme in the burnt out ruins of Kings Landing * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt32b19j430&t=4047s timestamp 1:07:27
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Oct 24, 2021 22:43
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Samovar posted:Only potentially problematic book from the series was Interesting Times. Discworld was otherwise sublime. A few of the books, mostly the Rincewind books, have some somewhat problematic depictions of women. They're a lot better than the sword-and-sorcery books they're parodying (a low bar for sure), but it does get a bit awkward when character after character is described as big-breasted and blonde and you can really feel Pratchett's horniness coming through. Fortunately, that almost entirely goes away after the first five books or so, with the exception of the character Angua. But yeah, on the other hand, most of Discworld is quite excellent with regard to politics. A lot of the books are quite explicitly feminist without being horny at all.
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Dec 6, 2021 16:55
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Pookah posted:Disclaimer: I haven't read the very early ones in years, but I remember the stereotypical female warrior Rincewind meets (Herrena the henna-haired harridan) is specifically described as not being, you know, dressed in a chain mail bikini, like he says she wears leather, but only because its practical, it's not That Kind of leather. There is the Anne Maccaffrey stuff later on, yeah... Well, it's been a while since I've read the early ones, too, so I may be exaggerating here. But despite not having a bikini, I remember Herrena still being described in a very men-writing-women way. And there's the dragon-rider princess in Colour of Magic, who IIRC does actually wear a bikini. And then there's Conina in Sourcery, and probably one or two others that I'm forgetting. I just remember there being a lot of discussion of breasts in those early books, to the point where every female character who isn't an old woman (Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg) or a child (Esk, Ysabell) has their bust size discussed at length. edit: to be perfectly clear, I'm not tryna cancel Pratchett here, I fuckin love his books and he got a lot better at writing women a little later in his career.
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Dec 7, 2021 14:09
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Jedit posted:The early Discworld novels were parodies. The dragonrider woman wore three napkins and string because that's how the characters she was based on were dressed (and the men did too). And Conina wears the chainmail bikini for the same reason Cohen goes round in a posing pouch - it's what's expected for barbarians. So it's not the Disc books that have aged badly; it's the source material. Is it really "parody" if you just do the thing though?
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Dec 7, 2021 14:24
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Holy poo poo that image makes me angry
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Feb 10, 2022 09:13
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Edge & Christian posted:
You're never going to convince me that when the writer wrote "not just blood. every fluid." and then bolded the phrase "loving me" they weren't specifically thinking about cum.
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Mar 27, 2022 05:16
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Kchama posted:That's actually not the moral of Ender's Game. The moral of Ender's Game is that Good People Are Good, Bad People Are Bad. Or at least, that was what OSC was trying to teach. That was the whole point of the genocide: Because Ender is GOOD, that means he could do a genocide while being innocent, and that his genocide would turn out to be for the best. Or Ender intentionally murdering other children doesn't make him Bad. When you're good, no matter what you do, even if you intend to do evil, it'll come out good. And in reverse, if you're bad, no matter what kind of good you do, it'll turn out bad. These are intrinsic, and you can't change whether you are Good or Bad. This reading doesn't make any sense to me. The book frames Ender's accidental killings as bad things. Throughout the book he has the philosophy that it is better to end conflict as quickly as possible with decisive, pre-emptive attack, because he thinks of every conflict as a potentially existential threat. The moral of the book is that this is a bad way to approach conflict, because it leads to unnecessary destruction and tragedy. Ender is not a good person, at first anyway. The book makes this pretty explicit with the parallels to his siblings Peter and Valentine; you are clearly meant to think of Peter as evil and Valentine as good, and see both of those aspects within Ender. Ender learns, by the end, that it's better to learn from and seek to cooperate with those who may initially be in conflict with you - to reject Peter's destructive tendencies and embrace Valentine's compassion. He is not "intrinsically good," he has to learn how to be good. And you say "when you're good, no matter what you do, even if you intend to do evil, it'll come out good" but Ender commits (accidentally-ish) an entirely unnecessary genocide of an otherwise peaceful species - I fail to see where the book frames that as "coming out good." Ditto the unnecessary death of his two school bullies. Anyway, that's why it's so jarring to learn that he's a religious nut homophobe. Compassion for one's enemies apparently doesn't apply if they're gay.
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Apr 22, 2022 19:39
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Kchama posted:Let me say again: It's not my reading of the story, but the one OSC says is intended. Ah I see, that makes more sense. Kchama posted:I would presume the 'coming out Good' is that the genocide wasn't actually COMPLETE and Ender was able to find the egg and deliver it to a new colony and end the hatred between the bugs and humanity by taking the hatred onto himself. I guess this sorta makes sense from a hyper-christian "the lord works in mysterious ways" sense. A more sensible person, in my opinion, would say that the genocide was bad and the saving the egg was good, and the fact that the bad partially caused the good doesn't redeem it, because it was totally possible that good things, even better things, could still happen without a prerequisite genocide. But I guess if you believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds because of an omnibenevolent god, then you have to believe that all negative things are ultimately cause of greater good, and thus have to frame it that way. It's super cognitive-dissonance-y, but that's rather the whole point of this discussion, I suppose - the cognitive dissonance between OSC's morals and the apparent morals of a book he wrote. Kchama posted:I think the biggest stumbling of the book as intended is the constant refrain of the reason why Ender is so able to destroy his foes and is the greatest general ever is because he loves them and has compassion/empathy for them which is uhh... never true. The adults talk about his compassion being important not because he has compassion for his enemies, but because he has to be a capable leader. His compassionate, Valentine-like side is what wins him the loyalty of Alai, Petra, et al. His ultimately finding compassion for the bugs is, to the adults, an unintended side effect, and that's why they hide the true nature of his "training." But yeah, we can both agree that if OSC meant it to be a story about unambiguously good and evil people then he hosed up.
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Apr 22, 2022 21:27
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Rockman Reserve posted:Genuinely no, not that I remember at all. I haven't read any of these books, so I went looking to see what y'all were talking about. According to the dresden files fandom wiki, the passages in question are in Storm Front (there's a title that belongs itt) chapter 8 (the skull insists upon a Although tbh the first part, him insisting on Dresden making him a Also, unrelated to the rape thing: the wiki describes Bob as "a spirit of intellect bound to a human skull. He acts as Harry Dresden's assistant and living encyclopedia of magic." Storm Front came out just four months after the release of Planescape: Torment, a videogame that features a misogynist talking skull who assists the main character and describes himself as a living encyclopedia. I assume four months is way too short a time, given publication turnaround times, for this to not be a coincidence, and the novel was apparently fully written a few years earlier as part of a university course. Helluva suspicious coincidence though.
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Apr 27, 2022 08:17
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If you define "fanfiction" as any writings about a character written by someone other than the original creator of that character, then the entire bible is fanfiction. The Torah is fanfiction about Yahweh and his chosen people compiled long after the stories were first told, the other Hebrew scriptures were full of fanfiction OCs based on that (the various prophets), then in the New Testament, Paul added the most popular OC of all time, Jesus, and a bunch of people riffed on that for a while, with Revelation being one of the last ones written. Then the Council of Nicea compiled it all together and decided what was or wasn't "canonical" according to them, but I don't think that counts 'cause they were just basically a fan club. So Revelation is sort of a fanfiction of the Gospels which are fanfiction of Paul's teachings which are fanfiction of the Hebrew scriptures which are fanfiction of the Torah which is fanfiction of the original oral tradition of Yahweh mythology. And we can get one level deeper if we consider the Book of Mormon.
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Jun 13, 2022 03:47
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Asterite34 posted:Heinlein seems like one of those scifi writers who was big into looking at hypothetical scenarios in the vein of "what if bad thing was good, actually?" Like Stranger is all about "what circumstances would justify a cannibal sex cult" and Starship Troopers is "what would make militant fascism look like a good idea" Even on the sex stuff, Heinlein is a mixed bag. Yeah, there's some real weird incest and pedo stuff in there, but that's mostly in his later works. For most of his career, he was just incredibly progressive about sex stuff - he was accepting of LGBTQIA+ people, polyamory, premarital sex, etc. He was writing in a time where "an adult cis man and an adult cis woman who are virgins and not closely related to one another and have similar skin tone get married and never have sex with anyone else forever (no divorce allowed)" was widely considered the only acceptable way to have sex, and his characters violated just about every aspect of that. For example, in the same book where the main character fucks his own mom and female clones, Time Enough for Love, there's also a rather charming scene at the beginning where, IIRC, two doctors who have never met but are performing surgery together in full-body hazard suits that obscure their personal appearance, including their gender, and they flirt and decide to hook up before ever finding out each other's genders. That particular pairing turns out to be hetero, but it's clear that in the future, everyone's bisexual and they would've still hooked up even if they were the same gender (and the main character, a two-thousand-year-old man born in the 1900s, is considered very old-fashioned for being hetero). I could be getting some details wrong, I haven't read that book in a long-rear end time. It's also the case that all of his later work, starting around Time Enough for Love, is incredibly self-indulgent and more full of weird sex poo poo. Don't read it. His early-to-mid-career stuff, including his most influential book Stranger in a Strange Land, is often quite good IMO. Despite having a "sex cult" in it, Stranger is relatively unproblematic - no incest, no underage poo poo. So I guess my point is, Heinlein had some hosed up hangups that today we would associate with right-wing libertarianism (pedo poo poo, incest, militarism, rabid anti-communism/anti-government intervention) but he was also anti-theocracy, sexually progressive, pro-worker's rights* including sex worker's rights, etc. And, yeah, it's hard to really pin down his political ideology because it changed over his career and he seemed to hold contradictory ideas that he would explore in different books. In conclusion, Heinlein is a land of contrasts. *i know this is theoretically contrary to the aforementioned anti-communism; the Cold War was a wild time for political ideology
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Jun 21, 2022 22:49
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Everything I know about Terry Pratchett tells me that he was an absolute saint. He had hatred only for bigots and anger only for needless suffering. He was explicitly accepting of trans people, despite being British. Everyone who has ever met him describes him as kind and sweet (and righteously angry at the injustices of the world). If we ever find out that he was a sex pest of any kind, it will also be the day we find out that the Pope has renounced Catholicism and bears have started using flush toilets. That he died at age 66 while Henry Kissinger still lives at age 99 is proof that there is no kind and loving God.
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Jun 28, 2022 08:17
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Toshimo posted:It was colonialist pro-Apartheid garbage on release and people called it out then. I was curious, because the last time I saw it I was an ignorant 14-year-old or so and I remember not really understanding most of what was going on. Here's an article I found from a few years after its release that ruthlessly eviscerates it. Tl;dr: the problem is that every non-white character is depicted as either as idiots or terrorists, and the white people are all good. Ultimately the message of the movie is "black people are better off on their own as tribal hunter-gatherers; they cannot handle modern society."
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Aug 12, 2022 00:43
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