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First episode was great. I'm already very into this show. The intro dream sequence in particular is so awesome at introducing a lot of core concepts for the story: Atticus is a veteran who views himself as a genre fiction hero; he aspires to be a John Carter type who fights aliens and gets with a Space Princess in the end; but the Hero's Journey expectations he has of a prevailing hero become meaningless when they slam against HP Lovecraft. Not even Jackie Robinson can overcome an immortal Elder God, conflating cosmic horror with white supremacy and systemic racism in the first 2 minutes. It's so goddamn solid. Not to mention other fun details, like at the end of the episode where the racist cops are attacked and become infected with shoggoth monster contagion, and one of them is visibly morphing into a grotesque monster, and the other cop is still aiming his gun at some scared unarmed black people. In case True Detective was too subtle about how the white patriarchal power structure in America is essentially just a predatory cult of Cthulhu worshippers.
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Aug 17, 2020 23:08
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a kitten posted:I think it's outright stated that he's a Korean War vet and it seems likely that she would be someone he has (or had) a relationship with This was my assumption, as well. The Princess of Mars figure in his dream was Jamie Chung, a reasonably famous actress, so I’m guessing she’s who that was. Which says some weird poo poo about whatever that relationship was, that he literally associates this Korean woman with an exotic space princess from a pulp sci-fi adventure novel.
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Aug 18, 2020 06:08
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IBroughttheFunk posted:Yeah, if that was a comprehensive map, it would be far, far fuller. I don't see any locations marked off in Connecticut where I live, and I can easily think of several towns off the top of my head. I'm from CT, and I'm very curious as to which towns these would've been. I grew up outside Hartford, in a mostly-black town that's surrounded by majority-white towns because of redlining. And it wouldn't surprise me in the least if many of those towns were "sundown towns" once upon a time. Hakkesshu posted:You are correct, I somehow missed that they were going to Massachusetts and just assumed it was the south because it's visually coded like the south. My bad. Yeah, if you missed their explanation, it's an easy mistake to make. Very few places in New England look anything like that, the massive corn fields and flat landscape and what-not. It makes sense for the iconography of the show, though: the popular white imagination of "racist America" looks like the South and the Midwest, but the reality is that it is ALL racist America. I'm also very worried for Uncle George. He's introduced in a happy marriage and is way too kind and paternal NOT to die horribly just to raise the stakes.
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Aug 18, 2020 20:27
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Bismuth posted:Abt the trueblood thing, I'm not sure that's a good comparison. Yeah, this show is definitely pulpy in a similar way, but the characters in True Blood always gave me this porn-y vibe where they behaved the way the situation needed them to, not in any way a real person might behave. For all this show's absurd genre poo poo, I don't feel like the character's common sense gets lost in it. If anything, they seem to be pushing against the genre elements, reacting to them like sane people would. It kind of feels like a black Ghostbusters in that sense. Fully agreed on Montrose, though. I rolled my eyes a bit when he showed up at his secret boyfriend's place to have wordless mechanical sex, because that's become such a cliche of "prestige" storytelling. "He's a violent, stoic manly-man, but look at his Secret Softer Side. How complex and brave." The drag scene definitely read as somehow redemptive for him, and I also wasn't there for it. He's still a lovely, violent man who abused his son and recently murdered someone for being inconvenient to him. Though, I kind of suspect the writers killed off Yahima because they didn't know how to write for them longterm. I mean, an indigenous intersex person who's 19th-century Arawak is a lot to juggle. The term "two-spirit" alone is super complicated. It's only in recent history that this term has come to mean nonbinary/trans/intersex in any contemporary sense (it was a concept for some groups historically, but not all), and even then that's mostly within First Nations and other North American communities. Would someone from South America 200 years ago have used the term? Maybe not.
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Sep 17, 2020 03:10
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Doltos posted:They're not and you like a hack but that's okay if people don't agree with my perception on Ari Aster films. I just want to get it out there that the thing you like is actually bad. "This director many people like is actually a hack. It can't possibly be that art is subjective and I simply don't connect with the style or themes present in his movies. I am the sole arbiter of quality and have decreed that anyone who disagrees is actually a Reptilian with a bad brain, because the alternative would be that my feelings aren't facts and THAT is inconceivable!" Pull up, man. Don't die on this hill. I like Ari Aster, I think his movies are good, you don't have to like them or watch them. I don't like Yorgos Lanthimos, but other people do and that is loving fine. Just stop. I started to disconnect from Lovecraft Country until I rewired my expectations for it. It's not "good" in a prestige sense and that's not a problem. It's more of a Strange Tales pulp comic brought to life, with episodic stories that happen to overlap characters. It doesn't feel like "an HBO drama" (more like something that'd be on STARZ or FX or something.) Not everything has to be a David Simon project.
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Sep 28, 2020 00:02
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radlum posted:I know little of the Korean War so can someone tell me if any of it was fought in trenches like the one we saw in Atticus fantasy on the pilot? My reading of the trenches was that they're from pro-war propaganda films Tic watched as a child, which would all have been set in WW1. Assuming he's in his 20's now, he was a child in the 20's/30's, and would've been right in the splash zone for Wings or The Big Parade or All Quiet on the Western Front. I'm sure the dream was also recalling his own experiences in Korea, but the grainy B&W that fades in and out definitely evokes that period of war movie.
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Sep 29, 2020 01:12
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Wolfsheim posted:Tonight's episode was kind of great? It had the first instance of actual deeply unsettling supernatural horror (Diana), it had extreme catharsis (the last two minutes) and it showed how rich white indifference is in some ways as bad as hatred and malice (Christina). Yeah, Diana’s plot was legitimately terrifying and very well done. I read it as a comment on the ways racist white institutions weaponize demonic or inhuman portrayals of black people to perpetrate violence against them invisibly. Emmett Till is not different from Tamir Rice or Trayvon Martin. They are all literal children whose brutal murders were “justified” using a false racist narrative. “They looked aggressive,” “they attacked first,” “they behaved like animals.” White America continues to frame these atrocities as inherently justified because they’re still so willing to see black people as monstrous. A 12-year-old with a toy deserved to die because he looked threatening to an adult police officer. It makes sense that the form of Diana’s demons was Topsy, a sort of twisted doppelgänger of a young black girl, summoned from a racist story written by a white woman and sent after her by racist cops. It also makes sense that when Diana tried to point this out to anyone else, she looked crazy because the grotesque parody of blackness stalking her was invisible to white people.
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Oct 5, 2020 09:55
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AtraMorS posted:Rather than sympathy, I think what got to Christina is the idea that she could never understand something. Like, when Ruby told her that she couldn't do something, she took that poo poo as a challenge; she's white and she knows magic, so she should be able to do whatever she wants. So she recreates the lynching thinking the brutality and pain is the point. She doesn't understand that she's missing the terror that Emmett felt and that would've rippled through the black community right alongside the outrage and despair and everything else. She can't feel that fear because even as she's being beaten, it's still all under her control. Yeah, she can't possibly replicate that level of powerlessness, on an individual or community level. She knew she wasn't actually going to die, and was fundamentally in control of what was happening to her. White people "slumming it," sure. It made me think of white people who make "reverse racism" arguments. "A black person once called me an ethnic slur, so I have experienced racism." There's this bad faith sense that somehow being called a Karen is comparable to being called the n-word, as it looks like those experiences share some common feature if you ignore all context. The obvious difference is that calling a black person the n-word carries with it the full implied force of an entire system built around white supremacy. If someone at Starbucks calls you a Karen, you can take your business elsewhere. You can't take your business elsewhere when confronted by white supremacy. There is no elsewhere; the power structure as it is has permeated everything.
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Oct 5, 2020 20:47
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Bismuth posted:I see Christina as a weird maladjusted robot lady who might have (unexpected) genuine feelings for Ruby and seriously misinterpreted what Ruby was saying she wanted Christina to understand/feel and went way too literal. I feel similarly about her. Mostly, I read her as a white feminist who doesn't really understand racism. The patriarchy discriminates against her as a woman - the Sons of Adam don't take her seriously, etc. - and she thinks that puts her on a similar plane with Ruby as a POC since hey, we're BOTH disenfranchised by the power structure here! But obviously their situations are not the same, and her "gently caress the rules, take what you want" philosophy comes off like a "pull up your bootstraps" screed. She's a white lady with access to wealth and literal magic. She has the means to say, 'gently caress the rules.' Ruby can't get a job at a department store.
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Oct 10, 2020 01:40
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Doltos posted:Yeah legitimately the Tulsa burning was loving brutal. It's one thing to read about it in history books, it's another to have a show vest interest in characters so you become emotionally involved when you watch it recreated. I'm glad they didn't have shoggoths pop up or something, it would have taken away the grave seriousness of the episode. I got into a conversation with someone about Watchmen and its portrayal of the Tulsa massacre, and their sense was that despite good intentions, there was something exploitive or sensationalist about how it packaged black historical pain. This episode is an interesting counterpoint to that, because the stakes are so personal. The scope of the tragedy felt much clearer to me...you actually get to spend some time in this community and see what it looked like before it was ripped apart. And definitely, it helps that your POV characters are all people you've seen shaped by the trauma of it (directly or indirectly.) It's wild that this event scrubbed from white history books for a century would be depicted twice within a year of each other, but I can definitely see how this version is better and more reverent. One thing I definitely didn't expect, and that I'm thrilled by, is how Hippolyta is being handled. She's the kind of character that always gets marginalized even in trope-conscious storytelling: this middle-aged wife and mother, whose job is typically to be concerned or voice concern or mourn the dead or provide emotional support. It's thankless. Turning that on its head is my favorite surprise in this show. I'm all-in for Hippolyta becoming the blue-haired spacetime adventurer from Diana's comics. You thought Tic was going to become a John Carter type...nope, it's Hippolyta. It kicks rear end.
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Oct 14, 2020 20:51
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Orange Devil posted:So, I'm Dutch...To be oppressed in your own country...Indonesian recolonization.... This makes me re-contextualize the anti-Communist purges that happen 15 years later in Indonesia, as well. It's like a relay race of generational trauma, from Nazi occupation to Dutch recolonization to a rightwing genocidal purge. Horrors feeding horrors for a solid 40 years, as if it stopped or ended there. Sunday's episode of this show was so effective and making me understand Montrose. For all the horror he experienced as a result of being black in Tulsa, he and the other survivors at least had each other to share and process the trauma. But his personal trauma as a result of being gay, the loss of his first love, wasn't and couldn't be shared with anyone, ever. It's devastating and isolating in a way that could turn anyone into...what he is now. MKW was next-level good in this episode.
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Oct 17, 2020 01:36
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FastestGunAlive posted:As an Asian American I’m reflecting on the use of Asian/Asian Americans in this show and Watchmen and I’m not able to put it in words but I feel... some type of way. I’m not offended and I appreciate both shows as an opportunity to educate myself but I feel disappointed I guess. My wife is Asian-American, and her complaint on this point about Watchmen was basically that Lady Trieu felt like an also-ran, a bit of diversity casting that didn't really intersect with the wider narrative in a particular or important way. If you met the showrunners way more than halfway, there's maybe some argument to be gleamed about colonialism or global capitalism, but trying to tie that into the show's specific themes of anti-black racism? Eh, I don't know. You could probably say similar things about Ji-ah in this. There are a lot of topics her story elicits - on feminist, anti-racist, and post-colonial grounds - but does the show really want to delve into them, or just acknowledge they exist? The writers clearly had a solid perspective and a lot of knowledge of black history and black thought, but there's a lot about Ji-ah's experience that's external to that and couldn't really receive time or focus this season. I had a similar thought a few episodes back about Yahima, who had SO much to chew on (as an intersex, indigenous time traveler) before they just gut her immediately and address none of it.
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Oct 21, 2020 00:37
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 04:30 |
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Mameluke posted:Don't need a second season, do need an Orynthia Blue spinoff Hell, I agree. It'd be shlocky as hell but I don't even care. I'd watch a Flash Gordon-y pulp scifi about Orynthia Blue and her cyborg daughter, traveling across spacetime with their pet shoggoth. Supernatural ran for 15 seasons, so why the gently caress not?
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Oct 22, 2020 00:02
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