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davidspackage posted:I don't know how the creators intended it, but to me it did feel like something dark and disturbing, to show how Dee was changed by all the poo poo that happened to her, despite her family's efforts to save her (and because of how much they failed to protect her) Completely agree, and I think they intended it. I was going to chime in to say I disagree with some consensus here on a couple things, but it's now it's an agreement with you and a different disagreement. At the end Dee is shown as at least completely broken and probably a villain (listen to the musical cues and look at the shoggoth, more below), and it's part of both a parallel with Atticus and the TV show's theme: people traumatized by racism often turn into monsters who take their trauma out on others, whether for racist reasons or not. The Atticus comparison: it's not a coincidence that his CO, the one telling him to execute and torture Koreans like Young-Ja , is also black. In that case it's not that they hated Koreans, just that they were the innocents the US served up as a punching bag for their rage over how they're treated at home. (Small aside: pretty sure it's never confirmed Young-Ja was killed even though dialogue assumes it. They killed to find her and did torture her, but she could be alive.) Also not a coincidence that the only other serviceman is also a disgruntled POC, Asian himself this time. You see the theme a little with her and Atticus's shoggoth. (I want to name him Station, for reasons frontpage readers may remember.) At first it looked a little bit strangely like Venom to me. Then I realized it. As someone else already pointed out, he's black, and the white people's shoggoths are white. Huh. And he's gotten better at killing than they are. Ending this darkly is the opposite of trying to provide viewers a feeling of satisfaction, but it makes the show respectable as something more than only wish-fulfillment. Though there's thankfully plenty of wish-fulfillment, particularly with all the one-dimensional mustache-twirling white villains. Except not Christina. That's what I disagree with some consensus here on. She is a three-dimensional character, especially when compared to all the other antagonists, who are just evil racist white men like Titus, her father, and Captain Lancaster, and she's even one of the most interesting on the show imo. (So much so I was puzzled and sad to see her go, apparently, at the end, but as I implied that must be necessary to turn Dee so strikingly into a villain.) She may have aspects of feminism, even white feminism, but that's mostly done with by the end of the second episode. By then thanks to her actions both manipulating and helping Atticus, she has everything, the nicest car, a mansion in Chicago, a whole magic town in New England plus her father's other assets. She's not looking for more or even to use magic to keep bending the world to her will because, as she said, her whole arc is new experiences and immortality to safely continue getting them. And look at her MO. She constantly gets things by making deals, then honoring them, even if she temporarily wavers in a huff. In fact her honor is her downfall! No revivied Leti-->no completed spell hijack. At least twice she has what she wants in front of her, and rather than use magic to take it or just grab it and run like any human could try, she bargains for it. No, she's not a simple villain. She's a sheltered child who for the first time is free but is still very much just that, a child. Look at her two or three most important scenes. The "or-three" one: shoggoth birthing scene. I remembered that just for the lore of that being where shoggoths come from in this (cows!), but it's also about her. Then there's the one where she talks with the kids playing like she's one of them, because she is. Then the big one, where she pays two whites to Emmett Till her. I must confess I still haven't decided what I think the spell she mutters before that was. Though it sounded like a mark of Cain going on, she already had the invulnerability she needed to survive it, and she couldn't have removed it like her father once did since then she really would have died. Didn't look like a painkiller spell from where I was sitting. I also don't know how far in development this was when HBO's Watchmen aired or got shown to the writers rooms at other HBO shows, but she seems heavily influenced by the arc of the TV Dr. Manhattan. LC has a bunch of similarities to that show, most of them probably coincidences. Anyway, I don't think she was lying in her earlier scene with Ruby where she said she didn't care about Till, but my interpretation is that the subtext of the conversation + this scene is that she didn't care but really wanted to care. She was apathetic but hated her apathy. She has (er, had) a lot in inner conflict, as much if not more than some of the other main characters. Two minor complaints about the last episode though. One, as I keep getting beaten to things... Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:Oh sure, I imagine it is as simple as self identification, as in if deep down you know you are privileged then it doesn't work. On a serious note, how do you identify any race but through exclusion, drawing Black by establishing a set of not-Black? On a less serious note, an off camera plotwhere they have to give thumbs-up/thumbs-down to every horseshit race-science stratification that was in use at the time. I did wonder how a spell could bind white people from magic when "white people" don't exist. (I'm pretty sure you know what I mean with that statement.) Sure, our 500-year-old idea of race is real, but the idea itself is bullshit because race isn't immanent in our physical universe, only our constructed social reality. I figured it must be some combination of identifying as white (I was also beaten to that) and/or (don't think I was beaten to this) being identified as white by your society. On a deeper level, the level of writing or "metatext" or whatever it's called, this is probably fine because either a) both race and magic are made up, so no worries, or b) in continuity the magic requires intention, so it's all rooted in the thoughts of people, exactly where race is lurking. Probably just a quibble of mine. More seriously, the episode let me down on maybe my favorite part of the show, the real audio. Not every episode necessarily uses it, but here I assume the old-timey song played during the ritual was supposed to count. Normally they are spoken word, relevant, and supremely well chosen. Not here in my view. Oh well. Also, man I must be slow, because it took me till episode 8 to realize the spoken word bits are in fact Lovecraft Country's spells, or its version of them. OK, that's just my interpretation, but I think it works. I dig the whole John Dee/Angel language/Liber Loagaeth lore, but that's all just bullshit and windowdressing, fancy runes and all. (I never checked, did they use the "Enochian" script in the show for the runes? I should check some day.) The real audio voice-overs on the other hand have real meaning and power. There also fun as hell if you can ID them or make an educated guess about them. I like imaging what other shows could do with this or just coming up with your own. Back to loving the show in general for something: how it used Lovecraft, specifically not too or all that much, based on my admittedly limited knowledge of him. I think of LC (TV) as doing even more successfully what this funky probably-obscure JRPG called Shadow Hearts (mainly the first one) did well: start with the general Lovecraft mythos, mix in real figures, put in some wacky humor and outlandishness while staying grounded in queasiness-inducing horror (complete with the Bad End becoming canon), then take the racism out of Lovecraft, and not only that but also, perhaps by way of apology, replace the racism with deliberate multiculturalism. That might have been why Ji-ah and the unfortunate Native woman were in here, because though putting black people in it positively would be enough to gall Lovecraft, doing so while making it exclusively black would be in danger of repeating his mistakes/sins. (Back to the theme of how some people traumatized by racism can end up.) It also just didn't lean too heavily on Lovecraft because it just bypassed him to go to his own sourcebook, John Dee's delightfully crazy Angels poo poo. LC namechecks the Necronomicon as being what it is not about, and I think "Book of Names" is its own term, a good one since it has a theme about naming and empowerment (I first made the connection when Hippolyta mentioned naming that comet or whatever, but it ballooned later). However, I reckon the Book of Names is really just John Dee's Liber Loagaeth (sp?) in another form, which is what Lovecraft did with Dee with the Necronomicon. It shows up tons of places, many of which I bet forumsgoers have encountered it in. I think the first time I learned about Dee and realized it was a Doctor Who audio drama of all things. I had the great fortune to play Bloodstained a year late so it was during watching this, a good dovetailing since that namechecks Liber Loagaeth directly, but as I said, same poo poo (good poo poo!) different name. Which brings me to... Anonymous Zebra posted:Someone on Twitter just pointed out that in comic books Hippolyta is the mother and maker of Diana (aka Wonder Woman). Dee's full name is Diana Freeman. I completely agree she had to be named Diana based on the DC comics character relationships, but that still leaves open the use of her nickname. (Aside: for what it's worth, the book Lovecraft Country in the TV show is, based on Wikipedia, I think a nod to the original Lovecraft Country book, where Diana is a boy named Horace.) Even up through the last episode I cannot decide whether her nickname "Dee" is supposed to be an allusion to John Dee or not. I don't think that she used a transform potion and the time/multiverse machine to become Dee and write the book, since John Dee being a 20th century black girl/woman with a robot arm would be a bit much even for this show, but her name "Dee" could be a reference since her name "Diana" pretty much has to be. OK I wrote a lot, but I had a lot pent up after 10 episodes. Good show. Great I think. Rewards thinking about it.
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Oct 23, 2020 08:38
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 13:21 |
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