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Autisanal Cheese posted:yeah the Season 1 reset is bullshit but probably something Disney asked for Yeah it might not be Disney but it's definitely some marketing bullshit about audiences not responding well to numbers.
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Nov 3, 2023 10:45
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 02:04 |
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Khanstant posted:How is that show, with the caveat the viewer might prefer to never see disney marvel material ever again? Is it the kinda thing where it stands on its own or do you need to be all up ins marvelsphere to make sense of cross-events and cameos? My gut instinct says you won't like it. Like most MCU shows it's not the kind of thing where you need to know an awful lot of context to make sense of things (tbh being familiar with the lead's earliest characterisation makes it harder to get along with what the show's attempting), but it's also not actually doing anything particularly good or interesting in and of itself. It's passable entertainment, which makes it stand head and shoulders above near most things the series has put out over the last four years. However, it's still got the same negative qualities that are shared by a lot of its ilk -- an constant return to flat centre framing shots by the cinematography, poor editing (including an absolutely laughable fight scene in the first season), and a plot that's more driven by busywork than drama. If you like the MCU then I suspect those things won't bother you, but like you said that's not your shizz.
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Nov 5, 2023 03:51
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Khanstant posted:It's partially just overexposure, I liked many of the comics as a kid, more a Disney thing than a constitutional aversion to superpowers. Mentally I think I'm filing it away with Andor as shows that sound better than average and the kind of thing of interest to me -- but for a fair shot, to only watch if I'm in a mood amenable to the IP that it is part of. Plus Lokis of all sorts are usually a fun time. Yeah, I figured it was Marvel/Disney rather than superheroes (not that "superhero" is a very specific descriptor of the type of character that most superhero shows focus on). Andor might be more your pace. It's a fairly conscious decoupling from several contemporary production trends in Lucasfilm/Disney. Not without problems (it does not know how to structure an episode, and I didn't find the characters psychologically compelling outside the villains) but it's nice looking, well made and is a fairly thoughtful approach to the setting without being particularly derivative.
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Nov 5, 2023 06:13
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https://auk.direct/product/children-of-the-circus/
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Nov 6, 2023 13:47
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I'm definitely getting it, Stephen Wyatt's a loving weirdo author but he's done right by his recent steps into licencing his properties. The Build High For Happiness book Obverse released was genuinely really really good. They did a Yellow Kang (YELLOW KANGS ARE BEST) story that mashed up Lovecraft and another about n aging cannibal lothario. But also I have to listen to it for sheer lmdabo value. Open Source Idiom fucked around with this message at 14:13 on Nov 6, 2023 |
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Nov 6, 2023 14:10
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It's lividliquid. She's just really angry all the time.
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Nov 11, 2023 04:18
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If we're talking terrible Christmas stories, Flip Flop is right there.
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Nov 11, 2023 22:45
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Khanstant posted:watching Cold Blood and do they ever bring up the notion of a prophecy or legend or whatever to make people "ready to share" the planet again? I remember a recurring character of the species but can't remember if they revisited that 1,000 years later deal. and most future earths I remember didn't seem to have a shared planet one way or the other. The NAs did, but pretty much everything else ignored this element of continuity. There's a classic Who episode that plays around with this slightly (Warriors of the Deep) but it mostly suggests that Earth Reptiles emerged and started a new cold war. Cold Blood is such a garbage two parter though lmao. The doctor praises a child vivisectionist and offers to move the Reptile colony to the middle of the Outback because apparently it's abandoned, lmfao, gently caress you Chibnall/Moffat how about they go live in Slough instead.
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Nov 11, 2023 22:49
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McGann posted:OODUNIT - quite fun. I still don't quite understand the context of the earth empire Torchwood and feel I may have missed some stories(I have listened to archive and a couple others but it's vague memory), but I like the Zachary Cross character. And I really always enjoy having a good Ood story - and James Goss is never a miss for me, so I definitely recommend it. Yeah, this was quite good. They've yet to actively define what Empire era Torchwood's role is, but my guess is that they're an officially sanctioned, reputable branch of the Imperial Court, and that they seem to divide their duties between archival work and being the areligious, less racist Inquisitors from 40K. Their role in this story seems to be specifically about maintaining the ongoing function on the Empire's slave classes. I thought it was interesting that official investigations are usually two person groups, and always include a slave.
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Nov 12, 2023 08:06
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McGann posted:Who would everyone say is their favorite big finish writer? I'm definitely going to choose James Goss. Goss and Fountain both write good stuff. Goss in particular has an absurdly high hit rate for how much he writes. David O'Mahoney is excellent, best writer no-one knows about. Up there with Shearman, if a different stripe. Jonathan Clements and Marc Platt are very good. Eddie Robson too. John Dorney is good, though less so that the others IMO. Simon Guerrier is good too. With the provisio that most of these people wrote their best work either under Gary Russell or in the side ranges. McGann posted:Author is actually why I chose Blood on Satan's Claw without remembering much - it's by Nev Fountain, who also did Kingmaker. It's just a gag, it'll make more sense when the set is complete.
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Nov 12, 2023 15:04
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McGann posted:...but speaking of Live 34 - it appears the author(s) (James Parsons/Andrew Stirling-Brown) have only really contributed to BF a few times. The I, Davros series (great), the aforementioned Live 34(great), a Bennie audiobook (IDK), and a couple Six stories (I don't remember them). Those are Paul Sutton, I believe. And I think Clements wrote Sympathy For The Devil. The Headless Ones is exactly what you'd expect, and also slow.
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Nov 12, 2023 16:29
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Davros1 posted:Sadly, Clements best stuff was his 2000AD stories, which BF no longer sells. (I *Heart* Judge Dredd, 99 Code Red! Pre-Emptive Revenge, Fire From Heaven). Yeah, this is true. His Benny is quite good as well. But tbh I think Sympathy For The Devil is the better of the two Warner Unbounds. Clements is a published historian and commercial translator who's done a lot of culture writing, and there's a strong angle in that story concerning Doctor Who's history of cultural imperialism and implicit racism ("Pol Pott killed every Doctor he could find, and none of them were you!") that's handled better than pretty much any other of the (vanishingly few) Who stories that even approach that material. There's nothing in Masters of War that I found nearly as interesting, it's basically a riff on an unpublished take on a first draft version of The Mutants. Even his Key2Time story goes there, mashing up British pantomime with Shin Megami Tensei (of all the loving things) to fairly great effect.
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Nov 13, 2023 01:45
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Confusedslight posted:Ive yet to be disappointed by a John Dorney big finish.] Guessing you've not heard the story he wrote where he plays John, a work from home writer that murders all his neighbours because they're very annoying.
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Nov 13, 2023 14:39
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The thing I mostly remember from that arc is Danny being a complete poo poo. The bit where it turns out he's been displacing his own culpability in doing a war crime onto the Doctor is very lol lmao
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Nov 14, 2023 02:44
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I really don't like the 12th Doctor in his first season, but the stories are mostly decent to good -- particularly the back half IMO. I know this thread gets mad about Forest Of The Night, but that one's mostly just criminally boring tbh. Plus IIRC you can just read it as a SFnal metaphor about misdiagnosis, which is probably the intention anyway.
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Nov 14, 2023 11:56
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Fil5000 posted:Doctor Mysterio has slid entirely off my brain. I know I've seen it, but I couldn't tell you what happens for the life of me and nothing is making me want to check it. When Superman gets erections he goes up in the air. hth
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Nov 14, 2023 12:15
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PriorMarcus posted:I wonder what the actress is up to these days. I haven't seen her in anything since her season ended. Living with her wife down in Mexico, last I heard.
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Nov 14, 2023 13:43
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Makes sense. Why else would they always be so angry, and hate having their relatives around?
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Nov 16, 2023 10:09
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YELLOW KANGS ARE BEST
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Nov 17, 2023 14:10
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Lottery of Babylon posted:A show about a newsman who gets cancelled because he's recorded saying something that sounds bad out of context if you don't know that his best friend is a pedophile but is actually completely okay to say because his best friend is a pedophile but he can't explain this to the public because he needs to protect his best friend, the pedophile Yeah, that's a good point (linking this to the premise of Moffat's Inside Man). You really get the sense that he's got a lot of anxiety about being targeted for something in ways he feels would be unfair.
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Nov 18, 2023 05:39
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Speaking as someone with a disability I hate this idea that disabled people can't be villains (or "evil", in Davies' words). That sucks. I get that there's a bigotry inherent to the character -- alterations to human body = scary stories for reactionaries -- but I think the character transcends anything that simplistic by virtue of being the focus of several nuanced and interesting takes over the years. I think meaningful progress is about writing towards nuance and complexity, rather than restricting characters to decorous and contemporary "taste" (again, Davies' words). Not that it's exactly what's happening here, given it's a story about the guy before his accident. But, still, gently caress restricting representations to model minorities.
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Nov 18, 2023 09:14
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Here's another frustration I have with it: instead of acknowledging that Davros should have gone to a wheelchair user (or, let's be fair here, a vision impaired actor) we're now facing a situation where Davros will continue to be played by an non-disabled actor. Additionally, Davies is essentially making the argument that villains should only be played by non-disabled actors, so to avoid the association of disability with evil. Which sucks if the intention is to open up greater opportunities for wheelchair users, the vision impaired, etc. Speaking as someone who's losing his sight ("My vision is impaired, I cannot see." har har) playing a villain is loving great, and people like me should have the opportunity to do so in ways that are meaningful to us and our lived experience.
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Nov 18, 2023 09:28
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RTD posted:Davies added that Children in Need night felt like the perfect opportunity to debut the reimagined Davros. AKA We thought it was important to fight exclusion by making Doctor Who's most prominent disabled character no longer be disabled. lol get hosed
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Nov 18, 2023 09:59
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Confusedslight posted:Is the davros series that big finish did a whe ago worth checking out? I think it takes place before he become the davros in genesis. It's very good, though you probably want to check out Davros (the play) as well since there's a lot of interconnectivity.
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Nov 18, 2023 16:28
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Rachel Denning, from Pyramid At The End Of The World, was also just in Wheel Of Time in a similar casual casting.The_Doctor posted:Both Good Omens and Loki have used Liz Carr without calling any attention to it. I wonder if this is something Carr asks for out of her roles. I can't remember any role of hers drawing attention to her disability, not The Witcher or DEVS or The OA, or even the odd episode of Silent Witness I've caught her in. (And that show loves mining it's regulars for random melodrama so I'd totally believe they'd go there, which is equally fair enough if you think about it.)
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Nov 18, 2023 18:20
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The story I always feel most uncomfortable about, in terms of disability, is Black Orchid.
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Nov 18, 2023 18:23
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Astroman posted:RTD's motives here remind me of Moffat's well meaning but misguided idea of showing medieval British villages as full of black and brown people "because that's what Britain looks like today and modern British people should feel represented". It sounds good, until you imagine him saying "Modern Beijing is very cosmopolitan and full of people from all over the world, so let's do a episode about 14th Century China where a bunch of white people are walking around." Or perhaps more problematically, "whitewashing history" in the sense that it says "many modern white British people are tolerant and live in harmony with minorities, and they were that way 800 years ago too." So British people just kinda became racist for a bit when they were colonizing India, Africa, and the Americas? That is covering up some elements of history that need to be known. Yeah, speaking of this and that clip I think there's something a bit misguided about casting an Asian man in the role of a Kaled high command leader (or whatever role he has, he's obviously fairly high up) since he's hailing from a society that's very much an allegory for Nazism. More POC Space Nazis is very "they say the next one will be sent by a woman". But I guess the composition of (some) real world fascist organisations have changed with the times and their metaphorical versions might change as well. But it still strikes me as a little wrong. LividLiquid posted:One thing I feel is being lost here in the disability discussion is that this is a show for children. I just don't understand why you'd use Davros at all if this scene was largely for kids with a naive understanding of the show and its history. You'd not actually communicating anything meaningful to them because they don't know anything about past depictions of the character. This change is only meaningful if you have an understanding of the show's history (and only clear given the context of the Radio Times interview, something a naive viewer also wouldn't be aware of). So it's a change that's very much aimed at people familiar with the show. Besides which, an absence of the negative representation isn't, in and of itself, the presence of positive representation. If the intent of the piece was to fight marginalisation then it absolutely failed, because there are no disabled people in it.
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Nov 20, 2023 09:13
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LividLiquid posted:Buddy, you definitely don't want to get into this with me and this thread is usually very nice and doesn't deserve to have to witness me to doing my thing again. We're on the same side, take your own advice about having more empathy and chill the gently caress out.
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Nov 21, 2023 03:24
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jisforjosh posted:loving Ernst Röhm was head of the SA (Brown Shirts) and one of Hitler's closest allies while being homosexual. He was later murdered by the party during the Night of the Long Knives. So yeah a fascist organization can have members you wouldn't traditionally think of belonging when you're talking about early days of a regime. Totally, though I believe by the time Davros was around the Kaleds were heavily invested in their purity regime -- generationally so -- so it's not early stages for them. Davros is significant among the Kaled elite because he still retained visibility and power among his peers despite their desire to exterminate him. He was just too essential to the war effort, and it's that ambivalence that's central to his circumstances. If you cast POC as members of Kaled high command (which is, yes, positive since you improve the lives of real life people of colour) you lose that subtext and end up suggesting a different sort of story, and you end up running into conflict between positive impulse (jobs and visibility for minorities!) and a fraught message (Nazism isn't about white supremacy!) I think the solution is pretty obvious though -- tell a different story, one that's not centred on space Nazis in the same way this short is. This allows you to retain the jobs and visibility. Open Source Idiom fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Nov 21, 2023 |
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Nov 21, 2023 04:13
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I think fiction should have something to say, but it doesn't have to soap box in order to do so. You can just tell stories that are informed by the historical time, or explore that historical context, without being preachy.
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Nov 21, 2023 22:52
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Sydney Bottocks posted:The biggest impact the original series of Star Trek ever had, was putting a black woman on the bridge of the Enterprise, as an well-trained officer, who possessed a highly important job that she was expertly skilled at...and it was presented to an American audience of the 1960s as no big deal. I feel like we're largely agreeing. A lot of 60's Doctor Who did try and casually present diverse futures -- to the point where it's considered a typicality of the Troughton era to have a base staffed by a multinational crew -- but they're nearly always diversely White. A few stories try to talk about race in some way or other e.g. explicitly in The Aztecs, Marco Polo, implicitly in The Ark and a few other stories, but usually to ambiguously useful ends. Mid Troughton would have more PoC guest stars (Enemy of The World, Tomb Of The Cybermen) but also White actors who'd been made up to look non-White (Abominable Snowmen, Tomb again), and of course Troughton's playing Ramón Salamander with a Mexican accent. That said, my experience with Star Trek is that it's heavily morality play based storytelling often bordering on the preachy. e.g. a lot of what I can remember of the two and a bit seasons of Deep Space Nine I've seen are episodes like "Bashir learns about wheelchair accessibility" or "Sisko explores AnPrim society and discovers they are dumb". And a lot of the stories about the Cardassians occupation that are used to allegorically consider various issues concerning colonialism, religious extremism and such. I'm not familiar with the show's original run, but what little I've read about it seems to suggest that the show's always been kind of interested in telling stories like these.
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Nov 22, 2023 00:50
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Narsham posted:If you want to go after making the message less clear, Genesis of the Daleks can itself be accused of that: Davros and the Kaleds come across as Nazi-like, I think we'd agree. And yet, only some of Davros' hand-picked researchers end up siding with him, while the rest demand the dalek program be shut down. Isn't that sending a clear message of "not all Nazis" and suggesting that plenty of Nazi scientists were OK chaps in the end? Either you admit that the whole analogy was deeply flawed and compromised from the beginning, or you accept that when writing a science-fiction allegory you can't expect a strict one-to-one correspondence in the way you seem to be demanding here. It's been a while but I seem to remember that everyone involved were fascists and they basically underwent a violent schism in terms of how they interpreted their fascist doctrine. Just because some scientists didn't support the dalek program doesn't mean they didn't believe in racial purity and the destruction of the Other -- there's a racial purity argument to be made both for the creation of the dalek (it's the ubermensch) and for the destruction of the dalek program (#notmyubermensch). They're all bad, to the point where it's not worth working out who's better or worse. Beyond which, even if we accept that the original presentation is muddled* -- assuming that the "point" of Genesis is to allegorically talk about white supremacists -- why make that presentation worse? But like I said, current fascist organizations can embrace, say, Rishi Sunak so this guy seems fine in those terms. But it does suggest a Kaled ruling class that was less obsessed with the rapacious elimination of the unlike than previously. But this is getting very loving nerdy and mountain/molehill-y here. *Given that it's Terry Nation it probably is. He loved the fascist aesthetic, whether it be the blond, blue eyed hero Thals, or his SSS officers caught in the ambivalence between cool heroism and cold blooded jackboot. I swear bro didn't know if he wanted to gently caress the fascists or make love to them.
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Nov 22, 2023 05:11
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Voyage of the Dammed is a lot of fun. Though, you know, another of RTD's disabled villains.
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Nov 23, 2023 05:44
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Lord Ludikrous posted:[*]Random Nick Briggs. I like the guy but his dalek voices stick out like a sore thumb and its jarring as hell when a dalek goes from sounding like Peter Hawkins, to Nick Briggs, and back to Peter Hawkins again during the same conversation. The additional/replacement dialogue just isn’t as good as the original. Not Briggs, and I bet he's fuming tbh lmfao. Good though, he gets too proprietary sometimes.
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Nov 24, 2023 15:49
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Lord Ludikrous posted:Wow really? Sure sounded like him - have they got another Dalek voice actor? It's David Graham, the original dude. Honestly I was surprised too ngl
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Nov 24, 2023 16:39
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I was going off of this: https://thedoctorwhocompanion.com/2...-of-the-daleks/ I guess both he and Briggs contributed?
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Nov 24, 2023 16:57
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That was good, but a little cringe and uhhh gender essential-y. I think Tate's got different habits as an actor these days and I found them distracting, but I like Donna and I like her, even when I think she's hitting every note as broadly as possible. Was surprised by how weak most of the Meep's lines were once the Meep was outed as evil (and also that's about the point where the became mostly CGI and stopped physically interacting with people and that's kinda disappointing). Also thought it was strange that for a story that was so keen to earnest to prove its politics and to be gentle with its vulnerable people, that they basically ended the story with a mentally ill being being sent to space prison for ever and ever and presented it as an uncomplicated happy ending. The first half was really strong though, pretty much up until the Doctor pulled out that dumb wig. Great puppet, great energy throughout, I like the new UNIT lady (though gently caress UNIT, duh) and the piece had really great energy throughout. It's so giddy and fizzy that it ends up biting the characters in the arse at the end, lmfao. Donna became an RTD Mum, which is awesome. Sylvia is great too -- I like the irony of the character's shifted relationship with Donna. Rose is lovely, but a bit of a cypher tbh, and I felt the narrative didn't do them any favours by making them quite so symbolic at the end there. (Before someone jumps down my neck, IMO the solution would have been to do more with them and to give them more shading.) Sad they didn't end up shipping the Meep off to Saudi Arabia at the end though. Real missed opportunity for a gag there IMO.
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Nov 26, 2023 12:52
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Yeah, the other soldiers aren't held accountable for what they did (or tried to do) while they were affected by the space madness (or whatever, the magic sunlight that flips your switch to evil) so it's odd that the Meep is.
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Nov 26, 2023 13:06
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Melusine posted:You can use she/her pronouns for Rose—that's what everyone in the show does, in addition to Donna explicitly calling Rose her daughter a bunch of times. I take the 'non-binary' line as RTD trying to be cute, and being well-meaning but a bit old/cis. It's speaking to an idea that transpeople transcend or are outside the gender binary, even those who are 'binary' transpeople like Rose seems to be (and Yasmin Finney is, as far as I'm aware). Ah, I wasn't sure. I was kind of reading the "non-binary" line and the part where Rose says that "after all these years I'm finally me" to mean that they were coming out as non-binary, after previously identifying as female in everything we'd seen up until that point.
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Nov 26, 2023 13:27
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 02:04 |
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Yeah, Davies writes dark poo poo, people die, etc. He'll do happy and fluffy, but he's not scared of sustained tension. Disney loves cutaways to cute animals, lame non-jokes to break tension, etc. It's all tone management to stop their work from having anything approaching an edge, since edge can be alienating and against The Brand. Normally you'd have a bunch of dead extras in an RTD script, or at least have cutaways to families freaking out, feeling fear, etc. Instead there's that gurning kid. Makes me wonder.
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Nov 28, 2023 05:29
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