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mary had a little clam posted:drat, episode 5 was awesome. Just weird and gross with great body horror but also, I was genuinely moved by Montrose at the drag show. I found that really lovely and , at least for this episode, I'm glad we didn't fall back on the trope of a self-loathing closeted queer beating the poo poo out of someone they are in love with. Beyond the sexy character stuff, I'm extremely curious as to what this is all leading towards. That scene is perfect just because of how people read that scene. It was stupidly gratuitous and obscene and absurd, but that is so perfect and that is the point. The editing is weird between scenes though sometimes Mameluke posted:Yeah Montrose sucks. Like it's nice that Michael K Williams got paid to hang out with some drag queens and wear a big bruise appliance but he just sucks the air out of the screen. Give me schlock or horror, not "oh woo the violent old man is sad cause he's Got Such Issues" IMO it speaks to transgenerational trauma, a big important thing and part of understanding things like how we pass on abuse and trauma to our children. One of the crazy things I've been thinking, have the only shades of brown in between black and white been the alien phone princess in ep one and the native undead two spirit person? If true interesting discussion to be had on the erasure of certain peoples in the conversation surrounding racism, and homophobia. We're really going to need some sex worker commentary soon so I can hit my bingo card though. breadnsucc fucked around with this message at 07:37 on Sep 17, 2020 |
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Sep 17, 2020 05:37
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:Big "Skyler" energy Ah, you are one of those people. I was interested in the disussion for a bit there, but now I can see where you stand.
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Sep 17, 2020 19:38
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Skyweir posted:Ah, you are one of those people. I was interested in the disussion for a bit there, but now I can see where you stand. On the side of the righteous
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Sep 17, 2020 21:58
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Thinking about it, I agree that the Montrose character is a total drag. I think the point I was trying to make was that Monty is unforgivable, he’s a villain in the inner circle. His place is to remind us among all the magic and skin melting that he’s the real monster, the cops are the real monster, and even Tic and Letti are not immune from being a part of that evil. Even the inner circle is not immune from the evils of real life, let alone this world.
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Sep 17, 2020 22:22
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Holy poo poo dont compare him to skyler lmao. Solvent is right though
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Sep 18, 2020 15:02
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What makes someone irredeemable? Montrose is a lovely lovely person, but he's also the impetus for the Atticus coming to Chicago aka the whole show. I would've been really annoyed if the family adventure trust catch was "the turning point" where Montrose "finally became a good dad" because that would've just been way too easy, but yeah... I feel like the theme of redemption is going to be a key part of the next 5 episodes.
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Sep 18, 2020 15:45
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He straight up murdered a person in cold blood, it’s going to take a lot more than five episodes to redeem that.
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Sep 18, 2020 17:14
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If magic didn't exist so would have Tic
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Sep 18, 2020 19:35
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Oasx posted:He straight up murdered a person in cold blood, it’s going to take a lot more than five episodes to redeem that. I was a little hung up on the fact that it was a dead body that reanimated, it’s just the way he did it, and living dead or not that was a helpful person who shows no animus towards anybody. I think it won’t be too far out to predict some kind of “martyr moment” from him later, but in the meantime, his dialogue is minimal, I can’t think of a time when he isn’t delivering a line through his teeth, and his actions are mechanical (the character, not the actor) so yeah, that’s kinda a drag.
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Sep 18, 2020 19:38
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Might have been better if they softened his actions by putting him in a situation like Yahima was hanging on a ledge or going to drown during the escape and he just didn't save them.
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Sep 18, 2020 20:00
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I still feel like there was a missing scene before Montrose's shawshank redemption escape
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Sep 18, 2020 20:08
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anothergod posted:If magic didn't exist so would have Tic I agree, but people here thought it was perfectly fine for the hero of the story to murder a person who did nothing to threaten him, a person who has in fact had saved his life twice. But at the very least Tic is generally a sympathetic character, Montrose is not.
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Sep 18, 2020 20:54
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:I still feel like there was a missing scene before Montrose's shawshank redemption escape breadnsucc posted:The editing is weird between scenes though sometimes Yeah, this is definitely a good point, I think I'm just so out of it on Sunday nights during that wind down TV time that I let a lot of it slip by.
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Sep 18, 2020 21:32
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Augh okay, I know I said I was out, but morbid curiosity had me watch 5 while I worked to see how the Yahima fallout was handled. I wish this show just didn't touch queer topics at all, tbh, I think it'd be better for it. The story editing leaning on sudden disorienting jumps in time would still be frustrating, but not in the same painful way as the LGBT content puts me on edge. It feels really oddly thoughtless. Why was Yahima even in this show? The pages are more important to Tic this episode. She wasn't the reason for throwing the punch. :/ Either Ruby or Montrose's plotlines maybe should have been their own episodes- Ruby's seems complete, but the Montrose part is so rushed.. I wish he had any dialogue to have a glimpse into his head about things. The silent acting isn't really cutting it for me. Probably it's unintentional, but man... the juxtapositions of gender non-conformity (yahima, christina/william, the drag queens mostly feel like props for Montrose tbh) and anal penetration (montrose/sammy, and ruby and the manager) have just the skeeviest vibes to me. This show is really willing to not beat around the bush and deal with tropes about Black people in media head on, but the way it steps on a rake about the ways queer people are handled in subtext just suuuuucks. It's a big distraction from what the show was actually handling well in episode one.
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Sep 18, 2020 22:49
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I’m guessing Yahima will be back.
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Sep 18, 2020 23:48
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Solvent posted:I’m guessing Yahima will be back. That was definitely my initial suspicion but it's still super weird how uninterested this episode is in her.
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Sep 19, 2020 00:00
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Something is absolutely wrong if people are upset at Michael K. Williams screen-time.
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Sep 19, 2020 00:27
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Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:Something is absolutely wrong if people are upset at Michael K. Williams screen-time. Yeah its not the actor's fault, I think he's doing exactly what the writers/directors want, and doing a good job. Its just the content they're giving him is a huge loving drag. I was kind of excited to see some queer content in a show like this, i thought maybe we'd get a very often ignored and overlooked black/queer perspective, but its the same poo poo as always The only potential this show has for doing something good in my gay eyes at this point is how it deals with ruby/christina's relationship. I hope they dont have ruby just run off at the point she learned the truth, because that...i mean, she already has been doing weird magic and very nearly murdered a guy, if she runs off just because her boyfriend is a girl I'd be miffed. Id like to see some insight into how Christina identifies, if william is just a useful suit or if he represents a real part of her gender identity. I dont have high hopes though
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Sep 19, 2020 02:39
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Bismuth posted:Yeah its not the actor's fault, I think he's doing exactly what the writers/directors want, and doing a good job. Its just the content they're giving him is a huge loving drag.
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Sep 19, 2020 02:43
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Solvent posted:Yeah, this is definitely a good point, I think I'm just so out of it on Sunday nights during that wind down TV time that I let a lot of it slip by. its the worst part of the show unless it has some secret purpose tbd and even then its a lame way to do a plot to cut out story stuff and then have everyone spend the first ten minutes talking about what happened between episodes
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Sep 19, 2020 03:13
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Soooooo this will probably not be a popular opinion, but I got curious today about MKW's own sexuality. He's kinda known for playing gay/bi characters--not exclusively or anything, but they're 2/3 of his HBO characters that I've seen--and I've never heard him included in any list of straight actors taking roles from LGBTQ actors. Wikipedia had nothing, but I did find this NYT article from a few years ago. It had the following segment (and I'm gonna put a couple slurs behind spoilers):quote:The Vanderveer of Mr. Williams’s childhood was often a landscape of drugs and violence. As he rode down the avenue, nearly every corner conjured a grisly memory. “That’s where I saw my first shooting,” he said, passing New York Avenue. Two blocks later: “That’s where I first got robbed.” Most of that seems relevant, but that line about being soft reminded me of a much more current interview from AV Club about Montrose specifically: quote:I didn’t make his sexuality the thing that I went after. It was the fact that he never had the chance to identify as anything. By the time we meet Montrose, he is so traumatized. He survived a massacre that took place in Tulsa. He moves to the South Side of Chicago, which is like moving into a war zone within itself. And he’s doing this during the Jim Crow era. That’s how we meet him. He’s been so beaten into a box and told how to feel and what the definition of Black masculinity or Black sexuality feels like. He was made to feel so much that being soft or being soft spoken or being mild… that his demeanor was a sign of weakness by his father that I don’t think he really had a chance to define himself any which way. Maybe I'm seeing layers that aren't there, maybe MKW is recycling interview answers, and maybe I'm not as familiar with bad tropes in queer portrayal as I should be, but this thread is flattening the character in a way that I think really misses the point. Like, we're perfectly willing to accept racism as a monster of the show, but...not homophobia or toxic masculinity? Much less a character caught at the intersection of all three? The biggest complaint so far --other than nitpicks about pacing and music selection--is really just a poor editing decision at the end of ep 4 (which would've been much better if it'd ended with Tic beating Montrose instead of leading off the next episode with that). For comparison, a couple of friends and I use Sunday night for TV watching, and we've been going through Doom Patrol followed by this show, and I've gotta say I'm way more interested in Montrose than DP's own resident self-loathing gay man, who came off to me as far more stereotypical through S1. I'm not rooting for Montrose--he's a loving murderer and a lovely father--but I do want to see how they play him out, whereas I had a good idea where Larry was headed after about two episodes. I dunno, I just don't feel what y'all are feeling. (FWIW, I don't think we've seen the end of Yahima either, mostly because when we first saw them, they were deader than they are now. But if it turns out the show introduced them just to kill them almost immediately for some other character's development, then yeah I'll agree that that's pretty drat bad.) edit: removed a jab about music tastes. the forums were crapping out so I posted a little before I was ready. AtraMorS fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Sep 19, 2020 |
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Sep 19, 2020 04:53
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Fwiw the only people who seem hung up on the Yahima/Montrose stuff is this thread. Reddit and twitter seem much, much more about race topics. Objectively Yahima is a throwaway character and Montrose being gay was more hamfisted than anything. Yahima being transgendered didn't matter as much as Yahima being a boring Native American soothsaying character. Montrose being gay didn't matter as much as the character being a lovely evil bummer that no one cares about his personal life. I think the worst you can say is that the showrunners naively used being a closeted homosexual then coming out in public as a redemption arc. They saw it as a positive thing while LGBT viewers were like ugh wtf is this poo poo again. Same goes with anyone with a brain disliking anal rape as a revenge plot line, especially violent anal rape that probably resulted in weird sepsis and death. In the end it's a pulp show with pulpy poo poo and if you get put off by the LGBT relations you might as well get put off by the race relations too, which is the whole crux of the show. Pulp isn't exactly the best place to fight for oppressed minority groups and will most often result in wtf is this poo poo moments. If you can't enjoy it now I doubt you'll enjoy it for the rest of the show either. What is nice is there's several times where I look up stuff I had no idea about with black history and got more informed. If that's the goal of the showrunners then they achieved that at least.
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Sep 19, 2020 05:58
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This is such a weird show. Normally that papers over a lot of weaknesses for me, but not so much here. I will say that episode five was the first episode I've enjoyed in a while. The ending, too, is very clearly meant to be Bad News, complimenting Wunmi Mosaku's arc from repression to hedonistic disregard for human life, and using that to say dark things about the abuse inherent to privilege (specifically in terms of race). It's a classic villain turn.
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Sep 19, 2020 06:15
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Some great perspectives here, I wanted to add that a friend of mine growing up had a dog named after the ending credits song. When I asked him about it he sang a big part of it. That was Merck, he was kinda a performer, but I’ve known other people to speak verses of whitey on the moon, it’s nice to be at least less ignorant and I tell ya, there can never be enough well played educational moments for people genuinely interested in being less ignorant.
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Sep 20, 2020 04:09
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What did Tic say right before attacking Montrose? I listened to it three or four times, but couldn't make it out.
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Sep 20, 2020 06:16
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davidspackage posted:What did Tic say right before attacking Montrose? I listened to it three or four times, but couldn't make it out. Totally different subject, but one that I was reminded of looking that up: When it comes to how we ought to view Ruby's actions at the end, it's worth pointing out that the episode title "Strange Case" is a reference to "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."
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Sep 20, 2020 06:32
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Goddamn that was not what I was expecting but it was super good. I was not expecting them to do a whole episode focused on a character we kind of knew about and then all the stuff with Atticus being kind of a total bastard in the war
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Sep 21, 2020 03:04
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Thanks HBO for not subtitling any of the korean stuff in my country to the point that I only understood maybe 1/4 of the dialogue in this episode.
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Sep 21, 2020 03:10
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Hollismason posted:Goddamn that was not what I was expecting but it was super good. I was not expecting them to do a whole episode focused on a character we kind of knew about and then all the stuff with Atticus being kind of a total bastard in the war Yeah I spent a moment trying to convince myself it wasn't him but drat. Good episode and I've always liked Jamie Chung so it was cool to see her carry an episode like that.
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Sep 21, 2020 03:49
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Haven’t really had an issue with the changes the show has made from the book til now. Didn’t hate the episode (fine to get some more backstory on Tic in the war) but I just don’t find this addition to the plot interesting. Then again it’s a bit early to tell so I’ll stay open minded. Edit: Actually on sudden retrospect, I do kind of hate it. I don’t see the backstory of Tic as a war criminal adding any compelling depth to his character. FastestGunAlive fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Sep 21, 2020 |
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Sep 21, 2020 04:22
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Gonna be rude for a second and quote myself quoting someone else:Kinitra Brooks posted:This episode also begs a conversation on the grander narrative of the structural violence of hierarchies, the problematic construct of our Western society that pushes the oppressed to become the oppressor. <----eta: that quote AtraMorS fucked around with this message at 09:32 on Sep 21, 2020 |
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Sep 21, 2020 04:30
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I have to admit I was surprised it didn't dovetail into the end of the previous ep.
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Sep 21, 2020 04:58
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Catching up on this thread became confusing because I thought the 'why could we ever like a character that would murder someone in cold blood' discussions were about Atticus doing war crimes, not his father slicing up the person they rescued. Which is....a little weird in terms of the broader series as a protagonist were supposed to be sympathetic to but I actually thought it worked well in the framing of this episode. I liked it a lot! And also there was no bad Marilyn Manson song to completely take me out of it!
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Sep 21, 2020 05:43
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Why were those tentacles furry!?!?
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Sep 21, 2020 12:26
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I really wasn't a fan of this episode, and was bored throughout most of it.
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Sep 21, 2020 13:10
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Open Source Idiom posted:Why were those tentacles furry!?!? Nine tailed fox.
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Sep 21, 2020 13:16
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This show kinda feels like it’s made by people who feel uncomfortable in horror. I don’t expect it to be scary, but I do expect it to try and holy moley the bad cg tentacles and her seeing this guys life of family and climbing mountains before he pops like a water balloon The way the show handles ghouls and ghosts would not be out of place in something like American Horror Story, a show that embraces camp. People exploding like wet bags, giant Halloween ghost heads yelling at people. I’m glad that the show is going big on the supernatural! It just feels like they have no confidence in it so they decided to make the gore so outrageous that it distracts. Lovecraft Country tries really hard to be an HBO prestige drama, and the competing tones crash into each other like two boring trains. But I’ll keep watching it!
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Sep 21, 2020 15:24
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Oasx posted:He straight up murdered a person in cold blood, it’s going to take a lot more than five episodes to redeem that. This is going to be interesting after the last episode. Not that I am not agreeing with you, and definitely the show displays a different behavior from Tic in the aftermath. Also, there's quite a time jump from the war to the current events. Still, our protagonist murdering a defenseless woman in cold blood "obeying orders" is a lot to take in. On another topic, I liked the fact that they showed that, even if segregation in the US army had officially ended in 1948, there were still segregated companies in Korea.
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Sep 21, 2020 15:44
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Open Source Idiom posted:Why were those tentacles furry!?!? She was a Pokemon.
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Sep 21, 2020 16:38
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Power Walrus posted:The way the show handles ghouls and ghosts would not be out of place in something like American Horror Story, a show that embraces camp. The very first episode featured this:  ... so I'm not sure if there was ever a question about embracing camp. I guess they could have had a picture in picture in the corner of John Waters giggling but hopefully the message still got out there.
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Sep 21, 2020 17:09
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