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Vote to threadban Bioshuffle This poll is closed. |
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| Yes (Goku) |
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146 | 85.38% |
| No (also Goku) |
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25 | 14.62% |
| Total: | 171 votes | ||
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Panfilo posted:[A-Train] straight up admits, "I'm Michael Jordan, not Malcolm X". He's very much a celebrity athlete that isn't about to rock the boat too hard, especially now with his heart problems. Yes. It's a major part of the show's critique of capitalism: nobody's efforts to change the system are genuine because everyone is compromised by capital, by their personal need for wealth or power or fame or influence. A-Train doesn't actually care about social justice or his African roots, certainly never did before, but he landed on it as a believable marketing pivot now that his career as a superhero is over. The completely empty virtue signaling in his energy drink ad makes that pretty clear. He's only as progressive as Vought will allow him to be, and has no qualms defending that very lovely status quo if it keeps him relevant. I don't think he's a literal sociopath, so I'm sure he does care that Blue Hawk is a racist who murders Black people. But he's also not going to risk anything over it. He'd tell Homelander about the plot on his life because, when it comes to it, he'll do anything to hold onto whatever tenuous power or influence remains to him. A-Train's brother pitched the idea that he give it all up, become a normal civilian again, and that premise was an absolute non-starter for him.
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Jun 13, 2022 22:48
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tokin opposition posted:This quote is very funny because as woke and now meta-woke this show is, it's in the same situation as A-train. it gets to mock corporate woke bullshit but Amazon does just as much trite pandering while doing all the bad things we all know they do. Yeah, I think about this aspect a lot. Because I do think the writers of the show are expressing a genuine critique, and also it's absurd this is an Amazon Original. Clearly, Amazon doesn't need to censor the message, because why bother? What are people going to do, not engage with corporate capitalism? Good luck.
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Jun 14, 2022 01:07
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No Dignity posted:A-Trains arc has been being given opportunities to redeem himself and make a positive difference and veering away from them as hard as possible to suck up to power and preserve his career instead. They basically spell it out for you with the Michael Jordan comment Seriously. I don't see what's hard to believe about A-Train betraying Supersonic. Of course he would. He'll do whatever he has to, to stay on the Seven and feel important. There's nothing he cares about as much as his fame or influence. Nuebot posted:My pet theory is that he's going to wind up in another position like in season one; homelander'll tell him to take care of Hughie and Starlight while he's busy, and despite the two trying to talk him down he's going to do the rear end in a top hat thing and his heart will go off. Only this time they're not going to stop to help him, because he's run out of chances. And A-Train will probably get the lamest death of anyone in the series. Possible. Dying in a lame, pointless way feels exactly right. But I'm kind of hoping Homelander kills him, because clearly A-Train believes there's some reward for loyalty, and obviously there won't be. He could've shown the mildest amount of courage or moral fortitude, used his position to affect even a sliver of positive change, but he chose self-interest instead. The message should probably be, "selling your soul for table scraps will never be worth it."
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Jun 14, 2022 20:56
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Starks posted:In all seriousness I don't really think what A-train did was as irredeemable as some people are making it out to be...some guy he doesn't know asked him to help coup his murderous, invincible boss who has super hearing and might have heard their whole conversation. I'm pretty sure 90% of people are going straight to Homelander in that situation. A lot of it's the accumulation of his past behavior, obviously. But it's also a way more loaded situation than you're describing: his murderous, invincible boss is getting more unstable and sadistic every day, constantly demeaning and threatening him personally, and recently went on an unhinged public rant about his inherent superiority over all other men. This following a scandal where he was intimately connected to a literal Nazi. When A-Train floated the idea of stopping a down-tier supe from killing Black people, Homelander not only wouldn't consider it, but seemed to take pleasure in shutting him down. It's not a secret that Homelander is a dangerous megalomaniac, and there's plenty to suggest that he's nearly a Nazi himself. Sure, it's asking a lot for A-Train to trust some rando he just met in a conspiracy against the most powerful man on Earth. But also he knows exactly how dangerous Homelander is. It's not just that he betrayed Starlight and Supersonic; his decision is also a betrayal of his supposed politics, of his community in general, due to his own cowardice and self-interest. The World Inferno posted:I just got that his superhero name is a pun on the A-Train in New York and that he is "a train". Choo choo. The A train is also, specifically, a train line running through Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn and Harlem in Manhattan. It's strongly associated with historically Black neighborhoods in NYC. Packaged identity politics have been part of his thing from the beginning, is my point. Xealot fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Jun 14, 2022 |
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Jun 14, 2022 22:40
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Given that half of all superhero media involves a villain character of the format, "what if a heroic character, but EVIL," there is no non-dated version of the trope. There have been many evil Supermen and Batmen and Flashes and Iron Men and Captains America and even Spider-Men. The only move left there would be to introduce, like, a queer LatinX teen who is evil. And...you know, no thank you. The novelty of The Boys was never the Superman-but-evil part. It's the "what if the actual Avengers / Justice League was owned by Exxon-Disney-Pfizer?" part. A much more interesting take.
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Jun 22, 2022 23:54
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Elephant Ambush posted:bezos only cares when his warehouse workers go on strike Yeah, it's this. The show can say pretty much whatever it wants about corporate capitalism and I seriously doubt anyone at Amazon is auditing it, certainly not Jeff Bezos who's busy doing billionaire poo poo. Someone might care if it actively, somehow, threatened Amazon's business model in any actionable kind of way. But it's a piece of fiction about a made-up world with superheroes. A shocking number of conservatives have been watching it for years without realizing it's satire. No matter how brazen it gets with its messaging, Amazon doesn't have to address or do anything. They could shoot a scene where a suspiciously bald executive forces Homelander to suck his dick, and at most some think piece would flash across Bezos' phone weeks later, and he'd ignore it.
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Jun 23, 2022 01:14
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Lady Radia posted:hey Dalael with the racism red text, why do you think Black Noir and Edgar are brothers I bet A-Train is also Edgar's son. Unrelated. Don't ask why.
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Jul 8, 2022 01:25
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PostNouveau posted:Stormfront was arguably a worse threat because she was a Nazi, whereas Homelander wants to build fascism to glorify himself instead of enact eugenics. I hear similar arguments pretty often, and don't see the relevant distinction. Homelander is a supremacist. He's not specifically, uniquely committed to the goals of the Nazi party, but I interpreted his fake apology tour this season (and his eventual break from it on live television) as a rejection of that difference. "But I *am* actually better!" The reason he was so compatible with Stormfront to begin with is that he mostly agreed with her. Like, divorced from the "Nazi" label, the fascistic and supremacist worldview she held sounded pretty good to him. He does think supes are rightfully top of the pile, should have all the societal power. And not even all supes: look at how he treats A-Train, or how he treated Blindspot, or his condescension towards Silver Kincaid. There's plainly an ethnic and gender component to his biases, with obvious out-groups that he resents and wishes he could kill without consequence. Which he eventually does. I'm only harping on this because of the obvious parallels to Trumpian Q politics, but just because the form of his racist fascism feels less organized doesn't make the agenda behind it all that different from literal Nazis. The belief that society is full of inferior mud people, and that true patriots should humiliate and reject them, is simply not different. The idea that policy should enshrine and realize that worldview is an inevitable outcome of enough powerful people thinking that way. So, distinguishing it from "actual" Nazism mostly serves the supremacist agenda by making it look more reasonable or moderate when it isn't.
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Aug 2, 2022 20:57
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I don't mean to be this flippant, but "Homelander has a Black friend" and "but the minorities he treats like poo poo actually are weak or deficient" isn't the refutation of my point you might assume it is.
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Aug 3, 2022 01:23
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Mu Zeta posted:I firmly do not believe anyone thought Homelander was a good guy after the pilot episode. The "meltdowns" on Reddit/social media aren't plausible and probably fake or mental illness. There was a point I might've agreed with this, but I really can't give right-wingers that much credit anymore. I've read too many absurd and idiotic takes on TV or movies to believe they secretly do understand and are merely pretending not to. The Boys is just one flagrant example, but I've seen plenty of posts on Reddit or elsewhere in which people say, like, "Disney's going to make X-Men woke now," or "Matrix 4 turned the franchise into SJW garbage!" I don't think they're kidding, I think they're actually that stupid and that illiterate when it comes to media. Are incapable of interpreting a story's thesis in a meaningful way and just react blindly to signifiers without contemplating how they're used in context.
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Aug 12, 2022 20:44
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thrawn527 posted:Took me a second to realize he hadn't been on the show already, and I was confusing him with his Comedian character. Soldier Boy basically IS the Comedian to begin with, yeah. The fact they played father and son on a show by the same showrunner just adds to the muddled associations.
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Aug 25, 2022 22:06
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GD_American posted:I never watched it but now that I know Rufus Sewell is the main antagonist I’m going to He's not even "the main antagonist," really. It's complicated, and why the show is good. Especially from season 2 onward, where the writers realized that those who benefit from the power structure - Smith, Kido, Tagomi - are far more interesting as characters than boringly pretty people like Julia or Joe. The dystopian premise of "what if the Nazis won" pretty quickly becomes a meta-commentary on how amenable American society would've been (and still is) to Nazism. Smith is absolutely not "a true believer." But he's also not resisting anything, does his job because he's obligated to and doesn't want to jeopardize his position. His arc is about the banality of evil, which is far more fertile ground for character than if he was just some kind of mask-off Nazi.
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Sep 8, 2022 22:20
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Cranappleberry posted:Smith believes in power and through that lens, that the nazis were doing something right. I suppose he did, and that's probably also the way he felt about the US Army before losing the war. I guess I viewed this attitude as, "some things are out of my pay grade." He was comfortable not thinking about aspects of the political world he enforced. When faced with actual leadership and real choices, the situation for Smith looks and feels quite different. The ending to the show is unfortunately stupid as hell, though, I agree. Stephen Root's excited, "it's happening!!" was infuriating. What's happening? I mean, I guess NaziWorld is being invaded by multiversal variants of people who died there, but why? To what end? Why does this matter? I do think the stuff with Smith and his wife in the last season was pretty great, though. Sadly, Man in the High Castle is also a lesson in how seemingly obvious arguments are invisible to far right viewers with zero self-awareness. Tons of neo-Nazis watched MitHC as alt-history porn, where the Nazi super-technology was awesome and the utopian mega-architecture Berlin was even more awesome and the world with basically no minorities in it was the awesomest. "Homelander is a good guy" is perfectly in line with that.
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Sep 9, 2022 00:16
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twistedmentat posted:So you can just skip to season 2? I've rarely seen less charismatic leads than Joe and Julia before. There's some relevant plot in S1 apart from them, but yeah their specific story doesn't really matter. Spoilers if you care: their "romance" and Joe's conflict as a double agent barely matters later. Julia remains relevant as a SF resistance person, and for her interactions with Abendsen, so we're stuck with her throughout. But Joe quickly leans Nazi and has an unrelated plot about that, and eventually isn't in the show anymore. The show definitely understands after S1 that the "villains" are more interesting, and they quickly become POV characters.
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Sep 9, 2022 19:52
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christmas boots posted:IIRC It's a crowded elevator that stops at the next floor so he's making a joke likening to a crowded subway stopping at every station (as opposed to like an express train which would make fewer stops) Yeah, this was what happened. The NYC Subway has Express trains along many of the most high-traffic lines, and a Local which stops at every station. It's an insanely common and very old joke to make about an elevator, that it's "the local" because it's stopping at every floor. Goons are bad at context and assumed the joke on this NBC sitcom was somehow that Kenneth was racist and likening the elevator to a subway car full of low-class riffraff.
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Oct 29, 2022 00:37
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twistedmentat posted:God I hated that whole thing, it was so dumb and goons just insisting "no its racist!" as if they were going to get a cookie for pointing out racism. And really just pointed out how sheltered they were, as if “the local” would only run in, like, the ghetto. As opposed to just being a structural part of NYC literally everywhere. Several local trains service the rich as gently caress parts of Upper Manhattan on either side of Central Park, less than a mile away from the actual 30 Rock.
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Oct 31, 2022 18:11
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Mr.Acula posted:Looking forward to new the Boys and Invincible seasons is one of the few things stopping me from jumping off my balcony You’ll believe a man could fly. Invincible is fine, I enjoyed it well enough, but I think I’m full up on any new “Evil Superman” takes. Homelander continues to be the richest version of that, given the political mileage they get out of him.
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Jul 8, 2023 23:37
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Sure, hopefully it goes somewhere more complicated. I never read the comics, but I understood the show’s premise to be what if Clark’s dad was Zod and not Jor-El.
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Jul 9, 2023 00:23
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Why is the like 25th MK game called, "Mortal Kombat 1"?
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Jul 24, 2023 20:26
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Mr. Pool posted:But because you can't ever win in the the Voughtiverse, embracing their identity gets them sidelined because people are bigots and can't handle gender fluidity. I think a couple times times someone has asked them point blank "why did you just switch just now?" and Jordan really bitterly said "because I *felt* like it" . I get the feeling it is 100% not just because they feel like it, in fact I'd be surprised if we don't find out that it causes pain and injury the longer they stay in one gender mode, past a certain point. I don't know why there needs to be a lore reason complicating that initial explanation. Jordan being genderfluid and expressing that "on a whim" is just how GF people often feel. Social rules feel arbitrary to them, and it's frustrating how entitled power structures become as they interrogate that. I've gotten into plenty of arguments with people about being trans, where there's a clear demand that trans people "prove their dysphoria" to justify receiving accommodation. "Oh, you really suffered, so you shall receive special dispensation from the gender police." "Oh, I now believe you have 'a female soul' or a 'masculine essence,' so I hereby grant permission." But not every trans person has some tragic story of self-hatred and bodily disgust, they just have a loose sense of what would feel more honest or comfortable and don't see why it's anyone else's problem. Jordan being sidelined by Vought because corporate refuses to market an ambiguously-gendered Asian superhero is a totally reasonable plot conflict for them. Society barely tolerates gender nonconformity of any kind, let alone when there appears to be no inner consistency or rigidity to how it "works." Like, I could totally see Vought platforming a trans superhero, who's an extremely passing and non-threatening (and probably white) trans femme who presents that way 24/7. But Jordan is "too many things," which I find interesting and fairly incisive.
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Oct 5, 2023 00:19
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bobjr posted:Andre did talk about how he wanted to be his dad power wise when he was a kid, so it might depend on how much you can influence what compound V does to you. It seems like it’s relatively easy to if you’re aware, but most kids aren’t. I'm sure the lore is still that it's arbitrary, but people's powers feel motivated or ironic way too often for that to fit. It seems pretty fair to assume people influence it, subconsciously or not. Butcher devoted himself to hatred of Homelander for years, so it tracks that his temp-V powerset is identical to Homelander. Huey is passive and avoidant and anxious, and his powers are teleportation. Jordan is such an explicit queer metaphor, you might as well assume the V manifested as gender-shifting to accommodate a psychology they'd have either way. Like, boring non-Supe Jordan would still be genderfluid at normal-person university. KilGrey posted:When she’s having lunch with her mom earlier she makes a comment that she’s “in balance”. I’m sure she knows exactly what and how to eat to be a particular size. Not just through necessity but her mom forcing her to keep strict food journals. That must be tiring. She probably has to be exactly even with her calories in and calories out to stay in her “normal” size. Emma is a great character, because yeah that hits hard on every self-hating body dysmorphic show-mom story you've ever heard, but with superpowers. "Feeling exhausted to keep precise control over my calorie intake" is also a real-world experience for a child actor type, right? The consequences are just louder here. Emma's power being control over her size, and society demanding a young woman only use that in one direction is pretty apt. And it's ridiculous, because she'd actually have a really useful crime-fighting power: getting gigantic and crushing poo poo. She's marketed as "Cricket" because it's cute and innocuous, but a male Supe with similar powers would be, like, "Titan" or "Atlas" or something.
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Oct 12, 2023 00:10
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The_Doctor posted:Yeah, I can believe it was more likely a social media admin gone rogue than a black boy who grew up in the UK. Not impossible, but as you say, someone will say something soon if it’s not the case. Honestly, the fact his positions are unclear makes it feel not worth it to sort them out now. I think I'm inundated enough by transphobes who seek to dehumanize me on main, that some now-dead actor who may or may not have had lovely opinions that he mostly didn't express out loud isn't worth unpacking. It would be ironic for this guy whose prior best-known role was as a very gay warlock on a YA show about a feminist witch to be anti-queer or misogynistic, but assholes abound so who knows? He was a compelling actor, and it still sucks he died at 27.
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Apr 1, 2024 23:26
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