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feedmyleg posted:The dude is writing a play for himself to watch and reinforce his beliefs. He's not making a documentary. Yes. It’s a purposefully revisionist narrative. I assumed the point of the scene was to highlight how delusional and disconnected from reality Veidt has become since the original story. He’s still the same amoral bastard who’ll kill his underlings for minor reasons, but now he’s doing it purely to serve his own vanity. This play is some odd attempt to turn Dr. Manhattan’s story into some classical mythos he controls and understands, but he’s just doing it for himself. It’s very strange.
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Nov 2, 2019 23:50
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duck trucker posted:Episode 7 better just be an hour shot of Dr Manhattan's penis steadily getting hard. I'm watching pornography. 75 milliseconds ago, data comprising the current frame left the Pornhub servers. It's 2001. The actress I'm watching leaves the University Hospital in Prague. As her parents swaddle her in a blanket, it is 2019 and she is asking her stepbrother if he likes her new bikini. In 16 minutes, I am ejaculating. I reach for the Kleenex box.
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Nov 13, 2019 23:02
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Orange Devil posted:I guess we give them the benefit of the doubt for at least another episode. It's actually just a mental health issue, really. I guess the show is going to sci-fi the explanation, but Keene's plan is to go into an intrinsic field chamber to become like Dr. Manhattan? Isn't there a throwaway line in the comic about the Soviets killing tons of people trying exactly that? And they intend to kill Dr. Manhattan, something Veidt also tried and failed to do with an intrinsic field chamber. I'd love if their plan is actually that ill-conceived and they straight-up fail in the exact same ways. But I guess we're supposed to take them seriously.
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Dec 2, 2019 23:02
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Intel&Sebastian posted:It's been a while since I've read the book but from what I gather Rorschach probably was a racist, just not an all-consuming one. Like if you asked him he would probably say being a minority was a contributing factor to an already immoral persons immorality. Aka he's an average American conservative. He was, for sure. I mean, he was explicitly homophobic ("Veidt, possible homosexual...") and nativist ("Swedish love, French love, but not American love") and misogynist (IIRC he called Silk Spectre an "aging whore.") Anyone with a worldview centered on how "all the vermin will drown" probably doesn't draw an ethical line at racism. His whole MO is to circumvent "liberal" institutions in order to rid society of all the subhuman bad actors who are defiling it. Pure-grade fascist stuff...I see no possible way it isn't also racist.
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Dec 10, 2019 02:36
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Weedle posted:A computer isn't capable of thought at all. As happened in the Westworld thread: this is a fairly useless area of discussion, because it boils down to an Other Minds problem. Consciousness is a phenomenon that exists beyond science, because it isn't testable by any physical metric. There's no material of consciousness, no way to distinguish mere behavioral complexity from the lived experience of being conscious. You can't even "prove" that any given human is conscious, merely that they exhibit behavior that implies consciousness. A computer and a brain are complex electrical systems that process data. The question of a sufficiently-complex computer "becoming conscious" is kind of like asking "does a dog have a soul?" I mean, do we have souls? Are there Souls, as a general concept? How do you know?
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Dec 13, 2019 00:14
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I hope they follow through on how there’s an Old Testament God who tried and failed to make an Eden, then returns to Earth to experience a mortal life as a Black Jesus before allowing himself to die at the hands of white nationalists. It seems like there’s something they can do with that to connect to the wider themes of racial trauma and historical atrocity in America.
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Dec 15, 2019 10:45
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Collateral posted:Westworld parallels... I was thinking True Detective, but same difference. If they’re doing more, I seriously hope it’s anthology and not connected to this plot. And I hope they give the writers some real time to think about what they’re doing. Because pounding out more material in a fraction of the time and hoping people like it is how everything from Westworld S2 to Matrix Reloaded happens.
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Dec 16, 2019 00:12
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emanresu tnuocca posted:...nobody really talks about Breaking Bad, yet Seinfeld and Friends are still culturally relevant. I think Breaking Bad is still “culturally relevant,” it’s just such an individual character story that it’s hard to connect it to the current moment, which is so focused on systemic realities. Something like Watchmen or The Wire is going to feel important now for obvious textual reasons, just as Handmaid’s Tale did in 2016. But BB still comes up all the time. It’s a modern take on some pretty evergreen literary themes, like hubris or ambition or the rise and fall of a King, so there’s a canon-building aspect to it (“Walter White” is an allusion to those ideas now, like “MacBeth.”) And it’s an excellent exploration of toxic masculinity and male fragility, which are specifically relevant in the current zeitgeist. Think of how “Heisenberg” has also entered language, as a shorthand for someone’s dark, violent inner self or a kind of egotist fantasy of masculine competence. “This loving incel thinks he’s Heisenberg,” is a sentence that actually makes sense in 2020. That’s a rare impact for a TV show to have.
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Jun 18, 2020 21:09
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PeterCat posted:Also, "Dil is a man" is probably not an accurate description of the character. No. It's almost like there are words now to describe such a person's identity in ways that are affirming and respectful. Agreed on the soundtrack. I loved this show in general until the last episode, but the score killed it so goddamn hard all the way through. And it involved one of the best Bowie covers I've ever heard. Which is remarkable, because HBO also did another stellar Bowie cover this year (a violin cover of "Space Oddity" in Westworld S3.) Between Ramin Djawadi and Reznor/Ross, even mediocre TV shows are just far and away better musically than they deserve. The music is one thing that didn't disappoint in late Game of Thrones.
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Jun 29, 2020 20:57
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Incelshok Na posted:It's not something that makes sense through a modern lens at all, but if we put ourselves in the shoes of a black New Yorker in the 30s it makes a lot more sense. It actually has far more recent precedent* than the 30's, at least in New York City. I'm specifically referring to the Crown Heights riot that took place in the early 1990's, which erupted after a traffic accident between a Hasidic Jewish motorcade and two black Guyanese children on the sidewalk. After the accident, medical services are alleged to have supported the Hasidic Jewish driver instead of providing aid to the two black kids (one of whom died, and the other was seriously injured.) The black community there rioted, and existing anti-Jewish resentment within their community played a huge role in how ugly it got. You can still see echoes of that today. That part of Brooklyn is very Caribbean black, but is very close to a huge Hasidic population center. So, it's not uncommon to see arguments and altercations on the street between both groups. *e: originally said “provenance.” This was the wrong word and was dumb. Sorry to all. Xealot fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Jul 4, 2020 |
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Jul 3, 2020 00:58
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Mantis42 posted:It's kinda like how older black voters didn't vote for Bernie even though he was objectively the best candidate. Yeah, I don’t want to do that. A decade ago, I also had a sort of Marxist arrogance where I believed all race issues are actually just class issues, but if the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that racism exists apart from classism...there are very valid reasons black Americans may not trust white progressives.
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Jul 3, 2020 03:18
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Incelshok Na posted:The sleeper hit is the "Well, actually, the poor relationship between black and jewish New Yorkers only dates back to a specific incident in 1991, fully seven years after Jesse Jackson tanked his presidential campaign by talking about 'Hymietown' for apparently no reason." Yeah, I phrased my initial post stupidly, mis-using “provenance” when I meant “precedent.” Obviously it’s a tension with more than a century of history behind it. I meant to say that, contrary to the assertion it’s some vestigial thing dating back to the 30’s or earlier, there are very recent events that inform that tension in recent history. As well. Another poster implied that anti-Jewish sentiment among the black community might seem odd or unprecedented if viewed through a modern lens, and I was arguing that this is untrue; it’s also a tension that continues to reaffirm itself in younger generations now. I’ve met people from that community who are younger and black, and that incident is the thing they pointed to to justify an anti-Jewish bias. Xealot fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Jul 3, 2020 |
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Jul 3, 2020 22:43
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Bust Rodd posted:I tapped out after the first Neonomicon because I just honestly hated the art style. I was indifferent to the art style, but I hated the pretty egregious misogyny. Specifically, the treatment of the woman detective as a "nymphomaniac" trauma victim who both hates and loves getting raped by a Lovecraftian fishman. Whatever Alan Moore had to contribute to the artistic or literary world has long-since been contributed, and I'm really not precious about anything he's made. Bust Rodd posted:I get violent and desperate and impatient, but what does she do that is “evil” at any point... I don't know that "evil" is a useful term for describing Watchmen characters. But pretty early on, there's the scene where Angela "interrogates" a guy by beating the poo poo out of him as visualized by a swinging door. Likening her to Rorschach doesn't speak to her being all that "heroic," I'd say. The first few episodes of this show were incredible, but I also hated the ending. I think my problem is Lady Trieu, a character who seemed interesting and great at first, but who later felt like something out of a completely different show. The ending hit me as: "huh, the white supremacists are just clowns who played themselves. I guess the real villain was this ambitious immigrant the whole time!" I'm being slightly facetious, but it did give me whiplash that the white supremacists were treated as such a menacing threat for most of the show, to become almost comic relief in the end. It was jarring. Not to say I'm opposed to Lady Trieu being "the actual villain;" she's the Veidt analog, so it makes sense. I just wish it was done better, or more cohesively. I imagine their intent was to say capitalism is the real enemy (this tech CEO feels she deserves Godhood because of her wealth, and she'll gladly steal it from this black man in a cage because he's wasting it!) But Trieu being Vietnamese kind of buries that lede, how her interests are essentially aligned with the white supremacists on this point. How she feels her wealth entitles her to Godhood just as Keene feels his whiteness does, and this black body is totally disposable to that end. If I was going to script doctor, I'd want the show to conflate capital with white supremacy way more explicitly before the ending. Like, as great as Hong Chau is, maybe Trieu should've been more of an Elizabeth Holmes type, a white feminist tech CEO who postures progressive values she doesn't actually have. Maybe the couple she bribes into vacating their home is black, making her Tulsa campus the explicit result of gentrification. Maybe she supports Senator Keene through donations and fundraisers because he's "friendly to business" (did that happen in the show? I forget.) It doesn't matter what, just whatever it would take to make Trieu's grab for power at the end feel like part of the primary story being told and not some strange non-sequitur, which is how it struck me as I watched it.
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Sep 24, 2020 03:05
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