7th Station ~TV, movies, games~

[Celedam]

I just watched Dragonslayer (1981) on Hulu, because why not. It was one of my favorite movies when I was a kid, and I hadn't watched it in, well… decades at this point.

It holds up really well — a classic of '80s fantasy. A few things stood out to me…

- There was significantly more gore than I remembered as a kid, as well as some partial nudity. I'm guessing that I only ever saw the "edited for television" version when I was a kid.

- This was Peter MacNicol's first on-screen role. Yeah, the guy who is best known for playing a short, neurotic super-lawyer in David E. Kelley dramas (Chicago Hope, Ally McBeal). How did that happen?

- The various special effects used to create the dragon were bleeding edge at that time, and they still look good today. Small-scale puppets, large-scale puppets, full-scale animatronics, and stop-motion animation — all good. If anything looks cheap, it's the green-screen technology used to composite the effects.

- None of the characters were truly evil, not in the melodramatic way that we see so often these days. The king sincerely believed his bargain with the dragon saved the kingdom, the guard captain sincerely believed he needed to kill interlopers and wannabes because they would provoke the dragon, and the dragon honored its side of the king's bargain and just wanted to feed its offspring anyhow. Even the hero, the wizard's apprentice, was unreservedly brave and did the best he could with the skills and resources he had. At worst he was a little cocky, but no more so than other cinematic heroes of that time like Luke Skywalker. The only hint of evil was in whether the bargain should have been made in the first place.

- The idea that the last wizard had to die in order to destroy the last dragon, that it meant magic was disappearing from the world, and that the church and the crown both took credit for it in the end… that all went completely over my head as a kid. I can appreciate it now.

I don't know if a movie like Dragonslayer could be made today. Either postmodern writing would ruin it by "deconstructing" (undermining) the heroic archetypes, or the studio would ruin it by turning it into an action-heavy blockbuster because that's the only thing that makes money anymore. Sure, the MCU has revitalized the heroic/superheroic archetypes, but it also depends on almost sixty years of comic book lore. I don't see the same thing happening with an original story. Even Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings substantially rewrote the characters of Aragorn and Faramir to make them more troubled and less heroic.

---

Speaking of puppets in classic '80s fantasy…

[Celedam]

Some of us read The Rook by Daniel O'Malley.

Well, STARZ has made a series out of it…

Spoiler: show

I'm really not getting the same vibe from this trailer that I did from the book. Not at all. Judging by this trailer, the series seems to be a British spy thriller with a supernatural twist, while the book was the reverse. The book had straight-up battles between superhumans (I wouldn't call them "superheroes"), in which they used their powers at full strength to spectacular effect. I don't see those battles happening in the series, maybe due to budget constraints or maybe due to a deliberate change in tone to attract an audience that is tired of superhero movies.

And the extra note about superhuman trafficking seems like a gratuitous attempt to be politically relevant. That's not in the book at all, at least not that I remember. In the book, the Checquy often act as troubleshooters to neutralize other superhuman and supernatural threats specifically because they cannot be controlled through normal means. But even then, it's a secondary function of the Checquy; their primary function is counterintelligence against similar organizations in other countries. (For example, a rival group of superhumans from Belgium called the Grafters; you can probably guess from the name what their schtick is.)

Anyhow, does this mean in the series, some faction of the Checquy is secretly trafficking in superhumans, and that is the mystery to be solved? Eh, I'm bored already. This is coming too soon after Orphan Black, which had many of the same plot points and a much more appealing lead.

[Celedam]

Attack on Titan Season 3 Part 2: the battle to retake Shiganshina District and Wall Maria…

The first episode is now available on Crunchyroll and Hulu. New episodes every Monday until July 1.

It's done.

I liked it. Not much actually happened, though — the battle itself took only the first five episodes of this ten-episode run, so the last five episodes were heavy with consequences and revelations. Pretty slow going, but appropriate I think to allow both the characters and the viewers to feel the weight of it all.

And Eren's last line…

Spoiler: show

Pointing out across the sea: "If we kill all our enemies over there, will we finally be free?"

The fourth and final season is set for late 2020.

[esm]

Finished watching season 2 of Dark on Netflix. Been waiting for this since I watched the first season two times in a row back in 2017. It has many similar to Stranger Things at the beginning but it has a completely different tone, and after the second season I still think it's one of the best series I've seen in the past few years.

[Celedam]

In other news, Neal Stephenson's Fall; or, Dodge in Hell drops today. A quasi-sequel to Reamde.

I'm on the waitlist for it at my local library — number 18 of 20 requests as I write this, on 8 copies.

I'm about a quarter of the way into it now, and I'm not sure I want to continue. This is the first time I've had serious problems with a Neal Stephenson book, and they might be insurmountable.

Spoiler: show

In a nutshell, Fall is about the fall of the Internet as we know it and the rise of the Singularity to replace it. The story begins either in the current day or in the very near future, and then it leaps forward several years at a time to describe the milestones in that process.

Now, it's no secret that Stephenson pushes a sort of technocratic elitism in his stories: his protagonists often are implausibly skillful and heroic geniuses, and he ultimately wants to burn everything down and start over from scratch with his geniuses in charge. I didn't have a problem with that as long as his stories were "sci-fi" enough to get me to suspend my disbelief — in Seveneves, for example, it was all done to survive the shattering of the Moon and the subsequent bombardment of the Earth. But the closer his stories come to the real world — and the more he tries to base his characters on real, identifiable people — the harder it becomes for me as a reader.

I think I've reached my limit with Fall, because in it Stephenson is finally messing with something that I know better than he does: Internet culture and how it affects real-world sociopolitical developments. (Hint: It doesn't, not really. Internet culture merely reflects the real world, and poorly at that.) As a technocratic elitist who writes about implausibly skillful and heroic geniuses, Stephenson seems to think a Facebook executive and a 4chan troll can team up to flood the Internet with so much disinformation that civil society will collapse and the American heartland will become a "Mad Max" wasteland.

No. Just… no. That's not how Internet culture, much less the real world, actually works. That's a fever dream of Boomer-aged politicians and pundits. I really don't want to dismiss Stephenson as one of those, but I think he might have finally reached the point where no matter how meticulously researched his stories are, he is writing from a perspective that is fundamentally and hopelessly out of touch.

I understand it's satire. I've read most of the stuff Stephenson has published, pretty much as he's published it, so I understand not only how he uses satire but also how that has changed over the years. My point is this book, here and now, is bad satire. Good satire is plausible and seductive. Bad satire is simply absurd.

In the meantime, I've started The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker — also borrowed from my local library. We have a fantastic library system here.

I finished it before I started Fall. It was… okay. It was charming and well written, but it didn't have much of an actual story. It was more like a year in the life of the immigrant ghettos of New York City, circa 1899–1900, as experienced by the titular characters who were not only newcomers to America but also newcomers to the human race. The actual story occurred almost entirely in the last quarter of the book.

[Celedam]

In a nutshell, [Neal Stephenson's Fall; or, Dodge in Hell] is about the fall of the Internet as we know it and the rise of the Singularity to replace it. The story begins either in the current day or in the very near future, and then it leaps forward several years at a time to describe the milestones in that process.

[…]

Turns out it's not about that at all. That's all just a long, meandering setup for the real story, which is an inversion of Paradise Lost.

Of course the title of the book is supposed to be a clue, but I thought "hell" in this case was supposed to be a metaphor for all of the technological and social upheaval that would inevitably come with the development of the Singularity.

There is some of that, but the bulk of the story is in fact a convoluted retelling of Paradise Lost with Lucifer (Dodge/Egdod) as the hero, "The Shepherd" (hint, hint) as the villain, and natural law / moral philosophy / eternal life as the great evil to overcome. The development of the Singularity is merely the context for all of that.

Given what I already know about Stephenson, I think I can see where this story is going and I'm not interested in going there, at least not right now. 'Cuz "light summer reading" it ain't. Maybe I'll come back to it in a few years, when I don't have to rush to finish the book so that I can return it to the library on time. (I can't renew it as long as there is a waiting list for it.) But even that might be difficult because the setup — the first third of the book — is crippled by "current-yearism". It is painfully topical and on-the-nose, and it will not age well.

[Moh]

Marvel announced some new movies and a few Disney+ exclusive series' at SDCC this year*.

Spoiler: show

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*You can find the whole list on Twitter.

I'm interested in seeing "Blade" and that's about it.

[Shoujo Q]

^I’m hearing that Natalie Portman is going to be the new Thor and that seems like such a horrible idea because I just didn’t miss her in Ragnarok and she only jumped on board when they whispered female Thor into her ear. I’d rather Tessa Thompson take that hammer to be honest.

[Celedam]

It's straight from the comics: when Thor becomes "unworthy", the hammer goes to his estranged girlfriend Jane Foster.



The Marvel Comics division has made many changes like this (e.g., Captain Marvel as the central character, other white male characters deemphasized or replaced) other over the last several years, and it appears the Marvel Studios division is now going in the same direction.

[erilaz]

I was going to ask what the Ásatrú reaction is to all this, but I guess I've already found my answer:

https://www.change.org/p/marvel-comics- ... supporters