The gears of revolution must be oiled by blood, Moomin
I'm mostly doing stream of consciousness rambles about nerd stuff.
I will move from my original point and I will make some weird mistakes
Don't worry about it. I'm doing it for me.
“star wars is about hope😊” BITCH HOW LITERALLY NOBODY GETS A HAPPY ENDING, SOULMATES GET TORN APART, FRIENDSHIPS GET BURNED TO THE GROUND, PEOPLE RUN OFF ON PURGILL AND DONT COME BACK, MOMS DONT SEE THEIR BABIES GROW UP, CLONES TURN ON THEIR GENERALS TF ARE YOU ON ABOUT
I've said before that Destiny is genuinely my favourite scifi setting ever. There's nothing else in the world that's like Destiny. God I hope there's a Destiny 3.
wordle in 1: joyless. it is statistically inevitable that your go-to starting word will be the solution one day, and this is no more of an accomplishment than running a random number generator once a day until it gives you "1"
wordle in 2: misleading. you may think that this is the highest achievement, but it suffers from the same disappointment of a lucky guess that wordle in 1 causes. your second guess is a strategic choice, but ending the game this early just isn't interesting
wordle in 3: the peak. your starting word gave you some information and then your second guess contextualized that information into a solvable position. your sharp intuition and restraint is what truly separates you as above average.
wordle in 4: statistically average, par for the course, the baseline against which all other wordles are compared.
wordle in 5: you're sweating. you made a mistake at some point, or your starting word was effectively useless, and it took an extra guess above average to close things out. wordle in 5 comes as a relief.
wordle in 6: crushing humiliation. you have technically succeeded but at what cost. your thirty square grid will stare back at you like barrels of a firing squad. a failure in all but name.
wordle failure: never your fault. what kind of stupid word even was that like come on
Sometimes we’re unsatisfied with a thing we made because when it only existed in our head, we saw all the things it could have been and when it’s done we know all the things that it isn’t, but we can’t see the way it expands into a million new things when someone else unpacks it in their head.
Sometimes I wonder how many of the 90 thousand people who have interacted with this post have been like “I think I’ll go to OP’s blog and see what other lovely nuggets of wisdom they have” and then get hit with a wall of nothing but homoerotic drawings of the men from the Yakuza franchise.
A frustrated artist with a big colorful thought bubble labeled INFINITE POTENTIAL over their head and a pencil in one hand hunches over a blank sheet of paper and asks, "How do I pack this down into sometime I can actually share?"
Panel 2:
The artist looks at a small grey box in their hands and asks incredulously, "All that work for THIS?!" Brow furrowed, they shove it off on a second person. "Here you go, I made this, it sucks."
Panel 3:
The recipient peeks into the small grey box and colorful light pours out onto them. Holding the open box, they look around in awe, surrounded by the colors of infinite potential the artist had originally imagined.]
I regret to inform you very little of it involves Kiryu, but if you want to see Saejima making out with the old man who teaches him to hunt bears I got you covered.
Everyone's going to hate Chainsaw Man's ending but In four years someone's going to make a two hour long video essay that will make everyone really appreciate it, but in that obnoxious way where they pretend it wasn't sudden or weird in the moment
It's probably going to be about how the recurring theme of Part 2 was that Denji was absolutely with his new life, that he was constantly chasing potential dopamine highs and then finding out that they were more complicated than he wanted them to be or just not really satisfying in reality.
This panel will be the smoking gun. That the best possible ending for Denji isn't becoming Super Chainsaw Man and defeating all the demons, but going back to being a run of the mill devil hunter who is at least a little appreciated for his skills but also doesn't have a lot of responsibility. He just does what he's told to do, gets rewarded for it then enjoys his time off with the people he likes.
They'll juxtapose this with traditional shounen protagonists and how they always have a big dream they're always striving for and say that Denji isn't like them, and shouldn't be like them. Denji is an awful protagonist and that's why he's a likable one.
They'll bring up that interview Fujimoto did about how he wanted to make something like The Big Lebowski, where characters progressed and better understood themselves but it still ends in an inelegant and kind of absurd way because that's how life works.
And, yeah, like. I'll buy all of this. I'll appreciate the ending of Chainsaw Man.
I saw this post on BlueSky and it annoyed me. Not enough to pick a fight with a dude because who the hell has the energy for that but annoyed enough to make a big multi paragraph post.
Parts of this will be -
But I hope my actual point will come through all the shit I want to talk about.
I really love Bungie. Even when they're falling on their face and pissing me off I'm still going to sit up and pay attention to what they're doing. No matter how lame Lightfall and every expansion after The Final Shape has been Destiny is still the coolest setting anyone has ever made ever, and Bungie and I share a very deep love for metanarrative bullshit. Bungie, the nebulous company that has people moving in and out of it constantly, has been in the gaming scene for a long ass time and one of their recurring motifs is using the habits and tropes of gamers and gaming as part of their stories. The fact that Guardians are a collection of Gamers motivated by skinner box dopamine hits is an in universe lore feature, one that has been taken advantage of by the villains of Destiny multiple times. A lot of the subtext bullshit in the OG Marathon was commenting on the fact that Marathon was likely not the only video game they've ever played, or will play. Marathon Infinity directly says it. This world exists for you to play in it.
Bungie are also big lovers of PvP. Marathon, Halo, Destiny, they put a lot of love and attention into their competitive game modes. I don't have a lot to say to this, it's just a fact, innit?
I don't like extraction shooters. I'm not against competitive multiplayer, but the fact that in extraction shooters I can lose my progress really skeeves me an extra mile, and the fact that I can lose my progress because some guy who has more progress than me can one shot me when I turn a corner sets me off an extra, extra mile. I can enjoy losing, when I can jump straight back in and try again. In an extraction shooter you die it's over, back to the lobby with nothing to show for it. Maddening.
But I love Bungies story telling. I've looked up some of the Lore for Marathon, watched cutscenes of the Cryo Archive introduction on YouTube. I am salivating man, this is the coolest shit. This is so /for me/.
But it's also not. Because it's an extraction shooter. It's not for me.
I am not the target audience of Marathon and that's fine? I think we can all agree that it'd be pretty entitled to demand that all video games cater to me, even when catering to me would be at the detriment of the experience for other people.
But the attitude from this person, and from other people I've seen, is that Bungie fucked up making Marathon an extraction shooter. That they're chasing market trends or some horseshit. That they're betraying the True and Real fans by making the video game they wanted to make.
People are acting like Bungie doesn't know what the fuck they're doing when they made a game where the meta-story is you being reduced to a killing machine and manipulated by various shadowy organizations who do not want you paying too much attention to what's really going on and mechanically you're incentivized to kill and move on rather than stop and take everything in.
People are acting like Bungie doesn't know what the fuck they're doing when they made a game that mechanically appeals to people who enjoy "kill person, get loot" while simultaneously having one of the major factions of the game be a fucked up murder cult who openly do not care about Tau Ceti or Durandal and are just interested in watching the runners kill each other.
People are acting like Bungie doesn't know what the fuck they're doing when they've made a game in a genre where interacting with other players is generally considered a bad idea because it leaves you open for betrayal, then advertises the launch of the game with an animation where two friends who repeatedly work together end up turning on each other because it's easier to shoot first rather than open yourself up to betrayal again, and then exploring how incredibly fucking isolating and fucked up that is in all the lore entries.
People are acting like Bungie doesn't know what the fuck they're doing when they've made a game that has the recurring imagery of Conway's Game of Life where you, personally, the player, ruminate on if it's worth trying to subvert the cycle of death and rebirth by trying to work with other players or if death and rebirth are inherently baked into the experience, after they made Destiny where characters ruminate on if they can ever win against what appears to be a manifestation of the death part of the cycle of death and rebirth with recurring imagery of Conway's Game of Life.
It's Bungie! The Medium is the Message! They know what they're doing they made the extraction shooter intentionally! Bungie aren't "Giving in" to the psychos, they're playing with them!
This isn't even what annoyed me the most about this post though. That's just all the other stuff that this post spurred me to talk about. You know what got me pissed off?
Just the idea that the people who killed this guy don't give a shit about the lore. This idea that he's a real appreciator, and the people who are just playing the fucking video game are "Psychos", "Cheeto-crusted losers". That the people who are good at this video game also skip the cutscenes, skip the text and think it's cringe.
Like. Fuck you man. I get that you're tilted at getting beaten in a video game, I'd get tilted too, but why are you acting like people are beneath you because they're better at a video game than you.
The non-canonical reason is because Sembia as a culture is imperialist. The intention is for them to be the moral villain for a campaign set in the Dalelands, the rich but uncaring march of "civilization", looking to "elevate" the Dalelanders with their trade and exploit the Dalelands for its resources without a care for the pastoral natural beauty or the simple culture of its people.
But even in canon, the reason is that when Sembia was first forming as a nation there was a real "This is the new world" energy to it as various nobles threw money around to establish colonies, attracting all sorts of desperate people open to being exploited if it meant a chance to crawl out of the hole they were in, as well as cults and criminals eager to exploit. These cults and gangs took root, particularly the Church of Shar, and greatly affected the nations culture.
Loki: Agent of Asgard is one of the best comics I've ever read and you'll never guess who fucking ruined it
Companion piece to my last ramble because I learned this while writing it. Once again, this is long and pointless and a waste of your time.
Comic books are slaves to the status quo. Everyone knows this. Even people who don't read comic books knows this. No matter how much writers try to move on from tired played out tropes and revitalise characters we're always one massive cross over event away from sending everyone back to square one. There was a period of time where Lex Luthor was the Vegeta to Superman's Goku, fighting side by side with him even though they still loathed each other. Even recently, Lex Luthor went through a whole amnesia thing and became a legitimately good person and ally to Superman. But these don't last. Superman's arch enemy is Lex Luthor, and if we're going to have a Superman comic we need to have him fight Lex Luthor.
So when Loki died and was reincarnated as a child, taken back to Asgard to be Thor's sweet little brother everyone was waiting for when this kid will become evil again. All of us, including Loki himself.
And it ends exactly how expected. The Old Loki hatched a grand plan to cheat death and return as the loved child, unburdened by his crimes.
Save one.
Overwhelmed with the guilt of what he's done Loki spirals into more tragic irony. Despite being the best example of how he can never change Loki resolves to try to change. To be a force for good and be loved by the people of Asgard for who he is. And to better shake off the baggage of his past crimes he makes a deal with the All-Mothers, he will do their dirty work and for each task one of his crimes will be stricken from the record. In his own words, he will be remembered for what he is rather than what he was.
Would you know more?
That's our synopsis, that's what Loki: Agent of Asgard is about, but that's not what it's really about.
Loki: Agent of Asgard is story about the status quo, and why it is the status quo. It's about what redemption looks like when no one wants you to be redeemed. It's a story about fighting against the story already written for you. It's a story about stories, and it's fucking phenomenal.
I'm going to skip over the whole comic and spoil the ending, if you haven't I highly suggest you read it, you don't need to know about the history of Marvel Comics and there's only one or two weird cross over moments.
At the end of the first issue the villain is revealed, Loki from the future. Evil again. From the start Loki's mission is marked as doomed. Even worse, it is doomed by the All-Mothers. The Evil Loki promises them a golden future for Asgard, with a worthy king Thor on the throne and an evil Loki for him to fight. He promises them the certainty of the status quo. He does this because he wishes to make his younger self into him earlier, to not waste all that time playing hero and get to what they're supposed to be quicker.
And why? Because even though Loki did everything right, even though Loki truly became the great hero he wanted to be. He was still, and always would be The God of Lies. They would never really forget what he is, never accept him as anything else. He would always be the villain, the arch enemy to the super hero Thor.
But just as the first issue revealed the villain it also reveals how this all ends. It ends with Magic, and Magic as Loki defines it is telling a lie and making it truth, telling a Story to the universe so utterly, cosmically perfect that it becomes true.
Loki actually, finally, really changes. He sheds the mantle of God of Lies and becomes the God of Stories. And he does so by telling a story so wonderful over the course of 17 Issues that the idea of retconning it, casting it aside, returning to the old status quo feels wrong to do.
It's a wonderful story, but what makes it my favourite is the ending. With all said and done all good stories need to end with the hero confronting the villain, right?
And so our big reveal. The old and evil future Loki was still the same Loki who genuinely did everything right and became a hero deep down. All the theatrics, all of the super villainy, was a literal mask to hide away a deeply hurt boy now aware that no matter what he did he would never be accepted by the people he wanted to be loved by.
He went back in time and tore down everything that made him into what he was, and in the process gave Loki the chance to actually change for real. There's no final battle between the twin Lokis, there's only a moment of self care. Loki embraces his "Evil Self" and tells him that it's okay. He understands.
It's beautiful, it's one of my favourite endings in anything and JASON AARON TOOK A BIG SHIT ALL OVER IT GOD DAMN IT.
How you might ask? WOULD YOU KNOW MORE?
By just, bringing Evil King Loki back. As an Evil King. Completely shredded of anything that happened in the ending.
And even fucking worse, now he's got a Symbiote, and it's tied to that dog shit villain "Knull" everything has been pushing so hard.
And even fucking worse? Jason Aaron also brings back Gorr the God Butcher, who totally beats up Evil King Loki because he's so cool and awesome do you like the villain I made up yet do you like the villain I made up yet do you like the villain I made up yet shut up Jason I don't CARE.
And then he dies, with the narrator spitting out the key words from Agent of Asgard like "burning" and "stories" as if it makes it all make sense now in the wider context even though if you know the wider context it makes it all make even less sense because the point of Loki becoming the god of Stories was that a Lie is a Story and he's still the god of lies so he would still be powering the sun with lies and GOD DAMN IT.
I'm gonna rant about a ten year old comic for a second
Marvel Comics used to really, really suck.
If we're honest Marvel Comics have always sucked a little bit. A lot of dumb ass cross over events and "Comic Book Storylines" and what have you, but in the 2010s Marvel Comics really sucked.
It was happening while the Marvel movies were at their peak, and was basically the root cause of the entire problem. Suddenly comic book writers weren't just writing comic books, they were writing Marvel comic books. There was now a good chance someone could make a massive blockbuster movie out of your idea, someone could make a new character you made into a movie and you could make a lot of money out of royalties. On the flipside as well, now people were making movies out of characters only the niche weirdos knew about so these comic books got relaunched to be more like the movie.
I will never, ever forgive Marvel for what they did to The Guardians of the Galaxy, is what I'm saying.
But there's one particular storyline that I particularly really hate. Because I am an obnoxious nerd who has an arts degree, which means there is one thing that pisses me off more than anything.
Knowing that I could have written it better.
Fair warning this is a whole lot of nothing, it's a big waste of time and you're going to think I'm a cringe nerd and come beat me up
Here's our set up, Original Sin, a major comic cross over event that turned out to just be an excuse to push the White Nick Fury off the board for the sake of movie synergy and get Black Nick Fury in there, who is a completely different character for some fucking reason. Spoilers for Original Sin I guess but fuck you you're not going to read it it's bad.
In the climax of Original Sin White Nick Fury now has near omnipotent knowledge of the Marvel Universe, he knows all the secrets, all the truths, he knows the exact phase to whisper into a person's ear to make their entire life shatter around them. And so he does all of once.
He whispers something to Thor and the undeniable truth of it sends him spiraling, Thor immediately becomes overcome by doubt and becomes Unworthy. No longer may he lift Mjolnir, no longer does he wield the power of Thor.
Thor gets really depressed, gets a new character design that very suspiciously looks like something Chris Hemsworth could pull off easily as well as a robot arm like it's the fucking 90s again and starts calling himself "Odinson". A lot of his appearances are generally fine, and in fact leads to one of my favourite moments in comic books ever despite generally hating most comic books from this era (New Avengers #32, you know what I'm talking about).
But meanwhile, a new Thor shows up. And gasp, this one's a WOMAN.
This comic came out in 2015, and if you were around back then you might remember that things in nerd circles was a little "Tense", so you can imagine how well this went over. They tried to act like the identity of this new Thor was a mystery but there were only like three women in Thor's circle so it was pretty easy to guess who it was. It was Jane Foster.
Once again, here's our set up. Jane Foster has breast cancer, which she insists on treating through modern medicine and not Asgardian Magic because she is a scientist and totally not because it'd be awkward if Marvel casually cured cancer. During some shenanigans Jane is called to and lifts Mjolnir, she gains the power of Thor and becomes a buff powerful superhero. Jane loves using the hammer because not only does she get to be a buff powerful superhero she gets to not be dying of cancer. The big drama for the majority of the run is sexism. Odin is a turbo woman hater and Frigga is the real wise leader. This comic runs at the same time as Loki: Agent of Asgard where Frigga is a manipulative monster and Odin is the cool, wise Father who loves his non-binary child unconditionally so I think wires got crossed somewhere.
It was a lot of girl power which reads a little extra cringe these days in my opinion
But the big drama as it is revealed in the closing issues of the story, becoming Thor purges her body of poisons and toxins, which includes her chemotherapy. Being Thor is making her cancer untreatable. Being a super hero is liberating, fun and also a big responsibility that she feels she has to complete, but it's also a very big sacrifice for her. Being Thor, being a Hero, is going to kill her.
But let's dial back a bit, because what's Odinson's opinion about this?
Well he really fucking hates it
Odinson is absolutely pissed that there's another Thor running around. Bro is absolutely seething, and immediately assumes this mysterious new Thor is an enemy. Not just an enemy, a priority enemy, ignoring recurring antagonist Malekith to get in Thor's face.
In the end of this encounter Odinson recognizes this new Thor as a good person with heroic intention, and accepts that Mjolnir made a choice of its own free will, but things are still a little frosty with Thor. Meanwhile Odinson is visiting Jane while she gets treatment and showing a lot of affection and care, it's a fun dynamic, a classic in comic books that you can even see in Superman. The hero and their civilian identity interacting with the same person on two opposite ends of the relationship spectrum.
Back to Jane Foster though, with our reveal that transforming once more will aggravate her cancer enough to kill her. Unfortunately at the same time Mangog, a big evil demon thing that kills Gods has shown up and he's going to kill all of the gods. The only one who can stop him is Thor, so Jane transforms one final time, and rushes to fight and die like a hero while all of the men who doubted her talk about how cool she is.
It's a pretty cool ending in my opinion. You know, for 2010s comic books. A nice thematic idea here of Mortals sacrificing themselves for the Divine. The fact that at the end of it, Jane Foster is the hero and not "Thor". Really neat, I like it.
But, I also hate it. Because the most important detail of the whole thing sucked ass. The thing that set this whole story off.
For years we never learn what it was that Nick Fury whispered in Thor's ear to make him unworthy. Everyone wanted to know, it was the real big mystery that every Asgard related run hinged upon.
So what was it? What was the truth so undeniable that having it whispered rattled Thor to the very foundation of his being?
It was basically "You suck"
Gorr's legacy is one of the worst retcons in modern comic books and one of the worst Marvel movies, ruining one of the only good runs from this era of comics and ruining a literal billion dollar franchise and that's all I'm going to really say about him.
So this was underwhelming. People really wanted something big. A massive twist. Something genuinely paradigm shifting. Instead, it was something we have literally already heard before.
-
Before I tell you what I think Nick Fury should have whispered to Thor I want to talk a little bit about Jason Aarons. Initially I had intended to put myself down and say I probably could not actually write something better here. I do genuinely believe that the little bit of fan fiction I'm going to share here would have been a better move, a single change in dialogue that recontextualizes multiple years worth of comics and has the makings of one the greatest twists in comic book story telling. But it's also true that I am coming at this from an outside perspective with the benefit of hindsight, making use of throwaway lines and temporary character arcs as being brilliant acts of foreshadowing all along. Writing within a system like this is not so simple, multiple writers are writing multiple things at once, with not a lot of room for proper collaboration, meanwhile you have an editor standing above you forcing you to change everything to tie into the newest cross over event or make everything line up with what an investor wants you to do. Originally, I had thought, the stories of Original Sin and the various Thor related comics were written by different people, with the truth of what was whispered and the intentions of it being diluted over the years by different handlers of said truth.
Then I actually did a little research and remembered that all of these comics were written by One Guy, and that until very recently this one guy had never written a comic that I actually liked and in fact had written one of the comic book stories that I had hated the most. And that he was the one who wrote Gorr to begin with, and so this entire saga was in a way another chance to push his personal villain to begin with. So I'm saying this loudly and proudly.
This is better than what Jason Aarons wrote.
"Gorr Was Right" sucks ass. What Nick Fury should have said is:
"Thor will kill Jane Foster."
Immediately, this is a more interesting thing for Thor to freak out over. Gorr's philosophy was already examined, fought and overcome. Having an entirely unrelated villain go "He was right though" and have Thor become instantly unworthy is lame as hell. Meanwhile "Thor will kill Jane Foster" is upsetting in a NEW way. "The most important person in your life is going to die and YOU'RE going to do it." It's so completely out of what Thor believes himself capable of.
It also changes everything Thor does after. He renounces the name of Thor in an attempt to fight fate. Thor can't kill Jane if there is no Thor. But then a new Thor shows up, so of course Thor fucking hates her. She's going to be the one who kills Jane, not him. It adds a new layer to the drunk self loathing arc they put Thor on. Of course he hates himself, he's going to kill the woman he loves. And then, of course the tragedy of the reveal, that being Thor is what kills Jane Foster, and all of his attempts to wrangle that fate away robbed him of what could have been more time to spend with her while she was at her finest.
But no, Thor was just sexist for a bit I guess. Lame.
This storyline's lasting legacy is inspiring the final nail in the coffin for the MCU, and you know what? That's a fine legacy. That's a worthy thing. Cheers to you Mighty Thor.
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