Second Unit Opinion

M/21/??? I like to talk about movies. Particularly Star Wars. Posts in quotes are from other people, credited in the tags. I guess you can call them second-hand unit opinions.

[ratliker1917]

the fact that almost every leader in world of warcraft is responsible for some atrocity is actually the most realistic part of the setting because that’s exactly what the heads of state of powerful countries are like irl. world of warcraft accidentally proves the folly of nationalism through bad writing.

[ratliker1917]

horde players and alliance players both get to be like “why should i even like my faction, all my leaders do is keep committing war crimes” and yes, now you should ask yourself that about your country instead of your high fantasy videogame military alliance

[bambamramfan]

It’s better when it captures the feel (such as at the beginning of this expansion) “our leader just committed a terrible crime. and now the other side is going to kill all of us for it, unless we band together unquestioningly and fight for our lives.”

[secondunitopinion]

‘Half the Sky’ is a fantastic book named after an excellent line - ‘women hold up half the sky’ - that until today I had assumed was some sort of wise African proverb.

It’s a Mao Zedong quote.

[sixth-light]

What irks me most about the whole “we can’t do what the audience expects!” attitude that has developed for big franchise stories is that, honestly, 95% of the audience isn’t thinking about it that hard. It says that creators are looking at the 5% of their audience who care the most, who are really invested in their work, often the people who care about stories and narratives in general…and perceiving that not as care, as a positive offering, but as the opening of intellectual combat. 

What a deeply tiring way to interact with the rest of the world. 

[brazenautomaton]

if nobody can predict your ending, your ending is shit and comes out of nowhere and violates the rules you have established

a narrative where the reader can’t anticipate the consequences of events is a shitty narrative

[bambamramfan]

Y’all are being so generalized that no one knows what precisely you are talking about.

The current wellspring moment of “break expectations” is GRRM killing Ned Stark at the end of book 1. And you know, that was really surprising, because the audience might have thought that no matter how foolish he was, that he would see it through, because he was good and just and the main perspective character. And when he didn’t that added tension to future scenes - you didn’t know who was safe. That surprised more than 5% of the audience, and I will gambit that it was good for the art form.

Now, since then, has there been a few hacks who essentially roll the dice just to avoid dread expectations? Yeah. (Though I’ll mention that Wildbow literally rolls dice for his battle scenes, and no one seems to be complaining.) Some of them are bad, but a) be more precise so we know what line you are talking about instead of implying that all narratives should be predictable and b) honestly most people don’t even fucking know those stories you think are so famous.

No doubt a balance between following narrative rules and changing things up is ideal. This does not mean that every popular move ever to surprise the readers has been terrible. The ones most remembered are actually pretty good.

[secondunitopinion]

“Write so that your audience can’t predict what’s going to happen next, but not the point that you’re subverting their expectations for no reason” is the literary equivalent of “draw the rest of the fucking owl”.

[bambamramfan]

(Reactions not written as they happened, but arranged on the timeline as if they were.) Okay this was a good start to the three hour capst...

[secondunitopinion]

endgame was very brown

[argumate]

yeah that’s right bitches, this is – and always has been – a Hitler was bad blog

[norsecoyote]

MCU Rewatch: Thor: The Dark World

Get ready for possibly my most contrarian take in the whole MCU: I legitimately love The Dark World.

I mean, yes, okay, Malekith is probably the single worst-realized villain in the entire shared universe, a character for whom “I want to destroy the universe… BECAUSE I’M EVIL!!!” is not even slightly an exaggeration, and who has a truly ridiculous power of Being Wherever It Is Convenient For The Plot Regardless Of Plausibility Or Established Rules About Interplanetary Travel. The Aether is also one of the all-time ill-defined McGuffins, although honestly post-Infinity War it’s significantly less so – understanding that it’s the Reality Stone and seeing how Thanos uses it both makes its various effects in Dark World less arbitrary and does in fact explain why Malekith is after it. 

Also, yes, Jane Foster continues to be a giant empty space where an actual character should be. I am bothered by that less in this movie than the first Thor because, this time around, she is given zero agency, and just kind of pushed around the game board by the other characters! Yes, it would probably have been better to just, you know, characterize her, but at the cost of some awkwardly regressive gender politics the film is at least able to make her stop being an active problem with the story’s believability (and it does some genuinely great things with Darcy to earn back some of its feminist cred).

So yeah, this movie is by no means perfect. But do you know what it is?

Funny as fuck.

Seriously, from the word Go, every single part of this movie (that isn’t one of Malekith’s solo scenes) is just immensely clever and entertaining. Even as it lays out a pretty unexciting plot, the dialogue sparkles, the actors’ timing is across-the-board excellent, and both the editing and sound design are working in concert to throw a constant stream of gags at you. The movie as a whole isn’t “shot like a comedy,” but there are absolutely sections of it that are, and they are just delightful – we were laughing out loud most of the way through.

Special mention has to be given to the final battle, which is the funniest fucking Big Action Movie Fight Scene I have EVER SEEN. Seriously, watch this:

It starts out so hyperserious and dramatic, and then… the cuts, the foley work, the absurd sequence of events, the framing (those cars crashing into the hillside on Svartalfheim…), even the facial expressions are perfectly pitched to turn what is simultaneously a hugely dramatic confrontation into a genuine farce. 

FUCK, it’s so good.

But aside from… well, actually no, as part of that cavalcade of comedy, the other reason I love this film despite all its flaws is that it finally fixes Loki. For as much as Ragnarok is a reboot of Thor, this movie reboots his brother, and actually gets him right. It throws away all the shitty, nonsensical “motivations” and “plots” he had before, gives him a new central drive and characterization that makes a shit-ton more sense, and finally lets him be funny.

Prior to this, if we ignore the Unbiased Reviews, Loki wanted to rule Earth, because… he’s mad about Odin concealing his true heritage, and now that he knows he wasn’t born heir to a king he wants to rule a random backwater planet because he deserves to as an Asgardian, which he isn’t, and so since he wants power he’s going to ally with an alien army who will somehow get way more power than him, and… yeah.

New Loki: he’s lost his adoptive mother, the one person he actually, genuinely believed cared about him as a person (even if he would never admit that), and in his grief he is desperate to earn the love of Asgard (and maybe even his idiot brother, too, whom he now sees not as an obstacle but a fun plaything). Yes, it absolutely sucks that they fridged Frigg (har!) to get there – although to be fair, she absolutely did deliberately sacrifice herself to save her home – but now Loki a) has a genuinely sympathetic motivation, even as it still pushes him to act like a dick at times, and b) is free to have fun, since he’s no longer trying to Screw Over Literally Everybody. 

Hiddleston in this movie is goddamned hysterical – you can feel Loki’s manic glee at being freed from prison (although the surprise of Chris Evans’ cameo is definitely a huge part of why that scene works so well). This movie finally gives us the Loki I didn’t realize I was waiting for through the first Thor and The Avengers, and it’s another one of those things where it’s just so good that it retroactively colored my memories of his first two films.

(side note: Anthony Hopkins does an incredible job playing Loki playing Odin; the way he mimics Hiddleston’s body language is so perfect and subtle that I realized “oh hey that’s Loki” even before I consciously noticed what the actor was doing to communicate it.)

So yeah. There’s really not much “thematic depth” to this movie to analyze, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t the single most fun movie to watch out of the whole MCU up to this point. Even now, it’s still only really surpassed for sheer joy by the two Guardians films and, of course, Ragnarok.

Just a pity about the plot, you know?

[secondunitopinion]

That final fight scene you linked reminds me very strongly of Doctor Who. Part of it is that the faceless grunts bear a strong resemblance to the Cybermen, but the weirdly low-budget look of the entire sequence, the focus on the normal humans caught in the conflict, and the fact that it’s a high-scope space fantasy battle set in a mundane Earth environment all make it feel like David Tennant is going to turn up any minute now.

[eroscestlavie]

i will tell anyone who listens about how besides being a loose adaptation of the illiad, the spongebob squarepants movie is about coming out

[eroscestlavie]

replace every mention of “being a kid” or “being a goofy goober” with “being gay” and the spongebob sqaurepants movie is about a young gay man who is denied a promotion by his homophobic boss, gets drunk at a gay bar with his friend the night after and comes to work absolutely sauced, then goes on a journey to try to deny his true nature complete with scenes where he and his friend try to fit in at a masculine gay-bashing biker bar, he grows fake facial hair (a “beard”?) and attempts to perform hypermasculinity unsuccessfully, just before he and his friend are captured and die they come out to each other and they cry a tear in the shape of a heart which saves their lives and ride back in victory on the back of david hassellhoff’s butt and then have a glam rock musical number where they radically celebrate themselves and at this point i’m not even making changes to the metaphors here that’s just what happens literally in the movie spongebob is gay

[secondunitopinion]

To provide a more substantive critique than people calling you crazy for (poorly but earnestly) analysing the Spongebob movie:

Spongebob lives in a cartoon universe which punishes knowledge and rewards ignorance (see Squidward), and his conclusion is “fuck it, I’ll be an idiot child and I’ll be happier for it”.

The Spongebob movie concludes with Spongebob basically looking into the camera and saying “I didn’t learn anything. Not only did I not learn anything, I actively refused to learn anything, and the fact that I adamantly refused to learn anything was crucial to my success.”

It’s not exactly conducive to a reading of the movie being about ‘coming out’.

What you’re picking up on is that Spongebob - from the start, not as part of a narrative arc within the movie - is an extremely queer character, albeit in a thoroughly asexual manner. He’s a sponge.

[timotaychalamet]

what’s that one movie that has you like “that’s MY movie” ?

[baroquespiral]

The secret plot of the Star Wars new trilogy

SuperMechaGodzilla: 

as others have noted, the current trend for the big studios is to begin with the structure of a standard narrative and then completely refashion the film with focus group testing and other modifications. The overall goal is marketing. In Jurassic World, for example, the narrative was originally about a bully who deliberately endangers his little brother in an effort to ‘toughen up him up’ (exactly the same motivation as Avengers 4 Thano, as it happens). This narrative was cut from the film because it made the kid ‘too unlikeable’. The result is a film where the plot is the same, but everything happens for no reason.

I’m pretty sure I’ve found the narrative that was cut from the new Star Wars trilogy, in which (even the parts of it I like) a lot of things happen for no reason. I like to imagine reams of production documents are now pockmarked with black bars where a single wildly unmarketable word was redacted: midi-chlorians. Since time immemorial, a species of sentient, psychic microbes has been capable of communing directly with the cosmic Force.  Humans encountered them and their amazing powers in some of their earliest off-planet ventures. Midi-chlorians taught - or at least, transmitted to - us the genuine spiritual core of the earliest Jedi teachings (interconnectedness and all that).  They also tried to teach us how to tap into the Force the same way they do.  But that was too hard, and kind of terrifying.  Instead, humans did what’s always come easiest to us: effectively enslaved midi-chlorians to use the Force for us. I don’t quite grasp the exact specifics of how this works, but the movies wouldn’t need you to either, that’s tie-in material.  Midi-chlorians don’t really have the stable personal ego humans evolved for our particular pack hunter reasons. They’re a kind of rhizomatic fractal hive-mind, and can experience others’ consciousness directly through the Force, and imprint mental states around them.  The basic Jedi teachings describe techniques of focus that prevent the midi-chlorians from distinguishing your subjectivity from their own while also issuing direct, undeniable commands in accordance with your (perfectly rational, of course) desires.  With the massive application of these techniques, their original hivemind was suppressed and they became symbiotic on humans.  The problem is they also imprint strong emotions really easily - without necessarily integrating them into the same web of context that constitutes a human ego.  So the Jedi paranoia of emotion is a precaution against turning your midi-chlorian-infested psyche into a giant echo chamber/feedback loop.

Absent a host they will float around looking for a sufficiently Force-sensitive human (they may even have devolved to the point of needing a human host to reproduce), and they’re now sufficiently dispersed to find pretty much all of them.  They’re also immortal - at least, in the same sense as any asexual microorganism; while their population was probably somewhat controlled under the Republic, the overall number of midi-chlorians in the galaxy is slowly increasing - and they pass from one human to another (often the original’s offspring) if their current host dies.  (Midi-chlorians are the reason Force “dynasties” like the Skywalkers exist.)  The Sith Rule of Two works because the remaining two Sith Lords deliberately gather the midi-chlorians accreting to others, and pass down these massive midi-chlorian swarms to their apprentices.  Darth Plagueis discovered the key to immortality through managing to imprint his full consciousness onto his midi-chlorians.  Sidious successfully suppressed his master’s consciousness when inheriting his midi-chlorians, but it was still there, and after his death, not only was Plagueis free - he imprinted & assimilated the remainder of the historic midi-chlorian bloom that Anakin Skywalker hadn’t passed on to Luke & Leia.  (Their birth, taking a substantial part of his midi-chlorians, is also the reason Darth Vader seems so much weaker than the Chosen One was set up to be.)   As a conscious midi-chlorian swarm, Plagueis spread himself around the universe, in two main concentrations: most of his original midi-chlorians, which he forced into a random occultist to use as a temporary body while he searched for an actually suitable host, mutating and disfiguring the individual who would become Snoke; and the legacy of Anakin Skywalker, which he sent to Luke’s new Jedi Academy.  The darkness Luke sensed was Plagueis/Anakin’s midi-chlorians.  He identified Ben Solo early on as the most capable of sustaining his full power, and slowly, slowly tempted him with the influence of small numbers of midi-chlorians, manifesting first as dreams and inexplicable feelings of identification towards Anakin Skywalker.  To be clear, in terms of moral implications this was little different from careful human-to-human psychological manipulation.  He didn’t possess or control Ben, which would have risked both rejection by Ben’s own midi-chlorians and immediately alerting Luke.  But as Ben became more consciously open to the Dark Side and obsessed with Anakin, he introduced more and more of Anakin’s midi-chlorians to his system - while also opening a line of Force communication with Snoke to divert suspicion if he was discovered.  Eventually Luke became aware of this.  But he was also under the influence of some of Plagueis/Anakin’s midi-chlorians - I like to think they activated Anakin’s own guilt at turning to the Dark Side, resonating with Luke’s conflicted feelings about his decision to show mercy to his father*, to nudge him into responding with violence instead of investigating further.  You know what happens next.

Now here’s Rey’s special Mary Sue deal: she doesn’t use midi-chlorians.  She discovered intuitively, possibly via Worm-esque traumatic ego-death experience at a young age, how to tap into the Force directly: that’s what “The Force Awakens” means.  This means her power isn’t limited by her midi-chlorian count, but requires a completely different methodology to harness - particularly, a different relationship to her own consciousness, characterized primarily by honestness with her own feelings, since she has the benefit - and risk - of a clear line of communication to the Force. All of this could still come out in the third movie, but if they were planning to they could have done the plot and thematization of the second a lot more effectively imo.  To wit: at the end, when Kylo realizes where Rey gets her power and they kill Snoke, instead of (as he had already been planning) assimilating all of Plagueis’ midi-chlorians, Kylo expels them from his body, choosing to take control of his own destiny.  As in TLJ, he’s still a fascist; he consciously chose to respond to Plagueis’ temptations, and even if he hadn’t, he doesn’t have some innocent “true personality” underlying Plagueis’ influence as if all those years never happened.  But he’s now more impressed by Rey (true self-directed übermensch) than Anakin (clueless dupe of Sidious, of Plagueis, of his own emotions alienated from him via his enormous midi-chlorian count).  With his own, newly awakened Force power, he beats Luke’s midi-chlorians fair and square.  Luke has accepted as much; after discovering Rey, he and Yoda’s midi-chlorians had finally chosen to burn the Ancient Jedi Texts that described the original midi-chlorian encounter, the basic mechanics of midi-chlorian assimilation, and the Jedi tradition based on it. Third movie setup: this is where the galaxy is really in dire straits.  Without any hosts capable of supporting his full power, Plagueis has become a literal plague, taking control of multitudes and assimilating all the midi-chlorians he can find.  The galaxy has surrendered unilaterally to martial law under the First Order as the only bulwark against the omnipresent threat of Force-zombies.  Some elements of the Resistance, including at least one main character (Finn?), has been offered amnesty in exchange for cooperation.  He’s reformed the First Order to be slightly less evil than it was under Snoke, and preferable to business-as-usual for many, but it’s still fascist.  Others are reduced to little more than nihilistic individual freebooters (Poe?).  But Rey is training a new order of Force-sensitives to awaken the Force within themselves directly and fight Plagueis by themselves, proving to the galaxy that there is another option.  (The only way you could conventionally resolve this scenario in a movie’s runtime might also be thematically convenient - someone unlocks the dormant species-being of the swarm itself.  Although this would violate the rule that you can’t actually show post-capitalism onscreen.) Anyway, besides the fact that nobody wants to hear about “midi-chlorians” any more, I suspect there’s another reason they suppressed this plot: because it would have made the anti-capitalist message too obvious. Midi-chlorians aren’t just a reification of the Force as text, they’re reification in-universe. Using them alienates you from your own connection to the life-stream of the universe. (obviously informed by @bambamramfan‘s analysis)

[secondunitopinion]

Reification vs Rey-ification, so to speak.

[theunitofcaring]

My biggest issue with regards to sex robots is the personhood of robots and potentially opening up a trade that is, well, sexual slavery.

Okay, fair, I am 100% emphatically against sapient robots. Sapient sex robots but also sapient warehouse robots and sapient toasters and sapient iPhones and dear g-d we are as a society nowhere near equipped to handle sapient robots and anyone even considering them is evil or very, very, very culpably reckless. 

But making robots in human shapes isn’t actually related to developments in making them more sapient. This isn’t a line we’re edging towards, it’s an entirely different arena of technological invention. So while I share the convictions of I-think-approximately-everyone that sapient robots are a terrible, terrible idea, I don’t think this is the right direction to push on to protect us from that.

[brazenautomaton]

it’s clear what we need

fiction about robots in society where the robots are NOT oppressed slaves just like black Americans in the 18th century, because they are robots

and every human is acting like they are heroically crusading against the evils of treating robots just like oppressed slaves

and the robots are grabbing the humans by the shoulders and shouting “STOP PRETENDING THAT THE PROBLEMS WE HAVE ARE ACTUALLY THE PROBLEMS YOU FEEL BETTER ABOUT YOURSELF FOR SOLVING!”

[secondunitopinion]

Star Wars (1977), et al

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998), et al

[memecucker]

Did Snyder direct a bad Superman movie or did he in fact direct a series of 3 minute long Superman shorts that were pretty good 🤔

[oligopsoneia-deactivated2018051]

Zack Snyder like Slavoj Žižek is actually just an extremely roundabout input to produce Supermechagodzilla posts

[sneeringimperialist]

[secondunitopinion]

Alfred: “A long time ago, I was in Burma. My friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So, we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never met anybody who traded with him. One day, I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.“

This is the man who ‘just wants to watch the world burn’; an anti-colonialist Robin Hood.

Alfred mistakes someone’s actions making no sense to him as their actions not being sensible.

[kropotkhristian-deactivated2019]

Is Heath Ledger’s The Joker an anarchist? I been seeing these articles from people that try to sound like they are experts at analyzing people saying that he’s an anarchist and that he isn’t actually mentally ill. Thoughts?

The Joker isn’t an anarchist or mentally ill. He is just supposed to represent the archetypal opposite of Batman. Batman basically represents “lawful good” and the Joker is “chaotic evil,” which is the firm opposite. I don’t think that “some men just want to watch the world burn” is an actually true statement at all, it is just supposed to represent exactly what Batman isn’t in the context of the film. The Joker has to be the way he is for Batman to be justified. It is why The Joker says “you…complete me.”

The only true anarchist in The Dark Knight is the prisoner that throws out the detonator on the boat. That prisoner is removing the possibility of a power imbalance of violence, which is exactly what anarchists are all about.

[kropotkhristian-deactivated2019]

Hey if you haven’t noticed, nothing scares the bad guys more than solidarity. Like literally nothing. That’s why all they ever do is try and split us up. They try and turn the LGBT community against the Muslim community. They try and turn lesbians against trans women. Lauren Southern was just caught spreading Islamophobic pamphlets that were blatantly attempting to paint the Muslim community as homophobic and transphobic. TERFs are constantly trying to paint lesbians who support trans women as somehow fake or less than.

Every time you show solidarity and stand with your neighbors and friends, you do a serious frighten to the folks trying to kill us all. So always stand up for each other.

[anosognosic]

rewrite this as written by a white nationalist and be enlightened

[secondunitopinion]

white nationalists are defined by splitting people up, and their splits are ‘very specifically us’ and ‘everyone else, including people who are 50% or more ‘us’’

this is why white nationalists are in a constant state of losing, because their definition of victory is actually impossible

[anosognosic]

All the groups mentioned by op add up to maybe 20-30% of the population of Western countries. In sheer numbers, white nationalists actually have a leg up here. And they are all about standing with their neighbors and friends.

(solidarity with your ingroup does not automatically make you the good guy, and oxytocin makes you racist.)

[kropotkhristian-deactivated2019]

Not solidarity with your in group. Solidarity with everyone together. White nationalists are banking on white people seeing themselves as white before they see themselves as the working class, similarly oppressed by the state and the ruling class. Solidarity doesn’t just mean “solidarity between LGBT people with themselves.” I don’t know how you could have gotten that from my post given that I talked about at least 3 distinct groups there.

[anosognosic]

In one sentence you say “everyone together” and in the next you draw a line excluding groups of people from “everyone” so I could literally not find a better illustration of my point than you’ve provided, thanks

[secondunitopinion]

it’s the paradox of tolerance as applied to solidarity. you can’t show solidarity with people whose creed is based on ‘all these people not like us are inferior/should be killed en masse/forcibly expunged from our society’.

and, yeah, there’s no shortage of communists who have had (and some who still have) this attitude, but as you can tell by the anarcho-communist snowflake, OP isn’t one of them