I’m warning you: if you are a gourmet of any kind, turn back now. What you are about to hear about will absolutely scar you for life and probably leave you with nightmares about blackened garlic and beef swimming in lard.
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.
Okay, this is not so much a recommendation for the sake of enjoyment as for horrified fascination. It’s a channel devoted to the kitchen escapades of a British woman who… does things to food. I can’t say she “cooks,” because that would be a lie. What she does is not cooking. It might be some kind of food sacrifice to an angry god of food poisoning.
Imagine this: a woman sets out to make meatballs. Rather than follow the usual procedure of combining meat, breadcrumbs, spices and herbs, some egg, maybe a little cheese… and crushing them into tight little balls… she just tears off chunks of ground beef, dunks them in a thick coating of egg, and then plunks them in the pan, where they are left to overcook until they are deteriorating gray blobs swimming in their own juices that no person who isn’t starving should consider eating.
She uses copious amounts of lard, ground beef (often boiled… go ahead and cry now), poorly-chopped onion, lots of egg, sandwich meat, and so on, usually cooked at temperatures that volcanologists say are excessive. There is no moderation here – she cooks everything to hell, literally.
She also has kitchen safety practices that make me want to die, like constantly cutting towards her own thumb. She’s going to slice off her finger someday, and on that day, I will be there to shout “I told you so!”
I do have to warn you: I am not 100% sure that she is not just trolling everyone. A few of her video titles sound suspiciously like she is, and it’s kind of hard to believe that a woman in the late 2010s with Internet access couldn’t find good recipes online. Either she can’t/won’t follow recipes, or she’s cooking badly purposely, for the entertainment of the masses. I honestly do not know. If she is trolling, then her son is a master actor, though, because he voluntarily eats just about everything she cooks without flinching.
I do want to mention that I have seen people online arguing that there’s a class element to her food, and that the cheaper ingredients point to a low income in Britain’s lower classes. Therefore, they say, we should not judge her cooking so harshly.
I… disagree. The inexpensive ingredients she uses are not the problem; many good meals could be made from them by a person of any class who knows what they’re doing. It’s the handling of the ingredients that is hideously, insanely wrong, in a manner that – again – could exist in any class or economic level. You could give her Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen and pantry, and everything she cooked would still be deeply, fundamentally WRONG.
Speaking of Ramsay, he would probably have a stroke and die if he saw these videos, so nobody send them to him.
One thing that baffles me is when she was trying to make a Big Mac, and she argued that the different size and shape of the “patties” was because “they have machines” at McDonald’s. I don’t know how they do it at McDonald’s (I assume that Satanic magic and dead rodents are involved), but I’ve worked at a Five Guys, and we made every single burger patty by hand, and they were not giant round lumps of loose meat swimming in lard and falling apart.
Anyway, the only thing more wonderful than these food snuff films are the commentary channels offering their viewpoints on Kay’s Cooking. So by all means, check them out.
The Avengers film series is about as mainstream as you can get today – I could argue that Avengers: Endgame was one of the most anticipated movies of all time.
But back in 2010 the MCU was just getting started, and at that time, we got the best Avengers show – and possibly one of the best Marvel shows – to date: Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. While it has some obvious influence from the recent Iron Man movies, this is mostly doing its own interpretation of Marvel’s comics, and it is glorious. It also has one of the most wonderful theme songs of all time. If you don’t believe me, google “avengers fight as one” and check out the music videos people have made.
But aside from the awesomeness of “Fight As One,” this show is amazing. Part of what makes it amazing is that… it isn’t strictly a kids’ show. It’s more a piece of superhero media that happens to be appropriate for children, but it’s serious and intricate enough that adults will probably enjoy it just as much.
The first half of the first season is pretty much about bringing the team together “as one.” You’ve got Tony already established as Iron Man, since the Iron Man movies had already put him in the public consciousness. But it gradually introduces us to The Hulk, Hawkeye, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Black Widow (who is a recurring ally/enemy rather than a full-on Avenger), Captain America, Thor, and sometimes Black Panther.
And for big Marvel buffs, it does indeed have characters that Marvel didn’t have the movie rights to in 2010, like the Fantastic 4, Wolverine, Spiderman, etc, as well as less prominent Marvel characters like Iron Fist and Power Man/Luke Cage, who are absolutely wonderful and deserved their own spinoff show. And it had the Guardians of the Galaxy before that group became big, as well as now-established characters like Vision and Miss Marvel (now known as Captain Marvel, and much more likable and relatable than in the live-action film).
Anyway, after a supervillain nearly destroys New York, Tony Stark decides to assemble the Avengers, a team that can recapture the 75 superpowered bad guys who have just escaped from SHIELD. So they all move into his urban mansion, and have some personal friction with each other. Just because they’re heroes doesn’t mean they all get along at first – the Hulk is grumpy and a little paranoid, Cap and Tony have differing ideas about technology and what’s important, Ant-Man despises Tony because he fights instead of rehabilitating criminals, and Hawkeye is a little pissed at SHIELD because he was framed.
But those rough edges, that friction, those personality quirks are what make the characters feel so likable and real. They’re not perfect, but they are likable, relatable and heroic. When they’re hanging out, or having conflicts, or making jokes, it really feels like they’re reluctant but fast friends.
The story arcs that follow include a lot of really fascinating conflicts, like a time-warping conflict with Kang the Conqueror, a gamma dome that mutates everyone inside it, invasion by the Kree, the Masters of Evil, the murderous android Ultron, a trip to Thor’s home realm of Asgard, etc. The second season has an overarching conflict with the Skrulls, who sow confusion and mistrust among Earth’s mightiest heroes and make things a lot more difficult for them, both amongst each other and towards the world.
Sadly, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes ran for only two seasons, when it was clearly laying out plotlines and groundwork for much more. Apparently Disney didn’t want a story with good writing, intelligence, all-ages appeal, great stylized animation and well-developed characters, so they gave us the bland, simplistic, messy and juvenile Avengers Assemble instead. Bleah.
So yeah, if you can find this series, definitely watch it. It’s packed with plot, excellent writing, and it’s as rewarding a watch for adults as for kids.
I love sausages. Make your sex puns now, get them out of the way. I will try all sorts of sausages, with all kinds of fillings, though my favorite is and remains Italian hot sausages.
Which brings me to Ordinary Sausage, one of the oddest and yet most hypnotic channels you will find on Youtube. It belongs to a very odd man who sounds like Peter Griffin, and who owns a meat grinder and a sausage maker. With that meat grinder and sausage maker, he endeavors to create sausages both divine and satanic, sausages that no sane mind would ever think of.
Sometimes he makes sausages out of various animal organs. Sometimes he makes them out of liquids. Or full meals from restaurants. Or just things like lobster or candy corn that don’t belong in a sausage casing, yet somehow end up in there.
And yes, the water sausage, which actually went viral. Why that one? I don’t know.
I find water sausage and air sausage and ice sausage to be the least interesting videos he’s done, because… you know what they taste like. There’s no suspense, no mystery. As opposed to, “What will a Slim Jim sausage taste like? Or a candy apple sausage?” where you really do not know what the answer will be.
And these videos are, to put it simply, quirky. It would be pretty dull if he just ground up ingredients and put them in a sausage, but he has funny running gags, rants, visual embellishments, songs, and of course sometimes his grinder just gives up and stops working right because he fed it nuts or a fish skeleton.
Once I found this man’s channel, I spent the next few hours watching every sausage tutorial he had. Hopefully you’ll do the same.
Disney is pretty much the Empire from Star Wars at this point, only with less creativity. Right now their main exports, aside from Marvel movies, are terrible adaptations of classic books (Artemis Fowl, A Wrinkle In Time) and terrible live-action remakes of their classic movies that completely miss the point of why the originals were good.
But of all the bad live-action remakes, the remake of Mulan might be the worst. This is a movie that people were divided about before it even came out, mainly because it was eliminating the characters of Mushu and sorta-bisexual icon Li Shang. But others wanted to see it succeed because it was supposedly a more “faithful” and culturally-accurate version of the Mulan legend. More on that later.
Then it came out, and it was… amazing. Amazingly bad. It managed to miss everything about what made the 1998 animated film work as a story, and as a feminist work. One of the biggest problems was that it turned Mulan from a relatable, ordinary girl with immense willpower and strategic thinking… into a Strong Female Character with ubermensch powers who can do anything. She became Asian Rey.
And one of the worst aspects of this change is that the movie devalues female intelligence. The original (meaning the 1998 film) gave Mulan a story arc that emphasized her fierce intelligence as well as her fighting ability. It’s clear in the film that she is not going to be able to rely on her strength alone, because… she’s a woman in an army full of men, and men are, in general, physically stronger than women.
So instead, we are shown that Mulan compensates with her brains – her ability to figure out a way to the top of the pole, turning her disadvantages into advantages; her clever triggering of an avalanche; her use of her combat skills in unconventional ways to defeat her enemies, and so on. From the earliest scenes of the movie, we are shown that Mulan is a problem-solver, a quick thinker, and a strategist. This – along with her courage and determination – is ultimately what leads her to glory, not her brute strength.
Hmm, a realistic yet uplifting message for young girls, about how they can use their intelligence to stand as equals to men? How can we ruin this?
Why, make it so that Mulan succeeds through brute strength, of course! No need for that silly intelligence to succeed and become a legendary warrior. Mulan 2020, instead of featuring Mulan using her intellect to reach the top of that pole and retrieve the arrow, has her just floating up the mountainside with a bucket of water on each arm. She’s unbothered by the physical weights that are causing the mere mortal men to flop on the ground and cry, because she’s superior to them. Yay, brute strength! Who needs intelligence and problem-solving abilities?
And of course, they take one of Mulan’s greatest triumphs from her, namely her use of an avalanche to wipe out the enemy army. A great moment that highlights that brains can beat brute strength, and gives a female character a win that her male friends could not.
So what do they do? Well, the avalanche is no longer a deliberate act triggered by Mulan. Instead, it’s a dumb accident caused by the bad guys… because their aim is bad. Something Mulan did NOT engineer deliberately, and had no way of knowing would happen, and thus cannot be credited for because there’s zero indication that she intended it to happen that way.
They took away the female lead’s biggest strategic achievement.
In fact… Mulan is kind of stupid in this movie. At no point does she show any strategic skills or problem-solving abilities. Even her father’s demand that she hide her chi (groan) isn’t handled logically – she shows off her ubermensch abilities at the matchmaker’s, but later she chides herself for not hiding her chi… while disguised as a man. And she’s too dumb to realize that if chi is supposedly a male-only thing (groan) then she can use it openly while masquerading as a man.
And this lack of respect for intelligence even seeps into the ending. In the 1998 movie, the offer from the Emperor is that he wants her to be his advisor. He wants her to be a PROFESSIONAL smart person who will help him govern China wisely. In the live action film? He offers her a job as a personal guard. No smarts needed, just chi and a sword.
So yes… in the name of female empowerment, they made a smart, capable, likable heroine who proved that you don’t need brute strength to be successful…. into a bimbo who uses brute strength.
Man of Steel is a movie that was divisive when it first came out, mainly because the infamous scenes in which Jonathan Kent tells his adopted son Clark that he “maybe” should have left a bunch of other kids to drown, and later lets himself die when Clark could have saved him because people were watching. I suspect the point of the scenes was to suggest that Jonathan loves his son so much that he wants to keep him safe at all costs, but the execution was faulty.
Oh, and the Superman killing Zod thing, which wasn’t necessarily bad (yo, fanboys, Superman HAS killed Zod before. Remember Superman II? Because Supes killed Zod in that movie, and he didn’t even seem to feel bad), but which they kind of undermined by having him joking and messing around in the very next scene.
And yes, I have my issues with the movie. For instance, it drives me insane that they call that skull fragment a “codex.” It’s not a codex. A codex is literally a bound book. Don’t call things what they aren’t, Zack!
Pictured: Not A Codex
But the opinions really started going against the film when Zack Snyder produced the follow-up, Batman V. Superman, which had a lot of weird attempts to deconstruct DC’s classic heroes by having them all either be psychopaths or really reluctant to be superheroes. Retroactively, Man of Steel became the “bad” Superman movie (even though I’d argue that artistically in direction, writing and overall acting, it’s superior to most of the other Superman films — certainly Superman 3 and 4, and Superman Returns).
But honestly? It’s actually a pretty good movie. Yes, it has Zack Snyder’s tendency to overthink things and subvert iconic figures, but the movie does treat Superman as a truly inspiring figure who makes the world better with his presence. And while it is a slow build, it does provide a lot of interesting ideas that add to Superman’s mythos.
For instance, I really like the idea that Clark Kent had to essentially grow into his powers, and develop discipline in his use of them. After all, having the superpowered senses… isn’t entirely natural. Had he lived his life on Krypton, he never would have had them. So we see him struggling to cope with senses going haywire in seemingly ordinary circumstances, such as rushing into a closet to hide from the stimuli, like an autistic child who is getting overwhelmed.
Or how about his anger? I’ve seen people complain about the scene where Clark essentially crucifies a guy’s truck, that it was stupid of him to do that. But… think about it. Clark Kent is a guy who has never been able to express his anger when people treat him badly. He’s been treated as a freak, a weirdo, a victim, and lived his life in fear of others. He has never once fought back, no matter what, because he knows his strength would kill anyone he attacked. This is the only way he can express his anger, and he’s probably bottled up a lot, especially if he blamed himself for his father’s death.
This is something that not many Superman stories address. Clark Kent/Kal-El may be an alien, but his heart is very human. He can be angry. He’s allowed to feel anger. Anyone who is mistreated will feel anger. And yet, we see him as someone whose dedication to not hurting others leads him to stand there and take the abuse rather than exerting his power.
In a sense, it’s part of his arc, because we see him freed from his anger and misery when he finally discovers who he truly is. After Jor-El gives him his pep talk, Clark/Kal-El seems newly at-peace and happy for the first time.
Which brings me to another thing I like: Supes’ first flight. It’s not so much the animation of the flying itself, which is… you know, it’s good. What I like is Clark’s reaction to flying for the first time — we see him laughing giddily with exhilaration, like a child who has just learned how to do something. It’s really very adorable.
This is more a personal like than an objective point, but I also really liked the design work for the Kryptonian clothing and ships — they gave the feeling of immense complexity and technological advancement that had fallen into decadence and decay.
I’m not going to go into a full-length pros-and-cons analysis of Man of Steel — not right now, anyway — but I wanted to note the things that were, in my opinion, good from a storytelling perspective and a character development perspective.
I feel like a lot of the reactions to Clark’s development in Man of Steel is based on this idea that Superman is perfect, and wouldn’t experience doubts or anger or whatever. And that’s not really conducive to good storytelling. I’m not saying that pure-hearted, noble characters cannot exist and should be subverted whenever possible, because that is not the case. But you can have pure-hearted, noble characters make mistakes and struggle. It doesn’t make them any less good.
A good example is Captain America in the movie Civil War. The climactic battle is sparked off when it’s revealed that Bucky killed Tony’s parents many years ago, and — more hurtful to Tony — Cap knew about it and did not tell him. This is not done out of malice, but because Cap feared what Tony’s reaction would be, especially since Bucky was brainwashed at the time the murders took place.
So do we see Cap as less of a noble, pure-hearted figure because he did that? No, for two reasons:
It was essentially a mistake, and a mistake that any one of us might make, because it’s in kind of a moral grey area. Should you reveal all and risk someone doing something terrible for revenge on an innocent person, or should you keep an important secret from someone who has a right to know? I don’t think there’s a clear-cut “right” answer.
He apologizes. He admits wholeheartedly that he was completely in the wrong and he does not make any excuses.
And that’s kind of how I see Superman in Man of Steel. He’s noble and pure of heart, but it doesn’t mean he’s devoid of internal struggle and personal flaws. A person can inspire hope and be a hero while still stumbling and getting back up again.
At the very least, Man of Steel should be commended for at least trying some angles that previous adaptations hadn’t, and trying to think about how it would be to grow up with superhuman powers. I do not wholly embrace Zack Snyder’s approach to superheroes, except maybe in Watchmen, but I don’t believe his depiction of Superman is a failure either.
There are a lot of online cooking shows that focus on foods from other countries, or relatively obscure foods, such as EmmyMadeInJapan.
But I recently found out about a relative new Youtube show called Tasting History, which focuses on relatively obscure dishes… because they’re from centuries or even millennia ago, as well as often from different cultures. Ever had syllabub, a foodstuff that sounds like it was named by a drunken Wolverine? Wonder what King Alfred burned? Want to make super-historically-accurate tortillas? Want to know the authentic way to prepare the drink of Grecian heroes?
And our host doesn’t just show us how to prepare these dishes, he gives the history and context of the dishes, as well as highlighting the obscure ingredients that were common at the time. For instance, in one episode he prepares Parthian chicken, and not only explains the importance of the unusual ingredients like lovage and asafoetida, but also the significance and the societal role of the Parthian empire.
So give his videos a try, and be sure to subscribe if you like what you see. He seems like a cool guy, and I’m still checking out his backlog of videos.
Which also brings me to Griffin and Liang’s complaint about Eowyn having her “happily ever after.” They managed to completely miss the entire point of everything that the good guys do at the end of the war. Eowyn turning away from her fighting days at the conclusion of the story is not just about her becoming a wifey. It’s about her choosing to embrace life rather than death, about creating something new and good and wholesome rather than seeking out martial glory.
Again, this is a thing that all the male characters do. Aragorn is rebuilding Gondor after its devastating war; Faramir is doing likewise to Ithilien; Legolas brings in a bunch of Wood-Elves to help fix the place up, and Gimli brought in Dwarves to fix up the war damage to Minas Tirith and Helm’s Deep and build a whole new kingdom. And of course, the hobbits return to the Shire and find it’s been wrecked by Saruman and his human lackeys, so once they drive them out, they have to restore the Shire to its former glory, which Sam plays a big part in, since he has a box of special Elven dirt and a mallorn seed. He literally causes the Shire’s plant life to return.
This is what Tolkien thought should happen after a war: not more fighting, but repairing the damage from the war and building things that are better and more noble. Everybody in his book takes part in this. So why is the woman expected to stay a warrior and keep slaying, when all the men are busy fixing stuff up and moving past the killing and death to peaceful lives?
Eowyn’s character arc is not about how she becomes a warrior and stays one forever because WOMAN FIGHTING EMPOWERED. That way, in Tolkien’s world, just leads to decay, blood, death and loss. Instead she embraces a new life of rebuilding and growth and life, which includes embracing romantic love. She even says at the end,
“I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, Return of the King
Faramir even highlights this plan by saying,
“And if she will, then let us cross the River and in happier days let us dwell in fair Ithilien and there make a garden. All things will grow with joy there, if the White Lady comes.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, Return of the King
Furthermore, a sane person would not see Eowyn getting married as being somehow a bad thing. Not only is it her embracing life rather than her suicidal rush towards death, but her relationship with Faramir is depicted as being one of equals. He respects her both as a woman and as a warrior, seeing no conflict between those two things, but wanting her to be happy and fulfilled in a way that fighting ultimately won’t make her.
Their relationship also makes sense because they were both recovering from similar experiences when they died: feelings of alienation and rejection, seeing their civilizations crumble from the corruption of outside forces, the recent death of father figures, and the Black Breath. Yeah, Tolkien could have outlined their relationship more, but her connection with Faramir goes a lot deeper than Liang’s contemptuous “Tolkien thinks women should get married to ANY man available.” They have a lot of similarities to build on, and unlike with Aragorn, she gets to know him as a person and not just crush on him because he’s an easy way out of a life she can’t stand anymore.
At the same time, Faramir is a more optimistic and sunny person than Eowyn, who tends to be kind of dark and moody. He lifts her up. He also provides a perspective for Eowyn beyond that of the Rohirrhim, where great deeds in battle are glorified. Gondor’s a little more sophisticated, and gives her an opportunity to learn to be something more positive than a warrior.
Faramir makes her a better, happier person by being who he is, and that’s ultimately a sign of a healthy, good relationship. Turning aside from being a shieldmaiden and marrying Faramir are part of a whole “deciding to live” change in Eowyn’s personality. You know, character growth. Something you don’t find in a lot of poorly-written characters that Griffin would define as “strong female characters.”
And even if Tolkien wanted to marry off his characters for a happy ending… so what? Is that so bad? Would Griffin and Liang have preferred it if Eowyn had just been miserable and lonely at the end of the trilogy? I already outlined why the “Eowyn stays a warrior and goes around killing stuff” thing was not going to fly in Tolkien’s world, so precisely why shouldn’t she get married?
This is why interpretation of a text from a particular political perspective is not the sole way you should look at it. Unless you’re very well-informed and dedicated to fairness and research, you can end up attributing motives and attitudes to the text and the author that are not fair or just, and you can end up bitching about things that are not actually problems. Like when you get upset when a female character does something that THE MEN ALSO DO, or when you totally ignore how a character’s actions dovetail with the attitudes and beliefs of the author.
That’s ultimately why I can’t take Griffin or Liang’s outrage seriously. Their feminist analysis is so shallow, so blinkered. They don’t think deeply about why Tolkien would have written Eowyn this way, they just condemn it because it doesn’t slavishly follow “strong woman” cliches and have Eowyn turn into Xena.
Seriously, how am I supposed to take “scholars” seriously when they can’t think outside of an incredibly narrow political viewpoint, or interpret a text by actual analysis? Major fail, you guys.
J.R.R. Tolkien is sometimes criticized for his female characters not being numerous or prominent enough. Despite this, he created the character of Eowyn, a warrior woman who disguises herself as a man so she can ride into battle alongside her brother and uncle, and was actually Aragorn’s love interest in earlier drafts. I read somewhere that Eowyn was created by Tolkien so his daughter would have a character to look up to, but I haven’t been able to find a source for it.
Anyway, Eowyn was an interesting and well-developed character that Tolkien clearly had some affection for. And she was treated with respect: her yearning to go fight and the unfairness of being left behind is treated sympathetically by both Tolkien and his characters, and never once is she dismissed because of her gender. Hell, she’s given the honor of killing the second most powerful bad guy in Middle-Earth (once Saruman lost his power) — even Aragorn didn’t get a memorable kill like that!
But when I glanced at her wikipedia page, I saw that feminist Peggy Griffin apparently claimed that Eowyn almost qualified as a “strong female character” (her exact phrasing) but didn’t because she decides to turn away from fighting and marry Faramir. The sneering implication of her text is that Eowyn is just being shoved into a romantic role with some random guy (not one of any importance), now that she’s done “playing” as a warrior.
What. A. Crock.
First, I do NOT like the stock “strong female character who wants to be a warrior, wears armor and defies authority” as an archetype, because it’s increasingly antithetical to good writing. It produces characters like the live-action Mulan, who has no flaws, no weaknesses, no identifiable qualities, no real obstacles to overcome, and thus flopped epically as a character because she was being compared to the well-developed, intelligent, hard-working, likable character from the 1990s. I’m not saying the “strong female character” archetype can’t be done well, but she needs to have more than “I rebel against all authority and I dress like a dude! Me so empowered!”
A female character should be written to be a good character first, and a woman second. Female characters should have to work for their triumphs, train, struggle, persevere, and work against their personal flaws in order to grow and become better (or if villains, possibly worse) people. Same as male characters. A good example is Leia from the original Star Wars trilogy: she was smart, capable, dynamic, strong-willed and an excellent leader on and off the battlefield, but she also had some personal flaws she had to overcome before she could find happiness. She had a bad temper (presumably inherited from her father) that often made her very snappish, and she had difficulty in Empire Strikes Back with expressing her deeper feelings that she has to work past (which she has, by the beginning of Return of the Jedi, which also coincides with the subsidence of her anger).
So it pisses me off that Ms. Griffin dismisses Eowyn’s journey just because it involves falling in love and retiring from the battlefield. You know why that isn’t an antifeminist thing to do?
Because all of the men do it.
Okay, not all the men get married at the end, but a substantial portion of the cast does. Aragorn gets married within a year, as does Faramir (obviously, since he married Eowyn), and Sam. Even Eowyn’s brother Eomer immediately starts sniffing around the Gondorian ladies in order to find himself a queen as fast as possible. Merry and Pippin didn’t get married to their wives right away (especially since Pippin is still technically a kid when the war ends) but they do settle down and get married, and later become the respective leaders of their clans.
And precisely why should Eowyn make being a warrior a way of life? All the men stop fighting when the war ends. Sure, some of them have to have some small-scale, brief conflicts because they have kingdoms and the Shire, and bad guys will inevitably attack. But none of the male characters continue fighting as a lifestyle after the war. And yet Griffin and her sneering cohort Liang claim that the ONLY reason a woman would quit her martial pursuits and get married is because she’s being forced into subservient domesticity under the patriarchy.
That’s because neither of them understand how Tolkien thought… and I suspect that is because neither of them has ever been a soldier, or even probably talked to one. Tolkien was a soldier, in the most hideously wasteful, pointless, poorly-handled wars in the history of the human race. He did not think that war and fighting were things that people — male or female — should do as a full-time pursuit, as a way of life. He thought that after the war was over, then people go home, get married and live peaceful lives.
Eowyn is literally being criticized for being treated exactly the same as the male characters. It probably never would have even occurred to Tolkien that he should write her eschewing marriage, donning a metal bra and riding around looking for people to kill. Not because he wanted to deprive a female character of power, but because it literally would not have occurred to him that anybody should do that. It’s not a matter of male vs. female, it’s just how he thought everyone should live.
That’s because Tolkien didn’t think of fighting as empowering, because he wasn’t an idiot. He knew that being a warrior was not just dangerous, but painful, messy, and capable of taking a terrible toll on a person (presumably he witnessed the shellshock victims after the wars). He knew that some people might find fame and honor on the battlefield with impressive deeds, but he didn’t believe that fighting should happen for its own sake. The male characters of Lord of the Rings only ever fight to save the world, not because they think it makes them look awesome.
Consider this quote:
“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend…”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
That quote, by the way, is by the male character that Liang dismisses as “any” man as if he had no importance. I think being the author’s mouthpiece on the morals and purpose of war is probably something reserved for important characters. Especially when the author specifically says that he identifies the most with that character… but hey, I’m not a “feminist scholar.” I just do research.
(Tolkien also didn’t have Eowyn dress as a man as some kind of feminist political statement — her dressing like a guy was purely practical, because she had to blend in with a force of men)
They also managed to miss the fact that Eowyn’s lust for battle-based glory is not depicted as a good thing. Eowyn’s longing for glory on the battlefield is at least partially based on suicidal depression and her frustrations over having to take care of her aged uncle, while her cousin died and her brother was exiled. Eomer suffered the same experiences, but he was able to go out and do something productive about it, because he was a man. By the time Eowyn kills the Witch-King, she’s pretty screwed up from months or YEARS of this treatment.
She’s not trying to fight from a healthy head-space — she’s trying to go out in a blaze of glory, after being trapped by her struggles in a country threatened with decay, because she sees nothing worthwhile in the life of a protector and leader off the battlefield. Aragorn explains in the Houses of Healing that she her crush on him was because he represented escape from Rohan and a chance for great deeds. That is not healthy.
And yet Tolkien is still completely sympathetic to her desires and wishes, even though they are not really in tandem with his own views on warfare.
“But who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all her life seemed shrinking, and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in?”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
I can’t say for sure, but Tolkien probably saw a lot of women who wanted to do things, and had the spirit and inner strength to accomplish them, but were constrained by society’s gender roles. Hell, he worked at Oxford — he probably saw a lot of this sort of thing. And he clearly had sympathy for them and their struggles.
And yet, Griffin and Liang just see it as “herp derp, woman fighting good, woman getting married bad, fighting is empowering, herp derp!”
On Youtube, I’m subscribed to a few comic-book related channels (Linkara, obviously), and I recently stumbled across a guy called Comic Tropes, who does retrospectives, reviews, histories and trope analyses of various comic books. Not just DC and Marvel, although obviously he focuses mostly on those.
He’s got a lot of energy, and he does some fun little self-competitions like when he counts the tropes in a given creator’s comic book, and he drinks something weird whenever an individual trope comes up. In one video, for instance, he drinks different flavors of moonshine. And he’s very fair-minded, such as when he examined whether Rob Liefeld had improved over the years.
If you enjoy Linkara or ComicsDrake or other such reviewers, then please check out this guy, and preferably subscribe.
Venom is probably one of my favorite movies that is not… very good. I fully acknowledge that it isn’t a particularly good movie, but I do find it very entertaining and diverting.
A lot of that is due to Tom Hardy in the dual role of Eddie Brock and Venom, which is… really good. His accent is strange, but he does a really excellent job with the odd performance required of him.
However, it does show some signs of being a rewrite of a rewrite. For instance, the beginning of the movie sees the symbiote Riot in the body of a dying American astronaut. He’s loaded into a Malaysian ambulance and is being driven to the nearest city, when he decides to hop into the body of the accompanying EMT, presumably because the astronaut is too far gone. So far so good.
But for some reason, the first thing he does after possessing the EMT is… kill the driver… while the ambulance is still moving. Unsurprisingly, the ambulance is wrecked. Why did he do that? If he had just possessed the EMT and sat there patiently, he would have gotten to the nearest city (his intended destination) in a very short amount of time. By killing the driver and causing the vehicle to flip, he made it so he has to WALK to the nearest city, which takes a considerable amount of time and energy, especially since he has to fix the EMTs broken leg.
And of course, there’s the infamous timeskip error. After reaching the nearby city, Riot consumes some eels and kills various innocent Malaysian townspeople, only sparing an elderly lady. He swaps bodies (for some reason), possessing the elderly lady… and there’s immediately a six month timeskip. A few scenes later, we see Riot-as-elderly-lady again, at an airport. What WAS he doing for those six months? Playing shuffleboard? Griping at the grandkids with their Twitters and TikToks? Talking about how much better things were in her day?
Riot’s questionable choices kind of continue when he gets to San Francisco, now in the body of a little blonde girl who just… walks right into the Life Foundation building. Wouldn’t it be easier to swap out into a security guard and not have to worry about someone trying to stop Riot on the way in, and possibly setting off the alarm?
Then again, the security at the Life Foundation is not very good, since obviously Eddie was able to break all the way into the cells with the alien-infected people. Eh, I guess they just wanted the creepy factor of a possessed little girl sauntering up to Riz Ahmed, rather than Carlton Drake being chased through the building by a burly security guard.
But now, something positive.
A lot is said about the relationship between Eddie and Venom, and I’ll admit that it is a wonderful odd-couple relationship. But I also like the interactions between Eddie and Dan, the man is now dating Eddie’s former fiancee, Anne.
Now, in most movies, the Other Man is a douchebag of some kind. He has to be a bad person, because that’s the most immediate and cheapest way of showing that the Love Interest should ditch him and get back together with Our Hero. Of course, it makes the Love Interest look like an idiot for dating him in the first place when he’s so clearly a douchebag, and it’s completely unrealistic because people who date your exes are likely not bad people, but…
Anyway, I really like that except for a bit of awkwardness when they first meet, there’s no jealousy or assholery in the relationship between Eddie and Dan. Dan is depicted as a genuinely good, kind, unselfish person who admires and wants the best for Eddie, and even keeps Eddie from being hauled away by the police by claiming that Eddie is his patient. There’s zero hostility towards a man who was engaged to his girlfriend six months ago.
And Eddie, in his turn, clearly wants Anne back, but shows zero hostility towards Dan. Like I said, he seems a little awkward when they first meet, but he’s never antagonistic, and he never says a mean thing about Dan. He meekly accepts Dan’s medical help, and even asks for his advice. In fact, when Venom attacks Dan, Eddie blurts out, “I’m killing you! I’m so sorry!”
So yes, Venom has some flaws, and I fully acknowledge that these are flaws even though I like the movie. But it also has some good points that many “good” movies don’t possess, and I really do like the depiction of Dan.
The Forest 