Nubia – A Great Character Who Is Neglected

On March 16, 2021March 16, 2021 By E. A. SolinasIn random, reviews, ruminationsLeave a comment

I am what you could call moderately informed about mainstream comics. I know about all the A-list characters, quite a few of the B-list, and a fair number of C-listers. I’m an avid viewer of Linkara’s comic-book review videos, as well as a few other channels that cover comic content, as well as research, TV adaptations… and the comics themselves, of course.

But when it comes to comics, very few things irritate me like taking a magnificent character… and doing them dirty.

For instance, I was livid when Birds of Prey came out, and I saw what they had done to Cassandra Cain. The character in the comics is a complex, well-developed character with a unique backstory, a lot of moral and personal confusion, a likable, good-hearted personality, and some representation for people with learning disabilities. She’s an elite super-assassin who couldn’t bear to kill, and who didn’t speak or read because she was able to read body language so well.

Cassandra Cain in the movie? She’s a mouthy little brat played by a kid who can’t act. It was revolting.

And I sort of feel the same way about Nubia. Now for context, until a few days ago, I had no idea that the character of Nubia even existed, because despite her superhero pedigree – she’s the kidnapped twin sister of Wonder Woman – she’s surprisingly absent from most comic books and not talked about very much. In fact, she’s so obscure that I realized that I had actually read Injustice 2, a comic with her in a small role… and I hadn’t realized that she wasn’t just made up for that comic.

And it’s really a shame, because Nubia is a character that could have a lot of power and resonance.

Unfortunately, her most visible reappearance in recent years… is Nubia: Real One.

This comic book is a perfect microcosm of everything wrong with DC Comics’ young adult stuff at present. They are desperately trying to reach out to younger readers at present, but instead of respectfully making stories about characters like the Teen Titans, Red Robin, Miss Martian, Superboy and other popular young DC characters… they make stories about the woes of being a mostly-ordinary, not-very-dynamic girl living in a crime-ridden rathole of a city, with a little bit of Wonder Woman crammed in there almost as an afterthought.

And yes, they deal with sensitive, painful, complex social issues… with all the subtlety of a wooden club to the nose.

These recent graphic novels are also made by people who are clearly not interested in writing superhero stories. Gotham High is perhaps the most obvious example of this, where it reimagines Bruce Wayne, Selina Kyle and… the Joker… as teenagers going to Gotham’s public schools. Melissa de la Cruz’s take on this concept was absolutely ghastly, and I hated every page of it. Reimagining the Joker as a slightly edgy but good-hearted poor boy in love with Selina absolutely made my blood boil. What they did to Alfred – having him abandon the traumatized Bruce for ten years – was unforgivable.

The future releases don’t look promising either. I Am Not Starfire focuses on a dumpy, self-pitying pouty goth teen who seems to detest the popular and beloved Starfire character, her mother, and whose lack of superpowers means she won’t be doing anything heroic. We get to focus on coming-of-age woes, mother-daughter drama, and probably how awful Starfire. How enticing. And the Jessica Cruz graphic novel seems to be abandoning the galaxy-spanning space-cop stuff for Mesoamerican mythology and immigration issues. It’s not impossible to deal with such issues in a Green Lantern title, but you should keep the core of the character intact – you can have space problems and social issues!

I’m not going to go into the politics represented in Nubia: Real One, because they are so polarizing. And I hate politics. What I can tell you is this:

There’s a lot of hate woven into the book. It’s the exact opposite of the Black Panther movie, which drew most people in by both acknowledging the struggles that African-Americans face and the need to help, and the fact that trying to get revenge or use violent means is ultimately self-defeating and wrong. It had a good heart that embraced everyone, and this comic… doesn’t. Whatever your political position, it should not come from a place of hatred, which is unfortunately the position of most people today.
A lot of aspects of it do not make sense when you think about them for more than two seconds (why is a well-connected rich boy going to a crappy inner-city public school?).
There is no zero subtlety. None. You know how the X-Men are often used as analogies for various minorities – black people, Jewish people, LGBTQ people? This allows the reader to examine the core nature and effects of prejudice without getting too tangled up in specific immediate politics, and allows them to be taught lessons in a timeless way. This comic is the exact opposite: it bludgeons you with current-day, extremely polarizing politics in almost every single page.

And really, Nubia deserves better. The Nubia of this book is almost painfully unremarkable in every way but her super-strength. I think we’re supposed to see her as becoming powerful and strong at the end, but it feels so artificial after watching her cower, cringe and cry for the entire book. Basically, someone gives her a pep talk about how great she is, and somehow this causes a complete change in personality. Not that she had much of a personality – she has the dynamic qualities of a wet sock.

Furthermore, Nubia is not a superhero in this. She does one vaguely superheroic thing early on, which only occurs in order to establish that all white people hate her because she’s black. But if you hear “Nubia is Wonder Woman’s black twin sister, and she has similar powers!” you expect her to do something… superheroic. Something epic. Something powerful. And it never happens.

Don’t you want to see this woman kick some butt?

In fact, you could probably cut Wonder Woman (who looks awful, by the way) out of the story altogether, and you would just have a rather melodramatic, poorly-written story about a not-very-interesting teenage girl dealing with over-the-top racism.

And that is not what the character of Nubia should be. I don’t know much about the character, but I would expect her to have a lot in common with Diana. And you would expect her story to involve massive threats, gods, monsters, magic, and some kind of epic journey for Nubia that spans both the world of the Amazons and the world of humankind. That is the kind of story that Nubia – the Nubia of the original comics – deserves.

She deserves to be bold, fiery, strong yet compassionate, and confident in her physical and mental power. Not saying she can’t have vulnerabilities – I love doubts and vulnerabilities in powerful characters – but the Nubia of this book is too drippy. I don’t want to see her punch a cop. I want to see her superhero-land on the ground so hard that it leaves a crater, only to rise flawless and indomitable from the dust, and punch some mythic monster in the face.

But it doesn’t happen. Because this book is made for people who don’t read superhero comics, by people who don’t read or write superhero comics.

Don’t ask me why Diana is suddenly speaking Spanish.

I can only speculate on why, because DC seems to be specifically deemphasizing everything superheroic about their superheroes… at a time when superheroes are more popular than they have ever been. I can only wonder why they are making stories that people who don’t like superhero comics won’t pick up because they ostensibly involve superheroes, and people who do like them won’t pick them up because they’re actually all about social issues and bad teen romance, not superheroing.

With a little research, I bet that I could have created a phenomenal story for Nubia. Perhaps one that marries the Grecian origins of the Amazons with some African mythology, for instance, and one that has oodles of action, fantasy and adventure. But for some reason, DC doesn’t want that kind of story to be offered to new readers.

And yet they wonder why My Hero Academia, an unabashed and unashamed superhero story full of action, drama, horror, heart and character development, resonates so strongly.

Oh, and the art in all of these books is horrific. Just the worst. I am shocked that the people who drew these are actually employed at a major comic company rather than posting on Deviantart. DC Comics has access to some of the best comic-book illustrators in the world – see the image at the top of the page – and they keep choosing people whose art is just… ugly and amateurish.

I could perhaps give this art a pass if it were being posted on social media by an enthusiastic self-published person, or someone with a small publisher. But this is DC. It’s one of the Big Two. The art in these books should be polished and sublime, and… are they under the impression that kids only like ugly blobby sloppy artwork in their cartoons and comics? Because when the art of Gotham High is as good as it gets, you have a problem!

Anyway, those are my thoughts on Nubia, Nubia: Real One, and the current slate of DC’s young-adult releases. Ciao!

My (Neurotypical) Thoughts on “Music”

On February 27, 2021 By E. A. SolinasIn random, ruminationsLeave a comment

So, singer/songwriter Sia has caused quite a kerfuffle in recent months because of her directorial debut, simply called Music. Ostensibly, it’s about a young autistic girl who, after the death of her grandmother, goes to live with her older sister, a drug-dealer/recovering alcoholic who is apparently the only relative Music has. Her sister, named Zu (QUIRKEEEEEE!!!!!!!!), is also woefully uninformed about autism, which attracts the attention of the Magical Black Person living next door, who knows all about it.

A lot of people, both autistic and not, have expended much virtual ink on Sia’s depiction of autism and the many, many problems with a movie that isn’t even very good on a purely artistic level (I’m honestly amazed Leslie Odom Jr. could say “crushing her with my love” without cringing so hard he teleported into another time zone). People have talked about the dangerous depiction of restraining an autistic person, the fact that Sia did all her research from Autism Speaks (which is to autistic people what PETA is to pets), Sia’s meltdowns on Twitter when confronted, Sia’s unhealthy relationship with actress/dancer Maddie Ziegler, and various other issues.

I am not autistic. I have other issues. I am, however, part of a family with several autistic people in it – all my siblings are on the spectrum, as is my mother, my uncle, and my late grandmother. Honestly, I think it’s more a continuum than a spectrum, since there are many, many areas in which autistic people have differing characteristics. For instance, did you know that some autistic people are extroverts? It’s true!

There’s also a lot of debate about whether Sia should have hired an autistic actor to play the central role. I’m not going to concretely opine about it one way or another, but I can say this: it is perfectly possible for neurotypical actors to play autistic people in a respectful way. Take the TV show Alphas from the early 2010s, which has an autistic character as one of its cast, played by a neurotypical actor. For the most part, Ryan Cartwright did a very good job, playing the character with subtlety, a lack of harmful stereotypes, and a general feeling of respect. His character, 97% of the time, felt like an actual person and not a stereotypical savant with some quirks.

So there’s absolutely no excuse for the depiction of autism to be as bad as it is in Music. No excuse.

I mean, this is bad. The autistic character, Music, is played with the kind of exaggeration that is usually associated with mockery and contempt. I can’t speak to Sia’s motives, but Maddie Ziegler’s performance is a horrendous depiction of autism. Maybe she was directed to act that way, but I can definitely say that her expressions and body language are… just horrible.

And the sad thing is, this was not a project whose premise was doomed from the beginning. I mean, imagine what Music could have been: a story about a young autistic girl who loses the person who has always taken care of her, and has to struggle with her grief. As if that wouldn’t be devastating enough, she’s thrown into a new, not-very-stable life with someone who doesn’t understand her and isn’t equipped to give her the kind of steady, reliable care she needs. It could have been a study of how this girl’s disability leads her to struggle even more with an already-difficult situation, and it would have been so much more satisfying when she finds some kind of happiness and stability…

… but it’s not. Because Music is not about Music.

Yeah, that might be one of the most baffling things about this movie. While it’s marketed as being about Music, and it’s called Music, it’s not actually her story. The story is mostly about her sister Zu, and her problems, and her issues with Music, and her romance with the Magical Black Person next door (who has AIDS, because he’s from Africa and apparently Sia thinks all Africans have AIDS), and her character arc about learning to love Music, and her happy ending.

I’m not saying that Music is not a significant presence in the movie, but she seems like a passive presence. She exists for two reasons: to further Zu’s story about how hard it is to have an autistic sibling, and to add colorful whimsy in the form of various music videos. She’s not there to have her own story. She’s an object to facilitate Zu’s growth.

Which is kind of confusing, because… the movie is called Music, not Zu. Why would you name a movie after a person who doesn’t even have a character arc? It would be like making the movie Batman Begins, but instead of focusing on Bruce Wayne, you spend the movie following Alfred. Why make a Batman movie that focuses on someone else?

And why make a movie called Music that isn’t about the character named Music?

I can only assume – and remember, these are just my impressions, I may be wrong – that Sia never tried to get into the head of an autistic person or understand how they think. Depicting their thoughts through music videos suggests that she just sees them as twee and quirky, not as people with their own feelings and thoughts.

So anyway, those are my rambling thoughts about Music, a movie that really needed a more sensitive and intelligent person at the helm than Sia. She’s a wonderful singer and songwriter, but this movie shows a surface-level awareness of deep, complicated issues, and a complete lack of awareness that autistic people are anything more than a mass of funny faces, quirky visuals and freakouts. Thank you, and good night.

Resident Evil TV Shows: A Rant

On February 23, 2021 By E. A. SolinasIn random, ruminationsLeave a comment

For the record, I have never actually played a Resident Evil video game. I have, however, watched them being played from the same sofa, and have gotten invested in them the same way you get invested in a very long slow TV show where zombies and Lickers can lunge out and chew on an identifiable main character. I am also moderately well-versed in the series’ lore, and I’ve watched the CGI anime movies. So I think I have at least a middling understanding of the franchise.

And I hate the movies.

Honestly, the movies feel like a thirteen-year-old girl’s fan-fiction, where the beloved main characters either do not exist, or are hollow inept sidekicks to the glorious all-powerful and beautiful Mary Sue. That is what Alice felt like to me. It also felt like Paul W.S. Anderson – who has produced maybe two adequate movies in his entire career – was making plots up based on other popular movies, and just slapping on superficial aspects of the video games to justify the name “Resident Evil.”

So I was pretty thrilled when I heard that they were going to be producing a Resident Evil TV series, because this was a chance to get it right. A fresh start! Maybe it would be something more faithful to the original games, with the Redfields, Leon Kennedy, Jill Valentine and Ada Wong.

Then… I read the information about it. It’s not about those characters. It’s about Albert Wesker’s made-up-for-this-TV-show-exclusively twin daughters, and we have more post-apocalyptic crap, just like in the movie series. As the final slap in the face, it’s being made by the same production company that gave us those crappy movies, executive-produced by a woman whose most notable success was Harriet the Spy, and written by some guy who’s given us about fifty million episodes of Supernatural. There’s really nothing to be optimistic about here.

I don’t know why it’s so hard for them to just make a good Resident Evil movie. I know that until Detective Pikachu you were lucky to get even a mediocre video-game movie, but… these movies already have their plots and characters sketched out for the filmmakers. Literally all you have to do is reshape the plot into a three-act structure, streamline the obstacles and quests, and add some dialogue. Voila! Movie!

And look at the characters! The characters of these games are iconic – not quite to the level of Mario, but they’re well-known and well-loved. I would love to see a movie about Leon Kennedy, Claire and Chris Redfield, Ada Wong and Jill Valentine. But in the movies, they’re either nonexistent or turned into pathetic defanged temporary sidekicks for the new characters that nobody likes.

I don’t care about Alice, no matter how much Paul W.S. Anderson wants me to because she was played by his wife. I don’t care about Albert Wesker’s newly-invented-for-this-TV-show daughters. I want Leon, Claire, Chris, Ada and Jill! JUST ADAPT THE GAMES! THE ONES FANS LIKE! But no, they’re doing the exact same thing that they did before – no attempt to make something that reflects the actual games that fans love to this day.

That’s why I’ve mostly stuck to watching the CGI anime movies based on the video games. They’re not perfect, and some of the CGI has aged, but it’s certainly better than the films.

THAT SAID…

I found out some utterly wonderful news last night. You see, there are actually two Resident Evil TV shows being produced. One is the above idiocy I whined about for so long. But there is another – a CGI anime being released on Netflix, which stars Leon and Claire… and which actually looks like a survival horror story. With an emphasis on “horror.”

And it looks… really good. Obviously you can’t tell quality from a minute-long trailer that is mostly Claire walking around an empty room, but the animation is good, the atmosphere is good, and it has Claire and Leon.

(I know Resident Evil games can have other protagonists, like the last game, but the adaptations should probably stick with established characters for the time being. Especially since the last original protagonist in an adaptation was… very very bad.)

Even better, I found out that they are rebooting the Resident Evil movies later this year… and while I can’t speak to the quality of the adaptation yet, the characters are Leon, Jill, Ada and the Redfields, it takes place in the 90s like the original game, and it’s apparently based on the first couple of games. I’m more cautious about this because… well, video game movies are almost always bad, mediocre at best, so I’m not going to get my hopes up. But the fact that it isn’t the Further Adventures Of Alice Doing Whatever She’s Doing really makes me hope it’s good and successful.

TMNT: Out of the Shadows and Mikey’s Cloudcuckoolanderness

On January 3, 2021 By E. A. SolinasIn random, ruminationsLeave a comment

One of the many, many aspects of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows that was a massive improvement on the not-very-good first film was Michelangelo. To put it bluntly, in the first movie Michelangelo came across as a budding sex offender – pretty much every single line he uttered revolved around his extremely sexual obsession with April O’Neil, often in very tonally inappropriate places. It was, to put it simply, creepy.

And yes, I know previous iterations of Michelangelo (the 1990 and 2003 versions) have asked “Can we keep her?” about April as well…. but that seemed a lot less sexual and lot more childlike.

Well, thankfully they dialed that back to a single joke line in the sequel (which he is immediately tased for), and Mikey even seems completely cool with the idea of April dating Casey Jones. Instead, he’s rewritten to be more in line with many other depictions of Michelangelo – a pop-culture-loving, skateboarding, soft-hearted sometimes-cloudcuckoolander, the most childlike and most loving of the four Turtles.

And they definitely made him a cloudcuckoolander, at least some of the time. In fact, it initially seems a little inconsistent – sometimes he’s just a little flaky and sweet, and sometimes he’s absolutely spaced out of what is going on around him and has no idea what people are talking about. Take the scene where Raph is running his master plan past April and Casey – Mikey’s only contribution is a strange, staring-eyed declaration of “You’re right,” and then he spends the entire scene eating pizza and not noticing what anyone else is saying.

And after rewatching the movie a few times, I think I’ve nailed down why. Mikey becomes a cloudcuckoolander and detaches from what is happening around him when he’s suffering some kind of emotional distress.

About halfway through the movie, Mikey overhears Leonardo and Donatello secretly discussing a purple alien goo that might be able to turn them into humans, or at least make them look human externally (the movie is little vague). Mikey then goes to Raphael and tells him everything – not because he actually wants Raphael to do anything, but because he just needs to vent his feelings. When Raphael predictably blows up and goes off to confront Leo, Mikey physically tries to stop him because he desperately doesn’t want his brothers to fight. It’s played for laughs, but his distress is very obvious.

Unsurprisingly, Leo and Raph end up angry at each other, having a fight, and eventually Leo and Donnie leave on a mission without Raph and Mikey. When Raphael rages about how he’s going to get his hands on the purple goo without Leo, Mikey… well, he agrees with Raph, but emphasizes repeatedly that he does not understand what Raph is doing.

This seems to be the first of the two situations in which Mikey goes cloudcuckoolander: strife in his family. He’s always at his best when he and his brothers are united, and when they work together, he seems fairly sharp mentally. But he seems to actively withdraw from the world around him when his brothers are fighting, because he cannot cope with it, and he cannot fix it by himself.

This also applies to taking part in Raph’s plan. Mikey goes along with Raph’s plan because… well, he’s kind of a people-pleaser. But he withdraws from the conversation when Raph is scheming behind Leo’s back, and drawing Casey and April into his plan. This is clearly not something Leo will put up with, so Mikey withdraws rather than taking an active role.

The other situation is after Raph and Mikey’s plan to infiltrate police headquarters goes boobies-up, and the brothers are all exposed to the eyes of the entire NYPD. Exposure is less upsetting to Mikey, however, than the reactions of some of the cops: they’re called “monsters” and treated with fear, horror and hate. This visibly hurts Mikey from the very moment it happens, even though it’s coming from total strangers.

When they return to the lair, Mikey reveals his hurt and misery to his father Splinter, who tries to reassure him, but obviously nothing your parents say is going to overcome rejection by the entire human race. And about a minute later, when Donatello identifies where Bebop and Rocksteady are, Mikey has become a cloudcuckoolander once again, giving a silly answer that doesn’t make any sense. Once again, he’s withdrawing from a situation that is hurting him, and only reemerges in subsequent scenes, where he and his brothers are more or less getting along and there are no non-villainous humans to hurt him.

I don’t know if this pattern was deliberately placed in the script by the writers, but it definitely does exist, and it honestly makes Mikey feel like a much more vulnerable and sweet-natured person. He just hates conflict among people he loves, and he wants to be loved and accepted for who he is rather than what he is. And who can dislike that?

All meditations on Mikey aside, I recommend Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows very highly. It’s not what you’d call a very good movie, or a particularly smart one, and it bungles the character of Casey Jones. But it does have a lot of love for the franchise and characters in general, and it makes you really like and feel the connection between the brothers.

And it enjoys throwing in over-the-top spectacle, such as the Turtles battling Rocksteady and Bebop on a crashing plane… using a tank. It’s wonderful. It’s just a fun popcorn movie, and no, you don’t need to have seen the first Bayverse movie to understand it.

The selfishness at the heart of Batwoman

On January 1, 2021 By E. A. SolinasIn random, ruminationsLeave a comment

I haven’t blogged about stuff for awhile, but I had to speak up on the subject of the CW’s laughably bad TV series, Batwoman. The shared universe formerly known as the Arrowverse is now several years past its sell-by date, and while it’s never been good exactly, it is pretty rancid by now. It didn’t help that they cast Ruby Rose as a character we’re presumably supposed to like, despite her inability to do anything but smirk.

Lately, I’ve been watching Youtuber ProcrastiTara’s reviews of Batwoman, and also keeping abreast of the news of the second season, which will be recasting the role with an entirely new character… more on that later. I’ve known for awhile that the people making this show don’t understand Batman, but I’ve recently come to the conclusion that the reason they don’t is because they’re too selfish to appreciate a character whose core is selflessness.

At the beginning of Batwoman, we’re informed that Batman’s real reason for donning the cowl and fighting crime isn’t to save others from the heartbreak that he has suffered, and it isn’t to protect the people of Gotham from evil. No, it’s because he’s edgy and he doesn’t like rules!

You see? They cannot grasp that he chose to be Batman for unselfish reasons, because the kind of people who write this sort of character are in themselves fundamentally selfish. If you have any doubts, we’re assured, at the end of the very first episode, that Kate’s reason for becoming Batwoman is because she wants “the freedom to be myself.” Her core reason for being a superhero is purely about herself, not about wanting to help others. No wonder the character is such a despicable tool.

Honestly, there is nothing heroic about a person who only does good things because they want to “be themselves.” Batman may be more fully himself when he dons the cowl than when he is Bruce Wayne, but that is NOT his motivation for doing what he does.

This was absolutely cemented by the promotional text released to publicize Batwoman 2.0, who is an entirely new character who is somehow able to be a superhero despite being a homeless drug addict with no combat training. What is this new character’s motivation? To “no longer be a victim” and “be powerful.” Again, it’s not about being good, noble and unselfish, about saving people who cannot save themselves – it’s about feeling an artificial sense of empowerment (which, let’s face it, describes pretty much all empowerment – most of the time, it’s just feeling a fake pleasant sensation, not actually changing anything or accomplishing anything).

People who are too selfish to come up with noble reasons for superheroes to do what they do should not be allowed to write/showrun for them. Period. I have zero admiration for these characters, and zero reason for cheer for them. Hopefully they’ll shoot this series in the head at the end of the second season, which they really should have done already when you consider the ratings.

Youtube Recs (Sorta) – Kay’s Cooking

On November 9, 2020 By E. A. SolinasIn randomLeave a comment

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.

Recommendation: Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes

On October 26, 2020 By E. A. SolinasIn random, recommendationsLeave a comment

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.

YouTube Recs – Ordinary Sausage

On October 26, 2020 By E. A. SolinasIn random, recommendationsLeave a comment

Let’s sausage!

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.

LET’S SAUSAGE!

Why Mulan 2020 Sucks: Brains Vs. Brawn

On October 21, 2020October 26, 2020 By E. A. SolinasIn random, ruminations2 Comments

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.

Bravo, Disney.

The Forest

Category: random