unspeakablehorror | Entries tagged with meta

So in the Murderbot Diaries Gurathin and Murderbot start off intensely disliking each other, and I found this one of the most enjoyable dynamics in both the book and the TV show. Characters who have to work together but hate each other are like catnip to me. Absolute best character dynamic two characters can have.

Interestingly, I think the TV show does more to develop this rivalry and the character of Gurathin than the books actually do. A big part of this is that the books don't actually give Gurathin a backstory, whereas the show does. And so while there are aspects of the books I definitely prefer, I'm giving the show a big W for how it took one of my favorite parts of the original story and made it even better.

Well, I finished watching the Murderbot TV show last night. Had to wait until I could watch it without paying Apple money (and without doing anything too hard). I find it interesting to do comparisons between books and their adaptations, which I can do here, since I've read most the Murderbot series now and the adaptation only covers the first book.

Here's my thoughts:

My initial impression from the trailer that they made the PresAux team seem like way over-the-top commune hippies was unfortunately quite correct. This annoyed me because it was so unnecessary. All the PresAux team are scientists and none of them have any combat experience, so there's no need to 'explain' why they need Murderbot's help with giant creatures trying to eat them or people trying to murder them.

I did enjoy the Sanctuary Moon additions, though. A tv show is the perfect format to depict a fake tv serial.

I don't think LeeBeeBee was a particularly necessary addition, but I'm not surprised she was added since she creates an extra element of tension in the show, particularly since they often tried to actively avoid interpersonal tension between the PresAux crew.

There was *alot* of body horror in the show. Like I was not expecting that much body horror. Did not enjoy that part lol.

I did find the show's use profanity amusing, though.

I don't remember all the book details to be sure about everywhere the tv show deviates from the book but I do know that the show has a number of deviations, one of the most noticeable being whenever it shifts to 3rd person perspective. The book is told from 100% first person perspective. I personally liked the 3rd person additions and thought they helped the show.

The standout characters in both the book and show besides Murderbot are Mensah and Gurathin. The black nail polish for Gurathin was a nice touch. The actor did a great job portraying the character.

Now I want to talk a bit about the themes here regarding the corporations, workers, and slavery. The show expands on the Corporation Rim stuff in a way that's in line with how it's portrayed in the books. Which is to say, it portrays the corporations as evil while avoiding any kind of class-consciousness.

Now, that may be a bit of a controversial statement, so I'll elaborate.

Neither the indentured workers nor the enslaved bots outside Murderbot are portrayed particularly sympathetically in either the book All Systems Red or the show, and they certainly aren't portrayed to advance any thematic call for liberation of workers, even enslaved workers.

Preservation is portrayed as good because it is a place where slavery doesn't happen, but it's not working to liberate slaves any more than the Jedi are in Star Wars. And just like how Qui-Gon upholds the legitimacy of slavery in Star Wars by purchasing Anakin from Watto, PresAux upholds the legitimacy of slavery by purchasing Murderbot from the corporation. These sci-fi stories have more regressive politics than what came out of the Civil War, where former slaves successfully fought for chattel slavery to be abolished.

The message in this show, as in the books, is that the system is inevitable, the system is undefeatable, and nothing you can do can change it. It's political nihilism dressed up as anti-capitalistic messaging. I don't think this was necessarily intentional by Martha Wells, but I do think it's why Apple found this particular story such an attractive one for adaptation. Like Severance, it gives the appearance of anti-corporate messaging that actually reinforces the beliefs and behaviors that allow corporations to continue doing what they currently do.

Corporations are also emphasized to be rational actors that would never intentionally do anything that jeopardizes the corporation's profits in both the books and show which is just not true in real life. Additionally, corporations are also shown as necessarily losing money getting people killed which is far from being a given in real life.

So, I thought it was a fun show. Just nothing revolutionary.

There's a difference between writing a good character and a realistic character (also note that when I say good, I mean interesting or complex, and not like, evaluating the character's morality). These things can overlap, but good characters are not necessarily realistic and realistic characters are not necessarily good. If I complain about a character, that doesn't mean I think a real person couldn't or wouldn't have done those things. I just don't think a person doing those things makes for an engaging character. Likewise, just because I enjoy a character doesn't mean I think they behave very realistically. Not all concrete truths make for worthwhile narrative truths, and not all narrative truths transfer literally to concrete truths. Deciphering the difference is one of the challenges of writing.

A lot of mainstream TV and movies specifically promote "Western" values and especially the values of the United States government as inherently superior to all others. Specifically, this media promotes capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism regardless of whether it's geared towards liberal or conservative consumption. In short, a lot of media is simply sugarcoated propaganda. This is especially true of children's media, and why "it's just a children's cartoon" is not a valid argument for a piece of media not containing embedded political values. Quite the opposite, actually. The whole point of children's media containing such values is to help ensure the absorbsion and adoption of those values by the future generation. The point is to get to them early, so these values become their default.

Now, the people involved in creating this propaganda are not necessarily aware that that is what they are doing. Indeed, many of these people may consider themselves apolitical or even countercultural. But their awareness of their place in the machine is unnecessary for the machine's usage of them. The machine functions in a way such as to elevate those most useful to it while suppressing the rest.

Some examples:

Star Wars - The depiction of the Ewoks employs a number of incredibly racist tropes, including depicting them as cannibals and them accepting C3P0 as a god. The colonialist aspect of the core worlds in the prequels like Coruscant is purposely obscured by making the Separatist government headed by Sith puppets and relegating things like the genocide of the Geonosians to a relative footnote outside the movies.

Star Trek, especially modern Star Trek - While Star Trek has always had implicit militaristic undertones (considering their supposedly peaceful mission of exploration they sure are involved in a lot of wars and their ships are sure decked out to the teeth in weapons), the last seasons of Picard and Discovery especially doubled down on this. Also Picard has a white saviorism arc involving the romulans that it never even bothers to resolve.

Avatar: The Last Airbender - contrast the narrative choice to depict the oppressed Jet and Hama as incredibly evil and, in Hama's case, irreedeemable, to the narrative's treatment of Zuko and Iroh. The narrative never treats Iroh as an actual villain, and Zuko is not only given a redemption arc, but becomes ruler of the Fire Nation at the end of the story.

Avatar - the white savior fantasy in space. The white savior fantasy is inherently colonialist.

Legend of Korra - basically doubles down on the colonialist and imperialist apologism of its predecessor. Also adds a copaganda angle.

The Sith are kind of inherently edgy, but that doesn't mean that all the Sith are edgy to the same degree. So, time to rate them by how much they exemplify the Sith trait of edginess. For this I will be using my very scientific Edge Factor metric. So let's get started:

Darth Sidious: 6/10. Not a maximally edgelord aesthetic. Spends much of his life pretending to be an inoccuous good guy, which is diabolical but not edgy. Also by the time his aesthetic becomes more edgy, he's well established as an authority figure, which is not a particularly edgy role. Edgelords are more about tragic rebellion than ruling: so in this respect Sidious is a victim of his own success. All of *his* rebellions were successful, which *is* tragic, but not for him.

Darth Tyrannus: 4/10. Look, cut him some slack, he's not used to this Sith stuff. Still, he does have that tragic rebellion thing going for him re: the Jedi and Yoda.

Darth Plagueis: 5/10. Leave him alone, he just wants to do his evil science. Scalpels are edgy, right? Anyway surely he can just delegate the edginess to his apprentice? He wants to get back to his experiments. Little too much authority for the necessary rebelliousness, and takes *forever* to rebel against Tenebrous, though he does try to (unsuccessfully) end the rule of two.

Darth Maul: 10/10. Someone understood the assignment. Classy all black attire. Single earring. Double-bladed lightsaber. Rebels against Sidious multiple times, but never vanquishes him. Dies tragically trying to get revenge. Maximum edge.

Darth Vader: 8/10. Solid edge aesthetic and history of tragic rebellion, but gets points deducted for position of authority in the Empire.

Darth Bane: 8/10. A little too successful so gets a deduction for that, but the aesthetic and rebellion are *off the charts*. Guy rebelled against his father, the Jedi, *and* the Sith. Not to mention the face tattoos and invincibility beetles have incredible edge energy.

Darth Zannah: 8/10. Again, too successful for maximum edge, but solid aesthetic with the face tattoos, plenty of rebellion, and a tragic willingness to sacrifice her closest relative for her ambitions all makes her Edge Factor competitive.

The thing about Palpatine's return in TROS is it was just badly executed. I'm a huge fan of Palpatine as a character, especially in the prequels. While I have many issues with the prequels, they did an excellent job on Palpatine's backstory.

But the sequels just did...so little with him. I chuckled a little when he chucked Kylo Ren down that pit. That's about it. But his return just comes out of left field. And was so tacky. It didn't have to be this way.

If a tv or movie series gets new shows or movies released that are awful and completely at odds with the rest of the series, I don't think "oh now the entire series is ruined", I think "isn't it great that I can decide that none of this new nonsense ever happened, because this is fiction so whatever I decide can just replace canon whenever I want". Makes things a lot less stressful for me. And if there's a bit here or there that I actually like? Sure, that part happened--none of the rest of it did, though. What do you mean, I can't do that? I'll do whatever I want. I just added a dog with a jetpack now. You can't stop me.

A little over halfway through the novel now. So one thing you get to see in the Dispossessed is people both living in and arguing for different political and economic systems. Which despite the didacticism, is still a nice change of pace from most science fiction, which usually keeps such concerns secondary or else in line with government propaganda. This can be unintentional at times, but regardless of the intention, it tends to promote uncritical acceptance of our unimaginably violent status quo. The Dispossessed doesn't do this. It might seem strange that I consider the didacticism a negative quality given my interest in the political and economic themes--however I disagree that such ideas need to be presented in a dry or didactic way. I think if one wants to primarily teach, nonfiction is a much better medium for that. I feel stories are better at spurring us to ask better questions than they are at giving us answers to those questions.

( Read more... )

Sometimes horror is intentional, and sometimes things are horror without meaning to be.

Legend of Zelda has both. Though as the intentional horror has been softened in the newer iterations of the game, the unintentional horror seems to have grown in sharp relief.

Let me explain.

In older Legend of Zelda games, bokoblins, bulblins, moblins, and other commonly encountered foes were part of a military force. This is not to say they couldn't be interpreted in a sympathetic light, just that they are predominately a fighting force.

However, in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, they could literally just be...a farmer (BOTW bokoblins)...literally just someone taking a nap (some of the moblins)...some guy picking berries (the TOTK bokoblins have such cute little packs for this 🥺)...a random traveller who's just minding their business until you come along (the Yiga). And yes, while all of them will pre-emptively attack you, it's hard for me not to interpret that either:

1. In a watsonian fashion as a defensive strategy of a regular person that is simply doing their best to defend themselves in a hostile world.

2. In a doylist fashion as not having to make significant changes to the gameplay mechanics or to the basic good vs evil narrative structure of the story.

And then there's the additional horror of Link using monster parts in his potions. Some poor farmer or berry picker's guts could be in that stamina potion. Link performed highway robbery on that poor Yiga civilian.

There's a lot of racism in Star Wars, including anti-arab racism, anti-asian racism, and anti-black racism. You can pick any of the main movie trilogies and probably most if not all of the books, movies, tv shows, or games that have been released to see this.

And no, having a few black or asian characters doesn't fix the racist origins of the tropes used to depict the Tusken Raiders or the Gungans or the Ewoks (the latter of who are depicted as noble savage cannibals)!

I've seen a lot of fans try to push back on fandom racism in ways that simultaneously disregard the racism built into the core of the Star Wars canon itself, and I don't think you can grapple with racism in the Star Wars fandom if you ignore racism in Star Wars itself. Doing that just makes it a fandom war between fans upholding different kinds of racism, not people who actually want to address racism in fandom spaces.

Racism isn't a superficial part of Star Wars (or a lot of other popular media), it's not something held just by 'fans who hate on Star Wars', or even something perpetrated only by fandom as a whole, it's a deeply entrenched part of society that manifests in different people in different ways.

Fighting racism requires understanding that.

Watched the latter part of Revenge of the Sith.

Wow, There are so many scenes I would have cut if I had been the one editing this film. Honestly it drags in quite a few places and it would flow a lot more smoothly if some of the excess were cut. I'm thinking that a lot of the stuff I didn't remember being in the film anyway could just be cut.

I'd also add some of the stuff that was originally cut back in, especially the stuff with Padme. I think some of the scenes contradict other parts of the film, so I'd have to consider how to handle that, but I'll bet some of that could be remedied through editing, too. I wonder if I could even change the events of the film a bit that way? I'll bet I could.

And it would probably still be shorter.

So a while back I made a post on pillowfort asking for hard sci-fi recs that had a focus on characterization. One of the recs was for the novel Mickey7, which I've recently finished. Here's a spoiler-free review.

This novel not only fulfilled all the specifications I set out, but it was fast-paced and suspenseful enough for my capricious attention-span. There's also some great world-building, from both a technological and sociological standpoint. The latter is something that I feel many scifi stories are pretty weak on, especially hard sci-fi. The main character is a historian (a hobby, apparently his society doesn't have historians anymore, largely due to anyone being able to look up any historical knowledge they could want to know at any time).

There are some extended infodumps to fill out the worldbuilding, but they're all plot-relevant and actually pretty interesting stories in their own right, since you get to learn a bit about the history of this spacefaring society called the Union.

He's also an Expendable, which is a person whose physical and mental patterns are all uploaded so they can produce a perfect replica of him after they have him do whatever fatal mission-critical task they need to have done that can't be automated (the reasons for which are explained in the story).

The story starts when Mickey7 has fallen down a hole on the ice world of Niflheim. Theoretically this is no big deal, right? He's technically immortal, after all.

Practically, though, Mickey doesn't really like dying. He should know, too, since he's the only person on the Drakkar crew that remembers it happening to him. More than once, actually.

I enjoy that a major antagonist of the story, the colony commander, is someone who has personality traits and motivations rather than just existing as an obstacle to be brought out as needed for the plot. I really enjoy antagonistic relationships.

Though the friendships and romantic relationship in the story are also complex. I really enjoy the social dynamics between the characters. Mickey also has a certain amount of antagonism for his best friend Berto, both for reasons that become clear early in the story and for reasons that are implied later on.

Mickey7 is a fast-paced, fun, frightening, and thoughtful look at the intersection of technology and society.

So today I'd like to review the episode Lisa The Vegetarian from The Simpsons from Season 7, episode 5.

( Read more... )

The theme of rightful anger being exploited for harmful ends is one I explore in my Star Wars story Cut Strings. I think it's a perrenially relevant topic, as I believe this dynamic to so often be involved when things go wrong in our real world. But I don't think there are actually any easy answers to this problem. If someone never gets very worked up about anything, chances are they will do nothing to stop injustice. But anger by its nature tends to close off more analytical thought, which can lead one to actions that do the very opposite of what they are intended to.

While I am personally obsessed with the Nightsisters, I find it disappointing that the non-Nightsister witches of Dathomir are never explored outside of the original work this entire mess was introduced in, which was The Courtship of Princess Leia. Especially as the 'good' witches were the main focus of the story they were introduced in. This is why I want to have them in my Heart of Shadow story at some point.

Dathomir's portrayal in Star Wars has always had a lot of, well, issues, and in fact there are a lot of similarities across the portrayals. But the differences are also interesting to me, and I think the retcon choices say something about the different people involved here.

Some speculation about Luthen Rael. I've put it under a cut in case people want to avoid that kind of thing as a 'possible' or 'unintentional' spoiler. But since I have yet to see Season 2, I have no idea if this is the actual direction they'll go or if they'll go with something entirely different. I like it though, and I think it has a certain narrative completeness to it.

( Read more... )

There needs to be a relationship tag format like this:

Person X🔪Person Y

Which is purely about people who hate each other's guts. These people are enemies. One or both has tried to kill or maim the other. They will strike again.

I don't know about anyone else, but I find negative relationships fascinating and fun to read about.

Oh, I watched Nimona recently. I thought it was fun but also feel it fell rather short of what it could have been.
( Read more... )

Just re-read the last chapter I've written so far for my Heart of Shadow fic and had a lot of fun reading it. It's Plagueis just being Plagueis (or rather, Hego Damask), and Dooku and Qui-Gon affectionately bickering with each other and not so affectionately bickering with Plagueis.

I love the secret identity aspect of the Sith. It's so fun to play around with that kind of character, and think about how the different facets of their personality, even the ones that are pure artifice, bleed into each other. A person is not their mask, but the kinds of masks a person chooses does say something about them. I actually think Plagueis wears two masks--the mask he shows the world, of a mundane businessman, and the mask he presents to Palpatine and himself, the mask of someone who both desires power and has the wisdom necessary to obtain it. Which is to say, the mask of the dutiful Sith Lord.

I don't think Plagueis, and that includes canon Plagueis, is very good at, or particularly motivated by, the things that are supposed to motivate a 'good' Sith Lord. Which is not to say that I think he doesn't want power or the destruction of the Jedi, because I think he wants both of those things. It's not to say that I think canon Plagueis can't be as cold as the frozen world he grew up on. But I think what Plagueis wants most is the personal freedom to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and companionship.

He was slow to kill his own Master and he wanted to rule over the galaxy for eternity with Sidious. If that isn't the essence of 'best friends forever' (forever!) I don't know what is. And of course he botched that up real good because he also never properly learned how to respect someone rather than try to dominate them. Like Sidious would never have accepted that scenario and Plagueis was a fool to think he would. Like thinking that a man that murdered his own father because he resented the authority that was exerted over him was ever ever ever going to accept a situation where someone else could exert power over him for infinity forever is just the height of hubris, but that's part of what I love about Plagueis so much.

And I also love that for Plagueis political power and the destruction of the Jedi are just kind of secondary to what he really cares about, which are his terrible little experiments. Love that the Darth Plagueis novel recontextualizes Palpatine saying that Plagueis could save the ones he cared about from dying into meaning that he could bring his science experiments back to life.

And I love getting to examine the relationship between Dooku and Qui-Gon in my story when Dooku was still a Jedi. Tales of the Jedi was just so boring in how it portrayed Dooku (also in how it portrayed Mace Windu, but that probably deserves its own essay) and particularly his relationship to Qui-Gon. Like he's practically a Sith already in that cartoon. There's no attempt to show, like, any actual significant shift in who he is as a person in his transition from Jedi to Sith. Anyway when I was writing this chapter, I had a lot of fun showing Dooku and Qui-Gon's dynamic with each other, how they're both similarly stubborn but also their very different approaches to problems and to life in general.

Anyway, it was fun to reread the chapter and think about all these characters again.

I'm a huge fan of the Phasma novel, and I really enjoyed her portrayal there, but it's not how I envisioned her backstory and if I ever did sequels fanfiction (which would require overcoming several logistical hurdles regarding my...issues with the sequel), I'd probably rewrite her backstory to line up more with my conception of it. There's two big things I'd want to change:

1. More focus on what she was to Finn. I just remember that scene where Hux and Phasma are talking about Finn (who she refers to as 187) and they bring up his baby picture on the screen and I'm wondering how long Phasma has been training him. Because even though it looks from the positioning of the scene that Hux was the one who brought up the picture, she was the one that gave the report on him, and was the one who gave his orders in the previous scene. Hence why I think she's the one he's had the most direct contact with.

I'd want to rewatch them to get all the nuances, but even his scenes in The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker with Hux seem to validate this. Finn's rancor towards Hux seems impersonal, simply due to the threat Hux poses to the people he cares about, but his anger towards Phasma always seems very, very personal. I think it's utterly tragic that the extended scene with Finn and Phasma was cut in The Last Jedi. I also wish she had survived to the end of trilogy because I feel it would have been way more fitting for their final fight to happen in the last movie.

2. I've always had a headcanon that Phasma was an ardent devotee of Palpatine and was perhaps even the only one of the villains besides Snoke to have ever met him in person before he 'died'. It was that little bit of trivia about her armor being made from the exterior of a Naboo starship (specifically because Palpatine was from Naboo no less!) that put this thought in my mind. In the Rise of Skywalker rewrite I'm envisioning she's the devotee of Palpatine and not that new rando old guy.

I think probably the biggest problem with the sequels was a 'too many cooks spoil the broth' issue. Even though I have many, many issues with the prequels, I think the fact that they present one unified narrative goes a long way towards making them considerably stronger than the sequels.

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Loftwings and Demons

And Sith and Porgs as Well...

Entries tagged with meta

Murderbot TV Gurathin

Murderbot (TV Show)

A Good Character vs A Realistic Character

The Politics of Entertainment

So You're a Sith Lord, But Are You an Edgelord?

TROS Gripes

The Power of Positive Thinking...

The Dispossessed: Politics and Ecology

Unintentional Horror in the Legend of Zelda

Racism in Star Wars

Revenge of the Bad Editing

Micky7

Lisa The Vegetarian: A Vegan's Review

Cut Strings and The Theme of Righteous Anger

Dathomir Retcons

Who is Luthen Rael?

Nemesis Relationship Tag Proposal

Nimona

Reflections on My Very Favorite Sith and Also Dooku and Qui-Gon

Phasma

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January 2026

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