Game of Thrones Rewatch: the "Short" Version (Part 1)

In honor of the final season of Game of Thrones, I’ve decided to rewatch the entire series, finishing up just in time to watch the upcoming season 8 in real time.  As I went through it, I decided to make little notes to myself: at first, it was just a note of when every major (or semi-major, in some cases) character dies, and maybe some of the best quotes.  As I got deeper into it, I made more and more notes, little questions, or revelations (“oh, that’s what that meant!”), or snide comments on dramatic ironies (“yeah, sure you’ll talk about it ‘when you get back’ ...”), or just observations of my outlook or feelings on a particular happenstance.  Eventually, it involved into the pseudo-outline you see below.

When I first began, I had 72 days to watch 67 episodes.  As of this writing, I have 29 days left to watch 31 episodes, so I’ve fallen a bit behind, but definitely not enough to make me worried that I won’t be able to hit the goal.  Obviously I’m not done yet; what you’re getting today is only the first 3 seasons.  But it worked out that that’s about the right length for a blog post.  Since my commentary is picking up (and going deeper) the longer I go on, it’s likely that the next 4 seasons may turn into 2 blog posts; we’ll just have to see.

Here are the rules of my rewatch commentary:

• THERE ARE METRIC SHIT-TONS OF SPOILERS HERE.  One wouldn’t think I would have to point this out, as it’s a rewatch, but people will complain.  If you haven’t already watched all the seasons of GoT up till the last one, DON’T READ THIS.  Perhaps you can come back when you’re all caught up.  (To be crystal clear: just because the comment is in season 3 doesn’t mean that it won’t contain spoilers for season 4 ... or season 7.  Obviously there are no spoilers for season 8 yet.)
• (Speaking of “shit-tons” ...)  I curse.  Anyone who’s read any of my other blog posts will already know this, but perhaps you got here via some link or other and don’t know what you’re in for.  Although the previous bullet point should have been a giveaway.
• My opnions are just that: opinions.  I present them here in case you find them interesting, but I’m not trying to convince you to believe as I do.  I ask that you show me the same courtesy should you choose to leave a comment—that is, feel free to share your own opinions, but don’t try to tell me I’m “wrong.”
• Likewise, whatever moments I found worthy of comment are also my opinions.  If I left out one of your favorites, sorry about that.  Feel free to remind me of it in the blog post comments.
• My comments are always super-quick.  If I want to expand on a particular thing, I do it as a pseudo-footnote.  In this case, “pseudo-footnote” means “formatted almost exactly like a footnote, but way more obvious.”  These “footnotes” are designed to be less ignorable, but that doesn’t mean you can’t ignore them if you want to.  They’re just topics I wanted to explore a bit further.  Sometimes only a sentence or two more, sometimes whole paragraphs.  Read ’em or not: your call.
• There’s not a comment on every episode.  Especially in the early episodes: sometimes there’s just nothing that jumped out at me that hour.
• I am watching the “Inside the Episode” shorts after the shows, for every show.  Occasionally that will inform my commentary (but usually not).
• Once I’m done with the rewatch, I may keep some commentary on the final season.  Or I may not; no promises.

Season 1

• Episode 2: I never liked Sansa.
• Episode 6: I continue to dislike Sansa.  In fact, I may like her even less at this point.
• Aaaand there goes Viserys.  “He was no dragon.  Fire cannot kill a dragon.” —Daenerys
• Episode 7: Aaaand there goes Robert.
• “I did warn you not to trust me ...” —Littlefinger
• Episode 8: Arya kill #1.  (Many more to come.)
• Episode 9: “Surely there are ways to have me killed that are less detrimental to the war effort.” —Tyrion
• Aaaand there goes Ned.
• Episode 10: “There are no men like me.  Only me.” —Jaime

Season 2

• Episode 3: Man, I really dislike Sansa.
• Tyrion is really good at all this political maneuvering stuff.  Theon is really bad at it.
• Ah, Brienne: so young and innocent back then.
• Episode 4: Joffrey is a sick fuck.
• Episode 5: Aaaand there goes Renly.
• I wish Theon didn’t suck so bad. [1]
• “No, my lord.  Anyone can be killed.” —Arya
• Episode 6: “You’re brave.  Stupid, but brave.” —Ygritte
• Episode 7: This Ironborn schmuck that keeps egging Theon on ... I’m starting to wonder if he works for Theon’s sister.
• Ah! there it is: the very first “You know nothing, Jon Snow.”  First of many.
• “It’s better to be cruel than weak.” —Theon  (Dumber words were never spoken.)
• From the perspective of later-seasons-Jaime, it is sometimes difficult to remember what an awful shit he is.
• Episode 8: How much easier would it have been if Arya had just named Cersei as one of her 3 deaths?
• Episode 9: Sansa should’ve gone with the Hound.  Another in a long string of bad decisions.
• Episode 10: “My father is dead.  And the only parent I have left has no right to call anyone reckless.” —Robb  (Zing!)
• Aaaand there goes Maester Luwin.
• Aaaand there goes the first person to die from dragonfire in a thousand years.  But definitely not the last.
• I’m still not entirely sure why the White Walkers didn’t just kill Sam ...

Season 3

• Episode 1: Holy shit! it’s Qyburn!!  I had no recollection of him showing up this early.
• Tywin continues to demonstrate that he richly deserves his ultimate fate.
• Nobody listens to Davos.  Sigh.
• Episode 2: Margaery appears to be the only person on the planet capable of controlling Joffrey.
• Episode 3: Aaaand there goes Jaime’s hand.
• Episode 4: There is but one person in the seven kingdoms who can give Joffrey a run for his money in the sick fuck department.  Poor Theon.  Still a jerk, but nobody deserves Ramsay.
• Aaaand there goes Lord Commander Mormont.  (And Craster, too, but that’s no great loss.)
• Only the second person on the planet to die from dragonfire, but undoubtedly the most deserving. [2]
• Episode 5: Aaaand there goes Beric.  No, wait ... never mind.
• Aaaand there goes Jon’s virginity.
• And this is the place where Jaime changes from mostly-bad-guy to sorta-kinda-hero. [3]
• Episode 6: Melisandre to Arya: “We’ll meet again.”  Looking forward to that shit! [4]
• Aaaand there goes Ros.
• Episode 7: “I’m stupid.  A stupid little girl with stupid dreams who never learns.” —Sansa  (Hey: she said it, not me.)
• Man, people in this show make a lot of promises they’re not going to be able to keep ...
• Episode 8: “If you ever call me sister again I’ll have you strangled in your sleep.” —Cersei [5]
• I can’t decide whether Tyrion really is that drunk, or if he’s just faking it. [6]
• Aaaand there goes the first White Walker to die from dragonglass in a thousand years.  But definitely not the last.
• Episode 9: Eek ... another wedding.  This never ends well ... [7]
• Aaaand there goes Robb.  And his wife.   And their unborn child.  And his wolf.
• And Catelyn.
• Episode 10: Tywin sending Joffrey to bed in the middle of the day is one of my favorite moments.
• Sam gives Meera some dragonglass arrowheads.  I hadn’t remembered that.
• “It’s not easy being drunk all the time.  Everyone would do it if it were easy.” —Tyrion
• Arya kill #2.

[1] Our culture has what I’ve always considered a curious custom: we do not speak ill of the dead.  No matter how shitty a person is in life, once they’re dead, we’re supposed to pretend they were a saint.  I’ve never really bought into it.  An asshole is an asshole, alive or dead.

There’s a parallel situation with Sansa and Theon.  Terrible things happen to them—truly horrible, awful things.  Do I feel sympathy for them?  Of course I do!  I’m not a monster.

But that doesn’t change the fact that they make some truly idiotic choices.  And that’s compounded by the fact that neither of them is particularly an idiot.  At least if they were stupid, you could understand it.  But they both have opportunities to make the right choices ... good choices.  And they both flub it.  Over and over.  I easily remembered Sansa’s first worst choice: it’s right in episode #2, where she chooses Joffrey over her family.  Raised to value honor over everything else, to value family over everyone else, she rejects both for a fantasy of a golden prince.  We can argue that she’s only a little girl at the time, but both Arya and Bran are younger, and they consistently make better choices than Sansa.  And, to make it worse, even after Cersei demonstrates to Sansa what terrible people she wants to marry into in a very painful way (remember: Sansa is the first to lose her wolf), Sansa continues to wail on about how much she loves Joffrey.  Puh-lease.

I didn’t even remember the corresponding scene for Theon until this rewatch, but it comes in S2E3.  Theon was so looking forward to this grand homecoming and it goes so badly.  And, sure, his father is a crushing asshole, and his sister is an even bigger dick than he is, and he brings a lot of it on himself with his bad decisions.  But he knows what the right course of action is.  He actually writes a letter to Robb (this is the part I’d forgotten), and he’s ready to ... I don’t know, exactly—send it? run away and deliver it himself?  But either way he’s going to warn Robb about his crazy father’s plans.  He’s all set to go ... and then he burns the letter.  Epically bad choice.  And, again, not the last one.

So, while I do sympathize with Sansa, and with Theon, that doesn’t mean I have to like them.  They do stupid things, despite not being stupid, they choose dishonorable paths, despite being raised by what is essentially the only honorable family on the continent, and they choose to go along instead of running away over and over even though it always works out badly for them.  I will never claim that they deserve the awfulness that is visited upon them.  But I’m also not going to pretend they’re anything other than terrible people.


[2] I’m still not sure how I feel about this scene.  Daenerys is a serious bad-ass, and there’s a lot of “fuck yeah!” going on here.  But, at the same time, Dany is always an honourable person, and this transaction feels like cheating.  I can’t find any statement she made that was an actual lie, but it certainly is breaking the spirit of the agreement to pay for an army with something that will murder the seller.  She’s getting something for nothing here.  And, yes, I know: she’s freeing an entire city full of slaves, and the guy had no right to be selling people in the first place.  But it still feels wrong, somehow.

On the other hand, I was looking forward to this scene the entire season.  One of my all-time favorites.  Fuck yeah!


[3] To be clear, I realize that Jaime was never completely evil (certainly not in the way that Joffrey is, or Ramsay), and I also realize that he never really becomes noble (the way that Jon and Dany do).  But Jaime is the closest to what I would refer to as a “heel turn”.  Technically (as that link will tell you), a heel turn is only when someone goes from being a good guy to being a bad guy.  But I’m happy enough to use it for the opposite situation as well.  Some ongoing stories (be they novels or TV shows) radically overuse the heel turn; my favorite example is Heroes, where, if you watch for enough seasons (hint: don’t do that), pretty much every single character undergoes at least one heel turn, and several characters (the most obvious one being Sylar, although Claire’s father Noah is nearly as bad) flip-flop back and forth so much it makes your head spin trying to keep up.  GoT has surprisingly few heel turns for a show that eschews black and white this hard (and, for more pointless meandering on that topic, see my post on shades of gray in fantasy.)  You could try to argue Tyrion, but he was never that bad a guy: his worst sins were decadence and a touch of laziness.  You could try to argue Varys, but he was never a bad guy either: you just couldn’t tell which side he was on.  Maybe the Hound?  Well, he may undergo some sort of redemptive arc before the story’s done, but I doubt we’ll ever think of him as an actual good guy.

No, I think Jaime is actually the only character who starts out as unquestionably bad (e.g. pushing Bran out the window, right in S1E1), and then then ends up, I would argue, unquestionably good.  First, he performs his little deception to keep Brienne from being raped, then he takes a bit more active role by going back to save her life after he was already free, then he sends her off to track down Sansa and Arya to try to fulfill his oath to poor, dead Catelyn, then his kindness to Tyrion in the dungeons, then the whole trip to Dorn to rescue Myrcella, and I honestly think that, at the end, he will be the only thing keeping Cersei from destroying the whole world, much the same way he kept the Mad King from destroying all of King’s Landing (the story of which was the impetus for my comment, which led to this long digression).  I hate to make predictions about a show which works so very very hard to be unpredictable, but let’s just say that, if Jaime dies while killing Cersei to keep her from carrying out some devastating scheme, I’ll be busy patting myself on the back.

So I think Jaime’s arc is a proper heel turn, and I think it may well be the only one in the whole story.  Which I’m fine with, and I’m mostly on board with it.  It is really hard to forget that image of him pushing Bran (and the whole smirk, and the little quip—“The things we do for love!”—certainly don’t help any), and I definitely don’t claim we should forgive him for that.  But I do think we have to recognize that not only is there a core of goodness in him, even in the beginning, when it’s buried pretty deep, but also that he’s actively changing over the course of the story.  I think that’s very different from a character like Tyrion, or even Arya, where what’s changing is not so much their fundamental natures, but rather our understanding of them.


[4] I’d completely forgotten this line.  One of several times during the rewatch that I was surprised by something I hadn’t remembered.  Which is, of course, really the whole point of the exercise.


[5] The way that Cersei looks at Margaery when Margaery takes her arm is utterly brilliant.  The amount of scorn that Lena Headey can invest in a single look is astonishing: it’s more than you would think humanly possible.  While Cersei is one of my least favorite characters, I postively adore Headey.  If you want to see her in something where you’ll hate her character a bit less, I recommend The Sarah Connor Chronicles.


[6] This is on his wedding night, to Sansa.  He does seem very drunk.  But he also makes some very canny decisions while supposedly falling over pissed.


[7] Were I dispensing advice, I would suggest 2 rules for common-sense survival in Westeros:

1. If anyone tries to promise you they’ll tell you more about a topic when they see you again, tie them down and do not let them leave until they spill it.
2. Under no circumstances attend any weddings.

Part 2 ⇒

A Netflix Matryoshka

Another short week this week, so I don’t have much for you.  If you want a quick TV recommendation, though, how about Russian Doll, which is new on Netflix?  It’s 8 episodes, but they’re a half-hour or less, so it’s pretty quick to blast through the whole story.  I’ve seen it described as Groundhog Day meets Happy Death Day, which is a bit weird, because Happy Death Day is already Groundhog Day meets Happy Death Day.  But it’s a fairly appropos description anyway.  Another review I read of it said that it managed to be fairly original while still acknowledging all its influences (or something along those lines), and that’s not entirely inaccurate either.  Bottom line, Natasha Lyonne is awesome, her characters are always an amazing blend of completely familiar and completely insane, and this show does not fail to deliver on any of that.  It’s got excellent music, an excellent, twisty plot, it’s both funny and touching (often simultaneously), and you should totally watch it.

At least that’s my take.  Your mileage, of course, may vary.

Final surrender to the CBS machine

When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy.  The networks have conspired to dumb us down.  But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true.  The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.  That’s a far more depressing thought.  Conspiracy is optimistic!  You can shoot the bastards!  We can have a revolution!  But the networks are really in business to give people what they want.  It’s the truth.

        — Steve Jobs, Wired, Feb 1996

We have finally given in and are paying for CBS All Access.  This was a difficult decision for us, and one that we resisted for a long time.  The situation is that the big broadcast networks are still struggling to figure out how they compete in today’s streaming world, and CBS, alone of the original three, has decided to start its own streaming service.  The problem, though, is that, at least currently, with CBS All Access you can either get a reasonable fee or you can get no commercials.  On the one hand, I have a severe problem with paying people to show me commercials.  If I’m paying a monthly fee, I expect it to be commercial-free.  But, on the other hand, I kind of have a problem paying CBS the same monthly fee as I would a premium movie channel: CBS All Access at current monthly prices is just a dollar more than I was paying for Showtime, and more than I’m currently paying for Starz.  That’s crazy talk.

But, it is true that there’s a new Star Trek out, and there’s only one place you can watch it.  It’s just that that in itself is not enough.  Oh, sure: there’s The Good Fight, which I suppose I’ll watch now that I’ve bitten the bullet, but it definitely wasn’t tempting enough on its own.  Being able to watch regular CBS shows without commercials is no draw: I can do that with my DirecTv, a DVR, and a fast-forward button.  Now, I could theoretically replace my DirecTv with a streaming solution, part of which would be CBS All Access, but last time I investigated that, it wouldn’t save me any money at all, and it’s not like I hate DirecTv or anything, so eventually I figured, why bother?

But now the second season of Star Trek: Discovery is starting, getting good reviews, and continuing to star Sonequa Martin-Green, who we loved in The Walking Dead.  So we are masticating the metal projectile, for better or worse.  And, since CBS All Access plus DirecTv is more expensive, it’s likely that soon we’ll be cutting the cable/satellite cord altogether.  Still not sure I agree that we’re better off this way, but at least the first couple of episodes of the new Trek were pretty damned good.

While perusing the vast quantity of shows available, I was again a bit disappointed.  In some cases, all the seasons are available.  For instance, if I wanted to watch the reboot of MacGuyver, I could do so: all 3 seasons are right there.  On the other hand, let’s say I finally wanted to give in and watch The Big Bang Theory.  Nope, out of luck: only the last season is available, and why would I want to jump in at the end?  (Well, assuming it ever will end, which perhaps it won’t.  But you see my point.)  Most of the older shows have a complete back catalog: feel like reliving the bizarre 80s phenomenon that was Beauty and the Beast?  All 3 seasons are right here.  And, as near as I can tell, every episode of every season of every Star Trek series is here—even Star Trek: The Animated Series.  So there’s 7 shows you could binge your Trekkie heart out on.

But, percentage-wise, there just ain’t a lot here worth watching, if you want my honest opinion.  I blasted through the first (and only, so far) season of Instinct, and I might try Salvation.  And/or Scorpion.  But, overall, not a lot going on, especially given the price.

I will endorse Instinct though.  Essentially, it’s a retooling of Castle:  There’s the tough, sexy female cop, played by an actor whose name you don’t recognize of Serbian descent raised in a former British colony still nominally ruled by Queen Elizabeth (yes, the two principal females leads really do have that much in common).  There’s the charming-though-somewhat-egotistical male civilian who gets paired with the cop even though the cop really should have an actual cop partner and not this “consultant” who is constantly getting put in harm’s way and exposing the city (New York, in both cases) to levels of legal liability that would get any actual politician who approved it fired on the spot.  But they go around solving crimes, having met because of a serial killer who patterned their murder spree on one of the male protagonist’s books but somehow even after that’s over they’re still “partners” for some reason, and it’s serious, because it’s a cop show, but it’s also fun, because one of the “partners” doesn’t have to follow the rules and can afford to be somewhat silly.  The female cop, of course, is a compulsive rule-follower.

And, if I stopped right there, you would assume that Instinct is just a rip-off of Castle, and perhaps you would decide it wasn’t worth watching.  But there are two issues with that.  First off, Castle is a good enough show that even a rip-off can be fun.  It’s only light entertainment, sure, but there’s certainly worse things on television.  And the other thing is, instead of Nathan Fillion having a big crush on his female cop partner, Alan Cumming is a happily married man.  A happily married gay man, even, which firmly puts the kibosh on the romantic angle right off the bat.  Which is nice, in a change-of-pace way.  It’s also nice to see Alan Cumming, who is himself a married gay man, get to play a married gay man, which is a role I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him in before.  Also nice to see his character having a very normal, loving relationship with his husband on a show where the fact that he’s a gay man has nothing to do with the actual plot.  Plus, Cumming’s character isn’t a useless mystery writer: he’s a former CIA agent and current professor of abnormal psychology, which makes him way more useful for actually solving the cases.  It’s a bit like Castle was injected with a spot of Criminal Minds.  Now, I’m not saying the show is perfect by any means—when the writers finally do decide that they just can’t stand having a female protagonist who’s not madly in love with someone any more, the romance comes so far out of left field that it will have you yelling “what the actual fuck???” at your television screen—but it’s a fun little time-waster, and, if you like those sorts of not-too-serious cop shows (like Monk, or Psych, or Death in Paradise, or, yes, Castle), you’ll probably enjoy it.

The Haunting of Hill House: A Win for Horror Fans

Nothing much to report this week, so perhaps I’ll give you a television recommendation.  If you haven’t yet watched The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix, you really should.  Assuming you like horror, this is one of the best television shows of the last decade, if not more—we’re talking a Game of Thrones level, Breaking Bad level, Walking Dead level show.  In fact, it’s quite possibly the best horror TV show of the 21st century thus far, period.  One has to discount certain contenders, of course: Ash vs Evil Dead and Santa Clarita Diet are magnificent shows, but they’re in the horror-comedy camp (pun inteneded, naturally), and that’s a different ball of wax.  Walking Dead is a triumph, of course, but zombie shows are not so much horror shows as they are post-apocalyptic stories of man vs natural disaster—it just so happens that the disaster in this case wants to eat your brains.  True Blood deserves a mention as well, but realistically it’s more urban fantasy (with just a touch of supernatural Harlequin romance).  So I think the only real competition that Hill House has is American Horror Story, which has some fantastic seasons but also a few clunkers, and Castle Rock, which is a tempting choice: it’s a beautiful story, with more Easter eggs for hardcore Stephen King fans than we probably deserve.  But here’s the reason Hill House wins: it’s terrifying.

American Horror Story has some gruesome moments, and one or two genuine scares (especially in the first season).  Castle Rock is more of a masterwork puzzle with the way it all fits together perfectly while also turning in on itself.  But Hill House has all those things: it started scaring me right in the first episode, and when I got to the end and finally saw how it all fit together, I literally gasped.  I’m now watching it for a second time so I can fully appreciate all the foreshadowing and callbacks.  But it also fully delivers on the scares: one of the middle episodes gave me such a vicious jump scare that I dropped my laptop on the floor.  And, you know: jump scares can be cheap ... you can generate one with a loud noise and a cat popping out from behind a chair.  But this one was well-earned and amazingly effective.  And that was only halfway through: there was still plenty more to come.

The show runner is Mike Flanagan, who has produced a slew of well-regarded if not so well-known movies.  THe first one I was aware of was Oculus, which is a clever (and quite scarey) film, even if it doesn’t rise much above genre fare.  Then there’s Hush, which is nothing short of brilliant.  Ouija: Origin of Evil is that rarest of beasts: a Hollywood sequel that’s actually much better than its cheesy original.  And then there’s Gerald’s Game, which is a Stephen King novel that I had pretty much considered unfilmable, as it contains almost no action whatsoever and has only a single character in a single location for about 90% of its length.  But Flanagan found a way to make it work nonetheless, although Game is one of the few King books that really doesn’t qualify as horror at all.  But, still: when I heard Flanagan was going to helm a remake of The Haunting of Hill House, I was pretty excited.

This version departs pretty firmly from Shirley Jackson’s novel, as well as from both theatrical versions: 1963 and 1999.  Both of those tried to stay a bit more faithful to the source material, but both were ultimately failures, in my opinion.  Flanagan, on the other hand, departs rather sharply and ultimately succeeds, and no less than Stephen King agrees with me:

THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, revised and remodeled by Mike Flanagan. I don’t usually care for this kind of revisionism, but this is great. Close to a work of genius, really.

Obviously I’m a bit biased when it comes to King—he’s the top point in my pentagram of literary idols—but I hope I don’t have to convince you that the man knows what he’s talking about when it comes to horror.

I could go on, but hopefully I’ve given you enough info to tell whether or not this is a show you’d be interested in checking out.  If you like horror as much as I do, I think you’ll find it pretty compelling.  I know I did.

An Open Letter to Judge John Hodgman

I am sending this open letter to one of my favorite podcasts, Judge John Hodgman, so I thought I’d also share it here with you guys.  The version below is a bit more fleshed out than the one I’m emailing, because a) when you’re writing to busy famous people, brevity is to be commended, but when you’re writing on your own blog you can be as verbose as you like, and b) I can do a lot more crosslinking here on the blog.

While the letter makes more sense if you’re also a fan of the podcast, I think you can probably manage to eke out some amount of enjoyment even if not.  And perhaps it will inspire you to give the show a listen.  There are worse outcomes, certainly.

Anyway, here’s the letter:



Your Honor,

I’ve been listening to your excellent program for a few years now—certainly not your oldest fan, but a faithful one.  One of the main reasons I keep listening is that your decisions are always right ... or nearly always so.  Of course, even a sage of jurisprudence such as yourself is only human, and can occasionally make a mistake.  At only one or two mistakes, I could overlook them.  However, some months ago, the number of such misstatements (all completely unintentional, I’m sure) reached a staggering three, and I felt I could no longer remain silent.

#1: Why all the hate for electronic cigarettes?  I’ve written about this on my blog before, but the executive precis is, e-cigarettes got me off smoking—and off nicotine altogether—after over 25 years of frying my lungs.  Now I’m consuming nothing more than water vapor and I still have to listen to people giving me shit about it.  It’s a little disheartening, to be honest.  I just cannot fathom what the complaint is: I’m not exposing you to second-hand smoke, nor even to secondhand nicotine.  Are you complaining about my second-hand water vapor?  Well, I hate to tell you, but you were breathing that anyway, even before I pulled out my e-cig.  I just feel that, instead of being congratulated on making a positive change for myself and my health, I’m being told I’m still scum because ... well, I’m not entirely sure why.  But I’m definitely still scum: lots of people have told me so.  Your Honor is not alone in this attitude, of course.  Many other people whom I respect greatly have also taken this stance.  Perhaps it’s just cool to hate on vaping, like dissing Nickelback or Keanu Reeve’s acting ability.  But Your Honor is generally not a joiner, so I’m not sure what the source actually is.

#2: I was also pretty discouraged by your discussion with your bailiff about how all us poor people in the tech business are forced to “dress down” because that’s the social norm in our industry.  Do you really think that I’m waking up every day and going, man, I wish I could tie a strip of cloth around my neck and be half-strangled all day, but I guess I’ll put on these horrible jeans with the holes in them so I can blend in with all the other guys at work?  Is it perhaps more likely that people who prefer to be comfortable in their clothing rather than fretting over how good the clothes look tend to gravitate towards jobs where fashion sense is not used a substitute for competence?  I know that you and the bailiff are natty dressers (and purveyors of fine clothing, even, in the bailiff’s case), but this discussion somehow reminded me of what a wise man once said about the difference between hipsters and nerds:

The definition, as we have discussed before, of a hipster, more or less, is someone who has enthusiasms like a nerd, but uses those enthusiasms to gain—to cudgel others with their taste, and to gain status because you like the wrong thing, or you don’t know what the right thing is, or you learned about something the wrong way, ’cause you found out about it once it became popular or whatever.  Whereas a nerd is someone who also has enthusiasms, but just wants to share the enthusiasms.

    — John Hodgman, “All Laws Are Off”

  
I never thought anyone could accuse Your Honor of being a hipster, but let’s just say I felt a bit like a clothes nerd when I listened to that episode.

#3: The coolest Delta fraternity brother is Otter?  C’mon man: D-Day.

I do continue to enjoy the show, however, and have even started sending a (very small) monthly stipend to Maximum Fun (which is something NPR never managed to convince me to do), because you were right when you pointed out that when artists you love do work that you appreciate, you need to show your support for that.  You’re right most of the time, really.  And I want to support that.

Why the MCU Is Cool: Bringing the Funny

[This is the third post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]


I want to take a brief tangent from my planned outline to discuss something while it’s fresh in my mind.  Just as this whole series was originally inspired by one of the MCU movies,¹, this post is inspired by our recent viewing of Ant-Man and the Wasp.  This movie, like the first Ant-Man movie, exceeded my expectations mainly because I had very low expectations.  And the reasons for that are actually fairly complex.

The thing about Ant-Man is, while he’s actually an original member of the Avengers, Ant-Man the superhero isn’t actually very important to their story.  And part of that is because Ant-Man is a fundamentally stupid superhero: he has weird powers that don’t make sense when put together as anything other than a plot device, a dorky costume, and a lame name on top of everything else.  In many ways, what Aquaman is to the Justice League, Ant-Man is to the Avengers.  So why is he even there?

To understand this, we need to understand how superhero groups work (I already touched on this last installment, but now let’s expand on it properly).  There are two basic types of superhero groups: the “event” group, and the “collective” group.  (To be fair, there’s also sort of a third type—the “non-group”²—but that’s really just a variation on the collective.)  An event group is a group that’s invented lock, stock, and barrel, specifically for an event ... the event almost always being issue #1 of the group’s new comic series.  The quintessential event group is probably the Fantastic Four, although certainly the X-Men are a pretty popular one as well.³  On the DC side, event groups are a little more rare; the Legion of Superheroes is probably the most famous, and even they are not that well-known.  The Watchmen got a high-profile movie,⁴ but they’re only an event group because DC refused to let Alan Moore use the collected heroes he had in mind, since he planned to do terrible things to nearly all of them.  Other DC event groups, such as the Doom Patrol and the Metal Men, are fairly obscure.  Contrasting with the event groups are the collective groups, which consist of pre-existing heroes gathered together into to form a new series.  If you loved Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman on their own, you’ll love them even more together as the Justice League!  If you thought Iron Man and Thor and the incredible Hulk were amazing individually, you’ll be blown away by the amazing Avengers!

These two types of groups are created for very different reasons.  An event group is the shotgun of superhero creation:  If you invent one superhero, and nobody likes them, you’ve failed.  If you invent a whole mess of superheroes, chances are that at least one of them will succeed, right?  Contrariwise, collective groups are about two things: crossover appeal, and reflected glory.  Crossover appeal means taking the Superman fans and trying to turn them into Batman fans, or Wonder Woman fans, assuming they’re not already.  And it definitely works: if it weren’t for Justice League, I’d know practically nothing about Superman, and very little about Green Lantern; for folks like Black Canary or the Atom, I’d likely never have heard of them at all.  Reflected glory means that the creators of the group hope that you’ll come for the big names, and learn to love the guys you never heard of before.  I mentioned last week that the Martian Manhunter fulfills this role in the Justice League: although he had been around for 5 years before the League was formed, and was probably the strongest superhero of the group—he has all Superman’s powers, plus shapeshifting and telepathy—he wasn’t very popular.  Most of those fans who bought JLA issue #1 were probably seeing him for the first time.  Undoubtedly the creators were hoping the Manhunter would get some of that sweet, sweet reflected glory from Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, and the rest.

Which brings us full circle back around to Ant-Man.  Ant-Man was introduced in 1962, a time when any ol’ moronic idea could be a superhero.⁵  The following year he acquired a sidekick, the Wasp.  As sidekicks go, Wasp was very unusual: instead of a young boy who idolizes the older, wiser superhero (e.g. Robin, Bucky), Wasp (a.k.a. Janet van Dyne) is a beautiful lab assistant and later fashion designer.  She is independently wealthy and generally independent; though she initially suffers from some sadly-period-appropriate personality traits (such as desperately chasing after Ant-Man in a one-sided romance), she quickly becomes a feminist icon, including campaigns to introduce more women to the Avengers and even becoming the second-longest-reigning team leader.  Even though she’s supposed to be Ant-Man’s sidekick, she is in fact infinitely cooler than he is.

And poor Ant-Man flounders in the Avengers (much as Martian Manhunter does in the JLA).  The writers just don’t know what to do with him ... nearly immediately they scrap the whole ant motif and make him Giant-Man, then they make him stuck at giant-size and call him Goliath, and eventually he ends up with the same powers as Wasp and dons the moniker of Yellowjacket.  Yes, that’s right: here’s a superhero whose ultimate form is to become a knock-off of his own “sidekick.”

So, despite the fact that Ant-Man is a founding member of the Avengers, I was never that surprised to hear that he wouldn’t be part of the team in the MCU ... except that Ant-Man’s secret identity Hank Pym is actually crucial to the story of the Avengers.  Pym is the calm, rational genius to Tony Stark’s brash, impulsive genius.  Pym probably designs more of the Avengers’ tech than Stark does, and it’s Pym who invents Ultron, who goes on to become one of the team’s greatest foes.  So shortly after my entire lack of surprise at hearing there would be no Ant-Man in the Avengers, I started wondering how they would manage having no Hank Pym in the Avengers.

But they managed it perfectly well.  All the tech gets desgined by Stark—who is, after all, a weapons designer—and Stark invents Ultron.  When they need a counter-genius, they just use Bruce Banner, which is actually very smart (Banner is almost criminially overlooked in the vast majority of Avengers comic stories).  Poof: no Pym required.  So at that point I naturally assumed we’d never see Ant-Man appear in any MCU property—not even a brief appearance in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.—and the thought that we could get a major motion picture which featured Ant-Man ... why the very idea was pure madness.

And then it happened.

And it wasn’t even Pym!  They went with the Scott Lang version, which makes absolutely no sense, because the Scott Lang Ant-Man is twice as useless as the Hank Pym Ant-Man because at least Pym is an interesting genius.  But somehow they made it work.  Well, I say “somehow,” but obviously Ant-Man works for the same reason that Iron Man works: they found the perfect actor to portray him.  I never cared much for Iron Man, but Robert Downey Jr makes me love that character.  Scott Lang is boring and Ant-Man is stupid, but how can you dislike Paul Rudd?  I don’t think it’s humanly possible.

Which brings us to why Ant-Man and the Wasp ultimately works: humor.  All of the MCU movies have utilized humor to some extent or other: with Joss Whedon at the helm, that was a foregone conclusion.  Whedon knows that making shows like Buffy and Firefly funny—not just the occasional mild chuckle, but rip-roaringly funny, on a semi-regular basis—somehow makes the emotional moments even more emotional.  There’s something about having laughed along with characters that makes you cry even harder when they hit those inevitable crushing defeats.  Nearly every MCU property has a couple of those moments in it: Hulk’s hilarious first encounter with Loki, the obligatory and highly comical clash of egos when Iron Man first meets Dr. Strange, Agent Coulson’s obsession with his car, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage exchanging origin stories on their first date (“Accident.  You?”  “Experiment.”).  But lately we’ve been getting movies which are pretty much centered on the humor.  Ant-Man gave us that, and Thor: Ragnarok doubled down on it.  Ant-Man and the Wasp doesn’t quite reach the levels that the latter film achieved—Yes Man is no What We Do in the Shadows, after all—but note that, just like Taika Waititi, Peyton Reed is primarily known for directing comedies.⁶  And the MCU is capitalizing on the comedic talents of these directors (and actors) in quite literal fashion: Ant-Man and the Wasp has already passed half a billion dollars on an estimated budget of less than $200 million, so the capital in this case is quite real.

And, let’s face it: humor is the only saving grace for a superhero who is still, fundamentally, stupid.  When your main character shrinks down and talks to ants, you better embrace that and not be afraid to make fun of yourself.  I’m a bit disappointed in the role they’ve relegated Hank Pym to (and Janet van Dyne, for that matter), but I can’t ignore the brilliance they’ve shown in turning what I assumed would be the worst idea for a superhero movie ever, and actually getting me to watch two of them.  And I wouldn’t say no to a third, either ...

So humor is important.  But it’s not the end of the story either.

⇐ The Heroes I Like

__________

1 That would be Captain America: Civil War.

2 Such as the Defenders or the Suicide Squad.

3 The original X-Men were an event group.  Later incarnations did a little of both; the more famous X-Men group from the 70s consists of 4 previously extant heroes (though most were fairly obscure), and 4 newly-created ones.

4 And an excellent one at that.

5 Have I mentioned B’wana Beast?

6 Of course, Guardians of the Galaxy is probably the most consistently funny series in the MCU, but James Gunn is whole different animal.

Because reality is real

Tonight we watched Ready Player One.  I thought it was pretty awesome, personally, although of course it’s one of those movies that you pretty much want to turn your brain off for maximum enjoyment.  But, you know, I don’t have any problem with that myself.  It’s certainly gorgeous to look at, and it has a bangin’ 80s soundtrack that I particularly appreciated.  Worth at least a look.

That’s all I’ve got this week.  Tune in next week for a fuller post.

Supportive listener (as best I can be)

I just got back from renewing my membership at the MaxFun Drive.  Technically speaking, I missed the deadline for the annual drive, but, you know: supporting the artists you love listening to doesn’t actually have a deadline.  You can do it any time you like.  If you too love MaximumFun shows like Judge John Hodgman or The Adventure Zone, why not go toss them a few bucks?  $5 per month is nothing.  I can’t even eat a meal at McDonald’s for that any more.  Why wouldn’t I be willing to give a measly five bucks to keep the good folks at MaxFun “artist owned and listener supported,” as their motto says?  Well, dammit, I am willing, and you should be too.

Anyhow, that’s all I have to say for this week.  Hopefully more exciting topics next week.

Tick Take Three

I just blasted through the entire second half of the first season of the new Amazon series The Tick—6 half-hour episodes—in a single night.  It really is that good.

While the Tick is ostensibly a superhero (based on a comic created in 1986 by Ben Edlund), it’s really quite different from other superhero properties.  Sure, a lot of superheroes, such as Batman and Spider-Man, have shown up in various movies and televsion shows, with radically different takes on the characters.  But in the Tick’s case, it’s less like, say, Conan, where many different authors and filmmakers have different visions for the iconic character.  It’s more like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where every version is a manifestation of the weird brain of its creator, and yet they’re all different.  And, somehow, all lovable.

The first series based on The Tick (1994 – 1997) was an animated one, and it had a lot to recommend it.  It was insanely surreal (for instance, their version of Aquaman was Sewer Urchin, who lived in the sewers, had a sea urchin helmet, and talked like Rain Man), had wonderfully consistent continuity (e.g. when evil villain Chairface attempts to carve his name into the moon with a giant laser, he is stopped by the Tick and Arthur, but forever after that episode, every time you see the moon on-screen, it has “CHA” on it), and was just plain fun ... if you were into superheroes.  It was true to its roots in that it was primarily a spoof of standard superhero stories, and it was excellent at being that, but admittedly was not much beyond it.

The second series (2001) was live-action, and its primary claim to fame was the casting of Patrick Warburton, who is an actual actor who looks like he was drawn by Ben Edlund and brought to life in a mad scientist’s lab.  You may have seen Warburton on screen now and then (most receently as the titular Lemony Snicket in the Netflix version of A Series of Unfortunate Events), but mostly you will know him from the many thousands of cartoons and videogames he has done voice work for (e.g. Family Guy, The Emperor’s New Groove, Tak and the Power of Juju, Skylanders, etc ad infinitum), because his voice is large and booming and perfect for the Tick.  There will never be any actor better suited to play this character, both visually and aurally.  But, aside from that, the 2001 series did just about everything else wrong.  The comedy was too broad and campy: it almost seemed like the writers thought they were Eric Idle, elbowing me in the side and saying the words “wink wink” to me through the TV screen.  Simple example: the 1994 series’ version of Batman was Die Fledermaus, which is the name of a famous German opera and is German for “the bat.”  In the 2001 series, he’s a Latino gentleman named “Batmanuel.”  And that should tell you everything you need to know about the level of humor right there.

This new series (technically 2016, since that’s when the pilot came out) is quite a different take.  Peter Serafinowicz is still no Patrick Warburton, but he is a remarkably talented fellow, and manages to capture the essential weirdness of the Tick quite nicely.  But perhaps the greatest twist in this version is that, in many ways, the Tick is a secondary character in the show that bears his name.  This, for the first time, is really Arthur’s story.  The mild-mannered accountant who becomes an accidental superhero but refuses to adopt a nom de guerre now has a dark (and terribly interesting) backstory, and a sister, who is neither a superhero, nor a prop to be captured by villains and thus require rescuing.  (I think part of the success of superhero stories in the modern age is that they’re finally discovering that the non-superhero “support” characters are far more important to the stories than they’re usually given credit for.)  Oh, it’s still wonderfully silly and surreal—it couldn’t be The Tick otherwise—but there is real pain and loss here.  Like Bruce Wayne, Arthur has to witness the death of a parent at a very young age at the hands of a criminal, but he responds not by becoming Batman, but rather by entering a world of therapy, nervous breakdowns, and paranoid conspiracy theories.  Which, if you think about it, is a much more likely reaction to that sort of trauma than growing up to put on a costume and fight crime.

Anyway, this new version of The Tick is wonderful, and weird, and well worth watching.  You’ll appreciate it even more if you dig superheroes, as I do, but even outside of that demographic I think it has something to offer.  Check it out.

Contemplation of Disinterment

Today I dug a hole for our guinea pig, mainly because I thought it might finally be time to reclaim that shoebox-sized space in our freezer.  I would say it took me a good half an hour to dig a hole which is perhaps a foot square and maybe half a foot deep.  If I’m being generous.  The whole time I was performing this arduous task, all I could think about was all those people on TV who discover they have to dig up a body, because there’s some vital clue that was buried with it, or there’s some lost artifact in the coffin, or because the body itself is a necessary component in the spell that’s needed to save the world, and, several minutes later, there’s one or two characters at the bottom of a hole they have to jump up to get out of.  And, as I was thinking about that, one word kept recurring to me: bullshit.

Also, why do these people always have shovels handy?  Before I spent half an hour digging the hole, I had to spend half an hour locating the shovel, which I guess I didn’t put back in the garden shed from the last time we had a pet die.  If you had come to me last night at this time and told me I needed to help you dig up a body, I’m pretty sure we’d have still been digging when the sun came up this morning, and probably not in any danger of getting that nice satisfying “thunk” of shovel-on-coffin any time soon.

But perhaps I’ve spent too much time thinking about this topic ...

Birthday movie reviews

It’s the second (and final, obvioiusly) installment of our March birthday season, so you won’t get a proper post from me.  But I thought I would treat you to a few brief reviews of my cinematic adventures for the weekend.  Without further ado, here’s my

Reviews of Movies for 5-Year-Olds

The Secret Life of Pets  We saw this back when it first became available to rent from Amazon, and both my then-4-year-old and my then 10-year-old watched it nearly continuously until our 48-hour rental was up.  So naturally we had to buy it for the little one for her birthday.  So naturally we had to watch it again.

I have to say it held up pretty well on second viewing: a lot of these sorts of movies don’t.  But I still laughed in several spots, even though I knew what was coming.  Good voice talents, good animation, interesting storyline.  I object to a bit of species-ism—you know exactly which breed of dog every canine is, but all the lizards are some weird amalgam of whatever saurian traits the animators felt like that day—but that’s a minor nitpick.  There’s really only one musical break, and it’s so highly amusing that I let it slide.  Gidget (voiced by the ever-funny Jenny Slate) is my girl’s new hero, and she not only got the DVD but also a physical manifestation of the sassy buttkicker.

Birthday girl’s review: I liked it.

Sing  So let me stress right up front that I despise musicals.  The vast majority of even the best Disney movies are just very short stories with lots of extended bathroom breaks.  So I was a little leery of this one.  However, interestingly enough, Sing is not really a musical.  A musical is a movie where people randomly break into song for no discernable reason.  However, Sing is about a singing contest, so every single time someone broke into song in it, there was a perfectly logical reason for it.  That said, it is true that not all the music was interesting to me—I don’t particularly care for Katy Perry, or Lady Gaga, or Taylor Swift—but there was enough to keep me mildly entertained: Frank Sinatra is tolerable, and I don’t hate Elton John.  And the punky stuff sung by Scarlett Johansson’s porcupine was pretty decent.  I found it weird that, of the five main singing animals in the film, four were voiced by actors, not singers (and the fifth was a singer that I personally had never heard of), and a bit disappointing that all of them were very extremely white.  But the story was engaging, the emotional notes were fairly restrained, and the acting was good, even Matthew McConaughey.  I felt some of the comedy was a bit over-the-top, but it was passable.

Birthday girl’s review: I liked it also.

The Boss Baby  Finally, the one movie we actually trekked out to the theater to see: Boss Baby was easily the best of the bunch.  Perhaps it was just that I wasn’t particuarly expecting much, but I really enjoyed it.  The commercials make it appear to be pretty much a one-joke movie, but it really wove a lot of different elements together and presented a story that was funny, fantastical, a bit of a caper story, and surprisingly touching at the end.  Also, no musical breaks, which is always a plus.  The voice acting was also the best of the three.  Alec Baldwin has this reputation for being a giant pain in the ass to work with, but I always find his comedy roles to be so good ... I mean, how much of a douchebag can he be and still be that funny?  Okay, sure: most of his funniness comes from overplaying douchebag characters, but, even if he’s only playing himself over and over again, at least he can laugh at himself, right?  Also, the unheard-of voice actor doing that Ian McKellan impression was spot on.  I really enjoyed that alarm clock.

Birthday girl’s review: I also liked it.  I liked everything that we watched!

Bonus review  The birthday girl also specifically wanted me to mention “the demons.”  This weekend she embarked on a rewatch of Crazyhead.  Which I definitely do not recommend you let your 5-year-old watch, just on general principle, but perhaps yours is as precocious and atypical as mine.  My little girl particularly digs kickass women taking down monsters with equal parts funny and creepy, such as the new version of Ghostbusters (which is another thing she watches over and over again), and Crazyhead certainly hits that note.  I can hardly wait to introdue her to Buffy.  So, while you might not want to let your kids watch it, you might find it pretty enjoyable for your own viewing.  And she specifically asked me to mention it, so now I have.


Next week, back to our regularly scheduled blogcast.

Perl blog post #54

Today I’ve posted an update on a couple of my CPAN modules over on my Other Blog.  While it is somewhat technical in the later paragraphs—even including some actual code this time!—it also includes some introductory paragraphs where I ramble on about my tendency to be distracted easily and how I probably have ADHD and I probably won’t even make it to the end of this.  So you may wish to at least read the first few bits and then tune out once you feel like it got too technogeeky and your brain checked out.  And then you can feel just like I do when I get tired of my latest project.

But after that you’re on your own.  Okay, I’ll give you one minor suggestion: I did just finish Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell on Netflix, and I quite recommend it.  Eddie Marsan and Marc Warren alone would make it worthwhile, but the remainder of the cast, plus an excellent adaption of Susanna Clarke’s riveting story, makes it unmissable.  Just my 2¢ worth.

It's Thanksgiving Time Again

Well, another year, another Thanksgiving.  As per usual, it was a quiet family meal with all our favorite traditional dishes—such as deviled eggs, mashed potatoes, buttered rolls, and stuffing—and some new touches, such as watermelon (added at the request of our middle child), and I suppose there was some turkey in there somewhere as well.  And we all came up with some things to be thankful for.  One of the things I was thankful for (yes, yes: after my lovely family and my lovely job) was the return of MST3K.

If you don’t know what Mystery Science Theater 3000 is, then you must immediately to go Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, or whatever your streaming engine of choice might be, and begin watching.  If you vaguely remember MST3K as “that thing where silhouettes of robots make smartass comments at the screen,” use the tips in the preceding sentence to refresh your memory, because you obviously didn’t fully appreciate the genius of this show at the time.  If you remember the show fondly, as most of us do, then I’m almost certainly not telling you anything you don’t already know.  The return of MST3K (probably early next year), roughly 17½ years after its last new episode aired, is a bizarre little story in its own right, and perhaps worthy of a longer post someday (not that I have any inside information; just a long-time fan’s perspective).  But today I’m just noting that I’m thankful to see it come back, with new talent as well as old, and I’ve got a lot of positive anticipation and excitement for seeing the new episodes.

And, on top of all that, we’ve now had a return of the Turkey Day marathons for the second year in a row, so we got to sit around and watch old episodes of MST3K before sitting down to eat.  So that was pretty cool.

Anyhow, I hope all my faithful reader(s) had a lovely Thanksgiving meal, if they were so inclined to do so and geographically poised to take advantage of said holiday.  Next week, if all goes as planned, we’ll start looking ahead to the next big holiday, which is already started to loom large in our household.  Here’s an idea of what’s going on at our house these days:

Smaller Animal: Alexa, how many days until Christmas?
Alexa: There are 28 more days until Christmas Day.
Smaller Animal: NOOOOOOOOOO!!!! IT’S TOO LONG TO WAIT!!!

Only 27 more of those to go.  Sigh.

Why the MCU Is Cool: The Heroes I Like

[This is the second post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]


So perhaps one of the reasons I like the MCU is just plain that I like superheroes.  Which, in some sense, I do.  But I’ve never liked all superheroes equally: I don’t believe anyone does.  Some you like, and some you like a lot, and some you don’t care much for at all, and some you really despise.  It’s like anything: Shakespeare plays, Beatles albums, Stephen King novels ... anything that has sufficient variety, you’re going to like some, dislike some, and be distinctly “meh” on quite a few others.

I used to find it hard to describe what sort of superheroes I like, until I realized what the pattern was: even when it comes to comic nerddom, I’m still a non-conformist.  I like the lesser-known heroes: the more obscure, the better.  With a few exceptions, when it comes to the big names, I’m not that big a fan.

On the DC side, that means I hate Superman, and most of the others I can take or leave: Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash.  The only big name I even sort of liked was Batman, and honestly the best thing about Batman was that, without him, you couldn’t have The Brave and the Bold, and that’s where a lot of the really obscure guys showed up: Creeper, Deadman, the Metal Men, Metamorpho, etc.  On the Marvel side, I thought Spider-Man was okay, but Captain America was nearly as bad as Superman, Hulk was practically cliché, Thor was boring, the Fantastic Four were annoying, and Iron Man was utterly useless: a knock-off Batman with better armor.  The only really big name I really liked was Wolverine, and I’m nearly positive that that’s just because I liked him before he got super-popular.  I can distinctly remember buying Giant-Size X-Men #1, which wasn’t the first appearance of Wolverine ... but it was the second.¹  It’s emblematic of my comic buying habits: I saw a cover with a bunch of heroes I didn’t recognize at all, so of course I had to have it.  New superheroes!  Is there anything cooler?  New people with new powers, new costumes, new personalities ... I’m one of those schmucks who is easily seduced by the new, the different, the revamped, the reinvented ... gimme something fresh and I’m a sucker for it.

So, when it came to Marvel, my favorites were always the more obscure folks: I liked Moon Knight, Ghost Rider, Warlock, Son of Satan, Hellcat, Moondragon, Power Man and Iron Fist, Tigra, Cloak and Dagger, and a billion other guys, most of whom you will have never heard of (unless you’re as big a comic book nerd as I am).  Probably the biggest (Marvel) name I can say I really liked was Doctor Strange, and that was mainly because Doctor Strange gives us the Defenders, which had a membership so fluid that there was practically someone new every issue.²  And, as much as I liked the Defenders, I also liked the Avengers.

Okay, now it’s time for a brief diversion on comic book publishing philosophy.  Let me stress that I don’t have any inside info: this is all based on things I’ve read, things I’ve heard, and a lot of observation.  The first interesting thing about comic book publishing philosophy involves a story about a lawsuit.  I’ve never been able to find out if this is actually a true story or not,³ but I read about it in some book about the comic industry, and it certainly seems true, in that it neatly explains a universal principle.  The story goes that, decades ago, when there were a lot more than 2 comic companies, company A had a hero, but they retired him.⁴  Some years later, company B made a new hero that resembled company A’s hero in some way: same name, similar costume, identical powers ... I don’t remember exactly how they were alike, but that’s not that important to the story anyway.  So company A decides to sue company B—again, I can’t remember if this was a claim of copyright infringement, trademark dispute, or what.  But, again: not that important.  The point of the story is, the court ended up ruling that, sure, the heroes were similar, but company A wasn’t using the hero any more, so therefore the similarity of company B’s hero wasn’t costing them any loss of revenue.  Therefore, no damages.

And, supposedly, this is why every comic company ever regularly trots out their old heroes, no matter how stupid (and let’s face it, some of those older heroes are pretty damn stupid⁵), even if they really don’t want to: because they’re trying to make sure their rights don’t lapse.  Titles like The Brave and the Bold were excellent for this sort of thing, because you had a big hero (in this case, Batman) to sell the issue to the masses, and you’d have a minor, or resurrected, or maybe even a long-forgotten, hero who’s just appearing to stay in circulation.  If the minor character happens to achieve some reflected popularity, that’s just bonus.  Mainly, you keep the guys in there, in the public eye.

This concept of using the big guys to sell the little guys crops up again and again, and especially in the “supergroups.”  In music terminology, a “supergroup” is when a bunch of successful musicians from other bands all get together and form a new band.⁶  In comic terms, all groups of superheroes are in one sense a “supergroup.”  But to use the term in the musical sense, there are two basic supergroups: one for each company.  DC’s is of course the Justice League of America, and Marvel’s is, naturally, the Avengers.⁷  Oh, sure: there are many, many groups of superheroes.  But most of them, such as my favorites the X-Men and the Legion of Superheroes, were created as a complete unit: in other words, X-Men members Cyclops, Angel, the Beast, Iceman, and Marvel Girl (a.k.a. Jean Grey) didn’t exist before the X-Men existed.  They were created specifically for that group.  But a true supergroup gathers heroes who were previously appearing in their own solo titles, as separate, pre-existing heroes.

The original Justice League, for instance, was Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, and the Martian Manhunter.  If we were playing “one of these things is not like the others,” I think you’d see the odd man out here.  But let’s look at the original Avengers: Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, and Ant-Man and the Wasp.  (That’s right: Captain America is not an original Avenger, although he did come along just 3 issues later.)  See the pattern here?  They always throw in a minor character or two, because that way the big guys help sell the little guys.

This pattern is generally taken to an extreme in the supergroups: the minor character(s) end up being crucial to the team, because otherwise the audience can’t figure out why the writers keep them around.  So, in many incarnations of the Justice League, J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter, is the guy who stays on the satellite and coordinates the missions for all the other members.  On the Avengers side, Hank Pym, a.k.a. Ant-Man, a.k.a. Giant-Man, a.k.a. Goliath, a.k.a. Yellowjacket, is pretty crucial to the history of the Avengers.  This creates a rather serious dilemma for the architects of the MCU, as on the one hand you need Ant-Man, and, on the other hand, Ant-Man is pretty stupid.  I mean, he shrinks and talks to ants.  Not exactly exciting as superheroes go.  You can get more action of Aquaman, with a decent writer.  But let’s explore that in a future installment.

The point here is that the Avengers, like the Justice League, always appealed to me for exactly the opposite reason that they appealed to most people.  I never cared about the fact that the greatest heroes of the Marvel universe were all there: Iron Man and Hulk and Thor and Captain America.  Because I never particularly cared for those guys.  I loved the Avengers because of the little guys: Ant-Man may be stupid, but Hank Pym is actually very interesting, and Wasp is very cool.  Then there’s Scarlet Witch and Vision and Beast and Hawkeye and Black Panther and Black Widow and Tigra and Jocasta and Hellcat and Wonder Man.  The Justice League seemed to follow a strict formula of one or two A-listers and then fill out the mission roster with the lesser-known guys, but the Avengers would often do entire storylines where the “Big Four” would never show up at all.  So, while I was in general more of a DC man than a Marvel one, it’s definitely true that I liked the Avengers more than the JLA.⁸

But that’s difficult to translate into the MCU.  The whole function of the MCU is to sell movies (and TV series).  To do that, they need to push the big names: the Big Four, of course, and Daredevil to a lesser extent (because he’s a lesser known name, if still bigger than most of the folks I liked), and they’ve finally managed to bring Spider-Man home, who’s probably the biggest name of all.  But those are not the guys I care about.  So what’s really interesting to me is how successful the MCU has been at integrating the smaller names.  We’ve only had two Avengers movies, and already I’ve gotten to see Black Widow, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Vision.  Now, with the advent of Civil War, they’ve added Black Panther.  Over on the Netflix side, Power Man was introduced in Jessica Jones, and he’ll be getting his own series in just a little over a month, plus Iron Fist is also in the works.  And, speaking of Jessica Jones, that opened the door for Hellcat, of all people, who is one of the most interesting comic stories of all time, and another one of my favorites.  Hell, they even managed to devote an entire movie to freaking Ant-Man, which I swore was impossible—or, if possible, could not possibly be any good.  But it was all right.  (They had to go the Scott Lang route and relegate Hank Pym to a side role, but, again: we’ll look at that angle in a bit more detail in an upcoming installment.)  Point being: the MCU has really done pretty well—surprisingly well, even—with bringing out the lesser known heroes.  And those were always the ones I loved.

So there’s one reason I’m so enamored of the MCU.  But there others.

⇐ What “MCU” Means, and What It Means to Me

Bringing the Funny ⇒

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1 Unless you count the teaser panel of the issue before his first proper appearance.  Which I don’t.

2 Although, to be fair, I also had a great affinity for the mystical superheroes, who were fulfilling my comic book requirements and my fantasy requirements simultaneously.  And Doctor Strange is pretty crucial to the mystical storylines, at least on the Marvel side.  Back on the DC side, it would be Dr. Fate and Phantom Stranger, along with some other lesser known guys (Spectre, Demon, Deadman, Ragman, Zatanna, Blue Devil, etc).

3 And I did some extra research while writing this post, only to come up completely blank.

4 Or her, but let’s face it: that far back, it was probably a “him.”

5 Exhibit A: B’wana Beast.

6 Being a child of the eighties, my go-to example of a supergroup is Asia, composed of former members of Yes, King Crimson, Emerson Lake & Palmer, and the Buggles.

7 We could discuss other supergroups: the Justice Society of National Comics (the predecessor to DC), the Invaders—originally known by the unimpressive moniker “the All-Winners Squad”—of Timely Comics (the predecessor to Marvel), the Crime Crusaders Club (another terrible name) of Fawcett, even the Mighty Crusaders of Archie Comics (yes, Archie had superheroes too).  But the big two are the only two left, for all intents and purposes.

8 Don’t get me wrong: the JLA had Firestorm and Zatanna and Red Tornado and Black Canary and Phantom Stranger.  So they had fun times too.  Just not as many.

And now for something not nearly as completely different as it was last time ...

Well, I have to bail on another post this week, unfortunately.  I just (as in hours ago) finished a long project for $work,^* and there’s just no time to work in a proper post before the weekend is out.

So, let’s play another little game of “Last Two,” which I invented about two years ago when I also didn’t have time to do a proper post.

Last two movies I watched:  We (meaning the whole family) just watched The Little Prince on Netflix, which we all thought was pretty good.  Even our eldest, jaded teen that they are, managed to keep their earbuds out of their ears long enough to get to the end.  Higher praise I cannot imagine.  Before that ... I think it was The Last Witch Hunter, which is sort of brainless entertainment, except it had XXX, Frodo, and Ygritte, which is not a bad cast for brainless sword fighting and car chases and nonsensical explosions (considering it’s a movie about witches).  But I’m not particularly hard on movies.

Last two audiobooks I listened to:  Well, I just finished Bitten, which is the first in the Women of the Otherworld series.  I wanted to try it out because I’d heard good things about, but I found it distinctly “meh.”  I’ll try at least one more to see if it improves, but it was a little too Harlequin-romance-y for my tastes.  Not bad ... just not great.  Before that I blew through Around the World in 80 Days, as a palate cleanser after coming off of The Android’s Dream by John Scalzi (which is the one I would really recommend: it was a bit slow for the first 2 or 3 chapters, then it took off like a bat out of hell and was amazing straight through to the end, plus I’ve already talked about what an awesome reader Wil Wheaton is).  80 Days is one of the few Verne books I never read when I was younger, and I picked it up at one of those buy-1-get-1-free-but-only-certain-titles sales at Audiobook.  One is always a little surprised by the casual racism when one reads a book published in, say, 1873, but it was actually the casual classism that irked me more.  ‘Cause, you know, Phileas Fogg is an English gentleman, and Passepartout is just a servant.  And here’s a fun fact that you might not know if you haven’t read the book: Fogg hired Passepartout the day they left on the journey.  So they go off and have all these adventures and Passepartout trusts Fogg implicitly depsite barely knowing him ... because he’s a gentleman.  It’s sort of ... disturbing, really.  But a sort of fun book nonetheless.  Just a bit anachronistically jarring when you’re reading it 150 years later.

Last two real books I read:  Dude, I hardly ever read real books any more.  But, weirdly, I’m right in the middle of one right now: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.  I wasn’t going to even start it until next week, but I made the mistake of reading the first several pages to see if the play format was going to work for me, and I got sucked in.  It’s not as good as sometihng actually written by Rowling, but it’s her story, so it’s still interesting enough to make you not want to put it down.  Before that ... I honestly can’t remember.

Last two bands I discovered:  Well, I just (as in minutes ago) discovered Pomplamoose.  Not sure how I never heard of them before, as they’re apparently a bit of a big deal on the Internet.  Everyone else in my house had heard of them, apparently (The Mother is the one who pointed me at them, actually).  I’m just a bit slow, I guess.  Prior to that, I guess I would say Aurora, who I was bit taken with after her appearance on Colbert.  I don’t think it was the song she played on The Late Show, but “Conqueror” is pretty amazing.

Last two albums I bought:  All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend by Aurora, obviously, and before that I think Still Night, Still Light by Au Revoir Simone.  Whom I also discoverd thanks to Colbert, because one third of Au Revoir Simone is now one third of Nice as Fuck, who was on Colbert last week (or the week before, maybe ... I forget).

Last two restaurant meals I ate:  Does Jack in the Box count as a restaurant?  I tried their new portabello-mushroom burger thing.  They keep advertising it all over the TV there, and it looks so good on the commercial ... but don’t do it.  It’s a bad, bad idea.  Before that, no family meal since last week (Topper’s pizza last Sunday—and, may I say, if you happen to live in Southern California and haven’t yet eaten at Topper’s, put down your computer right this instant and order; you won’t be sorry).  I suppose I ate out with my coworkers on Tuesday (I was sick the latter part of the week), but damned if I can remember what we ate.  Japanese, maybe?

Last two real animals I saw (excluding family this time):  I rescued a widow spider out of my shower this morning.  It wasn’t a black widow, but I’m not 100% sure if it was a brown widow or a red widow or what.  But it definitely had the characteristic widow shape.  Before that ... hmmm ... yesterday, I think it was, I saw a bright red dragonfly that swooped in and landed on one of The Mother‘s planter hooks.  It was pretty cool.

Last two television shows I watched:  Hmmm ... not counting watching things like Sesame Street with the kids, I would probably say SCTV Network 90 and Whose Line Is It Anyway?.  Last two shows I watched with another adult ... probably the season finales of Preacher and Stranger Things.  You totally have to check out Stranger Things if you haven’t yet, by the way.  It’s insanely good.

Last two podcasts I listened to:  I don’t really listen to podcasts, per se.  Judge John Hodgman sometimes.  But I do listen to streaming versions of NPR shows, so if we can count that, I was just listening to Car Talk in the car today.  They’re on repeats now, of course, since Tom died.  But I still enjoy it.  Before that ... well, I just recently discovered Nerd HQ and I watched a shit-ton of Zachary Levi’s “Conversations for a Cause” panels, which they thoughtfully videoed and put up on YouTube.  Again, not really a podcast, and, again, not sure how I only became aware of this recently, but they’re pretty entertaining to watch (top pick from the 2016 set: Felicia Day), and I find Levi just as entertaining as Hardwick, and maybe even a bit more endearing, somehow.

And that’s about it.  Hopefully that’ll tide you over until next week.  And, honestly, this post is long enough that I don’t even really consider it “interstitial,” so, you know ... be happy.

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* Technically speaking, the project is not done.  But it’s done enough to make my boss happy once again, and I think I can take the remainder of the project at a more reasonable pace.