Jude St Francis v Bojack Horseman

CW: suicide, self harm, childhood sexual abuse + exploitation (CSA+E), intimate partner violence (IPV), addiction

Spoilers for A Little Life and Bojack Horseman.

Warning re: likelihood of this being sort of a shallow discussion: I didn’t feel like doing a whole deep-dive into this heavy topic, instead wanting to write a brief thing about these two characters and the book and tv show they’re from. Just read this instead.

The novel A Little Life is pretty long. I found out when I was 2/3 of the way through it that it has a bit of a thesis statement when it comes to suffering and suicide: some people are too far gone for us to reach.

I may not have picked up the book had I known about the criticism it’s received on that topic, and so I guess I’m grateful that I learned in the middle of reading? There is a scene kind of early on where Jude, possibly the fictional character subjected to the most suffering of any other fictional character I’ve ever encountered, is adopted by his mentor Harold. It may be implausible in the real world, but, still. Harold and his wife Julia are portrayed in the novel as pretty much angelic. Kind, loving, supportive people who adopt the adult Jude, who deserves their angelic parenting, and who has never known anything even resembling parental love and support in his life. For that scene alone, I’m glad I read this book. I also enjoyed the depiction of friendship, although my enjoyment of the friendship did start to crumble away as the novel went on and its thesis statement came into clearer view.

I’m also glad I did learn what “the point” of Jude’s suffering would be before I got to his suicide – I was ready for it. I don’t really know what to say. I’m not sure if I think this book is cynical to the point of being grotesque or if it’s trying to get at some true vision of the human spirit in earnest, but, I do have a question about the choice of main character.

Before we get to that question, here are my Jude St Francis observations:

• Jude has moments of extreme self loathing countless times, it gets dull – this goes nowhere.
• The reader, and here you’re picturing me because I don’t know anyone else’s tastes, knows that his self loathing is based on bullshit.
• The people around him are occasionally aware of the depths of his self loathing (mostly they’re not, but every once in a while, they notice), and they know it’s based on bullshit and try to talk him out of it.
• His response is invariably to dismiss this and never, ever, ever reflect on it, except to repeatedly ask himself “why” anyone and everyone he loves and admires are wasting their time on him.
• I doubt most people are strangers to self loathing. Many of us go down those roads from time to time. Knowing what casual self loathing feels like, this reader thinks Jude’s insistence on self loathing without budging anywhere near reflection is a convenient and irritating contrivance to keep the character on the path towards the conclusion of “See? He was too far gone to help and they caused him more pain by trying.”
• To me the endless parade of shit Jude had to go through as a little kid is another contrivance added in to be like “See? No one could survive being put through all of this.” Which grosses me out, because there are survivors of this stuff. Kids who get exploited for years like Jude does exist, and they do survive, and I’m really grossed out by the implication that this book might be saying maybe they shouldn’t.
• Not sure that this depiction of CSA+E is informed by very much research, tbh (from reading and listening to real accounts of it)
• Similarly, the IPV relationship Jude briefly ends up in didn’t feel at all realistic (from reading real accounts and the book Why Does He Do that? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft)
• I’m not as schooled in self harm as the little schooling I’ve had on the above topics, but, the author has admitted to not researching self harm before writing all the self harm, so also that.
• Why didn’t he just do it waaaaaaaaay earlier?

On the last one – I know the answer is “because then we wouldn’t have a book.” But I’m not reading a journey of self destruction that makes sense. I’m reading a stagnant character experience happiness and sadness, sometimes profound happiness and profound sadness, and although each suicide attempt, and the eventual successful suicide, technically make sense, because he’s been established as a suicidal character and usually the attempts are around some sort of setback, it still doesn’t make sense as character progression. It doesn’t make sense that if he was so far gone, he didn’t attempt or successfully kill himself when the abuse was happening – in the monastery, in the hotel, in the group home, or after being rescued. Or in university, with no guidance or support, or therapy – just his group of friends, and no way to process his trauma. Why does it take so long? Why would he have decided to go through schooling (successfully), pursue a career (successfully), get adopted, keep up with his friends (successfully), if the whole time it’s been a foregone conclusion in his mind and in the author’s mind that he can’t ever heal, he is too far gone for that, and he just has to die instead?

The book compares Jude, with his chronic pain, disability, self harm, suicidality, and suitcases and suitcases of trauma to Harold’s biological son who dies after suffering a horrific childhood progressive and terminal illness that is entirely fictional. Despite it being a fictional disease, I think that comparison is kind of gross.

In trying to come to terms with this very large book I’ve read, I started to ask myself what I would have done with this thesis statement of “sometimes people are beyond help.” If I wanted to write a story about someone who was perhaps too far gone to be reached, too damaged to save, beyond help, I’d want it to be nuanced, and mostly, I’d have to ask myself who I’m writing this story about.

Why would it be someone with chronic pain? Someone who is disabled? Someone who has experienced CSA+E? Someone who has experienced torture? Someone who has experienced IPV? Like. What would I be gaining by trying to make that point? I guess personally if I wanted to discuss someone who might be “beyond help,” I’d lean more towards making it a Bojack Horseman type.

I do want to quickly say I’m on favour of policies like MAID (medical assistance in death) because we euthanize animals to prevent their suffering and they don’t have the capacity to make that choice for themselves. Humans with the capacity and who fit the criteria should be allowed to decide to end their lives peacefully if this is what they want. But Jude doesn’t reflect on his life or his suffering in any real way. All I see is someone who desperately needs to TALK to someone, which he does not want to do.

Here are the qualifications:

“You must:

• have a serious illness, disease or disability.
• be in an advanced state of decline that cannot be reversed.
• experience unbearable physical or mental suffering from your illness, disease, disability or state of decline that cannot be relieved under conditions that you consider acceptable.”

If Jude were real and if he were in Canada, he’d probably consider himself qualified based on the third bullet point. But – like. He’d have to convince someone of that, which means he’d have to actually talk about his feelings to someone, and that person would likely be a psychiatrist, and probably that psychiatrist could help him or could point him in the direction of help, that isn’t just death.

I will say that Jude manages to tell the entire story of his CSA+E and all the rest of it to Willem, and he does talk to a therapist or psychiatrist, but this changes nothing about his self loathing, self harm, and suicidality. He doesn’t “get better,” which in some ways is good because there’s no real cure for trauma, but there is healing. Jude doesn’t heal, not at all. Willem can’t heal him with sex, he can’t heal him with romance, he can’t heal him with friendship. Harold and Julia can’t heal him with parenting. Andy (his “doctor”) can’t heal him at all. All of this because Jude… refuses to heal?

I guess?

And what “help” is Jude so far beyond that is actually offered? Apart from love and support (which is always important IRL), there is a lot of yelling, sighing, disappointment, concern, and hiding of his razors. There is an insistence that he seeks professional help. Pleading for Jude to talk to them, to tell them what’s wrong. None of this even sparks the tiniest of lights in Jude that he might use to start to reflect, to start to try to love himself and let go of the loathing and the self harm. He just thinks, boringly, “I wonder why they love me when I’m so disgusting.” JUDE. I suppose it’s possible that some people do this with their trauma – they just hold onto it and refuse to consider the possibility that it might not all be their fault. But I don’t think what’s depicted in the novel is actually what that would look like.

Then there’s a fictional character who does reflect, and who does sometimes make strides, but ultimately may be beyond help, since he’s so stubborn and just kind of won’t help himself, won’t change. Bojack Horseman is wealthy, successful in his own way, able bodied, straight, male, has a history of bad behaviour, and a strange and earnest urge to be a good person. Or really, an urge to be seen as a good person, with a consistent refusal to actually doing the work to be a good person.

The show Bojack Horseman is a good palate cleanser for something like A Little Life. In the penultimate episode there is a recitation of a poem called “The View from Halfway Down.” You have to see the whole show to truly feel the effect of it, I think. The first time I saw it I sat with my stomach cold and thought, “That maybe saved someone’s life. Maybe that’ll save mine.” I don’t want to be super cynical myself, but I’m not sure that A Little Life and its “some people are too far gone” thing could do the same.

Things Bojack and Jude have in common:

• Cold success. Jude is a very successful lawyer working in a firm that is helping to ruin the world, and he loves it. Bojack is washed up but he’s happy and comfortable being a former tv star and enjoying the money he made doing it. Neither shows much inclination towards considering whether their success needs to be reflected on, whether they might try to do something that helps the world instead.
• Rich guys. Only one of these stories, and it’s Bojack, is interested in discussing the role of being a rich guy in the self destruction and harming of those around him.
• Childhood trauma. Jude’s is immense. Bojack’s by comparison really isn’t, but it’s enough. If A Little Life were better it would have probably not gone so far in it’s graphic depiction of CSA+E, because Bojack Horseman manages to make simple neglect one of the most wrenching things on a television screen.
• Addiction: Bojack’s to alcohol, possibly to other drugs as well, and Jude’s to self harm (and self loathing, I guess)
• Stagnation. Jude never changes. Neither does Bojack. Both stories are making a point about that – the point of Jude’s stagnation is “See, he can’t be helped and never could be helped and was doomed at some point in the middle of all of the CSA+E he experienced, weird thing to say due to real people who have endured similar, but, whatever!” And Bojack’s is “wanting to do better and actually doing better are two very, very, very different things.”

I think the difference between these two characters is agency. Technically, both Jude and Bojack have agency. Jude doesn’t want to heal, wants to hold on to his self loathing, wants to die, and he succeeds in all of this. But the novel, in achieving its thesis, pretty much sets him up as having no agency until it’s all over. You’re rooting for Willem, Harold, Julia, and all the rest to somehow save him, right up until the end, so his consistent choice to be stagnant and not accept help or try to heal aren’t as obvious while you’re actually in it. In contrast Bojack is always very clearly in control of his own actions. This makes him more compelling, and more true to life. I don’t think Bojack Horseman ever says that some people are too far gone to be saved (and here “saved” usually means redemption, but sometimes it also does mean the same thing as it does in A Little Life), but it does ask the question again and again. Can Bojack change? “Yes,” the show, I think, insists. But will he? And again and again, Bojack chooses not to.

After reading A Little Life, I felt a bit nauseated remembering the “some people are too far gone” thesis and understanding that it had been applied to someone in large part because of the experience of CSA+E, and in other large part due to chronic pain and disability. It’s just… unkind. The catharsis of Jude’s adoption and the other occasional moments of joy he experienced – not worth it, maybe, in the end.

After watching Bojack Horseman, I felt everything. Frustrated by him. Relieved that he lives. Angry that he hasn’t changed. Happy that he still has some relationships left intact. Terribly, terribly sad for him too. And grateful to be alive.

idk.

Thoughts on Rafah (and Canada)

This article, “Trudeau says Israel needs to follow ICJ ruling and halt operations in Rafah” was posted by CBC on May 24.

Since then, a tent city of refugees in a “safe” zone was bombed. I’ll wait with bated breath to see what other empty words come out of Canada’s government next.

Canada’s empty words, toothlessly admonishing our ally, which is currently plausibly committing genocide and definitely committing war crimes, coupled with Trudeau’s recent conflation of the criticism of Zionism with actual antisemitism should be no surprise. In Canada, there are still many Indigenous communities who lack safe water despite various governmental promises to fix it. I only learned recently of an Ontario paper mill, Dryden, dumping mercury from 1962 to 1970 into water that then poisoned two Indigenous communities. Just last week a new study shows that Dryden (which changed ownership last year) is STILL contaminating the water, and the new contaminants are worsening the effects of the mercury they dumped in there before, which the government never cleaned up. Hopefully some compensation for the people affected is coming, but why should it take this long? Why wasn’t cleaning the water a government priority long before now, and why has no one really been held accountable yet – not the previous owner of the mill, and not anyone in government?

Recently in southern Ontario some members of the Aamjiwnaang nation were treated in hospital because of toxic chemical exposure from a plant near them. INEOS, the chemical plant, is appealing the provincial government’s decision to give them a bunch of measures to comply with before they can reopen, because it’s going to cost them too much money. They’re hoping for the Dryden treatment, I guess.

Two years ago Canadian news was discussing the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in foster care. Trudeau did put through legislation to address this in 2020, to be fair to him/his government. The legislation grants Indigenous people jurisdiction over their own children’s welfare in an attempt to not have the state do what it had been doing up until then. Quebec appealed it. The appeal was rejected.

The story of Joyce Echaquan, an Atikamekw woman, is particularly horrific. She was seeking care in a hospital in Quebec and was dying, which nurses were apparently unaware of, as they mocked and dismissed her while she screamed. Quebec’s Premier denied that systemic racism had anything to do with what happened to her.

A recent provincial election in Manitoba featured the incumbent Premier promising to continue to not search a landfill for the bodies of Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran, two of four Indigenous women murdered, their bodies still missing. Former Premier Heather Stefanson stood by the Progressive Conservative Party’s decision to pay for billboards and newspaper ads about how much they did not want to or plan to search the landfill for those women. Since then, governments have pledged some money to start a search.

We’ve made slow and painful progress on Truth and Reconciliation, but every inch has to be fought for, mostly by Indigneous people themselves. At this point for politicians it’s good politics to signal to the rest of Canada that you “care” about Indigenous people, unless you’re in a right wing party, then it seems you signal the opposite (fuck you especially, Stefanson). But signals are often mostly empty words.

I believe in open borders. If a place in the world has cultural or religious significance to you, if you have ancestry there a long time ago, or if you just think it’d be a cool place to live and you want to go live there, if it were up to me I’d say, “Great! Send me pictures. Maybe I’ll come visit if you want.” But like, don’t take someone else’s home. Relentlessly. Don’t take their rights away. Don’t murder them. Don’t imprison them indefinitely without trial. Don’t snipe children for rock-throwing, or at all. Don’t murder their children. Don’t shoot their sheep and burn their crops. Don’t dehumanize them. Don’t do an apartheid. Don’t commit war crimes against them. Don’t sabotage any attempt at peaceful resolution to the conflicts you shouldn’t be feeding in the first place. Don’t commit genocide.

If Canada wants to be a peace-maker (and I am pretty sure that our government absolutely doesn’t want to be, despite its words), we need to be honest about what our ally is doing right now and we should hold them to account. We should prioritize the wants and needs of the Palestinian people when trying to help create a peaceful solution and not just be all colonial about it. Most of all, we should look to our own history and realize that it’s time for us to humble ourselves and take a back seat spot here. Let Indigenous people attain their self-determination while we get out of their way. Land back. End colonialism.

Operation Olive Branch on Instagram.

wyoming wolf torturer

A good poem:

https://tinhouse.com/letter-to-the-person-who-carved-his-initials-into-the-oldest-living-longleaf-pine-in-north-america/

My quick haphazard poem inspired by the above:

these same sentiments

BUT IN ALL CAPS

directed at the wyoming man

who tortured a dying wolf pup

after he ran her down with his snowmobile

for a bout of wholesome legal wyoming fun

And the officials who called it a day

after fining him $250

just for the part

where he dragged her around his mother’s bar

tape around her muzzle

taking selfies,

kissing her growling face

laughing,

and her eyes downcast, full of pain,

until he was done with her and shot her.

Animal cruelty law

doesn’t apply to wolves

in wyoming

But you’d better remember, wolves don’t belong in bars

(dying) wolves

(with taped muzzles)

pose a danger to bar patrons.

Strong wyoming men on snowmobiles

who torture wolf pups for fun

are, they say, protecting wyoming lifestyle

which clearly seems worth protecting

from wolves and city people and vegans

and every other bleeding heart

who’d limit human depravity

at least a bit.

Some story book told us

wolves were dangerous

a girl in a red hood and in the woods

(wolf as a handy metaphor for predatory men, shh, shh)

so the rest of it was totally fine

you just have to remember to only torture wolf pups outside

if you’re torturing wolf pups

in wyoming

I wrote that in 20 minutes after struggling with how to post a brief comment linking Olzmann’s poem to my thoughts about the wyoming situation on social media. I don’t think it’s brilliant, but it’s what I had in that moment and it’s better out than in.

I said once that hearing about certain instances of animal cruelty killed small parts of me. I don’t feel that way now, but this instance did crumble my day, and then my next day, and the next, and caused significant nausea and intermittent and profound sorrow. If hearing about it and seeing the pictures did the same for you, I get it. Best I can offer.

Google Maps Trip

Sometimes I like to take a trip via google maps. It usually ends up scaring me. Lately I’ve been specifically inspired by True Detective‘s fourth season, Night Country, to look for remote and northern destinations to drop my yellow person down into (if the van has been there, that is).

Anyway. Let’s say I accidentally teleported myself, my essentials (not food though), and a working vehicle into Red Lake, a little town quite a ways west from, let’s say, Niagara Falls Ontario, which is not where I live, but is not excruciatingly far. Red Lake has a nice-looking lake, a harbour called “Government Docks” which looks like a nice place to walk around by, and a restaurant called Antonio’s which appears to have one vegan option (spaghetti with tomato sauce).

I put the yellow person right there on the road close to the lake and was rewarded with a nice image of the sun, and a bunch of snow. I would like to drive on this road. Not in extreme weather though.

So if I want to go home, I’ll have to head east and south. I’ll take the 105.

from google maps

These long two-lane highways bookended by trees are pretty much what I expect driving in most places in this country. I can stop at Ear Falls. They have a beach, and Lac Seul Generating Station, and a splash pad, which I’m sure isn’t operational in February.

A million years later, there’s an intersection with 17 which is going to get me to 11 which is (part of) the trans Canada highway. At that intersection is Bobby’s Moose Creek Trading Post, which a reviewer didn’t like because there were no local or Indigenous goods, no public bathroom, and it wasn’t dog friendly (sad!). I don’t have a dog with me but I’ll skip.

At this point I’m thinking about when I might be able to have another meal. Not since the plain tomato sauce spaghetti have I seen a restaurant with a vegan option. To be fair, I’ve seen a Subway, but they barely have vegan options and even if they did, I wouldn’t do it. I also haven’t been looking hard, but, I think I’m right.

There’s something called “Eagle Lake Floating Vacations” but it says it’s a fishing camp, so I’ll just drive by.

Now there is Dryden, a bigger town that the van bothered driving through. There used to be a restaurant there, Kokom’s Bannock Shack, that apparently had vegan options and is now closed, which is very sad.

They have a Service Ontario if I want to go stand in a line. They have a tourist attraction called Max the Moose with 136 reviews, mostly positive. There is one 1 star review: “Its a moose… that got his balls cut off cause people couldnt stop playing with them.” I can’t vouch for that but that’s bleak if true.

There are many pictures featuring Max the Moose. I suggest you take a look. My personal favourites are the black and white artsy one where Max is looking to the sky, and also the one with the majestic rottweiler lying in front of Max. My canon is that this rottweiler was the dog denied service at Bobby’s Moose Creek Trading. I’m glad they got to enjoy Max at least.

I wanted a nice picturesque image of Dryden so I went for the street view on the little bridge, and I got this.

I wanted to know what that was, so I took a quick peak. It’s Dryden Fibre (paper towels, tissue, and paper). The first google review says, “Company responsible for dumping 9,000 kilograms (20,000 lb) of mercury into the English-Wabigoon River upstream of Grassy Narrows First Nation and poisoning the community, making it “one of Canada’s worst environmental disasters”. The company is all about profit, not caring for people. All the google reviews giving 5 stars are also probably bought off $$” – I don’t know about that either but will do some googling when I get home. [EDIT: soooooooo yes, this company is responsible for dumping mercury into a river and poisoning people from the Grassy Narrows and the Whitedog Indigenous nations and their water and fish. Link to a report on the situation and how it was handled, and the aftermath, with a focus on the community affected. Infuriating. Then there’s this too, about how the former owners, who are responsible for the poisoning, were let off the hook. And this, about the government deciding not to clean it up. And this, about how scientists recommended back then and again recently that cleanup was possible if costly, and could save lives. And this, about how the government is failing to help community members with health effects from mercury poisoning. Despicable, but honestly -93839337829338 star review to all the Ontario governments past and present too. Absolute trash.]

Now passing through Aaron Provincial Park. I doubt I’m in any shape for a hike but I’m going to risk it. The pictures people have posted look pretty great.

Now reaching Ignace, with a skate park and community garden, and a lake nearby.

At the time of this blog writing, just before cute little Hay Lake, there is a tourist attraction on the side of 17 called “Kelsie & Scotts Inukshuk”:

If that’s it, it appears to have fallen over. RIP.

Next, past some more vegan-unfriendly restaurants and campgrounds, there is the Arctic Watershed Marker, and I’d like to stop and read that if I’m not being tailgated.

Finally we reach the 11. It’s here that I went “omg how long is this going to be still.” And zoomed out. And. Yeah. In a careers class in grade 8, I was assigned the trucker career. I sometimes think about what life would be like if I had pursued that, but I think now it’s clear I lack the necessary patience along with the stamina.

So. I think a realistic goal for now is to just get to Thunder Bay, which is a city with a few vegan-friendly restaurants so I can maybe finally eat.

Along the way, I’ll pass by The Barn which appears to be a place you can water your horses. Then there’s a cool-looking river but it appears you don’t see it from the road until you cross a little bridge. At this point I noticed that the highway I’m on is alternatively marked 11 or 17. That must be why it’s a two-lane-on-each-side highway now.

There is a rest area where someone has posted a picture of a dog with some sort of orange thing in their mouth. The reviewer approves of this rest stop. It must be dog-friendly.

Suddenly I’ve reached Kakabeka Falls, and I must stop and take a look. The view from the little bridge over the river isn’t much, but people have posted some beautiful pictures of the actual falls on google. My personal favourite includes an extremely fluffy dog.

Moving right along, I go over Jelly Road which is Wing Road on the other side of 11/17, interesting. A little while later, boom. Thunder Bay.

After stopping myself from starving to death at Bonobo’s Foods (I’d order the Crabby Bonobo. I cannot resist vegan crab-type foods), I probably want to check out several places, including but not limited to:

• the Thunder Bay Art Gallery (currently exhibits are Radical Stitch, about beading, and Wall Pockets, about beaded wall pockets and I am delighted because I love beads and I feel I need many wall pockets and didn’t realize those ever existed until now)
• Centennial Conservatory (the word “arboretum” appears and I must go)
• the Service Ontario (jk)
• omg does Subway pay google to highlight their sub-par food on the map, seriously, I’m not going to Subway ever
• Hillcrest Park (you can get a view of the city from up high there, looks pretty cool)
• Mario’s Bowl (I suck at bowling but whatever, I’ve always wanted to be that eccentric person whipping bowling balls down a lane all on their own, grooving to whatever music is playing)
• Thunder Bay Museum (I like the red velvet people playing instruments the most)
• I’d go to the Boreal Museum too but it appears to be closed for the off-season
• and I might try to visit the Clean Kitchen Coach because I could use some pointers.

Anyway. I realized now that Thunder Bay is right on Lake Superior and I lost my little mind. I have ALWAYS wanted to see Lake Superior which has ALWAYS been the scariest and most existential-crisis-inducing of all of the lakes. The Mission Marsh Conservation Area is on the shore and I’d go spend my life there, so looks like a good place to stop for now.

Some stats:

• just the driving on this trip is somewhere around 6.5 hours, which obviously doesn’t take into account reading highway signs, looking at fallen-over inukshuks, going for random hikes because I can’t resist a conservation area, looking at dogs at dog-friendly and dog-unfriendly places, and looking unsuccessfully for vegan food and finding mostly Subways, sporting goods stores, campgrounds, curling clubs, trees, and so on.
• If I wanted to walk it, and let’s face it, I do, it would be 119 hours, and google warns me that Thunder Bay is in a different time zone from Red Lake.
• There is no transit available for this trip. This makes sense, but I feel that if people in Red Lake want to go to Thunder Bay they shouldn’t have to rely on a car, or a 119 hour walk.
• The trip, now that I’ve reached Thunder Bay, is not even halfway done.

Maybe I’ll finish this trip later. For now I’m hanging with the goddess Lake Superior, peering into her depths and wondering about the nature of life, death, existence itself, and the deep, deep, darkness.

See you next time!

Mole

I said, “It’s like whack-a-mole. We’ve just got to keep popping up, one after another, all over the place.”

I could ask, “Where did this version of me come from?” I’ve always been easy going, people-pleasing, very, very quiet. My voice still shakes in a confrontation – but there I go starting confrontations anyway. Direct eye contact and everything.

This new version of me has always been me. When I was little I was called “capa tosta,” meaning “rock head.” Not the most flattering name, but it was used affectionately when I was being a stubborn, uncooperative child. If you have a capa tosta, you don’t need to worry about mallets.

In the game, moles giggle as they surface. They sink back down whether they get hit or not, only to pop up again when the time is right. No one wins whack-a-mole. There are noises and lights and someone who definitely isn’t a mole collects a bunch of points, but the moles don’t ever actually stay down. They bide their time.

You find strength in surprising places, quiet places, and quiet people. Whispered conversations and meaningful glances when you can’t be sure it’s safe to say it out loud. You’d been convinced that power resides only with the powerful. But you find it so easily, right there, all along, in your own hands. There isn’t time to be surprised by how you’re instantly ready to use it.

The question that pops up at night: can I stay strong?

Strength is finite. We won one battle but the war goes on tomorrow, and if I still can’t sleep in the meantime, I will wear down like an eroding shore beaten by the sea. If I break, I’ll break knowing I did all I can to make things better for the ones who come after me.

This isn’t the sea or the shore. I’m a capa tosta, and what better place for me is there than here, in this absurd game of whack-a-mole, when no mallet can possibly put me under for good? Maybe I’ll keep popping up until the mallet breaks. We can call a truce. And agree, finally, to play a more equitable game.

mole people print at society6

(I want it)

The Extremely Boring Story of Youtube Comments Saving my Sanity

Spoilers for Free Guy, I guess.

Pointless preamble:

I took a “Popular Music” course and the prof gave us an unrealistic assignment to record the lyrics as you hear them in a song. “Don’t google it,” he said. OK, sure. He said, “Back in the day you wouldn’t have had that option. Imagine, we’d listen to the song over and over, and just PARTS of the song over and over, to try to figure the lyrics out.”

It distressed me. I remembered being a child and having to rely on the CD jacket to confirm lyrics, and if there wasn’t one, you were out of luck. Some of the first things I googled, once googling was a thing, were song lyrics. If I had a past life as a teenager and an adult before internet search engines, I know I’d be some poor soul listening to the same few seconds of music again and again to try to understand the lyrics.

It can be fun to not know, sometimes. As kids, a bunch of us liked “Someone to Call My Lover” by Janet Jackson. We didn’t know half the lyrics so we started making them up.

All I can remember is then we started changing the ones we knew, too, so that although the one she meets at a bar drives a funky car, if she meets him at a club instead, then he drives a “funky slug” and the part about falling so deeply in love was optional. And we’d sit at kitchen tables, pretty much chanting about clubs and funky slugs. But Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, and Google existed back then, and we clearly were having enough fun not to care about scream-singing correct lyrics. Simpler times. This is dark and out of place in my very boring story, but in remembering this small chunk of childhood I was surprised to learn that this song came out not in the 90s, but in 2001. We scream-sang about slugs and laughed hysterically about this and other nonsense, and after that summer 9/11 happened, and then the Iraq War happened, and then, and then, and then. I had no idea funky slugs were so close to our loss of innocence.

Anyway. If there’s anything that’s just as unimportant as but also more irritating than not being able to google what unknowable lyrics are, it’s not even knowing enough of the lyrics, or what the song in your head is called, or where to find it.

In a diner in Vancouver I heard a song I hadn’t heard in years, but only realized how much I liked the song AND ALSO OMG I DIDN’T KNOW ANY OF THE LYRICS OR ARTIST OR THE SONG TITLE YET as the song was ending. I tried to pay attention to the lyrics – any lyrics – because if you can catch just one phrase you can figure it out in seconds. But it slipped past me. “What is this song?” I asked in desperation as the final notes were fading away. My family all said variations of, “Shrug.”

Back at the hotel I was googling. “I heard it in a movie soundtrack once, I swear.” I said, googling soundtracks aimlessly. I literally put my hands to my temples and tried to replay the bit stuck in my head clearly enough to be able to recall lyrics. No use.

“New strategy: it sounded like a rock song from the 80s. It was a female singer. That should be extremely easy to narrow down.”

Five minutes later: “Don’t Get Me Wrong” by the Pretenders. My family was mildly impressed and they also were glad I shut up about it.

(The song ends with the lyrics that are the song title. I must have been distracted and it does mildly bother me that it took me that long to find the song. And I can’t believe I remembered it from Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, a movie I have perhaps seen, and if so, I saw it once, and remember nothing, except “Don’t Get Me Wrong” by the Pretenders.)

The actual story:

I watched Free Guy. I liked it. I’m not sure I liked it enough to watch it enough to really flesh out my only potentially interesting not-even-a-fully-formed-opinion-yet-just-a-raw-feeling about it into something worth blogging, though. Which is why this post is here instead.

(It’s that I find the concept of being created by someone as a love letter to someone else and then turning sentient because of it a little more than moderately horrifying.)

If I thought about it enough I’d either a) write something that might be worthwhile, or b) hyper fixate enough on it to realize it’s not a big deal, so, instead, I hyper fixated on the song that plays in a few parts of the movie.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cwjMzupxQk

This song. At this part of the movie (the kiss right before he remembers everything, should this video go blank one day because of property rights or whatever) I thought, “I know this song. I’ve heard this song. I know I’ve never seen this movie before. This song is in something else. Something short, like an ad. Like a car ad or something.”

I searched for the song title, “I Remember Everything,” I searched the Free Guy soundtrack, I tried searching for the use of the Free Guy soundtrack in other media. All Google would tell me is that “Fantasy” by Mariah Carey exists, and, thanks Google, but an Instagram reel of a cupcake with a sunshine face on it already reminded me of that back in March WHAT CAR AD FEATURES THIS SONG THAT CLEARLY HAS ROMANTIC VIBES BECAUSE IT IS STRESSING ME OUT??? HOW CAN YOU SELL A CAR THIS WAY??? It was driving me up the wall.

Now, I know you can search audio, but I didn’t get that far before Youtube comments helped me out. I don’t know why, considering how annoyed I was.

So on whatever video that contained “I Remember Everything” that I finally ended up watching (clearly not the one I’ve linked here, which, if it’s gone by now, has the droids I was looking for in the video description), hoping vainly that it would come to me, thinking I’d be cursed to just wait for the other thing that I KNEW existed with the same song to come to me again one day out of the blue long after I’d finally laid my frustrations to rest, and I’d have to wait for that moment to realize where I’d heard the song before, and this for some reason was causing me quite a bit of anger, and also I was stubbornly refusing to look into audio searches for (perhaps) masochistic reasons, there were a bunch of comments that were saying “Paperman.” “This is the song from Paperman.” “Christophe Beck used this song that he wrote from Paperman.” “I’m so glad this song, which is from Paperman, is getting attention.”

“Ohhhhh, it’s from Paperman. Not a car ad.” I thought. “Wait. What? Paperman?” So I had to watch a clip to be sure, and, yes. Paperman.

So my frustrations settled, new and less interesting and easily let go of questions replaced it in my brain (such as, …………why reuse a song? I’m not mad, but, huh?), and I can now move on with my life.

Thanks, Youtube comments. As we all know, those things are always helpful.

Two Adaptations I Liked, and all that

I revisited some remakes and retellings this week and wanted to compare and contrast them, but mostly just ramble about them. One is Aladdin (2019) and the other is Emma. (2020).

Always a topic of interest here, I think it’s kind of easy to disparage remakes and new adaptations – especially of the Disney variety. Yes, Disney makes them mostly as an excuse to print money, and it is not wrong to be cynical about that. I still find value in seeing the differences of the new version. If a remake offers absolutely nothing else, I’m still always fascinated to see what Disney finds important to delete, redo, shift, and rewrite. How they update LeFou – problematic, sure, but worse than the original? And how about compared to the staged version? It’s a nuanced topic and one I’d love to discuss in horrifying detail if you have a spare five hours! I remember thinking, while watching new Lion King, “how is this movie, which is going for ultra-realism (for reasons I don’t really understand) but also functions as something like a beat-for-beat remake of quite an unrealistic movie, going to do the ‘dress in drag and do the hula’ scene?” And then, Timon started singing “Be Our Guest.” Delightful. Obviously the original is way better. But if you ignore that, there are worthwhile tidbits in any of them for you if you’re a nerd, is what I’m saying.

I understand why some people aren’t interested in this. It can be tiresome to watch Disney create new plot holes while “fixing” earlier ones. Disney, please, EMBRACE THE PLOT HOLES. It’s about the message, not whether the movie make 100% real-world sense the whole way through. Also tiresome is watching them try to sanitize earlier films. It’s offensive, even, in some situations, but I think that permeating the anti-remake thought process is also a belief that because the originals were already made, that’s it, and now there’s nothing else to say about them, ever. But that’s not how story-telling works. There’s always a new avenue to explore in any story.

Unfortunately there are only certain stories that get this kind of treatment, and it’s based on which ones studios think many people will pay many dollars for. But even the most lackluster remake is going to, at the very least, give you remastered classic disney songs and score. Always worth it.

Aladdin of the year 2019

This version of “Arabian Nights” is better than the original.

Understandably, Disney changes some lyrics. “Where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face; it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home!” is gone. If the 90s were a kinder and smarter decade that wouldn’t have been there to begin with, but, growth and change, I guess. Even in the original animated version available on Disney+, they’ve altered it – the “barbaric” part of the line is still there but instead of the de-earing, it’s “where it’s flat and immense and the heat is intense.” In their 2019 version the lyrics have become: “where you wander among every culture and tongue, it’s chaotic, but hey, it’s home” – a significant departure/improvement. Does it solve racism? No. But that wasn’t the goal anyway. It’s just a small change that makes the final film slightly more welcoming to more people.

The other major lyric change is in “Prince Ali,” my favourite musical number from either Aladdin. The entourage now boasts: “he’s got ten thousand servants and flunkies” rather than the other thing, and, again, yeah.

There’s more focus on Jasmine in 2019. We spend time on her political ambitions, which I always felt the original is missing. She even gets a song that’s about vague female empowerment and not much else – and gets a reprise. The part where she intervenes and convinces Hakim to side with her and her father could have been woven a little better into the story, but as it is, it serves. It connects to the things she’s said right from the beginning about leadership and relating to the people at least.

Jasmine’s romance with Aladdin is given additional space to grow. It’s not that the 1992 version is missing that – Aladdin and Jasmine are just kind of cute there, and you don’t begrudge either of them falling in love so quickly. The new version’s romance definitely benefits from the extra bonding time. Jasmine also lies to Aladdin about her identity at first, making it a little less ridiculous when he’s doing all the lying later. In the original, Aladdin says she deserves a prince. In this one, he tells her that she should be the Sultan and I LIKE THAT BETTER, OK.

Jasmine gets a female friend, also a servant, also a major character, in Dahlia. Instead of being obstinate at the drop of the hat about suitors, she’s more focused on being Sultan than on being opposed to every offer of marriage. When Aladdin shows up with his parade, she is definitely unimpressed, but is watching politely until Genie says “heard your princess was HAWT, where is she?” My guffaw when I first saw it. Oh man.

If you’re not too busy laughing you are firmly on her side of this thing anyway during Prince Ali’s yam jam speech about purchasing her with expensive gifts. This speech includes the best line AND line reading of all time: “And, uh, THAT, over there, hidden, for suspense. Tada.”

Genie and Aladdin’s relationship is still adorable, and just like the Aladdin/Jasmine romance, this friendship gets extra space and time to develop. One thing the new version eliminates is the part where Genie gets frustrated when Aladdin goes back on his promise to free him. He does get frustrated, just, differently. He told him early on not to “drink from that cup,” and is now disappointed.

This is a strange change. It’s extremely understandable for Genie to be pissed in the original about Aladdin going back on this promise and NOT freeing him from eternal slavery, but in 2019 Genie isn’t even phased by that part. He’s just like, “So… you’re just going to lie to Jasmine forever?” This reminds me of the time we watched “The Beast Within” from Teen Titans and Beast Boy steals and eats Robin’s entire ham and eggs, and Robin just says, “But you’re a vegetarian,” (vegan, Robin, vegan) and three said “Robin’s such a good friend.”

Genie is a good friend too, and entirely selfless. Even the original Genie gets over it and is willing to sacrifice freedom if it means his OTP will get together, meaning Genie was always far too selfless for this awful animated/CGI-live action world. Freeing the Genie is just as moving in each version. Good for you, Genie. Everyone deserves freedom, but you most of all.

Speaking of everyone deserving freedom, then there’s Jafar. Jafar has traded in his fabulousness for mere temper-tantrums and scheming – that is, he’s a regular villain now, not so much a 90s Disney villain. Like Jasmine’s political ambitions and prowess, Jafar serves here, but probably could have been put to better use. I wonder if the de-fabulousifying is an attempt by 21st century Disney to leave queer coding of villains in the past. If so, what’s going on with King Candy from Wreck-It Ralph?

The 90s villains have a following. They are always more visually interesting than their very-conventionally-attractive protagonist counterparts. Their queer coding also makes them firmly present on screen. They steal the show, is what I mean. Acknowledging that the coding is problematic doesn’t mean people can’t or won’t enjoy those characters. Honestly, if Jafar was allowed to turn it out in this movie I think it would have been better for it. I think he would have really shone doing “Prince Ali Reprise” and I miss it in this version. On the other hand, if Disney is trying to move away from doing that (especially after the live action LeFou and Gaston), then, respect. Most importantly, this movie is for kids of today, and as this very good article that says everything I just said way way better than I did also says, kids of today don’t need queer coded fabulous 90s disney villains. [What they need are some overtly queer protagonists but that’s another topic.]

It could also be that they want the villains in their new versions to be scarier. “We’re going to take this villain 100% seriously, like the Horned King,” they may have said (verbatim, I’m sure). This potential reason is probably more realistic than Disney honestly considering whether queer coding villains is a good thing to continue to do. The result is kind of meh no matter why they’re making these changes. Scar in 2019’s The Lion King was boring compared to the 1994 version, also, I think, because all his fabulousness is gone. I guess it makes them scarier – if I had to choose whether to face off against a team of Animated Jafar + Animated Scar, or Live Action Jafar and CGI Scar, I would choose the animated duo. But honestly, it’s just because I’m going to have a better time since they’re more fun. That said, I much preferred the serious take on Shere Khan to the animated, but I was no great fan of Animated Jungle Book anyway, and I really liked the remake.

2019’s Aladdin has Disney deciding against Gilbert-Gottfried-trapped-in-parrot-body type of Iago. They went with a more realistic approach, which was a mistake. Wise-cracking Iago really makes Aladdin (1992), in my opinion. Although, the part where darker, slightly more realistic Iago laughs at Prince Anders sarcastically is hysterical, as is the part where Aladdin says “We have a north… and… a south,” and Iago croaks, “What?” I must also take a moment to appreciate the CGI animals Raja and Abu:

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Yes, I know, they do this, I’m sure, because it’s cheaper to pay low wages for CGI artists than it would be to pay for exploited animal labour. They don’t do it to spare animals from exploitation – and the low wages of CGI artists thing really does suck. But exotic animals used for entertainment suffer so I’m still happy to see these CGI guys, and the artists did a great job. Whether it’s more or less expensive should be a moot point here anyway (and the artists should be paid more) because you simply can’t get these performances out of real animals.

Real animals don’t act. For example, to get a shot of a real tiger looking that enraged – well. Someone would need to sacrifice themselves. You’d also have to actually antagonize an actual tiger into an actual state of rage, as they did for a few shots in Life of Pi, and that’s not OK either. That isn’t a tiger acting, that’s a tiger being deliberately stressed out to the point of violence. Stahp.

In conclusion: Aladdin of 2019 makes some key changes to the source material, a 1992 animated film. It adds a vague female empowerment song and reprise, adds some decent political ambition and will for Jasmine, and shaves off some of the racism of the original. It goes for a serious villain in Jafar, either to make him scarier or to reduce the overall amount of villain queer coding Disney has done as a corporation. Now let’s look at an adaptation that leans in to all of the problematic elements of its source material, and then some.

Emma. of 2020 (a year which, as we know, took place one million years after 2019)

Emma. is a fresh take on Jane Austen’s novel, managing to be as fresh as it is without changing anything from the story. The freshness may come from the moments the movie takes to highlight somewhat non-Austen things, like the hero ripping some sort of layer off and then lying on the floor in extreme frustration or the heroine lifting her dress up by the fire. Or maybe Harriet being… quite affected by Knightley checking her leg for breaks. There is quite a lot of overt sexuality in this movie (…for an Austen adaptation), but it never feels, to me, out of place. There is a moment in Pride and Prejudice (2005) in which Lizzie and Darcy are livid with each other. He just proposed. She just rejected him. They both have major issues with each other. After yelling a lot, once they’ve yelled everything they need to yell, they just kind of gaze at each other in the rain and it NEVER FAILS TO TAKE ME OUT OF THE MOVIE. I understand that it’s all about the tension with those two, but it doesn’t feel real to me that in the argument they’re having (which is: she’s furious that he hurt her sister; he’s self-righteous because he was protecting his friend; she’s hurt by the way he’s talking about how inferior she and her family are to him; he’s wounded by how disgusted she is by his proposal) they’d both simultaneously stop and think, “Hmm, maybe we should just have sex instead.” Maybe I’m just asexual but come on, Lizzie is sad for Jane, Darcy is sad for Bingley, and both have just been deeply, deeply insulted by each other. Now is not the time unless they both have a very specific kink.

Anyway. The overt sexuality here doesn’t creep into inappropriate moments. The one I could compare it to would be “Badly done, Emma.” Imagine Knightley: “How could you, Emma, you really hurt her, and you have a lot of privilege compared to her and people are influenced by the way you treat her, it was BADLY DONE.” And instead of Knightley (sorry to hurt her but sorely disappointed) storming off and Emma bursting into hysterical tears and screaming at the driver to go (rude!), they gaze at each other but make it sexy.

EXACTLY.

The pull of this moment is that it’s the real low point. The genius of it is that it provides an excellent foundation to climb back up from. I read this book at some point and can’t remember the finer details, but I did find Knightley pretty irritating a lot of the time. He’s a massive scold, more of a parent than a love interest (and I mean the age gap in the book definitely doesn’t help with that either). Filmed versions always soften their weird dynamic, and this version in particular does an excellent job of it. Here you can really understand what’s enticing about this – not that Emma is a silly girl who needs someone to humble, tame, correct her all the time. It’s instead that she has someone who will hold her accountable, as no one else does. Everyone else in the “three dull things” scene is horrified by what Emma says, and even though she has real enemies present, no one will actually call her on it, except Knightley. It doesn’t hurt that he acknowledges that she’s changed his opinions on one or two things, too. Something he does in the book as well, to be fair.

I also really like this moment where Robert Martin, who has been recently rejected by Harriet, tells her which way to get home safely and then just stands sadly in the rain alone with his thoughts after she has left.

Austen adaptations usually serve up lots of sad looking men. I haven’t done a thorough enough study on this but I’m pretty sure modern romance and romantic comedies don’t make use of this tactic enough. Odd, considering in your typical heteronormative romance, juicing BOTH leads for all the angst you can get out of them would probably be very engaging for the audience. On men’s emotions and Austen adaptations (this one in particular) showcasing of them, I watched a video essay recently which uses a clip from Emma and Knightley’s wedding in 2020. Knightley brushes away a tear at the altar. The essayist is showing it as an example of a man crying in a movie for something joyful (his wedding), and it isn’t used as a reason to mock or shame him and laugh at his expense, just simply showing his emotions because they add to the story being told. Which, according to that essay, is very atypical. Society, I tell you.

NOW. In direct contrast to Aladdin 2019, what on earth is happening in Emma. 2020 where the servants are ALWAYS THERE? OK, the servants in Aladdin are also always there. But Jasmine and Dahlia are more like friends than Princess and servant, and Aladdin and the Genie develop a friendship as well. All four of them truly treat each other as equals despite some very significant power imbalances. So what I mean is, this movie, unlike every disney movie ever and even unlike most Austen renditions, portrays a much more realistic servant-employer relationship. There are definitely moments where your attention is drawn to them in Pride and Prejudice 2005, but this is something entirely new. They’re everywhere. You can’t not notice them. They have names? Bartholomew and Charles in particular are always standing by, the picture of silence, misery, boredom, judgement. I can’t get enough!

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That last image there is Charles and Bartholomew walking away for discretion when Emma and Knightley are kissing. A lesser film would have them smile or something, some little acknowledgement that they, like you, the audience, are rooting for this romance but NO. They couldn’t care less and it’s amazing.

That’s all I’ve got. I like both adaptations. I think they are both very much worth watching. Watch them if you haven’t!

Veganuary – Gus Fring’s Mistake

Spoilers for Breaking Bad.

I really like Mary’s Test Kitchen’s “fried chicken” recipe using medium firm tofu as the base. I most often use the baked version because it’s an easier cleanup, but this twice frozen twice thawed no chicken chicken stock flavoured battered breaded tofu deep fried is just very, very good.

Not having something like it on his menu is Gus Fring’s mistake.

DEA agent Hank thinks that Gale (precious Gale) is Heisenberg, notorious manufacturer of the blue meth, because his journals have a bunch of stuff in them that certainly connects him to the blue meth. Case closed! For reasons beginning with a capital W, Hank takes a second look at Gale’s journal and finds a reference to Los Pollos Hermanos, a local fried chicken fast food chain owned by friend of the DEA, Gus Fring.

This puts Gus under suspicion, the tension builds, and eventually it leads, sort of, to Gus’s downfall.

Hank is initially suspicious of the Los Pollos Hermanos journal mention because Gale was a vegan, and “since when do vegans eat fried chicken?” Well if it’s “fried chicken” made with tofu they do. All Gus had to do was incorporate one popular, delicious, and well-known vegan option on his fast food menu and the Pollos connection might never have been noted.

If I were to be shot dead and my notebooks revealed me to have intricate knowledge of how a notorious drug was being manufactured, and if I’d written down one of the A&W restaurant’s phone numbers on one of the pages, nobody would note that as bizarre because of Beyond Meat.

The animal metaphors used in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are always intriguing. They do have some shots of factory farmed broiler chickens when kingpin business meetings are happening, and those shots are probably not metaphors, just establishing shots. That didn’t stop me from viewing it through an animal rights lens: those poor broilers. Because if any industry can rival the evils of the drug industry (and BB and BCS paint the drug industry as quite evil), it’s the meat industry and then some. Gus hiding his illicit drug money in a “legitimate” fast food dead chicken empire is perfect. The broiler chickens are like the hapless victims of his drug schemes – the child being shot by dealers, the child Jesse encounters in Spooge’s house. Even Wendy, who doesn’t die, but who lives a difficult life. Their deaths and suffering, like the deaths and suffering of the broiler chickens, are simple necessities for Gus’s massive, massive profits.

There’s also the tarantula that the child catches at the beginning of the train heist episode – that’s not an establishing shot. The tarantula is like many of the other insect/arachnid metaphors on the show – Jimmy’s cockroach, the ants who are maybe about Jimmy and/or the cartel, and there are others, often shown whenever something shady is going on. She perhaps stands in for Todd, and also the train heist more generally. The child is out in the New Mexico wilds and finds a tarantula, not really a cute and cuddly animal, a little bit dark and dangerous. Later, he finds the train heist right after it’s happened – definitely dark and dangerous. And he’s killed for stumbling upon it. Todd keeps the tarantula in a tank as a pet afterwards. Does he have an affinity with her because she’s supposed to represent him – someone dangerous the child encountered by happenstance in the desert?

As with the broilers, I prefer to look at the tarantula through an animal rights lens: she represents the child’s innocence. She was in the desert minding her own business, a wild animal. A child can’t be blamed for stealing a wild animal and because he was killed, I’m going to just go ahead and believe he was going to release her from the jar before he went home. Or that perhaps his parents would make him bring her back to the desert if he’d ever actually been able to go home, and he would learn a valuable lesson about respecting the ecosystem and would then make it to adulthood and volunteer at a wildlife rehabilitation center. Instead, Todd comes along and kills the child, and steals the tarantula to keep as a pet. Both the child and the tarantula are innocent victims of Todd’s bland, pointless, apathetic evil.

I don’t know what to do with the ants. They see an opportunity (Jimmy’s delicious-looking mint chocolate chip vegan ice cream cone that he is UNJUSTLY forced to drop before getting into the car with Nacho and associates – Nacho do you KNOW how expensive vegan ice cream is?) and they seize the opportunity. They swarm over the opportunity. It’s an overtaking – Jimmy’s by the cartel? Jimmy’s by unethical lawyer work in general? Jimmy’s by his own moral deficiencies just like his brother told him he would always be? Or is Jimmy the one swarming the opportunity, and turning from just one or two innocent ants sampling the delicious velvety coconut milk mint chocolate chip ice cream into… a good portion of the colony doing it because that’s literally how ants work?

This metaphor is harder to read through an animal rights lens because it relies on treating the ants as disturbing. Humans do probably have a natural revulsion instinct when looking at this kind of swarm, but it’s not evil, it’s just what sometimes happens in any ecosystem containing ants.

But they swarm the ice cream in plain sight, and people walk around it without pausing to examine it. If they examined it they may be repulsed, but at least they wouldn’t potentially get killed the way a bunch of other people do just by being anywhere near where Lalo Salamanca decides to be. Ants are just ants, man. But I like the scene, and I also dislike the use of animals in film. I hope the ants were all OK and all made it home, and I hope that tarantula and all the rest of the arachnids and insects who appeared on the show didn’t have an intensely boring existence (but they probably did because even with immense effort, it’s impossible to mimic an arachnid or insect’s natural life in a comparatively tiny terrarium in a human home).

And next time, Gus, have a vegan option.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=BeckyBroiler&set=a.2429386863942536

Veganuary – The Human Facet

It’s Veganuary, so it’s time for some vegan blog posts. Blast the celebratory trumpets.

When we talk about veganism, and animal rights, and animal ethics, we don’t often talk about the mental health side of things. I suppose we sometimes delve into the mental health of the animals, especially the mother cows in the dairy industry whose babies are removed from them so that the milk can all go to profit, the mother pigs in the pork industry who live in crates too small for them to turn around in, layer hens crammed in cages for their lives until they stop laying, the countless motherless babies of all species, the ones on the 12+ hours-long, and sometimes days-long transportation rides to slaughter without food or temperature control or water, and so on, and so on, and so on. We do occasionally mention the mental health of meat industry workers, usually when discussing the abuse they often inflict on the animals.

It might be helpful to discuss the human mental health side of things for its own sake, though. Workers suffering in these conditions don’t just take out their frustrations on the animals. There are other consequences beyond the animals, and veganism is not complete without encompassing all intersections.

This article talks about stopping meat intake specifically because of the impact of the meat industry on the human workers’ mental health and society more broadly. It mentions abuse of the animals as just one part of the impact that this kind of work has on people’s mental health. There’s more. There are statistics that suggest a correlation between high levels of anxiety and depression and working in slaughterhouses, and even amounts of violent and sexually violent crimes being higher in places with more slaughterhouses.

Most people wouldn’t do it, but most people purchase the products of such labour. That’s true of a lot of work, to be fair. West’s article compares negative attitudes towards slaughterhouse labour to the kind of people who don’t mind paying for the services of a sex worker but also degrade and dehumanize sex workers anyway. People buy plenty of green produce, but most people don’t want to do the grueling jobs on the plant side of the food industry, particularly at the despicably low pay they offer. The difference between regular undesirable work and slaughterhouse work is that although it may be just as labour intensive, and may be just as dehumanizing, and may have many, many hazards, and may barely pay, I mean. It’s obvious.

The brief footage in there of chickens in cages at abattoir or factory farms – you’d be working in that every day, 40 hours a week. Your job would be to kill – I’m not sure of exact numbers, but at a chicken facility, it must be hundreds of sentient animals daily. Some of them are sick or malnourished, many are injured and painful, and most, likely all, are terrified of you (understandably), and you don’t need to speak chicken to recognize the nonstop terror and suffering you are encountering and causing every single day. You don’t have to love animals for that to be damaging. You don’t have to like animals for that to be damaging. Working in terrible conditions at a factory of INANIMATE OBJECTS is damaging (just see Amazon) to human mental health, so consider how much worse this kind of work would be. There’s nothing in human DNA that makes this specific kind of work normal or natural. Maybe we once all hunted regularly or were perfectly capable of snapping a neck or cutting a head off of one of the small flock we kept in the yard. This is not that. The human brain isn’t supposed to cope in an environment of this level of suffering and exploitation, whether it’s consciously accepting that suffering and exploitation are the realities of the situation or not. That anyone does this job at all is a miracle for meat eaters, honestly.

I changed from being an infuriated teenager, despising slaughterhouse workers for the things they did, to an (hopefully more compassionate) adult who recognizes that individual workers are certainly not the problem. The entire industry and its place within capitalism is the problem.

Another problem I note in my day-to-day life when it comes to veganism and human mental health: other people’s anguish. Vegans, myself included, talk a lot about antagonistic conversations we have with strangers. I’ve had a few. Someone else told them I was a vegan (irl I have never told anyone that I’m a vegan unless they specifically ask, the old wives’ tale that we all self-identify right away is not true) and they get mad and start belittling me while I smile and nod and shrug and wait for the subject to change. Then I later complain, to a sympathetic, and probably meat-eating person’s ear, that I don’t think it’s my job to soothe someone else’s discomfort at the very idea of someone else not participating in an exploitative system. If you want to do it, great, sort that out for yourself, leave me out of it, and it’s not my fault if it’s not easy for you.

But most of my conversations about veganism with meat-eaters are with people I know and like, and who like me. Who see me as a fully human human, not some random stranger who jumped out of the bushes and yelled at them about veganism, which is, I’m sure, how the random strangers who have snipped at me remember the encounters. Most of the people in my life like animals. Love them, even. There’s the problem.

“But do they -?” “So they just -?” “It makes me so upset.” “I just can’t look at that stuff.” “There should be -” “But what’s wrong with honey, though?”

Nobody gets the honey thing.

(engage critical thinking skills: in a large industrial honey producing operation where profit is the point and everything else, including and especially animal welfare is not as important, are those bees living a good life or nah, because, nah. There’s more to it but that’s the basic premise – it’s exploitation. “Honey” that’s just apple syrup is fun to make and maple syrup tastes nicer and less aggressive anyway, eh)

Some vegans would be annoyed by these conversations and not have very much patience for them. For whatever reason, I have a lot of patience for them, and concern. How is it that there are so many compassionate people who are genuinely bothered by the realities of exploitation, but comparatively, few people who actually go vegan or take meaningful, lastinf steps towards reducing their participation in these industries?

It’s so much easier to eat meat. And eggs. And dairy. And honey lol. It’s everywhere. It’s pervasive. It’s normalized. But it’s so easy these days to be confronted by the realities behind the curtain, the harm done to slaughterhouse workers and animals alike and the awful green wizard of mindless consumerism insisting that we don’t pay attention. You can know about it and push it to the back of your mind, but chances are that, if you don’t already have someone in your life that you like or even love who is a vegan, you will shortly. We’re increasing in numbers every day and we’re everywhere. A lot of us are very nice and you aren’t just going to be able to dismiss us as some loud annoying stranger who makes you feel uncomfortable. You will end up having tentative conversations with the vegan(s) in your life and they won’t make it any easier for you to ignore things, even if they’re nice to you about it. It’s easy for you to eat meat, it would be hard for you to stop, and every time you choose to abstain it is a deliberate choice that requires mental/emotional effort. But it’s not as easy as it once was for you to ignore the realities of where that food came from and when it comes to the people in my life at least, I can see that it hurts them to know and participate anyway.

It’s so hard for one person to make a difference in a world of 7 billion + other people. I can tell you that making deliberate purchasing choices did and does wonders for my mental health. I’m not just choosing food based on what I feel like eating (although of course I do that – watch out for tofu folks, once you learn how to cook it properly the siren song of tofu is impossible to ignore and if I’m making my own focaccia dough I don’t miss the cheese on my deep dish homemade pizza one bit). I’m choosing food based on thinking about the little guys, and the big guys, the motherless guys – I can’t help them individually. If I could, I would scoop them all up and put them somewhere safe to live out their natural lives. I can’t do that, and that hurts me. But I can refuse to participate in it. Global meat intake increases every year despite vegan numbers increasing and vegan options becoming more and more popular. I don’t know what the solution to that is, but we do need a solution. I suspect it will look something like the larger meat-eating population becoming more familiar with and open to alternatives and finally cutting back enough to remove the financial incentives for the meat industry to keep growing. I hope it happens soon for all the normal reasons, and also because in a kind society like the one we should be building, nobody should have to work in a slaughterhouse.

And if you have the ability to make a small donation to your local farm sanctuary, you should do that, and if you do that, include a note about how you appreciate the workers and volunteers. Sanctuary work is also grueling on mental health.

Moving Forward Without Animal Research

Lately with news and world affairs and current events it’s just one terrible thing after another terrible thing. And then another thing, and another thing, and so on and so forth until ashes, ashes, we all fall down, I guess. I recently read an entire article advocating for ending the use of non-human primates in research, though, and it gave me some slim hope for the future.

It’s a creeping change, but I’m seeing it nonetheless. Whereas every new story on climate change comes with the ominous feeling I’m left with of, “well that sucks, but guaranteed no one in power is actually going to do anything about it,” stories on animal research have been slowly changing. A staggering number of animals are still being used for research. Living excruciatingly boring, lonely, traumatizing, and sometimes painful lives, then being sacced at the end. Yes, that’s “sacced,” as in, “sac.” It’s the term researchers use for euthanasia and it’s short for “sacrifice,” which seems like it was maybe once a half-hearted, flimsy attempt at respect for the sentient individuals we’ve exploited for our own benefit, but the term in it’s shortened form is just… not that. People who advocate for the use of animals do still treat the discussion as if it’s ludicrous to even suggest that we might move away from the use of animals at some point, but more and more people, including SCIENCE people, are starting to suggest a switch would be welcome, if not doable all at once right away. But possible. And welcome.

Anyway. This is that article in question. I’d like to see a better world, and undoubtedly a world in which we do less and less animal research, and then, one bright day, zero animal research, would be a better world.

Better </3 Call </3 Saul </3

And we’re waiting until mid July to see how this whole thing wraps up. I expect it to wrap up tragically. I expect a couple more moments of being truly sickened. Of being told, by the show, explicitly, what to expect, and still being utterly shocked when it happens. I expect the fish to die (NOOOOOOOOO). But in the meantime, and from the show so far, here is a list. Of course a show primarily (but not entirely) about love between male relatives, be it functional or dysfunctional, would break my heart into so many pieces.

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A list of moments from Better Call Saul that broke my cold, dead heart:

(This list doesn’t include deaths, though it will reference them, so, spoilers from seasons 1 – the first half of 6 of Better Call Saul abound.)

Irene wins bingo (3×9 “Fall”)

We start with the absolute pits of heartbreak.

You just watch her sadly sitting alone. Jimmy has deliberately sewn seeds of resentment towards her among her friends, isolating her, so he can have money he’s destined to receive, but slightly sooner. The money he’ll receive is for discovering her senior’s residence has been scamming her, and all its other residents, and helping to build a class action against the residence. And now here he is, doing this. Despite her sadness, her confused loneliness, she’s slowly becoming more excited as she’s engrossed in her bingo game. The numbers Jimmy is calling are all on her card (he rigged it). She gets bingo. She’s excited. He calls her to the front, checks the card, confirms she won.

“Come on, let’s hear it for Irene.”

And she turns around, with a sweet innocent smile of a woman who is so happy to have simply won a bingo game, and NO ONE CLAPS.

If you haven’t seen this episode and have to rely only on my recap to understand (please just watch the show, why are you making silly choices), then maybe it will sound dramatic when I say that no other piece of media has ever made me feel as nauseated as this one did. Not the goriest of horror movies, not stupid Game of Thrones being “shocking,” not even the myriad of other moments of people going out of their way to hurt each other in this fictional universe. This sweet elderly lady being turned into a pariah for NOTHING, not suspecting a thing, having no idea what she’s supposed to have done wrong – I couldn’t. I still can’t. After watching this episode for the first time I had to turn everything off for a while and just cry.

In the very next episode Jimmy manages to fix it, having had a change of heart. In real life he wouldn’t have succeeded. His manipulations would have forever tainted the way that Irene’s friends feel about her, but mercifully the show allows us at least some catharsis when Jimmy manipulates all the seniors into hating him and embracing Irene again. Irene looks at him with disappointment before walking away. And that’s it. One of her friends adds, “Shame on you.” I’ll add: Jimmy, you complete MONSTER, how could you?

Nacho gets kidnapped and Gus threatens his father (5×2 “50% Off”)

If I ever hated Gus, I hated him here. Even when he was threatening Walt’s kids, I was like, “well, Walter made his bed and needs to have his hubris knocked down a peg.” What I’m saying is, my hatred of Walt got in the way of me truly hating Gus even then. I really like Nacho, though, who by this point just wants out, and his father’s safety.

Is there a need to explain? This is just not how I want to see Nacho, Papa Varga, or even Victor, or Gus. WHY.

“I broke my boy” (1×6 Five-O)

And you broke my heart. Some notes:

• Mike doing a monologue? You know you’re in for a fascinating glimpse of his inner life, but man, it’s going to be disturbing.
• this is the opposite to Manuel/Nacho father/son dynamic – Nacho idolizes his father the way Matty idolized Mike, but Nacho is right to do so, and Matty was kind of wrong. Mike’s whole thing is: be a criminal, sure, but keep your word. In that way, he makes himself reliable and a decent(ish) person. But Matty was the ideologically pure one in their father-son relationship, where Papa Varga is with Nacho.
• “And it was for nothing. I made him lesser. I made him like me.”

Nacho looks at ID cards (4×8 “Coushatta”)

Here is Nacho, miserable, looking at some fake ID cards he had made for himself and his father. He’s planning to move them both to Manitoba.

Before knowing how this story would tie up it’s heartbreaking enough. His dad isn’t going to run and has said as much. Nacho would have to leave him behind, which would get him killed, and so he won’t. It’s just an impossible situation.

But ahhhh why, please, the Vargas should have made it to the moderately-dry-with-sharp-seasonal-changes embrace of Manitoba.

“You’re not a real lawyer” and “like a chimp with a machine gun” (1×9 “Pimento”)

It’s Bob Odenkirk’s performance of heartbreak that breaks mine. “I thought you were proud of me.” D:

The line “Slippin’ Jimmy with a law degree is like a chimp with a machine gun” hits particularly hard. Even though I enjoy fictional chimps with machine guns taking vengeance on hapless humans, and yes I couldn’t help but think of that one scene in Dawn of the blah blah blah with Rocket shooting the humans, I still felt every drop of disdain and resentment Chuck is hurling at Jimmy there.

Chuck hits his head OMG (2×9 “Nailed”)

OUCH.

I do feel for Chuck… mostly frustration for him here even though he’s 100% right. That’s always the way with Chuck. Like, yes, Chuck, you’re right, please deal with it in a different way than this though or you’re going to hurt yourself, and Jimmy. GO TO THERAPY.

But it’s the “Call 911. Call 911, come on.” It’s the sound of my heart breaking.

This is the end of an episode. In the first minutes of the next one, Jimmy gives up and rushes in, yelling at them to call 911, but what broke my heart upon first watch was not knowing whether he would – in fact, I was pretty sure he would not go in there to help Chuck. He was risking jail, disbarment, also simply proving Chuck right (and Chuck is right, as usual). In these final moments of this episode, it seems certain that Jimmy won’t help Chuck even though he wants to. Their rivalry is just not worth it, and it has never been clearer. At least, to me, and several in-universe minutes and a new episode later for Jimmy. But Chuck doesn’t see it here – possibly Chuck doesn’t see it ever. Although Jimmy does notice, here, for once, that the conflict between them simply doesn’t matter, all he does afterwards is escalate it. Not without provocation, but, still. AHHH.

Another part of this episode that breaks my cold dead heart upon re-watch is just before the copy-place scene, where Kim mutters to Jimmy that he’d better make sure all his Is are dotted and his Ts are crossed, sending him racing out to keep the copy-place guy quiet. It was only on re-watch that I found it heartbreaking in how eerie it is. Seeing what Kim is up to these days – she is flawed to the max, and honestly upon re-watching the whole show it seems that she really has been this person the whole time. She is a terrible influence on Jimmy. As she says in “Lantern,” she is an adult, and she made her own choices – so too is Jimmy. He’s making his own choices. But there’s something so disturbing about how Kim emotionlessly tells him to make sure he has covered his tracks, and he follows her advice, ending up here. With a THUNK.

Kim Crashes (3×9 “Fall”)

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh Kim. I hope this isn’t foreshadowing for her eventual fate. It kind of seems like it is – the road, the arrows, and then Jimmy’s botched “bad choice road” speech he gives her way later in season 5.

Also Jimmy, shut up. Stop celebrating. Literally celebrating ruining Irene’s life, here. Shut up.

On the other hand, this scene does a great job of symbolizing the emptiness of his “success,” so, well done all.

Hector makes Nacho beat up Krazy-8 (3×6 “Off Brand”)

Sweet boys. Kind of. Sweet drug dealing young men, really.

Hector is often a pitiable character. Even before Nacho helped give him a stroke he is just an angry man without any healthy outlets for his anger, instead specializing in creating and maintaining intergenerational trauma. I’m thinking of the scene from Breaking Bad where Hector almost drowns one of the twins, as a child, while the other watches, but this is somewhat reminiscent of that despite Domingo and Nacho not being blood relatives of his. Nacho’s face says it all. Imagine the difference if Hector had decided to just… not. I suppose we wouldn’t really have either show, so, OK. Fine.

Krazy-8 is a memorable character from Breaking Bad, even though he only appears in the first 3 episodes. He can’t not be memorable though, considering what Walt and Jesse do to him, but he’s also a fully realized character in his own right despite his short tenure. Dangerous, intimidating, intelligent, and resourceful. When you see him here, getting savagely beaten for reasons outside of his control, appearing like such a little scared puppy, it’s even sadder to think where he ends up.

And then there’s Nacho who is the human personification of anguish. I suppose he is making his own choices. But is he really, though, if Hector is at the helm?

“I am not crazy” (3×5 “Chicanery”)

Yes, I felt awful for Chuck. What a devastating scene for him. Everything he’s saying is true but no one will possibly believe him. But really, where my heart breaks is the tiny instant where you see Jimmy’s reaction, right after Chuck shouts that he’s not crazy, right after seeing Rebecca’s, the prosecutor’s, and Howard’s reactions. In this video it’s around 3:29. Howard’s reaction is difficult to parse – surprise, but also, not surprise. I feel he’s doing quick mental calculations of how to get HHM out of this one. The prosecutor is like “… bruh,” and Rebecca is certainly concerned for Chuck, but primarily shocked. Jimmy is not shocked, or surprised. He knew this was coming, was banking on this happening exactly like this, needs Chuck to go on an ugly rant to protect his own interests. And he feels bad.

Remorse. That’s not a performance.

I mean, I suppose you can read it as a performance, and if it is, then, yikes, but I know it’s not. Which brings me immediately to the next one, which is a performance:

Jimmy “never mattered all that much” to Chuck (3×10 “Lantern”)

It is really something that I was so enraged at Jimmy not long before this – just one episode prior, he’s ruining Irene’s life for quicker money. Here, he’s made some realizations, and is working through a list attempting to make amends. Chuck isn’t interested, which is understandable. What’s surprising is how numb he is, how blasé, how dispassionate. “It’s fine, you’re just a bad person. Don’t bother feeling any remorse,” he stupidly tells the person who would then become Saul Goodman. I get where he’s coming from but where he loses me entirely is, “Jimmy, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but the truth is, you’ve never mattered all that much to me.”

I gasped. Jimmy’s reaction afterwards is like a muted version of the performance while Chuck talks about how he’s not a real lawyer, but it’s just as gutting because you know this one hurts him so much more. I feel it’s a moment where Jimmy hadn’t expected that Chuck could still hurt him, especially after the con job with the tape recorder, and yet, there’s still this.

Almost immediately, Chuck begins deteriorating. He searches in vain for the source of the electricity he can once again feel. I think I yelled, “It’s not the panel, it’s because you broke your brother’s heart, you idiot.” He broke his own heart. He could not cope. His statement to Jimmy here is just one piece of a complex puzzle of why he is ill, and why he later kills himself, but I think of it as the most important piece of the “why.” Someone somewhere on the internet hypothesized that Chuck’s illness is him externalizing the guilt he is repressing for sabotaging his brother’s career, since it shows up after he enlists Howard to not hire Jimmy as a lawyer, and his relapse is right after hurting him here – I think that’s as close to the truth as anything can be.

I am also firmly of the opinion that he is lying. He knows it’s the thing that would hurt the most, and that’s why he says it. It’s his best chance at revenge for the bullshit Jimmy has pulled on him. It’s also the seed planted that grows in Jimmy afterwards, numbing him, making it impossible for him to grieve his brother, making it impossible for him to heal, or to handle any struggle in a healthy way, EVER AGAIN.

Kim yells at Howard (4×2 “Breath”)

I feel it all.

Kim’s rage, Howard’s shock and distress, and Jimmy’s pain (which Jimmy isn’t even allowing himself to feel so there’s also that whole layer).

Rhea Seehorn’s performance here is amazing. I don’t mean to be that guy but this is Owlmachine so too bad: women. Don’t. Get. To. Do. This.

Women don’t get to do this. In real life, and in fiction. Yet here we are. It’s oddly cathartic. If only Jimmy had taken her later advice and gone to see a therapist to work through his grief and all the other tangled-up feelings he has for and about Chuck, but, alas. All we have is this fleeting catharsis – which oddly, works for Howard, sort of. He deals with his own demons. Jimmy sees him having a breakdown later:

and recommends he see someone. Howard already is. Howard also has a chance to open up to Jimmy some more about Chuck but chooses not to, definitely because of Kim’s previous shouting fest.

Maybe Kim should have screamed at Jimmy too? First of all, she wouldn’t have. And second, I don’t see how that could have helped, but then nothing else did. Kim is looking out for Jimmy incorrectly – she’s doing the best she can, like in a later scene where she tries to take care of him with kisses and sex (presumably). But what Jimmy needs is a lot bigger than that. He needs someone who would hold him accountable for his (progressively shady) actions, as well as someone to tell him honestly that he can’t go on lying to himself that he doesn’t care about his brother and his brother’s death. Kim isn’t that person. The therapist might have been. Regardless, though, I totally get where she’s coming from when she’s screaming at Howard and it’s one of the most memorable, affecting scenes of either show.

Nacho calls his father (for the last time) (6×3 “Rock and Hard Place”)

I AM NOT OK.

He isn’t sure whether his father would still be alive, and is relieved to hear his voice. He holds back breaking down while talking, miserable, alone, in more danger than he’s ever been, and unable to control the situation with his father. Perhaps he is alive now, but that won’t be the case if Nacho stays hidden. But he’s also smiling, and laughing through tears afterwards because he’s relieved.

“What more is there to say?”

There is so much, but he can’t. He can’t burden his father with the knowledge that his son is likely soon going to die. He can only say goodbye.

Arturo announces that Tuco knifed a guy (3×6 “Off Brand”)

This is not a heartbreaking scene. In fact, it never fails to make me laugh. RIP to the guard’s jaw and whatever part of the other guy that got knifed. I do always feel bad for Arturo, who seems kind of haplessly earnest and does not deserve his horrific death not too far off. I mean. He does some bad things, for sure. But still.

But Arturo, you can’t just announce things like that to Don Hector. Tell him GENTLY, lol. What were you thinking?

In fact, just for fun, let’s imagine Nacho doesn’t switch the pills and Walt and Jesse end up working with Hector instead of Gus. Hysterical.

Imagine Tuco and Hector, but like, a Zuko and Iroh dynamic. It would be so incredibly dysfunctional.

It also makes me think of a moment from Emporer’s New Groove..

Kronk/Arturo: Looks like Tuco knifed a guy!

Yzma/Hector: WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS? Why, I practically raised him!

Kronk/Arturo: Yeah, you’d think he would’ve turned out better.

In Conclusion:

The fish better not die, dammit.

Better Call Saul 6×3 – thoughts

So, spoilers.

It’s been… something… twitter

Here’s a quick “so long” to twitter, which this blog thingy used to have. It’s been years since either of us has actively tweeeted, but we actually took the step to disable the account for reasons we simply won’t speak of.

Ultimately it’s because twitter is a negativity factory. It lends itself to outrage. It also lends itself to tweets like this:

JUST SO YOU KNOW *something wildly inaccurate, or something that’s a shadow of the truth but incredibly unnuanced* k thanks!

which always drive me (erm) nuts.

I’d deleted twitter off my phone because it was taking ages to load. I figured I’d add it again immediately, but decided to give it the weekend. I was addicted to scrolling (I thought) so I didn’t believe I’d last the weekend, but then the weekend passed. And then the week. And another week. I felt so much better about everything. It was undeniable. Twitter stayed gone.

It’s really too bad because there are a lot of cool, interesting, funny, informative, political, and pithy people on twitter. When we were actively tweeting, I don’t think we counted as that (both of us are more suited to long-form I think), but we did get to interact with some cool people, and some of my favourite online jokes come from twitter. I spent one night trying to not wake up my whole family, who were all in close quarters up north, laughing because of twitter. Unfortunately I’d opened twitter to scroll instead of sleeping and it was the 30-50 feral hogs day. At first I was lost, like, “OK what did I miss and how does it involve 30-50 feral hogs” and of course the more I pieced it together, the harder I was laughing. That night alone was semi-worth the aggravation.

And I tried to stay. I heavily curated my feed, muting and blocking liberally, but it was like whack-a-mole. You mute 10, you block 5, there’s still more to mute and block tomorrow. Apart from the times other social media/media pages in general have shown me animals literally being abused (a hefty FU to instagram for a bunch of those, what a worthless reporting system they have for it too – but twitter also did that so, whatever), by far the lowest I’ve ever felt about myself and the world in general, in relation to something found on social media, was thanks to some thoughtless tweet or another that I’d come across from time to time. I also found myself being angrier, less likely to recognize someone else’s humanity, because it’s easy to forget about people’s feelings and ALL NUANCE ALWAYS in however many characters it is now. There were times I wasn’t a particularly good person while on there – I believe and I hope I never actually tweeted anything at anyone that was too awful. I think I might have shouty capsed at a couple of people who were participating in a dogpile once, but I think, and hope, that was the worst I did. That isn’t me, though. I like an argument, but not like that.

Anyway. It’s twitter. I understand why some people still find it worthwhile. But I’m much better off only glancing at it on rare occasion.

Apropos of nothing there are also so many things a person could do with 44 billion dollars. Just so many opportunities to make the world a better place. Just a thought.

Encanto Again, or, Bruno Madrigal WAS Meant to be Screencapped

Spoilers for Encanto which is a movie I’m still obsessed with.

[screencaps from animation screencaps dot com]

A disorganized list of things that make Encanto so great:

• All the dancing, including Antonio’s new room dancing with most of the family, Dolores’s Bruno verse dance, Isabella rocking out with the flower mic, and obviously Félix and Pepa’s dance while not talking about Bruno
• Every single character, including but not limited to Coffee Child, Overly Excited Child, Guy Who Can’t Stop Talking Tactlessly, Guy Yelling About Donkeys, and Antonio
• Antonio (has to be included twice)
• The donkeys (especially the donkeys in the band on the Madrigal Titanic)
• Comedy toucan
• Comedy capybara
• “Helpful” coatis
• Helpful rats. Does affinity for animals run in the Madrigal genes? It certainly seems to. When the rats grab the shards of Bruno’s vision, I guess at his request, that’s pretty impressive
• The soup at the disastrous dinner, where there’s either half a corn cob or a whole corn cob in each bowl. I want to find a vegan recipe of that soup, it looks so good
• Men and boys being affectionate and supportive. I mean, Augustín? Félix? Camilo? Antonio? The adults show romantic affection for their wives which is nice, but then there’s also familial affection and general supportiveness all around. Augustín especially is a nice change of pace for a Disney dad, managing to be accident-prone but not useless, and even stands up to Abuela on behalf of Mirabel. Bruno, too, as soon as he comes back to the family, immediately goes into affectionate and supportive mode
• Compassionate examination of intergenerational trauma
• How is it so easy to ache for Mirabel, but remain understanding of Abuela, even at her worst? Ahh, nuance and no villains, I love you
• Connection within Pepa’s family: Félix barges into Mirabel’s hushed conversation with Pepa having overheard them through a closed door, and before that, Pepa comes into the room already upset because she overheard Mirabel muttering to herself about Bruno. These are the parents of Dolores, and that makes perfect sense. Dolores for her part can hear rats talking in the walls worrying about the house – so either that’s Bruno, or she also can understand animals, just like her brother. Camilo shifting into Mirabel and Bruno when he hears that Mirabel is in Bruno’s vision, shifting through all of the adults in his life after being zapped by lightning, and shifting into someone with a baby head reminds me of Pepa not being able to keep her feelings to herself, always with the weather overhead. Antonio being the cutest, most empathetic cousin and nephew reminds me of Félix always looking out for and pacifying Pepa
• Connection within Julieta’s family: All three sisters are being crushed under the weight of familial pressure, each according to her gift (or non-gift). Luisa is struggling to do all the heavy lifting and feels like she’d be nothing if she couldn’t keep up with the work. Isabella is struggling to remain perfect and pretty, which is an identity she’s been forced into, and to fulfil a vision of a perfect future she doesn’t even want. I think it’s deliberate that out of the grandkids, Isabella looks the most like young Alma, and Mariano looks a lot like Abuelo Pedro. Mirabel has to keep pretending that she’s fine even though she is NOT. When the sisters have brief but honest conversations, these things start unraveling almost right away. Mirabel is the key, a lot like Julieta, being a healing presence. Julieta is concerned about Mirabel the whole time, always knowing when something is wrong even when Mirabel insists she’s fine. Mirabel, after talking to Luisa, worries about her throughout the rest of the film, taking note whenever she sees her struggling. Once she tells Augustín about it, he does the same thing. Both Julieta and Augustín stand up to Abuela the way Mirabel eventually does, but, like, more
• The part where Antonio tells the jaguar not to eat the rats

In the past, we’ve made posts about how when you screencap certain goofy moves (Hercules only), the results are goofy. Looking at still images from Encanto featuring Bruno is a little different though. Some insights:

Bruno’s a Frozen fan

So there’s a bit of goofiness here. I do wonder why he’s still wearing the bucket, but then, he’s been in the walls for a while. Coping mechanisms become habitual. But there are more interesting insights to be gleaned than occasional goofiness.

This scene where Bruno revisits his vision goes by pretty quickly but when you slow it down, you can see some clear enthusiasm here, uncharacteristic for Bruno (or at least for what we’ve seen of him so far). His perpetual sadness makes a lot more sense when you consider that he might truly enjoy having visions, but the way everyone always reacts in such negative ways eventually ruins his enjoyment of his own power.

Eeeevery time.

He was so happy to come up with a clear and “easy” solution for once: hug your sister! “That’s great!” But Mirabel is furious with that result. Poor Bruno.

It adds a layer to the general sadness of Bruno, who lives in the walls where he can sort of sit with his family for meals but not really.

Lay it on thick, Encanto.

But there’s also reunited-with-family Bruno:

All right, enough, we don’t talk about him for a reason and the reason is that IT’S TOO EMOTIONAL.

That’s it. Will try to blog about something else next time.

Encanto

Last time on Owlmachine, I’d barely started watching Encanto at the theatre before the power went out. Today I saw the whole thing and jsfdnojawiouwnqfjncsjdk njgkrwdfjjfvnsjdfnvk. So.

will be dancing to this for weeks, thanks LMM and Carlos Vives

I’m of the Disney musical proclivity anyway, so obviously I was going to love it. Apart from being typically great animated fare, Encanto is special because, to me, it seems like out of all the Disney musicals, this is the one that would make the most sense on stage. I know The Lion King killed it, and I’ve never seen any of the others but I’ve heard good things, and some “meh” things, about all of them. I’m not sure how Frozen’s stage version was received generally, but that one likely ended up on stage more because it was a guaranteed money-maker than its material being well suited for live stage production. I’d still have gone to see it if it came here because I’m exactly that sucker, and also who wouldn’t want to see Frozen performed live?

But with Encanto, the way a larger cast participates in multiple numbers, and how Mirabel’s two sisters get songs of their own, and how the most popular song features a healthy chunk of the family singing about another family member, it just feels like this was meant to go on stage eventually. “Dos Oruguitas” could easily be sung by one or more of the children or grandchildren, the way Angelica sings “It’s Quiet Uptown” in Hamilton. (DO NOT listen to “Dos Oruguitas” in advance if you plan to watch the movie ever. Hear and see it first in its proper context.) And “Colombia, Mi Encanto” could easily fit in anywhere sung by anyone or, better yet, everyone.

Animation is probably my favourite medium for visual story-telling though, so as much as I would see Encanto on stage 36 times in a row and then some (if the funds for me doing that existed somehow) if the stage version existed this animated version would always be superior. As much fun as “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” would clearly be performed live, in the animation it was transporting as only animation can be.

It’s good, music is obviously amazing, the animation is amazing, the characters are instantly adorable, parts of it are REALLY sad and the resolution hits the spot. It has a fantastic message. Also the intergenerational trauma raccoon short that plays before it made me ugly cry, twice. The first time I saw it I ugly cried just because it was raccoons. I CAN’T DEAL with raccoons. The second time it was because the actual story that’s being told is very moving, and also again just because it was raccoons.

Let Us Watch All Seven Harry Potter Christmas Scenes

Happy Christmas Harry. Happy Christmas Ron.

owl machine

Because why goddamn not, right?

(well, maybe because the books are right there and they’re better, did you ever think about that?)

(shh)

---

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Christmas

What do I remember of this Christmas? Well, in the book, Ron makes a comment about turnips and he gets a maroon jumper (… sweater?) and the twins get jumpers too that have the first letters of their names on them, leading to the best joke ever:

“But we’re not stupid. We know we’re called Gred and Forge.”

And for some reason, that isn’t in the movie.

To be fair, it’s the sort of joke that is delightful and amazing while you’re reading it as a kid (and as a half-serious adult, too), but maybe it doesn’t work as well on screen.

So how’s the movie version?

To this movie’s immense credit, it includes a scene of Hagrid dragging in a…

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The Family Madrigal: The Strange Predicament that I Now Find Myself In

Heads up: personal ridiculous story time. Spoilers (not really though) for the first 30 minutes of Encanto because THAT WAS ALL I SAW.

On one of my days off, having failed to convince anyone to come with me to see Disney’s new Encanto as it’s the busy holiday season and I guess no one I know has time for a new Disney musical, I decided, hey, there’s a showtime in the afternoon and it’s still the week before school lets out for the holidays, so it won’t be too crowded. Let’s go!

All was going well (movie seems to be great, no surprise there) but then the power went out.

The small number of other people in the theatre and I had just gotten past the I Want song, called “Waiting on a Miracle,” when the theatre went black, and then emergency-light bright. I liked the song, but I preferred the upbeat introduction song “The Family Madrigal” the way I preferred “Where You Are” to “How Far I’ll Go” in Moana, the other Lin Manuel Miranda Disney musical. “The Family Madrigal” is fun, with a lot of punchy lyrics, multiple laughs, full of trivia, communal and familial – perfect for this particular moment in this province, when the cases are exploding exponentially and the very real possibility of a locked down Christmas is looming again.

I went home, annoyed, and bought the only songs I’d heard so as to not spoil myself and noticed that the most popular song, which we hadn’t gotten to, has a name that’s also a lyric (the most intriguing lyric!) in “The Family Madrigal.” I became even more annoyed.

Now I’m in this bizarre limbo, playing and replaying “The Family Madrigal,” and occasionally “Waiting on a Miracle,” but personally I’m just waiting on my next day off so I can try again to see it – provided we don’t lock down in the meantime.

That evening the universe seems to have felt that I hadn’t had enough Disney, so I heard the telltale sounds of one of my foster kittens doing a good impression of Mufasa’s last moments between the rails on the second floor. I’ve heard those specific scratchings before, maybe twice, with previous foster kittens. I’ve either managed to push those kittens up and back through the rails or they manage to scramble back up on their own. In this case I hurried over but I wasn’t even in time to see him dangling. This small white body just fell right in front of my face. Reader, I couldn’t freaking tell you how, but I snatched him out of the air. He would have broken at least one of his legs. Maybe pelvis or mandible. For an animal that likes to impersonate Mufasa a lot, cats are too fragile and not nearly as good at falling as we as a society think they are.

Anyway he realized a split second later (and too soon for me to react and set him down gently) that I was holding him and I guess this was the worst possible outcome in his brain, so he panic-launched himself out of my hands and I got scratched minorly. You’re welcome?

What I learned from this experience is that The Lion King just needed me. I’d have to be the size of a giant but I could have caught Mufasa. Could I explain wtf the plot would be after that? No. It would probably be very bad. There would suddenly be this giant human who had shown up without explanation. You’d have no need for Timon and Puumba so we’d lose out on “Hakuna Matata.” Basically everything would change. Perhaps the lions and hyenas would actually band together to kill and eat me. I mean. I’d watch it.

I’d rather watch the rest of Encanto though.

The Not-A-Princess Disney Princess

Eilonwy enters the movie The Black Cauldron thus:

Just popping out of the floor to look for a lord or a warrior to help her escape. But there’s just an assistant pig-keeper, oh well.

If you’ve never seen it but want to, you should just do that and ignore this post. Initially intended as a quick discussion about Eilonwy, it’s instead full of spoilers. All you need to know about Eilonwy is that she is great. She’s great. Better in the book, but then what isn’t?

The Black Cauldron is a bizarre movie. Is it too dark for its intended child-audience? Maybe. It was and is too dark for me – just one part, though. Despite this coming out a few years before my birth and even with the saturation of Disney movies in my childhood, I first saw The Black Cauldron when I was maybe 16. The scene where Hen-Wen is chased and captured by the fell beasts was too much for my poor animal-loving heart. It’s still pretty much unwatchable for me today, to be honest.

One day my friend was telling me enthusiastically about this movie I’d never heard of, saying things like “most depressing Disney movie ever” and “there’s this little thing and he’s kind of like Smeagol, and then he dies after making a speech about having no friends.” So obviously I went out and bought the DVD so I could watch it immediately. When it got to the part where the three witches give Taran Gurgi’s body back, I fully believed Gurgi was staying dead, and that they’d just lobbed his corpse at Taran because they’re witches. I thought the next scene would be a funeral, and I was quite shocked at how morbid it all was. And then he came back to life and I breathed a sigh of relief. To be fair, if any Disney movie was going to skip the magical resurrection, it would be this one. But they still managed a happy ending.

I think the fact that Gurgi is resurrected and they all get home safe (except some henchmen, but who cares) means that it’s generally not too dark for kids, but it’s definitely not for all kids. If I’d seen the Hen-Wen chase/capture scene as a small child I would have been traumatized. It’s all about scenes as building-blocks, I think, when you’re dealing with children’s films. That scene ends with Hen-Wen shrieking as she’s being carried away, and you’re left unsure of how things will turn out for her. Taran is reunited with her soon but she’s still in danger, and her return to safety is quite drawn out. In contrast, other Disney horror scenes are compact and self-contained, like Snow White in the scary forest. All of those terrifying eyes turn into cute woodland critters as she sobs, overwhelmed, and that makes it endurable. Pink elephants on parade settle into clouds. Big, tense confrontations with villains begin and end at the climax. Horror is resolved, and resolved as quickly as it began. The cauldron-born sequence that was chopped up because it terrified children in the test screen is very grisly and was much grislier before the hack job, but at least it ended shortly after it began, frankly.

On a re-watch just today, I tried to figure out what might have made this a better film purely from my own perspective. I remembered Eilonwy’s pluck and unfailing kindness (apart from understandable moments of irritation directed at Taran) as a bright spot, but what surprised me was that really, all the characters are pretty good. Taran’s hero journey is all present and accounted for. Fflewdurr is a decent guy and he even has a gimmick in his lie-detecting harp. My favourite moment of his is when, finally, annoyed at some ongoing sexual harassment, he snaps, “Oh, pull yourself together, madam.” A lesser film (a MUCH lesser film) would have him be into the over-the-top sexual advances because he’s a man and obviously man=horndog-at-all-times (</sarcasm>), so well done all, there. Gurgi is a little bit too pathetic but he’s still lovable. The Horned King is scary, Creeper is… like. Get a better job, bud. The three witches are kind of funny, but really they walked so that Ursula could run. The fairies who annoyed me so much the first time I watched it have grown on me (constant complaining is much more relatable in my old age). I still love Hen-Wen and the other guy.

She’s in good company, then. I think the main problem is that it’s too short. A few years ago I read a few of the books in this series, and, unsurprisingly, I think the story and characters work much better in novel-form, where they have room to breath and actually flesh everything out. But the movie’s not half-bad, really, it’s just freaking weird. 

There are obvious reasons, such as the financial loss as well as the lack of cultural recognition that the film and its characters have compared to the most other Disney movies, for Eilonwy to not be on the official princess roster. But I do wonder whether how young she is factors in as well. Vanellope isn’t on there either, and her movie got a sequel. Eilonwy is maybe 12? She’d probably seem out of place with the other princesses. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lXsL9HmxlY

It’s too bad, though. Before there was Queen Elsa and her formidable ice magic, the only Disney princess (unofficial) who could do magic was Eilonwy (do I have that right, because it seems wrong, somehow?). Maybe if the movie had been longer, there would have been more time to show some of it.

Verbose Windbag Alert

(Image is just a local swamp that I know of. It’s in what historically was the territory of the Wendat nation.)

Alas that I cannot sleep, for out there, somewhere in the wilds, Conrad Black roams, writing terrible sentences and somehow still getting published.

Content Warning: There is a quote in here that takes many of the world’s more recent genocides quite lightly to make a point that one stupid guy doesn’t like that the flags are lowered indefinitely due to the discovery of, at the time of this post, 1874 bodies of Indigenous people (mostly children, with between 3200 and 6000 estimated to be the total number once they find all of them) at the sites of residential schools, which are considered by anyone seriously examining the facts to be institutions of cultural genocide. The last closure of such a school didn’t happen until 1996. Not only that, he uses the example of atrocities against Indigenous people in the US as a reason why Canadian flags shouldn’t be lowered. Furthermore, the way he dismisses the realities of the evil done at residential schools is breathtaking. Also he’s a bad writer. But, wow, while I’m usually stunned simply by his awful prose, here I couldn’t look away from the banal, garbage opinions he expresses. This is clearly outrage-mining, and I guess kudos to the NP because you got me hook, line, and sinker, but this is just a personal blog, so big whoop.

I do think it’s worthwhile to take the time to question and mock two of his quotes on this little blog, because most people who think this way are smart enough not to say it out loud (or in ink in the newspaper they’re somehow still being published in). These sentiments exist, and non-Indigenous Canadians shouldn’t ignore them.

Here’s The Verbose Windbag on, first, the Biden administration, then the US’s treatment of Indigenous people, then a list of nations he feels have been non-apologetic about their genocides (he’s probably right about most of them, but not the way he thinks he is):

“The United States, which is now governed by the most hopelessly stupid, misguided and incompetent regime in its history [he says stuff about how Biden is bad at inflation and Afghanistan, and I have omitted it because it’s not relevant. There’s a possibility he has a tiny bit of a point but you’d never know if he does. These throw-away thoughts require context he doesn’t offer – his subject is not the Biden administration and it has nothing to do with Canada lowering its flags. Also, yes, seriously, when he says “most hopelessly stupid… and incompetent regime in its history” he’s talking about Biden, not Trump. Perspective, much?]. It also treated its Natives much more harshly than we did, but it does not lower its flag over it. Countries that have committed unspeakable atrocities — including Germany, Japan, China, Russia, Turkey, Rwanda, Sudan, Argentina (which massacred its Indigenous population) and many others — do not make a ludicrous pantomime spectacle of themselves before the world, but Canada does.”

Personally I think maybe the world would benefit if more nations were honest, publicly, about the atrocities they’ve committed. I’d like to know what he thinks people generally should do to prevent future genocides. Does it help somehow to not talk about them ever? How? Why?

This, though, is the worst block of text in the article (bolding and stars are mine):

“As we all are now tiresomely aware, the residential schools wrenched a minority* of Indigenous children from their families, and many were mistreated, but almost all of them were taught the elements of literacy and arithmetic in a way that they likely would not otherwise have been able to learn.** It should be obvious to anyone who has seriously*** read the full report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that its recommendations and allegations do not faithfully reflect the research in the companion volumes, which reveal a less horrifying picture than has been presented.**** And the billions of dollars in reparations that Canada and the various churches involved have made should be enough to right the injustices that occurred.*****”

*The use of the word “minority” is unnecessary. Mainly because it diminishes what happened and the ongoing trauma survivors have, and also because it’s confusing. Does he mean a minority of the total of all Indigenous children went to the schools (estimates are at 30%, which, yes, is a minority, but it’s not zero which is what it should have been), or does he mean a minority of the children who went to the schools were “wrenched from their families,” because either way, what a dick.

If it’s the first meaning, this is deceptive journalism at it’s opposite-of-finest, because even though you can say “a minority of Indigenous children” went to the schools and be technically correct, it’s probably more accurate to say “150 000 Indigenous children” in such a context, because 150 000 is the estimated number of Indigenous children who went to residential schools, and “minority” doesn’t really do the number *150 000* – one hundred and fifty thousand – justice.

If it’s the second meaning, even if some of the parents thought the schools were a good idea and the children weren’t necessarily “wrenched,” the abuse many suffered and the racism by design that all of them endured isn’t magically OK.

**All one has to do is imagine a world in which Indigenous children were taught in their own communities by teachers from their own communities, and if the government felt it was so important they may have offered the choice for students to learn math and english/french without leaving their communities. They were often struck or beaten for speaking their own languages in those schools and this man is just awful, there are stronger words but you’ll have to think them in your own head.

***This suggests that anyone advocating for the recommendations outlined in the TRC Report isn’t being “serious” which is ridiculous.

****I’ll remind the reader that nowhere in this article does he mention that they’ve discovered bodies of children.

*****No amount of money will right “the injustices that occurred” which is the way he describes death, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and cultural genocide suffered by Indigenous children at these schools. The only other time he alludes to any of it is in this same paragraph. “many of them were mistreated, but”

Conrad Black thoughtfully suggests that Canadians can’t claim to be responsible for the French mistreatment of Indigenous people before confederation just like we can’t claim responsibility for the works of Descartes, Richelieu, and Voltaire. So, yeah, in an article about how he thinks the flags being lowered is too much in the wake of finding bodies of children who died in institutions of cultural genocide mandated by the federal government, which is an article with no mention of any bodies or deaths, and that doesn’t specify that the injustices he’s diminishing include physical and sexual abuse of children, he finds time to name Descartes, Richelieu, and Voltaire. Thanks for your thoughts, sir. They have been completely pointless and poorly phrased.

This has not been to say that having the flags lowered fixes anything. It doesn’t, but it’s appropriate. We should be in mourning.

*Quick edit to say: around 4100 children were known to have died in residential schools. Their deaths had been known for a long time. These children, I believe, were named and their deaths were documented. The 3200-6000 estimate is the number of children who were unaccounted for, and who are suspected to be buried at residential schools in unmarked graves.

I didn’t know Uther’s size.

It’s been forever since I watched Meeeerlin, so let’s finish season 2.

Sweet Dreams

In this episode a fire-breathing jester servant sorcerer does a love spell on Arthur so that he will fall in love with a rude princess and this will start a war. Hijinks ensue. Merlin/Arthur snark abounds, as does Arthur x Gwen stuff (it’s an Arthur x Gwen episode).

The misunderstandings and miscommunications are all well done, funny, cringey, and so on, as they’re supposed to be. There’s even a point where today’s villain, King Something-or-another, complains because the rude princess isn’t interested in Arthur and this somehow ruins his war plans. He says, “every woman everywhere is attracted to him, I’m almost attracted to him.” And then that fire-breathing jester laughs but the evil king shoots him a glare so you know what, the evil king is attracted to Arthur, full stop.

I do think it’s refreshing that the love spell is being used to start a war. Usually it’s to take over Camelot or some such.

Anyway Merlin/Arthur anything is always good and the Arthur/Gwen romance is strong, so this is a quality episode.

The Witch’s Quickening

A lot happens in this one, so here’s a list:

• Morgana is mean to Gwen for, I think, the first time
• Then she’s nice to her again but gives her evil looks while she’s not looking – this came out of nowhere, I think
• Arthur is pretty mean to Merlin too, throughout
• Morgana disowns Uther for the millionth time but seems to mean it
• Merlin trips Mordred and he’s like “I’ll never forget or forgive!” Kid you just tripped on a stick, get over it
• Merlin sees a vision of himself freeing the dragon and the dragon burning Camelot, and he’s sad about it
• Also Merlin helps Arthur and co destroy a sorcerer’s camp and kill a bunch of people on Uther’s orders. Are we ever really going to deal with how bizarre it is that Merlin is on this side of the conflict?
• Morgana gets seduced by an insufferable liar named Alvarr, but I think he’s also Tristan of Tristan and Isolde. Either that or he looks a lot like him and his girlfriend looks sort of like her. Or my memory is flawed. However, they’re annoying, and whether these two are the same people or not, I know Tristan and Isolde were also annoying, so I’m kind of right even if I turn out to be wrong.  
• Morgana helps Alvarr escape even though it would have been nice if he died (but also he’s technically in the right in this stupid conflict; he’s just annoying)
• How does Uther not realize it’s Morgana betraying him? What a thick skull he has.
• The dragon is VERY insistent.

The Fires of Idirsholas

Morgause is back!

This episode is similarly dark as the last one, and is about the same things. I like this one better because it places Morgana close to Arthur and Merlin, and she has to face what her betrayal is doing to them (as in, she’s watching them slowly die of a sleep plague caused by her). She’s still conflicted, despite declaring to Morgause that she isn’t. Merlin is also close to Morgana when he decides, after a lot of angsting, to kill (or almost kill) Morgana. Morgause saves her because unlike Alvarr, Morgause actually cares about Morgana.

Gaius tells Merlin that he made the right choice in killing/almost killing Morgana because Morgana didn’t choose to use her gift for good, which is apparently what Merlin is doing.

So. Merlin choosing not to kill Uther or to not let Uther die, letting the more just and less bigoted Arthur take over is good, and so killing/almost killing magical women in service to that is also good. Cool.

This episode features a “I think I’m about to die” Arthur joking with Merlin about needing a servant in the next life.

Also. The dragon is freed. So the stupidity of the ethics in this show can slide this time around. I had a good time.

The Last Dragonlord

The dragon is PISSED.

Merlin’s father is in this episode. He doesn’t know he is Merlin’s father. Merlin tells him, they bond, then that guy dies.

Then Merlin inherits his dragon-entrapment abilities and Merlin is merciful. The dragon flies away and Arthur is told he killed it. Before that, they do a “I think I’m about to die” Arthur and Merlin banter again which I like.

2 down, 3 to go.