Redemptive Readings for Everything

TM!Root wooingannoying Shaw by singing the Portal credits songs at her

morningmightcomebyaccident and I recently discussed how genre shows might pay lip service towards the good science and technology can do, but the majority of Western visual media is still obsessed with Frankenstein. It’s inevitably about body horror and corporate corruption and hubris, and on the whole, science tends to not come out looking so good. Shows discussed included Fringe, The Matrix, the MCU, Dollhouse, and Orphan Black. I’d ultimately put WH13 in this category, too. BSG, definitely. DW is basically fantasy in scifi wool, so it doesn’t count, and it, too, is has a foundation of fear. They all looooooove them some Straw Vulcans. And that attitude has real societal impact. Look at the silly fears over GMOs, gene editting/therapy, the sorry state of replication because preliminary results are getting rushed out to their 5 seconds of fame and condemnation, the self-sabotage of potential social issue solutions due to complete avoidance of genetic variation implications. (Tangent: compare to Japan, where the horror is in the indomitable natural, and community-driven technology is the solution. Hence kaiju and mecha. Guillermo del Toro talks about it quite well in the Pacific Rim commentary.) You rarely see actual Hard-Sci-Fi optimism in visual media. Brilliant treatment of the Singularity and VR and the implications thereof on the object level, rather than as a metaphor for the usual character themes, tends to be confined to books, maybe the occasional animation production. The only live-action TV show besides PoI I can think of right now is Eureka. But PoI went there with the full implications. In that context, Root died, but Root did not end. And that was a thing to be celebrated, the way they framed this episode, and in all of the preceding work to build to this point. And this fucking aired on CBS! On mainstream network TV! Holy shit, it’s so satisfying.

#anti-science fear is partially what has corrupted science #in the absence of trust in research for the joys of discovery #science and engineering become required to have profitable applications #just as art needs creative freedom from politics and economics sometimes #so does science #but if we’re always afraid of frankenstein we’ll never regain wonder #representation matters for more than just social justice #achieving post-scarcity with inequality is more desirable than achieving just equality #which would either mean everybody poor or a culling to limit population #and guess who gets culled first #so stop shackling science to profit by cutting off support for science outside of profit #remember: samaritan kills researchers out of fear #don’t be like samaritan

WOMP WOMP WOMP IT WAS NOT A GOOD PAYOFF IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN DOMINIC :\\\

#hot take title: canon is better than fanon #this is some fine meta if i do say so myself #I haven't seen fanfics really engage with the manipulative side of these characters #especially compared to how people do engage with that aspect in RGU fanfic #boo to sanitizing these characters! #winner and still world champion at chicken

Major, major kudos to Inbar Lavi. She’s doing a very, very specific but subtle Eve characterization that has to bridge several contradictions and make it look easy. And none of it is on the page. She’s building this complex personality entirely out of her delivery.

Lucifer on Netflix went the full Buffy in the sense that they stopped writing cases of the week in an independent way. It’s clear that they started with the character throughlines they wanted to hit first, and then constructed a case that best facilitates that storyline, and of course, rule of funny. Which, thank goodness, because I think I may never watch a normal homicide procedural ever again. I’ve stalled out on Life, Elementary, and the earlier seasons of Lucifer, because I still could not give a rat’s ass about the case of the weeks. Thankfully, the writers learned to stop giving a shit about the cases except as a vehicle for jokes, gimmicks, and character development. (The other huge thing Lucifer learned to do was to stop being a Pretty People Drama where every combination of the cast sleeps together for DRAMZ, and instead every combination of the cast sleeps together because it’s funny.)