Iron Myr

But no. Not true. Zombie statistic. Pop statistic. Citation can’t be found.

I was thinking about Disco Elysium's Moralism while trying to explain this post to someone, and of course about "Kingdom of Conscience", and it occurred to me (and I know this isn't an original thought) that centrists have a very hostile relationship to desire. It's not just beliefs and convictions that must be "put away immediately, and the child reprimanded," it's the wordless desires that lie under those beliefs and convictions. Desire is by definition unfulfilled: all desire is the desire for things to be different, which is the opposite of what centrists want.

What I'm saying here is that the lack of sex, and of sexiness, in Nolan movies (and Marvel movies and other contemporary blockbusters) has a direct connection to their political messaging. It's not solely American puritanism or risk-averse PG-13 corporate conservatism - although it is those - it's also this desire thing. These movies don't just lack sex, they lack eroticism in the broadest sense of the term. They lack frisson. Even when there is sex or nudity, there's still no eroticism!

flexing hrothgirl!!

"Without a tub of wax for my ears – which Himesh Patel’s ever anxious Eurylochus, Odysseus’s doomed right-hand man, uses to sail safely past the Sirens – I was exposed to the full din of thumping sticks, staffs, swords and clashing armour, thunderbolts, crashing waves, grunts, screams, toppling palaces and burning temples. But unlike Matt Damon, the wax-free Odysseus who is tied to the mast as he is conveyed past the Sirens (naked ladies reclining on some uncomfortable-looking rocks), I gazed at the shipwrecks and bloodbaths without any agony of emotion."

and

"There are more female characters than in most Nolan movies, thanks to the source material. But none of them has much to say, in contrast to the characterisations in the poem."

Well, that tracks for a Nolan film -

"The couple have no chemistry and nothing in common. Throughout his wanderings, the uxorious Odysseus clings to a little doll figure, intended to represent his wife (like the spinning top clutched by Leonardo di Caprio in Inception); the real woman is barely more interesting."

Yikes -

"If you’re not going to compose a script in Homeric Greek, or even in metrical English verse, you might as well use something like conversational American English. But writing dialogue is not one of Nolan’s talents. The language is relentlessly expository, humourless and flat."

The lines she calls out in this section will probably make a least a couple of my friends laugh incredulously -

"I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In at least one interview, he cited my version of the first line of the poem: ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’ But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script."

....oh my GOD, EMILY -

"The most troubling ethical problem with Nolan’s Odyssey concerns the decision to film part of the movie in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, thus normalising the ongoing violence against the indigenous Sahrawi people. It is particularly galling that Nolan used this land simply as a visually striking backdrop for a film that centres, aggrandises and redeems the hero of a territorial war on account of his belated and partial acknowledgment of his own guilt."

case and point, this instagram post from a few months ago

the original author of this is a transmasc, who then started selling prints of this design. he got called out by many, many trans women in his comment section for how he portrays the trans woman, and he would either ignore their comments entirely, or respond with something callous and ignorant like "it's just a piss joke. get over it"

his videos have hundreds of thousands of views, and almost 40k likes.

i do not want to share a community with people like this. and you shouldn't either. we need to tell fellow trans men and transmascs that this is not okay.

i am not posting his username or his hashtags because i do not want more attention driven to him specifically, and it goes without saying that please do not harrass or threaten anyone.

This military honour is bestowed so rarely that it never truly threatens the aristocracy. It's instead a vague hope, dangled in front of the unlanded soldiers. They compete fiercely against each other to reach the top, thus ensuring that the kingdom's armies are always full of devoted soldiers who are too distracted with internal feuds to question the social hierarchy that forced them into this position in the first place. Any new queen finds herself powerful, yes, but still nothing compared to the overwhelming power of the aristocracy. She lives the rest of her life a puppet of the state.

The honour is the result of ancient reforms, which are too entrenched to get rid of now. Half of the aristocracy can trace their lineage back to some mythical queen of old, so to ban this tradition would be asking for a coup from this power bloc. If that weren't enough, the entire population would be appalled because of the sheer cultural force of these stories.

The kingdom is not primarily split by class, but by tribe. The major tribes each occupy a portion, but far from most, of the aristocracy. Every tribe also contains countless of the unlanded. The promotion of each new queen is an enormous boost to the influence of the tribe from which she hails. Tribes compete against each other, raising their children to be soldiers from birth so that they can have a slightly higher chance to attain this honour. Much like Story 1, but now even the aristocracy is distracted and divided.