Unbetitelt

There are many seasons of The Boys that I need to add to my data set, and I don’t recommend watching them unless you have a strong stomach. They are gross and disturbing in ways that tv shows in the past never were. I don’t know why it was decided to tell stories with this much brutality. title% plot overlapThe Boys S1E1 (2019)56%The Boys S1E2 (2019)31%The Boys S1E3 (2019)29%The Boys S1E4…

She’s like a one winged dove. Sings a song sounds like she’s singin’. To me, this sounds like a song about a woman who’d just gotten a lobotomy and who was no longer viewed as fully creative or human thereaafter. After hearing a familiar voice from a stranger, I remembered something about how much it can hurt to love someone. It was a memory of being in love and having it hurt so much it was…

A madrigal is a song from the renaissance period that sounds like several, contrasting yet complementary songs played all at once. They periodically achieve coherence amid moments of accidental syncopation, as in a jazz song. When we hear a madrigal within the collective voice of the media, we can take comfort that an age of renaissance will arrive soon. Groups of people retelling a story about…

You know those internet videos of people rescuing animals who are stuck in a bad situation and within just a couple of minutes you can breathe a sigh of relief as human heroes set them free? Those sorts of videos are also made of people, but they don’t get circulated on the internet because it would look like those who made the videos needlessly tortured people to create drama for entertainment…

My survey of the X-Men franchise wouldn’t be complete without the three Deadpool movies and an unofficial Deadpool spinoff which depicts an ex-X-Man’s life as a regular, free guy who works at a bank and has access to a coffee shop girl and a Roblox-esque video game in which he can stalk his past victims from when he pretended to be Professor Xavier. Here are some links to my analysis of X-Men 1,…

I have so many questions. If autistic brains are just more masculine than average, then do women with autism have man brains without knowing the rules of how to be a man? That would make them like alien beings sent to planet earth to report on the foreign customs of men and women alike. A character of this type shows up in a popular sitcom called The Good Place as Janet and she’s portrayed as a…

Ocean’s 8 was released in 2018 and is the most recent movie in a franchise consisting of five films. It shows the signature of having its script constructed with an AI tool which mined a non-public domain novel for a lot of material. film% plot overlapOcean’s 11 (2000)11%Ocean’s 12 (2004)4%Ocean’s 13 (2006)4%Ocean’s 8 (2018)38% As a percentage of the total plot, the most recent film in the…

I’ve composed a poem by organizing the titles of my blog posts so that they make a type of sense and I imagine that AIs compose poems in a similar fashion by spinning and re-arranging individual lines of poetry to create rhythm and rhyme. They are probably better at it than humans and some poems, like those of Edgar Allen Poe, have such strange rhythm, repetition, and rhyme that I’ve wondered if…

My last post focused on the unusual number of recent films featuring a black, female space Jesus figure and I failed to identify when this trend started. One, 2014 movie I hadn’t seen before now surprised me by giving the protagonist a Jesus figure story arc in which a son sacrifices himself to save others and teaches his father something in the process. This is the central arc of both The LEGO…

Star Wars gets a lot more interesting if you imagine that Luke and Darth Vader are actually the same person and that Luke is really an older man who got retired with a forgetting treatment and is re-learning about who he had been in a professional context over at the death star. That means that Luke blew up his own workplace because he hated his dadboss, Governor Tarkin, and brother, Emperor…

There is a new season of Marvel’s Thor spinoff series, Loki. My husband likes most shows and liked the first season, but wanted to stop watching this second season after fifteen minutes because the heavy, fascist themes scared him. I needed to take a break too. After I realized that X-Men and Star Trek were about fascist organizations that are portrayed as heroic, it made me worry about such…

There are a number of interesting issues to consider when comparing plot overlaps across various Star Trek franchises. Whereas Star Trek: The Next Generation used a picaresque storytelling style with little narrative connection between episodes and no long character arcs, the more recent Star Trek series: Picard and Discovery rely primarily on very long storylines that span seasons. When it…

The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.. is a quote from Steinbeck’s classic novel, Of Mice and Men, about an itenerant man who kills his dumb scapegoat sidekick when the rancher’s flashy young wife gets raped and murdered. By leaving behind a dead scapegoat, he can make a clean getaway. I felt like this book was a genealogical predecessor of the underlying story within The X-Men…

The second X-Men movie ends with the US president surrendering to Xavier’s international band of eugenecist assassins, mind-erasers, and torturers collected from insane asylums. The wisdom of Magneto/Q gave Xavier/Picard the confidence to stop time and to barge into the oval office to hand a document to the president which villainizes a US government researcher and father of a child who was…

The third X-Men movie is called The Last Stand and it is about Jean Grey’s return as a villain who helps Magneto attack Xavier who insists she is too uncontrolled to be allowed to have power. He thinks this about anyone he finds sexually attractive and wants to murder them in some way shape or form. I view him as as a monster who believes his presence within a chain of command protects him from…

The fourth X-Men movie focuses on a veteran who was a victim of illegal scientific research that caused him intense pain and made him forget his past after the woman he loved was killed by his past coworker and older brother. When he went to military doctors for help with his grief and PTSD, the researchers offered to turn him into a mind-controlled, mind-wiped weapon and breed him or else send…