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cannoli-reader · 6 months

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My notes watching Wheel of Time Season 1, episode 2

Posted on readandfindout.com on 11/19/2021

1:48 – Just for the record, on this so-woke show, the two blackest actors are playing Padan Fain and Eamon Valda. Not even cool bad guys, but scummy, marginally competent, bad guys. And rapists.

2:46 – More stupid world-building and “characterization”. I hate hate hate hate hate these lazy monologues about something pointless that is supposed to be profound and allegorical, or some experience or anecdote from a character’s distant past that is incredibly on-point and relevant to the current situation. Seriously. Back during their strike that messed up broadcast schedules about 10+ years ago, I opined that they didn’t deserve anything because TV writers are the absolute lowest form of fiction writers. Nothing in the production of the five major fantasy series I’ve seen adapted for the screen since then has changed my mind in the slightest.

By the way, there had better be something other than “cutting off an Aes Sedai’s hands prevents her from channeling” to explain how the Children of the Light got around “live witches being somewhat hard to (execute)."

5:00 – As abstractly symbolic intros go, this is not the worst. I’m still going to start using the Skip Intro button unless I see it’s somehow relevant to the coming episode.

6:20 – One thing that has never occurred to me, regardless of medium… if they were going to prevent the Trollocs from crossing the Taren after them, they would be effectively stranding them in the Two Rivers. With all the people the boys left home to protect.

8:36 – In the Borderlands they have a saying, ‘The look of the Eyeless, and the Noseless and the Lipless is fear.’

9:30 – I like this version of how Moiraine screws over Hightower. The book version seems not have landed with people as much, and the fandom doesn’t have much sympathy the boys being disturbed by it, which feeds into the myth that Moiraine is always right and smart and everyone should never doubt her because she’s the bestest.

11:27 – “I know, instead of showing character interactions on screen, why not just yeet one of them out of there and then have Mat tell the audience what it would have been like!” “Brilliant Rafe! Book authors are just morons, aren’t they!”

11:52 – Yes, this! Rand’s articulated thought is an actual thing. Like, Moiraine has good reasons for doing what she does, but she also badly handles the Two Rivers boys, so their reasons for being wary of her are also good.

11:55 – Also making it possible for any of them to be the Dragon kind of undercuts that this is something Rand struggles with when he is finally told what specifically the Shadow is after him for, but if done right, it gives opportunities to explore the conflict in dialogue, rather than internally as ITB. Not super confident it’s going to be done right.

13:55 – “Words are important and how we use them is important.” Spoken on a TV show that’s going to mess up all sorts of words, and misuse them dramatically. Edit from the Future: Oh, you sweet summer child.

14:50 – "The Power inside you is the smallest part of your strength. It’s your mind and how you use it that will mean much more in the battles to come.” Explains so much about Egwene, really.

15:35 – That Moiraine has already sensed Egwene’s channeling ability should rule her out as “the most powerful channeler who ever lived.” Meanwhile, ITB, normal people don't care who is a more powerful channeler than whom. To normal people, they are all just channelers, and normal people more likely to call them Aes Sedai than channelers anyway.

17:01 – “It’s the wind that listens to you” is neat wording, harkening to “touch the wind that moves the sun”.

21:07 – I suppose getting the dream stuff out in the open right away works, to stop the fans whining about them not trusting Moiraine and saving time.

22:35 – I like this conflict. It informs the rest of their relationship. Even if to the uninitiated, Rand comes off as petulant, based on the ITB world-building, he’s got legitimate questions.

23:34 – The word “bastard” is never used, once, in the whole Wheel of Time series. In a series where the main character discovers that he was born out of wedlock, with the circumstances of his birth and parentage being a significant and traumatic issue for him, and where a major character conceives a royal heir outside of marriage as well, with her pregnancy being an issue with her character over three books by the original author. Take all your woke bullshit and gender studies nonsense and shove it where the Dark One will be confused, because that’s way more important! That people in WoT don’t even have the concept of legitimacy says way more about gender relations and women’s agency than all the substituting of the word ”person” for “man” or “woman” in the world, or finding ways to cram LGBTQ issues into a series that is already overstuffed with material that it doesn’t have time or room to adapt to the screen.

Even Brandon Sanderson, with all his other blunders, abuse of anachronistic language and misconceptions about the themes and setting, did not make this mistake. He used “interrogate” more times in one paragraph than Jordan did in 11 books, but he was not stupid enough to use “bastard” in the mouth of a character in a world where female social dominance is unquestioned and even mass murderers and Darkfriends are appalled at rape.

More relevant to the plot, Rand’s prior understanding of Egwene taking the Wisdom job and cutting off his nookie nicely establishes that his anger at Egwene’s choice to follow Moiraine is not petty relationship crap, but genuine betrayal that she’s siding with outsiders.

23:47 – Mat is trying to talk Rand into being more reasonable in his hostility toward Moiraine. Because if you’re going to swing and miss that hard for the setting, why not the characters, too? That is a kind of Mat-like rationalization, but it’s the sort of thing Mat says, rather than does. He talks about being practical and self-preserving, but then he acts according to principle.

25:43 – I don’t think Moiraine actually hopes her “sister” in Whitebridge will let them stay. And “wars and witches” kind of do concern them. The effective portrayal of the Three Oaths requires writers who are on the ball, and reasonably clever. But shows keep hiring TV writers instead.

25:45 – Waiting for the zinger question, and it better not come from Valda.

26:00 – There is no worse Child of the Light to alter into an Inquisitor of the Hand of the Light than the egregiously unsubtle and incurious Eamon Valda, whose only tactic is “the charge”.

26:43 – I could be wrong, but I also don’t think the Children ever refer to Aes Sedai as sisters. Even when Niall and Balwer are plotting their PR campaign about the Tower split.

27:27 – “Madam” so they have French in this world?

27:58 – NOOOOO! They would never recommend someone seek out a sister for Healing! What is this?

28:09 – The idea of Moiraine grinning sycophantically like that in the books is highly amusing to me. It kind of looks like Lan is thinking “seriously Moiraine?”

You would think the Children would be questioning how Moraine and company managed to escape Trollocs when they managed to inflict that wound and meanwhile, no one else shows any sign of injury.

29:20 – There’s just something wrong about Moiraine being the one to tell the kids “it may not be the truth you think you hear.”

29:49 – I like the ruins. It’s the kind of thing that WoT should have. They’ve been through the equivalent of two falls of the Roman Empire, after an apocalyptic cataclysm.

30:05 – Nosewart.

30:17 – I’m thinking Nynaeve’s moment of revelation is going to be her saving Moiraine’s life when she turns up again by Healing her.

30:21 – We need singing even less than the books needed dress descriptions. Which were actually important. Unlike the singing.

31:08 – Moiraine only tells people things when she needs a reaction. She told the story of Manetheren to sway the ire of the villagers. She would not whip it out when the kids are already in a good mood and especially not when the last on-screen words with Rand were a fight. Don’t want him getting too full of himself.

31:48 – Nosewart

32:21 – “They knew no help was coming.” Yes, who betrayed them again, Moiraine? See this is why, regarding Rand being suspicious, this is a bad time to bring that up.

34:30 – Sweeping vistas and scenery shots. The TV equivalent of dress descriptions.

36:33 – Don't sniff on camera! First off all, sniffing has a particular meaning in this fandom and second of all, you have a certain osenay artway issue to which it calls attention.

36:50 – You’d barely know Perrin was a widower, if Egwene hadn’t mentioned Laila twice on the journey now.

37:50 – I guess this is their adaptation of how Perrin becomes a Coyotebrother. Because that looks too small for a wolf.

41:05 – Okay, at least with Moiraine being unconscious, there is some excuse for her not telling the boys what Shadar Logoth is. However, Lan on his own would absolutely tell them. Moiraine acts like they have no agency and will behave as she expects. Lan acts like they’re idiots. The former would just sit where they were left and not move without permission, and the latter would not trust them to behave.

43:00 – Which he does.

43:30 – Now they might think this version of the Shadar Logoth story is more economical, but it utterly destroys the lesson of Aridhol, which is that doing things for the wrong reason, and fighting the Shadow with the wrong attitude, is just as bad as being on the wrong side! This is incredibly important, because it informs the stakes of Rand’s internal conflict for most of the story!

And let’s not even get into the potential motivation such as the fact that it conveniently fits with a specific political narrative, leaning into “Walls are bad” and steering away from any implications for extremist methods and their narrative, where what side you are on is all that is important and any tactics are justifiable if your heart is in the right place. In WoT, motivations matter. Using evil methods to a achieve a good end is self-defeating, and the penultimate major lesson for Rand to learn. In later books, we believe a mentor figure who declares that unless Rand pulls his head out of his ass, his victory over the Dark One will be as bad for the world as his defeat, because Shadar Logoth is an example of how that can be.

44:59 – Be neat if this is the same spot where Rand sees Sammael get Mashadared.

45:27 – Good, right profile. Keep showing that right profile, Egwene! No, stop, don’t turn. No, no. Not the left side… And cut to wide angle. Phew.

45:51 – Lan, you have now let all four Emond’s Fielders out of your sight. Are you really doing any good poking at Moiraine’s shoulder?

47:30 – Mat-Perrin interactions are weird. Mostly because they barely exist ITB.

Also, I’m thinking somehow Mordeth is going to infect the dagger from Laila. Or Mat will take up an already infected dagger, because he gave his own away, which is no less dumb.

50:00 – This is all very stupid, because they were specifically warned against touching anything. Whereas they were not in the books, and the dagger was just something Mat picked up at random, instead of specifically messing with stuff he knew he should not, against instructions.

51:18 – One problem with CGI creeping evils is that it’s hard to get horses to react to it. Aldeib’s just standing there in the background, chillin’, because Moiraine can’t run so they can’t have her horse run off, but it looks very incongruous.

I do like this version of Mashadar. For my money they will never top the depiction and atmosphere of Shadar Logoth from the WoT PC game, but this is an interesting way to do it, especially when you remember how much Moiraine’s weaves in the prior episode looked like the book description of Mashadar.

52:08 - “Why don’t you hoist me up?” is a very good question when directed at someone canonically eight inches taller than you.

52:43 - Good use of the power-wrought sword’s properties.

53:19 - The person who says “I’ll find you” when forced to part from their love interest always must shortly after jump from a great height.

54:20 – Forget Rand and Mat, you guys left Bela!! Narg’s lines are cut, and Bela doesn’t carry Egwene out of Shadar Logoth. This show is bullshit.

55:07 – Nynaeve FTW!

#wot on prime #season 1 #timestamp annotations

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georgewfmpyear2 · 1 year

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Narrative Structure

I know that I want my game to built around an old space wizard telling his stories to an author with the player going through those stories from the wizards perspective but I'm not yet sure how I want to structure the game around those, whether there should come one after the after in a directly linear fashion or if there's a more interesting way to do it.

The main benefit of having the game let the player play through the stories in a directly linear fashion is it becomes much easier to link them narratively in a cohesive way as well as it being much easier to justify the existence of a skill tree like mechanic for the player to be able to upgrade the wizards spells. I don't think there would be anything at all wrong with this approach but I think I could create some more interesting larger narrative components out of just simply portraying these stories in a different way.

The first way I considered doing this was inspired by the Netflix show kaleidoscope which I haven't actually seen but I know takes an unconventionally non-linear approach allowing people to watch the episodes in any order and still get a cohesive experience. I want each of the wizards stories to be mostly self contained episode like experiences and I also wanted to play around with the wizards memory of those stories so I could try a similar approach but I'm not entirely sure how I would implement it into a larger narrative without it seeming like its in a non-linear order just for the sake of having it in a non-linear order. I think on its own it would seem like a relatively pointless addition but if I combined it with some other mechanics based around the wizards memory of the events like changing details based on what the player does within the stories I think it would fit a lot better and enhance the narrative experience.

I think one way I could definitely improve the narrative experience with a structural change is with the implementation of narrative choices throughout the stories which allows the stories to feel more personal to the player making the wizards stories feel more like a choose your own adventure book as well as making the author character question the strength of the wizards memory of the stories. This also opens an opportunity to have a cool moment at the end where the player can read through parts of the authors biography about the wizard seeing their actions and choices in a written story. Although having these kind of choices might seem to contradict the fact they are stories about cool moments I think if these choices are implemented in the right way then they will enhance that aspect making the player feel more directly involved in them like their putting their own mark on those stories rather than just playing through them in a way that would be exactly the same, every time.

This mechanic could also be supported by more minor choices the player may not always realize their making which could lead to minor dialogue changes between the wizard and author in a similar way to the honor system in the red dead series. The honour system goes up with honourable actions and down with dishonourable actions which can affect the way other characters see the player character and how certain events play out. I think a similar system could work for affecting minor dialogue moments but also affecting the way the author portrays the wizards actions in their book with the author writing the wizard more like a hero or more like a villain depending on the players actions.

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alphabetsoup-blogposts · 1 year

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I've tried to explain before...

...that I live in a world of tampered devices and platforms, that my online experience is not like other peoples and that it's impossible entirely to prevent it. It's the unlovely product of a world of anagrams and I guess it beats the death threats (just).

Things that would shock other people are commonplace for me—a cursor that moves independently to circle objects and underline words was a thing for a while, a mobile phone store once instructed me, very insistently and with added sarcasm, to upload the registration number etched on the sim card tray and I have played at least two online games in which the names of NPCs were altered to track those of my IRL acquaintances.

Ho hum.

Recently, these difficult experiences have focused on the Amazon platform and they have proven to be hugely disruptive as well as disorienting. All the pages are a patchwork mix-and-match ("consumers found this bar of soap to be difficult to assemble and noted that several screws were missing"), the website decides for hours at a time that I am not resident in the UK and nothing can be shipped (no, not a VPN problem), I cannot check out groceries because the buffering is eternal and when I do get an order through, the delivery driver decides to drop off approximately only half my groceries and then several hundred yards away. Finally, when I phone customer service, the telephonist does not recognise any of the dialogue boxes that my son and I are plainly viewing on the screen and therefore cannot help. If I try to use the chatbot, it simply cycles through a frustrating and pointless mobius loop of self-referential questions.

You will have your own view of what these things mean and I know you will not suspend critical judgment just because I say it is so, but I am an old, old hand and do not ask myself anymore whether I could be "imagining" things. The long and the short of it is that platforms do this when someone wants me to address, or revisit, a particular task or code and the message has to be passed on anonymously. Last night, for example, I infer that someone wanted a more detailed re-examination of codes on Lao Radio and so I got the run around for approximately 6 hours with respect to kindle dictionaries that my son—who is interested in Asian languages—would like to use for his studies.

I don't normally set all these problems out like this. Sometimes I explode and sometimes I vent a little but I rarely explain. Today, I'm writing all this down because I am going to do something unpleasant that will impact people who are entirely innocent. I'm going to postpone my efforts to read the "books" for another day. I will not log back in to my usual arrangements tonight, as I previously said I would, or tomorrow morning. That means that work will not get done, which is a great shame, but I must take a stand to protect myself and my family—nor will I try to catch up with this work later on. It will be lost. As things stand right now, I intend to pick arrangements back up at 900pm Monday evening (which takes me to Brisbane for the Tuesday morning breakfast show).

Next time something like this happens, I will postpone work for two days, then three...and so on until, perhaps, we are not working at all. As I say, I can see where this is headed and it makes me sad because there is so much in the collaboration that is good and so many wonderful people giving it their best, but one should not surrender to bullying—it only ever gets worse.

Footnote—It goes without saying that in this murky world nothing is what it seems and so I wish to emphasise that I do not think Lao National Radio (or any coders they may or may not have) are likely to be responsible for this. (I bear in mind all the possibilities, including that these episodes involve a kind of competitive double bluff intended to derail the whole exercise.) Nor do I think Amazon qua company is engaged in some kind of malevolent control. I'm unable to say whether the company could have prevented this with more robust security measures or whether it is simply a case of local hacking. I'm leaving that question to those who understand the tech issues and capabilities much better than I.

#how things work

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sealofreconciliation · 2 years

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Posting these here first just in case Reddit doesn't let me post it there. I've only gotten up to his analysis of Conquest 21, but i'll post the rest here when i'm done with them. I don't know how to quote someone via Tumblr, so i apologize for these looking like greentexts, but if anyone can help me with that, i'd appreciate it.

Shoutout to @emblemxeno btw; they're the ones who provided sources for the jp script of Fates, and i probably wouldn't have even made these in the first place if it wasn't for them. They're an excellent blog, and i highly reccomend that anyone reading this check them out.

Fates: was the story as bad as people say?: a response (Part 1: opening statements, introduction and prologue).

Link to the original post here.

Hello everyone.

You might be wondering why i'm making this it's own post instead of just leaving a comment on the posts themselves.

It's relatively simple: these posts wouldn't get any attention if i just went to the months old analysis threads and posted them there, and i don't feel like spending so much time writing all these posts just to get ignored and/or have no one but u/Odovakar (herein reffered to as Odo) to call me out if i make bad arguments.

For the record, i will be using the original japanese script when talking about the plot, due to the localization taking massive liberties with certain aspects of Fates's story and characters, creating problems that weren't there originally, including problems claimed by these very posts. My sources whenever i claim differences between versions can be found at fateswartable here (fan-translated versions of the scripts made before the game was localized; was unfortunately mostly abandoned after Fates made it to the west, making it so the last 2 chapters of BR and over half of Rev remain unfinished) and at Linkmstr's channel here (playthroughs with a patch retranslating the game to be more faithful to the original script). I double-checked to see if there were any differences between the two, and aside from the english patch making extremely minor and irrelevant changes to the dialogue in order to make it read less stiffly than the fan-translated scripts, they seem to be practically identical to each other (most of the time), leading me to trust them as sources.

With that out of the way, let's get on to the post itself, starting with the introduction.

I'm mostly fine with Odo's introduction, except for this weird paragraph:

>Fates often gets defended by sweeping generalizations. "It's not that bad, people exaggerate", "people miss the point/the themes", "people can't read", "it's a story for teenagers so it's okay for it to be bad", "Fire Emblem isn't known for its stories anyway", etc. I think these kinds of excuses are improper in any serious discussion, and by making an analysis like this I want to detail why Fates is so often singled out as the worst written game in the franchise and show that it's not some kind of conspiracy or people being upset over unmet expectations.

I'm.... gonna need some more context for some of those arguments, chief.

Like, yeah, the last two are pretty terrible arguments, the fourth because it implies having a target demographic excuses bad writing and the fifth because, even if the entire series had terrible stories, it wouldn't and doesn't matter when discussing Fates's story on it's own merits.

But the first two just sound like normal arguments. I don't see the issue with them as long as the defendant provides evidence for those claims, even if it's gonna be harder than accusing a specific person of doing so due to the increased burden of proof that comes with claiming a lot of people do something than just one.

The third one sounds bad, but i've gotten into pointless arguments with internet randos before. Most times, when someone pulls that line, it's just shorthand for “a lot of people often misinterpret what happened in x piece of media in order to make it look worse/better than it really is”.

Which is a hell of a claim to try and prove, granted, but not much more so than the first two, so i still don't see what's so bad about it that makes it “improper in any serious discussion”.

Moving on from that, we head to the analysis itself.

For the record, a lot of this is just restating what happens in the plot, so i'm only going to go over parts where i actually have something to say.

Starting this off weak by nitpicking a nitpick:

>It's never explained how Corrin could mistake a fish-dragon for a bird, even as a child,

Idk man, young children are pretty stupid.

Assuming Corrin was like, 4 or 5 years old, I can buy them just assuming Lilith was some sort of weird bird they'd never heard of or seen before.

Onto some actually interesting points:

>Once back in the real world, the protagonist gets bonked on the head and kidnapped to Hoshido. The one doing the bonking is Rinkah, one of the prisoners whom Corrin saved last chapter - it's never explained how she found them or why she lingered in that exact spot Corrin would teleport back to after all the Nohrians had left following the earlier attack on the fort, but it's lucky that the protagonist gets attacked by someone who owes them one - Rinkah even let's Corrin keep their evil sword!

Rinkah's dialogue heavily implies she found Corrin by accident:

>Kamui: It seems like i'm back.

>Marx and everyone else are no longer around...

>??? (Rinkah obviously): ...A Nohr soldier?

>Kamui: !?

The fact that she's surprised at finding what she thinks is a Nohrian soldier there implies she just went there to check out the place, not expecting to find anyone (no idea why tho, you got me there).

Which is incredibly convenient, no doubt about that, but hey, i've never claimed nor ever will claim that Fates is above doing some contrived shit in order to move the plot forward.

>It's now becoming clear that the prologue is struggling to contain itself. So much happens in a single chapter now that neither Corrin nor the player has any time to react to what is going on. Corrin doesn't question their transformation nor their sword almost murdering them. Gunter, who has been one of the few people in their sheltered life, was murdered in front of them and yet is not mentioned again in the prologue once Hans runs away. Maybe Corrin cried in their tree cabin in their fish-dragon-maid's pocket dimension, but if they did, the game didn't show us that.

This is the first of many times throughout this post where Odo criticizes the prologue's break-neck pacing, mostly in regards to it not lingering long enough on scenes or plot points, and i actually agree with him here. Even if there's nothing to imply those scenes couldn't have just happened off-screen, that doesn't do much to alleviate how little time the audience has to process any of what just happened in the story, or that it would have been nice to see said scenes.

>Corrin tries to protest and says the Nohrian siblings are their real family, and Ryoma says something which I think is indicative of the worldbuilding of Fates as a whole: he does not recognize the Nohrian royals' names outside of Garon. Perhaps this is meant to imply that the Hoshidans don't know or care about the world outside of their borders, as they seem to live in a paradise, but even then that is extreme, especially since a war has been going on and Ryoma is an active fighter; he would want to know the name of the highest ranking members of the enemy. We know he was on his way to the fort Corrin attacked where all four Nohrian royals were present, too. At the very least he should know who Xander is, being the crown prince, the queen's son and a leader of Nohr's military.

Doesn't happen in jp:

>Mikoto: you see, Kamui, you are a Princess of Hoshido...

>When you were young... you were kidnapped, and taken to the Kingdom of Nohr.

>I am your mother, Mikoto.

>We are your family.

>Kamui: That can't be...

>You are my real mother?

>You're lying...

>I cannot believe such a thing.

>Ryouma: Yes, you would think so.

>But this... it's the truth.

>I am Ryouma. Your older brother.

>Kamui: ...My older brother...?

This is the entire conversation between Corrin, Ryoma and Mikoto before Ryoma tells them about Sumeragi, Corrin tries and fails to remember what happened, and then they leave to rescue Hinoka and Sakura from the Faceless.

Moving ahead a bit, i know, but another piece of evidence to support that this detail was made up by the localization is that, at the start of the route split, Ryoma recognizes Xander as a Nohrian prince immediately:

>Marx: You're alright, Kamui...!

>To think you were alive, and came back for us...!

>Kamui: Big Brother Marx!

>What's with this war!?

>Marx: Come on...Let's go. You can also participate in the battle, Kamui.

>With you here for us, the war will be over soon. We'll be able to conquer Hoshido without any needless sacrifices.

>Kamui: Big Brother Marx... I...

>Ryouma: Watch out, Kamui. That man is a Prince of Nohr.

Ryoma knowing that Xander is a Nohrian prince at that point means he either knows enough about Xander to recognize him just from appearance or knows his name and overheard Corrin calling to Xander at the start of their convo, and recognized him through that.

Either way, it means Ryoma, at the very least, knows the name of the top general of the country he's at war with, and i presume that line was added in by the localization to try and set up Hoshido's isolationism problems earlier on, regardless of whether it made sense or not.

And a small nitpick: we don't know how long the Nohrian siblings stayed at the Bottomless Canyon for; for all we know, they retreated long before Ryoma got there.

Next nitpick:

>Monsters known as the Faceless are attacking villages, and Sakura and Hinoka, two Hoshidan princesses and Corrin's real sisters, are there. It's never explained why Hinoka doesn't fly away with Sakura to safety,

They do explain it.

>Hoshido Soldier: Yes.

>Princess Hinoka and Princess Sakura stayed in the village to help evacuate the villagers!

There's more evidence for that in Hinoka's inroduction, but i'm saving that for a point Odo makes later on in this post.

>One could assume Corrin inherited the gift of foreseeing the future from Mikoto, since they've both now predicted the future to an extent, but neither the dream nor Mikoto predicting her own death are ever acknowledged, get forgotten, and the future sight ability never comes into play again (outside of three very specific S supports. We'll get there).

Mikoto is dead, so yeah, the fact that she had one prophetic dream when she was alive, which she only confided to Yukimura, and no other dreams that we know of, isn't going to be a particularly interesting talking point to anyone.

It's safe to assume it's been a really long time since Corrin's birth, and it's heavily implied by their dialogue that this was their first time having a dream like that; i would take MORE issue with the future sight if it showed up again despite taking so long to manifest for Corrin the first time around, unless they changed the game so someone like Orochi had plot armor like the siblings and couldn't die in battle, conveniently knew about the future sight and how it worked, and helped train Corrin to hone that ability better throughout BR and Rev, but that would take way too much effort just to further explore a throwaway ability that already has a built-in reason for not appearing again.

It's fine to want more out of the future sight, but on an objective sense, there's nothing wrong with it disappearing from the story like it does given how rarely it seems to trigger.

>I suppose we're not meant to question how Mikoto could predict her death, but why would she only tell Yukimura? And why weren't any steps taken to prevent this and prepare Hoshido and her children?

Let's look at what Yukimura has to say about Mikoto foreseeing her own death:

>Yukimura: Lady Mikoto had a premonition of her own death. Her fate was inevitable...

>Therefore, this was not your fault, Lady Kamui.

>It was all King Garon's...

>No, more like that terrible demon's work. That is what Lady Mikoto said.

It's pretty weird to assume that Yukimura saying Mikoto “predicted her own death” and “she told me it'd be Garon, no, a demon's fault” translates to “she foresaw her death down to the time, method and location, and didn't do anything to stop it or prepare the kingdom for when it happened for unexplained reasons”.

Not only can i just as easily make the argument that Mikoto only foresaw that she'd die in general, and had no idea when, why, how or where it'd happen, only having the vauge suspicion Anankos would have something to do with it, i actually have evidence to back up said claim aside from just it making more sense for the story: Corrin's dream was very innacurate.

Corrin's dream correctly guessed the location in which the route split battle would take place in and that the Hoshidan sibs would try to use their supposed blood relation to turn them to their side. It also incorrectly guessed who would be fighting there (all the retainers are there instead of just the royal siblings), what exactly they were going to say to each other, how the fight would go down, and possibly even which side, if any, Corrin would choose depending on the route (the dream always portrays Corrin as having picked BR IIRC), so that's 3 (maybe 4) for 2 on the innacurarcy-to-accuracy ratio for the prophetic dreams.

Assuming Corrin and Mikoto's dreams are the same ability, it only follows that her prophecies would be flawed too, even if in vagueness instead of inaccuracy.

It also explains why she didn't tell anyone else; telling everyone in Hoshido “btw i'm going to die someday, don't know how or when but i think it'll be because of Garon or something” is likely to just cause mass panic and worry in the kingdom over something she doesn't even know the date of, including wasting resources on defenses for an invasion that could be years, if not decades away.

>As it stands, this line seems to only be here to excuse any involvement Corrin may have had in Mikoto's death. Absolving any moral responsibility will be a recurring element in Fates. This is just the first taste of it.

I find it strange to claim Corrin had any moral responsibility for Mikoto's death in the first place.

The only thing they did wrong was bringing Ganglari with them to Hoshido, and even then, as far as they knew, the Ganglari was just some edgy-looking sword who tried throwing them off a cliff once and accidentaly led to Corrin getting their own pocket dimension; it would be ludicrous for them to assume it was also an undercover bomb and throw away a perfectly fine weapon, especially since it never misbehaved before or since the canyon.

>The speed at which Nohr can mobilize its forces is astounding. Considering mere minutes have passed, the Nohrians must've known exactly what would happen and when. But how? That is never addressed,

Firstly, Garon's little more than Anankos's meat puppet at this point, and Anankos is almost certainly the one who sent the invisible soldiers to kill Mikoto in the first place; it'd be stupid of him not to have Garon mobilize the Nohrian army in preparation for the barrier going down when he's the one who decided exactly when it was going to happen.

Secondly, where did you get that math from?

There's no way of gauging how long it's been since the barrier went down; no one says anything to give a point of reference as to how long it's been since the explosion, and fights in Fire Emblem have always been scaled down from what it's probably like in-universe for the sake of gameplay, including time.

>and it's also not addressed how the Hoshidans didn't see them coming before they were right at the border. If there's one thing we know of the Hoshidan military it's that they've got spies and ninja.

Who's to say they didn't?

We don't know where they deployed from, how far away said deployment was from the Hoshidan border, what Hoshidan strongholds or patrols they had in the way of the army, or how long it took for the message to reach the capital. There's nothing to imply they were only seen when they were near the border already.

>Come to think of it, how on earth did Kaze know the Nohrians were right outside the Hoshidan border? In Corrin's own words, only an hour has passed since the plaza was full of life, and Kaze fought with us against the mysterious assailaints, so how come Kaze is the one making this report?

This post should have really used the jp script:

>Kamui: .......!

>That's right, everyone in town...?

>...No...The town...!!

I assume that's the line Odo's talking about, but even if it's not, i searched both the fateswartable script and the patched playthrough for the line where Corrin states it's been an hour and it was nowhere to be found in either version, leading me to assume this was another example of poor localization.

Also, like.... how is Kaze making it to the border and back in the time it took for Corrin and the Hoshidan siblings to have that conversation an issue, at all?

That's genuinely just a speed feat for Kaze that puts him as being able to move to and from the Hoshidan capital and border quickly.

Lastly, carrier pigeons exist in Nohrshido, and Takumi even uses those in BR while he's possessed to tattle on his party to Iago; it's not a stretch to assume Kaze got the report through one of those if there aren't any soldiers nearby and if we assume he wasn't fast enough to go to the border and back.

>Here is an interesting question I've not seen brought up before: if the invisible people attacking Hoshido could use Corrin's evil sword and cause an explosion well within the Mikoto's barrier...why did they need Corrin to bring it to Hoshido? Garon summoned it effortlessly at the start of the game, and the specters demonstrate clearly that they're able to kill a lot of people despite being within the barrier, so why? Did they need Corrin to get close to Mikoto? The game shows they're capable of teleporting and/or turn invisible, so that seems unlikely. Mikoto could've been assassinated and Hoshido invaded long before this.

The only specter in that cutscene who might have teleported is the head honcho, who's implied to somehow be of a higher caliber than the rank-and-file Vallite soldiers thanks to him being the boss of this chapter, though even then it's somewhat ambiguous whether that was teleportation or just him dodging Ryoma's attack then hiding himself with his invisibility.

And the soldiers's invisibility is flawed btw. During battles, you can see it's not true invisibility; it's them turning themselves opaque, so it's difficult to see them, but anyone can still see them if they squint hard enough, and that's not even mentioning how much of a dead giveaway the purple flames that surround them whenever they turn invisible are.

Given all that, assuming the boss specter didn't teleport, i do indeed find it hard to believe they'd have made it that close to Mikoto, especially since we don't even know how often she leaves the castle. And if Corrin, Ryoma, Kaze and Azura were enough to push them back, i don't fancy their chances against the entire royal guard if they tried fighting their way to the throne room.

And even assuming they could have done it themselves... why would Hoshido blame Nohr for that, at all?

The barrier would still have been up, so it couldn't have been a Nohrian that did it, and no one there knows about the invisible soldiers; wouldn't they assume it was either some disgruntled Hoshidan kamikazing himself or an accident, and just stayed defending themselves from Nohr's advances?

Like, the only way Hoshido could possibly blame Nohr is if they assumed Nohr had made some miraculous advancement in Faceless technology very quickly, and had gone from creating dumb muscle that didn't have a will of it's own and had to be set free on camps to attack anything it saw, including their own soldiers if they stayed there, to making perfect copies of humans, that still didn't have wills of their own, could turn opaque, summon swords, and were smart enough to blend in with crowds and use subterfuge.

That'd be an insane assumption to make about Nohr's R&D division, instead of just chalking it up to an accident or betrayal.

The next two paragraphs are criticizing the pacing again, which i agree with, except for Ganglari but i already gave my counter to that earlier, and then we get to this:

>Why did Azura have a Dragonstone at the ready?

She likely got it from Valla and, as such, would have made up some bs excuse even if Corrin had asked her more about it, so it would have been an irrelevant scene for the worldbuilding; plus, that's disregarding how out-of-character it would have been for Corrin to choose to stay and demand that Azura explain to them where she got that dragonstone instead of heading out to help in the fighting, given how she only gives them the dragonstone after getting the report that Nohr was invading.

>Why did Garon have Gunter assassinated (and was Corrin the real target)?

Corrin has no reason to trust Hans, the bloodthirsty psychopath who kills for fun, at his word, and has no one to ask it to who could give them a satisfactory answer, given that none of them have any personal experience with Garon or know whether he'd order such a thing or why.

>To make one thing very clear: the problem isn't that we don't get answers immediately. The problem is that next to no questions are asked or mulled over.

I get that, i really do, but you picked a terrible point in the story to criticize Corrin for not asking more questions; they've just been informed that Nohr is about to invade, are still feeling guilty over Mikoto's death, and are very likely conflicted as to which side to join, if any. They're not just going to stop and ask Yukimura for a history lesson as to why the Yato was inside a statue instead of heading out to the frontlines.

The only way Corrin asking these questions at this point in the story could possibly make sense would be to make up some version of Fates where Nohr takes longer to start invading after Mikoto's death.

Which is fine to want, but i'm not interested in discussing what the game could have been; i'm interested in discussing what it is, and in the version of the game that we got, Corrin refusing to join the fighting in order to ask irrelevant questions would have been hardcore character assassination.

>There is also something to be said about the cast being very Corrin-centric. As the protagonist, it makes sense Corrin would be the most important character, obviously, but characters are frequently very clear over their devotion to Corrin. Lilith says her life can't be empty with Corrin in it,

The closest Lilith ever comes to saying something of that intensity in the og script are these dialogues:

>Lilith: You gently cared for me....

>Because of that time, i dedicated my life to you.

>By making use of that undeserved power, never again can i return to being human.

>But it's okay... even though very soon forgiveness, too, will not be possible.

>Even so...If Lady Kamui is alive...Then...

And even then, it's thoroughly justified in-universe as to why Lilith likes Corrin so much; they saved her life and treated her well, and she's extremely grateful to them for doing that.

It's no different than any other character in any of the games, or even in fiction, being deeply grateful to another character for saving their life and feeling like they owe them a debt they can never repay, so i don't see the issue with Lilith liking Corrin.

>Camilla and Elise frequently fuss over Corrin,

They barely get to visit Corrin in the Nothern Fortress and know they only have five other people to keep them company when they're not there; i don't think it's unreasonable to infer that they're trying to make up for lost time when they do get to visit.

Still, i would have preferred it if Camilla's reasoning for caring so much about Corrin was given in the story rather than supports, i'll give you that.

>and on the Hoshidan side only Takumi shows mistrust towards the person raised in enemy territory waltzing into the castle, carrying the blade that eventually killed Mikoto.

After they wept over her death, turned into a mindless dragon that attacked anyone it saw out of sheer grief, killed a bunch of the enemy soldiers instead of helping said soldiers take down the rest of the royal family, or at the very least running away to safety, nearly killed, and had to be pacified by, Azura while in that state of blind rage, offered to go into self-imposed exile out of guilt, and was chosen by the Yato as someone who would save the world, all against the one piece of incriminating evidence that they didn't throw away a sword.

Accusing Corrin of detonating Ganglari intentionally doesn't make any sense given all those events, unless the Hoshidan family is just supposed to distrust Corrin so heavily that they think they're trying to do some 4d chess maneuvers; they'd have to assume Corrin's sadness at Mikoto's death was just some really convincing acting chops; that they were in complete control of their transformation all along and were just feigning the blind rage; that staying and helping them kill the enemy soldiers was just to gain the family's trust; that attacking Azura was an unexpected curveball they did just to really sell the “gone mad with grief” angle, and somehow knew she had a dragon stone that they could use as an excuse for why they'd calmed down and why they could control themselves fine every time they transformed afterwards; that they knew for a fact that the family would just refuse to accept their offer to go into self-imposed exile and it was just done to make the act even more convincing; and lastly, that they either managed to find a work-around to the whole “the Yato decides who's worthy to be it's wielder” thing and somehow got it to only show up when they felt like it should, in order to give themselves some more credibility, or that intentionally causing all this destruction to a peaceful nation was a step towards saving the world.

I don't blame Takumi for being angry at Corrin, for the record; he was always the most emotional of the four siblings, and seeing his mother die in front of him cannot have been good for his mental state.

Him accusing Corrin of having done so intentionally IS juts him lashing out at whoever he can get away with blaming for this, though; not only due to all the reasons listed above, but because he also tries to blame Azura for it with no evidence:

>Takumi: Shut up, Aqua! You're her accomplice!

So, yeah. Corrin unironically did nothing to deserve suspicion from the Hoshidan sibs.

>Hell, all of the Nohrian siblings defied Garon's orders almost immediately so that they could bail Corrin out despite not knowing whether or not they'd actually be in any danger.

They were paired up with a convicted criminal who used his promotion to soldier-dom as an excuse to commit murder and theft legally, and were ordered to take a fort with only him and Gunter for backup; i think it's fair to be concerned about their safety in that situation.

>To make a short list of the characters "tied" to Corrin, we've got: three maids, one butler, one combat instructor, four Nohrian siblings, four Hoshidan siblings, Azura whose life mirrors the protagonist's, one adoptive father, and one biological mother, and the list will just grow longer from here.

Sounds like an incredibly generous definition of what makes a character “tied” to the protagonist. They have 5 people who work for them/their adoptive father, 4 adoptive siblings, 4 “real siblings”, some rando who parallels them, an adoptive dad, and a mom.

I'm pretty sure if we're going by that definition, most protagonists in the series have only slightly less characters tied to them at the start of the game than Corrin. Most of them start with people they're friends with, and if we're including something as vague as “works for them” as a valid reason to be “tied” to the protagonist, nearly all of the FE protags skyrocket past the 16 people listed here by the start of their mid-games/end of their early-games.

>Yes, these are characters in their own right, but throughout the prologue and beyond a key aspect of their character is their relationship to Corrin. Thus far into the game they have also been introduced and defined primarily through their connection to the protagonist. To give an example, Hinoka is introduced crying over finally having Corrin back, and then Ryoma explains she became a warrior for their sake, after which Hinoka has almost no lines for the remainder of the prologue.

Literally false.

Here's Hinoka's ACTUAL introduction:

>Hinoka: It's alright.

>Your hard work to protect those people was very noble.

>The villagers are still in the middle of evacuating...

>We must fight until none remain.

>Even if our situation is unfavorable, we'll show them how princesses of Hoshido fight until the bitter end.

When Corrin talks to them for the first time:

>Kamui: Are you alright?

>Hinoka: I'm fine. This is nothing for me.

>You are one of Big Brother's reinforcements...?

>Sorry, but your help isn't neccessary.

>On my pride as a Princess of Hoshido, i will fight to the end even if i am alone.

>Kamui: I understand, but please don't overdo it. We will do something about the enemy.

>Hinoka: Hey, wait.

>Kamui: Yeah?

>Hinoka: For the time being...I am grateful for your assistance. Thanks.

>You can take this medicine. Your wounds should heal if you use it.

>Don't worry about me. I’m still going good.

This introduces and defines Hinoka as someone who cares about the safety of the innocent people of the village, is willing to die fighting in order to protect them, is so prideful as to refuse help at first and tries to downplay how bad her situation really was, before softening up after Corrin shows genuine concern for her, gives them some medicine, and reassures them that she's fine, showing she does care after all.

She never mentions Corrin once in any of those dialogues, unless you count being surprised at being told Corrin's name at the end of that last dialogue and repeating it in shock.

THEN she breaks down crying after finding out her sibling she thought was either gone forever or dead was alive and had returned to them, Ryoma mentions that she trained hard to get them back from Nohr, and then she calls all of Nohr evil for sending the Faceless to Hoshido and kidnapping a child, promising to make them pay for what they did to Corrin, all of which pales in comparison to what her previous dialogues estabilish about her personality.

And lastly, i don't see why the first point is a bad thing as long as it's justified in-universe. All the people listed have very good reasons to care so much about Corrin, so i don't see the issue with them being introduced and defined, mostly just at first btw, by their relationship to them.

Odo repeats the exact same complaint about the future sight being underutilized, this time with an unnecessary Awakening comparison, and gets to a section i have a lot to say about:

> Corrin's established character up until this point makes returning to Nohr a very unlikely option.

This is not solely a subjective opinion, but rather an idea the game has gone out of its way to reinforce. Let's take a look at what the player knows of Corrin and the conflict thus far:

>1) Corrin hates violence and killing and is ready to go against Garon in order to defend people. The Nohrians are unambiguously the aggressors in this conflict.

I don't think it matters too much who started this war; picking either side means Corrin spends months engaging in violence and killing innocent people, and they know that.

They know that the rank-and-file soldiers are likely just following orders, that Felicia, Flora, and Jakob are still in Nohr, as far as they know, and that they'll probably have to fight and kill them if they side with Hoshido, and most importantly, that the Nohrian siblings won't take this blatant betrayal standing and will try to fight them. They're not going to be eager to side with Hoshido and more likely than not be forced to fight and kill their own siblings, who they know are good people, along with their own friends on the Nothern Fortress AND a shitload of likely-conscripted soldiers just for a shot at killing the people actually responsible for this, even if it's the better choice morally.

>2) Corrin knows Garon murdered Sumeragi, their real father, and kidnapped them as a child.

>3) Garon has been sending monsters into Hoshido to cause as much destruction and suffering as possible.

Both of those just sound like good tactics to me. Kill the leader of the country you're currently at war with in an ambush, take the young child with him as your own to both deprive the rest of the Hoshidan royal family of manpower and increase your own, and destabilize the opposing country by hassling them.

It isn't nice to do any of those things, granted, but this is a war. Not only can Garon easily justify all of those with pragmatism rather than him being evil, the Hoshidans also attempt to do the first and third ones multiple times throughout the different routes, and Corrin even siding with Hoshido in the first place means they're dedicated to killing Garon by any means neccessary, including ambushing him while he's enjoying a show, so i don't see why they'd take that much issue with that.

>4) Garon gave Corrin a magical sword which exploded, killing Mikoto, and before that almost killed Corrin themselves. It also came close to killing Corrin at the Bottomless Canyon.

They have no proof Garon intended for any of that to happen, other than the fact that it's incredibly convenient for Nohr that the barrier around Hoshido went down as a result of Ganglari exploding, which is not evidence.

>5) Garon was behind the assassination of Gunter, orchestrated by Iago and carried out by Hans. Gunter meant a lot to Corrin and was one of the few constants in their life.

Corrin literally has no evidence for that claim whatsoever other than a beaten, retreating Hans telling them as much, which could just as easily be an excuse he made up on the spot to try and stop Corrin from killing him.

>Now, obviously, the argument is that Corrin cannot abandon the family they grew up with, but Corrin themselves even said that they wouldn't regret dying if they died kind. Assisting in the invasion of an innocent nation with the knowledge of everything mentioned above is shaky at best and most certainly not kind.

Fighting and killing their way through a nation they know is filled with innocent people just to take down the three guys responsible for fucking everything up isn't kind either, if still moreso than choosing Nohr.

The only choice Corrin can make at this point that doesn't involve throwing away at least part of the kindness they displayed at the start of the game for the sake of joining a war is picking neither side, but we'll get there later.

And besides, this is assuming humans are always perfectly consistent with their stated morality, which is evidently untrue. People can and do betray previously stated beliefs for multiple reasons, including emotion, and i don't see why Corrin would, or even should, be exempt from that, especially since picking Hoshido doesn't mean just themselves dying for the sake of saving the lives of defenseless P.O.Ws; it means betraying and very likely killing the only family they know, along with their friends and a bunch of random soldiers, for the sake of killing three evil people. Those are two very different consequences for a moral choice.

>Corrin has been consistently portrayed as too kind for their own good and ready to stand up for their beliefs, even against their family members; Xander won't win them over by saying "if we kill them all here, they'll be demoralized and we can conquer Hoshido more easily!"

From a pragmatic sense, it could appeal to Corrin. Nohr is so much stronger than Hoshido that any chances Hoshido has of winning this war are slim to none, and prolonging a war they know they can't win will do nothing but cause further casualties. Assuming Corrin already agrees that Nohr winning is a foregone conclusion (which is weird of Xander to do, admittedly, but maybe that's just some good old-fashioned patriotism seeping through), then yeah, that IS a pretty good argument for Corrin joining them.

>Furthermore, and this is important: returning to Nohr is effectively suicide. As listed above, as far as Corrin knows Garon wants them dead. Garon ordered Xander to kill Corrin if they stood in his way after the fight with the prisoners of war, the sword given to Corrin by Garon flung them down the Bottomless Canyon, and when it exploded in chapter five it's possible Corrin would've died if not for Mikoto.

I've already given my counterarguments for the last two points before, but even assuming, for the sake of the argument, that Corrin does believe Garon intended for the last two things to happen, i find it odd to list Garon threatening to have Xander kill Corrin for openly disobeying a direct order as one of the reasons for their distrust. It isn't nice to try and have them killed because they wouldn't commit a war crime, but that isn't in any way evidence that he'll try to kill them at the first available opportunity.

>We know that Garon commands absolute obedience and is a tyrannical psychopath who even indulges in the occasional maniacal laughter. Going back to Nohr isn't, or shouldn't, be as easy as just waltzing over to the Nohrian side of the conflict.

And given the only things Corrin knows for certain, Garon has literally only threatened to do something bad to them when they disobeyed an order, and by all accounts, they went above and beyond in their mission: instead of just taking over some random fort, they helped kill the leader of the opposing country and gave Nohr a chance to invade Hoshido, even if by accident. Corrin has zero reason to believe that anything bad would happen to them if they went back to Nohr.

>Having to pay for multiple paths

>Of course, if you only bought Conquest, you've got no choice but to go down that route anyway! That is another major flaw with the way Fates is structured: you're stuck with the version you bought, so if the prologue convinced you to want to experience one side rather than the other, you need to fork up more money. Needless to say, while not directly related to the quality of the writing, it is not conducive to the players' immersion.

>More than that, you barely know these characters you're meant to fight for after only a few chapters. If you bought only one version physically you're locked into your choice and likely selected that path either for the marketed gameplay difficulty or because you liked the design of the Pokémon anime characters on one side more than the other - a very common joke in the days leading up to Fates' release. The choice, as it's presented, was likely already determined before you reached this point.

This is honestly the weirdest part of this entire post. What does the completely out-of-universe criticism of “it was greedy of IS to make you pay for the different routes”, which i agree with for the record, have anything to do with the writing in Fates? Doesn't this contradict your earlier statement of “I will only be discussing the writing, plot, characters, etc., unless there is a rare instance where I need to comment on gameplay elements which directly tie into the plot.”?

And that was the branch of fate section of this analysis.

Overall, i'd say there's a few good points here, like the pacing and unasked questions, that are, unfortunately, overwhelmed by a sea of easily-debunked nitpicks, bad faith interpretations of developer intention, characterizations and plot points, and multiple arguments criticizing dialogues or plot points that only happen in the localization, not the plot as it was actually written.

Unfortunately for everyone, this is far from the last time these flaws will pop up in this analysis series.

See y'all next part.

#fire emblem #fire emblem fates #corrin fire emblem #ryoma fire emblem #xander fire emblem #reddit #story analysis

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captnjacksparrow · 3 years

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I enjoyed your meta so much and I think you understand the most about Sasuke. So I want to ask you about the start of disaster for me, namely when Kakashi tied Sasuke in a tree and sternly told Sasuke to give up on revenge although in their very first meeting Sasuke basically told him (and the rest of Team 7) that killing Itachi is his only dream/goal. I mean I get it, his message is nice, Sasuke should think about the bond he has created (namely Naruto because yes, they have bonded strongly) instead of abandoning it for un-rewarding quest of revenge. I also think that revenge is not a good thing to pursue if you're determined to throw everything for the sake of revenge. But Kakashi should be softer on handling it imo. Sasuke just met Itachi and got reminded about his pain and rage, to expect Sasuke forget about his revenge is illogical. Kakashi should emphasis on "you will lost the bond you've created if you drown yourself in revenge" instead of "revenge is wrong and brings nothing to you". Because let's face it, without Sasuke pursued Itachi he will never know about Itachi's sacrifice so in the end, he OBTAINED something, namely the truth about his clan's tragedy. Kakashi claimed that he's similar with Sasuke but he didn't empathize with Sasuke's pain at all, and expect Sasuke to process his grief in the same way as him, which is suck because he turned into perfect emotionless cold-blooded robot for Konoha (he even pushed Gai and pointed a kunai to his neck). Heck, Sasuke even tried to make Kakashi understand about his pain, namely he asked Kakashi what if he killed all Kakashi's loved one, but Kakashi still didn't understand and expect Sasuke to smile when he lost everything like Kakashi did.

So I think Sasuke left Konoha is an unfortunate event that can be prevented if Kakashi brought Naruto (and Sakura maybe, dunno, don't care about her) to emphasis what will he lose if he pursue revenge, in softer and nicer tone (because Sasuke is just 12 years old in trauma for the love of God). Kakashi (and Konoha) also should investigate more about Itachi because he and his organization planned to take Naruto, Konoha's jinchuriki, instead of letting him go away without any action to pursue him. If Sasuke stayed with Naruto, he eventually would met Itachi again (because Naruto is Akatsuki's aim after all), and he will know the truth on nicer term than in Madara's cave. BUT, Sasuke of course will not stay silent if Kakashi just asked him to forget about Itachi while he himself doesn't investigate it further. The novel fact that Kakashi is Itachi's former superior and know how kind and gentle Itachi is, also he knew how shitty Danzo is from the whole event with Yamato/Tenzo/Kinoe made me angrier because dammit that man has all the puzzle pieces but HE DID NOT DO ANYTHING.

Except become perfect emotionless robot for Konoha, the same Konoha who killed his father.

Sasuke and Naruto deserve better teacher honestly (I put Naruto because Kakashi is also Minato's student and he did nothing to Naruto in Part 1 and practically all Naruto's childhood before Naruto met Iruka)

Thanks for the Ask!!!

You seem to confuse the Filler episodes with the Canonical one and that's why you came to this conclusion, Anon.... So, I'll explain about that.

Kakashi should be softer on handling it imo.

if Kakashi brought Naruto (and Sakura maybe, dunno, don't care about her) to emphasis what will he lose if he pursue revenge, in softer and nicer tone (because Sasuke is just 12 years old in trauma for the love of God).

That’s simply not possible....

Because Sasuke is a person who never listen to lengthy preachings as Kakashi is mentioning here. Remember Sakura was talking pages and pages of dialogues to stop him... That didn't move his heart at all. Not one bit. But Kakashi's words almost reached him and HE CHANGED...

Here, the moment Kakashi talked about the pointlessness of pursuing Revenge and that he has people who he had bonded with.... Sasuke made this considerate look in the bottom left panel....

Well, I attached this panel here only to show that this scene happened sometime at afternoon considering the White Background....

And he was carefully giving it a thought until late Night.

The point is Sasuke himself knew that obsessing with Revenge is just wrong... He wanted to be happy, have fun, pout, smile, bicker, banter and all that (Thanks to Naruto's presence)...

And that's why he had such a peaceful dream like this..

And that's precisely why he could just give up his life for Naruto by shrugging off all his dreams in the Land of the Waves.

Meaning, Sasuke just doesn't want to pursue Revenge at all.

Aaaaand then Sound Four Ninjas came and screwed him up and Sasuke just made up his mind to pursue Orochimaru.

"To gain something, you must also give something up..."

"This Village can only hinder you... All you gotta do is to snip your worthless ties... The you can gain even greater power.."

This pretty much wasted all the efforts Kakashi put into giving him a short Pep Talk.

And also, this ‘using force to make Sasuke listen’ is not something only Kakashi knew it.... Naruto also knew this very well..

"The only way you and I can communicate is with our fists!!"

Even if Naruto talks endlessly about how Revenge is Bad (Which he never did).... Sasuke would never listen unless by using a force.

So, Sakura tried her love-filled Softer and Nicer tone... And she failed...

Whereas Kakashi and Naruto used force... And it worked. LOL... Sasuke has constructed such hard walls in his heart... It can't be broken by words alone, you know.

he turned into perfect emotionless cold-blooded robot for Konoha (he even pushed Gai and pointed a kunai to his neck).

The novel fact that Kakashi is Itachi's former superior and know how kind and gentle Itachi is, also he knew how shitty Danzo is from the whole event with Yamato/Tenzo/Kinoe made me angrier because dammit that man has all the puzzle pieces but HE DID NOT DO ANYTHING.

These are simply not true because they are not canon...

That whole filler block was nice, I agree... Consider this Boruto shit fillers, this Kakashi Filler was so good....

Anyways, the point of that Filler block is to show Kakashi's journey from his Childhood to how he became a Sensei, as a prelude to his Canonical fight with Obito in the upcoming Episodes.

The facts left by Manga, that had happened before Part 1 (off-screen) was...

Kakashi disqualified two freshly graduated Academy Teams prior to Team 7....

Kakashi has worked in ANBU....

Kakashi has a history with Orochimaru & Jiraiya...

Kakashi is a trusted Shinobi for Third Hokage...

Kakashi has a history with Itachi and Yamato during his ANBU days...

The Anime team constructed a story with all these facts established by Kishimoto and developed a new filler episodes on their Own. So, it can't be considered as Canon... It was explicitly mentioned as Filler... So, there's that.

In my Opinion, the idea of ‘KAKASHI DIDN’T DO ANYTHING’ .... is all just a Filler and we will never know what happened during his ANBU days and basing our opinion on the Filler block will lead to no where.

Also he should investigate more about Itachi because he and his organization planned to take Naruto, Konoha's jinchuriki, instead of letting him go away without any action to pursue him.

Hmmm... Let's see...

This is the state of the Village when Itachi came.... It's almost destroyed pretty badly. Added to that, the Village has just lost the Hokage and they were in the process of selecting someone.

Also, Kakashi got knocked down by Itachi with his Tsukuyomi after their encounter.

Do you think, anyone can able to pursue Itachi amidst all these Chaos and on top of that, the Elite Jounin of this Village was in Coma???

Except Kakashi became a perfect emotionless robot for Konoha, the same Konoha who killed his father.

That's simply not true....

First off, Kakashi father committed Suicide.

Second off, Not the entire Villagers slandered his Father. It was only his Peers and the people who accompanied with him on that mission that he abandoned.

“In the End, Both the Land of Fire and his peers blamed him for Everything.... As if that weren’t enough... Even the people whom he rescued had turned against him and slandered him...”

Even the Anime says the same thing... And the word ‘Villagers’ were never pronounced explicitly. Plus, it also implies that only the Land of Fire blamed his Father, not Konoha’s Hokage.

Third Off, To prove the above fact further.... He was still considered as the Hero of the Village... Which was acknowledged by Obito himself....

“He is some Hero who save the Village and died in the line of Duty”

Why am I bringing this panel???

Because Kakashi’s father, Sakumo was long dead when this scene happened. But still Obito thinks that he was a hero and died in the line of Duty.

Meaning, Not everyone slandered him... And the real reason for his Death was not disclosed to the Entire Villagers and that’s why he was still considered as the Hero.

So, this Konoha killed Hatake Sakumo is all some fanon theory.

I am not going to say... Kakashi is the Best Sensei.....

But he is not as bad as the Fandom makes it out to be.

Because, It’s just like you said, in Part 1 Kakashi didn’t focus on Naruto.... It’s a narrative decision to introduce Jiraiya into the Plot and him taking Naruto under his Hood.

Which means....

He definitely focused on Sasuke a lot. Which was even acknowledged by Jiraiya here....

And it’s precisely because of this.... Kakashi didn’t teach anything for Naruto. And he focused entirely on Sasuke and passed on his predominant Jutsu Chidori to Sasuke.... A Jutsu that Sasuke even used until Chapter 698...

So, Kakashi’s words could reach Sasuke and he passed down his Jutsu. All of this shows that he respected Kakashi and he even considered him as his Family, according to his confession in Chapter 698.

I won’t be saying he was the Best Sensei.... But calling him, a Bad sensei for Sasuke is too extreme.

As for taking care of Naruto before Iruka coming in to the picture....

My point is very simple....

Kakashi lost Minato, his Sensei at what age??? Around 14??? Not sure. He lost him when he was very young. Provided that he lost all his Teammates, Sensei, his Mother, His Father..... Do you really think he could take care of Little Naruto with all of the tragedies that was going on around his life????

Plus, Kakashi too has his own Journey, you know. He can’t leave his Ninja Career and dedicate his entire life to take care of his Sensei’s son who was already taken care of by Third Hokage.... [[Please don’t believe that shit Filler where Hiruzen coldly offers Monthly Money as an expenditure to a 4 year old Naruto... That’s some ugly filler]].

It’s not only Kakashi... Same applies to Jiraiya. Everyone has their own Journey. No one is obligated to dedicate their life to Naruto. Now, I may sound a bit insensitive. But what I am trying to say is...

Naruto was not entirely left alone by Hiruzen in his apartment and left him to Rot. Like this fandom portrays him to be. Well, I wish Kishimoto could’ve given a proper explanation for this. But there are clues and we have to make sense with whatever we have.

In Episode 3/Chapter 3,

We see Naruto can able to cook Ramen, Have a kettle.... He even have a Bread Toaster.... He can able to get up on Time to go to Academy....

Do you really think Naruto just learnt all of these manners on his Own???? It’s simply not possible for a Kid to learn these things. Someone actually taught him these stuffs until he can fend off on his own. My bet is Hiruzen. And that’s why you could see Naruto was revering Hiruzen in many places in Naruto Manga, even in Boruto.

So, Either Hiruzen or someone took care of him on an Aesthetical level.

But what Naruto really needed was an Emotional Support. Someone who can love him for who he was.... Talk to him... Feed him... Smile at him... Treat him like a Kid... Something of this sort. Simply put, he needed a Family of his own. [[For hell’s sake.... Not a family where he was married forcefully and have kids]].

Hiruzen, being a Hokage, can’t just leave everything for Naruto’s sake to provide Emotional Support whenever he required. Even if he could arrange someone to take care of him... Will they truly love him without any resentment??? You can ask someone to do a job... But you can’t ask someone to Love another person... Can you???

That’s where Iruka (A Chunin who don’t go out for Missions) and Sasuke (A person who shares every similarity with Naruto and of same age) came into the play. If you want to read more about Arranging Foster Care for Naruto and Sasuke... I’ve written a lengthy post here.. [Link]

Kakashi and Jiraiya, being A Jounin and A Sannin, believed in Hiruzen. And that’s why after his death, they both had a lengthy discussion about Naruto’s well being and came to a conclusion on who should take care of him.

Aesthetical support and Emotional support is like Apples and Oranges. Just because Kakashi didn’t provide the Emotional Warmth, it doesn’t make him a Bad person. But Kakashi made it up in Part 2 by helping him develop a new Jutsu, he piggy backed Naruto and teamed up with him in the fight against Obito, helped Naruto meeting Raikage and so on.

So, Kakashi is a Decent Sensei to both Sasuke and Naruto, if not the best.

#kakashi #naruto #sasuke #jiraiya #obito #itachi

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argumate · 4 years

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you're clearly often implicitly /aware/ that you're wrong about or at least don't know how to contest something, but you don't announce that this has happened: you just pivot to a new angle. it's not only a problem from the point of view of etiquette & granting your argupartner the satisfaction of being right; i think it's also part of the reason you often wind up talking past people who aren't used to your style, as they mistakenly assume you're still arguing for a point you've given up on.

I’ll have to try and catch myself in the act, but there are definitely differing conversational styles at play here, for example there is a kind of engineer dialogue that runs something like this:

Alice: so we use the index as a cache key to avoid recomputing the field--

Bob: what if it’s negative?

Alice: doesn’t matter, we’re treating it as unsigned and hashing it anyway.

Bob: are we vulnerable to collision attacks?

Alice: possibly, but the hash is reasonably secure and there are easier ways that a malicious user could arrange denial of service.

Bob: will cache memory usage be a problem for large requests?

Alice: I don’t think so, we clear the cache after each session, but we could always cap it at some maximum just in case.

Bob: okay then what happens?

there are several ways to read this as a positive exchange even as Bob aggressively hunts around for edge cases and weaknesses: they are helping Alice by checking for potential issues while prompting them during a walkthrough to help explain the design to others, they are trying to understand the design themselves as efficiently as possible by zeroing in on the parts that they don’t understand or that seem the most suspicious, and they are displaying a lot of attention and engagement with what Alice is saying.

however you can also read this as Bob attempting to humiliate or discomfit Alice by raising a flurry of pointless questions instead of trusting that Alice has already handled these issues, or perhaps Bob is trying to show off to the audience and demonstrate superior ability by trying to catch Alice out in a mistake, or maybe Bob is being abrasive and rude by not softening their speech: “I’m struggling to understand this aspect of the design, would you be able to tell me what happens if the blah blah? Oh I see! Thank you, that makes sense to me now, forgive me for interrupting, please continue,” etc.

and of course any of these interpretations could be true! you would need to know more about Alice and Bob and their personalities and preferred interaction styles and previous history and work environment in order to judge the emotional undercurrents of this dialogue, but it’s easy to see how misunderstandings can happen and people can end up thinking of each other as jerks (”they keep trolling me!” / ”I’m only trying to help!”).

social media amplifies this difficulty by stripping out a lot of shared history and context and tone and body language and putting the whole thing in a blender and then the conversation takes place in front of an audience of enraged baboons who tag team both participants, so it’s unsurprising that there are hurt feelings and missed connections.

none of which is meant to excuse deliberately being a jerk of course, it’s just that sometimes the solution for incompatible communication styles is to find other people with more compatible communication styles.

#Anonymous

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revchainsaw · 3 years

Text

Bumblebee (2018)

Good Evening worshippers, and welcome! Today the Cult of Cult goes a little more mainstream than usual. It's been a while since i've tackled a big Hollywood superhero film. But I do believe that these sorts of films will be remembered fondly my small groups of people in the future, especially the smaller films that are being overshadowed by the big bad MCU, films like 2018s Bumblebee.

The Messsage

Bumblebee was originally released as a prequel to the Transformers franchise that had started all the way back in 2007. However, reboots had really hit the market as a way to breath new life into struggling franchises, and the Transformers series had already gone to just about every absurd extreme you could imagine. No changes were made to the movie as it was released, but with it's more childish and heartfelt tone, and a new aesthetic that was softer, smoother, and all around just generally more pleasing to the eye, I think it was a wise choice to rebrand Bumblebee as a new beginning.

Our story is of two friends from two very different worlds and how they came together. Our first character is Bumblebee, then known as B- number sign/it doesn't really matter. Not yet Bumblebee is a soldier set with securing a safe location for the Autobots to regroup and make their home as they suffer a pretty serious defeat on cybertron at the hands of the tyrannical Decepticons. Optimus Prime, here again voiced by Peter Cullen and looking so much more like himself, assigns this task to Bumblebee promising him that they will meet him there when the time comes. Then Optimus fucks off for the rest of the run time making way for our little hero.

Bumblebee lands on Earth and is immediately set upon by John Cena and his military goon squad. It probably would have been wise for Bumblebee to avoid John Cena but in his defense, he couldn't see him. Hardy har har. In his attempt to flee his voice box is damaged, he seeks sanctuary by taking the form of a run down little VW bug, and suffers from amnesia.

Then we have Charlie. Charlie is not like other girls. She likes cars, all the retro music, which wasn't retro when the movie takes place, so I'm supposed to just think she's a rocker but it kinda seems like she'll listen to just about anything. I think in 2018 liking Motorhead and The Smiths (who are used ad nauseum in this movie) is perfectly common, but I feel like in the 80s that was a much different and much older attitude to take.

Anyway Charlie's poor family lives in a super fucking nice house and are poor because the dialogue keeps insisting they are so it must be true despite all the shit they have that actually poor people would sell blood and teeth to attain, but hell, this is Hollywood and Hollywood poor is like regular people upper middle class. Charlies family is so poor that instead of giving her a one time graduation/birthday present to buy a part for a car she already has, they just give her a moped, She also spends all her time at a pull apart where the manager (who might be her uncle that wasn't super clear) is willing to just give her a Volkswagen so I don't understand why she didn't already have the project car up and running. Whatever, it's a plot contrivance. All you need to know is that Charlie is tenacious and hard around the edges cuz her dad is dead and she's not yet mature enough to process that in a healthy way. Maybe her character arch will teach her to let others in, we'll have to find out.

There's also a wacky nerd named Memo, and some bad guys, and John Cena. They are all also pretty archetypal and contrived and don't really do anything of note that isn't just filling a beat that this kind of movie needs to walk. Charlie starts Bumblebee up, discovers he's a robot and the two begin to bond. Charlie learns to make a friend, and bumblebee is learning about himself. They get into hijinks and get revenge on a bully girl who makes Regina George look like a saint, she pretty much only picks on Charlie exclusively for having a dead dad.

The moment Bumblebee is woken back up, some technology goof em up that both he and Charlie are unaware of brings two Decepticon baddies into the picture. I don't remember their names, but since I love The Venture Brothers let's say they can be "Jet Boy and Jet Girl". Jet Boy and Jet Girl are sometimes cars, sometimes various flying military vehicles, and they make friends with the deep state and plan to get all the adrenochrome from all the orphans, or just to go find Bumblebee and beat his ass good cuz their bad guys. Let me tell y'all though, Jet Boy and Jet Girl are so bad that they don't even care that the government is listening when they reveal that they are planning on bringing a Decepticon Invasion and after they rough up Bumblebee real good they are going to destroy all life on this planet. So they start by killing a military scientist.

John Cena is after Bumblebee and he's homies with Jet Boy and Jet Girl until the military scientist butt dials him and he hears the evil plan. John Cena goes from heel to face and helps Bumblebee and Charlie save the day. It's a giant CG clusterfuck climax a la any superhero film in the last 10 years and I basically stopped watching. BumbleBee pulls a Hellraiser on Jet Boy, and then he hits Jet Girl with a freaking boat. Charlie uses her diving skills do dive down and save him, but he's a Giant Robot and he was okay and it was literally pointless for her to to except as a way to show that her character has completed her arch by doing the thing that was representative of her connection with her lost father.

Bumblebee turns into the Camaro from the first movie, meets up with Optimus prime, and the stage is set for this prequel to squeeze more prequels out. So it wasn't very creative, but was it bad? Let's find out.

Please Stand to receive the Benediction.

Best Aspect: Transform the Franchise

Bumblebee was directed by Travis Knight of Laika fame and it shows. This movie marks a stylistic change in the transformers franchise, as in it doesn't look like utter dog shit, but it also represents in many ways a tonal shift. It does hold on to a lot of gross sleaze that has unfortunately been forcibly jammed into the DNA of the franchise but it also attempts to be a more heartfelt entry. The characters of Bumblebee might all be sort of a waste of time, but at least they are doing something with emotions, even if the emotions of the characters are only explored as deeply as a children's cartoon I'm glad they are there. In the previous installments the only thing the characters did between running from action piece to seizure inducing action piece was drool over underage girls like a bunch of chimpanzees at the facility where they test experimental E.D. meds. It was nice to see that at least somewhat tampered. This transformers movie feels more like it's for kids and young teenagers, and strangely that more friendly tone makes for a much less juvenile product.

Worst Aspect: Remember I Love the 80s from the 2000s

I hope you really like Stranger Things. I do, but because Stranger Things was so successful it' s going to be everywhere. Not true Stranger Things just 80s nostalgia porn. This 80s nostalgia is going to be forced on you whether you like it or not, and it's not going to be fun. It's gonna be in your shows, in your music, in your Sunday like Bacon in 2010. It's that or Marvel Franchise Brand Whedonisms. Bumblebee is that brave movie that says, "Why not both?" It would seem fitting that a property as quintessentially 80s as Transformers should feel completely comfortable doing a period piece set in the 80's but it's so fucking half hearted it's depressing. It wasn't done to appreciate the roots of the IP, it was done to cash in on a trend and it feels it. All they did was throw up a date and insufferably force an 80s soundtrack down your throat as if that was enough to convince you that this movie needed to be set during this time. Other than that you could have told me this film was set in 2007 and I couldn't tell you any different.

Best Character: Charlie's an Angel

I liked Charlie. Sure her Arc is predictable, her taste is dumb, and she isn't exactly a master of her own destiny to any degree. But at least she is a woman in a transformers movie who's got something going on. Sure she's defined entirely by grief, but that sure is better than pretending that being able to work on cars is a feminist character trait instead of a weird fetish thing. They certainly do that thing with Charlie, but at least it's not the only thing they throw at the wall. Bumblebee is by no means out of the woods in this department, but it garners a lot of goodwill for trying. Like a racist uncle who just started his journey out of ignorance, but hasn't yet realized he has to stop asking mortifying questions to the barista at Starbucks. Okay, maybe that's an extreme metaphor. I'm saying that perhaps Charlie is not a great character but she's a great character for a Transfomers movie.

Worst Character: It's JOOOOHHHNNNN CEEEENA!!!!

Why is John Cena in this movie? I don't hate the guy, but his character seems pointless. You could remove him from the movie completely and replace him with any one of the random military goons at any point and it changes nothing. What was with that dumb salute at the end? It seems like they put him in this movie in post and it was just to pump up cast list. I wish he was given anything to work with. I can't remember his characters name, and it's not like John Cena did a bad job, I was just annoyed every time they kept giving him hero shots. I felt like I was watching a trailer for a different movie.

Best Actor: Optimal Primo!

Every time Peter Cullen speaks I want to listen. There's a reason they haven't had Chris Pratt or somebody with a bigger name come in and take over the role at this point. He's why the audience keep coming back. Peter Cullen IS Optimus Prime, and there's no changing that. He also wins twice. He's the best actor in the movie AND he's barely in the movie. Good call Peter.

Worst Actor: Mean Girls 2, Meaner and Girlier

I don't want to be cruel so I'm not going to go into to much detail, but there's an actress in this film who's performance is so mustache twirlingly evil and stupid that it ruined my suspension of disbelief when i knew going in that i was about to endure a 2 hour toy commercial about robots that turn into cars. Beldar Conehead was a more convincing human being than Tina.

Best Effect: Goo Be Gone

I really appreciated when the bad guys shot the government nerd into a blast of snot. That was pretty fun for me. Best part of the movie hands down.

Worst Effect: Live Action?

Bumblebee is a cartoon. It's a great looking cartoon but it doesn't sell itself that way. If we were doing a Roger Rabbit thing I'd have no gripes. However, I think CG is just getting worse. I'm criticizing this and it's still lightyears better than the previous entry's on the franchise. No transformation or fight sequence in Bumble Bee had me straining to make sense of what I was looking at. I think it was a great idea to start using some basic shapes and outlines to these characters, and return somewhat to their 80s designs. But at certain points, especially when there were no humans in the shot, i was pretty convinced I was watching Clone Wars. There may not be anyway around this, as the Transformers concept might not be able to be pulled off in any more effective manner. It's a minor gripe, but I just didn't think it looked like anything other than a very expensive cartoon, and in this franchise that's a compliment, because it least it looked like SOMETHING!

Best Scene: Space Opera

I am not a Transformers fan. I missed the boat on the cartoon as a kid. I would sometimes catch it at friends houses but I was more into Batman, Star Wars, and Ninja Turtles. By the time I came onto the scene the world had moved on to Beast Wars. I did one day arbitrarily decide that my favorite Transformer was Sound Wave. He looked great in this. I am a big fan of the return to form with a lot of the character designs in this. They really did keep the things that worked from the other adaptations, and they are steadily removing the things that didn't. For this reason, the scenes on Cybertron, particularly the battle with Soundwave (i prefer for personal reasons) looked great and were exciting to watch. I remember thinking Cybertron used to look like a Marilyn Manson shot a music video from inside to dumpster. This is so much better.

Worst Scene: Blocking the Box

There's a scene in Bumblebee where Charlie's family decides the best way to save their daughter was to cause a pile up of vehicles in an intersection, and it's pure contrived writing that saved any character in that sequence from being killed in a horrific traffic accident. It was stupid, played for laughs, and it wasn't exciting as much as it was anxiety inducing. I also thought that there was no reason the covert military group covering up extraterrestrial life wouldn't just disappear this family of fucking morons in their little piece of shit car. The logic of the scene was just so childish like, "No they won't hit me, I'm a good person."

Summary

Bumblebee may be remembered fondly in a decade. I think especially if the Transformers franchise were to end here. It didn't get the publicity of the other films, and that really is a shame. For my money, this was the best Transformers movie so far. I was very tempted to give Bumblebee a C, it does just enough to right what was wrong from the other movies to make me appreciate all that work. This movie has heart, and if you are at all into Transformers then l think you should see it. It's still pretty stupid, and pretty basic. It's not offering anything new to the genre, and it feels like a commercial for more movies. I really wish we could just get movies that want to tell a story. I thought it over and decided that it wasn't fair not to grade Bumblebee on it's own merits. Bumblebee is substantially better than the films that preceded it, but that's not saying a lot, when the films that preceded it are joyless exercises in self abuse.

Overall Grade: D

#Transformers #Bumblebee #Optimus Prime #Action #Adventure #Car #Super Hero #Robot #Scifi #Grade D #D #Grade: D #2018 #2010s #(D)

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movienotesbyzawmer · 3 years

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August 26: Mission: Impossible III

(previous notes: Mission: Impossible II)

Another one I haven't seen since it first came out (fifteen years ago!), but I remember liking it. Other than the exciting new personnel in the cast and in the director's chair, I really can't remember any details about this.

The director is, of course, J.J. Abrams. He comes in scalding hot from his television work, most notably Lost, and is making his feature directorial debut here before eventually directing what is currently the top-grossing movie of all time in the US. There was reason at the time to expect an improvement over the spotty second entry, but what does it say that I can't remember anything at all… okay let's start it.

You know how movies often love to tease the audience by opening with a really really exciting scene that's supposed to blow your mind and make you go OH my GOD like HOW did we GET to this VERY EXCITING SITUATION and then they jerk it all away and start from the beginning, this movie begins with that. That and very "modern" shaky shaky handheld camera stuff. I don't like that handheld stuff but whatever.

After the credits it's clearly back to before-problem. Ethan is having a chill dinner party with his girlfriend who is not Thandie Newton but who is definitely being tortured by Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the opening tease.

That is subtly interrupted by a covert request to meet at a convenience store for some espionage and, perhaps less subtly, a lot of exposition. Very unnatural dialogue lets us know that Ethan is not in the field any more, he is a trainer, but one of his trainees is in trouble with PSH and will he help please. Also that was his fiancée not his mere girlfriend. That is a much more elite status. High stakes OMG.

Off to Berlin, and I'm reminded that the previous movie didn't do as much globetrotting; it was pretty much in Australia the whole time. I like location diversity.

The rescue of the played-by-Keri-Russell former protégé is not a stealthy one. They plant a bunch of blowy-uppy things around the rusty warehouse where they're torturing her and cause chaos to help them get to her and shoot their way out. There is no mask-craft so far.

After a cocky moment where Ethan demonstrates that being down to only one bullet was just fine with him, there's a cool shot where a closeup of Ethan has a nicely-framed surprise explosion behind him.

Much splody. So much splody. Maybe M:I3 is the one that should be remembered as The Splody One. There are rockets toppling wind turbines being negotiated by chasing helicopters. But the most suspenseful issue is that KR has a secret surprise blowy-uppy in her bloodstream. A race to maybe do something about it doesn't work and she dies. I remember predicting her death to my friends before the movie started, but it didn't make those friends like me any better.

Worth noting that J.J. Abrams is not wrong to apparently think we will think all the wind turbine imagery will look pretty neat.

Before dying, KR sent a postcard to Ethan, and not even in a normal way, in a "Hi is this Rollo Tamassy? I was given explicit instructions to let you know there is a delivery for you in dead Keri Russell's mailbox" kind of weird way. The postcard had a blank microdot hidden under the stamp. Feels slightly eye-rolly. Simon Pegg is now in the movie now, though, so that's cool.

Ethan had to have a serious talk with Julia about how serious his life is or something, and they get married like right there in a storage room! Then Ethan and the team go to the Vatican and do a heist there. It's an okay heist that involves seeming like bickering Italian van drivers and then changing into different costumes. No masks though. They still look like themselves. J.J. Abrams clearly told people, "why should I watch the other Mission Impossible movies when I literally made Alias".

They shoot magic sticky pebbles near cameras to make them not work, this is important to their method, but I'm not sure how this is supposed to end, aren't they kidnapping PSH or something?

0:47:57 - Welly welly well, what have we here, they have the mask machine! We actually see it 3D-print a PSH mask, now we talkin

Ooh, and we also get to see a whole thing about the voice disguise technology, Ethan has a PSH mask on and he forces the real PSH at gunpoint to say a script to teach the tech thing his voice, but it's not ready in time when he has to say stuff in disguise and there is suspense there, I like it!

They successfully completed the heist of stealing PSH from the Vatican, even though we didn't see exactly how they transported his sedated body out of there but okay

"Whoever it is I'm gonna find her and I'm gonna hurt her", we're seeing PSH be a villain on a level that one really doesn't see very much.

Ethan responds to that by doing an odd thing that I guess would be described as "dangling him from the bottom of a plane that is flying up in the air and therefore scary". He's trying to figure out what "rabbit's foot" is, which we heard about in the opening tease. We still don't know what it is. I've known for fifteen years apparently and even I don't know what it is so

The next exotic location on our tour appears to be the bridges connecting the Florida Keys, and things get splody again! Rocket bombs destroy the bridges they're on plus also some of the vehicles that are around. Right before that happened we saw the secret video message that KR had hidden in that microdot pre-her-unfortunate-death, and it was the news that the spy executive we've seen a couple of times, played by Lawrence Fishburne, is secretly a bad guy. So the rocket-equipped military force that is recklessly decimating bridges and automobiles is probably under Spy Executive's direction. Kind of rash doing all this destruction.

Oh, I remember that shot! Ethan is running away from a car that is the victim of a rocketplosion, and the force of that throws him in a way you don't see very much, it was probably hard to make it look that good. There are other cool shots in this sequence too.

Oh I like this I like this… the bad guys that are under the direction of Spy Executive have apprehended Ethan just after he found out that PSH kidnapped Julia. He has 48 hours to do a "rabbit's foot" something for PSH in order to save Julia, but he's all restrained and has a strange mask on, but what I like is that Billy Crudup, who is Spy Executive's lackey, did a trick that required Ethan to read his lips. BC knows what's up and is helping Ethan, it's exciting.

1:21:53 - Ethan has escaped and met up with his crew (hey, we have hardly even seen Simon Pegg, what is up with that), and they're doing a heist plan, and it involves drawing skyscrapers on glass and the camera angle matches the actual skyscrapers and it's pretty cool especially when he's doing geometry and actual mathematic calculations to plan some kind of corporeal transfer between two skyscrapers.

That scene is followed by a very impossible-looking shot of Ethan on top of a Shanghai skyscraper; it zooms in from way far away and then circles him and stays on him having a conversation with Ving Rhames, all one shot.

Then a very exciting sequence, the one that was planned for so academically before; Ethan does a super crazy run off the top of the building, and the bungee thing he's attached to does cool looking stuff to get him to swing to the actual building that is his destination, but it's on a sloping thing and he slides down it and there are bad guys he has to shoot. His job is challenging.

I keep forgetting to note this but I do keep observing with satisfaction that the score is all orchestral and traditional, none of the neo-slickrawk of the last two.

Things happened so fast that I didn't quite comprehend how all of his leaps and swings resulted in him obtaining the "rabbits foot", but I guess the thing that looks like a cartridge-container for a pneumatic tube conveyer that has a thing with a radioactivity symbol on it is that. What even is.

The meeting to do the exchange of Julia & "rabbit's foot" is set up and pretty quickly we're caught up to the tease from the beginning. We now are enjoyably frustrated that Ethan thinks he gave them the "rabbit's foot" but dude is asking for it and it's like wut dood I gave it? That ends with PSH seemingly shooting Julia and BC showing up and clearly being in cahoots with the bad guys after all. And it was a fake Julia in a masky-mask, the real one is still okay somewhere. Masked-and-now-dead woman is someone we saw as PSH's translator at the Vatican and the expository dialogue that helps us know this is so artificial-seeming that it reminds us that elaborating on who that really was is kind of pointless and laborious.

This long monologue by BC, mixed too quiet again, also tries to explain his point of view, but I can't quite get it. He says something about the "rabbit's foot", are we supposed to know what it is yet? He mumbled something about a "middle eastern buyer".

1:44:45 - Somehow Ethan was able to get Simon Pegg on the phone after biting his way away from BC (SHHH NO TIME TO EXPLAIN), and then he gets to the top of a suburban Shanghai house and a shot is really cool showing that and it moves and follows him in a cool way, and then the subsequent shots of him running through the streets are cool, he's on the phone with SP who is telling him exactly which little city streets to turn into.

Just as he has found Julia and is maybe going to rescue her, he gets a big headache and we remember that he has the same mini-splody in him that killed KR, and PSH shows up, pretty bad news. PSH delivers his threatening dialogue in a vividly psychopathic way.

PSH's end is dumb, especially on paper. He turns is back on Ethan, who is easily able to jump him and fight him. The fight spills out into the street and a lucky car accident seems to fatally maim PSH while leaving Ethan unharmed. Meh.

The final resolution involves trying the idea they had at the beginning that didn't work with KR, where some kind of on-purpose electrocution death preludes the micro-splody death and then you just have to be good at reviving the person. And it almost doesn't work… but then it does oh my god it does

There is a very very pleasant shot of Ethan and Julia strolling through a Chinese village with a canal bridge and it really is nice looking and I want to go there and stroll like they are strolling.

But then they're back at HQ or whatever and oh, I guess it turns out BC was the only secret bad guy and Spy Executive was good enough and they're all on good terms and Ethan and Julia go on a honeymoon the end. Oh, and the final exchange cheekily reveals that we will never know what "rabbit's foot" was. Creative? Cop-out? Who's to say? (insert why-not-both gif)

So what's to remember about that movie? Was it indeed better than MI:2? I guess a little; there are several little annoying things from both of the first two movies that are absent here, so that's refreshing… but also some of the plot contrivances don't improve on what we've seen so far. Some very very very ambitious visuals! That's the real thing I want to make sure not to forget about this. The previous one had John Woo's signature visual style, but none of it matches the accomplishments of the cool shots in this one. I might have preferred a little more playfulness with the espionage stuff, but if I recall correctly the series doesn't really return to that form.

(next: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol)

#Mission: Impossible 3 #M:I3

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