snowpiercer, fma, daft punk
Jul. 12th, 2014 01:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaSnowpiercer. I enjoyed it a great deal, though I'm having trouble articulating why I enjoyed it. It's certainly very campy-80's/90's-scifi in many respects, and I generally dislike that sort of thing (I was pretty unenthused by Blade Runner, etc, though I did enjoy The Fifth Element quite a bit so maybe there's some granularity there). It's very 80's-sci-fi in the way that it addresses "issues" and "topics" (lol classism on a train! also the working classes are just sitting around all day and wallowing in misery, right, it's not like the whole thing with classism is that the upper classes rely on hard and dangerous labor from lower classes, also the upper classes come in and randomly slaughter the lower classes sometimes because ???? reasons??? etc) . The twist-ish-thing at the end was dumb. It suffers from the why-the-hell-is-this-so-common problem of "the protagonist is way more boring than everyone else, why is he even the protagonist."
And yet. The action was intelligently and sharply paced (HEY MICHAEL BAY YOU COULD LEARN A THING OR TWO). The aesthetics felt strange and mishmash but worked in a fun, strange and mishmash way. It wound up being good stuff.
(It's also possible I was just distracted by the hot dad. Mmm Namgoong.)
FMA. Kinda. I got in a chat with someone about effective altruism / preference utilitarianism, etc, which seems to be the trendy Pop Philosophy Position (TM) of the techbrat crowd nowadays, a position that I find myself rather suspicious of, mostly because a lot of it is presented as "you should go make piles and piles of money via problematic means, but seriously, just as much money as you can get—it's okay though, you're donating it to charity so you're actually doing the most ethical thing possible"—ahem. Anyway randomly it occurred to me this kind of romanticism-of-working-within-the-system-to-change-it-eventually-maybe is totally personified by Fullmetal Alchemist's Roy Mustang. I mean, okay, he made some kind of vow to not kill innocents again (I think??? uhhh full disclosure, I haven't really watched FMA since middle school-ish and I haven't read the manga or watched Brotherhood, so my memory could be totally foggy/incorrect :D;;;), but besides that, he is presented as ruthlessly political and calculating, pretty much willing to do whatever to get promoted, with the noble end goal of Being High Up Enough He Doesn't Have to Take Fucked-Up Orders, and Also Change Things Probably. It's interesting in that I fuckin' love Roy in that context of FMA, whereas I'm more skeptical of the effective-altruism types, which would seem to be a rather similar philosophy, and now I want to see this whole realm o' things explored more.
Basically I want to know if anyone's written the fic where Roy gets comfy in his high-up position and starts worrying about his mortgage and mellows a bit on his whole "FIX THE MILITARY" thing and settles for doing some ineffectual symbolic reforms instead. I imagine it'd be enormously difficult to execute well. It goes against a lot of the things in Roy's character as presented, so we'd have to see a lot of believable character growth/change/etc over the course of the fic. And it's a hard plot to make exciting; there's a reason most fantasy-ish plots end with something more like "RECK DA SYSTEM"-type things. But I'd be curious to see the attempt.
Daft Punk. They are so great and why don't I listen to them more. Here, have a listen to "Giorgio by Moroder", a fabulous track from their latest album I only just heard tonight. It's based around this short narration by this dude who evidently pioneered electronic dance music, just talking a little bit about his life and what led him to making music, and slowly Daft Punk builds around his narration with some electro-funk beats and keeps building into a really nice concluding drum solo. There is something very loving and striking about that, the monologue or whatever, that makes it feel very much like a homage and a tribute and, well, it helps that the music itself is fucking sick, too.
And yet. The action was intelligently and sharply paced (HEY MICHAEL BAY YOU COULD LEARN A THING OR TWO). The aesthetics felt strange and mishmash but worked in a fun, strange and mishmash way. It wound up being good stuff.
(It's also possible I was just distracted by the hot dad. Mmm Namgoong.)
FMA. Kinda. I got in a chat with someone about effective altruism / preference utilitarianism, etc, which seems to be the trendy Pop Philosophy Position (TM) of the techbrat crowd nowadays, a position that I find myself rather suspicious of, mostly because a lot of it is presented as "you should go make piles and piles of money via problematic means, but seriously, just as much money as you can get—it's okay though, you're donating it to charity so you're actually doing the most ethical thing possible"—ahem. Anyway randomly it occurred to me this kind of romanticism-of-working-within-the-system-to-change-it-eventually-maybe is totally personified by Fullmetal Alchemist's Roy Mustang. I mean, okay, he made some kind of vow to not kill innocents again (I think??? uhhh full disclosure, I haven't really watched FMA since middle school-ish and I haven't read the manga or watched Brotherhood, so my memory could be totally foggy/incorrect :D;;;), but besides that, he is presented as ruthlessly political and calculating, pretty much willing to do whatever to get promoted, with the noble end goal of Being High Up Enough He Doesn't Have to Take Fucked-Up Orders, and Also Change Things Probably. It's interesting in that I fuckin' love Roy in that context of FMA, whereas I'm more skeptical of the effective-altruism types, which would seem to be a rather similar philosophy, and now I want to see this whole realm o' things explored more.
Basically I want to know if anyone's written the fic where Roy gets comfy in his high-up position and starts worrying about his mortgage and mellows a bit on his whole "FIX THE MILITARY" thing and settles for doing some ineffectual symbolic reforms instead. I imagine it'd be enormously difficult to execute well. It goes against a lot of the things in Roy's character as presented, so we'd have to see a lot of believable character growth/change/etc over the course of the fic. And it's a hard plot to make exciting; there's a reason most fantasy-ish plots end with something more like "RECK DA SYSTEM"-type things. But I'd be curious to see the attempt.
Daft Punk. They are so great and why don't I listen to them more. Here, have a listen to "Giorgio by Moroder", a fabulous track from their latest album I only just heard tonight. It's based around this short narration by this dude who evidently pioneered electronic dance music, just talking a little bit about his life and what led him to making music, and slowly Daft Punk builds around his narration with some electro-funk beats and keeps building into a really nice concluding drum solo. There is something very loving and striking about that, the monologue or whatever, that makes it feel very much like a homage and a tribute and, well, it helps that the music itself is fucking sick, too.
no subject
Date: 2014-07-14 01:59 am (UTC)I do think a Roy who lost track of his priorities would be interesting to explore, especially in the context of his relationship to Riza and the promises they've made to one another. Could make for some very interesting darkfics.
Although it could be considered as interesting that in FMA, Scar, the character who could have been more likely to be used as a foil in term of having reasons to wish to change society by means absolutely without the system, is definitely not presented as a man with any sort of broad plan for society, or the sort of connections for doing so on a global stage. He's just a man looking for revenge, one murder at a time.
I do think a lot of Japanese media have a very nakedly ruthless, even in the context of childhood media, frame to the concept of "getting stronger". That's pretty much the goal of any battle shounen manga lead, usually, and I don't think most Western media of the same kind would express it in those terms. There's often a feeling that their view of politics is much more likely to be from a Hobbes PoV, you know?
What you say about the whole effective altruism thing actually makes me think of Tony Stark :3
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