Recent viewing, UGH edition
Jun. 15th, 2025 07:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonsterSome people like to disappear for a month at a time and come back with nothing but complaints and negativity and that's valid, okay?
Murderbot: I'm a huge fan of the books and was heavily motivated to find the good in the TV adaptation, but I'm honestly so disappointed. It's not just that they've changed things, it's that they've actually turned all the story's meaning, themes and character dynamics on their heads in a way that actually genuinely pisses me off and not in a fun way.
In brief: Murderbot is a humanoid cyborg construct designed for security and bodyguard type work. It has hacked its own programming so that it no longer has to obey its human owners, but has chosen to hide this and keep doing its job while using its newfound freedom exclusively to binge-watch TV in secret. The clients it has most recently been assigned to protect come under attack while on a planetary exploration mission, and in the process of protecting them and uncovering the perpetrators, it starts to form genuine social bonds.
The books, The Murderbot Diaries have three major themes. They're not subtle. They're not ambiguous. Pick up any one of the books and you're going to get lovingly hammered with the same three points:
1) Capitalism is inherently evil and corrupt.
2) Everyone and everything with a consciousness deserves personal autonomy.
3) The power of friendship saves the day.
Somehow, I honestly do not know how, the show has managed to surgically extract and discard all three of these themes, leaving nothing behind but an empty shell of set dressings and ugly cynicism. Murderbot's clients - in the books, citizens of a highly functional socialist utopia that has staunchly resisted the dystopian hypercapitalism rampant in most of the rest of the galaxy - are portrayed as bumbling hippies singing kumbaya while reality passes them by. (The corporate hellworld, on the other hand, gets a tasteful glow-up that reduces its widespread practice of slavery to a run-of-the-mill shitty workplace, and instead of fighting against the corporates, the socialist utopia is actually struggling with its own citizens who yearn to become hypercapitalists themselves.) The issue of Murderbot's autonomy is addressed mainly through a series of sexual assaults and harassment incidents, all of which are played for laughs. As for friendship: Murderbot and its clients hold each other in open mutual contempt. Anyone who's been on my blog for more than five minutes knows I normally love stories about people who dislike each other being forced to work together, but that's not what Murderbot is! Murderbot is about a frightened cyborg slave being welcomed warmly and unconditionally into a circle of decent humans who respect its differences from them and never ask it to assimilate in exchange for its rights and freedoms. Warping that into a generic hostile-forced-teamwork story is an ugly, bewildering choice.
I'm especially unhappy with how they've handled the character of Dr. Mensah. She's an ageing black woman who, in the books, is portrayed as a competent, brave and moral leader. She's authoritative without being tyrannical, caring and emotionally intelligent without being reduced to anyone's caretaker, and it only takes a short acquaintance for her to basically become the centre of Murderbot's emotional universe. In the show, she has an untreated panic disorder that prevents her from properly doing her job; she treats Murderbot dismissively, criticises it and blithely disregards its boundaries; and her screentime has been drastically cut to make room for the handsome male actor whose supporting role they've decided to elevate. I know it's not exactly breaking news that our mainstream media culture isn't great about female leads - let alone female leads who are neither young nor white nor conventionally pretty - but come the fuck ON.
There are a couple more episodes left in the season and I'm going to watch them because they're only about twenty minutes each, and if nothing else I'd like for Martha Wells to do well out of this and for a wider audience to be drawn to her books through the show. But ugh ugh UGH. I usually don't like to attribute malice to creative choices that could be better explained by obliviousness to implication, but the blueprint for how to do better was right fucking there. So it's hard to see the ugliness and moral vacuity of this show as anything other than an intentional statement on the part of the showrunners, and I hate it.
Andor season 2: I've been putting off writing about this for ages because I honestly don't know what to say. Season 1 was so good with its female characters that watching it go off the rails has been bewildering.
Here are some "highlights":
- The lesbian couple who broke up at the end of season 1 were brought back together under highly contrived circumstances for a single episode, solely so that one of them (the nonwhite one, just to add that extra bit of pizazz) could be killed off.
- The evil ISB agent enjoyed her second and third incidents of being physically assaulted by male characters in ways we're encouraged to see as serving her right. One was an actual domestic violence incident in which her romantic partner strangled her. (The first incident was at the end of season 1 and involved an all-male mob breaking off from a mixed gender crowd to force her to the ground and beat her. I convinced myself at the time that I was overreacting by reading misogynistic dynamics into it but it turns out I was right back then! I actually didn't want to be right!)
- The thirteen year old child bride-to-be from season 1 had her wedding, and nothing else was ever seen or heard from her again.
- The sole conventionally hot woman went through, in order: a rape subplot, a sad languid drug addiction subplot, a stay-at-home-wife who runs away so that her main character husband can stop looking after her and is free to go Be Important subplot, and finally a new mother standing patiently in a wheat field waiting for her doomed main character husband to come home from the war subplot.
Every time I think about it I just feel sad and sour and jaded. There were still things I enjoyed - the worldbuilding was excellent and immersive, the women all acted their fucking hearts out on the shitty material they were given, Mon and Kleya got significantly less screwed over than the rest, and seeing more K-2SO was super fun - but the showrunners made some seriously fucked up choices and it's hard to overlook when everything else about the show says that they are heavily immersed in progressive discourse and have no possible "I just didn't knoooow" excuse for their regressive bullshit.
Captain America: Brave New World: Okay, I can't actually claim to have been let down by this one, as I already knew I was capital-o Over the MCU and only sat through it for sociable reasons. But it's still a shame to poke my head back in on an old fandom and find there's absolutely nothing left there for me. I truly just don't care anymore.
This honestly did feel like a particularly weak entry in the continuity, though I can't rule out that I'm being harsher on this one due to having lost my fan-tinted glasses. I hardly even feel like I need to start with a summary, because surely by now everyone knows the MCU drill: the world is about to suffer a terrible calamity because [supernatural fart noises] and [villain with an on paper quite reasonable grudge being completely unhinged about it]. Our hero has to step up and protect the status quo, with massive bonus points if he pays lip service to social justice while righteously lecturing marginalised characters for standing up for themselves The Wrong Way. This film follows the formula so closely it's like they're being graded on a rubric. The action sequences are perfunctory. The plot is weedy and insignificant and tries way too hard to puff up its chest and be continuity-relevant. The CGI is awful. It really feels like a movie that got made because it had already been written into Disney's budget, not because anyone involved had anything to say or a single spark of inspiration to work with.
Which sucks, because Sam Wilson is a fantastic character and there was so much they COULD have done with him, so many themes they sort of fumbled with half-heartedly but never developed in a meaningful way. There's racism, there's impostor syndrome, there's what could have been an interesting response to The Winter Soldier, where the previous Captain America chose the tear-it-all-down approach and current Cap is now edging back into the Establishment. Instead the film wastes huge chunks of screentime trying to make us feel sad that the president's daughter isn't talking to him because of all those pesky human rights violations he committed against, among other people, her boyfriend.
I liked Ruth and Joaquin as new characters, and Giancarlo Esposito's wonderful secondary villain whose name I can't remember, and I was happy to see Isaiah again, and I did quite enjoy the part where the President of the United States was an orangey-red rage monster throwing embarrassing tantrums and smashing things up. (Gosh, just imagine!) But in a few months I'll probably have forgotten most of what happened. Not even former fandom nostalgia was enough to make me care about this soulless mess.
Murderbot: I'm a huge fan of the books and was heavily motivated to find the good in the TV adaptation, but I'm honestly so disappointed. It's not just that they've changed things, it's that they've actually turned all the story's meaning, themes and character dynamics on their heads in a way that actually genuinely pisses me off and not in a fun way.
In brief: Murderbot is a humanoid cyborg construct designed for security and bodyguard type work. It has hacked its own programming so that it no longer has to obey its human owners, but has chosen to hide this and keep doing its job while using its newfound freedom exclusively to binge-watch TV in secret. The clients it has most recently been assigned to protect come under attack while on a planetary exploration mission, and in the process of protecting them and uncovering the perpetrators, it starts to form genuine social bonds.
The books, The Murderbot Diaries have three major themes. They're not subtle. They're not ambiguous. Pick up any one of the books and you're going to get lovingly hammered with the same three points:
1) Capitalism is inherently evil and corrupt.
2) Everyone and everything with a consciousness deserves personal autonomy.
3) The power of friendship saves the day.
Somehow, I honestly do not know how, the show has managed to surgically extract and discard all three of these themes, leaving nothing behind but an empty shell of set dressings and ugly cynicism. Murderbot's clients - in the books, citizens of a highly functional socialist utopia that has staunchly resisted the dystopian hypercapitalism rampant in most of the rest of the galaxy - are portrayed as bumbling hippies singing kumbaya while reality passes them by. (The corporate hellworld, on the other hand, gets a tasteful glow-up that reduces its widespread practice of slavery to a run-of-the-mill shitty workplace, and instead of fighting against the corporates, the socialist utopia is actually struggling with its own citizens who yearn to become hypercapitalists themselves.) The issue of Murderbot's autonomy is addressed mainly through a series of sexual assaults and harassment incidents, all of which are played for laughs. As for friendship: Murderbot and its clients hold each other in open mutual contempt. Anyone who's been on my blog for more than five minutes knows I normally love stories about people who dislike each other being forced to work together, but that's not what Murderbot is! Murderbot is about a frightened cyborg slave being welcomed warmly and unconditionally into a circle of decent humans who respect its differences from them and never ask it to assimilate in exchange for its rights and freedoms. Warping that into a generic hostile-forced-teamwork story is an ugly, bewildering choice.
I'm especially unhappy with how they've handled the character of Dr. Mensah. She's an ageing black woman who, in the books, is portrayed as a competent, brave and moral leader. She's authoritative without being tyrannical, caring and emotionally intelligent without being reduced to anyone's caretaker, and it only takes a short acquaintance for her to basically become the centre of Murderbot's emotional universe. In the show, she has an untreated panic disorder that prevents her from properly doing her job; she treats Murderbot dismissively, criticises it and blithely disregards its boundaries; and her screentime has been drastically cut to make room for the handsome male actor whose supporting role they've decided to elevate. I know it's not exactly breaking news that our mainstream media culture isn't great about female leads - let alone female leads who are neither young nor white nor conventionally pretty - but come the fuck ON.
There are a couple more episodes left in the season and I'm going to watch them because they're only about twenty minutes each, and if nothing else I'd like for Martha Wells to do well out of this and for a wider audience to be drawn to her books through the show. But ugh ugh UGH. I usually don't like to attribute malice to creative choices that could be better explained by obliviousness to implication, but the blueprint for how to do better was right fucking there. So it's hard to see the ugliness and moral vacuity of this show as anything other than an intentional statement on the part of the showrunners, and I hate it.
Andor season 2: I've been putting off writing about this for ages because I honestly don't know what to say. Season 1 was so good with its female characters that watching it go off the rails has been bewildering.
Here are some "highlights":
- The lesbian couple who broke up at the end of season 1 were brought back together under highly contrived circumstances for a single episode, solely so that one of them (the nonwhite one, just to add that extra bit of pizazz) could be killed off.
- The evil ISB agent enjoyed her second and third incidents of being physically assaulted by male characters in ways we're encouraged to see as serving her right. One was an actual domestic violence incident in which her romantic partner strangled her. (The first incident was at the end of season 1 and involved an all-male mob breaking off from a mixed gender crowd to force her to the ground and beat her. I convinced myself at the time that I was overreacting by reading misogynistic dynamics into it but it turns out I was right back then! I actually didn't want to be right!)
- The thirteen year old child bride-to-be from season 1 had her wedding, and nothing else was ever seen or heard from her again.
- The sole conventionally hot woman went through, in order: a rape subplot, a sad languid drug addiction subplot, a stay-at-home-wife who runs away so that her main character husband can stop looking after her and is free to go Be Important subplot, and finally a new mother standing patiently in a wheat field waiting for her doomed main character husband to come home from the war subplot.
Every time I think about it I just feel sad and sour and jaded. There were still things I enjoyed - the worldbuilding was excellent and immersive, the women all acted their fucking hearts out on the shitty material they were given, Mon and Kleya got significantly less screwed over than the rest, and seeing more K-2SO was super fun - but the showrunners made some seriously fucked up choices and it's hard to overlook when everything else about the show says that they are heavily immersed in progressive discourse and have no possible "I just didn't knoooow" excuse for their regressive bullshit.
Captain America: Brave New World: Okay, I can't actually claim to have been let down by this one, as I already knew I was capital-o Over the MCU and only sat through it for sociable reasons. But it's still a shame to poke my head back in on an old fandom and find there's absolutely nothing left there for me. I truly just don't care anymore.
This honestly did feel like a particularly weak entry in the continuity, though I can't rule out that I'm being harsher on this one due to having lost my fan-tinted glasses. I hardly even feel like I need to start with a summary, because surely by now everyone knows the MCU drill: the world is about to suffer a terrible calamity because [supernatural fart noises] and [villain with an on paper quite reasonable grudge being completely unhinged about it]. Our hero has to step up and protect the status quo, with massive bonus points if he pays lip service to social justice while righteously lecturing marginalised characters for standing up for themselves The Wrong Way. This film follows the formula so closely it's like they're being graded on a rubric. The action sequences are perfunctory. The plot is weedy and insignificant and tries way too hard to puff up its chest and be continuity-relevant. The CGI is awful. It really feels like a movie that got made because it had already been written into Disney's budget, not because anyone involved had anything to say or a single spark of inspiration to work with.
Which sucks, because Sam Wilson is a fantastic character and there was so much they COULD have done with him, so many themes they sort of fumbled with half-heartedly but never developed in a meaningful way. There's racism, there's impostor syndrome, there's what could have been an interesting response to The Winter Soldier, where the previous Captain America chose the tear-it-all-down approach and current Cap is now edging back into the Establishment. Instead the film wastes huge chunks of screentime trying to make us feel sad that the president's daughter isn't talking to him because of all those pesky human rights violations he committed against, among other people, her boyfriend.
I liked Ruth and Joaquin as new characters, and Giancarlo Esposito's wonderful secondary villain whose name I can't remember, and I was happy to see Isaiah again, and I did quite enjoy the part where the President of the United States was an orangey-red rage monster throwing embarrassing tantrums and smashing things up. (Gosh, just imagine!) But in a few months I'll probably have forgotten most of what happened. Not even former fandom nostalgia was enough to make me care about this soulless mess.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-15 11:06 am (UTC)Andor I think got fucked by needing to very suddenly go from five seasons to two. Not that a lot of what happened wouldn't feel bad regardless (in NO universe did Bix need a kid?? I'm with the person who said 'maybe she shouldn't have been in the season at all if that's what they were gonna do') but the pacing sure did make it worse.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-15 11:42 am (UTC)Andor definitely got fucked by having to be so compressed, but I'm willing to cut them exactly zero slack for that because the readiness with which they reached for all these lazy misogynistic tropes to close off all their female character arcs in a hurry feels emblematic of why the tropes are so shitty in the first place. Pressed for screentime? Throw a woman under the bus! Still pressed? Here, throw another one! Like. You guys are the problem. The problem is you.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-17 12:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-18 09:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-16 05:55 pm (UTC)I didn't read your Andor grumbling because I've been stuck at about episode 7 for quite a while, I keep putting off continuing because I'm so disappointed about a character death choice they made at the end of the second arc, I felt genuinely betrayed by it. Not specifically spoilering it in case you haven't watched that part yet! I don't want to see if you've finished the series because I don't want to spoiler myself for the rest of it, which I will get around to eventually.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-16 10:55 pm (UTC)I’ve finished all of Andor now (it took me a while too) but thanks for being careful about spoilers. ❤️ Cinta, right? That was so fucking awful and honestly I almost quit watching on the spot. I’d already had some feelings about how they were handling Bix up to that point and how they’d treated Dedra in the last season finale, but I was very much in “I’m probably just being oversensitive” mode and was committed to giving the showrunners of the benefit of the doubt. Then that happened and I was like OHHH no actually you guys really are just covert misogynists. I get what you mean about it feeling like a betrayal because up until then I’d been so appreciative (those misgivings I mentioned aside) of the amazing women characters Andor gave us and it sucked so hard to realise they were all vulnerable to being treated as cheap plot fodder.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-17 08:50 pm (UTC)I've been avoiding spoilers but I have a horrible suspicion Bix's story is going to go downhill too, after I was a bit ehhhhh about her getting nothing except 'barely functional/drug addiction/attempted rape', but the payoff of her revenge moment was pretty great so I was hoping it would turn around. Unfortunately I'm afraid that won't be the case based on things I've rapidly clicked away from.
Oh well. My expectations for the rest of season two are vastly lowered after what they did to Cinta.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-18 09:12 pm (UTC)I’m just screaming this exact thing back at you because RIGHT??? Like, what the FUCK. No excuse.
I won’t comment at all on Bix right now because spoilers, but I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts once you’ve finished the series.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-17 01:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-18 09:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-17 12:08 pm (UTC)Sometimes mildly embarrassing to look back on the days when I was SO into the MCU, although in fairness to my past self, I truly believe that the movies have gone downhill. Although possibly I just stopped viewing them through the glow of Winter Soldier and Bucky's murder strut.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-18 09:22 pm (UTC)MCU has fared worse for me than any other fannish obsession I think I’ve ever had. Usually I can look back on even my trashiest, most embarrassing fandoms with nostalgic fondness, but basically everything about the MCU - especially the Cap & friends corner of the MCU that we were both into - feels actively off-putting now. I hope one day I’ll at least be able to rewatch The Winter Soldier with positive feelings again, because I maintain that was a genuinely good movie.