Q-Workshop Dice

I have a lot of dice. I actually got into collecting many more sets than I needed in the last few years. Most recently, as I've finally moved into metal dice, of which I have a fair number of sets now, I've found that my older resin dice of the type I'd used for years appeal to me a bit less. But of those that I do have and still could use, the Q-Workshop dice are probably my favorite. Not only are they intricate and colorful, and have pleasing designs on them, but they are also branded, so they have ties to something that you may be playing, or at least enjoy. I became aware of them years ago as they were producing a licensed set for each Paizo adventure path, but then some additional ones came out as well. They've also got Call of Cthulhu licensed sets, The Witcher licensed sets, and others that aren't licensed but are just their own designs.

Now that I've bought them, I'm not sure which adventure path or other source the dice sets belong to anymore, in all cases. I know I have a Pathfinder First Edition, or maybe a Pathfinder Playtest set, for instance, and I know that I have a dice set that's Elven runes or something like that (but in an unusual color) and I know I have a Halloween dice set. I think the rest of them belong to one of the Paizo adventure paths.

I'll show them; you'll probably see why I've gradually decided I don't need anymore of these. Not only do I have more than I can ever use (and this is just a small sampling of my many dice sets), but a few of the sets are hard to read; the intricacy of the designs may look pretty, but it can reduce the functionality of the dice. And two of the sets, perhaps coincidentally both yellowish in base resin color, do not actually look that great. The Legacy of Fire set in particular was really disappointing. This is what they look like on the storefront image:

Bright, clear, colorful. This is what my set actually looks like. Although I didn't take this professionally with a camera and lens and background and lighting designed to show it off, even so the difference is immediately noticeable.

Instead of bright yellow, my dice are "spicy brown mustard" and the color of the printing on them is somewhat pinkish. Due to the relative lack of contrast compared to the top image as well as probably not the best execution on this set, it comes across as very muddy, hard to read, and kind of ugly. Prepping this post made me think that, "hey, why haven't I reached out to Q-Workshop, and asked them if that's just what this set looks like, in spite of the professional picture?" so I did, including sending them both of the above pictures so they can see the contrast themselves. I ordered these in March. I probably should have thought to do that right away, but I didn't. Apparently, their dice are warrantied, although against what exactly I'm not sure.

The other muddy pair is, I think, the pirate-spiders themed adventure path set, if I remember correctly. They're not as bad, but they're not my favorite either. Sorry; I got half the set in my own shadow. At least the printing is pretty clear, although the mustard color makes them look a little muddy again.

A few more of the sets that I like better. The black with red lettering is also hard to read unless you're playing outside under bright sunlight, however. But that's as advertised, so I can hardly complain about it.

These really snaky ones are pretty cool, and the snake scale effect on the printing on them is an interesting and unique effect.

And of course, the Halloween dice. These are really cool. There's also one of the adventure paths that is very similar, but it's got demonic icons on it, so I like the Halloween ones a little better. Let's not let the Satanic panic people actually have evidence to tell us that they told us so.

Finally, the Strange Aeons dice set, which is the Cthulhu-themed adventure path. This one is my clear favorite of all of these sets. Followed by an image of all of them on my counter together. The little brown tobacco pouch is what I keep all my Q-workshop dice in. Ignore the paper. My wife is out of town, so that's just a reminder to myself of what food's available in the house so I don't overlook something and let it go bad or whatever.

Although that shows two dice bags, I actually have six or seven more dice bags as well, and another one that's full of my metal pirate coins, which I use for tokens, since I have a Heroism point mechanic in my rules-light fake D&D game.

I may yet get another set or two; I'd like the actual Call of Cthulhu dice, and maybe the Horror on the Orient Express set too. Other than that, I think I'm over this particular kind of dice, however, and I've taken the other sets off my Amazon wishlist, probably for good. The only reason I haven't bought those two is that they're quite expensive. I think almost $20 for a set of resin dice is a lot of money (most of the sets I have were either naturally cheaper, or I bought them when there was a price drop on Amazon for whatever reason.) For that kind of money, I can get a nice metal dice set, and I tend to like metal dice better now anyway.

Sword & Sanity

I used to have a page called Sword & Sanity where I talked about my concept of my game being a hybrid of D&D-like fantasy and Call of Cthulhu-like investigation/horror game. I didn't coin the term, I found it on another blog years and years ago, but then again, the concept is hardly a new one. As the blog there suggests, arguably the entire original sword & sorcery mode of genre fiction was a weird tale with Lovecraftian horror themes inherent throughout.

Some other guys have tried to hybridize the two officially too. Swords Against Cthulhu was an early effort in fiction, and the Greyhawk Grognard came up with an AD&D/Cthulhu hybrid he calls Swords of Cthulhu. Sandy Petersen, the creator of the venerable Call of Cthulhu game itself, wrote a pretty hefty 5e product that hybridizes them. 3e had Heroes of Horror (which isn't overtly Lovecraftian, but tries to hybridize fantasy and horror, certainly.) Paizo had a similar product, as well as two adventure paths that are meant to be horror/fantasy hybrids, including "The Carrion Crown" which is mostly Gothic, Transylvania-like horror, although with a Lovecraftian chapter, and "Strange Aeons" which is much more overtly Lovecraftian. And as I've said before, that was in many ways the conceit of the old Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay system; that it offers Call of Cthulhu scenarios in a D&D-like setting. More or less.

As an aside, the Q Workshop Strange Aeons dice set is my favorite set of plastic dice.

Let me quote just a little bit from the prologue or introduction to Petersen's book. This is pretty good advice for anyone wanting to explore this hybrid tone in setting.

M. R. James was a writer in the early 20th century who specialized in creepy ghost stories. One of Lovecraft’s favorite authors, James wrote an essay in which he laid out three rules to construct an effective ghost story. His rules apply to any type of horror, however, and I consciously apply them to scenario-building and when running horror-themed games.

The first rule: Don’t use Jargon

Nothing spoils the sense of fear more than bringing the player out of the game and back into real life. Every time you refer specifically to game rules or introduce concepts by means of technical terminology, you lose a bit of potential creepiness. The game is filled with tactical options, all of which use precise terms, which means you, the game master, need to find ways to avoid saying things like, “Let’s see… the shoggoth acts on initiative count 21. It rolls and hits with an… er… pseudopod attack, inflicting 3d10+9 bludgeoning damage, plus 2d6 acid. What’s your Constitution save bonus?”

Don’t articulate monsters’ actions, but instead do the rolls, avoiding overmuch commentary. You still need to inform the players of damage inflicted and special restrictions, but you can accomplish this without parroting specific game rules. Use evocative descriptions, like “the creature moves with sickening speed, lashing out a tendril dripping with hissing acid.” Experienced game masters may already be doing this—it is one of the basics of drawing players into an adventure.

The second rule: Make the enemy malign

Friendly ghosts aren’t scary—it’s a fact of life. This applies to monstrous forces too. If the players find out that the fungi from Yuggoth are trying to establish a quiet mining base, all terror of them vanishes. The Mythos is full of entities that players can interact with, but all of them are malign and creepy, even the sometimes-peaceful ones. You can learn the language of ghouls, but even when they are friendly, they are always eyeing your physique with an eye to how tasty you look. Even the small and seemingly harmless zoogs gleefully trap and eat visitors to their forest.

Fortunately, the Mythos is filled with terrifying purpose. Sure, the fungi from Yuggoth might only say they want a quiet mining base, but there must be more to it than that. What are they mining? What is their underlying purpose? Are they using the ore to construct some sort of gigantic bio-techno-magical device? If so, what will it do? At first glance, the great race of Yith appears respectably neutral—even benign. That is, until you realize that they periodically exterminate entire sentient species by mass mind-swap to continue their existence! (Humanity has only escaped this fate because it is too puny for Yithian ambition. Thus far.)

The Third rule: use a mundane setting

James points out if you set a ghost story in an esoteric and inaccessible locale, readers can’t easily imagine themselves in that situation. As a result, he set all of his stories in the places and locales he knew well: seaside hotels, old country churches, public libraries, and so forth. You have a major advantage here, since you are running a roleplaying game. Your players normally throw themselves into the roles of their characters, empathizing with them and cross-exchanging personality traits. As a result, they know and feel their characters, and it’s easy for them to buy into the setting you choose.

You can make the story even more dangerous by putting it right in the heart of the players’ stomping grounds. You could set up an adventure with a shoggoth as a dangerous enemy under a distant glacier, but the players will be more invested if you have that same shoggoth patrolling the sewers under your campaign’s capital city, sneaking up through openings and pulling victims down to feed. Knowing that shoggoths exist in some distant place in the world is one thing. Knowing that there is a shoggoth in your home city eating folks every night is another thing entirely.

Adding horror to adventures

Horror is a delicate topic. When horror is combined with another genre, the usual result is that the other genre wins out. For example, most horror-comedies are really just comedies with a horror element. Many attempts have been made to mix horror and superheroes, and, again, the end result is generally a superhero story with a horror element. Most players of fantasy roleplaying games understandably are focused on high adventure, derring-do, and sword and sorcery. And of course, when horror is added to the adventure theme, just as with other genres, the adventure is what remains, though now horror-tinged.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Consider the difference between the films Alien and Aliens. The first is a horror movie. The second is an adventure movie with horror elements. Both are great films.

This definitely reinforces to me the wisdom of the decision I've made to pull back from a lot of exotica in the Dark Fantasy X setting. If anything, it's almost more familiar (at least to Americans) than the general Medieval-like setting, because where it differs from generic Medieval, it is most likely to veer into frontier Western America. The races that aren't human, which I've deliberately de-emphasized, all have a horror kernel to them if you dig into their nature sufficiently. So, there you have it. Sword and sanity revisited.

The Mummy

As an interesting follow-up to my recent Raiders post, by funny coincidence I was over at my daughter's house last night and she and her husband wanted to watch The Mummy with me. So almost immediately after talking about it, and pretty close to after watching Raiders, I watched that one too. 

Both are very similar in various ways: 1) American adventurer (wearing leather) 2) mostly in Egypt, 3) dealing with a supernatural threat, 4) during the pulp era (20s-30s. Not exactly the same, but close enough.) Of course, the supernatural was more the McGuffin in Raiders where it was more overtly the actual threat in The Mummy, but still—the rough similarities are very striking. No doubt that's on purpose; Raiders was a huge hit, and The Mummy, even though it came the better part of 15-20 years later, was signaling to audiences that it was the same kind of movie.

But of course, in other ways, it wasn't at all. Notably:

1) Rachel Weisz's character is orders of magnitude more likeable, more feminine, and more "cute" than Marion. She's just a delight to have on screen, whereas Karen Allen's Marion always drags the movie down, and she's never likeable. 

2) The tone of The Mummy is both more horror and also more slapstick and silly at the same time. It's a bit more extreme on both ends than Raiders, which is more of a playin' it straight (with admittedly some subtle gags) action thriller. Even the supernatural element (the ark) is downplayed, and doesn't do very much that's supernatural until the very end. Meanwhile, Brendan Frasier is constantly dealing with literal undead monsters. 

3) Even the rivals in The Mummy are actually sympathetic rather than enemies, and they end up joining forces at the end (except for Beni, who betrays them all.) Fighting Nazis on the other hand, comes across as significantly more grounded and serious. The climatic fight scene near the end of The Mummy almost completely surrenders to this and doesn't even try to go for a horror tone anymore; it's just superficial horror icons in an over-the-top and gag-filled action sequence. Raiders doesn't have a climatic action scene; it has what is essentially a climatic horror scene. Normally, however, the degree of horror tone vs action tone in the movie is reversed, but at the end, they kind of flip-flop.

3) Both action icons are good at their role, but Frasier comes off as a bit more vulnerable emotionally. Ford's Indiana Jones may be vulnerable physically—compared to James Bond, for instance, which is a comparison both Lucas and Spielberg did in fact make—but he's always hard and serious about it. Even his "romance" with Marion comes across as kind of forced by the screenplay rather than real. Which is probably fine, because then he's not with her again in the next two movies, of course.

4) Imhotep is more a force of (super)nature rather than a villain. Belloq, on the other hand, is an absolutely fantastic villain. Sala is likeable, although kind of minor. In a way, the only really major character who's likeable in Raiders is Indiana Jones himself, and Belloq is a great villain. The Mummy has a different paradigm where Imhotep is an OK villain—sometimes—and other times just a horror icon that's kind of superficial, but the supporting cast is full of likeable figures. Evie is a super likeable love interest, her brother Jonathan is great as comic relief and a foil, of sorts, the rival adventuring group has some great moments, the prison warden is interesting (although, again, mostly comic relief, and to build up tension with his death), and even Oded Fehr's character is interesting in his own way.

5) The practical effects and paint-on-cell effects from Raiders still look pretty good, even though the movie is over 40 years old. The CGI in The Mummy doesn't look that great anymore, and it's just under 25 years old. Some of that isn't necessarily the quality of the CGI, though—some of the CGI mummies look bad because that was the visual design of them. They might even be practical at times, and they still look a little funky. They tried too hard to let them have emotional skull-faces. It just looks fake and cartoony in retrospect. To be fair; this issue isn't a movie-breaking issue, but it's noticeable, especially after all these years. It just doesn't look even as good as Raiders does, done many years earlier.

Leftism as a cult

https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=30300

[T]he distinction made between universal religions like Christianity and folk religions like Shintoism provide an insight into why one triumphed over the other with some exceptions. Christianity pushed out paganism in Europe because it offered something that paganism either did not offer or did not address as well as the new religion. Similarly, Christianity has been a failure in Japan because it lacks something the native religion possesses.

A simple example is the Gaia worshippers. What is it about this doomsday cult that the believers find appealing? There is a money racket to it, for sure, but this is only possible because millions of people sense that the way we are living in the modern age is leading to some sort of supernatural doom. Is this belief appealing because it offers salvation from this world or is the appeal that it provides them with something to supplement their identity as a group?

If we take that last part a bit further and incorporate Gaia worship into the basket of things we call the Left, the result is a collection of beliefs that define a group of people and give them an elevated sense of status. Proof of their uniqueness is their membership in a group that holds these beliefs. They are on the right side of history because they carry their groceries in grimy canvas sacks and take their young children to drag shows at the local library.

Perhaps the appeal of what we call wokeness lies in the sense of identity it provides to people who live in highly conformist societies. The people who embrace these ideas are uniformly white, educated and upper-middle-class. They live in inorganic sterile suburban developments and work in fields with high levels of enforced conformity, like education, government, and corporate management. The folk nature of the new religion is what helps give their lives meaning.

On the other hand, it is possible that the new religion is the vestigial part of the old world-rejecting religion expressing through social fads. The gender stuff is a clear rejection of biological reality. Gaia worship is the rejection of human progress and civilization itself. The thread that runs through all of these social fads is their destructiveness to Western societies. The new religion of wrecking things appeals to people seeking an escape from this life.

The other appeal is that the destruction of the old order and the coming of the new world orders is full of uncertainty. The weirdness of these beliefs operates as a selection mechanism, filtering out anyone who questions the project. The new religion selects for those seeking the same shelter from the storm, but also those who think that when the storm passes, they will lead the way into the next phase of humanity. There is, after all, a whiff of Calvinism to all of this.

At this point, it is hard to know where the new religion will go or where it will end up on the folk-universal spectrum. What we can know is that new religions are like new ideologies in that they appeal to those unhappy with the present. Communism appealed to disaffected intellectuals and the urban industrial poor. Christianity appealed to provincials in the failing Roman empire. The reason this new religion appeals to the managerial class is they are unhappy with the present.

Woke people are not uniformly white, although I'd accept that probably the majority of them are. There are plenty of black, hispanic, and Asian (of all stripes) woke people, although I'd also argue that they gain something from it that white people do not, in the sense that they are the Chosen People of wokeness. 

Still, that quibbling about a minor detail aside, I think and have thought for a long time that this article does a good job of explaining the insanity of the Left. They're insane because they're following the dictates of a cult, and that cult is their identity. Because of that, they are completely impervious to logic or facts that contradict their cult beliefs. In fact, logic and facts threaten their identity, so they reject them all the more harshly when presented with them.

The sooner normal people and conservatives (some overlap, admittedly) accept that reality about the Left, the sooner they can effectively deal with them. And they do need to be dealt with. Because their cult is defined in large part by its opposition to Western Civilization, having Leftists in power is an existential threat to our very societies.

Lord of the Rings

When I was a kid, the face of fantasy was Darrell K. Sweet. He seemed by far to be the most prolific cover artist of the 80s, and his work graced many of the most famous and widely available titles as well, including, of course, the covers to the Tolkien books that were readily available when I was young, like The Hobbit, the three volumes of Lord of the Rings, and Unfinished Tales. The copy I bought of The Silmarillion in that era did not have his art, but he probably was on at least one printing that I don't have. He also did the covers for the Xanth novels, the Recluse novels, the Thomas Covenant novels and even The Wheel of Time novels, although he passed away before the last one came out (as did the author; the last two volumes were finished by Brandon Sanderson.) Although I think of him as a fantasy book cover illustrator, that wasn't the extent of his work. He did lots of stand-alone works, and books that I never read and therefore don't really remember, although his style still sunk in my zeitgeist in that role. He also did plenty of science fiction titles; the James Hogan's 2001-inspired Inherit the Stars and the rest of that series, for instance, or some of Alan Dean Foster's Pip and Flinx novels, etc.

As I continue my discussion here, I'll put a bunch of his work in this post. There's a lot more Tolkien-related work by Sweet than the book covers would represent; I think he was probably commissioned to do one of the calendars at one point.

All that said, Darrell K. Sweet's iconic cover art is important to my generation of Tolkien readers, but my own visualizations in my head while reading were never very much influenced by them. Rather, I saw Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings movie before I read it (1978 release date) and the Rankin/Bass Return of the King (1980). While both leave much to be desired, and I discovered that very quickly upon first reading the books in 6th grade (I got them for Christmas that year), both also do at least a few things quite well, and at least some of the visual design of both seeped into my consciousness and stuck with me as I've read the books. Repeated readings have not changed that much, neither have the Peter Jackson movies, based on the John Howe and Ted Naismith, in spite of the fact that both clearly were more careful to follow the details of the source material.

On top of that, the songs of the Return of the King have stuck with me; "Frodo of the Nine-Fingers" and "The Bearer of the Ring" and "Where There's a Whip, There's a Way." I can't explain it, but I suspect plenty of people who first discovered the series through the same vector probably agree with me. 

That said, the look of the characters from the Bakshi movie has been hard to root out of my head, and they do mostly follow the descriptions. The casting was actually quite well done; many stage and screen actors had prominent roles. John Hurt was Aragorn, for instance, and Anthony Daniels was Legolas. Quite different from his much more famous appearance as C-3PO. Many of the looks of the landscapes and more were also heavily influenced by both movies; I've never been able to think of Cirith Ungol as looking all that different than the Rankin/Bass portrayal. Even if they pronounced it as Sirith Ungol for some reason. (I've never really understood mispronouncing Tolkien's names. He has detailed discussions in the Appendices to Return of the King that tell you exactly how they're meant to be pronounced. And how to pronounce C is literally the first thing that it says.)

Anyway, I bring all of this up because I just finished an hour or so ago a long-delayed re-reading of the Lord of the Rings, in the new copy that my daughter bought for me earlier this year; the William Morrow Deluxe Pocket boxed set. I had long ago worn out my original copies that I got in the 80s with the Sweet covers. One of my younger brothers had given me his set, which was a mass market paperback set with cover "art" that were character stills from the movie, and which no doubt were published to coincide with that. It had been many years since I'd re-read the Lord of the Rings, because my hobby of reading has taken a beating as I became more involved in work, and raising kids. Now that I'm mostly a 51-year old empty nester with my younger boys in college and my older kids married, I'm rediscovering it, or at least doing quite a bit more of it than I have in a long time. It used to be that I re-read the Lord of the Rings pretty regularly. I've probably read it all of twenty times. But I've also probably only read it twice or so (not counting this most recent) in the last twenty years. It was magnificent to re-read it. I had forgotten how much I loved it.

A few curious details. Sometimes people talk about the Lord of the Rings as if it should be considered a single novel. I find this curious, because it's almost always published as three books (four, of course, because it's usually bundled with The Hobbit, as is my copy.) This is a pretty nice copy; stitch bound, with a vinyl cover on each book, and all are slightly different shades of earth tones. It's not the nicest copy available; my son-in-law actually has the ~$400 leather bound Easton Press editions, which are the nicest, but it's still a pretty nice copy, and nice enough that at this point in my life, I doubt I'll have any need to ever replace it in my lifetime. 

One interesting nod to the idea of the book being all one book (I've never really accepted that, even if Tolkien himself believed it. It's a three-volume trilogy, and always has been.) is that it has continuous pagination through the three volumes of Lord of the Rings. It is in three volumes, as you'd expect, but The Two Towers doesn't start again on page one, like my earlier copies have, it starts on page 400 something, which is the next number after Fellowship of the Ring ends. It also has the Stephen Raw maps that I remember, which were redrawn in higher definition, but very closely hewed to the original Christopher Tolkien maps that were originally published with the books earlier. Stephen Raw was commissioned to draw them not because there was any change wanted to the maps, other than that they wanted clearer originals that they could print in reduced mass market format and have them be more legible. Raw was commissioned in the mid-90s, and worked closely with Christopher Tolkien. It actually took me quite some time to recognize that the maps in my newer printings were different than the ones that I had seen before by Christopher; he really tried very closely to replicate the original, or maybe to restore them, in a way. Of course, my copies of the book are a little on the small side, so even so it's not super great trying to refer to it, but I do have really good high definition Middle-earth maps that I've found over the years on my hard drive. If you can still find it, although I think the artist no longer distributes it because when Peter Jackson's trilogy was announced he worried about copyright being brought to bear against him, Star Dogg's high definition map is probably the best one. But I do have high definition Stephen Raw and even Christopher Tolkien maps that I've collected online; the Christopher Tolkien being the famous one that was first published with Unfinished Tales in poster form; black ink for features and red for names and labels.

Of course, if you don't mind being online, there's an interactive Middle-earth map that's quite good too.

But enough about the physical copy itself. What else did I notice about reading The Lord of the Rings again after so many years and so much thinking about authorship and structure of books (among other things that I've thought a lot about.) Structurally, and this is no secret, but I probably hadn't really thought about it as much as I did this time, the Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit, for that matter) is written as a lot of vignettes interspersed with travel montages. The pattern is usually travel, stop and focus, then travel again, then stop and focus. Most of these stops are "homely houses" where homely in Tolkien's version of English doesn't mean what it does to us Americans. Rather than being ugly or plain, it mains welcoming and home-like. Even on the very borders of Mordor itself, Frodo and Sam find a homely house in the form if Faramir's hide-out in Ithilien. In most of these homely houses, the characters find unexpected allies that become friendly and helpful very quickly, give them counsel and other help, and send them again on their way. Frodo and Sam weren't the only ones to do this, Merry and Pippin at Wellinghall with Treebeard qualifies as well. 

I'm not sure that I love this structure, or at least that I think anyone else should mimic it. It is repetitive unless done extremely carefully and extremely well, and I doubt most writers who are not Tolkien could pull it off. Most writers have action and tension still in the destinations themselves, rather than just character and world-building expositions and dialogue, at places meant to be places of rest, primarily. 

Besides that, though, I think that Tolkien's skill with travel sequences is almost unparalleled. I read in awe this time around as I paid attention to the structure and how he wrote. I couldn't do it, and I doubt many other authors could either. I'm kind of curious, having just re-read all of that, to see how its done in some of the other books that I have in my queue. The Riftwar Saga has a fair bit of traveling, if I recall. I'd really like to see how its done there and pay more specific attention to the structure of the writing, for instance.

In fact, and I've said this many times before, Tolkien's particular linguistic skill makes him able to write in a way that no other author that I'm aware of who's put to pen to paper in the fantasy genre can do. And not just the language; Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott could certainly imitate a Medieval mode, but Tolkien was able to give the sense of Medievalism without actually being Medieval. It's a brilliant hybrid of Medievalist and modern style. But no, what I also mean is that he understands folklore, mythology and the rest of the material, and why its timeless more than anyone else. Most of the Tolkien pastiche that was super popular in fantasy in the 70s, 80s and 90s was fundamentally modern, and only superficially touched on any of those themes, tropes, or deeper meanings. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing; although what it suggests to me is that fantasy is sometimes best served by not standing too close to the shadow of Tolkien. Nobody else has, to my knowledge, ever really come close to honestly recreating what he did, and they look the poorer for it. Nobody seems to ride down Robert E. Howard because he wasn't writing Tolkien pastiche. In part this was because Howard was also similarly more talented than most of his imitators, but also because his own approach to the genre was completely different than Tolkien's, so it's a little hard to see them as competing head to head for the same kind of appeal to the same kind of audience exactly. People may tend to like both of them, but they do so for primarily different reasons.

Other features may even be seen to be somewhat primitive. The foreshadowing is really on the nose about a lot of things. Then again, surprise twists and subverting expectations was, no doubt, among the last goals that Tolkien had in mind.

And I did say that Sweet's illustrations rarely looked like the descriptions of the characters, right? Well, Gandalf is OK here, and the three hobbits, while indistinguishable from each other, are clearly the three hobbits. Gimli is OK too (although the books talk of him openly wearing a coat of mail.) But who's that man with the weird long feather in his helmet supposed to be? Boromir, or Aragorn? He doesn't really look to me like either. Of course, if you think that looks funky, check out this image of Thorin before the Wood-elf king from The Hobbit!

I think a lot of my love for the iconic images of a Sweet cover are more based on nostalgia than anything else. He obviously had some talent, but it is more and more difficult to actually recognize the subjects of the painting in them the more you look at them. He seems to have had only a very vague idea of what the texts that he's illustrating are actually supposed to be like sometimes. Does that second image above look like Frodo and Sam on the slopes of Mount Doom, with Barad-dur (I presume) in the background looking like it's only a quarter mile or so away instead of many leagues? And why is Gollum following them? And why does he have a dog snout? And yet, that's what it says the image is. Maybe it's mistitled and its really supposed to be climbing the stair up to Cirith Ungol? Even so, that's not really a great rendition of what's described.

Raiders

For many, many years—decades, even—I've maintained that Raiders of the Lost Ark (and yes I refuse to accept the renaming of that movie, just like I refuse to call Star Wars "A New Hope") is one of my favorite movies. In fact, after after a number of things damaged my esteem for the Star Wars franchise overall, The Empire Strikes Back fell in my esteem from the number one slot, and Raiders was literally my favorite movie.

That said, I haven't watched it in a long time, and none of the sequels are really anywhere near as good as the original (especially Crystal Skull, and by report, Dial of Destiny is a far cry worse yet.) Although all of the original trilogy were... OK. But like I said, I'm not sure that even this could be true anymore, for a variety of reasons, and the evidence in that is that there are a bunch of movies that I've repeat-watched several times since watching Raiders. A lot of things have happened to alter my perception of a lot of things since I last watched it. What did I think and notice this time that I never have before?

1) First off, how unabashedly Jewish the movie is. Not that it does even a mediocre job of reflecting actual Jewish attitudes about the actual ark, to the extent that there are any, but it is incredibly Jewish in a modern cultural Jewish way. The casual implicit superiority complex about the ark and all that. The obsession with the Nazis. The shady morality of the "heroes." The unlikableness and entitlement of the love interest. I had thought the story was by George Lucas in broad strokes, honed by infamous brainstorming sessions with Spielberg and Kasdan (who are both Jewish, although Lucas is not), but the story is actually co-credited to Philip Kaufman. Who is, of course, also Jewish.

I don't know if this really changes anything at all about the movie, but I never noticed it before. The fact that the series continues to use Nazis as villains, even when set in 1969, is both a powerful testament to the grip Jews have culturally on Hollywood, but also on the grip Holocaustianity has on America and Western Civilization overall. Setting the movie in the 20s would have worked quite well too (c.f. The Mummy) although of course, you'd have to have Bolsheviks or someone else be the villains. Imperial Brits would actually do nicely. But I'm positive that having cartoon Nazis was an extremely deliberate feature, not just an accident of timing.

2) I thought this even as a kid, but it's more marked now. Karen Allen is fine as an actress, I suppose, although she's not really all that attractive, which is something you'd think your leading lady love interest would be. But the real problem is that her character is so irredeemably unlikeable. She's just the worst. Curiously, she is more attractive in Animal House just a couple of years earlier. Those must have been three hard years between 1978 and 1981 for her. Which I've never seen and never had any desire to see. It seems like it's only fails to be the ultimate bitter beta unearned and undeserved revenge fantasy story because Revenge of the Nerds is worse.

3) Sala made an interesting comment when he's first introduced and they're all standing around on his rooftop patio. "Cairo! City of the living! Paradise on earth!" And then, of course, it's shown as a Third World craphole, inhabited by dirty, stupid people, who the movie treats with both contempt and condescension. Paradise on earth? I doubt it. But it kind of worked in the early 80s. People didn't know much about Moslems in the West back then, and the exotic Orientalism made them seem as they are portrayed; simple, primitive, not very bright, not very advanced, bad teeth, yet probably mostly friendly, when they're not threatening you because they're allied with the wrong Westerners. Our perception of Moslems after several wars in the Middle East that we didn't really want to be involved with, but were suckered into thinking were important, and then the unfettered immigration of them into our country has made this naïve and simple perspective feel extremely dated. I miss being able to think of Islam with even that mixed positivity, because I hadn't yet been exposed to too many Moslems to believe it anymore. 

4) Now that Harrison Ford has become very old, and it shows, it made me think how old he actually is in this movie. He looks young enough, but that's only because I'd not really seen him in anything much earlier than this except Star Wars and its immediate sequel. (He looks even younger, of course, in American Graffiti, but I've never seen that for some reason. For years it's been on my list, but I haven't gotten around to it.) He actually isn't really that young. He was born in the middle of '42. When this movie came out, he was 38. His first Hollywood role, which was uncredited, was in 1966, for crying out loud. He does look young in that one, but he was only about 25, so that makes sense.

5) I watched a video not long ago that posited that George Lucas had, in the case of the soundtrack for Star Wars, very deliberately imitated older Golden Age of Hollywood scores, in part as a cue to the audience of what kind of movie they were watching. That's obviously true here too, although I don't know of any particular things it was temp tracked with the way Star Wars was. Lucas was actually initially not going to have a unique score for Star Wars at all, and just re-use and license older soundtracks and classical music pieces; he was convinced to have a unique score, but he instructed John Williams to stick pretty close to the temp tracks. Once you know what they are, you can actually really notice this. I don't know any of this detail for Raiders, but of course the entire genre, some of the specific stunts and gags and beats are very much Republic Serials. The under-truck scene in particular was famously taken from a stunt Yakima Canutt made famous in the Westerns, having done it at least two separate times, most famously in Stagecoach (1939). Everything about the movie was a callback to older serials and classic westerns, and in 1981 the majority of the audience would still have recognized that. I doubt that that's true now, of course. This was always one of the best features of the movie, honestly. And George Lucas' entire oeuvre for a while.

The soundtrack is still amazing, by the way. It remains one of my favorites of all time to this day. Which is part of the reason why hearing its classic themes bowdlerized in the trailers for crappy movies like Dial of Destiny mingled with the ultimate Boomer band, the Beatles of all bands, is grating.

(I don't really dislike the Beatles. I've seen Paul McCartney in concert within the last few years. He's a nice guy, appreciative of his fans. However, I've come to dislike the reverence that the Boomers have for them a great deal, and the smug certainty with which they proclaim that the Beatles are the greatest band of all time and why wouldn't everyone of every generation recognize that? It's a major turn-off. So much so that I think I won't really miss not hearing the Beatles very much if ever anymore when the last Boomer finally dies.)

6) It's hard not to think of the dialogue in the infamous brainstorming sessions when Indy and Marion are first talking. It really lends a creepy undertone to that scene.

7) My hair is probably a little grayer than Marcus Brody's, but the actor playing him was a good ten years older than me when he filmed this. Sigh. Getting old sucks. And I'm a good 13 years older than Harrison Ford was when he filmed it. Of course, I was only 9 when it came out.

8) Katanga and his crew are kind of creepy. Especially Katanga, though. I had cognitive dissonance about this for many years, because he's obviously presented as a good guy. But he's creepy. I wouldn't have gotten on his ship.

9) There's more deus ex machina than I remember. I guess if you move fast enough and keep the pace up, you really don't much notice it. I still remember my dad complaining about one that he couldn't get over; that if Indy and Marion simply closed their eyes, they'd be spared the murderous intent of the ark, as if they were any better than the people that it killed. But again; see 1).

——( † )——

I absolutely refuse to see the new Indiana Jones movie. Not that my esteem for this series is that great; like I said, every movie since the first one has been inferior to it, and only Last Crusade is really even all that entertaining (although also frustrating.) Heck, my esteem even for the first one has dropped significantly. I think I actually think that The Mummy is a better Indiana Jones movie than any actual Indiana Jones movie. But still; I'm pissed off that Kathleen Kennedy's bitterness and spite knows no bounds and that she's so determined to ruin these franchises. I'm also pissed off that Harrison Ford, who I used to think was the epitome of cool, has been so willing to callously screw over his legacy like this. Does the paycheck really mean that much to him? The guy's 80s, and has been a movie star for decades. Please don't tell me that he's broke. If so, my respect for him, already considerably lower after learning altogether too much about the man personally, will be almost completely evaporated.

Fantasy over time

I recently reread the original Icewind Dale trilogy by R. A. Salvatore published in the early 90s. I've also been rereading the Lord of the Rings for the first time in a few years, and I'm about 25% or so into Return of the King as we speak. Because my wife is out of town helping my injured son who broke his ankle in a bad landing from a jump, I will probably have little to do in the evenings and on weekends other than read, so I expect to make good progress. I've also got the follow-up prequel to the Icewind Dale trilogy queued up; the Driz'zt origin story, and I've got Raymond Feist's Riftwar Saga—in its original edited form, not the "author's cut" that's been in print since. 

I've also recently reread a collection of Robert E. Howard stories, and I have more to go, some Black Library stuff from the old Warhammer world published a number of years ago, some more Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stuff to read, some Thieves World stuff, etc. And not that long ago, I reread The Belgariad five book series again for the first time in many years. While I'd often mocked that, the truth is that I've also always liked it, and rereading it again, I realized that my mocking of it as extruded fantasy product was probably unfair, and as much driven by the zeitgeist about that series over time and the unlikeable and stupid statements made by the author about fantasy fans before his death. He actually doesn't seem like a very nice guy. And finally, I've also recently reread the original Dragonlance books—although I was doing those as an audiobook while traveling, and I peetered out before getting all the way through the third book. Part of those were better than I expected them to be after all of this time, and parts of them... were not. Terry Brooks is the most iconic author of this era that I never had much interest in, after failing several times to reread the first Sword of Shannara book because it just didn't interest me enough.

I became a fantasy fan at this crucial juncture, in the 70s and 80s, when an older generation of faster, punchier, sword & sorcery (and anti-sword & sorcery, full of subversion of all the tropes, just like the anti-western is a subversion of the western) were still in print, and readily available. It was easy to find sword & sorcery, planetary romance, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, John Norman, and Robert Adams all over the public library, shelves on the bookstore, and even the little book section of Wal-Mart or Krogers. Much of this wasn't great; thud & blunder it had been derisively labeled, referring to its facile pastiche nature of better written stuff by guys like Howard in decades earlier. But what was also happening is that pastiches of Tolkien in a more high fantasy mold were becoming mainstream at this time, including much of the work of the authors mentioned above. To me, these were the twin pillars of the fantasy genre, and anything else that was out there was either unusual or unique, or completely outside of my interest, like romance in fantasy drag, or feminist screeds in fantasy drag, etc. Y'know, like Marion Zimmer Bradley or Mercedes Lackey.

What seems to have happened since then is that a new type of fantasy, or maybe new types of fantasy, have become prominent since then. Brandon Sanderson is one of the faces of this; which is kinda funny, as he finished the Wheel of Time series after Robert Jordan died, and Robert Jordan is seen as one of the vanguard of writers who pioneered this new fantasy. Sure, sure... Wheel of Time starts off very similar to a typical 80s-90s high fantasy, but 1) it was super, super long with a bazillion characters. I mean really long; one book in this 14-15 or so book series is nearly as long as the entire Lord of the Rings, 2) it had tons of soap opera elements and politics, etc. 3) it starred deeply flawed characters, including a main character who literally went insane over the course of the series, and 4) it indulges heavily in high concept and world building. I would say to the detriment of character, but given the length of time that we spend with the characters, that's not really true. But definitely to the detriment of plot and pacing. But the fans don't seem to mind that. 

George "Rape Rape" Martin seems to have pioneered a second point of this new type of fantasy. It has most of the same "features" as Brandon Sanderson's stuff, but not only are the main characters frequently flawed, but they're literally terrible people; more like villains than heroes, and the tone of the stories indulges this deep dive into nihilism and borderline snuff film material. A lot of other authors have also made hay in this "grimdark" side to "modern fantasy".

Here's a decent video that some guy who I often disagree with makes discussing modern vs classic fantasy, but he has a gigantic "classic" definition that basically means the 70s-90s generation of high fantasy, and he ignores everything else classic that comes from before that. Full disclosure; I disliked the video because I think that it's got a perception bias due to his Millennial generational perspective. But it's a nice place to at least start with a discussion of generations of fantasy.

Of course, he's a reader Youtuber. That's not the entirety of fantasy. I would suggest that the prevalence (if you can call it that) of TV shows and movies has a very different picture. What's going on there is often unrelated in many ways to what's going on in publishing. In the 80s, sword & sorcery pastiches of the Conan movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger were super popular, although few people were writing new works and publishing them that were in that mode. And what's going on now in fantasy streaming and movies is heavily influenced by 1) the success of the Lord of the Rings movies and the Game of Thrones streaming show, and 2) the influence of woke ideology. Even when they're adapting (for many definitions of adapting) older works like the attempt to launch a Shannara show, or a relaunch something based on Willow, etc.

I think another breakpoint is RPGs. It seems to me at least, although maybe my perspective and perception is too limited to really be correct, that "classic" fantasy has lingered much longer in the fantasy RPG world. Indeed, it seems that contrary to what "modern fantasy" fans seem to desire: overly innovative high concepts and world-building wonkery, these traits are typically rejected in the RPG space. Sure, sure... innovative settings have their fans, but they don't end up getting as much mainstream success as the much more traditional settings. 

Although one aspect of "modern audiences" that seems to be prevalent is woketardery. But like woketardery everywhere, its impact is—at best—polarizing. There's a big chunk of gamers that are overtly rejecting that in the game and playing older, or at least older-fashioned stuff. Not just in terms of mechanics, but they also heavily reject a lot of aspects of diversity and specialness. Of course, fantasy diversity as a metaphor for real diversity is a tricky thing. I think loads of people who virtue-signal haplessly and frequently about how wonderful it is that some other town than theirs has loads of Third World scumbags in it are still skeptical of fantasy turtle people and fantasy crow people and fantasy rabbit people, or whatever.

Anyway, what do I think and what to I like? Mostly, I'm a traditionalist. I went through a lengthy phase where I wanted fantasy to do something a little different, but it wasn't really classic fantasy fatigue... it was bad classic fantasy fatigue. I'm finding, especially as I revisit a lot of my older favorites, that they're as good as ever. I'm also finding that a lot of new trends in the publishing world are not to my taste. In fact, many of them actively offended me to the point where I'm now much more entrenched in my classic fantasy tropes than I used to be.

Although; I should add that I'm not quite sure what my own breed of fantasy really is. Is having a setting that's as much Old West in many ways as it is Medieval Europe a classic or modern fantasy trope, or does it not even track on that divide? I think relative to what's going on in books, it's probably not super innovative, but compared to what's going on in RPGs, its borderline heretical.

I do also tend to favor plots and heroes that are not necessarily traditional fantasy plots and heroes, but are very traditional from things like spy thrillers, conspiracy theory stories, and crime stories. Again; I don't know that that's really all that innovative; Glen Cook was writing Garrett P.I. books in the 80s, and Simon R. Green published the first Hawk & Fisher story in 1990, and if I thought hard enough I'm sure I could think of more examples. I'm also not entirely sure that mixing fantasy with some other genre is really all that innovative, or has anything to do with what "modern fantasy" is doing. But in general, I'd say that focusing too much on worldbuilding and high concept is wonkish and borderline masturbatory. But that's my taste; I prefer a focus on character and plot, and while I like worldbuilding for its own sake—to a point—I think it's easy to go too far into that. In fact, I think that it's particularly a pattern that I could fall into if I'm not careful, so I go out of my way to keep it to a dull roar.

Belated Friday Art Attack

I know it's already Wednesday evening, so Friday will come around again before we know it. However, I'm not sure how Fridays are going to go anymore. Last week, I had no opportunity to make a post. This week, I probably will if for no other reason then because once work is over, my wife is out of town, so my time is completely my own. But we'll see. Work has been insanely insane lately—almost toxic, to be honest with you—so I thought I'd make a post now, in case I don't get to.

I love the Morrison Formation. So much. It is even the formation that made me really appreciate the sauropods, which otherwise would be "giant scaly cows" and not terribly interesting to me.

A few more of my bright and polite retro-futurist images. Same artist, I believe, as the last batch. I have a few more yet that I haven't used. But I'm about ready to move on.

A Lovecraftian sword & sorcery type image.

The deep, dark forest is not only part of the soul of the Northern European, but also an object of fear to him as well as a wild and untrammeled wilderness.

I've long been a fan of mingling fantasy and gothic horror. This Dracula-like castle in a storm on a mountain ridge is the perfect image to represent that.

I believe these are both screen shots from the Assassin's Creed game about ancient Greece. To me, though, who's never played an Assassin's Creed game in my life, they're just cool images of ancient Greek champions.

Another dark and spooky foresty fantasy landscape. 

A rather cheesecakey and cliched "sexy Galadriel", with a touch of 70s hippy van art vibe. I don't love this kind of stuff, but I like it well enough to have a few in my collection.

Good old fashioned action

I decided to take a break from my fantasy reading, after finishing two fantasy ebooks in pretty quick succession, and picked up Chuck Dixon's Levon's Trade, which I had bought some months ago. I read it so quickly and enjoyed it enough, that I went and looked for the sequel. What I found is that while I'd bought the first ebook for $2.99, I could buy a Kindle omnibus of the first six books for $4.99, which I quickly did. I've now read five of the six. I also watched Chris Hemsworth's Extraction last night. I'd had that on my Netflix queue for months too, but I hardly ever go to Netflix. Because of weird personal issues (my son broke his ankle out in the mountains out west, and my wife left with little warning to go help him. He can't drive, he can't walk; he can't do much of anything for a few weeks) so I'm here at home all alone for two weeks. That gives me the opportunity to catch up on some reading and watching of stuff that I otherwise haven't been doing much of because I've been busy enough to make it difficult. 

I'm struck by the similarity between the two concepts; both are essentially old-fashioned violent vigilante thrillers. Both have a Western man warrior, who's become somewhat psychologically broken, or at least damaged, by family grief that has nothing to do with his career as a former special forces expert killer, who get caught up in seeking redemption of sorts by combating Third World organized crime. In the case of Levon Cade, it starts with seeking to find the missing daughter of a friend and have enough money to fend off the petty lawfare of the father of his dead wife (cancer) and have custody over his young daughter. As the series goes on, the enemies become more varied, but in most of them there's a corrupt Third World organized crime element; Zetas dealing meth in backwoods Alabama, Ukrainians with traditional protection rackets and other organized crime staples (although in this case, a rogue element within their own organization is the catalyst of the problem), Middle Eastern smugglers doing a bit of everything in Middle America, etc. Cade is just a normal guy living a normal life who happens to be a highly effective killer with a special forces background, in most cases finding trouble that he wasn't looking for but couldn't seem to avoid.

Tyler Rake of Extraction is an Australian special forces who's young son died of cancer, and because he couldn't deal with it, he essentially abandoned his family for a tour of duty in Afghanistan. He does, however, have a crew that he does merc work with, and was hired to rescue the teenaged son of an Indian drug lord (who's in prison) and has been captured by a rival Bangladeshi drug lord. This poor, surprisingly gentle and kind of shy and retiring kid becomes a surrogate second son of sorts as he attempts to get him out of the city in Bangladesh; the drug lord is such a power that the police and military are completely coopted in his corruption.

So there's some significant differences, but also some very marked similarities. The special forces background, the character being defined in part by past family tragedy—cancer in both cases—and the full throttle violent vigilantism being perpetrated against both Third World organized crime organizations but also corrupted official law enforcement when needed, etc. Both are kind of a callback to a simpler, almost old-fashioned vigilante thriller that was popular in the 70s and 80s and a bit beyond, while also having their own modern spins on the genre at the same time. Levon Cade in particular is part Jack Reacher, part Die Hard, part The Fugitive, and part Punisher. Extraction is more like a classic Rambo movie in an urban setting. It's the characters themselves and their personal journey, as well as all of the non-stop vigilante action, that unite the two.

I heartily recommend them both; the Levon Cade series of novels (which I'm admittedly only halfway done with; there are eleven in total) and the Extraction movies. I've heard the second one is just as good, if not better, and I will almost certainly watch it this week too.

But it's nice to see that there are actually some good movies and books being made today that hearken back to this old-fashioned aesthetic. I've read before that vigilante fiction like the Dirty Harry and Death Wish movies thrive in a time when trust in social institutions like the government is at a low, and violent crime (which in the West, quite often has a Third World element to it, especially if you consider African-"Americans" to be essentially slightly differentiated Africans, which is both fair and accurate) is at an all time high, and corruption and incompetence are the stories of the day with regards to the government. If so, it makes sense that these kinds of plotlines and stories feel fresh and relevant still (or again) today in spite of the age and vintage of their earlier peak.

UPDATE: As an aside, although not focusing on the violent action nearly as much, the movie coming out called Sound of Freedom with Jim Cavaziel is a similarly-themed story too. And it amuses me that Sound of Freedom was the #1 movie in America over the 4th of July, coming as it is from an indie Christian studio.

Friday Art Attack

Before I post the art, let's ramble just a bit. First, some political/social news. People are making a big deal about a couple of Supreme Court decisions that came down yesterday. I think the Z-man has the best take on them:

[T]his case is a good reminder that words on paper will never constrain a ruling class. The letter of the law means nothing to people who have no respect for the spirit of the law. Right now, our ruling class has no respect for the rules that are supposed to govern Western societies. No amount of ink spilling will cause them to change their minds about it.

Another thing worth mentioning that I did not cover in the show is the implied cowardice in these cases. When the Left had the whip hand on the court, they rammed through as much as they could as fast as they could. When the Right has control of the courts it is nothing but baby steps and concessions to the Left. This recent case was a chance to roll back a lot of horrible ideas, but they cucked.

This removes the last argument for voting Republican. We know that when they have control of Congress they will fink on their voters. When they have control of the White House, they will appoint people like John Roberts to the bench. Even with a stacked court the people who vote Republican cannot expect to get anything for their support, so what is the point of voting for a Republican?

Vox Day had a briefer take on it as well. Again; I'm quoting them rather than putting it into my own words, because why not? I agree with both takes and did already before I read them. Even though they appear on the surface to disagree, I don't think that they really do, and both can be equally true.

Conservatives will celebrate this as a great legal victory, and perhaps it is. But the reality is that the damage has already been done, as university educations and the lifelong debt they entail are best avoided by everyone of any color.

However, if the ruling can be successfully applied to an employment context, that could be significant indeed. 

Totally switching gears; my reading. I've read 22 books so far this year. My minimum goal was 12 books, which was kind of weak. I had a "real" goal of 20, which I've now passed, and a stretch goal of 30. I had a "crazy stretch" of 40, but at the rate I'm going, that might actually be possible.

I'm reading more than one book at a time. I tend to read, depending on my mood, 1) a physical book (I'm halfway through my new copy of The Two Towers right now, 2) a Kindle ebook (usually on my Kindle app on my phone, so I can read it wherever I am without having my Kindle device). I just finished Keith Baker's Son of Khyber, the second of the Thorn of Breland Eberron trilogy. 3) a gamebook of some kind. I picked up Drow of the Underdark, which I hadn't read since I first bought it back in the late 3e period, and 4) a pdf gamebook. In this case, I'm actually reading two; Death on the Reik right now, the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay "director's cut" book by Cubicle 7. I'm also reading The Age of Worms. This one slipped in because I was going back and forth between physical copies of the Dungeon Magazine issues which I had physical copies of (about half of the run on this Adventure Path) and pdfs of the magazine. 

So, I'm 75% done with the Age of Worms, at which point I'll pick up Savage Tide. I'm going to read all of the Adventure Paths, until I run out of ones that I have. This will probably take me several years, because I do it slowly, and there were a lot that came out from Paizo for Pathfinder (and Starfinder.) If I finish Savage Tide this year, I'll be happy with my progress there. I'd also really like to finish all of the Enemy Within plus companions this year, but I suspect that I may not.

And finally, I need to pick up a new ebook since I just finished one late last night. I don't know what I'm going to pick up there yet. It might be a non-fantasy book. I'm considering Levon's Trade by Chuck Dixon, which is a kind of Jack Reacher or Mack Bolan-like vigilante fiction thriller.

Final rambly thought; my wife liked The Flash and in what was perhaps a lapse of judgement, I allowed her to talk me into going back with her to see it after she watched it first without me. I didn't really like it. It wasn't actually terrible, but it was forgettable and kind of insulting. Michael Keaton was certainly the best part of the movie. What did I not like? Ezra Miller. Even assuming that you can divorce his performance from his real life persona (which I cannot completely do), he's just an irritating, obnoxious character. Barry Allen—and keep in mind that I was always more of a Marvel guy than a DC guy, but I've seen a bit here and there of DC as it was when it was good decades ago—is a tall, lean blond guy from a fictional Midwestern city (first vaguely in Ohio, later Missouri) who's a forensic scientist, often a bit of an alpha jokester, and is, in the words of Batman, "[T]he kind of man I wouldn've hoped to become if my parents hadn't been murdered." Like all superheroes of the Golden and Silver Ages, he has an iconic love interest, Iris West, a cute little redhead. Flash isn't awkward and stupid around her, they're already a serious item, if not actually engaged, and they do end up getting married in the comics canon.

Barry Allen in the movies is a super beta Jewish kid afflicted with logorrhea and terminal awkwardness, who's mother, we now find, is Hispanic and who's father is the guy from Office Space. Apparently, the movie division didn't "get the memo" because this character is not only unlikeable, but he's unrecognizable. There is an Iris West, a chubby Halfrican who also bears no resemblance whatsoever to Iris West, but is it least friendly and a bit more likeable than the other Halfrican who played her in the CW soap opera Flash show.

The plot isn't really very bright. A lot of folks have talked about the multiverse angle being overdone by now, but the reality is that the multiverse as a deus ex machina device feels very lazy, and isn't used cleverly. If it were, I don't think that there'd be a problem with it. 

As many have said, the CGI is really had. It almost looks as bad as the cow in Twister from... what, 1996 or so? When did that movie come out? The attempts at a lighthearted Marvel vibe boil down to Barry doing or saying something stupid, and we're supposed to think that it's funny.

Anyway, it's not a terrible movie, but it isn't a good one either, and as an adaptation of the Flash character, it's particularly egregious, as DEI casting decisions and super beta writers who can't imagine what a normal person acts like completely ruin its ability to emulate anything recognizable. But, as an alternate version of a speedster character who also happens to have an old Batman (Michael Keaton in Dark Knight Returns; how awesome would that be?) and a Hispanic dykish Supergirl, it's still only... OK. 

There are a lot of rationales being tossed around by entertainment self-proclaimed pundits for its failure. I think all of them have some merit. I have no doubt that Ezra Miller's own behavior is a factor. As is general superhero fatigue. As is James Gunn's rebooting of the DC franchise and getting rid of Henry Cavill only to cast a discount Henry Cavill who literally looks almost just like him except a bit younger. I think by far the biggest factor is just that the Flash character as he's been written and portrayed thus far just isn't a very likeable character, and nobody really wanted to see a movie that not only focused almost solely on him, but literally had two of him on screen for most of the movie.

About superhero fatigue, I think it's a mistake to call superhero fatigue a problem that audiences have. In reality, it's a problem creators have. When they get to the point that the creators are fatigued with a genre, and just churn them out formulaicly without any love for a paycheck, or try to subvert them or do something different with them because they fundamentally don't really want to make a superhero movie, that's when you've got superhero fatigue. The same thing happened with the Western in the late 60s and early 70s. I don't think the audience tired of them. The studios and creatives tired of them, and stopped making them in such a way that audiences would like them. And then, of course, audiences were blamed for moving on and abandoning the genre rather than the creatives, who were by that time making anti-Westerns that turned the tropes of the Western completely on its head, but wore the superficial trappings like a skinsuit. The same thing has happened to superhero movies. Sure, audiences don't like what's being made. But that's because the creatives have turned the superhero movie upside down and are wearing its superficial trappings like a skinsuit. Audiences aren't that stupid. They know when a superhero movie isn't really a superhero movie anymore.

Anyway, enough of all that. Here's the art attack.

First, a few bright and polite retro-futurist pieces of art. When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, a lot of this kind of gee whiz futurism was still very popular, and because I had an interest in science, science fiction, and related topics, I saw a lot of this kind of stuff at the school and public libraries where I was devouring anything that looked vaguely on topic.

Some Wayne Reynolds. The last one is Eberron, but the first two are 4e pieces. I haven't seen nearly as much of his work as I used to. I think either his star is fading and he's not being picked up as the iconic face of the brand art, like he used to be for Wizards, Paizo and Green Ronin (among others) or he's just moved on to doing different stuff.

Some wererats or skaven-like monsters, or something like that. I'm a big fan of that kind of thing particularly, but this is a different Wayne Reynoldsish take. I actually think that this might be a Wayne Reynolds piece, but I'm not 100% sure, because I don't see his initials on it, and I can't remember where I found the digital image anymore. I've had it for a long time.

I love this kind of rainy, grubby, dark fantasy Medieval horror kind of vibe. This isn't the only piece I have like this, but this is as good as any that I do have.

A couple of AI generated girls; Snow White and the Tomb Raider, respectively. Given that both are about to get live action remakes, or so we hear, that I won't want to see (the first starring a race-swapped Hispanic Snow White and the latter starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who may actually be more unlikeable than Brie Larsen even—and certainly less attractive) I thought these images of what they should look like will stand as a testimony against whatever we actually get.