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Post by realjla on Feb 22, 2016 16:38:07 GMT -5
I'm wary of any TV show where everybody says, "Well, season 1 is kinda slow, but then it gets better..' If there's a 50-50 split on whether the women are characters or 'props', that's not a good endorsement! I just don't care for 'fantasy worlds' for that kind of setting. At least Camelot stories mix real with fictional locations.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 22, 2016 17:31:23 GMT -5
I'm wary of any TV show where everybody says, "Well, season 1 is kinda slow, but then it gets better..' If there's a 50-50 split on whether the women are characters or 'props', that's not a good endorsement!See, this is why we get along.
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Post by realjla on Feb 22, 2016 18:18:05 GMT -5
Aw, shucks! I mean, Alfalfa wanting to keep Darla out of 'The He-Man Woman Haters' Club' is one thing, but GoT takes that a bit too far...
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Post by Cei-U! on Feb 22, 2016 21:36:47 GMT -5
I have family members who love Games of Thrones and tried to get me into it but I just can't scrape together any interest. And it's not just my general dislike for sex and gore in my entertainment. There's just nothing there to entice me.
Cei-U! Maybe it's gentic!?
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Post by Deleted on Feb 22, 2016 21:57:31 GMT -5
The one and only episode I saw was just sooo degrading towards women. I wanted to give it another chance, but my husband thought it was worse than I did. And he refuses to watch it.
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Post by batlaw on Feb 23, 2016 3:26:46 GMT -5
I've never read Ultimates, but thanks for giving me another reason not to! I never read it either till just a couple years ago. Wasn't terribly impressed and dont get its praise. Perhaps it simply resonated with times and just appeared better then? To me it was just gratuitous and simply "look how edgy we can be".
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Post by Icctrombone on Feb 23, 2016 6:34:11 GMT -5
I've never read Ultimates, but thanks for giving me another reason not to! I never read it either till just a couple years ago. Wasn't terribly impressed and dont get its praise. Perhaps it simply resonated with times and just appeared better then? To me it was just gratuitous and simply "look how edgy we can be". The first 2 volumes of the Ultimates are great. The incest stuff that CW is referring to is Ultimates v.3 which is terrible. Thanks Loeb.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Feb 23, 2016 7:49:00 GMT -5
I never read it either till just a couple years ago. Wasn't terribly impressed and dont get its praise. Perhaps it simply resonated with times and just appeared better then? To me it was just gratuitous and simply "look how edgy we can be". The first 2 volumes of the Ultimates is great. Absolutely. There is so much to like in those two volumes. I really didn't expect much subtlety in an Avengers reboot book written by Mark Millar, but there we are! Just off the top of my head : - Is Thor an Asgardian god as he claims, or is he a psychologically troubled man who got his hands on some experimental technology, as his brother says and as available evidence indicates? This sub-plot was developed over the two volumes and was really well done, as we readers couldn't decide until the final few pages. - Politics used as a plot element are far richer than usual in a comic-book, very plausible, and laudably devoid of "good guys vs bad guys" dichotomy. America, Europe, Iran, they all show the best and the worst of what they're capable of in our own world (emphasized for the comic-book world, but in a believable way). I loved how we were made to understand the point of view of the super-powered villains in volume 2, and also how the initially unsympathetic Ultimate Cap turned out to be a straight arrow in the end. (I take it that Millar must be a left-leaning person, which makes his writing right-wingers as convincing good guys all the more laudable). - Captain America meeting his old girlfriend from WWII, who has since grown old and married Bucky. That was heart-wrenching. - The sheer wide-screen aspect of the stories, something we had already seen in books like the Authority. So many scenes that could have (and should have) been transferred straight to the silver screen: Captain America's "parachutes are for girls" scene, the fleet of helicarriers attacking the Skrulls, Natasha and her cross-building jump (just an incredible scene!), Hawkeye's badass escape from his abductors... Awesome! - The reinterpretation of our heroes in a modern light that actually pays respect to the classic concepts, something I really didn't expect. Not all of them come across as pure and white as the 1960s characters, but neither are they sacrificed on the altar of edginess and "relevance". The infamous "Hank Pym is a wife-beater" meme is in there, but more as an actual important plot point than as an exploitative element. - The general tone of the series, which reads like a couple of movies and not like a reboot of a comic-book. No wonder the films lifted so much material from The Ultimates. And if you're producing movies, you don't plan for the next twenty years : it's quite all right to kill major characters for real. Nobody felt safe, and we didn't expect people to come back from the dead if they bit it. - The art is gorgeous. Really. My only real gripe is about the ending of volume 2. I think it would have been better to maintain a certain ambivalence on a certain subject, but perhaps Millar wanted to leave the series by dotting all the i's.
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Post by Cei-U! on Feb 23, 2016 8:14:01 GMT -5
Once I'd internalized the mantra "These aren't THE Avengers, they're the Earth-Two version," I enjoyed the hell out of the first two Ultimates volumes... and I really hadn't expected to.
Cei-U! I summon the pleasant surprise!
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Post by Prince Hal on Feb 23, 2016 14:06:09 GMT -5
I have never bought in to the idea that Batman and Superman are natural enemies.
Great for an imaginary novel in 1966, but otherwise, sorry, I just don't see it as anything more than an artificial contrivance.
On the same note (and I have no idea if even a vestige of this remains in continuity), I hated the Denny O'Neil-created Green Arrow-Hawkman feud in the JLA. In what he must have thought was an effort to create characters, he created caricatures. It was two bowls of stupid for lunch.
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Post by Mormel on Feb 23, 2016 14:56:53 GMT -5
The one and only episode I saw was just sooo degrading towards women. I wanted to give it another chance, but my husband thought it was worse than I did. And he refuses to watch it. Was the episode you saw the one where Daenerys (the platinum blonde girl) gets married to the leader of the nomadic horsemen? Because if it was, she becomes more badass as the show progresses, although more as a politician than as a warrior. Beside Dany, there are a handful of female characters who are quite badass and do have fighting skills on a par with the male ones. But yes, I'd agree that GoT features many scenes that are highly sexist, throughout its run. It's also very quick to have the more unsavoury among the male characters issue rape threats or make insinuations. There is one female main character that spends much of the series being the target of terrible verbal abuse and public humiliation. If the first episode doesn't hook you, and even puts you off, I'd say it's probably not going to get better as you go along. I'm still sticking with the show because I'm invested in the characters, but I'm not as infatuated with it as much as I was with the first two seasons. But that has more to do with its tone growing more cynical and sadistic in general, than with a misogynistic aspect.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 23, 2016 15:27:00 GMT -5
I'm still sticking with the show because I'm invested in the characters, but I'm not as infatuated with it as much as I was with the first two seasons. But that has more to do with its tone growing more cynical and sadistic in general, than with a misogynistic aspect.LOL!!! Lord help us all. By the way, it's really not okay if you're okay with misogyny.
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Crimebuster
CCF Podcast Guru
Making comics!
Posts: 3,949
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Post by Crimebuster on Feb 23, 2016 15:40:21 GMT -5
As someone who has read the books and watches the TV show, the treatment of women in Games of Thrones is a particular bugaboo for me. I think that the producers might have missed a bit in translating the series from page to screen, though otherwise they have done an excellent job. In the books, there are definitely plenty of misogynistic characters and events, as the world itself is heavily skewed towards male dominance. But I never felt as though the author was being misogynistic - it was more commentary on how misogynistic classic high fantasy societies are, or would be. It was more reportage in a way, not titillation.
Once it's put up on the screen, though, and made visual, it plays out differently, and there have definitely been times where it seemed the showrunners were at best just completely tone deaf and blind to how the material was playing out on television, and at worst playing up the rapey and incesty parts for titillation and entertainment. It's a very fine line and I think they cross it sometimes - not intentionally, maybe, but nevertheless. On screen there is inherently a more voyeuristic and participatory relationship with the viewer than there is with the reader on the page and I think they didn't consider this enough when deciding how to adapt certain sections of the story.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 23, 2016 15:45:36 GMT -5
As someone who has read the books and watches the TV show, the treatment of women in Games of Thrones is a particular bugaboo for me. I think that the producers might have missed a bit in translating the series from page to screen, though otherwise they have done an excellent job. In the books, there are definitely plenty of misogynistic characters and events, as the world itself is heavily skewed towards male dominance. But I never felt as though the author was being misogynistic - it was more commentary on how misogynistic classic high fantasy societies are, or would be. It was more reportage in a way, not titillation. Once it's put up on the screen, though, and made visual, it plays out differently, and there have definitely been times where it seemed the showrunners were at best just completely tone deaf and blind to how the material was playing out on television, and at worst playing up the rapey and incesty parts for titillation and entertainment. It's a very fine line and I think they cross it sometimes - not intentionally, maybe, but nevertheless. On screen there is inherently a more voyeuristic and participatory relationship with the viewer than there is with the reader on the page and I think they didn't consider this enough when deciding how to adapt certain sections of the story. Thank you for the explanation, Crimebuster. It makes sense. I understand that things happen in stories so that they can be told. And not everything is always going to be favorable to everyone. I accept this (I mean, I read comics), but it was just so overwhelming in the first episode. I guess I just did not expect what I saw, and it was kind of jarring.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Feb 23, 2016 15:58:40 GMT -5
To quote Honest Trailers : "Incest! Beheadings! Attempted child murder! More incest!... and that's just the first episode!!!"
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