…Sometimes, life sucks. Sometimes, some days just feel
wrong, no matter what, and sometimes, you just think about the future and
wince: you can see what is coming clearly, you just cannot figure out a way to
get out of it.
Or maybe you can, you just are not sure, (or maybe you are),
if the way out is not worse than staying on course is. Or maybe it is worse,
but you are just going to go that way anyway, because which is the lesser evil
here? …But we digress.
…No, not really, we do not. The hurricane Florence is gone,
whatever is going on down with Kavanaugh and his accuser is a storm that few
people want to touch, and whatever changes the ‘me too’ movement was supposed
to bring were not brought, and people are beginning to experience backlash from
it instead. That is important, because if ‘me too’ does not begin to bring-in sociopolitical
advantages, but brings disadvantages instead, its’ support, official or
unofficial, may begin to dwindle and then…it would end, leaving everyone right
back where they have started…if by ‘everyone’ one means Americans. Even
Canadians never got as much involved with ‘me too’ as their southern neighbours
did, never mind the Europeans, and-
And nothing. The Americans love to believe that they are the
entire world when they are not. Post-1990s they could – and did – impose their
will and values onto the rest of the world and it worked…until it did not.
Everyone and everything, even a country, even its’ regime, have a time limit,
and once it runs out, that is it. You are screwed. Well, not necessarily
screwed, but certainly done, and will have to invent something new or bide your
time until the next opportunity to bring back your old bag of tricks. What
next?
Yes, Russia, (and maybe China, and other countries), have
participated in steering the U.S. in the direction of the mess that it is
currently in, but so did the U.S. itself – it has no idea where it is going; it
still has, well, democracy as its’ political polar star/lighthouse/traffic
light – you make the metaphor – its’ light has grown vague and indistinct, and
this is bad.
Look at Russia – it doesn’t have anything like democracy in
its’ system of values, not anymore: Putin is apparently setting himself to be
the modern Ozymandias: ‘look at my works, yet mighty, and despair!’ with not a
sentient soul around to appreciate the colossal wreck – but it still has plenty
of will and determination…and also an idea, or even – the idea, that democracy
and Western-style politics is good, and it tries to go there, and maybe, one
day, they will even achieve it, whereas the U.S….
Whereas the U.S. does not have that, or perhaps – it has too
many majorities in it instead. There are too many people who have, well, ideas,
of where the American democracy should go, and they all are pulling it in
different directions, set against the background of the still-weakened
state/country of U.S.A. The concept of ‘Balkanization’ of U.S. is not anything new;
it is actually a common American dystopia, depicted in ‘into the badlands’ show
among other things, for example. Will it come true in real life? We will have
to wait and see.
Does the mention of ‘Badlands’ bring us back to the realm of
fiction? In there, various goings-on are happening, too. The ‘Charmed’ reboot
is happening in October 2018 and already there are people praising it for being
‘woke’ (or whatever), for having a mixed-racial cast. Sigh. The various films
have already tried this out. ‘Black Panther’ – with a primarily Afro-American
cast. It was praised…until people realized that ‘Black Panther’ was not about ‘real
life’ Africa, but more about an idealized, American version of Africa – and the
hype about that movie quickly died. ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ had a primarily
Asian-American cast, (if not an exclusively one), and the same thing happened, only
quicker, because as far as movies go, ‘Asians’ were less fictional than BP was,
so its’ differences from reality are starker and more obvious. ‘Charmed’ isn’t
a movie, it’s a TV series reboot, one that deals with witches and demons (among
other things; the original series also had ghost pirates, ancient Greek gods
and demons, and anything else, really), and the real-life racial issue didn’t
really feature much in it; from the trailers of the reboot, it seems that the
reboot will go down the same route, the races of the actors and actresses playing
regardless.
The worst that can happen? ‘Charmed’ v2 will be a variant of
‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’, in which Rowling has racebent Hermione,
making her Afro-British, and by extent, Rose and Hugo Weasleys, (Hermione’s
children with Ron) into biracial people. (Though yeah, I do not remember Hugo
being in the story, but still. Let us mention him by default). And what
happened next?
The play did not bomb, but only because the actors delivered
– yay for them. There had been rumors of a musical/movie adaptation of the
play, but the matter of Hermione and her race has come back once more. Either
she really is Afro-British, in which case we need an Afro-British, or an
Afro-American, actress in the HPCC movie, and that…isn’t something that is
easily done by anyone, not even Rowling herself, who is very pointedly involved
with the ‘Fantastic Beasts’ movie series, (where the bulk of characters, and
especially – main characters, is Anglo-American, or European…basically,
Caucasian), and not with anything ‘Cursed Child’-related. This means that all
of her words in defence of Noma Dumazveny had been just that – words, and if the
readers/viewers/fans are not buying them, J-Ro will easily switch back to an
Emma Stone-Hermione, as she did with Jim Kay.
To be more precise, in collaboration with Jim Kay, J-Ro has started
to re-release her HP books: they are already up to ‘Prisoner of Azkaban’, and
the Hermione featured there is more like Emma than Noma, to put it blankly.
Merlin knows why, of course, but if people are praising J-Ro for being ‘woke’…then
maybe they should not, and she is not. Not really.
This, of course, brings us to Rick Riordan, who in his last
novel, ‘Burning Labyrinth’, or ‘Burning Maze’, or whatever, also showed that he
didn’t have to be ‘woke’ either if it didn’t deliver, and who has also started
to release illustrated hardcover versions of his novels; so far, there’s only ‘The
Lightning Thief’, done by John Rocco, (who seems to be Riordan’s artist of
choice, when it comes to illustrating his novels and mini-novels in color), but
it’s a start.
The dramatic irony is that J-Ro’s novels, illustrated by Jim
Kay, are not selling so hot, and neither is the illustrated hardcover edition
of ‘The Lightning Thief’. People just are not buying those books as much
anymore, so both J-Ro and Riordan have their work cut out for them and need to
invent new tricks or something, (as we have talked in the beginning, here).
J-Ro is already doing this approach with her FB films; Riordan…we will have to
wait and see.
Speaking of movies… a Disney/SW representative has made a
statement, that they will be slowing down with the new films; after the SW9
movie is release, no new SW movies will be made for a while. This isn’t
surprising; in fact, after ‘Solo’ this statement was to be made soon or later –
right now, Disney has brought SW and itself into a corner when it comes to SW
movies; but there’re always TV series to keep the SW franchise afloat. Maybe it
will work in the end.
Anything else? No, not for the moment; see you all soon
instead!
No comments:
Post a Comment