Thursday, 30 April 2020

Quarantine entry #40 - April 30


Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, COVID-19 or not. It’s raining today, so we got to stay inside, and on the DA – which itself is supposed to end at the end of May, aka within four to five weeks – I found a comic about a South Andean deer named Awka and her friends.

…From what I could understand, the South Andean deer are disorganized and scattered, at a disadvantage from the introduced red deer, (better known in North America as the wapiti), who are staying together and who have blocked-off some of the South Andean deer migratory routes and don’t let them pass. Balrog and Gandalf the Grey so understand – been there, done that, ripped the mountains of Moria asunder – where were we?

Ah yes, the deer wars. Some of Awka’s family are trapped on the other side of the red deer blockade and cannot get through – supposedly, because we are never introduced to them at all. Instead, we get flashbacks and the like, as Awka messes with the red deer herd by being the absolute worst. Pause.

Here is the thing. In AoS, (especially the initial seasons), in ‘Frozen 2’, in ‘Trolls 2’ and the like we are introduced to the idea that there are few to none deliberate villains, mostly people that misunderstand and the like. That is nothing new, even the Old Norse, (and I am not talking MCU here), had a saying that amounted to, like, ‘Even a hero had their flaw and a villain isn’t all bad’. That is realistic enough, but when we are dealing with a movie that has a magical snowman (on top of many Norse mythical monsters), or a comic that features talking deer, realism isn’t up there, is it? Tolkien’s LotR trilogy, in particular, was really clear-cut – there are the bad guys, and here are the good guys, no one is in the middle…and there are racist overtones, even though his fanbase, (such as David Day), try to deny it.

By contrast, Mr. Martin’s ASOIAF series never really has purely good or evil characters, (let us leave Brienne out of it). As a result, both in GoT and in the novels, ASOIAF became something of a morass to wade through, as alliances are made and broken, everyone is soldering on – and the unquestionably evil Night King, a fusion of Sauron and the Witch-King of Angmar, (aka the Nazgul #1), is leading an army of White Walkers and the Walking Death onto the living. To Mr. Martin, it seems, humanity is a morass – but we’ll have to hope that in his final books, he’ll show how Westeros defeats the Night King – if they defeat him; plus the GoT version was extremely dissatisfying to its’ fanbase, but we’ve talked about this before… Back to Awka?

…With Awka and the rest of her South American comic, it is the same thing – the author/illustrator is doing their best to depict everyone as well-rounded characters, and as a result, it is extremely hard to root for Awka sometimes, and she is still the main character.

Pause. Modern mass media, such as comics, TV series and movies may try to get rid of outright evil (and outright good?) characters, but that will never happen, because not all characters are equal and because conflict, (outright or otherwise) is still the main plot motor, so good & evil are still a part of media world, and for main characters in any fictional plot, they are especially important; I’m not sure if I’ll be rooting for Awka to succeed or even continuing to follow the comic, but I felt that the above had to be said. What else?

…I confess that I wanted to talk to you about bison today. Why? Because of yaks. You see, there are two species in the bison genus – the American bison that most people know, and the European bison, aka the wisent. The two species of bison are related to each other, naturally, but they look quite different from each other, and the scientists have established that proportionally, the American bison is more closely related to the yaks than to their European relatives.

To elaborate, the ancestral bison species were Eurasian rather than American animals. Then, as they began to go west during the Pliocene-Pleistocene period, they interbred with the yak ancestors and split, eventually, into two species, the American and the European. The American bison consists of several subspecies; the European bison – of only one, (the rest were killed off by humans), but this is how the cookie crumbles; the American bison is more closely related to the yak than to the European bison. Bet you that MLP: FiM, which featured both the American bison, (wrongly called buffalo – both bison and buffalo may be bovine mammals, but they are not closely related to each other within the group), and yaks, did not tell you this!..

…Well, I guess that this is it for now – see you all soon!

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