Moon Knight, 'Gods and Monsters' - May 4

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so let us talk about the MK season one finale instead – and it is a jumble.

Ok, no, let’s try again: for a show that aimed at talking about the mysteries of the mind on one hand, and that was flipping between the various settings – a mental institution, U.K., Egypt, and so on – MK was remarkably straightforward and controlled: it was yet another hero’s journey, one that MCU kept under tight control…until the twist at the end… which could be seen a mile away.

…When AoS’ S1 had Ward turned traitor, it worked because it was so unexpected… and nothing gave it away. In MK S1, the appearance of a third personality – Jake Lockley (or whoever) – was choreographed several episodes before the S1 finale. Therefore, when the man – or the personality, whatever – did appear in MK and finished ‘the Harrow job’, no one was surprised. Except maybe for Harrow.

Let us elaborate. In the S1 finale, the Spector and Grant personalities of the titular character have reunited with each other and with Khonshu, and defeated Harrow and Ammit. We have discussed Ammit/Ammut before, and the same goes for Tawaret, who bonded with Layla as well. Again, Tawaret is not a warrior goddess; Ammit/Ammut is not much of a deity period, and I, for one, just could not help but to visualize Mr. Riordan’s ‘Kane Chronicles’, especially the second book, where the Kane siblings, Carter and Sadie, have their confrontation with Khonshu.

Again, I proclaim: MK has not ripped-off ‘Kane Chronicles’ directly; the two media are quite different, not to mention that Layla’s character is quite original… in that that she’s a strong, independent woman who lives in MCU, (the viewers of the 2021 ‘Black Widow’ film) will be so impressed… and who is an avatar of an ancient Egyptian goddess, just as Marc/Steven/Jake is an avatar of an Egyptian god. Pause.

…Khonshu appeared to be quite ready and willing to work with the Jake personality of MK, implying that he himself is just as morally shady and ambiguous as Jake himself is? Not surprising, given Khonshu’s re-appearance in the Marvel comics, when he appeared as an enemy of the Avengers, and while he was not as evil as Mephisto was, (the comic version, as we have not seen a live-action one yet), he certainly was a bad piece of work – and MCU’s Khonshu lives-up to that rep, no problem.

…The problem here is that Layla is still legally married to MK, regardless of which personality is in the driver’s seat, and Jake is quite nasty, by all standards; plus, there is Khonshu playing extra interference, and the god’s moral ambiguity and other personality flaws can easily make an already tense situation worse. What is left?

‘Dr. Strange 2’ is coming out in a couple of days, and people are already divided about it – fair enough. In RL – and did I fail to tell you that it sucks, ‘cause it does – the RF has pissed-off the West by trying to use the Holocaust as its’ justification regarding its’ conflict with Ukraine, and it didn’t work, while overseas, the U.S. will try to use the RF to ty to discredit the Donald again. Can’t say that I blame the latter; if the Donald runs in the elections-2024 and wins – and given the current POTUS’ less than stellar performance here, it could happen – if the Donald wins, then the rest of the Western world can freely tell America to shove-off and sort itself, because this sort of political unpredictability gets very tiring very fast – but we digressed.

…The final face-off between Ammit/Ammut and Khonshu is reminiscent of the showdown between Set, (possessed secretly by Apop), and Horus, in the first book of the ‘Kane Chronicles’, and here I have to talk about Ammit again – not only her/their deification by MCU is absolute fiction, their depiction of the ‘new’ deity is highly reminiscent of Sobek instead.

More precisely, Ammit/Ammut was a Chimera: hippo in the back, lion in the front, and a crocodile head to cap it all. Sobek, on the other hand, was depicted as a crocodile-headed human, (or a crocodile), nothing more, and yes, he was a proper god, a warrior and a protector, (among other things). To conflate him and Ammit (Ammut) was, and is, just wrong, it is cultural appropriation at its’ stupidest worst.

…Whereas Layla’s current evolution into Tawaret’s representative smacks of copyright infringement instead: her new duds are just excessively similar to what WW wore in the WW84 film. Tawaret is a hippo goddess of fertility, (among other things), so why the slimming get-up? …Oh, wait; it is Disney/MCU, never mind. When money is not involved, Disney is certain to play it safe; and when it is… well; we will just have to see what, and how, the fight between Disney and the Republicans in the state of Florida will go. Did I not mention that the real life sucks?

…Getting back to the Egyptian myths and mythos… there were several falcon-associated deities in there, but they tended to be male, because they were associated with the pharaoh, (who were overwhelmingly male themselves, cough); the most famous are Ra, Horus, and their fusion, Horus-Ra – the Egyptian myths could be quite confusing on their own right, (which may be why WW84’s creative team tried to go with the Mesoamerican imagery instead), but we digress.

…No, we are not, not really. The final official judgement on the MK S1 is out, but mine is that it is one part reworked Mr. Riordan’s ‘Kane Chronicles’, one part MCU attempt to tackle serious issues, (mental issues in this case), one part MCU sticking to what they know best – i.e. entertaining people, and all of this is wrapped-up into an ‘independent’ MCU series, which takes place separate from the rest of the MCU. The end result is something that you can see for yourself, and I will take my leave of you now.

See you all soon!

Moon Knight, series premiere - March 30

 

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, hence why I kept on down low for several months now. However, I have come back, (and with a new haircut), and I feel like discussing something new for the moment.

The problem is, what do I want to discuss? Given my blog’s latest tendencies, people might assume that I want to talk about MCU’s ‘Moon Knight’ premiere, ‘The Goldfish Problem’. Fair enough, but for the moment there’s nothing to discuss: MCU has made a wide choice by making ‘Moon Knight’ separate from the rest of MCU – for the moment – but it does leave us rather bare-handed and flat-footed as to where to go from here; so far, there’s nothing, except…

Except for Ammit, also known as Ammut, (and Ahemait, apparently). As a matter of fact, she was an Egyptian deity, but the thing is that the ancient Egyptians did not worship her/it; instead, Ammut was an underling of Anubis, who was the divine judge of their afterlife, and if an ancient Egyptian was found to be unworthy, Ammut would it his heart, and the ancient Egyptian would be ‘dead a second time’, according to the official sources. As such, the ancient Egyptians did not worship Ammut, and in the religion of mainly animal-headed deities, Ammut was a completely bestial chimera, with the head of a crocodile, the main and the forequarters of a lion, and the hindquarters of a hippopotamus: whereas the Greek Chimera was just three random animals jumbled together, the Egyptian Ammut personified three of the deadliest animals known to the ancient Egyptian culture and society. Neat, but she/it still was not worshiped… unlike in MCU. That is not a problem, actually, but a while back there was an article about how the team Moon Knight criticized Gal Gadot and Patty Jenkins as to how they handled the Egyptian angle in WW1984, calling their approach… retrograde and backwards, basically. The irony here is that MCU seems to be treating the ancient Egyptian mythology very similarly, especially when you look at the episode’s monster.

Let us roll back. At the episode’s finale, the show’s main villain, Arthur Harrow, have conjured up some sort of a demon creature with a humanoid body and the head-skull of a jackal, (for simplicity’s sake, let’s treat it as such). Well, given the strong influence of the ‘Mummy’ trilogy (of the late 1990s and the early 2000s) in the monster’s depiction and actions, I feel that MCU have repeated the trilogy’s confusion and conflation of Anubis and Set.

…If there are people who are not too versed in the ancient Egyptian myths, then while Anubis was the divine judge of the ancient Egyptian underworld, Set was a god of evil instead; the two are depicted similarly – Anubis has the head of a jackal, whereas Set has the head of… a Set beast or a sha, a creature that hasn’t been fully identified yet, (though some people associate it with the saluki, an ancient dog breed; the fact that Set was also Anubis’ father in the ancient Egyptian canon doesn’t help things either. Still, the ancient Egyptians had no problem in keeping the two gods apart, and they did not consider Set wholly bad; he was one of the strongest lieutenants of Ra, the sun god, and regularly helped Ra with fighting Apep, the chthonic demon-snake of the ancient Egyptian myths. More precisely, Rick Riordan got the facts down flat in his ‘Kane Chronicles’ trilogy, and since Mr. Riordan is associated with Disney just as the MCU is, there’s no reason as to why MCU had to conflate the two gods and throw Ammut/Ammit into the mix as well. I wonder as to how they will treat Khonshu the moon god now…

Did we digress, or rather ramble? Well yes, we have. In my defence, it has been a while since I wrote in my blog and I have a lot under my belt, but an article entry about the ‘Moon Knight’ series’ premiere isn’t it, sadly. Therefore, I am ending my rant for now.

See you all soon (hopefully)!

 

Pre-New Year Rant - Dec 26

And so, 2016 is almost coming to an end. Odds are, we will be celebrating New Year in the USA, where I will not be able to regularly access the Internet, most likely, so first, let me wish everyone a happy New Year beforehand.

Secondly, let us wish good luck and good riddance to 2016. With less than a week to go, we had a major airplane crush in Russia, (no survivors), death of George Michael in the U.K., and the fallout between U.S. and Israel in the U.N. The last is particularly WTF-worthy: throughout its existence, Obama’s administration, (and the man himself), was very slow-mo. Now, with less than a month left, it, including Obama itself, is trying to compensate for 8 years of missed chances and opportunities, by running around like some crazy chicken making one mess after another. (The only thing different between now and then is that now Obama is making his usual snafus at a breakneck speed, rather than slowly, as he did back then). Either way, I feel sorry for Obama; I am not the biggest fan of the Donald, but I can see why the Americans have voted for the latter: the man is an unknown entity, while Hillary would have just continued Obama’s plotlines and strategies, and the Americans had enough of this for the last 8 years.

…The problems is that Obama himself just continued the strategies of the Republican president George Bush Jr. in those last 8 years, so regardless of what the president-elect has promised has electorate, there is no guarantee that things will be fundamentally different after January 20^th, 2017. People want variety, but they also want stability, and democracy is not very stable, (just ask the ancient Greeks – in Sparta they invented communism instead). With the election of Trump, the American society has once again put the plebeians/proletariat against the patricians/elite, and now both sides must figure out where to go from here. In Ancient Rome, it can be seen even in plays of Shakespeare – ‘Coriolanus’, ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘Anthony and Cleopatra’ – this conflict brought the end to the Republic, and paved way to the Empire. George Lucas, your Star Wars franchise says hi to the real world…maybe.

SW, incidentally, have developed its own issues: they do not know how to move forwards, now that the old canon has been declared apocrypha and redubbed ‘Star Wars: Legends’ instead. SW7 was very good, but it heavily relied on SW4 in terms of the script; ‘Rogue One’ is even better, but it is still set in the past, in the realm of the movies 4 through 6, (and it isn’t much different from some SW novels set in the ‘Legends’ universe. Still better than the real life U.S. politics, though).

Back in real life, there are not any breakthroughs or major shifts of the happy variety; in my own life…ditto. The TV and the like? Well, we have to look forwards the rest of ‘The Librarians’ S3. They seem to have conflated Horus and Ra – or confused him, but so did the ancient Egyptians. Ra was a sun god and the creator of the ancient Egyptian world. Horus was the brother and/or son of Isis and Osiris, (and just a brother of several other Egyptian gods); he was more of a war god instead. But! Both of them had the falcon as their sacred animal. Both of them had solar qualities in their divine portfolios. And! For a while, the ancient Egyptians worshipped both of them in the figure of Ra-Horakhty, so the differences between Ra and Horus are not important. What is important, (relatively speaking), that in S3, ‘The Librarians’ are faced with Apep, a snake-demon of darkness and night, and they are bringing a magical artefact of a sun god, (or the sun as a god) to challenge him. Frankly, they could have done the Greek version with Apollo and Python instead – it would be really similar, and as the S3 episode with the oracle has shown, they are keeping/have kept it in mind already.

…But still, this cavalier attitude towards the Egyptian mythology is grating. Rick Riordan and his novels were able to keep it straight; this really bad movie, ‘Gods of Egypt’, was able to keep it straight; so why ‘The Librarians’ cannot? Who knows…?

Then we have ‘For Honor’ game, by Ubisoft. It had appeared earlier in 2016, very exciting, but with flaws. Yet it continues to develop, and so far, it has appeared better than even before – not just with the new characters, but even a new game plan, that of Apollyon the warlord, who has to be stopped with plenty of melee fighting, maybe ranged too.

No, seriously, so far in all the game simulations, the combat was melee – but in the Apollyon promo, there are bows and arrows too, as well as combat-trained animals, maybe? Wolves and at least one war elephant… This game is shaping up to be really exciting, believe it!

The mention of war elephants reminds me of DW – I have been rewatching some of its episodes, the last one being ‘Ming Warrior vs. Musketeer’, which showed DW at its best. The hosts were unprejudiced; the tests showed the relative weaknesses and strengths of the various weapons, and the combat simulation was well orchestrated and interesting. The lack of prejudice really showed, too, as opposed to such S3 episode as ‘Hernan Cortez vs. Ivan the Terrible’, for example. For the first two seasons, DW was a good show, and then in S3 it went downhill so rapidly, that DW got cancelled – no funding, no staff, no anything. Even AoS has done better than DW – it is in its’ fourth season, remember?

…Mind you, for a while probably the entire MCU had problems: not only Luke Mitchell had left, but Jaimie Alexander (Sif) and Hayley Atwell (Peggy Carter) did, as well as who knows whom else. However, MCU – including AoS – survived. ‘Agent Carter’ did not…

Speaking of TW, a new show – ‘Riverdale’ – is coming to the screens in 2017. It is based on the characters from ‘Archie’ comics, but-

On one hand, Archie and his friends are very flexible. There were crossovers with the Predator movie franchise, the Walking Dead TV series, the Ramones’ music group, the Marvel comics (such as the Punisher, who might be getting his own TV series in MCU, BTW), etc. The ‘Riverdale’ adaptation – a soap opera/drama/mystery/etc. – is not very different. But-

On the other hand, ‘Archie’ was very demanding and particular when it came to its’ mark/brand/whatever. It generally took down the smaller folk who tried to use them for its’ own game, but when it came to someone more powerful – like the Marvel comics – it generally backed down first. Now, when faced with the CW and the ‘Archie’-based show, it seems to have reached a compromise with them: ‘Riverdale’ will keep the ‘Archie’-based character names, but the trademarks and everything else? It will probably something separate from ‘Archie’ comics instead. This is how ‘the Cursed Child’ works, after all. It is still a fanfic, but Ms. Rowling endorsed it at least to a point, for a part of the profits at least. Everyone got happy and we will have to see how ‘Riverdale’ works in 2017.

This is the end of this rant, and for now? Have a happy 2017!

PS: Here is a pallid vector ogrekin based on the new ‘Villain Codex’ rules:

OGREKIN (HALF-OGRE) CR 4

XP 600

Male human ogrekin fighter 2

CE Medium humanoid (giant)

Int +5; Senses low-light vision; Perception +1

DEFENSE

AC 16, touch 11, flat-footed 13 (+1 Dex, +6 natural)

hp 25 (2d10+10)

Fort +7, Ref +1, Will +1

Defensive Abilities bravery +1, pale rebirth

OFFENSE

Speed 30 ft.

Melee shortspear +7 (1d6+9 plus disease), bite +2 (1d4+4 plus disease)

Special Attacks disease

STATISTICS

Str 23, Dex 13, Con 22, Int 8, Wis 14, Cha 6

Base Atk +2; CMB +7; CMD 18

Feats Cleave, Improved Initiative, Iron Will, Power Attack

Skills Climb +12, Swim +12

Languages Giant

SQ deformities (oversized maw, weak mind)

ECOLOGY

Environment any

Organization solitary or family (2–6)

Treasure NPC gear (spear, other treasure)