Quarantine entry #2 - March 23

It is the second day of the quarantine, and real life still sucks more than it usually does (obligatory disclaimer, this is). I am still going through the DW episodes; this time I stopped on one of S1’s last episodes – ‘William Wallace vs. Shaka Zulu’. This episode is not prejudiced, just faulty. Why?

Well, for most of the weapons, the two contestants went neck to neck, practically – Wallace’s claymore sword, (used by the Highlander in FH, remember?) wasn’t really superior to Zulu’s sword-like spear, and the Scottish chainmail wasn’t too different or really superior from the African shield.

The ranged weapons – ditto. Zulu had a glorified throwing stick, while Wallace had a ball and a chain combo – neither weapon was very effective.

The mid-range weapons: Wallace had a war hammer, (just as the Shaman in FH does), and Zulu – a battle-axe, (FH’s Hitokiri, I suppose). Both weapons are similar in design and function, neither gets a real edge.

Finally, we get special weapons, and Zulu has a spit of poison. Here where it falls apart for him, as this poison is not really a weapon at all, does not get him any kills, unlike Wallace’s targe and dagger combo. Whatever else you can say about them, they kill, and so Wallace killed Zulu in the episode’s stimulation face-off. It went just under 2 minutes, making it one of the shortest fights in the DW’s entire history – but DW S1 was weird like that, this is why I continued to watch it even in the more formalized S2 & 3 – but we talked about it before. Anything else?

Just one more thing – Wallace’s war hammer, (in real life that is two words, unlike the game franchise, where it is just one), reminded me not only of the Shaman, but also of Robert Baratheon from the Martin-verse.

Here is the thing. I do not care for Cersei, either the novel or the GoT version, but Robert Baratheon was not too sympathetic either. Frankly, I suspect that GM based him on real life Henry VIII, (maybe influenced by Shakespeare’s depiction of that monarch), who used to be a valiant knight and warrior in his youth, but became a tyrant as well as monstrously fat in his later days. The main difference between Henry VIII and his GM counterparts, (there were more than a few of them, including several Targaryens), was that Henry VIII also actively influenced U.K. economics, changed the country from being Catholic to Protestant, (and this trait remained after his death), and was in general a much more active and pro-active king.

Pause. Yeah, if you ever read GM’s books, (especially before his Targaryen love fest), then you would notice that there was little progress, social or otherwise. Yes, ASOIAF/GoT is fantasy, but a relatively realistic one, more so than LotR is, for comparison, and in real life, once people get fed up with how things are made, they try to do their best to change them – even Shakespeare’s plays about English history, (as well as others, such as ‘Coriolanus’, for example), reflect it.

Not so in GM’s novels – the world of Westeros doesn’t change too much, even after losing their dragons and becoming much diminished, Targaryens continue to rule, everyone else – to obey, and nothing changed until that ill-fated tourney, when Rhaegar absconded with Lyanna Stark and jumpstarted the entire Robert’s rebellion. When Robert killed Rhaegar at the Trident, and the Lannisters finished the job at King’s Landing, the world of Westeros did change…and then it stopped. GM doesn’t appear to be too interested in change, the entire ASOIAF novel line – at least until the final seasons of GoT derailed everything – was about the return of Targaryens, as represented by Jon and Dany. Yes, the king would have been a former ranger of the North… I mean, a Night Crow, one of the black-robed folk at the Wall, cough, and the queen wouldn’t have been a virtuous elven maiden, platinum hair and lavender eyes or not, but a much more experienced and jaded woman, (in theory). Instead, however, we got, well, GoT S8, where Jon killed Dany, and the throne went to Bran, even though ‘the Wise and the Crafty shouldn’t rule’, according to the late and lamented Terry Pratchett. Plus, the North did separate from the rest of Westeros – this would be as if Scotland won slash seceded from the rest of the U.K…. wait, are we talking about the real world again?

Back to Westeros and Westeros v. 2, because in real life the U.K. is still united. Everyone was aware, consciously or not, that the last two seasons of GoT went against the grain of GM’s novels, but they were still aired anyhow, and GM endured it…why?

Because whereas now the hoopla associated with GoT and GM has noticeably died down, back then, right after GoT was finished, there were a lot of plans for sequels, spin-offs, prequels, what have you – and GM was probably going to get at least a part of the financial plenty from all of this bounty. But! If he confronted the HBO and co. regarding his disapproval etc. regarding the last GoT seasons, his relationship with HBO and co. would have deteriorated no matter what the outcome was, and then he would’ve had problems, especially if GoT was cancelled, and it would be his fault, even if just in part. GM may look like someone atypical, but he certainly loves his money, I would bet!

…And yes, people are aware by now that his views regarding his fans are not very flattering for the fans, but the fact is that GM’s novels are products that people need to buy…at least from his POV. Otherwise, if his works will remain on the shelves, he is in trouble, and since they are, odds are that he will not go to confront HBO, (or didn’t, in the past tense), because GoT and co. are his ‘other’ source of income. Fair enough, especially since by now the world of Westeros does not appear to be coming to the big screens anymore, and GM may be in trouble nevertheless.

Getting back from the real life to Westeros, what about Robert Baratheon? My point is that his war hammer made him an atypical knight from the start – realism or not, GM’s knights fight with swords, and seemingly – only with swords; even such fairly mundane weapons as war hammers, clubs and spears seem to be exotic weapons in their hands. This was not the case in real life; tourney lances aside, so I cannot help but to wonder if Robert did not win at the Trident, because he was wielding an atypical weapon by Westeros’ knightly standard and because he was also atypically large and strong by Westeros’ standards as well. Quite a bit of imagery associated with Robert Baratheon, (and by extension with Gendry, cough), is reminiscent of storms and thunder clouds and of Thor, the Norse thunder god, whose trademark weapons was the war hammer, as practically everyone knows these days. Where was GM going with this? In GoT it went nowhere, save for Arya and Gendry’s relationship, and GM himself is keeping mum, even before the COVID-19 struck.

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

FH: Zealot - July 24

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and your family often makes it worse. Oh, they are trying to make it better, probably, but they make it worse instead, even though it is completely unnecessary.

No, seriously, judge for yourself: in the U.S., Mr. Muller is finally testifying, (or is he testifying again?) and everyone is abuzz, (and is already making new plans in case the testimony doesn’t go the way that they want it to go); in the U.K., Boris Johnson is elected the new PM and plenty of people have ideas as to how this will go – either really bad or really good. He’s rather the Great Britain’s version of the Donald…but USA isn’t calling them out, not after their ‘original Donald’ opted to open his mouth and start a racist mess of things…until today, now that Mr. Muller is testifying in court, and everything previous is apparently put on hold.

RF, of course, is a breed apart from the West. The initially civilized elections in the Moscow municipal council became the 21^st century version of the pre-1905 Russian revolution; there were two Russian revolutions: the 1917 one, which succeeded, and the 1905 one, which failed…if taken by itself, since it was the precursor and something of a test run for the 1917 revolution, it was more successful.

Yet even the 1905 failed revolution forced everyone in the Russian Empire to realize that something was rotten in the state of Denmark…not that it was enough. Whatever it is that is currently going on in Moscow…we will see. RF always has some disaster or another occurring on its’ territory; there had been a fire at another children’s summer camp, and some sisters have killed their family, literally drowned them in blood, apparently…but we digress. Where were we?

Oh yes, FH has revealed its’ new Viking hero/anti-hero, the Hulda. Admittedly, it is hard to pin down just what has inspired her, but, firstly, she is holding a war hammer, and secondly? There is the imagery of Jormungandr. And Ragnarok.

There are several versions of how to say the name of the Norse World Serpent, so let us call it just the World Serpent from now on, and yes, in the Norse myths it was the arch-nemesis of Thor the Thunder God for reasons unknown. It is featured primarily in three myths. In the first, the original Loki, who was more of a fire giant-god than a frost one, met an ogress, or a witch, or some other dark entity named Angrboda, (but yes, there are different version of the name again), and together they had three children. One was Hela, (yes, the Hela from the Thor 3 movie), who was humanoid in shape, but was half and half otherwise – alive on one half and dead on the other… or half black and half white… or half red and half blue… the accounts vary.

The second was Fenrir or Fenris wolf, the biggest, baddest wolf of them all, one who needed an impossible chain to hold him, who bit off the arm of Tyr, another Norse god, who was the son of Odin and a brother of Thor… and who was going to swallow Odin whole during Ragnarok, while yet another son of Odin that wasn’t Thor was going to kill him.

And finally, there was the World Serpent, a sea snake so large that it encircled the world in the Norse cosmology, dwarfing everyone, god and mortal, dragon and giant… you get the picture. It lived on the bottom of the sea and never ventured onto land… supposedly. And then, one day – and here we come to the second story – the giant-god of the sea, Aegir, had a party for the Asgardians, but did not have a cauldron big enough to make mead for all of them. The only cauldron big enough for that belonged to a giant named Hymir, who was Tyr’s maternal grandfather and who was not on the best terms with the Asgardians.

An aside: Odin’s own grandma was a frost giant’s daughter; whereas the Greeks made some sort of a division – here are the Olympian gods, who are not Titans, and here are the Titans who are not the Olympian gods, though the latter are their descendants, but the two groups are separate, the Norse didn’t. Asgardians freely intermarried with frost and stone giants, though the fire giants, led by Surt or Surtr were not a part of it, and so it was really hard to make sense of their feud with the giants – it felt more like a great big family quarrel than some sort of a life-and-death struggle that went down in the Ragnarok proper – but we digress.

Anyhow, Thor and Tyr came to Jotunheim, the land of the giants, and Tyr’s grandfather took Thor fishing, and Thor caught the World Serpent on his hook – intentionally, most versions say. He began to pull it out of the water, when the line snapped, or Tyr’s grandfather intentionally cut it, because, hey, the World Serpent, and so Jormungandr escaped. Thor thrown Mjolnir at it, and the hammer that never missed scored a hit, but the World Serpent survived that experience – this time.

And finally, we have the big Ragnarok face-off, as Thor and his reptilian arch-nemesis went at it, well, hammer and tongs. Eventually, Thor would break the Serpent’s skull with his hammer, and die from its’ venomous breath – in the Norse myths, all dragons are venomous, just as the real-life snakes from which they are derived. Even the most infamous dragon of them all, Fafnir, (or Fafneir), was toxic – but we are not talking about him. The point is that unlike Hela, who was a deity of the Norse, (and so was Loki himself, of course), neither the World Serpent nor Fenrir were – they were monsters. By combining Thor’s war hammer with the World Serpent, the FH team combined the incompatible, and made something of a mess of symbolism, again.

…Yes, FH is a game. Yes, it appears to be more interested in symbols and symbolism and symbolic representations of the samurais, knights, Vikings – and the ancient Chinese, the Wu Ling team. However, Hulda somehow feels especially experimental and strange. Vortiger – we have discussed before – is Vortigern, a controversial – but not necessarily evil – character in the Arthurian legends; he is a Black Prior, which only confuses things further. Sakura is Hitokiri, which is an executioner. Marvel comics aside, in real life executioners were hated in Middle Ages, they wore their hoods to protect their anonymity so that they would not be further boycotted in real life, and they were certainly not fighters or warriors, especially in their depictions. And Hulda? She is a zealot.

No, she is not a minor villain from the Marvel comics, who fought Magneto and died for his trouble; nor is she a part of a different group of Marvel villains, who work for the dread Dormammu and might be really just variant Mindless Ones; FH defines her more as a ‘real life’ religious zealot, so let’s talk about that.

In real life, the zealot movement was established by Jews in the 1^st century A.D.; they sought to incite their fellow Jews to arms, to rebel against the Roman empire and to drive its’ forces out of the Holy Land. That didn’t happen, and actually the Holy Land vanished from the face of Earth until the post-WWII 20^th century…but what does it have to do with the Vikings?

Nothing. FH’s zealot is a completely fictional creation; this character is supposed to cull the weak to reveal the strong in face of the upcoming Ragnarok, and as it was said earlier, the most notable thing about her is the fact that she, (or he, there’s a male version of this character too), seems to be wielding a war hammer.

…Yes, in real life, this is how you write it, to differentiate from Warhammer the game franchise. Unlike games and game-related fiction, the real life war hammer was not widely used; the closest I can remember was in DW S1, where Walter Wallace used it against Shake Zulu’s battle-axe, well – the Zulu Axe, in one of the least satisfying episodes of DW S1 – but again, we digress.

Let us wrap things up. Real life sucks, and your family may make things worse, accidentally or on purpose. In AoS, Lincoln apparently left behind a sister, and Daisy sends her some moneys for some reason or another – to assuage her own conscience, probably. (How big those sums and what is the state of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s finances are one of those things that will be never addressed). And FH continues to haphazardly throw together symbols and images from various aspects of samurai, knight, Viking and ancient Chinese cultures, hoping that they stick.

This is it for now; see you all soon!