Endlings: Thylacine (and the Gorgon) - Nov 10

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so let us talk about Ms. Haynes’ Medusa-based novel? Pause

In truth, I wanted to talk about BB/Endlings ‘Thylacine’ episode, but not unlike what we had with the Florida panther last month, BB/Endlings found their stride: it is dutiful retelling of Wikipedia articles, including the Thylacine one. When the ‘Wild Kratts’ cartoon series had the titular characters travel back in time to see the Thylacine and its’ extinction, it was actually a more derived take – and ‘Wild Kratts’ is a children’s cartoon!.. Where were we?

Here is the thing. Ms. Haynes positions herself as a progressive person, she talks about the Greek myths from a more feminist/feminine P.O.V., but…

…but these days (mid-2020s) it might not be enough. Obviously, kudos to her for not talking smack about other mythological writers, but it does make her essays – about Helen, Medusa, the Amazons – feel rather flat and one-dimensional: they are dutiful retellings of the depictions of the mythical women in the modern or post-Medieval art, writing and sometimes in other media, such as TV series. There also dutiful retellings of the myths of the mythical women in question; they are broken by sarcastic comments (that do not amount to anything and serve to better depict Ms. Haynes as a person), by rhetorical questions (that are not usually followed up), and by the like. One can imagine Ms. Haynes as, say, a university or a college teacher, who is delivering lectures to her class, engaging them in discussion and conversation, trying to make them think about her subject, and largely forgetting about them once they graduate and leave her class behind. There will always be exceptions, of course, but usually the effort behind those exceptions will come from the other people, not her. Ms. Haynes non-fiction book, ‘Pandora’s Jar’, has the same feeling. It is quite informative, of course, but not particularly progressive – or ‘progressive’; in a Protestant/post-Protestant world of the modern Western culture, this can make the difference between eternity (remembrance) and oblivion…

As for her fiction books… ‘A Thousand Ships’ is based on various Greek (and Roman?) plays about what happened during the last days of the Trojan War and what happened after, including the Odyssey and a few other chapters. Here, Ms. Haynes tries something different, such as Penelope’s personal development, but-

-but what can you do, if you are writing a novel (or another piece) based on someone else’s story, such as the Greek literary works and folk myths, and not your own? Most often, one out of the three: you can dutifully retell the myth such as it is, (Mr. Pullman did in his book of the Greek myths), you can write something that is entirely your own, (aka your own work, which can be argued pro and contra, but it’s yours), or you can re-tell the original story (for example Perseus’ and Medusa’s) with just a few different tweaks ‘behind the scenes’, a sort of crypto-history, put otherwise. In addition, this is how Ms. Haynes’ novels feel like – dutiful re-telling of the traditional myths, with a few comments – sarcastic, poignant, etc., it doesn’t matter – scattered here and there; they don’t amount to anything but to make her novels stand out from the rest and make them more sellable. It is not a bad strategy, it certainly is sensible, but, again, it makes her books, novels and otherwise, a one-hit wonder, forgettable quite easily.

… ‘Stone Blind’ is the telling of Medusa, Perseus, and Athena; Ms. Haynes is being sympathetic towards Medusa, making Perseus a coward, and the decapitated head of the Gorgon eventually petrify Athena, who thus finds peace in death. This is actually quite clever, but the mild, respectful, (and sometimes sarcastic) language of the novel wears away any controversial bits, making the readers of ‘Stone Blind’ feel stone cold towards the novel’s characters. The Gorgons are not bad. Athena is cold. Perseus is a coward, apparently. So on, but currently there is plenty of fan works that drive the same point home; in ‘Thousand Ships’ Ms. Haynes made Penny the Amazon queen suicidal – that is something else, but we’ll talk about it some other time. What about ‘Endlings’?

Same thing that goes down with Ms. Haynes, really. The first episode, about the passenger pigeons was intriguing and thought provoking because there was talk about bringing the avian back (and we talked about it). The second was also interesting, because of the silphium’s ambiguity, (and we talked about it too). However, the next episode – the Florida panther – and this episode – the Thylacine – are straightforward: the pumas are dying out in Florida because (insert your reason here), and the Thylacine is gone because (insert your reason here II). Maybe it disappeared in the second half of the 20^th century, not the first, but it is still gone, and it cannot be brought back (because humans don’t want to, apparently – is it so much harder to bring back the Thylacine than the dire wolf or the giant moa?). Aye, ‘Endlings’ are supposed to be sad – but sad because of the inevitable extinction, not because they are just that depressive and simply-made… Ah well, this is real life. It sucks, remember?

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

Endlings: Florida Panther - Oct 28

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, which is why I wanted to talk about Riordan and Oshiro’s ‘Court of the Dead’ novel (CoD), when I realized that it was not that different from the Florida panthers. Say what?

This week, ‘Bizarre Beasts’ released the episode about the Florida panthers – the wild cats, not the sports’ team and, again, it is a straightforward retelling of the Wiki page, plus an audio quote of Ms. Betty Osceola, an important person among the Miccosukee Native Americans. She is talking, to nobody’s surprise, about the Florida puma, and-

-And, yes, the obligatory statement: the North American ‘panther’ is another name for the puma, Puma concolor; it is only a distant relative to the ‘true’ panthers – the jaguar and the leopard; its’ closest relatives are the cheetah and the jaguarondi, a little-known wild cat that doesn’t look anything like the jaguar. Pause.

…All cats resemble one another; the differences between a tiger, a puma, a bobcat, and a housecat are mainly due to their sizes; there are few specialists as there are among the bovids, for example, or the rodents. This allows the felines to be very successful carnivores, and the puma is one of them; it is still the top feline carnivore in North America west of Mississippi. In the east, it is another story, as only the state of Florida still has any in the wild. This group of pumas was shrinking fast, due to inbreeding, so the U.S. government brought several pumas from Texas to fix this – and they did. But because the Florida wild themselves are shrinking, the pumas there are still dying-out and people need to fix this situation – just watch the BB episode for yourself. Stop.

So, here is the situation – after the series’ premiere that talked about the potential recreation of the passenger pigeon (done by a completely different narrator), and the dodgy episode about the dodgy silphium plant, BB hit its stride – the Florida panther episode is straightforward and simple, with nary a problem; it is delivered in a touching, poignant manner that is supposed to resonate with its’ audience – and perhaps it does. Only, is it enough to make the latter care enough to do something, to be affected by the BB delivery? That is the question.

On the other hand, we have ‘The Court of the Dead’ novel, where Will and Nico (a homosexual WASP couple) team-up with Frank and Hazel (a heterosexual POC couple) to help many monsters who don’t want to be evil, defeat a group of villains that are quite reminiscent for J-Ro’s Ministry of Magic in her HP books. These days she is keeping quiet (for her own reasons), but Mr. Riordan is going full speed ahead!..

Of course, he might not have a choice – when he stopped featuring sexual minorities and the like in his YA novels (‘The Trials of Apollo’ series), the price for his books fell to a flat $10-$15 dollars a book, that is very cheap by modern standards, and perhaps even a financial loss. Therefore, if Mr. Riordan wants to stay in the green (and work for Disney), he has to toe the party line, and if not, then just look at Gina Carano – she did not, and so she is gone.

Therefore, again, Mr. Riordan continues to release progressive and forwards-facing books; the problem here is that the society may not care; these days, the Americans are highly individualistic, and care only about what they think; a book, no matter how well-written, is not enough on its’ own to change their opinion – you need federal support to do so. In the U.S. In particular, this is a chancy and an unlikely thing to have or to manifest, and so that is that. ‘The Court of the Dead’ remains an inert, almost impotent, almost pointless and unrequired YA novel that does not do anything, or does not affect anyone, just as the ‘Endlings’ series of BB do – or don’t do. Sad, isn’t it? That is real life, however. It sucks.

This is it for now. See you all soon!

 

Call of the Wild 2020 - Feb 21

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. One’s family makes it worse, and you hate them, you hate them, you hate them forever – onto the 30^th generation, onto the 20^th incarnation, and beyond! All hail Lilith and Sammael! …Where were we?

Ah yes, real life sucks, so let us talk about the 2020 ‘Call of the Wild’ film. We have discussed it last year already, when we only had just a teaser to go on, and it was released only this month, (aka February 2020), and what can I say? It is neither ‘Cats-2019’ nor quite as bad as ‘Doolittle-2020’, but it is certainly worse than the ‘Sonic’ movie is, and when you fail to surpass an anthropomorphic extradimensional blue hedgehog (supposedly) creature, then you suck.

Let us elaborate. The ‘Call of the Wild-2020’ movie failed on several levels. One is the CGI – oh, the technical side was done marvellously, we’re talking Cirque du Soleil quality, (a curse upon this abomination for 30 generations, for 20 incarnations!!), but regardless, you can still feel that the dogs are CGI very easily, so there’s that, and that’s a problem: just ‘like ‘White Fang’, the ‘Call of the Wild’ is a dog novel; humans play important roles, even critical ones, but the main characters are dogs and wolves. Considering that the 2020 ‘Call of the Wild’ film had only CGI animals, this means that it put itself at a disadvantage: the non-human characters just do not look real, no matter how authentic they were supposed to be.

The human characters have their own problem. The original novel was written in 1903, when political correctness was unheard-of, and so all of the human characters in ‘Call of the Wild’ were Caucasian, (technically speaking), and except for Mercedes, (played by Karen Gillian in this film) – male. So now, we got the two Quebecois mail workers played by Omar Sy, (an Afro-American) and Cara Gee, (an Ojibway woman). This is very politically correct and modern, but, sadly, ‘Call of the Wild’ seems to be one of those pieces that does not do transition to ‘modern’ too well in general. The original novel, just as its’ companion ‘White Fang’ was very, well, manly. The 2020 movie is anything but, and seems to be going for a more balanced, modern, politically correct approach – and instead got a pale imitation of the original novel.

Yes, Han Solo… I mean, Indiana Jones… I mean, Mr. Ford did his best to liven the movie, and may be its’ redeeming feature, period. (Chewbacca mutters and tells Han that you should never have a dog do a Wookie’s job, and can we try it again, in space, this time? Han points out that that is what the SW4 movie is for. Chewie sniffs and hugs his best friend. The end). However, you have to admit that his current incarnation – John Thornton – is rather manly himself, (possibly for the greater contrast with Dan Stevens’ Hal, who looks ridiculous in an unattended manner by the movie’s standards). The conclusion itself is also different, pause.

In the original novel, Thornton and his dogs, (except for Buck, of course), are killed by Native Americans, and in response Buck teams up with the local wolf pack and begins to kill them instead – this is how the novel ends. Here, the Thornton arc is resolved in a different manner, and Buck teams-up with the wolves in part because he gets into a relationship with a local she-wolf, black in color. Apocryphal Lilith much?

Now, about wolves – we talked about them before, when we discussed the AFO episode ‘Puma vs. Grey Wolf”, and the punch line here is that wolves aren’t just stereotypical grey color, they can range from white to black, why the great Audubon himself made a couple of paintings that featured precisely the white and black color morphs of the wolf, (he also made paintings of the so-called Inuit dog and Indian dog, but we won’t get into this here), but that’s it. Wolves may be of any color, but they are still the common or grey wolf, Canis lupus, the end. Why give Buck’s love interest an atypical fur color? It is anyone’s guess.

Speaking of love interests… first, Cara Gee? Is she pregnant in real life? If you look at the interview clip on the IGN YouTube channel, you see that she is caressing her stomach and the camera is angled thusly as to keep it out of the view. Maybe I am overreading this, but it still looks weird. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if news of her pregnancy and/or childbirth hit TMZ or something similar.

Back to dogs and wolves… Yes, Buck is a hybrid dog to begin with, even in the original novel, (a St. Bernard-Scotch Collie mix), which makes himself something of a hybrid, which makes it kind of doubtful that he and a wolf would have viable offspring. St. Bernards are a derived dog breed, they are some of the biggest dogs around, and they are cases of gigantism from natural P.O.V., which may create issues if they are released in the wild. Yes, ‘Call of the Wild’ is fiction, a fairy tale, (sort of), but it can be noted that in the original novel Buck is not interested in any female dogs or wolves whatsoever, and there is no romance at all in ‘Call of the Wild’, (whereas in ‘White Fang’ the situation is different). Here, in the 2020 movie, the situation is different, and not in a good way – compared to the book, the movie feels diminished, a disappointment. Yes, political correctness is important, especially now, when the coronavirus, (yes, I know that it got renamed, but let’s not get too distracted here), is bringing the worst in humanity again, including the anti-Asians racism, (though apparently in Ukraine the native people are turning upon each other instead – how are they better than their Russian cousins, are again? That is right, they are not, apparently. Ouch!), but sometimes it just does not work, period. In ‘Frozen 2’, the socio-political agenda did not work, but it was still a good film, just different from ‘Frozen 1’.

…Not unlike the ‘Dark Phoenix-2019’, this version of ‘Call of the Wild’ just is not a good film, and political correctness just makes it worse, period. It may not be as bad as real life, (cough the coronavirus cough), but it is not very good either, both because of the CGI dogs (and scenery) and not. Go and see ‘Sonic’ instead.

…This is it for now, see you all soon!

AFO: Cougar vs. grey wolf - Sep 20

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. In case of Canada’s current PM, Justin Trudeau, this is because he has worn blackface/brownface in the past, and now it came back to bite him in the ass. The photos really show him in an unflattering light, but are they causing him to lose?

Well, if he loses, those photos will certainly be one of the reasons, but not the only one. As compared to the U.S., where each new presidential election is a bigger show than the lost one, (a tendency that became really obvious since Bill Clinton became impeached), Canadian elections… are not. Maybe it is because Canada is still subjected to the U.K., whose queen (or king) can always interfere, overtly or covertly, unlike the U.S., which is its’ own, independent country, but another reason is that Canada and its’ politicians tend not to blame anyone else when things go wrong in their lives; Hell, Trudeau has already apologized for those photos and this approach seems to be working – certainly, at least some people are turning onto Mr. Scheer for failing to apologize in his turn – it happens. Where were we?

Oh yes, someone has pointed out that when in the past I was doing my going-through of the AFO episode list, I forgot to cover the ‘cougar vs. wolf’ episode, so I might as well do it for closure…

Right. So, in one corner we had the cougar, (also known as puma and mountain lion), and in the other – the grey wolf. (As opposed to its’ more ambiguous cousin the red wolf, I suppose). The grey wolf lost. Why?

…Because the wolf is not an individualistic fighter, but a team one. ‘The Velvet Claw’ series and the companion book are somewhat outdated by 2019, especially when it comes to taxonomy of carnivores, but they are correct in that the cats are individualistic fighters, and the dogs are not. The puma, the lynx, the tiger, and the domestic cat have their differences, but even at a first glance a complete amateur of zoology/biology will I.D. them as relatives, and their lifestyles are very similar too. The only outliers among the cat clan are the African lions and the African cheetahs, (for a while, there were lions and cheetahs in Asia too, but now the cheetahs seem to be extinct there, and the lions are doing barely better. Sad, this is), because they do live in social groups – the cheetahs in family coalitions, the lions are more derived. Why this is so, is another question, but for now let us focus on the fact that the wild cats, small and big, tend to be solitary. And dogs?

This is where it gets blurry. Actually, most wild dog species are solitary, behaving as, say, the red fox does – we’re talking small carnivores that live on their own or in family groups; some of them, such as the raccoon dog of Far East, (initially), and the maned wolf of South America, can look very exotic, but their lifestyles are similar. And then there are the pack hunters.

Who are they? They are the domestic dog, the wolf, (grey and red), the coyote, the jackals, also – the African wild dog, and the dhole of Asia. This is it, right?

…No, because there’s also the bush dog of South America; proportionally, it may be related closest to the aforementioned maned wolf, but whereas the maned wolf looks like a wolf, or a dog, on stilts, the bush dog looks like a mix between a basset hound and an otter; it doesn’t even bark, more like chirps and squeaks, and it can swim and attack its’ prey items in water, as well as on land. A very atypical dog, but then again, South America has plenty of atypical carnivores, period – but we digress.

Such outliers as the bush dog aside, most pack hunting dogs look the same – streamlined, long-legged, long-muzzled, big-eared and long-tailed… built not for strength, but for speed and endurance. These carnivores evolved to act in a pack, overwhelming their prey through numbers, and using their jaws to tear and rip it to pieces, sometimes even eating it while the prey animal is still alive. They are hunters rather than fighters, especially when it comes to other carnivores, such as big cats and bears, although when it comes to dominance fights within the packs…they are ritualized, actually, and usually are resolved through shows of strength… and then…

Well, there is a video clip on YouTube that shows a wolf pack taking down a coyote. While externally wolves and coyotes are similar, wolves are larger and bulkier than coyotes are… although now scientists know that they do interbreed with each other as well as the domestic dog species, creating such animals as the eastern wolf, the eastern coyote, and the red wolf. The last species may actually be a species, having evolved into taxonomic and biological independence from both grey wolves and coyotes, but we digress. Wolves have evolved to function within a social unit – their pack, with which they bring down their prey items, from rabbits and hares to white-tailed deer, elk, and even the American bison. On their own, wolves are not very effective, as compared to the great cats and bears.

…Now a puma, technically, is not a ‘great cat’ – it is a ‘small cat’: it cannot roar, it can mew like a domestic cat, (or a bobcat), does, and while the jaguar, (can be twice as heavy as the puma) dominates the parts of the New World in which it lives, the puma does not. It can break even with an American black bear, (sometimes), but a grizzly (or brown) bear overpowers it more often than not, and the same goes for the jaguar, (which is unquestionably the bigger and more powerful animal of the two), and even wolf packs. Pause. ‘Packs’ is the key word here. A wolf pack can stand up not just to the puma, but also to the American black bear, (the grizzly/brown bear is a tougher question to answer), but a solitary wolf is no match for even the puma – which is precisely what has happened down in the CGI simulation of that AFO episode. While the rest of the carnivores are a mixed bag, (though, again, the ‘jaguar vs anaconda’ episode was something else), solitary pack hunters, (it even sounds as an oxymoron), are fair game and just are not… up to their best game, (pardon the tautology here), when facing-off with anyone by themselves. The grey wolf just couldn’t win by itself, especially against a mountain lion, which might be small and light by ‘great cat’ standards, but it still packs a punch well above its’ weight. The ‘puma vs. grey wolf’ episode was actually good, because it was honest and straightforward – whatever else you can say about AFO, at least there weren’t any inconsistences and partisanship as there was, (sort of), in DW, but that is another story…

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