A lot of it is pretty standard conversion story stuff, as well, I suppose…

I’ve seen it suggested that, like a lot of those sorts of Christian conservatives, he carries a lot of guilt he doesn’t want to deal with and isn’t keen to acknowledge. That seems to me, perhaps, the most reasonable explanation for where this all might be coming from.

It very clearly is. Just… Everything he says the book is supposed to be is incompatible with that approach.

It really is. But of course, some of the women ended up as mothers because of it, which is clearly the role they’re meant for, so who can really say…

Great heroes changing the world 👍
Ordinary people working to make things better 😡

Haven’t read the thing, but from what I’ve heard it has a bone deep commitment to great man history, literalized through all that light nonsense. Daelus might’ve been bad, but he’s still a great man and a natural authority and shouldn’t be put to the standard of us regular mortals.

Watching those films has really made me want to raise my game.

Honestly, as someone currently trying to do ’wandering hero’ type stuff, the Zatoichi series is frustrating in an ”oh, so this is how good you can make a character like that” sort of way.

A picture of a majestic humpback whale leaping from the seas with the caption “humpback whales are forming super-groups”, rather than simply admire the wonder of nature I am making a poor quality music gag

This is why whale punk had to happen

Ah, Shad… It sure is a choice to go: ”I’m going to write a dark story about how even the most heinous and murderous tyrant can be redeemed. Also, the heinous tyrant is just, like, the coolest guy, who can beat you with a flick of his finger, and all the girls love him, because he’s just so great.”

social media is the reality tv of the internet

This is so cool!

Well, this doesn’t seem like a good idea.

The central question isn’t so much ’who did it’ as ’why is there a guy downtown who only hires redheads and has them sitting around copying the encyclopedia’.

If you want to do a good, strictly formula Holmes series, the key elements are odd details and strange circumstances that lead to the uncovering of some manner of conspiracy.

Yeah. My objection to Elementary as a Holmes adaptation has always been that it’s a rote, murder-of-the-week police procedural at heart, and the Holmes stories simply weren’t.

Modern People: Haha those old movies with married couples in twin beds!

Also Modern People: The grape suspect was unalived when he drew a pewpew…

As far as I can tell, being too comic book is an issue with a lot of modern Trek.

I think the world could use more episodic series that seek to deliver the same basic experience, over and over again, and to do it as well as possible. It’s a format that offers a great deal of possibility, yet not even TV works that way, these days.

To the degree he does develop, he does so in the context of a specific situation.

The demand that protagonists undergo a clean change over the course of a story often ends up making them more shallow. The fact that Zatoichi will remain the same at the end of a film as he was at the start opens up room to explore him further, without necessarily having to take him anywhere.

When I say ’miles ahead’, I don’t mean of the MCU, but of American franchise films, in general. Their story circles and hero’s journeys end up limiting them quite a bit, when it comes to actually exploring their characters.

Probably helps that they’re aimed at a somewhat narrower audience. They don’t have to be everything to everyone.

A bit looser in plotting, of course, but in terms of characterization, they’re miles ahead, even though the characters don’t really grow from film to film.

There’s nothing necessarily bad about that sort of a conveyor belt approach, either. Between the 60’s and 90’s, the japanese film industry put out about 25 Zatoichi films and 50 Tora-san films, sometimes at a rate of three films a year, and they’re mostly very good.

The price of this was that their individual films could only be so good, but that’s not much of a problem when every other studio is busy tripping over their own feet.

Marvel won the culture not because it was the best studio around, but because it was the only one that could promise consistent quality.

It’s tempting to say that the main reason the MCU conveyor belt approach ended up so successful is that Hollywood is just kind of bad at this sort of thing... Also probably true.

The value of art is, at least in part, in the effort put into its production. If people see you’re not putting in the effort to write a good story, they will lose interest.

In the end, it didn’t last, because American businesses resent the notion of having to provide a quality product, will turn everything into a conveyor belt, if they’re able, and never count on the fact that audiences don’t like to be condescended to.