Michael Offutt's Blog, page 66

Aquaman is a hated character among my nerd friends so I bludgeoned them with puns when the five minute trailer dropped.

Last week, the five minute trailer for Aquaman dropped, and it got me really excited to see it. But it was also a goldmine for irritating my friends (who hate everything D.C. and absolutely will not see an Aquaman movie). Because "raving" about it would invite all kinds of attacks that I wasn't in the mood to fight off, I used as many puns as I could grab, and it elicited a few chuckles instead. So here I am to "pun"ish you with them. Feel free to borrow any of them if you like :).

"The length of the new Aquaman trailer seemed fishy, but it had an ocean of content."

"Did you sea it?"

"I think everyone that goes to it will have a whale of a good time."

"There's a wave of positive enthusiasm coming out of Comic-Con. I surfed some of the reviews."

"Jason Momoa can coast on his perfect casting."

"Does anyone want to shell out for a ticket?"

Anyway, I hit them with like eight of these within a minute. My most critical friend, Jake, just rolled his eyes (he truly hates DC movies). As far as trailers go, I think it's pretty good as it just shows most of two really specific scenes and what goes on in them. You get to see Black Manta shooting lots of eyebeam rays, and some pretty cool destruction as well as some humorous elements courtesy of Jason Momoa's comedic timing (he's kind of playing Aquaman like a big dumb jock in parts). It seems to have worked for Chris Helmsworth (as Thor) so why not?

Honestly, it's kind of refreshing to see DC take on the other heroes like Wonder Woman and Aquaman. Without even knowing too much about it, I'm also rather excited for the Flash movie to come out at some point. I know that Batman and Superman are both moneymakers for Warner Brothers, but I'm kind of sick of both of these heroes. They have been explored ad naseum, and it's fun to see other things in the spotlight. It may be where D.C. begins to find its strength. Maybe we'll see a Dr. Fate movie someday or perhaps a Teen Titans live-action movie.

If you haven't seen the trailer, give it a look below:

Lets explore a little psychology on writing and how it feels great to be in control of everything for this week's Insecure Writer's Support Group.

Here we are once again at the first Wednesday of the month. And most of you that visit and comment on my blog know that it is time to address the question from the Insecure Writer's Support Group page.

October 3 question - How do major life events affect your writing? Has writing ever helped you through something?
Interesting questions and very psychologically-based, don't you think? Hmm. It calls to mind the old idea that none of us are ever in control of the things in our lives and that a feeling of control is just an illusion...it's a structure that our brains maintain to keep us from slipping into madness. Maybe? Maybe not? What do you think?
So I'm going to ask you to allow me to go on this thought tangent for just a moment before I get back to answering the question from the IWSG.
I suppose most of us feel to greater and lesser extents that having control of one's life is desirable. But if I were to follow my brain down this particular rabbit hole of psychology I end up with something entirely different than an answer to the above question. For example, I've started to believe that some people want to give up control of their lives, especially the old and the disabled. It's not helpful at all for technological apps to be invented and then shoved in their face for them to learn how to use just because it saves time for the caregiver. "What? I don't want to learn that?" "I don't want to install that?" "Why is everything so hard?"
Some people actually want to be waited on hand and foot because they are exhausted from life and have no desire to learn anything more. THEY ARE TIRED. Oh...so tired. One example of this is an old person paying money for something. To a caregiver they might say, "Just take the money out of my wallet and pay for that thing." But nowadays we can say, "You use your cell phone to check Facebook so I know that you can use that technology. You need to download this app that allows you to pay someone electronically and do that. I am no longer going to be your hands to fetch money from your wallet when you can do it yourself. Huzzah! You have been liberated! I'm going to go hang out with friends now!"
But does the old person feel liberated? Nope. They feel like they've just taken on another burden of "being independent." Some people I know personally (who are old) say, "Being independent actually means 'you get to do all the work or you get called lazy, which may be accurate but it's how I feel. I don't care that it's something I can do. I don't want to do it anymore."
In a nutshell, "I no longer want control of my life. I want someone else in charge of it." That sentiment...more or less. What a poisonous idea in a country that wants everyone to stand on their own.
Anyway...I digress...so let me answer the question at hand:
I find that I tend to write a lot more than usual when I've been affected by trauma. So, it is most definitely a coping technique. Sometimes, I work this same trauma through fictional characters, and the whole story becomes a kind of "catharsis" for the feelings that I have pent up inside of me. And yes, sometimes writing helps me through frustrating periods of life, because I feel like I can exert control over the story when it eludes me in reality.
I like control. I'm not to that point where I want to relinquish it. And writing makes me feel like I can control everything, so that makes it awesome.
Did that answer the question? More or less?
Thanks for visiting. :)

The ever evolving ways in which Dungeons & Dragons tackles gender.

I've played Dungeons & Dragons almost since the very beginning when it came out in the early eighties. If you are at all familiar with its pop-culture influence, then you've probably seen it in the Netflix series Stranger Things as well as in big budget blockbusters like E.T. or other films that have boys playing games with each other. In the beginning, the games rules were just black and white photocopy sheets that came inside boxes with colorful fantasy art on them and weirdly-shaped dice made of plastic that chipped (because it was cheap stuff) as it was used. You also had to fill in the numbers with a white crayon so that you could see them better.

Back in those days, there was a cursed magical item that mean Dungeon Masters would inflict on players within the game who were involved in operating a "character." And to explain the mechanics of this tabletop rpg, I'd like you to think of it as a fictional character in your favorite book brought to life in a living story, and you may understand the appeal. The Dungeon Master would create a world for your character to live in and give him or her challenges (back then there were no non-binary folks). The cursed magical item was called a "Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity," and it was pretty awful. It looked like any other kind of magical "belt" that you could stumble across in the world, and most of these things bestowed fantastical strength (a prized virtue for being able to do the most damage and be the instigator of heroic feats). But sometimes you donned one and it was this cursed item. The effect was instantaneous and virtually irreversible: your character would switch sexes and you'd become the opposite of what you were.

For a game that was played mostly by children, this was heavy stuff and a great source of ridicule for the victim. Most DM's that I knew quickly realized they'd crossed a line (when they'd given out this kind of item) and reversed what had happened to the character in remarkable ways. And it's this struggle to deal with how important gender-identity actually is, that I find fascinating about characters in which people are extremely involved.

In the modern edition of the game, 5th edition, the "girdle of masculinity/femininity" is just simply gone. I looked for it in my Dungeon Master's Guide last night and couldn't find it. And maybe that's a good thing, but I started to wonder why. Maybe someone at Wizards of the Coast (the parent company of Dungeons & Dragons) realized that "gender" needs to be taken seriously, as does transitioning from one to the other. And maybe (in the end) it is too big a topic for tabletop RPG's to deal with in an official stance, by providing a "cursed" item that inflicts a gender change.

I did see one iteration of this item about ten years ago in a previous edition of the game. Renamed the "Girdle of Gender Change" it now offered options that were random depending on a dice roll. The wearer could end up as a non-binary person, stay the same sex, or turn into the opposite sex. But even this was probably not enough to cope with our ever-expanding definitions (as a society) of what gender actually means.

To give you a clue (in case you don't know) in the modern world we now have 26 different sexualities and 39 different genders/sex. The complete list is HERE. It's a fascinating read, and I understand why a troublesome item such as a "Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity" is no longer something that one should even have as a magic item. And even if it were still around, could it still carry the "cursed" moniker without offending someone?

For what its worth, tabletop roleplaying games have come a long ways to tackling gender and sexuality. The new module called Curse of Strahd features a vampire in it that swings both ways just in case male to male would fit better in a story than the traditional male to female. You also frequently run into npc's who are clearly either the same sex and in a relationship (or are clearly mixed race). And you even run into gender swapped characters, who have had surgeries to become something that they were not born into or have embraced magic to accomplish this. None...and I really do mean none...of this was around in the eighties. Along the way there have been foibles, enraged parents, upset players, and people who just didn't know how to deal with this item, much less the gender identities of characters being played by people who wanted to participate, but who also wanted to feel included.

I never would have thought back in the eighties when I was a person with far less worldly experience that gender is/was as important as it is. But I suppose my first introduction to its importance came through a tabletop roleplaying game. So maybe, even after all these years, it just might be one of the best vehicles for people to come to understand it better and appreciate gender in all its diversity.

The Dark Phoenix movie doesn't feel earned but there's still a chance it will be good.

The trailer for Dark Phoenix dropped yesterday. Although it's good, and I'm already committed to seeing the movie in 2019, it seems kind of awful to tap such a good villain in a movie with the rights to the X-Men being transferred to Disney. Being part of the larger MCU, the whole Phoenix saga thing could easily be the next Thanos build-up for a universe that loses its original Iron Man, its original Captain America, and its original Thor (their contracts are up if you didn't know).

Of course, Disney (with the rights) could go in a completely different direction and recast all of those characters. That would probably be best anyway because the X-Men have been through a number of similar plots to the point that I have X-Men fatigue. Fatigue isn't good for long franchises, and it takes a real effort to breathe life back into them. Marvel proved it could totally do that with Spider-Man so maybe it can totally do it with X-Men as well. They just need to have really good casting and good writing and lean on the characters in the greater MCU that remain popular with fans.

Also, Disney should negotiate new contracts with Downey, Evans, and Helmsworth...those guys are pure gold when playing the now iconic characters we've seen them in for some ten years now. If you haven't seen the trailer yet for Dark Phoenix, it may be worth a look. I've included it below for you. It may actually be good too, but to make Dark Phoenix truly worthy it should involve a huge universe as big as the Avengers movies. Dark Phoenix destroys suns like they were pieces of candy and can melt Professor X's brain like he was a drooling idiot with a sippy cup. She is power incarnate and all of the villains we've seen in the X-Men are nothing compared to what she eventually becomes. Knowing all this makes me feel like there hasn't been enough build-up to this to feel truly earned. Seeing Jean Grey give off some light here and there and some foreshadowing of the crisis of this dark side to her soul just hasn't been satisfying enough for me to declare: we are ready.

So yeah...it seems like a money grab. But that's what studios do sometimes. It takes a truly disciplined hand to play it slow. After all is said and done, Disney has played a slow hand for years and has shown remarkable discipline and restraint to just allow all these stories it's been seeding to converge in the unrivaled spectacle of Thanos unleashed. Warner Brothers (the DC universe) and Fox (the ones who used to own X-Men) just never seemed to get that. They were always too rushed to keep putting out product with no regard as to whether it ever made sense with anything that had been released before by any other director.

At least Snyder's soft reboot seemed to make sense now and pave the way for Dark Phoenix to have a decent chance at being good. I much prefer the new cast to the old cast, although I kind of miss Patrick Stewart. He was a perfect Professor X. 

The Latest Trailer for the Crimes of Grindelwald dropped yesterday and it's left me with a dozen questions and few answers.

The latest (last?) trailer for the second Fantastic Beasts movie dropped on the internet yesterday. It had a big surprise in it that caught me off guard. The surprise is that Nagini, the snake that was Voldemort's final horcrux (and also his seemingly ever-present companion animal) was once a woman. Some people leapt all over this and asked Rowling if Nagini was an animagus. Rowling (of course) clarified it all on twitter with this:
I had no idea what a "maledictus" was. It looked a lot like word (or letter) salad, but someone had to know. So this is what I found via my friend Sasha:

"A maledictus was a term used to denote a female individual whose blood had been cursed from birth, and eventually would lead her to turn into a beast. What manner of beast it might be was entirely dependent on the type of curse they had been afflicted with. The curse, which can be passed down from mother to daughter, can affect a whole family line."

And then my friend Geneva added, "Blood malediction also shows up in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Astoria Malfoy, who is Draco's wife and Scorpius's mom, is also a maledictus." I didn't know any of this because I haven't seen the play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, nor have I read the script. Geneva also reminded me that Harry Potter himself once served as a horcrux so anything can be one.

J.K. Rowling also tweeted out that she had been sitting on this "secret" as to what or who Nagini actually was for some twenty years now, so it isn't a recent development and she knew about it before she started writing the very first book (probably). Maybe the idea formed shortly after, but in the end she'd sussed it out nonetheless.

So what does all this mean? It's interesting for sure. Here are just a few of the questions I have:

1) Why did we never see Nagini as a woman in the prior movies? One answer that came from friends that seems acceptable is that the curse had run its course by then and permanently transformed Nagini into a serpent. Fair enough.

2) Does that mean Voldemort and Nagini were in a relationship? Answer: It's obvious they had some kind of relationship. If it was romantic then that adds other implications like...

3) Did Nagini have children with Voldemort?

4) If they had children, then did they have babies who were maledictus as well?

5) Does Nagini then have the ability to cast spells and wield a wand? A little research from reading an article on Entertainment Weekly's website revealed that Nagini does not (in fact) possess a wand.

6) Did Newt Scamander collect Nagini? I found out (with a little research) that Nagini is a member of the traveling Circus Arcanus where she puts on a very convincing transformation act for muggles. So she's basically a side-show person. The actress that plays Nagini, Claudia Kim, said that Nagini wants to stay a human being and she can transform from human to snake at will. Yet due to the blood curse she knows she will eventually become a snake forever. Nagini is also friends with Credence Barebone, who ran off and joined the circus after wrecking havoc in Manhattan in the first movie (he also transforms into a thing).

7) Did Newt Scamander give Nagini to Voldemort? If so, why?

8) If it's a curse then, does that mean Nagini was cursed by an heir of Salazar Slytherin? Or..

9) Is Nagini the heir of Slytherin?

10) Could Harry Potter's ancestors have cursed Nagini's bloodline?

11) Could Voldemort be Nagini's son?

12) If it was an ancestor of James Potter and Voldemort fell in love with Nagini, then maybe Potter's ancestors were the instigators of all the racial hatred that boiled over in the timeline of Harry Potter himself. Which makes me ask: is the whole Harry Potter story then simply one of revenge? Is Voldemort a tragic anti-hero seeking revenge for turning his beloved into a snake and then having his own magic backfire on him?

I'm sure that some of these things will be answered with the upcoming film, but it doesn't stop me from asking questions.

Crimes of Grindelwald drops November 16. 

What it's like to live with obsessive compulsive disorder.

I have obsessive compulsive disorder, but much like autism, there's a spectrum on how it manifests. For me, I become obsessed/compulsive with cleaning, with fictional characters, with inventory, with random thoughts that never seem to end but just cycle and cycle and cycle for hours (and even days) on end. I can close my garage door, turn a corner, and then have to circle back just to make sure it's closed. I can check a door two, three, or four times to make sure it is locked. I can wash my hands over and over. It's a strange thing.

In my day to day life, if someone leaves a mess in my house, I am compelled to clean it up no matter how exhausted I am. If I start to draw something, I can become obsessed with it. I lose so many hours concentrating on one thing that I forget what time it is and a whole day flies by and I work myself to exhaustion. I can become obsessed with fictional characters and write and write and write until I reach a point that I hate all of it and just need to step away for a long time in order to feel right with the world again. But it's difficult to reach that stepping away point. My brain tumbles over and over on thoughts for seemingly no reason...details that plague me until the wee hours of the morning.

If something stands in the way of my obsession I can become irritable or even angry. It's difficult for me to let things go. For example, if I went on vacation, and the thought that I might have left the stove on somehow enters my brain...and I didn't know anyone that could go and check for me that it was turned off to reassure me...it would ruin my whole vacation. That one thought...that one thing...would destroy any fun that I could possibly have. My mind would turn on that one detail to the point of...obsession. Insane obsession.

Having OCD means that I am the butt of jokes. People snicker around me that they can just leave something messy, because they know I will eventually have to clean it up. I am compelled to do that. People will take advantage of me at work because they'll automatically assign the management of a huge database to me because they know no one else will do as good a job because I will obsess over each item. They don't care that it's stressful. The easier jobs will go to someone who doesn't have O.C.D., who has shown that they are "normal" and in other words...don't really care and won't do a good job because (again) they don't care.

Living with obsessive compulsive disorder means that people who do genuinely care will tiptoe as if walking on eggshells around you. They know if they mistakenly put something out of place that it will bother you. That you will have to correct it, and your compulsion to correct them makes them irritable because no one likes being corrected. But you can't help it.

Like most mental disorders, there are good things about having obsessive compulsive disorder. I'm very organized. I can find records that go back decades because I know exactly where they are. I manage money well (almost to a fault). I could tell a person exactly how much something cost or how much they were spending on a certain thing because I keep track of it on spreadsheets. Over time I've tried to break my obsession with perfection. I had a dent in my wall that I filled in with spackel but didn't paint for over a year. I did that on purpose. Every day I looked at it as a challenge not to cover it up. It was a challenge to myself: I dare you to leave this glaring mistake on the wall for all the world to see. Leave it there and don't fix it. Let its imperfection be a contribution to your home.

Chaos bugs me. Before I started writing this blog I was out in the yard raking up all of the leaves that blew on the grass from the neighbor's ugly towering poplar trees. Now there are a few more on the lawn, and I can't stand them. So even though I'm tired and just want to read a book, I'm going to go outside and pick all of them up. Every single one, and then throw them in the garbage.

Some people say living with obsessive compulsive disorder is a good thing. It's not. I wish my brain was normal, and I wish it didn't obsess on things. But it does, and that's just the truth of it.

Hog lagoons are the most disgusting business practice I have ever seen.

News agencies all over the place are reporting on hog lagoons being drained by hurricane Florence. Despite having the name "lagoon" attached to it, which conjures up images of tropical paradise (at least in my mind), these things are anything but that. Hog lagoons (if you don't know) are huge open sewers...they are pits the size of four football fields...and I guess there are thousands of them in North Carolina. Huge pig farms channel the waste product of thousands if not millions of hogs through pipes in the floors of these enormous warehouses and into these cesspools which must stink like nothing on earth.

NPR reported that the waste from these "lagoons" is now contaminating everything because its gotten into the river and groundwater. This stuff is so toxic, it kills all the fish in rivers and streams every time they overflow. Imagine returning to a home where your very insulation and drywall was soaked in pig urine and feces. It defies belief that this is happening because of something that's obviously legal. But regulation on huge "job creators" like these pig farms requiring them to install sewage processing plants is probably "bad for business." I can just imagine the super rich pig farmer who owns it all looking at his empty "lagoon" and smiling, "Well ain't that just special! It dun git cleaned up all by itself, and now I dun 'ave to worry 'bout it." Meanwhile being completely oblivious to the thousands of people who may be literally forced to wade through the aftermath of their bad judgement and cost-effective decision-making.

So today I am thankful. I am thankful that (when it rains) it is actually drops from the sky falling on my house and not pig shit. I am thankful that I can walk outside, and my clothes are not stained with pig feces from a pig farm spraying its excrement as fertilizer over ground (and becoming air-borne in the process). I am thankful that I am not dealing with miles of pig feces.

This is hands-down the most disgusting business practice I have ever seen.

Did Warner Brothers give the name Arthur Fleck to the Joker in order to make fun of Ben Affleck?

This Sunday, io9 posted an article showing Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker (he's been cast to play the character in a solo film). I haven't really been following all the casting news in the wake of the steaming pile of garbage that was Suicide Squad, but it seems telling that Jared Leto no longer wanted to reprise the role. What took me by surprise was that Warner Brothers gave the Joker a real name. I've read tons of the Batman comic books, and I don't remember ever seeing a name given to the Joker. I mean...sure...there's been names given to this character in lots of movie and television adaptations. Why they felt it necessary to do this is beyond me. The Joker is just fine without a real name. He is (after all) not really definable even with an ordinary sounding name. So what is the name they gave him this time around? It's Arthur Fleck. Or, you could abbreviate it A.Fleck, or "Affleck." When I saw that, I was embarrassed for Warner Brothers. Seriously, guys?
It is no stranger to anyone that has been following Ben Affleck's tenure as the Batman that he's not very happy with the role anymore. When Henry Cavill hung up the cape as Superman (announced last week) so did Ben Affleck. Honestly, all of the Justice League characters minus Wonder Woman have been handled poorly by Warner Brothers, so this is no surprise to me. But just a few days later, to mock Ben Affleck by naming the Joker after him seems like grade school revenge. As in, "Ha ha, Ben Affleck...you're such a Joker..." It's juvenile and makes me wonder why they are even greenlighting something as bad as all of this sounds.

Warner Brothers should just make only Wonder Woman movies from this point out and forget about any crossovers. Maybe someday a good director like Christopher Nolan will come along and reboot their universe, because as it stands now, it's gotten really disappointing. Of course, I haven't seen any clarification coming out from Warner Brothers about this name, so maybe it's coincidence? If it is, then it's a bad coincidence and they should rename the character out of principle.

Is there an inverse relationship with the quantity of dialogue a villain has and how otherworldly that villain is supposed to be?

Undead wights under the supervision of a White Walker using chains that they got from somewhere to pull the
dead dragon, Viserion, out of the frozen lake. I had this random thought on Friday night as I was trying to get to sleep: where did the White Walkers get the chains that they used to raise Viserion's lifeless corpse up from the frozen lake so that the Night King could resurrect the dragon into an ice dragon? If you don't know what I'm talking about, you probably haven't watched season 7 of Game of Thrones. Anyway, I don't know why it bothered me on Friday night. I wasn't watching Game of Thrones, but this kind of thing does vex me just a wee bit because I have a lot of faith in the Game of Thrones franchise and the detail probably has a source somewhere.

So here's what I come up with. The White Walkers probably got them from a ship at Hardhome, which they sacked sometime in season five. But it still doesn't answer how they knew to bring them along, so maybe they went back and got them or they just decided to bring them along.

Is it ridiculous to think that the White Walkers communicate with each other the same way humans do? "Hey, I think we should bring these chains along. You never know when they will come in useful." Or the Night King turns to one of the White Walkers and states, "I told you that these chains would come in useful," and then the White Walker shrugs and says, "Yup. I guess that's why you are the king." But having those kinds of conversations would get in the way of being big, bad, and scary if people could hear them.

For example, would Darth Maul have been so scary in the Phantom Menace if he had a lot of dialogue and banter with people? Probably not. But for what it's worth, the emperor in the Return of the Jedi had a ton of dialogue and his on screen scariness didn't diminish one bit. But then again, he looked just like a really old man (not otherworldly).

So it makes me wonder...are there certain kinds of villains that we just shouldn't hear speak because it ruins a suspension of disbelief? And what qualifies as that kind of villain? Maybe there's an inverse relationship with how otherworldly the villain is supposed to be to how much dialogue they should actually have in the script. As one goes up, the other goes down and vice versa.

What do the rest of you think?

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina has a trailer now just in time for Halloween

The new trailer for the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is now out, and as expected, this Netflix series is based upon Sabrina Spellman, a teenager turned 16 who now must decide whether to sign the Devil's book and become a Bride of Satan. It comes out in late October (the timing is perfect for Halloween). It's also in the same universe as Riverdale, which airs (in America) on the CW, but I guess everywhere else is branded as a "Netflix Original." As a note, I think this is odd, but whatever.... And yeah, I'm in the boat that hopes Riverdale and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina do crossovers. These characters need to interact.

I'm also going to take the time to make a point about witchcraft, not that I'm an expert or anything. But exposure to people that call themselves "witches" because I have friends that practice polyamory (more than one love) over here in Utah (I am not one), I've been exposed to my fair share of tarot-reading, astrology-spewing, and crystal purifying women. I have been educated on "witch" versus "wiccan" and that many people get it wrong. So to your delight, I'm going to pass on what is said to me...to you.

Witches are fictional characters imbued with magic powers that are often associated with demonic or otherwise forbidden powers. They are found in the myths, legends, and fiction of countless cultures across the globe.

Wiccans are real life practitioners of religion created in the middle of the 20th century. Inspired by European paganism, this religion is definitely Western, and its found especially in Britain and in North America. They perform rituals and even sometimes claim to be able to cast spells, but their powers are no more a proven fact than that of any Christian faith healer (which is to mean zero or zip).

Witches and Wiccans are NOT the same thing, and a show depicting witches is not an attack against or a representation of Wiccans. Yes, Wiccans like to call themselves "witches," but that claim does not retroactively make every story ever written about witches to be about Wiccans. Witches as a concept are independent from Wicca.

And honestly, I have no idea why they do call themselves witches other than to elicit a kind of "edgy" (read as unique) factor similar to putting on black and eyeliner and going to a goth club. It's even better if you can get people to sympathize with your persecution while you clamor for universal acceptance for all.

So there you have it...consider yourself educated :)