BobbyBesar

Something occurred to me this week about the coffee thing with Cooper, which may be obvious but I don't think has been stated. In a lot of ways, Cooper is simultaneously an homage / deconstruction of noir and 80's TV detective tropes. I feel like the archetypal noir relationship with coffee is not a pleasant one. You don't drink it because it's good, you drink it because you've been up all night chasing down leads for some dame and you're dead on your feet so you stumble into a diner, grit your teeth and choke down a cup of bitter garbage. So, while Cooper does appear to be genuinely enthusiastic about everything, I feel like the coffee relationship is particularly highlighted for this reason, even aside from the overarching cops + donuts joke.

That reminds me. Even though it isn't stated, Leo Johnson seems super duper Canadian to me as well, and I couldn't figure out why. Eventually, it struck me: with that lovely blonde ponytail, and big, stupid doughy meathead face, he basically looks just like a professional wrestler (for those of you not in the know, many wrestlers are canadian). Unfortunately, the long hair look isn't really in vogue anymore, but just look at some of these specimens. Intentional? Maybe. Twin Peaks would have been conceived and written right around the peak of Hulkamania, when the WWF was basically at it's peak on pop culture exposure. Curt Henning (Mr. Perfect), who has a very similar look to Leo, was a heel (villain) at the time and would have feuded with Hulk during that period. And you don't get much more heel than Leo.

Wouldn't it be simpler to just say that Herbert should not have written Heretics of Dune?

I could swear there's at least one Superman story where some other super-powerful alien tries to seduce Superman to impregnate her to make super-powerful warrior babies. I can't think of a specific one at the moment though.

So, I've watched about a dozen episodes of Stephen Universe, and while it has some charm, I don't think I can say I like it overall. One the plus side, the lore around the Gems which is slowly being hinted at is pretty cool. There's a pretty interesting ruined civilization vibe. I even sort of like the way it's being dripped out very slowly. But, I really can't make myself enjoy Stephen. He's self-consciously hijinks oriented in a way that just sort of grates on me. There's a little too much forced-feeling wackiness. There are bits I like a lot. For example, I like his interactions with a lot of the supporting characters. But when he's by himself, I just get tired of Stephen. I have a few other thoughts that I can't quite justify, that I think are just tied to episodic children's TV format, so I can't really hold it against them. The last few episodes I caught also had a really weird animation thing going on, where things got melty-er than usual, and Stephen's arms stopped having any consistency with the standard character styling. Based on my understanding from Adventure Time, it seems like they're giving more leeway to directors with stylistic things like that these days, which is fine, I guess, but still weird. I think it suffers in comparison to Adventure Time, which isn't really fair as Adventure Time is a fairly singular thing.But Stephen seems to fall more squarely on the children's show side.

Oh, also, Shin Megami Tensei has an Incubus as one of the demons you can recruit. He has a very large, uh, thing, coming from his crotch-al area. Uh, there's also this guy.

I'm on the record as saying that gratuitousness is a key determinant in my thought process, which suggests hand-waving. But a "justified" trope can still be gratuitous. A glowing sword can glow because it's magic, and that's just what magic swords do, man. I don't think it really matters. It's easier to identify in the hand-waving form, but the less obvious ones may still qualify. That really just gets in to the question of the skillfulness with which the justification was crafted.

Generally speaking, I don't think that individual moments really count. In my mind, its more about retroactively justifying character design than it is about specific events. Individual events start getting into the realm of whether or not a scene was necessary and thus into questions of writing quality. Plus, the gratuitous fanservice type scene probably has its own, more specific trope.

Example time! Example 1: Final Fantasy's Viera (bunny girls). The entire race wears stiletto heels because their ankle joints are basically shaped like Barbie's feet. There are technically males of the species, but they're secretive and so never seen. Female viera "retain their appearance until old age", which I guess means they're all always at prime physical attractiveness. Plus, there's this: At first I was thinking: maybe their very concept is inherently sexualized? So it's possible to argue they fall under the "Yeah, they're sexy bunnies. Deal with it" exception. But, even if the initial character design was just a one-off Playboy bunny joke, there's clearly been a lot of lore built up since then that tries to justify it. That lore is what qualifies. INCLUDED! Example 2: Darkstalkers' Felicia. Felicia is a naked, sexy, catgirl. BUT! There's no attempt to justify it. "Sexy Catgirl" isn't lore so much as a mission statement. She's basically "presented without comment: catgirl". There's basically nothing about where she comes from aside from "there are monsters, some of them are cat people". Any information that _is_ provided about her is not sexual in nature: she's an orphan who wants to be a pop idol. EXCLUDED! One interesting thing that this brings up: the longer lived the property, and thus the more lore you get, the more likely it is to fall afoul of this. If you have a character with a sexualized character design, with enough iterations you're probably eventually going to end up in a place where you try to justify that character design.

Succubi exist to justify wet dreams to repressed medieval prudes. It goes way back, but the decision to apply it in any particular fiction is still a deliberate one.

I've been thinking that over. Specifically, for Darkstalkers' Morrigan. I actually think that succubus et al are something different. It isn't gratuitous, because sexuality is a necessary and defining trait for that character. Can you have a non overtly sexualized succubus? I guess, but it wouldn't really make sense. It becomes the converse: it's actually straight line logical to design that character that way, therefore she's _not_ sexy because of <elaborate explanation> rather than the other way around. The problem there is: was it really necessary to make this character a sex-demon? If not, that's sloppy and pandering writing, but it isn't the same kind of post-hoc justification we're generally talking about here. Unless they actually designed the character first, then backed into the demon thing. Which I could see happening. The question again becomes whether it's actually important for her to be a sexy demon. I'm could be convinced either way on a case by case basis, to be honest.

Man, I love the the camera work on Bobby's scene with his father. I don't know much about film-language, but it seems like a very rigid framing around his body. It's probably mostly just to do with his posture, and the fact that he's full front to the camera (although not addressing the camera), which is unusual in TV. It feels very regimented and strict, as appropriate for the character. Since the whole frame is taken up with him and Bobby, Bobby seems even slouchier by comparison. Also, is it bad that when I think of Bobby, I basically just mentally replace him with this:

Let's keep talking about Twilight, because Twilight is fascinating. The problem with trying to include cases that appeal to females is that in many cases the goal of "titillation" is a little different. In Twilight, Edward isn't appealing because he's primarily visually attractive (which isn't to say that he isn't good-looking, but that's not the primary appeal), he's appealing because he's a 14 year old girl's conception of a perfect boyfriend, who thinks Bella is uniquely the most special and interesting girl in the world and is kind of interested in sexy fooling around stuff, but in a non-scary way because there's no actual weird penis and vagina stuff. There's an implicit assumption in this discussion that we're talking about visual titillation, which (Taylor Lautner notwithstanding) isn't something that Twilight is very interested in as it's core appeal, especially with regards to Edward. Being a visual medium, the films did this a little big, but again, primarily with Jacob. However, I could possibly be convinced, but because it ISN'T used as an excuse to get him shirtless all the time (in fact, much the opposite, it justifies him being covered up), I think that we would need to agree that "sparkliness" is inherently attractive to the target market, and that the "uh, vampires are sparkly because their skin is made of marble" is the justification. That is something I might be willing to stipulate to, having seen my fair share of shoujo anime. Even then, I'd personally prefer a little more contortion and actual lore building (e.g. the venom inside Twilight vampires - look it up - sweats from their pores and crystallizes when it reacts with air, therefore making them sparkle). Otherwise, it's pandering writing, but not necessarily this trope. In order for this to work with Twilight, you need to re-define the gratuitous backstory to apply to the elements that are attractive, in which case Twilight begins to work: what appeals about Edward is the sexy/chaste dichotomy in that he absolutely wants Bella but refuses to have sex with her. In this regard, his being a vampire at all begins to be an elaborate justification for that. HOWEVER, him being a vampire is too integral to the plot-stories being told, so I think it begins to fail about from a "gratuitous justification" perspective. I don't even know what's happening in this thread anymore.

If you're wondering whether your criteria above apply to Japanese specifically, I can tell you they do not. Forms of address and levels of formality in Japanese absolutely relate to power and behavior prescription.

"blagged" sounds like a relatively recent coinage? Bollocks is about right as an equivalent.

Hah. Those are cute, but a little on the nose, since they're pretty self aware. I just find self aware examples a little less illustrative because there is deliberate intent. I'd argue that the Azure Bonds example might also be a Jessica Rabbit situation: the armor is sexy because she likes to look sexy, so it's an explicitly sexual explanation. I think a lot comes down to my feeling that the explanation be elaborate and gratuitous. Distracting enemies with your tits is fine, but it's a throwaway joke within the confines of a standard fantasy setting. Overheating optical camouflage (which really feels like a perfect example) is so much more labored.

But the "That's just how it is" type explanation can't be eligible otherwise this applies to everything ever. The whole point is that the creators make an attempt to wallpaper over gratuitous sexualization with lore. If there's no lore, it doesn't work. I also feel the explanation itself has to be a little gratuitous. Baywatch doesn't count because while there is a justification (theyre lifeguards), them being lifeguards is integral to the identity of the show. The actual explanation (as I recall from an interview) is that Stephanie Meyer had literally no idea how vampires worked. She knew they weren't supposed to go into the sun, but didn't know why, so she concocted sparkling. There wasn't any attempt to sexualize them, really, just poor understanding of Vampire lore.

AFAIK, Twilight doesn't actually give an in-universe justification for anything. It's just the way vampires are in their world, and even that is maddeningly inconsistent, there's no meaningful attempts at lore in general. It's also not really used as an excuse for sexualization since the vampires don't really hang around shirtless. The Twilight werewolves, are closer. They hang around shirtless because turning into wolves shreds their clothes, and in the films they're treated more with a sexualized "female gaze". Even then, it's a little tenuous because there's a direct logical connection (clothes are physically destroyed, because of normal physics) rather than a back-story derived one.

Also: "Two assholes drive into the woods. You'll never guess what happens next." This makes me want to start a twitter account that is purely devoted to buzzfeed-ing iconic movie scenes. "This Sith Lord had a secret about Luke's father. I couldn't believe what he said next!" "This cyborg assassin had to destroy the last piece of technology from the future. What happened next brought a tear to my eye!" "You'll never guess which deadly sins this serial killer planned murders around Number 4 blew me away!"

"No, it can wait until tomorrow" is pretty good telephone writing. (in the Bob Newhart sense). Regarding the whistle, I'm pretty sure that he mentions his desire to take up whittling to Diane, and we do see him with some earlier stages of the whistle a couple of times.

Just to add: I thought of a good illustration of the distinction: if you're a student, you can try to bullshit your way through an essay/test/etc. i.e. you don't really know anything about the topic, but you know things adjacent to the topic, so you just talk in circles around it and hope that nobody notices that you actually have no clue what the economic impact of the Franco-Prussian war was. But you wouldn't say you lied through the exam in that case. Is there a colloquial equivalent in the Queen's English? I didn't realize it was an American-ism.

Does anybody else kind of want them to Tron Legacy / Lucas the red-room scene with present day Kyle MacLachlan? Just as a special feature or something.

Yeah, I don't feel that I did that all. My point was that in so far as magical realism is well defined, I don't think Twin Peaks actually fits the criteria at all, for the reasons I cited. My joke about "urban fantasy" is speaking more to the way it could be positioned, rather than what it "belongs" to per se. Having watched a little more of the series, I will say that if you ask me what Twin Peaks is "about", I would say it's about boundaries. Boundaries between genres, between identities, between dream and reality, and even between the viewer and the television. I think a great deal of people's fascination with the show derives from an inability to categorize it neatly. Incidentally, I think the same resistance to easy categorization is the western appeal of many popular anime. So, that's what Twin Peaks and FLCL have in common, I guess.

I know the case is closed, but... I think Jessica Rabbit fails the test because it's fundamentally about offering a non-sexual explanation for sexualizing a character. Jessica Rabbit offers an explicitly sexualized explanation for sexualizing the character. Similarly, if the Big Boss dictator man makes his female uniforms bikinis because he enjoys looking at breasts, it doesn't count. It counts if they're bikinis because the women have magic that makes them overheat and also cloth is really scarce in their planet and also it's based on their traditional tribal uniform.

This is pretty common parlance in the US. Although, it isn't white lies per se. Bullshitting is a slightly different skill. It involves saying a lot of words without actually saying anything. Making your target believe that you agree with them, or will sign the deal, or whatever else without actually presenting a position or making a commitment. It's telling people what they want to hear without actually saying it.